Moving Work Forward

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Stacia Garr, Co-founder and Principal Analyst at RedThread Research, shares her journey from History Professor to Entrepreneur, discusses the hidden truths she’s uncovered about our changing workplaces, and lays out a vision for a more inclusive future of work.

 

Episode Notes

In today’s upended world of work, some questions have moved to the forefront: Just what does the future hold? And how can People Leaders responsibly embrace change to move past old obstacles, inequities and biases? Few are better prepared to answer these questions than Stacia Garr of RedThread Research. Stacia’s commitment to uncovering truth and turning data into compelling stories about employee experience has made her a trusted advisor to executives from many of the world’s leading brands.

In her talk with Jesse, Stacia shares how her love of history turned into a mission to better peoples’ lives at work. She discusses some of her most compelling and unexpected research findings gained over the past decade. She identifies the opportunities that ultimately led her to pursue a path of entrepreneurship, and she leaves us with a look at the new workplace: where it should go, where it shouldn’t, and why moving work forward should be everyone’s concern.

Guest Bio

Stacia Garr is a researcher and thought leader on talent management, leadership, D&I, people analytics, and HR technology. A frequent speaker and writer, her work has been featured in Fortune, Forbes, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal as well as in numerous HR trade publications.

Stacia co-founded RedThread Research in 2018 after leading talent and workforce research for eight years at Bersin by Deloitte. Before Bersin, Stacia spent nearly five years conducting research and creating learning content for the Corporate Leadership Council, part of CEB/Gartner.

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+ Episode Transcript

Stacia Garr [00:00:00] Like for me, I'll tell you the coolest moment of everything that I do is after we've collected the survey data and we get the first statistically significant responses, when we look at it and I think, I know something that no one else knows, but I'm going to get to go tell everybody. Like, that is so cool to me.

Jesse Purewal [00:00:34] From Qualtrics Studios, this is Breakthrough Builders, a series of conversations with people whose passions, perspectives, instincts, and ideas fuel some of the world's most amazing products, brands and experiences.

I'm Jesse Purewal. My guest on the show today is Stacia Sherman Garr. Stacia is a researcher and thought leader on talent management, leadership, diversity and inclusion, people analytics and HR technology. She's a frequent speaker and writer, and her work's been featured in Fortune, Forbes, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and of course, many, many pubs in the HR trade. Stacia co-founded RedThread Research in 2018 after leading talent and workforce research for eight years at Bersin by Deloitte. Before that she was five years at the corporate leadership council, part of CEB Gartner. Stacia has an MBA from the University of California - Berkeley, a master's degree from the London School of Economics and undergraduate degrees from Randolph-Macon Women's College.

Today on the show, Stacia and I talk about how she became a builder by way of her love for history and her passion for people and entrepreneurship, key trends she's seeing in HR tech and people analytics, some of the biggest surprises from recent research she's done, and what she thinks lies ahead in the new future of work and in the talent economy more broadly

Without further ado, breakthrough builder, Stacia Garr.

I am here with Stacia Garr. Stacia, thank you for coming on the podcast.

Stacia Garr [00:02:09] Thanks so much for the opportunity, Jesse.

Jesse Purewal [00:02:11] Stacia you've done some really interesting and diverse things over the course of your career. Let me ask you how you frame yourself and who you are as a professional.

Stacia Garr [00:02:20] I like to think of the work I do is, is really enabling others to make the lives of people at work better. So I am a researcher. I do a lot of writing about the future of work, about talent management and about, right now, a lot on people analytics and diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. But really if I kind of zoom out to the 30,000 foot level, when I go to sleep at night and think about, you know, am I pleased with the work I'm doing? It comes down to helping people have better lives through their workdays.

Jesse Purewal [00:02:54] And has research always been at the core of that for you? Has getting in touch with a truth through empiricism and divining it in storytelling always been part of your story?

Stacia Garr [00:03:04] It has as a professional. Yeah. My first proper job was at a corporate executive board now part of Gartner and I was a researcher there and then have continued on that research path ever since.

