Redefining Employee Flourishing with Ali Khan

Welcome to the Happiness Squad Podcast. Your weekly dose of practical tips and inspiration to help you operate at your fullest potential. Integrating the science of flourishing into how you live, work and lead. I'm your host Ashish Kothari, the founder and CEO of Happiness Squad and author of the bestselling book Hardwired for Happiness. I will be your personal guide on your journey to explore the many facets of happiness, well being and flourishing, from personal growth to building more positive environments at work. In each episode we will share powerful insight, tips and stories from our guests who are leading experts, company executives and flourishing solution providers that you can implement right away to make happiness your competitive edge. Whether you're looking to overcome life's challenges, to go from good to great, or to enhance your team's performance through flourishing, this podcast is the place for you to find more joy, health, love and meaning in everything you do. Join us every week as we rewire for happiness together. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Happiness Squad Podcast. Today I'm excited to introduce my dear friend Ali Khan, who's the founder and CEO of shape, a company pioneering the science of flourishing. At Shape, Ali and team have developed a survey instrument that can help organizations holistically measure their state of flourishing and take actions to increase their level of flourishing up to 10x faster now. Prior to starting shape, Ali spent over two decades as a technology executive, most recently as a Chief Technology Officer and Chief Science Innovation Officer at the Global Insurer Access Flagship Wellbeing Services effort. In our conversation, we explored the business case for flourishing and some practical ways of measuring and quantifying the impact of flourishing on productivity and financial outcomes. We also tackled the challenges of short term thinking and explored strategies for fostering a work culture that emphasizes kindness, support and sustainable well being. As part of the conversation, ali shared the 12 holistic domains that Shape uses to diagnose the overall state of flourishing and helps individuals and leaders choose the interventions to improve it specifically tailored to their situation. So friends, whether you're looking to enhance your personal well being or or seeking strategies to elevate your team's engagement and productivity, this episode is packed with valuable insights. Stay till the end where you hear Ali's personal go tos to make sure that despite running a fast growing startup company, how he takes care of himself and flourishes. My dear friend Ali Amazon so excited to welcome you to the Happiness Squad Podcast. I've been waiting for this conversation for a while and so welcome.

Thank you so so much for having me. Ashish. Working with you has been A learning experience. I'm sure this is not going to stop here. This is where we'll probably pick up from.

Yeah, no, it's just been such a joy and I'm so excited about the things we're going to create together. We're so united together in this mission to help individuals, teams, organizations flourish. So, no, it's just a joy, my friend. Listen, we always start with this question to our guests of what does happiness mean to them? And how has that definition changed over time? But I'm going to ask you a slightly different question. I'm going to ask you, what does flourishing mean to you? And how has that definition of what helps individuals and organizations flourish changed over the time for you?

Thanks for catching me off guard. First of all, you know, actually flourishing and happiness are intertwined. That's the truth. You know, I love your name, the Happiness Squad. Happiness is a fundamentally core tenet, a foundation of flourishing within yourself. And so if I, if I answer the question first, because we look at flourishing flesh from the, you know, through the lens of work. And so we, we say it's about people reaching their full potential through the conditions that enable optimal performance, fulfillment and growth. And so when we think about that and how we reach there and that hopefully it helps explain how it's changed over time. Actually flourishing, we find, has been there through the ages. It's been the red thread throughout history. It's been there as part of foundational elements that are related to legislature thinking. It's been there from a spiritual thinking, you know, a very strong religious principle thinking. And it also has defined, you know, as we know how organizations like to think about psychology as well. So some of the greats, you know, have really come come to this. But what we found is that it's really been fairly new in terms of the context of workplace. And when I say new, I mean as in terms of organizations like you've set up, like I've set up, they've only really just started to bring the pieces together. And so originally, you know, six, seven years ago, when we conceived SHAPE as an idea, it wasn't actually looking for flourishing. It was actually looking for what we think businesses really want from employees is performance, and they aren't trying to enable performance. And if you get performance as a leading metric, right, your lagging metric, which isn't true to say productivity is a lagging metric, but it's closer to that than it is to a leading metric. And so along the way, when we started looking at the research thesis was what are the Drivers that fundamentally help or hinder a person from reaching their peak performance every single day. And as we started going through that, it became so easy to see that if I'm going to have physical work environment, for example, the right temperature, I'm going to have the right ergonomics, I'm going to have the right lighting around me, fundamentally you are in a heightened state and therefore you are flourishing in those drivers or you are struggling or you should be striving in the midpoint to get to the top. So we didn't want to use languishing as a model point. We wanted to use flow flourishing as our case in point. Striving and then struggling. And so if you flourish across all those drivers happens to be relationships and kindness and supportive and empathy, you have got the best possible chance to perform.

