Episode 9 - Great Idea! - Hanna Paul

Not only is this guest an amazing inspiration, a brilliant and beautiful soul, she also has an amazing story of how she ended up at a great company helping others find their voice to inspire others.

Hanna Paul of Ideawake, joins us for a great conversation!

 

Leighann Lovely  00:15

Let's Talk HR is a place for HR professionals, business owners and employees to come together and share experiences, to talk about what's working and what's not. How we can improve best practices so that companies can better attract, train and retain all generations of workers. We all know that there has been a huge shift in what people want. generations are coming together, more than ever, on what's important. Mental health has been brought to the forefront of everyone's mind. Let's humanize these conversations. Let's talk about how the economy has been impacted, and what needs to happen to find a balance. I'm your host Leighann. Lovely. So let's get this conversation started. And remember, if you enjoyed this episode, follow us like us and share us. We have an amazing guest with me today, Hanna Paul. She has made a career change going from the healthcare industry, to tech startup company. So I'm thrilled to talk with her today. Hanna Paul is a trained occupational therapist who jumped into a startup industry after exposure in the tech scene in the San Francisco Bay Area. Hannah saw how technology was being used to solve problems and disrupt the status quo of how services and products are accessed and experience. She has worked at a variety of startups leading clinical research trials for a VR company to serving as the Director of Customer happiness in telemedicine a catalyst and lover of change. Hannah currently serves as the customer success and implementation manager at a Milwaukee based startup idea week, who is focused on innovation idea week is essentially an online suggestion box on steroids. Change is the only constant in life. And companies have to be open and evolving and growing in order to make it in this day and age. Welcome, Hannah, I am so excited to have you here and talk with me today. Why don't you tell me a little bit about yourself.

 

Hanna Paul  02:28

Be glad to and thank you so much for having me. My name is Hanna. I'm the Customer Success and Implementation Manager at Ideawake by day and by night I'm Hanna banana having a good time on the town in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. My day job, I'm really much actively involved in working with different companies that choose to work with Ideawake and powering their innovation programs. So I work to consult with them to figure out best practices for them to be able to tap into the creative mindset of their already existing work workforce, either on the frontlines or in manager positions, we really want to utilize the individuals that are closest to their products to see ways that have strategies and solutions for bridging gaps and improving employee engagement and returning costs and revenue. So I get to be that person that shows them how to use the product, and use it to their advantage that they can get the most out of it and make innovation and innovative changes to their existing products or creating new ones.

 

Leighann Lovely  03:32

That's fun to be able to actually help the people see how those tools work. And yeah, that's a fun position to be in. But Hanna, you you actually have your Bachelor's of Science in Occupational Science and a Masters of Science in Occupational Therapy. So tell me, you know, the journey of how you found the role that you're in now, you know, at Ideawake it's very much of a industry change.

 

Hanna Paul  04:05

Yeah, absolutely, nothing in life is linear and get ready for a loop de loop ride because that is my journey. So I graduated from the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee in occupational therapy in 2016. And there's five ot schools within the Milwaukee area. And that means that there's a lot of saturation when it comes to OT's being here, and I knew it would be difficult for me to get a job at a location in which I felt fulfilled in being in setting wise. And so I chose to do a travel therapy contract. And that led me to getting a state license in California and in Oregon. And the plan was to travel the whole West Coast and do three month contracts at different cities and just kind of go along with it. I ended up having my first interview with a travel staffing company and landed on In a town called San Rafael, which is about 40 miles south of San Francisco. And so in April of 2017, I made the journey across the United States from Wisconsin to San Francisco. Found a sublet with a married couple there and moved there knowing absolutely nobody. But I was just ready for a change a culture shock, culture shock for myself, even within the United States and started my occupational therapy career in San Francisco.

 

Leighann Lovely  05:32

Small town girl moving and well, you know, small town, I suppose. Compared to San Francisco. Definitely. Yeah.

