Building a High-Flow Culture: Insights from Team Exos and Steven Kotler

Hello everybody. Welcome to Flow Research Collective Radio. I'm Stephen Kotler. I'm the executive director of the Flow Research Collective. I'm still learning to talk this morning. And I'm your host. I'm joined by my co-hosts, Dr. Sarah Sarkis, who's a clinical psychologist and the person I turn to in times of absolute trouble. So when my own life goes crazy, Sarah is who I call. And we have a panel of amazing guests with us today to talk about everything from entrepreneurship and business and flow and peak performance through risk-taking and mindset and a whole bunch of other great stuff. And over to you, Sarah, to introduce our guests.

Thanks, Stephen. So good. I'm so glad to be here. I was saying this before we started that this really feels like a bring your friends to work day for me. So I'm so happy. I'm so happy. So I am a licensed psychologist, but one of my most fun detours in life happened at the beginning of the pandemic. I became a consultant for a large performance organization called Axos. And shortly after dating as a consultant, we partnered up as I became their senior director of performance psychology. And it's really been one of the most fun Unexpected detours of my life. And I have 3 of the people I've been collaborating with for the last few years here today. I have Sarah Robohagen, our CEO, and she is described as a human exclamation point. And that is an accurate description. We also get to connect with Greg Hill. He is our Chief People Officer. We will get into it later, but you are my favorite decenter of all time. Nobody pulls it off like you. And we have Amanda Carson Phillips, our Chief Performance Innovation Officer. And in the interest of full disclosure, Amanda is who I work with the closest. She is technically the person I report to most frequently. And it is just such an honor to have all three of you here. I cannot wait to see how this conversation runs. Unfolds. For anybody who has been hiding under a rock, uh, I'm gonna have Sarah— we call her SRO, but we're going to call her Sarah— I'm going to have Sarah start and just sort of give an intro of like give Exos's story and, um, the climate in which you entered the story.

Yes, for sure. So yes, I am SRO, not to be confused with Sarah, because there's two of us on the call. So EXOS is an awesome company. We are a human performance coaching company. So essentially we were founded actually in the science, I would say, of elite sport coaching. And so our founder, Mark Verstegen, was the first person to realize in elite sports that all these poor athletes were dealing with performance psychologists and strength and conditioning coaches and nutritionists and physical therapists, and none of them were talking to each other. And Mark was like, what if we could put all of that integrated under one roof and really holistically coach an athlete? And that was the founding of our company. Years later, we managed to move into corporate performance and well-being. Why? Because all of us as executives have just as many stresses on our body as a high-performance athlete, do we not? Everyone around this call. And we recognized that there was a real opportunity to bring so much of the science of human performance and coaching into this corporate world. Because as Mark would say, at the end of the day, people are people, whether you're coaching them, a Navy SEAL or an NFL player or somebody who's trying to have a really tough conversation at work. Ultimately, the science of what's going on in our bodies and minds is pretty similar. So that is the history of EXOS. And then in February 2020, Greg on this call and myself entered the picture. So We actually joined the business. I joined as the CEO with this real exciting intent to say, how could we take what Exos was doing to many, many more people? Little did we know, 2 weeks later, we would be shutting the entire business down because at the time we ran 400 gym sites around the world. So that little thing called a pandemic isn't great when you're in the gym business with sweat and all those sorts of things. And so I would say the, the, the place that we enter this conversation is one of, it was a really grueling time for our business. Not only did we have to all jump into little boxes like this, but we had thousands of frontline coaches and staff that we had to figure out how to take care of their wellbeing. We had to do furloughing, all of the tough things that people had to do at the same time as trying to transform the business for our future, which is where we're at now. And for me personally, as the CEO, I will tell you that I had led the turnaround of a $5 billion business in the 2008 recession and burned myself out to a crisp. As Sarah would know, when you see the little pictures of the matches that represent how burned out you were, I did not know a lot of the science that I now know about recovery. And flow. And as a result, I did everything that you shouldn't do. So this time around, as I was at Exos, I was much, much more determined to figure out how do we do this the right way and how do I learn from Amanda, the team on the call to help us see if we could get our company through this really difficult challenge and do it in a way that actually helped our well-being and performance. So there we are.

Yeah, it's quite a thing when you take over a company in February of 2020 and 80% of it is incumbent on being, uh, is incumbent on being, um, face-to-face. And I really love that your experience of depleting your own body in order to succeed became momentum for like a mission and a vision that was really expressed as somebody who's not on the senior leadership team. I have a particular vantage point here. It was really clear from the senior leadership team from the start that we were going to try to do this differently. And so, Greg and Amanda, is there color commentary that we want to add to this pre-story as we get into the nitty-gritty here.

