Las Vegas 2019
Workplace Engagement Panel
Panel includes:
Dr. Nicole Forsgren, CEO and Chief Scientist, DevOps Research and Assessment LLC
Dr. Christina Maslach, Professor of Psychology, Emerita, University of California, Berkeley
Dr. Andre Martin, VP, People Development, Google
Gene Kim, Author, Researcher, and Founder of IT Revolution
DN
Dr. Nicole Forsgren
CEO and Chief Scientist, DevOps Research and Assessment LLC
DC
Dr. Christina Maslach
Professor of Psychology, Emerita, University of California, Berkeley
DA
Dr. Andre Martin
VP, People Development, Google
GK
Gene Kim
Founder and Author, IT Revolution
Transcript
My tendency is to, uh, script everything out. 'cause I, uh, uh, I have that need for, uh, you know, uh, helping achieve the desired outcome. Uh, and yet with this panel, uh, having known these people for so long, I have this exact opposite. I'm I'm in a I'm relaxed. I can't wait for the next hour. So let me share with you just broad, a sketch of my desired outcomes at dive. So sketched out with Dr. . Um, and then, uh, we'll do introductions and jump into the questions. So my specific goal, um, for the session is to explore how the discipline of workplace engagement, uh, which we've heard so much about in the last two days. Um, how does that body of knowledge and that literature, uh, overlap, relate to the burnout literature and to what degree do they oppose each other, uh, comp uh, contradict each other, or maybe even support each other?
Uh, so that's, uh, uh, my primary objective and I asked each one of these, uh, distinguished panelists to self as selfishly as possible, put their desired outcomes as well, and, uh, use this really unique opportunity to, uh, you know, explore these. And so, uh, I'm just really, really delighted and relaxed, and that's going to be a really worthwhile, um, an amazing event. So, uh, ideal outcomes that, uh, Dr. Mazza and I, we talked about was how do we find, uh, kinds of solution that will make a genuine positive impact to burnout and engagement? How do we get people genuinely thriving in their environment instead of being beaten down? Um, Dr. Mazza, like you said, um, you know, and if that is possible, I want to learn about it and if possible, uh, be a part of it to help spread the word right. To make it. So, um, so that's kind of the, uh, the broadest sketch, uh, that I have. So when we start with, uh, each one of our distinguished, um, scholars to introduce himself, uh, Dr. Mazza, can we start with you?
Can you hear me
Okay. Round of applause for our amazing panelists
I didn't even say anything yet. That's very cool. Okay. Um, hope it's not going downhill from here. Um, so I'm Christina maslak, uh, professor of psychology at UC Berkeley. And for many years, uh, starting in the seventies, uh, when I kind of stumbled across a phenomenon that didn't have a name, but eventually came to be known as burnout. I have been studying that and trying to understand what it is, what causes it, what kind of outcomes and, and effects it has, and what can we do about it? Uh, and that in my first round of interviews was usually what people wanted to know. Please, we know it's here, do something, do something. So I would, would be great today to, to really get into some of those things about, uh, what to do about it. And that right now is the thing that, um, is the biggest question for me, that one, I get asked the most and the one I really want to find a lot of answers to, which is how do we make positive steps moving forward in the work environment.
Thank you for sharing. Thank you for sharing your area of interest areas of study. And if you could talk both also share the things that you're most interested in these days as well. Dr.
I'm Nicole Forsgren, I'm the head of Dora, and I do research and strategy at Google cloud. Um, I have been leading the largest studies into DevOps or tech transformation or find and replace whichever you were leadership's. Favorite words are around that, uh, the capabilities and practices that drive value and positive outcomes, uh, for the last, uh, 10 years I've been in tech for about 20. Um, and the things that I've been excited about are understanding what drives value and positive outcomes, including, um, the things that our organizations sometimes tend to care about. Things like productivity and money and things that we also tend to care about. Things like, um, productivity and, um, reducing burnout work-life balance, um, happiness satisfaction. Um, and when I say happiness and satisfaction, that's also, um, finding work that makes good use of our skills and abilities, because those are the types of things that are engaging and fulfilling. And also when I go home, um, at the end of the day, I can like shut my brain off and shift on to other types of things.
Thank you, Dr. , Dr. Martin.
Hi everybody. You saw my, uh, my career timeline last night. Thanks again for letting me spend some time with you today. Uh, when it specifically gets into burnout and engagement, you know, I've spent 20 years in a very singular space, which is, like I said, last night, how do you help talent grows fast? The companies that are part of, and you can only grow, develop, learn, be curious when you're thriving and you know, so this idea of the opposite side of, you know, what causes people to get burnout, what do you see in terms of leaders of fast growth companies, um, as they try to pursue sort of the same trajectory of those companies do, and how do you just help people stay engaged, which is where you find discretionary energy and effort to put forth against the biggest challenges we face. So that's sort of what I'm interested in. Engagement's been a long, long, long time pursuit of mine, um, both personally, and then professionally in companies I've worked with. So thanks for, let me share the stage.
So, um, you good or did I interrupt you? No,
I can talk more gene if
You know this, by the way. So as a, uh, um, uh, someone who's not immersed in this, this is such a treat to be able to ask really, you know, uh, fundamental and basic, uh, dumb questions like this. So can you educate me on what is exactly the relationship of workplace engagement and burnout? Are they diametrically opposed? Do they intersect, do they conflict? You know, how do academics, academics talk about this work? Um, go,
Okay. Um, well academics often come up with very different points of view, uh, and competing ideas and competing theories. So to think that there's everybody going in lock step on one particular point of view, you know, it takes a while before maybe there is some, you know, coalescing around that. Um, so I will share where I started with it and, uh, that's not always how people define it, but, uh, doing work on burnout, uh, raised some challenges, uh, which was that people often didn't want to talk about it. Managers, CEOs did not want to participate in any work to find out what was going on because it was going to be too, you know, threatening or litigious or something like that, you know? And so, but they wanted to know what's the answer, what's the answer. So, uh, at that point, my colleagues and I kind of did a pivot and said, well, rather than simply just focusing on trying to understand bourbon burnout, why don't we focus on what is the positive opposite that we'd like to get to what is not burnout?
