The Nexus

Want to create a workplace that values creativity, collaboration, and personal growth? It all starts with a strong foundation in performance culture and a commitment to core values. We're meeting this week with New York Times Bestseller, Dr. Vince Molinaro and our very own Founder & President, Kevin Burtt, to discuss what it takes to build a dynamic, engaging work environment that inspires your leaders, your team and drives results. From leadership strategies to fostering a culture of innovation, The Nexus has got you covered - tune in!

From Dall-E to ChatGTP and AI art on TikTok, a new generation of AI and automation has landed, with implications for your workforce and the future of your business. Do you choose to be an early adopter and use AI to generate value? Or wait and see, and risk being left behind? Internationally recognized digital and cybersecurity strategist, Ritesh Kotak, joins us at The Nexus to discuss Artificial Intelligence and the future of work.

Do your company values drive value? Can you draw a line from your brand, your employee engagement, your customer impressions and success back to the core values at the center of it all? If not, then we think you're missing out on your company's true potential. Kevin Burtt, Founder and CEO of Nexus Communications, sits down with our host on the Nexus Podcast to explain how and why values should create value.

Long before the pandemic, many people would look at their jobs and ask themselves "is this what I want to do?".  It was only during the pandemic that those for whom the answer was "no" decided to act, en masse. Their decision to leave their jobs has had a direct impact on the current labor shortage, which has influenced inflation - a contributing factor in a potential recession.   We are all feeling the effects of that choice, if only indirectly.  So, now the question is: what to do about it?   At Nexus, we speak with lots of organizations who believe that those who left may have made a different choice had they been able to connect those people to the organization's values. Connecting people to values (a subject we'll explore in later episodes) is one of the principal purposes of storytelling.   In the last of our three-part series on storytelling in the workplace, we speak with Dr. Suzanne Keen – president of Scripps College in California, and a specialist on the subject of "narrative empathy": the effect of stories on the human brain.

In our last episode of The Nexus,  veteran storyteller Steve Pratt told you where stories work. Now, in our next episode on storytelling in the workplace, we're going to tell you why stories work. Or, more specifically, Dr. Peter Jensen will. Dr. Jensen is a sports psychologist, performance coach and founder of the Third Factor, one of the preeminent performance coaching firms in North America.   Whether you're a pro sports coach or a CEO, Dr. Jensen will you tell you the same thing: your first responsibility to your people is to build their self-awareness and self-responsibility, and there are few tools as effective in doing that as storytelling. You want to know why? Then you should probably listen.  Dr. Peter Jensen joins us at the Nexus.

Before it became the on-trend leadership skill of the post-COVID age, we here at Nexus were advising clients on how to use storytelling in their organizations.    Now, teaching leaders to do something they probably do all the time outside of office hours may seem quaint, but anyone who's had to suffer through a story told horribly knows storytelling is a proper gift, just as anyone who's been inspired by a well-told story can speak to its power to change minds, hearts, and behaviours. At Nexus, we see storytelling a core skill set that can both sustain and transform an organization's culture, even (and especially) in challenging times like the ones we're currently facing.    That's why we're devoting the next several episodes of The Nexus to storytelling in the workplace.  Our host, Chris Nelson, will speak with experts on how storytelling works, why it works, and what you need to do it well. In the first episode of our storytelling series, Chris speaks with Steve Pratt, veteran storyteller and co-founder of Pacific Content, one of the most successful branded podcasting companies in the space. 

This summer, you probably had to go WAY off the grid on your vacation to not hear about the latest workplace trend – quiet quitting.   Exact definitions vary, but Quiet Quitting boils down to this: consciously choosing to not do anything more than the bare minimum at work, so you might preserve your well-being.   People who quietly quit aren't disengaged, exactly – rather they're choosing to protect themselves in ways they feel their work no longer will (if it ever did).  The question, then, is why do people quit quietly? And the answer (sadly) may be another meme, one that perhaps hasn't had the same traction as quiet quitting:  Greedy Job.  Greedy Jobs are everywhere and have been around a lot longer than quiet quitting. As defined by the Boston Globe in a recent article, "Greedy jobs are often on-demand, deadline-intense, and client-facing. They hog your life and won't let go. But they can be very lucrative."   To discuss what we do about both, we've brought in productivity consultant and best-selling author Julie Morgenstern, who wrote "Never Check E-Mail in the Morning: And Other Unexpected Strategies for Making Your Work Life Work".

Every five years since the early 90s, the UK government has tracked something called "work intensity" and what they've found is disturbing if not surprising: more people are saying they work harder to tighter deadlines under greater levels of tension. In 1992, 23 percent of workers who responded to surveys on this subject said they worked at high speed; 30 percent of respondents said they "worked very hard"; and 53 percent claimed to work under "tight deadlines." Today those numbers stand at 45, 46, and 60 percent, respectively. Now…layer on top that a pandemic, rioting in the US Capitol, inflation, war in Ukraine, a looming recession. Workers are stressed – and they're asking themselves questions like "Why the F$&# am I putting up with this?" That is a challenge for any employer, one that our guest on today's pod set out to solve with his own company. His name is Jason Fried, he's a co-founder of the tech company Basecamp, and after twenty years of trial and error he put all his solution in a 2018 book called "It Doesn't Have to Be This Crazy at Work". Jason joins us to talk about what he sees now in the wake of COVID, with a potential recession looming on the horizon.

It's a secret to no one that for a long time, women have had to overcome systemic disadvantages in the workplace…and the pandemic did not help.  As we've explored in other episodes, the lockdowns of recent years have affected women (and working mothers, in particular) more acutely than other parts of the working population, and that effect was so pervasive it was even given a name: "she-cession." Of course, now that the pandemic is over you'd expect the She-cession to be as well, and that's where our guest on this podcast would say you might be wrong. Sarah Kaplan of the Rotman School of Business joins Chris to talk about the work that still left to do, and how the pandemic has made it harder.

You might think that with our current labor shortages that employers are getting creative in how they attract and hire candidates. Some employers are doing just that, but according to our guest on this episode of the Nexus, many more are still using the same tired hiring practices that yielded dubious results before the pandemic…and it could cost them. Forbes Contributor and Founder of WeCruitr Jack Kelly sits down to tells how and why hiring practices need to change.