Podcast: Internal Comms at Apple

How do you use creativity to keep your employees engaged? It's a question most of us struggle with – especially now.

Translating business initiatives to human lingo is one of the most important things we do as Internal Communicators. Creativity is essential to that. Luckily, we’ve found just the person to inspire you. 

Meet Janet Hitchen – one of the newest additions to the field of Internal Communications consultants. Janet’s career is impressive – from a start in banking, working in Employee Engagement, to a rise-through-the-ranks of Apple Retail EMEIA, to the founding of her own Internal Comms consultancy, Janco. She was probably the first person to use iPads in her Internal Comms strategy, and one of the most creative Internal Communicators I’ve ever met. In this podcast episode, Janet talks us through her career journey, what it’s like to do Internal Comms at Apple, what she’s learned and importantly: her own unique vision on Internal Comms. Watch the podcast below,  listen to it on your favorite platforms, or you can easily read the full transcript right below.

Jonathan: Hi Janet, I’m so happy to have you here. We've been speaking throughout last week a bit because we got in touch through the wonderful miracle of the internet. I mentioned that we're doing a series on the leaders of internal communications, in our podcast. And, that tied in to getting our beautifully because you worked at a bank doing internal columns and all sorts of communications roles for a very long time.

And then you make a switch to a very well known brand to most of our audience out there, named Apple. I really love your story. So for this podcast, I want to focus on what was your journey like in your career, and then, specifically let's use that Apple park and see where that went, and what our audience can learn from you.

The road to working with Apple

Janet: Sure. Thank you, Jonathan. As you said, I started off at a bank, and then I moved to Apple. So two incredibly different companies. I was in corporate investment banking for quite a while. I started off working in France and I moved across to the UK, and actually started working in employee engagement. So I was doing a lot of engagement work for the UK branch of Crédit Agricole. And, one of the projects that I was working on was when Agricole and Lyonnais came together. It was a very well known merger back in the day. One of the big pieces that came out from some of the engagement work I did with the leadership team was that we needed somebody doing the communications. There had been no internal comms at the time. The branch in the UK was about a thousand people getting to that sort of level, and everything was just coming from Paris. So, I was asked to do that and to start the function. The CEO took me to one side and said, well, this is one of the pieces of feedback that we've been given, this is one of the outcomes - fancy it? I said, yeah, okay, why not? I'm not fully understanding what I was getting myself into, but knowing that it was going to be really good fun and that I had a huge number of stakeholders that were really keen on supporting me, and really keen on this happening. This was output and an outcome, as I say, of a leadership seminar.So that was really good fun. I did that for a few years. It was setting everything up from scratch. So, why are we doing what we're doing? How do we communicate with our people? Who are our people? What kinds of different kinds of people are there? We created the whole thing from scratch. Then, I started to think that it would be quite nice not to be in banking anymore. I’d like to do something a bit different. I always loved a new challenge and, but then the credit crunched. So, I realized I was incredibly lucky to still have a job and to still be enrolled. That gave me different challenges, which were more around how to do the same thing, or more, with less money. I think everybody during the credit crunch had that challenge. You know, you've got to continue doing what you're doing. You've got to make sure people are still having the same experience, but you don't have any budget. So that was interesting for about a year or two. And, during that time, one of the things I was trying to get was some good speakers to come in. Work at our seminars, to come in and do some motivational talks, working with the learning and development team. I went to this thing called the London Business Forum. It was basically a lot of people wearing gray, black and navy blue, sitting in a room. I'm listening to two speakers and I was absolutely blown away by one of the speakers that I saw. It was the creative director of Innocent smoothies. And he was completely different to everybody in the room. He brought a completely different energy and it was amazing. It was so refreshing, and I was completely inspired. I remember his presentation being unlike anything I'd seen before. and he came on, he was wearing this bright yellow. I remember it vividly. He has a bright yellow tee-shirt, and a big beard, and he was just full of life and full of energy. And I thought, wow. I want to work with someone like you and I have to do something about this. So I kind of put it out there and started looking for roles. Wrote down a list of the companies I would like to work for, and how do I make this happen? Then, I’m on LinkedIn, bizarrely, and I saw a role at Apple for internal communications, and I thought, okay. I'll never get it. I'll apply. We'll see how it goes. You know, we'll see how that goes. And six months later and 16 interviews, a lot of interviews, I got the job. Tech does tend to do quite a lot of interviews. Brilliantly, when I met the guy for my final interview, I sort of said to him, you know, I've met an awful lot of people. And he said, yeah, but you're trying us out and we're trying you out. And it was the first time somebody had actually said that to me. I actually could have said, yes, you know what? This is not for me. It was so liberating to suddenly have somebody that's senior in the organization say  “if you don't like us, that's okay, you don't have to take the job.” Wow. And it just really relaxed, really settled me. I got the job, which was great. So I was working for Apple retail, very different from corporate and investment banking.

