This episode of Cruising Altitude features a conversation with Matthew Owenby, Chief Strategy Officer and Corporate Services Executive at Aflac. Matthew and host Nicole Alvino discuss Aflac's commitment to fostering a supportive and respectful workplace culture, which translates into authentic and empathetic customer interactions. The discussion covers Aflac's hiring processes, their focus on dignity and respect, and how AI can enhance the employee experience.
This episode of Cruising Altitude features a conversation with Matthew Owenby, Chief Strategy Officer and Corporate Services Executive at Aflac. Matthew and host Nicole Alvino discuss Aflac's commitment to fostering a supportive and respectful workplace culture, which translates into authentic and empathetic customer interactions. The discussion covers Aflac's hiring processes, their focus on dignity and respect, and how AI can enhance the employee experience.
Quotes
“ The employee experience here is built in the foundation and really a philosophy that if you take care of your employees, they're going to take care of the company and take care of the customers. What we mean by that, in a daily basis, is treating people with dignity and respect. Trying to enter into a relationship with our employees, which we know is foundational to communication and trust and engagement. We want the same type of relationship with our consumers. So we are overtly focused on our employees' experience as well as how they feel about the workplace.”
“ We customize our development based upon the roles that you're in. So we have continuing ed, we have leadership development, we have new employee orientation, new leader orientation. And that is all sort of foundationally kept within our annual ethics training, our annual awareness training around engagement activities. And so it really is a system rather than an activity that happens once or twice a year. We have a systematic integrated talent management program that's been operating here continuously for three decades, if not more.”
“ We see AI as enhancing an employee's experience, reducing the level of anxiety around a special project, or I need to go do this specialized research on this. Or when a consumer calls, what would it be like if you had all of their claims history, all of the times that they've called, some of the issues they've had as a customer support specialist. If you had all that, how would that change your interaction with that person if you had all of that at hand?”
Time Stamps
*(02:22): Meet Matthew Owenby
*(07:23): Aflac’s unique employee experience
*(11:24): Aflac’s hiring and training policies
*(15:44): The crossover of consumer and employee experience
*(20:27): The impact of AI on employee and customer experience
*(23:59): The biggest employee experience lesson Matthew has learned
Links
Connect with Matthew on LinkedIn
Thank you to our friends
This episode is brought to you by Firstup, the world’s first intelligent communication platform. More than 40 percent of Fortune 100 companies use our platform to connect with their people, design and deliver personalized communications, and gain engagement insights throughout the employee journey. That’s how they give their employees better experiences from hire to retire. Learn more at firstup.io
Producer: Today we're returning to the basics of employee experience and company culture. Trust, communication, dignity, and respect. Because these principles don't just shape how employees feel at work, they directly impact how customers experience our brands. Aflac’s Matthew Owenby highlights how cultivating a supportive workplace translates into more authentic, empathetic, and effective customer interactions.
Matthew Owenby: If you take care of your employees, they're gonna take care of the company and take care of the customers. Now, what we mean by that in a daily basis is treating people with dignity and respect, trying to enter into a relationship with our employees, which we know is foundational to communication and trust and engagement.
Matthew Owenby: We want the same type of relationship with our consumers. We are overtly focused on our employees' experience as well as how they feel about the workplace.
Producer: Matthew joined Aflac in 2012 as VP of Human Resources following 15 years in HR and operations at Bank of America and General Electric. In 2023, he became Chief Strategy Officer overseeing strategic planning for the US business while continuing to lead HR and corporate services.
Producer: In this episode, Matthew and host Nicole Alvino discuss Aflac's hiring processes, their commitment to maintaining a supportive and respectful environment for both employees and customers, and how AI can enhance employee experience. On Cruising Altitude, we talk about employee experience lessons from leaders at companies with over 30,000 employees.
Producer: A lot like reaching, cruising, altitude at 30,000 feet. Things look a little different when you're managing 30,000 people. On this podcast, we bring you insights from the leaders who inhabit that rarefied air. Today's episode features an interview with Matthew Owenby. But first, let's hear a word from our sponsor.
