Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: What's really interesting is the future of work is agent to agent communication. You could think of our AI coach as just one agent that we have that we've built here at Perceptics. Right. But what we want to be able to build in the future that we're working on right now is to allow our system to talk to the rest of the agentic systems that our customers are going to be using.
Welcome to a new episode of the what Works podcast series.
In this episode, Joe Fried, the Chief Product Officer at Perceptics, talks with Kathy Andaris about the evolution of employee experience and the integration of AI coaching within organizations. Joe emphasizes the importance of behavior change, the role of nudges in facilitating this change, and the future of work involving agent to agent communication.
Let's get to it.
[00:00:57] Speaker B: Joe. Welcome to the what Works podcast.
[00:00:59] Speaker A: Thanks for having me, Kathy.
[00:01:01] Speaker B: I'm so excited for our conversation as we're going to talk about the future of employee listening, the future of employee experience, and how AI is impacting all of this. So I know it's going to be an amazing discussion. But before we get into all of this, tell us a little bit about yourself, Joe, and who you are and what got you here.
[00:01:22] Speaker A: Oh sure. Well, again, thanks for having me, Kathy. I am the Chief Product Officer at Perceptics. Before I got to Perceptics, I spent actually most of my career now in the technology and startup space. I had the fortune of co founding a couple startups. One was a small edtech company and more recently a company called Cultivate which was a venture backed passive analytics and AI coaching company. This was before AI coaching was cool, way back in 2017 when we started that company. Cultivate was acquired by perceptics in early 2022 and now I'm lucky enough to lead the product teams here at Perceptics and continue to innovate and push the EX industry with novel AI solutions. So that's a little bit about me.
[00:02:09] Speaker B: Tell us a little bit more about what Perceptics does today, but then also what where is Perceptics going overall in the future with this AI enablement now?
[00:02:20] Speaker A: Absolutely. So Perceptics is an employee experience and behavior change platform.
And when I say EX or employee experience, that means that's our business now. Other vendors in the EX space, EX tends to be a side business, whether it's to their larger focus on CX or part of NHRIS or some bigger platform.
But Perceptics only focus is on employee experience and from a technology perspective that really allows us to move faster and make investments with that pure EX focus.
Now when you think of ex, that's not just engagement surveys.
Now that's certainly where Perceptics started. Perceptics for over 20 years has been helping global organizations, including a third of the Fortune 100, build and scale employee listening. But today, ex, you can think of that as the entire suite of technology and services of how larger enterprises measure and change behavior at scale. So this isn't about just listening, but it's about the performance of your people. You want peak people performance and that is a platform now that Perceptics has built. And because it's not just about survey technology anymore, as an EX company, you really have to make investments and innovate in ways to understand and change that employee experience.
And at Perceptics, that's been the exciting thing over the past five years or so. The leadership team here, the investors have been really driving innovative investments with acquisitions like I mentioned of Cultivate, but also with say a company like Waggle, which became our crowdsourcing product or with humu. And that investment allowed us to combine Cultivate and humu and the 20 years of experience and in house expertise to build our Activate product which we launched last year. That's our behavior change product which also won an award last year at HRT Tech for product of the year. So while many EX vendors have traditionally made investments and are built to produce insights, well, Perceptics has built a platform that doesn't just get you the insights and then walk away. Our system now has the ability to produce that individualized coaching on those specific behavior drivers identified from the employee listening. We call that Ex Aware. And now the CHRO has a learning system that is continuously listening through those various channels, but then also continuously coaching to drive impact. And we do this for some of the biggest organizations in the world like ComClass, Marriott, etc. So that's a little bit about what Perceptics does.
[00:04:52] Speaker B: Wow, I have so many questions on this because I know you said so much on this and it really brings me Back to like 10, 15 years ago when I was actually in organizations leading, amongst other things, I was leading the whole talent space and I was as part of this that we also had the employee listening or employee engagement area as we called it at that time. And we had the whole survey piece and was a huge effort of course to even do these surveys once a year and lots of money spent on that and lots of like numbers basically that we gave to the senior leadership team, we always had like a big meeting with the executive team to look at the employee engagement or employee survey results.
