Ted Audio Collective Before I was an academic, I worked as a consultant, and there was a lot I loved about that job.
But there's also something that I don't miss.
All the recruiting events.
It was our job to recruit the next cohort of consultants from colleges and business schools.
And at these events, so many of the students would ask us again and again questions like, what kind of projects are you working on?
What kind of client issues are you dealing with?
And let me tell you, after a long day at the office, those questions weren't interesting to me.
They didn't really stand out, but mostly the answers didn't capture what it was actually like to work there.
They weren't helpful.
So what are the right questions to ask?
The questions that unlock a wealth of knowledge about a workplace.
I'm Aduba Akinola. This is Ted Business from the Ted Audio Collective.
Our speaker today, entrepreneur Marion Kampan, is here to show us a better way to gauge an ideal workplace.
And for her, it really comes down to assessing workplace culture.
Then after the talk, I'll model some questions I love to ask.
But first, a quick break.
And now, Marion Kampan takes the Ted stage.
Imagine this, you've been applying to a ton of jobs for months.
And now, finally, you're getting not just one, but two job offers.
Congratulations. It's time to celebrate.
It's great news, right?
But after the celebration comes the time where you can ask yourself, how is it that you're going to choose between those two job offers?
Some people are going to tell you, just go for the salary, the higher the better, right?
Others are going to tell you, no, go for the title, the position, the higher, the better.
And others are going to tell you, look for the mission, the kind of projects that you're going to be working on.
The more experience, the better.
Well, I suggest that you look at a completely different criteria.
I suggest that you choose your next job based on the company culture.
My name is Marion, or better said, my name is Marion, and I am passionate about corporate cultures.
When I say my name, people can guess that I am French and they usually want to guess further, where in France is she from?
And there is a city that comes to their mind, the capital of love, Paris.
But I have to disappoint you as beautiful as Paris is, I come from an even better place, even more beautiful.
So I don't come from Paris.
I come from Tahiti.
And Tahiti is this island in the middle of nowhere in the Pacific Ocean.
And a lot of people dream of retiring there with a coconut in their hand by the beach.
Well, I didn't wait for retirement.
I actually spend my childhood there, and Tahiti is great, yes, for the beaches and the coconuts.
But the best thing in Tahiti, it's the diversity, because you see, Tahiti is an island with a bit of a melting pot culture.
So if you're thinking about these two job positions that you have and you're thinking about which one should you choose, and if you're looking at corporate culture, you might find it hard to know from the outside what it is going to be like to work in that company.
Most people think that it is impossible to know beforehand what a company culture is going to be like before you work there.
Right. How are you going to know before you go to Japan what the culture in Japan is really like?
Well, I disagree with this.
And in my sharing today, I would like to share with you two different ways for you to figure out what a company culture is going to be like beforehand, because that's going to avoid you signing a contract that you're going to regret down the line.
I think most people don't follow those two tips that I'm going to share.
And the numbers show.
Gallup has run a study on the state of workplace worldwide, and I've pulled the number for East Asia, and the numbers are dreadful.
Overall, there is only 17 percent of people who are engaged in their work.
That means about 80 are not.
When people are not engaged, then they tend to want to leave and go somewhere else.
More than half of them want to quit.
And if they can't quit because maybe the marketplace is not that great.
What happens is people are starting to be quiet quitting.
That means they're coming to work, but really, they do the bare minimum not to get fired for employees and employers.
This is dreadful numbers.
And I'd like to take those numbers and bring them to reality.
What does that look like, really?
And I'll give you an example of a coaching client a couple of years ago who is a lawyer.
Let's call her Junita.
And Junita is an awesome lawyer.
She's really great at what she does, but she didn't want to end up in a law firm.
She found it a bit boring.
She wanted something more exciting and fancy.
So she ended up in a startup.
But after a few months, she just realized this is not the right fit here.
You see, Junita really, really likes things done well.
She likes to take her time and double check, but she's surrounded with entrepreneurs and startups, people who want to go fast and break things.
So there were a lot of tensions between her and the rest of the team.
So very quickly, after a few months, she just burnt out professionally.
She was questioning herself as a lawyer.
She was questioning herself as an individual.
She was questioning herself.
Why is it that I can't fit in here?
So we worked together and she moved to a more traditional workplace culture where she saw that people were behaving a little bit more like her and shared her work ethics.
That's where she really thrived in her job.
And this is what I wish to every single one of you is to experience a place, an environment that brings not the worst, but the best out of you.
So how are you going to do that?
Know that a place is going to be good for you.
Basically you're asking me, how can I do to know that a thing is going to be good before I experience it myself.
Well, I think you're doing this on a daily basis.
For instance, have you ever checked for a restaurant's rankings and comments before you go?
You're checking. You're trying to see what it's going to be like.
Or maybe if you're doing groceries and you're looking for, I don't know, avocados because you want to do a guacamole, how are you going to select the right avocado for yourself?
It's the same. So I would like to compare company cultures to avocados.
If you have 10 avocados, how do you know which one is the right one?
You're probably going to take one and put some pressure on the skin and you might feel that there is resistance, maybe too much or too little.
And that's how you're going to judge.
So today, what I would like to share with you are two tools.
The first one for you to assess if a culture or a company is going to be the right fit for you, the first tool for you is to observe.
Observe, observe, observe.
What do you observe?
Well, you observe the entire recruitment process because what happens in the recruitment process is companies are trying to show you their best side.
They really want to attract you.
They want to get you.
They're seducing you.
So if there is some things that you don't like there, you're probably not going to like afterwards either.
Let me give you an example.
If a company takes weeks to answer to your emails or even book an interview with you, well, that kind of culture is probably a bit slower than what you would expect.
