Chief People Officer, CONSENSUS CLOUD SOLUTION INC
How Consensus Cloud Solutions Scales And Sustains A Thriving Hybrid Culture with the CPO
In this interview, CPO of Consensus Cloud Solutions, Lynn Johnson, explains how she scales and sustains company culture to ...... culture code Our Guest today is the chief people officer at consensus Cloud Solutions Lynn Johnson Lynn welcome Kevin thank ...
About Lynn Johnson
In a September 2024 interview, Lynn Johnson, Chief People Officer at Consensus Cloud Solutions, discussed the company's hybrid culture and workforce management. She stated that the company has five generations in the workforce and that managers must adapt their styles to different generational needs to enhance productivity and build trust. Johnson described the company's culture as "steeped in community, productivity, accountability, and kindness," and said it is guided by six core values including striving for excellence, demonstrating empathy, and embracing innovation. Johnson noted that the company has a virtual onboarding program lasting three to four hours to align new employees with its mission and values. She mentioned a partnership with GrowthSpace to provide executive coaching for managers, and said the company's 2024 focus includes improving employee engagement tracking, professional development, and mental health support. Johnson also discussed a government contract with the Office of Veterans Affairs to implement a customized version of the company's EAX electronic faxing product, which she said would help streamline secure document transmission for veterans, including those in rural areas.
Transcript (29 segments)
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Kevin Cruz0:00
Hello everyone, I'm Kevin Cruz. Welcome back to what I know is going to be a fun episode of The Culture Code. Our guest today is the Chief People Officer at Consensus Cloud Solutions, Lynn Johnson.
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Lynn Johnson0:12
Kevin, thank you so much. It is such a treat and such an honor and a privilege to be joining you today. Thank you for the invitation. I'm super excited. This is a topic that is near and dear to my heart, so really excited to kind of get into the weeds with you on culture.
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Kevin Cruz0:31
Thank you. And Lynn, I'm from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania today. At least that's where I'm sitting. Tell the listeners, where are you coming to us from?
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Lynn Johnson0:45
I live in a suburb of Los Angeles in Tarzana, California. I work out of our downtown Los Angeles office a couple days a week. So beautiful Southern California, where right now it's probably sunny and 70, a little breeze. I know we do have lovely leaves changing color here in the Northeast, but I was born in Redondo Beach, grew up in Orange County, so I've got a lot of friends and family in Southern California still.
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Kevin Cruz1:17
I miss it. See, you're still a Southern California native at heart.
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Lynn Johnson1:25
I do miss the four seasons, but we do have a Japanese maple tree outside my home office window that changes colors probably around February. So we do have like one day maybe where we have a difference of the falling of the leaves. So I am jealous of the different seasons you're in.
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Kevin Cruz1:50
Lynn, let's start with, for people who don't know, haven't heard of Consensus Cloud Solutions, who are you? What do you guys do?
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Lynn Johnson2:00
Consensus Cloud Solutions is a midsize global organization focused on the transformation, enhancement, and secure exchange of digital information. We basically help get your documents securely from point A to point B. One of our great flagship products is called eFax, so it's electronic faxing. It's an opportunity for a small office, home office, midsize business, large scale business, or an individual to safely and securely fax documents from one location to another.
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Kevin Cruz2:46
I was going to say, maybe people haven't heard of Consensus, but I bet most people have heard of eFax. They're using it or they've received an eFax. Very popular tool. When you say mid-market, about how many employees do you have?
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Lynn Johnson2:59
We have right around 600 employees, and we're worldwide. We have offices in Japan, Ireland, Canada in both Ottawa and British Columbia, Australia, and all across the United States.
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Kevin Cruz3:21
That's incredible. Culture is kind of a squishy thing to a lot of people. It means different things to different people. How do you put your finger on it? I'm an outsider. How would you describe Consensus's culture to someone like me?
