KF #16. Drives Engagement Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Angela, welcome.

Angela Jackson
Hey, Pete, thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to hear your wisdom, talking about “The Win-Win Workplace.” And I’d like for you to kick us off by sharing any particularly surprising, fascinating, counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made about us humans at work during the course of you putting this together.

Angela Jackson
So, the research that I do at Harvard University that really undergirds this book is really around what helps people thrive in the workplace. And just a simple one-liner that came out for me that was really surprising, that won’t be surprising to others, that at its base, people just want to know that they matter.

And that can be realized and seen in many different ways. And what we tried to do in “The Win-Win Workplace” book was to identify nine ways that, when people experience these strategies, these behaviors, that they feel like they matter at work.

Pete Mockaitis
I feel like we could talk for 40-ish minutes about that sentence alone, “We just want to feel like we matter.” So, can you maybe unpack that a little bit in terms of what are some work experiences that just say, “Wow, I feel like I matter a whole lot” versus some work experiences that are like, “Wow, I feel like I absolutely do not matter”?

Angela Jackson
Yeah, and I just want to be clear. A lot of my work, and I’ve looked at over 1700 companies, I’ve never met a CEO or a leadership team who said they don’t care about their employees. But what’s so fascinating is that when you go and ask rank-and-file employees, does the company care about them, you have upwards of 60% saying that they don’t. So, there’s this huge disconnect in between what employers, management teams, leaders, executive leaders think that they’re doing and what’s being actually felt.

And so, when we talk to like actual everyday workers, things that they said mattered to them was that, one, that there’s a recognition from their manager or from the company that they have a life outside of work, and that their life outside of work, their lived realities, really impacts their ability to show up engaged in work.

So, being very specific, if you think about, like, we’re all in this sandwich generation today where we have kids of our own, we have parents who are elderly, and we know the numbers of boomers who are retiring. And so, because of that, what we’re seeing more and more are that workers are asking for flexibility, not because they want to sit at home and twiddle their thumbs. It’s because they’re playing defense at all levels.

You know, how are you there for your parents, how are you there for your kids and showing up. And so, a bit of flexibility in saying to people, “Can I adjust your hours by coming in maybe a little bit late? Is there a one or two days that you can work from home?” To them, to employees, they told me that means that their employer actually sees them as a full human.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you, yes. What’s intriguing is, with regard to the senior folks, you said they don’t say, “Our people don’t matter.” And yet, it is felt at 60% perhaps that it feels that way, that as though, “We don’t matter,” or, “They don’t care.” And it’s intriguing in terms of just like the mental processes at work. What’s behind that? Is it perhaps that the senior folks are just so fixated on the results and the pressure and bottom line and delivering, delivering, delivering, or what do you think is at the root of this?

Angela Jackson
Yeah, Pete, I think about this a lot and I talk about, in the book, we’ve got these win-win workplaces and we have this other phenomenon that I call zero-sum workplaces. And how I describe a zero-sum workplace are these are very traditional workplaces. They’re the ones that say, “You have to come into the office because I came in the office. And when I came in the office, this is the way I was mentored.”

So, it’s really anchoring what that leadership’s experience was. It doesn’t matter that they’ve been 20 or 30 years out of the rank and file. And so, it’s what we’re asking for is like a re-questioning and a re-imagining of the workplaces for this moment. And so, one is a lot of leaders are tied to nostalgia. They’ll tell you the great ways that they’ve been mentored and invested in and how they rose through the ranks. And so, it’s hard for them to reimagine how mentoring could happen, how development could happen at distance.

I was very fortunate early in my career. I worked for Nokia and we were a global firm, and I led teams that were based in Singapore, I had colleagues that were in the UK. I worked remotely 50% of the time and, because of the distance, because of the time zones, you really had to put trust in your people. And what I found as a manager is that if people weren’t doing their job, it became evident really quickly. But we shouldn’t penalize everyone because there are some people that might take advantage of a policy.

Pete Mockaitis
And what you said there really resonated in terms of, “Well, when I did this, it worked like this. Like, I had to hustle, to stay till midnight, to be abused verbally by higher-ups.” And it reminds me, we had a conversation with Rahaf Harfoush, who used the turn of phrase, performative suffering, which I thought was just perfect in terms of, like, “Whoa, well, we did it, and so look how much we suffered and we experienced the hardship and so, too, you must. And if not, something is going wrong, or it’s unfair, or I was cheated, or there’s something that ain’t right here.”

Angela Jackson
And people today have a different type of social contract with work. I’m Gen X, and I would think about what I was taught to do is you go into work, you put your head down, you get in before your boss, you leave later. And what you get in exchange for that is a good paycheck, right? Hopefully, a good paycheck.

What we’re seeing now when we’re looking at this next generation of workforce, many of them report, 42% said that they would take a pay cut if they could maybe work remotely, if they could have more flexibility. And what we’re seeing with all of the research is that people want purpose in their work. They’re willing to take less. Some of people want to go away from the big cities and want to be closer to home.

What I’m saying is there’s a very different calculation today than it was in previous generations. Gen X, the Boomers, you know, if we were born and raised like I was in Chicago, I was willing to go out to LA and go out to New York. Like, we’re willing to run and go wherever for that next milestone. And what we’re seeing with today’s generation, they’re not doing that.

The second thing is, I think about my grandfather who worked at a Chrysler factory, he was there for 40 years, he was part of a union, I was able to go to college because of that. That’s not the same social contract we have today.

So, you have everyday workers who are watching, mass layoffs, when we see that with government jobs that are typically the safest, people immediately think, “What’s in it for me? What’s in it for me to work at a job that could lay me off and I haven’t seen my kids in seven days because I’ve been traveling, because I’ve been going in late?”

And so, really, today when we think about employers and CEOs, they’re really thinking about, “What’s the value proposition that’s going to resonate most to employees today? That is how we’re going to keep people. That’s how we’re going to attract people.” And they’re actually putting a number on that.

So, by meeting their needs, reimagining their benefits, reimagining how people are trained and placed in their positions, they’re seeing lift on the financial side by implementing these practices. And I just think they’re going to be ever needed when we think about the climate now where no one’s hiring, right? Everyone is trying to do more with their incumbent workforce. Well, it becomes, “How do we keep them and keep them engaged, they’re not quiet-quitting?”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, wow, there’s so much to dig into here. Let’s talk about the social contract in terms of just really articulating that in terms of the old world versus the new world.

You highlighted that job security is no longer a thing, that’s just kind of not around, and so that changes the calculus. Could you elaborate on your articulation of the social contract between executives and lower-level employees in the olden times versus the now times?

Angela Jackson
So, one, you would have, and I think about my parents, your parents, people would stay at their job 20 or 30 years, right? There was loyalty. There were pensions at the time. There was sharing in the success of the company. It was beneficial for people to stay. They were getting bonuses at that time. They had factories and unions that were looking out and making sure that people had benefits and that they could pay for the latest hospital bill or emergency bill.

And what we’re seeing today is that people still expect those things, when I say people, everyday workers. For example, there was this Edelman Trust Barometer that came out, and it said that when people think about where they should be up-skilled for the future or learn these new future work skills, generative AI, they’re looking to their employer for that.

Typically, in the past, employers did invest in training their people. What we’re seeing now is the shift that people are left on their own. And so, what does that mean when you are thinking that you’re a cog in the wheel, at any time your job could be eliminated? And maybe that’s not because sales are down, maybe sales are great. And we’ve seen that with a lot of the tech companies, but they want their share price to rise. So, they’ll just, again, let people go as a signal to the market that they’re being more efficient.

Those are things we didn’t hear about in the past when we talk about that social contract. You were let go because typically you were underperforming. Someone had, whether you disagreed or disagreed, they had a real rationale. It wasn’t because we’re trying to manipulate the stock market, for example. And also thinking about that social contract, the other thing was the stability that you had raises. And you know, there was more employee ownership. There were more pensions.

Right now, when you negotiate your wage, that’s the best that you’re going to do when you’re going in the door. Most people know that. And so, to get that next raise, right, even if you are awesome at your job, you have to go somewhere else. And what we’re seeing now are companies who are letting their best people go because of small things.

This return to office is becoming a big thing. We have A-players, and there was research by colleagues out of MIT, where companies are losing their A-players because there’s inflexibility. And what I always say to CEOs are, “A-players always have optionality. So, it may not be just in this moment, but they’ll have one foot out the door.”

Pete Mockaitis
So, as you sort of lay out the social contract before versus now, it seems kind of like the employee’s contract is just worse now than it was then, and the “compensation” to keep it fair-ish, is that it’s like, “Well, loyalty is no longer something employees bring to the table.” And it just seems like, “Why would they? That’s normal.” So, is that a fair characterization? If the social contract is worse, what are the employees…are they just kind of out of luck or is there a counterbalance on their side?

Angela Jackson
I absolutely think it’s a counterbalance. There’s a set of employers who are still interested in that contract, and they’re interested in centering what employees want. I’ll give you an example. A couple months ago, Spotify put a billboard in Times Square, and it said in substance, “We let our people work remote because we hire adults.” And some would say, “Okay, that’s cheeky and it’s cute, but why did they do that in Times Square?”

Well, if you look down the street from Times Square, you have JP Morgan Chase that is requiring people to come back in the office. And they know some of those people will leave. And what Spotify is trying to do is say, “We’re different.” And they’re using that to actually attract talent, get A-talent. And they’re seeing a tangible benefit.

When I connected with their CEO, he was saying, “We attribute our flexibility and our policies and our people policies with keeping our teams. We let them work from wherever they want in the world. We want them to pursue their passions. Why? Because we know that if they’re excited in their lives, that they’ll bring that excitement to work, if we can sustain that.”

And so, while it’s broken with certain companies, there are a set of these companies that I write about in that I call win-win workplaces are actually using this as their competitive advantage, this moment and this differentiation.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, so in this new contract, Spotify is bringing some things to the table with regard to flexibility, etc. They will still fire you readily because they’ve had rounds of layoffs and such, but they’re bringing some other goodies, such as the flexibility. And any other key things you’d highlight there?

Angela Jackson
I think it’s flexibility. I think it’s passion. When you talk to their employees, they’re passionate about what they do. And what gets exciting about that piece, is when you’ve got employees who are passionate about the mission, that they feel supported, what you’re building towards is what I call an ownership mindset.

And those are the employees, my research shows, are the stickiest, the most loyal. Like, they feel bought into what the company is doing and they want to go the extra mile. And it’s not just about the paycheck. It’s because that company matches up with their values, the way that they live their life. There’s not that gap, that air in between the two.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. It seems like there’s got to be something going on in terms of bought into the mission or purpose, or we’re having fun solving problems, or there are colleagues that were just a blast to be around who inspire and are fun. Are there any other key bits of value on the employee side that are really getting accentuated these days?

Angela Jackson
Yeah, the big one is around agency. And so, we have a number of companies, the most famous one is we think about Google and their 20% time off to pursue an interest or an innovation. We’re seeing more and more companies actually give their people time to tinker. And by that, I mean some of them are doing it in different ways.

They may bring a problem of practice to an ERG group or a group of employees, and say, “If you can come up with the ideas, all ideas are welcome.” And giving people funding and budget to actually work on some of these ideas. Coca-Cola bottlers, in North Carolina, is doing something very similar. They had a challenge around frontline workers and how we retain them. And so, they challenged a group of rank-and-file employees to come together and solve that problem.

And that was an acknowledgment that these people are closest to the problem. So, of course, they might have some loose solutions to solve it. And so, it’s innovations like that where people are bringing rank and file into the thinking of the company, into the challenges, and also giving them the agency to begin solving some of these problems.

