Louis Carter on The Future of Workplace Culture: Strategic Trends Shaping 2025

Hey everybody, welcome. Great to see you all on here. Please do add your, what you want to hear from us today, what you expect to hear from us today in the chat bar. Any questions that you might have, start now, right? Go ahead and add them and we'll be thinking about what you want to see.

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During the next 45 minutes, Bernadette was former head of operations, people analyst at CVS and, and Better and several other companies. Just great mind in our people analytics space. I've really enjoyed working with her. The truth is that I can't do this without Bernadette. And most importantly, I wouldn't want to do it without Bernadette. She's just been awesome. We work on these cases together and she's been looking at all the trends and findings from the past couple years. And she works with the data on all of our Most Loved Workplaces dataset and other benchmarking datasets. That we do for many publications. So it's really a pleasure to bring in today with us our very own Head of Our People Analytics, Bernadette Quinn. Bernadette, welcome.

Hi, thank you so much for that really nice introduction. I really appreciate it. I'm excited to work— be here with all of you today. It's a really exciting topic that I'm pretty passionate about, so excited to dive in. And then likewise, I would like to introduce Lou. As you all know, Lou is the founder of the Best Practice Institute and creator of the Most Loved Workplace initiative. He is a renowned thought leader in organizational culture and emotional connectedness. His work focuses on improving workplace environments by fostering positive emotional connections and leadership practices that drive performance, innovation, and collaboration. He's also the author of several influential books and research papers on leadership, including Great Company and others, and his writings typically explore systematic collaboration, psychological safety, respect, and achieving transformation. Performative workplace cultures. So excited to be on this webinar with him. So starting off, I'll kick it to you, Louis.

Thanks, Bernadette. Yeah, so just to give you a little bit more about us, if you're a Most Loved Workplace and you're on this call, you already know much of this. We really— our purpose is to create a competitive advantage for you. I'll tell you why. A lot of companies look at engagement and as the thing that drives their performance. We look at something deeper and something that really moves performance and retention and engagement and everything else with outcomes, customer outcomes, and that's emotional connecting. And we do it through employee listening deeply to comments and through our Spark Index into what they're doing inside their culture and how do they collaborate, how does their values, personal values, align with that of the company, how are they respected and feel respect both top-down and across. So it's not just does the leadership respect employees, it's do employees respect leadership. So it's a whole system, not just a one-way linear approach that a lot of people look at these days, which is just, is your manager awesome. Are you staying in your company because of your manager alone? We don't just look at that. We look at, do you love your manager? Do you love your employees? Do you love your leaders? Do you love your workplace? Do you love your CEO? And vice versa— CEO to employees, managers to employees, leaders to employees. So the whole system is important to us. So bringing together that entire employee experience of everyone in the system, from the top down, down up, and the culture that emerges from emotional connectedness and how people actually create outcomes or come together to actually achieve, and giving people those recommendations in real time, enabling marketing and branding so that you can bring this to the world as a Most Loved Workplace and bring all the things you need for that, the reporting, the analysis, workshops, consulting, so that you can be a Most Loved Workplace certified and making it simple for you. By the way, a lot of people find that the, that other certifications are pretty tough to do and end up having, it's like kind of applying to you know, Ivy League at Harvard or Yale, and it takes them years and years to do. What we're looking to do is looking at you as a snapshot, where we take you, where you're at right now. That's what's important. Understanding where you are and where you want to go. So if you're awesome, awesome, terrific, we'll capture that beautiful essence of who you are as a most loved workplace, how you place love at the center of your business strategy, which is what this movement is all about. Loving your workplace and putting that at the center of your strategy and everything else emerges from that. Your people, your clients, your customers, everything rises from there. So the next slide goes into a little bit of that, of, you know, who our team is, how we came about doing this, where we launched these, the, the products and the key research that came of it from the University of Pittsburgh and McGraw-Hill, and the books and the community creation and the machine learning that we put our team on to create something awesome for you, which is we had a, a contest And all of us labeled thousands of comments and the winner got a nice DoorDash and some swag and stuff like that. Actually label 1,000 comments is a lot. So then we're going to go into how we did that and how it became the new BERT analysis. If you look up BERT analysis or Roberta analysis from Twitter, the Twitter Roberta analysis, we use that as a construct, a framework, our team here to