What is in fact better than nothing met, or, you know, a something. And so we were looking at it in terms of our data, it as an opposite of burnout. So we're talking about people who have energy and enthusiasm, and when, you know, they're coming to work, they're not exhausted and, you know, overwhelmed, uh, they want to get more involved in the work. There's something meaningful about it. And, you know, you, the joy you get out of that and, um, you know, in satisfaction rather than take this job and shove it cynical, you know, hostile kind of attitude, and really importantly, having a sense of professional competence and efficacy, and I can do this and I can work at it and get better and, and contribute and so forth. So that's really, and we called it engagement. And at that time engagement sometimes was maybe not the best choice because people would be thinking, oh, you mean like when people are getting married or they're, so they get, you know what, no, no, no. You know, um, but that was what we called engagement. So we did frame it in terms of a positive opposite of burnout. Others have argued that it's not opposite. It's something else, but that's
Well, and it's a fascinating kind of start cause I probably picked up not in the academic world, but in the practice of engagement and you know, fascinated about probably 10 years ago, I was a place called Mars incorporated is privately held firm. And we were really trying to take the furthest edge of engagement, which was thriving under this idea of like we were seeing, even back then in the next 10 years, there will be a company whose employee brand or employee proposition, their selling point is going to become to work here. And you will walk out physically, mentally, and emotionally healthier than when you walked in. Like, we were actually in a pursuit of proving that on small scales and still today I'm blown away that there isn't a company that can do that. Cause it's all within our reach, you can set up a system that actually will allow people not just to be engaged in work. It will actually allow them to be productive and healthier. It can be done. It's a long way off, but there's, there's seeds both in research and in practice that will tell you it's possible.
And by the way, like when you think about engagement, I mean, if you were to do the literature search and the citations, is that engagement the same as Dr. Masley's engagement or are they
Yeah, I mean, in how she described, I believe it is, you know, and so whether you take the academic sort of positioning of it's the opposite edge of burnout, or you talk about Gallup, which would say, you know, engagement is about the factors that will contribute to someone, having greater emotional commitment to the place they work and therefore have an opportunity to thrive. So it feels it doesn't feel dissimilar or an opposition. Um, it feels like those are just ends of a continuum, right?
Yeah. Although I would say, um, and I've said this before that that Gallup again has a different sort of, I think, slightly different point of view. Um, and they're looking at it. I mean the commitment, uh, and what that means is what will you get out of your employees if they are highly engaged and committed, and they have this concept of discretionary effort, Which means people will work over time and you don't have to pay them for that because they are so engaged and so committed. And that I think is at odds with some people looking at happiness and satisfaction and personal health and wellbeing, you know, so those don't always draw.
They also wrote a book. I mean, one of the most famous books to come out of Gallup in the last five years was wellbeing. So they've moved beyond that. They started their, I will own the Gallup started in that spot of working with organizations because they were trying to make companies able to grow, like it was a pursuit of shareholder value. And then they started publishing this idea of thriving and that book and wellbeing actually took that same position, which is there's a greater aim. Yeah. Yon where we started and they're starting to see even sort of the limitations of the way that they started their company to begin with.
Uh, and by the way, I just want to take a moment just to analyze and inspect something you said, um, you know, so there was a kind of a jaded assertion made that, you know, the purpose of there, is it true that this kind of a school of thought that said, uh, engagement is all about sort of maximum extraction of value from people or, or is that just kind of a
Gallup for the, so the Gallup Q 12 is, was termed. If I can jump in a little bit, please, the Gallup Q 12 was termed engagement. And I think it was maybe a bastardization of the word because engagement was gaining so much traction and it was a quick and easy way to measure engagement, but it was not necessarily the same, uh, conceptualization of engagement. As many researchers in many of the field had been thinking about and measuring engagement. It really was a way to squeeze more effort and work out of workers, which when it wasn't used correctly was perhaps inadvertently leaning to more burnout. And I think this is another thing that's important to note, if you aren't careful, um, you can burn out doing something that you absolutely passionately love. I feel attacked, right? I mean, I had my startup Dora, which I loved and Jane's totally going to be like, I see you, Nicole.
Um, that first year of any very tiny bootstrap startup, I found a way to commercialize and monetize something that was so incredibly dear to my heart. And I still love it. And like, I don't know if any of you who like seen the laser beams come out of my eyes when I talk about something that I love, because Dora is dope. And if I can find ways to make people's lives better in making software better and more efficiently and drive value to our organizations and not burn out. And I like, the love is coming from me. I burned the hell out that year and I didn't catch it because I was doing what I loved. And I worked myself into the ground and I hopefully was making everyone else's lives better and I didn't catch it. So like, there's this like really careful, trade-off where you're engaged and you're thriving and it's amazing. And I forgot to eat and sleep and self care. And, and I'm, it's like really encouraging that there is research out there and companies out there and practice out there that can find this like practical balance that we can then share with others too. Like you can go to work and you can thrive.
Yeah. And the starting point of it all, like whether it's Gallup or, you know, use Qualtrics or, you know, any of the number of providers from a practitioner standpoint, it was never about Gallup extracting energy. Like, it just wasn't the way we walked into that work. It was really about, you need a mechanism to create a conversation in your company that has to do with something more than like productivity. And so those, like, it was in the conversation, at least in Mars and some of the places I've been that was the real differentiator, right. Because you could have a conversation was about, Hey, do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my job? Do I have clear expectations? Is someone actually caring about me on a daily basis? Are they thinking about my career? Do I connect to the mission of the company? And so I'm not sitting here as a Gallop advocate. You know, I like, I think there's any number of benefits and drawbacks to any system. I am sitting here saying it's important to allow your teams and yourself to have that conversation, your company, however you get there, right? However you get there, whatever instrument, whatever survey, whatever process you want to use, open up the conversation. And you're going to find that everybody's struggling with it.
Awesome. And so I think everyone will dispute that a no-no, I don't think they dispute that those are very noble things. So, so let's go to the next, maybe think to analyze that one of the things that's very impactful for me was a specific thing that CEO of Compuware said crystal O'Malley. He said, uh, in business for hundreds of years, there's only three metrics that matter customer satisfaction, employee engagement, um, and cashflow cashflow. And I thought that was such a great statement. Then hanging out with a very conservative CFO, JOA said, I was like, do you believe that? And he goes, of course, even, uh, you know, a CPA bean counting, you know, a finance person, uh, we'll see the logic of that, right. Uh, you need to have customers, you need, uh, employees who are engaged with their work, who actually want to help customers and you can't run out of money. Uh, so I, I find that very logically delightful. Um, and I think valid, could you share maybe scrutinize that from a kind of academic point of view? Is that too naive? Is that useful? What are your reactions when you hear something like that to anybody?
