A Swan Song to Transform Compliance Training, with John Hansen, CEO and Chairman of Atana

[00:00:00] your podcast. You actually have a little start, a little chatter about it, and then you go into the official start. Thank you for noticing that. Sometimes we pick something, a funny exchange from the green room that's safe for the outside world. That is not me playing that music. That's canned music.

[00:00:42] Well, hello everybody, and welcome to this episode of Small Talk Window, where the host and guest have a small window of time to dispense with the small talk as quickly as possible and settle into a meaningful conversation around the world of work. And today I have a very interesting guest. His name is John Hansen, and he is CEO and Chairman of Atana. Welcome, John. It's great to be here, Brent. I'm looking forward to chatting with you.

[00:01:09] Oh yeah, absolutely. And we have a really interesting topic today. I think we're going to actually maybe make a dent in solving a sort of a challenge that folks have in the learning arena. But first, if you wouldn't mind just sharing with our audience a little bit about Atana, a little bit about you, what gets you animated up in the morning after your cup of coffee, if you drink coffee, most people do.

[00:01:38] What kind of animates you? It's a caffeinated beverage of choice. That's right. For some, it's Red Bull. I'm not quite there yet, but maybe someday. What animates you around the world of work? What excites you about this industry? So this is my eighth company. I know we're on the audio, but if you saw me visually, you would see that I'm up there in the years.

[00:02:07] And this is my swan song. This is my going out and leaving a legacy. My previous companies were all hard tech, and I was CEO of some pretty amazing technology companies. But you know, Brent, I was, from the day, from the time I started my first company, when I was 30 years old,

[00:02:32] I was disappointed in my colleagues in the technology space. And, you know, if there's bad CEO models, tech, I think, has its disproportionate share of those CEOs and founders who are not, shall we say, employee friendly.

[00:02:54] And particularly in treating, in the case of technology, women, people of color, people that were disadvantaged, there was no empathy at all. And so I was really frustrated by this. I didn't know I was frustrated as I was going through.

[00:03:15] It's just like I saw this anomalous behavior. And so when I had an opportunity, and plus, you know, I was teaching later at the University of Washington in a business school. I'm meeting amazing people. I mean, teaching amazing people. And I just saw this incongruity of what I was seeing in the workplace versus really the great people that are there, you know, at the university and coming in and coming into the workplace.

[00:03:45] And I said, so in 2016, I saw an opportunity to purchase this company and to really make a difference. And how can I make how can we make a difference using learning to change culture, change behaviors, change attitudes and create a respectful workplace?

[00:04:09] That is my swan. This is my swan song. I was like, I really whatever I can do passionately to make a difference. And here at Atana, we got, you know, 25 plus employees that all share the same passion of trying to make a difference in the world of work so that people enjoy coming to work. That's what I get passionate about, why I get up and why I'm still doing this and I'm excited about.

[00:04:37] And Atana, you know, we kind of found this pretty unique way of doing this. So the goal, the principle is how do we help companies create a respectful workplace where people love coming to work? They feel psychologically safe coming to work. They feel engaged at work. How do we do that? And so that was the puzzle that we set out all those years ago. And so that's what we're trying to do.

[00:05:06] That's that is really inspiring. And, you know, a lot of companies talk about this in our space, in the HCM space. And, you know, they're doing all sorts of different things. And it's there's a lot of really interesting, I would say, deep philosophical conversation in our marketplace around how to make work life better.

[00:05:33] And how to foster that really engaging, inviting, safe feeling, psychologically safe feeling employer culture. It really is a driving. And, you know, there's so many companies out there and folks out there talking about it. And we talk about technology and, you know, it can be facilitative in that.

[00:06:01] But it really comes down to, you know, having the right attitude and leadership and all this kind of stuff that you alluded to with tech C-suite folks in this sort of thing. And now our topic today is really related to that. It's a really nice segue here, you know, and stop me if I'm running a field, if I'm not sending this up right. But I'm going to try my hand at it.

[00:06:30] You know, we have learning. Learning is sort of an essential. Everybody thinks about learning. And, you know, just intuitively, we know it's important in the workplace. Career development, having those learning opportunities for folks to get better at their job or just to learn new soft skills that make them – that will help them have a better work experience as well, right?