develop the Spark and Love scores. So it's our own custom. So when you come in and you come through the Love Workplace Index, you're using that custom proprietary work that we worked really hard on developing for you. The new BERT analysis past the Twitter, and there's no others past there that created it in, in this way with Spark. The next slide, we go into a little bit more about the rest of the team. And the next one, it's like Tracy's on right now. Thank you, Tracy, for all of your help. All the folks that come into this, your client solutions manager and your customer support, Zachary and Christian, all the people you talk to as a part of this that you'll discuss and they'll help you. So we're we're really a community here for you, right? We're coming together for you within your Most Loved Workplace experience when you get certified, as you get certified, and then all the solutions that we provide to you. You have a great team to help you with it, and I just want you to know them. They're just phenomenal people. I'm really glad to have them on with us, and I feel lucky to have them as a part of our team. And the next one for Bernadette is going to bring in, and I'll kind of bring you through here. What is it that makes us, you know, different and unique? People ask that. So, you know, one of the really important factors to Love Workplace Index, its relationship to outcomes. And there's reasons for that, right? Really, the simple one— when you have happy employees, happy people, you have happy customers, you have people who stay longer, you have candidates who want to work for you. And we proved that through our research, 2 to 4 times more likely to perform at higher levels compared to other most loved workplaces. That's attributed to voluntary discretionary effort. I love that term. I'll tell you why. It's when people come in and they don't just do what's expected of them. They go above and beyond because they're connected to that purpose. They're connected to being a most loved workplace, connected to really engaging in this kind of experience with everybody. So secondarily, most loved workplaces also are 2 to 4 times more effective in retaining employees than other organizations. We've proven that through all of our MLWs. 92% of job candidates— this is interesting— they choose the company because they're certified as a most loved workplace versus other. And we found that actually this figure employee— what we do with employee emotional connectedness is 40% more effective than engagement alone. So we're, we go above and beyond because of the deep analysis we've done, because of the amount of data that we've collected, because of how we bring this to you in the form of deep analysis and action planning to really make this work for you and improve as a most loved workplace. The next slide kind of goes into sort of the future now of workplace culture, what Bernadette's gonna bring to you, what you're gonna be looking at. This is really exciting, and it, I'll tell you why. We looked at 2 years of data and we're looking at what it's going to be like in this year and potentially in years to come. So we're going to give you info that we've learned and do some futurist work. Feel free to ask questions in the bottom and to, to speak as well. Bernadette, thanks so much for bringing us through these slides and can't wait to work with you on bringing this great data to everybody.

Thanks, Lou. So I'll go ahead and dive right into my portion. Basically, actually, let me ask everybody if you could drop in the comments, what do you think? The future of workplace culture is. It'd be interesting to see some thoughts. And let's see, I see some questions. Great. So you can go ahead and throw those comments in as you're listening to the presentation and any questions that you have, and I'll keep my eye on them. So I think what's important is understanding the history of where HR has evolved over the last century. So, you know, as you all know that HR originally was more of an administrative function. That focused on record keeping, hiring, and really just basic processes. But much of this changed in the, around the 1930s, '40s, and '50s due to a large body of research that started to be developed around behavioral and psychological management. One of the things that you may have heard of is the Hawthorne Experiments, where they went in, they're really trying to understand what is motivating behavior in in the workplace, and they found that, you know, it's not just finances or a paycheck, it's really people. You know, there's much more there, including, you know, how people engage with their managers, how they're being monitored. And they even studied things like, does lighting affect performance? And it didn't. It was more like, you know, a culture and a sense of belonging with their colleagues and understanding common goals. So, and throughout time, as you all have seen and experienced, that HR has become much more of a strategic function where it's not just about doing the processes anymore. It's really about workforce management aligning with business goals and starting to focus on development, performance management, and culture. And now we're getting more into the digital and talent management era where, you know, it's, it's really the sort of next level people management where it's using data and analytics and tools to measure performance, to streamline how HR operates within a company and to really understand how to attract and retain high-performing talent. So it's really come a long way through evolution. And now where we're at today is really the HR function is a business leadership function and a key driver of the company's overall success and ROI. And more and more and more