EP 23: Designing for Scale, Delivering with Care: How Talent Ops Work at Scale
In this episode, Martijn Feikens, Head of Global Talent Operations at ING, shares how talent operations actually work inside a large, regulated, global organization. We talk about scale, complexity, stakeholder management, decision-making in matrix structures, and why people remain the only asset that does not depreciate. Timecodes: 02:10 Martijn’s role and global scope 04:40 Why global banks are complex organizations 07:30 Consensus culture and decision-making challenges 11:50 Employer brand as a strategic lever 13:40 Technology, regulation, and risk aversion 16:05 How to decide what is worth pursuing 18:10 Stakeholder management at scale 22:30 Why simplicity matters in leadership communication 26:30 Designing for scale, delivering with care 28:10 The five OKRs guiding Talent Operations 29:50 Leadership conversations at senior level 31:40 Why slow does not mean ineffective 33:30 Learning stakeholder management over time 35:40 Global standards versus local needs 36:40 Looking ahead to 2026 38:10 Why people are the only asset that doesn’t depreciate ___________________________ Connect with us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/matchr/ Get in touch with us: https://www.matchr.io/who-we-are/contact/ ____________ Connect with Martijn Feikens: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martijnfeikens/ Connect with Adriaan Kolff: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adriaankolff/ ___________________________ RSS feed: https://media.rss.com/leaders-in-talent/feed.xml
Transcript
[00:00:58] Adriaan: Ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to another episode of the Leaders in Talent Podcast. And for many months, I’ve been courting Martijn Feijkens to be a guest on the podcast. And of course, he said yes quickly, but given the scope, size, and responsibility of his work, it took a few months to find the right date. Martijn is the Head of Global Talent Operations at ING. He is currently responsible for the global delivery of recruitment, learning, international mobility, and travel operations, leading an organization that functionally has over 200 employees across the globe, across different business units, in a global organization of over 65,000 people. Martijn, thank you so much for taking the time to be a guest on this podcast. And to start off, I would really like you to give our listeners a little bit more perspective on what it means to be Head of Global Talent Operations at ING, one of the largest banks in the world.
[00:02:10] Martijn: Oh, first off, thanks a lot for having me, Adriaan. Pleasure to be here.
[00:02:14] Adriaan: Yeah.
[00:02:15] Martijn: So what’s it like? Yeah, that’s a good question. And to be honest, one of the largest global banks in the world, I don’t think we’re that. I think we definitely are one of the largest European banks, but definitely not one of the largest banks in the world. There are definitely other banks that are a lot bigger than we are. Though, to be fair, ING does have a balance sheet of over a thousand billion, which is quite a bit.
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[00:03:16] Adriaan: Yeah.
[00:03:17] Martijn: What’s it like? Yeah. So I am responsible for four areas that, at first sight, might not seem very connected. So it’s recruiting, learning, international mobility, travel, and all operations. So at first glance, yeah, you can see the recruiting, you can see learning and people development, and hiring the right people, and making sure that they travel to the right places and do so safely. And also making sure that we have the international opportunities for them, but also for ING to have the best talent in the right place. So what I usually say is that what we do as a team is enable the flow of talent across ING to make sure we have the right people in the right place at the right time.
[00:04:06] Adriaan: And then what does that look like? Take us into your world, right? Take us into your, like, in terms of the impact, in terms of the size, in terms of the number of hires that you do with your team.
[00:04:23] Martijn: Yeah, so I have to say, even though I am in operations, I am of course quite far away from day-to-day practices. Yeah. And we have lots of teams, and functionally I have lots of teams in the different countries. So ING is active in over 40 countries.
[00:04:38] Adriaan: Yeah.
