Sometimes you can learn a lot about a person's purpose and values by reading their own description of what they do. That certainly applies to Claude Silver, Chief Heart Officer at VaynerMedia and my guest on this week's podcast. In her LinkedIn profile, Claude describes what she does. “It's been five years since I stepped into the awesomeness that is Chief Heart Officer at VaynerMedia. Without a doubt, it’s been a life affirming role and it's only made my devotion to people's process deeper and more relevant. I have the honour of working with and working for 1000 humans and I have the honour of speaking to people inside and outside of VaynerMedia, about the need to treat employees like humans are not numbers. I have been given an extraordinary platform to share why kindness, empathy and true heart leadership is needed in today's workplaces. And even some tips on how to go about breaking the conventions that were set in the dark ages, where notions of inclusivity were never spoken of. This role is filled with the exquisite, dirty work of being human. In my opinion, it's the best kind of work there is and I'm so fortunate that for me, it's my life. It's not a job.”

You can listen to this week’s episode below, or by using your podcast app of choice, just click the corresponding image to get access via the podcast website here.

In our conversation, Claude and I discuss:

• How the role of Chief Heart Officer emerged and how it has evolved

• Claude’s close working relationship with Gary Vaynerchuk, the CEO and how together, they seamlessly merge a people perspective with VaynerMedia’s business strategy

• The Kind Candor program, which is in place at VaynerMedia and which is designed so that feedback is an act of caring and a way of making employees better

• The work that Claude is leading on diversity, equity and inclusion

This episode is a must listen for anyone interested or involved in one of the most important relationships in business, that of the CEO and the CHRO and how the right organisational culture can drive at the same time, business success and employee wellbeing.

Support for this podcast is brought to you by charthop. To learn more, visit https://www.charthop.com/digitalhr.

Interview Transcript

David Green: Today, I am delighted to welcome Claude Silver, Chief Heart Officer at VaynerMedia to The Digital HR Leaders podcast. It is great to have you on the show Claude. I know we had actually talked about doing this way before the pandemic, when you were planning a trip to London and we were going to record you in the studio. Can you provide our listeners with a brief introduction to your background and your role at VaynerMedia?

Claude Silver: Absolutely David lovely to be here, thank you for having me and thank you for being patient so we could get this together as well. My name is Claude Silver, Chief Heart Officer at VaynerMedia. I came to this role by making a pivot in my career actually, I was a strategist for a very long time working in holding companies, ad agencies, I even ran a surfing company a long time ago. I started on my digital adventure in 1998 in San Francisco, really as a part of the first .com boom and then of course the bust. I studied psychology and really, who I have been the entire time, my whole life I have always been this person. I mean, I have a wonderful title, which is Chief Heart Officer, but I've always been this mentor, this coach, this person that really wants to help people figure it out, figure out how to see the silver lining in things.

So I met Gary Vaynerchuk the CEO, when I was actually living in London and I was at Publicis London. We met, we connected, it was really incredible. It was like meeting my brother or the other side of my coin, if you will. Soon enough he and I started to work together, in New York, at VaynerMedia Headquarters in May of 2014.

Around a year in to my career with him there, I was running a very large piece of business. It just dawned on me, I got that voice in my head that just said I wasn't interested anymore in the world of advertising. I didn't want to create campaigns anymore, but I wanted to be with people, I wanted to be with the culture and help them people flourish and help the culture be the best they possibly can be. So I thanked Gary so much for the opportunity, I told him that I love the place, it is amazing and he said “so what do you want to do?” And I said, I only care about the heartbeat of this place. I only care about the people and one thing led to another and created this role, The Chief Heart Officer role, based on who he saw me being, besides just running a very large piece of business. I think I had amassed a lot of equity there in people and again, just taking charge in terms of being that go-to person. So it was a very easy transition because it's not a mask I have to wear every day, it just is me. So I've been doing this for five years now, almost to the day.