And I think I spent my first month trying to figure out what on earth to wear to the office because it was not a suit. I'll tell you that. 

Entrepreneurial Internal Comms

Jonathan: When you say Apple retail, Apple has several divisions, right? And then you are on the internal comms part of the retail side of Apple.

Janet: Yeah. So Apple retail was set up, a couple of years before that when Steve jobs brought Ron Johnson on board to create the Apple experience for the customer. So before that, you could buy Apple from John Lewis, Currys. You know, those sorts of places, but you couldn't buy it with an Apple experience. So they weren't controlling it. Control, big word. They weren't looking after that customer experience. So Apple retail was born to do that. It was created to do that. And when Steve brought Ron Johnson onboard, Ron was basically given carte blanche to kind of set it up. I was brought in when the operations function and the communications function had just let up. So previously, it had been very operational, you know, move that thing over there. This is how we're going to do a scene and meet. We've stuff around the visual merchandising, operational type stuff. I was bought in when those two functions had split apart, and communications becoming its own function, in its own right. I was asked to work on things like partnering, relationship management, a lot of strategy. A lot of understanding the business is what the business is trying to achieve, and then, we can figure out communication strategies that will support that. But a lot of it, because we were brand new and because we were no longer part of the operations team, was to actually explain to people what communications can be.

So it's not just the stuff that pops out at the end, and the operations. Yes, we will do that, but there's also a whole heap of other stuff that we can actually have some fun with. There were at the time, I think three of us in the UK looking after that. I think at that point there were three to five countries. Two countries that were just coming online. We're just starting to come online when I joined. So there were three or four countries in Europe. Very quickly we became four people and we were looking at setting everything up.

We were setting ourselves up as the global team as well. So we were based in Cupertino. We had people in Tokyo, we had somebody in Australia and we had our group of Europeans. We had to do everything. I mean, we had to create everything from scratch. 

We had an intranet that we didn't particularly like that much. So we wanted to create something new. We created a new communications tool that was all based on the iPad, which back in the day was incredibly innovative. It was a way to allow us to get messaging out very quickly to, to our people. That was kind of really good fun. because we had a blank piece of paper, we had everything to play for, and pretty much all of the partners were supportive and wanted us to succeed because if we succeeded, then the rest of Apple retail was succeeding. It was a really cool environment to be in. Relationship management, business partnering, setting stuff up. Even the “boring stuff” like creating processes. We really had some fun with it because we realized that if we got the processes nailed, it helped people to understand who we were, what we were doing. It helped them to understand why certain things would take longer, why they couldn't have a video if they can have a two days notice. What it also did was it allowed us to have more creativity. 

The phrase that we used was, the process shouldn't get in the way. It should just set you free. Because that just allows you to move forward and allows you to spend more time on the cool stuff, the fun stuff, and the creative stuff. 

Jonathan: Yeah. First off, It sounds almost like you were hired to be the internal comms entrepreneur. Setting up all those things, which are amazing opportunities. 

Janet: There was a team. We have a very entrepreneurial spirit. 

Jonathan:  That's amazing. You mentioned one key thing that I want to touch on a little bit because you made this intranet that was on an iPad, which is indeed back in the day, this is when the iPod was first released.

So that's an amazing way for a company to both eat its own dog food and then also figure out, well, how can we make this work on the B2B side of things? Just really interesting, but you mentioned speed, right? So you can get a bunch of communications messages out there, and I mentioned that, especially in retail, but that's a very critical factor to successful internal communications.

