The Competitive Advantage of the Win-Win Workplace

The Win-Win Workplace framework emphasizes centering employee voices and operationalizing feedback, transforming insights into practices that not only improve productivity but enhance employee loyalty, which directly impacts financial performance.

AI can efficiently collect, analyze, and operationalize feedback, making it easier to act on employee insights quickly and effectively, which helps to streamline feedback loops, improve decision-making, and maintain employee satisfaction.

Fostering transparency, redefining employee-manager relationships to a peer-level dynamic, and encouraging open communication all contribute to a culture where employees feel respected, valued, and motivated, enhancing overall engagement and loyalty.

Small businesses can conduct informal employee feedback sessions, one-on-one meetings, or brief surveys to understand what matters most to their team. They can then use straightforward, affordable tools or AI applications designed for small companies to help organize and act on this feedback, showing employees that their input leads to tangible changes.

[00:00:17] Debbie Goodman: Welcome to On Work and Revolution where we talk about what’s shaking up in the world of work. I’m your host Debbie Goodman, I’m CEO at Jack Hammer Global, a global group of executive search and leadership coaching companies. We help find great leaders and we help develop them into even better ones.

My main mission with all of my work is to help companies and leaders to create amazing workplaces where people and ideas flourish, which is why I could not be more thrilled today to introduce our guest, Dr Angela Jackson, who is a renowned workplace futurist and ESG expert who is literally reshaping the future of work.

So Dr Jackson is the founder of Future Forward Strategies, a labour market intelligence firm. She’s a lecturer at Harvard university on leadership and organizational change. And she’s worked at global organizations like Viacom, Nokia. She’s a sought-after advisor serving on several boards, including Arena Analytics and Guild Education.

Dr Jackson is also widely published in leading journals and has spoken at prestigious conferences like TED and The Economist. She has a new book, which is set to release in March, 2025. You can actually sign up for this on her website, we’ll add that info to the show notes, but prior to her book launch, in fact, this week, Dr Jackson has a new research report entitled The Competitive Advantage of the Win-Win Workplace. And today we’re going to get a little sneak preview of the very intriguing findings, and more. So welcome to the show, Dr Jackson, Angela.

[00:01:44] Dr Angela Jackson: Thank you for having me. Thank you.

[00:01:47] Debbie Goodman: Okay. So, I mean, one thing we can all agree on is that markets are tough, there’re spiralling costs and labour costs are always the biggest line item for most organizations and it’s harder than ever for companies to keep showing the returns that shareholders expect. So one of the first things to be attended to, in order to reduce costs is headcount. And now you come out with an alternative perspective, which is backed by data, that’s really important to say, and that demonstrates that investment in certain people practices has significant and positive impact on growth and the bottom line. So this data backed research, tell us more about the research report, what’s the premise, the why, what are some of the findings?

[00:02:33] Dr Angela Jackson: Yeah, absolutely. So again, thank you so much for having me on. This research really started over 4 years ago and I had studied over 1200 companies and this is right during the pandemic and trying to understand what practices that they were implementing that really were helping and showing promise with employee thriving and I was able to collect these practices, nine of them in a framework that we call the win-win workplace framework and they start with one, you know, centering employee voice.

And that’s something that I saw across all of the 1 200 companies. And when I say centering employee voice, people say, well, what does that mean? You know, we have employee surveys, we have, you know, 360 reviews. And really what this meant, was a definition around that employees have a say in the matters that matter most to them.

And so what does that mean? That means on a variety of dimensions of how a person is doing their work in the workplace, they actually have input, and that input is taken and actually operationalized. And when I say that, most people pause and say, well, we can’t do everything, you know, we’re going to lose control of the workplace if we do everything that employees say. I will say, we’re not saying that. What we’re saying is, employees need to have a say in how they can be more efficient, more productive, and that companies should actually take that seriously as they would input from their board of directors, for example, and really think about how they operationalizing it, how they analyse that feedback and say what they can do, say what they can’t do, but also provide a rationale behind it.