I would only add the fact that when you have a company of coaches, they're also responsible for inspiration and answers. And so in addition to their own well-being, our team's well-being, you want to make sure you're inspiring the inspirers. And so that was a real call to action for us.

Yeah, Sarah, and the last thing that I would add is joining Exos in 2003, so being here for, you know, over 20 years, it's been amazing to see just the landscape of professional sport change, the way we think about military operators change. And now we're thinking about and seeing that revolution happen in corporate America where how do we really think about the human? How do we optimize their recovery? How do we optimize their performance? And so, you know, for me, as Sarah mentioned with an exclamation point, this is an exciting time to be in the space of human performance.

Yeah, I find it to be like the— I'm so glad that I'm overlapping in this period of time where I do think organizations and corporations are starting to really think intentionally about how we use our human resources, you know, the, the engine that, that moves us. So When you're sort of sitting there, you're with this, you know, you're now, all three of you are in positions of real power. And, you know, I sort of have this vantage point where I kind of know part of the script, but I'm gonna ask it like I don't. So where did we start? Where did Exos choose to first place all of their attention and focus when it came to creating this change?

Well, I would start by saying, Greg, you should jump in, that we— where we started was an epic fail and that we all early in the pandemic, I think every one of ourselves and our clients, I should mention that we support 30% of the Fortune 100. So we were talking to very senior HR people everywhere and we were all dealing with exhaustion. And we quickly said, well, we've got to reduce screen time and we've got to get people to have recovery and let's do no meeting Fridays. That was our first effort, wasn't it, Greg? And we epically failed. And why did we fail? Because I'm the worst offender. All of my leaders and me kept breaking the rules. Greg, what happened?

It's very true. And I think in addition to that, the world was being reinvented. So it's really hard to not have urgency. And so how do you figure that urgency out while having Intentional recovery was definitely a journey. And for us, we've tried, as Sarah said, quiet Fridays, which was in essence, no emailing. We tried half-day Fridays. We tried half a year called summer Friday. And particularly with us being a customer and client-facing organization that's all reinventing themselves, that sounded like the right thing to do until we, we really realized how to fail, as Sarah said. And so, We started with status quo is not an option. And that's usually a really good business case for change.

Yes, Sarah, I mean, I would add this as well. Like, as we were going on this journey and thinking about ourselves as an organizational culture and how we optimize each of our human performance coming out of the pandemic and really looking at our entire team as athletes, we said, we've seen this problem before. And this concept of burnout, we had seen it with the athletes that we were working with 20 years ago. And how do you create sustainable levels of high performance? And we started, you know, to whiteboard out the similarities between what we were seeing today, what we were seeing 20 years ago, the differences, and really more similarities between overtraining and burnout and high performance in any medium. So it was really a fun time for us to apply all that we've thought about in terms of work and recovery ratios now with an awesome team into the way we actually work in corporate America.

Can I jump in with a question here? I've been listening to everybody sort of talk and it strikes me that in a sense, Amanda, what you're talking about, like we started, if you go back to sort of peak performance, especially in the business world in the '90s, it's Tony Schwartz's work on energy, right? So suddenly everybody was hip to energy. It's no longer about quality metrics, Energy is the big thing. Okay. We got to maintain energy. And this, of course, introduces sort of recovery and burnout of these ideas in. And then we have this like weird, let's say, 15-year period where sort of the internet happens and Silicon Valley sort of takes over performance with like, "Oh, no, no, you guys have it wrong. We need to play more. We're going to play more. We're going to get ping pong tables and beanbags and we're going to do all this." Right? And That was another sort of epic fail, right? There are, and I won't name names here, but there are a number of really big sort of tech companies who industry secret, you can't hire their employees after they've worked at the tech company because they've broken them. Like, they no longer know how to work in the world anymore. They've been too pampered. They've gotten too much of that stuff. So, then the pandemic sort of forces the hand, right? We're like, business we're in, which is sort of cognitive peak performance, suddenly gets— this is back. What I want to know is what's— what— like, we've learned a bunch of lessons, right? Amanda, you've been here for 20 years. So, what do we think? I know what I see and what I think is different, which is, one, we're no longer in squishy psychology, we're actually in neurobiology. So, one, if you're looking at mechanism, the mechanism has got more rigorous? What other— what do you guys see? So what do you think is different now in this current iteration?

I mean, from a science standpoint, like, I think, you know, I can definitely comment on that. But I mean, truly in partnership with HR, I think the real difference at this point in time is that industry-leading organizations and industry-leading leaders in those organizations are looking at human performance in a totally different way, and are much more open-minded to really think about applying the model of human performance, as we would say it, into the workplace, moving away from just generalized concepts of well-being and generalized concepts of disease reduction, and thinking about how can we architect an environment based on human performance science that optimizes the interconnectedness of the brain and the body of my employees? And I think that's the most exciting point because the landscape has changed and there's an openness to really think about how we can help individuals be at their best in a new way in the office. Greg, I mean, what do you think as a, you know, as a people leader?

