How this man is changing the world of work one moment at a time.

Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. Today, I am delighted to have Luke Fisher, who is the CEO and co-founder of Mo.work. And I found Mo.work when I was looking for a really interesting application for employee engagement and recognition. Luke, thank you for joining me today.

No worries. Thank you.

Now, Luke, tell us about Mo.work and what problem are you solving for business owners?

So, I think everybody relies on Mo.work because the brand's actually Mo, and Mo tends to confuse everybody because it's just 2 letters. Mo is short for moments. Moments is what we think are core to building relationships and ultimately enhancing the productivity of your team. So it's how do you motivate them? How do you bring them together so that ultimately they are much more productive and perform better ultimately for your organization? But as an employee, they'll get much more from work if they're experiencing more moments.

So just tell us, how does that platform work then? Is it a software? Is it a survey? As people are more and more distributed and not going back to the office, maybe it seems like Mo's time has come.

Yeah, it's a great time for us and we're busy, busy at the moment. I think people are lacking energy, a sense of connection. Even some of the, you know, conversations that you would overhear in the office about a deal that's been done here or a new person that's joining or whatever it might be, all of those little interactions in which you learn are lost. Like, conversations now are so productive and task-orientated in the way that you have a Zoom meeting to talk about a thing And that's it, and you lose all of the other things that surround it. So at a practical level, we're a platform, SaaS platform. So you would access our website with a user account, you would download a mobile app, or you might see us integrated to a system like Slack. You can post and share experiences that matter to you. We tend to see moments that are worth celebrating from one end of the employee lifecycle all the way to the other one. So from the moment that you first get your job to the first day that you have in the office to when you pass your probation, you get promoted, all the way through to when you leave. These things are worth sharing and they often bring people closer together. You can also link it to things to elevate the moments like rewards or experiences that you might want to make to improve, you know, someone delivering a significant contribution or whatever.

Now, Luke, why would someone have a dedicated app like Mo rather than, say, use Facebook and have a company Facebook account?

Yeah, it's a great question. We get a lot actually. And I think the learning when you speak to our users is people in their personal lives are really familiar with segmenting communication channels. And, you know, you might have WhatsApp for quick chat, which is like Slack in the workplace. You might have Facebook to go and see what your mum or your nan's up to. And that might be like Microsoft Teams. And then you save and reserve specific moments that you might capture with an image for, say, Instagram. And the way in which we think about Mo is for those high-quality moments that are much more emotional than functional. So the way in which people understand us, albeit the functionality might be consistent, you're posting and people are interacting with it and so on, there's this level of reserve for high quality that tends to create that level of distinction. So the call-out and the memorable is what you— we really want to capture, not the everyday interactions, the, you know, the functional chat to get a job done like Slack does.

So in terms of these high-quality moments, I'd seen that one of the aspects is about recognition from the company to a member of the team, but also team to team.

Yep.

Which, as you say, is another big part of what's missing when people are all working from home. Can you just talk us through how does that work? Because that mechanic is really interesting.

Yeah, so what— so it comes from a belief really that, you know, the leaders of the organization don't see everything that happens. Like, there's a real visibility and context gap the larger a company gets in understanding how somebody's really contributing. And that contribution, often at a leadership level, will only be visible if it's relating to an OKR or a performance objective that's linked to one of the strategic objectives in an operational plan, right? But there's a million things that people do each and every day that isn't captured in terms of a value contribution in those relatively fixed measures. So all of that other contribution— if somebody makes your day or somebody helps you out or somebody goes and gives you that extra little bit of effort to help you overcome one of the challenges that you've got, it feels good for them, but it also feels good for you and enables you to grow. And those interactions, when you're working in a modern team, isn't necessarily driven by the company because you're a team of experts driven to achieve a goal in a much more matrix structure than you might have seen in a kind of command and control organization.

And you talk about the sort of matrix, which implies there's a certain scale of company. What sort of companies, organizations are using Mo, and how big do you need to be before it makes sense?

