In the fourth episode of Happy Here, Wisq CEO Jim Barnett speaks with Rich Deal, Executive Vice President and Chief HR Officer, FICO.
Rich has been with FICO for more than 22 years, and in his role, he focuses on attracting, engaging, developing and deploying talent through innovative human capital management strategies. As a distributed, global team, FICO embraces autonomy and trust with its 3,400-person workforce.
“Physical proximity should not be a proxy for performance or commitment. Get past that,” Rich says. Rich also talks about how important it is to connect change to employee feedback, so that people feel their voices are heard, and the power of finding purpose and meaning in work.
Read on for a full transcript of the episode with Rich.
Jim: I'm here with Rich Deal, executive Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer at FICO, where he's focused on attracting, engaging, developing, and deploying talent through really innovative. Human capital management strategies. He joined FCO 22 years ago from Arcadia Financial, where he held the executive HR role for three years.
Rich has extensive experience leading acquisition, integration activities, building compensation and performance management systems, and developing leadership competencies. He holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Wisconsin and a Master's degree in Industrial and Organizational Psychology from Purdue University. I'm super excited to have Rich here today. Welcome!
Rich: Thanks, Jim. Good to be with you.
Jim: I'm really excited and really happy to talk to you today because one of the things that I've learned about you over the years that I've seen you do your craft, is that you're a really progressive people leader and you're willing to embrace change, stay really curious, and take some risks. You don't always find that amongst leaders.
How did you develop this approach to being progressive and trying new things in the people ecosystem?
Rich: You know, it starts with having a really great group of executive leaders that I've had a chance to work with. They're open to new ideas. They're willing to invest in technology.
They're willing to invest in new ways of thinking about the relationship that we have with our people. And I think you know, at our organization at FICO, we really value people. We believe that all of our success is dependent upon the thoughts and the ideas in their head, and so, making sure that we're bringing the best tools and the best processes and the best communication devices to our people to sort of help harness all of that talent is what gets us out of bed every morning.
And that leads you to some pretty innovative ideas when it comes to the people management space.
Jim: I love what you just said about valuing people. What are some of the things that you do for your people to show that you really value them?
Rich: Well, we start at the very beginning of the, of the relationship.
We've invested a lot in our onboarding process because we wanna really get off on the right foot with folks. I mean, there's nothing like joining a new organization with different processes and, and new relationships that need to be built and. Like a lot of companies, our people are geographically dispersed, so it's not as easy as just walking into a room and meeting everybody.
It takes time, and so we help our new people come on board, gain really easy access to the tools and the processes that they need to be successful in their particular role. We start right at the very beginning. Of course, we have dozens of different kinds of jobs in the organization, different career paths, and we've customized our onboarding process to try to cater to the need of those people, whether they're in a sales role or a professional services role, or a software development role.
We try to customize the experience in the middle of the relationship with our people. It's all about really harnessing their thoughts and ideas about how we can improve the company. Now they're the ones experiencing it firsthand. I think a lot of companies like to ask their people how they're doing and ask them for ideas. Sometimes those, take the form of surveys. Sometimes those surveys get put on the bookshelf until it's time to do another survey.
We've really tried to have those conversations more frequently with our people, and perhaps more importantly than anything else, help our people understand that they've been heard.
And so it's not just listening, and it's not just driving change, it's helping people connect the changes that we're trying to make to the kinds of feedback they gave us. So they feel a sense of control. They feel a sense that other voices being heard, and I think that's a really important part of the relationship we try to have with our folks.
Jim: Yeah, that really resonates. And by the way, the results have been amazing. FICO was recognized as the number one on Forbes' list of America Best Mid-Size Employers and also recognized in Forbes' list of Best Employers for Women. I mean, that's really impressive. Tell us about the culture at FICO.
Rich: I think it begins and it ends with really valuing people at the end of the day. I mentioned the onboarding process and how we try to have ongoing dialogue with our folks. We're an organization of really highly educated folks, and you can choose to manage really highly educated, smart people in lots of different ways.
We've chosen to embrace sort of a trust first type of option. And I know the last several years with the pandemic, and it has been really hard on a lot of people. We use that as an opportunity to double down on our trust strategy. So we were early adopters in remote work.
We've embraced things like flexible work location and flexible hours even before the pandemic came along. And of course, the pandemic gave us an opportunity to expand on. On those ideas, we really try to focus on setting clear goals for people, making it clear what's expected, and then providing them with the tools and the information and the guidance they need to drive success and then sort of get out of their way and not overburden them with a lot of bureaucracy.