I think that that's all very true. I think for us, it's always going to be different generations in the workforce with a different vantage point, and we're no different right now. But what I would also say is new now is Everybody's trying to solve one of the two same problems, and that I think is fairly new as opposed to organizations trying to be competitively advantaged, disadvantaged, catch up, et cetera. And so whether that is the obvious of wellbeing, which is the core of what we're talking about today, or along with that, the return to office and creating some type of community and productivity depending on the company, the cultures, and the leaders, that really is the call to action across the planet. And so I think that's the only thing I would say is a little different as an HR perspective is The business case is pretty, pretty quick. It's how do you solve it and show science as well as kind of being true to that company's culture, mission, and so forth. But that, that's new for us. And I think that helps us, as Sarah mentioned, with all of our clients. They're all asking us to solve the same problem. We might have to solve it a little different for each of them, but that's a pretty exciting call for us.

Also, I think the last thing that's really significant, and Stephen, you could be credited with a lot of this change, is that the mainstreaming of human performance conceptually. So I think about some of our biggest clients—we won't name names—but who really have jumped on board. It's because the leader at the top of the organization deeply personally understands how to drive their own performance. And they're like, wait, this isn't working in the organization. And then I compare and contrast that with other clients, you know, I've had plenty of conversations with CEOs and you talk to them about some of these concepts and they're like, no way, no way. There's no way this is going to work. And you actually, I look at them and go, 5 years from now, you're going to think about this quite differently. You're actually behind the play. And I think some of that's because leaders who personally have benefited from tuning their own operating system differently are leading the charge to what Greg just said. To help us to have that first conversation.

[Speaker] Yeah, and I think a lot of those leaders are people like yourself that you broke your own system in the process of achievement, right? I know we talk all the time with clients about like, you know, the idea that like we don't wanna wait till the system is broken. I love those answers and that was such a great question, Stephen. And I think like one thing I wanna highlight is like There's a couple of things that everybody was saying that I just feel like I want to crystallize. One is that just start. These people are brilliant senior leaders and they're basically saying to you, "We didn't know what we were doing. We just started. And we had a commitment to iterating. And we were willing to take the failures and pick them apart for the tiny wins inside, but just start." So, I think I think that message is so fundamental that it just bears repeating. Like, you don't have to have the best corporate strategy rolled out A to Z before you can really make a difference inside the people, inside your organization, inside of their lives. And here's the other thing as an employee. There's something very remarkable when you realize that your senior leadership team is trying. And by the way, they're saying we don't have all the answers, we're going to have to solve this together. So I also wonder, you know, uh, the three of you are being modest, that, you know, one of the things that I think Exos did that I rarely see is that you made us study ourselves in a couple of critical ways, and not vaguely study ourselves. So Whoever wants to sort of take the lead on this one, can you tell a little bit about how in your pursuit to create a culture that doesn't kill your employees in the process of achieving your goals, how you used our own people as an experiment?

I should probably go first because I think back to the epic fail when we were starting to do these Fridays that weren't working. And then in a funny— like, luck finds you when you're trying to do the right thing. You know, there was a funny twist of fate along the way where Amanda's team had been sort of gently nudging and pushing that there's science behind what we should do, we should try to do it. And then I happened to be personal friends with Adam Grant, and I happened to be texting with him about— it's got There's got to be a better way to work that doesn't burn people out. And he goes, wait, I've got someone who wants to study this topic. And then you put that together with Amanda's team and she can explain the rest. But what I would say is for me as a leader, and I'm a Gen X leader, which means I grew up in the era of 60, 70, 80, 90-hour weeks with no, like you described, Stephen, before, like just no breaks, no nothing. We didn't realize what we were doing. I remember being— I am wired to be resistant to this change because it's impossible for me to believe that my team is going to deliver results and have recovery. But in the end, I was like, having spoken to Adam, having spoken to Amanda's team who were just very, very persistently, appropriately pushing, I was like, well, if we do this as a research study, you have to, you've got to give yourself over to science. That's the only way to, for me to know that there's no way this is not successfully working if the science is telling you that it's working. So that's kind of why we did it that way. Amanda.

I will also, this sort of reminds me, I think it was when I was writing Bold and we were researching something Google had done. And at one point they were testing, they wanted to know which produces better results for employees if they get during a performance review a hug or a raise. And I want you to know, if you were in the, I didn't get a raise group of this study group, the control group, and you found out later, how pissed would you be? I'm just saying. I'm just saying. In terms of experiments run on people who work here, Google sort of wins for that one because I was like, I dug it up researching it. So obviously the people who partook in it know, and they'd be like, I would've been very uncomfortable with that particular study.

