Episode Transcript
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You're listening to the HR Mixtape. Your podcast with
the perfect mix of practical advice, thought-provoking interviews, and
stories that just hit different so that work doesn't have to feel, well,
Joining me today is Collin Williams, founder and chairman at
New Era ADR. Collin specializes in alternative dispute
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resolution, helping individuals and organizations resolve conflicts
efficiently and effectively, avoiding the time, costs, and
We got to chitchat a little bit about our backgrounds before we
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went live. And it's always fun to meet somebody who
is familiar with the Chicagoland region and also
has a love for Colorado like I do. So love that we were able to connect
that way. You know, I want to start our conversation off
with this idea that a lot of people avoid conflict.
It feels uncomfortable. But really conflict itself
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probably isn't the problem. It's how we handle it.
So, you know, why is it so important for organizations to start
to talk openly about conflict and what shifts
when we start seeing it as something that we can navigate rather than
Yeah, when I think of organizations, I think there's two kinds
of organizations, right? There are open organizations, there's closed
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organizations. And when I say that, you really think about an
organization that has lots of transparency from the top down, right? It's
telling everybody what's going on in the company, that's
openness, right? And then there's closed organizations where everybody looks
at maybe the executive team, the HR team, the legal team
as a black box. what's going on. I don't have any idea
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what's going on in this organization. Open organizations tend
to fuse conflict, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Closed organizations
create conflict. So I think there's a big difference
when you engage in transparency, you let the
employee base know what's going on, you're going to have far less conflict.
And when you have conflict, it's going to be things that matter. When
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you have a black box organization, you're going to create conflict
where there really shouldn't be any, because there's just an innate distrust of
what's going on. And so I think the important thing when you think
about how you should run an organization is full transparency. And
I could tell you all sorts of things from my background about how this works. But
it really is amazing when you engage with the employee base and
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you tell them, this is what's going on and we're going to be transparent. We're not
doing well financially, here's why. We're doing great financially, here's
why. We're having this problem, we're having that problem. If you tell people,
then they tend to trust what you're saying. If you don't tell them those things,
You know, it's interesting because, you know, often HR sits in this
space where they have this role where
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they have to be risk adverse, right?
They have to protect the company from things like
litigation and harassment claims, EEOC
claims, all those kinds of things. but, and,
I guess and would be a better way to phrase it, and they're
in charge of creating this people first culture. And often
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they do that, I think, by falling back to a more
traditional view of HR, which is the rigid rules and policies. How
do they evolve from that thinking to see their role,
and that is, I've lovingly referred to it in
Sure. I actually think that there's pretty vast difference
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between rules and policies, right? I think when you implement
lots of rules, I think there's a feeling around rules that
they're very, very rigid. And there's not really a great way
to bend them. There's not really a great way to get around them. When you start implementing
rules upon rules upon rules, you create a culture of, I
have to stay in my lane and just do it. And that actually inhibits creativity, which
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creates a problem. I don't think policies are necessarily as
big of an issue. I think if you create policies, it
sort of drives the organization in a certain way. I think it's also
important to educate the employee base about why we have these policies.
But if you also think of a policy, there's leeway in there, right?
You can do things around a policy that you can't necessarily do with a rule. So,
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I think policies can be a really good way of driving your organization in
the right direction and mitigating risk. While also, if
you educate the employee base, if you have an open door to discuss
those things, then they're going to say, I understand why this policy is
in place. And I don't necessarily have a problem with it. And maybe we
can bend the policy this way. Maybe we can bend the policy this way. We
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can't do that with rules, right? So, I tend to
think of this in a very different way, which is like HR can be like very
rule and policy based. But I think of those two things differently.
I think when you become very rule-based, you become too rigid and that creates
distrust. I think when you have policies and you educate people about
why you have those policies, and quite frankly, they can be good for the employee
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base too, I think that's a good thing. So I really think of
How do you create the safetiness in that? And the way
I guess I think about it is in past organizations, I
guess I've looked at policies as rules and I've looked at
guidelines as where we have the flexibility. And I
guess I've always come to that conclusion because when I have gone to
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unemployment claims or EEOC stuff, we
always go back to the policy documents, right? And what do they say and
did we follow them? Maybe you can elaborate a little bit more.