And that’s pillar number 9 that bookends this, we say that’s creating a culture of employee ownership. And that could be lived and felt in many different ways. So that could be literally we’re having employees who own pieces of this business, or it could be a piece where we truly are so transparent with our employees, and we bring them into the operations.

Things that we might traditionally say. Oh, a front desk receptionist. She doesn’t need to understand, you know, the operational efficiency and assets under management, but really saying that we’re going to relate to employees in a very different way and bring the men shoulder to shoulder to explain the business so they understand the rationale behind the decisions that we’re making.

 The other pushback that I get, frankly, is that takes so long. Well, actually, it doesn’t. With the invent of generative AI and other technologies, we can actually take in more information, analyse it, and turn it into operational practices, and then report back and say, this is what we can do. Actually, this is what we can’t do either in the future. And this why, or we can’t do this right now and let me explain why. This type of operationalizing is seeing a grand shift in the workplace, from how traditional workplaces have really operated to what’s going to be required in what I call the modern workplace or what I call the win-win workplace.

[00:05:45] Debbie Goodman: Yeah. Okay. So pause there because there’s so much just in that one idea around centering employee voice, and as you say, so much pushback to say that’s just too time consuming. You can’t please all the people all the time. That doesn’t sound like a great strategy. How is that new or different? Firstly, one thing that I have heard from some of the most progressive workplaces, is how you shift the dynamic from the almost parent child relationship to a peer to peer adult to adult relationship, where people feel like their opinions and their viewpoints are respected, where their time is respected, where you share the commercial imperatives of a business with them. As you say, somebody who’s working a front desk or a janitor or somebody who you think, Oh, they don’t really need to know the commercials of this organization. Actually, they’re perfectly capable of understanding. Everybody’s perfectly capable of understanding how this business actually works and grows and thrives, and if you don’t share that information, if you’re not pulling them in, you’re just cutting off one element of how your business can actually grow. On that point specifically, I’ve seen, even in my business, how I’ve assumed that everybody in the organization would naturally understand what the key drivers of growth are and then being completely surprised when I’ve asked people, so do you understand how we make money here and how we get profits, and to realize that actually some people don’t know and why my fault.

I didn’t explain it. I didn’t share the information. How long did it actually take to do that? Not a whole hell of a long time, actually. And so that’s the first one. And then secondly, People are using AI in a very, you know, most people are using AI in some way or another, it’s still at a very superficial level, understandably, because we’re still new to it.

But what I’m hearing you say is that we should be, need to be incorporating the use of AI in the collation of data so that things like this centering of employee voice, understanding what people want, and then operationalizing it, all of that data gathering, that is soon going to be at sort of our fingertips if we use AI well.

[00:07:57] Dr Angela Jackson: That’s exactly it, and I just want to put a finer point on that. So, it is that shift from that parent child relationship to peer to peer, and we talk about this in this report and also in the book, where if you really believe that someone’s a peer, you take time to bring them along on the journey.

You take time to educate them. You say things in different ways to bring them along because you really believe that you need their buy in if you’re going to move forward as a team. For somehow, when we think about traditional workplaces, that has been set aside. I always tell the story of my grandfather. He was a factory worker at Chrysler and he worked on the line and he put doors on some of their cars. And that’s what he did for, you know, 30 plus years, put door on, put door off. But if you were to ask him how the company made money and how his role, his particular role in putting that door in affected the bottom line of the company, I’d gather he didn’t, he wouldn’t be able to know that.

And the reason why is no one took the time to educate him. They took the time to say, we need you to do this faster because we need to get more car outs. Okay. So he did that. They moved as fast and efficiency. But they never brought in the said, is there anything that you’re doing that we could do differently that would make you more efficient. So he wasn’t brought into the business that way. And, and what we’re seeing in this research is that’s a huge missed opportunity. And what we’re saying is we understand that that is difficult, but leading businesses right now are really thinking about how they leverage generative AI and large new technologies to actually take in more information, so that they can analyse it and have insights to then operationalize. To give you an example of that, there’s a global financial services firm that I researched. And the way that they’ve operationalized employee listening is that, they have tens of thousands of frontline managers and they knew that some of those managers are great. Their employees love them. They’re highly rated. Some of them are, you know, middle road. Um, they’re leading the business and they’re doing well. And then they had a third that were underperforming, not only because of what their employees and their direct reports said about them, but also they were underperforming in terms of the assets under management for their individual locations.