Producer 2: Thank you for listening to this episode of Cruising Altitude. This episode is brought to you by Firstup, the company that's redefining the digital employee experience to put people first. And lift companies up by connecting every worker everywhere with the information that helps them do their best work.
Producer 2: Firstup, has helped over 40% of the Fortune 100 companies like Amazon, Ford, and Pfizer stay agile and keep transforming. Learn more at firstup.io.
Producer: And now your host, Nicole Alvino, CEO, and co-founder of Firstup.
Nicole Alvino: Hello everyone and thanks for joining us on Cruising Altitude. I'm Nicole Alvino, Founder and CEO of Firstup, super passionate about ensuring that every worker feels connected and engaged with their employer. Firstup is a SaaS platform used by 40 of the Fortune 100 to provide an exceptional employee.
Nicole Alvino: Experience for every employee. When we do this, we retain and grow our people and increase efficiency and adoption of organizational initiatives, all part of driving a high performance culture. So our mission today is to help you learn about how we can retain top talent, improve organizational culture, and drive your business outcomes.
Nicole Alvino: So Matthew, welcome to the Cruising Altitude podcast. Thrilled to have you.
Matthew Owenby: Thanks for having me. I appreciate the time.
Nicole Alvino: Yes. So when people start and join Firstup we have them share three fun facts to better get to know them. Can you please share three fun facts about you with our listeners?
Matthew Owenby: Sure. Happy to.
Matthew Owenby: I am an avid CrossFitter. I read. Based upon seasons. So the summer season is science fiction. The fall season is sort of fantasy Tolkien type reading material and the winter months are self-help business reading, things like that. And I love dogs. I have Labrador Retrievers.
Nicole Alvino: Those are great. So what's the book that's on for summer?
Matthew Owenby: I'm reading The Foundation right now by Asimov.
Nicole Alvino: Great. I love those fun facts. You've got all the, the muscles, the stamina to get you through the books, and the dogs are there for moral support, emotional support. There we go. There we go. So tell us about your current role at Aflac and how you got there.
Matthew Owenby: Yeah, happy to. A good way to describe. It's pretty diverse. I'm listed as the Chief Strategy Officer and corporate services executive, which means that I'm responsible for quite a lot of unusual maybe activities from planning corporate strategies to corporate aviation. I'm responsible for security, accounts payable, supply chain, obviously HR, travel meetings and incentives, some sales support operation activities.
Matthew Owenby: The president of a printing company that we own called Communicorp. It's quite a lot of diverse activities. How I got here was before the turn of the last century, which is weird to say, but I am from the past. I worked for a company called General Electric, started out in HR, worked my way up there, left and went to Bank of America in 2004.
Matthew Owenby: Worked in various HR and operations capacities, and in 2012 I joined Aflac to lead essentially their HR strategy and execution program. Then over the years taken on what would anyone would refer to as core operational activities.
Nicole Alvino: That's great. So you mentioned several things about Aflac that probably a lot of listeners didn't realize Aflac did.
Nicole Alvino: So anyone who's ever watched television has probably some familiarity with Aflac. But can you tell us the difference between Aflac in real life and what we see in commercials?
Matthew Owenby: Yeah, for sure. I mean, when you, when most people view the commercials in Aflac, they're really looking at a small portion of the overall Aflac business lines, the vast majority of the Aflac Corporation.
Matthew Owenby: It's actually in Tokyo. We have nearly tripled the size of our corporation in Tokyo and have been over there in, in that area for greater than 40 years. The difference is, I don't know that I would say there's a lot of differences. You know, most of the persona around the duck is really about reducing the typical anxiety that comes from consumers and their interactions.
Matthew Owenby: Generally poor interactions with insurance companies and we're different. We actually pride ourselves on paying claims very rapidly. We want to have relationships with our consumers, which is similar to how we want to have relationships with our employees. So while the duck is sort of a whimsical illustration.