Pete Mockaitis
And I like that a lot in terms of, like, the Coca-Cola bottling example, with the solving of the problems, because when I think about purpose, and maybe I just have too high a standard, but I don’t imagine, I guess it depends on how you define purpose, and I’d love for you to expand on this, that folks are saying, “I am deeply inspired at my core by the mission of getting sugar water into the hands of more and more people and growing the market share,” right?

Like, I don’t think that purpose sense in the Coca-Cola context specifically is resonating. So, when you say purpose, are you thinking about something with more, broader, with additional facets, or maybe it’s like, “Hey, know what, purpose isn’t going to be so much of a motivator in certain organizations. So instead, hopefully, we’ve got some of that autonomous problem-solving goodness to offer”?

Angela Jackson
Yeah, I love that. And I love your push on this too, Pete. Purpose means different things to different people. And so, say you’re at a Coca-Cola bottlers, for example. For them, the purpose is, “At my job, can I be really good at it? And do I have a company that’s investing in me? And do I feel like my work matters?”

So, that’s having purpose versus being at the front line and you’re feeling, you’re just a number. No one knows your name and what you do. You don’t know what you do, how that connects to the overall vision of the company. And that’s hard sometimes when you’re at the front lines. How do you connect that to the overall strategy and show that through line? So that’s one set of purpose.

Then you have the other set of purpose where, you use a Spotify, or I even use my job at Harvard. I love the research I do. It gives me a sense of purpose that I can work on research around workplaces that help connect people to better companies that are willing to invest in them. And so, really thinking about, like, this is something I’d probably do for free, that I would talk about. And you have a set of people who are just really connected to what the business is delivering, and they find deep value in that.

And I believe if you go to some of those employees, they’ll tell you why they’re excited to get up every day and go to work, what they’re learning, how they’re growing, being an international company. They’re doing a lot of exciting things within the company to keep their people engaged.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’d love it if you could share perhaps a favorite story of an organization you’ve seen really make a transformation or an about-face in terms of getting with the program to creating more of a win-win workplace?

Angela Jackson
One that just came to mind was a CEO of a fast casual restaurant. He brought in me and my research team because, again, with their frontline workers, they were having a challenge around getting them to take advantage of the benefits that the company offered.

And the CEO, he was so excited and proud of himself because he offered rank-and-file employees, access to the 401k plans, but he was perplexed because no one took advantage of it. And so, he called me in, and he’s like, “Dr. Angela, tell me, what does your research say about this? Like, I would have killed for a benefit like that.” And I said, “Well, I don’t know.” “Have you asked them?” And he hadn’t asked them.

And to his credit, fast forward, he did end up asking them. And what he learned from his rank-and-file kind of employees is that the 401k was great, people appreciated it, but they had more present-day issues that they needed help with.

Pete Mockaitis
That was my guess, it’s like, “I’m paycheck to paycheck. Saving for retirement would be nice, but that feels more like a luxury at the moment.”

Angela Jackson
“Will I be able to retire,” right? And that was it. And so, to his credit, he acknowledged that. We did the listening, and what he did was the money they had allocated for that, they put into a flexible fund so that employees would have choice about how they wanted to spend those dollars. So, they could spend it on caregiving. They could spend it on transportation. They could spend it on a massage for themselves in the area.

But what he was able to acknowledge, and when we went back and talked to employees, one thing that they told us when we asked that same question, “Do you think your employer cares about or give us some examples?” they start citing that they had some agency over how these funds were spent. And everyone spent them differently.

And what was so interesting that we found after we tracked where they spent the dollars, many of them spent them in their local community, with local small- and medium-sized businesses. So, not only was it great for these employees and giving a sense that this company was actually shoulder to shoulder with them in what they need today, they also felt good that this was money being driven in the community where the business does business.

And I’d say one thing is, when we talk to actual employees, they would say, “We’re appreciative for the 401k, but I’m so happy that I actually get choice. I feel like they really see me and understand me.” And again, all of this is around perception, when we talk about how we feel at work.

So, there’s intentions, and then there’s like how those intentions are received. And what I’m seeing with these win-win companies are they’re really keen on tracking how it’s being felt and experienced by the rank-and-file employees so that they actually get it right and not assuming that they know what’s best and what they want.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes, that is, in my entrepreneurial journey, I have made that mistake numerous times, like, “People should want this because it’s cool,” as opposed to, “Well, do they actually?” and “You must ask.” So that’s handy. So, you lay out, in your book, “The Win-Win Workplace,” nine strategies for creating better workplaces. Could you share with us a favorite in terms of it just being tremendously transformational and high ROI? Like, “This is not that hard and yet it makes a world of a difference. So, come on, workplaces, everyone should just go ahead and do this.”

Angela Jackson
Yeah. And I have to say, a lot of this book, and what pleased me about it, is these are common sense things. And what we noticed with our conversations with leadership is that it’s harder to put them into place because what it really takes is, one, intention; two, and what we write about this in the book is a commitment to measuring this.

We do lots of things for people. We don’t ask their feedback on them. The second thing is we don’t measure if it’s effective. And this is a problem with a lot of the plans and trainings that we do in the world and, again, billions of dollars spent, but the outcomes, we’re not really seeing any of them. And so, what we’re asking companies to do in this moment is to reevaluate how you’re training people, how you’re developing people, and really think about what’s adding value for them and making sure that it’s actually adding value for the bottom line.

And these nine practices, in particular, they show a correlation to output, a lift on the financial side, and that’s really important because what we’re trying to do is move conversations around investing in people just as an expense or the charitable thing to do to, one, actually seeing it as a revenue driver.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and I totally buy it in terms of, maybe if you could just specify the mechanism of action here, because it kind of seems like the extent to which people, human beings, are feeling good things, and able to take care of themselves, their lives, that which is important to them, their health, they are able to show up and be smart and creative and engaged and rocking and rolling. And so, that just seems intuitively commonsensically true, but it is kind of a trickier thing to measure.

Angela Jackson
It is and it isn’t. So, the one way that we’ve mapped out, and for this case study, we talk about the private equity firm Blackstone. They have hundreds of portfolio companies, and one thing that they did is they did their research across their portfolio companies. They saw that, investments in talent, they were able to map out an ROI.

And so, what we found were, and what they found were, investing in actually training people to manage people had an ROI. And how they mapped that was amongst retention. They did pulse surveys about frontline, “How did they feel about their managers? Would they recommend their managers?” And then what they were able to do in terms of some of the financial institutions that they looked at, they had measures, for example, on like cash on hand and assets under management.

They noticed that people, when the employees were happier and that they felt great about their manager, that some of their businesses had more assets under management and they had higher sales. And so, they were able to disaggregate that. And so, we tell employers, “Find two to three metrics that you think are key, that you think would show you the health of your employees.”

“Have those metrics on the same dashboard that you’re thinking about, ‘What’s our sales over this quarter? How many products have we produced? What services have we put out?’ And have those same three metrics? So, you should be looking at them. So, one, get a baseline. Two, think about the problem of practice or opportunity you see with your talent. Is it around training? Is it around training managers? Is it about reimagining benefits? Is it about like building your deep pipeline? And just think about what those two to three measurements are, and begin to measure them quarter over quarter.”

And again, it’s going to vary from company to company, but just once you have those three metrics, you’re going to have two measurements that you’d say, “If this is going right, this is how we know. This is the effect that it will have on the bottom line.”

So, it’s an art and a science, but it’s absolutely doable and it doesn’t have to be cumbersome. We’re not saying measure 20 different things. We’re saying, “What are the two to three people metrics that are most important to your business and the business model and the bottom line?”

Pete Mockaitis
This brings me back to one of my favorite consulting projects in which we were trying to reduce attrition at some call centers. And so, as a lowly analyst, my job was to create an actual tool that actually measured real attrition.

And so, I was creating this spreadsheet, and it was so fun because, like, every day or a couple days, more people said, “Oh, hey, can you add me to that daily list?” And so, it’s like I was the keeper of the real attrition numbers. And I had, I guess, my first professional audience, the email list was growing and growing and growing. And, sure enough, once they got engaged, there was real numbers, the excuses disappeared, and we got real about the interventions.

And we could see, in terms of more experienced representatives have a lower average handle time on the phone, resulting in more cost-effective solutions and answers to customers. And so, we could sort of see that line very clearly and it’s cool. Can you share with us, in terms of you mentioned higher sales or assets under management, can you connect the dots a little bit between “We did a thing and it made people happier, and somehow dollars came out the other side”?

Angela Jackson
Yeah, absolutely. So, there was a healthcare system, and what they were having issues with, with all healthcare systems across the country, is retaining talent. You have nursing shortage. You have frontline kind of worker shortage in healthcare. And so, what they did was implement two things that they did were great. One was a flexibility around scheduling.

So, many people who are listening and know healthcare, it’s one of those tenured issues. Like, if you’re the new nurse in, you get the worst shift. If you’re tenured, you get the better shift. They tried to, one, is just reimagine that, and be more equitable, and fair in their scheduling so that new nurses don’t always get the most terrible shifts, because what they found out through measuring it, that was actually burning them out.

They were able to reduce turnover with nurses by 10%. That was really significant because the average turnover they said of a nurse cost them $180,000. So, when you think about that across 3,000 nurses, that’s real dollars and cents that they were able just, by tweaking the schedule and understanding they started with listening, trying to understand “What were the barriers? Why were people leaving? And what would make them stay?”

Two, they knew what their baseline is. And then, three, they got real about what you said, the cost of attrition. I was surprised with my number of companies that how many of them didn’t have a real grasp on the cost of attrition. So, most people might think attrition is just the person leaving their job. Attrition is also the time that you spent finding that person, the time that you spent training them over the years, the value that they had.

And now it’s the cost you need to find someone else and to train them, and they’re not going to be as good as the person who’s been there for four or five years because it takes that onboarding time and getting up to productive speed.

The second thing this healthcare center did, and we found, they found that one thing in common is that people wanted training. And so, what they begin doing is offering training benefits. If it was anything related to a person’s job that they wanted to learn, or if they wanted to go back to get their degree, they were giving them a pool of funds. And they watched, of the people who took advantage of this training, how longer they stayed versus others.

The people who took advantage of training stayed 30% longer. And, again, in a healthcare field where tenure actually really matters, people get better at their jobs and costs are going up when you’re trying to replace talent, like 30% longer became very substantial to their bottom line. And so, they reinvested those dollars into more training, more internship, and just doubling down on what the nurses and other healthcare providers said they needed.

Pete Mockaitis
And, Angela, I’d love your take, if we could shift gears for a moment away from the executive strategic level, to, let’s say you are an individual contributor listening to this and saying, “Okay, that sounds really cool. I’d like some of these goodies,” do you have any pro tips on how we can make the case for whatever it is that we think would help us to flourish?

It sounds like we’ve got a clear situation along the lines of getting some numbers and a financial ROI case to be made? What are some of your other pro tips for folks who find themselves in that position?

Angela Jackson
I think the biggest thing you can do to be awesome at your job is to know your value. You need to understand how you add value in ways that line up with the business and the business strategy.

So, for one, every company that I’m out talking to now, they’re thinking about their generative AI strategy. This is new for everyone. And what a rank-and-file person who’s working, you know your job intimately, you’re an expert at your job, you should be thinking about how do you add value with the new technology? How are you saving money? How are you saving time? How are you being more productive? And have an analysis on that.

