Name: Your 2026 Strategy Is Only as Strong as Your Managers
Uploaded: 2026-02-23T17:31:00.296Z
Duration: 1 h 2 min 32 s
Description: Your 2026 Strategy Is Only as Strong as Your Managers

Transcript for "Your 2026 Strategy Is Only as Strong as Your Managers": This is so bizarre. Respond to you have thoughts that are in your head, things that you're trying to get done, but I'd like you to be here. Yes. Close out those tabs. Minimize that window. You could send the message later or just send it just send it as it is. Totally fine. But just so that you can be here and be a part of our conversation today, get get any of those distractions away. Also, many of you are already doing this, which is you are building community by and and really boosting participation by getting in chat. And some of you, you've been to our events before. You understand LifeLabs. We promote participation. We want you to connect with one another. Say hello. Where are you in the world? We got, yep, you got Jennifer from Maryland. You and I, I'm in Connecticut. We're both getting snow on the East Coast over here. My East Coast folks, we know we got blizzard conditions. Hello, Anna Annalisa from San Antonio, Texas. Welcome. Naria from Atlanta. Serena from Salt Lake City. What's up, Michelle from LA? So we got people from all over the world. And here we go. I wanna kick things off. So, again, my name is Brendan. I'm a facilitator and facilitation manager with LifeLabs. A little bit about me. Right? So we're here for we're here for our managers. Right? I and I'm being I'm one of them. Right? So the the conversation that we're here for is, you know, how do we build and strengthen our manager individuals and teams and ultimately our organizations this year? Now I care really deeply about this. So my background is in organizational psychology. Many of you know what that means. It it just I study people in the workplace. I really care about people in the workplace, and and I've for over a decade now, I've worked as a facilitator, a coach, a consultant. You know, I I've been as a leader inside of organizations, including LifeLabs. And, ultimately, I help really about solving two of those biggest problems that you're dealing with, which is how do you help people perform their best and feel their best at work? And I know that many of you are here for that. Like, how do I help my managers perform their best and feel their best at work? And today, we're gonna talk about, you know, in particular, what we're seeing at LifeLabs are, you know, some strategies and skills that really matter. And we also have a special guest who is also gonna be able to share, in particular, as a people ops leader, as a talent development leader, as a learning and development leader who are folks that we love to work with, and you are representing, what are we doing? You know, what are folks really focusing on in people operations right now to make a difference for their manager teams? And so I actually want to introduce our very special guest. Gemma, why don't you go ahead, unmute, hear who are you, and what are you here for today? Hello, everybody. Brendan, thank you for that. I'm. here representing Oyster, and I am the senior learning manager at Oyster. I always kinda squint a bit when I say senior because it makes me feel like a a pensioner. But I am the senior learning manager at Oyster, which means my job of many things is to look after manager enablement. So that's why this is a a topic that's passionate. I think we're I'm sure lots of you are learning people who have turned up here today. And I I think the one of the things that I find as a learning specialist is I like, if I'm not busy, I'm letting people down. And that's kind of why this webinar really, really appealed to me when I was asked to help because I feel like if I'm not helping managers, I'm letting them down. So I don't know if that resonates with anyone in the call today, but, yeah, my job always do is to support managers. That might be documentation. It might be building an AI solution. It might be just coaching, chatting, being there for them, building community. And then I do that across the wider company as well with some lovely other people I get to work with. Mhmm. And, Jim, I I I mean, I I'm in the same boat. I mean and in LifeLabs, that's what we do. I mean, we we train, you know, managers, leaders, and teams, lots of different people, but we know that and we'll talk about it today how important those middle managers are. You know, the senior leaders, it's not like we don't care about you. We do we do absolutely care about you and especially what you're creating and role modeling and the goals that you have. But, you know, if this is this is our event, you know, serving our managers, and I'm one of them. And you may be you may be too out there. Feel free to let us know. So a a little bit about LifeLabs, and we'll hear gonna hear more about Oyster, and Gemma's gonna tell us what what, they're doing inside of their organization. But at LifeLabs, many of you know who we are, some of you don't. So we train and develop leaders, managers, and teams, and we do that with companies all around the world. Our mission is to teach people life's most useful skills. And in doing so, we've trained, I don't know, o I've said, like, over a half a million people, more than that. And the outcomes that people get are more engaged and a more high performing workplace. And that's again, like, that's what I I spent my life doing, you know, helping people perform best and feel their best at work, how to perform well and stay engaged. And we do that really well. We do sixty minute, ninety minute, and two hour workshops, and we do practice intensives as well as we're looking into group coaching. And so we we have a variety of modalities, in person and virtual, and it's just a privilege to get to do that and to support managers in the skills that really matter. We'll talk about some of those things today, and then I'll pass it over to Gemma. Let us know a little bit about Oyster. Well, first first I just wanna say I'm a proper LifeLabs learning nerd. So I am absolutely buzzing to get the chance to do this on behalf of Oyster. I've watched so many webinars, so it's really cool to get a chance to be in one myself. I am representing Oyster, the company we help companies across the world hire, pay, and care for talent no matter where in the world they are. So we're all about making global employment simple and as human as possible. So we're a platform which is backed by lots and lots of in house experts who know their stuff about global hiring, helping people navigate their hiring process. And as a b corp, that's also a really cool thing about us, that we we we believe in impact. We believe in being responsible. We believe in doing what we say, which I really love and is one of the reasons that's really attracted me to staying at Oyster for so long. I've been with the company for four years. This will be my fifth year. The company is five and a bit years old, so I've seen it grown, seen it become what it is today. And the things I wanna share with everyone as well as learn, if you've got good ideas, please share them back. The things I want to share are all things that we're doing. So I'm not going to be sharing with you ideas that we've got. I'm sharing with you ideas that we are, we have in our 2026 enablement plan. And a lot of that is because things happened in 2025 that we learned from. So as a company, this b corp, this culture of being open and transparent, we we build in public and we share what we learn. So that's why I'm really excited here today. And if you have any questions about how things are going for us, very, very happy to do my best to answer