And then as you said, I mean, sometimes nothing happened with it, or sometimes maybe some big organizational projects happened with that. But overall it was very hard to get traction on that. And so we always struggled at that time. And I know many leaders are still struggling with that. How do we get action both on an organizational level, but then also on the front line, on the manager level, on the team level?
And how do we make sure that people can actually do what the employee population tells you what where we need to focus? So walk us through how all of these different components that you had both like the traditional employee service. But I think everybody understands that area. But starting maybe with the waggle piece, with the crowdsourcing piece and going, how does cultivate, how does the AI coaching add to that all the way to how does and why is kind of nudging with the Humo acquisition? How do all of these different pieces fit together like end to end for maybe a talent leader that wants to really make change happen in an organization?
[00:06:39] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you've really articulated the challenge that we've seen and it's been a historical challenge. And I think the way you even articulate it kind of identifies some of the problems are that these things are traditionally not connected.
So you even mentioned, right. The area that was looking at the engagement surveys and the data is usually not the same part of the organization that does leadership development that doesn't make the investments in the change. And so the group or the team that looks at the listening results is not the same group or the team that is charged with actually manager development. And those technology wise, the systems are not connected. So when we thought of activate, we thought of our behavior change product. We thought, how do we actually connect the dots with all these systems? And that's what we've been working on really for the past two years. You can think of all the acquisitions that we've been doing has all been in relation to do that. And there were sort of three critical challenges that we had to solve or say three pain points. And this usually shows up with customers in Action planning isn't working. That's usually the feeling that comes out of this. So all the disconnect everywhere, it comes out at the end of the day and it's like, well, action planning didn't work well. Why do people feel like action planning is broken? Well, there's sort of three big areas. And number one is that it's just too much work for the manager. So managers have to action plan. So the individual manager has to actually sift through all the data. And what we hear from customers is simplify. Can we simplify the messaging for the manager of all the things, of all the noise that's going on with our frontline people leaders, which you know are overloaded by everything, how do you simplify that message so you can tell that manager the exact thing, one or two things that they need to work on that are going to move the needle to affect change? Number two, the second big challenge is if you can imagine you listen to everybody in the organization. So everyone contributes to giving feedback of what sort of goes right or goes wrong. But typically only the leaders see the results and then only the leaders see action planning. So now only a few, now the burdens, right, only on a few people to actually drive behavior change organizationally. But we both know many of the hardest behaviors to sort of change requires everybody to buy in. You need everyone involved in the process if you really want that peak people performance inside of your company. So you need a system that's going to engage with everybody, not just the executive or the people, analytics folks who gets the data. And then the third and final piece is because these systems are not connected, they're not measurable. So how do you measure actual impact of the behavior change if you don't have a single system that connects the dots all the way through? So when we thought about all the acquisitions that we made, right, we rolled that all into Activate to say what Activate now allows a company to do. It's based off our people insights model. And so we've mapped the actions or the behaviors, right, or the nudges to the actual survey questions, to the themes, to the impact that the company is trying to drive. So therefore, every single question that comes through the perceptics platform or a listening channel, you can pull a thread all the way through that. We know specific actions based on behavioral science that can help move the needle. And we've trained an AI on top of that system. So now I'll give you an example. Say I'm a manager and I get my pulse scores back. So every manager gets their pulse score and it's always a big deal. I don't have to sift through all that data now. Now that AI is going to automatically create an action plan for me. No more manual creating of action. It's going to say, hey, Kathy, we know that these are the two things that you can work on the top Behavior drivers that are going to move the needle. Now that's personal to you, Kathy, right? Because your team gave you that feedback, but it's also tied into the themes the business is trying to impact. So, so not only are you doing it because that's important for you, but at scale it's important for the business as well. So it's automatically created. No more manual. Right. So it simplifies the process.
Next piece is you now have a suite of tools to help me take action on it. So I'm going to start to get the nudges. This is where humu comes in.
