You’re listening to Balance, Not Burnout, a podcast helping leaders rethink the speed of their business. And I’m your host Mark Williams. Join me as I explore the power of a more intentional, balanced approach to leadership. Thanks for listening.

Welcome to Balance, Not Burnout. This is Mark Williams and today special guest coming from Palo Alto, California. Mr. Sina Farzaneh. Sina is an entrepreneur, advisor, facilitator and coach with over 15 years of experience in global marketing and technology sectors. He’s passionate about the intersection of community communication and change. What brought Sina to me is he is currently the CEO of a company called Poll path. It’s in his description, a lightweight communication tool used by executives to boost community involvement and alignment. prior to running pole path, he previously co founded advocacy based in Shanghai, which became the world’s most awarded word of mouth marketing agency based on the belief that marketing should be done with people not at people. So Cena Welcome to the show. love to have you.

Thank you Mark, very excited about this.

I want to jump right in and talk about pull path because I don’t even remember how you got to me, I think it might have been LinkedIn, maybe a LinkedIn message. So for those you that are using LinkedIn, oftentimes it does work. And to let you know I do reply. So Sina had sent me a message via LinkedIn we had hooked up, and he introduced me to this to this tool that he uses called pull paths. So Sheena, let’s have a brief description of pull path. And maybe just a little bit about your history and what brought you to pull path.

I’ll take a step back, just that when I studied anthropology in school, and I love technology from Silicon Valley. And I love marketing is kind of drawn to that. And I flew to Shanghai when I was 2425 and had to figure out what to do. And I had the intersection there, I kind of found word of mouth marketing. And being a foreigner in China, not speaking Chinese, I had to go find 2000 or 4000, like moms in these lower tier cities. And I just like how do you do that? So I took something from my anthropology playbook, which is called participatory observation. As the anthropologist you go into tribe, you participate with the tribe, and you observe everybody. And I kind of use that approach and talk to moms and kind of got them involved. And hey, what do you think about this idea, very basic back and forth. And this concept of involving them, it turned out that it influences them, the more that they got involved, the more they felt kind of aligned and part of it. That’s how we got 30,000 Moms recruited and kind of ended up really surpassing advertising as a channel when we were working in China. So that’s how I got involved with this idea of involving people at scale. And pull path is a software product, very lightweight, that’s built for people to create interactive updates, so that they don’t just send their updates at people. But there is a response on every screen. So when you send a response update through pull path, you get back hundreds or 1000s of responses instead of just likes or reads, or a few comments.

So 100 was, first of all, I will also back up, you and I could talk for days, I’m sure about anthropology, the decision to study anthropology living in Shanghai, which sounds just awesome. But I’ll skip that for now. But at some point in time, you and I over a beer, I’d love to have that conversation. But we have been using pull path now for over a year, I think third 12 or 1314 months, something like that. We have had an incredible amount of success. So let me share just a little bit about how we use it a broker’s international scene is exactly correct. If it comes across as a almost like a personal PowerPoint, if you will, it’s a communication tool. And prior to using pull path at brokers International, we deliver communication to our employees, generally speaking once a quarter in all company meetings, and generally throughout the month, I might send either a short video on something special, or I would send an email, you know a newsletter type thing with with highlights. There wasn’t really a regular systematic way of communicating outside of our quarterly meeting, they were more ad hoc. And I have found that with many companies that I work with, every once in a while you’ll find a company that the CEO sends out a short video maybe on a regular basis. But this tool is really I would consider it like a magazine subscription. We send it out roughly the same week every month. We can install in it any message we’d like both either it’s a video or a PDF format or pictures and someone logs into the system. It opens up and they’re actually actively engaged. So my employees are actively engaged on each screen. And in fact, most of the screens ask a question, and there’s participation. So tell me seen a little bit about the gamification process and how you thought of that, because that’s one of the things I love about the system is the gamification.