 

Hanna Paul  05:39

Yeah, absolutely. Definitely a different scene. Then Milwaukee, grew up in Appleton originally and then was on an often Milwaukee for for school, from 2011 to 2017 16. But yeah, San Francisco was calling my name. And little did I know, it was the place I needed to be to discover these these wings that I have. And I started to really see while I was working as an occupational therapist there, that the health care system is a model that is a mean machine and making money on sick people. And the day to day was was tough. I was involved in a lot of situations where I was being pressured to be involved in Medicare fraud. And I didn't see that as being fulfilling for myself, I loved my patients, but I didn't love the productivity. I didn't love the documentation side of things. I didn't go to school to become a documentation just I came to went to school to change people's lives and get them feeling better, and not make decisions based on what their insurance was and got the best reimbursement. So being there, I, specifically in the Bay Area, got exposed to the tech scene. And I saw the innovation happening there. I saw how the different companies were treating their employees so well and meeting their hierarchy of needs that they could get the most productivity out of them and creativity. And I wasn't getting that in health care. I wasn't getting mental health support. I wasn't getting reimbursements for my travel costs, and having just different things like buying meals and just life balance. And so I wanted to be on the innovative side of healthcare, I wanted to be on the preventative side of healthcare. And so I while I was still an OT, I switched to part time and dipped my toe and working in some startups, one being a virtual reality company called corona Labs, which uses virtual reality to use the visual system to help people combat chronic pain. And I ran the clinical research trials there. And then I did product demonstration for another startup called a site, which was a CCTV set of glasses that allows people with visual impairments to be able to see different things from a distance do contrast, hyper zoom, things like that. So I began sort of industry journey, then, wow,

 

Leighann Lovely  08:02

that's those are really amazing, different, different tools that that can people can utilize and use for. Well, health. I mean, yeah, simple. So from there, you know, you've obviously made your way back here to the greatest city in the world.

 

Hanna Paul  08:23

Yes, the greater mafia. How did tell how Did someone get you back from California to Milwaukee? Is the real question, right? Yes, well, that was an offer to go back to school for a PhD and my goodness, my program chair, he can spell excuse my French shit on a stick. And he was like, well send you to Switzerland. And you can do part of your doctoral program there. And so I didn't know what I wanted to do. Because I knew the OT job, I was burnt out. And I done it for two years. And I wanted to be in tech. And this was the next next best thing. And so I said yes to it, and eventually gave that nine months. And so that that also was that point, I felt that feeling I thought with ot were just I didn't light up in the morning, I felt dread going to work. And I didn't want to spend four years of my life writing a 400 page paper to prove a point. I can prove a point pretty easily without having to do that. We need people to be in those roles. But that's just not who I am. Right. So I quit the Ph. D program didn't know what I wanted to do, and started networking in Milwaukee area. And this is a story I do love to tell it's been a huge catalyst into what led me to where I'm at now, is I went to a networking event with new Waukee and the shift and they had a speaker there who asked the room, how many people here are doing anything with their degree? And 10% of the room raised their hand. And I had been telling myself this story that I couldn't be anything but an occupational therapist for my whole life and that there's no way I'm gonna be able to get another job other than ot I knew that's not where I'm going to be able to change healthcare was on the current model, I needed to be on the preventative side, I need to change the status quo. And so that was when I realized my skill set went way beyond just what occupational therapy was. And so I landed a job at a local startup here and virtual care for telemedicine. And in customer success, I did that for two years, when a lot of great things learn, I did not want to become a software engineer, I learned I not want to be a social media, individual content strategist, I knew I love customers, I knew I loved leadership. And I knew I loved being on the strategy side of a company. And so got an invitation to check out idea awake. And that is the long winded story of how I ended up at my current role.

 

Leighann Lovely  10:42

And that's, awesome. And you're so right, the amount of people that I talk with, that have have a degree in specific industry that they're in unless they are accountants, unless they are doctors, unless they are, you know, very specific to something that they have to have in order to do what they're doing. And that being those very niche industries, those doctors were you can't be a brain surgeon unless you went to school to be a cure, oh, my God, I hope somebody doesn't work on my brain if they don't have education and know how to do surgery on my brain. Same with my accountant, I'm not going to go to, you know, an accountant, if they don't have a lot of years and or an education in accounting. But when it comes to those transferable skills from those degrees, if you want to do something else, we're from so many other degrees, who decided or who said that an 18 year old coming out of high school has to make a decision for the rest of their life on what they want to be when they're in their 20s, their 30s, their 40s their 50s? Mm hmm. It's interesting that at that young age, we have to make a decision. What do you want to be when you grow up?