them. Absolutely. I mean, that's why we love partnering with Oyster and and, I mean, just working with organizations. Like you said, like, you'd see people first employers. I mean, I I know that, for many, that's an aspiration, and I know that lots of folks out there out out in your seats, you know, you're committed to being people first, but I think it's really special, Gemma. And I know we're gonna hear about it just like the ways in which you're putting people first at the company and, again, enabling them to perform well to, you know, feel great at work. And that's one of the reasons why you stay, and I'm sure that's some of the reasons why the people at Oyster stay at that company. So I wanna hear more about it, and that's gonna be part of our agenda. Now, Gemma just mentioned questions. We do have a q and a function, so you could find that next to the chat. If you have questions, we're gonna do our best. I'll look to monitor those questions throughout. I have Courtney Hastings, who's on the LifeLabs marketing team, and you may see Courtney's name pop up in chat. You may also see her answer some of the questions that you pop into the q and a, but feel free to put those questions in. Again, I'll I'll try to get to them during this the time that we're here. And also at the end, I'll I'll I'll I'll reference those questions. But use chat as well as a way. I know people are already you're you're sharing. Some of you are are talking about what, you know, your thoughts on today. You're sharing things about yourself and where you are. Nairobi, Kenya, welcome, DJ. So we wanna see you active. But let's get into our agenda for today. First thing we're gonna cover you know, we're we're starting this year. For some of you, you're like, February, Brandon. We're well into 2026. But I think it's helpful to to do a bit of a reflection, just a small reflection on managers and their experience last year. What are the what are some of the things that we've learned to set the stage for why it's so important internally at your company and and toward you know, working with those individual managers on how to strengthen them. Right? It's they've gone through a lot, and we wanna recap that before we get into how to build stronger managers. And then we'll also, of course, make some space for you, for questions, and, again, pop those into the q and a. So first thing is let's get into the impact. And and Gemma and I are both gonna chat about this. I know I'm gonna come from the standpoint when it comes to impact on managers, You know, at LifeLabs, myself, my team you know, so I oversee our East Coast facilitation team. I work with lots of facilitators. We work with lots of managers. So I'm gonna speak from my perspective on a decade of working with managers, and what am I hearing from our facilitation team who are in the classroom who are who are teaching and coaching. And then we're gonna hear from Gemma too in terms of internally, you know, from from her organization, what are they experiencing and noticing and seeing. Now just to recap. Right? You see up on the screen, and and I know some of you are are in tune with your managers. But I think that we've seen you know, since 2020, right, what 2020, I think, represented the pandemic represented a big shift in work. Really huge. And it's not like we haven't been going through change, but I think that's where all of a sudden it was like, change is happening, and you have to adapt very quickly, and you have to perform well very quickly. And we started to see that that that was what was needed. And since then, it seems like the the trend has just continued. And last year, it it's the same where we have folks who are experiencing lots of volatility, you know, and that's not just happening within their organization. Global economic social instability, which then impacts organizations, and that's led to lots of different things. For some, it is just shifts in the way we work. Right? So some internal disruption where we have, okay. We need to move things around. We need to reshift priorities. For some and and I know many of you out there, that's led to some really, I'd say, emotionally difficult physically difficult challenges like reductions in workforce. And I I'm I'm with you. We've been there, and we've worked with lots of companies. Right? So that there's disruption on on multiple fronts, and some is like, okay. We have to change, and some is, oh, no. We're really dealing with some some issues that are gonna, you know, cause some grief within people and within the company. Also, just strain. Just people are not feeling relieved. Right? So, again, it's it's not it's been consistent change from year to year. Again, I think the pandemic in 2020 represents that initial shift, but it really hasn't let up for folks, and they're feeling the weight of all of the change. And now, of course, we're gonna talk about AI, technology acceleration. We're gonna hit upon that today because I know it's important to you all because we have to pay attention to it. But we of course, that's just one more thing on people's plates that they're gonna have to adapt to, and managers are feeling the weight of that technology acceleration. And we'll we'll talk about skills that might be really helpful in terms of supporting them. And and then finally, the readiness gap, and I think that does speak to a bigger a part of our topic today, which is that managers are feeling very under resourced and under skilled, and we know that. They told us that. We saw it in if you've re if you've read through Gallup's state of the workforce report from last year, we know it right now. Managers are the most overwhelmed, most disengaged group according to the data. Their engagement fell from 30% engaged to 27% engaged, which is the sharpest decline of any of the subsets of employees. So they're feeling the weight of this of all of these things more more than anyone else. I could tell you firsthand, I'm feeling it too. And and a lot of them again, most of them don't feel like they have the skills or the resources to do their jobs well, which is why folks like Gemma, folks like yourselves are it's just so important. So I wanna pause here. I've shared a bunch of these things, Gemma, from the list or or even what's not on the list, you know, what are some of the things that you're noticing that you got from last year when it comes to Oyster's managers? Oh, it's a good question. I mean, what you've said resonates with the managers I work with. I will say what what I think characterizes an oyster manager, which I've never seen stronger in anywhere I've worked, is the care. Like, the deep, deep care for every one of their team, and that they'll go out to battle to to make sure that person gets the best. And I I think with that comes the the, like, the deep emotional, like, baggage of carrying that around when not everything will work out as you want as a manager. You can't create a new role for that high performing employee. Right? There is no, like, ideal path for every single person. You can't necessarily always have the training that you want. You can't necessarily find that exciting project that will keep that good person for an extra bit of time. And I think what I've what I've seen across Oyster consistently because of our, like, strong focus on well-being and and that care is just managers. Not how necessarily burning out workload wise, but burning out emotionally and then having to just spread themselves so thin so that they end up having to use more of the, like, more of the time that they need to be tactical to maintain the relationships they have with their employees because that's what they really care about. With that brings challenges, which I can talk about a bit later. But