Wait, please tell me you remember the results.

I'm highly invested. Oh, the raise worked better. Yeah. Funny that. The raise did outperform the hug.

Funny that. Something about Maslow is going on there, but sure.

It does tell you we prioritize safety and security above connection at a base level of the brain, right, in terms of approaching voice strategies. Sarah, I have a question because we're sort of circling around epic fail ideas. And then maybe the answer is, oh, one is a philosophy that I talk about in my book and the second way is how I run my company. But in your book, in this, you talk, and I'm very much wired like you are. I heard you talk about Bode Miller. Crashing to learn. I've broken 88 bones, right? I'm a big believer in— I've started 16 companies and broken 88 bones. I'm a big believer in crashing and learning. But, one of the other things at the Flow Research Collective, and we're coaching people in 130 countries and all over the world sort of thing, but I won't coach anybody directly. And, one of the main reasons is because my risk tolerances are way out of whack and I found that I'm a bad coach, right? I hire the best I can absolutely find. I personally am a bad coach and it's because of this very thing. My risk tolerance is freaking crazy. I tried back in my 30s when I was just getting good at flow. I always tell this story. I was just coaching friends of mine. I put one dude in the hospital. I nearly got another couple divorced who are still married today, like 20 years later. You know what I mean? One of my friends is no longer talking to me still to this day. I was a disaster when I did this. So, my point is, how do you do it? Like, what am I not seeing that you're seeing? How do you have this attitude of the best way to learn from failure is just to crash? And yet, when you're dealing— and I've also heard you— the reason I want to ask you this question is I've heard you talk about the individualization of trading. This is one of the things that I certainly see, how you learn, where your risk tolerances are, where are you introvert to extrovert, those sort of foundational questions about and others we could probably tease out, change everything about how I train you. Forget about like meeting the client where they are, forget about personal life. I'm just talking about like basic things. So how do you do that? How do you come together? And like, every time I try to do it, it's a freaking disaster. So I want to know how you do it.

Well, I think it's funny, like, I— this is top of my mind because I was listening to someone use this quote over the weekend. That leadership is contagious, right? How you show up, whether whatever your energy level is, the way you're— other people are going to catch that energy level. And I am with you, Stephen, like my risk tolerance is really, really— I'm very comfortable crashing, burning, and stepping up and moving on. But I also, not just to play into Sarah's world here, but I deeply believe that I know everyone's wired differently. I mean, I come from the country that invented bungee jumping, of course, you know, but it doesn't mean that everyone is that way, which is why, you know, Sarah teaches us a lot. Dissent really matters. And, you know, I have actually partnered with Greg for many years beyond just this role. And I love— we have such a great relationship because the days when I'm about to swing too far, He's the one I turn to to go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, just wait up. Is everyone on the bus? Is everyone with us? And I think you really do need that just to help make sure you're gonna connect with the widest group possible and get to that culture of risk-taking, sensible risk-taking, I would say.

It's also a great example of using self-awareness as a leadership capacity, like knowing, oh, you know what? I probably need somebody to double-check my risk math. Totally.

That's a very good way of saying it.

You're telling me you do the same thing I do. You hire, you get people in between you and the end user. Right. Okay. No. All right. I like how we've come to the same conclusion here.

That's so good. Double-checking your risk, man.

That's really good. Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly right. Okay. So I want to, if it's okay, Stephen, I want to get, I want to get a little, I've been, this is like me getting to get all the secrets because in my real life, I, hear about these projects as they unfold. So, Amanda, I want to kind of go back if we do high level about the, the Adam Grant, because a bunch of really interesting things emerged for Exos during this experiment around culture. And this really— our thought question was, can you be a high-performing organization and not kill your employees? So, dive in.