David Green: So tell us a little bit more about Chief Heart Officer? I'm sure you get asked about this a lot, but you talked about how it emerged as such, but what is involved in the role and how has it evolved in those five years since you have been doing it?

Claude Silver: Yeah, I love that question because the evolution is the main part. The role was initially set up to scale Gary and you know that is scaling the un-scalable right. It is doing what he does with people, but in my way. What I asked him the minute he said, that’s it we're going to create this Chief Heart Officer role, I asked how do we know if I'm successful? He said, we'll touch every single individual and infuse the agency with empathy. So every year and multiple times a year, I ask him if that is still what I am doing. Even three weeks ago, I asked him. So it is mine to figure out every day how I am going to do that, based on who I am speaking with, what challenge we have in front of us. What someone is coming to me with, whether or not that is difficulty receiving feedback, wanting a pay rise, wanting to switch teams, lots of this is the best place ever and they just want to tell me about it and so forth and so on, want some personal coaching. I get to go into my toolkit every day and figure out how to hold space for that conversation and have a connect the dots for people. It is not that we are a giant agency, we are only a thousand and that's not that big, but really it is all about the relationships, it really is all about the fact that when we say we are people first, we are people first, it isn't any kind of smoke and mirrors.

So the way the role has evolved is, I had to learn how to scale myself and so I was able to find people who I felt had a very similar, we'll just call it a DNA, very similar way of being with people, trusting first, showing kindness, compassion, being empathetic, understanding that vulnerability is a strength, those types of things. I found them in different pockets and they call them culture champions, they are in every office, multiple people in certain offices and I can call upon them at anytime to help me figure it out with someone. Because my role was initially to oversee everything that is HR, it is really to oversee everything that is people and the experience that they are having. I changed the name of the department pretty much by day five, to People and Experience rather than HR, I hired a wonderful HR department, which is fantastic. So my day now is much more in the 20,000 foot view, the clouds and then the dirt, what is happening on the ground and I'm literally going up and down, up and down and sideways all day long. In operational meetings and senior leadership meetings, figuring out bottlenecks, figuring out how to get higher quality talent in the door, what do we do to keep our talent mentorship, making sure that we have diversity at the forefront of our brain every single second. Just yesterday, we kicked off an enormous education project.

So anything again, that has to have people and experience, and that has just grown in five years as we have grown. It is also understanding more of what is needed as our people go through different life stages now.

David Green: And it is so important in any organisation, but especially one that has grown over the last few years, that the people are at the centre of every big decision, every big initiative that an organisation has taken, I guess you are representing the people in the organisation?

Claude Silver: That is exactly right. I mean, earlier today I went for a gender pay equality exercise and then presented that to Gary today. Anything and everything that has to do with people in the organisation from the minute they apply and put their CV through our system, to their last day, whether that is a voluntary or involuntary exit. And then even afterwards, we have something called an alumni program, where we try to help place people who have left us, for whatever reason, in other organisations because ultimately if we can keep people in our ecosystem, it is better for us. I would like to say, it is really better for the world if we are doing our job right, which is really teaching necessary life skills, otherwise known as soft skills and hard skills.

David Green: Well it is nice, isn’t it, if people talk about the college they went to with fondness and it is also nice that they talk about places that they have worked, with fondness as well, even when they are not there anymore. They are almost like an ambassador for your organisation, even if they are not working with you anymore.

Claude Silver: Oh, a thousand percent. They are absolutely the brand and I would love for someone to look back in 20 years, 15 years and say, well those seven years I spent at VaynerMedia they were the best seven years of my career. Or what a great career decision that was back when I was 23, or 45 it doesn't matter. I want this to be a place where people wake up and they say, no matter what because we know it's not Utopia, no matter what I go to Vayner every single day and they have my back.

David Green: Yeah, that's good. So tell us a bit about your working relationship with Gary. I met him very briefly at a conference in San Francisco, three or four years ago it was the first Unleash conference in in the US actually, he spoke on stage and he is definitely a real ebullient character, isn't he? But what was amazing was how important he stressed that the whole people and culture of the organisation was, that really came through very powerfully. So tell us a bit about your working relationship with him?