And so, you know, I think, for me, data and numbers and using that to make better scientific decisions is at the core of doing things well, because if we don't have that, we are just going off of our gut feel. We're making decisions based only on our own experiences. And we know that that's not a good way to make decisions, but the other part of it, and I love the way you framed the question, Jesse, is around storytelling as well, because what we remember as humans is stories. And so it's really finding the data to make good decisions, but then a big part of my job is finding the stories that bring those to life that people can connect with and remember, and think, Oh yeah, that connects to me individually.

And I can do something different as a result of that story and know that it's backed by credible information.

Jesse Purewal [00:04:00] How does a history buff, how does a professor of US history, which you are, get interested in the career angles that you've kind of pursued over the past decade, decade and a half. How'd that happen?

Stacia Garr [00:04:12] Yeah. So I have a master's in history, as you said. And when I graduated, I wasn't completely sold on the idea that I wanted to be a historian. What I loved about history was the idea of identifying patterns and making connections, and this idea that individuals existed in these bigger systems, these bigger trends that were happening, but even so ,sometimes an individual can make a massive impact on their time or their organization or their country.

And I love that concept. What I didn't love about history was that it was always backward looking that there were a lot of people out there who didn't necessarily see the value of it. And so wouldn't necessarily spend the time and energy to kind of derive those insights. And so I did two things at the same time.

One is I went to work for a corporate executive board doing research on leaders in companies instead of research on leaders in countries, which is what I'd done for my master's degree. And then at the same time, as you said, I decided to teach history, part-time at Northern Virginia Community College to get a sense, like, is this really what I might want to do?

Like which way? So I basically just pushed off the decision.

Jesse Purewal [00:05:22] Well, let me ask you about the story you told me once about your Abraham Lincoln books. It's a fascinating view into, I think, how your mind works and the 15 authors. Can you tell that story?

Stacia Garr [00:05:32] Yeah. So when I was in undergraduate, I had two amazing history professors.

One of them is a gentleman named Dr. John D' Entremont. And he taught a course on Abraham Lincoln and it was not your ordinary, you know, here's Abraham Lincoln, kind of go on your way sort of thing. But we actually read over the course of this semester, 15 different books on Abraham Lincoln. At the same time, I was taking a course from another professor who was very into propaganda, into world war II propaganda.

And so it was this amazing intersection of seeing how, different perspectives and a viewpoint that somebody that an author might want you to adopt could influence how the, the facts, you know, I put facts in air quotes, how the facts showed up. So, you know, you had one author who was from the far South and his opinion on Abraham Lincoln was very different and written for a very different audience than somebody who is maybe from the North.

Um, and this, this is, you know, in the early two thousands, it's not like we're reading stuff from the 1860s or seventies about Abraham Lincoln. So what it brought to me was this idea that, um, propaganda in different viewpoints is alive and well with us. Part of the way that maybe we cut through some of that, especially when it comes to making good decisions is that we use data to help us understand what we're working with and to then make those decisions better, to provide that data to others.

And then to tell stories that help them remember and change their perspective.

Jesse Purewal [00:06:55] Yeah. And to your point, recognizing and respecting the patterns, but not being backward looking. So, so then you go into a role of corporate executive board, and that's where you start to have some real accountability for understanding the patterns in the data, but have also an accountability to your clients to look forward and help them start to make sense of it.

So walk me through that, that experience in the early part of your career and what it was like to use the facts from the rear view mirror to look ahead.

Stacia Garr [00:07:22] Yeah. You know, it was, it was a really powerful experience to be there at that time, because we were really at the dawn of many of the technology companies that we have seen come to the fore today.

Certainly at the very beginning of cloud computing, we were seeing the beginning of things like talent management suites and like, Salesforce was a new thing. It was, you know, this idea that we could have these cloud-based databases. And that then translated into what we do in HR. That was one thing. The second thing that was a big shift was the realization around the impact of employee engagement from a scientific perspective.