When you go in and you’re talking to your manager, the second thing you need to do is speak their language. And so, going in and knowing how you’ve been more productive, what you’ve added in your value, and talking about that in terms, starting with that, and then telling your manager or leadership who you’re in front of, what they can do to help you be even more efficient.

So, you’re really couching it in it’s in their best interest to do this. You’re saying, “I’m an A player. This is what I’ve delivered. And from my job, I’ve noticed if I could get XYZ support, I could be even more productive.”

So, for example, I’m in Boston. We have the worst traffic in the country. And so, what I saw one employee do, she went in and instead of saying, “I want more flexibility to work,” she’d say, “You know, this is what I produced last year, but I did notice that I spent four hours,” her commute was two hours back and forth, “in traffic.”

“I think that if I could leave and show up to work either flexible 6:00 a.m. and get off earlier, come in late, that I could be more productive. I could also be more productive if I could have one day of non-commute time.” Laying it out like that, she got a great response because you’re leading on with curiosity, you’re coming in with data, and again, you’re centering what matters most to them and helping you, you’re helping them help you help them.

Pete Mockaitis
Is that a movie, “Help me help you help them”? That’s good. Well, Angela, tell me any other key things you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Angela Jackson
Yeah, I think the biggest thing, and I just want to just double down on the point I just made, in this time and in this moment, particularly, we have to advocate for ourselves. I think about people who are in jobs today who have ideas on how to improve the company, how they can be more productive. Make sure you’re communicating those to your direct manager. Make sure that you’re getting face time with a more senior management. Make it your business to do that. People need to know you exist.

I’ll give you an example. I have a very dear friend that was in DC and she was part of the latest rounds and cuts at the IRS, and she’s a tax attorney. And she goes, “You know, for a time I didn’t even have a manager for months.” And I told her, “I wish I would have known, because if you can’t find the person who manages you, or if they’re not paying attention, you need to find the next person up the rung to do that.”

And then, two, these strategies give you that economic case and argument. And so, once you make it to your employer, they may respond favorably, they may not. I always say that’s data. If they’re not giving you what you need, there’s a host of employers who are looking for people like you, who are adding value, and who are thinking differently. So, I’d say be on the lookout for those employers and also bring the ways that you’ve been adding. Lead with the ways that you’re adding value when you speak to them.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Angela Jackson
“Whatever you can, do, and whatever you do, do it to the best.” And that’s one of the Goethe quotes. And then I love this other one by Howard Thurman, and I actually just write it in my book.

It says, “Whatever you want to do in the world, do something that lights you up because the world needs more people who are lit up.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Angela Jackson
Oh, gosh, my favorite one was putting up a worker advisory board. We had 200 workers from across the U.S., red states, blue states, across different sectors, and really worked with them to help place them in jobs that were impacted by the pandemic, and we’re able to study what happened to them once they were placed in the jobs.

And that actually became the research that undergirds the book. You know, we found somewhere in these, what we now call win-win workplaces, and the others were in what we call a zero-sum where people didn’t want to work there. They were quitting. They weren’t staying. They had regular turnover. And just really understood that the difference between the workplaces were these nine strategies, how they were investing in their people.

Pete Mockaitis
So, as we contrast a win-win workplace versus a zero-sum workplace, could you give us a couple telltale signs, maybe it’s a number or a metric, or maybe it’s a vibe that’s like, “Okay, yeah, this sounds like what a win-win workplace is versus this sounds like what a zero-sum workplace is”?

Angela Jackson
So, I’ll give you an example of one and it just popped in my mind. So, a few weeks ago, some of your listeners may have seen Jamie Dimon at JP Morgan Chase. They had a town hall meeting. They invited all of their employees to ask questions.

One brave soul, he stood up, and he asked this question around the return-to-work policy to Jamie Diamond. I think Jamie would say it wasn’t his best day. He totally went off. And then the person went back to their desk, and their direct manager said, “I can’t believe you asked that question. You’re fired.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, really?

Angela Jackson
Oh, really.

Pete Mockaitis
I didn’t know that part of the story. Okay.

Angela Jackson
Yeah, let me tell you more about it.

Pete Mockaitis
Keep going.

Angela Jackson
So, Jamie Dimon didn’t, I’m sure, and I’m certain that Jamie didn’t say to that manager, “Fire him for asking that question,” but what that manager was operating on is that zero-sum workplace. That zero-sum workplace means if you say anything that ticks off the big boss, you are gone. No questions asked. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done, right?

And what that did in that moment, you know, they subsequently told him he could keep his job. And so, the person stayed there, but you have to think about all of the thousands of people who were watching that moment. We say centering worker voice and these town halls are important, but as leaders, how we show up in those spaces really matter and it builds or decreases psychological safety. Like, who’s going to ask the next question that they think, might think, might tick off Jamie? Probably it’s not coming anytime soon.

The second is, “How do we train our managers differently,” right? This manager had an old-school frame, and if he had been actually trained, knew the policies and procedures, had talked to someone and got advice, that person wouldn’t have lost their job, and I wouldn’t be able to tell this story today, which is not the best shining example of JP Morgan Chase.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s just…I am shocked at that notion. It’s about as antithetical to psychological safety as you can get, “You said a thing we didn’t like, so you’re fired.” It’s like, “Okay, well, good luck getting any kind of creativity or quality constructive friction in conversation that leads to goodness if that’s the vibe that we’re all keenly aware of here.”

Angela Jackson
Yeah, and you’re being invited into a town hall, right? And so, this is why we talked about that disconnect. Companies spend billions of dollars on saying that they listen to their people, but it’s not felt. Those are just one of those moments, “You invite me in to listen. You ask for my advice and then you blow up.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Angela Jackson
And so, that’s a classic. There’s many more samples and flavors of that zero-sum workplace. I’m sure what your listeners can listen and lean in on how that looks like. Like, we’ve all had the bad bosses, but it becomes the norm, right? And that’s really unfortunate because instead of operating out of creativity, there’s a lot of fear. And in general, there’s a lot of anxiety in the world today. When you’re bringing that in the world of work, it just becomes closer to home.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Angela Jackson
I think my biggest one is “Outrageous Openness” And it’s just around being open to what’s happening in the world, being curious and outreaching.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool?

Angela Jackson
Right now, my favorite tool, honestly, is ChatGPT. And can I tell you why?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes.

Angela Jackson
When we talk about being productive, some people have zero inbox, I’ve not gotten there yet. But it helps me be more productive with my responses and doing it in a more timely fashion.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m a huge fan of the Superhuman email app, and they’ve incorporated some AI features that I’m genuinely impressed. It can now clearly label podcast pitch in all of my incoming emails. And so, I can just very quickly go, “Hmm, forward, forward, forward, forward, forward, so my producers get those fast.” It’s like, “Okay, well, that’s 90 emails out of my inbox in about three minutes. That felt pretty productive. What else?”

Angela Jackson
And don’t you feel good at the end of the day? You’re like, “I’ve done my job. I’m not the bottleneck.” It’s like playing tennis, you know, get the ball over the net.

Pete Mockaitis
Totally. And a favorite habit?

Angela Jackson
My favorite habit is meditating. Every morning, I don’t do it for long, I’m not one of those gurus. I do about five minutes. I get clear on the day. I say what I’m grateful for from the day before and it actually centers me to have a better day.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that really connects and resonates with folks that you’re known for?

Angela Jackson
The time to make friends is before you need them.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Angela Jackson
So, they can go more in the book, they can go to ReadWinWinWorkplace.com. Also, I’d love to share with your listeners. We’re doing our first summit on “The Win-Win Workplace.” We’ve got 80 employers who are actually practicing these principles and using these strategies to see their ROI. We’re doing that in Chicago on May 5th and 6th, and it’s open to everyone. I say employers, managers come, but even people who are looking for their next opportunity, these are the employers you want to be in front of. They’ll be in that room. And you can go to WinWinSummit.org for that.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Angela, this is fun. Thank you.

Angela Jackson
Pete, thank you again for having me. I appreciate it.

Pete Mockaitis
Jen, welcome back.

Jennifer Moss
I’m so glad to be back. It’s been a while.

Pete Mockaitis
It sure has. Eight whole years. Boy, a lot could happen in that timeframe. Can you share with us something transformational you’ve learned over the last eight years?

Jennifer Moss
As I’ve gotten older and I think become a little bit more, aware that change takes a really long time to happen, and you sometimes move sideways, and you move backwards.

And yet there has been, when I look back to when I first wrote Unlocking Happiness at Work, and now Why Are We Here, there has been some real advancement in the discussion around happiness and well-being at work and that’s a positive thing that I think has been really impactful on me and my level of hope for the future.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Hope is good. We like hope. More of that, please. So, tell us, in your book, Why Are We Here?: Creating a Work Culture Everyone Wants, any particularly fascinating discoveries you’ve made along the way?

Jennifer Moss
There is just such brilliant research going on out there that’s been untapped and we need to spend more time, I think, with our academic partners in workplaces because it’s just so necessary to learn that there are ways that we can actually improve the workforce.

And I broke the book out into these three parts, the foundations, which is really hope, purpose, and community, and then I go into the second part, which is all of these unbelievable shifts that have happened at work in the last five years that feel like we’re in the multiverse of work. This isn’t the future of work. It’s the multiverse of work. And it really is dealing with AI and the rapid evolution of technology and generational bias and how that’s polarized the workforce. And then also just flexibility now, a right not a perk.

And so, I talk about that from a sense of compassionate leadership and leaders having a sense of openness as a leader, and really around understanding freedom. And then the third part is how we’re going to get there as a collective, and that’s belonging and recognition. And so, this, for me, across the board, every single chapter was this real understanding of the psychological barriers that we’re all facing as human beings that keep us from feeling and behaving with those kinds of traits. And so, it was a lot of learning and a lot of self-discovery too, as a leader myself.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, there’s a lot of rich stuff to dig into here. Thank you. Can you tell us, in terms of the academic community, sort of researchers doing studies and publishing them in journals, is there a particular discovery or thing that is well understood amongst academics looking at this stuff, that is generally not at all, or not frequently, implemented in the real world?

Jennifer Moss
Yes, and, one, is I would say it’s the first chapter, which is really interesting because today Gallup just put a note, basically, that hope is what every single organization needs to be fostering to be able to build out a future-ready organization, and it is the first chapter of my book. And, actually, John Clifton was interviewed, and he’s the CEO of Gallup, and talked about kind of the book and the importance of the book, and I think it’s because he had been seeing this hope need and this loss of hope inside of organizations.

And the thing is we constantly say in leadership, “Hope isn’t a strategy, and we can’t make hope a strategy.” And the thing is that leaders are getting that completely wrong. When I interviewed senior leaders in the military, they said hope is their only strategy. They always make hope foundational to the mission because how is anyone going to put their life on the line if they don’t have hope that they’re going to be able to achieve the end goal?

And so, in the book, I talk about how practical it is to build hope. It’s easier than building empathy and almost any other trait because it’s really, it’s tactical and you build it through these small incremental settings of goals, having the agency and the support to get to those goals, and then creating plan Bs and plan Cs so that if one plan to your goal fails, you have another plan as a backup.

And so, I talk about how we can do this, like 20 minutes every single week can build cognitive hope in an organization. It’s not hard, and I think that it’s been easy to put it off as something that’s simple and too simple to be valuable, and instead, it’s actually so needed right now.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so hope, we need it, got to have it, are missing it. Can you define, specifically, what do we mean by hope?

