Work Besties Who Podcast

Bridging the Invisible Gaps: A Guide to Workplace Culture with Ivonne Furneaux

• Work Besties Who Podcast • Season 2 • Episode 80

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Ever feel like your workplace culture looks fine on paper… but something still feels off?

In this episode of Work Besties Who Podcast, we’re joined by Ivonne Furneaux (corporate insider turned culture consultant) to talk about the hidden divides she calls “ghost gaps”—the invisible imbalances that impact who gets information, who gets a voice, and who gets seen.

Ivonne shares practical ways to narrow these gaps at the organizational, manager, and individual level—plus her actionable Four I Framework:
Inform • Involve • Inspire • Invest

We also get real about how culture shifts during layoffs, why middle management has an outsized influence on the day-to-day employee experience, and how “work besties” help people stay connected, resilient, and authentic at work.

Key takeaways

  • What “ghost gaps” are (and why every workplace has them)
  • The information gap between frontline and corporate teams
  • The power gap and how to gather input without “everyone in the room”
  • The visibility gap that many women experience—and how to close it faster
  • How leaders can protect culture during layoffs with transparency and investment
  • Why middle managers shape culture more than most people realize
  • How levity + work friendships make work feel more human

Reflection question

What’s the biggest gap where you work right now—information, power, or visibility—and what’s one step you can take this week to narrow it?

Connect with Ivonne Furneaux

LinkedIn: (2) Ivonne Furneaux | LinkedIn

Website: Ivonne | Transform Your Workplace Today
YouTube: Ivonne Furneaux - YouTube

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This episode is for educational purposes and does not constitute legal or HR advice.

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Work Besties! Theme Song Written by Ralph Lentini @therallyband

Claude F:

Eva, feel like you're doing the work, hitting the goals something about your workplace culture to feel today.

Jess K:

We're joined by Yvonne Fernell, a corporate insider turned culture consultant, who exposes the invisible gaps that keep women from feeling seen, supported, and fully influential out.

Claude F:

And stay till the end because we're going to ask Yvonne a question we all need to reflect on. What's one invisible culture gap that everyone should identify in their workplace? And what's the first step to closing it?

Jess K:

Trust us, her answer changes how you will show up at work.

Claude F:

Hi, I'm Claude. And I'm Jess. We are corporate employees by day, entrepreneurs by night, and work besties for life.

Jess K:

Join us as we explore how work besties lift each other up, laugh through the chaos, and thrive together in every industry. Work besties. Hi, Yvonne. Thank you. Thank you for the nice intro. Uh so we start off by asking what was the moment you realized culture wasn't a buzzword, but that missing link?

Ivonne Furneaux:

That is such a great question. And my career spanned like 25 years in corporate, in retail, manufacturing, real estate. And so when I first thought about it, it was kind of hard for me to pinpoint what's the exact moment. But I will say that my first corporate gig out of college was working for Target. And I worked there for five years. I worked there in internal communications. And everything about the culture at the time was very aligned. Everything was in alignment with how we communicated internally to how we treated our customers externally, to how the stores were designed, right? So there was this very clear perspective that created for me this sense of everything is unified from the brand to how we treat people to the way we do our work. Everything was unified. For me, that was my first sense of what culture really means in the workplace. But I will tell you, I didn't really appreciate it until I left. I left Target and went somewhere else because maybe or maybe not I didn't love my boss. And so I thought that I would go somewhere else and it would be better, right? But it wasn't. It wasn't better when I went somewhere else. And that I think that was the moment when I left a great culture, then I realized the importance of culture and what it really means because it was my first experience. I didn't totally understand it and appreciate it when I was in it.