Yeah.

So what we found was actually flourishing and performance really go well, you know.

Closely together, very much linked with kind of what I'm finding in I work, what Alex Edmonds has found, what all the folks at the center for Positive Organization Scholarship have been teaching for the last 20 years. Kim Cameron and Jane Dutton and Bob Quinn and so many others. Monica Verleen. But I loved, you know, I loved how we started, you know, Ali, which is basically you said, look, we study flourishing at work, and I think they are intertwined with happiness because, you know, the reality is work consumes majority of our waking hours for most people, right. For most people who are working, which is a big chunk. That is what we do. And if work has no meaning, or worse, we find showing up to work draining. You can't have life satisfaction, you can't have happiness. So they are fundamentally linked. And the second point, which is also really important is your link that you're making. And that's why we kind of so quickly connected and became such good friends, is we are united, which is this work can help really unlock performance. And when we did research friends, we did an external survey around where organizations are. You know, what we found is only 25 to 30% of the full human potential is really being harnessed in many organizations. Right. That was kind of our research. I'm curious. You've done so much extensive work, Ali, what are you finding in the business case for flourishing? And how are you articulating it in terms of the productivity that can be unlocked, the creativity that can be unlocked? What are some quantitative numbers you're finding?

Okay, great. I'm going to give you just two examples for this one, because we've got quite an extensive array now of metrics starting to come together. The first one is if people want to have a look on my LinkedIn profile, they'll be able to see that we're articulating the value of flourishing through the context of if you had this driver of flourishing present, what would it look like for you to flourish with or without that sounds like bitten, like an optician.

Yes, Right.

But effectively, if you had a great manager, let's just keep it really, really simple. And there are factors to that, you know, we've studied and are able to service. But let's say you've got a great manager, your chance of flourishing can be up to seven, eight, nine times better. And if you don't, it can actually be negligible. Actually it can really drag you down.

Yes, of course.

So what we then start to do is we start to peel away and start to layer more information on top of, for example, I don't have a great manager, but I've got really good self determination, I've got a wonderful set of colleagues. So how much do they compensate for and drive that flourishing? Now we're starting to find how this compensation, or as we call in the literature, confounding and contributing factors, we're starting to find the more complex nature of how do you measure this? So this is an entire methodology that actually we had to develop from scratch in order to answer that very question, what's the value of flourishing in real terms? So that's one aspect. The second aspect I want to answer your question is the dollar value. Is there a dollar value to productivity? Fundamentally. So we spend a lot of time building another methodology we call the value of the benefit. So a really simple way of articulating this and there's some acronyms here I'm putting out, but there's one acronym everybody will remember very, very easily called crap. Right. All businesses have a lot of crap, by the way. Right.

We call it friction. Yes. We call it irritants. Yeah, crap.

But what they've got is got claims risk, they've actually got on top of that retention risk. So attrition, they've got absenteeism risk and performance risk. So what we did was we went back to the literature and we found a better than, you know, the active literature was actually economic models that we could create that link right into the heart of industry measures of those four areas. Now, three of those four are absolutely there in the Bureau of Labor Statistics or in the UK, the Office of National Statistics. So we went to 40 countries and started to collect that data. This was a Two year study by the way. And what we assembled were lookup tables of what literally the government's telling us and we could go back and source them. What does an organization look like on average in an industry of a certain size, scope, et cetera, when you look at them from the lens of claims risk. And so insurance claims, health life.

Exactly.