Claude Silver: I think it's so funny, we talk about this sometimes because we do so much on intuition he and I, I remember we connected and it was like meeting my other half. We connected and it was like oh, wow, we have the same belief in humans. We both come from this place that we trust first and it is almost like, okay, if you trust first then you get all that other muck out of the way. So what is the one thing we want to figure out? Does this person feel safe to come to work every single day and bring their best or is there fear in the system or are they the fear in the system? Are they the synth in the system?

So anyway, our communication it is intuitive but it's very text-based. We have obviously weekly check-ins, I am in so many conversations with him on a leadership level that I am on screen with him. What I believe my role is to literally feel the conversation, feel what is going on in the different cultures. Again, I have people that can feed me that information along with speaking to people all day and listening, taking in data and looking for patterns. Whether or not that is speaking to people in Singapore with my evening tonight or LA tomorrow.

When Gary announced the role internally, and remember I had already been here for 16 months, he said this role will make no sense on paper but will make all the sense on heart. That is his way of speaking but that is also my way of speaking, because it just makes sense to have someone in an organisation I truly believe, and I don't know if this is a function of HR, that is given the baton to make decisions based on people and has all the autonomy in the world to make those decisions because it has already been blessed. So the only thing I go to him for when I need a decision is either a spot salary increase, which is very rare, but it is literally a termination, that is what he wants to know. Who are we terminating? Why? Have we looked under every single rock? Is there not another opportunity? Okay, understood. But we are texting all the time, which is awesome.

David Green: Yeah, it seems we hear a lot of CEO's saying that people are their most important asset, but I am not sure they are all saying it truthfully. I think with Gary he actually means it, doesn't he? I guess the fact that, you have got the role you've got and you've got such a close relationship is indicative of that.

So many people work in HR roles or people roles and they just stay in that function for their whole career, they work their way up to effectively be the Chief People Officer. Do you think it helps you and it helps your relationship with Gary that you have worked in the business, you are obviously an expert in what you do and in the industry that you are working in?

Claude Silver: It only helps because I speak agency, I am fluent on an agency floor because I spent almost 20 years in an ad agency on a creative advertising floor, a little one up the ladder from a Line Manager, making very large decisions on businesses. So it is the secret sauce, aside from just being who Claude is, just my own DNA and how I was brought up and that I am always the emotional optimist. I truly believe that there is a silver lining and that's not to negate what goes on with a human being, of course. But because I have been in those operational meetings, in a prior life, because I have done resourcing and staffing for my own team, I don't have to learn a new language. However, if you put me on the floor of the stock exchange or you put me in the city centre in London, I would have to learn an entirely new language and it would take me some time, obviously. So that is not what you need today. A huge KPI of ours is speed.

David Green: Yes, that makes sense. You mentioned a couple of the initiatives that you are working on, it would be great to dive into some of those in more detail. Maybe let's start with the Kind Candor program that you have got, can you tell us a little bit more about that, the intentions behind it and any outcomes that you have managed to measure so far?

Claude Silver: Yes and I will say Kind Candor isn't even a program, it is literally an unveiling of what is right beneath the people first culture and it is the way we are going to have, it is the way we are now having conversations. We brought Radical Candor into the system awhile ago, about four/five years ago when the book came out, we really made it our own. It was still very difficult to get into the water stream and partially that is because you have got nice guys, such as Gary or myself who want to give people second, third, fourth, and fifth chances.

Again, back to the trust first, that didn't do us any favours though, that really didn't because when it came time to put someone on a performance plan or even exit them, what do you think they said? No one told me that, no one gave me that feedback. I am sitting there going, Oh my God, that didn't happen or I failed to do it. So we needed something new that really spoke to who he is, his personality, his DNA, obviously mine because I come straight from him and then something that we could scale. We can scale kindness very, very easily because it is literally a value of ours. If we need to teach kindness, I am not sure if we have got the right person in house. And and then the candor part is the honesty, if you come at it in that way of caring about a person, of really wanting the best for them and that might not be here.