Jennifer Moss
Hope right now is this kind of key trait that we need to get people to feel like they can see themselves inside of society, writ large, but also inside of our organizations. If you don’t have hope, you feel disconnected from the mission because you don’t see yourself as part of the future. You also have anxiety around things that are new. AI, for example, if you see yourself as becoming obsolete, and you don’t have hope that you are part of that picture of an organization, you disengage, you’re less productive.

Hopelessness makes you have to be in a survivor state every day and you’re not thriving so you’re not actually thinking about the future, which is what we need right now. We’re just moving so quickly that if we don’t have a future perspective in our organizations, and people are in just survivor mode every day, we’re going to see attrition or we’re going to see what Gallup calls the Great Detachment, which people are at work, but they’re extremely unhappy, they’re actively disengaged, and they’re actually spending time trying to get other people to be as unhappy as they are, which creates a social contagion and it’s really unhealthy.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. So, hope, very important. And so, what exactly is hope?

Jennifer Moss
Hope is a sense of feeling that you are encouraged by the future, that you see that yourself in the future, that you feel like you have a legacy, that you have a sense of mattering and meaning in the world, that the world itself cares about you, that the world itself is safe, and you feel psychologically safe in it. Hope comes a lot with a sense of community. So, you believe that there are people there for you in a time of need.

Whether it’s actually tested or not, it’s a perception that you have social support, and that’s a big part of a sense of hopefulness inside of your community, inside of society, and your place inside the world.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, I’m hearing that hope is a belief, and it seems to encompass a lot of things. Could you tell me in one sentence, how are we defining hope in this context?

Jennifer Moss
I think I just described it, but, yeah, hope is…

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I guess it’s like a lot of things, but like what is the umbrella that is encompassing all of those things?

Jennifer Moss
Hope is a sense that everything is going to be all right.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. A sense that everything’s going to be all right. And so, then we’ve sort of already gotten a sneak peek at some of those segments there. And so, within everything being all rightness, there’s a component associated with the future, like what will unfold. There’s a component associated with community and people and relationships, like I feel a sense of comfort and belonging in their midst. And I guess, are those the key pillars? Or, what would be the subcomponents of this belief?

Jennifer Moss
I mean, you just listed really all of what those subcomponents are to hope. But I think the important part right now to, I think, for us to focus on is the fact that we have a high rate of hopelessness inside of our world right now.

Globally, the sense of hope is significantly reduced. And that’s because we have moved from a state of the pandemic being a crisis, but we’re in poly-crisis right now, which is a cluster of crises that have all come together to make each crisis actually worse than if it was individually on its own. And so, that poly-crisis, that sense of always feeling uncertain, that fluidity of our lives and never feeling on solid ground, that is creating a lot of questioning.

This is why I wrote the book Why Are We Here? because people are feeling like a lot of “what’s the point-ism?” And you feel that if you don’t have a sense of hope that you are doing something that actually is going to make a difference, that the belief systems that you had and the infrastructure that you trusted is going to stay a trustworthy institution. And our hope is being eroded by a lot of the issues around the world and poly-crisis and this political instability, and that is eroding our connection to each other and our sense of who we are as human beings.

I mean, progress and cooperation are a big part of what make humans, humans, and successful. And we’re not going to feel cooperative if we haven’t felt hopeful that there’s a reason for it. And hope gives you a reason for being, and without that, we lose progress, we lose innovation, we lose a sense of societal congruency, which is, I think, one of the biggest problems that we’re seeing right now is this real separation and disconnectedness amongst people today.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s a cluster all right, Jen. Poly-crisis, that’s a good turn of a phrase. I hear you in that when there’s multiple things, it does really feel greater than the sum of its parts, like, “Let’s worry about one thing, and take your pick, politics, climate change, my economic footing, AI is going to take away my job, like, fill in the blank.”

And then if you have multiple, you can just leap from crisis to crisis and really dwell in it. And once one gets boring for your brain, oh, not to worry, we can anxiously stew and ruminate on another one. I served up right for you. So, a cluster, indeed. And so, the “What’s the point?” I think that really hits it for me.

And I was grilling you a few times on the precise definition of hope, it’s like I think the “what’s the point-ness” really does feel, at an emotional gut level, like the vibe, the experiential definition of hopelessness. And then I guess if we take the opposite of that, it’s like, “Well, what’s the point?” I mean, like, “Hey, we’re making a cool thing happen with people we care about to make things better for all of us and a group of folks that we’re serving. That’s the point. So, we’re going to get after that, and that feels pretty good to our just basic human longings for progress and cooperation.”

Jennifer Moss
Yeah, and if people feel like everything they’re working on is some sort of pipe dream that’s not going to be realized, you can imagine inside of organizations that want to build new things and get people excited about new innovations. productizations of cool stuff that it just will, you know, it just makes people feel like, “Why bother? If I’m going to see this thing through and at the end, it’s just not going to actually matter or it’s not going to affect any change.”

And when you look at the data around people that have a sense of purpose and their goals being realized, it’s such a different type of mentality and level of performance in an employee. If you feel like, “Okay, I have leadership that’s going to see my project through, they support me, they give me the resources, and then they’re going to amplify it or use it,” you’re much more eager to try new things and experiment and put yourself at risk.

You’re not going to see that if people feel like they’re constantly in this rotation of projects that never actually end up going anywhere, or that the organization is only building something that isn’t going to improve the world. You see so many Gen Z’s attracted to organizations with purpose, they feel tied to the end goals, and they’re rejecting organizations that don’t foster that.

And so, we need to be able to recognize that when there’s hopelessness, people are seeking hope, so they’re going to be more even more inclined to be attracted to companies and work that support that sense of purpose.

Pete Mockaitis
And you said there’s a 20-minute practice that builds hope. What is it?

Jennifer Moss
Well, and I keep saying, like, culture can be built in 20 minutes or less, and middle managers play a huge role in that, and hope can be built just through this idea of setting a goal and having a manager and the organization support you getting to that goal without micromanaging you or making it about hours worked, not the goal itself. Like, the productivity measure shouldn’t even be relevant here. And then having people come up with different pathways to getting there.

This is Snyder’s theory of hope and it’s really applicable in the workforce. You see Google with their OKRs they’re really looking at, and the way that they do goal setting within the organization. It really is peer supported. They co-create their goals. They talk about it transparently with the organization so people can support. There’s a lot of support for continuing development to hit those goals. Those goals are challenging enough, but not so challenging that you can never actually achieve them, so you’re always building hope.

And it’s also that you have milestones, so you’re celebrating along the way, instead of it being like, “Oh, we sold a million-dollar, you know, whatever product,” or, “Landed a client,” and/or, “The project is finally done after three years and then we finally celebrate.” It’s about incrementally reminding people that they’re hitting milestones, which builds cognitive hope. So again, it’s just weekly and then incrementally, and then over time it really does change the atmosphere of innovation inside of these organizations that obviously are known for their innovative thinking.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, this is resonating. And it just sounds like we’ve had previous guests talk about the intrinsic motivators of play, like it is fun to solve problems. You feel like you’re actually getting to use your brain. And some people pay good money for the pleasure of solving problems with video games or whatever, they’re at kind of escape rooms, activities that they’re into.

So, could you tell us a story about a team that had a cool shift in terms of they were doing things the hopeless way, and they made some changes, they started doing some things hopefully, and cool results unfolded?

Jennifer Moss
Well, I go back to Atlassian, who’s a great example of distributed workforce, and they just do things really well. They were finding that people were not using the space, and they were dealing with a sense of loneliness, and they started to test, “How do we make it so that people feel excited and that they’re inspired by the organization?”

And they started their hackathons as one, where everyone comes to the table once a quarter, and they just play and do cool things, and everyone’s so excited about it, and that really has led to some incredible innovations, but, plus, it also created this other part of the hope strategy is that they were bringing people together. And there was another part of, again, that these satellite offices were, now they’re 91% occupied in an, interestingly, fully remote workforce.

They have all this in-person time, and they realized, “Okay. Well, at this point, we’re not necessarily giving people a sense of their product or their work being seen.” So, they started this togetherness focus and started to have people go and work in other offices, and really championed and supported people actually going and spending a week with a peer in another market. So, at any one time in New York, 50% of the office is occupied by people from around the entire organization.

And in these environments, they also are bringing CEOs and C-level executives to come into these spaces, so there’s an opportunity for everyone’s ideas to be seen, which makes you feel like, “I’m not just doing things in a vacuum. I actually am being evaluated and supported by some of the senior people around the organization.”

And so, they’ve done a really great job of pushing back on this idea that you can’t have remote workers be cohesive or have friendships or it’s just always loneliness for those people working remotely. They totally bucked that myth. And they do that by building up their workforce to still feel like when you’re together, it’s not about distraction, it’s about getting what they call “getting s**t done,” that’s their motto. And you go in the office to still get s**t done, but you are also focusing on building a sense of pride in the work that you do, and for others to see what you’re working on.

Pete Mockaitis
That is so cool and fun, and that just lights me up in terms of whenever there’s just a beautiful win-win in terms of people experience, as well as organizational functioning and profitability. And, like, building the remote offices, I’m sure like, from one frame of reference, I imagine there is a finance employee somewhere at the spreadsheet, saying, “No, no, no, no, this is not net present value positive for these funds into this purpose.” Because it can be hard to see a measure. Well, what is the value of people feeling like they’re seen, and like they belong, and like they have friends, and the engagement and reduced attrition that comes with it? It’s hard to quantify.

But I recall, and I just sort of thought Bain was really nice to us with regard to some of the investments they made. Like, you could just transfer to another office in the world for six months, and I was like, “Oh, that’s kind of cool of them. How generous.” And maybe there’s a part of that, but, really, it was a deliberate move to facilitate best practice sharing across the worldwide network.

Jennifer Moss
I love what you’re saying because I’ve been, for many years, an advocate of spending money on making sure that people get to see each other and investing in that travel spend. I mean, right now, we’re supposed to be saving money on our commercial real estate, hopefully, the people that have downsized. Why aren’t we moving people around so that we can get them to see each other?

Because one of the things in the book that I learned is that we have this real shift in the last five years where people used to see other people in their organization. They used to make friends with people because you talked about your kids’ baseball team, or you were friends because you like the same type of movies. And it would create these ad hoc kind of outside of work relationships so we move from these simplex relationships, which are just transactional to multiplex relationships, which include knowing about each other.

And since the pandemic, we are really much more focused on simplex relationships, it’s much more transactional, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that we’re only seeing our team. And I’ve heard this across the board in my interviews, “I just feel like I only know my team. I don’t know anyone else in the organization. We’re so siloed.” And that was already problematic, but there were ways that we fixed that by just creating opportunities to meet and connect.

And so, it doesn’t need to be five days in the office. Lots of data shows that’s actually counter to cohesion, but it is concentrated focus on getting real time with each other, that has more meaning and develops these multiplex relationships. And we’re not doing that very well, so we just blame it on it being remote work that’s created loneliness. But it’s actually so much more complex than that, but the solutions are much easier than people think. And it isn’t just like, “Yeah, that strategy of forcing everyone back through return to office mandates.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, a couple follow-ups there. Five days in the office is counter to cohesion. What is optimal for cohesion?

Jennifer Moss
Well, Gallup says one to two days in the office per week and then you have others that say, I mean, hybrid is optimal if hybrid is done right. I mean, Mark Ma, from University of Pittsburgh, and Nick Bloom from Stanford, they’ve done lots of lots of research and found that, from a purely capitalist standpoint, the most financially viable is hybrid. People feel like that’s an okay meet in the middle.