Employee liability and so forth. And then you've got retention. So how many people? It's basically voluntary, not involuntary. Right. Voluntary attrition. And then you've got absenteeism. And all these numbers are actually recorded there. So we inside, we started to build quite a complex model. It's multi layered. And then what we did was we applied it to your scoring system within shape. So when you scored, let's say for example 80, those 20 points have a value and we can now link that value to the value of the benefit that you haven't availed. And when we can compare that and correlate that to the wage tranches that we are collecting from different people, you can actually go and construct a real dollar value that's we think around about 10 to 20% out of a real, you know, it's not wooden dollars, it's a real CFO material quality information we're providing. So this is an entire methodology to look at productivity from a human capital, linking it to financial capital.

Yeah. So look, there's so much there to unpack and there's so many of the points you made that I love. So first of all, let me start with. Oh my God, how beautiful is your acronym Crap, right? Claims, retention, absenteeism and performance. I think it's a really, really beautiful. All of these are quantifiable. Right. Productivity is quantifiable. Absentism, we know that. Retention, I'm assuming in claims you're both as like it's basically healthcare claims. So like the cost of providing healthcare and you know, insuring your people. Or are you talking in terms of claims just on lawsuits or health risk claims that people might make on you?

Actually it goes all the way into all the costs, what we call workers compensation or it could be employees liability. And so all of that, so we cover all of that, which I love.

Very extensive, which I love. You know there's a couple of other ones that we usually throw in here in our methodology, which is one is creativity. Right. The other one is around we break performance into productivity and profitability. Right. Two key measures. But I love it. I love the simplicity of crap. I think it's something that most CFOs can put their hands around. And 10 to 20% is meaningful friends, right? So in a world, think about this. This is what I loved about what Ali is doing and the mission that we are on, which is when it comes to your physical assets, we have these strong models that exactly know at what level of performance these assets are working on and what is the potential to improve. In fact, we are continuously improving them, right? If you're at 80%, you're like, how can I get 85? If you're at 85, I can get 90. And guess what? If you're at 30 or 40, I mean, there's a big problem here. I think you want to really focus on it. We don't have that for human assets till now, right? We are now building these models that allow us actually to look at individual flourishing that people can action. But organizationally, what level are people working? We can quantify it, and there is a real opportunity to now work on quantifiable dollars around the improvement that we can generate. You know what I also loved is this notion of what you mentioned, which is the third thing you mentioned, Ali, which is oftentimes people don't know where to start. I mean, this is a massive elephant problem, right? Let's be clear. Everybody knows it, nobody calls it out. And then oftentimes we say, well, it's their problem or it's the organizational problem, or what can I do? My manager sucks, or our culture sucks, or there is this central thing and there's not much. And what I love is also in your work, you're one saying, hey, it's actually a whole set of factors. The absence of one does not preclude you from still taking action, right? So I loved your example of the manager. In fact, share an example. Ali, I invite you to share an example. Think about an organization where at the overall level, you know, it might have not been the ideal situation, but is there a real story you can tell around a team that's still managed using, you know, some of these really specific interventions to improve their flourishing?

I'll give you quite an emotional example, actually, as the recording's happening today, if people want to go back into my LinkedIn profile, they'll see a real case in point. Actually, this is two examples. Perhaps separately, I went to an organization, they said, yes, we really like this, but we've only got this much budget available and it's all for mental health. And so I said, well, I'm not going to take all the budget, but look, what if the problems aren't mental health related? Because that's 80 to 90% of your entire human support budget apart from learning and development. And they said, yeah, but that's all we've got. We've assigned it in that bucket. That's what we're going to spend it on. So I convinced them that they should really try and use certain shape because we included mental health. But all of These other metrics, 120 different data points per person, you know, we could provide a much broader view. So they took that and we looked at the data and we came back and we had quite an emotional conversation with it because they, they were, you know, really, really focused on interventions related to classical, what they called mental health or meditation, so forth applications, EAP, occupational health. We came along and we said, actually 60% of your problem is relating to your culture. What are you going to do now? And so then they realized they had to use a big chunk of their L and D budget for that. And, and it shows how the metrics help an organization really open their mind. And Ashish, just as a second example, last week we presented back real results and there was a moment in there where there's a question that we ask. My business has low levels of toxicity, backstabbing and malicious gossip. It's a scary question really when we think about it. And the score was hovering around about 30. So I paused and I didn't know the founder of the business was there and listening to the debriefing and some his, his voice, a voice came up and said, I don't want these people in my business. And I thought about it and you know, it's a natural reaction when you're a founder of a business and you've got all these people and that's the score. And they knew about it. It turned out they knew about it. They'd asked people, please don't do these things, this is counterproductive. So I told them an alternative way to do it which was very, very pro flourishing. This is the impact of what that does to your colleagues from a human perspective. And this what therefore has an impact on the client, but it has a long term impact on everybody's performance. And so we managed to get a really nice conversation going where we brought the pro aspects of flourishing. And what are they? They're about kindness and support and caring, these aspects of happiness where that's really what people want to do. We got them on board to agree that all really people want to do is come to work to contribute to something bigger than themselves. So we found that in the data and we ended up honing down on a very interesting and honest conversation, which you're quite right, organizations know, but they don't really have a number for it. And when the number staring them in the face, the conversation changes.