[00:04:40] Martijn: Some big, some small. And when you look at it from a recruiting point of view, I think in total at ING we have about 150 people working in recruitment. Yeah. Part of that is external staff because we have a big RPO partnership. Yeah. Part of that is internal people sitting in the countries doing the actual day-to-day work. I’m not really involved in all of that. Yeah. I am involved, of course, in setting the standards, in providing the direction, sometimes providing some strategic clarity, and providing priorities on what we want to work on. I have very regular catch-ups with all of the recruitment leads in all of the countries. Same, of course, on the learning side and on the international mobility side. Travel a bit less, because travel is more of an area where people can largely do it themselves. We have a clear booking system, and most of it is more about steering, providing management insights, and stuff like that.
[00:06:29] Adriaan: Yeah.
[00:06:31] Martijn: But it is, of course, a large scope. Yeah. And ING is a relatively complex organization. Relatively, because I can’t really compare anymore after nine years to any other organization. But in my consulting days, I did see quite a few other organizations, and this one does really stand out as complex. And it’s due to a few things. So one is that we are a matrix organization. Yeah. And we’re definitely not the only matrix organization. There are many more out there. But we sometimes do tend to complicate things, I would say. So in a matrix organization, you have your hierarchical lines, and you have your functional lines.
[00:06:42] Adriaan: Yeah.
[00:06:43] Martijn: We have that too. So I hierarchically am part of operations, the operations domain. My boss reports into our global COO of ING.
[00:06:52] Adriaan: Yep.
[00:06:53] Martijn: Functionally, I am part of HR. So I have two lines in there. But where it gets a bit more complicated sometimes is when I have colleagues in countries. They usually have those same types of structures. So one line hierarchically, one line functionally, but then usually there’s also a third line in there of reporting to global in some way or form. And sometimes that’s a formal line that’s drawn on a piece of paper in our organizational chart. Sometimes it’s informal, like I have in a lot of parts of my organization. But that then already creates three different types of reporting lines. And as you can imagine, that sometimes also creates three different types of priorities, and people pulling on others to move in the direction that they want.
[00:07:33] Adriaan: Yeah.
[00:07:34] Martijn: So that makes it pretty complex. And then the other aspect that makes ING maybe a little bit more complex than some of the other, mainly American banks, is because of what I would say our orange culture, which is a very big positive differentiator, because we generally have a very nice culture to work in. But we’re Dutch. Our headquarters are in the Netherlands, and those Dutch roots you can feel quite a bit throughout the organization. It’s also due to how ING has grown in the past, through mergers, acquisitions, buying other companies, but then still having those companies keep quite a bit of autonomy in how they operate. And then also on the Dutch side, we have our polder model, as we call it, where we sometimes try to find a little bit too much consensus before we actually move on.
[00:08:31] Adriaan: Yep.
[00:08:32] Martijn: And that is something that we still experience today in the culture. If there’s no clear top-down priority setting and decision-making, then the other way to get to decisions is by getting consensus from all of those different parties and all of those different countries. One wants to go right, another wants to go left, another wants to go through the middle, and another wants to go backwards.
[00:08:59] Adriaan: Yep.
[00:08:59] Martijn: So that makes the operating landscape and getting things done pretty tricky in general.
[00:09:09] Adriaan: And this is exactly something I would like to dive a little bit deeper into. I have a background at Unilever, so that’s where I started my career. At the time, a 120,000-people organization. And also a matrix organization. But by definition, the matrix organization changed every year in terms of who was reporting to what. And every time they changed the playing field in that way. When you talk about your role, with those four different domains and all those different reporting lines, how do you go about setting the agenda for your different teams? How do you actually make sure that things do happen in that consensus-type environment? Tell me a little bit more about what that means for you in your leadership role.
[00:10:02] Martijn: Yeah, so a couple of different things come to mind. One is always getting the right priorities. But with priorities, there also usually comes capacity and availability of resources. Because I can have whatever priority or proposal or project I want to do, but in a lot of cases, if I don’t have the people, let’s say it has an IT angle, which a lot of things do these days, and there’s no capacity to make development happen, or if we have, in some cases, 500 other requests for changes in our HR IT systems as well, then it’s sometimes really difficult to get that priority. And to actually get it, what I’ve so far always experienced is the need to come to a very clear case of what you are proposing and what the benefits are that it’s going to bring. And quite often, there needs to be some sort of cost-neutral or financial benefit in order to really make something work.
