Eric Hunn

▶0:01HostWelcome 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 Eric to the Built By People podcast. Eric, 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.

▶0:55GuestYeah, so as a young person, I was pretty clear on wanting to go into the topics of law and law enforcement. So I went and got a master's degree in public administration and did my law degree at the same time. And so my first roles right out of school, I worked for the White House Office of Management and Budget and had some portfolios around all of those topics. After September 11th, I did a stint as a prosecutor. Wanting to actually practice law. And somewhere along the line, I sort of realized that maybe I had over-indexed on the subject matter rather than the work environment. And so I ended up getting a portfolio when I worked at the Office of Management and Budget, a second lap through there where they gave me the president's management agenda, if you will, for Homeland Security. And what I noticed in that role is that there were some innovative ways that government was trying to replicate some of the flexibilities of the private sector. And I realized that I may have over-indexed on the subject matter, which I still love talking about and reading about, but that I was actually more interested in how did I make a work environment that was really fulfilling and stimulating, in particular that just had a lot of freedom to it. Because one thing that you'll notice if you've ever worked in a large organization, and particularly a large organization like the federal government, is there's a lot of rules, there's a lot of bureaucracy that's built in there., and that often means that you just don't have a lot of flexibility or freedom to make those decisions. And so I've noticed in listening to the podcast that a lot of people come in apologizing that they didn't start off in a traditional HR role. It feels like the majority of folks are actually coming at this from a different angle rather than saying, oh, I want to grow up and join HR, which I think is probably some people's vision, but I think a lot of us realize along the way that the soft skills end up being incredibly interesting as you get along in your career. And some people just love working on the technical side and do that their whole career, but a lot of us start thinking about leadership and management and decision-making and all kinds of great topics and realize that the people function is actually a great platform to work on all of those topics. And somewhere about halfway through my career, I evolved into that and started working for different organizations. And so now, you know, I'm the Chief People Officer at Premier Protein. And so we just get an opportunity here to create just that great work environment environment that I was always expecting would be my path, but didn't necessarily start off finding that kind of environment that I was hoping for.

▶3:28HostEric, your company has achieved remarkable success, $10 billion market cap, nearly $2 billion in revenue while maintaining a startup culture. How have you managed to preserve that sense of freedom and flexibility despite being a public company with regulatory requirements?

▶3:47GuestYeah, there's this funny tension when you are in a senior management position. You want a lot of control because you see the organization and you see all the different threads. You see the issues that come up, the challenges, and you say, I want to know what everybody's doing, make sure that everybody's working hard and doing the right things. And it's, of course, completely natural from that vantage point that we're concerned about that. But at the same time, the people who are not in those positions are also wanting that same sense of control. Now, as an executive, I have plenty of control, right? Ultimately, the company leadership can do hiring and firing and decide what people get paid and what jobs they have. And there's a lot of power there. Ultimately, all want to have some control over their work environment. And so I think there's an inclination as you get bigger to try to exert that control. And paradoxically, the more control you try to exert, the more folks who don't have that power are going to exert back, which is often termed reactance in psychology. And once you have that insight, the hard part is not even getting that insight. The hard part is living it. And so it's very tempting to say, oh, something went wrong. Let's put a control in. Let's stop this from never happening again. But I think the harder thing is to say, what are the organizational costs for every time I try to exert control on people? Every rule I put out there, nobody starts off as a bureaucracy with all these rules. They just get built up one rule at a time. Like the frog boiling analogy that people use so much. And you never know when that organization just starts to feel like a bureaucracy, but it happens one rule at a time. And if you're in a position as an executive, people function, you often have that ability to say, hey, you know, this rule might make sense on an individual basis, but on a collective basis, when do these rules of totality not make sense? And so what I try to do is to be that counterbalance to say, this might make sense from a risk standpoint, but what is this going to do when we start adding these things up? And so I'm always trying to play that other side there and say, How are we going to safeguard to make this place feel more like a startup? Because we all love that idea of you're in a startup and everybody's accountable and working together in partnership and you think, oh, I don't, there's not a lot of rules. We just show up and we just working on the same mission. At some point along the way, you start to develop all these roles and structure and it kills that joy of just having total ownership that this is our little enterprise. And what we've tried to do is just create that feeling and try to be both a public company and grow., but also retain a lot of that feeling that people have of ownership and accountability that you feel when you're in more of a startup environment and try to just be very choiceful when it comes to any roles that we try to add.

▶6:32HostEric, in our last conversation, you mentioned something really interesting to me, and that was, we never made hybrid mandatory, we made it compelling. And that really stuck with me. Can you elaborate on the specific strategies you've implemented to make the office a place where people want to be?