You know, I love, I love both of those examples. Ali. The McKinsey Health Institute research, you know, highlights 3% of burnout is demands are individual, 97% is organization, team and job. Same story on well being, 27% is individual. And all the interventions are individual versus the job, team, organization. So kudos to kind of bring and highlight that right in an instrument where people can see it. Let's go back to the second one though. You know, this is always a tricky, tricky area because here's. And I'm wondering how I want to delve into that story and that conversation a little bit and whether people said it or not, we know that when you invest in employee satisfaction, when you invest in employee flourishing, we know the results, the business case is there, but we also know that often it works. This is Alex Edmonds work. It works if you have a 3, 4 year plus horizon toxicity and pressuring people works. This quarter I can be kind and caring and oh my God, right, Like let I give you. And all of a sudden I don't meet my quarter, my stock ranks, I'm fired. That's what so many leaders convince themselves about. And you know, part of it is not convince themselves, part of it is true. There's so much of a quarter to quarter performance. Did you get into that dialogue? Did anybody ask that question? That's great, Ali. You're talking about caring and kindness and all of these kind of things. But you know, there's a reason these people are successful even though they are toug toxic. We know about them, but man, they deliver in the short term. And everybody's stuck in this quarter by quarter cycle.

It's oh, wow, that's a really, really. It's a very telling question that you're asking. And let me surprise you. What I found is when you've got numbers like this staring you in the face, the first thing that happens is you find a very different reaction. The real reaction that we had actually was in this particular example was one of the colleagues on the call said, I don't recognize what you're saying because it's not what I see.

That's blindness. I'm unaware. Right. Like I don't even recognize. Sure. I think that's number one. Yeah.

Right. So you get that kind of reaction. And actually the answer to that was really quite straightforward. How many people do you work with in your total company? That we've looked at five. Well, it's that classic case, right? You are the average of the five people around you. Sounds like if you look at your scores, I'm sure that your team is having a great create time. But what we also know is that there is no such thing as a monoculture anymore. Monocultures are made up of the sum of the microcultures inside an entire business. So you could be in one part of an office and living a great life with five people around you. But the other part of the office, there are a whole bunch of people who are absolutely hating it and nobody even knows about it because they're not getting involved. So you're absolutely right. You're blind to it because you can't see. But the numbers don't lie. And so this links to my second big point. What's really interesting is that once they get over the fact that, hey, we're just the mirror, if you look closely, you can say no to this, but then you're just as bad as, you know, you're worse than you were before. In fact, when you before you came to this with open belief. And what you find is that once they're over that particular point, Ashish, it's very, very hard for them to actually argue the case in point. That short term is going to really work. We don't really get into those conversations. And I really like your point. Will Fleming from Oxford University, he published a piece of work at the beginning of this year that said wellbeing doesn't actually work in the current form. And it's quite scary because you've got a lot of organizations plowing a lot of money into what they call wellbeing services, but they're negligible in their impact.

I was going to say, yeah. I mean I've been saying this for the last five years. 95% of well being investments that companies are making and they've gone up. Because that's the other thing we hear all the time, Ali, is yeah, we're spending a lot of money on well being. Of course this matters. We care. I'm like, yeah, but they're all low roi. They're all individual. Like you're not fixing the problem.