[00:11:21] Adriaan: Yep.
[00:11:22] Martijn: Because if it’s not there, then ultimately our cost base increases, and you hope to get some sort of non-financial benefit out of it. And in some cases, it’s worth it. For example, if we do some sort of effort on the recruitment side and it massively improves our employer brand, and somehow it becomes way easier for us to hire in certain markets where we’re relatively unknown.
[00:11:46] Adriaan: Yep.
[00:11:48] Martijn: But to actually get to those benefits, that’s of course super, super tricky.
[00:11:52] Martijn: So that’s always where it starts. And then ideally, within HR, we get priorities set and agreement from our global HR management team, who then say, yeah, this is indeed a good idea. We’re going to go for this. And this actually becomes a priority. We’re also going to communicate it to our sub-teams so that they actively work on this, and in some cases, get it incorporated into their individual targets to really make something happen. If you lack that, then it’s basically a best-effort thing to try to get people on board for whatever you’re trying to achieve, and to have them do that from their own time, from a business-as-usual perspective. And that basically means that we cannot invest any money into anything, but we can still drive improvements. So, for example, what probably every single company is doing these days is using GenAI or whatever LLM for job descriptions, because usually that thing does a better job than any human does. Exceptions aside. And that is definitely one of those efforts that you can do without any financial investment. Yeah. But then to make sure that everybody does it, and to do that at scale, and again taking the recruitment organization as an example where there are 150 people, how do we make sure that all 150 do it in the same way, with the same prompt, and get the same type of quality? That is sometimes pretty challenging, but still feasible to do in BAU time.
[00:13:35] Adriaan: And this is such a, like, just talk me through this particular example, right? Because from the outside, it’s like a prompt for a job description. How hard can it be?
[00:13:47] Martijn: To be honest, this one is pretty easy, because thankfully we do, as every ING employee, have access to Microsoft Copilot. Anybody can use it. So this was not a super difficult thing to do. But if you talk about any IT solution that needs to be integrated into our IT infrastructure and landscape, then it’s a completely different story. Yeah. Because then a couple of things come into play. We are in banking. It’s a very heavily regulated sector, and way more regulated in the EU than in the US. That’s one. Then, because of being a regulated business, we are quite risk-averse. And that means that I have to get a lot of different parties involved to get any sort of green light to move ahead with any sort of technology. And then two other things: we, together with a lot of other big global financial institutions, got fined a couple of years back for failing anti-money laundering practices. Yeah. And that has basically strengthened that risk culture even further. Yeah. While on the one hand it’s in the back of all of our minds as ING employees, because we put a heavy focus on it and it’s a very important point, at the same time, because it’s such a heavy focus, any due diligence we need to do before we can actually move ahead is so heavy that even signing a new contract could sometimes take up to six months. Yeah. Start to finish after we say, yeah, now we want to contract this party. And then six months later, we have a signed contract, and then we still need to start implementation. And you can already hear what that means for throughput time. So any new initiative that you want to pursue, you very quickly fall behind competition sometimes, because others are able to move more quickly than we are.
[00:16:03] Adriaan: Yeah. Hey, and how do you then decide this is worth pursuing, chasing? Because there’s new technology constantly coming up, right? And everyone promises one thing and another. How do you prioritize what you want to put your name behind and really drive, and get all the stakeholders involved? What’s your decision-making framework?
[00:16:27] Martijn: Yeah, that is a tricky one. So I don’t really have a clear decision-making framework there. Yeah. But I heard this, I think, nice quote from Josh Bersin a while back at Unleash in Paris, where he said that indeed there’s new technology almost every single day, every single week. So what you buy today is sometimes outdated in 12 months’ time. And therefore, your most important capital as a bank becomes that thing that doesn’t depreciate. It’s your people. So anything that either helps our people, but to be honest, also sometimes reduces our reliance on people and manual work, that for me always gets priority over the more non-financial or intangible benefits that something brings.