Matthew Owenby: And sort of when done to reduce the anxiety around insurance companies. We take our jobs very, very seriously. We just don't take ourselves very seriously, take our customers seriously and our business, but we tend to be sort of whimsical people.
Nicole Alvino: Oh, I love that. And Tokyo, I did my study abroad in college in Tokyo and lived there for six months with the family.
Nicole Alvino: So that's, the Japanese culture is very near and dear to my heart, so I love that. That's the big part of the business. You touched on it a little bit. Can you tell us about what the employee experience is like at Aflac?
Matthew Owenby: Yeah. The employee experience here is built in the foundation. Really a philosophy that if you take care of your employees, they're gonna take care of the company and take care of the customers.
Matthew Owenby: Now, obviously, taking care of someone is somewhat driven by a person's perspective, but really what we mean by that in a daily basis is treating people with dignity and respect, trying to enter into a relationship with our employees, which we know is foundational to communication and trust and engagement.
Matthew Owenby: We want the same type of relationship with our consumers primarily because if you are, if you're contacting Aflac to utilize your policy, generally speaking, you've not had a great day. It could be a cancer diagnosis, it could be an injury. Sometimes it's wellness claims, but generally you, you've not had the greatest day.
Matthew Owenby: So if your interaction with a person is someone that also hasn't had a great day. Then the two things are just not gonna be the way we want them to be. So we are overtly focused on our employees experience as well as how they feel about the workplace.
Nicole Alvino: How do you do that? How do you ingrain that in your culture to make sure that they're delivering that exceptional experience to your consumers?
Matthew Owenby: A lot of it happens frankly, through the hiring process. We look to hire people that have like values and or interested in joining. A culture that is looking to reinforce those values. Trust, communication, engagement, relationships, which you can't find all that out during an interview process necessarily.
Matthew Owenby: But it first starts there. And then once you're here, we reinforce it and encourage it through our own behaviors no matter where you are in leadership. And it's designed to be self-replicating, right? The behaviors that we want. Leaders and employees to to experience are the ones that we expect out of our leadership every single day.
Matthew Owenby: So if you're in leadership, one of the tenants of being in leadership is that you are an exemplar in the values, an exemplar in the behaviors that we believe help people engage, reduce anxiety in the workplace, connects people to the objectives and the strategist corporation.
Nicole Alvino: Yeah. And you mentioned a few of your engagement initiatives that are unique to Aflac.
Nicole Alvino: Can you explain some of those?
Matthew Owenby: Yeah, I mean, of course we do the typical things that most corporations do around engagement surveys. We tend to score a. Well outside of the norm for a variety of reasons. Some of that is it. It could be as simple as, Hey, look, we have an entire portion of our HR team that's dedicated to employee success.
Matthew Owenby: What does that mean? That means if you need career path help, if you need resume writing help, if you need a perspective on open position, whatever you need from a career perspective, we have a dedicated group of employees that do. We have an engagement team that looks at creative ways to provide people with opportunities to build relationships internally.
Matthew Owenby: We have onsite healthcare, so if you have a cold or if you need a checkup, if you need a physical, you need a prescription, et cetera. You don't have to go down the street or worldwide headquarters located in Columbus, Georgia, which is fairly rural. So some of it is just the convenience aspect, but also it's if you're having an issue at work from a healthcare perspective, we wanna take care of you.
Matthew Owenby: We believe those are some of the things that help people engage with a fairly unique culture.
Nicole Alvino: Yeah, definitely. It's started going back to treating people with dignity and respect. That's the way to show that you're doing that with action. Can you talk a little bit about your hiring and training policies?
Matthew Owenby: Of course the hiring process obviously varies by the division and the activities that a person is interested in doing, but let's highlight the, you know, our customer contact organization specifically when you're hired into that organization, you are generally going to, before you have your first customer, inter interaction, have between six, eight, or 10 weeks of training.