that's I mean, I've I've some of the best managers I've ever worked with are at Oyster consistently, and I and the managers some of the best managers I've ever been managed with are at Oyster. I'm so lucky. But I think with that just comes the burden, the burden of trying to control a world which is just throwing change at you every five seconds. Yeah. I think that you know? And I think that it's sort of this it's kind of a ironic thing where it's like your your best managers are probably the ones feeling the worst because of how much they care. And it's like this it it's like the more you care and which which I believe is is the job of manager, to care about those who are, you know, sort of in your charge, right, who you know, you're you're sort of, you take on that sort of emotional burden, like you had said. And I think that it's it's kinda unfortunate how some of the best managers are feeling the most burned out because of how much they care and how much they're trying to do for their employees. And I do yeah. Go ahead. I I will throw in. One of the things we also find is that they care so much and they want them to do so well, sometimes that biases with the positivity towards how they're doing. So that's another challenge is they then compound that effect a few months later when they haven't had, like, the the headspace or felt the moment to say, hey. You know, that wasn't quite right. Then weeks and weeks later, they then got a bigger issue to have to deal with. I find this culture of like the the oyster culture of wanting people to succeed so hard. You you, like, you hang on just to hope that they will get better. And you have support. measures in place to do your best, but sometimes people just it doesn't work that way, does it? So that's been really interesting. to input and think. about how I think I and I I you know, now that you mentioned that, I feel like that is gonna be really, really difficult, especially now for this year. I think with with all of the technological advances, with all of the, you know, the expectations, I think, that are going to increase around we need to move faster, we need to work better and smarter, then then, again, it's going to be managers who have to have a lot of the tough conversations around what does success look like, are you meeting expectations, and we're no longer gonna have that. I think ability to move slow when it comes to people's performance in some ways, it feels like every year, it's just more and more competitive. And, again, like, managers get that burden because they want people to succeed, and it's just sometimes it doesn't always like you said, it doesn't always work out. And it definitely have to give managers the ability to have the difficult conversations, give them the skills to be able to have those difficult conversations. So we're gonna get we're definitely gonna get into that. But, Gemma, thank you for sharing. And I know that people are in chat as well, and they're they're talking about their experiences with, know, you their manager teams. Some of you are coming from that manager perspective. People are noticing, like, yep. Is it lasagna? Ysenia? Ysenia? Yep. You're noticing managers being disengaged. And then, yeah, it's a shame. That's why I think we're here. We know it's a a problem that we need to resolve because those are the folks who are caring, leading. They're keeping the rest of the organization floating and engaged as well. So let's get back into it and talk a little bit about the impact of 2025. There is more. I know some of you are are were looking at that slide, you're listening to us, and you're going, I could add to the list, Brendan. There's there's all of these hidden small tactical things as well that we just can't fully capture in one slide. The day to day things that shift and change. So I get it. But what I'd like to get into are what we're learning and what we're seeing as a way to build strong managers. And, we're not gonna cover everything here today. It this is part of a big conversation, and I I again, it's the beginning of the year. So I want us to to be right now in the beginning of this year in the conversation of how to do this, and we'll share some of the things that we're noticing. Of course, there are more. Wanna hear from you. You may be in chat going, hey. We're also doing this. But this is our our road map. What we feel are three critical areas again, there are more, but these are, I think, the ones that we could focus on today to build stronger managers are, one, we'll talk about culture alignment. This is a theme that's shown up over and over again. Right? So this isn't there's nothing new about culture alignment. But, again, I think repeating a message multiple times before it sinks in is what's necessary. Sometimes you gotta hear something again and again. You have to hear the examples of what people are doing to start to understand this is a piece to focus on, and and we'll hear from Gemma as well on how they're aligning managers to their culture. We'll talk about that as well, like, what we're doing and how we work with managers to align them to the culture. Second, when it comes to building strong managers, helping them connect, We'll talk about social inclusion for managers and as well just growth. And, of course, how do I what are the skills that are gonna be needed? How to help managers grow and thrive in today's environment so they're not feeling the same feelings that they're they had in 2025. And then finally, AI adoption, which kinda fits into everything, but it's it's its own piece, and we'll get into that last. So when it comes to culture alignment, I'd like to to first tap Gemma. Because I think, Gemma, your example of what of what Oyster's doing at a cultural level to align their managers is just is actually, I think, a perfect way to even talk about what we mean as culture. So I'm gonna pop into this slide. And and, Jim, like, just give us a rundown of what we're seeing here and and how this all fits into aligning managers to to culture. Thank you, Brendan. Right. So I'm gonna talk about values, and I don't know how anyone's gonna respond to that. They might be like, oh gosh. Or we've done this. It doesn't work. Or maybe you're at a company where you're like, yes. This is like the backbone of who we are. However however values land in your company, something that I'm really passionate about, I'll give you an insight into my background. I used to be a classroom teacher, and I used to teach children who are between 11 and 18. And one of the things I always go back to is what are we what are we teaching to? What are the rules that we're trying to support? Because once we've got the boundaries, we can then start to build curiosity and we can start to stretch and form it. And one of the things I find about values is that it it feels intangible. It feels a bit woolly. And we had like, always do at 2025. We had issues that were coming up in our engagement survey. We could see them ourselves in every day around collaboration. We had issues in teams prioritizing their own workload over other teams. We had issues in people being so nice, they didn't offer a different opinion because they didn't wanna hurt anyone's feelings. Going back to that comment about our managers are the most, like, compassionate I've ever known, that compassion would maybe lead to you fighting for your team more than you should because there's a greater goal at stake. So what the wonderful people in the team I work with did is they they just went back over the values, and we looked at what we needed to be working as as a as a company. And we came up with four values. And they're on the screen, build and give trust, make it happen, united team, and drive