Jess K:

I feel like that I can resonate with that one. I started my career at Coca-Cola and the culture there, obviously, just thinking about the brand and the empowerment behind it. Um, yeah, you you always kind of grass is greener when you pop to a different location and think I'll solve it. And you're like, wait, maybe it wasn't so bad. The the grass is pretty green. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

So how would you define culture? Oh, that is a great question too. Culture is the behaviors, actions, and decisions that people take within an organization that create this shared experience. And I will say that, you know, it's really easy to say culture belongs to HR, right? Because HR is going to do events or whatever. But culture is shaped by everyone. Culture is shaped by the way we do work, the expectations and the history that have been created. It's created by the leadership expectations and decisions. I had an old boss who used to say that culture was defined by who you hire, who you fire, and who you promote, because it was all about what is the organization valuing and that creates the culture. It sometimes is our tendency to say, we're going to create a culture team and they're going to do all these fun things. But and all those fun things can help, but that's not really what defines a culture. What defines the culture is the day in and day out collective experience that we share within the workplace.

Jess K:

In your career, it seems like you've come across many examples of working across connected versus disconnected.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Jess K:

What do you think from an internal perspective causes that misalignment? That's such a great question.

Speaker 2:

The misalignment always comes from when leaders don't walk the talk. So when leaders are saying one thing but doing decisions that don't align with the thing they're saying when you're not in congruence, that's what creates the disconnect. The other disconnects that are created are literally by the way the organization is designed. So when we think about an organization, it's like an ecosystem, it's like a spider web. And there are all these parts and we all connect to each other in a network. And some people are in an office and some people are in a plant and some people are in a retail store, and some people have access to email and some people don't. We'll talk about those gaps in a minute. But all of those ways of working and the way that the organization is designed creates some actually very tangible disconnects that create imbalance and disconnection across the entire organization.

Jess K:

So I I've done a little bit of research on you, and one of the things that I think you've coined, at least I haven't heard before, was ghost gaps. Can you talk a little bit about what those are?

Speaker 2:

I made up the ghost gaps. If anybody else is using it, they stole it from me. Um first, everyone. Yeah, you heard it here first. And I love, I will tell you, I also love Halloween. So this opportunity to like call something ghost was like right up the mallet. So the ghost gaps are basically the hidden divides in the workplace that create imbalance and disconnection. So my work in the corporate world was in communications as well as in DEI. And when you work in those two, those two spaces are very interconnected, right? So I started to do some advanced research work in some of this workplace and organizational design stuff. And you realize that there are so many persistent gaps that exist in every workplace. And we don't talk about them because we either just accept them as they are or we don't see them, right? They're invisible. So some examples of ghost gaps would be an information gap. An information gap means that some people have access to information that others don't. So if you think about somebody who works like hourly in a retail store or in a plant or manufacturing facility, they are not going to have the same level of information access as someone who works in a corporate office who sits at their desk and is looking at the intranet and getting email and going to town hall meetings, right? It is a natural imbalance that happens. But because there is that imbalance, then what happens is that those folks start to get ignored when it comes to the information, right? Even when they could get that information or if that information is important to them, they become the orphan stepchild of the audiences internally, right? And so they get left out of the conversation even when they should be included. I think of it as like information asymmetry. It's this imbalance that happens in an organization. So that is like a prime example of a ghost gap that if we could start to narrow, you then start to create better connection and fewer silos in the organization. Because there is no reason that one segment of your employee population should be treated as less important than any other. Everybody deserves to at least have access to information. Some other examples of gaps would be a power gap. Who gets to sit in the room and make decisions and who doesn't? I will say another thing that may sound a little controversial, but the workplace isn't fair. Okay. It's not fair and we just got to get over it. It's never going to be fair. As long as you're working in a for-profit organization, there will always be some imbalance. There will always be some ghost gaps. But the trick is if we can narrow those, we're going to create better connection and better balance and better well-being for everyone. There's even evidence that shows that when you are on the negative side of these gaps, when you're left out of information and decisions and you don't feel empowered, you could you either check out emotionally or it actually can have an effect on your actual physical well-being. There are lots of reasons for us to really be thinking about how we can narrow all of these gaps in the workplace for the better of the individual and the organization.

Claude F:

Yeah. I have a question about the power gap, right? Yeah. And being including in meetings. Because obviously, not everybody can be in those meetings and be part, be at the table, right? So how do you include those people? And should they be included as well? So how would you include those people in and hearing them to be able to say their point of view at the table?