 

Hanna Paul  11:56

Yeah, what and no one ever tells you like, you hear that you hear that statistic of the average career change number for people is seven, but no one tells you hey, that might be when you're 19, that might be when you're 20, that might be might do six career changes in your 20s No one tells you when those things are gonna come, it's more of this metaphorical idea outside of ourselves, when the time comes, that we're actually not happy with what we're doing. Right. We don't think this is the right time. And then we have different factors that come in when it comes to families and moving and children and, and I don't have those different limitations. And I actually don't want to use one limitation just was different gifts in life that I have to use as navigate. But yeah, it's a it's an interesting mindset that we have in America that we make you at 18 have to decide on a career and then think you have to be in that the rest of your life.

 

Leighann Lovely  12:49

Right? And what really, what is the most important aspect of what we learn in each career? Is it the technical skills? Or is it the soft skills that you gain? And again, everybody that I talked to is like, well, it's the soft skills, because those are things that you learn over time. Whereas the technical skills they can they can be taught if you have the capacity to learn. And there are very few people that I have ever met in my entire life that don't have the capacity to learn. I would say that, I mean, there's almost nobody, everybody, no matter. And it's different. I mean, obviously, it's different for everybody and the capacity in which they learn. But everybody has the capacity to learn technical skills, soft skills are a little bit more difficult to learn if you struggle with certain things. If you are scared to death to talk in front of people, that's going to be a major thing to overcome. You're probably never be a public speaker. Then again, I'm sure somebody out there is going nope, nope, that's that. I became a public speaker and I was, you know, anyways, there's always there's always one out there saying no by overcame anyways. Yeah, it's the thing that, you know, when you're at that age, when you're 18, you're 19 Nobody ever complains that oh, they're not, they can't do this job because we're not capable of training them on the technical skills. It's always they're so young, they're so green. They're a little rougher on the edges when it comes to the politics in the office. That's just a matter of, they need exposure. And as you've gotten exposure to the world, you get better at that stuff. Which is what you can't be you can't be an elected official. You can't be president until you're like What 45 or something like that. Part of the reason is because of life experience. They want somebody who's been around the block. And I may be wrong on the age of that but so don't quote me on that. Anyways, so you made your way back to the Milwaukee market. Now you you are now with Ideawake So let's really get into what does idea week do? What is the the the nuts and bolts of the company? What do they do for? You know, for other organizations?

 

Hanna Paul  15:12

Yeah. So idea week is an idea management software platform. It's a platform that collects ideas. And we work with 14 different verticals, from manufacturing, to health care to insurance finance. And what we want to do is is to empower companies to have innovation programs. Evolution, as you said in the intro is so important when it comes to companies making it in this day and age. And so what we do is we give a voice to the employees and make it a fun process where they are being recognized for their ideas. We have five main reasons why people stop, we did a survey and last year that looked at what are the main reasons why somebody stops contributing ideas. And it's because the ideas fall in the black hole, they don't get recognition, they don't know where to share, they don't know how to share, and then fear of retribution from management for submitting those ideas. You know, we have a lot of us have that story, we had an idea and someone takes it. So where does the recognition get tracked. And so what our platform does is it has timestamps, it has proof of ownership, it has communication systems to let somebody know that their idea is being looked at that it's being evaluated that that the steering committees are being allowed to put a scorecard with it and rate it. And so what the whole system pretty much does is and I can kind of go from the customer journey is is each company will select challenges that they want to set up for their company, and we recommend to them might be how do we improve the patient discharge experience. And then the employees are given access to the platform. And it's very much like Facebook, where you submit an idea you can like you can vote, you can comment, you can take individuals and go, Hey, Jill, did you see this idea? What would be an awesome, we're just talking about this, let's add to this idea. And so you have this collaboration happening of employee engagement improving, you have different things coming to the table that you're not going to have in hire, hire an outside consultant come in and spend a year learning your product, when you've got people who know it right now what the needs are, and we're so close to it. And so what that does is it allows for camaraderie to build within a company, it allows people's voices to be heard to feel seen. And then what happens when the ideas go through the challenge. And you can put time, you can keep it open and have it be open all the time, like a box sitting in the office and you put a card in and they check it every once in a while. Or you can do timed challenges, which you're going to get much more engagement and ideas when it's timed. And so then once the challenge closes, different review teams, different stakeholders, decision makers will look at those ideas, they'll be able to sort them using our system with simple clicks of the button. Rather than having to sort them through and excel sheets and slack and Microsoft Teams and email and things being lost in the sauce. They're able to score those things and then select which ones are going to have the best ROI, which ones are going to be quick wins with big impacts that they can do what's going to be Low risk, low costs, and not much time to have to implement. But then they also can take the person who submitted that idea and go, Hey, we really liked this idea. We would love to give you time in your workday for you to implement this. And so they can go through three stages, we have a second service of ours called idea box, where it's an innovative, it's an accelerator, and that individually committed the idea if they want to, or a team can create a team that will go ahead and test that idea out how to pilot it, and then how to implement it and then show and demonstrate the value and actually putting that idea out there. But it also could be the regular departments, the business unit managers implementing those ideas. That's the great thing is personalized to each business. And so at the end of the day, it's a really awesome tool for collecting ideas, continuous improvement, continuous improvement, hackathons, different things like that we're able to power on our platform.