Yeah. But you know, the example I like to give and there's a lot of work being done by Harvard University. So we're part of the community of practice. I'm getting to see this information from Tyler and Matt Lee's work et Cetera, you know, it's wonderful to see that they're publishing about the concepts of love. And so when we think about, you know, the example I take people to is when you're young and your parents ask you to do something, there are two ways to do it. One is, you know, the screaming and shouting and I fully expect you to do it. What's the sustainability behind that? How long is that going to last? Maybe till 16, 17 years old at most. And you want to move out or do you want, you know, do you find more value and longevity in being taken along, you know, the journey of love, where I see the value in what we're doing here and I want to be treated the way I would, you know, like to have been treated by a loving, caring parent. That's what I'm going to do for other people. So this concept of Wellbeing actually in 2023 I found, has now shifted into this wonderful new concept of sustainable wellbeing. And I think sustainable wellbeing, when you look at the core tenets of what they're aiming to achieve within those longer term kind of views, and there's many organizations out there really pushing this. For example, the well Building Institute Institute is doing this as well. They're looking at a longer three year commitment from organizations towards a much larger and deeper impactful view of helping people in the building. Even though they focus on the building, they're really working back from the experience of the people in the building. And so when you look at these concepts now, Ashish, I think the world is getting there. 2024 and beyond is about sustainable wellbeing, which to me correlates beautifully well to the core tenets of flourishing.

So let's get into that and let's get into that and I want to keep some time towards the end around like three or four things that I find so often take people away from this. Right. And I don't think it is people. You know, there are some people who shout and scream and belittle and, you know, all of that. I think there are some, but I think those are a lot more. I think there are, you know, job pressures, time pressures, lack of prioritization, matrix organizations, death by 10,000 different priorities, you know, and leaders who are ineffective at helping their teams kind of figure it out, but shrug their, you know, say, ah, this is what it is, we've got to do it right. That's really driving, you know, some of the stress, some of the anxiety, some of the kind of helplessness. But let's Come back to that conversation in a minute. I love your flourishing wheel, I love the 12 domains and I want you to share a little bit around those 12 with our listeners. So as if people step back and think about flourishing as much, much, much. And I say, you know, in math we say greater, greater, greater, greater than mental health because a lot of people go to mental health. Flourishing is so much greater than that. What are your 12 domains that you look at Ali in flourishing? We hope you're enjoying this episode. If you'd like to start building habits and integrating the hardwired for happiness practices into your life, come check out Rewire our program on the Happiness Squad website. Rewire contains 35 minute micro practices that can help you truly build habits for a happier, healthier life filled with more love and meaning. The program uses the science of habit formation and the power of community to support you in moving from knowing to doing to being. Now back to the episode.

Thank you so much. What we found when we went to the literature with the question what do you look beyond physical and mental health to truly understand a person's ability to perform to their best possible state? And what we found was the literature was guiding us towards a handful of many, many concepts in fact, but the ones we focused on were based on statistical rigor and significance. So fundamentally, what are the P values that give us the best predictive value of each of the different topics? So we looked at things like job satisfaction. That's where we settled employee commitment and employee engagement. We had manager style, corporate culture, the business essential. So this is coming from, you know, your 7s work over at McKinsey. The 7s. Yeah. So we found the 7s is wonderful, by the way, but it's even more powerful when you add a couple of other S's. So we call it the S10 model. And actually you democratize it. You get everybody's view and you find there's somewhat disparity between what the observed view of the, you know, the management team is versus the people at the ground level. And we've done some amazing bound analysis that helps show a whole different picture all of a sudden. And culture just by the way, corporate culture, very difficult to measure, Very, very difficult and tangible. But what we found was wonderful that companies like human synergistics, they're known as the Kleenex of measuring culture in the world. Their models, we looked at various other models out there and we found that we could actually measure to their quality with just 25 questions what they can do in about 150 questions. So this is called Cronbach's alpha score for the listeners. So you can look it up. It means that you've got the single prime or the alpha that tells you what typically 10 questions might tell you. A good famous example, by the way of this is NPS the. Net Promoter Score. Fred Reichelt created it back in 2003. He then found that those 10 questions were actually highly predictive for just two questions. So answering two questions could tell you with a high degree of accuracy. I think it was something like 90% from the Bain literature that you could guess with good reason what the responses were going to be. So we used exactly the same approach to scientifically work out what are the most powerful questions. We got to the 25 in there and then the final two or three. So we've got the physical and the soft work environment. So these are everything from noises and so forth all the way through to your IT systems. So these are aspects that you physically work with every single day. So we measure those too. And then not only do you have psychological and physical health, we have what we call life outside of work. So there are things, you know, yes, you bring your whole self to work, but then if you're doing that, you're bringing your baggage with you as well. Right. So we measure the fundamental tenets that a person's going to be impacted by in work as a result of what's happening outside of work as well. So we've got these 12 areas and we actually originally had 250 questions, by the way. And through a series of deduction and highly, highly grade, you know, high grade measurements, we've now got it down to about 150 factors which you measure all within. You collect those data points all within a 25 minute survey, which makes it so powerful.