Speaker 2:

Right. Yeah. So to your point, not everybody can be in the room, right? You'd have a you'd have to have a very big room, depending on the size of your organization. So when not everybody can be in the room, there are still ways for people to have a voice in decisions that are being made. There are still ways for us to consider everyone when we're making decisions that are going to impact them. So focus groups, surveys, leaders getting out into the organization and actually talking to people, which I know sounds crazy, but when you do that, you learn a lot and you get people's opinions. I read a study that in mid to large sized companies, like 5,000 to 10,000 employees, something like 30% of employees would not recognize their CEO, couldn't pick them out of a police lineup. There is a huge disconnect. There are people who work in your organization who will never have an encounter with the CEO, depending on the size of it, right? But the visibility, again, creates connection. So as much as it matters for us to create our own visibility, it is really incumbent on leaders to get out there and talk to folks and get to know them. It builds trust, it builds credibility. And you're going to hear some great feedback that you can take into the room for the people who aren't empowered to be at the table.

Claude F:

Totally. For example, if you look at the retail you were talking about, you have the retail people, you have the people in the head office. A lot of time, the people that are the head office don't understand what the retail people are going through. And vice versa. And vice versa. Really having this back and forth, this conversation, this communication is so important. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

I'm a big fan of if you're a corporate employee, spending time in the field office, whatever that may be, if it's a store, if it's a manufacturing facility, if it's drivers and trucks, if you are a corporate employee, you should spend some time doing that work in the field so that you understand what it is. And those are the folks who are having direct contact with whoever your end customer is, whatever you're doing. They are your first line for your brand to the customers. I think it's just really important for corporate employees to have that experience.

Claude F:

Yeah. In a lot of you know, company I worked with, there's this view of a lot of great ideas are coming from the field.

Jess K:

Yeah, exactly. Anyone who's the closest to the actual person purchasing or using your output, whatever your organization is, will have some of the best ideas for sure.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely. But we have to listen to them, we have to give them an opportunity to do that. Continuously, right?

Jess K:

It can't just be like a one-time thing and then you walk away. It's got to be a continuous communication loop of some sort. I think you bring up an interesting point too. It kind of reminds me of how a lot of organizations now are doing reverse mentoring. So they actually bring people into some of these meetings that are a different level than what the um typical uh attendees would be in that meeting just to get some fresh ideas, to get some awareness of some of these conversations and what's going on. And those have been super eye-opening as well, because they're hearing very different perspectives and points of view.

Speaker 2:

So I was when I worked at one company, we would do what we called diagonal slice meetings. And it was like taking a senior leader and then people from cross sections of the organization from different business units, different levels, people who would never normally be in a room together for a project. And it was really, really cool experience every time we did it because it was people who wouldn't normally get to interact with each other, learning about what they do, and then just kind of getting a human perspective across the organization was really interesting. So that's something I try to continue to do everywhere I worked.

Jess K:

Diagonal slice. That's that's another place.

Speaker 2:

Yes. Teaching you all kinds of new fun norms today.

Claude F:

So if one of our audience is actually working in a company where you do not have this back and forth communication and able to say your point of view, how can you change that?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. If you're the person who feels like you're not being heard, how can you change it? Yeah, I have a framework for how you do that. I call it the four-eye framework. And it's a framework that's intended for organizations, leaders, and individuals to use to close the gaps in the organization. And I mention that because, like I said earlier, it's not just on the organization to close the gaps, it's on individual managers. And it's also on you as an individual to be empowered to close your own gaps, right? To recognize and do something about it if you are feeling like you are left out. So raise your hand, send an email. You know how many times I've seen people in 300,000 person companies send an email directly to the CEO? They do it all the time. Like, send who cares? Send an email and tell them what you think, you know? Um, so there are ways, if you are persistent to make your voice heard. If you feel like your manager isn't hearing you, go to that person's manager. Our loyalty is to ourselves and our own career. I think we're seeing this now with all the layoffs across the universe, right? It's really important that we are like the stewards of our own success in the corporate environment because that isn't always reciprocated from the you can make your experience better. You can empower yourself by raising your hand, talking to the right folks, finding a sponsor, you know, find somebody who will believe in your work and then will be your voice in the room that you are not invited into, right? That's the person that's going to help you get ahead. So I I would just say, like, do whatever it takes to make your voice heard. Between raising your hand for a project or sending that email you may have been afraid to send, or getting in front of somebody that you don't know to get to know someone and network. Um, there are all kinds of ways that you can make yourself a little more visible that's going to help you get ahead.