So data that actually proved that if you had stronger levels of engagement, you could expect higher levels of productivity. Those studies had only been done in the previous couple of years before I started at corporate executive board. And that perspective was dramatically changing how people were looking at employees in the organization and the way that we should actually be treating talent and nurturing talent and therefore how we should be changing HR practices, systems, et cetera.

And so it was really an opportunity to see these two concepts, the changing view of what employees themselves represented and the technology that we had to enable seeing that from the very beginning,

Jesse Purewal [00:08:33] Well, and this is a year where a lot of it's come to a head. Uh, you know, we've obviously seen that for the past year, this shift to remote and the requirement to make agile work the new normal come to the fore, remote onboarding, all the rest of it, HR and IT have had to really work together a ton to come up with immediate solutions over the past, the last year or so.

How do you see successful organizations driving collaborations between HR and the talent side, the employee side and the IT side, or, you know, whoever's looking after kind of the tech stack in the house.

Stacia Garr [00:09:10] I think in general, the most important thing is to be clear on the strategy and the outcomes that the organization is trying to go for.

So we see a lot of organizations trying to grab for the neatest, shiniest, brightest object, because it's cool. I mean, some of the things that are new with artificial intelligence or machine learning, or some of the other buzzwords that you see out there, they can enable really neat things. But a lot of times, folks aren't necessarily focused on what problem are we solving with this particular technology?

And so with Red Thread, we spent a lot of time talking about, what is your strategy when it comes to employees? What do your employees need? How are you thinking about them by different segments and what those needs are? And our ability now with data is so powerful that we can judge that with much greater sophistication, using data to identify what those needs are and then saying, okay, how are we going to go after that?

And then what's the tech that can enable us to do that. And also, what can we latch onto that we already have within our organization? What's our existing tech stack, where might we be able to expand on our existing versus bringing in new? That's where you're going to start to win over friends in IT, you know, whenever HR comes out and just has yet another system to add onto the stack, that doesn't make anybody happy. That collaboration point is important.

Jesse Purewal [00:10:20] Yeah, I was going to next go into, what do you counsel chief people officers, or HR professionals to do? What dialogues do you persuade them to have with their leadership teams around the continued adoption of analytics? What's the right way to approach this?

Stacia Garr [00:10:34] Yeah so it starts with, what is it that are the business priorities and where does, where does your talent strategy hook into that or your HR strategy hook into that?

And given that, how are you going to measure when you've made progress on that? So what are the specific metrics and analytics you're going to be able to look back on in 18 months and say that was a success or that was not, and then putting those into place early, aligned to the outcomes and then going through that whole process as we discussed.

Okay. So this is what we're trying to drive for. What's the strategy that we're going to use to get there. And how are we going to think about that in different ways across the workforce?

Jesse Purewal [00:11:10] Stacia if you look back on all the years of research that you've done studying organizations through the window of talent, what do you think most people would be surprised to hear or to learn about what the data on talent management or employee engagement reveals?

Stacia Garr [00:11:27] Yeah. One of the things that was most surprising to me was a study I did a number of years ago on performance management. Right now we are very much so in a zeitgeist of believing that we should be coaching and developing everyone. And that's the best way to get to better outcomes. And in some instances, I don't disagree with that.

In many instances, I don't disagree with that. But what was surprising about this particular study was that we were looking at two different models of performance management, one we called the competitive assessment model. And one we call the coaching and development model, which is very similar to what we're seeing now. Competitive assessment was more of this kind of old school, GE, rack and stack, rank people and fire the bottom 10%, that whole, that whole thing.

But what was fascinating about this data was that we didn't actually find the model made the difference in terms of how employees performed or their levels of engagement. What mattered was the clarity of expectations around the model. So if people knew they were going into a company where they were going to be ranked and stacked and compared, as long as they knew that and the expectations were clear, that was okay. If they were going into a coaching and development company and they knew the expectations, that was okay. Where companies fell down and where performance fell down was in the middle, when there wasn't clarity on what was going to be expected and what it took to succeed at that organization.

