Matthew Rieck

▶0:00HostWelcome to the Built by People podcast, where we share the stories and insights of the world's top HR leaders. Join us as we dive deep into the minds of HR executives, uncovering their strategies, challenges, and triumphs in shaping today's workforce. I'm excited to welcome Matt to the Built by People podcast. Matt, thank you so much for joining us. And as a starting question, I always love to ask if you could share a little bit more about your career journey.

▶0:48GuestSure, Dave. First of all, thank you guys so much for having me. I'm excited to be on. And yeah, my career journey is somebody who got really lucky a bunch of times and also got some jobs that I, absolutely did not deserve. Like nobody ends up in insurance even going to high school or college. Like I'm going to go into insurance or even into HR. It's usually kind of fall backwards into an open role somewhere. And then you just kind of, you just never make your way out.

▶1:13HostThat's your career.

▶1:14GuestYou're in it. And so, but it worked well for me throughout my career because I'm pretty cognizant, Dave, of my strengths and weaknesses. Like I really know that like I'm good with people. I'm good with training and development. I like speaking. I like organizational development. I'm not great with numbers, with detail, like a monkey is better in spreadsheets than me. So I always hire that analytical person. That's great. Cause I know that I'm weak there. But yeah, I started off after college working for a small insurance company just because that was the job that happened to pick me up. And from there, after I finished all of my schoolwork, I went on again and I went to Farmers and I was there for several years. Farmers had a deal where if you were with them and I helped them start small agencies and taught people how to do their first set of books and how to market and how to get clients and all that kind of stuff.. And then I made my way to a job that I absolutely had no right to have. And that was that NASA has a backup landing site at the time. It used to be for the space shuttle up there in Edwards, California. And it's a big dry lake bed if you've never been up there and they can, you know, bomb it and land planes on it and do whatever they want up there and nobody cares. And so I got a job up there in HR operations for their emergency service division. That's police, fire, and security up there. And I continued to do HR up there. It was a great gig and really super nice people, but that area is mostly just sand and Joshua trees. So it's not where you want to live out your whole life. I know being in Utah, you might have some of that, but I'm sure you have some grassy areas as well. And then, yeah, I ended up doing a gig as a VP and then I did some consulting for about 5 years on insurance, mostly with small business owners, businesses under 500 people. And then for about 120 different clients throughout that 5 years. And then I joined Enzone about 16 months ago. And InZone was 268 people at the time I joined Dave, and now it's 907, 16 months later. So we are a PE-backed acquisition-based insurance company. We're buying up a lot of like mom-and-pop small insurance agencies and integrating them in and giving them new tools to be successful and all that. But as you can imagine, that is the melding of a lot of different cultures because we buy about 50+ agencies a year. So that's integrating a lot of little companies with one bigger company.

▶3:29HostMatt, we talked previously about how you think that companies struggle with employee retention.

▶3:35GuestYeah.

▶3:35HostWhat are the most common mistakes you see organizations make when it comes to keeping their best talent?

▶3:42GuestOkay. So average length of tenure in an organization in America right now is 3.9 years. So if you think about that, all the money that you spend recruiting, training, developing an employee, and then that employee leaves. You lose the institutional knowledge, you lose the relationships they had, everything. So the biggest first mistake that companies don't have in place is they don't have succession planning in place. So every single— and succession plans, like, vastly come, you know, made up by all these consulting companies and stuff. It's really easy. The formula's like 4 steps, and I stole it from somebody way smarter than me. It's like, name the person that you are, that you're talking about replacing, Who's the person that would take over for them? How long would it take that person to get ready? And then what skills and training would that other person need to be able to take over? It's a really simple 4-part formula, right? And then the 4th one is the most important, that part of what skills would they need to be able to take over the role? Because that becomes then your training plan for that person. And for people to stay at a job, they have to have some upward mobility. They have to be able to make more money. They have to be challenged. They have to have all these things. They have to have a good working environment. And if you have a succession plan in place for them that allows them to know how they can move up within the organization to be able to make more money, money and have a future there. If you don't have that in place, especially for the top 20, 30% of people, they'll leave every 3 years because they just get bored and it doesn't seem like there's a path for them. So companies don't have succession planning in place. Second thing that they don't have, Dave, most importantly, is they have no mechanism set up for employee appreciation. And I'm not just talking about like a pizza party once a quarter. They don't have any way that they regularly connect, appreciate, show their people that they're valued and anything beyond their normal compensation is, you know, just a little bit of gravy. Most companies don't have anything in place, and most employee appreciation programs are actually free, but companies don't know how to do them.

▶5:30HostMatt, how has your perspective on company culture evolved since transitioning from traditional HR roles to becoming a content creator and thought leader in the space?