A lot of systems that are well-intentioned, but send weird messages about trust. We're trust first organization, and I think some of the scores that you've mentioned in the Forbes rankings are people reflecting back that they really appreciate that. And we see positives in our work-life balance scores, for example, as we measure that on a regular basis.
But it's fantastic. When we recruit new talent and we talk about our culture, we tell real stories and you see people light up and they say, 'That's the kind of company that I want to join.' And that's really rewarding.
Jim: That really resonates with me, those two themes that you're talking about. Trust is really an important part of creating autonomy for people. And balance. I've been thinking a lot and writing a lot about autonomy and balance, and seems like your approach to distributed teams embraces both of these concepts.
Rich: Yeah, exactly.
We have a saying that I like to reinforce, which is, 'Physical proximity should not be a proxy for performance or commitment.'
Get past that and focus on, you know, what needs to get done, how you're going to measure success. Providing people with milestone metrics along the way so you know, whether you're on track and then let them go do their jobs.
Jim: Where are your teams located?
Rich: We have about 3,400 colleagues around the world in 30 different countries, so a pretty broad global footprint for a modestly-sized organization. Our largest office is in Bangalore, India, with about 1,300 colleagues, and we have multiple offices throughout Europe, throughout the rest of greater Asia and multiple offices in the US. Our strategy when it comes to talent acquisition is really to be opportunists. We don't have the financial resources of many of the much larger technology software competitors.
So, we win by not getting all caught up in where people are physically located. We're looking at finding people with the right culture fit and the right technical skills and experience who want to be part of something special. We trust them to be able to do that regardless of whether they're located in our San Diego office or our Minneapolis office or anywhere else around the world. And that has served us.
Jim: And have you seen since the pandemic and since this move to a more distributed, more hybrid and remote employee, any sort of impact on connection or belonging or a increase in isolation amongst some of your teammates?
Rich: Yeah, we hear about it. Our folks were pretty geographically dispersed in all these various offices, but throughout the pandemic, the topic of mental wellbeing and just wellbeing in general, whether it be mental or physical, became the point of conversation.
It had always sort been on the radar. We have wellness programs, those types of things. But it just became a more frequent point of dialogue and as we started engaging with our people around things that we could do as a company, as a leadership team to try to help people deal with some of those challenges, we began to realize that there is some isolation going on here.
And so, you know, we began to look for ways to engage with them and engage in dialogue with them that wasn't all just business focused to try to help them connect.
You know, another example that's really near and dear to my heart, during the pandemic, I think we, we hired and onboarded, like a thousand people during the course of that two and a half year period. And most of them were onboarded without ever having met their immediate manager or their coworkers in person.
And so those important relationship building opportunities that used to happen around the coffee machine or around going out to lunch together, they just didn't happen. And they didn't happen for years. And so we had to get really creative about trying to use other tools and technologies to help people connect.
Jim: When you talk about your dedication, these tools, this technology, your commitment to making sure people feel trusted, that they have balance, that they're able to connect... What comes up for me is something that you talk a lot about, which is creating a people-first company. And I'd love to hear just sort of in your own words, what does that mean? Because a lot of people talk about creating people-first companies, but very few companies are able to achieve it at the level that FICO has achieved.
So what does it mean really to be a people-first company? And what are some of the other things that companies should think about doing to really live that promise?
Rich: I believe that every single member of any organization gets up in the morning and brushes their teeth and gets ready to go to work with positive intent. I think we all as human beings want to know and truly believe that the work that we're doing is important and that it actually contributes to some greater good, that it has real meaning.
And I think every company that's in business to deliver value to its customers, produce products and services that somebody values, you know, has a value proposition. And I think the challenge between true people, first companies and companies that may have more work to do in that regard is how do you connect the positive intention of every single person who has a human being, wants the do good, wants to add value, wants to succeed with the overarching value that you're trying to create for your customers as a business?
If you can connect those dots, I think you create a very, very special culture. Where I like to use the flywheel analogy, people start to be emotionally committed to the success of the business. They demonstrate discretionary effort in ways that are, in many cases, intangible, but so powerful, especially when you aggregate them across teams of people, and it just yields differential business results.
It's easier to recruit, it's easier to retain, and it's easier to achieve your business results.
Jim: On a related note, one of the things that you've talked about is connecting talented people with important business decisions. You've talked about that is one of the elements of your formula for success.
So what does entailed to connect talented people with important decision?
Rich: Yeah. There are a couple of things that we do.
Number one, we engage in dialogue with our people on a regular basis. And I'm, I'm not talking about just the, the supervisor-employee relationship. We do engagement surveys every 90 days, and we ask provocative questions.