Yeah. I mean, that was the question. And, as Sarah said, we failed. We tried these tactics, if you will, and they just weren't sticking. And so, we said— but we didn't quit. We're like, "No, we have to figure this out." And, that's really when we went to the whiteboard and we said, "What do we do with athletes?" There is a work-to-rest ratio in which athletes in which we create adaptability and high levels of performance? How do we do that in the workplace? And this is where belonging and dissent and true partnership between Greg, Sarah, myself, Sarah, you know, Sarkis, you, and the rest of the team to say, what are the components? What is the framework in which we can now nest these various tactics to unlock new levels of human performance in the workplace? And so we went back to that state and said, how do we create this framework? What are the most important things? What are our— what does our model say that, you know, our employees are struggling with? And we said, we've got to figure out ways to optimize recovery because our work-to-rest ratio in corporate America right now just isn't working. That's why we're all so burnt out. That's why we're stalling out at certain levels. So how do we think about individualizing recovery? How do we really make flow an end state and a cornerstone of something that we're looking to foster and architect within the ways that we work through the day, through the week, through the quarter, you know, through an annual and multi-year cycle? And how do we do that without abandoning senses of community? And lastly, you know, the real I would say creativity and partnership with Greg, how do you do that in a very complex organization? And so, you know, the net-net was we implemented a 4-day workweek. We thought about how do we create more recovery time for individuals. And the construct of that 4-day workweek was what we said. And I remember calling you thinking, what do we actually call this? This, you know, because it's a recovery day. And, you know, that's where we came up with the You Do You Friday as the name. And so that, that really blends in the core concept and the framework of autonomy and flexibility. And so I think when you roll all this together, how do you optimize the individual, the recovery for the individual? How do we re-architect, you know, the ways that we work throughout the day? How do we help our team identify when they need to upregulate and downregulate? How do we make sure they have the metacognitive skills around flow to be able to achieve it? And then how do we enable leaders throughout our organization to utilize that as a tactic to help each one of us as employees be at our best and feel at our best? And I think like rolling, like that was the concept and that was the readiness culture code. It was no longer just a tactic. It was a framework and it was a code in which we were all going to abide behind. But I got to sit in the science aspect where it's like, yes, of course, this will be great. You know, we'll just do this 4-day workweek thing. I had no idea about PTO and other schedules and, you know, all the other elements of what it takes to legally run a business, a multinational business nonetheless. So, you know, Greg then had the fun job of thinking about, well, how do you actually turn this into a— not a policy, but just a cultural change in how we work? And without Greg and his leadership, there's no way this thing would have landed the way that it did. So, I mean, Greg, I think, you know, how did you take the science and turn it into a transformative HR initiative?

Well, I think for us, we, you mentioned it before, Sarah, which is we were very humble. Mark built the company on humility, continuous improvement. So we leveraged that as an asset to say, we don't know what we don't know, but what we knew and what we've proven out is that intent mattered. Here's what we're trying to do, and we're going to continue to tell you what's working and what's not. And when it doesn't work, we're going to tell you quickly, humbly, and move on. And so I think our organization really gravitated to the fact that we were trying to solve an unsolvable thing at the moment. So that was a really powerful tool for us. And two, as both Amanda and SRO said, we knew that a very complicated global company, this was going to land differently for different teams. And so the word code is a really important part of it because it was not an HR policy. It was, here's what we're trying to do and here's what we, we think you have an obligation to do as someone who's been in our organization and understand the science and the history of it. And it's your responsibility to look left and right, not just from your manager. So how are you keeping your peers, your teams accountable on how might we? And so we used the term how might we, and that was a really classic change management tool, but it came up day in and day out, like a lot of our vocabulary that Amanda's referencing. It's very quickly, we can't do that. Okay. Pause. Breathe, as Amanda would say. How might we? And once we started empowering the teams to think about how they would take our intent and make it work for their team, their client, their location, that's where the magic started happening. And that's where the code started to come to life because once they agreed to it, wasn't being agreed to by anybody on this camera. This was agreed to by teams throughout the organization. And they had to go and, and connect and make sure that they were keeping each other on the how might we train. And so I think that was the magic sauce going back to the idea that the, the top-down was really just a behavior. Did we really do what we were saying? And that happens quickly after a month or so. They're like, okay, this is real. And it quickly became a bottoms-up program through the, through the code conversations. And so I think that was a real special way for us to make it work.

Yeah, what anybody who's listening— what Greg's underplaying, and I just have to say, is that what Amanda and SRO are highlighting is that there is between the— there's the three of you and then a few others that kind of sit in at that level. And I have the privilege sometimes of being in content calls about this kind of stuff. And there is something, you know, you really kept calling to task, like, but This isn't about a 4-day workweek. We can't get lost in the glossy thing. This is about moving the lever in Widget. And I really want to say this because I know that CEOs and senior leaders are listening to this episode in particular. And sometimes it floats by like, "Well, what were they really leveraging?" Transparency. They told us right from the start, "This is a pilot program. We are experimenting." for which we are subject.

Hold on, Sarah. I just want to interrupt you because everybody here is familiar with the program except our listeners. So, it's called You Do You Friday. This is a Friday that's devoted to whatever you want to do. So, how is it different from 3M's 15% time or Google's 20% time? One, for starters, what's new here? I mean, leveraging autonomy and flexible adaptability, this is Toyota and Kaizen. This is obviously not new. It's flow-based principles. So what's new? What are you guys doing? It's question A. Question B, you studied with Adam, you got 6 months worth of results. Are there long-term— I'm curious about long-term habituation. Basically, what happens 2 years in once everybody comes to expect that I get Friday for myself? Have you looked at that? So clarification what the program is, what distinguishes it, and have you looked at what happens long term? Those are my 3 things. Sorry to interrupt you, Sarah.

