How Thriving Employees Build Win-Win Workplaces with Dr. Angela Jackson

When you think about the literal millions and billions of dollars that we are investing in what we'd say employee benefits and employee thriving, you have the opposite of where we know. Research says that 52% of American workers feel that their employers don't care about them. So with all of this investment, all of this listening, you got 52% of employees saying they still don't feel heard. And so if I'm sitting in the C suite and I'm spending these dollars, I would think it's time for me to think how do we spend them in a more effective way.

Welcome to the Happiness Squad Podcast. Your weekly dose of practical tips and inspirations to help you operate at your fullest potential by integrating the science of flourishing into how you live, work and lead. In each episode we will share insights, tips and stories from leading experts, company executives and flourishing solution providers that you can implement right away to make happiness your competitive edge and find more success, joy, health, love and meaning in everything you do. Hello friends. I'm Ashish Kothari, the CEO of Happiness Squad and welcome to our podcast where we share practical tips to make flourishing your competitive edge and help you deliver high performance and results powered by well being and not at its expense. I'm on a mission to help 1 billion people not just experience happiness, but really use it as a tool to unlock their fullest potential. If you're interested in learning how you can make happiness your competitive edge, make sure to follow me on LinkedIn and subscribe to our newsletter@happinesssquad.com today I'm thrilled to be joined by Dr. Angela Jackson, a leading voice in the future of work and founder of Future Forward. Dr. Jackson has worked with entrepreneurs, Fortune 100 companies and policymakers to shape the evolving landscape of labor markets and today she's here to share insights from her groundbreaking research and upcoming book the Win Win Workplace How Thriving Employees Drive Bottom Line Results. In this episode we are going to explore how thriving employees can truly drive superior bottom line success and how organizations can harness the nine pillars Angela created for creating sustainable and human centered workplaces. We dig into the importance of centering employee voice, shifting leadership mindsets and fostering an ownership culture. We explored how the unique opportunities small and medium businesses have in creating engaged workplaces and discussed the barriers that prevent organizations from fully realizing the benefits of this Win Win culture. If you are curious how to align employee well being with business growth, this is the episode for you. Let's get started. Hi dear Angela, so lovely to have you with us on the happ Squad podcast.

And can I just say that I'm happy to be on the Happiness podcast. Thank you for the invitation.

Look, you know, you made such an impression on me almost a year ago when I heard you speak about your really unbelievable research around this notion of a Win win workplace. And in fact, you have a book coming out shortly, the Win Win Workplace How Thriving Employees Drive Bottom Line Success. Share a little bit around that research and your findings and the main message, Angela, in your book.

So when we think about the Win Win Workplace, How Thriving Employees Drive Bottom line results, what we wanted to pick up on was a line of research that I started almost five years ago and really understanding what employee practices could have a correlation to bottom line and firm level outputs. And what we did was I interviewed 1200 companies, small, medium and large, and there became a reoccurring theme. This especially came to light during the pandemic where we could point to a practice and the employer or leader could say, we've been doing this and this is what we're seeing. And it was fascinating to see that because many times when we talk about investing in employees, that's always seen as an expense. No one talks about the business case for doing that globally and really taking it down a layer to individual, individual practices. You know, it's more of it's the right thing to do, it's the moral thing to do. And we've always done it, we should do it right. And so I was really fascinated by this group of leaders and companies that had really shifted their language around this. They had shifted it to we're doing these set of things and we're seeing these actual outputs, which makes us want to do more of these things.

Yes.

In fact, we're not seeing it as an expense, we're seeing it as like a revenue generator. And for me, as I began to map that over these 1200 companies, I know that they had an inkling around that. And so what I wanted to do with this latest research that came out this year was around taking that framework, which we call the Win Win Workplace framework, and the nine practices, and laying that over the Fortune 500 companies to see which of these companies were implementing one or more of these practices and to see if we could have a correlation to financial outputs. So, for example, reduction in turnover, increased productivity, increased assets, increased shareholder price. And so in collaboration with my institute, Future Forward Institute, with Just Capital and also Burning Glass Institute, we took a qualitative and quantitative approach to this. So we looked at surveys, publicly available information. I talked to employees at These companies to understand their sentiments. You know, we looked at places like Glassdoor to really make meaning of what were companies saying that they were doing, how was that operationalized, but also how it was felt by employees. And then more specifically, what impacts did they have on financial outputs of the company.

