Gordon Sheppard (00:00)
Learn how to improve attraction and retention of top talent by doing wellness check-ins with co-founder Karen Unland from Taproot Publishing on today’s episode of the Executive Wins podcast.

Welcome to the show. I’m your host, Gordon Sheppard And before we get started, I just wanna say thanks. Thanks for listening and being the type of leader who wants to learn how to get more wins in business and in life. On today’s episode, you’ll learn how co-founder Karen Unland from Taproot Publishing is attracting and retaining top talent by doing wellness check-ins at the beginning of every meeting.

But before we get started, I want to let you know that today’s episode is brought to you by the Executive WINS Workshop. Now in this high impact workshop, senior leadership teams learn how to reverse engineer past wins in a structured way so they can get more wins in the future. This highly interactive session is for senior leaders who want to improve profitability, processes, communication, and a whole lot more. I’ll be your instructor, bringing 25 plus years of experience and a proven system.

that will help you get fast results in your business. It’s available in half day, full day and customizable formats. And it’s really good for team building and corporate retreats. There’s also a multi-level version. It’s called a wins audit. And that’s where I interview managers and employees at all levels of your organization. And I find out how they get their wins. And then I bring that knowledge back to the executive team so they can use it to take action. Visit executivewins.com forward slash workshops

learn more.

And now on to today’s show. We are just so lucky to be joined by Karen Unland, the co-founder of Taproot Publishing, a local phenom in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada that publishes in-demand stories, newsletters, podcasts, and a whole lot more. She’s also a values driven leader who is scaling her business by building a really strong work culture. In this episode, Karen shares a win that we can all learn from. At the beginning of every staff meeting, she does a wellness check-in with each person on the team.

And not only will you hear about how she does it, but she also shares the core values that led to this best practice and how it is ultimately helping her company to grow by attracting and retaining the right people. And now here’s Karen Unland with her executive win.

Gordon Sheppard (02:36)
Karen, welcome to the show.

Karen Unland (02:38)
It’s great to be here, Gord. Thanks so much for having me.

Gordon Sheppard (02:40)
Well, and I’m really glad that you’re here too, because I know that the other leaders that are listening to this today are going to get a ton out of what you’re about to talk about here today. But many of the people listening aren’t going to know who you are and what you do. So if you could take a moment to please introduce yourself and tell us about your work, that’d be great.

Karen Unland (02:57)
Sure, so my name is Karen Onland. I’m the co-founder and COO of Taproot Publishing. Taproot Publishing is a media company in Edmonton. Our flagship publication is Taproot Edmonton. we set out to provide reliable intelligence to people who live in the Edmonton region. We want to…

inform people and connect people and inspire people with information about what’s going on in their community and that it manifests itself in a whole bunch of newsletters that we publish every day and a podcast about City Hall and original stories from our team of journalists who pay attention to what’s going on.

Gordon Sheppard (03:42)
It’s a remarkable venture that you are putting forth at this era of journalism. It’s amazing that you’re doing what you do. It’s influenced me enormously in the work that I do. The roundups that you do around events in business have been a huge influence on what I do, which has been great. The municipal coverage and then even the tech coverage, and I’m just picking off parts, you can hear me just sort of picking away at parts of what you’re doing. It’s remarkable what you’re doing. So I’m really so glad that you have this venture going and it’s a healthy thing, and especially at this local level where the need

is so high for the perspectives that you’re bringing. So I just want to say thanks. That’s a great thing. And again, we’ll make sure that people get the link to Taproot to check it out. And I think it’s well worthwhile doing. But the nice thing was I ran into you at a networking event and was able to ask you if you wanted to come on here and participate. And we always kick these off with sort of one main question, which is if you had to describe your biggest win in the last couple of years in business, what would it be and how would you describe it?

Karen Unland (04:39)
So the way I would answer that question is we’ve done a lot of hard work that is ongoing work on establishing a process for truly living our values at Taproot and conveying those values to our team as our team has grown and as our team is almost always remote.