I think it's less of a question of how big are you and more of a question of how much do you care. So if you are a people-orientated leader, And you know that you can't do everything, and therefore to deliver the outcomes in which you aspire to, other people have to help you get there, and you realise that in exchange for them doing whatever it is that helps you achieve the objective, they need something back, then we might be right for you. That's how I think about it. I mean, complexity and scale and multiple locations add to that difficulty. And for sure, the larger you get, the less awareness there probably is, or the more countries that you operate in, the harder it is to create those senses of connection and energy and momentum within the company that we talked about, the atmosphere and the conditions, the culture being one in which people thrive in. But you don't have to be a large business. We're a pretty small business and it works pretty well internally.

Oh, okay. So you use it yourself. So what would you say, a minimum of maybe 10 people or 5 people, or is it simply that They need to just be maybe in different locations.

I think, yeah. So generally, if you're— I mean, we've had a number of companies that use this that are kind of 10, 15, 20 people. I think the conditions are also important. If you're sat next to somebody every day, which of course at the minute none of us really are, unless you're in a key worker position, then that's when you start to see these things break. That sense of connection breaking. And then you should think about it.

Sorry. Okay. And then you talked about multiple offices. What about language, Luke? Because more and more companies have got offices, even for example, outsource teams in different countries with different languages. Is this sort of transnational, multilingual as a platform as well?

Yeah, yeah, for sure. So the language bit, is now actually relatively simple to fix. Like, there's loads of third-party services that can access your codebase and can do a machine translation with a human check, you know, within weeks. So we use something called Smartling. There's other things called like LingoHub. So the app's in 15 different languages, I think. So yeah, those kind of things can be supported pretty quickly.

Now, another aspect of Mo that I was interested in was ideas. I think that also you're helping companies on the ideation process internally. And of course, that's one of the old adages about, you know, we need to be together because collectively, you know, that's when we get stimulated. Can you just tell us how Mo is helping with that part of a business culture?

Yeah, sure. So the key thing in the context of employee engagement is that you feel like you've got a say. So most of the research papers will talk about it in the context of employee voice. What it really means is that you, you have the opportunity to say your bit. There's loads of things that we would have seen in companies that we've all worked in where you have an idea that something could be better. So we just give people a place to share that, for colleagues to share their views on it through just very simple voting, like thumbs up, thumbs down, to give you a sense of just how important this is. And then they can layer on their comments and suggestions, evolve the idea together, and then someone can make a decision on the idea. It's pretty flexible who can do that. The other thing that we've recently added is challenges concepts, so leaders can put forward specific challenges so that they can encourage employees come up with ideas relating to some of their challenges. So it's a really nice way to align top priorities for the organization with willing to suggest improvements throughout the organization.

And do you have some kind of rewards program built in so that if someone did come up with the 4th solution to COVID, for example, could they get a, you know, a 6-pack? What's the kind of— any kind of coupons or prizes and things like that?

We've avoided most of the traditional kind of points mean prizes type reward structure. What we— we talk about meaning over money. So how do you understand what's important to somebody? At, you know, and it really comes down to individual circumstance. So how something that might be motivating and meaningful to me might be very different to you, might be something you just don't want. And we think the same in terms of how people should be rewarded. It should be about what matters to them. So an example of that might be, you know, the ability to take a day off or the ability to take a course that you've been wanting to that gets you accredited in the thing in which you do. Might be to go out for lunch or a few beers with your colleagues that you've been distant from for ages. So all of those things in our world would be a means of creating a moment and elevating it with some financial enablement from the company.

Now, one of the things that interested me about this creation of moments is you're getting potentially some social media content. Are you finding that these moments are then being used by the company, for example, for recruitment, for example, or for even promoting what a great place it is to work?

Yeah, so one of the fascinating things in the way in which, like, recently companies have got fairly savvy to employer brand and employee value proposition and how you articulate what it really means to be associated to this organization. And as much as you might, you know, design a beautifully looking web page, or as much as you might pen down all of the most perfect words that summarize what it looks like, there's nothing really that represents it better than the experiences that your people share. So how do you showcase those? There's nothing better than taking content in which has been shared, celebrated by your people, to bring that to life and add some real credibility to what you're saying. So yes.