Amazing. So what did you find?

Well, this is an exciting part of it when I think about that. So one is we always hear about the war for talent and how every business, small, medium and large, is facing that, and especially in this new world of work where expectations are very different. And so what we found was one strategy around centering employee voice that was present in all of the companies, even if they implemented another strategy. And we always hear things about voice. And we have 360 reviews, we have surveys. Put your ideas in this box, this feedback box. And what was so insightful around the companies that I looked at is they took that a step further and what that meant to me and what I gleaned from the employees and came up with this idea and definition around voice that employees have a say in the matters that matter most to them. And so typically, from a survey's perspective, we're surveying as a leadership what matters most to us. And so what happens when you flip that to understand first, what matters most to employees? What matters most to their ability to actually do their job and to ask for their voice in that. And there was one other key insight that I have to, like, double click on to share. It wasn't just the asking. What we heard was, we want to see how this is operationalized. And if it doesn't, we'd like to be brought into the thinking of why. And I think that that's a reasonable, reasonable offer. And I think it's one that leadership should really deeply think about. Because when you think about the literal millions and billions of dollars that we are investing in what we'd say, employee benefits and employee thriving, you have the opposite of where we know. Research says that 52% of American workers feel that their employers don't care about them. So with all of this investment, all of this listening, you got 52% of employees saying they still don't feel heard. And so if I'm sitting in the C suite and I'm spending these dol, I would think it's time for me to think, how do we spend them in a more effective way? And that's really going to again, how can we center what employees want? How can we pillar two was change the relationship with them. And so instead of it's a Parent, child, it's more of like peer to peer. Right. And it's really understanding that mutualistic benefit. So I say for my CEOs and I'm talking to them, it's a mind shift from my employees are there to serve me and to serve the business. For that leader to think at every level, how am I serving these employees so they can help. Right. With meeting the business outcomes and objectives.

Yeah. So Angela and I mean, look, I grew up in the field of operations at McKinsey. I spent 12 years of large scale transformations in manufacturing, procurement, et cetera. And it's really interesting. This is at the heart of the work we do. And it's not that, by the way, different for these leaders. It's just that when it comes to human flourishing and well being, somehow we have this almost two different approaches. So I'll give you an example of what you're highlighting around centering employee voices and a peer to peer relationship. I mean, this is the way operations transformations work, right? When we think about our physical assets, no CEO, no CEO will say to the employees, this is what I need you to do. We ask those frontline workers and those supervisors who are working with those physical assets, hey, what will help us increase efficiency? What will make this improve safety? What will increase the quality because they know it best. But somehow when it comes to our workplaces, we have these one size fits all, well being programs that we roll out. We spend so much money on it, and then the result is 50% of our employees feel that, you know, I'm not being heard. And so we do it in operations. And I think your invitation and through your work and your research to say, you know, there are companies who are actually changing it. It is a fundamental mindset shift and it's about giving the power back. You know, it's really enabling them to say, hey, what would you like to see? Where do you want this to go? So I love that, I love that part of what you're doing and I.

Love, I want to just say that I really appreciate what you're saying here. So, you know, I'm a professor at Harvard University. I lecture and teach on this and I use the business case model. And that's all about helping people make decisions and think like leaders. That's a skill when we think about the modern workplace, that we need people at all levels. It's not enough just to have a set of people that has information. We need to understand how that's up, down and across, really. And to your point, it is a mental Model shift. You know, I go back to, you know, Frederick Taylor and you think Taylorism and how this all started around work, right? It was like, I'm going to give you just enough information so you can do your job and do it really efficiently. And if I give you too much information, that could be a distraction because you can't handle all of that, right?

You cannot handle it. You should just stay in your lane.