[00:07:02] Yes. And learning folks, however, the folks who sort of lead the charge in learning in organizations, often they have a challenge – often they always have a challenge before then, which is to sort of making the case for learning under all circumstances when it comes to, you know, EBITDA or, you know, when it comes to, you know, just operationally or, you know, what's going to be in the organization?

[00:07:30] Organization's best interest from the many perspectives looking at that in terms of organizational, you know, perpetuity and this sort of stuff. I'm getting way too complicated in my explanation of this. But – Let me make the CFO happy. I think that would be a good summary there. Yeah. Yes. And I was kind of delicately dancing around that. But you got cut right to the chase there.

[00:07:58] It really is that question, you know, how – we talk about accounting, the bean counters, the finance department. How can we make learning seem like just a no-brainer to these sorts of folks in the organization? Maybe we can start there. What are some of your thoughts in that regard? Well, I think there's a gap. Have you ever been to a webinar where the topic was great but there wasn't enough time to ask questions or have a dialogue to learn more?

[00:08:28] Well, welcome to HR and Payroll 2.0, the podcast where those post-webinar questions become episodes. We feature HR practitioners, leaders, and founders of HR, payroll, and workplace innovation and transformation sharing their insights and lessons learned from the trenches. We dig in to share the knowledge and tips that can help modern HR and payroll leaders navigate the challenges and opportunities ahead. So join us for highly authentic, unscripted conversations, and let's learn together.

[00:08:55] Between what the business strategy and financial performance needs versus what the learning, the folks in learning, the folks in HR in general, what their goals are. And sometimes those goals are in conflict and it creates a gap. The people in HR, the people in learning, I mean, you know this, Brent, as much as I do, they're passionate about their workforce.

[00:09:24] I mean, they care about their people. They're people people. That's why they're in HR. And how can we create this environment where the people are more engaged? At the C-suite, they tend to have other issues. They care about their workforce from a philosophical point of view. They know they need their workers. Well, most companies know they need their workers.

[00:09:51] I can give you some examples of C-suite that, you know, they're truly assets to be deployed and, you know, reckoned with as needed. But let's say the majority of the companies out there, most organizations out there, they do care about it. But they don't see how the work that's being done in HR and learning in particular really moves that needle.

[00:10:14] So as a result, when times are tough, L&D, learning and development, tends to be one of the first departments that gets cut significantly. And when times are good and then they have a hard time recruiting quality people and keeping and retaining high-performance individuals, then they invest in it because it's, you know, the market has dictated that.

[00:10:35] So, to me, so much of the training that is being done, so much of the learning, we call it learning, but there's a chunk of it called training. Yeah. That is not beneficial really to the business bottom line. We call that mandatory training or compliance training. And, of course, the legal department says we got to do it. The regulators say we got certain things we got to cover.

[00:11:04] And as a result, they're spending money. And more importantly, the people are taking time to take this learning content. And they're like, what a waste of time. They dread it. Matter of fact, it's a negative. You know, I'm waking up this morning. I got to take my sexual harassment prevention training. Oh, my gosh, I'm so excited to do that. Words never mentioned from an employer manager.

[00:11:30] And so, our view is the interesting thing about learning, training, compliance, or otherwise, is you have a captive audience. You have this person coming in to take it. Sometimes it's sitting in a classroom, but nowadays, most of the time, it's on an e-learning. And so, you have a captive audience. How about the money you're invested to take that and, more importantly, the time that the person is doing it? How about you add some value?

[00:12:00] How about you add some business value? How about you add some value back to the learner? And so, then they're going like, okay, I guess this wasn't a complete waste of time. And what we're doing is, one, we create engaging content. But more importantly for us, we also take that time to look at their behaviors and their attitudes to try to go to a depth of saying, what are they really thinking?

[00:12:26] And when I was a CEO, I pretended I knew what my employees were thinking around the world. I didn't. I didn't have a clue. I was relaying on people reporting up to me what it was. And so, I mean, one of the funny, my favorite story is a report a couple years ago when Howard Schultz was doing an interview. And he says, I don't know why my baristas are getting upset, aka trying to unionize.

[00:12:57] When I gave them what they wanted, which was paid college courses that we provide to them. That was the number one thing they asked for. We did that, but yet they're still upset. And when I heard that, I'm sure like most people that heard that, you're like, Howard, you are so detached from reality of what your employees, your critical employees, their baristas, customer-facing employees,

[00:13:25] what issues they really had. And so, what a gap on that. And so, to us, it's really how can we close that gap of one showing value to the business and really giving them a perspective into their employees and managers. That's unprecedented. That really, what are they really thinking?