And that five days a week, it ends up, actually, making people feel less connected, they’re more resentful to the organization and feeling less loyal, so they don’t invest in relationships in the same way. We also see organizations that have been focused on return to office mandates tend to also, as part of their kind of work personas, they’re overworking and there’s a lot of burn out there. And when you’re burned out, you also don’t really want to hang out after work or spend a lot of time chit-chatting. You feel like that 20 minutes of just having lunch every week could mean an extra hour in your pajamas at 11 o’clock at night so you avoid it.

And so, we’re seeing a lot of data that shows that that’s not great.

And fully remote is not great either in many ways. Some organizations, like Atlassian and others do it well, but from a purely capitalist standpoint, it is kind of that Goldilocks zone where there’s a little bit of both. But ones that are most successful are like the ones like Microsoft where it’s 50% of your time, not Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. It’s sort of fluid, and managers get to say, “Hey, let’s talk about what makes sense.”

They have moments that matter, which is like, you know, an onboarding or a project that they really want to work on, or some specific reason why you’re in it together, but that can be fluid from week to week. And so, that kind of autonomy but a little bit of time together that’s used in a better way is where we see higher cohesion and happier workers.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, we talked about hope a lot, but you actually mentioned eight areas for folks to address. Could you give us the quick one sentence, what do you mean by this area, and then maybe one quick tip for giving that a boost?

Jennifer Moss
So, purpose is the second chapter. I was able to talk with Adam Grant. He and I are really aligned on this idea of that leaders get this purpose wrong. It’s like part of the mission statement, your values and your purpose, and it’s always tied to this big grand mission statement. But no one really cares about that unless you’re in this executive group. There’s about 20% at the highest level that really feel connected to the purpose. Most people just want to tie their daily values to work.

So, one of the things that we recommend is that leaders of their teams have this one meeting every single week. And I know we’re meeting fatigued, but it’s 20 minutes, again 20 minutes to fix culture, and it’s a non-work-related check-in. You ask, “What lit you up this week? What stressed you out?” and everyone goes around and talks about that. And then, “What can we do to make next week easier?”

Because purpose really is about, “Does the thing I do every day, even the tedious and boring things that I do every day, do they matter? Does anyone care about it?” And if that’s connected to who you are and you feel good about it, you feel like you have purpose. And so, “What lights you up?” that’s like pure magic for managers to motivate. You know, “Okay, now I know you like this. Now that makes you excited. Oh, let’s try to create some of that thinking and fuel your work with that.”

And then, “What stresses you out?” that’s how you prevent burnout. That’s how you make sure that someone saying they haven’t slept every single time you ask them this question or they’re not sleeping, you can dig into it. Then you have managers as mental health conduits, not professionals, and they’re just able to get to it.

And then, “What can we do for each other to make next week easier?” builds that sense of shared goal-setting and helping each other and quick wins, which also builds cognitive hope. And it really, from the interventions where we’ve tried this, it’s really done incredible shifts in morale. And so, I think, like, that’s purpose and why I really feel like that’s a key critical thing that we should be working on.

Pete Mockaitis
And community?

Jennifer Moss
Community is just we’re all lonely. We need to have friends again. And the way that we’re seeking out friendships right now are based on accountability and conscientiousness. It’s a huge switch from pre-pandemic, where we were looking at shared interests, likeability, someone made you laugh, but now it’s like, “Can you get your job done because that’s all I care about?” And so, we need to bring rituals back.

We used to have what is called, I think, before it was called forced fun. And we don’t want forced fun, but we want rituals because that’s how you build social contagions, and people feel like going to work isn’t just like going to school without our gym or recess. It’s super boring right now. So, building friendships through rituals.

And then when we look at solving the big problems, compassion is how we, as leaders, address AI anxiety. We have to understand that there’s a lot of people, especially our younger cohort, one in two are feeling AI anxiety, which Gallup calls FOBO, fear of becoming obsolete. And so, compassion is how we do that because empathy is listening, compassion is taking that listening and putting it into action.

And then when it comes to really looking at openness, if we create openness, this is going to solve that generational divide that we have right now. A lot of mature workers say, “I don’t fit into this workforce. Like, this is not at all my philosophy, and I don’t really want to worry about obsolescence in my final years of work.” So, we’re seeing them, a lot of mature workers leave early, and I think that’s actually going to be a major labor force catastrophe if we’re not careful with that group.

And young people are just opting out. So, we need to stop this hyperbolic, “Boomers can’t Google, and they’re micromanaging,” or, “Gen Z’s are lazy and entitled, and they’d afford a home if they just stop buying avocado toast.” That, to me, is just like, people think it’s funny, and, actually, it’s creating a real sense of ageism at work.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, so you’re saying, in both directions.

Jennifer Moss
In both directions.

Pete Mockaitis
So, the Millennials think that the Boomer is an idiot who can’t Google, and the Boomer thinks that the youngsters are irresponsibly burning their cash. Whereas, like, there are realities associated with, like, affordability is harder now. And then on the other side, it’s like, “Hey, technology is changing much more rapidly now.” Like, that’s also true, and that is also hard, and it needs to be acknowledged.

Jennifer Moss
It is. And you know what? I keep saying, like, stop using terms like “reverse mentoring.” We use that all the time. And it assumes that an older worker knows less about technology or something than a younger one, and we talk about Boomers know this and Gen Z knows this. We see this always when we talk about technology, and it’s just assumed that one generation knows something more than the other, which is not accurate.

Like, look at Dr. Hinton, he was the founder of AI, probably knows a lot about AI, and he’s in his late 60s. And so, this idea that we have to learn in this reverse way, instead of peer mentorship is a way better approach to talking about it. And, really, in the book, I just go through all the language that we don’t realize we’re using, the narratives that we use a lot, and that it just creates this continued labeling of an entire generation as being a very specific thing. And instead of just taking those assumptions away and looking at it, I think, with an openness, that’s what leaders need to do.

And then I think my favorite chapter was freedom because this whole idea of the reason why workers don’t want to have these RTO mandates, or don’t want to go back to work is that we’re missing the psychological barriers that people are feeling right now, which is, “I had my freedom in this certain area of work,” and it goes across the board, not just with return to office, but across the board.

There was more investment in well-being, DEI, you know, all of these commitments, and promises that were made to people. And when they started getting those clawed back, it felt like, “Wow, now my freedom, my sense of freedom is being taken away.” I talk about this from a neuroscience standpoint, and our sense of freedom is deeply baked in our neural wiring. It’s something we would go to great peril to stand up for, and a lot of this resistance is subconscious.

It’s conscious and subconscious because we’re fighting for something that we feel like is ours now. And so, that trust is a big factor, and so organizations that are making these choices really quickly and just sort of throwing it at employees is why I believe that this whole issue has continued to be so polarizing. Instead of understanding that people shot up when it comes to the rates of social anxiety from 4% to 36% of people explain that they had social anxiety through the pandemic.

So, you’re not just saying, “People, go back to work. Deal with it,” and if they’re resistant, it’s because they’re lazy. It’s because they have generalized and high levels of social anxiety. So, I think this, for me, was a big aha, recognizing why the pushback and why the resistance is so, so difficult for leaders and employees to get on the same page.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m curious, could you share, if folks are in the individual contributor role of things, and they’re vibing with what you’re saying, like, “Yes, Jen, this sounds right and true and good, and I wish my organization would do some of this enlightened stuff,” what do you recommend they do?

Jennifer Moss
Well, as an individual contributor, your life is still—you’re still in charge of it, and although happiness at work, it really needs to have societal and policy change. You need to have leadership and high-level executive managers and individuals all play a role to make it the kind of culture that everyone wants. We have a lot of responsibility too of our own choices. It’s a privilege to just quit so I don’t just say, “Oh, everyone can quit.”

Not everyone can quit. It’s not that easy to do. But I do say that there are a lot of things that have happened, habits that have been imposed on us and self-inflicted habits. Like, I just wrote this article for HBR that was really, I think, well-received and it was titled “Let’s End Toxic Productivity.” And we’ve become toxically productive. We’re waking up in the morning and checking, we’re sitting in our pajamas, we’re calling it fun work. We have our glass of wine while we’re doing admin, and it’s like, “Oh, this is fun work because I’m drinking and I’m doing my admin work.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s one way to do it.

Jennifer Moss
Yeah. It’s like, “No, this is still not healthy.” And you see this increase specifically in women that are just completely burning out, and they’re hitting that wall. So, we do feel a sense of pressure that, again, it’s like institutional stress, but it’s also us feeling like we need to perform at these high levels. And a lot of that is because we’re still in this sense of urgency mode. We’re still in surge capacity mode, and we haven’t stopped that, reset that habit and replace those with more boundaries.

We can’t always make those choices because there’s a lot of reasons for it, but in the book, the first chapter was me interviewing Kara, who was on track to be the first female black partner in her law firm, and she lost three members of her family. And when I met her, she was driving an Uber, and I said, “Wow, that’s intense. And what made you choose to do that?” And she said, “Life is short. I’m working on my nonprofit in Costa Rica, giving microloans to women, and, yeah, I’m making less money, but I just feel like I needed to do this. Like, I’m compelled to do this.”

And you’re seeing more women, why we have the thinnest executive pipeline in history right now. And for the first time in a decade, we see the global CEOs of females decline, and a lot of it is just a purpose shifting, and we’re going to lose a lot of talent because people are just, overwhelmed. But we do have the choice, and I have had so many interviews.

I interviewed over a hundred Uber drivers for the book, and every single one of them said, “I feel better.” And it’s shocking because we would think, “Really?” Our perception is, “No way. You had this opportunity to be the first black female partner, like, how could you be happier?” And she said, “I am. It’s extraordinary how much healthier I am and happier I am in this role.”

And I think, when you face your mortality, you realize that. And a lot of us have collectively faced our mortality over the last five years or have a sense of it potentially being uncertain, and that changes you. And this is what we need to look at, it’s like, “What are our deathbed regrets?” And if that doesn’t fit into the schematic of, “Okay, is answering an email at 11 o’clock at night drunk, is that going to be our deathbed regret? Probably. Or, is missing time with my family, or is being healthy, or is actually setting boundaries?” And that is where I see a lot more people making those choices for their own happiness and healthiness.

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s zoom on this, you interviewed a hundred Uber drivers, and all of them said they were happier driving Uber than doing another job.

Jennifer Moss
Well, I would say maybe 80 to 85 percent of them did, 15% were just like, “I’ve been always driving this car and it’s good for me because I…” That 15% and I found were really proud of making a paycheck to be able to put their kids through school or giving them a better life, and so there was still a sense of pride. They hadn’t left another job, but the majority of them had.

And there was three people I interviewed that had left Wall Street. They were making lots of money and, fortunately, they had some money to be able to support that. I saw a lot of retirees that took early retirement but didn’t want to return to corporate, so they were driving an Uber just to continue making money, but they had no desire to actually go back. And a lot of them had very solid positions within their company. They made good money, but they didn’t want to be in that environment.

This is where they would say things like, “I just don’t fit. Like, this is good for me, this pace.” And I also found, too, what was a really interesting data point is that 20% of American grandparents are primary caregivers. And so, we never think of that, and now we’re seeing more organizations have grandternity benefits, which I think are fantastic.

But we think only older Gen Z’s and Millennials need that help with the kind of paternity and maternity leave, but grandparents are taking on primary care, so flexibility has become extremely important for them. And so, so organizations that didn’t offer that, that was leading them to go into places where there was flexibility. And I would say across the board, that was one of the main factors, was just “The flexibility to be able to do what I needed to do as a parent, as a grandparent, or even just for my own passion pursuits.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I mean, I think that is so stark in terms of many workplaces are failing their workers so profoundly, in terms of flexibility, purpose, belonging, that folks would prefer to receive a fourth or less the compensation in order to just drive a car and not have to deal with all that crap.

