How Customer-Centric Leadership Strengthens Organizations From the Inside Out

[MUSIC] >> Welcome to the Employee Safety Podcast from Alert Media. We provide business professionals with insights and ideas for protecting their people from the vast array of threats facing organizations today. Each week, you'll hear advice and best practices from an experienced safety leader. Here's your host, Peter Steinfeld. >> Hello, everyone. Today is a special day for the Employee Safety Podcast. We're celebrating our 100th episode and our second anniversary. I'd like to extend a heartfelt thanks to all our listeners, without whom this show would not be possible, as well as our fabulous guests who are willing to spend their valuable time sharing thoughts and best practices on employee safety. I've experienced so many eye-widening, aha moments based on the amazing advice they've given, and I hope all of you have too. To help us commemorate our milestones, I invited alert media CEO Christopher Kennessey to the show. Christopher, or CK as he likes to be called, joined the company in March of 2022. Prior to alert media, he spent 20 years in C-level and executive leadership roles at various tech and fast growth software organizations, like NetMotion, The Foundry, and Cisco Systems. Throughout his career, CK developed a unique customer-centric approach to leadership, which has already strengthened bonds with our customers, employees, and other stakeholders across the globe. CK talks about that approach, and much more in today's 100th episode. This conversation means a lot to me personally, and I'm excited to share it with you. Let's listen in. CK, welcome. Peter honored to be here. It's fantastic to have you on the show, and it's been great to have you captaining the ship since you joined us back in March. Real quick, when you were looking at your next opportunity, what got you excited about alert media? I was in the market looking for my next opportunity, and I sat down with my wife, and I was just talking about what I was looking for in an opportunity, and I was just sharing with her that I really wanted to go someplace that had a mission, and that had a strong culture, and had a customer-centric approach to the way they went about their business, and I had a laundry list of things, and my wife was like, "If you can find all those things, I'm going to be surprised." I felt pretty lucky to come somewhere that checked all those boxes, and if you can go somewhere where you're making a difference helping people, it's a pretty rare thing in today's world to be able to work somewhere where you enjoy your colleagues and also feel like you're making a difference, and it's sincerely occurring. Yeah, without a doubt. Well, now that you've spent a bunch of months traveling the country to meet with our customers and safety leaders from all kinds of industries, what kind of trends or perhaps business challenges or pain points do you find that they're experiencing? Yeah, I mean, it's a real dynamic time for safety leaders out there, and some of the things that we're seeing is just the drastic increase in threats, whether that's active shooters or weather-related threats. There's just so many headlines out there that are causing safety leaders to really have to make sure that they're reassuring the organization leadership, that there are plans in place and they're prepared to react when those issues occur, and so that's one trend that I've just seen out there where it just seems that EHS leaders are really on the forefront and that they have a much bigger voice in the business, and then in addition to that, I've seen some pretty interesting examples of how EHS has partnered with business itself and has really helped the organization overall, which is something that's pretty fascinating. Do you have any impactful stories that you can share from the travels that you've gone through? There's a couple different stories, but I think one, when it comes to partnering with the business, which I thought was pretty fascinating, was we're in Chicago and Creightonboro was sharing with us that they'd set up our product and they were using it effectively to communicate in emergency situations, but then they also went to the business and said, "Hey, just so you know, there's this great technology that's here to help." And one of the business partners they worked with was the supply chain. And supply chain said, "You know what? If you could actually circle critical junctures or put a perimeter on critical junctures that our supply chain uses and alert us to potential impacts to our supply chain, that would be hugely valuable." And so the owner of our technology and the EHS leader at Creightonboro, quickly partnered with the business and put almost like a perimeter around the key supply chain junctures, one of which was the border crossings with the U.S. and Canada. And as Creightonboro was bringing in goods on the Canadian border, they were, with a very short period of time, almost stuck in that log jam around the truckers that were, because of kind of COVID frustrations, were blocking the U.S.-Canadian border. And because of our technology's ability to kind of sense the source of issues and situations and locations, we were able to quickly flag that and point it out to them. And the EHS leadership was able to notify supply chain, supply chain rerouted it to another border crossing that was just 10, 15 miles down the road and really avoided being stuck in a long line of trucks, which would have been for days and really would have impacted their supply chain. And so that's just one example, but it's just fascinating to see EHS really partner with the business and leverage whether it's our threat intelligence or just the communication platform itself to kind of get the message out. - Yeah, that is an excellent story. And I did a podcast recently with Grant Hayes, former Secret Service agent and now consultant in the security industry. And he said that the next level for security and safety teams is to not just do that basic blocking and tackling of video surveillance cameras and badging systems and things like that, but to see how you can partner with different areas of the business to make them more effective. And then therefore that is a snowball effect. It goes back to executive management. They see it makes sense to invest in security and it can help with your budget and all those types of things. So fantastic story. - Yeah, and one other one that was pretty fascinating was I was gonna have a call with one of our larger customers. It's in the