Um, I guess I'll just start off by saying that my first response would be to say to him, what do you mean by employee engagement? Because I'm finding, it's becoming a little bit like a tower of Babel, we're all using the same word, but we may not actually be making the same assumptions or, or, you know, what it would be. And, and are we really talking about the same thing? And that's why I mentioned that. In fact, there are some different models that are out there. Uh, the other thing,
If it were the word cloud that Andre said, I'll just assume that, you know, what, the beautiful words that flu ah, that's came out of Andre's mouth, right? It's like,
Yeah. Um, what you're asking
Putatively stash
The, well, the other thing that I'm running into now is that when I ask people how they know, if they do how engaged their employees are, they are likely to cite some numbers from a survey. Um, and I'm an author of a survey. So I know about this, but that is an index, but it means they haven't gone and actually walked the floor. They haven't talked to people. They haven't gotten a good sense of what do those numbers reflect really in terms of what's going on here. And so I think that too, again, that's why I'm asking, what do you mean by engagement? Or if I can put the statement a different way, if you were successful in building more engagement, which is everybody is saying, oh yeah, we want more, we always get 30% engaged in 70% or not. Well, we need more, but it keeps being 30%.
What's going on, you know, and I'm asking, what are you doing? And what would success look like for you? How would you know, beyond a test score if people are high? Yeah. What is the behavioral stuff that's going to be happening? What will tell you? Um, that, yeah, we're getting more engaged and things are, you know, so it's like taking those things out of just the numbers on a survey, which is really a bit of a distance from what's actually happening day to day. And so for me, I really am trying to get a better understanding of what people think they're doing and why they're doing it. And is it showing anything that is improving, um, the working situation for the employees?
And I think to kind of extend that a little bit that's so I am also an author of surveys. Sometimes, sometimes they can be helpful and useful as a signal and as a touch point or as a baseline. Um, and one reason I really like NBTI the burnout inventory is it's multidimensional, right? So you have a few touch points. You have a few pieces, it's still a signal that you want to understand what's happening behind it. You want to understand where you go from there, you want understand what it will look like. I always worry, might be too strong of a word. I always make a face when people come back and they want to have face
When people want to have one number or one metric, you know, like what's one metric that matters. What happens when you have one metric or Sam Guggenheimer if he's here, right? If someone throat, he, he said this to me once, and I was like, this is genius. If you only have one metric, you know what metric will be gamed. So if you can have a few, particularly a few that may be intention that at least helps, right? You still will want to understand what's underlying it, what's behind it. Um, if, if you improve what that improvement means, what the behaviors will look like. But if you ever try to reduce it just to one, you, you, you run the risk of like over reducing behavior. Or like once you only like throw up one number, people are going to gain that. We're not stupid. We know how incentives work. This is business.
Yeah. It is. It is super cool. Just to finish the thought, right. That, that you're seeing. I get, like, I get really excited about this space, um, because it's moving, right? So if you watch progressive companies, it's moving from, yes, we used to do a survey to, we changed that into a meaningful conversation that we opened up in our companies about this issue, all the way to areas of design thinking. Now being a big part of the worlds that I live in, because what we're finding is it's actually the design of the employee experience. Like how do you bring you all into the changes that will impact your life and create experience touch? I mean, all organizations are a series of touch points with you, right? That's all, they are thousands every day in terms of spaces and policies and procedures and managers and all the rest.
And so you're starting to see this conversation shift into God. If we just designed with the, who are going to use the product, the product be in the organization, and we created something that works for you, actually, it's going to be easier to not avoid burnout, but diminish the possibility of it, not to ensure engagement, but to give us a better chance. And so I'm seeing like even the conversation and companies start to move from a survey to let's learn how to be design thinkers. Let's learn how to build products that people want to pick up and be a part of. I think that's a really important shift when you talk about where the space is going in practice. Um, it's been fun to watch over the last few years,
Ah, sort of internally, uh, debating whether to ask this. Um, but let's do it. Those are lovely words, but I mean, if, if I were to, uh, I'll just say what's in my head. Oh, Dr. Martin, it looks like Dr. and Dr. Forest. When I was saying engaging as a bunch of who ha how would you directly respond to that?
I respond to it pretty simply as that like organizations are in its end in its simplest form. Like I said, last night, they are a relationship between humans. And in the end, we know that relationships are really important currency. And part of what I challenge our leaders through every day is your job is to make sure that your people have what they need to be great. Your job as a leader is to unleash the full potential of your people. And so I do, I listen to CEOs who talk to me all the time about those areas. Are we growing the business? Are we growing our people? And are we retaining customer loyalty? And all those have factors of engagement, their definition of the term, not a survey, um, that are really important to understand. And if you see systems that way to me, right? It's not who hot.
It's like, we're all humans working in a singular mission and goal. And so engagement, the more you can flourish, it better relationships are the better. The relationships are. The more we listen to diverse opinions, the more diverse opinions we have, the more innovation this present, the renovations present, the better chance we have of growing the firm and building a better world. Like I believe in the formula. And you have to, to practice in the spaces I practicing. You have to, to do the research they're doing, you have to, at some level, believe there's a reason to do more than just treat our people and ourselves as if we're disposable resources, which is in the end. What I believe the conversation's about. I mean, I like, I don't know. I don't know. I don't think they believe engagements who ha
No, I mean, I started off saying I defined engagement as the opposite, but you know, long ago, that was kind of the way I was trying to sort of get at it. So, no, I don't think that, I guess what I'm saying is that, um, I'm running into these other issues, which leads me to think that there may be some things that are getting in our way. It's not going as smoothly as it might be. Um, in the last few years I have, um, visited with organizations and, uh, they're administering surveys. Um, and usually more than one, uh, annually. I mean, how many of you, right? Your company has annual surveys that have all sorts of stuff about, you know, everything, right. Uh, okay. So annual surveys. And what I will do is ask, let's say, what are you, what are you measuring and why?
And what are you finding out? What is, what is happening? Um, and of late people are complaining that the dial of the needle is not moving. You know, somehow we're getting the same results over and over again, and they're expecting something to change. And the question is why, and, uh, you know, and, uh, have they done anything or are they done something? And it's not really, it's not, again, what does this success look like? What are they trying to do? And when I talked to the employees who are taking these surveys, they, if I can say this are getting burned out on surveys, because they're answering the same questions every year. It's the same survey. It's not changing. It's not saying, okay, we tried X, what do you think about that? Or anything? It's the same one. And after a while, they're saying hell with it, you know, I'm just going to answer down the middle.