The comparison that I would draw is I came up through journalism and always worked in a newsroom which was like an open office kind of concept where, with really clear norms and hierarchies and sort of like communication by osmosis. And there is, we’ll talk maybe later about.

how much unhealthy culture there is in a typical newsroom. And a lot of the things that we’re trying to do at Taproot are really in opposition to trying not to commit the sins of the father, so to speak. But it’s very different to be running a news organization when you’re not in the same room, which is the case for most mainstream newsroom places these days now post COVID.

And then to try to like just build in the kinds of values that we want people to to embody not just parrot or not just know that when that when we onboard them there’s like a deck that has these words in it

Gordon Sheppard (06:28)
So neat to hear about your lived experience, right? Spending those decades in your traditional news setting. I think when I remember years ago when I worked in the media business, never, I don’t think I ever worked for a train manager. I don’t know that anybody ever went to do management training. And so that by osmosis thing I can completely relate to. just, you you’ve seen it and we see the peaks and valleys that it creates with these spectacular highs. And then those disastrous stories that everyone needs to write the book about maybe when they retire or sooner.

Karen Unland (06:34)
Mm-hmm.

Gordon Sheppard (06:56)
if that’s possible for sure. And so you’ve set out to do it differently. You know, you’re sort of at the helm in a sense of running your own thing now and you want to do it differently. And what would you say the win is for you then? Because you described this moving to remote work. What’s the win that you’ve gotten these last couple of years?

Karen Unland (07:13)
So the WIN is this process, this practice that we adopt with every meeting, which is called a wellness check. And it’s kind of a temperature check. We’ll have it in the show notes, because it’ll be easier for you to look at than for me to explain. But it’s four squares or rectangles that range from

that goes struggling, surviving, thriving, excelling. And the struggling and surviving are kind of orange and yellow, and the thriving and excelling are various shades of green. And then on each of those indicators is also some words to help people situate themselves in how they are. And before we have any meeting,

Taproot, we ask the participants to go around the horn and say what their wellness check is, like what their state of mind is. And it seems like a little thing, but when you just start a conversation saying, how are you today, and people say, fine, you get no information, and we’re also kind of trained.

to hear that, okay, let’s go, let’s do the work, right? And so we are depriving ourselves of useful information to know how someone is that day, how they’re showing up at work, and they’re deprived of an opportunity to feel like we actually care about the answer. So, yeah.

Gordon Sheppard (08:54)
I I can’t admit I’m struggling at work, can I? Like what miracle have you pulled off here that somebody would feel comfortable or confident enough to say that? Because I certainly have come up in what you describe. I’m fine, let’s move on, let’s get to the task, and then whatever it leads to underperformance or whatever those things are. you know, and just remind me of the four again, but I just want to pick on struggling for a second, but go ahead, what are the four?

Karen Unland (08:57)
yeah

Sure,

Struggling, surviving, thriving, excelling.

Gordon Sheppard (09:23)
Because struggling just with that one alone. So someone’s in your meeting and they’re like, okay, you know what? Thanks for asking. I’m struggling today. What’s the reaction in the meeting when somebody says that one?

Karen Unland (09:27)
huh.

Mm-hmm.

The reaction is typically to down tools and say, you want to tell us more about that? Do you need to, do you want to like leave the meeting and we’ll come, we’ll talk separately. But I would say you make a good point. We rarely hear struggling, even though probably sometimes that’s how people are.

One of the things I think that helps us get that true answer from people and give them the psychological safety to admit or not even admit to reveal or say that they are struggling is that we will say it to my co-founder and I. If we are struggling that day, we’re not afraid to tell them that’s the case. And so we’re modeling.

It’s really important that people answer that question honestly.

Gordon Sheppard (10:35)
The modeling,

wait a second, leaders aren’t allowed to struggle. Leaders are supposed to be, right? This is a really, I’m so glad that you’re doing this, right? And I remember being in a setting where I was moderating a panel of nonprofit leaders and learning about the stigma of mental health. And if they talked about, and one of the leaders actually said that, you know what, I have mental health struggles and I lead. So it was one those first moments of, we’re both.