So now I didn't even have to create the action plan. But what's the hard part about even if I have an action plan is I read it once and I put it in a drawer and I never come back to it. Who comes back to their action plan? We hear this time and time. We take my survey results, I read them. There's a lot of conversation during that month of the survey results. But then three months later I never remember what I'm trying to work on. Not only that, but what do I do? So maybe I do remember my survey results. I do remember that say my team gave me feedback that I need to do better in career planning. Well, what do I do that? How do I approach that? What are the conversations I need to have? How can I actually do that in my day to day work? That's where those nudges come in. So nudges will start to get pushed to me in my flow of work, whether it's teams, whether it's slack, whether it's email. However I like to get them to give me bite size actions I could do immediately with my team. That's also part of our AI coach. So I don't have to wait for an actual nudge. I can actually have a conversation with that AI coach and it will help me do it. It will help me draft emails, write agendas, practice hard conversations. So now I'm getting personalized continuous coaching. But it's ex aware, meaning it's not just coaching me on general be a good manager. It knows the specific behaviors I'm working on because it's tied to my survey results. So you can imagine now I have an AI coach and its only job is sort of to help you, Kathy, improve those behaviors on your survey scores, which is a benefit for you, it's a benefit for your team and overall it's a benefit for the company. And then the last piece is because it's all part of the same system.
Now that CHR or that exec team, right. They can actually start looking at the impact and we see that across our customers. So we shared a couple of these case studies at our Insights conference a couple months ago about how customers are seeing the behavior change. And it's not only the behavior change, but you can actually watch the engagement. So in fact, we had a customer called Leidos. So they're about a 50,000 person company that just recently launched Activate.
Their specific goal is they wanted to support leaders in continuously using data from employee listening. And their goal was to drive and shape actions that would lower attrition, drive engagement and increase productivity. And so far they've seen 83% of activate recipients engage with intelligent nudges. So that's 83%. So you click the button and imagine you click a button, you have 83% of your managers now engaging with an L and D tool that's going to give them continuous coaching. So you can actually see that. So for the first time you can actually measure the engagement and the intervention that you're doing with the system and then tie that back to that actual impact that you're trying to drive. So I know that was a whole lot there, but it's important because that while it's not just one product, it's not just one AI coach, it's not just one copilot, our chatbot. It is a system. It is an entire platform that's based off our 20 years of experience that takes into account all the acquisitions that Perceptive made, all for the purpose of behavior change at scale. And that's Activate.
[00:13:48] Speaker B: You said so many things that I want to double downtown. But one thing that I really loved about that you started out saying people tell you action planning doesn't work. And that's certainly something that we hear all the time. The problem was actually not that the action planning tool wasn't good, but people just didn't know what to take action on or they didn't actually take action. And that's what you're solving for. You make the action taking much easier, not just the action planning process. And I think that's a different way of thinking about what this is all about. Because you're thinking about the outcome. Because nobody cares what's in the system if nothing happens with it, right?
[00:14:24] Speaker A: But that's just even building the action plan, right? That's the easy part, right?
[00:14:28] Speaker B: The hard part, it's taking action, right?
[00:14:30] Speaker A: What do I do with it in a day to day basis? How does it stay with Me, how can I actually change behavior over a period of time? And I have to because it's not just one time. Change is happening all the time. And so we hear that a lot from, from customers. How do we have, how can we install a system, a platform that's not a one time use platform. It's not one time behavior change, but it's, it's always giving our people the agility and ability to adapt to whatever change comes through with whatever change. And whether it's that feeling from our team, whether it's an external change, but I need that, that, that continuous coaching and action to be able to adapt to change. So that's a system, that's a platform, that's not just a survey and an action plan.
[00:15:12] Speaker B: So tell us more about the nudges. So how does the nudges work?
What are they based on? What does a nudge look like? When it gets to me, why is it actually getting the results? Because you said some really high number of your customer that's actually accessing these nudges and that's much higher than when you usually tell people oh, here's a training program or here's a program around whatever kind of we want to train the leaders on that came out of the, out of the survey. So tell us more about the magic of these nudges and why are they so impactful?