You can't stay in your lane. And so I think about the shift, and that's in my writing a book, I call that really the Zero Sum Workplace. And we're thinking about that shift in mentality to saying, actually I understand that the better you are informed, the better you can think about how you do your job, how our goals are aligned beyond this vision statement. Bring me into the business planning. What are our objectives? Let me come back to you and say how in my seat, in my job, I can contribute to that and have people to begin to think about that. And that's what we call ownership culture. And that's one of the pillars in the framework and book. And ownership culture shows up in many ways. On one end, it's exactly what I described. Bringing employees at all levels into the thinking, taking time to update them, just like the CEO does to their board of directors, doing the shareholder calls. We never say they can't handle that. We expect that we need to give them the information and if we don't, we expect to be questioned on it. Right? When we're in those annual reports, why are we discounting our most closest shareholders, the ones that are operationalizing that? So it's a fundamental shift. And I share my own story of work. When I came into work, and I think about also my grandfather, we were hired to do one job at the beginning. And you do it really well. My grandfather worked at a Chrysler factory and he worked for Lee Iacocca. He loved Lee Iacocca. But what he did for over 40 years was he put doors on, on an automation line. And so no one ever came to him and said, what could we do to make you more efficient? Right? What type of training? What else do you see across the organization? He was just focused on putting doors on. So when he clocked out at 4:30, he was like, well, I did my number of doors. I don't know what Tom did, I don't know, you know, what Matt did, I did mine. And he went to sleep like he didn't know the correlation between how many doors he put on and how that would mean for sales, right? And revenue for the company for that year. And so I think in this moment we really need to give people more credit. And when talking about that employee ownership culture, it's having them have a stake and we have to inform them. And we see that businesses that do that have 10 to 15% higher revenue. So there's a direct correlation to this. And I think specifically for small and medium sized businesses, this could be a point of differentiation. When we think about the war for talent.

Absolutely. Especially when it's the small to medium businesses, that's what I get excited about. So one of the big areas we're trying to push on is like, I know the small medium businesses account for almost 50% of the GDP, 50% of employment. I mean, it is the backbone of our country. Right. They don't have the scale. In many cases it's hard to get capital, it's hard to attract, retain and develop talent. But what they have is agility. They have the benefit of size. Imagine if these practices could help them really arm their employees. I think we can turn them into Davids who can take down the Goliaths that are slow moving.

You're so right on this. I spoke to a thousand small and medium sized businesses a couple months ago at the Jim Moran Institute for Small Businesses. And I'll tell you the big question that they had as I talked to them. And the big worry, right, was this fear of becoming obsolete. How do we compete against Amazon, Burger King and others that are paying $25 an hour? And through my research, the biggest way is that they have the competitive advantage of proximity.

Yes.

So when you go and work for a large corporation, you know, I always say, you know, JPMorgan Chase or you could say Amazon, you know, I'm not going to meet Jamie Dimon if I'm at the front desk. Rarely. I don't know if I'll have an opportunity to be mentored by him, just by the sheer size of the organization. But if you're at a small or medium sized business, you do have that opportunity. I was at Indiana at a manufacturing company called Jergens. And the CEO there, he writes birthday cards to everyone, to their spouse, to their children, handwritten. At larger companies, you can't do that. But when you go back to that statistic of 52% saying, I don't feel like my employer cares about me, it's the small things that actually matter.

Yes.

The small and medium sized businesses can operationalize. You think about becoming an owner. Small and business size can actually bring them in a room. I was with another company called Stoneage. And they have an ownership culture, they give them all the information. Carrie Siggins, who is their CEO and said, you have to be humble as a leader and you have to be willing to be transparent and to be questioned. Which takes that humility and say that's okay. And that's again a paradigm shift of I'm the CEO, I'm the C suite, we know best to being humble enough to say we don't know everything. This is our best thinking, we're willing to listen and if we don't know, we can get back to you.

I love it. So when you look at the big companies, right, obviously in small companies, private companies, I think that is, we see a lot of this. Talk to me a little bit, Angela, from your research is what are the barriers towards operating in truly creating a win win workplace? Why isn't it happening? I mean, you know, when you step back and you think about this, it makes common sense, right? Give people the information, leverage their expertise, their creativity. Otherwise you clock out at 4:30, I'm done. You have, you know, you're literally operating with your hands behind, one hand tied behind your back. Why aren't more organizations doing so?