Matthew Owenby: Customers are so important to us that we're very, very careful about who interacts with them. We want people to be prepared. We also want that time to help people reduce the anxiety of interacting with a person that, as I mentioned before, might not be having the greatest of day and they may have anxieties built up 'cause of other experience with insurance companies that, you know, make, um, a provocative interaction.
Matthew Owenby: And we look to train people on how to bring. Those interactions down don't match the emotions of the people on the phone. Let's be dignified, let's be respectful, and let's take care of people when we can. When you think about the long-term development, it really depends on where you are. We customize our development based upon the roles that you're in.
Matthew Owenby: So we have continuing ed, we have leadership development, we have new employee orientation, new leader orientation, and that is all. Sort of foundationally kept within our annual ethics training, our annual awareness training around engagement activities. And so it really is a system rather than an activity that happens once or twice a year.
Matthew Owenby: We have a systematic integrated talent management program that's been operating here continuously for three decades, if not more.
Nicole Alvino: I love that the system approach because then it is ingrained in everything you do and really thinking about caring for your people from hire all the way to retire. And I know you have a unique point of view about about that as well.
Nicole Alvino: Can you just talk a little about that?
Matthew Owenby: Yeah, I mean, we wanna hire people for life. That is certainly, if you've spent any time in Tokyo or Asia, is definitely something we've imported here in the United States, which is kind of unusual, at least in my experience, from. Working at other corporations, they, I always felt like they were happy to have me.
Matthew Owenby: I didn't think that they were necessarily planning on keeping me forever. Obviously they didn't. But at Aflac, we truly want to hire people for their entire career, whether that's 10 years, 15 years, or in the case of our, our CEO greater than 45 years. So it is not uncommon, you know, if I were to pull up the demographic information today, you would see.
Matthew Owenby: Greater than 800 people with greater than 30 years of service, and we're proud of that. We want people to work as long as they're healthy, as long as they feel like working here, we want 'em to be here. It's good for the culture, it's good for our customers, it's good for the company. I. That you have experts at the corporation that are really, you know, they're dedicated as we all do as employees, a huge portion of our daily lives and time to a corporation, and it really just reinforces through evidence.
Matthew Owenby: When I'm telling you about our culture, I run into very few people that are. Racing to retirement at Aflac, it's always like, I don't know that I really wanna retire at 65. I'm thinking more like 70. And we're like, good. Stay as long as you want.
Nicole Alvino: Yeah, no, I love that. And it's, it, it is very Japanese. We could probably take some learnings from that in this country and other places in the world.
Nicole Alvino: Just as far as, like you said, what you get from the culture and expertise standpoint, and obviously it, it's, you know, supported financial metrics as well.
Matthew Owenby: But Nicole, you think about it like this, you know, if you, and I knew that you and I were gonna be working together for 30 years, the way we treat each other would change pretty dramatically..
Matthew Owenby: Right. I mean, if it's, if it really is about a relationship, I'm gonna be real careful with you. I'm gonna be more likely, I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt. I'm gonna take the do no harm approach. My whole attitude of work changes when it's, Hey, it's me and you for the next 30 years. So let's try and get along.
Nicole Alvino: No, I love that. And it's, it's how you treat your, your consumers too. Yes. I think you've taken so many important things from that consumer experience to the employee experience. Can you share a few more examples of that?
Matthew Owenby: Yeah, I mean, the, you know, it's obviously beneficial to the corporation to have customers that persist with us for decades.
Matthew Owenby: I mean, that, that's the best outcome for the corporation. Yeah, but in that same vein, if, if you're this bought into the mission of the corporation, which is really helping our customers in most cases, in their deepest time need, then it makes nothing but sense to have a workplace culture that is highly caring and highly interested in how our employees are feeling daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, and ensuring that we're doing everything we can do.