change. And you see these animals on the screen. And it's like, if anyone is a learning specialist or like brand or anything, there's loads of different ways you can make values stick. And I'm not saying these have landed with everybody. But the important thing for me as a learning professional and as someone who supports managers is if we can get our values established, they're a a guardrail. What the problems I'm seeing with our managers having to work with is they're so busy. They like, having to navigate ambiguity is really tricky. And how do you know in that moment how to address the way that we work as a company? Unless you make it really clear how we work as a company. Added complexity at Oyster is we're fully remote, which is incredible because it means I get to be home for my kids. But it means we have many, many different ways of working. We're in over sixty, seventy countries. We have loads of different interpretations of what it is to be at work. And what we wanted to do is not be one particular country. We didn't want to have we've got majority of our people come from Spain. We didn't wanna have the Spanish way of working as the majority. We didn't wanna have the American way of working. We wanted to have the oyster way. And what does that look like? So what the relaunch of values has allowed us to do is to be really, really clear on how teams should be behaving. Without this, in 2025, and I don't know whether this is happening in your teams as well, our managers were having to create a way of working. And we had values before, but they just weren't landing in such a tactical way. So managers were sitting down with their teams and they were saying like, how do we want to navigate this problem? How do we want to work with each other? How do we want to collaborate with each other? And then every team had its own way of working. And I think of this as an operating system. So if you imagine every phone had its own operating system, you're gonna get conflict. There's a reason iOS launches and we all get an update at the same time. It's so every app can talk to each other. And I think what we had in 2025 was a lot of different apps that couldn't necessarily communicate in the same language. So the relaunch of this values is critical. And for us this year, it's absolutely critical because it categorically defines how we want to navigate decision making, how we want to navigate problem solving, how we want people to navigate when they find there's something that they're not happy with because they don't think it agrees with the way we should be working as a company, the greater good. And what we've done with that is we've we've got a Goldilocks option. So there's what does it look like to be too much of make it happen? And making it happen is is deciding that something's not right and and moving forward on it. Or saying speaking up and saying like, you know what? This this needs to change. What's it look like to do two less of that when you don't say anything, when you just stay quiet because you think someone else is gonna be doing it? So what we've tried to do is give it really black and white way of working at Oyster. The challenge in 2026 is to try and embed that in a way which goes beyond where we are now, which is people can name the values. People can say, oh, you are operating in that way. What we need to be doing is that retro that reflects on where the values didn't land. So in terms of like, I can talk about how we're enabling this with our managers, but I just wanted to set the seed because my my teacher brain always goes back to what's the curriculum? What do we actually need people to know? Mhmm. And then where can they be creative from there? So that's what we've tried to do. We've tried to give our managers a curriculum. We've rolled it out across all staff. We're embedding it across all of our different touch points so that the language is there. The next thing is the reinforcement of the behavior. Yeah. I love it. I do. I mean, I I know you know? And I see there's a comment in chat about, you know, challenging organizational approaches to using values. And I think that you brought up, Gemma, some really I think the things that you're doing are the are really the important ways to reinforce the values. Like, this image here, I love it. And at the same time, you mentioned there's gotta be work done around what does it mean to make it happen. And one of the things I love that you shared was, like, what what is too much of a value look like and what is too little of a value look like? You know, like, meaning, like, what is good execution and what is, like, maybe less, you know, less effective execution look like? And I think that's such an important factor, and and we're gonna you know, I think I'll and I'll touch upon this as well, but I think to to Robert, I think you had a your comment in the chat around, you know, values and principles, they can allow for some I I'd call them less desirable behaviors. And I think, Tema, that's what you mentioned is we need to we need to suss out. We need to work together to understand what are the valuable behave valuable behaviors associated with us and what are the less valuable. And I had you know, an example is we worked with a client and their one of their values, they were really quickly growing. But and in order to do that well, one of their values they came up with was be scrappy. And in the beginning when they were growing, be scrappy, they didn't they didn't fully explicitly define it. But what they did was they implicitly defined it as being, like, being adaptable and to change and being able to change really fast. But what happened over time is that what it actually turned into was basically, be scrappy meant just be willing and okay with anything. Right? Like they were changing people would change deadlines, and they would say, sorry. You gotta be scrappy when they got pushed back. Or people would give feedback that wasn't effective, and it would be like, listen. You just gotta be scrappy sometimes. So it was like, it all of a sudden got twisted into something that it was never meant to be, and I think that is really important for organizations right now. For you, it was redesigning. Right? You got folks together. You redesigned. But I think to your point, sometimes it's like, let's just do a retro. Like, let's make sure, hey. How are people interpreting these? How are they working and not working? And also and I wanna ask you this, which is the enablement piece, which is, okay. How do we define them? Great. That is a really huge step. How how do we define them? What does good look like? What does not good look like? But then there's also how do I do it? And I am curious, Gemma, what is, like, one thing you're thinking about when it comes to enabling managers right now to act on these values and the behaviors that you mentioned? It I would say less one thing, more low stakes multiple touch points. I I don't think values training goes anywhere personally for my group. And I I'm not standing here saying this is how you do x, y, and zed. I'm saying, I know my people. I've known them for years, and I know what lands with oysters. What we need to address is those moments in the the life cycle of a product, the life cycle of a project, the life cycle of a performance development moment. When are the moments that would have been better on reflection if you could have said what you needed to say early on? If you're in a retro and it's a project retro, can we just put a lens over this just for a second and check that you have said the things that you really need to say? Because that's what we need you to do. And doing that involves a leader being critical about their own project. It involves