And, and I think now with retrospect, it makes sense. But at the time I remember looking at the data and I'm like, Are you kidding me? These, these rank and yank whatever language you want to use, these, these competitive assessment companies, they're doing just as well? Like, there has to be something wrong. And no, no, it just comes down to expectations and people knowing how to meet them.

Jesse Purewal [00:13:06] And what about performance management? Vis-a-vis different demographic characteristics, whether it be gender or background. I think there's some interesting findings that you've revealed through RedThread and other areas where you've done research.

Stacia Garr [00:13:18] Yeah. So one of the most interesting studies was one that we just completed, I guess, about a year ago now, where we had been doing a whole bunch of research on women and networks, actually in the, in power dynamics and organizations.

And we were doing that study at the same time that we were doing a general study on performance management, what worked and, you know, all this other stuff. And when someone on my research team came to me, or actually I think I went to her and I said, Hey, I'd like to look at this data by demographic data, by things like gender and ethnicity.

And she said, well, you know, whenever we do this research, whenever anybody does performance management research, people get the same scores, it breaks down, fine, whatever. I was like, I get it. But let's like do this deeper dive. Okay. Like, let's not just look at the overall , let's dive more deeply into some of these subsections, things around coaching and feedback and candor, and all this other stuff.

And so we did that and it turned out we had pretty statistically significant differences amongst men and women. And so then I kind of stepped back and I said, well, look, let's look into this a little bit more. Like my understanding is just that usually it's the same, like, but maybe there's more here. And I totally felt like I was like Alice in Wonderland going down the rabbit hole.

And it turns out there's this incredibly rich history of research that shows that different, you know, demographics tend to get rated differently in different ways. You know, for instance, for women, the feedback tends to be less specific. It tends to be more behavioral. So, you know, Stacia, you did a nice job, you know, talking about this or making people feel welcome.

Whereas for, for men, it's often much more like, you achieved this objective. So there's, there's some pretty serious differences. I've been doing research on this space for close to 20 years and I'd never seen any of it. And so that was also surprising to, to come across and is something since then, we've spent a lot of time and energy talking about, particularly in the context of COVID.

Jesse Purewal [00:15:10] What implications does that have for the types of conversations that leaders then need to start to have with their teams? Because I'm guessing this wasn't a situation where there was a blip in the historical record, that actually, if one were to continue to excavate data from any given period, you'd find some similar results, just having the courage to go look. What would, what would you say is the right thing to do?

If I'm a people manager, I have that new kind of insight that I'm acting on. What do I go do differently? What do I lean into that I've maybe been doing all along?

Stacia Garr [00:15:39] Yeah. So one of the things that was really interesting was that you could get rid of some of this bias. If you told managers, for instance, that women are as good at hitting their objectives as men, right before they, they wrote a review or gave a review.

Not that that Stacia is as good as any other person, but women generally. And that would actually get rid of the bias. That's one thing certainly that we can do. In terms of things that we could lean into, you know, there's been a lot of effort around sponsorship in the last number of years and being actively supporting and being actively an ally of different groups.

And so being the one who speaks up and says, Hey, um, you know, we should be inviting this other person into this conversation, or, Hey, I know that you think so-and-so, who's kind of in the typical, you know, group would be good for this promotion, but maybe we should be opening the, this new opportunity up to a broader subset of people. And so I think that there's been a number of people who were doing that work already and who are kind of advocating for folks who are not necessarily in the room or advocating for opening the aperture wider. And I think that's an area that we should definitely be leaning into more.

Jesse Purewal [00:16:52] We'll be back in 30 seconds after this brief word from Qualtrics.

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Jesse Purewal [00:17:28] We're back with Stacia Garr, HR thought leader and founder of red thread research.

I've heard you talk Stacia about the intersection between people and data and this idea of being at an inflection point where, what organizations and leadership teams do now around things like analytics and data privacy will set the stage for a lot of what we get out of our employee experiences over the next few decades. Can you talk a little bit about your perspective and philosophy here and the guidance you're giving to companies?