Jennifer Moss
Yes. And, really, again, it’s the focal point of the book because people described what they were missing, and the data shows that the big Gallup whirlpool that goes into the happiness report found that people would take 37% less pay if it meant higher work-life balance and flexibility. I mean, we can solve these problems and yet now we’re seeing more people double and triple down on less flexibility, which just erodes that trust, and I think the data is there.

There’s so much evidence to show that if you provide autonomy and trust in your workers that you hired, that you spent a lot of money to recruit and retain, they’re adults, you hired adults, so why are you treating them like children when you bring them into the organization? And so, to me, the freedom chapter of flexibility, specifically, it’s like, it’s just such a no-brainer, and organizations are just making this real play to have control, and it’s turning people off.

And they are willing, at this point, to take much less pay to have a life that feels like that there’s a sense of freedom in it. And that’s why you’re seeing this high level of disengagement, this constant turnover. People, even if you’re in the organization, are just not feeling like they care about work. Quiet quitting, and disengagement is so high, that you’re not even getting the most out of your people. You’re actually getting a fraction of what you could be getting from your people if you just let go of the power and looked at this as a mutual respect of transferring skills and just working together.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. Well, Jen, tell me, anything else you want to mention before we hear about your favorite things?

Jennifer Moss
I just really hope that people just start caring more about each other, and putting five percent more of their effort into just being kind and altruistic. And, you know, it really is 20 minutes, 20 minutes of eating lunch with each other, Cornell found, actually improves well-being and happiness at work. It’s just one lunch every single week together.

If I can tell people to just take 20 minutes of thinking of some sort of tactical strategy that you could do to make someone in your organization’s life better, you will feel better for it. And if we could create a bit of a social network or contagion around that, I think it would spill over into something really, really transformational.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Jennifer Moss
“You can have anything, not everything.”

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Jennifer Moss
I love Dr. William’s study that he did for the Oxford Wellbeing Institute this year, and he said, basically, well-being programs aren’t working, wellness is not working, but the one thing that does work is volunteering and altruism. So, just being nice to other people is the one well-being program that we should be focusing on this year.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Jennifer Moss
I love A Little Life. It’s so painful but it is the most beautiful book I’ve ever read.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Jennifer Moss
One of my favorite tools right now is ResearchGate. Being able to have the ability to go through there and be able to use it for really incredible research that you can, as a journalist and as an author, be using so that we aren’t spreading misinformation, so that we really are getting it from peer-reviewed sources.

That makes me feel so much better about the content I’m putting out, and that people are reading something that I know has been backed through evidence. And I think every single writer and journalist, and anyone communicating to the public, should be using that source instead of some of the AI sources that might be not as accurate.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Jennifer Moss
I do practice gratitude. And I know that sounds hokey but it’s something that I really try to do. We do it around the dinner table but, lately, just for me, it’s like, “What went well this week? What can I work with that I have versus what I don’t have?” and it does work. It gets me out of my habit.

And just taking a moment to take a breath, and realize that there’s still a lot of good things in the world that I appreciate. It does ground me in this time of poly-crisis.

Pete Mockaitis
And, if I may, when it comes to practicing gratitude, I think that there’s some nuance in doing this excellently, because sometimes I can list a thing that is objectively a blessing or, “This is a good thing, and I am noting it, I am listing it, I am acknowledging it.” But sometimes when I’m doing gratitude, I actually feel gratitude for the thing that is objectively good, and other times, I don’t have the feelings. And since you’re a good researcher, can you tell me, does that matter in terms of doing a gratitude practice? Or how should I do it optimally?

Jennifer Moss
Dr. Robert Emmons in his book Thanks, and a lot of his research, are so useful on this concept of gratitude and how it impacts. And sometimes it is tail that wags the dog, you know, like that idea that you think about these things, it is a narrative that your brain is using. So, anytime that you refocus on something that maybe you’re not feeling, but you know is valuable, like, “Oh, be thankful for having clean water.” And at the moment, I’m just not like, “Oh, I’m so grateful for clean water,” but I’ll mention it.

And it does help you have perspective-taking because from a neuroscience standpoint, it does take out the things that you could be focusing on that are not positive. You have only so much you can attend to at any one time. It’s like 40 things that you can attend to in the moment while you’re processing tens of billions of pieces of information. But if you’re attending to something, even if you don’t feel those, you know, necessarily those chemical reactions to it, it is creating a desire path in the brain.

So, the more that you put that focus, that neural wiring, and you go over it and over and over again, you create what is called gratitude fluency. So, you go from practicing gratitude to being grateful, and that happens over time. It’s like a language that you learn and you become fluent in gratitude, and so then it’s an automatic response to feel gratitude towards something versus having to practice it. But it is something, as it works through your life, it does change the chemistry as well. It just takes time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that is helpful. And if nothing else, the fact that I have oriented my thoughts towards a thing worthy of gratitude means that I wasn’t like whining about “This water doesn’t taste very good. And a key nugget, something that you share that seems to connect and resonate with folks?

Jennifer Moss
One of the things I would say is that we have more agency sometimes than we think if we’re really stressed and burned out. And one of the best things that we can do is really do a values assessment. What do you care about? What do you love? And then make your priorities for the year. Focus on that.

And if you’re saying yes to something, like a project that maybe you’re excited to participate in but it’s going to take that extra 20% of your time, put it on that scale of “Is this FOMO? Is this something I have to do? Or, is this another thing where I’m going to regret saying yes in the future?” And take some time to rest.

Rest is not a four-letter word. Look at what you can be doing with that time for work, and instead refocus it on making sure that you’re well and healthy and prioritize your own well-being and the well-being of the people around you first. And then, hopefully, you’ll start to see the benefits of that.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more get in touch, where would you point them?

Jennifer Moss
Jennifer-Moss.com.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Jennifer Moss
I would love for all of you to spend the next month and every day say something nice about another person behind their back. Spreading positive gossip inside of an organization actually improves psychological safety for those people coming into the space. And when it gets around to someone that you said some awesome thing about them, it really does make them feel incredibly special. So, just for the next month, just talk nicely about all your co-workers and see how that spreads a positivity contagion.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Jen, thank you. This is fun.

Jennifer Moss
Thank you so much, Pete. It was great. Too many years in between, but maybe it’ll be less next time.

Pete Mockaitis
Neel, welcome.

Neel Doshi
Pete, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, me too. I’m excited to talk culture. Could you kick us off with something strikingly surprising and counterintuitive that you know and have learned about culture that most don’t?

Neel Doshi
Yeah, absolutely. The core of our research has landed on this realization that, fundamentally, culture is about motivation. And to unpack motivation, you have to understand what motivates people. To unpack that question, what you realize is that actually fundamentally only six motives, reasons why people do things. Motives are the root of motivation.

The first is play, you do something because you enjoy doing it, it’s fun. The second is purpose, you do something because you believe your contribution matters, what you’re doing matters. The next is potential, you think it’s building up to something that’s important. The next is emotional pressure. Think about when maybe you guilted someone into doing something. Well, that’s an example of emotional pressure. You’re acting on someone’s identity to get them to take an action. Economic pressure, you’re trying to chase reward or avoid punishment. Or inertia, you’re just now going through motions.

What we’ve realized, and we can prove this all day long, is that when a culture maximizes play, purpose, and potential, you get outlier performance. When it does the opposite, maximizes emotional pressure, economic pressure, and inertia, you get fairly lousy performance.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Wow, check it out, there’s so much there right off the bat. Thank you, Neel.

Neel Doshi
There’s a lot there.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, boy, there’s so much to get into because it feels right. Because, naturally, when I get a set of categories, I want to try to find the counterexample, like, “Oh, what about this?” but it seems like that’s holding together pretty well. Anytime that I do something that’s kind of what’s behind it, and I’m having a hard time thinking of anything I do that doesn’t fit in there. So, very nice.

Neel Doshi
You know what’s funny, Pete, like you say that, it’s hard to find the counterexample, but at the same time you look at the average company and they don’t work this way, which I think is a very interesting paradox because when you hear this research, and you say this really resonates. It kind of has to be true. Like, it follows my intuition, it follows my life experience, but then why do we look at our teams, our companies, ourselves, and not manage this?

I’ll give you two examples which I think you’ll find interesting because I think your pursuit of the counterexample is fascinating. We spent many years helping to transform the performance model of one of the world’s biggest hedge funds. And I remember in the opening conversations, I was talking to the founder of this hedge fund who is wildly successful, he’s made more money than 99.99999% of humanity, and the rumor had it that was when he was on vacation, he’d bring an IT team with him to set up his nine-screen Bloomberg Terminal in the hotel room next to his.

And he says, “Neel, okay, I respect your work. I loved your book, but play, really? Like, do you really think that’s a driver of performance?” And so, I asked him, “Why do you bring an IT team on vacation and set up a nine-screen Bloomberg Terminal when you’ve already made more money than humanity?” And he said, “Well, it’s because it’s fun.”

And I said, “Okay, that is what made you the most successful person in your industry, and you don’t think that applies to any other human being?” And that really clicked for him.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well, I’ll tell you, trading can be crazy fun, too fun at times, so I’m resonating there. So, play, yes, it’s just fun. And when you say corporations aren’t doing this, you mean they’re just sort of ignoring it entirely, or they’re only thinking, “Hey, you know, it’s a job, there’s a compensation, you need money, therefore, we’re fine here,” and that’s about the extent of it?

Neel Doshi
Yeah, I think that’s more or less it. Like, a common question and answer I often see and have, so I talk to an executive or CEO, and usually it’s because they read our book, they asked me to come talk to their team or their company, and I’ll say at this point, “Do you doubt that motivation drives performance because that feels pretty intuitive, I would imagine for most people, that we kind of know that the more motivated we are, the better we perform?”

So, that’s an easy one, like, “Yes, of course, I know that motivation drives performance.” “All right, in your company, do you manage motivation?” “No, not really.” Okay, so that’s thing number one. Thing number two is exactly what you just said, Pete, like when you think about how you manage motivation what are you doing?

And, generally, what companies have put into place are systems that create emotional pressure and economic pressure and often inertia. So, they’re not just not managing it, they’re managing it in the opposite direction of how it should be managed.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s powerful. Well, could you perhaps bring this to life a little bit in terms of a tale with a culture transformed? What were things like? What did you go do? And then what happened?

Neel Doshi
One that played out in the news not long ago was the issues that was manifesting in the retail banking industry, specifically, with Wells Fargo’s fake account scandal. Like, if you remember, this is now circa, like, 2014 or something like that, Wells Fargo hit the news for ultimately creating on the order of three to four million fake accounts. Now, that’s amazing, by the way. Just think about the volume of that, like three and a half million fake accounts.

Pete Mockaitis
There must be some motivation behind that effort.

Neel Doshi
Yeah, exactly. You got to want that. Now, the thing about this is when that situation was unpacked, the fundamental reason why was because they were using pressure to drive performance, emotional and economic. And so, as a result, you get phenomenon like check-the-box behavior and cheating.

So, a different financial institution approached us, and I’ll never forget what the CEO said, literally, these are the words he said. He said, “We know in our industry how to create mercenaries. We have no idea how to create missionaries. So, what do we do?”

And so, I said, “It’ll be easier for me to show than tell.” And he said, “We’ve got lots and lots and lots of branches. Why don’t you take a dozen of them, do whatever you want? Our analysts will measure them champion-challenger style so that we can see, did what you do actually have performance.” So, here’s what we did. First, we eliminated the pressures.

