Keeping Teams Engaged in the Digital Age with Vivek Nigam

00:00:08:05 - 00:00:09:02
Wayne Turmel
Hello there, buddy.

00:00:09:03 - 00:00:35:11
Wayne Turmel
Welcome once again to the Long Distance Work Life podcast, where we try to make sense of remote and hybrid work and just generally how the world of how we make a living is changing on a regular basis. My name is Wayne Terminal. I am a master trainer here at the Kevin Eikenberry Group. This is sadly an episode without Marissa.

00:00:35:13 - 00:00:53:23
Wayne Turmel
But the good news when we don't have Marissa is we generally have somebody else really smart and interesting. And that certainly happens to be the case today. Vivek Nigam is with a company called Re Team. He is going to tell you all about it right now. Vivek, how are you, ma'am?

00:00:54:01 - 00:00:56:17
Vivek Nigam
I'm doing great. Wayne, Hey, great to talk to you again. All right.

00:00:56:21 - 00:01:06:08
Wayne Turmel
Well, you say that now. I generally find that wears off. So who are you? What's re team? Sure. What the heck is the deal?

00:01:06:09 - 00:01:27:23
Vivek Nigam
Yeah. So my name is Vivek among the founder of the companies. Copy, Remo. We also go by re team, their product called Re Team in the market. We work with companies who are experiencing challenges with team engagement as they adapt to this change of work, work, work, working place and retention has been strained with 20 to 30% turnover.

00:01:28:01 - 00:01:52:23
Vivek Nigam
Team engagement is lower by 15%, innovation is low by 25%, and traditional methods of getting people engaged just aren't working the same way. Right thing. We need some different methods. And with the new inflationary climate, you find that companies are, you know, revenues are even getting strained as well. So we want to work with companies who are looking to change their engagement culture, improve team participation, and build a better sense of belonging.

00:01:53:01 - 00:02:10:05
Vivek Nigam
Those to us are the foundations of how do you improve productivity, innovation and retention. So that's who we are all about. We have a platform, we have a service model, and we engage with people and we've got some AI that we've been integrating, although we're really big fans of what we call natural intelligence.

00:02:10:07 - 00:02:37:13
Wayne Turmel
Okay, so let's hold it right there and what you just said there. And we will have links, of course, to Vivek's Company and all kinds of good stuff on our show notes on long distance work life dot com. Okay, So let's get back because obviously when I have ten people on the show, my question is always what was the problem you were solving?

00:02:37:13 - 00:02:49:18
Wayne Turmel
Yes. Yes. What what was going on or what is going on that in your case, team leaders in particular need assistance doing?

00:02:49:20 - 00:03:10:01
Vivek Nigam
Yeah. So I'll tell a quick story and then delve into a few more of those things. So Genesis for this whole thing was actually growing up and watching my dad and how he how he went through his life. My dad was born in India. You were super smart guy, but running through the organizations here, he never attained that sense of belonging.

00:03:10:03 - 00:03:27:16
Vivek Nigam
And I remember the conversations in the kitchen between my my mom and dad. And I knew exactly what they were. Is my dad capacity for promotion yet again. And it wasn't like, say, the Met. He had three master's degrees and he worked hard and I thought he was out of the house all the time, but he never quite felt like he belonged.

00:03:27:18 - 00:03:55:17
Vivek Nigam
So as I was growing up, he gave me some advice and he would say, you know, when you start working, I want you to go out for a beer with everybody. Those are the things I didn't do and I never fit in. So when I started working out, find people that reminded me of my dad and people who are smart, quiet, hard workers, but just never really participated in team meetings, never really engaged with the team and wanted to find ways to get them to be more participative, give them a better opportunity.

00:03:55:19 - 00:04:05:14
Vivek Nigam
So I always made it my personal mission to help them. And I'll tell you, 100% of the time, when I gave them a stretch goal and they had that opportunity, they were absolutely brilliant.

00:04:05:15 - 00:04:28:16
Wayne Turmel
And so I love that you said that, Vivek, because that's actually my mission as well. I got into this crazy business because I knew so many smart, talented people with communication skills were holding them back. So whether they lacked the skills or they lacked the ability or confidence to use them effectively.

00:04:28:18 - 00:04:43:19
Vivek Nigam
Exactly. And sometimes you just don't know. It's not that you don't have the skills. You don't know what to say, how to how to use those. And so we built a platform around those trying to increase engagement, and we're finding some great results and robust mission of of a team.

00:04:43:21 - 00:05:08:22
Wayne Turmel
And I love that. Now, help me out because in our book, The Long Distance Leader, and what started this whole craziness for us is this notion that you think leadership first location second, right. That good leaders, people who are really good proactive leaders are making this remote thing work because they're doing all the things leaders have to do.