▶6:51GuestYeah, so the first insight we had was we needed to make sure that everybody was seeing that leaders were going to role model and lead first. Throughout the pandemic, we did have a small crew open. I continued to come in occasionally just to make sure that I wasn't just having folks come in. We have a food lab here, and so we had to keep those essential operations open. About a year into the pandemic, we decided to ask leaders in the next few months to start to come back into the office. And lead first by example. And so we asked that group to come in, people with titles of associate director and above, to come up into the building and come in on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. And so we made the business case, you know, our CEO and I explained to the company what wasn't working being fully remote. It maybe felt like we were being just as productive, but we were missing a lot of the connection. We were missing some of those constructive challenges that happen when you're face-to-face in a room. People were struggling with multitasking. When you had more than, say, a handful of people on a meeting, realistically only 2, 3, or 4 people are really participating in that call. And so we decided to bring people in as soon as vaccines were widely available to folks. We didn't make it mandatory. We made it compelling and interesting. So we hired an employee experience team to focus on having bigger, better, more over-the-top workplace events. We anchored our company meeting that we do every week, including this morning. So the first thing when you're coming into the office on a Tuesday after working remotely on Monday is there is an anchor meeting at 9:15 that draws you in. You want to be in person to see the people, the laughter, the jokes, you know, pop up in front of the company and just participate. And so just by anchoring that week, it draws people in. And over time, if you were online, if you're watching, you'd start to say, hey, What's going on in the office? It sounds like they're having a lot of fun. They're having a meal there. We bring in lunch every Tuesday and Wednesday and pay for it. Comes in at right the same time. As you and I are recording this, there's several dozen people sitting and eating together because we've timed it all. And by putting that all together and making sure that we are doing it at the same time, we avoided those traps of, oh, I came into the office only to get on Zoom meetings. Why didn't I even commute? And instead said, when I come into the office, it's because I want to have these big connection meetings. It's because I want to have an in-person challenge session to brainstorm and leave some of those other activities, the deep work that you might want to do, some of the one-on-ones, keep those on the periphery and keep that central part of the week, those 2 days together. Putting that all together is how you build an aligned office so that those days really feel compelling to be in the office versus trying to take attendance,

▶9:37Hostwhich we'd never done. The concept of freeze and refreeze influenced your return to office timing. How did that early decision impact your company's culture compared to other organizations that waited longer?

▶9:51GuestYeah, so we tried to really avoid the trap of giving people return to office dates. And so I saw so many— we're here in the Bay Area— so many tech companies saying, Okay, we'll just give it another 6 months, a year, what have you. Some people were making these declarations of, we don't need the office, go wherever you want. And we realized that there was no way that we could predict the course of virus that was novel to humankind. And instead we said, what things need to be true for us to get back into the office? And like everybody else, we stopped operations here in March of 2020, but we said, as soon as there's widely available vaccines, as soon as cases are going down, We can bring you back to the office, we think, in a safe manner. And we were very transparent along the way. I would do a weekly update with people about the science, about what was happening, about case rates, what was happening with our people. And just over time, we were taking advantage of this idea that all of a sudden we noticed that our assumptions about the 5-day in-office workweek changed overnight. So that's the great sort of unfreezing. This is an old concept dating back to, I think, the 1940s. Everybody unfroze those assumptions, but before they refroze and everybody got comfortable with, I can work from anywhere forever and ever, or I can move away from the office, we were actually telling folks, we are excited to get you back in here as soon as we can safely do that. And stay tuned for when we get those conditions, we'll bring you back in. And by doing that, people had this greater sense of trust of like, all right, They've got a plan. These are the criteria, and when we meet them, I'll bring you back in. And the problem is if you just waited too long, it's very hard to go backward. People feel a real loss aversion, which is a lot more negative than positive. That'll stick in your mind when you say, you told me that we were going to come in and then you changed it, or you told me I didn't have to come into the office and now you're changing it. Our strategy really stuck the entire time. It hasn't changed. And People will to this day ask, hey, you're 2 days a week in the office, 3 days apart, and we give Friday afternoons off to everybody. Are we ever going to go to 5 days a week? And the answer is no. We've been doing this for over 3 years and this is working for us. And we think it's not going to change unless there's something that really would unfreeze again.

▶12:09HostEric, since moving that hybrid, you've been the number 2 and 3 spot in terms of great places to work. Many companies have talked about the promise of hybrid work as the best of both worlds, but many have found it to not deliver on that promise. How have you managed to buck this trend and make hybrid work so well for your people?

