Hearsay Platform

28/06/2024

23/01/2024

We are running a series of Hearsay Platform LinkedIn Polls this quarter to unpack people's behaviour when thinking productivity and technology at work. Thank you to everyone who responded on Monday.

The question we asked was, ‘When thinking about your note taking during meetings which of the following do you do most?’

✍🏻 Write notes in your work book.

🖥 Type notes on your computer.

👩🏻‍💻 Access a transcription product.

Key Findings

🥇 70% of you are still handwriting in your workbook!

🥈 23% are typing notes on your computer

🥉 And only 6% are accessing a transcription service

I am sure some of you will be surprised by this large number manually writing notes particularly with how easy it is to access a tech solution.

Why are so many people still doing it? It's a habit.

And when probed further to explore that habit, people realised that it was probably not the most efficient way. Some were working late into the night summarising their meetings, others couldn’t decipher their own notes and some more, realised they were doubling up on effort.

At Hearsay, we have calculated that we can save you 7.5 wasted hours a week by using our platform.

I am going to dive more into meetings habits over the next month but just for today, why not break the manual note taking habit and get on to Hearsay.

DM me for an onboarding session.

01/01/2024

For the last 17 of 20 years since my hubby has lived here in Melbourne, we have rung in New Years Eve with the age old Finnish tradition of uudenvuodentina.

The melting of tin over a live fire to predict your future dates back to the eighteenth century and was originally only for the Finnish-Swedish high society (tin was expensive). Now it is a fun thing to do for a lot of Finnish families.

First, the tin is melted in a large spoon over a fire and once molten, the metal is poured into a bucket of ice cold water. The second the liquid hits the water, it cools and instantly re-solidifies. As a result, random shapes of the tin are formed and interpreted to cast predictions for the New Year.

This year, in our family, Arto’s was a tiger roaring into a great new job; mine was a volcano about to explode with abundance; Ollie’s was a sail ready to take on adventure and Kristian’s was a flower about to blossom. (see above)

Other shapes and their meanings include:

🌊Waves: Big changes are coming in the upcoming year.
⚓️An anchor: Your year will be filled with stability and commitment.
🐇A rabbit: A new addition to the family will happen soon.
🐻A bear: You’ll fight and compete with a friend.
🐱A cat: This year, you'll make enemies and resort in scheming.
🎸A guitar: You’ll encounter someone lovely, which could evolve into a relationship.

The other thing to look for is the texture:

A lot of holes: Lots of success and opportunities ahead.
A lot of texture: Money and wealth will enter your life.
A long, tail-like shape: In the upcoming year, your health will be flourishing and you'll live a long life.

We have done this with many friends and our own family over the years and it is a great way of bringing a bit of Arto’s culture to our Aussie lives. It is also fun and who doesn’t want more fun?! Roll on 2024.
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14/12/2023

We have been researching onboarding tools to double check we have the right system on Hearsay (we found out we do but need to make some tweaks to our flows but that is another blog!).

During this research process, I contacted two companies on the web page and organised meetings for demos.

Company Number 1: Got on the call and got asked a barrage of questions. We answered most that we could and a lot of weren’t really relevant. What we expected was a bit of chat up front, of course it’s a sales call, but when we tried to shut down the questions and ask for the demo, we were very surprised. The company representative said, ‘my colleague will take you through the product on another call, I just want to find out more about your business’. We denied the offer and just asked for an email with the specific demo we wanted to see.

Company Number 2: Again, we got on the call, this time the sales rep asked a few questions but made it clear it was our meeting, we received a demo and asked a lot of questions.

It was a great reminder to me that companies still, particularly B2B businesses, build customer experiences around what suits them and not based on customer needs.

We know that customer-centric organisations outperform their peers by 85% in sales growth so why is this still hard for businesses to build a process right for the customers?

What should Company Number 1 have done differently? These three things:

👂🏻 Listen First, Sell Later: Rather than reel off a load of questions that you need to tick off a list, ask relevant questions to unpack the needs of your customers. Create a dialogue where questions are used to clarify and tailor your offering, rather than overwhelming the customer with irrelevant queries.
👩🏼‍💻 Flexibility in Customer Interactions: Ensure that your customer interactions, whether it’s a sales call or a product demo, are flexible and customer-driven. The experience should be adaptable, allowing the customer to lead the conversation to areas they are most interested in.
😘 Be Open and Honest: It would have been preferable if our sales guy got on the call and said straight up, my job is to ask a load of questions to learn more about you and then we find the right person to take you through the product. This didn’t happen.