00:05:09:00 - 00:05:23:19
Wayne Turmel
What is the point of your technology and the work that you do? Is the point to reinforce those folks or is it to help everybody else who kind of isn't?

00:05:23:21 - 00:05:24:08
Vivek Nigam
Yeah.

00:05:24:10 - 00:05:25:18
Wayne Turmel
Doing so great.

00:05:25:20 - 00:05:42:09
Vivek Nigam
Yeah. Yes. And yes. What we find, a lot of times we'll run into people that say, hey, we got these recognition programs, we're doing these things, we're doing this stuff, engagement. And and I just love that. And especially somebody who says to me, Yeah, we built psychological safety and starts using those terms like, this is a kindred spirit.

00:05:42:09 - 00:06:07:17
Vivek Nigam
These are the people that really are making a lot of effort to do all the right things. So how do we help them? They're doing all the right things. They don't necessarily need what we provide, and that's okay. They're already achieving the mission that we're on. What we can do is make that easier for them, right? They're doing a lot of activities, doing a lot of preparation, and we can provide them some tools and some processes that just facilitate and make that easier.

00:06:07:19 - 00:06:24:08
Vivek Nigam
AS Yeah, so for example, a lot of our our tools are all about getting to know each other. And so these are things that you can use in the platform with one click and say, Hey, I'm just checking in to see how you're doing and get, get some responses and start to see a trend. Or I want to say thank you.

00:06:24:08 - 00:06:41:17
Vivek Nigam
And instead of having to do a formal event and make a big thank you, you can do it in one click. Record your voice and record your video and make it very authentic. Say, Hey guys, I just want to thank you for the work you guys did last week. And it's amazing how how impactful that is for people.

00:06:41:19 - 00:07:05:15
Vivek Nigam
So those are the things we want to get people into the habit of, of being being recognition based and thankful culture. And it just helps those people do that. For the remaining, I would say 95, 96% of people who have the right intentions and are doing these things but are so busy doing other things, we provide a platform to really help them build engagement and make this make this easy for them.

00:07:05:15 - 00:07:28:02
Vivek Nigam
So it doesn't is not something that has to take 20 or 30 hours a week to really engage your people. And we've heard numbers like that from a lot of people. So we do want to help that that that other, you know, I think is about 95% of people who know they want to do this, do some pieces of it and all, they generally feel like they could do this better.

00:07:28:04 - 00:07:54:22
Wayne Turmel
Now, you spend a lot of time talking about natural intelligence versus artificial intelligence. And I know the minute I said artificial intelligence, about half the audience's eyes rolled up in the back of their head, and the other half are, you know, willfully submitting to the robot overlords. But what is in your mind? What's the difference and how do they work together or compete?

00:07:55:00 - 00:07:57:14
Wayne Turmel
Help me with that. Yeah.

00:07:57:16 - 00:08:17:00
Vivek Nigam
Anybody who's played with chatbots or some other A.I. technologies and boy is just exploding right now. Right. These things have come a long way in a very short period of time. It'll give you the sense that human beings are going to be replaced and completely obsolete in a matter of years. It just feels that way. And we don't think that's the case.

00:08:17:01 - 00:08:39:10
Vivek Nigam
Right. So these tools are absolutely amazing. But we talk about when I talk about natural intelligence is the stuff that you and I, human beings can infer that we can see from each other. A.I. can pick up some of those things, and it's great at that. But it gives us the insights. It helps us be better. So we believe in taking A.I. and constraining it.

00:08:39:12 - 00:08:59:04
Vivek Nigam
So it's not just an open ended, you know, solve all the problems of the universe. It really starts to be okay. Let's go straight down to let's solve this problem. And the first one that we rolled out with, which we absolutely love find a better way to say something. It could be anything. Let's say I want to say thank you, Wayne.

00:08:59:04 - 00:09:16:03
Vivek Nigam
Thank you, Wayne, for for giving me this platform, letting me be on your show and people who are very good at it, they'll come up with something beautifully eloquent and it's wonderful people who aren't. And we have a person on our team. She's from Brazil and she says, Looking is my second language. And sometimes I struggle with this.

00:09:16:05 - 00:09:33:00
Vivek Nigam
They can go back to what we call the reaching assistant, leverage some AI, and say, Hey, I want to say thank you to Wayne and I want to make it sincere. How do I do that? And we'll come up with a nice paragraph that sounds really formal, sounds very businesslike. It's really nicely written. And they can use that and make some minor edits and boom.