Yeah. And you're on your way to kind of further distill it over the coming years. Right. To make it smaller, smaller, smaller. You know, I loved. There were a couple of things in your model that I really loved. And we just took the survey. Right. So we are in the process of kind of looking at the results because, friends, what Ali and I are really trying to figure out is a very close collaboration around the perl model that I've talked about, you know, on this podcast, which is all around factors at the job team organization level that people leaders can take action on and the factors that Ali has, because no surprise there would be a 90% overlap. We have a 2530 question survey. There's 150. So we are mapping it up because I love the platform that Ali has built. It took us literally five minutes to onboard. It didn't even take me 20 minutes, Ali. It took me about 10, 15 minutes, to be honest, to go through the questions, partly because I understood the construct of the questions. But if you're reading it for the first time, it might take longer. Right. But because there was an overlap, we're trying to figure out how do we create this view at a team level from the data that once you take that literally, tells you at an individual team, what level are you performing and what is the biggest driver that will help you improve that performance. So a lot to come. That's what Ali and I are so excited about. But what I loved about the domain, number one, there were several things that really stood out for me. The first one was, I think front and foremost, Ali. I think recognizing people talk about, bring your whole self, but most people will say, I'm not interested in what's happening outside, or I don't think it's my job to address it. And nobody is looking for somebody to address it. But I think we need to understand it because when you say if somebody's struggling personally, they're not going to show up. And if you in that moment give them the autonomy, the flexibility, even just care or a listening ear or a hand on the shoulder, say, I know it is hard right now and we are here for you. Even further, if you're able to do something to help them, you are going to have somebody whose heart you won for life and who will be with you.

Yes.

So I love the fact that we're saying, hey, let's sense into how our people are doing in life, not just at work. So I love that. I love, love, love that. I think the second thing that I really liked about it, about what you've done, is I think oftentimes people underestimate how the lack of systems, a clear strategy, you know, all the, all the essays as well as the, you know, get in the way. The problem isn't, you know, the problem is half the time there are multiple priorities. They're not clear what they need to execute everything. You know, I have one client who told me, you know, it all paper looks really, really. When you're really high up, it looks really good. Right? We have five strategic priority. You know, we have five strategic priorities, five pillars, very clear. Within those five pillars, we have seven different sub pillars. Within those seven pillars, we have 25 different things. So, like, when you really add it up, no, we don't have you know, five priorities. We've got 120 priorities and any one of them they're like I have to solve for sustainability, I have to solve for diversity, I have to solve for diversity, you know, supplier diversity, I have to solve for cost, I have to solve for innovation, I have to solve for manufacturing, you know, and quality. And oh by the way, every day, depending on who I talk to in a cross functional team, I'm being told by this matters more today, this matters more today. And you know, and I love the 7s, the 10s that you've created because it kind of says hey, as a business system, are people clear? Because if they're not clear, that's a huge load that you're putting on people, right? So I think that's the second thing I really, really liked about it because most well being surveys, flourishing surveys don't touch that at all. You know, they don't get into that level. So I love those questions. And then the third one lot for us to discuss, the whole physical and the soft, right? The hard and the soft, the physical and the software environment I think that I found to be really, really interesting. I think is really important. But I think as we work closely together I think that's where I think there is such an opportunity also to kind of further shrink that down to find what are some simple ways in which. But I think it is so right. I mean we don't explicitly often think about how our work environment is affecting how we are working. Everything from lightning to what's present in terms of food is the place structured. We do that in lean manufacturing all day long. 5s is a key lever. Why don't we have a similar level for our work environments and for our software environments which is as much a part of work environments. Right. Physical as software. So I think it's wonderful. Friends, I really invite you to go to the website of shaped. Look at the 12 domains of flourishing. It'll have you reflect on your own kind of as you look at the organization where you are and see hey, can I really get underneath maximizing what we are getting from all the amazing human beings that are working at our place. So question Ali for you, when you looked at these 12 domains, how many people have taken this survey? How many companies like how much data do you have now around this?