Thank you. It’s a, I got to go back to China for that. Because when I was starting to get these ladies involved, the numbers once it became dozens, and had to go back to Shanghai, I would have them on these like these, like group chats and have someone try to screenshot so that I know what’s going on, it was a mess. So we built a system where they could come back every day and do their missions. And in the early days, one mission was worth I’d give them like 1/20 of like a penny, basically. So it wasn’t really worth anything, it was actually phone recharge, they get their phone recharged. And as the numbers got bigger, I close to the hundreds I couldn’t I didn’t want to spend money anymore, we changed it to points. This is back in 2010. Like gamification was just starting. So I took the first course at UPenn when I came out, and engagement just just went through and people loved the leaderboards. And the points weren’t even worth anything. That’s when I really learned up like, Oh, this is really interesting. And then through time, I’ve learned that the points allow us to say the more you learn, the more you earn. And the and the last thing I’ll say on the gamification is, the points are great for leaderboards, you know, but only some people are competitive. So it’s really important to think about it, like, it’s good to have rewards in general, so that anybody can kind of the more you learn, the more you earn. And then I also like, in addition to extrinsic rewards, like, I don’t know, like a voucher from Amazon. Sure, intrinsic rewards like coaching with you. Like what a gift, right? That type of a thing. I love those career boosting type of rewards

the advantages for us at brokers, especially the gamification part was we’re at, we can actively see who’s engaged in in the communication process, right. So an all company meeting, put 140 people in a room, you know, you’re connecting with maybe 5060 70% of them, you know, there’s 10%, that are, you know, off somewhere else, there might be five or 10% on their phones. This allows someone to read the communication, literally work with the communication, interact with the communication, and leave feedback. So we have found that our open rate or our read rate is over 90%. So most of our employees look forward to it every week, or every month, I’m sorry, it gives me an opportunity to record a video on the front end. So we open up with a video of myself, it’s usually between one and three minutes. And it highlights things in the month that are either accomplishments or things that are coming up. We do a few fun things that I find really great. And that’s no, what’s my name. Every month, we put a picture of two or three employees. And we asked people if they know them. So not only is it a fun way to get to know people, because we then put in their likes and their dislikes, and some of the you know some of the interesting facts about them. But it’s spreading around who your people are. And we have really had great feedback. And the largest probably the biggest advantage of all, which is tying us into balance, not burnout is it provides an avenue of fun avenue for employees to provide feedback. And as Sina will attest, every single month, we easily get 40 to 50 comments, if not more, every single one of them is read. And they’re really good comments for the most part. So getting back to balance, not burnout, you talk a lot about a feedback loop. In your opinion, why is that so important in what you’ve done in the past? And describe that feedback loop? Which is important to you?

huh? So feedback loop at the core level is what we’re doing right now. Which is you’re saying something I’m responding, you talkback, like even my sound, it tells you that I’m listening, right? That is part of the feedback loop. And what I found first, I saw this in advertising and communications. And then I saw this internal within companies, there’s too much talking, it’s too easy to broadcast the message to everybody and expect people to read it. And because of it, we’ve gotten really good at like skimming or skipping things. And were barraged with all of this talking at us. And I don’t think that’s very healthy, because then the anthropologist background, like we evolved to very specific environment and it wasn’t this. That’s the whole point. Right? And so this idea of actually listening to each other, feeling connected, feeling heard, is like core to being human. And I find that in Company Settings a lot of times because there’s a lot of talking at that part is just ignored. Too much and that I think, besides the hours and the travel, that is what leads to burnout. You just don’t feel whole,

right? Yeah. 100% Do I even know in my own, in my own both professional and personal the amount of information I’m sent on a daily basis, whether that’s LinkedIn message requests, whether it’s, you know, every so often a Facebook Messenger conversation, I must receive 120 to 150 emails a day. And I tried to describe for people, if you send me 16 paragraphs in an email, I promise you, I can’t read them. I just don’t have the time to read them. So provide me the bullet points, right, I need a little context. But give me the main, you know, summarize, summarize what you need to tell me and tell me quickly, we have found that a pull path because it’s fun, and because it’s engaging, and because your employees do have an opportunity to respond. You can send them tidbits of information, whether that be through a video, again, a PDF, a save the date for something coming up in the future. Maybe it’s an announcement on a new product Initiative, or even an expense or budget meeting, right things that might involve various people, you’re sending it in small tidbits, and they’re reading it and responding. So we have found that to be fantastic. Tell me a little bit about the birth of the company and how you know what size of our organization is, is good for and things like that. Nice.