Karen Unland (10:45)
Mmm.

Yeah.

Gordon Sheppard (11:05)
And

as we learn more and I read books like Heal to Lead and we find out about leaders and kind of what that means, you’re living it. You’re the living embodiment of like, no, I’m not gonna do it the way I experienced in my other work setting. I’m leading the whole thing now. And you’re actually able to go in there. How does that feel for you to sort of walk the talk?

Karen Unland (11:26)
Well, it’s a work in progress, because I probably don’t admit to struggling as often as I actually am struggling. And so if I’m saying that, it’s really probably very apparent to everybody that I’m on a really bad day. But I just feel like we cannot expect honesty of our team if we don’t give it. And also, they need to know.

Gordon Sheppard (11:29)
Bye!

Karen Unland (11:54)
Like, why do we ask? It’s because there’s, if someone is like entering into that day and like excelling, like they’re really, they’re, then they’ve got more capacity to do some hard things. If they’re more in the yellow or the red, then maybe today is a day where we get the bare minimum done and that’s good enough because we, because there’s, the company will not rise and fall on one okay day, right?

Gordon Sheppard (12:23)
I love where you’re describing that. you’re saying we’re going to get you at peak productivity, we’re going to help you and we’re going to let you do your thing. And then when you’re sort of having a moment where you need time to get to peak productivity, we’re going to accommodate that as well. I don’t know why I’m thinking about when we talk about our cars, like we wouldn’t force our car to drive fast if something was wrong with the motor. And our car tells us like whether we want to know or not, right? In terms of when we get to work. So that’s really wonderful that you’re able to support that.

Karen Unland (12:39)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Gordon Sheppard (12:50)
When I talk about wins for me, there’s a sort of what I call the anatomy of a win. And I’d like to divide these conversations into sort of five major parts. And the five parts are, let’s talk about the strategy, the work plan, the people, operations, and results that sort of go into this. So you’ve got this wellness check. This is very intentionally designed to have a great organization. You can see that this is intentional by the leadership to pull this in and put this into play. You’re walking the talk, you’re doing the thing. What is the strategy behind having a wellness check at every meeting?

Karen Unland (13:21)
well, I’m going to have to lean on you to tell me is this strategy or tactics? Cause I don’t know if I know. Yeah.

Gordon Sheppard (13:29)
Yeah, no, let me jump in there. So somewhere in there, there’s values. Do you know what I mean?

There’s values, goals, and objectives that sort of go. If you talk about typical strategic planning ideas. So is this a values-driven exercise? Is it the goal of productivity? If you sat down with your three-year plan, what’s the strategy behind having this be part of it?

Karen Unland (13:40)
Yeah.

So in order to get Taproot to where we want it to be, where it is the publication of choice in the Edmonton region and that we have a repeatable model that could go into other cities that have a similar need for properly incentivized news.

We need to have a team that has resilience and can…

slowly replace all of the functions that my co-founder and I started doing when we started the company in 2016 and became full-time in 2019-2020. So if we don’t look after our people, they will not be able to help us grow this company to live up to the vision that we have for it. We also will burn ourselves out before we get to a

like achieve that grand goal. So I think part of it is just like to inculcate in people this really core value of Taproot that we care. We care about how they are and we want them to be equipped to be able to care about each other. And you need information sometimes in order to be able to know how to care for somebody.

Gordon Sheppard (15:28)
So this is a very

intentional way to build a great workforce in a remote setting, which is the current reality of your business. You’ve got your vision to scale this thing. It’d be fun to actually look at your strategic plan and see how many cities you’re going to take over and how you’re going to take over the world. But one of these core things around people these days is you’re putting this fundamental in place, which again reflects the values of the founders and is going to put you in a position to scale better. Because my guess is attraction and retention, we talk about that as a fundamental.

Karen Unland (15:39)
Yeah.

Gordon Sheppard (15:56)
is better for you for the people that are sticky. Is that fair?