I'm going to make it up. Um, I, you know, I won't answer, uh, you know, the first time I wrote out an extra answers to the questions, nobody obviously paid any attention or some, you know, why should I bother? Which means that the surveys increasingly are going to be garbage in garbage out. It's not going to be telling you very much. And that may be one of several reasons why they don't change from year to year as well. Let's not do the engagement survey or the burnout survey or the job satisfaction, or, you know, whatever you take the Dora survey, you know, and the,
I see a survey and then no action is taken because you do a survey and you do a massive reorg. And they're like, oh, we'll just do it again later. We'll we'll reset next year.
And nothing happens. And I am. So I see that as actually using tools, not in the right way to actually help you understand what's going on, but turning out to be something that is turning people off in the organization. And really what you want to do is to, if ideas, Hey, engage them in. How could we move in a more positive direction? How can we identify some of the pebbles in our shoes that you know, are really driving us crazy all the time and we could do something about it. So the, the problem with surveys sometimes is those numbers just get a little floating above, you know, the crowd of people and it's not giving you any direction. It's not something. The other thing that happens is people will, uh, who look at the results of the surveys. I find that many organizations do not feed the results back, nobody ever hears whatever happened. And that just adds, why should I bother? You know, should I even think about these questions? Because nobody ever said what we learned from it. And you need to just ask me the question.
And now I agree. I agree with the, like, there's a lot of organizations that, that use these instruments really poorly, right? I mean really poorly because in the end, like I, and the organizations, you know, I've had the pleasure to be a part of, they always treated engagement as a team level phenomenon. The only place you can sort of work on climate really is a person who's surrounded by 1200 people every single day. And so I'll take Mars. As example, Mars ran a survey, they used a number of different providers, but their orientation was always, we will never on high fix any of this. Right. And if, and if we do surveys and it comes up to us, it's going to be years before it comes back down to the employees. So why not push that all the way down and ask the question of, Hey, what can you, as a team who's working together every day do to work on climate.
And then what are the things the system can also take on over time? And you have to do both, right? You have to be working at both ends because in the end, like organizations are, like I said, last night, they're 10,000 teams over and over again. And so at least when you pull it through the team level, people feel like they have some ability to impact their own like day-to-day life, which is what ultimately those surveys should do. And if you're in an organizations that using the practices that you talked about, which are valid as well, help to change that, because the last thing you want is not to be able to use your voice in a way that can drive change in the very place that you're working. I feel bad for the organizations that are in that place, because then you do like you stop hearing the voice of your people. And that just seems counterintuitive in, in the world that we live in. Like we need everybody's viewpoint in order to make the decisions we're trying to make, given the world that we're living in,
That'd be fair. This isn't just surveys. Right. I know plenty of people who have done in depth, heartfelt qualitative interview-based investigations. And they've just been tossed either because we don't have, we don't have some kind of resources, whether it's money or it's time, or, you know, I joked earlier there was a reorg or we just aren't going to do it. And then how does heartening is that in some ways that's almost worse because the survey is like, oh, you wasted 10 minutes or 20 minutes of my time. If it's an interview, I talk to someone face to face someone personally didn't care about what I said, and it was ignored. No one cared, no one fixed anything. No one did anything. So
I think the survey,
Yeah. I mean almost what Andre said. What we need to do is understand that in large part changing or improving our culture or our tools or technologies or a process in some ways in many ways needs to start, particularly for our culture and our engagement at the team level. Some ways I'm rolling this up on high, you know, sometimes there's like limited things that we can do except resource allocation, right? Like big budgets, roll up to the top. If there are any patterns, some, some things are kind of limited on context because teams shouldn't be compared to teams because like, if you got a mainframe team and a cloud native team, like that's a little different, not, well, that's a lot different, right. But if you're up top and you like universally are seeing consistent patterns, find ways to like allocate resources and try to fix things. Because if people took time to offer feedback, in some way, they're telling you things, whether it's through a survey or an interview, or like somebody just bitched around happy hour, consistently things are happening
And practically speaking, you know, and we could talk surveys and the like all day long, but there's also a really personal element to, to burn out engagement. And, you know, I just always, you know, in this world, I'm a born optimist, right? I believe we're really lucky to be in the companies we're part of, um, and they need to get better every day. Right? So many of you are working in fast growth companies. These companies are growing 20, 30% year on. And so, you know, it's outstripping our processes, our tools, our own human resources that we have. And so, again, for me, like the very simple things you can do is have a conversation, your company, I just shot a video for our, you know, function around this idea that for, Hey, about three years, I lost 30, 40% of the use of my hands.
I had a back surgery. I spent most of the time in a neck brace and was clinically probably pretty depressed burnout working my tail off the whole time. And, you know, you learn some pretty important lessons in those moments are out. All I needed was to someone to talk to me and know that I wasn't alone, right. That I'm not the only one going there. And then I didn't want to make that the only conversation I ever had. Right. Because in large part, when all we talk about is what's going wrong in bearable. You know, what we're going to get is just more stuff going wrong. Um, and we're caught in that place. So first opened up a conversation that, Hey, it's okay to feel burnout. We're all gonna have moments, right? As a leader, you have to open the door for people to say, it's okay to talk about those things, right.
I think secondly is then, you know, you really need to make sort of balance and energy of priority. Every one of my team has a performance goal that is about your energy management. I want you to walk in with the same energy you CA you've walked into the year with walk out with the same energy. What do you have to do to be able to do that? It's all different for everybody, right. But my job as leader to make sure you're doing the things that continually increase your energy and keep you in balance with the demands, just the world's putting on us right now, I've got a 14 to 17 year old, my jobs, the easiest thing I do every day. Right. And then like the really practical thing I think we all can do is, is to make sure we are models as much as we can for working in smart ways.
I'm in a new company, six weeks. You know, what I do is I come in at six o'clock every morning, I leave by three 30. I start, as I intend to continue. And my organization is brilliant as Google is, it will take everything I'm willing to give, just will, you know, and you have to model that idea of like, I care more than anybody in the world about the success of organizations. And I'm unwilling to upend my life because it's just not a good model for anybody else. Like we can do these jobs and we can work smarter. And part of that is you got to realize what are the things that matter to you? And every time you compromise those as a value, they no longer exist in the world, at least for the people who were watching, do your work, you know? And so I just think there's a big piece of modeling for us as leaders. It's super important to hang on to. So just to talk like really practically about some things that, that are strategies we can use, because that's part of, I'm assuming while you're sitting here, right, is that you're struggling with this subject in your own
Life, just because they're too polite to leave. I hope that's not the case. Um, but this, this is great. And I think it's actually very practical. So let's stop doing that and let's go to something very academic, um,
Actually came to a research conference.
