In this talk, Louis Carter introduces the concept of "Love of Workplace"—the collective sentiment employees feel toward their organization. He argues that treating love as a business strategy can differentiate a company and improve performance. Carter outlines a five‑area framework (collaboration, vision, values, respect, and career development) for measuring workplace love and explains how simple questions about love for the company, managers, teammates, and CEO feed into sentiment analysis. Using state‑of‑the‑art natural language processing and AI, his team at the Best Practice Institute extracts the dominant emotions (sad, angry, upset) from employee feedback, distills the top two‑to‑three actionable items, and delivers rapid recommendations. He stresses that negative sentiment must be addressed immediately to prevent damage. Companies that achieve "Most Loved Workplace" certification benchmark their scores against peers across the five dimensions, receive guidance on improvement, and treat employees like family throughout their lifecycle. The overall message is that embedding love into a company’s lexicon drives cultural change, higher performance, and longer employee tenure.
Chapters
Love of Workplace. It's employee sentiment and how they feel about the company. Word love means a lot to a lot of people because it's such a confluence of emotions and it's so powerful for organizations. And to think of love in the context of loving employees as a business strategy, loving customers as a business strategy, is really a wonderful thing for companies to hang their hat on and to not just brand themselves on, but also to live. It's incredible what happens when you put that word into the vernacular, the language, the lexicon of a company. It shifts everything and makes people think differently, act differently. It truly is a differentiator. Unlike, you know, sort of ways that you typically think about what love is, we construct it in 5 different areas. And we also have the simple question of, do I love my company, my workplace? Do I love my managers, love my employees, love my teammates, love my CEO, which gets to that sentiment analysis that we have and uses a lot of natural language processing and new artificial intelligence state-of-the-art tools to really understand the depth of emotion that people are going through. Love is something that you really have to wade through. A research project that, that I did, we did with my BPI team at Best Practice Institute, um, that looks at companies across the spectrum around the globe, um, and employees around the globe and what makes them say that they will love their company and also perform more and stay longer. Most people don't have love of workplace. Oftentimes we lose track of it because we're too focused on strategy, or we're too focused on customer acquisition or business development, and we keep running toward that goal, and we don't think about all the other things that are at home and need to be attended to. And the fact that that culture or collaboration and, and, uh, a way in which we work in inside of our own environments is getting in the way of our progress. So we look at that sentiment. That sentiment helps us understand, number one, exactly what they want, right? So the people who are sad, angry, and upset— literally these are the three emotions— have things that they say they should, you should do. And what our tools do is they take out the jargon, They summarize it and they say what you need to do. So what we do is we take those 2 to 3 things that you need to do and we give them to you. Life today should be quicker in making changes. And I've always believed this at any point in time in my life, I've thought, well, when does change need to happen? It does need to happen yesterday because there's people who are on this kind of, what I say, other side. They need you to change quickly because a lot bad can happen if you don't address these issues around negative sentiment. And in the workplace, in the world, and they need to be addressed immediately. Companies that are Most Loved fully realize that they want to help with the life cycle of that employee and treat them almost as family. So if you're working on our construct, we have those 5 areas and then you can— we benchmark it against other companies who are Most Loved Workplace Certified. And so you can see where you stand in collaboration, Vision, values, respect levels, and also killer outcomes, which is developmental career development to give people the chance to achieve. And then you can see who people love the most in your company. Then you get advice in terms of what you can do to increase those based upon the answers of employees.