So Kind Candor is our new way of being and we have had a lot of fun with it. Some people are using #kindor or # whatever, it is not in the water stream so much that people are using it in their own vernacular and they are using it now in their meetings which means that it is working. Which means it is not a word such as empathy, which has different meanings for different people depending on your makeup, but it is very easy for me to say kindness.

Okay, empathy is the emotion, how you act on empathy is being a kind and compassionate person, let's figure that out. Then the honesty part is being extremely specific and actionable with what you are telling them. We rolled that out January 5th or whenever we came back, in an all hands meeting and it is now a part of our vernacular, it is absolutely something that is happening in any meeting, in any text message I get about a difficult conversation that someone had to walk into. They will text me back and saying, oh, it was full of candor dadadada specific, specific.

So for us, it was a really natural evolution in a way that allows us to not only put people first, but also put business decisions at the fore.

David Green: Yeah, it makes sense. I say to my kids, they are 12 and 10, I always say treat people how you would like to be treated. I guess some of that comes into that, sometimes it is just putting yourself in the other person's shoes. As you said, being kind is one thing but to actually couple that with the honesty as well so that there aren't surprises.

Claude Silver: Exactly, exactly, exactly. And you know, human beings, we are all incredibly diverse, we are phenomenally messy because that is just the scenery, it is just beautiful. There is something beautiful about all of us. So we can't change someone's behaviour, I have no control over that, but I have the control of at least putting something in the system, teaching people and then hopefully they adapt to it. That again, brings people into a culture of autonomy and that is what we want to give to people. We don't want Micro-Managers here.

David Green: The answer is fairly obvious, but it would be good to hear some examples. How important is it and how to ensure that leadership, not just Gary and you but other Leaders in the organisation, that exemplify the principles behind Kind Candor?

Claude Silver: What I can say is one of the evolutions that we have had here, in the five years I have been in the role and certainly the seven years that I have been at the company, is we have now brought in very tenured, experienced individuals who not only have come from other top tier creative agencies but they have been clients before. They are adults and that is really important, it doesn't mean that they have all the answers of course but the great thing about Kind Candor is if you can let go of the reins, you can understand that you don't have to have all the answers. As a Leader, but just as a human being, we don't expect people to have all the answers. I do expect Leaders to be guides, I expect Leaders to come to the table with a level of maturity and to set other people up for success. Now that has always been in the system, but we now have an incredible Leadership team, we meet every Monday together, globally and we talk about these things. So yesterday was one of the meetings where we were talking about bringing in high-performing, high achieving talent and what's that like? What do we need to give these people as responsibilities, aside from the first part of their job description, what is the second part of that job description? Which is how did we even hear them and how do you be the bigger person in every situation and how to give feedback. Don't be a chicken, we are not hiring you to chicken out we are hiring you to put a stake in the ground and then to have people identify or be inspired by who you are.

David Green: Yes and that all goes to creating that culture, you talked about that culture of trust, safety, psychological safety. I love what you were saying there about not having all the answers and actually Leaders being vulnerable and admitting that you don't have all the answers. I guess the events of the last year, has taught us that none of us have all the answers and it is ok to say we don’t know the answers sometimes.

Claude Silver: A thousand percent David, and I think that takes emotional courage, vulnerability. For so long, we have all seen vulnerability as soft and that is a weakness. Quite frankly, if you can raise your hand and admit that you don't know something or that you also are burnt out, what does that do? It just normalises and equalises the playing field and then they can get on with it, rather than feeling like, as a Leader, you have to be all the end all. Be judge and jury, that is just not possible. It is not feasible anymore, as you said, if there is one thing that we have learnt, we don't have all the answers and we have all been in a very large, collective experience, together.

David Green: And again, if Leaders set that example, then others also know that it's okay not to know everything and not to pretend that you know everything and that helps to create that culture as well.