Um, actually, I, I, that's actually a bit of a joke, but Christie, uh, Dr. you said something that I just, I think we were walking and I just stopped, or you just simply see this as something so startling to me. Uh, that was just so surprising. So let me tell you what that observation was. Um, you had made the notion that, you know, there's this famous Gallup survey that shows that, uh, you know, employee engagement hasn't changed in 40 years and, uh, you said, um, maybe we're measuring the wrong thing. Are we measuring something that's actually static that maybe it's actually remembering something that's personal and intrinsic versus something that we can actually change. And I thought that was, and I, by the way, I have no interest in, like, I have no opinion on gal. I, you know, it's all, um, I have no expertise, I'm an opinion to judge it, but I mean, just as a hypothesis, like it is it, should we care? Um, that employee engagement has increased over 40 years? Is it, or do you think it might be some sort of, um, uh, instrument flaw? Uh, Alex said,
Well, when there's something like that, that that's, that's static and predictably that's static. Um, you begin to wonder what it really is that, I mean, you know, you're putting in this fishing line and what kind of thing are you, are you getting out there? Um, so I raised that as a possibility, maybe that's, you know, the 30%, however, that is measured, if you know any of these things, um, what does it really tapping, you know, at some point, um, and it's, it's not getting bigger, it's not getting smaller. Um, and it was also a way for me, I think, to sort of think about the other 70%, that's the majority, I mean, and it, and it's like, uh, what are you, you know, what is your strategy for the next 20% after the 30? I'm gonna, you know, on some scale, not the far end, the burnout end, but you know, in between and what might be the thing, what is happening with those people?
Um, they often are get to call if they're not engaged, they're disengaged. And I'm a big believer that those kinds of bi-modal things are very useless. They are not helpful at all. Um, people take burned out, not burned out. No we found from the data that there's actually a whole kind of set of profiles that you can gather, you know, with the MBI scores that show that people are sometimes a little short of, you know, engaged, full engagement, but they're okay, they're doing fine. You know, it's not any big problem. What would it take, you know, to say, move them into a more, you know, a better position that they had more exciting things to do, that there was ways they could give and contribute as opposed to the people on the far end, who might be really hard to work with at that point, if they're, you know, highly burned out.
So I'm just concerned. I think about at some macro level, what is this information telling us, because it's not giving us guidance as to where to go to whom with what sort of things. And I think then people are kind of saying, okay, that's great. But I mean, what do we do to get to get there? What I have also found out recently and talking, you don't put out a plea last year when I talked here about burnout, say that if people had any ideas or had tried things, and there was something that they really thought was working well, uh, to kind of move towards in a better direction to let me know. And one of the interesting things is that a lot of the ideas that people have submitted and are passionate about and really believe in are almost always not completely, but almost always things that I would call under the radar.
They're not going up to the top and asking for money, asking for permission, saying, we want to make a change. It's kind of like it's within our span of control. We could reorganize how we do X or how we're going to deal with why, when that problem arises. Nobody else has to know about it. We can just work it out for ourselves. And what they're often saying is that we try it, we tweak it till we get it going and it's working well. We're really proud of it. Now we get unexpected benefits. We didn't anticipate, which is always a nice surprise and it builds optimism and it builds hope. Well, if we could do that, we could try something else. And it's not about, you know, they're the problem. This is whatever we can't do anything. And somehow changing that framework to say, there's probably smaller steps, easier first wins, and they're worth it, you know, not reinventing the whole business, but, you know, making those steps in a positive way and realizing that there is more that you could actually do in concert with the team and, and, and so forth in some way.
Uh, so Dr. Martin has a 20 year practitioner space. I mean, so what is your reaction to like, should we really care if employees have been consistently had this level of engagement has been increasing for 40 years? Uh, is that, is that actually worrisome? I mean, what, what is your kind of reaction to that? Yeah. So,
Uh, I'd start with, you know, the, the mean hasn't moved, right? But inside every population, there are companies who have moved the needle for themselves. And so, right. So I always look at like, Hey, in every one of your companies, there are people on the continuum. There's folks who are feeling the pressure and there's folks who are thriving right now. And so as a person, who's like a designer of employee experience. I always like thinking about like, who are the people that right now thrive in the same company are working in, what are the assets they're using? What are the ways that they've changed the way they work under the radar in different ways, and how do you find those and actually make them more available to everybody. And there's also organizations in Gallup, in Qualtrics and whatever survey use that have moved radically in terms of the conversation and engagement, you know, and you know, those movements are meaningless unless you actually can walk in there, but engagements is something you feel, you know, walking into enough companies like you feel engagement.
The minute you walk into a place, take me to a call center. You know, I used to work in a manufacturing, 180 manufacturing, um, spots around the world. I could walk into every one and almost without fail go that isn't a highly engaged workforce that is thriving, or that is a workforce who's in danger of being really burnt out. You can feel it when you're in it. And so I love this idea of it is a team-based construct, regardless of the survey. There's nothing stopping you from making changes that help produce a better day-to-day environment. And I love that sort of ability of leaders say, Hey, right or wrong, let's give it a try. Let's try to make our own world better in small ways. And that starts to add up over time, right. Because you're feeding this sense of finding the better practice. Yeah,
No, there's, there's, I mean, I cannot tell you how many people would say, wow, we were just so, you know, it's kind of like an opens up. We could do some other things, you know, it's kind of like, as opposed to just sort of feeling like you're beaten down and you can't do this, that's not allowed dah, dah, dah, you know, um, and sometimes they've even been given seed money, you know, to do some kind of things, you know, spend it as you will kind of thing and whatever. But, um, I guess, I guess what I'm saying is I worry sometimes about the conversation, whether it's engagement, burnout, or other kinds of things, getting framed as such big issues that people assume it's going to require millions of dollars and is going to require, you know, rethinking how we are going to do tech in the 21st century or the 22nd, if we get there, you know, um, that kind of thing, and that kind of stops people. Cause you just don't know where to begin with that. It's supposed to, you know, start sort of in your own sphere kind of thing, and, and get some of those initial positive wins and try something out. And if it doesn't work, try something different, but have a sense that yeah, we can solve some of these problems.
I have a, just an open-ended question and this is actually came from you, Dr. . So what are the most strategic places to spend energy time and money? And so you're looking at a, uh, group of technology leaders, leading rebellions inside of a, um, often conservative organizations that don't want to change. I mean, what advice would you give them?