We are often reminded, sadly, through a terrible experience, what makes a great one. Wouldn’t you rather be a business that people talk about post

30/11/2023

Earlier this week, an agency similar to , that started the same year we did, won B&T Best People & Culture under 100 people. Well done Trudi Sampola and the Nature team.

At BrandHook, we looked at Nature as peers and friendly rivals. But we didn’t win any awards for Culture. In fact, the failure of managing our culture is what blew up the business and changed its scale up course.

So what have I learnt from our experience? The three ‘what not to do's’:

❌ Do not think it is one person’s or one department's job to create business culture. It is every leader’s job to drive a great work culture. I certainly took my eye off the ball and focused on bringing business in and forgot to look at what was happening on the office floor. 😚
❌ Do not ignore the early signs of unrest. Leaders need to be emotionally intelligent and trust their intuition. If you can feel a problem.. there is a problem. And nipping that in the bud early is key. 😔
❌ Do not think that culture builds organically. Creating culture requires active participation and the leaders of that organisation need to be intentional in those values and that vision. We naively promoted BrandHook as a ‘family’ but like most families, there were fractures. 💔

When building your business, it is important to learn from what not to do as well as testing out what to do.

Our story serves as a cautionary tale for other entrepreneurs: culture is not just a facet of your business, it's the backbone that holds everything together. Neglecting it can have far-reaching consequences, affecting not only your team's morale but also the very trajectory of your business growth.

27/11/2023

As a strategist immersed in the realm of insights and data, navigating contradictions is part and parcel of the job.

When gathering first party data, you hear varying views (sometimes from the same person) and it’s the job of the strategist to distill these divergent opinions into a coherent narrative.

But I might need some help on this one. 🧐

The Australian Retailers Association (ARA) has predicted shoppers will spend $6.36bn across the four days between Black Friday and Cyber Monday. According to their study with Roy Morgan, an increase on last year!

In a cost-of-living crisis where many people are tapping into their savings accounts to pay for everyday bills and mortgages, I find this extraordinary and paradoxical. 📈

The idea that ‘I am saving when shopping during sales’, is real. The psychology of it comes down to the cognitive dissonance we feel when buying things at full price. When the price is reduced for a restricted period of time, people feel better about the purchase. The phenomenon of seeking a ‘better deal’ during more prosperous times is understandable. It's the thrill of securing a bargain, a triumph for some. 🎢

But shopping like this during tough times when many are diving into their savings accounts or popping the purchase on the credit card is nonsensical. More debt, less savings, more tat.

It really makes you think about the intricacies of consumer behaviour. Are these Black Friday deals a lifeline for consumers, as described in the press, or are they a symptom of a culture that prioritises immediate gratification over long-term financial health? 🤑

When you look at this rationally, hovering over the top, it doesn’t make sense, but it does highlight the contradiction between ‘consumerism’ and financial well-being. It really demands a deeper look at our spending motivations and the underlying 'why’ during these tougher times. 👩🏼‍💻

23/11/2023

Over the last 4 years I have learnt a lot about building a tech business, but I did not start as a developer. Instead, I am a category expert. And as a brand experience person, I am great at visioning the end product or feature addition, but I lacked the detailed knowledge in understanding the best technical solution.

This has limited my ability to brief or review a build suggestion.

When past tech teams have presented their back-end options it has been difficult for me to comment or critic if that it is the right option for Hearsay Platform. I relied purely on trusting the experience of those building.

Enter

I have started using AI to help me with tech solutions in three ways:

🎬 Kickstart the exploration stage: it is a great starting point when I am trying to understand how some of the features I want built, could be developed. ChatGPT kind of acted like a brainstorming partner. Recently I googled what solutions were available for Hearsay to integrate with Outlook and Google calendars to make it easier for our users to create Hearsay meetings. More on that soon!

📲 Refine the tech brief: once I have a better understanding about the tech options, I can then use the platform to help draft a brief for the team. It helps turn my platform improvement idea from that, into a well-structured technical flow that can be easily communicated to the team.

🧐 Assess options delivered to me: Lately, I have also asked to guide me on solutions presented to me. I can compare the different technologies suggested and keep probing until I get a good summary of pro’s and con’s.

Like most people I love and how it is helping with our workflows. We have seen the benefits of it throughout Hearsay Platform and what it delivers to our users.

It is very important to know how to use the platform in a way that gives you the most.

And lucky for me (and some might say lucky for him) I share an office with , the founder of 37. Yesterday he gave me a great lesson on how to best ask ChatGPT for answers. The variety of ways to prompt, the detail you should give the platform to ensure you get something useful and the importance of continuing to prompt to get the right answer.