How do I think about that flexibility that I potentially could provide in
Yeah, I mean, I actually think of policies more as guidelines. So
I think it's and I think that's really the important way to
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think about it is a policy is a guide and it drives the organization in
a certain direction for whatever reason that may be. you create
culture within a company, right? And you have to have a way to somewhat enforce
that. That doesn't mean you need hard lines to enforce it. It
means that you can create policies and say, here's why we're doing this,
right? And the reason is we want a better culture because we
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think X, Y, Z creates a better culture. So to me, I
think of policies and guidelines as the same type of thing, whereas
I think of rules as something very, very different. And I think
when you're drafting policies, I think you have to inherently, this probably
is what differentiates them from rules, right? Is
to build in some flexibility. I think a policy should be, or
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a guideline, we can use these interchangeably at this point. I
think it should be a way that drives you in a certain direction, but it
isn't hard line, right? So there should be
some flexibility built into policies. There should be an inherent knowledge
from the HR team and at the legal team that this is not a firm
direction that you need to go. But there is some, we
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need to have some culture within the organization. So we need to build these things. But
I think in building them in a way that's flexible and not saying, this
is the way things work. If you deviate from that, you've created
a problem and that's going to lead to litigation or whatever,
maybe conflict. So I think it's, and you can always work with
attorneys on this too and say, like, I need this policy to be built
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in a way that's going to have some inherent flexibility and
not be a hard line rule. And that's, you know, that's an art. That's
not a science. But I think if you think about it in that way and think, you
know, I'm really going to build some flexibility into this while still driving towards the
Well, and I think that sets you up for increasing the
trust in your organization. We know that trust and transparency
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actually lowers risk. I'm sure that you've seen that. Do
Yeah. So I can give you some really interesting examples. I
was the general counsel of a tech startup in Chicago that
was completely black box. So it was run by, they were
in their late twenties. And essentially the executive
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team board was three people, the two founders and the chief financial officer.
Nobody had any idea why decisions were made, how decisions were made. Things
were just laid upon the employee base. And
it was a very, very confusing culture, particularly for me being an attorney.
And I don't have any idea why things are happening or what's going on. To
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make a very long story short, that company completely imploded.
The two founders and the chief financial officer and the head of sales all went
to prison. I was a witness against them
in federal court. So when you think about what black
boxes can create. I mean, that's an
extreme example, right? That doesn't mean every black box
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organization is going to have those problems. But there was
just a massive amount of distrust. And what that created was
when problems started, the employee base completely turned on the executives and
that created a maelstrom of all sorts of bad stuff. The
company I went to after that, complete transparency. We had a dashboard that
every morning you could see all the sales, everything that happened the
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day before. And it was real time. So you could see
all this stuff happening. Then every Wednesday, we had an all company
meeting where we would talk about everything that had happened. And
this wasn't a small company. It was 150, 200 employees. We
would get everybody in the basement. We would talk about everything that happened. We would have some
folks talk and introduce themselves so everybody knew each other. totally
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different culture, right? We didn't have those problems. We sold that company for
$275 million. So I think when you think
about those two things, you may think as an executive or
an HR team or a legal team, that not letting everybody know
what's going on is a good thing. And some of that hiddenness can
maybe even keep the employee base in line. That's You're
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going to create massive problems for yourself. I think when you let everybody know
what's going on in the organization and what's happening and why, then
that employee base is going to be loyal to you. And honestly, they're going
to be a lot happier in their jobs. And that creates a much, much better culture.
Yeah, I know that the organizations I've worked for that there's been
that transparency. It doesn't leave you guessing
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at the direction of a lot of things, where the company's going, where your job's going,
the impact you have. So yeah, I totally agree with
that approach. I think there is definitely still some of
that mentality that exists out there, though, that You know, we can't
tell them everything because we don't know what they're going to do with that
information. So how do you balance some
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of that? And I'm thinking of, you know, specifically public traded companies where
you do have some proprietary information that
may affect whether somebody can, you know, buy or sell a stock that
they have. How do you work in that parameter with
Well, I think, I mean, you think about publicly traded organizations and
I worked for Oracle and you can set up, obviously there's statutory
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mandated periods where you can't trade and things like that. I
don't think necessarily not telling people is the solution to
that problem. They just have to understand that if you have access
to this information, then there are limits on what
you can do with it. So you have blackout periods, you
have periods that you can't trade the stock. So it's not that we're not
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going to tell you that these things are happening. Oracle used to do a very,
very good job of basically saying, we're going to let you know everything that's
going on, and here are the periods that you cannot do things. If
you go ahead and do things during those periods based on the information you have,
that's on you. That's the decision you made, and you're in
trouble for that as an individual. And that's just
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personal accountability. So I don't necessarily think
that hiding lots of things is the solution. I think that
being transparent and then making sure people understand the ramifications of
what they do then leads to personal accountability for
their actions. And I think that's really, really important. I think
there's also this concept, and this is a little bit of a deviation, of making sure
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that the HR team has an open door and people really believe that.