[00:17:25] Adriaan: And then from your position, right, because especially leading such impactful teams, when you decide on something and say, this is what we’re going to pursue, you need to get a lot of ducks into the same row. How do you communicate that? And I love that you started at the beginning. It’s like, how do all of these tie together? It’s like, we are the talent flow in the organization, and I could immediately visualize that. Is that something that you are constantly doing and reminding people of, in terms of the vision you have for the different teams? Tell me a little bit more about how you do that.
[00:18:08] Martijn: So I think there are two aspects here. So one is getting all the ducks in a row. Yeah. And then the other is more the storytelling around any initiative and why it’s so important to all get in the same row and maybe also start rowing together.
[00:18:25] Adriaan: Yeah.
[00:18:25] Martijn: So if we first get into the different ducks, it really comes back to the risk averseness of our organization. But I know that it’s a thing in banking in general and in financial services. So for any new initiative that I want to pursue, I need a bunch of people and departments. Yeah. And there’s basically a list. So I always need to align with compliance. I always need to make sure that our operational risk management colleagues are involved and sign off. I also always need to make sure that our information risk colleagues are involved. Of course, for most IT solutions, I need our IT architects. We need IT risk experts. We need our business control office to be on board. We need our data protection executives, so basically the internal HR party that’s responsible for data privacy, to be fully on board. Same for DPOs, and most obviously legal. And then once you’ve done most of these checkbox-type things, then of course we have all of our functional people. So on, for example, the learning side of things, we have a lot of people working in learning at ING, and those are always very important stakeholders to bring along and take along.
[00:20:19] Adriaan: Yeah.
[00:20:19] Martijn: And then you get more into the storytelling of what you are trying to do. How does that make sense for us as ING? How does that make sense for our employees? How does it hopefully also make sense from a financial perspective? And that is sometimes lots of informal coffees and lots of chats to get all of those people on board behind the initiative that you’re trying to push or pitch.
[00:20:24] Adriaan: So it’s first almost like the one-on-ones, the meeting before the meeting, yeah, and getting people to understand.
[00:20:31] Martijn: Definitely. And sometimes it goes almost beyond that. Again, dependent on how big the initiative is and how much we want to pursue it. But sometimes, to make a difficult initiative happen, especially when some people might be against it, you don’t sit with those people directly. Instead, you ask someone who is in favor of the initiative and has a good relationship with a stakeholder who is against it. You ask them, hey, can you sit with this person informally? Can you have a coffee? Can you mention this topic and say it’s a good idea? And do that informal push to get stakeholders moving. Then, once they’re in a more open mindset and you sit together, you can pitch your idea. And then, if you want to be a bit nasty afterwards, you send a recap email saying, hey, we talked about this and that, and all of a sudden it becomes a bit formal.
[00:21:33] Adriaan: Yeah.
[00:21:33] Martijn: But we don’t do that last piece too often. Yeah. It’s very easy to make some enemies using that.
[00:21:38] Adriaan: Yeah. No, I can totally understand that. So that’s the first part, getting the ducks in a row, right?
[00:21:45] Martijn: Yes.
[00:21:45] Adriaan: Let’s say people are aligned in terms of communication, right? And the reason this is front and center is that we’re scaling rapidly as an organization. And I noticed for me, as the CEO and founder of Matchr, that I actually need to start communicating in a much clearer and more consistent way in terms of where we’re going. Before, I could do that one-on-one because of the size of the organization. But now we’re passing over a hundred people in a very short period of time, and I don’t know everyone personally anymore. Right? So I really need to make that step. I can only imagine what that must look like for you in your position. And also, if you want to change something, you need to get this massive oil tanker moving. Even a tiny bit of movement can take a long time. So how do you do that?