[00:13:49] And the way we do that is it's no new tool, no new app, not doing an assessment that the employees hate to take anyways. They have to take this training. They're taking the training. They're sitting there. How about we take that opportunity to really talk to them and get their thoughts? Sorry to interrupt, but you brought up a good point.

[00:14:13] And I'm starting to think perhaps we should do a two-parter here, a two-episode series here because I think there's a lot to get into. But in the time we have remaining for this episode, one thing I just want to kind of point out here is one of the things that the C-suite really is concerned about or pays attention to, especially the CEO and the CFO, is risk mitigation.

[00:14:37] And if we're going to have this mandatory training, this compliance training – by the way, I totally agree. It's right in the name of it. Who wants to do compliance training? It's mandatory. Now I have to learn. I think training has got – I think learning and development has got some branding issues. They probably do.

[00:14:58] So, yeah, but why not make that more engaging so that your workforce is more apt to retain the training that they're participating in? And you're going to see some behavioral change as well through the Atana method from what I understand. Yes, correct. From that.

[00:15:21] And so you're not just checking off a box and when the regulators come knocking, doing an audit or maybe there's an incident. You have more to tell them than simply, oh, yeah, well, we checked the boxes. We gave them that training and that compliance. That's a little bit more. Yeah, exactly. Have a little bit more to share with them.

[00:15:42] And you'll be more apt to avoid those incidences in the future if you've ever had one or ever, forever if you've never had one, which is really interesting.

[00:15:54] And that to me is sort of the killer app, if you want, for the learning folks to really get into that stream where they're really able to more easily communicate why it is what they're doing is valuable to the business.

[00:16:17] In all instances, at any given point in time, no matter how the business is faring. And our goal is to make the learning and development professionals heroes. To share insights and discoveries with the C-suite that was like, wow, now I really understand.

[00:16:42] Now, by the way, I was talking to a customer a couple of weeks ago and they said, you know, John, our culture is amazing. And they are. They're a great place to work. Great culture. Huge. 100,000 plus employees around the world. And she said, you know, I don't really see the value of what you're doing. And I said, well, that's awesome. You must, every office around the world must be running top notch.

[00:17:12] And she smiled, says, well, no. I said, wouldn't you like to know really the issues that's going on in certain areas and the fact that you're committed to a great culture? That's awesome. Don't you really want to know instead of some samples? And she said, yes. But as you know, Brent, the majority, you know, the latest studies, you know, that are saying that, you know, 33% of U.S. employees are engaged.

[00:17:43] Boy, that's a problem. And 16% are actively disengaged. I think that's an issue. I think that engagement, and what does it mean to be engaged? You look forward to coming to work. You're highly productive, and with that much of a tax, you know, it's estimated to be $1.9 trillion tax on the U.S. economy. Yeah. Because people are coming to work just punching the clock and getting a paycheck.

[00:18:08] And so how can we actually fix that cultural component is my dream, my passion. Yeah, not to boil the ocean, but why not, you know, solve a bunch of different challenges or be an asset to the organization in a multifaceted way with your learning? Not just in ensuring that you've complied with the law.

[00:18:34] What a narrow perspective of just unbelievable time. Our poor friends in Chicago, three hours of training for sexual harassment prevention. Wow. Three hours of your day. That is, you know, California, two hours if you're a manager. How about we spend that time actually trying to add value to the employee and manager and to the company? I mean, we got to change that.

[00:19:04] Multifaceted, you know, is our perspective. Absolutely. Absolutely. Drive engagement, elevate engagement, cultivate it, foster it while you're also taking care of compliance at the same time and learning as much as you can about the organization. There's so many different proof points to this. Yes. John, it's been a wonderful, wonderful discussion, and I definitely am going to have you back on the podcast today.

[00:19:33] Again, this is just absolutely fascinating. Thank you so much. It's been a privilege, Brent. As you can tell, I'm really passionate about trying to make a difference in moving, you know, our great companies and organizations forward. That's my dream. That's my swan song. This is my farewell. Oh, it points for mentioning the term swan song on a podcast, by the way. I love it. Thank you so much, John. You're welcome. Thank you, Brent.

[00:20:03] Thank you.