Matthew Owenby: To reduce the frictions of employment in that caring, consistent, dignified way. And, you know, you can't do it perfectly, but we're also very focused on it, meaning that if there are things that people are telling us that we need to improve on, and there are, we are actively doing something about it, and we're reporting to you what we're doing.
Matthew Owenby: Um, so that in real time we're showing, Hey, look, these are the steps we're taking to improve your environment. And as the example I gave you before, you know, one of those activities, particularly in regards to having real time healthcare support on location came directly out of engagement surveys. Our career success Center, which I gave a brief description of, came directly out of engagement surveys.
Matthew Owenby: People saying, Hey, look. I don't feel like I have a, a def defined career path, or, gosh, I see a lot of posted roles being filled by people from outside of Aflac. What can I do? What can you help me do to improve that internal performance? So we take these things seriously and we, we take actions when we know mm-hmm.
Matthew Owenby: We have opportunities.
Nicole Alvino: Yeah, you're providing personalized, tailored experiences to your employees, just like you train them to do with your customers. And so I love that those two things are so, so linked and obviously the way that you're meeting your people, where they are with what they need in all those moments that matter, helps them provide that.
Nicole Alvino: Same level of service to, like you said, these moments that are, these people are having a really rough day that are picking up the phone. And do you have to just meet them where they are?
Matthew Owenby: And you know, Nicole in the insurance has obviously been negatively in the news lately. And you know, we want to be the opposite of that.
Matthew Owenby: When people call, we recognize that we're in an, in an industry that isn't particularly well loved and we, it's not as though we want you to love us, we. But we also want you to have an experience that's consistent with your expectations. Like how would you want to be treated if you had a negative healthcare diagnosis?
Matthew Owenby: That's the experience we're shooting for every day when someone calls here.
Nicole Alvino: Yeah. It's so, so basic. Sometimes I think the things that we learn in kindergarten, we, if we just went through life with those principles, we would maybe have a better place.
Matthew Owenby: So basic and simple.
Matthew Owenby: Yeah. I mean, when you think about the values of the corporation, which are integrated with our ethics, right?
Matthew Owenby: The things that we care about, the things that we want are super basic. Communication. We want to build relationships. We want to have recognition. We want people to feel non-anxious about coming in, but these are really, but they can be hard to do. If they were easy to do, then everyone's doing it right.
Matthew Owenby: But we tend to favor basic high impact over complicated low impact. And if you could just have a consistency in communication, what does that mean? That means that there should be no weeks where a person that works for me doesn't hear from me directly.
Matthew Owenby: No weeks. There should be very little fire drills driven by me.
Matthew Owenby: As a leader, I control the pace of work. So it's my job to ensure that I'm not creating anxiety and problems for my team by not planning properly or by not communicating effectively or by not telling them something that I know. Hey, look, three months from now. If there's an 80% chance that this is gonna happen, keep this in the back of your mind.
Matthew Owenby: That way when it comes, you're not surprised. A lot of this is really kind of basic 1 0 1 relationship activity.
Nicole Alvino: Yeah, that's interesting. It's actually a good segue, so of course we can't have a podcast without talking about AI and the impact. I'm a firm believer that. AI and automation can help deepen human connection, and I'm just interested in how you all are thinking about AI at Ale parts of the business where perhaps it makes sense and parts where it just doesn't.
Matthew Owenby: Well, I can tell you the parts where it makes sense from consumer perspective is the every day wellness claim. That should be automated. Nothing to see here. Move on. You've got a cancer diagnosis, you're talking to a human. Period. End of story every time.
Matthew Owenby: Right there. Yes, there are aspects of that that could be automated.
Matthew Owenby: We're not doing it primarily based on, that is a bad day. Probably the worst day anybody has ever had. And the last thing we wanna do is, Hey, spend 15 minutes, click on all these conditions. It's better. No, let's talk to Matthew and figure out what's going on. Mm-hmm. How can we help? How can we support.