[00:22:36] Martijn: Yeah, it starts with, for me at least, writing down the ideas and what you’re trying to do in a very clear, easy, and simple way.
[00:22:46] Adriaan: Yeah.
[00:22:47] Martijn: Because if I try to do something and I can’t get my grandmother behind the idea I’m trying to pitch, then what I’m trying to do is just complicate it.
[00:22:58] Adriaan: Yeah.
[00:22:58] Martijn: And sometimes you need to make it as simple as something that a five-year-old can understand, to really make your story land. And also make sure that your story lands time and time again, because just mentioning something once will not do anything. I took a course in university once on change management, where there was a quote from John Kotter.
[00:23:25] Adriaan: Yeah.
[00:23:25] Martijn: And here I paraphrase quite loosely. This is where he said, if you think you’ve communicated something enough, then multiply it by ten times.
[00:23:38] Adriaan: Yeah.
[00:23:39] Martijn: And then you’re close to it. And I sometimes try to apply that consciously as well, to really repeat the same message time and time again. And ideally also reinforce that through other presentations. So for example, we recently had a team restructuring. And after that team restructuring, we did a nice exercise to come up with what we now stand for as a team and what we want to be known for. And I actually came up with a team tagline.
[00:24:09] Adriaan: Yep.
[00:24:10] Martijn: So that’s for our COO people team. So people operations team, basically.
[00:24:16] Adriaan: Yep.
[00:24:16] Martijn: And our tagline is “Design for scale and deliver with care.” And that tagline, for example, is repeated in every single presentation, in almost every single meeting that we do. And that really reinforces that thinking, and especially that scalable thinking, in a lot of people’s minds and hopefully, ultimately, also in their behaviors. Because, like I said at the beginning, a lot of our countries have quite a bit of autonomy. Yeah. And they sometimes, in decision-making, can say, no, I don’t want to do this. But by reinforcing that construct of scalability and doing what’s best for the company in its entirety, rather than what’s best for a specific country that has 8,000 people, you need to think what’s best for ING and not what’s best for our specific group of employees. And we reinforce that through these types of things by repeating the same message time and time again.
[00:25:28] Adriaan: Hey, and Martijn, when you sit down with your team, is it you leading that workshop and getting to this tagline? Do you have external trainers, or is it your team leading that? How do you get to that outcome?
[00:25:43] Martijn: Yeah. This was done with a lot of external facilitation.
[00:25:47] Adriaan: Yeah.
[00:25:47] Martijn: So external in two parts. First, external from the team. We have some actual consulting teams within ING that help parts of the organization go through reorganizations and come up with stronger new organizations than the ones they went into.
[00:26:06] Adriaan: Yeah.
[00:26:07] Martijn: But also external help from more coaching-type profiles and leadership coaches. Yeah. They help us through the transition and really reinforce the thinking and the messaging and things like that.
[00:26:25] Adriaan: Is this something that you also do looking forward to 2026, that you have a theme or that you communicate, like, hey, this is what we want to achieve in 2026?
[00:26:36] Martijn: Yeah, I wouldn’t say so concretely what we want to achieve in 2026. Yeah. But we have set, for our bigger people operations team, some very clear objectives. And we’ve come up with five clear OKRs that we want to be working on and that we also have clearly defined results for in 2026. So we do something to elevate employee experience. Yeah. We do something to empower data-driven decisions, because we as HR are sitting on a lot of people data. Yeah. And we also have pretty good dashboards in making that data available. Yeah. Not just to HR business partners, but also to our line managers. And now we need to make sure that the decision-making is actually based on that data.
[00:27:31] Adriaan: Yeah.
[00:27:31] Martijn: Then we have a third one that’s about designing for both global and local, and delivering for scale, so that anything, any new initiative that we do is actually scalable across all of our countries and across all of our employees. We have something focused on making sure that everybody grows and learns and develops themselves, and that there’s a real focus on that. And lastly, and this won’t surprise you, it’s about being compliant and being effective, to make sure that we don’t run any major risks and things like that.
