The Hush Collaborative is saying the loud part quietly.

Born at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the female-owned Minneapolis-based firm approaches consulting with a community organizing mindset, encouraging companies to slow down, listen and put their people first.

It's all about promoting voices that traditionally go unheard, including clients themselves. The Hush Collaborative serves, as strategy principal Lauren Buckley puts it, "midmarket, middle of the country companies that are either on the verge of or experiencing incredible growth and want to be able to sustain it" without burning out their employees — or losing them altogether.

The key, she says, is building community rather than relying on outdated ideas of "workplace culture."

It can be a counterintuitive approach but one that employees are hungry for even as many employers return to pre-pandemic business as usual.

"People are different now. You can't just give them a pizza party and check it off the list," strategy principal Allie Fendrick said. "We have to kind of reinvent the way that the community is built within an organization entirely."

In an interview edited for clarity and length, Buckley, Fendrick and operations principal Kate Meehan share more about how Hush is changing work.

You officially launched in 2021, when the nature of work was in flux. What's the back story?

Buckley: We had the ability to be in control of our time in a different way, and so the reality is, we all were working full-time jobs while we started this business, and without the pandemic, that would never have been possible.

We got to a point where, like so many people, we were frustrated by the amount of energy and effort we were putting in, we were seeing our colleagues put in, and we were seeing our clients put in specifically on strategic initiatives, and then watching all of that energy, all of those resources, all of the money and all of the time continue to end in failed attempts at actually changing how we were going to achieve the goals that were set out for us. We kept asking for the opportunity to try a different way of collaborating and building strategy together instead of having it be a siloed process and that was met with a lot of pushback. What the pandemic enabled us to do was put that idea into practice with a client that was ready to do things differently.

Why Hush?

Fendrick: What we've often said is that in order to do strategic work, you have to quiet the noise around you because a lot of times people are moving at an incredibly fast pace, especially in business. It's always reaction-driven, and no one is stopping to actually take the time to think through what they want for their future, how their current pace is going to get them there.

Buckley: We're very feminine-economy focused. The masculine, especially American capitalism, I would say, defaults to listening to the loudest voice in the room. Our point of view is leadership looks like being a person who's willing to say, "I don't know." And we also believe that real ambition has to come from asking for help. It's not about being right.

What does feminine economy mean to you?

Meehan: It's a principle that centers in abundance mindset and reminds us that it's best if we're distributing our resources in an abundant way, in a way that actually takes care of everybody and supports people. It's also the notion that our resources are finite, and we have to be very thoughtful about how we use them, because they do run out. So it's about how and where we spend time, money and energy as a business, how that goes back to the community or doesn't. Our money, who we work with — it all matters.

Many pandemic work changes are now receding: de-emphasizing DEI, returning to offices. Did you anticipate this?

Buckley: What we know, and what I think everyone knows, is systems are very difficult to change. And most businesses are running on a system. What we also know is most businesses are made up of people, and people resist change. And so there's a lot of reasons why we're defaulting back to basically what has made, depending on your opinion, our economy the envy of the world for hundreds and hundreds of years. But we're also not really thinking about the fact that the Industrial Age is not going to be the future of how our capitalist society runs.

It doesn't surprise us that people are defaulting to what they know and what they've done before, and in some cases it's not bad. We would all agree there is power when you get into a physical room with each other. It cannot be replicated digitally, sometimes. And so asking people to come back to the office is not necessarily a negative. Mandating it is, because it doesn't work for everybody.

Employee experience is the No. 1 indicator of customer experience, and customer experience is the No. 1 indicator of profit.

What do employees want from employers?

Fendrick: I think employees want to be treated like humans at work. I don't think they know what that means yet, but it's more autonomy, more flexibility, being rewarded for their work vs. just being potentially discarded.

Buckley: Actually understanding and feeling the impact they have. I think that's the piece that employees have signaled very clearly, that they want to understand the purpose, they want to understand how it connects to their role and their day-to-day job, and they want to be able to give feedback, receive feedback and have change actually occur in those areas.

The reality is most leaders, their tenure is 18 months to two years. You can't expect a leader to be able to have this kind of impact in that short period of time. A huge part of this is we make up the timelines: We have to believe there is time, and we have to give people the time to actually have impact, and that's the piece that I think leaders are still really digging their heels in about is it has to be faster, it has to be shorter, it has to be more money.

How do you differentiate community from culture?

Buckley: Organizational culture became popular in the 1980s. And so first and foremost, it's really interesting that companies have had to innovate in every other way but this one. And I would also argue that based on burnout, turnover, anxiety, depression, all those things, the reality is it's also not working.

Culture is a massive thing. When you think about culture, it is not something that is easily changed or easily adapted. In fact, culture usually requires assimilation, it requires you to fit in.

The reason we think community is the solution is when you think about community, community is made up of generations of people. Community is made up of people who don't always agree. Community is made up of holding each other accountable. Community is saying, "We want to achieve this thing, and we need to do it together."

What does that look like in practice?

Buckley: We always start with values, and we talk about them as drivers of behavior. So for example, if you currently have values that are stated, and they often are, in the abstract, we focus on, "How do these things actually impact the way your leaders treat each other? How does this apply when a strategic partner does something that is outside of the agreements that you have? What does it look like when a customer is having an issue with a product or service? What does it look like when an employee is experiencing something within the walls that should not be happening?"

If you don't have a decisionmaking protocol that is attached to your values, they are pretty toothless.