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Lynn Johnson3:34
Great question. At every town hall we do and every employee communication, we remind our employees of our six core values. Part of what culture looks like is living out your core values. Our core values are: we're striving for excellence, we demonstrate empathy, we embrace innovation, we focus on solutions, we communicate openly, and we're driven by data. Our culture is really about having a culture of productivity, accountability, and a layer of kindness. What does it look like to help make a difference in other people's lives and to enjoy what we're doing together as a community? When I wake up and want to go to work, I want to work with individuals who are like-minded, who share the attitude of 'How can I make a difference today?' I would say our culture is steeped in community, productivity, accountability, and living out these core values on a daily basis.
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Kevin Cruz5:30
There's a lot of great stuff there, Lynn. It reminds me that great leaders often balance having empathy and holding people accountable. You're talking about kindness, joy, and community, yet also driven by data and accountability. How do you make sure everybody gets it? If I'm a new joiner at Consensus, how am I going to learn about these values and the culture? How do you sustain it for people who've been in the company for a while?
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Lynn Johnson6:14
It's super challenging, and what makes it even more challenging is that we're virtual and remote. Right now, 52% of our employees are not attached to any office whatsoever. Part of what we do is a very robust onboarding program. Our onboarding orientation is about three to four hours, virtual, where our service desk works directly with new hires, and we do this every week. Our HR team presents the history of the company, our philosophy, mission, vision, and values. We go through employee programs and how to stay connected in a virtual world. Then every new employee is given a position focus of expectations and how we'll review them. We marry the hard business results with the soft squishiness. I learned from a mentor to guide with an iron fist but a velvet glove. We set firm boundaries and clear expectations, and hold people accountable. If an employee isn't doing their job well, we step back and ask if we've provided the right training, toolkit, guidance, or mentorship. If they have all the tools but still can't do their job, we have a different conversation. You can train a skill, but you can't train an attitude.
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Kevin Cruz9:38
You mentioned training. I'm passionate about training and support for managers and frontline leaders. By definition, frontline management filters 80% of the employee base. Seventy percent of the variance in employee engagement is tied back to who your manager is. There's that old saying, you join a company, you leave a boss. But you're a pretty small organization that doesn't have the resources many large organizations have for leadership development. What are you doing to develop your managers?
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Lynn Johnson10:33
We don't throw them in the pond and say 'swim.' We've created an employee resource portal overall. We look at training not just managers but employees on our tools and products. We've partnered with a company called GrowthSpace. They have programs for specialized one-on-one coaching, five sessions with an executive coach, matched based on specific needs like communication or creating ROIs for their team. We do this across all manager levels. We also have virtual management webinars, run five times, with all levels of managers. We just had one on manager essentials about providing feedback, with everyone from our CEO to the youngest manager in tenure. We also do pulse surveys and engagement surveys. One question is, 'Would you continue working for the manager that you have today?' The scores were fairly high. Through the pandemic, we've had to learn how to manage differently. We have five generations in the workforce. How you manage a Gen Z is very different from how you manage a Gen X or the Greatest Generation. Good managers create relationships with employees. Relationship doesn't mean I need to know everything about you personally, but you have to trust me, and you can't trust someone you don't know. Developing trust goes back to our culture of layering a foundation of trust.
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Kevin Cruz17:01
I want to jump in because there's lots of good things there. It's impressive that your CEO participated in the effectiveness workshop. We do these kinds of manager essentials workshops, and routinely, a CEO will kick off a time management workshop and show up 12 minutes late. Or a C-level leader will talk about how important the topic is and then say 'I gotta hop off.' The fact that you have C-level support for manager development is critical. I also want to highlight that you're doing pulse surveys, including a manager effectiveness question. In many organizations, they ask about overall engagement, but given how valuable the manager is, you've got to ask that hard question. Lynn, this is a short format podcast, so I want to turn to some more fun questions. Imagine you could send a book, podcast, or Netflix special to every employee at Consensus, and everyone would consume it and take it to heart. What would you send?