Janet:  Yeah, absolutely. So in retail, you might have something go wrong. Let's say something happens and all of your payment systems go down. You can no longer take payment where you're no longer in business. So we would have crises communication like that, where we would need to need to make sure that we could get out information to our teams so that they either knew what the plan B was, what was actually happening so that they didn't try and do some sort of workarounds in store, or are they trying to figure it out in each store because you don't want each individual store trying to make and do their own workaround? From an IT perspective, it would be really tricky. So a lot of it was about making sure that during some of what we would consider crises to get that information out to people. The right people, at the right time, so that they could then support the customer experience. A lot of it was about making sure that the employee experience goes with the communication that we needed to give to them. Allow them to give the customer the best experience. So the customer experience was always at the center of what we were doing. The employee experience was to allow them to give the customer the best experience. So if you want to do that, you need to get them the information fast, get them the information they need. Make sure that they feel confident in what they're saying. You want to make sure that that customer feels they're having a great experience, in the same way, that they're having a great experience with us, with a product. You want to make sure that customers are having a great experience with the employees as well. So all of that was quite daunting. The Apple experience is huge. The products are amazing. So you could have seen that as a huge amount of pressure. But at the time, because of the environment, we were working in, because of the partnerships that were positive, strong and supportive, because of a team who were incredibly smart, creative, really good at problem-solving, really good at learning on the fly, really good at dealing with ambiguity.

You never knew what might get thrown in your way. I'm really good at those sorts of things. You felt really supported and you felt like, actually, we can have some fun with this. 

Jonathan: Would you say those are the two kinds of key components of really successful internal communications in large companies? A, a great team to support you, and B stakeholder to buy-in and support so that you feel the business is behind you.

Janet: Yeah. You have to have a business. You absolutely have to have the business. The business needs to understand that you are, what you're doing, why you're doing it. Equally, you have to be able to tell the business that you understand what they're doing and that what you want to do is to support their business objectives. If you don't understand what those business goals are, if you don't understand where the business is going if you don't understand the challenges, how can you create a strategy that will support the business? You can’t. Having a team around you that you can trust, that is incredible, who you can laugh or cry with, you know they've got your back.

It's an incredibly empowering experience. 

Jonathan: So basically we’ve gotten to the point where Janet is in Apple and you've set up these processes for the quicker side of communications. And then you were also talking about the really fun side of communications because you’ve got a really cool, and very energetic approach to internal conflict.

You sounded like a creative director at an ad agency. What kind of cool stuff did you do there? 

Janet: I mean, we were able to do some really fun stuff. A lot of it was dependent on how soon we could find things out. Time is always something that you're kind of challenged with because things might be secret.

You might not have the full picture, but you still need to create something that will eventually get the full picture. By the time that you get it, it will be too late to do the really cool stuff you want to do. This sounds a little bit strange, but again, dealing with ambiguity was kind of one of the key things that we were able to do. During the 2012 Olympics, we sent an iPad around the world, which sounds really crazy, but we did an iPad relay and we sent it around the world and we allowed our teams to meet each other. We allowed our teams to explore cultural experiences, we allowed them to tell their stories. So there was a huge amount of storytelling that was involved in the work that we did. Understanding some of the business needs that we had, say it might be, focus on a specific product, we would look for a different, more creative way to be enabled to do that. So one of those opportunities was to allow some of our teams in France to meet with an incredible film director. At the beginning of that project, we weren't allowed to tell anybody who the famous film director was, because it still hadn't been announced and it still hadn't gone live. It was still possible that things might not 100% workout. So we were setting up a communication piece and an engagement piece without actually being able to tell people what the prize was going to be. Now in a lot of places that might not work, but I suppose we were very lucky because people knew that there was going to be something fun that was going to happen. We were able to create a competition around film, around different apps, around how you tell a story of your town, your village, your city, wherever it may be that you live. Tell that story. So we were asking them to be storytellers. Tell that story. Then we will choose the best ones, as a byproduct of the product we want you to talk about. Instead of constantly repeating the same messages over and over again, we were able to look for different ways of being able to make what the business wanted to be the focal point, the topic of conversation without ever really mentioning the product, which was kind of fun.

Again, we were very lucky because of the environment that we were in. People trusted us and they said, if you're going to run a competition, we know it's going to be good. The prize that we were able to then offer became bigger and bigger, and we were able to do more and more things with it because we told the director about this and he went, great, I’d love to meet them. So they were able to meet him personally and there was some cool stuff that we were able to achieve and, and give those people a gift.

It was a wow moment. Offering some behind the scenes stuff, offering up things that people won't necessarily see outside. What we show inside has to be as good, as creative and innovative as any of our external marketing.

It was really good fun to be able to play with that. 

Jonathan: That’s a pretty tall order knowing which company we're talking about. So that's really cool. I mentioned that now I'm just putting on my internal comms hat and looking at it from a content perspective. Using such campaigns also gives you a really big load of content to play with, right?