We certainly wanna know how people are providing scores on various dimensions, but we have open-ended questions where we ask our people, what should we do more of to increase our rate of growth or to increase our rate of earnings or net income? And on the flip side, what should we stop doing because it consumes a lot of resources and from your perspective, it doesn't add a lot of value.
And honestly, every 90 days we get thousands of responses along those lines. I have historically been worried that we get so much feedback that a new challenge emerges and that that challenge is anybody listening? Does it really matter?
And so one of the things I'm dedicated to doing along with our executive team is when we make decisions and they relate to the feedback we're getting from our people, and they almost always do. We have to be really deliberate in helping our people connect those dots and understand that we made this policy change. We made this organizational structure design change. We set these new priorities or goals in place. We changed this incentive system. We added this benefit program, and we did it because a number of people came forward and told us that was really important to them.
And they were willing, in some cases, to even make financial trade-offs to allow us to afford to do certain things by moving resources around.
And I think that it becomes different than the employee-employer relationship that so many people experience now. It's kind of like, we're all in this together. There are guidelines and, and there are limiting factors for sure. We can't do everything we want, but I'm engaged in the decisioning process.
My opinion actually does matter and it drives change that I value. That creates the special culture that we're really striving for.
Jim: I know you have a really novel approach to sort of how you share that with team, I think in all-hands meetings and some other things. Can you talk a little bit about that approach?
Rich: Yeah, so like most companies of our size are larger, we have town hall meetings or all hands meetings as we call them, and we structure ours to be after every one of our quarterly public earnings calls so that we can talk openly about our financial results and about the remainder of the plan year ahead and prior.
Years ago, we would do that in a very structured fashion where each member of our executive team and our CEO would come forth with a set of slides and things that they wanted to talk about.
And it had very 'push' feel to it. You come to the call and you listen to the information that's being presented to you. And a couple of years ago, we changed that format specifically because we wanted our people to know that their voices were being heard. and we began to use our quarterly engagement surveys to actually structure prepared questions because we knew the topics that were on the minds of our people and what better way to tell them that we heard them than to structure those calls in a Q&A framework where their questions were the ones that were being addressed.
And so now we do a 90-minute call with about an hour of the call being structured Q&A based on the content of the last engagement. And then the remaining 30 or 40 minutes is live Q&A.
It's interesting, one of the things we've done most recently, because when you do big Zoom calls, people can choose to raise their hand or go and chat, and they can be anonymous.
And we've started shifting that and challenging our people to say, wouldn't it even be better culturally if you couldn't be anonymous? If you had a smart question you wanted to pose in front of 3,000 of your colleagues and you had to actually show your name. And so where people are getting their brains wrapped around that right now, and it's just sort of taking the quality of the dialogue to an even higher level.
Jim: I love the way you tried new things. It's really fantastic.
And I want to talk a little bit about one concept in particular.
We talked about the importance of connection and using novel and innovative new ways, digital ways to enable that in the attempt to sort of create a culture where people feel they belong.
And what I'd like to explore is the concept of inclusion. Inclusion is typically a very important part of building that culture belonging. I'm just wondering, how does FICO think about inclusion in creating an inclusive environment?
Rich: Well, it may sound simple, but we start by talking a lot about it.
Sometimes I think the most powerful thing in the leadership team can do is to verbalize what they truly value. And so we spent a lot of time using the terms, inclusion and belonging, and then our actions have to match those words. And so we've done things that a number of companies have done around the creation of employee resource groups or ERGs to bring people with different perspectives.
To share those perspectives and to also educate their peers in a really friendly and welcoming kind of manner to create that culture where it's, it's okay. We, we do recognize that individual differences exist. It's not that we wanna pretend they don't exist. It's actually about getting better in touch with them and being better aware and knowledgeable about them so that you can value them. You understand them.
So it starts with verbalizing that we value it, and then it follows through programs like ERGs. We've even included in our performance management system, elements of inclusion and belonging. We use something called a behavioral rubric that gets deployed to all of our people. And the content of the behavioral rubric changes depending on role type, but some elements of it, for example, are core values which incorporated inclusion and belonging component.
They apply to everyone. And so it's our way of saying, not only do we talk about the value of inclusion, and not only do we have programs to reinforce that. We're actually gonna hold each other accountable for demonstrating inclusive behavior.
Jim: Great. And, and you talked a little bit about ERGs, and I just wanna make clear to our listeners that may not be familiar with that term, it refers to employee resource groups.