00:09:33:00 - 00:09:42:23
Vivek Nigam
Now what you've done is you've taken I made it in a way that will enhance what we do interpersonally, and we think that's very valuable.

00:09:43:01 - 00:10:21:16
Wayne Turmel
So just so I catch this as a leader, you say I need to reward and recognize this person and I want to do that. I'm not really sure how you use a AI to give you that first draft to put it together, and then you can tweak and adjust that or you can say, Yeah, that's great. Zuckerberg I think that's the thing with A.I. and my fear is not that I exist, it's that people are inherently either lazy or rushed for time, depending on how generous you feel.

00:10:21:18 - 00:10:44:02
Wayne Turmel
For example, you know, the first thing I did with Shaggy and I don't know if I've ever said this on the show, first thing I did with Chad JP was write me a one paragraph bio for author Wayne Turmel, because I hate when people say, Send me your bio. And it sent me this very lovely, concise bio, which also gave me a degree I do not possess.

00:10:44:08 - 00:11:07:11
Wayne Turmel
And I did not write. Yeah, yeah. Now, you know, if I'm rushed and in a hurry, it would be really easy. And by the way, since Chatbot thinks I'm smarter than I am, cool, It's cool to just use that without using the the human thinking up front and then on the back end. Right.

00:11:07:13 - 00:11:23:16
Vivek Nigam
Right. Yeah. You know, and and as you as you recognized earlier. So I came from the tech world and it actually reminds me a lot of when I was in college, at one point, someone said to me it was a professor who said it said to give us all these software tools to analyze how do you do this?

00:11:23:20 - 00:11:46:20
Vivek Nigam
This an electrical engineering class, I think was and I said, remember, design happens here, right? So the thought process has to happen here and you have to strategize here. Everything else is a tool. And so in our minds, we take A.I. in the same way, even as fascinating and as amazing as it can be as much of a time server as can be.

00:11:46:22 - 00:12:16:16
Vivek Nigam
We also believe that the human capital, the human condition, the human intelligence that national intelligence is really critical. And we use that as a tool to augment what we're doing. And, you know, my lesson learned back then was I went to no cool software and I relied on that only tool. And sure enough, I didn't realize what I was doing and spare you the details, but I saturated a circuit and and handed in really proud, got back F and Y because guess what you did?

00:12:16:17 - 00:12:37:19
Vivek Nigam
You relied on the tool and not on on your thought process and your human condition. We think it's the same way. If we rely completely on AI, it is going to bite you at some point. We think the combination of what you do, what you think about that, you know, focus on human experience and that interpersonal experience, plus A.I. is really powerful.

00:12:37:20 - 00:13:07:12
Wayne Turmel
AI That's great, and thank you for that explanation. This is really in the weeds and I really don't want to spend a lot of time there. But does the AI I yeah, I take into account things like work stats. So for example. Yeah. You know, Bob is an introvert and Rajesh is you know really out there will is Taylor and adjust some of that to.

00:13:07:18 - 00:13:30:05
Vivek Nigam
Yeah exactly exactly right so what we do when you're kind of say something and say a thank you it does not right It tries to give you a level thank you. And that's done on purpose. One of our missions is to level the social playing field work to help people who aren't as comfortable and people are comfortable give them a little bit more of a closer.

00:13:30:07 - 00:13:49:16
Vivek Nigam
We never wanted to be everybody equal and one line, but get it, get the plane feel a little bit closer. So for things like that, it does not, however, we do a lot of other things. We do sentiment analysis. We do a lot of other components. Actually today we just talk about one that's going to be rolling out very shortly.

00:13:49:18 - 00:14:12:22
Vivek Nigam
We're based on the speech that you use. Like, you know, we do a lot of video. If you post something in a video, it is not going to take that and extract from it some to do some natural actions that we should take as a team based on what was being proposed. A lot of we would do is share ideas for innovation and based on the ideas in fact out what those are.

00:14:13:00 - 00:14:41:03
Vivek Nigam
When we do that, we actually feed in profiles for the user. And the reason we do that, if I'm talking and it knows when I talk, I, I talk all over the place, right? My, my mind will go this way and that way of, you know, kind of, kind of have a little bit of a tree of thought sometimes it will give me a series that may be a little bit lengthier, but one of the guys on our team really smart, much more reserved, much more organized.

00:14:41:06 - 00:14:56:19
Vivek Nigam
It's going to give them a shorter list. That is something that he can really manage and that the team can manage according to his profile. So, yeah, there is a combination of feeding in behavioral information and of an information perspective.

00:14:56:21 - 00:15:04:09
Wayne Turmel
One of the coolest and also scariest things I have heard in a long time is the notion of sentiment analysis.