The big reason, and you started with this Ashish is really mental models. You know, a lot of us grew up in the old world of work where we said, you know, there was this, you know, the boss, you know, you come in before the boss, you stay after the boss, doesn't matter if you have any work that you come in so you can get face time. You have to be at the water cooler. You know, they feel like this is the only way that you can be mentored. And we're hearing a lot of that now with the return to office mandates. It's basically, this is the way work has been done. We were successful in the past at doing that and so that's why we're doing that. All that is true. But there's this great book, what Got yout Here Won't get yout There. We're having a generational shift in the workplace. The pandemic illuminated for us that there are different ways of doing work. And so now to retrench on that doesn't make logical sense to people. And so we have employees who are asking more questions, who said I was productive, I did the right thing. And now you're telling me to come in just because you said so, just because the downtown needs us so I can spend money on lunch when I'd prefer to put that in My savings. And so I think we really have to have a different relationship with employees. So that's one. The old world of work worked for many of us in leadership. And for those who didn't, myself included, I'm raising my head. I just put my head down. You think about Gen X. That's what we're supposed to do. We did it. We saw our parents move up. We saw people we respect move up in the organization. So you just kind of, you were quiet, you put your head down, you paid your dues. And now when we see this shift, we have this opening really in this moment to do things differently, to learn to be more. More humble. And so when you think about why people don't do this, I'll give you just another quick story. I was talking to Joe Nolan, who's the CEO of Eversource, an energy company that is based in Connecticut, and he goes, you know, I'm around my peers, other CEOs, and they're complaining about millennials and other generations. And, you know, if you meet Joe, he's a straight shirt. He says, you know, hey, I can't profess to understand them either, but I do understand that they're the majority of my workforce and they will be the majority. So I feel as a leader, it's my responsibility to understand them and to take seriously what they're sharing with me and to react with that, because we are only as good as they are happy and productive. And when you look at his numbers and his bottom line, he can give you examples of how these practices have been operationalized and what that return on investment looks like. And so that's a different case, right? It's a different skill set. What we're asking of our chros, of our business unit, we're actually saying instead of HR just being seen as an expense, something you just have to do something you do. Because we've always done it. We're saying actually we can be more sophisticated by this. We can actually measure it. We can actually have levers, which are the strategies in the book and in a report that we can pull to see what works for our company, we what doesn't work. But at the end of the day, we'll have a business rationale and case behind what we did, and we'll be able to communicate that to our employees at every level to make sure that they're bought in.

I love that for sure. I think it is a fundamental paradigm shift. Right? And I think the research that you and, you know, you are doing, I'm Familiar with Yan Emanuel's work, we're finding the same from Alex Edmonds. I was just before this, you know, talking to Kim Cameron and all of his amazing work at the center and Monica's work. You know, the science of flourishing. You know, we have all the data we need where this is not just, you know, sappy, feel good, do it, because you should be kind to people.

Yes.

If we are not integrating these and transforming our workplaces, I think we are actually not living up to our financial fiduciary responsibility either.

And we have to have that conversation that shifts the paradigm. And there are headwinds that we've both heard about that are coming that way. You have the SEC that is looking at human capital and how they're being treated and seeing that as material to disclosures and what I tell to clients in my research. Isn't it better to get ahead of that, to come up with your own framework for doing this and measuring it so that you know the data so you know what levers you can pull to improve those numbers because they can be improved? So that's a fundamental belief. Sometimes people say, well, if we listen, they're going to be unhappy anyway. How about we try listening in different ways and we measure that to see how happy are employees here? How happy are they with, you know, insert said benefit, insert said way of working. Can we tweak it? Does that data and number change? How do we connect the line? And this is why I feel like a lot of my work now is with COOs and also CFOs, because how do we do the work to come up with a calculation on how this directly impacts the business? We know it does, but a lot of companies are just not measuring at that level yet.

That's absolutely right. You also highlight, you know, when you talk about listening to employees, a lot of people say, yeah, we do employee engagement surveys. Yes, we listen. But what you are articulating is a very different kind of listening.

Absolutely. So when we say employee listening and employee voice, for us in this report, and what we saw across the companies is that the definition we have is employees have a say in the issues at work that matter most to them. And so that last piece that matter most to them is really key because one is we need to understand what matters most to them. If you think about the traditional benefits that we give people, that's one size fits all. And that's, again, one of the main pillars. Three is around reimagining benefits. You know, we say everyone should get a 401k, we'll do insurance, we'll do reimbursement from the gym and we go down this list and sometimes we'll offer food at work and we pat ourselves on the back. But when we deeply listen to employees, they might want something very different that could cost more or many times it's been less than it would cost in these generalized benefits. Now I'll give you an example. We were working for one case with the CEO of a fast casual restaurant and he was very excited because he had given every employee from the frontline access to 401k. They were contributing, but still the satisfaction of the employees were low. And he was like, I just don't understand why, you know, I would have killed for these type of benefits. If I was in their place, I.