If you have people that are making their stories, did you have like individual pieces on each story that you would send-outs, or what did you do with that? 

Janet: A lot of the time it depends on what else is happening in the business. So yes, we had a huge amount of content. You're looking at it from a central perspective.

Centrally, there were certain things that we have planned, but we always knew that our strategy would remain fluid depending on anything else that might happen in the business, anything else that is something you need to be prioritized. So we were always able to be really flexible. One of the nice things as well with retail was we were able to sometimes just send content to certain audiences, so we could just send it to France. We could just send it to Europe, we could just send it to the UK, to Belgium, to whoever. We wanted to blow it up and send it to Europe, and then that got picked up because by our teams globally, because they looked and they went, wow, this is really cool. This is a really cool story. We need to tell that story globally because it’s an inspirational piece to it. Even if somebody in China is not going to be meeting this famous film director in France, that's okay, because it shows the kinds of things that we do. It shows the inspirational piece, and it also allows that team in France to share some of their stories back as to why they create, how they won the competition. Allowing them to share their story globally was incredibly powerful.

So even though we were talking to 60,000 people, it still felt incredibly small because we were still bringing it down to the individual.

Small budgets, big results

Jonathan: That's amazing. Would you say that that’s the opposite way of working with internal comms outside of completely different environments? You are no longer in a credit crunch, so you had budgets to make all these things happen.

Janet: So the thing I'm talking about in France, the budget was next to nothing. 

Jonathan: Okay? To the internal comms teams out there that are listening, you don't need a whole lot of money to get really cool stuff done, 

Janet: I think money does help. When you're working at a company like Apple, and you get given a prize opportunity, that is a resource as an internationally renowned film director. You get that for free. That's easy to get handed to you, you want to play. You're not then having to go and create the prize, not going to have to create the experience and pay for that experience, because it was something that was coming from other parts of the business. I think what not having a lot of money can do is it can make you work harder creatively. It can make you think a lot more about, do I really just spend the money on X or Y, or how can we do that differently? How can it allow me to have a little bit more perspective? There's a couple of books that I have already read on that. From back when I was at Crédit Agricole, which was talking about, you know, if you give yourself a different parameter each time you look at the same issue, put a different challenge to it, and then allow yourself to look at it with a different perspective, you’ll always come up with a different response. Don't allow yourself that whole day to write something. Allow yourself an hour. Allow yourself only 150 words to write a story that you think would probably be 500, and actually see what happens if you allow that parameter to happen. We had quite a lot of parameters. We wanted to make sure that we were valuing our people's time. We knew that we couldn't give them hours and hours of content because they don't have time. So actually what you do is you have to do things that are short focused, and you don't really force a lot more creativity. In some of the ideas that we have, it's just going to take too long, or it's going to be too convoluted, or it's too complicated and people aren't either going to engage with it. 

It's also looking at what is right for your audience. Sometimes what's right for your audience, they don’t need a lot of money. Sometimes it does, don't get me wrong. Any CFOs listening, give us the money, but it doesn't necessarily need to do that.

Decentralizing human potential

Jonathan: I think that’s something that everyone can take to heart, for sure. I want to move on your journey into Apple because now you've done the processes.

You've done some very cool and creative campaigns. So what happened then? Because you've been there for almost nine years, right?

Janet: One of the things that I wanted to do was to work on global projects. So the wonderful thing about the team that we had was that we were working very well as a global team. So working as that global team, I was able to get involved in a lot of stuff. You know, people say “Oh, well, you must've just been working on European things.” It's like, actually, no. We could be working on something from Europe that would go globally, or we could be working on something that was purely global, and have business partners across the world.

 I identified the iPhone as being a really fun thing, but a real challenge back in the day for us. And I wanted to see if we could lead the communication for that from Europe. Europe was particularly challenging because we did a contract phase. We sold contracts. Contracts are complicated because there are so many different versions of them. It was rough for our teams when you think that there might be three, four, five, 600 different options of ways to buy a product, it's just mind-boggling. Full respect to the teams that were able to do that. I found it absolutely incredible. I had this conversation with my director and I said, why don't we just run this out of Europe? Because we are the most complicated area, and every other region should kind of fall out of it, if you like.