Jess K:

Those are some great ideas. So you just teased us on your four eye framework. Yvonne, why don't you walk us through what those four eyes are and what the framework really entails?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so the four eyes are inform, involve, inspire, and invest. So inform is all about closing those knowledge and information gaps. So at the organizational level, it means seeing where those gaps exist, where people aren't getting access to information, where people are feeling left out and in the dark. And what are kind of the tools and processes you can do to narrow those gaps? Managers can make sure that they're being transparent with their teams and sharing information and not hoarding information. And as an individual, you can take it upon yourself to be more informed. I know from experience working in internal communications, it can be really frustrating because we put so much information out and then you'll hear from employees like, I didn't know about that. Well, you got like six emails and it was on the internet and it was a poster. So there is some personal accountability to being informed within an organization, too. The second one is involve. So this is all about like creating an inclusive workplace, right? The organization can be more inclusive, invite more people to the table, hear opinions and voices, um, develop inclusive leadership, create employee resource groups, whatever that looks like in your organization. Managers, again, same thing, like include more people in a meeting or in a project. What can you do to get folks more involved? And then your personal accountability is to get involved, is to raise your hand for that project, join the ERG, become the leader for the ERG. Those are all ways that you can get more involved. Inspire is all about connecting work to the big picture. So as an organization, you have to set a vision for the company and for the future that people believe in, not just in their heads, but in their hearts, that people want to be a part of so that they can feel like this day-to-day thing that I'm doing of entering these numbers in a spreadsheet has a purpose that's bigger than the spreadsheet. You know, it's also on you as an individual to say, like, this may feel like a rote task, but what I'm doing is contributing to something bigger. When I talk about this, I in particular involve, I always share the story about a janitor at NASA who met John F. Kennedy when he was president. And the president asked the janitor what he does here at NASA. And the janitor said, I help put men on the moon. He didn't say, I'm op floors or I clean toilets or I wipe down counters. He said, I help put men on the moon. He had a very clear understanding that what he did contributed to that other thing, you know, contributed to something bigger. So I think we can all do that, you know, and I found a way to do that everywhere I worked. When I worked in retail, it was easy because I could shop at the stores. You know, I worked for that company. That's easy. And I spent way too much money at this, whatever store it was that I worked for. And when you work in a B2B business like manufacturing, it may be a little harder. You know, I worked at a steel manufacturing company and I don't personally purchase large coils of steel or plates of steel for personal use, but I could go drive down the uh the road and cross a bridge that was made with the steel that my team made. Or I could go see a windmill in a in a beautiful field under the sunset that was created with the steel that my team made. So there are always ways to make those connections. So that's that's inspired. It's about yeah, and feel proud. Yeah, feel proud of it. And and honestly, if you don't feel proud, then then that's maybe that's not the organization you should be in. You know, it doesn't align with your values.

Claude F:

How can you keep the culture of a company intact when you have layoffs, when you have all those news?

Speaker 2:

It's not easy at all. Um but I'll I'll say two things here. The the fourth eye that I didn't get to is invest. Sorry. And invest is no, that's okay. Because invest is about investing, invest is about investing in people. And investing in people is what keeps your culture solid going through the layoffs. So it's a direct correlation. You know, invest at the organizational level means investing in opportunities for people, investing in your front lines to develop them into managers. They are going to be some of the most loyal employees you have if you invest in those frontline workers. And similarly, invest on a personal level means investing in myself, investing in your future, investing in your education, investing in development and skill building. So investing in your employees before those layoffs even happen is critical to then maintaining that culture. And honestly, if leaders were really honest about the state of the organization, either from business perspective, market outlook, whatever it may be, people should not be surprised when layoffs happen because you should know, hey, we're struggling right now and there are some tough decisions that are going to have to be made. If these layoffs are coming as a shock to people, it means that the organization has not been transparent with the employees about what's been happening on the inside that has led them to have to make these tough decisions, right? Once those tough decisions have been made, it is really incumbent on leadership to set a clear vision for the future and a plan for the for what's ahead for the next 60, 90 days, short term vision, long term vision, and also to be really, really honest about what happens next. If there's a possibility that more layoffs could be on the horizon, don't say otherwise. But the way That you get the engagement to maintain through it and after it is to be as transparent as possible, telling people what's definitely not going to happen, what might happen. Here's what we're struggling with right now that we don't know yet, that we're trying to figure out, and we'll have to make a decision on and we'll let you know. But when you wait and don't share that with people, you just break a lot of trust. And then people just sit and wallow in like wondering if they're next. Um, you know, and that's just not a good feeling for anyone. It's it's a horrible feel. I've been there.

Jess K:

So from the individual perspective on that, regardless if you're hopefully all these companies are being as transparent as possible. Yet even those ones that are though, when you're sitting in the middle of it, what are some recommendations that can keep you motivated and help you continue to feel still happy and authentic and um excited and proud to be working at the company?

Speaker 2:

I think the first thing you have to do is recognize that your feelings are valid. A lot of times when you're a survivor, there's a lot of guilt that comes with that. Why did I get to stay and that person got let go? Um, there's a lot of anxiety and fear that you're gonna be next, a lot of anger that you didn't know that it was coming. So I think you have to like give yourself a minute to sit in those feelings and acknowledge that they are totally valid and that you are not the only one feeling them. Other people are feeling them too. And so you can come together in that feeling and like just get together and talk about how this sucks right now. But you know what? We're all in this together and we're going to get through it together. It's the only way you can get through it together. You cannot get through it alone. Otherwise, you will feel overloaded or anxious or guilty or whatever. The emotions will overtake you if you try to do it alone. So the best way I have found to get through it is to take comfort in your team and really build, rebuild the trust and connection with your team, set a plan, prioritize your work. And when you're down, people, it's a really good time to go back and think about what are the things that are not important that we're we've been focusing on that we don't need to anymore. Redistribute workloads, come up with tactical plans for how you're gonna tackle things for the next 90 days, like I said. But that that having a plan in place will at least give you something to like work toward and feel like you are making progress toward a future versus wallowing in the past. That's helpful.

Jess K:

Yeah, I agree. Reassessing what's not important is really critical in that one. Because I think a lot of times we think keep doing, and then now there's less people, so we add on all this work, but that's just not realistic.

Speaker 2:

Right. So let's be honest, sometimes the reason a role is eliminated is because the work was not as important, right? So that doesn't mean that everybody else should do the work that was already deemed not important.

Jess K:

We have a good way at answering back and be like, well, I guess Bossy didn't think they were important, so I'll just take it. Exactly.

Speaker 2:

If you're listening, try that and let us know how it goes. Yeah, I'll let you know.

Jess K:

Going back to those four steps of empowering and something that everyone can relate to. Of those steps, which one do you feel that people resist the most and why?

Speaker 2:

I think people resist the last I the most invest because it requires the most work. Requires because it means putting actual time, energy, and resources towards something, whether it's your own development or whether it's the investment of the organization into a new management training program or something like that. There is like a tangible investment that goes with Invest, even if it's time. If I'm a manager, Invest could mean I need to spend an hour more a week with each of my team members. That is an investment of my time and energy. You know, so I think that is the one people resist the most because it just takes the most effort. But I also think it has the most reward if you put in that effort.

Jess K:

Yeah, and it kind of goes back to what you said before. If those are the ones that are feeling the most unease, if you don't provide them that time and one-on-one, it's gonna continue. You do need to help them with that.