Claude Silver: That is exactly right, it really does. I think it reduces unhealthy friction energy reduces this are you on or off the island, this idea of they are good and they are bad. It is getting rid of all that stuff.

David Green: We talked about that ability to give feedback. What is the number one piece of advice that you would give to our listeners about delivering effective feedback?

Claude Silver: So aside from being kind, which I think that that is a given if you know me. So going into it with as much humility as possible. I think the other thing to do is to make sure that you at least try to understand how the other person is going to hear what you are about to say. Because what happens when it is, David, can you sit down a little bit, I would love to give you some observations of the conversation we have just had. Well, you are a human so you either go fight, flight or flee and you put up walls immediately. So it doesn't matter what I have said, because you already have a defence. So understanding how we are going to enter that conversation, which is probably with something great. For example, David, I really appreciate that conversation that we had and really I recognise that you have studied up quite a bit on it and you must have practiced on it, I would love to give you some observations that I have had to work on too. Vulnerable, make yourself a human again, just because you are the one that is giving the observations or the feedback that's again subjective, isn't it. It is subjective as just because I happen to like light blue and you like dark blue doesn't make me right. It is subjective. So that is what I mean about understanding how that other person is going to hear and receive and again, knowing that this is all subjective. Hopefully the point is to get you to growth because we all have this invisible ink here, I don't know if you can see it on my head. It says, help me grow. Every single one of us.

David Green: Yeah, we all want to grow. I was wondering actually whilst you were talking, obviously this last year a lot of us have been working virtually, pretty much exclusively. Is giving feedback different in that kind of environment, that virtual environment, versus doing it face-to-face?

Claude Silver: I have to say yes, but I would love to say no. I have to say yes because already this is so foreign. We can't feel each other's energy. I can't see what you are doing, are you being all jittery under the table because I can only see your top part. You know what it is like when people are twiddling their fingers, moving their legs up and down, being jittery with their hands. So we can't see any of that and so how can you deliver whatever it is you are going to deliver with just more humanity, with just more tenderness and that is not to be soft and to shy away from the topic, that is not what we are talking about. It is to just understand that loneliness is at an all-time high, emotional and mental health and those issues are at an all time high.

This has not been easy for anyone and it hasn't been easy for myself, or you, so identify with that and walk into the conversation in slightly a different way than if I was in person with you because it would be very different. It would be different, I would have more ability to hold the space with you, to create a space physically than I do looking on a screen and wondering what's going on over there.

David Green: Home life obviously because everyone has been at home, but it is understanding the individual challenges. I am lucky, my wife doesn't work so she has been homeschooling the children, looking after the children. I am lucky I live in a house where I have got my own office tucked away from the rest of it, I am not having to share it with anyone else, but not everyone else is that lucky. Lots of people are having to share broadband or they might be a single parent with two young children at home for example, how do you balance work and family? So this has been really challenging I think.

Claude Silver: Yes and that takes a healthy dose of understanding what it has been like for you, so that you can understand what it has been like for others. Empathising the fact that you have a job but those two people also have four kids or no childcare because for a long time no one could have anyone in your home. It has been such a human experience and one that I don't think any of us were necessarily prepared for or ever saw coming. Of course there are gifts that have come from that, more time at home, more time with your kids, certainly more time with my daughter and the idea that we don't have to get all suited and booted everyday.

David Green: I think it has shown how adaptable we are, as humans, as well. We are lucky that we have had the technology that we are using today for example, I just think what would have happened five years ago when we were using those old conference systems where we couldn't even see each other, that would have been even more dehumanised.

Claude Silver: Oh yeah, seriously dreadful.

David Green: Of course, the pandemic isn't the only crisis that we have gone through in the last 12 months. I know that an initiative that you have really been focusing on within the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Practice since the murder of George Floyd. Can you tell us a bit about what you are working on and what practical steps you have taken to address the challenges facing underrepresented groups in the workforce?