First, a quick note on the whole bite size concept, because people see points, and they’re like, oh, gamification, but I think the true part of it is that it forces simplification, it forces you to take those 16 paragraphs or whatever, that people, people write that way. And it forces you to go bite size, because if it’s more than two paragraphs, on a screen, you won’t read it. And it was kind of skipped through it. So the one thing I like about pillpack I use it for like strategic workshops and like strategic projects like is, how do you take a big concept like psychological safety, and just make it bite size? So people kind of bit by bit, kind of get into it while giving feedback. I really love that part of it. It just feels more human. Right. And,

yeah, I wonder percent agree. And let me interject here for just a second, because we recently did something with Siena and his company. You know, there’s a lot of talk about AI, artificial intelligence. And I would submit that probably 85 to 90% of the population, including myself here has no idea what that actually means. Right? I read about chat GPT, I might go there and try something or write a song for me or a poem, but I really don’t understand it, I really don’t understand what it can do for the business from a very high, I get the idea. So we actually wanted to talk about artificial intelligence to our employees. Number one, just to see what they knew. Are they afraid of it? Obviously, the only thing you hear right now is it’s going to take over the world and everyone’s job. So how do we actually quantify what they know what they’re afraid of? What kind of information can we get, and the poll path was a fantastic way to deliver and get feedback on a subject that quite a lot of people might not know about and might be embarrassed to talk about. But this gives them an avenue alone at their desk, you can ask direct questions, and they can provide feedback. So I want to use that as an example. Because I think that that speaks directly to what you were just referring to.

Totally. And it’s interesting in this case, or in some cases, where companies aren’t really sure about what to do with AI. And so they’re, you know, sometimes they tell their people not to get into it, don’t use chat, UBT at work. In those cases, I think pull path is a great way to start the conversation about AI. And one thing that I’ve learned is if we, if we pivot away from like, the technology, because it’s all just so crazy, the stuff that’s going on how it can be used more towards your work. You know, where is it inefficient? Where do we have fat to cut? That’s a really interesting conversation. And the way that I’ve framed it, and I see that it kind of, I think it works pretty well is if you had an intern, like what would you use him for? Do you have an hour of work that you could delegate or not, because that by itself is going to become delegation is going to become like, the biggest capability or skill that we’re going to need? So anyway, so I think it’s a great way to start that conversation about people’s work. And imagine not only do you have an intern every week for an hour, but what if you have one alongside you all day? What if you have a roomful of robot interns? What would you have them do? And that’s the type of imagination we’re trying to get people to think about. Then the company can be like, alright, let’s prioritize this area or this project or this task. Use AI.

So what size company is the perfect size company to use pull path?

I mean, I’ve worked with everybody from like little startups all the way to enterprise. And of course, you know, bigger is better and all that. But my favorite type of companies actually more SMB. Midsize. It’s a company that’s maybe grown just beyond where people really really know each other. And at 100 seems to be like that’s when it kind of starts 100 500. And so before they have too many formalized corporate processes, I think the whoever’s in charge tends to be still more purpose driven and mission based. So it’s just kind of fun, like they actually want to listen, I find sometimes as you get more toward larger companies, like more corporate people are like professional managers, they don’t need to listen to get their salary, they just need to have meetings and town halls. And that’s good enough, the 20th century way of like factory way of working is good enough. But those who are leaning into 21st century leadership who believe in organizational dialogue, and involving people entering the community, that’s the sweet spot. So it’s almost like midsize company is great for I think, great for Coolpad. But it’s the type of leader that humanist leader, the one who believes and kind of arming people with information, and being efficient about it and not wasting time in meetings, those type of people are the ones who get the most out of Pull Push, typically