Claude F:

Yeah. Do you do you think that media management has a big part in doing the part of the culture? Because at the end of the day, you are talking to the team that is closer, let's say, I don't know, to the field, to the reality. And then you can pass along when one is uh the information that you get from the leaders, then go back to your team, and vice versa, championing your team to the leader, saying, Hey, my team has a great idea. Look and and have this meeting or whatever, this funnel to go and and present it to them.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think out of everyone, middle management probably has the biggest role to play because, like you said, they are like they're doing the work in the middle. They're they're supposed to be the advocates for their employees up the chain, and they're supposed to be the stewards of information and priorities down the chain. And when that's not happening, then that's where again you see those gaps widen farther and farther and the disconnects grow. To your point that middle managers have probably the most responsibility for shaping culture. They're also the ones who shape the way we work on our teams individually, right? They're they shape what are the expectations? They shape, am I expected to work at nine o'clock at night on a Saturday? That's shaped by my middle manager. That's not shaped usually by the CEO, right? So they are shaping kind of the day-to-day experience of the majority of people in the workplace.

unknown:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

The importance of, in a way, middle management.

Jess K:

Everyone has a role in it. And while it's great to have it come from top down, usually where it really is implemented and created is middle.

unknown:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

And it's usually where it gets stuck too. Like when we think about an information gap, middle management is usually where the information gets stuck, right? Because they're not sharing with their teams, they're not pushing it down. So we've got to unstick middle management somehow.

Claude F:

Now I have a question also about shaping culture and work besties. Because we are the work besties who podcast. So what is your your view about work besties and the importance of work besties in the culture?

Speaker 2:

So I think having a best friend at work is so, so important. I have had several best friends at work. I've had several work spouses. It's like somebody that you can commiserate with and connect with and gossip with and um someone who has your back all the time. That's why Gallup includes it in their engagement survey. Do you have a best friend at work? It's because it is critical to your experience in the workplace. So I do think, though, that it has become harder for people to find those folks as we have more distributed workplaces. You know, it's harder to form some of those bonds and connection when you're not physically together in spaces. I've still managed to find it even in remote workplaces, but I do acknowledge that it becomes a little more difficult. Um, but I think to your point, it's critical in shaping culture because what work besties give you is this sense of humanity that sometimes we forget about inside the workplace, right? We forget that we're actually people who like to laugh and tell jokes and have fun and lean on each other and sometimes cry, whatever it is. Um we're like these different people inside the walls of work. And so work bestie um gives you some freedom to be your authentic self in the work, in the context of the workplace that you don't always get to have.

Claude F:

So you you say you you worked in communication, but also HR, correct? So is there a way management can actually nurture the this whole work friendship and how to make it acceptable and even make it flourish it?

Speaker 2:

Well, yeah, I think, you know, going back to this idea of having fun at work, I think in corporate spaces we often take ourselves way too seriously. Like most of us in corporate jobs are not curing cancer and delivering babies. You know, most a lot of people are doing administrative type work. And again, not that it's not important, you can still find inspiration, like I talked about earlier. But if we just took our level of seriousness down a notch once in a while and had a little levity in the workplace, it would go a long way to creating better human connection. Managers can kind of encourage that work bestiness is to just create environments where levity is allowed to flourish that will naturally create some bonds. I used to do silly things with my team. Even when I had a remote team, sometimes we would do like avatar-only meetings where we would show up like in funny hats and as silly avatars for our virtual Zoom meeting. When I worked in an office, we used to do like a fun shoe Friday at one place, and we'd all wear like our most fun shoes on Fridays, and then even the guys in IT got in on it and they'd walk by with their fun shoes. It's just like silly things, but they just add so much um goodness to your something to bond over besides the work.

Jess K:

Well, Von, you've given us a lot of great examples of things. Would you be willing to share us an example of a moment that maybe a leader did not handle something well and what you would have recommended for them to do differently? This would probably more so in regards to like establishing culture and um engagement.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So I worked with this one senior leader. He was a chief technology officer, and um he had this horrible reputation in the organization for being really mean. People didn't want to be around him. Like they would, you know, if they saw him coming down the hallway, they'd run like the principal at school and all the kids just scattering.

Jess K:

Like Miranda presentated devil's one.