Matthew Owenby: Certainly from an employment perspective, we've used automation tools for a long time. We think that AI, certainly in the next three to five years, really is more of an augmentation rather than some sort of replacement theory program. You know, I'm old enough to remember the tech boom in the late nineties early and how, you know, I think back about that time and.
Matthew Owenby: It definitely wasn't cars replacing horses. It ended up being more access to unique information and easier frictionless shopping, things like that. And of course, that displaced some people, but it, you know, if you were, if you remember those times, it was mm-hmm. Kind of the end of the world for the entry level job.
Matthew Owenby: Well, we're hearing the same thing now. We just don't see that here. You know, it'd be the nature of insurance, maybe the nature of our business, but we see AI as enhancing. An employee's experience reducing the level of anxiety around a special project, or I need to go do this specialized research on this, or when a consumer calls, what would it be like if you had all of their claims history, all of the times that they've called, some of the issues they've had as a customer support specialist.
Matthew Owenby: If you've had all that, how would that change your interaction with that person if you had all of that at hand? And so that's what we're. Thinking in certainly the near and midterm, we're gonna see out of AI, not some world ending these jobs are gonna completely go away because of this automation or this advanced technology.
Nicole Alvino: To be able to provide a more personalized, contextualized experience for customers, I would think you would be able to do the same for your employees as well.
Nicole Alvino: The more that you know about them, the nuances, the different moments of behavior, you just get to know them better. So it's every, every person is their unique individual and we can treat them as such.
Matthew Owenby: Yeah. Or using AI like. You know, you and I see it in, in probably our personal lives, which is, Hey, I see every single Thursday, Nicole and Matthew have a meeting.
Matthew Owenby: Well, why Go ahead and put that meeting and set it up for you. So it's sort of reducing the friction. Not that that's an aggravating activity necessarily, but it's just reducing the overall administration workload on employees.
Nicole Alvino: Yeah. And the cognitive drain too, that it can create. I love that.
Matthew Owenby: That's one last thing you have to think about.
Nicole Alvino: Exactly. Exactly. So there's clearly been a lot of change the past two years. How, what do you think you've learned the biggest lesson from an employee experience perspective, given you've been at Affleck for a long time? Hmm.
Matthew Owenby: Yeah, I, you know, I had the opportunity, I was responsible for our COVID response.
Matthew Owenby: I don't necessarily wanna take us back to more sad times, but out of that activity, frankly, just, it just reinforced a lot of the things you and I have talked about, the importance of communication, accurate communication, quickly, being available, making time, telling people what you know when you know it.
Matthew Owenby: I think very few people are looking for perfection. I. They're looking for access and what do you know and why do you think what you think? And they can draw their own conclusions. So I think COVID, particularly for our workforce, was a reinforcing time period of our values and an opportunity to behave consistently with them.
Matthew Owenby: But you know, in the challenge that it's created in a culture. That is highly dependent on relationships is the change in workplace configurations. Lots of remote work, lots of hybrid three days in, two days out, et cetera. We have activities like that going on both in Tokyo and across the United States.
Matthew Owenby: What that means is that our people leaders have gotta double down on their own engagement with people. It's back to that. Make sure there's not a week that goes by where you're not reaching out to a person, checking on 'em, seeing how they're doing, having a touch base, giving them some accolades, recognizing their behaviors, their activities, et.
Matthew Owenby: It's a little more challenging, you know, when you think about the remote environment and employees that you know, may never get the opportunity to come to headquarters where there's fun ducks and lots of people and everything going on. And so what we do there is we bring everybody in. For a week, at least as they're hired, we go through a new employee orientation, very old school, frankly, like mm-hmm.
Matthew Owenby: When I went through in 1997 or whatever it was, where you get to meet the leadership team, you get to see that you're a part of something bigger than yourselves. You get to see the activities that are going on. And so we've learned, even though we we're in an environment where a lot of that happened virtually due to, uh, a lot of the emergency response.