If that dynamism is what you're looking for and you like structures and companies that are more process oriented, that's the right culture.
But if you're looking for a very entertaining, dynamic, energetic workplace, that's probably too slow.
You might want to look for a company that responds in a matter of days or even hours.
Another example would be if you have three people interviewing you and only one speaks and the other two are silence and you figure the one that is speaking is the boss.
That culture is very hierarchical and that's fine because it's not good or bad.
It's not right or wrong.
It just is. And you need to know whether you like that kind of culture and that fits you.
Or if you want a company culture that really is more flat and allows you to speak up and challenge the status quo, that's probably not the right kind of culture for you.
So the first thing you can do is observe, observe, observe.
The second thing you can do is to ask questions.
And so asking questions is really cool because that's when you have the avocado in your hand and you're putting pressure there.
You know when they're asking you in an interview, hey, we finished all the questions.
Do you have any questions?
Hell yeah, you have questions.
You should have questions.
And I'm going to give you three questions that are going to up your game when it comes to interviewing.
This question starts with the first question, which focuses on the future potential that you have in that company.
And it's a bit in your face, but the question is what kind of people get promoted here?
That tells you if they tell you, well, nobody got promoted in last year, you know you probably don't have a big future in that company.
But if they say, oh, Alexi got promoted last month.
Interesting. Alexi sounds like a really cool person.
Tell me more about him.
There you're asking follow up questions to discover more.
Well, why is it that he was selected as the one being promoted?
And then you listen to what they're telling you.
If they say, well, you know, he was the boss's best friend, so he got promoted.
Well, unless you're very close to the boss, you probably don't want to join that company.
But maybe they're going to say other things like, you know, Alexi's technically the best out of us.
For instance, the best engineer in the team.
So we promoted him.
Great. This company culture is about meritocracy.
So if you're really good at your job, you're going to get promoted.
If they say, well, Alexi got promoted because he's been the longest here.
He's the longest in the company.
All right. This company values loyalty, longevity, tenure in the company.
What is it that you like?
So for me, the best answer to this question, if I would apply for job would be Alexi got promoted because he's the best at his job.
So he has the skill.
He also is the best of us.
We all look up to him.
What that means is that he is a team player, probably, and he represents the culture best and we promote that.
And finally, we're promoting him because he has the potential to be a great manager.
For me, these are red.
These are green flags.
All right. So that's the first question to see if you have the potential to grow in this company and stay long term.
The second question is very simple, but also tells a lot.
And that question is, what are your core values?
I'm going to give you the red flag straight away.
The red flag would be core values.
What are you talking about?
What is that? That's a company that has no idea about corporate culture.
If they say, yeah, we have core values, but I don't remember what they are.
Sorry. Red flag. Or if they say, yeah, yeah, we have a core value, our core value is excellence, then you need to follow up with a question again.
Great. Excellence is a core value.
Tell me about it. When was the last time that you have seen excellence around here?
And a red flag is, uh, I don't know.
A green flag would be someone telling you, yeah, just last week, we, we provided the best project so far for the, with the team and we're all really proud of what we have produced.
Okay. Keep asking because then you know what the company culture is like.
So that's the second question.
And the third question is also tricky, but it's reminding you that there is no company culture that is perfect.
And from time to time you will have conflicts discussions that are a bit tough to have.
And what you want to know with this last question is how are the people in this company going to deal with these challenges?
How do people deal with one another?
That last question is tell me, when was the last time that you received feedback here?
Again, a red flag would be never.
Well, that's, that's not good.
Um, if the company says or the interviewer says, well, I received feedback once a year in a performance review, that's probably not enough.
But if they say we're providing and receiving feedback very regularly, almost daily, because we care about the growth of the people here.
And we trust that our colleagues can take feedback and that we're good enough to deliver it to them.
Oh, that's a green flag right there.
Okay. So we've seen the three different questions.
The first question is what kind of people get promoted here?
The second question is what are your call values?
And the third question is when was the last time that you got feedback here?
Now, these questions are really important because you're kind of grilling your interviewer and your interviewer could be a very junior interviewer up to the CEO of the company that will tell you a lot as well of what the company culture is like.
But so at some point you will have to realize that yes, the interview is important because it helps them select you as a future employee, but it's also helping you select them as a future employer.
So the balance is reversed here.
And what you need to bear in mind is the idea that it's not only about them here and you discovering more about what the core value and what the company is like, but also about you as a professional.
And you need to be very clear about what you want and what you expect from a company.
So be very clear and define what should work look like.
What should work feel like and what should work be like.
If you define this for yourself, if you observe, observe, observe, and if you ask the three questions that I have shared with you, I trust that you will be able to choose between those two job offers and decide which company you would like to join.
And I also believe that you will be able to choose for yourself the most outstanding workplace culture.
Thank you. That was Marion Kampan speaking at TEDxNYU Shanghai.
This talk got me thinking about some of the questions I like to ask to figure out what people's day -to -day lives look like in an organization.
And one of my favorites is, what brought you joy at work today?
I love that it's so open -ended and subjective.
It means you're going to get a lot of different answers and that means more data for you to piece a larger picture together.
I find it's important to focus on the relationships that exist within an organization.
And that is really what so much of our workday consists of.
All those moments, big and small, where we find ourselves working alongside one another, dealing with the good and the bad.
A question is a terrible thing to waste.
So as you search for meaningful work, what question is going to serve you best?
That's it for today.
TED Business is part of the TED Audio Collective.
This episode was produced by Hannah Kingsley Ma, edited by Alejandro Salazar and fact -checked by Julia Dickerson.
Special thanks to Maria Lajas, Farah DeGrange, Daniella Balorazo and Roxanne Heilash.
I'm Madupa Akinola.
Thanks for listening.