companies have recognized this and supporting it. So going into the next slide, now some of the key drivers of this change really are some of the things I already talked about, but really businesses have recognized that people and culture are a competitive advantage, right? It's not just about the product anymore and putting out the output and the product into the world. It's really like what's be going on behind the current and what are those secret ingredients that drive success and performance. So it's funny, like a long time ago, I remember a CEO saying to me, everybody is replaceable. I feel like that concept is not really the case anymore. More. Not everyone is replaceable. A body or an employee is replaceable as headcount, yes, but high-performing teams and individuals are really hard to replicate, and businesses understand that. You can have teams and individuals that can literally transform a business, and replicating that is highly challenging and even very expensive to do. So, so there's much more value on humans and their capabilities. There's also in that thread, there's a lot of competition for this talent, finding the right people, finding the changemakers and making sure that they are engaged and retained in the workforce. And then some of the other key drivers of change have also been, you know, legal and social movements. As we've seen, there's been a lot more focus for DEI strategies and making sure that there's fairness and rights in the workplace, which also ties into how how people are expecting to be treated in the workplace and what they're expecting from the workplace. It's no longer just the, hey, go to work 9 to 5, clock out, go home. It's really become the focal point of many people's lives and satisfaction with their lives. And they are expecting so much more from their work and how their relationship is with their employers. Then other key big factors that can't be ignored is really this sheer factor of globalization and workplace hybridization. HR used to be a more administrative function because things were a little bit easier to manage if you had 10, 15 people in a company. Now you have companies that have 2 million people, like Walmart has 2 million, the federal government has 2 million employees, Amazon has 1.5 million employees, and they work across many different nations that spans across culture and so many different components that really you cannot ignore how sophisticated an HR function has to be to keep up with that sort of dynamic aspect of their workforce. And not only to mention that people are working online and different environments, whether it's a factory, a distribution center, a hospital, there's so many different factors that really we need to adopt a lot of different technologies to manage this level of complexity. And then that naturally flows into the fact that HR has changed because of technological disruption and all the new technologies that have become available and all that change that has brought these functions. So in the next slide, this is what we're seeing. This is all the technology that's available, just some of it, not even all of it, that has become available to HR to help manage all these complexities of process, benefits, people analytics, learning and development, sourcing candidates, and measuring engagement. It's quite expansive. As you can see, there's tools upon tools upon tools. On tools, which is both overwhelming but also very liberating. And, you know, we see a trend where companies really are going into the automation of HR processes and doubling down on that, especially with AI available, has really transformed the capabilities that each department has, you know, really focus using leveraging tools to help create or foster more emotional wellbeing in the workplace, including, you giving tools for psychological support, helping with work-life balance, helping even— there's even platforms for helping to quit addictions. And then another key focus is that there's really this drive for integration and scalability because there are so many tools. They really have to work with each other and push for common synergies so that it doesn't get overwhelming and cause bigger problems down the road. But I think the biggest thing though is really employee focus and talent attraction. And I think that's where you know, I kind of put this Most Loved Workplace logo right in the center because I think that's really where you can solve things operationally with tools pretty easily. But now solving employee engagement and their sentiment and emotions around the workplace, that is a bit more challenging. And what I really love about the Most Loved Workplace, a key contributor to all of this is, and a big success of HR really becoming a business leader is the analytics behind all these tools and measuring impact. So it used to be that HR was a little bit more intuitive as far as how things were going in the workplace. Yes, there would be surveys, but it was a little challenging to analyze the sort of underlying elements of those surveys and trends given just the system limitations. It would require a tremendous amount of manual work to figure out what are those correlations, and you really needed somebody who was a, had a doctorate in analytics to really provide those like really in-depth insights into your workforce culture and what people will say. You, you would be able to get more superficial insights and those are always important and that's what sort of things jump out first when you look at surveys. But really it's so much more complex than that when it comes to data. And I think companies and business leaders are really understanding that. And it is a tool for empowering them and to understanding, one, what