But it's not an interrupt. It's great. It's an addition.

Amanda, why don't you explain also what was in the readiness culture? Yeah, absolutely.

So, so it's not like the concept is what we did was not the UDU Friday. And as Dr. Sarah Sarkis said, we get caught up in the UDU Friday. Yes, there were elements of this that, you know, are known in the science. But how do you put them all together and architect them in a way, in a framework that is pointed at helping each employee recover optimally so that they are able to find their best work and find flow state more often. That was what we were really trying to figure out. How do we create sustainable levels of high performance? And so, the core components of the code, it's the Readiness Culture Code, are number 1, you know, how do we prioritize recovery? And so that's where the concept of You Do You Friday was one tactic within there. And so we called it You Do You Friday because each individual needs to recover in different ways, but they had the freedom to, to really not have to commit to work that day. But if they wanted to be, you know, working or doing emails or catching up, absolutely, like, go for it. And we actually found that individuals were utilizing that time to do work because they wanted to. I mean, one of the cool outcome metrics of this study was that the team was more intrinsically motivated to work at the end of 6 months. And so anyways, I digress, but the U2U Friday was all around, if you need to take the time to get out there and move more and hike and do things you enjoy, go for it. If you need to use the time to take care of yourself and life in itself, go for it. If you want to use that time to catch up on work or do work because you want to, go for it. And it was really thinking about how does that individual take that time for themselves to recover more. And so that's why we intentionally called it You Do You Friday. So the prioritizing of individual recovery was important. Thinking about the flexibility and the autonomy and then obviously the community building. But when you think about the core tactics of how we're architecting the workday, the You Do You Friday was, you know, kind of one of those elements of a work-to-rest cycle. But we were also totally changing the way we were, you know, hosting and handling meetings. We had a new meeting etiquette. We decreased our meeting time to 25 minutes, 50 minutes, and meetings would go no longer than 90 minutes. Within those meetings, in between, were very specific types of micro breaks. And, you know, we had to teach our organization to really think like that, really identify the science of what's happening to the brain when your brain is on meetings, and utilize these basic concepts, which to us were basic. But when you think about them at an organizational level, they're incredibly novel, and they're incredibly challenging habits to get people to break. So The 5-minute micro break on the 25-minute meeting is not meant to check your phone. And so, that was a really important piece of just how we think about meeting cultures and how we really promote walk and talks, different types of meeting structures, getting people outside, getting people to think about how they architect their day, their week, their month, their quarter, their year, their multi-year cycle. With recovery as a part of the, of the work environment versus something extra that you have to figure out how you're going to do. And I think, you know, that's always been what Exos is about. Yes, we are inventing certain levels of science. Yes, we're proving how, you know, new types of training or nutrition or recovery modalities can optimize performance, you know, within those one component parts, but what Ekso has always been about is taking the best science, creating a framework, and actually pushing that out into the real world and saying, can this work? And when you think about the awesome stuff we did with Marissa Shandell, the doctoral student that we were so lucky to come into contact with and work with, after 6 months, you know, we saw, you know, an improvement where, you know, 93% improvement where our team was able to end the workday without feeling emotionally drained. People were feeling less emotionally drained. More of the team was able to leave the stress of work at work. 120% change. Individuals, 115% change, had more energy at the end of the day. And you know, these, these are the components that matter. It's how people feel. And I think one of the most interesting stats, and it was just at 6 months, but we are doing it longitudinally and I can't wait to continue to share the data, was that the work felt easier. And so when you think about capacity of human beings, the work itself was no easier. We were under incredible load, we were hitting our metrics. But to the individuals who were now working under the readiness culture code, you know, through the architected ways of working, prioritizing recovery, the work they were doing felt easier. And so, you know, those are the things that really get us So excited to continue to look at— we'll come up on the 12-month, we'll do 18, we'll do 24. We'll start looking at some wearable data. And really, the story is just starting to unfold. But there's no doubt people are feeling better. People are excited to be working. And it's coming with a point where they're able to find a flow at a more significant level.