I’m sitting here nodding as you’re speaking to a few points. One, I agree with you about the size of the company. As we grew, I had been at brokers international now for nine years, when we first started, we were roughly 75 ish, 80 employees. For the most part, everyone knew everyone more obviously, within the departments that you that you worked in, and the departments that you that you maybe worked on projects with. But as the company got to about 105 110 115. Now, it really is more difficult to know everyone, you might see the face and recognize the face. But if you’re on the first floor, the second floor, you might not know everyone. And so yeah, there has been a little bit more disconnect. So I would want them sent I agree with the size of the company, for sure. I also think that as companies grow, hearing the message from the leaders of the company becomes more important. Because you are a bigger company, it’s impossible for me to have a conversation with 140 employees every day or every week, or run into the same people every every week, it’s almost impossible. So this really does give a format. So I love that. And I think it has been a fantastic tool for us. The other thing I wanted to mention, which I agree with is I think what’s changed over the last 10 or 15 years. And I’ll use a few buzzwords, transparency. well being of our of our employees work life balance. You know, if I go back 20 years for my career, I don’t think anybody gave a crap. You know, if I was happy or unhappy, they wanted me to come to come to my job and do my job. Today we are we as a society are much more concerned with how our employees are their well being, making sure that they’re, that they’re mindful of what they’re doing, and that their mind is at work when they’re at work. And because we realize so much of our life can impact our work life, it’s important that things are good at home or in your extracurricular outside of work activities. Again, I’ll go back to the poll path and what it’s done for us because I think it’s important one, it’s it affords us that transparency, we can send direct messages that feel a little more personal than 140 people in a room, they get to respond individually. And I think that’s a real important piece here, when I do an all company meeting, and I might ask lob a question out to the entire group, many people won’t respond, one because it’s in the front of a group. And there are a lot of people that don’t want to do that. A lot of people don’t want to provide negative feedback in front of a group, which I totally understand. And even sometimes there might just be people that aren’t willing to open up that way. So this gives someone the opportunity to do it, whether they’re in their home, they’re in their car, they’re on their phone, or in front of their computer, you get to see and digest the company information and respond in your own comfort level, which is I think, is fantastic. So for us, it has been not only just a good communication tool, but our employees love it. It gives us that opportunity to receive some feedback from our employees. And again, going back to work life balance and balance, not burnout. We can ask direct questions about workload about time off. COVID is a great example of how we managed COVID. And we did that through employee involvement. What if we’re going to be out? How long should we be out? How do we connect? How do we reconnect? So I think all of those things are positive. And maybe there’s something I missing? So what would you add to the advantages of a pull pathotype communication from any size corporation that I may have missed?

Advantages. There’s, it’s just so it’s just so it’s basically the next way to communicate. It’s more human way to communicate at scale, and I don’t know many other formats that can do that. Because, you know, you talked about you lob a question in a room and like not many people want to answer, like, I’m that person. I had like social anxiety up to like, like 30 or so or whenever it was, and I will totally not do that. And I’ve realized that I’m also a digital introvert in that if you have a team’s or slack or whatever, I don’t need to be, you know, ask a question. and make it all public. I’m just not, I’m more of a one on one guy. And so I don’t see a lot of other tools that allow for that two way dialogue at scale. I just the internet’s that are kind of public, like DMS, but the problem was sent in everyone can send you an email, in theory, everyone gets a new email, whatever. But you’re overloaded that, that there’s too much noise in there. And the other interesting thing is with a pull path is it’s structured. So it’s not a survey where you’re getting all these responses back and all these comments and you’re like, overloaded, because that’s one reason why people wouldn’t do it. They feel like Wait 1000s of responses. That sounds crazy. But what if we don’t follow up on it, but it’s structured through this kind of like, a lot of it’s mostly closed ended, right, just kind of pick a response, we’re not promising to do anything. We’re just taking in your input and your ideas. And I think that’s another really important part, how much information you can give without being overwhelmed with the, with the, with the feedback and the feedback.