[00:15:45] Speaker A: Yeah, well I'll kind of expand it a bit and I'll say the nudges are really the foundation of the entire system. So I'll say if we start with the nudges, right. So when we acquire acquired humu, they had made a lot of great investment. They had this army of PhDs in behavior science that build a library of behavior change nudges. So we have a library of over 2,500 nudges based on some 90 behaviors. That said, look, if I'm trying to you know, change something like psychological safety or well being, what is something bite size I could do in my day to day work to actually put that into practice. And then over time, as I do these little changes over time, I can actually see that, that impact on the team. So we had a lot of great content.
That was the start. So that was the start of the system. And we combine that with the recommendation engine from cultivate to understand. Well how do we actually link that to my survey results? So I understand the behaviors I'm trying to act on and now I can actually push that out to my team. So think of that as the base of the system. Right. Tied to our people insights model. But what has been really exciting over the time, right. Is the advent of AI on top of that nudge library is actually what is super powerful and super exciting for us here at Cultivate because large language models have gotten so good that it sort of opens up a lot of capability. So now it's not just the nudges, but we've trained a large language model on top of our nudge library. So it just doesn't give you the nudge but actually gives you coaching around that. So instead of just getting a nudge, maybe that's the start of the conversation now with the AI coach. Great, you gave me a recommendation. Well now help me put that into practice. Help me role play with that nudge. It's about the practicing, it's about in my flow of work, it's about me now continuing the conversation. So the nudging has turned into AI coaching. So but the nudging is the foundation. And that's important because when you think of the market of AI coaches and there's tons now, which is, which really is the future. I think even Josh wrote about this a couple of weeks ago, right. It's the new user experience.
The new user experience of L and D is going to be coaching and that's okay, right? I may have many coaches, I may have a coach for financial well being. I have a coach to help me code better and now I have a behavior change coach. I have a coach that is going to help me show up with peak performance for my people and I'm going to get those insights. Our specific AI coach is trained on that library of nudges. So when it's giving me coaching, it knows, it knows the behaviors that can move the needle. It's not just going out to the Internet to sort of grab some generic manager feedback. It's actually tying Kathy, what you are trying, trying to accomplish, you specifically, and it knows that because you've given it inputs, because the company has given it inputs, but more importantly because you have all that data from listening, so you have all the data from exit surveys, onboarding surveys, anniversary surveys, your team pulse survey. It's aware of the employee experience. And so that's this power of connecting employee experience to AI coaching actually gives you a very powerful tool to make sure that you're always optimizing the performance of your people based on that coach. And so you can think of the nudges as sort of the base platform. The second exciting thing is that when we launched Activate, we got a lot of great feedback. And one of the biggest pieces of feedback we've gotten from customers is, hey, we love your library of over 2,500 nudges, but can we start to add some of our own content? So the other amazing thing that we've done here is we've taken our library of nudges and we've trained a large language model to build nudges for our customers. So now a customer can come to us and say, hey, we've got our own content, We've created our own content. Say, it's a leader training guide in the voice of our own company. They can load that content to our system. Our nudge agent can create nudges in the same structure as the rest of the nudges and they could supplement. So what we are evolving to is a customized AI model per customer. So a customer can come in and say, hey, I have your base AI coach. I have your base nudge library. That's great. You could just turn that on like that. And you start. But I want to also add some of my own stuff. I want now your AI coach to also be trained on our own content. So you start to get bespoke AI models that are coaching, right, customized to the company. So now it's their own contents, their own voice. So now they're using our platform as really the highway to say, look, I'm going to use your systems now, push out our own content.
So now this is where it becomes a system or a platform. It's collecting data, it's understanding the behaviors and it's driving coaching. But that coaching is ability to run anything through that highway, whether it's third party content. I'll give you an example. So when we launched, we didn't have any healthcare specific nudges, right? Well, we started working with some of our healthcare specific customers and we built customized healthcare nudges in conjunction with our customer. And now those are in the library.
So you can imagine that we can now feed more content, whether it's unique and bespoke for a customer, or whether it's holistic content that we build and we use nudges to now train the AI coach. So three or four years ago, nudges themselves were the product. Now they are feeding AI coaching. And that's the exciting evolution, right, of what we can do with technology and AI in our system.