Speaker 2:

I'd worked with him, and I'm like, I didn't understand why people had this idea of him. So I did some focus groups with people in the organization, and it turned out that there was this whole like urban legend that had been built over time, that he had like yelled and berated someone in a meeting. And because he wasn't present a lot in the office, that legend, that story just took hold and took over his whole reputation, right? So my advice to him was to get out there and talk to people. And this was somebody who was very uncomfortable with the quote unquote fun. So I literally created a calendar for him that we called scheduled spontaneity. And we would schedule time for him to go be spontaneous. And at first, people thought it was like they would see him coming, like with an ice cream card. Oh my God, what's happening? He had an ice cream. Are we all getting fired? Over time, it was like, okay, people were like, oh, he's actually pretty cool or he's funny. He had like this very dry sense of humor that if you didn't know him, you might have thought he was a little off-putting. But over time, though, the engagement scores went up amazingly because people got to know him and there was more trust and there was a little more levity, and slowly the urban legend started to fade. And I never really did find out the truth if he actually did yell at and berate someone in this meeting, but it didn't matter at that point. So all right.

Jess K:

Well, this has been awesome. Yeah. Uh Yvonne, if you could give um an immediate action for a woman to close the culture gap this week, what would it be? So I'm gonna give two pieces of advice.

Speaker 2:

One is about the gap, and one has to do with your identity at work. The first thing I want everybody to understand is that you do not have to be defined by your title or your position at work. Okay. You do not have to be, that does not have to define you outside of work. It doesn't even matter to your friends and family. If you work a corporate job and things like finance and HR, your friends probably couldn't even describe what you do anyway. They love you for who you are. So I want everybody to just remember that you are not defined by whether you are a coordinator or a senior director or a vice president in the context of your corporate job. That's first and foremost. That said, if you want to create a better experience for yourself in the context of the workplace and narrow the gaps, the first thing you need to do is recognize that the gaps exist and understand which is your biggest gap. For some people, that's going to look different depending on their place in the organization. For a lot of people, the biggest gap that they will have to overcome, for women in particular, is a visibility gap. It's feeling unseen, feeling like you're not invited into the room, feeling like your work isn't getting noticed or your voice isn't being heard. First step is acknowledging, recognizing that gap. And then thinking about which of those four eyes we talked about earlier is going to help you narrow the gap the fastest and in the most effective way. Is it to be more informed? Is it to be more involved? Is it to invest in yourself in some kind of development that's going to get you noticed? Is it to simply feel more inspired at work? Most of the time, it's going to be getting more involved in some way. So raising your hand for a project, volunteering for something, finding yourself a sponsor within the organization, that to me is likely the quickest way for you to narrow the visibility gap, which again, I think is the toughest gap that most women have to overcome. Thank you. So inviting me.

Jess K:

So, Yvonne, if people want to learn more about what you've been sharing, where can people find you?

Speaker 2:

Yes. So you can find me on LinkedIn. I post lots of articles and videos there. Um, I have a YouTube channel, Yvonne Furneaux, and you can also visit my website, yvonferneau.com, and there you can learn all about my speaking services as well as my consulting work.

Jess K:

So we just want to say, Yvonne, we've so enjoyed our time with you. This has been beyond educational. Thank you, Yvonne. You've reminded us that culture isn't optional, it's the vessel in which our leadership lives, especially within the middle management.

Claude F:

Your visibility and influence don't just live in your role, they live in the gap you feel. So tag your work bestie who needs this conversation. And we remember everyone is a leader that makes the culture.

Jess K:

Thanks from your supportive work besties. Remember, whether you're swapping snacks in the break room, rescuing each other from endless meetings, or just sending that perfectly timed meme. Having a work bestie is like having your own personal hype spot.

Claude F:

So we keep lifting each other, laughing through the chaos, and of course, thriving. Until next time, stay positive, stay productive, and don't forget to keep supporting each other. Work bestie!

Head Shot

Claude F

Co-host
Head Shot

Jess K

Co-host
Contributor

Ivonne Furneaux

Guest