[00:28:04] Adriaan: I love how you’re able to articulate all five of them without blinking.
[00:28:13] Martijn: I—
[00:28:13] Adriaan: Cheat it. Is this something for you as a leader? Do you constantly hammer this down with your team and with your direct reports? Do you sit down with them, or how do you go about inspiring that messaging, but also keeping clear what our most important OKRs are?
[00:28:29] Martijn: So what we do is that anything new we propose, and now we’re indeed going to set the priorities for 2026, we’ve already set them, but every single one of those priorities is linked back to one of those five OKRs. So later on, we can also structure and show everything that we’re doing and how it leads back to our overarching objectives, and how that’s hopefully going to lead to results later down the line.
[00:29:00] Adriaan: How do you do that in your one-on-ones? Because the people that report to you, those are managers, right? They manage teams. You’re quite far removed from the actual day-to-day recruitment or the learning and development training, et cetera. So what are the conversations that you’re having with the people reporting directly to you?
[00:29:23] Martijn: It’s usually about this type of structured thinking. In general, I don’t think people need a lot of hand-holding. But where I usually can help a bit further is making sure that whatever we do is very clearly structured. Also, what we propose to do is very clearly structured, not only to those objectives and how they lead to results, as I just mentioned, but also that for every single thing we come up with, or every good idea that we have, we’re super clear on what we want to do with that idea, what impact it should have, and what business outcomes it should ultimately lead to. So if you do it that way, and ideally structure it even further, you can always trace it back to, I’m doing this because in ten steps it’s going to lead to this and this business outcome. And that’s where I try to help.
[00:30:21] Adriaan: When it comes to time for you, right, because maybe some of our listeners are thinking, oh my goodness, it takes six to twelve to eighteen to twenty-four months before a small piece of technology is implemented. This sounds way too slow and not exciting at all. What is the excitement about your role, the work, the size? Tell us a little bit more about that other side of the story.
[00:30:48] Martijn: Yeah, it’s a good question. And you could also rephrase it as, what’s actually keeping you in that job? And to be honest, while things indeed don’t move very quickly—
[00:31:03] Adriaan: Yeah.
[00:31:04] Martijn: —it’s usually the things that we do, we do very well.
[00:31:08] Adriaan: Yeah.
[00:31:10] Martijn: And that is one thing that I quite like. Of course, you do need to like the whole stakeholder management piece, because if you don’t, then you’re really not going to thrive here, or at least not in some of the more senior roles where you need to do very careful, clear stakeholder management. Yeah. But for me personally, what’s keeping me here is that we can still always improve. We always have new challenges to solve, and we always have new problems to fix. And that is what I enjoy. And ideally, also structuring things behind it or alongside it, and making sure that whatever we come up with really works, that we implement it really well, and that it actually delivers the results that we envisioned at the start.
[00:32:01] Adriaan: Yeah. Martijn, have you always been a good stakeholder manager? Has it been something that you’ve grown into over time? And for people who are on that journey, do you have some things that have worked well for you in the past?
[00:32:20] Martijn: Good question. I think the answer can only be no. I don’t think you can ever be a very good stakeholder manager from the start.
[00:32:29] Adriaan: Yeah.
[00:32:31] Martijn: But you learn, right? It’s a skill that you need to practice and develop. It’s the same as presenting to a big audience. I myself am naturally a relatively introverted type. I can still do a pretty good presentation, not because I like doing it, but because I’ve practiced it so many times. And when you practice, you become good at it. And once you become good at it, something also starts to become enjoyable. And that’s also the case with stakeholder management.
[00:33:14] Adriaan: Yeah.
[00:33:15] Martijn: And what I personally always try to apply, and this also happens at home in our household—
[00:33:23] Adriaan: Yeah.