having a moment where people can surface the things without there being a response straight away. Like, we're actively it's those little moments that I think are they take a long time because they're across multiple teams and multiple moments. But they're the things we're aiming to do this year and the things that we've run so far in the first quarter, which have had the most impact. It's been like, we've recently just gone through a calibration cycle for performance development reviews. And that's an ex a perfect moment where we need managers to understand how critical it is that they can build trust with each other. And, like, you need to earn trust by being honest. We need that's the moment where we call that a value, and we say, well, if you're not being if you're not challenging the others in your group, then what is the point of this process? How can we hold ourselves. to a standard? So that's I say, like, it's not one. It's many, but it's complex and it's little touch points. And the aim is to be reflecting on that in a few months time when we do our engagement survey. There are some key triggers that we've mapped to our values. So we know where we know what caused us to redo our values. We have similar values to what you said when we were first, like, elevate talent was one of our first values that we all loved at the time, but, like, what does it mean to actually, like we're elevating talent every day. So now we've got these more concrete values that were built from engagement survey data over years. The idea is to go back on that and to see if we can see again. So me as a professional, I can choose the quality of the work I'm doing across those multiple touch points at the end using the survey, doing some workshops, getting some feedback. Yeah. Hopefully, it's simple. I mean, I love it. I it's the internal work. I mean, I don't get to do that type of internal work anymore, and I used to. And I I but I just mean how to reinforce, how to define the values, how to enable people. You talk about role modeling. And I think it's it is really important, especially when we're considering culture alignment because the the idea is we want everyone to be aligned to the way we do things. Right? The way we Oyster does things because it's what we believe has is going to keep making us successful and making us attractive and keeping people here. And to your point though, it's like, what's the what's the point if the the the ones who most of the people are looking at? Not if if the senior leaders are important, think they definitely have to be, at least according to the research. It's like they have to be showcasing and role role modeling them, but they don't have as many touch points with the entire rest of the organization. So if they could say they're not doing it and they're not feeling enabled to and to role model that, it's it's almost like we're we're gonna fail. And I think some of the things that you brought up, this is I just wanna recap. I know for some of you, this again, this might not be new because you have done this type of work before. You've been in Gemma's shoes. You've had to work with values alignment, culture alignment, and things like that. But I think, again, it it I I still see at companies that I work with, with clients that I work with, the same mistakes keep happening. So one and you heard this from Gemma. Right? You saw the image. I love it. Right? It's it's it's awesome to have values, but at the same time, how do we make them behaviorally explicit? And so we do need for folks to remember them, and that is important to to know that this is the way that we do things around here, but at the same time, being really explicit on what does good look like. What is too much of this value? What is too little of this value look like? Also, when it comes to how those values and the culture scales, you know, of course, we know it's the managers. They just have their they they just have so many more touch points with the frontline staff, with the rest of the organization. And so if they cannot act on those behaviors, then, again, right, it's like they're not gonna have that alignment. Right? The culture is not gonna come together. Also, something that you mentioned, Gemma, you talked about performance reviews. Right? Like, when we're if we're gonna pause, we have to think about, okay. Are we incentivizing these behaviors at all? And that is a key when it comes to aligning to culture is, yes, we can tell people, okay. This is what good looks like. Right? When we one of our values is is, courage over comfort, you know, and that's, you know, stepping out of your comfort zone. And we've had to behaviorize that, but at the same time, we're also thinking, okay. How have we how are we measuring that when it comes to individual contributors, managers, leaders? You know, what are we seeing on our performance reviews on our, you know, sort of on our metrics when we pause? Are we actually doing those things? Alright. And then also making cultural viz culture visible, cultural behavior specifically. I mean, making them visible Gemma, one of the things I love and I think other people appreciated was the visuals that you have attached to those values. You know, we do something similar at LifeLabs where people can see an image and they can name what value it is. We actually do this every single retreat. We have, like, a values recap, and we show the image and we say what value it is. Value is this, and everyone goes into chat or people raise their hand and they shout it out. And so people can name and and really see, like, what does that value look like. But I think I wanna expand upon this. Something else that I think is really important, and and this might be really important to you for 2026, is what is it you know, are leaders and managers naming what they're doing? And when I say naming what they're doing, I'll give you an example, right, of how to how culture and values can be attached to behaviors. So one of the things that I think is a is a pretty explicit expectation for LifeLabs, lab mates, we'll call them, and even leaders, is to name when a behavior aligns to a value. Now do we do this every single moment of the day? No. But it's very normal to do. And I think one example was one of our senior leaders, one of our executives, you know, they'll they'll have weekly newsletters that we send out, and quite often, they'll include a video from one of our executives. And in this particular video, the executive decided to share a personal challenge that I think at least I would name as as vulnerable, you know, sharing of themselves. And before they shared that challenge, they said, there's they they said, this is a courage over comfort moment for me. And so as I mentioned before, one of our values is courage over comfort. And, regularly, we see our leaders and our managers and, of course, now our individual contributors will name when they're inhabiting a value. When they're noticing, they'll give feedback, and they'll attach their feedback to one of those values. And so I think that that's another way in which we strengthen culture is just giving people that language and then letting them show it visibly through their feedback, through their sharing. And I'm I'm curious, Gemma, actually, have you noticed any of those visible attachments to values where people are saying, like, this is a make it happen moment or, you know, an another example like that? Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. I mean, we've just launched a values recognition program to give people the opportunity to say when they see somebody living the oyster way. I think the the thing that I really wanna get across here, and I I see this, like, different opinions of values in the chat. The thing that I really wanna get across is this is the values aren't about us building a culture of success because we have an incredibly strong culture at Oyster, and that's the people, the care, the belief that what we're doing is the right thing, the fact that we we all passionately love working remotely and we believe that we can make that work across multiple cultures and multiple countries. The Oyster way for us is critical for us being successful. So when I say to someone that was like I did it recently actually in a Slack channel. There was a bit where, well, like seven or eight teams came into a project and it all started with someone saying, think we need this. And at the end of it, I came back in and was like, that was an incredible united team moment because everyone could see how critical what you needed was. You had the smallest voice in the room. We listened and we knew that was important for the company and we dropped what we were doing to prioritize it. That might not have happened two years ago. There might have been, my team's working on this. You'll have to send in a ticket, and then we'll see if we can schedule it in q two. But what happened was everyone jumped in. And I I I like, I went in and I put a mushroom in the chat. Was like, united team moment. That was great. But I kind of stopped myself there and put the extra bit in, which was like, this is better for the company now. Like, what you have done is now a better result for Oyster, and that's what's important. The fact that we work together to do it is great. The most important thing is we focused on what the company needed and not what our individual teams needed in that moment. Right? Like, it's that's what I love about the Oyster Way and the process of being part of creating it was really special because it was Yeah. it's totally founded in being successful as a company. Because if we don't do these things, like, we may not be as as we want to be. And we want to be really successful. We want to give ourselves every chance. So as I said, it Yeah. like, values run differently with different people, but but that's the foundation of it. So the mission of twenty twenty six is to get the sentiment of that across. I. want people to be able to associate a mushroom with this and and with that. Yeah. Because that's. like recall. Like how when you're at school, you know that different chemicals do a different reaction, but why? That's. the bit really critical because then we we're we're like, we'll move all move forward towards what we wanna do, which is that more successful company that can help more customers create more impact. Yeah. And I'd I could talk about it all the time. I just could keep going on and on about it. I know you can too. And I think a lot of folks here appreciate it. And I know, of course, this conversation is not 100% new in terms of mission and vision and values and aligning people to them. But, again, you know, we we have such so much change, so much volatility, and so much stress. And, again, we're still seeing the challenges in getting people to align to their culture and their organization and knowing, like, this is this is what's gonna help us as an organization be successful. So I hope this was inspiring to some of you, and that's where we're gonna pause it. And so we're gonna move on. Right? So now we're gonna move on to our second theme. So our first theme was culture alignment. You heard about the oyster way. I've recapped sort of cultural alignment and talked about especially that enabling managers to fulfill upon those behaviors. Right? So if culture, you know, is a you know, really specific behaviors and what good looks like and what not so good looks like, Then there's also how are we gonna bring managers together and help them grow and enable them in that way and keep them engaged. So I wanna tap again, Gemma, for you to talk about your Leading Together initiative that you did at Boister. Yeah. Well, a common theme. I'm conscious of time, so I'll bring this together quickly. But the concept of united team is how can we how can we help people feel connected, like the mushrooms there, the mycelium. How can we help or manage to be connected? And there are many diff like, we're a remote company. We have to be intentional. We can't rely on those magic moments where you just pass them in a corridor. And what we're trying to do this year in particular is resolve an issue where we've got very strong downward flow leadership to second manager to first line manager, incredibly strong. What we want to establish this year is a more hierarchical, that cross functional flow. And that's that united team piece because what we wanna break down is one department having a priority that doesn't quite align with this department's priority. Like, this is an entire process of goal setting. This is an entire process of communication. But but for our managers, what we wanna do is, as we're making all those changes to enable people to more clearly see goals, to be more cross functionally able to collaborate, what we wanna do is to create that team effect. I'm in this with you. I like, in a minute, we've got lots of managers who maybe haven't met each other, definitely haven't met each other in person very often. What we wanna do is to be able to have someone in legal and someone in product and someone in our go to market teams. At that level, having the ability to call on each other, to be there for each other, and to know that as we move into the next phase of whatever it is in the year, if it could be, like goal setting or whatever it is, like, to have each other's backs. It's been incredible when it's happened organically. What we wanna do is make sure that everyone is part of a loop. So that's that's the plan for this year is to have that first tier manager, second line manager, leadership stream, and to be creating those those, like, threads across the org as well as up and down. Yeah. And I think, yeah, I think that it's I love this aspect of an initiative. Right? It's like it is a it is sometimes has to be an initiative if we want people to lead together, to keep culture strong together. And I think Christina had a question in the q and a. Right? Like, what if culture on a team is strong but not across the organization? So how like, how can we get middle managers to encourage culture alignment systemically? And, Gemma, you could you could speak a little bit to this, but I think you kinda did. Right? You you kind of define, like, we're coming together. We're gonna you know, this is an initiative. You're getting the managers together. We're talking about leading together. Right? And I think that just by connecting managers together for this sort of theme, it's just it's a way to get everybody on the same page across the organization. Is that some kind of what you're imagining here as well? Like, Yeah. maybe some teams are better than others, but this is gonna this is gonna scale it? I think and and, like, I mean, tactically, the way that we're doing that is I mean, we we will have all hands. We we have we already have, like, quite a cascade of information through, but, like, giving certain groups information in a certain way, telling them how other groups are gonna receive that information and how they might need this kind of support. Letting some like, letting a leadership group have the ability to comment on a strategy that maybe they didn't have the ability to comment before because it was over in that part of the company. Opening up more avenues to be able to say, what are you doing over there? Because we're doing this over and it I know it sounds basic, but doing that horizontally more often so that we're not relying I think this is just very