are the key issues that are blocking them from success and helping their employees feel satisfied and performing to their best capabilities. And it's also something that's really empowering for HR leaders because they can say like, hey, these strategies, they actually work. And I think that's why they've been more empowered, because now companies can see like if you do X, Y, Z, you will get this result and not having that information is really, really unfortunate because I don't think it empowers HR in a way that it should be. Now, actually going into driving engagement a little bit more with culture and using our survey, I just wanted to go into this section and explain a little bit more about how Most Loved Workplace works. The Most Loved Workplace framework is simple and complex all at the same time. Our pillars are based off of measuring SPARK, measuring love, employee NPS, and sentiment and emotion. And so SPARK is a framework that is based on a few key components, which include systemic collaboration, positive vision for the future, alignment of values, respect, and supportive of achievement. So these combined really indicate and can be leveraged to foster an emotionally connected workplace and help drive performance. Love is also another pillar where it refers to the deep emotional connections employees feel towards their workplace. And this is critically important to understand and engage with because that's what really, like going back to Hawthorne's studies, really drives people. And then the day, it's not just a paycheck, it's really how they feel, their emotional sentiment towards their colleagues, towards their managers, towards leaders, and towards the business itself. Then, as you see here, we have ENPS, which is a metric that we use to just do a check on how people are feeling about the company, how much they would recommend the company to their peers and other people to work at, which is extraordinarily important, especially when you're measuring, you know, against other companies and your performance and benchmarks. And then finally, sentiment and emotion, which is a really interesting part of the Most Loved Workplace platform that I'll pass to Lou in a minute to get into. But the point is that these 4 pillars combined, we've seen in our research, if, if a company measures these and also engages in strategies, specific strategies to improve each one of these, they often see really profound impact. Specifically with retention, performance, and attracting new talent. So one of the things that we discovered over the past couple of years of studying data is that these companies actually have 3 to 4 times higher retention rate and productivity, our customers that have focused on elevating these elements. So it's truly critically important and there's such a high ROI, such a high ROI on fostering the development and in these areas. Now for the next slide, I'm gonna actually pass it off to Lou to discuss a bit more about the platform and how it works and how we're able to measure these elements in a really sophisticated way.

I'll try to work on the sophistication angle. You're far better at that than me. First of all, I thought it was great what you had mentioned. I think we should coin a new word, HAROI. Hi, HAROI. I like that one. It's just great how you described us and explaining about the research and how important it is to bring this in with connection connectedness more than engagement, right? I thought it was just really well said the way you articulated it. So what Bernadette's asking me to do here, and we're— what we're doing next, is look at what it is that we dive into with emotion and sentiment. And while you could do this with other tools, and out there anyone can do emotion and sentiment out there because, you know, most tools do it, the question is what do we do differently with emotion and sentiment that helps you get even better and connect to important outcomes. And the answer to all that is that our Emotion Sentiment looks at very specific aspects. It's not just take Emotion Sentiment, positive, negative, neutral, and throw a bunch of emotions on it. It looks at sub-elements, and those sub-elements are around emotional bonds with the workplace itself. It sounds strange to have an employee have a bond with, you know, something that's likely a concept or inanimate object, right? It's not living. It's a thing. It's living in only that we're together as a as a unit and as an entity, it's connected in that way. And that's why we use the word bonds. And the elements around those bonds are things like psychological safety. We hear that from Amy Edmondson, great study. And we actually have a correlation analysis between our model and hers because we respect her so much, which showed a very high correlation between those who have psychological safety and those who took our Love Workplace Index. So there's a high correlation. The other ones are belonging and mutual support. If you really want to geek out into the other additional elements in our study, in our research, go look at another study by Meyer and Allen called Organizational Commitment. And these are things like organizational commitment behaviors. And the basics behind it is that when we have 3 things that we look at when, when employees want to stay, the first is continuance, second is normative, and the third is effective. A-F-F-E-C-T-I-V-E. Continuance is I have to stay here. Something bad's going to happen to me, right? Normative is I have I have to keep things the same in my life because that's just the way it is. Effective is I really want to do this. I want to achieve, I want to do more. I believe in this mission and this is why I keep going, right? So continuance and normative are reasons