healthcare space, one of the top 10 healthcare organizations in the US. And the first call I was gonna have with them, the leader got on the phone and said, "Hey, I'm so happy to meet with you. "I wanna talk to you, but I'm in the middle of a crisis "and I can't talk right now. "So you mind if I call you back in a week or two?" And I said, "Yeah, absolutely. "The safety of your employees "and your business comes first." And so we had a follow up call and I said, "Hey, what was that crisis that you had?" And once again, this is a very, very large healthcare organization and their supplier of kind of food to their patients and all their hospitals, the organization went out of business. And so they had to like in short order find another supplier to bring in food for all the patients. And as you probably know, if you've ever been in a hospital, there are so many dietary restrictions for different patients, whether it's sodium levels, whatever that may be. So talk about having to quickly partner with an organization, understand the organization's requirements, understand the requirements of this healthcare organization, understand the patient requirements. And it's fascinating to hear how EHS and our platform played a key role in this business issue that occurred. And they were able to help get through this difficult period of time just by making sure they were able to communicate in a timely fashion, be able to communicate in the best ways that the employees were able to communicate and get the information back and forth. So it was pretty fascinating. - Yeah, those are very illustrative stories of why things are changing and why EHS is getting a stronger voice at the table. Like you said earlier, what else do you think has made that change? 'Cause I know when I first started in this industry over 20 years ago, EHS was to kind of a backseat at the table. And now it seems like executive leadership, the C level recognizes the importance of safety and security. What do you think has changed? - I think there's a lot of different factors to it. I think there's a lot of noise out there with the way that information is communicated. And I think EHS leadership has proven from a technology standpoint and from a leadership standpoint that they have a way to really effectively communicate and cut through the noise and provide leadership in difficult situations. And so I think when there's a requirement to get a message out, make sure it's targeted, make sure that there's good two-way communication back and make sure that there's a lot of organization, I think EHS leaders are primed to jump in to help in those sorts of situations. - Well, speaking of leadership, just to switch the topic a little bit, I've heard you talk, since you've been here, a lot about customer-centric leadership. What does that mean? - Yep, it's about improving the experience at every touch point to create more value for the people we serve and the people we serve is essentially the customer. And so one of the things you asked me before, you said, "Hey, what attracted you to alert media "and what did you notice from the outside looking in?" And the place I was at previously, we had a really strong culture and that was important to me. And when I came to look at alert media, right away, you go to the website and it's pretty easy to find what our cultures are and what our values are. And that came from Brian Krueger, our founder, and has been instilled in the business, from to be honest with you, people like you, Peter, that have been here for quite some time to provide the leadership. But if you look at our culture and values, like the number one culture and value that we have is that the customer always comes first. And that, to me, from the outside looking and like really resonated with me. And it's something that really aligned with kind of my leadership style because I really believe in kind of customer-centric leadership. And my basic philosophy on it is, if you spend your time looking from the customer perspective out, you tend to just have a better business. You're typically providing better support to the customer 'cause you look at it from their perspective. When you're developing products, you look at it from the customer perspective and then you challenge your teams too to make sure their products are easier to use, they're easier to train on, easier to implement, and then from a customer support standpoint, the same thing. And so for me, customer-centric leadership is just looking at from the customer lens out, identifying their pain points, and then making sure that impacts every element of the business through the customer voice. - It's so true. If you focus on the customer, all the other problems tend to take care of themselves in one way or another. - Yeah, no, no, absolutely. And I actually had a pretty great experience recently visiting here in San Antonio, which is just about an hour and a half drive from Austin, my new home, and we're going to visit with Waterburger. And so we're there, spending time with them, just learning about their GSOC and how do they support their various team members and stores and the challenges they face. And when you have like a thousand locations, like the amount of unique challenges is pretty amazing. And so they shared with us that they love how we really reduce the noise and how our threat intelligence capabilities are clear and concise and impactful. And so I kind of said, "Hey, well, what else could we do?" And what came back to me was, is when you send the threat out, we would love in the email, if really in the body of the email, you could quickly state what is the distance between the threat and the key members of the team and locations, which is a real simple request. Not that it's easy to do, but it was a very simple request. And I understood from a customer lens standpoint, if you're sitting there and you're getting an alert, what should you just love to just pull up your phone and say, "Okay, is this employee, is this distance away? This location, is this distance away?" So you really understand the impact and you can quickly go back and address it. And so I was able to come back and talk to our CTO and our CTO is amazing at understanding the customer voice and why things are important. And we're pretty quickly able to put out that new type of email alert that allowed that Waterburger leader to quickly look at their phone, understand the proximity to threat and then make better decisions on how to support the employees in the organization overall. - Yeah, that's such a great example of just