I think there's always been I've been in a lot of organizations that
have this culture of, sure, HR is the team I'm supposed to
go to, but there's no way I'm going to them because of
that concept of, what are they going to do with what I tell them? So
I think that requires time and trust that
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you can build over the HR team, which will permeate through the employee base
saying, hey, you know what? I went to HR. I talked to Shari. Nothing bad
happens. You can trust her. You can go to her and
tell her what's going on and understand that that's going to be kept in confidence and
she's going to use that information to create a good outcome. Once
again, that's something that's built over time, but I think there's always
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this danger within HR and legal that if you
do take that information and you do something bad with it, that's
going to get everywhere. And then you've got a really, really big problem. So
it's really just, it's about being honest, transparent and
honest and making sure people understand. And that
can be true in the HR function too. Somebody comes in, you say, look, if you tell
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me this, then I might be obligated to go tell somebody else and
do something about it. So you make that decision, but
I'm letting you know what the outcome may be because I have a
responsibility to the company. And then as they decide, I don't want to tell
you, then that's okay. They decide I want to tell you, then they
understand the ramifications. But not understanding those things,
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Yeah, and it's a it's a hard role to be in for HR, you
know, in all honesty, because you do want to have that transparency.
But then when that person comes and says, hey, I want to tell you this, you give them the
details and they go, OK, good. I'm not going to tell you now. Then you're like,
oh, no, there's something happening. You know, that's just the role
that we sit in. But but I think you're right, is we have to create
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that environment where people feel that we are a
resource for them. But also we have
to be very transparent, like you said, about what we have to do with some of the
information that we get. You know, I've definitely been in that spot where
somebody's come in and told me something and then I told them up
front, hey, like there are things that I just have to take up the
chain, either go talk to our general counsel or our executive suite
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about it. And it's hard. It's a hard conversation to
have. How can HR start to build kind of that people-centered
way of doing HR so that they have that relationship with
employees and with the leadership team, because they do sit
Yeah. I mean, once again, I think it's trust that's built over time.
I think you're absolutely right. You think about this in the concept of
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like, and I hate to use this example, but like sexual harassment, right?
So somebody comes to you and says, somebody made me feel really uncomfortable. They
said X, Y, Z, it was completely inappropriate. And you tell them,
well, look, If there's somebody doing that within my organization, then
I don't really have an option other than to confront them
about it and figure out what's going on. And maybe that needs to be taken to
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the legal team. Maybe that needs to be taken to the executive team. So
you just have to understand what's
the severity of this, right? Do you feel uncomfortable here? Is
this a bad situation? Is this something that could happen to somebody else?
Then I really think you have to be comfortable with the fact that we need to escalate
this. Or is it just somebody that you don't particularly like? And
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certainly they said something offhand, but it's not, you know, off the cuff that wasn't
appropriate. But maybe that's not something they do
all the time. So let's talk about what this really looks
like and what the outcome is going to be depending on which
route we go. And then you can make that decision. And once again, I
think when you do that over time, that's going to permeate through your
employee base. People are going to talk about it, right? That's the something that
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I think HR and legal always need to acknowledge. Whatever you
do, The first thing that person's going to do is go tell the person
they trust the most. And that person's going to go tell the person that they trust
the most. And that's going to go throughout the entire organization. So
I think you need to acknowledge that. And that can be a good thing. It could
be a really bad thing. So I think when you build that trust and
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say, the HR team and the employee base says, I
went to the HR team. It was a really good experience. because
they counseled me. They didn't say, this is what I need to do and
this is what I'm going to do. It's more of a collaborative thing
where, okay, this is what happened. Let's figure out what the solution to
that looks like. And depending on what you tell me, that means I
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might need to escalate it. And if you're not comfortable telling me that, that's okay. But
if this is really a serious thing, then we really need to consider how
we do this. And I think if you act in that collaborative way, once
again, that's going to go throughout the entire, it's going to permeate the employee
So, you know, I had the privilege and I do say privilege working
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in a union environment before and sometimes those collaboration conversations,
we can't kind of come to a agreed upon solution, which
might lead us to mediation or arbitration. You know, we have
those kind of tools written into our policies
or guidelines. Maybe you could start with explaining just those terms
mediation and arbitration for maybe somebody that's not familiar with them. And then how
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do we write those into our policies so
that we still come across as approachable as HR
Sure. Yeah, I actually worked for the National Labor Relations Board in law school and
did a ton of union litigation when I was outside counsel.