why people stay is the wrong reasons, right? So we want to find out who those people are, number one, and help them to get to effective commitment within the, the organization. So we look at those deeper elements in emotion and sentiment with psychological safety, belonging, mutual support, effective commitment, and organization citizenship behaviors, and even looking at its correlation to things like the Big Five personality theory. We found some really interesting things about individuals who are part of most love workplaces involving even showing that neuroticism was a high factor in a lot of the sources, which isn't a bad thing, because what we're looking at is people who are highly detailed and want to do even better. These are the people in your company, in your culture, who love doing it and wanting to be there. Some of them don't even see work-life balance as a thing, right? Not that they want to do more work in their life, not that they want to have more of life in their life with the— part of the work-life balance, but because they see them being and doing and living in the same aspect, right? So they want their life to be part of how they show up in the world. And sometimes that is work, right? So we did make those correlations. Who are these individuals who are doing so darn well inside of companies? Well, they're people who really care about showing up as their best selves, and they care about being better every single day, not accepting what they were yesterday, but improving consistently and constantly fighting that kind of desire to say, look, I give up. 'Cause they know that giving up isn't part of growing, isn't part of becoming even better as an individual. They also let go of the past quite a lot. And they say, look, that was then. Now let's find out what we can do even better into the future and feed forward into the future, become that even better person. And with the help of the individuals around them and with the acceptance that they're more agile and that they themselves can grow and have that growth mindset rather than fixed mindset, and accept that there are better ways of doing things. Those are the people that really make up a most loved workplace. Those are the people that really are extraordinary and create that feeling of being respected, feeling of, yes, loved inside of a company. Because why would you want to go to a place where people don't want to get it even better and people don't want to really achieve together what the company's purpose is? So the feedback itself, as I said, is employee-centric. What does that mean? These are the top 3 reasons why we love this company. And then looking at promotion, what can we do better to love the company even more? So instead of saying, what does the company do wrong, which will give you some really mixed feedback, and it'll be super hard to go in later on and say, okay, I'm really bad at these 5 things, what do I do? And also look at action planning and AI to tell us what you should do better. We ask the the people what we should do better, right? So human in the loop is the people. So the world's going to change to AI one day completely, right? So we can slow that down by asking the right questions. Who can help us get better? Our people. Who can help us get better? Our people. So that's why we call it employee-centric. It's employee-centric, not AI-centric. So you're not going to get a ChatGPT answer. You're going to get themes from from people, from employees who are telling you what to do better and telling you the things that you do well, that they love about you, that you can use in social amplification. You can use to beat those darn Glassdoor reviews that are in there that shouldn't be in there, that give you all the negative feedback. By the way, it's all the stuff, hey, what do I do about this? And then secondarily, one thing that you'll see in the other platforms too is that they're very transactional. They focus just on salary, compensation, benefits, etc. Most employees do that. That's a masking mechanism for employees. We found in our research that only 2 out of 10 employees believed that benefits, bonus, compensation, salary was actually a factor for loving the workplace. 2 out of 10 employees believe that salary compensation was a factor toward loving the workplace. That means that 80% of people believe that it's the transformational aspects, it's the spark aspects, it's the love aspects, it's the Love Workplace Index aspects of why they would stay, why they would join them, and why they perform more and help and delight your customers. That's why we're looking just at the trans— we're looking at transactional and transformational, and we're taking out the transactional. And we're saying, look, that's the transactional elements. Pay attention to it because it's the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy. Super important. Gotta make sure comp and benefits and bonus are all there and you're fair and equal and you help people to have a connection to their structure for performance. All good. But we also, we want to actually separate out, we do separate out transformational elements and say, now look at these themes. These are the things people love that you can amplify. These are the things that people tell you to do better that you can amplify on a transformational level and the collaboration How to respect, how to align the values, how to create a common purpose, common lexicon, and then finally how to achieve together. So the machine learning that we developed was our team of trained individuals who know the concept, know the model, to actually— our humans in the loop training the model so that it can learn, the model can learn and identify all the right emotions, all