strong. Retro's at this. are very strong. I've never seen us do a retro across a role level as opposed to a project level. So that's. the kind of thing we'll be encouraging. We started doing. manager list sessions. They were, like, a really good our managers are willing to tell us what they think. Our managers are, like, willing to let us know ideas. Now we wanna start segmenting that so we can give them the chance to connect with each other. Yeah. I mean, that that connection, I think, is really important. I I I I could say that the most impactful programs that we do at LifeLabs when we're training and working with folks like yourself, right, people in learning and development, HR, people operations, the most impactful programs are not just this one off where it's like, yeah. We're well, maybe we'll take, like, a middle performing managers and just chuck them into some training. It's not like those aren't helpful to some degree, but we see that the most impactful ones like, we're bringing everyone. Like, we're gonna bring everyone together. We're all gonna pause. We're all gonna focus on these topics. And that sort of what we see is, like, we get mixed groups with some of our organizations where they're training, and we have top performing managers who are identified, hanging out with some of the ones who may may need more help or less experience. And they're all building the same language. They're all sharing challenges. They're all sharing things that they're working on and they're developing. I think that is what what I think about leading together as well. And for those of you thinking about 2026, you know, is is, like, what are these maybe bigger programs that we're we're building? And I wanna pause just for the sake of time. I wanna go on to this. I mean, I think another thing, and this is slightly different, but one of the things that we train and develop managers, leaders, and teams in are what we call our camps cravings. Now some of you have taken our effective one on ones workshop. You've seen this. CAMPS refers to certainty, autonomy, meaning progress, and social inclusion. And it really, CAMPS cravings deal with what we believe are fundamental needs that contribute to our own engagement and motivation. And I think speaking about leading together, one of the things I'll I'll share is also considering you know, we talk about engagement. You know, Gemma, you mentioned the engagement survey. We do one. I've I used to, you know, roll out engagement surveys for 5,000 plus organizations. And I think a lot of the times, we tell the managers, here's what your team is feeling. But I think this year, it might be also listening to your managers' camps cravings. Getting them together, looking at them as a group, and saying, which of these cravings is being met and which is not? So you could see these up here. Right? Like, certainty. You know, what is going on? What is our plan? Am I is my job safe? Right? Am I safe within this environment? Autonomy, thinking about, you know, what are my choices? How much control do I have? You know, do I have a voice in the changes that are happening, meaning how does my work matter? AI is coming out. Like, does my work matter more, matter less? Like, what what am I actually doing? Progress, how am I performing? How am I growing? And then finally, social inclusion, how do I belong here? Where do I fit in? And that's again why I think Leading Together is super strong because it that social inclusion piece is especially critical for managers right now who feel isolated, who feel like they're experiencing their work, you know, totally separate from other people when in fact a lot of managers are sharing the same feelings, the same challenges. And I just want you to think, you know, even for yourself, and then you'll you can think from your managers from the manager perspective. In chat, I want you to to to think about if you if you rated these on a scale of one to 10, which would have the lowest score? And type that in chat. Maybe we could see if there's a trend here. Which of these do you feel like is the lowest scoring item? Yeah. Don't overthink. Go with go with what feels right in the moment, you know, even if it's, like, I don't know, 100%. Yeah. And so I think that this this is just something that we train we talk about with our managers in our effective one on ones workshop. We also talk about this in leading change where motivation and engagement tends to dip. But I think one of the ways to think about leading together is bringing people together and and and really having them talk about their own engagement. What are they doing for themselves? What are they doing for other people? And then, yeah, you you answer that for yourself, but the next step might be to answer from your manager's perspective. How you know, what's their lowest score right now? You know, what dimension is really hurting them? And you don't have to type that in, but I think that's your next question. And for some of you, you know, you could see there's different dimensions popping up. There's a lot of certainty, of course. Right? But there's social inclusion. Yeah. People are feeling isolated, not connected. That's why, again, you know, coming together, training together, developing, and growing together this year might be the answer for some of you. We do that really well at LifeLabs. We build programs for managers. Right? So, again, this is just, another way of thinking about supporting managers this year, thinking about their camps, cravings, and which one of these really needs work, and how are we gonna help them to boost their own engagement so that they can, you know, care for care for and support the engagement of their staff and their teams. Alright. So I wanna pause here and wanna move on to our final topic. So we've covered culture alignment. We covered supporting managers through connection, through growth, supporting those camps, dimensions, you know, really raising those up. And then, of course, I think AI comes into play because, well, it's the biggest news. Right? It's it it's disrupting. It's interrupting everything that we've had going on. And I think it's important to to consider, you know, how are we enabling managers, how are we helping managers, and supporting them through this. And I wanna talk a little bit with Gemma about specifically how you're thinking about AI at Oyster, and we'll come back to this people first image that you had in the beginning. I mean, how we're thinking about AI Oyster is massive. That's like a 20 webinar series, It it? For every company right. now. I'm picking a very small part. Like, the the way in which we're approaching AI is company wide, like, structural reorganization to ensure that we've got coverage across the company. People are being enabled. I'm very busy. I'm gonna be honest right now. I'm trying to enable as many people as possible. But the example I wanted to share here, which is relevant to managers, kind of, is inspired by our company model. And our company model is to be AI first to allow customers to get the answers they need about their employees, to to find out about their team members, high pay care, all of those situations. And then to know there's a person, to know there's someone who can really truly be there, to answer the complexities of global hiring and management of team members. So how that relates to what we're doing for managers is a similar thing. We want managers to have answers at their fingertips. We have agents that can do that. We've built our own in house agents. We've fueled our agents with lots of talk tracks. So our managers can ask a a simple problem that could be like, can I say no to a PTO request? They can get a yes or no answer, but they could also