Matthew Owenby: One of the things that we brought back very rapidly was that orientation process for new employees. We learned a lot, but also it just reinforced that we were right around focusing on relationship, focusing on communication, and focusing on building trust. We used a lot of that going into the pandemic, frankly.
Matthew Owenby: Our culture and our employees reacted, I believe, completely different from other organizations that maybe didn't have that trust, maybe didn't have that engagement, maybe wasn't used to seeing me on video every single week saying, okay, here's what we're doing now. Here's what we're planning on for next week, and y'all, when we figure it out, we'll be right back here and, and pulling y'all together to tell you what we know.
Nicole Alvino: Yeah, it's back to the basics, that foundation of trust, consistent communication, showing that you care and, and have empathy. So I, you know, in, in moments of challenge and crisis, it's about. Going back to those basics, and again, you had built up so much trust over time that your people, it did. It's not like you had to invent it overnight.
Nicole Alvino: You had that already. And so it was probably just more of a, a safe haven and then really reinforced everything that you would put into building the culture.
Matthew Owenby: Well, and you know, one of the ways you can measure why this culture matters is we didn't experience the effects of the great resignation.
Matthew Owenby: People hung on with us. I mean, our attrition rate didn't change at all. You might recall it was chaos back then. And it was, everybody's quitting and moving on and, you know, everything was going virtual and, and I, I think there was a portion of the, those people that were like, well, I don't have anything to lose here, so I'm gonna move on and go to greener.
Matthew Owenby: Pastor, we didn't experience that. And of course that, I think that was from years of building up trust and competence with employees doesn't happen overnight.
Nicole Alvino: No, it doesn't. It doesn't at all. I love that story. It does sum up exactly what Affleck has built. So now switching, we call this podcast Cruising Altitude since it's kind of at cruising at 30, 35,000 feet.
Nicole Alvino: And for me personally, that's where I get moments of clarity and perspective. I'm on planes a lot. What is the place where you get that sense of clarity and perspective?
Matthew Owenby: It's gotta be fitness. The strangest things happen. I mean, this morning I was in the gym and I thought, those are two bills that I forgot to pay.
Matthew Owenby: I remember getting them out of the mailbox on Monday and I had completely forgotten about 'em. So I get all of my clarity out of high intensity workout moments, which can be very distracting. I try and keep a little notepad close so I can remember all the little details about my life, but it's almost, nearly always during exercise.
Nicole Alvino: I love that. That's so great. And then one thing I like to always ask so our listeners can take your wisdom with them. What is one thing that you always do and what is one thing that you never do?
Matthew Owenby: Hmm. One thing I always do is. I try and attempt to put me into a another person's position, and one thing I never do is match another person's emotions.
Matthew Owenby: So if I'm dealing with a person that is sad, I'm not sad. If I'm dealing with a person that's angry, I'm not angry. So I try and not be pulled into an emotional situation. It's fine for people to be emotional around me. But I never try and match another person's emotions.
Nicole Alvino: Yeah, I love that. Well, it's, you are such, such a great leader and obviously leading a big part of the culture and the outcomes at Aflac.
Nicole Alvino: So thank you so much for joining us, Matthew. And then how can people get in touch with you if they want to ask more questions or continue the conversation?
Matthew Owenby: I'd love that. I'm very, very good at getting back to email, so if you want to catch me, the best way to get me is my first initial, which is M, and my last name, which is spelled O-W-E-N-B-Y at aflac.com.
Matthew Owenby: I'm happy to have additional conversations with anyone.
Nicole Alvino: Super. Well, thank you so much for joining us. It was such a a wonderful conversation. Thank you for having me.
Producer 3: Thank you for listening to this episode of Cruising Altitude. This episode is brought to you by Firstup, the company that is redefining the digital employee experience to put people first and lift companies up.
Producer 3: By connecting every worker everywhere with the information that helps them do their best work. Firstup has helped over 40% of the Fortune 100 companies like Amazon, AB InBev, Ford, and Pfizer, stay agile and keep transforming. Learn more at firstup.io.