[00:33:15] Martijn: —my wife is a clinical psychologist—is reverse psychology. Sometimes I screw something up, and my wife asks, if it were the other way around, how would you feel about it? And applying that same type of thinking, that same type of perspective, to stakeholder management works exactly the same way. So if I’m trying to push a new learning solution from global to a country, and I put myself in their shoes, I might think, oh, here’s that guy again from global headquarters, from the ivory tower, saying we need to do this. Why the hell would I do this? How does this benefit me? And by doing that structured thinking ahead of time, and having a clear story about how it benefits them, you can get into good conversations and hopefully understand what they’re concerned or worried about, what they like, and what they don’t like.
[00:34:23] Adriaan: So make it all about them, what’s in it for them. Understand what their needs and wants are, and see if you can take them on that journey.
[00:34:31] Martijn: Yeah. And of course, always reinforcing that message about what’s in the best interest of the company as a whole.
[00:34:41] Adriaan: And as a company as a whole, because that sometimes means they need to work with something that might not work for them.
[00:34:52] Martijn: At the moment, we’ve done a big Workday rollout over the last couple of years. So almost all of our countries are now on Workday. We’re really starting to see the benefits of that, because everybody is on the same system, all data is in the same place, et cetera. But for example, we’re doing another implementation at the moment for another country where they currently have a custom ATS, an applicant tracking system. So they need to say goodbye to something that was custom-built for them, that works exactly the way they like to work, and now they need to get on board with a global standard that, in the grander scheme of things, makes sense. But for them, specifically for that country, it can feel like a big step back.
[00:35:37] Adriaan: Yeah.
[00:35:37] Martijn: And then indeed, you sometimes just need to convince them that it will make sense. Maybe not in six months’ time, but it will make sense in a year from now. And ultimately, even though for that specific part it might feel like a step back for you, if you look at the whole, it’s going to be a big improvement for that country as well.
[00:36:02] Adriaan: Is there sometimes also a case of, sorry, this just has to happen?
[00:36:08] Martijn: Definitely. Oh, definitely. That sometimes also happens. We always try to have a good eye for local nuances, and definitely for local regulations, legal constraints, and local laws. But if that’s not applicable, we do sometimes say, this is just how it works, and this is how we’re going to do it.
[00:36:39] Adriaan: Yeah. Martijn, we’re a couple of hours away from your Christmas break as we’re recording this podcast. Anything in particular for 2026 that stands out that you’re excited about looking forward to?
[00:36:57] Martijn: Oh yeah, that’s a tricky question. I’m very much looking forward to seeing how we can further help our employees develop themselves and stay relevant in the labor market. We talked briefly about technology moving super fast these days. But to be very honest, I think technology has always moved relatively fast, and change has always been a constant. But to really help and give our employees the tools to develop themselves, and hopefully also instill that mindset throughout the wider business, and maybe even with our senior management, that this is important and will become even more important in the future. People are your most important capital, and they are something that will never depreciate.
[00:37:55] Adriaan: Yeah. And also to quote Alex Hormozi, investment in human capital is the biggest investment you can make in terms of bang for your buck, if you look at it that way. So I fully agree. Martijn, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me and for sharing a bit more about what your world looks like. I find it absolutely fascinating. I remember a couple of months ago when we spoke at a leadership event and some of our partners presented different technology solutions, and you were speaking to them and saying, okay, but how does this really drive efficiencies and cost? It all looks nice. And that was the moment I thought, I really want to have you as a guest on the podcast. Because you explained that if we go for something, it’s going to take so much work to get it implemented. So I really want to know what this looks like. And you also asked all of our other senior leaders at the event, what is everyone really doing at scale? And I loved that, because you were really probing. And then you see quite quickly that behind the shiny presentations and the “we’re doing everything with AI” narrative, it’s actually very minimal.
[00:39:17] Martijn: Yeah, indeed. If you start to probe, then the actual scalability part of it is sometimes a bit lacking.
[00:39:24] Adriaan: Yeah.
[00:39:24] Martijn: But thanks a lot for having me on the show.
[00:39:27] Adriaan: Awesome.