[00:21:08] Speaker B: So how does it look like for an individual then? If they use this, how does it physically look like? I mean, they participate in the surveys and they of course receive things from their manager. Just in their, in the natural course of their interactions with managers. But how do they interact with nudges and with, with the AI coach?
[00:21:29] Speaker A: Yeah, sure. So the great thing is this is all in the flow of work, right? So our common use cases is either in teams or either in Slack. And so you could imagine, right, if I'm an individual contributor, I'm already giving feedback in the survey process. So I already have a relationship with the platform, with perceptics. So let's just say I'm in Microsoft Teams, right? And now I already have a bot in Microsoft Teams that's going to ask me for survey feedback and that's going to be common, right? So whether it's perceptics or another vendor, I'm going to get asked for survey feedback. Well, typically if I'm an ic, that's where my experience ends. I had some, you know, a third party system that I probably never heard of that, you know, a couple times a year comes in and asks me to give me feedback and I never get anything else from it. I never part of anything. I said maybe I'll get a high level presentation from the company that says these are my feedback to the survey results.
But the power there is that I'm already interacting with a smart system there to give feedback, right? So I'm already having a conversation with that system. So that same application, that same AI, that same bot, that same in my flow of work. Now it's going to come back to me and say hey Joe, thank you for the feedback on that survey. These are the behaviors that your team is working on. Now I'm in the process. So let's just say Kathy, same thing, career planning, right? Let's go back to that same example. You're the manager, so you as a manager you get an action plan because you know your team said you did poor on career planning, now you saw your whole report so you get all the results. But at the end of the day really what matters is career planning. Well, if I'm an individual contributor I'm also in the process. It comes back and says hey, thank you for the feedback as a team, because I'm part of the team, we're going to work on career planning and as an IC it's going to give me some. So maybe as an ic, what can I come to the table with in my one on ones to help you as my manager? Give me career planning. Here's some resources internally at the company for career planning. For me right now all of the coaching is around me as an individual, helping me get a better sense of career planning. It's not just on you, Kathy, to help me for career planning. That's a big part of it, sure, as a manager, but it's on me as myself. And so now I'm part of it and I'm bought into it. And do you know why I'm bought into it? Because I'm the one who gave the feedback. So what we hear a lot is if you're an ic, you're frustrated because you give feedback on the surveys and you have no faith that's going to be interacted. Well. Now automatically I'm bought into this system because it was my feedback. So now I know, oh, yeah, I gave that feedback on. On career planning. And now the company is helping me with it because I gave the feedback. Now the loops closed. Now I know if I give feedback on a survey, I'm going to start to get things about it. Now this opens me up to give more feedback. Now that survey fatigue comes down because I know if I give the feedback, it loops right back to my AI coach. Right now I'm more apt to give more feedback. Hence I'm going to get more coaching. And it all comes in my flow of work. And so that's the beauty of the system for everybody.
[00:24:38] Speaker B: Wow. And so now I'm in this, going, going further with this kind of use case. I get now nudges about career planning too, right? I could get like, oh, no, you're going to meet with your manager. Here's some things that you might bring to them. Maybe here's some ideas that you could bring to them where you want to go with your career so they can help you better.
[00:24:59] Speaker A: Not only that, but you get that coach. So I could get that nudge, but I could also get that coach where I could just ask it questions to say, okay, so maybe I got that nudge. Maybe I understand it, maybe I don't. Maybe I need help. Maybe I just sparked a thought in my mind and I go, oh, okay, well, I have like five questions on career planning. Well, now I have an AI coach. Now I'm having a conversation, right? So as an ic, I have a resource. Now maybe I only leverage the nudges. Maybe I only read them one time, but I have this AI coach and I can get as deep with that AI coach as I want. It's open 24 7. It will answer my questions in a very empathetic way and it will help me on career planning.
[00:25:39] Speaker B: So for the ic, the AI coach, can it Only answer specific things. What, for example, and I had this, actually the exact use case when I was running this process at Kaiser Permanente. Some of the issues were actually not about anything that even was HR related. But the nurses, for example, said the cabinets are placed in the wrong place in the hospital room. What if I ask the AI coach that, where does that go? It's something that's more operational.