 

Leighann Lovely  19:26

That's, that's great. And I would assume that this has to help with obviously employee engagement. But you know, that employee that sits back and thinks, Well, you know, I have a solution for this or I have an idea. And that person that that never gets heard and then gets frustrated and eventually leaves because they feel like they're just never been heard. So the overall employee retention at companies, when a company implements something like this, because now all of a sudden you feel more valued As an employee, because you have a voice for the first time, and the company's actually taking, you know, an interest in what the employees are actually saying. And I've been at companies plenty of times where you know, as an employee, you can see what's broken, where maybe upper management or stakeholders or who, people who are not on the ground level, they, they don't see that every day, because they're not in it every day. And it's not that they're, they're not trying to pay attention. It's just that they don't, they're not walking the floor on a regular basis, noticing the things that as an employee, you do notice. And when you go to a manager and say, hey, you know, I noticed this, that manager, that mid level manager may not also also doesn't have the authority to go up and say, hey, you know, we think this done gives everybody that equal. And in my right, the equal playing field to be, hey, I have an idea, or I noticed this, and I think that this might work in order to fix this idea. That I mean, is that equal playing field? Everybody has the same right to be able from the janitor to the reception to the manager to anybody?

 

Hanna Paul  21:20

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I love that you said janitor, because we have a blog about how Flaming Hot Cheetos was pitched by a janitor that worked at the Cheeto ended, or lilies industry. I don't know what the parent company name is. But it was a janitor that came up with Flaming Hot Cheetos, he went and made an in recipe and made the Cheetos had people try it. And that's how we have Flaming Hot Cheetos, you know, it can be anybody.

 

Leighann Lovely  21:45

Right. And that's, that's great. And you never know where that diamond in the rough will come from. Because, you know, for so long, we assume that the position title that you hold is where you are in the hierarchy of the company. And that I think that's wrong. Every position at a company is vitally important. And sometimes the people who are the quietest are the people who are the smartest, they just may be introverts and aren't comfortable with a public forum, or aren't comfortable with the idea or coming forward with that. By giving them a platform like this, they can do it quietly,

 

Hanna Paul  22:28

They can be loudly at the same time to because they can write and do research and show supplemental materials as to why their idea has meaning. Yeah, and I love that I love the idea of you sharing, you know, for the people that are quiet, that they just aren't ones to speak up, we all have different gifts. And I think back when I was in health care, when I was seeing all these issues, I didn't even think to even I didn't even waste my time as I would actually put it, it felt like a waste of time to put ideas together to take down a healthcare system where there's clearly so many issues, what I'm gonna write an email and then send it to them. Whereas this, it's actually being shown that they want to hear ideas and a huge thing we briefed them on is we want them to tie their challenges towards business unit goals. And so then you can use the business unit goals as a reason for why this idea is so important, because it's going to lead to the strategic goals of our company. And I can't tell you based on my whole career, I don't know what the business goals were all of all the other places I've worked at, I have no idea. But if I had known that, and then given an opportunity to engage in something, and I feel like I could have improved the lives of my co workers the lives of my patients, mostly, but also administrators too. But I never felt like my voice was ever going to be heard within the game of labels of who gets to have a seat at the table here. Like you said, everyone gets a seat at the table or an opportunity to try to sit there.