Would have killed for these benefits. But I was killed.

I would have killed. And so me coming in from Harvard, you know, he's like, Dr. Jackson, does your research explain why this is? I said, well. And he goes, can you help me and you know, understand why this is? I was like, well, have you asked.

Them, have you asked them, have you.

Asked them about what benefits that they really need and want more? And so we end up doing a survey and doing that and what we found out was clear and there was some hard truth in that, right? And so when we tried to understand the perceptions around the 401k, specifically at the front line, you think fast casual, we heard from employees that, you know, my priority is putting, you know, food on the table. My priority is paying rent. My priority is getting to work and make sure my car is fixed to get to work.

Right?

I am caregiving for, as we think about the sandwich generation, my children and my parents. So I need a different type of benefit. And so what we glean from those insights, for example, is we gave employees the option that the money that we would contribute, we could still, the company could contribute that or they could use that funding for other benefits that employees said that they wanted. So a lot of those dollars shift to an emergency fund. So when life happens or accidents that with no excuse that someone could write in and talk about and apply for these emergency funds, that means a lot when you're talking about a frontline worker that spends over 26% of their after tax income on transportation. Getting to work is a huge issue when think about where I'm at in Boston, the cost of housing, to be able to have the American dream and maybe put a down payment on a house. We saw businesses actually in our reporting and case studies offering these as benefits. And what we saw on the other side was, you know, reduced amount of turnover. When you look at that same metric, does my employee care about me? We're going something from 52% saying that they don't to 83 plus percent saying they do. So these are major shifts. When you talk about turnover, when you talk about efficiency, when you talk about someone feeling that they have a stake in the company because they feel like the company has a stake in them. And that's a very different fundamental shift in, in the relationships we have at work.

Enjoying this episode. If you think someone you know could benefit from these insights, why not share the podcast with them right away? A quick share could make a big difference in someone's day. Thanks for spreading the happiness and being part of this happiness revolution solution with us. Absolutely. I love that example, you know, and it speaks very closely to. So one of the companies I deeply admire, I talked to their CEO, Safwan PayActive. Right. And this notion of. And I didn't realize till I spoke with him, I mean, this is how much of a, you know, if you look at most executives, if you look at most of us, you know, academics, consulting, where in the, we live in this space where we are actually so disconnected with the realities of majority of what people are dealing with, like really, I mean, that's it. We saw it in the pandemic research I was doing. I'm like, you're so removed. You actually don't know. You can try and be empathetic and think and come up with these benefits you think are going to help them, but you have no idea. So like this data, I mean, it's, you might know the exact statistic, but this notion that almost 50% of those who work, if they had to come up with $500 in a week to pay for emergency, they don't have it. They don't have it. And they would go to a payday loan to pay 20, 30%. And if we just made that available to them, that was the basis of PayActive. How can we let employees borrow from their own earnings that they have earned already?