Stacia Garr [00:18:00] Yeah. So if we think about it right now, we are beginning the process of building a lot of very sophisticated, uh, algorithms that will make at least sorting decisions, if not final decisions about, you know, certainly when we bring in resumes or people from the outside, into our organizations, which resumes do we see for instance.

Well, I think that the, what happens outside the organization is essentially, and not too far in the future, going to get to what is happening in the inside of the organization. So think about certain candidates getting recommend internally for jobs or rotations and the like, and the challenge that we have in, and some of this has been pretty well publicized, is that the data sets that train these algorithms on are historical, and there's been bias in humans' historical behavior.

And so if we set it up so that we just use historical data equals, you know, success -- in the past, this person was hired; therefore, you know, we're going to try and find more people like that person -- well, you're going to end up with a non diverse workforce, which is, you know, in many ways what we have at the moment.

And so one of my big concerns is that we will just be solidifying the challenges of the past and reinforcing them and putting them actually into the algorithms that, you know, it's more, we'll continue to feed them with data, but if we're not fixing it early, uh, we're going to have these problems. So I think it's incredibly important that we're talking about AI and ethical AI and how we use data and, and who's going to get to see the data and all these other things, you know, the European union has been ahead of us in the US on this topic, but we're seeing the United States come up, you know, particularly in California with a lot of the California privacy act, as well as some other work that's coming through.

But I do think it's really important -- what's going to influence what happens? The algorithms that we have 10, 15, 20 years from now.

Jesse Purewal [00:19:49] So on a sliding scale of unabashed optimism to significantly worried pessimism around how this will actually play out given the choices you believe leaders around organizations and society are prepared to make, where do you fall right now?

Stacia Garr [00:20:05] I'll go for a seven, which is pretty optimistic. I think that we have some challenges, but we also have people who have now recognized those challenges and care deeply about this, these issues. And the other part of this, the human resources professionals out there are also keenly aware of these issues now.

And I've seen some vendors who've come into the market, who've come in with a plan to do things that I think are maybe, um, outside the realm of what we would want to do with data about people; might be fine to do with data about, you know, individual customer decisions, but not data that actually affects people's livelihood. And the HR community and the people analytics community have pushed back hard and said, no, that's not, that's not okay. Um, I think that there's more opportunity to formalize that things like ethics, charter data, ethics, charters, and companies, as well as vendors and the like, but I have been remarkably proud of our community in terms of what we've done, in terms of saying there's tons of opportunity for innovation, but we have to remember that this is people and people's livelihoods that we're, that we're working towards.

Jesse Purewal [00:21:12] What do you think will be the most lasting impacts of the pandemic-forced-resets? So the way people work, the relationships people have to colleagues and to companies and even to work itself?

Stacia Garr [00:21:26] That's a great question. I think my aspiration or my hope is that the longest lasting impact is that we're going to see more and more equal involvement from both parents in the lives of their kids, because through flexible working, we've seen what we were missing out on.

So I think it's a little bit of a cliche to say, you know, hybrid, work's going to stay, blah, blah, blah. It is. And that's absolutely true. But then what are, what are the downstream impacts of that? And I think the downstream impact in many ways on families is going to be positive. Once we get in place, some of the support systems that were removed, namely schools during the pandemic. I think, I think the impact will be positive. So, so that's one thing I think, and I hope the second thing that will happen is, is that we transition to being much better about using data and objectives to measure performance than we were in the past. You used to be, you know, I mean, there's tons of studies that show, for instance, that proximity to your manager would be a strong predictor of your performance score.

Um, certainly we know that, you know, face time and hours has been a predictor of performance scores. My hope is, is that because we're now going to consistently be managing people who are outside of the office that we will begin to be much more objective and clear about what we need people to do and to not be assessing them on whether they're sitting there on their chair. So those would be my two hopes.