The communication plan would be a subset of what we've managed to nail in Europe. He agreed. So, the first lesson is to be careful what you wish for. I worked on that for two years. I worked with our team who were in Cupertino. A lot of the challenge wasn't in the room. I wasn’t having the corridor conversations, having a chat because I'm eight hours away in a different country. So, that was a really interesting challenge. It did teach me about the importance of relationship management. So all of the things that we'd set up in Europe, I transferred them across. It was, let's understand the business, let's understand what my key partners really care about. What are they trying to achieve? What are their goals? What are the things that we're struggling with, and then how can I support that? Part of that was also how can I make sure that they don’t think it's a challenge that I'm not in the room, how can we figure that out? So there was a lot of traveling back and forth to the US, but there were some brilliant relationships that I was able to make. Working with a couple of the guys over there, we were able to figure out a way to make the eight hour time difference work in our favor.There was a team of us working on the iPhone in Europe, and we were able to then do some creative thinking and play that back to the guidance in Cupertino. We were able to have this exchange of ideas, if you like, around creative problem solving and the problems that we were finding with the ways we wanted to do new things. I couldn't have done it if I hadn't had incredible people around me, and incredible people who were willing to give me a chance, and support. And even telling me, you know what, if you fail, it's okay. If this doesn't work, do not worry. It's not a problem. You'll have tried, we’ll pick you up and we'll keep going. You'll do something else. And I thought, wow, that also gave me a lot of resolve to be like, this is not gonna fail. We were able to work in that way using the eight hours as almost an opportunity to allow for more creativity, more people thinking about the problems, more people coming up with ideas. People bouncing off each other led to some really innovative and cool things for our teams. That was really good fun. It meant that because we were able to make it work, another couple of opportunities and came up for other teams globally, to be able to lead parts of projects from outside of the US which was, which was incredible fun because the intellectual capital that you have around the world is insane.

So the fact that all the ideas have to come from the center, I've never really understood, Use the intellectual capital you have. Use people’s creativity, their innovation, their ideas, and their energy to move forward.

That was really good fun, but tiring. I did that for a couple of years. I asked to hand that over to a new person, because I think I did it for about two years and I thought, you know what? I probably need a break. We've done a huge amount of pioneering, coming up with new ways of working or figuring out new ways of doing things.

I think I probably just need a break. I handed off to somebody else for them to then start thinking of new, different, cool, innovative ways. Maybe take it in a different direction. Great fun. But it's also good to know when it's the right time to step back and say, I've had a great time, but now it's time to do something different.

Working with a global team 24/7

Jonathan: That's also a pretty brave decision to make, especially when you're, on top of getting great results like you were. I also think it's nice to hear how almost a recurring part of your story is that instead of looking at boundaries or parameters limits, upon which you can achieve, instead of looking at them as a negative thing, you actually use them as a creative tool. Which, I think is something that especially because internal comms, in general, is plagued with not having a lot of resources, or not having big budgets in a lot of other companies. I definitely think that that's something that a lot of people can take away from this conversation, is that those limits can actually help you. They can be a tool, if you look at it from the right way.

Janet: This is a challenge.

This is hard. We’ve just got to fix this. There's gotta be a way to do this. Very simply, one of my main business partners would always wake up at seven in the morning, so he'd call me at his seven in the morning, which was my 3:00 PM, he’d tell me, I'd already had something.

So let's flip that. He would send me something at the end of his day and say, I need you guys to think about this. This is a challenge that we've got. This is a problem we're trying to solve. I would then work with the team. So if you see, it wasn't just, hey, can you solve this communications problem? It was, hey, we've got this business problem going, work with a team, and then come back. For the beginning of my day, I would say, hey guys, let's set this up. We would then sit down. We would try and figure out ways we could come up with different ideas, or different things that we'd seen, or different feedback that we got from our audience. We would then take that back to him at three o'clock when he'd call me at 7:00 AM his time, and I'd say, right, here are some of the things that we've been thinking about, which were a different perspective from the youth, from the way they'd been thinking about it in the US and from the Canada market. I think at that point we had like 10 different markets in Europe. We were able to see very different ways that customers were reacting to things, very different ways of selling a product, very different ways of doing things that allow all of that different perspective. It just made things much broader and gave us a much greater opportunity to have to do that. It's smart. He would sort of end his day, he'd say, right, here are the things that are bugging me. Here are the things I want you guys to think about while I'm asleep. Which is perfect. We then think about that. He'd wake up and we say, hey, here's what we've been thinking about. That meant that everybody was still working within their own time zone.