That's exactly it. Right. And that they would be able to pay it back. And I'll give you an example. There's a company called Comp that does that, that gives that flexibility. But we saw during the pandemic, right? And I tell friends, I saw my colleagues who made six figures, who because of caregiving issues, because of the pandemic, could not be present at work. And so I said if that happened with Women with means and parents and men too, fathers. Imagine what was happening before with people who made $15 or $20 an hour for work. And so because there's that chasm that we've seen, the separation from CEO pay and C suite to some of the earlier workers mid workers, we have completely different live realities. And this became clear to me a few months ago. There was a New York Times article where there was a social worker in Washington and she was living in her car with her daughter and her dog experiencing homelessness. And each day she and housing insecurity, she would go into work and her job was to counsel others. And we have this world of work now where when we talk about that traditional work, not only was it just do your job, put your head down. It was also don't bring your personal life to work. We're paying you to only focus on work here. We've always known that that's a fallacy. You know, when you have a terminally ill parent at home, you might have been diagnosed with a health condition, you might be experiencing homelessness or to your point, some emergency. That all comes with us. It doesn't. It's not like there's this electronic veil that stops at the door. And so when we talk about a win win workplace and the case studies I saw in the book that's coming out in March is we are seeing more employees acknowledge that and build benefits around that. Also training what I call some may call frontline managers, I call them frontline leaders to recognize this. And when we talk about operationalization of this win win workplace managers are key. We know through all research how someone experiences the workplace is directly impacted by their manager. It doesn't matter how great the CEO is in the traditional world of work, we really never trained managers. We promoted managers because of their individual contribution. Were they really good at their job? We weren't really promoting or hiring people for how good they are at management. And so we. One low level that I've seen lever that I've seen companies small, medium and large do as I've seen this transformation take place over looking at these case studies of over 1500 companies is that there has been a real intention about training managers about people practices just like we train them around business operations. What does it mean to be a manager at insert name corporations? How not only what are our values and mission, how are they operationalized, how are they seen and felt, how are we then judged and assessed as managers? And that's also bringing them into this ownership culture. And that's key because again, if you look at a lot of mandates or a lot of proclamations that came in the last few years, you have CEOs go out and I've seen this. The latest one is around skills first hiring. And there's this movement to stop hiring for degrees, but really to place an emphasis on what skills can someone do whether they have a degree or not. It sounds amazing in theory, but how do you operationalize that? When we went and looked at the majority of companies who said they were going to do skills first hiring, when you look at their most recent hires, they all still have degrees. And the reason why that is a company can remove that requirement. But as a hiring manager, what am I screening for? Have you told me and brought me into that business case on why hiring in a different way is going to be better for efficiency, output, productivity, turnover. And that's the gap that we've missed. You know, we're so used to this, you know, traditional, like I said, zero sum as what I say you do that we have forgotten that to really have that transformative change, we have to bring people along and at all levels and really understand what's in it for them. When we say, listening to employee voice, you know, making changes and decisions that they have a say on what matters most to them, what matters most to a middle manager, how do we make them a frontline leader, what shifts and what information do they need, and how do we speak to what's most important to them? And so I think that's what we've missed in this kind of old traditional workplace that I think I see companies leading in this more modern win.

Absolutely. And friends, if you're listening right, Angela, what you're talking to is fundamentally we have a frozen middle. Right? We have a frozen middle and people always come about, we need to get rid of middle managers. They are getting in the way. No, they are frozen because one, we never upskill them and secondly, we just push. Right. And at the heart between strategy and execution is that middle layer.

Yes.

If we only help them learn how to get more from the teams they lead, rather than just tell them what to do and feel the pressure to just pass down. Right. That is a critical skill. And I think if we do that, I think we fundamentally increase thriving, get them involved in the solution, and through that we improve performance.

Right. And one other point I'd make with what I've seen with a set of companies too, they also made the realization that everyone's not going to be a manager, nor does everyone want. And we think about the traditional way of work, the way to get to promote it is to be a manager and to go up the ranks.

It's okay, you don't need to go.

Out, you don't need to go up. And so again, that's a reimagining, right? How people work in the workplace, how they can be best equipped to thrive again in service of, you know, the business thriving. Right? And so it's a different way of how we promote, how we hire, how we engage in terms of transparency and really bringing people into the thinking and just mutual relationships in work. And so it's exciting for me because there's a set of employees that are leading on this, and I've interviewed them. You know, when I look at the nine pillars in the framework, most of them through line are doing that employee deep employee listening. And then they're operationalizing with several strategies in the framework, and that's strategies two through nine. And one that.

Can you talk a little bit about them, Angela?