 

Leighann Lovely  24:02

Right. And that's great. It is because especially at the larger organizations where people sometimes feel like numbers, and they feel like their voice is drowned out by hundreds of other employees, or you have a company that's got multiple locations, and you have no idea of tracking what is happening from one place to the other. This is a great way to create collaboration and create communication among everybody, everybody who wants to participate. So it's I mean, this is just an amazing so without giving obviously any confidential information away. Can you tell me anything about you know, one of the most exciting things that you've worked on other than the Flaming Hot Cheetos? That one would have been awesome to work?

 

Hanna Paul  24:57

Well, I mean, that wasn't us, but just like, right In general, but yeah, I mean, I would love to take, like, you guys. Yeah, again, it's cool. So I've been with Ideawake since November. So still fairly new. But I can tell you about a few different companies we're working with, you know, top ones Epson on Sirius XM, HP, and then some health care one Sanford Health, OSF, advocate Aurora, here based in the Milwaukee area. And I think what the most, the project that I personally am really excited about right now is specific to COVID. And it's trying to find ways to save time for the nurses in their day, that with ideas so that they don't have as much of burnout, and that they can provide the care that they need to, to the patients that they're taking care of. So that's one where it's, you know, there's human engaged challenges here, where we're trying to impact lives beyond just let's try to improve this product, let's try to improve this productivity line or save on scrap metal, you know, it's impacting people's lives is the main thing here. So that's been one of my favorite challenges to be a part of, and, and talking about creative solutions for trying to do team building exercises, and, and things like that. So I love the idea of building culture through innovation as well.

 

Leighann Lovely  26:17

Right? Yeah. And that's, that's awesome. You know, I we go on about the cool thing, like the Flaming Hot Cheetos, but you forget that there's amazing other projects like that of, you know, the human side, the figuring out the culture, the that that's an awesome project, I mean, that you should be thrilled to working to be working on something like that. So typically, the size of companies, I mean, are you working on? You listed off some pretty large organizations? Are you usually engaging very large companies? Do you have some smaller companies that come in and say, Hey, we've got, you know, 30 employees? And we'd like to, you know, put this out there to see if we can get them engaged, you know, what, what typically is the size?

 

Hanna Paul  27:03

Yeah, that's a great question. So, we range from as little as about 100 employees upwards to I think our most is 165,000, there is no maximum on it, it's how many users you want to have engaged on the platform. But we usually have the minimum be 100. And then it can be separated out into departments and locations. So when you get to those really big enterprises, you know, maybe you want to focus specifically on HR, you want to focus specifically on it, you can segment them out within a community. So you can have multiple different groups so that you can be gaining ideas in different areas, because let's be real, there's so many different parts to a well run machine, that it's not just, you know, one big thing, and if we have too many ideas, and then the bandwidth of being able to get really selective and targeted about what we're trying to get out of the challenge can get lost. And so the beautiful thing is, is that we're able to do that we're able to provide a system that the entire enterprise, if its massive, can, you know, take it as an undertaking, or we can go as small as 100. And look at all those users and participants from that, and that company to be able to contribute to the challenge statements and innovation program.

 

Leighann Lovely  28:15

Great. So I want to talk a little bit about the employee side of that, you know, I would assume that employees are, you know, after they understand, after they understand how it works. And after they understand what's you know, what it's all about? I would assume that there's some pretty reasonable buy in some pretty good buy in with this platform. Do you follow up? And kind of do a little bit of study, I guess, on what the employees feedback is what they feel, you know, how they feel it went? And if they felt that there was value in it?

 