And through listening, what they were able to glean from all of the employees that were reporting to them were some insights on that could improve efficiency, some practices that could be improved by the managers and what the company was able to do was to take this and they were able to refine this analysis and implement that into a manager training program.

To really think about how can we train and educate these managers differently based on what they’re hearing and I say, ta da, what they were able to see with a 40 percent of this group that were underperforming, they were actually able to get them up in terms of their performance. And what that tells us as leaders, what we all know is that we have blind spots.

That things are happening. And unfortunately, in the day to day of doing our jobs of leading and also doing the actual work. Sometimes there’s not time to operationalize all of this. But with some of these new technologies, we can do that. And we see leading businesses actually making the business case in doing that and seeing how that directly implicates their bottom lines and this financial institution example, they saw increased assets under management because of a direct correlation to this operationalizing this large supply of employee voice and points.

[00:11:47] Debbie Goodman: Wow. Okay. what I’m hearing is that this approach to designing a manager training program, instead of this coming from the top down, this is we think you need to know in order to manage your team well, instead they took this employee listening, which I really love that term. They listened to people who are being managed. There were enough people to be able to gather a lot of data. And then they used that as the basis for the training program, which could then be, designed and trained and then operationalized. Cause when we say operationalized, it’s like, how are we going to use this in the day to day, which is a very different approach to how manager training typically happens, right? I mean, usually there’s not a lot of employee input into how managers should be trained.

[00:12:35] Dr Angela Jackson: Right. And why that matters, and this is really important, is that most of us were promoted because we were great individual contributors. We were very good at doing our job, myself included, and I write this in my new book, The Win-Win Workplace. I say, I was promoted because I was a great individual contributor. I wasn’t taught to manage people. To take empathy right to take into account their live realities and where they intersect with what was required on the job. I managed like I was managed previously, which was like that. That’s how I learned how to manage. What I’m saying here is that in the future of work in a win-win workplace, it will be critical for companies to understand what does it mean to be a manager at insert name a particular company.

What do employees actually need? And so in this example, when I talk about the global financial services firm, I say that they took that and they used that to tackle a problem with underperforming managers. But what they found is this listening was good for all managers. So now anytime someone is promoted or they’re hired in as a manager, this is a part of everyone’s training, right?

This is ground base, this listening and these strategies that we’ve gleaned from the employees is now integrated in all aspects of our management training. And so that ends up being, what does it mean to be a manager at this global services firm? And that’s the shift that we’re talking about there to shift from the parent, like you say, I’ve told you, you need to do 1, 2, 3, 4. And there’s an acknowledgement saying, I have some blind spots about 5,6 and 7, but I’m willing to consider those and really look at what impact those could have on the business and the way that we do work in this company, the way that we understand the values and taking the time to synthesize all of that and again, operationalize it.

[00:14:31] Debbie Goodman: Right. So I think about all the hundreds, possibly thousands of people that I have interviewed over my career in executive search and executive recruiting. And granted most of the people I speak to are at manager or leader level, but certainly individual contributors and even early stage career people.

And oftentimes the things that they are most upset about is how they’re just not listened to. They have an idea, that they really believe can contribute or make an impact and they’re just ignored. There are so many organizations that talk about and invest so much money in this idea of talent retention.

And there are all these talent retention strategies and bells and whistle employee reward programs. And we’ve seen this talent management strategy that companies invest a lot of money in and the one piece that I don’t hear at all, if not certainly not consistently is how about we actually take the time to consider that our, that all of our workers have a contribution to make in terms of what matters to them and what’s important to them and if we were to actually listen to that, take that into account and operationalize some of it, maybe not all of it, what would that do in order to retain our best talent?