When you looked at these institutions, these branches before, they used to have this weekly high-pressure call. Like, the goal of a call was to make you feel bad about your performance. I mean, if you really observed the call as an anthropologist might, you have to conclude that is the purpose of this, to create pressure. Their systems were about pressure. The way they thought about compensation, the degree to which your comp was commission-based, for example, the degree to which your promotion was based on metrics, all of this was essentially a system designed to drive performance through pressure.

The first thing we did is we got rid of all that. We got rid of pay-for-performance, we got rid of the high-pressure conversations, and what we replaced it with was a system that was really about creating play and purpose. Now, what does that look like? Think about the times where you felt real play in your work. Like, my guess is what it felt like was you were chewing on a new problem, it was really interesting, it was filling you with curiosity, maybe you had the opportunity to learn something or experiment in some way.

These are all precursors for growth. Fundamentally, if you think about the opposite of play, it’s boredom, and so it really tells you that play is highly attached to novelty. So, what we did was we put into place a set of practices, rhythms, measurement systems that were about play and purpose. So, for example, in our future state branches, every week, every branch would lay out the problems they want to solve. These aren’t goals. These aren’t financial metrics. These are just problems they want to solve.

And the ask of every person is to come up with ideas, and as a team decide which ideas we’re going to experiment with. They just ran that rhythm every week. It was fun. Like, when you start to understand the problems that we’re trying to solve, “Well, this is really interesting, and I can come up with my own ideas? That’s really interesting. And as a team, we’re going to help improve and choose ideas to experiment? Well, that’s interesting. And I’m going to actually run experiments? Well, that’s really interesting, too.”

That is one of about five different tactics we put into place, probably the most powerful one, and immediately, you saw a bunch of changes happen. You saw everyone start to care about performance without all the pressure, because they start to view it as a game. You start to see everyone create more ideas. As they created more ideas, their sense of ownership increased. As their sense of ownership increased, that casts a halo on all of their work. All of their performance increases.

We’re measuring motivation as we go, so their motivation is increasing. Then ultimately, they were measuring performance, and what they found was productivity, customer satisfaction, and sales all increased, and that was after eliminating the pressure systems.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Neel, that’s so cool and beautiful, that notion of play, like, “Yes, that stuff is fun.” And that’s what they say, I’m thinking about in Silicon Valley, in terms of, “Well, if you want to attract the top talent, the most brilliant software engineers, the top thing is not the foosball table or the compensation. It’s like, ‘Are you giving them interesting problems they get to solve?’”

It’s, like, they’re playing. They’re using their brain like, “Huh, how would we do that?” And then they get to try some things, experiment, see if they worked, vibe with other talented, sharp people who push them so they’re learning and growing and trying new things. And then in the course of doing it, they actually care about the metrics.

And I’m also thinking about a time, I coordinated a couple youth leadership conferences, and I was really big—because I used to work at Bain—so I was big on the Net Promoter Score, like, “What is the satisfaction of our students who are attending these?” And so, I had tracked it from the previous year, and everyone was a volunteer, so with my team, my staff. I didn’t have any economic anything over them.

But we were just thinking, “Hey, how can we make just a really amazing experience? Last year was great, but can we make an experience that’s even better?” And so, we had all these ideas, “Well, we could try this. We could try that. Well, maybe let’s watch out for how we do this. Get some more outside time, mix things up, make this interact.” So, we had all these ideas, and we were playing with them.

And then I thought nobody else really would care about this Net Promoter Score metric all that much, because, like, hey, I work in Bain, and I’m a numbers dork. And so, I remember I told my buddy, Graham, a fellow volunteer, he’s like, “Our Net Promoter Score is higher than last year by like 20 points!” And he said, “YES!”

He was so jazzed! Like, other people were in the room, like, startled. Like, he has just told we won the lottery or something, and he gave me a huge bear hug, and I was like, “Oh, I didn’t expect you to care about my dorky little number nearly this much, but you did because we were playing, and then as you’re as you’re playing, you’re invested and you care about the performance and the winning, even though I didn’t say, ‘Now, Graham, if we don’t boost our Net Promoter Score then this was a failure.’”

Neel Doshi
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Or, “I’m taking you out for drinks.” There was none of that.

Neel Doshi
Exactly. You know, Pete, what you’re raising is a really important misconception I often find in our research. Well, people ask me, “So, Neel, are you saying metrics are bad?” “The scoreboard can make a game more fun. You often need the scoreboard to make the game fun. The problem is not the metrics. The problem is you weaponized the metric. You made people feel bad about it. You used it to create pressure.”

If you set up a game like you just did, you set up a game, you had a scoreboard for the game, you didn’t put any pressure against the scoreboard, but you encouraged experimentation, you encouraged thinking, problem solving, well, now the whole thing is fun, and you feel a great deal of ownership for that.

And so, in a lot of these systems, what you find is companies are using their measurements the wrong way. The irony is, like, you see goal systems in companies, and you ask, “Well, what is the purpose of a goal system? Like, why are you doing this?” And, generally, if you’re really thinking about it, it’s two things, “I’m using it to create focus and alignment, and motivation.”

But it’s the second one that often gets completely forgotten, and so, you see companies with goal systems that are actually creating a great deal of pressure, negative motivation. And what you described is a perfect example of the opposite.

Pete Mockaitis
And I want to back it up all the way to almost your first sentence, when you say, “Culture is about motivation.” That seems to really cut to the core of things, because so often with culture, we say, “Oh, is it more of a top-down or is it a bottom-up or distributed?” So, we think of all these sorts of domains by which we might categorize or put into types different sorts of culture, “Is it formal or is it informal? And then how does that show up with the dress code or the artifacts that are put…?”

So, usually, in these sorts of almost generic textbook conversations about culture, that’s sort of what we go to. But I like how you’re getting after culture is about motivation in terms of, fundamentally, “Do all of these things make folks more into doing their finest work, and making things happen? Or, are they more so stifling?” And I guess there’s a little bit to be said for different personalities and individual preferences there, but it seems like you’re really pointing out some universals that cut across whatever my personal proclivities are.

Neel Doshi
Yeah, a hundred percent. When I started this research, which is almost three decades ago now, if you ask somebody, “What’s the recipe for building a high-performing culture?” you’d have been given the answer, “Just copy GE.” And that didn’t work for them, as you see playing out these days. That “Copy this other company” is, essentially, we don’t understand the root cause, so we’re kind of guessing. We’re guessing at patterns that may or may not fit.

The root cause is, fundamentally, motivation. So, all of these attributes of an organization’s operating system, like centralized, decentralized, remote work, not remote work, like all these attributes are the symptoms at the edges. The key is we can make a lot of those attributes work. You can make an entirely remote-based company super highly motivating. You can make an in-person one super highly motivating. You can make one that leans more towards centralized, more towards decentralized.

You can get these dynamics right, but what you have to understand is that the fundamental thing you have to solve for is “Is everyone motivated the right way?” And then you realize there’s actually a lot of flexibility in how you build that machine.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we’ve heard a bit about play. Can you unpack purpose and potential for us?

Neel Doshi
Purpose is probably, I’d argue, maybe one of the most misunderstood. So, play, the misunderstanding is ping pong tables, like, “I want to build a high-play culture, so I give ping pong tables.” No, that’s not it. It has to come from the work. Purpose has a similar problem, where a lot of people believe that purpose comes from our mission statement, like, “I have this big grandiose mission statement, we put it on the walls, we put it on the mouse pads, we put it on the screensavers, and that somehow imbues purpose.” Not really.

Like, the better way of thinking about purpose is its opposite. Like, if the opposite of play is boredom, the best opposite of purpose that I’ve found is fungibility. You feel fungible. You feel like a cog in the machine. Because even if the machine is incredibly purposeful, if you are a cog in that machine, you will not feel the purpose motive, and that’s a very important distinction that people don’t quite understand. I’ll give you an example of this.

I was working once in a performance transformation of a really cool, fast-growing tech company, And I was sitting down with the CTO, and I said to the CTO, “I’ve noticed that you’ve set up a model with the engineers where they are quite fungible.” And he says, “I did that intentionally.” He says, “You know, Silicon Valley, low retention rates, lots of attrition, I need to make sure I don’t have business continuity problems so I’ve made them all fungible.”

And I said, “By making them all fungible, you’ve increased your attrition rate because they don’t have that purpose motive. They don’t feel like they matter. They don’t feel like their work matters, their contribution matters. It’s about personal purpose.” And that’s the thing companies really miss on the purpose motive. It’s you feel like your contribution matters every day, day in, day out. If you don’t go to work that day, outcomes that you care about won’t happen.

Another example of that is think about the modern-day call center, where you’re sitting in that call center, you’re plugged into a phone system, and once your one call ends, you hear a beep in your earphone, customer immediately starts talking, and let’s say you have to take a break, you just kind of log out, no big deal. All the calls get routed to someone else.

You are a definitional cog in the machine at that point. You don’t really feel like your contribution matters. If you log out, no big deal, “No big deal. There’s no stakes to my work.” In that world, you don’t feel the purpose motive.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I’m hearing you. It’s interesting because, on the one hand, that really resonates. And on the other hand, there is kind of always a vast population of people who could do what we are doing. So, it’s like an individual person has talents and skills and abilities and is fun and special and unique as a miraculous creation. But also, it’s like, just as the call center employee could be swapped in for another call center employee, so too could the software engineer. So, maybe let’s get a little bit clearer on the stakes. It’s like outcomes they care about will not be advanced if they don’t show up to work.

Neel Doshi
I totally hear you. Like, on some level, aren’t we all replaceable? Yeah, totally. It doesn’t mean that a company has to make you feel that way. Like, let me give you a simple example. Toyota. Toyota does this incredibly well on the automobile assembly line. So, if you think about an automobile assembly line, how could that not be cogs in the machine? Like, you’re standing there, this chassis kind of rolls up in front of you, you maybe bolt a door on, it rolls away. How do you not feel fungible? How do you not feel like a cog in the machine?

What Toyota does, Toyota has a very deep and interesting set of beliefs, which turn out to be highly accurate. Their beliefs stem from the realization that there’s really two types of performance. One type is called tactical, the other is called adaptive. Definitional opposites. Tactical is how well you stick to your plan. Adaptive is how well you don’t stick to your plan. You can think of a tactical as convergence, adaptive is about divergence. Definitional opposites.

So, the Toyota line worker who’s just standing there just mindlessly plugging the bolt in, that’s all the tactical performance side of the job. What Toyota realizes is that there are so many possibilities for improvement on an automobile assembly line, they can’t even really compute it. That every job could be done better, every part could show up broken, every supply chain could have an issue, and what they want is they want their line workers to be as adaptive as possible, and they’ve built that into their system.

So, imagine you’re that guy, you’re bolting the door on that car, and you have an idea. It could be any idea. It could be to improve your performance in any way. You reach up above your station, and there’s this yellow cord hanging from the top called the Andon cord. You pull that cord, your line manager comes up to you and says, “What’s your idea?” You say, “Well, if my tool was shaped a little bit differently, I could do this job better, cheaper, faster, safer.” Your line manager is kind of jotting it down on a clipboard.

In your team are machinists whose SLA, their agreement to you, is to take your idea and hack together something that you can try within 24 hours. They bring it back to you, you try it. If it works better, they scale it up. If it doesn’t work better, no big deal. There’s a bit more nuance to this process. I’m kind of simplifying it a bit. But the gist of it is they are saying to every line worker, “Your ideas matter.” And by doing so, they’ve emphasized the adaptive side of their job, where your unique thoughts are important, your unique ideas are important.