Hanna Paul  28:50

Yeah, absolutely. Recently, just this week, we had a meeting with one of our customers, and they did a survey with their employees to see how they enjoyed the the platform and things like that. And they shared how they really, really enjoyed being able to feel like their voices were heard, and that they could be a part of something bigger than themselves. There's different things when it comes to you know, software and how we can make the user experience improved. And we're always making those software we'll never be obese, I think anybody battles so that user experience is so important for us. So we want to know where we need feedback to improve it so that it's simple and very easy for you to be able to engage in it and, and want that continued engagement, you know, it can become one of those things where you get maybe not as excited by it, you know, a year down the road, not something we've experienced, but just more so we want to continue to have people be actively involved in the challenges and one of the ways we do that is by offering prizes and gamification in our system. So prizes could be anything from monetary or non-monetary work could be an Amazon gift card for submitting an idea. Or it could be vacation days or lunch with the boss or lunch with the CEO or extra time to work on a Project and implement it, we really want to have people be inspired by the opportunity to contribute to something like I said, bigger than themselves. And we can do that through prizes, both with recognition of just simply a shout out, or like I said, the monetary stuff, too, we know that everyone's got different tax brackets that they got to be in. So we have different suggestions for things like that. But from the employee side, they really do enjoy the fact that they have a voice and they're being heard, and that their employers are taking the time to want to, to learn from them. That's another really big thing. And it makes it be from this hierarchical, you know, system to more of this wheel where we're kind of dancing in different spinning spaces. Whereas you may never have been able to talk to this person, because you're here and they're way up here. And now all of a sudden, you're in a lunchroom with them and talking through your idea. And all of a sudden you have this creativity and his passion pouring out of you that you didn't maybe even know had within you. And that's one of the coolest things I think that we get to see.

 

Leighann Lovely  31:08

You know, it's interesting that you, you mentioned prizes, that when when you could walk up to somebody and give them a gift. And they're like, well, thank you, thank you. But when you label it as a prize, all of a sudden, it becomes much more like, Oh, yes, I get a prize for this. And I, it's so weird. I don't know why as humans, if you dangle a carrot on the end of a string and say, Hey, if you do x, you get this. And for some reason, people just get really, really excited at the idea that, hey, if I participate, and then once you get them engaged, I'm assuming that they see what a great opportunity this is. And it doesn't have to be monetary value. Yeah, it a cup of coffee. Again, I know in my younger days of when I was entering into the workforce, the idea of sitting down with the CEO of a company, the CEO of my company was extremely thrilling. At the same time, it made me so nervous, I thought that it was gonna lose my stomach. I mean, it's just those those things are very exciting opportunities for people to one be involved, but at the same time be heard. Because there's so many people out there that are so unbelievably brilliant, but they haven't had the opportunity to, to show that yet. Like the janitor, and the and I keep going back to that, because I just think it's awesome. Great example. It really is. It really is. You know, that's it's like the movie, what was the movie Good Will Hunting. I mean, he was what put it trying to put himself through school, you know, being a being a janitor at a at a college, and there you are a diamond in the rough. There are hundreds of 1000s of them out there that will never be discovered, because they're not given the opportunity, or, you know, a voice to be heard. And it sounds like this is the mechanism for those voices to be heard.

 

Hanna Paul  33:16

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It is. And that's, that's the great, greatest part of this. And there's there's this shift going on in our society, in our culture, when it comes to what, what leads to a job. You, you go to Google, you go to LinkedIn, you go to Twitter, they're hiring people without degrees. They they're looking at your experience and looking at what are you good at What lights your soul on fire? What pours out of you, when you can't, you can't stop? It's changing. And at the end of the day, it's coming down to who are you as a person? What are your soft skills? What are your hard skills, but what is it that is your unique gift, and it doesn't need to be that you have a four year degree on you and grant it education is great. I'm not here to say that education isn't something you know, for, you know, worthwhile, but you can go to a software boot camp for six months at the age of 19 now, and go get trained as a software engineer and end up with a six figure salary at the age of 19. It's getting much more like trade school in the sense of training where we're getting really specific to what people want to learn. And that pressuring them into this one specific funnel of how is it to be successful in life? Oh, it's a degree. No, it's different now. And and that was one of the things that was hard. The hardest thing for me when I left San Francisco was what do I want to do? I have all these choices. And I my mom said to me, she goes Hang on. You have no idea how much of a gift that is for you to be able to say that as a woman that you have so many options to choose from. And that was a way for me to get the cup You know, half full and not half empty at all, there's so many choices, I don't know what to do, it's, I'm standing on the successes of so many other women that fought for these rights to be able to say I can be anything I want to be, and I have no limitations, and I have a ceiling that I can break if I want to, I definitely am the type of individual, I'm the type of woman that 20 years ago, I wouldn't have made it, people wouldn't have been ready for me. But everyone's you know, shifting and moving around. And I love to see that people are in this great resignation that we're seeing already in, in the United States happening, they're going for what they want to do COVID made them look back on themselves and go, What is it that I want to do with my life, you know, it's an employee's market now, and people are really getting clear on where they want to spend my time. And companies have to think about that. And that's where ideas like is a great way for them to look at employee rent retention, that's the thing that they're really gonna have to consider, they're got to consider benefits, they're gonna have to consider allowing for new things to be done and given to improve the happiness of their employees. Because at the end of the day, life's about, you know, really enjoying being in the present moment. And, you know, the cultures that you're around and, and the stress and do situations where you're meeting these deadlines, and, and for what, you know, I always ask myself this question of if this role, you know, something were to happen to me, and I couldn't do my job, could somebody fill it? For me? The answer is, yes, we all get stuck in this mindset that if I'm not doing this, I'm not here, the world's gonna stop spinning, it's gonna keep spinning. So make sure you're spending it in a place where you feel supported, seen heard, and that you have somebody who sees your gifts and wants you to use them in your day to day

