Louis Carter of the Best Practices Institute discusses the Most Loved Workplace certification and WorkplaceLytics platform, which measures employee sentiment through love scores and open-ended comments. The platform validates data across multiple steps to prevent gaming, and Carter argues love metrics matter in M&A deals because financials alone miss an organization's soul.
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Welcome to the Use Case Podcast. This is William Timcup and Ryan Leary. We have Lou on. He's from the Best Practices Institute. We're going to be talking exclusively today about workplace.
Yes, workplace. You got it.
Best Practices Institute also has an award that y'all put out around most loved workplaces.
A loved workplace really is how people listening, co-creating together, aligning values, having a shared vision, respecting and feeling respect, and being able to achieve outcomes together. The fact that we ask questions around, do you really love your your company? Do you love your CEO, your managers? And then asking questions really about what do we do well to be loved? What can we do better to be loved? And listening deeply to those comments and then the company doing something about it, developing skills and addressing these comments right into sort of the bowels of the organization, right to the front lines, and being able to transform what that workplace is really all about.
Personally, I've always been cynic of employees loving a company. The one company out of every place that I've worked, I legitimately fell in love with that company. I bought into the mission. I drank the Kool-Aid. I love the leadership. I love the people, everything about it. But if you would have given me a survey back then or asked me, how do I feel about the company? I would have said yes either way, like I love them because I would have been afraid. You know, there would have been some type of negative to come back to me had I have not. So my question is, how do you discern between those employees that are answering truthfully from the heart versus just answering because they feel like they need to?
So you go through WorkplaceLytics, you go through the MLW app several times, get correct data. We ensure that we know it's accurate data. You are able to look at the proper sentiment, emotions, themes, and identify the spark areas that benchmark against the averages as well as the love or sentiment toward those areas. And we can identify where there's discrepancies in the data itself, that there's too much positive, too much negative variances, and they do it over again until they get certified. We guarantee it because you keep going until you get honest, and we take being honest very seriously.
Sentiment to me, if I go to a site and it's all positive, like there is no negative sentiment, I don't trust it. You had 6,000 customers last year and no one had a bad experience? Nah, I don't trust that at all. Equally as much, I don't trust all negative sentiment. Why are they still in business? Come on. To me, it's an 80/20, 70/30, a preponderance of positive sentiment, but I also want to see some negative sentiment.
The science behind it, it is true. You can find patterns like that, right?
Right.
We have 3 different steps, which is the question about love of these different areas and then the spark construct itself and combined with the comments and the story, right? So, what story, your culture profile, are you really giving?
All those have to be aligned.
They all have to be aligned. Exactly. Is your story the same as your spark, the same as your love scores, same as your comments?
That's harder to game, right?
It's harder to game. Exactly. The more variables you give, the harder it is to game the system.
So, if we were to say, yes, Ryan and I are running a billion-dollar company, blah, blah, blah. Okay. And we say, you know what, we've never— yeah, no. And we're thinking about acquiring a company and merging it with another company. Why wouldn't we do this as due diligence? So I'm not even thinking about it as the award to make the company better. I'm trying to figure out, is this actually a good company? I can see all the numbers. I can see the P&L. So I can see profit and loss and all that stuff. But do people love you?
Yeah, that's—
why wouldn't they? It's 6 weeks of time.
Why?
Why?
Why not? It makes complete sense. I love it.
If I'm going to go out and spend $300 million into a company, and buy them. Why wouldn't I want to know this? Yeah, that's blue ocean right there. Especially the people that put the deals together. So the Goldman Sachs of the world, et cetera, before they take a company public, this would be something that they could do. Again, you can see all the numbers in the world, but you still don't know the soul.
It's funny you say like soul of the machine, right? It matters. Soul is what drives companies. It's what drives profit. It's what drives legacy. It's what improves or increases stock price. The new market, the new way that we perceive the marketplace, which is really what we're talking about, is the soul the organization.
Discover how Most Loved Workplace certification uncovers genuine employee sentiment and drives meaningful change. Sign up for WorkplaceLy today and transform your organization into a truly loved workplace.