Yeah, absolutely. So the pillar that undergirds the nine elements is centering employee voice. So making sure that employees have a say in the things that matter most to them. And that's being operationalized from there. If you look at strategies two through nine, that saying you go in and you think about what is the problem or practice that an employer is seeing, or what do they see could be an opportunity. And so one is, we talked about a little bit about this is around reimagining and really thinking about how we have mutualistic relationships. So that's changing from that kind of, you know, parent child to peer to peer. I'm going to bring you in, we're going to relate differently. I'm going to see you as a person that you're coming in with things that are going at home. And I understand it's to my mutual benefit to make sure that those are addressed so that you can be in a mindset to work, right? And seeing the interconnectivity of that. The third that we talked about was the reimagining benefits, right? Again, instead of saying, we know what's best for you, and it's cookie cutter, how are we on a continuum to give the flexibility to workers that they need? And a lot of that is, you know, people say, well, you know, that's giving them too much power. And, you know, what if that goes off the rails? What we've seen with that is in leaders that are actually able to have the boundaries, right? They are very transparent about what they say, what they can and what they cannot do. And what we're seeing that too is a difference in how they hire and they hire with that lens. We hire people with an eye towards an ownership culture. Right. That's the screening we do so that we can get people and hire people that can come in and lead and who want to be part of the business that know that every decision made we're not going to agree on. But at least I know that I'm respected and I've had a say in it. Right. And you've brought me along. And then the last piece, when we think about it, is really thinking about how do we report and be transparent about this, about these practices not only within our organization, but how do we use that, talking to all of our stakeholders. Right. When we're doing our annual reports, we want to talk about that. And we're seeing a higher share value because more and more research is showing that consumers are voting their values. Especially when you're thinking about Millennials and Gen Z.

Yes.

So think forward, thinking about how you're talking about this, how you're reporting on this. You've got investors on the street are investing with this lens and we're not going to get into ESG or otherwise, but we know more and more that this matters to individual investors and to the investment shops. So I always say to future forward thinking companies, CEOs and leaders, you want to engage here, you want to pilot, you want to test them and you want to learn which are the right strategies for you out of the nine that we're offering. And then you want to measure and inherently when you start doing more of these, the other ones start happening. So again, if you say ownership culture, that changes who and how you hire, that changes how you promote managers and leaders because you have an eye towards that. As a manager, if I'm going to promote you, I need to know you've demonstrated listening and operationalizing that feedback in others. You know, I want to make sure that you are on board with hiring differently. Right. And letting us know how we can hire better without just relying on a credential. Because with a credential, you got to think 2/3 of veterans don't have a college degree. The majority of Americans don't have a college degree and we know the cost of higher education. So how do we as a company make sure that we're not overlooking talent just because of the ease of screening for a credential? But again, these are all mindset shifts and we've seen it starts with one practices and they really snowball into others, because one, there's a financial case, they can map it back to again, increased assets, increased shareholder price, reduction in turnover, increases in productivity. And we go over those numbers in the report so that people can have the tools.

I love it. Angela, I'm curious, from all of your research, how soon do these outcomes start to show up once you start to make the shift?

So once you start with employee listening, that happens immediately. And I'll tell you why. Because on all of your reports, you know, many companies do pulse surveys just to check quarterly how people are feeling. And so as soon as you implement that first type of survey, which in the book, I detail and give examples of what companies have done so that again, companies can make them their own, but they have a starting place. As soon as that's implemented, you have a benchmark and you get data. You can start once you analyze that data. And with generative AI, you're able to do that instead of weeks and months and coming back, you can literally do that in days. And we've seen larger companies actually have business cases for doing this. And so over the next quarter you're able to measure one, you're able to tell people what you're going to do based on that. And over the subsequent quarter you're able to implement and pilot and again get information, feedback on what worked, what didn't work, did it move the needle on that question? Do you feel like this workplace cares about you? Like you're able to see that within 60 to 90 days and so lower cost, you've got technology that can analyze this, that can cost less, that can give us the results more quickly and that we can operationalize at all levels. And so why not take advantage of this moment to implement some of this research? Data driven research.

Absolutely. It is so interesting to me that these are such practical strategies and yet we feel them when somebody says so logical, right? Like, hey, listen to your employees, get them involved in your benefits. And yet there is such a big chasm that you and I find between practice and knowledge.

Yes, but I mean, it's hard, right, to change your habits.

Yeah.

You know, I give a lot of grace when I have these conversations and when I'm working directly with CEOs, many of the CEOs I've met, no one's ill intentioned, they're trying to do their best. But our mental models, we were raised professionally in certain ways and it worked for many people. People have thrived in this. When we talk about reimagining benefits and you know, like they Said when we talk about return to office, everyone goes, oh, you should return so you can get FaceTime. You can be mentored. Because that was the way that they were mentored. You know, that was the way that I was mentored. You know, I made sure I was there, I was there early, I stayed late. You know, I come from corporate. Before academia, I worked leadership positions at Viacom and Nokia and before that at other companies. I was that ambitious. Go getter who did that. It didn't matter that, you know, my boss was leaving at five and I stayed, you know, they stayed a six night stay. Even though I didn't have anything else to do. I just wanted to prove to them I was committed. And so it's just going to take a new imagining about how do we measure investment by employees, how do we measure productivity? And what I like about this research and this framework is, is it gives us a way to do it that's data driven versus this is the way that we've always done it.