And yeah, and can you give us any sort of a case study of what the kind of— what's the impact on the organization? We talk about engagement levels, right? And something crazy like 70-80% of all people who are working are not engaged at work, which is a terrible loss of course of productivity. Do you have any kind of before and after metrics for the impact of MO at work?

Yeah, we do. I think if I'm speaking honestly, like, people make investment in this market for either moral improvement or moral investment, or economic investment and economic gain. And I think many just want to create the environment for people to succeed, and therefore don't seek to measure. Others aren't measuring because they're not commercially savvy enough to measure the impact. And then the— what is currently the fairly few that are measuring impact see results typically across what we brand as a value ladder. So they'll get a level of sentiment improvement first up. They then typically see a level of reduced churn, so people are less likely to want to leave. They will see improvements to employee engagement. So the survey that people typically do to measure the levels of employee engagement or satisfaction, we've got countless examples of improving that. And we think the big opportunity is how do you motivate people such that they become more productive and therefore perform better? And that's our, that's our next big challenge, is proving with some confidence and good solid attribution to productivity improvement, attribution to us.

And the other one is— yeah, and in terms of— you talk about investment there, Luke. How much money are we talking about for your average company, and what's the pricing model?

Yeah, sure. So we typically price based on the number of people, and it's probably at and around the price of a cup of coffee per person. So I went to Starbucks this morning. I was amazed that my coffee cost me more than £3. So less than that.

Really? So that really is a very low-cost entry for people to be able to roll this out, right? And that's a monthly program, presumably?

Yeah, absolutely. So if you're, if you're 100 people, you're looking at £300 a month, or there and thereabouts.

And can you give us some name checks, any customers that are currently working with you? Using Mowork?

I can. I'm trying to think desperately who we've got on our website and that I know that we've got permission to share. Um, we— a good one. Um, so we're, we're recording this in the UK, so William Hill. So William Hill would be a great example. So we're live with them across 5 countries: UK, US, uh, Philippines, and can't remember where their other locations are in Europe. SHL is another business that we often talk about, so they play in the HR tech space. I think they're in about 25 countries around the world. So yeah, lots of them. Have a look at the website, it's got a much better memory than I have.

Okay, I will do. And where do you see the impact of COVID affecting your business, Luke? What, what do you think you'll need to do in the kind of human resource engagement that's driven by the impact of COVID I think COVID has acted as a catalyst for many of the changes that were happening in work anyway.

Like, more and more people wanted to work flexibly, more and more people wanted to work for a company that they cared about, that were making the right kind of decisions and had values that they could stand by. It wasn't just about the money. The level of kind of digital acceleration to support working from home means that all of these things have just happened a lot faster than probably most people in my position or in HR expected them to. So I think it gives a really good opportunity to not, you know, not fall back to where we were and to give people much more choice to get the right balance between productive work, collaborative work, level of social connection that you get from work. And the— I guess the opportunity depends on where these things wash out. Like, I hope that it means that we continue to be able to work more flexibly in a way that means that we can really get the best out of ourselves and the experience that we have at work, and that we see it much more of a means to an opportunity rather than just a means to an end. But it really depends on how some of this stuff washes out. If we, you know, if businesses mandate everybody back to the office, then we're kind of going back to where we were.

And speaking of where we were, where can people find you, Luke, if they want to talk to you more about mo.work?

Well, there you go. You've just said it. So the web address is www.mo.work. So that's it. It's that easy.

That easy. It's been not work. It's been a pleasure, Luke. Thanks for joining me.

Thanks so much. Cheers.

You've been listening to Luke Fisher today with me on the Speak PR podcast. And we've been talking about using mo.work as a platform for engagement for your team, which I think is important because having your team as evangelists for your business is going to be one of the best ways to ensure productivity, reduce churn, but also to get the kind of alignment and results that you want. So thanks for listening to this episode. And if you're interested, do check out the speakpr.co website for the mastermind. In the meantime, I wish you the best of health, a profitable business, and that if you've got staff, you think about engaging them and do that with modotwork.