I think the one thing I just want to make sure is clear, though, to answer your question, Stephen, what's different to some of the other examples you threw out is there was a very, very clear, intentional structure to the week. Like Tuesdays and Thursdays, heavy load of team-based meetings so that Mondays and Wednesdays were more individual one-to-one meetings, walk and talks, get outside, see the fresh air, and intentional breaks put throughout the day. And point being, I think my biggest learning, which I've shared with a lot of clients, is Google's 20% work time is kind of freedom wherever it happens. Whereas this is about structurally changing the calendars of the company from the CEO down so that everybody is on the same system of trying to get ourselves into this level of recovery. So that we can get into more flow, so that the work can feel easier. So point being, we've— Greg and I, actually, and Amanda have had this conversation with so many clients. The first step in this process is I say, show me your calendar. And if your calendar is back-to-back-to-back-to-back meetings 5 days a week, you can bet your bottom dollar the next level down and the next level, it's happening to everyone. So you've actually got to restructure the way the whole day works for everyone to to even be able to do something like a radio sculpture.

Yeah, this is the power of modeling and how potent it, uh, it really is. I'm also conscious— I said I would be the timekeeper, so I am conscious that we're, we're sort of starting to wind down here, um, in our conversation. It feels to me like at the very least we need a part 2. Because I would love— I love Stephen's question. I think it is so valid. And I do think it's the thing that leaders think about so often, rightly so, which is what's the habituation journey with processes like this, right? So that will be so fascinating. So what I hear is an invitation to a part 2. That's how my mind thinks it. And there's a gazillion things that I would love in the remaining time that we have to, to cover. But one thing that I would love for us to, to look at also is like, how has this— I'd love to hear from each of you, like, how is this informing how we work with our clients? Right? Because for me, that was a huge transformation, seeing how it was being rolled out internally and then how that was seamlessly changing the very way that we were coaching our clients?

Yeah, I mean, it's a great question because I think back to your modeling is everything. It's a heck of a lot easier for me to take on this conversation with a CEO who's wired to say this isn't possible when I can— I've lived it, so I can look at their calendar, I can talk about it can be done. I mean, Greg, you should answer that too because you you deal with a lot of HR professionals.

I would say two things that are really happening now are that the great companies are already starting to do this. And so there is becoming a competitive disadvantage versus a competitive advantage in the marketplace on the war of talent, regardless of macro labor conditions. So I would say that's something that all organizations are seeing, including our clients. Two, they're learning how to, how to interface this with the return to office so that they don't hear, I'm doing the same thing I did from my home, only I paid for commuting and time here. And so I think this idea of rethinking the workplace, how I work, intentional recovery, connectivity, community is a big pot right now that I do believe organizations are very intent and set and trying to solve. I think Sarah's comment around Change requires minimal risk. And so they're now starting to see other organizations do this successfully in their own way, according to what's true to them and their culture and their mission and their business. I think that personalization with the common goal of recovery is really starting to play out. And the second part I would say that we're hearing too is that right now they're seeing what is possible. And, you know, one of the things we're telling our clients is start small. Little things can make a big difference. And once you start seeing momentum and credibility, because the small project still requires modeling, and if a small project, they see that modeling, it's just as powerful as an organization-wide change. And so that, that credibility and momentum are really important. So I think starting with areas of where you think you can have success first, uh, with the groups, in some cases, in some of our clients, it might even be a subgroup. It could be the marketing team. It could be a geography. It could be a warehouse. So they're all thinking about where do we have the most likelihood of success to come back and report out and learn and broaden. And so I'd say those are two really important pieces we're helping our clients with.

Can I ask, I want to ask a wrap-up question because it's come up and almost there. One, are you guys measuring execution and productivity in your clients? Are we seeing productivity go up as a result? One. 2, the metric Amanda kept pointing at, which is the amount of flow in people's lives. So, are you measuring the amount of flow in people's lives? And 3, this is sort of— Adam mentioned this in his TED Talk. Adam Grant, when he mentioned his TED Talk about the Chinese experiment on flow, who flourished during COVID who didn't. And the only metric that mattered was how much flow you got, but it wasn't flow at work. It was how much flow did you get in your primary flow activity? Thing you do to bounce back from work? So have you also measured the amount of like primary flow activity people are doing on the You Do You Friday? Um, those are really geeky flow-based questions, but it's the Flow Research Collective Radio, so I gotta like— we gotta go there at the end at least.

You also just got yourself an extra meeting because we're going to brainstorm with you around questions we want to ask ourselves. Those are great questions.

We are. Greg, you should talk about, I think the metrics around, you know, business impact and, you know, impact with our clients because even that mattered a lot. Like we couldn't just change the way we worked without measuring the business outcome. So, I mean, Greg, like what did you, how would you summarize that?