Jesse Purewal [00:22:52] I want to move the dialogue into some questions about your leadership philosophy and some of the things you've done in your career. Tell me the founding story of red thread research. If you would.

Stacia Garr [00:23:03] Yeah. So my co-founder and I were both at Bersin by Deloitte. I was, I'd been there for eight years and she'd been there for about five years and that's long enough to, kind of, certainly know your space well, but also kind of know the opportunities that are out there.

And there were a few things that we just wanted to do differently that, that we couldn't do, you know, where, where we were with it being an SEC regulated firm. And you know, some of those things were around innovating in terms of the process. So we, we like to do research where we call it research-thinking out loud.

And so that means that we are constantly publishing even before we're certain, you know, we don't go through the whole process of, we're going to like analyze that data to death and then put it out there. We put things out there, we get feedback and we go back and we look at all the things, and it's just kind of this wonderful process of involving our community in the work that we do.

The second thing actually goes very strongly to that point. We try to involve people as heavily as they want to be in the work, which I think is fun. And then, you know, the third thing that we do is that we are just trying to make it more approachable, fun, a little bit irreverent at times, in terms of the work that we do, because it's important, without a doubt, but it also isn't, it shouldn't be boring.

So, but anyway, the two of us started the firm together. So we're two female entrepreneurs and we're three years in and firm's going great. We're we're growing and I've never been on a steeper part of the learning curve. So it's, it's been great.

Jesse Purewal [00:24:31] What do you love most about it at this stage? A few years in.

Stacia Garr [00:24:35] I love being able to make decisions quickly and see the impact immediately.

So when you're in a bigger company, you, you know, there's other people you've got to get approval from and bought in and all the rest and there's lots of good reasons for that, I've worked in a big company and there's lots of good reasons, but it is really fun to just decide on Monday that you're going to change the website and do something different, and on Tuesday, the website's changed. Or you're going to, you want to reach out to these people and talk to them about something. And then, then you do.

Jesse Purewal [00:25:01] Stacia, talk to me about what it's like to develop teams, doing research in talent management and employee experience and so forth. It strikes me that not only do you have to have an empirical rigor and excellence in writing and a curious sense about yourself, but you also have to really deeply get enveloped in the idea of the unique relationships that HR professionals have with the rest of their organizations. And the topic of talent is inherently a sensitive one. So how do you discover and develop people in this zone? Professionally.

Stacia Garr [00:25:38] Yeah, it's not easy. You know, like you mentioned, there's kind of an interesting intersection. So you need people who understand data and are fluent with it. And many of them, you know, being able to run the statistical analyses, but they also have to be able to write. They also have to be able to speak to clients and to present. And those three skill sets often do not overlap. Then you add into it that you need to know something about HR and talent.

Ideally you also know something about technology and HR technology and you know, and all of a sudden it's, it's, it's pretty hard to find folks. Well, what we have found though, is key, is one of the words that you used, which is developed. So nobody comes into this space knowing everything, people know a small fraction of it.

And then it's a question of, do they have the ability to develop the other areas. I think that when we are looking for folks, the question we always ask is, do they have intellectual curiosity? Do they go through the world asking why -- Why is that that way? Why, why isn't it another way? Why should we do this? And if people can do that, I can pretty much teach them everything else.

Jesse Purewal [00:26:40] And at this stage of your career, what advice do you like to share with younger professionals who might have some interest in the kind of career path that you took?

Stacia Garr [00:26:49] Yeah. So I, I often ask them to identify which of those three areas that they spike on. So being research, writing, and speaking, and which ones fulfill them the most, or give them the most energy, is probably the way I would think about it. You don't have to always be the person up on the stage talking about things. You know, you can be the person who's writing it and doing the research and then somebody else does it.

But I ask them to, to think about those and then, then I have them develop their capabilities in the other areas where they it's just knowledge, right? Like go and listen to a whole bunch of podcasts on, on, uh, HR technology or, you know, do this or that. So I, you know, I think we try to identify what gives them energy first and then where some of the gaps are and then fill the gaps in as well as we can.