 

Leighann Lovely  36:52

You gave me goosebumps, everything that you were saying, because there has been an absolute shift, it excites me that there has been so much of a shift in the world to see and talk to people every day who will come to me, you know, obviously, I'm in in the staffing industry, my day job, night, you know, podcaster by night. But people come to me all the time and say, Listen, I don't I don't want to do this job anymore. I'm done with it. I'm, I'm burnt out. But I don't know what I want to be when I grow up. And I always ask them, Well, what skills do you have? What do you like to do? What gets your blood pumping in the morning at the idea of, well, if I could just do with that? And they're like, Wow, but I don't have the I've never done that before. I don't have the skills, you know, I technical skills to do that. And I look at them and go, have you ever applied or talk to somebody in that industry? Have you ever started networking with people who are in that industry, because tackling you know, the technical skills can be trained. Again, I go back to unless you want to be a brain surgeon, okay, you can't just one day wake up and say I'm going to be a brain surgeon. But there are so many skills that are transferable. And there are so many people right now who are saying, I will hire somebody who has the soft skills, and is willing to put in the effort, if they will just simply come in every day, put forth the effort, and they have the soft skills there. I will train them on everything else. Because there are so many jobs open and so many companies suffering right now, to just get people to show up. This is the time to anybody out there listening, if you're not happy in the job that you currently have, you have the ability to be happy. You just have to take the initiative and figure out what it is that you want to be when you start adulting.

 

Hanna Paul  38:55

Yeah. And adulting is never ending, right?

 

Leighann Lovely  38:59

If you if you're going to a job that you hate every day, right now is the time to figure out okay, what do I love? Or if if it's that you do love what you do, but you hate the culture, then you need to find a new job in that area. Because if a company right now has got that bad of culture and they're not fixing it, they're never going to

 

Hanna Paul  39:21

And that's an enablement on your part as well for the status quo to that way. That's a huge thing. I see so many people so many of my friends, they're spending their times and their evening hours complaining about work and I just sat by it because that's not how it should be.

 

Leighann Lovely  39:36

No. And right I mean, there are in companies right now are paying for quality people. They are it's an employee market. You said it, we could all say it until we're blue in the face. You can go in as long as you are not demanding the world. You can't go in and say hey, I was making, you know, 20 bucks down the street. Now I want 30 Okay, it's unreasonable. You can't go in and gouge an employee, you go in and you tell them this is how many years of experience I have. This is what I'm able to do for you. I just want to be paid fair.

 

Hanna Paul  40:08

I actually disagree a little bit here. And I'll just go, yes,

 

Leighann Lovely  40:12

no, I know. I know. But no, if you were severely underpaid at a company, yes, I totally agree. There are some circumstances where people are being severely underpaid. But when I limit, especially women, I'm just saying that, you know, if you're, you shouldn't be, you know, basically gouging. You know, an employer on purpose, because you know, you can, it's, it's about fair, all around. Because what's going to happen is, if you do that, there is going to be, there's going to be a shift, there's going to be a balance, and unfortunately, it's going to come back around. And if you are being way overpaid for a job, because they have to hire you right now. It could come back to bite you. One day, I'll just yeah, definitely

 

Hanna Paul  41:01

increase in salary doesn't always mean an increase in happiness, you got to look at the benefits, you got to look at the culture, you got to look at how they treat every single employee, if they give you benefits for hybrid working, travel, PTO, all of it, and leading by example, look at looking at the leaders. That's that's really important to see how do they live their lives? And are they understanding that there's different types of people because each company needs people that work to live and people who also live to work? It's just it's a beautiful balance,

 

Leighann Lovely  41:29

right? Yep. Well, we are almost at time. But I have one more question the question of the season. And you probably have actually a couple of examples of these just from talking to talking. But I have a lot to say, if you could pinpoint a time period in your career that made a huge difference in your life or career path. When would that be and why?