▶12:33GuestWe talk about an idea of a regenerative culture. And so this is an idea borrowed from agriculture where folks are trying to have an environment where you're not depleting the soil, but you're actually putting things like mulch and cover crops there so that you're getting more diversity and making the soil better than when you started. And so we took that kind of idea and incorporated it when it comes to our company. And so the framework that we have for that, which we talk to our employees about, is we start with purpose. And so we worked very hard on a new purpose for our company a couple years ago, 'cause it all starts with purpose, as you probably know. So we've changed our purpose, which is now called changing lives with good energy. So that's the purpose that we use. We focus on different purposes for different people. For some people, it's the products. For some people, it's the people. For some people, it's growth. But we let people define whatever that is for them. And then we focus on having an environment where people can connect and belong. If you don't feel connected personally to coworkers, or if you don't feel like you have a sense of belonging there, nothing really works. It all just feels like you're going through the motions. And then from there, we focus on how do you grow in the role. It's not just growing in terms of progression, although we do have a above average promotion rates, but even just progress in your career. Am I learning new skills? Am I getting new ways of developing? Am I getting coaching or insights from people? All of these things work together. And when you have those foundational pieces and that freedom to grow and do new things, companies end up winning. There's so many great studies about companies that have those great work environments just do better in the marketplace. And so we feel great about how we're doing in the marketplace in terms of our growth and our positioning in the space. And when you're in that position, it's very easy to recruit people and say, hey, this is a winning company. People want to go work for winning great companies. They stay. Our attrition rate just keeps going down and down. We're now below 10%, even at our size. And it just ends up being that kind of virtuous cycle that bringing back to the agriculture example where it just builds upon itself and you get that momentum and it's much easier to maintain that versus the inverse.

▶14:44HostEric, you've taken an unconventional approach by eliminating traditional HR practices like performance reviews and employee handbooks. How does this align with maintaining accountability while maximizing freedom?

▶14:59GuestYeah, this is a tricky one because a lot of companies come in and there's these HR practices that somebody teaches you early in your career and you assume that somebody must have studied this and As you dig deeper and just see all of the great work that's being done, whether it's books or podcasts or articles, you realize that a lot of these practices didn't necessarily have great evidence in their foundation. And performance reviews, I would say that overall they look like they are much more biased toward the rater than the people being rated. And so if I have a tool that is really biased toward the rater, I'm not getting anything out of that other than a very long and cumbersome process of doing performance reviews, which I think most people, including myself, have done over the years and really dreaded doing. Justifying a year's worth of work to your manager is just no fun. So we got rid of those. We got rid of ratings. When I joined the company, there was ratings, and I think ratings just hinder a growth mindset, make people not want to take big risks because they want to make sure that they're just keeping that A-student mentality of, I just want to know how I'm doing. I just want to be rated a 1 again this year. And I think that can stifle innovation counterintuitively. And so when we are looking at all of these practices, we just have to really think carefully about any sort of rule or policy we put in place. You've got handbooks out there that at some point it's almost like you've got a set of laws that, you know, no human being is pouring over the handbook to try to figure out all of these rules. And while I think it's often adding clarity to say things like, How much PTO should I take? Okay, we do that. We'll explain to you some of these benefits things and anti-harassment policy. You certainly need to have that. But so often I think it actually takes away from clarity when you put all this together and you basically say, hey, there's a rule on page 372 that you didn't follow, and here it is, you should have known. And I just feel like that's fundamentally not really in keeping with that practice of having an accountable mindset. And so Every time you do that, I think you take away from people's agency and their ability to take accountability for their own work. And so we resist that every chance we get. It's not that any of these things in and of themselves are bad. It's just when you put the whole thing together, it just starts to feel like, is this a place where you're going to get the best out of me? And usually it isn't.

▶17:15HostEric, what parting advice would you like to share with our community?

▶17:18GuestI've been thinking a lot about the idea of work-life balance lately, and I've got two school-age kids. My spouse works. I think work-life balance is an unhelpful metaphor for most of us because it implies that I am essentially on some sort of tightrope and that if I can just get this equilibrium of making my family happy and my work demands that I can rest there and be comfortable. And of course, if you picture that metaphor, that sounds like a pretty tenuous place to be where you're standing, trying to balance. And I think that is probably not the right way to think about work because you'll never be comfortable in that position. There'll always be more that you can't get to. You'll never feel like you're enough for the family or the workplace, especially if you've got a very demanding role. And so I like that regenerative agriculture model when it comes to how I see work. And so the way it works for me is I think that work makes me a richer, more interesting person because I'm thinking about how do I solve conflict interpersonally? And it works at home, it works with your friends, it works with coworkers. How do I make decisions? Those are things that work in and out of work. How do I deal with when I get triggered or feel a sense of threat? All of those things are skills that you can use in or out of the workplace. And if you can bring those ideas in your work to home or from home into work, it just creates more of that regenerative model where things are flowing together rather than that tightrope metaphor. And so for me, it just gives me a greater sense of peace. And I realize that I've worked at a number of workplaces and I wasn't always in that position where I felt like work was making me a better, richer person. And I don't think that necessarily there are that many companies where that's true for folks, but for me it feels if I have the privilege of helping create a work environment where people can feel that, where they can blend those to make themselves. That's where you get into the real value of the profession that we've chosen to be in. And that's how you change people's lives.

▶19:25HostEric, thank you so much for joining us on the Built by People podcast. It was a pleasure to have you involved.

▶19:29GuestThank you, Dave. Appreciate it.