You guys know take better than I do. I imagine Eric. So I'll ask you first and then I'll add on,
Um, I would say identify within your sphere of control within your span of control, identify the biggest pain point, whether it's your pain point or your champions or sponsors pain point, um, and that, and also something that is fun or interesting or compelling for you because it's got, let's be real. It's gotta be at least a little bit of fun so that you don't like burn out or skip frustrated and then hack around on that, because then it's fun for you. It's creative if you like, like if you're just burned out on people, sometimes I joke, I hate people. Like if it's one of those projects, do it by yourself. If you really love collaborating with people, grab a partner, grab a pier, pull something together and then show somebody else. And the joy of that is that if it's a giant headache for some, for you, even if it's only headache for you, it's probably a giant, massive headache for somebody else at minimum, it's a headache for you and you just made your life better. Right. And then you share like you show somebody else's cool thing that you just made, even if it's only like an adjacent headache for them, you've probably spurred some dope idea, right? And then you can show other people and show their people. And the nice thing is that you've probably like ignited this fire. And now, like you said, it's, it's a fun, little win. It was a great little side project. It was fun for you because it was something that was exciting.
And by it being a headache, you've solved a problem. You've probably solved a problem for other people. And then it's a win and I am very like, I'm pretty ambitious. So for me, I like doing those kinds of things because then there's also some sort of impact, right? It's a win. So like my hobbies are very different things, but for work, I like, I like doing those types of things that solve problems because then it's, it's a hobby when it feels like a hobby at work, but it's also impacts I can throw it on my perfect
To birds. Yeah. I, and I, I love that idea. You know, I love a couple of the things that she said, underscoring, the idea of finding the problem, you know, like you run teams, who's the most stress member of your team right now. Right. Figure out where their needs are unmet and you solve for everybody, which I just love as a premise. Right. That idea of like find your most stress consumer solve form. I think the second thing, which is I, you know, this word rebellion, like anybody who's trying to drive transformation in any system like utmost respect, right. Because we're pushing against the ocean every day. And so that idea of small wins and that idea of like the thing that you all will probably do in most organizations, isn't complete the transformation that you're a part of it's that you're going to show people that it's possible.
You're going to show people that it's possible to push on the system. You're going to show people in small ways that you can thrive and have a good career. You're going to show people that, you know, what the energy's worth it because we're starting to slowly get the wheel to turn. And I just like, I have big props to you for doing your, your job in that way. And this idea of like, you just gotta show people it's possible, right. And once you do that, then you know what more people go, man, you can have a good career and you don't have to kill yourself, man. You can sort of do small things around engagement. You don't have to wait for the entire organization to shift. And that's just really important to reinforce, especially in the time when we're sort of locked down with a lot of inertia and reasons why we can't do something reasons why it's not the right thing. So I just, I would hook onto those same ideas and say, just go there. You can't go wrong.
Uh, Dr. M um, yeah, no, I like all of that. I mean, again, that hope that optimism, the, you know, the things that are possible. And, um, I, you know, if you're thinking where I think you're full of hoo ha yeah.
Um,
I'm kidding. But I do think, um, there are ways of investing in small ways. How can I, how can I put this better? Um, I think it was M and M you know, the company, um, long ago, which was known for always putting aside a little pot of money just to use for little small experimental trial runs, not for any particular product or particular goal, but just a little pot, you know, kind of thing. And, and I think using that same idea with teams with people, because increasingly I see a lot of what's happening in the social environment, the weakness, not just me, uh, as being so important with, you know, engagement and, um, you know, preventing burnout and being able to do some seed grants and just sort of say, what would be something that you could do this year? You know, find a particular thing that you want to work on and give it a try, and it doesn't have to be a success.
It could, you know, but you've learned something from it. And, but give people, you know, the idea that it's worth experimenting, worth, reaching out, worth, trying to figure out something else that would make a difference in terms of how we're working, what we're doing. Um, I think that gives people more voice. I think that gives them more kind of choice and control. I think it's a way for them to develop other kinds of skills. So there may be a lot of things that come as a result of that. Um, and in, in some sense, it's saying we, we hired you because we thought you were really pretty good. And we believe in you enough to give you a little running room occasionally to do something. So I, I, I think that sort of would fit in, in the same
Andre. They don't in five just Googling m&ms, uh, that's actually owned by Mars. Where, so are you familiar with that?
I'm familiar with it at scale, actually. So, you know, Mars, one of the things that we did, they called make the difference awards and they, uh, they ran a two year, um, storytelling process. It was about two things, which I love, which is sort of what you're talking about is they gave people the freedom to make the company better. Um, and then what they did is as a, as an associate there, you weren't employees, your associates, you had, you were expected to catch other people doing these great things and nominate them for this process that ultimately was this great storytelling process twenty-five thousand nominations, every two years, that bubbled up all the way to the top 100 stories being told to the Mars family and executives as an engagement process, right? That was how we practice engagement was you're going to get to see people who are living in, you know, the manufacturing site in Poland, in their spare time making changes to the way that that site works, because they love this company so much.
And then they took them all the way up. And the big part of that process was how do you let more people know that these stories are being told and steal them with pride and then be the next person to do the next great thing. And it was just a part of the fabric of that culture, which was, again, I think the practical end of engagement, right? It was, how do you build this sense that, you know, we're looking for you to make the system better and we will be there to celebrate you when you do. And that can be both on large-scale like they did. I mean, it's one of the most fascinating piece of work I've ever seen. I mean, stories of people that got literally, if you got, if your story made it, you were sent with your spouse to DC and spend an entire week sort of in that storytelling. And like people left their city for the first time in their life. You know, they came to DC and this family it's a privately held company, but they literally believe engagement to their core, which showcases the way that they create moments for their, for their associates. So it's a point of pride for me. I think it's an amazing thing that they do.
And I think that's kind of gets to my little aha moments here over the last hour and forgive me that I'm not even looking at the audience, I'm really here for me. I'm just hoping that, you know, you're getting something out of it. Um, but that is just a by-product of the hour. I mean, to me, it's just obvious now, right? That this is the learning dynamic learning, um, uh, dynamic, right. It's, uh, empowerment at the edges. That is where the improvements come. Right. Support it at the core. Right. It's just, uh, it all, you know, Facebook was saved by the PHB compile that was done at the 20% time. Google was saved numerous times, but 20% improvement project. I mean, so, I mean, suddenly these stories sound very familiar. Uh, now this, this has been great. So, but I, would we be kicking myself if I didn't ask this last question just because, uh, um, uh, well, I want to, um, so we, we talked about the word cloud for engagement versus burnout, but I think the, the other academic literature that I'd love is from Dr. Mahali cheeks Mihai, uh, um, about, uh, flow, right? I mean, so like, how would you overlay the, uh, cheek Mihai work with engagement? I mean, is that orthogonal intersect, contradict? I mean, what's the edgy, can you help me understand how we should think about that?
