Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:11 Well, hello everybody. I'm here with Kathy Endis, the Vice President of research at the Josh Person Company, and we're going to talk about employee experience. Kathy, can you introduce yourself a little bit first and tell everybody what you do?
Speaker 2 00:00:25 Duh. Thank you Josh. Hello everybody. I'm Kathy ands. I'm the vice president of research. What I do is I really lead all the research that we're doing on topics of employee experience as we talk today. Talent learning and development, HR technology, HR practices, pretty much anything you could think about in this big space.
Speaker 1 00:00:45 Well, it's been really fun working together and I really appreciate all the work that you're doing for our entire community. So let's talk about this project. We're in a very tight labor market and everybody's worried about back to work, hybrid work, supply, chain of talent and so forth. Employee experience is a huge topic. Tell everybody a little bit about the project of research and how we did it, first of all, and then we'll talk about the findings.
Speaker 2 00:01:09 Great. Yeah, thank you Josh. Yeah, so employee experience is such a big topic and such a complicated topic. And this project we started in earnest here, the Josh bis company about a year ago. But really it goes back much further. Many years ago, like five, six years ago, Josh, when you started thinking about the irresistible organization and what this is really all about. So what we started out with is setting up a big framework of what is employee experience, actually, what does it entail? Like what's inside of employee experience? Is it just tools or journeys or listening? And we said yes, all of that is part of how you get to an employee big experience, but what is employee experience really about? So we set out this pretty big framework. We call it the irresistible organization because if you do all of these things, it makes your company irresistible.
Speaker 2 00:01:55 Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And um, so what this includes is a number of things that literally anything that touches your work and your life as you work with the company. So it includes of course the work that you do. Is your job meaningful? Does it fit with the, the talents and the capabilities you have? Does it fit where you wanna go with your life and your work? Do you have autonomy? Can you make your own decisions? Do you have some flexibility in your job? Do you work with great coworkers? Are you working in a good team? Next thing that's part of that, we call these six big areas. We call them elements and then 24 dimensions under it. So the next element is your manager, how your manager works with you, whether that's your project manager or your line manager. Do they set good goals with you?
Speaker 2 00:02:37 Do they give you feedback, tell you how you should be working better, what you should do to improve? How is does the company give them some development opportunities themselves so they can be a better manager? So management of course is key there too. The third thing is the workplace. And when we think about the workplace, it's the digital workplace tools and processes, the physical workplace. And of course in the pandemic, the phy physical workplace changed a lot as well. Whether we had to do distancing requirement or we changed working altogether, not from offices but from our homes. And then also the cultural workplace. So is this a place that's inclusive and diverse and where I feel like can belong? So that's work management, workplace of course very, very big in the pandemic health and wellbeing from the very basic of can I be safe here?
Speaker 2 00:03:27 Can I be well here? Or do I get sick here? To things like, am I overwhelmed? Do I get some support for not being stressed out? Not being burned out, all the way to, is my family supported here? Do I get us some financial support as well? The fifth thing, what we call growth opportunities. And that literally has to do with, of course, can I move my career in different ways? Can I learn here, is it a culture that also supports my learning? Those kind of growth opportunities and the the sick thing, what we call trust in the organization. So is the company just making money or is there a mission and a purpose that's beyond financial goals? Are leaders transparent? Are they empathetic? Do they act with integrity? Does the company invest in me as a person, as an employee, even when the business is not doing so well? And do they focus also on the broader society, the environment, does the company give back to the community? So those are the six elements. And then beyond that, we have technologies and services, but what we found out, it's not just about technologies. This was the big framework, the reset out to study it. Okay.
Speaker 1 00:04:30 So we had these, so we had these six big areas with 24 sub-dimensions. Yep. And all sorts of practices in each one. That's right. And then what happened? Tell me about the analysis and what you did and then what you discovered.
Speaker 2 00:04:43 Yes. First we came up with this framework. We ran it by a lot of people just to make sure that we got it right and we refined it all the time. And then we sent out a very, very large survey. So we said in all of these things that you can do, like these six elements, the 24 dimensions, we identified 83 practices. We turned them into questions in a survey. And then we sent it out to almost a thousand companies around the globe. And these were companies in all sorts of industries in the US and Europe, in in Asia, small companies, mid-size companies, big companies. So lots and lots of different companies filled out this very large organizational practice survey where we ask things, how do you as a company, how well do you do these kind of things? For example, how do you give your employees agency and autonomy or how do you make sure that there's a sense of inclusion and diversity and belonging?