I think, first of all, mediation and arbitration, right? Mediation is
a collaborative process where you bring in a third party who has no stake in
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the game, who actually can go between the parties and say, what's your
position? What's your position? They are not there to make judgments. about
it. They're there to work with both parties to try to come to
some middle ground that everybody's content with as
a result. So it is not a litigation process. It
is not like going to court. It is very much the opposite. It's
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about actually trying to bring the parties together to some sort of resolution using
a third party intermediary. Arbitration, different
thing, right? Arbitration is litigation. It really is the
exact same as going to court with a few nuances, like
it's all confidential. It has an arbitrator instead of a judge. It's
probably a conference room instead of a courtroom. But the process looks
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very much like going to court, filing a complaint, an answer, discovery, all
this different stuff. I think the important thing, number one,
mediation is a great process that is completely under use. I
think the important thing about mediation is it should be done early. People
love to mediate things when you're 75% of the way
down the road in the court in the case. And the
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problem is then people are pissed. They spent a lot of money. They
spent a lot of time. They become entrenched in their positions. It
becomes a lot harder for that third party to walk in and say, let's find
some middle ground. So I always like to say, if you're going to do mediation, you
can build that into the policies and do it early. Do it before people
become really, really angry about it. They're probably angry to begin
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with, but let me tell you, two years down the road, you're going to find
some real anger. So that can be built in,
and I don't think anybody has a real problem with the concept of mediation. What's
happened with arbitration over the years is that people have become very distrustful,
and there's good reasons for that. People have built arbitration policies that
are six pages long, and they're less
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about what's the process and how do we get to it, and more about how
do I eliminate avenues, right? How do I absolutely
mitigate risks in favor of the company and against the employee? So
there's become this distrust of the process. And there's also this concept of
arbitration being confidential. So people think, well, nobody's
going to find out about this. And that's innately in favor of
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the organization. That's true. It is innately in favor of the organization.
But there's a lot of reasons as an employee, you might not want this information out
there, right? There might be something embarrassing. And that's when you go to court,
everything is out in the open. So confidentiality, to
me, isn't the problem. It's building these arbitration policies where
you say, you can't do this. You can't do that. You've got this
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deadline. You can only ask for this much information. That's when
you create a problem. Like arbitration at the end of the day is about creating
a faster, more efficient, less expensive way to
a result. Right. And to me, it's about both parties
telling their story to an independent party who listens and says, I
believe that story and I don't believe that story. And here's your outcome. And
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to me, I think fundamentally that's good for the employee and it's good for the
organization. You don't want to spend a lot of time litigating
things. But when you create these policies that
are clearly anti-employee, then that's when
you have a problem. So when you ask, how do you build these things? I
think at the end of the day, an arbitration policy should do a couple
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of things. It should have a class action waiver. right? That's the
reason it was created. And that was the biggest benefit to organizations is
that you don't have a class action starting. So, and then I think it's
about creating an efficient process and not a lot of fluff around it.
So you say, okay, you have a problem, you file the arbitration with X organization,
hopefully new era. but you file with that organization. Then we move through the
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process and get to result. And I'm not going to create a lot of
barriers around this whole process that
impede the employee. And I think if the world
had stuck to that, that sort of paradigm, then
we'd be in a much better place. And people would realize arbitration is good
for both sides, but you know, we really have entered this
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world where I think, Companies too often are using arbitration policies
as a way to mitigate all risk and not as an avenue to actual
redress. And I think that's why there's created a lot
of distrust. That's why unions despise arbitration. But
at the end of the day, had you stuck to a world where you say, look, we
just want to stay out of court, we want to make this fast and efficient, and
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we want to get you to result, And if we were wrong or
wrong as the organization, then I think we'd be
in a much better position. And I think we're trying to push it back
in that direction, right? Where everybody realizes like arbitration was
created in the early 1900s because people didn't
want to go to court. And if you look at it that way and say, look,
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it's just, we don't want to go to court. We want a faster, more efficient process.
Yeah, for sure. You know, as we wrap up our conversation and
I think about those in HR who are leaders listening now, what's
one step that they can take tomorrow or walk away from this podcast
to cut down on risk, but also strengthen empathy and
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Yeah, we go back to my favorite word and the
thing that I've seen that works best in organizations is transparency,
right? So when you're constantly in communication with your employee base,
however the best way is to do that, you can have newsletters, daily emails,
you can have company meetings. Certainly for large organizations, that's
more difficult. I think when there is complete transparency, and
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you make that part of your culture, and maybe even build policies
or guidelines around it and say, these are the things that we're going to do to
be transparent, you're putting yourself in a position to succeed. And
when you start saying, well, we can't tell the employee base this, can't
tell them that, and we need to do this this way, and they don't need to know
about that, and the executives are making these decisions, and don't tell
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anybody. Then I think you're entering a world of distrust, which
is just going to create a cascading set of problems. So
transparency is my favorite word in all organizations. We live it, I've lived
it in other organizations, and I've seen what the antithesis of
that looks like and what it creates. So yeah,
Collin, I love it. Thank you so much for taking a few minutes of
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I hope you enjoyed today's episode. You can find show notes
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