22/11/2023

Yesterday I participated in the Walk Against Family Violence organised by the , which started at the . Before we walked, I chatted to Steve from , a store at in the market, about why he thinks the market feels so calm and collaborative.

A very timely discussion considering what is going on around the world and Steve’s view? That food and the market's multi-cultural community who love food, makes for a peaceful market. Hear his answer in the link in the bio

Food as a peace driver is an interesting idea so I went on the hunt for examples around the world. I found that in 2015 in London there was a pop-up café called ‘Conflict Café’ which ran for a month set up by peace-building NGO .

It served food from parts of the world in conflict in the hope that new conversations would flow, inspired by sitting at a table and enjoying a meal. I couldn’t find anything recent but thought what a wonderful idea as way of creating peace.

15/11/2023

Last week released their Future of Work 20 2023 – a list of leaders and innovators who are rethinking the way we work. It is an interesting list of people and includes, SaaS tech, generative AI creators, investors, educators, health workers, architects and more.⁠
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‘We are, at the end of 2023, still very much in the middle of the in-between. The pandemic and the introduction of AI turned the page on what work was—where it happened, and how—but what it will become remains to be seen.’⁠
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The people profiled are helping to nudge the way we work with AI to make work more productive, and some would say, more enjoyable.⁠
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09/11/2023

Silence is a terrible strategy 🤫

I heard about the outage on Wednesday from one of my school-mums-what’s-app group where someone had posted that the trains in Melbourne were down.

At 12pm on Wednesday, out of curiosity, I did a quick search on Optus’ socials to see if there were any communications about the outage that up to 10 million Australians were suffering.

Workers, business, exam students, hospitals, public transport all seriously affected and what did I find? 🍩

🍩 Nothing on LinkedIn
🍩 Nothing on Instagram
1️⃣ One post on Facebook that had been uploaded at 7am – by the time I saw it, it had 2.4K reactions, 842 shares and Optus had limited who could post a comment.
1️⃣ One post on Twitter (X) at 6.47 am, 341K views, 159 reports, 411 quotes, 348 comments/likes. The hashtag on Twitter (X) unveiled the normal anger and hillarity.
🙋🏼‍♀️ 🙋🏼‍♀️One press conference: At 10.30am, I read, the Optus CEO spoke to the media

Silence like this, is a terrible strategy. Being quiet and ‘hope this all goes away’ is not a strategy to follow in a crisis. It lets everyone else set the tone and tell their version of the story as seen on Twitter (X). And great comedians can have a field day - Jimmy Rees ‘The Great Optus Outage’.

What can we learn from this event? Own the conversation.

📱Be active on the socials: Have a load of customer facing team members posting, commenting, and updating every 10 minutes while the top brass and the engineers work out what the hell is happening.

📺 Be visible in the media: Speak up, speak up often, be empathetic, apologise, deal with the backlash in the short term, have a clear message that a multitude of people can ‘rinse and repeat’ and prepare a full analysis of what happened when you can. When it is all fixed, inform and compensate.

05/11/2023

At some point during most weekends, I walk with a group of women called ‘The Pharlaps’. As well as walking, we have two favourite topics, business and wellbeing. So, when one of those women sent our whatsapp group an article and film of spruiking some gummies that helped him loose weight, our menopausal joy skyrocketed.

We started searching the web and were even choosing bottle amounts, when I had a better look at the video of Hamish speaking. I looked at his mouth and something was off, I googled a bit more and found that it was indeed, a fake film.

It’s not just in Australia that this is happening. Last year, Musk was famously a victim of a deepfake (https://eftsure.com/en-au/blog/cyber-crime/deep-fakes-protect-your-organisation/) espousing the benefits of BitVex, a scam cryptocurrency trading platform.

In North America, the proportion of deepfakes more than doubled from 2022 to Q1 2023 (https://sumsub.com/newsroom/new-north-america-fraud-statistics-forced-verification-and-ai-deepfake-cases-multiply-at-alarming-rates/).

When you are quickly scrolling and you notice something of interest that is anchored in what looks reputable, it is not unreasonable to read, watch and buy.

It is a keen reminder to all of us that scams are everywhere, even the famous are affected.

Take those extra minutes to interrogate something that takes your eye and if it looks to good to be true, chances are, it is!

14/03/2023

Only 35 % of workers are satisfied with their company's approach to flexible work due to the lack of tech, tools and empowerment.

More and more evidence that CEO's need to actively hunt out the right tools that are intuitive and easy to use to cater for the needs of their people.

Read 's Future of Work report here.