Speaker 2 00:05:32 So we asked about all of these organizational practices and, and we also asked the companies about their organizational performance outcomes. So are they profitable? Are their customers satisfied? Do they engage and retain their employees and are they innovating effectively? So we asked about practices and then outcomes and then we identified which of all these 83 practices actually correlate with these outcomes. Just to see basically how you get started on this. Because one thing that we hear all the time when we talk with ex leaders or HR leaders about this topic is people are very confused where to start. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, where do we start is probably the most frequent question that we'll hear, right Josh? Yeah. Anytime we talk with them like, oh, there's so much to do. And of course this framework is so broad, it includes kind of everything we do in HR and leadership development, in management practices, in cultural practices and business practices. So where do we start on this? Well,
Speaker 1 00:06:25 So we'll talk about that in a minute. So tell us a little bit about what you discovered as the most important things in those 83 items. Yeah, what
Speaker 2 00:06:33 We discovered here, the most impactful thing, or the most important things are actually when you think about these six big dimensions, is the one about trust. So people trusting the company, feeling that they can trust the company, that leaders are transparent, inclusion, diversity of belonging, played a big role and care. All of those kind of more cultural things play a much bigger role than more tactical tools, technologies, practices.
Speaker 1 00:06:58 Well, I do wanna ask you in a couple minutes how you create a sense of trust and in a world of a lot of issues of trust of the government or the media or social networks or whatever it may be, I can understand why we want our employers to be trusted. For sure. What is the second or third area that you found? I know there's a couple of really interesting ones I want you to bring up.
Speaker 2 00:07:18 One very interesting thing we found out was about pay. So pay practices. So we asked two maybe contrary questions about pay practices. The first one was about absolute pay. So do you get more money than others? Basically above average pay, we ask these organizations, do you pay people above average and do you give them above average benefits? So that was the more the absolute pay. And then the other side was do you faster equitable pay and recognition practices. So fair and equitable pay and recognition practices. And what we found was fascinating. So the fair and equitable pay was number six on the list of these 83 practices. If you rank them up top to bottom on their impact on all these outcomes and the absolute pay was number 72. So wow. Huge difference, right?
Speaker 1 00:08:06 <laugh>. So it doesn't matter how much you pay people, it really matters that they feel that it's fair and equitable, which is a pretty important lesson in a time when companies are throwing bonuses and perks to try to get people to join their companies. It, it may not matter if people join the company, they don't feel it's a fair and trusted place to work. It may be wasted money,
Speaker 2 00:08:27 It may be wasted money. Because if you think about it, if you come there, you might join for the pay, but you're not gonna stay for the pay and you're not gonna get the best customer satisfaction outta paying somebody a lot of money because you don't wake up every day and look at your paycheck. It's like, yes, I'm so excited because I'm so happy to go to work because I make so much money. It only goes so far.
Speaker 1 00:08:46 So in fact, I've, it's funny cuz I've been involved in a lot of different pay systems. I've always felt when you give people big bonuses and stuff, it lasts about two days and then they forget about it. Very true.
Speaker 2 00:08:55 It it's very true. It's not very long lift. Right? It's like, and the same goes with the, the total amount of pay money that you make. You don't have to wake up every day and think you
Speaker 1 00:09:05 As long as you, as long as you feel that it's enough to support your family. So yeah. So another area that I wanna ask you about is an area, we've done massive amounts of research and this is the skills development, training, growth. There's been so much job change and there's so much demand for new careers and new uh, opportunities. Where did that fit in? The ex soup
Speaker 2 00:09:26 <laugh> in the ex soup is right that actually one practice really stood out out of all of these practices that we identified or that we asked about in the growth opportunities area. And that was an area that asked about do you encourage your people to continuously develop regardless of their role, regardless of where they are in the company. And what that really signifies is it's not just about senior leaders or middle managers even, or what we call knowledge workers, although I hate that term because even frontline workers of course have have a lot of knowledge too, right? So, but not just the desk bound workers, but frontline workers too get career development opportunities, career pathways to different jobs. Jobs that might be suitable for their skillset and for their aspirations where they wanna take their their lives. So all of these kind of things that Walmart,
Speaker 1 00:10:16 So all these, so all these technologies for skills inference and learning in the flow of work, they're gonna pay off for companies is what you're saying because there a lot of
Speaker 2 00:10:23 Gonna pay off. Yeah. They're really gonna pay off. And what really also factors in this, what we call career pathways, right? Mm-hmm <affirmative>. So helping people in frontline jobs to get degrees to get to a higher paying, to a better job, to a job. Maybe that gets them what they wanna be, even if they're not doing this. Like if you're a warehouse worker and you wanna be a nurse, well you're gonna have to, well here's, here's
Speaker 1 00:10:43 I wanna ask you kind of a difficult question. So we know that Walmart, target, Disney and Amazon have all invested collectively more than a billion dollars in employee development. Yes. Does that overcome a lack of trust that an employee may have in one of those companies? Are they trying to bandaid something that may not be good or is that an added on benefit? How do you see the relationship between, I'm thinking particularly about Amazon that just had a really scathing article in the New York Times last weekend.