We're still, I'd say at the early stage through the process of training the product we needed to make sure that the although the questions by and large they're not made up by us. So when people Ask us do the questions work? We chuckle because we're saying actually they come from the literature, they're already proven and we've got the weight of millions of completions out there that we're bringing on board. So we've already had a boost beforehand. What we've done is we've really worked hard to actually refine the way in which they work with each other. So for example, how much does culture contribute to an erosion of mental health, for example, predictively, we're starting to unpack those kind of secrets now. So we actually never really reveal. Okay, let me pause and just say I want to become famous for being the company that says we do not ever tell you we never kiss and tell. From a promo perspective. We've now got, you know, clients who are happy for us to tell the world that they are using Shape and we've got some advocacy people can see that on the site. But the multi thousand of people that have completed it, what we can say is absolutely beyond statistical significance. There are values there. We're working with academia now as well where they would like to study certain topics using Shape data. So it's not saying they're studying us, they're studying topics using shapes data because we've got a single hit platform that gives them data acquisition in a GDPR compliant, highly private confidential way. We then give them the analysis that they can follow through on. They can perform further thesis work on top of that and they can do the publishing as well. So quite a lot all coming together there.

So thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who have actually, you know, I was going more on how many people have actually taken shape, not companies, but individual responses.

Not hundreds of thousands just yet. But that's absolutely, you know, on the pipeline in terms of the size of organization. So again, let's get there.

I mean, but the bigger point you're making is I think you have enough with what you are predicting. What you're saying has statistical significance behind it and publishable.

Publishable as well. Quality.

I love that. So what are you finding, you know, overall when you look at those 12 domains? Ali, and let's take a balcony view. Are you finding certain factors that, that organizations tend to be leading on and certain factors that tend to always be lagging or kind of out of sight, out of mind.

It is so, so variable. The truth is when we looked at a company in Australia just a few weeks ago in the education sector, wildly different results, wildly different. And with these trend lines that we look at, yes, we're digging into those across the board. So we do see, for example, some data around, for example, females struggling more in life outside of work. That's one of the trends that we tend to see. We do see, for example, in certain industries now we're starting to see men are struggling less. And we're trying to dig deeper into what potential kind of links might be coming from or clues coming, because correlation is not causation, as we all know in our space. But we're starting to look at what the longitudinal data might lead us towards. What's really happening under the hood over here in the work environment as well as outside. But the thing that struck me the most at the moment is you can actually go to an organization and the way shape is constructed, it really gets under the hood from the perspective of the people in a scientifically validated way. And what you find is you can't really predict what's really going on in that business until you've actually done the proper survey. It's wildly different.

And how. And when you look at a company, how across teams are you finding the factors to be the same or different?

Yeah. So you do get similarity in terms of experiences amongst different types of teams. So the, your network component that we've created allows people to call out, I work for this person, these people work for me. And by building the network nodes, you get a mathematically pure organizational chart validated by every manager, the best people in my team. And you get it from everybody in the team validating that they work for a manager. It's actually turning out to be more accurate than the HR systems.

Of course it's not updated. Yeah.

And because of that, now what we're starting to find is that we can study the information with so much more rigor and depth to really look at what do the correlations look like when it comes to some of the core tenets and factors of flourishing.

I love it. So this notion of being able to look at it overall, which is interesting, but really being able to study it at layer by layer by lever and finding what are similar that organizationally we can work on. But more importantly, what are team specific that the teams can action and what are some things that are individual that individuals can action?