Claude Silver: I will say that that was the biggest challenge I have probably ever went through in my career was those moments and those few days afterwards and literally not having any answers, the only thing I could do is listen. The questions I was being asked, I didn't have answers for and that was a very, very humbling place to be and a good place for me to be, I have to say, also to look also at my own bias. So, as soon as the murder of George Floyd happened, I think that next week I brought in an incredible trainer who took all of the Senior Leaderships, I am talking 85 people all across the globe, through 3 hour Zoom trainings, very intimate trainings sessions on racism, anti-racism, unconscious bias, micro aggression and what it is to be an ally. Then we trickled that throughout the system, but I have to start with the Senior Leadership because they were also getting the questions and they didn't know how to answer those questions either. So the training was one thing, having these conversations, immediately sitting down our black and our African-American group, which is an ERG an Employee Resource Group. Bringing in our Hispanic and Latino groups.

Even our Asian, Asian American groups, bringing everyone together, literally just to hold it, listen and then put plans in place. So it is one thing to put initiatives in place, right, everyone can do initiatives. That is easy. We can do fundraising projects, all of those things, but really we need a strategy in place and one that wasn't just going to be for crisis. Similarly too and I don't mean this in a flippant way at all, when COVID hit there was no playbook. You and I didn't all of a sudden say, what did they do in 1985? You know what I am saying, there was nothing, we had to make it up on the fly.

We have to go into triage immediately, same thing with George Floyd, especially in America when the riots and everything took place. What I will say is we started a very in-depth search for a Chief Diversity Officer. We have hired that person, that person will start in mid April, cannot wait. It took a very long time to find this person. I met 45 different people on screen and filtered them through the system. So I am really excited about that. But getting the groups together and listening, and then literally riding shotgun, being a passenger, while they put together plans. Yes, I was the Executive Sponsor, but it wasn't Claude’s plans. This is what does our black and African-American group feel like they need from VaynerMedia today, tomorrow and the next day. A lot of that was visibility, a lot of that was wanting to know what mentorship looks like here. What are our numbers? How do we want to increase our diverse hires, those types of things, how can you help us from a mental health perspective that might be different than how you can help the masses? We were bringing in specific, very well know meditation teachers to sit with our black and brown communities, which has been a really exceptional thing and really well received. To put together recruiting plans, leaning on Gary to help us, we have so much equity and currency with him and it is not that he is the magic trick, but to go into any of these colleges or organisations you are having him speak and letting people know, our door is open. In America I removed the need for a college degree from every single job description, unless it is legal because you need to have a JD there. But that I think also allowed us to look in different areas for diverse hires and by no means are we there, we still have a long way to go, but that also opened the door to look into gender equality and and pay and look at our LGBTQ+ and revamp some of our benefits to make sure that we were inclusive to people that were going through transition. It opened the door to look at diversity in a holistic manner, once I felt like we had enough steam in our black and brown communities, the work isn't done and like I said, we are about to embark on a whole new adventure with our Chief Diversity Officer.

David Green: Great, it's a great story because of obviously the transparency but also the way you gave under-representative groups a voice and I think most importantly taking action. I think listening, especially at the outset, is very, very important but it is about action at the end of the day. People need to see that action across the organisation, both inside and outside.

Claude Silver: Always, always. And we have had a lot of people from the outside knock on our door and kind of poke a little hole here and there to make sure we are doing what it is we say we are doing. If Gary says something to the press, are we doing that? And that is fantastic, it keeps us honest and we are, which is the great part.

David Green: I love hearing the story on the evolution of The Chief Heart Officer, I mean it is fantastic. Maybe you could share your number one or perhaps it is more than one piece of advice for small/medium sized businesses looking to address the significant and important challenge around diversity and equity and inclusion?