Speaker 2 00:11:16 Yeah. And I read that article and you know, I don't think it's gonna bandaid that enough, but I think it's gonna make a huge difference honestly. Because you can think about a frontline worker. If you think about a warehouse worker, they might be the first in their family that are gonna get a degree beyond this job. It's also gonna signify to their children, for example, to their relatives. Wow. Degrees are for us too, right? We can get an education and it's gonna send a huge signal in their community. It's not just for the people that already have a degree, for example, that get an MBA now after have masters, which usually is the case with these educational assistance, uh, like tuition reimbursement programs. But bringing it into communities where people might not have had that. So
Speaker 1 00:11:59 This is what, so this is good to, this is why all this money's being spent in this area. Another one I want to ask you about that's very relevant and it has to do with the research we published more recently is the wellbeing initiatives in companies. All of the tools and programs and exercise classes and so forth, where did that fit in the ex soup?
Speaker 2 00:12:18 So health and wellbeing didn't score all that highly an impact, but of course you gotta keep your people safe and healthy. You can't have people at risk when they are a manufacturing company for example, to get injured at the, in the manufacturing site. You can't have a newest slip and fall and and hurt themselves of course. Right? So, but it's more a basic expectation of course. It doesn't really inspire trust. It can erode trust of course if you have an unhealthy environment. But perks didn't score very highly at all. And because you think about, for example, people are really overwhelmed and overburdened and I asked somebody about all their wellbeing programs and they said they're really not all that useful because I don't wanna have a yoga class after I've already worked 70 hours this week. I just don't wanna work 70 hours a week <laugh>. So I don't wanna now also have to go another hour, take
Speaker 1 00:13:07 71 hours a week <laugh>.
Speaker 2 00:13:09 Exactly. So rather than these are really band-aids, I think a lot of these perks programs are, are more band-aids rather than anything else. And people really don't feel they can use them anyway because they work too much and their work is not set up for that. And that's what we also found in a recent study healthy organization, that it's really the business practices, management practices that need to be set for health and wellbeing, not just like perks.
Speaker 1 00:13:34 Okay. That's really interesting. And I know people can read about the healthy organization in that study also. So we did look at different industries. Yeah. And it occurred to me that the industries that score highest in EX are in some sense more trusted in some ways. What did you learn about the industry variations and what that might tell a company to do in this area?
Speaker 2 00:13:55 It's interesting. When we looked at company demographics locations, or whether in Europe or in the US or in Asia, organizational size and industry. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> by far industry was the biggest differentiator. So the spread between industries in terms of their maturity and and employee experience was much bigger than in terms of geography or organizational size. And what we found was those industries that are dependent on innovation, life sciences and pharma financial services technology for example, scored much more highly than those more compliance and process oriented companies or industries like healthcare. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> manufacturing or energy and resources. And the reason for that is when we looked at maturity levels and we identified four levels of maturity, the highest level that we identified there, we called this equitable growth. And that means that every individual can grow and be the authentic selves and learn from mistakes and can be supported to develop their skills.
Speaker 2 00:14:54 All those things that we talked about just right now. And so those industries that really are dependent on innovation as their business practice for their business purpose, like life sciences and pharma for example, if you don't have people develop new pharmaceuticals mm-hmm. <affirmative> versus when you're a manufacturing company, you probably say, well people are just like operators that need to just not make mistakes. Something like that. Very different approach to employees, but there's always companies that can also be excellent in employee experience in any kind of industry. So there's examples of excellence of course in healthcare and energy resources and on and on and on. So it's not just those innovation dependent costs. It's
Speaker 1 00:15:33 Interesting, I was just thinking of a company I visited before the pandemic called Cummins Engine in Columbus, Indiana. And they're the largest manufacturer of diesel engines and they a lot of other things too, but very, very highly engaged, always very highly rated in diversity, inclusion, belonging, employment, brand respect and trust in the community. And they're in the manufacturing business. So you can do this in any industry if you choose to. I
Speaker 2 00:16:00 Absolutely. I absolutely. And that's where we are always when we bring in examples also in our, our study we always select not just from like one industry, but many different industries. So we have examples of Deutsche Telecom and ibm mm-hmm. <affirmative> s and Microsoft and Unilever. Very, very different industries across the globe to um, to show how it's possible in any of these kind of industries. Well,
Speaker 1 00:16:23 And we have case studies on that and I wanna highlight, I'm gonna be doing an interview or a case study with Victoria Roberts from truck stop.com, which is one of the best places to work, which basically is a truck stop and trucking company. So you don't have to be a pharma company to have a great workforce.