[00:15:51] Dr Angela Jackson: Yeah, I love this point where you say there’s so much money, time, and I say lip service into investing in that. But when you look at research, only 48 percent of US employees believe, that their employees care about them. 48 perfcent. And so we have to rethink, just think about the business case of saying we’re investing all of this money and only 48 percent feel like we care about them.

I would say we need to really think about the return on investment of those dollars. And think about it as a leader, how do I reallocate that in a way that employees feel like they actually are being seen and heard? Because if you’re investing a trillion dollars and only 48 percent of it is effective, you’d re-look at your investment, wouldn’t you? It’s like 52% of that spending has just gone out of the window. And so I think we have to really look at this from a business case perspective. And what I’m offering, this research is showing us and what I’m writing about and how you operationalize this in the new Win-Win Workplace book, is saying okay, everything that we’ve known about the workplace and how we manage, that’s been based on a very traditional system. And I call that in the book, the zero-sum workplace where, I know what’s best for the employees. I tell them what’s best. We dictate what they do. We focus on the bottom line. We listen to them maybe sometimes. We operationalize it. And if we can’t, we can’t, you know, we’re doing good by giving someone a check, great. That has been the paradigm in business since the invent…

[00:17:28] Debbie Goodman: Since the industrial revolution.

[00:17:32] Dr Angela Jackson: Right? If we move from that Taylorism right to this more modern workplace, we’re really thinking about we’re not doing this just because it’s the right thing to do for employees, we’re actually doing this in service of being a better business, of actually returning shareholder value of being good steward of the dollars and the assets we have under management. It requires us to think if employees are not felt like they’re cared about. If we see that they’re not using the, I’m using quotations, the “benefits” that we give them, then we are required right, as a leader to relook at what those are. And any leader who is not thinking that way is really going to be caught flat-footed in the future of work. And I’ll give you an example. I was speaking to a CEO of an energy company that’s based in Connecticut. And he is a boomer. And he goes, Angela, he goes, I know these workers. I can’t say I understand millennials, but I do understand when I look at my data, they’re going to be the majority of my workforce. So to be effective, I know that I need to listen to them and my job is to better understand them and to take seriously what they’re thinking. And so, when I hear my peers say and complain about them, I just stop them because I was like, I can’t think in that way.

 My goal to my shareholders and to the board is to drive business outcomes, and I know that I can do that through them. And so that was his rationale in saying, when he listens and he’s operationalizing it, when he’s treating them as peers and actually taking time to bring them into the business and to actually give them a rationale for why or why they can’t do something.

He felt like that’s his job to be done. He goes, that’s what I do for my board of directors. That’s what I do when I give a shareholder’s report. Why wouldn’t I do that with employees? And so we need to understand as leaders in the C-Suite, what is our reason for not doing that? Cause it takes longer? Well, you’ll sit there and you’ll spend that time with shareholders.

Why do you think the rank and file is worth that same amount of time? Why don’t we think they can’t understand it? And so I’m hoping that this research pushes traditional leaders to rethink about that relationship with their employees and what they’re able and capable to manage and to understand.

[00:19:54] Debbie Goodman: Yeah. when you’re talking about the idea of the stewardship of the budget really, and we think about the pressure that shareholders place on leaders, shareholders, investors place on leaders. the C suite in order to make that buck go further. And the sort of outdated idea that the best way in order to drive profit or to drive growth is to reduce the investment on people. That’s kind of bizarre when you really think about actually, it should be completely the opposite.

[00:20:25] Dr Angela Jackson: And it should. And we saw this really illuminated during the pandemic. We saw that we needed to shift in ways that were unprecedented, that many of us thought that we couldn’t do. You know, jobs that we said you had to be in office for, all of a sudden, people were doing them from home. And what we’re seeing now is a shift back.