listening and then turning around and doing something about it. A lot of companies say, "Yeah, I hear you, but they don't do anything." So that's one of the key reasons I'm at Alert Media is we listen and we do something about it. Well, let's shift over a bit to employees. They've really been through a lot over the past couple of years and their perceptions of workplace safety have changed quite a bit as well. How do you recommend that organizations navigate or perhaps reimagine their duty of care to enhance employee trust and engagement? - Yeah, what's happened with the pandemic the last few years has, I think, really challenged EHS leadership and allowed us to, quite honestly, become more visible in their organizations. And it's also been really hard on the employees and how they've had to adjust just to the drastically changing work climate, work environment. And so from, I think, from the duty of care standpoint, duty of care has expanded to remote, dispersed traveling and hybrid workforces. And so that change has occurred. And it's kind of fascinating to see kind of how organizations have embraced it and who is doing a great job of it and who isn't. And it's really different from organization to organization. I'll go into one organization and I'll see leadership say, hey, we acknowledge that our employees are no longer in our offices and we feel that the duty of care extends to their home and we wanna embrace that. And then we see other organizations where they go, you know what, our exact team is not comfortable with it. And basically we're going to think the duty of care is really focused around our corporate offices and nothing else. And so it's really changes from organization to organization, but it's fascinating to see the more forward-looking organizations really embrace wanting to extend duty of care regardless of where their employees are. And beyond duty of care, the Edelman Trust Barometer revealed just this year in 2022 that 77% of employees say they trust information from their employer and that's over 20% more than they trust the media or the government. - Wow. - So I think that's pretty a fascinating statistic that, you know, I think there's a lot of noise in the media nowadays. And so to look at that trust barometer and to say that the employees actually trust the voice of the employer 20% more than media or government, I feel there's a huge obligation for me as a leader to make sure that I'm really careful about that voice. - Yeah, you have to be careful about what you're saying, but then also know that people are waiting to hear from you. So you have to have the right way to be able to communicate with them quickly and efficiently. - Yeah, no, no, absolutely. And that's why, you know, organizations have that responsibility and that opportunity to build trust by informing their employees of these critical life-saving information wherever they are, whether they're in the corporate office or they're remote. And actually what's really fascinating to me is 'cause that trust is there, it quickly extends beyond emergency communications. And we're starting to see how kind of employees are expecting organizations to act accordingly to their stated values. Look at how organizations have embraced extended parental leave or DEI initiatives or healthcare travel reimbursement. And so it's that trust that communication certainly extends beyond emergency situations, emergency comms to the relationship with the employee overall. - Yeah, I mean, people spend oftentimes more time with their work family than they do with their own home family. So why wouldn't you want to treat them similarly to you would your own personal family? - Yeah, absolutely. Well, getting a bit more personal, what's the hardest decision you've had to make as a leader? - So there's always a lot of hard decisions that go into leadership to make leadership difficult. You know, I think one of the more current ones to me was really kind of at the start of the pandemic. I was the leader of a software company in Seattle and we ended up having a retirement community that was nearby in a nursing home in a matter of like 24 to 48 hours. We ended up having eight people die from COVID and it just tore through the nursing home. And before when you kind of heard, oh, there's a potential death in New York City and there's a potential death in LA and there's like one or two. You're like, oh, well, you know, how really broad is it? And then when it quickly happened literally 15 to 20 miles from our corporate headquarters of our company and eight to 10 people died within a 24 hour to 48 hour basis, it really caused us to say, hey, other people aren't working from home yet, but if we're really as employee-centric as we are customer-centric and organizations have to be employee-centric, then we needed to stop the way we're doing work even before anyone else was implementing it. And so that was a difficult time just 'cause you had to think a little bit out of the box and just in prioritize the health and wellbeing of your employees before anyone else was really doing it. And so that was a time where it was, it was kind of really difficult and it was a hard decision. But I don't know, if you ever err on the side of the customer and the side of the employee and you really can't lose sight of either one, to be honest, then I think good things almost always come out of it even when you're in difficult times. - Well, COVID clearly showed us that there's lots of new emerging threats out there, but the threat landscape is increasing around the world, just so much going on. The news cycle continues to apply pressure to all the safety leaders and their loved ones. So what inspires you to stay motivated and hopeful with all this stuff going on? - Yeah, we're definitely hopeful here at Alert Media and we're definitely appreciative of the impacts our technologies make. We had a stark reminder of that, just of what occurred in Uvalde, so close to our corporate headquarters, those that don't know where that's located, I think it's about 120 miles we're there about from our corporate headquarters here in Austin. And so the day after that occurred, it was so hard to come into work and just see the fear in the eyes of parents worrying about their children as they're going to school just about the climate that's out there today. And so the threat landscape is real and there's just more and more of it out there and it just seems to get closer and closer to home, which is a stark reminder of the difference that we're making here at Alert Media. And one of the things