the right sentiment, Sentiment, by the way, is positive, negative, neutral. Emotions are the love, the gratitude, all the stuff that we always said when we were a kid. Well, what emotion are you feeling? Well, those are the emotions, right? And there's definitions for them too. And we've had some really great debates around how to define emotions, which is actually really a lot of fun. You want to do a cool, fun workshop? It's— let's— we'll define emotions. You'll see how many people can debate what love really means, how many people can debate what respect means, gratitude means, optimism It's a great debate. And what is interesting about when I see that debate happen is that you always come back to the same thing. It's meta-analysis. Boom, boom, boom. What's that? If you ask why 100 times, you're going to come back to the same definition. It's just those 100 people have different ways of saying it. It's really cool to do that. Take part in a workshop with us. We do that. So that's the machine learning aspects and the multidimensional analysis that you see in our platform and how we did it, how we think about our research and how it will manifest in this Twitter Roberta analysis. Look it up, look up Twitter Roberta analysis. Really interesting. What happened was one of the first emotion and sentiment analysis tools in AI. This is before ChatGPT. A bunch of coders took all the raw data from Twitter. It was Twitter back then. It's not X. And they identified through, they took out all the emoticons and all the stuff that would kind of budget up, you know, and looked at just the text and they processed it through what's called an aspect-based sentiment analysis. And that has things like 8 classifications of emotions. So you'll see in the bottom of it, the classifications of tweets, positive, negative, neutral, and on the right-hand side, it's like gratitude and like angry. And you hear of that with rage clicks a lot in apps, or surprised, confused, happy, and love. So we took that RoBERTA LSTM model, we changed Right. And I'll show you that in the next slide, what that is all about. We put our data set into that. So we put all of our Most Loved Workplace data, all of our companies in aggregate form only, everything's anonymized and into the data set, we cleaned it. We took out any emojis or punctuations and user categorizations, and we did the same aspect-based sentiment analysis, but we did something different. We labeled them beforehand and we changed the Twitter-based this BERT analysis to be our own with the Spark elements and the Love of Workplace Index. And we labeled everything, all the comments on our own to train the machine. So we train the machine to think more like this. ChatGPT and Claude AI, they all have their own training, by the way. You might have heard a lot of, of sort of sentiment, a lot of news about, oh, ChatGPT or Gemini, they've been trained to tell me things that, you know, certain way and the, to be this way in the media, right? Or say this so that I'll vote this way or that way. Well, guess what? Yeah, they actually do. They're trained a certain way to have ethical implications. They are trained a certain way to think in a certain way, to have certain parameters around how to help society be a bit more forgiving, right? In some ways. Now, whether that's good or bad, it's debatable, right? It's debatable whether that's good or bad. What we did was in a similar fashion to ChatGPT or Claude AI or Gemini, Bard, all the others out there. We formulated it with Spark and Louis Carter. That's our parameters. That is our way of feeding back to you the best possible themes and ways of creating your culture so that it's super engaged, it's super emotionally connected, it has those great scores, great research behind it to give you the best possible light. These are the 4 categories that we put them in. Sentiment, that I talked about before with the Twitter bird. That's 3. Positive, negative, neutral. Second is emotions. These are the fun ones that you can have debates on. Love, optimism. You have neutral in there too. Disapproval, anger. And we put them into topics that you know very well. Some are competencies, some are skills, some are just general categorization, things that can be easy for companies to be able to say, yep, we fit in there. And you could fit your own into there as well. Themes itself, well, this is what what you may know of already is thematic analysis. The initial tool we created was a thematic analysis tool. Instead of having to wade through a million comments, we put them into specific themes that we can show you soon. So when I look at that now, Bernadette, and the next slide.

So I think, let's see if I can share my other screen. One of the things that Lou was discussing, you can see how it actually plays out on the platform. So you can see that we have our measurements for love and spark and how we can select different benchmarks from different years to compare progress. And also you can see how we are measuring each area. And these are all administered by a survey that captures, you know, the questions that feed into this. Then I think, you know, naturally goes into the comments. And this is what Lou was focusing on where our system— sorry, my internet's a little bit laggy today. But as it's loading, there we go. You know, we can see how the system is categorizing each one of these comments. So, oh, I froze. But at any rate, you can see how it picks up the sentiment and emotion of each comment. So, you know, if it's a positive comment, if it's a neutral comment, neutral being like there's no serious emotion around it. And then a negative comment could be like, I really don't like, or sometimes that could be categorized as disgust.