Speaker 2 00:16:38 Agree. No, absolutely. And I think companies like for example, Deutche Telecom is a great one too, because they have a great mission that people, that they say, I will not stop until everybody is connected. I'm like, how great is that? Right?
Speaker 1 00:16:51 I love that. That is such a great, I I I'm not sure that the phone companies here feel that way. I know <laugh>, my landline here never works. Right?
Speaker 2 00:17:00 I think they've stopped, although you were not connected. So, but
Speaker 1 00:17:03 Okay, so lemme ask you one more big question. If trust is the most important thing of all, and these highly innovative companies tend to be better at it, and of course that would lead people to leave a maybe untrusted company and go to a trusted company, how do you build trust if you're an HR professional or a leader, an executive? What have you learned about how to do that?
Speaker 2 00:17:26 Yeah, so trust is, it's really, it's such an important thing and I think a hard thing to build. Cause it's not just one thing, right? So there's a few things that I'd call out in trust. So trust is all about listening and listening to, to people of course is, is very, very important. And the more you listen to people, the more you learn about them, the more they tell you, and not just what the problems are, but then also how you can solve these problems. So tapping into the ingenuity, the ideas of your whole workforce with listening and opening up those listening channels to any kind of worker, including the frontline workers. We have a great story from T-Mobile where they opened this kind of crowdsourcing of ideas with a crowdsourcing platform to all of their store employees. And they get all sorts of ideas, including things like in Hawaii for example, no shirts, no shoes, needs to be a sign on the <laugh> <laugh> on the front.
Speaker 2 00:18:20 That wouldn't occur to you if you're in the corporate offices in New York, right? Because you're like, you are just sitting in New York. Nobody comes in without shoes, for example, <laugh>. But, um, it's very important for the people in the T-mobile store in Hawaii. So it's super important to listen to people and give them channels to submit their ideas and help them implement these ideas. So the listening is really, really key connected to listening is psychological safety. So if, if you're listening to people but they don't feel safe to submit their ideas, you, you kind of, you won't learn anything, right? And psych psychological safety of course comes out in all sorts of studies too as part of team performance and really high perform managers, faster psychological safety, psychological safety means you can speak up, you can submit your ideas, you won't be punished for that.
Speaker 2 00:19:06 And healthcare, for example, is super important because psychological safety can mean literally life and death difference, right? If the nurse can't speak up and tell them a physician that they need to wash their hands because they get the night shift is a retribution for that for the next five weeks or something, they're not gonna speak up and somebody might die. So psychological safety, very, very important. Not an easy thing to do, but a very important thing to do. The last thing on the dimensional of trust is competence. So do leaders know what they're doing? Are they leading well? Are they competent in the areas that they're leading in? And can they set a tone? Can they set a vision with including listening? So it's not an either or, right? You gotta do both. And then I think the last thing I'd call out on trust is trust is a two-way street. So if you don't trust your employees, they're not gonna trust you. If you, for example, like control their keystrokes in uh, in remote, uh, hybrid work or something to measure their performance or if they're actually working, you're not gonna trust them, right? They're not gonna trust you. So your policies, all your procedures, all of your performance management, all of those kind of things, if you expect people to trust you, you're gonna trust them back.
Speaker 1 00:20:15 Kathy, that is great. Thank you so much. Those are such great suggestions. I really appreciate you taking time with us today. So for those of you listening, let me make one more comment on this. One of the things we did over the fall is we had an interview with David Gillis, who's the New York Times author of the Coroner Office. And he was telling us about CEOs and some of the CEOs he was interviewing and he made the comment that a lot of the CEOs, he talks to just feel lucky that people came into work every day because he's worried that people are gonna show up. And I think we're in an economy like that right now where if the employee experience is not good, there's a lot of risks to your business and certainly to your business growing. And Kathy, I just thank you so much for all the work you've done on this and wonderful explanation.
Speaker 1 00:21:00 Those of you listening, I will put the link to the report in the notes. And following this report, we finished a pretty big report on wellbeing called the Healthy Organization, which is sort of like the matched set to the employee experience study. And one more thing, we have an online assessment. So any of you that hear this podcast and would like to diagnose your company's ex strategy and where you're strong and weak relative to the benchmark data relative to other companies in your industry, let us know when we can have you go through that. Thank you again, Kathy, so much. Thank you. Appreciate you doing this and we'll do this again more often. Bye everybody. Thank you. Bye.