That's not like a coaching thing. Does it just tell you, I don't know the answer to that, or you've got to talk to your manager. What does that go first off?
[00:26:16] Speaker A: Right? One of the most important things when you think about training these large language models, right. Is putting the guardrails on what you want to talk about and what you don't want it to talk about. Right. And so specifically for our AI coach, its only purpose is workplace behavior change. It's very focused. Right. And if it's outside that, it's going to say, hey, that's, that's, that's not my role. That's not my job. I'm not an expert in that place. That really helps us keep the guard rules in because you don't actually want people having conversations. That's outside the realm of that coach. It's also from a privacy, security, safety perspective, we want our customers to realize, right. With all these AI coaches on the market, you really want narrow.
You really don't want general.
You want to have a narrow focus because that's how you measure success. My goal isn't now to understand the efficacy of individual L and D providers and content, but the efficacy of coaches.
What's really interesting is the future of work is agent to agent communication. You could think of our AI coach as just one agent that we have that we've built here at Perceptics. Right. But what we want to be able to build in the future that we're working on right now is, is to allow our system to talk to any of the other agents that our customers are doing. So now if you're in Perceptics, right, and you're talking to the AI coach, and maybe you ask us something that really needs to be answered by their workday agent or their servicenow agent. Well, that's okay because our agent can just say, hey, actually, you know what, you need to go talk to this agent over here. I'm going to send you that way.
[00:27:51] Speaker B: So maybe your agent will not be accessed through your perceptive platform, but it could be that they get it in their overall copilot.
[00:28:01] Speaker A: Absolutely. And in Fact, right now we've already made a big step there where we've made acctivate standalone. And you don't have to use Percepts listening data. It's available standalone. You can start with just using Activate or maybe in the future you're just using the agent we're working on now, which is our conversational listening agent.
So at a period of time, you can imagine that if I'm gathering information or running a survey, I may not go to a platform at all. So yes, the future is we want to fit seamlessly right into where the employee is experiencing and doing work in.
[00:28:39] Speaker B: The last few minutes. What is the one thing that you would like our listeners to take away from all of this? What's the one thing that they can actually incorporate into their work tomorrow?
[00:28:51] Speaker A: Yeah, you know, I think the one thing that I think when a EX buyer comes and they have the frustrations, right, about action planning or taking action, these, these long held book beliefs that it's hard to do, I see no change. Right.
Is to think about the connection between EX and learning and development. So a lot of times the sort of the buyer gets a little boxed in by the idea of why I have to connect with CX or other sort of data and that's the way path forward. Right. But instead if they think about how do I connect my EX to L and D, how do I do that? And if they start thinking in that paradigm and think about creating a connected solution, it unlocks ways that I think are going to make action planning much easier. Whether they do that with Perceptics or another vendor. If they start to think of how do I connect EX to L and D, how do I connect the people responsible for behavior change and the people responsible for listening? If they create a system that does that, I think that will unlock a different mindset and I think it will help lead them to that behavior change at scale.
[00:30:00] Speaker B: Wow. Fantastic. I couldn't agree more with you, Joe. And I think it's such an exciting time to actually unlock this finally with the help of technology. I think the market market is ready, the tech is ready and it has such a huge impact on organizations and individuals. So thank you. This was really fantastic. Thanks so much for joining us.
[00:30:21] Speaker A: Awesome. Thank you, Kathy.
[00:30:25] Speaker B: There you have it. What an insightful episode with Joe Fried, the Chief Product officer of Perceptics. AI is here and it's transforming the employee experience in significant ways. It's not, not just about faster, easier employee listing and data analysis. It's about reinventing how change happens at every level of the organization, from the executive team to managers and to the frontline. It's all part of building a super worker organization, helping every employee to become the best version of themselves.
I hope this conversation has sparked new ideas on how you can leverage technology to enhance your work work environment. My key takeaway is the power of connecting employee experience with learning and development to unlock behavior change at scale.
Whether you're a business leader, an HR professional, or an individual, there's a role for everyone in shaping a more dynamic, irresistible workplace, and AI based nudges and coaching can make this all a reality.
Thank you for tuning in. Until next time, keep pushing the boundaries of what works in your organization.