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Lynn Johnson19:35
One of my favorite business books is by Patrick Lencioni, called The Ideal Team Player. It talks about wanting team members to be humble, hungry, and smart. If I had my magic wand, I would send that book to all our employees and say, 'Let's read this together, do a book study, and make sure we're all creating and being the ideal team player.' As a leadership team right now, we are reading Multipliers by Liz Wiseman. My HR team and a couple of different function groups are reading it as well. It's important to multiply individuals on our team and be a manager that multiplies.
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Kevin Cruz20:55
That's a great one. Liz did a great job. Let me ask, Lynn, imagine you could send a letter, Slack message, or Teams message from future you to a younger version of yourself on day one as Chief People Officer. What kind of message would you send? What have you learned?
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Lynn Johnson21:44
I would tell my younger self to be curious, unpack trends, look at the why, ask why a lot to understand what's really going on. So many times people give a surface answer, but that's not the root. Seek to understand before you seek to be understood. Also, realize there are multiple ways to get your message across and deliver news for people to absorb.
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Kevin Cruz22:52
A phenomenal executive I met taught me the power of asking 'Tell me more.' When someone puts forth their situation or viewpoint, rather than immediately responding, pause and ask 'Tell me more.' Often that second chance to share reveals the really interesting things.
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Lynn Johnson23:34
We're talking here at almost Thanksgiving 2023. End of the year. You're probably already thinking about next year. What's your focus for 2024? What are you going to lean into as CPO?
I think it's taking what we're doing now and enhancing it. Looking at the journey we're on and understanding if we have the right tools to help our employees be engaged. Can we track engagement? How are we looking at employee development and professional development? Also, mental health and the mental well-being of our employees. If we provide proper training and resources, employees will be engaged and productive. A big push for next year is training development and prioritization. Everyone has priorities in their own life, and we need to focus on one task at a time. Another big goal is how to enhance communication in a virtual world and build community. We're strongly encouraging people to come back to the office two to three days a week if they're local because we believe that enhances collaboration and provides mentorship opportunities.
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Kevin Cruz26:28
That's the part I worry about. Two of my kids are out of college and adulting in their 20s. Both have remote jobs. When I was in my 20s, I learned so much just by being in an office—not always from meetings, but from hallway conversations, an executive grabbing my elbow to give advice, or overhearing things and asking to be involved. I worry about career advancement disparities for remote folks.
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Lynn Johnson27:26
I wrestle with that. It keeps me up at night because I think we're doing a disservice. I had a meeting yesterday with a vendor, a young man early in his career. We talked about that very thing. He said his company is 94% remote, and he feels it's a disadvantage. He really wants to learn from the person to the right and left of him. I think we have to find a happy medium, providing good mentor opportunities to allow people to grow and develop. We're stunting the growth and potential of our employees when we're not investing in them. Sometimes investing means face-to-face meetings.
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Kevin Cruz29:11
Last question, Lynn. When it comes to all the exciting things going on at Consensus Cloud Solutions, what are you most excited about? Any big things happening next year?
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Lynn Johnson29:25
One big thing that is super near and dear to me is that we have won the government contract for the Office of Veterans Affairs. We're implementing a specialized product, high-trust certified, in the process of getting our FedRAMP authorization. It's a customized version of eFax that we're rolling out to all VA facilities. I'm super excited because we have an opportunity to partner with the government to provide an innovative, effective, and efficient solution to expedite communication exchange, supporting and enhancing healthcare for our veterans. This breaks down barriers for inclusion and equity in healthcare, especially in rural areas. We're on the cusp of really transforming healthcare technology, and to be a part of that is exciting. Who doesn't want to help impact healthcare in our country?
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Kevin Cruz32:20
That's the most important big challenge there is. Great that the work you're doing for the VA. On that note, Lynn Johnson, thanks for being humble, hungry, and smart. Thanks for joining The Culture Code podcast. We appreciate it.
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Lynn Johnson32:32
Kevin, thank you. It has been an absolute pleasure. I really appreciate the time we spent today. Thank you for letting me share my heart. It's a topic I'm passionate about, so thank you for your time.