Claude Silver: For small/medium businesses and really for any business, I think that there is power in numbers. We want to make sure that you have a very diverse floor and especially if you were dealing with consumers or customers because customers and consumers make up the macrocosm, so you need to be able to speak to them, whomever they are. And so that is really, really important. So having the right talent internally, whether or not that is a freelancer or whether that is a full time hire, you have to be able to represent the macrocosm, I truly believe that. Then you need to be able to click into that and make sure that whatever you are giving to a white person and especially a white male, that you are granting that same exact thing to any person in an underrepresented community and that means giving them ample time in a meeting and also making sure to say, I see that person with their hand raised. It is obviously pay but it is also attention. Giving people attention is really important, making sure that we are not asking a black or brown person to wait a second whilst I figure this out with this white person over here, perception is reality and so optics are very very important, honest optics I would say. There are so many things to look at, but I think that if we can take a step back and as you tell your kids, put yourself into someone else's shoes as much as you can, you and I will never know what it is like to be anything other than a caucasian, we just won’t. So we can do so much and that is why we need other people that have come from these backgrounds to help us with cultural competency because you and I are just going to miss a few things. Not because our intention isn't there, we are just going to miss a few things. So cultural competency is the most important thing I think that we could be looking at in totality now and we need to bring people in to help us.

David Green: Last question to finish and we haven't talked that much about technology and data and analytics yet, but I think you are going to get the opportunity to do that now. So this is a question we are asking all of our guests on the series, it would be interesting to get your perspective. How does having the right people data in place support a business operating in a fast paced environment like VaynerMedia and maybe tackle some of the topics that we have talked about?

Claude Silver: So we brought in a company called HiBob, which is a people management system and we starting integrating with them a year ago and so we are now seeing the fruits of that labour. As we set up the system in the summertime, so we don't have a full year's worth of data yet but we will have by July/August. The great thing we can report on their dashboards for anything, whether or not it's for progress reviews or D&I numbers or learning and development programs, anything and everything, they have been incredible to work with. So that is what I would say I am really looking forward to when our Chief Diversity Officer comes in in a couple of weeks, for that person to really look at these dashboards and make sure that we are reporting the right things because again, I don't know everything and that's the beauty. So looking forward to that. Before we were using that, we really were relying on ADP, which gives you a little bit of an info but certainly not the level of detail that I certainly wanted or Gary certainly wanted. Once upon a time he and I really had this dream that you could create a baseball card basically, for every single employee and at any given time you can type in David Green and up comes whatever it is I want to see. HiBob is giving you that and it really was 18 months until I found that right system that had an incredible user interface, that I thought could adapt well to our culture and I'm happy to say that it has. Of course we use Slack just like everyone else. That has been very effective in terms of, it is not reporting, but it is certainly effective in terms of keeping people together, keeping the culture alive or creating rooms and groups based on a variety of different things outside of work.

David Green: And of course as a business in the media world a lot of it is about data and understanding what works, what doesn't work. So it is bringing some of that into how you manage people.

Claude Silver: That is exactly right. I mean our media department has so many bespoke pieces of tech that they have created, whether or not it is ad tech or Facebook ads or all those things. So to your point, it is bringing some of that mindset into what we call a honey empire, a people first company, because people also want to have information at their fingertips and they should. So we have finally gotten out of Google Sheets, which has been fantastic. We ran a company for 10 years in Google Docs, we are growing up. I said to someone the other day, I was interviewing another Senior person and I said, when I started in 2014, we were a very young team. We were like 13 years old, we still had spots on our face and I have seen the evolution. We are 20/21 years old right now, just coming out of adolescence and growing up and I really am so proud of the work that we have done to create a very sustainable and fast paced company that is built around being good to people.

David Green: Brilliant. Well, it has been fantastic to hear your story Claude, thank you so much. And thanks for being a guest on the podcast. How can listeners stay in touch with you and find out more about VaynerMedia, follow you on social media, for example.

Claude Silver: Yeah, terrific. Please follow me on LinkedIn or Instagram. I have a podcast as well. Whenever someone writes, I write back, it just might take me a little bit of time. We are hiring a lot right now at Vayner, so please go to our career page. I would love to stay in touch and David, thank you so so much for having me today.

David Green: Well it has been an absolute pleasure Claude and hearing about your role and the great work that you are doing. So thank you very much.