We bring people on, you just put your name in down there and we can get you a demo. Also have a research paper we can provide to you after this to just put your email in the bottom right-hand corner. And then at the end, we can go ahead and we'll show you a bit more about it. Email our name. I see your names here anyway, but we can show that to you. When we were talking about the future trends and, you know, Bernadette and I, she did a great slide on all the tools that are available right now. Right. And there's a lot of them. What is it that can get even better? Right. And how can we incorporate AI into the future? Right? And is it all about AI or is it about the human element more? And we're finding that human in the loop and having humans train AI is a good thing, but more so we're moving away from it, right? We're looking at more about people can identify when something's written by ChatGPT. People can identify when you're not coming from the heart. So we're looking at trends. What do we do about the trends, Bernadette? Let's look at them and look at the different tools that are emerging. Look at what is happening for the future, how we're getting back also to organization development, transformation in real time. We're moving back to office, we're getting away from remote even. There's mandatory in-office, some of the trends in high performance. We're going to go through those. We're going to go through what's important in terms of getting reconnected from the top level to the bottom levels. And so I'm going to let somebody who's much better at this than me, Bernadette, do this. She's awesome. It sounds so much better coming from her. So Bernadette, you got the floor.

The things that we're seeing with our high-performance companies that trend well on our surveys is, is really, it's kind of simple concepts. So one of them is, you know, having approachable and transparent leadership. That's become incredibly important. People want to know what's going on in their company. They want to see what's going on with their CEOs, who's leading them, the type of messages what their CEOs are saying, where's the business going, how do they fit into those goals. So that transcends into communication and engagement. You know, having regular communication and most importantly, feeling heard is a really big thing. Employees want their voices to be heard. And this is incredibly— it's so much of a focal point these days because companies are going through rapid changes really quickly. Quickly, and not having that opportunity to be part of the change process and feeling heard is really impacting employee sentiment and morale, especially when there's really big changes, especially when there's new technologies. People feel like they get left out. Focusing on experience, so meaning more specifically, you know, culture, things, how people are engaging with each other in the workplace, especially because there are so much more diversified teams working in different environments. Being able to feel connected to each other and not getting buried in some digital location on a Zoom, you know, it just really having that human connection is incredibly important and fostering that amongst your employees. Career development and mentorship. So, you know, I don't think I have to dive too deep into this, but this is such a critical, important employees really really want to feel supported and they really want to learn. And this is becoming more and more of a trend, especially as you have different generational differences in the workplace and different desires. It's not that people want to sit and do the same job for 40 years anymore. They really want growth. They want challenge. They want to be intellectually challenged. Diversity inclusion is definitely a hot topic because, you know, as we know, some companies are doing away with their DEI programs. I think that's really unfortunate and a lack of understanding of what truly drives DEI strategies and the impact that DEI has. I think it's been assigned this layer of, oh, it's about race promotion in the workplace. It's so much more than that. Excuse me, race and gender. And those are two critical elements, but it's so much more about that. It's not just those factors. It's really about things like generational differences, about intellectual differences. You know, people were starting to understand the different, you know, spectrums of intellectual capabilities and how people work, personality types. It's so much more than what I think the political focal point has put on DEI. And I think companies that— and as we've seen in our research, companies that do promote DEI in the workplace and have a good understanding of what DEI is typically succeed. And then as we've talked about over and over again, the investment in technologies and tools, we can go on about like how the adoption of technology has really helped companies succeed as far as how they're managing their employees and engaging with their employees, as it makes this sort of process and effort more quantifiable, as well as easier to make more transparent and to track progress. So going into the next slide, some other trends that we're seeing is that, you know, we're seeing some industry trends where we can see here in the chart that some trends are, some industries are doing better than others. Things like manufacturing, energy, financial services, health and wellness versus other companies that are performing lower like professional services, education, computer software. And I think there's a common theme that we're seeing amongst these industries. Again, it's these industries have done well in areas of career development, mentorship programs, adoption of technology, and