Um, some of the burnout work that has been done, um, and the measures they've developed for that have explicitly used flow, uh, in it and incorporated it as, as a, as an element. So, um, others have not more so explicitly, but it does. Um, although you trick people, they did that. Yeah.
And your mental framework and how you think about it. I mean, how do you sort of integrate that? Um, the flow focus, joy, um, words, uh, thank you, Dr. M Dr.
So I mean, I'll, I'll take a run out of course, which is, you know, and I'll ask the question, the audience, just as a reflection exercise, which is, Hey, in your career, what was the one moment you can point back to where you were at your most creative and innovative, and then just ask the question, like, what were you surrounded by then? Because that is your formula for engagement. And I believe that's what flow is all about, right? As society, there's moments in our lives, and we're fully unlocked, we like return on our brains are fire. And we're just doing things that were like, I can't believe I'm doing this right. I can't believe this is happening. Um, it's when you write one of your masterpiece books, it's when you go
That's tears and, uh, you know what, I know what you're talking about,
But you have those moments. And so like, that's the formula for engagement and it's contextual and it's very different for each one of us. And a good way to go back to your team is to ask that same question. When was the moment in your career when you felt like you were firing every single piston and what was true around you at that time? And how can we replicate more of that now? I mean, that's like that to me is always like the practical definition of flow.
I got goosebumps in fact, by the way, and in a rare moment of acknowledging you, uh, and so the, the cheeks and Mihai, um, I mean, it's just poetic. It's a sense of a flow that, uh, you're having so much fun or so fulfilling that you lose track of time. You can even do sense of self, right? It is those transcendent moments, uh, that is, uh, you know, like transcendent and this, it was just this incredible depiction and it served, um, contradicts, but also complemented by the work of Anders. Ahlgren Dr. Andrews about acquired learning, which is like learning is hard, but it can also, uh, you know, trigger, flow and joy. So kind of the spirit of the second ideal.
So I do, I will note that there has been some, some research recently into, uh, different conceptualizations of productivity and how productivity, some conceptualist conceptualizations of productivity are the ability to accomplish complex tasks without interruption, which is kind of orthogonal to this idea of flow and how that, that type of flow, um, contributes to, and is predictive of work recovery, which is the ability to disconnect from work. You can leave work at work, and that also helps reduce burnout. So I think it's kind of a similar thing. It's a little different. I also, uh, when you mentioned that idea of flow, it makes me think of the book designing your life, which comes back to what you were talking about. Um, uh, design work. Has anyone here seen that or heard of that book designing your life? I'm a professor assigning homework, check it out.
I really appreciated that book because it helped me think about, so it, it's nice. It's based on, uh, a couple of professors who do, uh, kind of design science thinking, but applied to your own life. And it ha it's like walks you through a very systematic view of doing things, gives you a little worksheets. It's dope. Um, but it helps you think through the things that you enjoy doing, the things that you don't enjoy doing, the things that you're good at, the things that you're not good at. And also the things that you do where you find yourself in this flow, where you just lose track of time, because there are things that we're very good at, but we hate doing, there are things that we're not particularly good at, or like, like we, we love doing, but we may be like, don't like flow through.
There are things that we're very good at doing, but we like the take energy from us. And there are things that we're very good at, but we get energy from the things that we like lose track of time off. And it helps you go through and think about how we can design our lives. And there might be some things that like, maybe we don't get money from because capitalism and it helps you think about how to structure your day. And if there are things that we love, but we maybe don't make money from how to structure those into our lives in hobbies, or how to like going back to what you said, how to manage your energy so that we can structure our lives that way. And it was such an insightful way to think about structuring the things that I am particularly good at, and that bring me energy and that bring me joy. And as soon as you brought up flow, so much of those things that kind of helped me structure my life to avoid burnout, bring me energy, bring me flow. And I love it. So homework you're welcome.
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention like one thing that, uh, ha this had that sort of transcend state, uh, Nicole was like many years ago when we're doing the clustering, right. We must be assessing, like we knew there was some signal there. Right. And we finally found it that sense of triumph and a joy. It was like so much fun statistics, SPSS, highly recommended, so fun. All right. I have achieved all of my objectives. I'm going to turn over the mic. Um, and now you can ask all your questions in the remaining six minutes, actually. I mean, we can go a little bit longer, um, without violating the time mark. So I'm going to hand over the mic to, uh, uh, Jeff gala more, but, uh, a round of applause for our
Hello. Uh, this is . Uh, thank you. That was great talk. That was very thought provoking. Uh, one of the things that, uh, kind of resonated was when you're talking about, are we measuring the right things and employee engagement, obviously I've looked at this academy weekly, but, uh, sitting through like a pitch, uh, pitches from like companies that have been doing engagement surveys for a while, they claim that they've done engagement surveys for 30 years and things like that. Right. And there was one slide that really made me pause where they defined their engagement as, uh, things like commitment and pride and advocacy and job satisfaction and outcomes as retention and discretionary effort, like does employee engagement nothing to do with an employee? It was all about the job and the company. So there was nothing about, well-being nothing about happiness, nothing about the employer. Do you see that as a trend? Do you see that as a something that's changing?
Uh, so I'll, I'll give a sample of the thing I'm most excited about that I've seen in some of the surveys. So I can't remember. I think it was IBM, but one of the big companies had a conjoint survey as part of your hiring process. So imagine you went to this company and you said, Hey, I want to apply for a job before you could do that. They had a series of sort of questions they asked you that were basically about what kind of company do you want to work for? And it was like, would you rather have this, or this, would you rather have this, or this, would this make you more or less satisfied, more likely to stay? And I thought it was really fascinating as they were doing this survey with perspective people who were looking to join a different company. And so ultimately they were saying, Hey, we're going to all the information we need to build the company that the best talent want to come to.
And that was kind of the most ingenious way. I've seen people sort of measure sort of some of these things different than just measuring the employees that are already there. Cause I think what they're trying to get at is how do we build a company that people want to come and work in, right? Which is ultimately sort of the end of the question you want people to come and you also then in the end, want to retain the talent you have. So I thought that was just a real interesting edge. I hadn't seen before. They got me intrigued about a different way to think about the construct a little bit.