He wasn't saying, I need you to join a call at two o'clock in the morning because that's when we're going to have this meeting. It was an incredibly profitable, and innovative experience. I think most people thought it wouldn’t work, but it did. We had fun with it as well. 

Jonathan: You've basically created the tech/comms version of the empire where the sun never goes down. 

Janet: It's that whole kind of concept of follow the sun, but it's how you make the sun work for you. Customer service organizations use the follow-the-sun model (35:20). So we were just looking at how we can take that model and actually make that work, but not in a customer service setting. 

Jonathan:  At one point you also made the very brave decision to say, well, I've been at Apple for a very long time and I think I need something new. What happened there? 

Janet: I think nine years is a long time to be somewhere. I have had incredible experiences and been given amazing opportunities to work with some really wonderful people, but it felt like it was the right time to do something new, something different. Quite a lot of people might think that that’s crazy. I’m fine with that. But it felt like it was time to do something new. So I left Apple.

The key is self-adaptation

Jonathan: What are you up to now?

Janet: When I left Apple, I went on a creative sabbatical.

I called it a creative sabbatical, because I literally just wanted to go and create stuff, learn new creative stuff, and do all the things that I hadn't been able to do when I was working. And so I learned film photography and I'm still learning film photography. and that has been an incredible experience.

I'm learning to just slow everything down. I still love taking photographs with my iPhone, which is never going to go away. I still love posting them on Instagram and that is never going to go away. But there is something more profound about film photography and that you have to slow down and you have to judge things, right?You can't take 75 photographs of exactly the same thing. And knowing that one of them will be okay, you just have to wait and get the right shot. It’s about patience. There’s a technicality behind it that I still don't really understand, I'm still playing with it. There’s a delayed gratification to it, which is when you can't immediately look and see what it looks like.

You know, even on an SLR, you can kind of digitally go, okay, that's the shot I got. No, that's not right. I need to do that again. With film, I have no idea if I got the shot, fingers crossed and I've got to wait for the film to be developed, and the scans to come back, so there's huge learning in that. There’s also an understanding of learning to love your mistakes. And sometimes there were shots where the lighting is completely off, or there's something very bizarre happening, but actually it's given you a really cool photo. And so it's looking at that and thinking, wow, that is, is kind of incredible..

I also learned how to make jewelry. I did calligraphy, I've done all kinds of different things and it's really interesting, but film photography is the one that's really sort of stuck. I'm now using the camera that my dad had when I was little. So this camera was bought in 1977 and is probably older than most of the people watching and listening to this podcast. But it works perfectly. And there's a real joy in having this camera that is 42 years old, still working beautifully. and there's a sense that my dad took lots of photographs when we were fighting, you know, when we were young growing up. I learned to take my first photographs on this camera, and now I'm kind of continuing to take photographs, learning to figure that out.

So there's some really good fun stuff that I'm having with that. 

Closing thoughts 

Jonathan: I'm loving it. Also, a great way to sort of reinvigorate that creative energy that every communicator needs. You're very much involved in that now, and you're investing in your own learning and development, which is also really important.

So what's going to be next?

Janet: I'm looking for experiences that allow me to put employees at the heart of what I do. So, you know, what I was talking about with Apple was the customer was at the heart of ultimately the customer was at the heart of what we did. But, from an internal comms perspective, we were putting the employee at the center to make sure that they were giving the customer the right experience.

And so I'm looking for experiences that allow me to do that. Try new things. I think, if you look at my seat like we've talked about, I was at the bank for quite a long time and I did lots of different things in the bank. I was at Apple for a long time. I did lots of different things that are awesome. So I've had this sort of real depth of experience in these two companies, and I've really gone deep. I've seen cycles. I've seen how things work within a company. And I just like to get some more experience in different places, and experience new and different types of company. New types of challenges, but always for me, putting the employee at the heart of what I do.

So, yeah, that’s kind of good.

Jonathan: So if there are people listening here and they think, oh, I have just the right challenge for Janet, how could they reach you?

Janet: LinkedIn, always the best way. 

Jonathan: All right. There you go. Janet Hitchen, go and find her on LinkedIn. Janet, I really want to thank you for your time on, you're amazing and have a really inspiring story.

I thought it was lovely to hear your journey and everything that inspires you, and how you really throw your own person into your career, which is really beautiful to see. Once again, thank you so much for your time. I hope you enjoyed it here on the podcast, and I look forward to having you back on sometime in the future.

Janet:  Thank you, I’d love that.

Jonathan: All right. See you.