But I think the bigger question is why would you want to do this work in the first place? And if people are not either excited by the ideas aspect of it. Like for me, I'll tell you the coolest moment of everything that I do is after we've collected the survey data and we get the first statistically significant responses, when we look at it and I think, I know something that no one else knows, but I'm going to get to go tell everybody, like that is so cool to me. And so I get really excited by the idea, right? In some ways, an idea person. So if you're excited by the idea, or if you're excited by the idea of, of helping people at scale, this is a great fit for you.

Jesse Purewal [00:28:22] I love it. I love it. Stacia let me take you to a lightning round here. I'll ask you a couple of questions. Just give me your, your first thought. The first one is a brand that you admire, one that you can't imagine living without.

Stacia Garr [00:28:34] I am fully now in the Peloton cult. It's like I got one last November, and I love that thing. I love the whole ethos, the Facebook groups that tell you like where people are coming up with different exercise routines. And if it works for me.

Jesse Purewal [00:28:53] All right. And as a history professor, as a history buff, what's a favorite book?

Stacia Garr [00:28:59] Ooh. Anything that James MacPherson writes, he's an amazing historian. So he he's written about Lincoln. He's written about others, but anything that he writes, I'll read.

Jesse Purewal [00:29:10] What's the biggest thing that's going to be on the mind of the chief people officer in 2025, four years out from now.

Stacia Garr [00:29:18] I think we're still going to be reckoning with hybrid. Unfortunately, I think that there's going to be a lot of downstream effects that we don't necessarily, we haven't thought about yet.

And I think there's still going to be a question of like, how do we make sure that people treated outside the office are equitably treated as those inside of the office and a question of ingroups and outgroups and what the impact of that is on things like leadership and succession and promotion and the like.

Jesse Purewal [00:29:39] Statia what's something that would surprise most people to learn about you.

Stacia Garr [00:29:43] My pandemic activity was taking voice lessons from a recording artist. And, uh, I am not a great singer, but it puts me very thoroughly outside my comfort zone. And I laugh a lot because I'm so uncomfortably outside my comfort zone. So I don't think people would expect that's something I would do.

Jesse Purewal [00:30:03] And where should we not be surprised to see you 10 years from now Stacia?

Stacia Garr [00:30:09] Um, Probably still leading a company, but I'm not sure if it will be RedThread. We'll see, you know, I I've been a researcher for a long time and at some point I think I'll probably want to do something something differently, but I do like leading a company. So, so it would probably, probably still be in our space because I think, um, like I said, I think we have the power to change people's lives in a meaningful way.

Jesse Purewal [00:30:34] Well, appropriately suspenseful and ambitious. I love it. Stacia, it's been terrific to get to know you a little bit. It's been great to have you on the show. Thanks so much for the conversation.

Stacia Garr [00:30:43] Thank you so much for having the opportunity. It's been really great to get to know you and, and, love your show.

Jesse Purewal [00:30:55] Thanks for listening to Breakthrough Builders. You can subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed the show, I'd be grateful if you could spread the word by leaving a rating and a review, it really does help other people find us. And please tell your friends. Breakthrough builders is a Qualtrics Studios original, presented and produced in collaboration with StudioPod media in San Francisco.

The show is hosted and executive produced by me, Jesse Purewal. Our writer is Todd Bagnull. From StudioPod media, Deanna Morency is our show coordinator. Editing and production by Katie Sunku Wood. Additional editing and music is provided by Nodalab. Our designers are Baron Santiago and Vansuka Chindavijak. Website by Gregory Hedon..

Photography by Christy Hemm Klok. Special thanks to the entire breakthrough builders crew at Qualtrics, including Ali Rohani, James Wadsworth, John Johnson, and Kylan Lundeen.

Season 3Jesse Purewalemployee best practices, people analytics, diversity, bersin, storytelling with data, future of work, redthread, talent management, inclusion, belonging, equity, employee experience