Can you give some examples of what they are and, and talk a little bit more about some of the best practices that you've seen work well?
Rich: Yeah, sure. We recognize four ERGs right now, and I expect that number may grow over time. It began a number of years ago with what we call Women at FICO. It was an affinity group for women to come together and talk about women's related issues.
But I wanna be clear, and this is true with all of our ERGs, everybody is invited to come. And so, for example, our Women at FICO ERG may choose to bring in a guest speaker and talk about work-life balance you know, challenging work environment and how they juggle a variety of work-life balance issues.
Everyone's invited to attend men and women alike. We have another group for LGBTQ+, which we call Out at FICO. We have another group that's focused on race and ethnic. And then the last group, which has gotten a lot of traction is called FICO Cares. And it, it speaks to a lot of people's interest in giving back to their community.
And in our case where we don't have a big corporate headquarters where 80% of our people are located; we're spread all over the world. Those communities are incredibly diverse, and they take many different forms. So we've allowed people around the world related to the FICO Cares ERG to recognize and give back to their communities in the way that they feel and their culture feels is the most impactful.
So it looks a little different in our Bangalore office than it does in our Sao Paulo, Brazil, office than it does in our, you know, San Jose office. But they all have one thing in common and we're bringing people together to give back to their community and the sense of pride that comes from that, and, frankly, our ability to then showcase the things that people are doing within these ERGs and share it with their colleagues.
It's another form of inclusiveness. It's another form of creating a sense of belonging around our people.
Jim: When you think creating a people-first company. Are there any other things that we haven't talked about that you want to stress, or are things that you feel really good about that you've seen work well in your career?
Rich: You know, the thing that we focus a lot on, Jim, is helping people really understand the company's strategy and how their specific role connects to it. I like to use sort of a, you know, an automobile manufacturing environment. If you're the guy who puts the front left tire on the car, on the assembly line over and over and over again, and if you've ever tried to drive a car with only three wheels, you know that person's job is really important.
If they never get an opportunity to see the whole car, to see the finished product, to understand that without their task, that car isn't going anywhere, there's something really important that's missing.
And I think it's an easy analogy for me because a car's a physical thing. And so oftentimes in knowledge companies like ours, the nature of what people are working on is so complicated and so ephemeral that we lose sight of the fact that it's still important that we help them connect to the bigger thing they're building. So in our case, you know, we're building a software platform to help our customers make better decisions.
And if you're one of our 2,000 software engineers writing lines of code every day, you may not understand what that means. And one of the things we've realized is it's so important that we take the time to. and help you understand exactly what it means. Because if you can connect to that bigger thing, your level of engagement and commitment just goes through the roof.
And it leads to the kind of culture that we're really trying to build. And you can do special things that you couldn't do. If that person just thought that their job was to write a line of code and they weren't really sure how it made a difference someday. And so that's, that's where we're spending a lot of our time.
And it sounds obvious—every company writes goals or they have OKRs and they try to align them. I think very few companies do it really, really well. And it takes, it takes a lot of effort, but I think the return on investment of investing in that particular space is just huge.
Jim: Well, I totally agree with you. Purpose and meaning are really, really important things for creating an engaged environment.
I'd love to close with one question for you, which, which is, what's one thing that you do personally to lead a happy life?
Rich: Yeah. I'm gonna go back to what I mentioned a moment ago. I asked myself every day when I used to drive home from my afternoon commute or my evening commute, and now it's when I get out of my desk chair in my home office: Did I make a difference today? Did I move the needle?
And there are good days and bad days for all of us to be sure. But I think if you think about that being your uber purpose for every single day, it changes the way you think. It changes the way you think about your customers. It changes the way you prioritize your time.
Set as a personal goal that you really wanna make a difference today. And it could take many different forms. Sometimes it's a new relationship that you build that you know the dividends of which aren't yet clear. Sometimes it's a new technology that you chose to focus on and learn, or a new skill.
Sometimes it's a deliverable that you pushed over the finish line. But I think when you focus on that it's a lot easier to stay psychologically satisfied and it makes it harder for you to feel disconnected. And I think that's a real risk that we all face, particularly in these times when we're together in person less and less is that feeling of disconnectedness.
And I think if you if you deliberately try to make sure you're adding value every day and reminding yourself of the value that you are creating, I don't know. It makes me happy. It makes me, it puts a smile on my face and it makes it all worth it, and it makes me excited to get up tomorrow.
Jim: I love that. Did I make a difference? Well, you made a difference today. Thank you so much for being here. This was really, really terrific.
Rich: Thanks Jim. I appreciate the opportunity.
