Fulfilled and engaged employees drive results, but today’s executives are making decisions without leaning into the invaluable employee perspective. In this episode, you’ll hear from Co-Founder of the E1B2 Collective and HR expert Anthony Vaughan. Learn how his victories and defeats have shaped both his perspective on employee retention and business success.
GUEST AT A GLANCE
Business podcast host, co-founder of the E1B2 Collective, HR aficionado, and talent retention expert, Anthony Vaughan has a lot to say about what it means to maximize the employee’s perspective. Through years of research and experience, Anthony knows how to drive leadership transformation and engender employee loyalty.
A QUICK GLIMPSE INTO OUR PODCAST
🔊 Podcast: Transform Your Workplace, Sponsored by Xenium HR
🎙️ Host: Brandon Laws
📋 In his own words: “The Transform Your Workplace podcast is your go-to source for the latest workplace trends, big ideas, and time-tested methods straight from the mouths of industry experts and respected thought-leaders.”
THE BEGINNING
Anthony was young when he started his first company. Eighteen months after transferring from Wesley to West Virginia, Anthony was heading up a seven-figure brand, 60 full-time employees, 25 collaborators, and a partnership with Under Armour. Anthony was only nineteen years old.
But no matter how fast his rise to success, in reflecting back on his first company, Anthony admits that he made some critical mistakes. “I didn’t know what an IDP was (Individual Development Plan). I wasn’t aware of the term ‘career mapping’ and how to go about that,” Anthony recalled. One of Anthony’s partners eventually sat him down and asked him about the future: “Where is all this going? What am I going to be doing down the road? And how does this connect to my own career aspirations?” Anthony didn’t have an answer for him, so he did what most would do when confronted with a challenge: he ignored it.
Anthony said, “Long story short, he sent me an email about two and a half weeks later after trying to get my attention for six straight weeks and said, ‘I’m going to move on from this.’ He took Under Armour with him who, in turn, took 99.9% of every single athlete that was associated with the brand. And he opened up shop and took a lot of my other executives and coaches that were involved as well. It taught me a very clear lesson. All he really wanted was to have a career mapping conversation, a thoughtful one-on-one. An individual development plan, if you will, of what he could do to continue to grow and prosper within this organization. Since I didn’t give that to him, that ended the business shortly thereafter.”
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
The Realization
“My COO looked at me and said, ‘You’ve got two choices, kid. You can pick up the pieces and try to rebuild it. Or you can start something new and dedicate the next few years to learning and growing.’ […] And I decided to go with research study, dedicating the rest of my life to understanding the mistakes that I made, career mapping, IDP, and strategic employment. I just started going down the rabbit hole of studying every day to never make those mistakes again.”
Putting Research Into Practice
“I studied. And when I say literally three hours a day, Brandon, I really mean that I replaced my athletic background, exercise, and training, for three hours a day. And I plugged research in, so I’m looking at white papers, case studies, mentors, thought leaders. I was doing this in the midst while running my second business. […] And I picked my head up and decided that I wanted to jump into an organization and learn how to do this tactically and not just be a researcher or thought leader.”
Getting Started
“If you’re in Individual Development Plans and the frameworks, employer branding, analytics, I would literally type those in Google. And then next to that, I would type in ‘case study’ or ‘white paper’ because those are the types of things that you actually want to read. And then it showed me really deep tactical structures and processes that I never really knew about. Then, I just started dreaming up and coming up with my own variations of what I would do differently, how I would approach it, all by looking at what they did.”
“I also had a lot of great people that would sit with me for 60 minutes, 90 minutes, once a month, once a week, to just talk to me about all the things they were doing actively and give me access to be a fly on the wall. […] I just sat there and listened.”
A Graduation Model
“We realized that most of our employees — about 78%, 80% — had a desire to stay with our company for 12 to 18 months. We were like a stepping stone to another area. I just kept noticing it. So I talked to some of the people that walked away and asked them what made them leave our company. And it was because we didn’t have some of the roles they were looking for. So we did an audit of the org. I asked, ‘Do we need any of those roles?’ And objectively and interestingly enough, we found out — contextual to our goals for the next two to three years — we actually did not need those roles that were out there in the market. We didn’t need that capacity.”
“And I asked, ‘Why don’t we create a graduation model? Why don’t we make partnerships with the next tier of companies that are similar to us?’ So we created a learning and development program where we gave employees exposure, shadowing opportunities, and we graduated them to those companies, but it needed an agreement: that they would be with us for 18 months, 12 months — whatever the case was — so that we could predict that.”
“Once they knew they were graduating to the next level. Once they knew they had shadowing opportunities. Once they knew that we were going to really support them contextually to their aspirations long-term, and that we cared about them, all the metrics that we all know and love spiked.”
Putting Employees First
“I think for us, what we care most about is really utilizing employee data — readily utilizing their perspectives, their nuances, what makes them them, and putting those things first to guide any business executions that we want to put in place.”
What Employees Need
“Number one, employees need their employees to operationalize flexibility and empathy. […] I think that the human beings leading organizations need to check themselves. They generally need to put employees first. A lot of organizations are making decisions that only behooves their executives’ perspectives.”
LEARN MORE
Interested in finding out more? Go check Anthony Vaughan out on LinkedIn or find some helpful resources (including Anthony’s business podcast!) at e1b2collective.com.
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