DEI programs. And I think manufacturing does so well is because they're really innovative and they really have a lot of focus on process management and performance management at the individual level. It really contributes to their bottom line, and they've understood this for a very, very long time. Like, you know, studies with Taylor and going back to the early days of studying service operations and measuring quantifiable impact. They've had a longer history in these type of programs because they've measured it more. Some things that we're also seeing of our high performers, specifically these companies, is that they put forward a people-first culture. Again, doubling down on employee development, driving leadership engagement. I love how some of these companies, they actually have have CEO-hosted events and they do this frequently. They even have a CEO-hosted book club, which is really cool. Coming up with innovative ways to keep that connection between CEO and employee is really important because people do look up to their leaders and they do, and they are inspired by their leaders, and it's really important to keep that engagement. Work-life balance, incredibly important. Avoiding burnout, Collaboration and communication, again, keeping that connection in a very dynamic workplace and on the different sort of mediums that are used to work together. And then most importantly, continuous feedback. These companies and our higher performing companies, they constantly have mechanisms to measure feedback, to measure their success of their strategies, their people's strategies specifically. So through engagement surveys, through performance management systems, these sort of things. Now, our lower performing companies, this is one chart that I wanted to pull up. And I think, you know, it's very easy to say that, oh, if a person has been employed at a company, they're more likely to not like their CEO if they have been there for a longer period of time. And this might be kind of like a little shocking to see, but the reality is not just about tenure, it's about the change behind the tenure and what happens with their connection with the CEO and with the company. People that have been employed at companies longer have experienced a lot more change. And this is more true in the last decade, as you know, we've gone through really big technological, economic, political, a lot of different transformations that transcends into the workplace. And then you have things like COVID, new tools that are being adopted. AI is the big one. You know, these things really impact how more tenured employees see and feel emotionally connected to their workplace. So, so that's something I point out here. The lower performance correlates with low engagement with leadership, like never seeing a CEO in 10 years of working there, never meeting the CEO. Obviously, you know, it's really hard to do this. The larger the company, if you have 2 million employees, but really creating those touch points however a company can is truly critical. And then again, poor communication around change is a big trigger, feeling left out, also getting little recognition and feedback. You know, people really pour their hearts and souls into their work and then they don't get recognized around the good work that they do. And that's unfortunate. And so critically important to foster this sort of culture of of recognition in your businesses. And then also just having a lack of insights around employees. You'll be amazed, you know, from my own experience and then partnering with other big companies, the lack of insights they have around their employees is truly astonishing sometimes. And it really shows in the output of these type of surveys. So tying it up, the predictions for 2025 is that companies are going to continue engaging in hybrid workforces and fostering that emotional connection. They're going to evolve around what DEI AI means, kind of what I was talking about before, and trying to understand how that function looks like, especially when it's under threat. Their companies really are going to be managing huge change around AI integration. I'm sure all of you are thinking about, or even doing already, integrating new tools to improve, improve workflow and engagement. That's going to be the really big theme. And then also, you know, the change around that integration, especially the generational change. You know, of course, older generations are more are fearful or reserved about AI integration and new technologies. So managing that to create equity in your workplace, strategic workforce planning, that's always a theme. But I think, you know, especially in certain industries where we've seen a lot of boom and bust and a lot of hiring and then a lot of firing, hiring and firing again, you know, I think companies are trying to get smarter on how they manage workforce headcounts, attrition, retention, all these things. And then again, once again, improving continuous feedback and listening is something that increasingly companies are adopting and paying attention to because it impacts workforce management retention and ultimately saves on their bottom line. So that actually is wrapping up my portion, and I'll pass it back to Lou to close it up.

Wow, that was awesome, Bernadette. Thank you. I mean, it's a great presentation. Everybody will get this as well. I couldn't say enough great things. Bernadette said it all. Thank you all for joining us, and Bernadette for a great presentation. And to everybody Have an awesome day and we'll see you online on Most Loved Workplace. Bernadette, thanks again. Thanks everybody.

Yeah, thank you all. And, and excited for everything that's to come in 2025.