 

Hanna Paul  41:55

Yes, it was meeting a patient of mine, and I can't use her first name. So we'll call her Jen. I met Jen and California. And Jen story changed my entire life, not just my career. And it made me see the world not through rose colored glasses, that I have a purpose here. And it is to spread light, and to also spread light and shine light, where people are lacking in putting humans first. And that their systems and processes in place that are keeping things the way that they are where people are hurting. And so this patient made me see that I'm here to make change. And I'm here to do it in a graceful way. I'm not here to take a you know, grenade and throw it and boom, let's see what catastrophe we can throw up here. But how can we work together, all of us with systems we already have in place to make the world a better place. And I think it's a great place. You know, there's a lot of beautiful things happening in this day and age. But that patient without going into it changed my life. And what I wanted to do, and I'm just felt this inner power, inner drive is intuition. screaming at me and going, you are not here to be at the bottom, you are here to be with people that are influencers and here to make change and and make people feel safe with change, excited about change. And so I would say that was it. And that's when I was being around the tech scene, I knew I needed to step out of my current position. Because I wasn't able to have a voice there specifically, where I wanted to impact people in all industries, not just one.

 

Leighann Lovely  43:50

May I ask you a simple question? Yes, I'll try to get a simple answer. Was it something she said? Or was it something she did?

 

Hanna Paul  43:58

It was the way it was her story of how she grew up. And what happened to her as a child and as a teenager, and her not having the right support and love from her family. And hearing that whole story and how it played impacted the rest of her life where she was then disabled at the age of 30 for the rest of her life when she could have lived a life much more fully, much more healthy, and actually lost her this week. But I'm so glad she's not in pain anymore. And she's not suffering and her family. And I've remained very close. And I told her the last thing I said to her was, you changed my life. And we said we loved each other and that goodbye. And I always called her girly. And that's how I said goodbye. I'll miss you girly.

 

Leighann Lovely  44:49

Thank you very much for sharing that. It's amazing how, as humans, a simple story can impact us in such a profound way. Yeah, obviously was beyond words. But that is the human connection, isn't it?

 

Hanna Paul  45:04

Yeah, we're here for a certain amount of years. And I find so many people getting caught up in the the to dues the, the number the comparisons, and I just want to remind them, we're here to smile every once in a while and, and have fun. And I love to inspire the inner child and children, everybody, especially adults, and if I can remind one person to smile on a day, that's my mission, you know, I love what I do at Ideawake. But I use it as my channel to be able to impact as many lives as I can through positivity. And so it's, it's that patient that I wish I could give her that world, I wish I could have given that world to her, but I couldn't, it was too late. And so I'm wanting to prevent and save others from a potential life like that. And that they can empower be feel empowered to make life whatever they want it to be.

 

Leighann Lovely  45:57

Well, that's beautiful. Thank you so much for coming on today. And if somebody wants to reach out to you, how would they go about doing that?

 

Hanna Paul  46:07

Yeah, I would love to hear from you. A few different ways you can email me Hanna at ideawake, I do not have an h on the end of my name. So it's H A N N A @ ideawake.com. You can also find me on LinkedIn for Hanna, Hanna Paul. And then just another thing too is if you are looking for help with, you know career changes and things like that I love to help people with developing the personal brand and getting to that core of what is your purpose and what is your passion. So please reach out. I'd love to hear from you. And I hope you all have a beautiful, beautiful day wherever you are.

 

Leighann Lovely  46:42

Thank you so much. Thank you.

 

Leighann Lovely  46:45

Thank you again for listening to Let's Talk HR. I appreciate your time and support without you the audience this would not be possible. So don't forget that if you enjoyed this episode to follow us like us or share us. Have a wonderful day.

 

Contact Hanna Paul

E-mail – hanna@ideawake.com

LinkedIN - linkedin.com/in/hannapaul

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