Absolutely. Every person can make a really big difference. And we've created a whole new algorithm which is very, very unique around not just focusing on your weakest areas, which is typically what we're told within a lot of service, in fact a lot of measurement systems is drive up the weaker scores, get them to the heightened state and Focus on the lower scores first. But what you find is that actually if you've created a north star called flourishing and you want to get there, the things that you might do want to do instead are actually not the things that just the weakest scores, but across the board things that align, that give you the best possible chance, the probability to flourish. So we've shifted the focus onto those actions which are different per person, per team and for the whole company.

Yeah, that was the other thing that I found to be really insightful. Friends, as you're looking at surveys, as you're studying this problem, yeah, let's not focus on what we are weak as the only factor. Let's look at what we are good at or which actually increases the probability. Because in the end there's only so many things we can focus at at one time. It's important to understand which ones significantly improve the results that we are looking for. And they might be different by a team or individual and an organization. And so the invitation again of let's try and take granular approaches to really optimizing our human assets. Just as you take granular approaches to optimize store productivity the way you use granular approaches to study diagnose manufacturing systems, lines, equipment. Right. We don't do one size fits all, let's not do one size fits all interventions here as well. Let's really use the science to understand and choose the right interventions and also enable individuals autonomy to be to take the actions. We do that in stores, we do that in factories. We're not driving it from the center a year after the survey or six months after the survey, a program that is one size fits all. We really support individuals to be able to pull and deploy. And so I think there's a real kind of what I would call a breakthrough approach here. Right. That can really be created using this level of granularity and actionability of data.

And Ashish, thank you so much for having me. I want to invite everybody to go to shapepowered.com we have what I think is a gift. We created this with, making it a very, very nice gift for everybody, which is what we call the Book of Flourishing. Simply putting your email address in immediately you will receive the Book of Flourishing, which is really just a three to four minute read of going through and understanding the power of what flourishing can do, what it really means and where it came from. So thank you so much again for having me. I am a big fan of your model as well. And I think that we will find so much between the two worlds coming together. Because the truth is, people cannot achieve flourishing without human support. And the work you're doing is fantastic.

To help them do that. Thank you, my friend. Look, as we bring this podcast to a close, I just personally want to ask you, you've been, obviously I know how hard it is to be an entrepreneur. Start something from scratch and grow it. What are some of your three to five tips that allow you personally ali to be at your best? What are some things that nourish you and allow you to flourish?

Yeah, I have to force myself to really remind myself that pausing, taking a step back is an absolute necessity. So I've learned that getting time with my family is actually the thing that you miss the most because you get so used to the daily grind of working, working, working to take a step back. My real pride and joy, actually is one of my sons is quite entrepreneurial. He's actually just picked himself up and moved over to California for six months.

Oh, wow. Sam.

Yeah, Sam's moved over. He's just landed over in San Francisco. He's been there a week. He's a little bit homesick. My other son is wonderfully getting involved as a project manager within the utility sector over here in the uk. My youngest one is just starting her finals at school for her age. So we've got this diversity of different things happening. So to keep on top of that as well as work is, it gives me plenty of challenge and diversity, if you like. And I think the other thing, friends, people who keep you grounded, who take you back to normality, actually to not have heightened levels of thinking and pontification, as I call it, at all times is quite a nice thing to do. So. And yeah, I've got some pretty good friends. If they're probably listening to this, they'll chuckle because they keep me grounded.

I love it. Friends and family, you know, always reminding, setting boundaries, coming back to what matters. My friend, this has been such an amazing conversation. Thank you for the beautiful work we are doing, a lot. Excited about what we are collaborating and building together. Really grateful. Have an amazing rest of your day.

Thank you so, so much, Ashish. And really looking forward to a deeper collaboration as we go through the next few years. Thank you.

Take care. That wraps up another episode of the Happiness Squad podcast. We hope you found the insights actionable to enhance your journey towards happiness and fill your life with more joy, health, love and meaning. Please consider leaving us Review and share the podcast with anyone in your professional or personal life who you feel will benefit from some of these very insights. It's a really simple way to extend support and spread positivity. Take care and remember, happiness is a choice that's available to you moment to moment in the here and now. Take care and see you next week.