Karen Unland (16:00)
For sure, it’s very expensive for a little operation like ours to lose people and to try to find someone else. We can’t afford a revolving door.

Gordon Sheppard (16:16)
And so as you meet sort of salary realities with culture build, what a great intentional thing. That’s, honestly, I get super excited about that, because there’s not many people that are thinking multi-level organizationally. It’s a lot of like, get them in, get them out. know, why is turnover happening? They don’t know, but you’ve got this built in from the get-go. If we have a strategy in place, in your case to scale and have a great workforce, we always need a practical part, a work plan. This is kind of the what, who, and the when to make that go forward. So I’m going to suggest a couple things that I’ve already heard, which is,

every meeting we’re going to introduce a wellness check. You know what mean? And that’s sort of a very practical part of it. Is there other practical parts in a sense that help support this win?

Karen Unland (16:57)
We record what people say, like we, not in the case of like, we’re not having like the AI listen to our meeting, although lots of people do that now. We write down in the meeting notes where people say they are, whether they’re like thriving, surviving, wherever. We haven’t done this yet, but I would be very interested to kind of…

kind of plot the accumulated wellnesses of everybody over time because I would kind of give a shape of how the year goes. Maybe we can see some patterns around, okay, daily savings time. really talk to things about everybody.

And so, yeah, like, we haven’t fully taken full advantage, I think, of the richness of the information that we have, but we could if we took the time. Yeah.

Gordon Sheppard (17:55)
you’re in a position to actually data track

that in a sense when you think about your scaling strategy, then if you had that built in as a way to help your workforce move forward, would know at certain times of the year or whatever those things are. You would also get some indicators around when to off board somebody, which is a very difficult thing for folks to do, but sometimes if people aren’t fitting into the culture, for example, this would be another strong indicator as a way to go along as well. So that’s interesting. you’re doing it every meeting. You’ve got it in this

Karen Unland (18:16)
Yeah.

Gordon Sheppard (18:25)
table format again, people are to get a chance to take a look at that as well to learn from it in a sense. And then you’re you’ve got the stats on it as well. And then you’re practicing. So I can hear there’s all these kind of pieces going into making it happen. The third step in there is the people that are involved to sort of make this type of win occur. Now, I’m to say you and your co-founder, did you sit down and go, we have to do a wellness check? Like what how did this? Like, was it the two of you that kind of got that started and who were the other people involved?

And maybe what was the attitude of those people to make this win occur?

Karen Unland (19:00)
So we were introduced to the concept of sort of mapping your sense of well-being onto a color in an accelerator that we were accepted into, that Mac and I were accepted into in 2019 called ATBX. So ATB was running this sort of boot camp for entrepreneurs and

to teach us a lot of things that we needed to know in a hurry about how to build and grow a company. And it really resonated with us, gave us that experience of feeling safe about saying in front of a bunch people that you’re just surviving today or perhaps even struggling. And just kind of stuck in our heads.

So my co-founder, MacMill, his background is actually in software development. one of, think, the strengths of our company is that we bring very different experiences in the workplace to our workplace that we made. So he comes from a culture of like he had at…

dozens of direct reports at one time when he was working in software development. He did one to ones with people. I never heard of that before we came, you know, like a newsroom would not do something as woo-woo as that or as strategic as that or anything. It’s not woo-woo. It’s like, you know, like a real business. So, and he thinks a lot about

just company culture and how do you grow and how do you have a strong strategy. And so he noodled, actually, on what we were introduced to at ATBX. And we’ve gone through various iterations of it, but the current version that people will see in the show notes is kind of, it’s been the most successful at getting.

people to truly understand how to give a right answer.

Gordon Sheppard (21:27)
Love it. And so there’s the two of you. You’re at ATBX. You get this framework. It resonates with you. You actually bring it and implement. I mean, that’s pretty remarkable. There’s other people involved in this win as well. There’s the people around the table in your meetings, right? They’re sort of part of it as well. And what was, again, if we just talk about their attitude towards it, did they see it initially and go, yay, let’s talk about things? was it a slow sort of bring in in terms of incorporating this? How would you describe, again, them and their attitude towards this?