▶5:41GuestWell, I'll tell you the weird thing about social media, Dave, that's so funny. Is that, let me give you an example. Let's say that every single company out there has, just, we'll do an easy one. They have an employee of the month, or if you think that sounds cheesy, call it employee spotlight. So let's say Dave is your employee of the month and he's your marketing manager, for instance. So you're going to take a picture of Dave, maybe 2 paragraphs about what he did was great that he's recognized that month. You're going to send it on an internal email to the company, and then you're going to post it all the company socials, your company Facebook, LinkedIn, X, whatever you've got, right? What that does is it brands, Dave, it brands your company as a great place to work because you're doing employee appreciation. It gives that employee some sunlight to the rasp. It also tells everybody else in the organization what you value as a business, because people want to make their boss happy. They want to make more money, all of that. So all of that comes together with that, but you don't just have to do employee spotlight. Every month there's a sales leader. Every month there's a service leader. There are your safety awards, your promotions, your retirements, your new hires. You can get 20 to 30 pieces of free content that are all employee appreciation, put 'em out in email and on social media. And it takes somebody that knows social media, maybe 5 to 10 minutes a day to do all that. And if every company did that, they would have a huge amount of employee appreciation that nobody does. So the first thing I think is that companies don't understand how easy the mechanism is to put in place. And if they did it, how people would feel if they were constantly being recognized. That's the biggest one for me.

▶7:08HostMatt, your viral LinkedIn video about the job market resonated with hundreds of thousands of viewers. What do you think made that particular message connect so strongly with people?

▶7:19GuestFirst of all, I was casual and relatable. I think I was in my t-shirt for that video. I just shot it because I needed a piece of content that day and I shot it and I was going. It was timely because it was talking about what my predictions were for the job market for 2025. I think LinkedIn in particular, like, I think that video has 3.4 million views and LinkedIn in general is kind of, can be stuffy or people put a stuffy kind of presence up there. Once you have your role, there's no reason to be stuffy and you can be human and relatable. And I think that just talking to people off the cuff about stuff that we can all relate to at work is helping it land way more than I thought it would. In fact, a long time ago, I used to try to make super professional videos in my suit without the spring light and the, you know, everything at my desk and they didn't work at all. And it was actually the ones where I could just talk to people like we are right now that landed. And I think we could all relate to looking at the job market and the economy and all the inflation that we've had the last couple years. And we all have feelings about that. So that caused a lot of discussion around people and that's where videos tend to blow up.

▶8:19HostI found. Matt, you've written a book on employee retention.

▶8:22GuestYeah.

▶8:22HostWhat was the key insight or revelation that inspired you to write it? And what's the name of the book?

▶8:28GuestThe name of the book is The Employee Retention Bible, and it was recently published. It's on Amazon. And the purpose of the book, I made the book like a checklist, Dave. I made it where every employer or leader could just go down it and they could figure out exactly how to do succession planning, all company meetings, how to do discipline, how to do employee appreciation plans, and just basically made it like a workbook that people could go through and put things into place. Because I get so many of the same questions over and over, Dave, for people that don't understand how employee appreciation can be free, because there's a lot of companies that charge a lot for it, and also how they can do it so that their employees are going to feel like it's genuine and that they really care about them and want to stay a long time. Because if you look at all the crazy things that we spend money on at companies, one of the things that never goes away is people giving a genuine praise to somebody specific to what they did to contribute and recognizing them.

▶9:24HostMatt, from your experience in training and development, what skills do you believe are most critical for HR professionals to develop in today's rapidly changing workplace?

▶9:35GuestWhat I would say is the best skill that you can develop actually as an HR professional is to network yourself with other professionals that are either at or above your level, meaning that there's, for instance, LinkedIn, there's hundreds of free groups that you can go on. There's webinars every day that people are posting for free that people can attend. You get into these groups and a lot of times they have small group sessions where you guys talk about current issues. You get to learn from people that are smarter. I have learned so much from those, from people that are more experienced than me that have handled bigger problems than me. And I'm thinking something's a really big issue and they've handled it at such a bigger scale. I think getting into these groups that are now largely free due to LinkedIn, building your base of knowledge and networking with other leaders that you can always call up and go, how did you guys handle this? When you guys did this, when you transitioned to buying an acquisition or releasing a whole new product line or pivoting the company, how did you do that? How did you work with the people? That's really what matters is building a network of people that you can rely on and learn from.

▶10:30HostMatt, what parting advice would you like to share with our community?

▶10:33GuestI would tell everybody that follows Built by People that you are not just your current role and you're not just your current company. So I would tell you to build relationships, to build skills, to get certifications, to get degrees, to get things that are important to you and your career. If you work for a great company, you can stay there for a long time and build a really great legacy. But we all know that things happen at companies all the time. There's layoffs, there's mergers. Things get bought, things close. The point is to always be developing yourself and trying to improve your skillset so that you're always marketable and you're always at the best edge of your field, whether that's HR or wherever it happens to be.

▶11:12HostMatt, thanks so much for joining us on the Built by People podcast. It was a pleasure to have you involved.

▶11:16GuestYeah, thank you so much for having me, Dave. This was great.