I do as CEO is whenever we have a new higher class of employees and luckily we've had a lot of success lately, we've been really growing and so we've had some quite large employee new hire classes and just last week we had a group of 10 new hires and I spend about an hour talking to every single new hire group when they come into the business, talking about our culture and our values and our cost-percenture approach and all those sorts of things. And it was really, one of the things I always ask the new employees is why did you choose to work at Alert Media? And for them, you just hear a lot about the mission and how they really believe in the ability to help people. And so that's, when you kind of look at that threat landscape and how it's increasing around the world, kind of the employees inspire me a lot here because they come to work every day because they actually want to make a difference and they want to help others. And they really buy into the fact that the company itself makes a big difference around the world and that we help our customers make the world a safer place. And there was a recent news article I was reading and so while the weather threats are on the world and with climate change has gotten significantly worse, the actual, the number of deaths associated with it has ironically gone down a bit. And the whole point of the article was, as a world, we're doing a better job of communicating about these dangers, giving people advanced notification of it and putting people into safer positions. And so it's interesting to assume as climate change happens and as the world becomes more dangerous that immediately the impacted people would increase with it. But while there's obviously, there's always a lot of impact to people out there. It's actually, we as a society have done a better job of managing that impact and helping others. And we're hopeful that that trend will continue and people obviously will need the tools and technology to help and that's what inspires us every day to do what we do and work here. - Yeah, I think you're exactly right. There is the bright light or the hope out there is that there's something you can do about it. There are technologies you can leverage. There's things you can do to adapt and overcome these things as they increase. - We're really proud of our technology that it's kind of known across the industry. So it's always been easy to use and very easy for people to send out a critical alert when organizations need it most, when there's a crisis, right? 'Cause when there's a crisis, everybody gets really stressed and I think this has to be simple. That's what we kind of thrive ourselves on. We're very prideful of. But the other part to it, which I've just been super fascinated about lately is just our engineering team has put a lot of thought into automation and being able to automate these critical alerts and quickly identify who's impacted and letting EHS leaders know which of their people and locations are impacted when and getting the information to them as quickly as possible. And the combination of what we do with, with our ability to have all these threats that we human vet ourselves, the ability to know where your people and locations are and the ability to automate that in seconds and tell you which of your teams are impacted by potential threats. That's been pretty fascinating to me. You see that level of automation, the speed at which we inform EHS workers of potential threats impacting teams. That's something that I think is pretty inspiring as well that I think is, hopefully, will help us make a difference in the world over time. - Well, CK, thanks so much for joining us to celebrate two years of the Employee Safety Podcast. I am confident that our listeners got a lot of great takeaways from you. I certainly did. Is there anything you'd like to share about what's new from alert media? - We have several exciting things coming down the pipe that I can't share right now, but I can say that we have a fantastic new office, a new facility in Austin. So we're really excited about that for our employees, for them to be able to come into work and really be proud of where they work and the services that we'll have for them. We're also excited to have our customers stop by and visit our corporate headquarters and spend time with us. 'Cause the more time we spend with our customers, we're always better as an organization for it. You can't say you're customer-centric if you're not spending a lot of time with your customers. And to emphasize that point even further, we're hosting our first employee safety conference on October 26th to 28th. And that's one of the things that's really fascinating to me about this industry, about just health and safety compared to other industries that I've been part of, is that people want to share. They want to help each other get better. They want to lift each other up. And so the whole goal for us, this employee safety conference, for people to come together in person, and it'll be here in Austin, and to kind of share these best practices and to learn from each other. And so we're excited to have that October 26th through 28th. And all the details for that can be found on our website or at employeesafetyconference.com. So once again, employeesafetyconference.com. - Yeah, the sense of community in this industry is just fantastic. And hopefully we can help add to that. So I know I'm certainly looking forward to bringing everyone together here in Austin. Before we sign off, where can our listeners find you out there? How do they connect? - Just go to the alertmedia website. Go to LinkedIn. We're actually on Instagram now as well. So getting involved there. And then I always appreciate people listening to this podcast, which is obviously a great way for you to hear about what's going on in the industry. And then the part we have to plan it. - Indeed. Well, thank you again and to all our listeners out there. Thanks for joining us for 100 episodes and counting on the employee safety podcast. I'd love for you to subscribe at alertmedia's website or on your favorite podcast player. So you never miss a show. And as always, your ratings and reviews on Spotify and Apple podcasts help other people find the show. Have a wonderful and safe week, everyone. - Thank you for listening to the employee safety podcast from Alert Media, the industry's most intuitive emergency communication and threat intelligence solution. To learn more about how to protect your people and business during critical events, visit alertmedia.com. Until next time.