And we’re seeing certain leaders say we need you back in the office because you need face time, you need to be mentored. How will leadership get to know you if we don’t see you? And we’re seeing that shift to not the business case behind it. I would love and challenge any leader to actually come up with a business case on why this needs to happen.

And I would challenge them to give that to their employees and see what reaction that they get. When we hear all of this, we talk about we need people back in the office because we have leases. We need people back in office because there’s businesses around there and we want to be a good steward to the local community and ensure that our employees are buying and patronizing local businesses.

We’re doing this because you need to be mentored and the only way that we see that you can be mentored is that if you’re here and I’m watching you and I can see you and talk to you. What we haven’t seen is a push to saying, how do we mentor employees differently? You know, is it about seat time? Is it about face time?

Is that really how we’re judging someone’s productivity? There are other ways that we can judge their productivity. We know that. And when are we going to push ourselves as leaders in management to challenge that old paradigm of what work looks like and productivity looks like and actually use data.

And that’s what we’re pushing in this report, in this book, actually using data to inform those decisions and to use that to actually present to the employees. And here’s the granite. Everyone’s not going to agree with you. But they can’t say that you haven’t made the case and showed them the data. And so if you can stand on that and actually seeing that employee as a peer versus I’m their boss, and I call that the traditional zero sum workplace, we can bring them along.

And what we’ve seen with companies that are using reporting and using data, is a competitive advantage. We’re seeing that they’re actually have a higher net promoter score among their employees they have lower turnover. They have higher assets under value. They have greater efficiency. When we go a little deeper in doing actual qualitative interviews with on the ground employees, they say that they understand the business better. They say that while there’s certain policies around return to work or expectations that they don’t agree with, they understand why they made it. Even though they may not like how it impacts them, there’s a respect there. There’s a felt that someone, that their voice has been heard and they’ve been respected.

And I would say that’s what most of us want. We want to have an audience. We want to be listened to and we want to be explained if you don’t go in our direction as any management, if you’ve been the C suite, you know, sometimes you don’t agree, but when you’re shown the data, you’ll be willing to fall in line, but you feel respected that you’ve actually had the conversation versus you do what I told you to do, because I know best.

[00:23:45] Debbie Goodman: So, what about, and this is probably, this is our last question, cause there’s so much I want to ask you about, but, what about smaller companies? Because it’s all very well to say, you know, we’ve got the data from these big organizations and we can see how the business case works.

I speak to many CEOs and founders of organizations where they are just, they’re doing, they’re working so hard just to keep afloat. where everything is an emergency where they feel like they just don’t have any extra time, energy, capacity, money, resources, nothing.

It’s just so marginal in order to collect data, in order to do any of the stuff, which sounds beyond their reach. What is one or two things that a founder or a CEO of a smaller company, where they love the idea of, becoming an organization where they are taking this information and using it to improve the workplace.

What could they do?

[00:24:40] Dr Angela Jackson: Yes, and so I love this question because I feel like this framework is critical to competitive advantage for small and medium sized business, and I’ll tell you why. One, the first amount of research I did, was around 1200 companies and they were across small, medium and large companies.

We revalidated that with fortune 500 companies to see if it was still held true. And so when we think about the small and medium sized business environment, they have all of the pressures that you just named. But they also have the pressure of how do they retain talent when you’ve got Burger King, you have Amazon that are paying $20 an hour.

How do you maintain competitiveness when you want to actually attract talent? And so that’s why moving to this win-win workplace has showed actual greater returns. And so when I’m speaking to small and medium sized businesses, I say this can be your competitive advantage because in large businesses, you know we talk about Jamie Dimon and I’m not to pick on him, but, and if you work for JPMorgan Chase and you’re at the front line, what are the odds are that you’re going to be able to interact and learn from Jamie Dimon?

At a small and medium sized business, you can actually have that type of interaction. I was in Indiana and I talked to a medium sized company, a manufacturing company, Juergens. You know, the CEO actually writes cards to everyone for their birthday, for their children’s birthdays, for their anniversaries.