Karen Unland (21:31)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

to remember now. Like I don’t think we’ve ever had resistance, but it was also so you know this this company has grown in fits and starts through COVID and you know and so we have had people on our team come and go and when I’m thinking about people who have left I think

like an indicator might have that that was going to be how it was, was a little bit the degree to which people were able to embrace this practice, maybe. I don’t know if that’s fair, but the current team was almost like almost all of them were onboarded with the understanding that this is how we do at Taproot.

And so probably people that came to it later, I think it depends on the person. The people that are still on our team that predated the wellness check, they’re the kind of people that totally get why we would want to do that and are totally on board for doing that.

Gordon Sheppard (23:17)
And doesn’t

what you’ve just described speak to scaling? Like do we get the, you know, if we’re looking at our Jim, get the right people on the bus idea, you know, as we kind of move forward and get those Jim Collins, that idea is so fundamental, certainly in the business literature. And I love the way you’re describing it as well. In the pre-notes, I was able to see that you have three Cs in your life. Is that correct with the around?

Karen Unland (23:21)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Gordon Sheppard (23:45)
Yeah, what are those? And again, it speaks to what exactly what you’re saying now.

Karen Unland (23:48)
Yeah, so alongside the development of this wellness check has also been the sort of iteration or reiteration of what are taproot’s values. And we have a deck with quite a few of them, but in the end we decide we need something that’s memorable. And so the way that we express it in day-to-day life at Taproot is that we are curious, we choose courage, and we care.

And those are kind of the rocks that help guide decision making, like on every level. And then to kind of reinforce that with people at our Friday staff meeting, which is our only all hands meeting that we have in the company.

We start the meeting with a wellness check, but we ask people to add on to their indication of where they are on the wellness check to say how they lived or experienced or observed one of our curiosity, courage, or care in the past week. And again, it’s just a little bit more information. It makes them reflect.

Like they want to come to the meeting prepared. so, and it makes me reflect and Mack and I try to take that opportunity to also do like a little bit of storytelling about here’s a situation where I need a courage and or here’s where curiosity served me well or here’s how.

I really noticed that X was showing such good care for Y, right?

Gordon Sheppard (25:45)
I love where

you’re going with this. And again, it’s not just a wellness check. It’s a wellness check based on these fundamental values at a time when you were onboarding people into your world with all of this really, really clear. So when we speak to certainly business successes, this is a massive foundational piece that you can see how you’ve taken the time to kind of get into it. But now it’s sort of, I’m gonna say a non-negotiable from what I can see for what you’re talking about. Is that fair?

Karen Unland (26:08)
Yeah.

That is fair, yeah. It’s really important to us that, and it’s taken a long time to get here and sometimes we just don’t fully embody it as well as we would want to. It’s like it’s not perfect. But I’ve never worked anywhere that was this intentional about making sure that people…

felt safe to say how they really are and that the mission, vision, and values were not just a thing that was like on the wall. And that’s really important to us.

Gordon Sheppard (26:49)
I’ve been nine layers deep from the CEO getting one of those strategic plans, handed in my lap to go tell my unit of nine people or whatever. And I didn’t even understand the words. And I just sort of had to go through that agonizing moment of trying to say, well, how can we make it our own? And it was such a horrible exercise. But in fact, you’ve got a chance to build it, influence it directly, live it every day. And that’s the people component. Operationally is the fourth step. And we want to be able to allow these things to be in place. So I’m going to say operationally, for example, you have a

one page chart in a sense that has these colors on it that allows people to kind of see what’s there. You have this operational chance to sort of track information. Are there any sort of other things around it operationally that are like policies and procedures or things that are operational components that allow you to pull this win off?

Karen Unland (27:38)
I think just the consistency of that this is how every meeting starts, that this is how the Friday meeting is after we go around the horn and ask people for their wellness check and their values story or their values demonstration. We do some updates on KPIs and stuff like that and then the rest of the meeting is wins and gratitude.