This is the way we've always done it. I think that's it. I think that is the science that is now caught up.

Yes.

And you know, I always say, look, I was giving a talk to a board and I said to them, how many of you believe Earth is flat? And literally everybody you can imagine looked and says, what is wrong with you? And I said, Look, 500 years ago, 50% of you would have raised the hand and said earth is flat. Even today, 1% believe Earth is flat. But at least 99% of us have kind of gotten on the way of science. Right? I could ask the same question on climate change. Is climate change real? Not whether we caused it, not whether it's good or bad. Is it real? And again, today 70% of people say yes. 50 years ago people were like, what is climate change? I think this field, thanks to work you're doing, Kim, and so many others, we have the science where we don't have to think about this as an either or. Right? So that's kind of the first invitation I want to leave our listeners and we'll put the links on how they can find your work. Angela as well, is we don't have to make either or decisions. Do we take care of our people? Do we split the pie or do we actually take care of our shareholders? Right. We can truly grow the pie. We can expand, we can create more value, which is what you're finding in your research. Second, I think what I really, really loved about your book, what I really loved about the practices are when we're taking this concept, which is okay, so I know, I get it, but how do I do it into really practical ways? I'm like, if you want to do it, here is what you need to do. Engage your people, listen and choose the ones that will make the difference. And start with employee listening as kind of the foundation. So I love how practical you are making it to actually put it into practice.

And that was really intentional. And I just want to double click on what you said around it's an either or. And that's why we call this the win win because we've been for far too long really saying that there's this binary between the two and it doesn't have to be. And the data and the science, if we will listen, is telling us it doesn't have to be that way. And again, I've seen a set of employees, you know, employers as I'm going across, who have actually really embraced this. And as I think about it, that's going to give them the competitive advantage, the workforce that needs to be nimble to think differently than we've ever thought before. And so again, it's an exciting time. I love this analogy of climate change. What we thought was true, you know, 20, 30, 50 years ago, 100 years ago, it's shifting real time. And so this is an exciting moment for companies who want to use this as their competitive advantage. And that's why we call the report there because really this becomes a strategy and a tool to win right in the modern workplace.

So Angela, what are some of these companies and where can if our listeners want to see the full report and learn from these companies, tell us some and then tell us how we can get access to that list.

Perfect. So the report can be found@the winwinworkplacereport.com and we'll also I'll send you a link and if you want to put it with the show notes, we can have it there.

Beautiful.

The actual guide that we're producing that supports the framework, the actual guide that we produce to support companies in operationalizing this framework will be out in March 11 with the book the Win Worm Workplace How Thriving Employees Drive Bottom line Success. And what we're really looking there is the play by playbook guide of how companies have done this. And so some of the companies, when you think of smaller mid size, I point to Stone Age that's based in Boulder, Colorado. Carrie Siggins is really nationally known for creating a win win workplace and this employer mindset culture and really thinking about Again, can articulate the financial case of doing this employee voice. I think of Jergens that is based in Indianapolis, but that goes into larger organizations. In this report, you'll see two case studies with intel and you'll see cigna. If you think about the work that intel is doing, their CEO never had a four year degree. He had an associate's. And so deeply based on his lived experience and how he's grown through the world of work, he deeply believes in the potential of people, deeply believes in growing them an employee voice. And they've set up systems to actually do this and that's their playbook. You know they did in California. They're now replicating that with the CHIPS act and funding in Ohio and investments in doubling down. If you talk to him, he's not doing this because it's a nice to have. This is really a business imperative and how he sees growing the organization.

I love this, Angela. I know you and I could talk forever. I am so excited to connect again offline and really find how we can amplify each other's work. Thank you for the unbelievable passion you bring to this, the real operational and financial orientation that you bring to this. I think anything that we can do to support you, it'll be our pleasure. And our listeners I know will have gotten so much from this conversation. So I really appreciate it. Appreciate you taking the time staying a bit longer so we could record this. Thank you.

Thank you.

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