Okay.
Hi, I'm John Walsh from the university of Michigan. And first I have to say three bright stars together in one place. This is awesome, but discussion. That was really interesting to me about this was that the idea of this landscape of touchpoints. And, um, I'm not sure if I can really formulate this right. But what's kind of teasing around my brain is like, how do you view, you know, both from the research side and both the practical, just people dev side, how do you view, um, this, this moving landscape and how do you actually then take that to bring out and tease out real data that is useful for the rest of the world? That's a good question.
Oh yeah. Okay. Um, that is always the big question is how you tease out that data. Um, and for me, um, I can use the word, you know, the touching point again is always going back to real people where they're working, observing, talking, et cetera, to match up with any other indices that we're gathering in terms of their output, their productivity, absenteeism scores on a survey and all of that kind of thing. Uh, and till I can hear the voices behind the numbers, I can't, you know, I, I worry to rely on the number two exclusively and so forth. So I really do think it takes, uh, a multiple focus kind of approach on that. And, uh, it's also being open to the answers might be not one but several. And so the idea that there is a, which I really hate a single best practice, a one size fits all, you know, it was kind of like I'm going to banish those concepts because they usually don't work for everybody and everyone, you know, you need to customize, you need to sort of figure out, you know, what will work here and what kind of people we're bringing in so forth.
So, um, it's not an easy question to answer, although yeah, that's the goal.
I love the answer though, right? Because I think inherently, what you're saying is that like those touch points, although the similar touch points happen to every single company, like organizations are vastly different, right? From the principles and values, they were founded in to the areas and industries they're working in to the very ways of working, they believe in. And the important thing is in those touch points that you're actually using them to reinforce the things that you stand for. Right? Because we all joined brands and we all joined the aspiration of the company. Right. And the more we can make that true in these touch points and they're small and big, like I always think about when you walk into your company headquarters, what does the physical space actually say about what the company cares about? I walked through many companies. I'm like, I don't know if your space is communicating what you would want it to, frankly. Right. And it's, and that's a really easy example, but that's a touch point that we sort of, we lose, like you look at the spaces, physical spaces, the easiest thing to look at and go, that's a touch point every single day, all the time we're having with our employees, what's it saying about what we care about? And then this is to your point, which is it's going to be different depending on a lot of things, a lot of things. And therefore, there's not one single answer to that question.
Oh, sorry. Uh, I can answer both those. Okay, good, good. Uh, Amazon is incredibly frugal and you can see it in their design, incredibly sparse, incredibly frugal. It communicates a lot about what they say, what they value. You gotta be on board for that. Now I will say from a practical research standpoint, and I think this is a theme that has been at least under, if not obvious, it's been obvious to me as a researcher. Uh, if not underlying, um, you have to be absolutely concrete and clear as, as the, as you go out and interview people, as it starts to build up bubble up, you have to be incredibly clear with your definitions about what it is you think you're measuring, right? So as you start, as themes start bubbling up, you need to start being incredibly clear with terms, whatever it is you want to name it, whether it's engagement, whether you'd like that word or not define it, uh, so that you know what it is that you are measuring, or what did you think you're measuring, whatever you think your proxies are. Because whenever you're measuring something across several touch points that are emerging, you can change those later. But if you want to start communicating particularly several complex touchpoints later, you gotta be crisp on that because otherwise it like there'd be dragons later.
Hi, my name is Jessica Sant. I work at Comcast and, um, we are taking on, uh, starting to do OKR, which I know you guys at Google have been doing for a while. And so speaking of figuring out what to measure, um, we have a, every other, every other month EMPS survey, so employee NPS. And so one of the questions is, would you recommend this as a place to work? How motivated are you? And a couple of other things like that. So we're trying to figure out what is the thing that we want to measure every, every quarter regarding employee engagement or EMPS. And so participation rate, I think is an easy one that no one really argues that we shouldn't measure participation rate. We want to have a good participation rate. There's a lot of debate on, should we measure ourselves on motivation, right? And we want to increase motivation by 2.2 per 2% over the quarter. And that to me seems tenuous. Cause if, if my employees know that I'm getting measured on my motivation score, going up, then am I telling them the wrong thing? Because you know, like, am I kind of, uh, losing the well, and I guess I'm curious, like what do you guys measure? And do you have, okay, ours are, or goals set around these engagement numbers.
I'm sort of too new to talk about Google's process. I haven't gone through it yet. So I I'd love to come back to that one. When I've had a little more time in the company. One of the things I will say that, um, from an engagement standpoint, I like measuring much more than the mean on engagement is I like to measure up. So for me, it was always like, Hey, who cares? What the mean is now I care that somebody, you see somebody working on making the place better. And so follow up, has your team improved its practice since the last time you were asked, and that's just a good way to get momentum, right? When you get everyone's attention on movement, as opposed to the mean you get off the measurement of engagement onto the action of engagement, which is just a much better way to build energy around it. So that's where we were.
I, what I would add to that is, um, it's sort of what was also implicit puts it in my question about what do we mean by engagement? Are you really ultimately interested in motivation per se? Or is it really because you're assuming that motivation, if it gets higher, we'll do what, what is the success look like? People are to whistle while they work. Are they going to, I mean, you know, right dancing in the aisles, are they going to be, uh, fewer mistakes? Are they going to be delivering better? I mean, what are the things that you assume if people are engaged, people are motivated. If people are whatever what's going to happen. And that's what I'm asking, what are you looking for? And I personally would say, identify what you really care about moving the needle on not the internal processes. That might be a part of that, but ultimately are your assumptions correct?
That that's the way to go. And that's what to measure to get to whatever the thing is, or the things you know, that you think you would like to be able to see in terms of employee behaviors, success, you know, dah, dah, dah, dah, and, and be able to measure those because those are going to be a lot more meaningful to actually feed back to everybody in the company on a regular basis. Lo my, we are, you know, we have be actionable and actionable, you know? I mean, what are they going to do with we're 2% higher on engagement. I mean, it's like,
I don't want to imply judgment on this, but Paul polling on EMPS every other month is kind of a lot that, that feels heavy to me. It, there could be different motivations behind that. So I don't, I don't want to, I don't, I don't want to imply judgment on this because this is completely context blind, but that, that feels heavy with no, with no context that feels heavy.
Oh, Hey everyone. Thank you so much for time. We are out of time, but, uh, I'd like to extend .