00:15:04:10 - 00:15:04:23
Vivek Nigam
Oh yeah.

00:15:05:04 - 00:15:12:00
Wayne Turmel
That that is. And in the fiction writer in me is fascinated by yeah.

00:15:12:02 - 00:15:34:18
Vivek Nigam
It's it's really powerful we've got an engagement where we you know we working with the company that started out actually back in December and rolled out a whole new process and we were just there just to help build the engagement as well. And at the same time, watch the comments and the behaviors in the platform. You can see in December everything was very negative.

00:15:34:21 - 00:15:56:08
Vivek Nigam
People were not happy. People don't always react to change very well, but there's a lot of factors why. But then but the condition was that people were not happy. That's just sentiment. That's just based on what they're saying, what they're posting, what the things that they're doing was to see as as the company engaged and spent the time investing in the engagement month over month.

00:15:56:13 - 00:16:15:09
Vivek Nigam
Little by little, it got better and better. And I remember we had a little celebration when it hit neutral and said, Hey, now they're neutral this great today, they're positive, which was a great thing. And just use it as a as a tool. Like what am I dealing with? Like, how are people feeling? I think that's I think it's actually very powerful.

00:16:15:11 - 00:16:29:21
Wayne Turmel
So let's flip this. We don't have a lot of time left. Sure. Fascinated because this started with your father, the individual contributor who is feeling it. Let's put this on its head as an individual contributor.

00:16:29:23 - 00:16:30:02
Vivek Nigam
Yeah.

00:16:30:05 - 00:16:39:09
Wayne Turmel
How will I and the different tools that are available to us make their life our life easier?

00:16:39:11 - 00:16:58:21
Vivek Nigam
And so I'm going to jump to the grandiose vision piece here and you will see this and I'll give you a prime use case in working at a corporation years ago and and working with a woman I work with, she she'd been working at the same company for 30 years, 30 plus years, and she was a vice president.

00:16:58:22 - 00:17:18:00
Vivek Nigam
She heard her career was great. But she told me the story that she had started with another woman who's still at the company, same number of times. They started the same week. Both started as engineers, but the other woman was still an engineer. 30 years later and said, well, why is that case? And we spent a lot of time talking about this.

00:17:18:00 - 00:17:40:08
Vivek Nigam
And in in the traditional world it was that somebody from higher up grabbed her and said, You're coming with me. Let me teach you how to do these things right. So now think about that. She got a lot of attention and and her career blossomed and she grew through the organization. But the other one, her her peer did not get all that and didn't blossom.

00:17:40:08 - 00:17:59:13
Vivek Nigam
So what we want to offer to people who are individual contributors were maybe a little bit on the quieter side. Let us show you how these things are done. Let us give you some tools that let you contribute and be noticed and be heard a little bit more so that your career can also advance the way others do.

00:17:59:15 - 00:18:07:03
Vivek Nigam
You have that that opportunity? That's our goal. That's our mission. We've seen some great success with it and we're hoping to see a lot more.

00:18:07:05 - 00:18:35:14
Wayne Turmel
I love that because I know that went in 25 years of talking to managers. Yeah, the one thing that we feel like we don't do as well as we might, but is the coaching and mentoring piece and the fact that this allows support and encouragement on both ends. So this is really fascinating and it'll be interesting to see how all of this works out.

00:18:35:16 - 00:18:59:14
Wayne Turmel
Vivek, thank you so much as always. Folks, we will have the show notes links if you are intrigued and I can't believe you're not and want to check all of this out, please look at long distance work like Dot com. I am going to boot Vivek out of here just long enough to wrap up the show and say thank you for listening.

00:18:59:14 - 00:19:18:17
Wayne Turmel
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00:19:18:18 - 00:19:25:23
Unknown
If you are interested. 4949 30.

00:19:26:01 - 00:19:51:17
Wayne Turmel
Check out Kevin in my new book, The Long Distance Team Designing Your Team for Everyone's Success. And please, please, please don't be shy. Marissa is doing a wonderful job with the show on Social media, particularly on LinkedIn. We are looking for your questions, topics, people that we should talk to and your pet peeves. Quite frankly, we're having a blast with that.

00:19:51:22 - 00:20:15:17
Wayne Turmel
So you can reach myself or Marissa through email or through LinkedIn. The links are in the show notes. That's it. Thank you so much for joining us. We are really, really excited to bring this show to you. We're excited to bring you very, very smart people like Vivek and our other guests. Thank you for joining us. Talk to you soon.

00:20:15:21 - 00:20:17:12
Wayne Turmel
Don't let the weasels get you down.