You know, he’s walking the plant field. They can see him. And so, in seeing him, they can talk to him. So that’s an impact we can have. Does my employer care about me? We can completely shift that. The second thing of that ownership culture and thinking how that might manifest in different ways, because we have flatter organizations and smarter organizations, we can actually bring them into our thinking.

We, in a small company, we can get everyone in an all-hands meeting. And share with them the reports and educate them and offer times and small meetings where you can actually explain to them. That’s important because what we’re talking about is more of that peer to peer relationship, letting people feel like their voices have been heard and their feedback has been operationalized and if it hasn’t, telling them why or when it can be. And so those shifts are easier. It is harder at a large organization. And we see that when we’ve got CEOs who give mandates, like we’re going to drop degree requirements. That’s been another one about skills first hiring. When you look at those same companies, when you look at who they’re hiring, they’re still hiring most people with degrees. And the reason why is that there’s so many layers, it really is harder to adopt these. And when I see the small and medium sized businesses, this is your advantage. You can get that feedback, you don’t have as many employees. You can use technology to analyse it and operationalize this. I did this with a company in Brooklyn. It’s called First Batch Hospitality. They took all of their listening. They use generative AI for their 80 employees, and they were able to give insights and actually report back.

And what we heard from employees is that that mattered, that they were actually given the time. They know how busy the CEOs are, they know how busy the chief people operations are, but they felt that because they were given time to actually reply to them as professionals, as adults, they felt better about the organization. The net promoter score went up. Attrition went down and we saw efficiency go up because these employees felt like since they were heard that they were able to get more of their ideas. They felt like it wasn’t just a waste of their time. So I just want to double click that this is more important for small and medium sized businesses, especially when they’re going up against the big guys, you know, higher wages for talent. We’ve seen that employees will be willing to take a lower wage if they feel like they’re brought in and they’re respected and that they’re cared about.

[00:28:42] Debbie Goodman: And so then just to reiterate on the absolute easy to do, is show employees that you care. I mean, there’s so many, many, many small ways that you can do that. Even if you’re a CEO of a company of 20 people or 50 people, share information on how you are making decisions. That’s an easy, that’s an easy lift.

That’s a low lift to be able to do that, particularly with a small company. And then the best thing about small companies is that you can try things quickly, you can try them out, maybe they’re going to fail, but you don’t have to operationalize something for a massive organization, which is certainly going to take time.

So those are, just what I’m hearing you say three ways in which it’s kind of like an inexcusable, in fact, CEOs, founders, the leaders in small companies can absolutely do these things without any extra budget. Actually, you don’t need any, you don’t need any budget for any of that. It’s super easy

[00:29:34] Dr Angela Jackson: Well, and that’s why it’s exciting, right? Because we’re talking about what perceptions are in the workplace, and a perception of an employee is really their reality, and it’s the leader’s reality. And so how do we shift that using more information, using transparency, and also using data to do that, to bring people in with our thinking?

[00:29:57] Debbie Goodman: Okay, we’re going to have to call it a day right here. Dr Jackson, Angela, this has been absolutely fantastic for, listeners. This is actually our redo because we tried to record this live at a conference last week, and unfortunately that, that version had to hit the trash bin. So we’ve had a redo today, which turned out to be a completely different conversation, and I’m so glad we had this opportunity, in terms of the recent report that’s just come out. How can listeners access that?

[00:30:27] Dr Angela Jackson: So they can go to the thewinwinworkplaceresearch.com. I will also share a link with you so they can download the report in the share notes. So if they go to your site, that’s the other way that they can go. And they should just be out on the lookout for the book in March 11th, 2025. Not only will we share these practices in the book, we’ll also provide a playbook on how you can actually operationalize them because that is the biggest question that we receive from leaders.

[00:30:57] Debbie Goodman: Fantastic. Thank you so much for doing this with me twice. So lovely to have you here.

[00:31:03] Dr Angela Jackson: Excellent. Take care.

[00:31:05] Debbie Goodman: Bye now.