get, in addition, a talk track of how they might talk about that with someone, how they might suggest to someone that they address that with the team. What could they do to help the team better manage PTO in future? So we've got that. And every manager can access at their fingertips that initial first line support or that wider, more more like contextualized support depending on how much context they point to the agent. Very proud of that, up and running. But we all know humans don't work like that. So what we've been working really hard on the past quarter is reviewing all of our people processes to know where people are most useful. And then we've just totally gone to town on making sure that managers know that they're on there's every situation that they want a human, they can have a human. Every situation where they want to have someone to coach or to walk them through. So what we've tried to do is to use automation, to use AI to transform our processes, to free up the people that we have in PeopleOps and myself to be there to coach. So that's kind of the the biggest thing for us is following our company model is how can we make sure that our managers know that, yes, they've got AI, but we're not pushing them towards I mean, there's a whole other conversation about how we enable our staff to grow with AI to implement our tools. All of that, I'm gonna park and I know for time we can't talk about. But just that. little example has been really important. for us to where you need in the employee life cycle a person. I I think that, I mean, I'm biased towards that. Like, I I feel like one of the I think the big one of the biggest advantages of AI is to enable better human connection. Right? Or I would say enable us to focus on the most important needs or the most important work, and a lot of that is what are people here for. And I think to your point, like, just giving managers faster ability to get answers to simple questions so that they can do their work better, but also freeing up space for people ops folks. And I know some of you are like, HR is about to get replaced or repurpose to the work that you've always wanted to do rather than answering tons of technical questions on PTO requests. It's okay. Now I can actually maybe do more meaningful work and AI can help direct that work to me. And I think that is really important. And I think that, that kinda speaks to something just for the sake of time, a pivot here to what at least we're taking on at LifeLabs is the stance that AI is gonna is really make our people skills even more important because of those tasks that AI can take on. What our ability to communicate well and to manage well, to lead well, to connect with humans is going to be even more important. And what we've seen, and at least we're we're kinda noticing and and what people are interested in right now, These are three skills that are popping up and and for for folks. And whether you do your own workshops, folks, or you work with LifeLabs, feedback, coaching, and delegation are three skills that we're noticing as perhaps more important in an AI enabled or even to Dema's point, an AI first organization. And I'll go over really quickly just what we mean by that. So feedback, I think some of the things that people are noticing already is that we still need human judgment when it comes to AI, and we see of course, we want employees to be able to experiment. I think that's really important. And that's why it's important also for people to experiment and to feel safe doing it, but that's where feedback skills come into play. And we're we're we're seeing that trend already, which is that, you know, managers being able to give feedback well in terms of appropriate use of AI or, you know, reviewing you know, sort of helping employees to sort of understand, like, what does good look like, what does not so good look like, or what was the you know, here's what you how you used or implemented AI, and here's the impact that it had. So we need to be able to get feedback well around AI issues. Gemma, you had mentioned, right, like, one of the issues your managers were focused feed feeling is I'm noticing something, but I I just don't wanna say anything about it. So that's especially why it's important as people are gonna be experimenting and using AI in new ways that we're able to give feedback on it. Coaching as well. Now coaching, we associate not with telling. Right? Coaching is different than do this, do this, do that. What we're thinking of as coaching is asking questions. And so managers who can actually ask, not just, you need to start using AI more. That's not what we mean. But the best managers are gonna be like, hey. Where could AI come in? Where could AI benefit here? How how could AI, you know, make your workflow more effective? What is successful AI application look like for you? So asking the right questions around AI, and then finally, delegation, separating what is AI good at and what is it not. So there's a difference between write this draft and, hey. What I'd like you to do is write three drafts using AI, synthesize, right, like, synthesize, you know, this you you know, what's going on, verify the sources, tailor, you know, these these drafts for your audience. Right? So I think that there's ways of delegating that are gonna be different, and that's where we have our delegation workshop come into play. So just three skills to be thinking about. These are all skills that we teach at LifeLabs becoming even more sort of popularized. So I'll I'll sort of pause and end with that. And we do have some questions, of course. As usual, I get right to the end, and I have, like, no time left. I just wanna thank Gemma. Thank you so much for sharing the things that you're doing at Oyster. I probably spent a little bit too much time nerding out and and and real you know, trying to, you know, playback and and reflect on what you were sharing, but I I wanted you to leave with some closing words for everybody if you'd like to. Oh, gosh. It's been lovely. I've really appreciated it. If anyone wants to reach out to me, Gemma Taylor on LinkedIn, if you wanna ask questions about anything I've talked about. I can't promise to understand other people's companies, but I do know my own and got, well, a decade nearly two decades in adult ed, so I've probably got something useful somewhere to share. But thank you for the chat's been really interesting. I've really enjoyed this. And, Brendan, thank you for hosting. You're welcome. Donna, thank you, and thank Oyster for, you know, participating today, for sharing. And I know that some of you answered asked some questions. I'm sorry if we didn't get to all of them today. I wanna thank you for your time, your energy, your attention, for being here, for sharing things in chat. I know many of you have been very active. I know you've been staying an extra two minutes with us. I know some of you have meetings to get to. If you see on the screen, there also should be a link in chat. Your feedback does make a huge difference, both the things that you really liked and anything you wanna see more of or less of even. So all of this feedback makes a huge difference for us, for me. We read every single comment, every suggestion. It helps us to build out a road map and to find out, you know, what are those things that you really matter to you. But once again, thank you to Gemma. Thank you to Oyster, our partner, and Jen McKinnon, over at Oyster as well. Thank you to Courtney Hastings who's from LifeLabs who you've seen in chat. And, of course, again, thank you to you. We will see you next time, hopefully, back in here, back in our labs in the future. But until then, take care. Have a great, safe rest of your day, everyone.