Fantastic. So once again, I want to describe the process that we have done and give you a time estimate as well. I think we spend no more than about two hours a month producing the pull path. I shoot a video every month, that video takes me probably five or six minutes, I do it on my phone, we then upload it into the pole PATH system. We do company announcements, we do new employees, we might do save the dates, we might do a recap of an all company meeting. Certainly guests and or guests that are coming to the office are major milestones within the company. But it reads much it reads and is driven much like a magazine. So the way we do it is very, very formal, right? There’s a there’s an opening, that opening is always from me. Then we give announcements, then we give financial updates, we end with what’s coming, you know, kind of an HR section, save the date, and then we always do who’s this write a picture? And who’s that? So it follows a similar path, no pun intended. And we also we also use the points. So the gamification is as important because as through every page and every question, your employee has the ability to earn points, we’ve done some fun things with those points, so you can accumulate them over time. And so the winner at the end of the year, who has received the most points could win something. But we also use that intermittently. And again, it gives us an idea of tracking who’s actually doing who’s reading it, who’s going through every single page, What page are they on. So it gives you a lot of analytics. It’s a wonderful tool. So I would like to say, give us a quick promotion of where they can find more information on Pull Path, Sina?

https://pullpath.com/

You can send me an email directly and we’ll know in five minutes if we talk whether it’s for you or not. It’s like, yep, really easy. Yeah,

it was a very, super easy interview. I’ll call it an interview process that I had with Sina about 1516 months ago, we hit it off. I love the tool. It’s incredibly cost effective. So I’d asked you to reach out to Sina and at pull path.com If you’re interested, and seen it my final question, which I asked every guest. Again, balance, not burnout. It’s Saturday morning. You have no responsibilities, you can do what you want with who you want. Describe a perfect Saturday morning for Sina.

Well, I’ve got two young daughters, who are age three and five. And the perfect morning is they’re sleeping in their own beds. When they wake up, and they get in mind. And this is so cute. It’s so it’s so snuggly, so that’s very nice. Have a nice breakfast with my family, my wife. And then I probably go out to train Muay Thai, I recently got back into kickboxing, Thai kickboxing that’ll make me feel great for the day. And if I can have a lunch with friends, because I really liked connecting with people, that would be amazing. And then I do need to get maybe like an hour of work. And sometimes for me, it’s just taking notes or kind of just thinking about stuff. If I don’t, then I’ll feel I’m not balanced. So just maybe an hour of me time. And I’ve thrown in a little bit of breathwork recently, I learned that few months back. And so I tried to do that every day. And that’s kind of it like nice little wind down. You’re talking about morning but the whole day. And I recently realized if every day can be like that Saturday. That’s a great life. So if there’s a way to integrate the work and the life and the way that you’ve been able to do not like before, but like how you are now. That’s a great life. Right?

Yeah. I’ll give you a quick tip. If you have an Apple watch I have on my Apple watch. It’s called mindfulness. And you can actually push a button and it gives you two or three minutes of breathing. And I do that probably three or four times a day. It just gives me literally, you know, two or three minutes of just slowing down taking a deep breath Be mindful of where I am and what I’m doing. So congratulations. Good for you. That’s awesome. So once again, I want to thank Sina Farzaneh from pull path again, that’s pull path.com fantastic tool. And again, back to our balance not burnout gives you an opportunity to get some direct feedback, that feedback loop that’s so important from your employees. It allows you to give your communication out and gauge the responses back and really gives an opportunity for your employees to engage, which I think is the biggest part. I can’t thank you enough for being on the show. Sina. Thanks again. And I hope you have a great weekend. Thanks. Thanks for being a part of us.

Thanks, Mark. This was really fun. Really appreciate it.

Great. Take care. And thank you. This is Mark Williams Balance, Not Burnout. Thanks for listening. If you think balance is as important as I do at work and all throughout your life. Help the show out by leaving me a five star review. Follow me on social media, or sharing the podcasts with someone you think would appreciate it. If you have comments or questions I’d love for you to join the conversation with me on LinkedIn. I want to thank OBI Creative for producing the podcast and Swells Beats for getting the music for me. Thanks for sharing your time with me today. And until next time, this is Mark signing off.