I, I would say from a, a non-workplace talent perspective, our sales performance was obviously important. And so that, that doubled or went over 200% increase. The second part is how we show up for our clients and each other. And what we use is NPS. And so our coaching NPS in every area, including on the app, digitally, on demand, and live, all went up, which meant our talent was able to bring themselves in a better, more effective way. And so those were really important for us and our clients. Our clients want to make sure our coaches are hitting their workforce. And so those are two areas in particular we worked at. And then the traditional workplace ones, turnover, voluntary turnover, type of turnover, all of the idea of how our organization is churning and who was churning gave us an advantage from a talent planning where we were on offense. And so all of those metrics were very, very positive. I'd say the area that we're encouraging our clients to look at is when they talk about productivity, we tend to talk about efficiency. And that's an important distinction from the two because not everything can be connected in many parts of many organizations that we work with. They do have that based on the work they do, how they do it, and where they do it, computers, et cetera. There's productivity metric, but many service-level organizations, they have to look at other metrics around goal setting, achievement, and both business and workplace. And so those are, those are all areas we're looking at. And I would be remiss if I didn't say Adam Grant and Marissa, they validated what we had already been experiencing for 6 months. So that research came back and it was a validation that not only our employees felt like they were performing at a different level, our managers felt their teams were. And I think that's super important because we did do baseline performance management tools and, and different pieces of goal setting to see are we actually performing and completing work that we need to, as, as Amanda said, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, et cetera. All of those metrics improved greatly as a result of the study.

Yeah, and of course, we were looking at different dimensions of flow for sure. And so, as we were quantifying that, it all was through a qualitative set of questions at this point. And we were looking at different dimensions. And so, when looking at, for employees saying that they were engrossed in their work, 46% improvement as a result of going through the readiness culture So, 6-month period of time. When they're working, are they totally absorbed by it? 60% improvement. This one I thought was really fascinating because, as Sarah would say, like, we want flow triggers. We're, you know, architecting our workday to think about flow triggers, but also flow detractors. And so, this one from a percent change is like really big, but I think it really talks about the importance. So, The statement was, you know, how much do you agree with that nothing can distract me when I am working? 318% increase, which is like totally absurd from a percent change. But it's just the connotation that these simple things done savagely well around removing distraction, thinking about flow triggers, and just building these metacognitive skills that, you know, as Dr. Bertram would say, Those are really important. And so as we're thinking about what does the future of work look like and how are we thinking about architecting the achievement of flow and just making it part of the nomenclature of what we're trying to achieve for the individual, what we're trying to achieve for the team, and then ultimately for the organization and how that is a core component of the future of operational and organizational effectiveness. And the last thing that I thought was really fascinating, just the last set of data and how we were looking at things, we have mounds of data, which, you know, people would start yawning about, but I get really excited.

Not us.

Clearly. Not us. Raw group. I know.

It's the correlation matrix of it all. I mean, it gets so fascinating around when, you know, people were able, when our team was able to find flow, the correlation was statistically significant to them feeling more belonging at work, to them having more engagement at work, to feeling like they had an improved utilization of their time, that they were actually creating more progress at work. And that they, you know, those were the main things. So I think, you know, it's like, what are we doing to create flow? And then how are they mapping to these other really important business objectives? I think And back to your point, like, what's novel? Man, we are just getting started in thinking about how these elements around achieving flow are then correlated to other metrics within the business.

If I could just add one point before I think that we learned, which is super important to Amanda's point, is she mentioned autonomy and flexibility. And what we also found in this study is people can find flow at 5 in the morning. Or 10:00 PM or somewhere in between and our ability to allow them based on who they are, their lifestyle, what other competing priorities they have. That was a huge part of what Amanda just described because there are certainly the triggers and all the things you all know so well, but I think our ability to give that freedom in the framework of get your work done in the period of 4 days or whatever that period may be and allowing them to use that whole day, that whole week in some way to do that was a really big part of the feedback we're receiving.

I'm just so glad you got to say freedom in the framework because it was my favorite thing you kept pushing us on. So I'm so glad you got to get it in there. It was one of my favorite Greg-isms.

It's also one of the problems with peak performance training at an organizational level is foundationally, you can't fight your circadian rhythms. If you're a night owl, you're going to wake up at 10:00 at night, and that's when you're going to find flow the most. I'm an extreme lark. I start my workday at 3:30 in the morning. Nobody wants to get up and work with me. Right. But yeah, I think that's one of the— it's a hard thing in corporate culture is you can't fight your biology. You have to work with it.

Yeah, totally. Well, listen, because I always keep my promises and the shrink in me that always starts ends on time is going to note that it is exactly 1:05. So we have to let our fearless leader off to your next call. But this is a, this is a part 1 of at least 2. I can't stress how much joy my, my journey with Exos has brought me. So it's just been such fun reimagining all the things together and just having my bring your friends to work day here has really set Monday up quite nicely. For me. Thank you, everyone.

And Sarah, total pleasure. What— it's a fun topic. We could all talk about it forever. Yeah, we really, really could.