It’s like that like every other meeting is about solving problems. That Friday meeting is about celebrating what went well or praise that we’ve heard from people or what have you. And then we end that meeting with curiosity. Like we ask our team, what are you curious about? So that they have a chance to say, why are we doing this? Or you mentioned that and I don’t even know what that is. Tell me more about that.

So it’s just like one more chance to say that we truly do walk the talk. And here we are, walking the talk.

Gordon Sheppard (28:44)
Fantastic. And the fifth step finally is how do you measure the results? So you’ve got this win. What are you measuring and how do you measure those results from this?

Karen Unland (28:57)
you’re making me think that, we missed a step. We got a chance to do that. I do think it would be really interesting to internally to, again, look at the pattern of people’s wellness. To a certain extent, it is like, people still productive, thriving? I guess, I mean, it’s a very qualitative measure, but.

I have one-to-ones with most of our team and that’s like just me and them. And so there’s a little bit more of a chance to say, okay, but how are you really? And probably we get more surviving struggling in that meeting than you would get out loud in front of everybody. And then we did like that’s a safe place to kind of try to do some listening and

problem solving and figuring out around that. I think we could do more on the measurement.

Gordon Sheppard (30:08)
That’s okay. it’s funny

because measurements can be exactly that concrete thing, like whatever percentage of wellness increase could be that kind of measurement you could go for. I’m just going to maybe say the qualitative ones are also pretty impactful. So if you had to measure it for yourself qualitatively, how does it make you feel as a founder?

Karen Unland (30:15)
No.

Hmm

Mm-hmm.

It makes me feel like we are closer to having a healthy workplace than we’ve ever had ourselves before, like both at Taproot and anywhere else that I’ve worked. It also makes me feel that there’s still lots of room for improvement. Like this is an infinitely perfectible thing. And if you ever stop trying, that’s like…

an indication in itself. we will keep working on this, but so far I think that it makes me feel like that we are living our values, that it is inherently curious to actually want to know how someone is and not just do a nicety. And it shows that we care about people when they answer that question. And we try to make room for

the courage to admit that things are not great.

Gordon Sheppard (31:26)
I’m so glad you brought your values up there. If you didn’t do it, I was gonna recap them there right at the end. You’re living them, you’re win around the wellness check, but way beyond that is that you are intentional, and I’ll take your word as well, intentional about building this culture, intentional not only from caring about people, but from a scaling perspective in your business as well. So imagine what a nice time to be able to integrate those things and create that kind of success. Karen, this is just a pleasure. I think so many leaders are gonna learn from

your example. If people need to reach out to you to learn more about it or to learn about Taproot in your business, what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

Karen Unland (32:01)
Probably best ways email, so I’m Karen at Taproot Publishing dot CA. And if you want to like reach out to me on social media or you don’t want to remember that the email address, LinkedIn is the place where you can find me the most now these days.

Gordon Sheppard (32:17)
Karen

Unland on LinkedIn, outstanding leader with the three Cs and ready to share those with the world and with her team as she grows her Taproot publishing business. Karen, thank you for being on the show.

Karen Unland (32:26)
Thank you so much, this was very fun.

Gordon Sheppard (32:30)
We are curious, we choose courage, and we care. Those are great values, and they could be the foundation of the wellness check-in that you do to support your staff to grow your business as well. And Karen was generous enough to share Taproot’s Wellness Check-in PDF, which will help you to determine if you are struggling, surviving, thriving, or excelling at the beginning of any meeting. And if you liked this episode, then make sure to check out our upcoming episodes, which include

From asset-based financing to traditional, how Chelsea Yarmuch got a win and saved her company a lot of time and money. And if you want a great team building opportunity, then check out our workshops at executivewins.com forward slash workshops to learn more. If you liked today’s show, be sure to subscribe, leave a review and share it with a fellow leader. And don’t forget to check out all of the links and resources in the show notes on executivewins.com. And keep listening.

to the Executive Wins podcast for more inspiring wins to help you grow yourself, your team, and your entire business.