And so, they’ve essentially built a system that emphasizes the part of the job that requires you to think and, actually, de-emphasizes the part of the job that doesn’t. A lot of companies get this completely wrong. Like, the biggest thing I’ve seen as a mistake is they think that Toyota’s system is a suggestion box. So, like, Pete puts an idea in a suggestion box and some group of folks in corporate think about it.

This is not at all what Toyota has done, “It’s Pete’s idea. We’re arming Pete with the tools to experiment. Pete is going to see if his idea worked or not. Pete is going to be the one that learns from it.” That is a, fundamentally, different model than most organizations could even wrap their heads around. And so, not only is that building your sense of play, it’s building your sense of purpose also.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, it just sounds sort of fun. I kind of want to hop on a Toyota line right now and see what ideas come to mind.

Neel Doshi
This is what’s remarkable about what they’ve done. They’ve taken a job that most managers would have said is motivationally irredeemable. You just cannot make this job motivating. They’ve taken that job and they’ve pulled those levers as hard as anyone could possibly pull them to great success in terms of both productivity in factories and quality.

Pete Mockaitis
Now you’ve got a turn of a phrase, “the total motivation factor.” Can you define that for us? And this is actually a number that could be calculated.

Neel Doshi
So, if you start with that foundational research that proves that if an organization creates more play, more purpose, more potential, and less emotional pressure, less economic pressure, and less inertia, you’ll get to maximum performance outcomes. Now, it turns out that performance is actually shockingly hard to measure. You can measure the tactical side of performance, like, “How many cars do we make?” It’s hard to measure the adaptive side.

Because how do I measure, “Did you come up with a good idea or a bad idea? Or did you experiment? Did you not experiment? Did you see a problem? Did you not see a problem?” Like, all of the adaptive side of work is actually very, very difficult to measure.

But what we found is motivation is actually not difficult to measure. And what we recommend to most organizations is measure motivation. If you know that it’s a root of performance, measure it, and that measurement essentially measures the degree to which you feel play, purpose, and potential. Those are positive to the number. The degree to which you feel emotional pressure, economic pressure, or inertia, those are negative to the number, and that number is the total motivation factor. Relatively easy to measure, relatively easy to calculate, highly predictive of performance.

And so, much like you found with Net Promoter Score and your example with your volunteers, the act of measuring something as long as you don’t put pressure against it actually signals you value it. Oftentimes, in more organizations, what you measure is the strongest signal of what you value. And so, measure it, you’re signaling you value it, you’re signaling you want people to think and experiment against it. It starts to become a self-fulfilling prophecy of improvement at that point.

Pete Mockaitis
So, with the measuring, is it just sort of surveys? Or how is that figure actually generated?

Neel Doshi
There’s a few implements. I’ll describe to you our most cutting-edge implement. Because the challenge is, what we found is the act of measuring something affects the thing that you’re measuring. There is certainly a quantum physics aspect to human measurement.

So, for example, a very simple example, let’s say I had a survey for an organization that had a question that was, “Pete, on a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you hate your CEO?” Like, obviously, no one’s going to put that, but let’s say I wrote that question. Well, all of a sudden, I’m priming you to think a certain way. The question itself is priming a thought process.

Pete Mockaitis
“Oh, it didn’t even occur to me to hate my CEO. Well, now that you mentioned it, a little bit.”

Neel Doshi
You know what the funny thing is, I’m kind of giving you an absurd example, but I see more subtle versions of that exist in organizations’ measurement systems. In the spirit of trying to measure negativity, they often prime negativity, which I find to be really fascinating. Like, you’re trying to build an organization where people have agency. They’re trying to affect that… agency is fundamentally an attribute of play and purpose. You can’t really have a play and purpose without agency.

So, you’re trying to create these cultures of agency, these cultures of positivity, hope, optimism, and then you have instruments that actually are priming the opposite, like instruments that are saying, “Pete, you have no agency. The only way you can affect change is to anonymously complain to our executive team.” And so, what we find is that the instrument has a way stronger effect than people think on the mindset the questions themselves are creating, which is wild when you kind of think about that.

Now, so our cutting-edge instruments on this, they’re not just about measuring motivation. The instrument itself is about creating it. The act of filling out the instrument creates motivation. So, there’s a few tricks that we have. There’s probably like a hundred tricks that we’ve kind of built into our cutting edge of measurement, but I’ll give you one specific one.

When we measure motivation using our best implements, we won’t say, “Pete, how do you feel about your work?” What we say is, “Pete, think about your next quarter, the quarter ahead of you. And as you think ahead, do you see that work as it’s going to be fun and interesting, or do you see it as boring? Do you see that you will have a lot of personal impact, or do you see that you won’t?” So, play and purpose, and we kind of go through all the motives that way.

But by making this forward-looking, making this about the work you haven’t done yet, the measurement doesn’t become about complaining. It becomes a diagnostic to improve something that hasn’t happened yet. It becomes about anticipation. Very simple example of how our instruments are designed to avoid the problem of fomenting complainers. But that’s simply that. What we do is we say to an organization, “Every single team, every quarter, should do a health check. That health check is not a survey you do on your own. It’s a conversation you do as a team.”

And in that conversation, we suggest “The first 10 minutes, everyone does fill out this questionnaire, this diagnostic. You’re doing that first 10 minutes on your own. You immediately, as a team, get the results, and the results guide you through a conversation as a team to commit to something to change.” Because a lot of times, measurement, what’s the point if it doesn’t lead to action? And on these topics, a lot of teams are ill-equipped to take action. They just don’t know.

They don’t know what degrees of freedom they have. They don’t know what the tools are. And so, what we do is we, essentially, say, “Every quarter, every team, do this health check. First 10 minutes, we’ll do this positively priming diagnostic. The next hour and 20 minutes, we’re going to commit to changes we’re going to make in the next quarter based on it.” And that instrument not just measures, it puts you on the path to improvement more or less automatically.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Okay. Well, Neel, tell me, are there any other key do’s and don’ts when it comes to motivation and culture? And I’m thinking, specifically, even for individual contributors who are thinking, “Oh, I don’t know. This sounds like some really cool systems I wish were in place in my organization. But what can I do? Or maybe, how might I be able to hack my own work to experience more play and purpose in it?”

Neel Doshi
Start with yourself. That’s the easiest place to start. What we recommend to folks is, first, just start to understand the science of motivation. You can read Primed to Perform, we have a bunch of other articles. There are a lot of ways to kind of get your head around understanding the science of motivation. That alone is an important first step as an individual, because you want to start to ask yourself, “Am I feeling play in my work? Am I feeling purpose?” That’s kind of step number one.

Step number two is there are levers that you can pull on your own. So, for example, a lot of organizations, as we talked about earlier, their mechanism of alignment is usually just a number, like, your goal. It would be the equivalent of, imagine if I’m coaching a basketball team, and I say, “Okay, guys, here’s your goal. Get 100 points. I’ll see you guys after the game.” A lot of companies actually work that way, which makes very little sense when you think about it.

Like, the goal was the easy part. The strategy is the hard part. The problems to solve are the hard part, like, “Why am I, essentially, not coaching any of that?” So, the second step I’d say to an individual is take a step back from the systems of your company. Maybe the systems are creating pressure. Take a step back from them.

Ask yourself, what problems could you solve in the next month or two that you think will be valuable to your customer, to your team. Really start to understand those problems and start to come up with ideas against them. Just get yourself into a mindset of falling in love with the problem you have to solve, even if your company hasn’t made that easy.

The third thing I would say is get your team to learn the science of motivation, because teams have a lot more degrees of freedom than they think. Individuals, typically, have the least amounts of net degrees of freedom in an organization, but teams have way more than most teams exercise. Teams can do a lot to actually affect their rhythms, their habits, how they think about problem-solving, how they think about novelty and creativity. Lots of that is owned locally.

In fact, what a lot of companies don’t realize is, if you think about motivation as a construct for a moment, play is inherently local. Like, if you’re a large organization, like imagine you’re JP Morgan Chase, there’s very little that Jamie Dimon can do to create play in a working team because it’s inherently a local phenomenon. Purpose is also inherently a local phenomenon.

And so, as a result, when you measure motivation out, a majority of that motivation that’s controllable by the organization, about two-thirds of it, is actually controlled at the team level. Yet, most organizations don’t manage that. So, the third thing I’d suggest, even if you’re an individual kind of listening to this or reading our book, get your team to start to learn how to do this. Get your team to start to experiment in ways that they can improve themselves, and you’ll be surprised by how much a team can actually do.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And as we start to imagine, “Okay, we want more play and we’re going to find interesting problems and we’re going to just go after them,” are there some particular pointers that make that effective or not so effective?

Neel Doshi
I’d say a couple of things. One, any team can start to get into the rhythm of a health check. You don’t need your company to do that for you. Like, any team could start to go down the path of measuring, having this conversation, coming up with ways to improve. We have loads of tools for this. Like, they’re super easy to start to experiment with. Like if you’re kind of in that path and you want easy first steps, what I’d recommend is go to Factor.ai and do a health check as a team. Simple as that.

The second thing I’d suggest, have a habit in your team where you take whatever goals that have been given to you and you turn it into problem statements. It’s very simple, but like, let’s say you said, “We want to increase Net Promoter Score of our volunteer group. Okay, what are the three problems that we might want to solve in the next quarter that could get us there?”

Just do that. Just keep doing that every single week. Turn your goals into problems to solve. Make that muscle memory. Make that habit. You start to do that, mindset changes really quickly. You start to realize, “These aren’t pressure systems. Like, I actually have a lot of agency and control.” That’s the second thing I’d do. Like, if I’m transforming any organization, those first two steps are usually our first two steps.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, Neel, tell me anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Neel Doshi
The thing that I often find organizations asking is, “Is this easy?” because everyone’s under pressure, executives are under pressure, CEOs are under pressure. A lot of their pressure is usually on short-term time horizons. And so, there’s often a temptation to say, “Well, I could just use pressure for the next quarter to get that bump that I need to get, and maybe like we deal with this in a few years.”

The funny thing is, at this point, it is just as easy to motivate a performance lift the right way as it is to motivate a performance lift the wrong way. It is just as easy to do it, and you just have to learn a new technique. And so, the one thing I want to make sure every person, every individual contributor, manager, leader, CEO realizes, you want the short-term lift? You can get it by motivating people the right way. You don’t have to motivate people the wrong way to get it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Neel Doshi
I’ll give you one that we often use in our own work, because people come to us and they often say, “Neel, my engagement levels are low, like the engagement scores are low. How do I grow engagement? What’s the trick? What’s the perk? What’s the next ping pong table?” Simple answer. If you want your people to be engaged in their work, make their work engaging. That’s it, full stop. The other one I find I’m often using in change management with companies is “You can’t wake up somebody who’s pretending to be asleep.” One of the biggest problems I find in a transformation is, often, we’ll work with CEOs who’ll say, “I want the outcome that you’re describing. I want the more adaptive organization. I want the higher motivated organization. That’s great.” Their existing systems typically are the problem, and their existing systems usually create a great deal of pressure for their middle managers.

So, the middle managers are usually under the weight of a lot of pressure, and that problem is that pressure makes you less adaptive, less likely to learn, less likely to experiment, less likely to try new things. And so, the ironic challenge of change into a high-performing organization is your high-pressure organization is the thing that thwarts change. That’s the irony of this whole thing. A lot of organizations will implement systems that will incentivize people to resist change.

And so, when we often work with an organization, what we’ll find is that there’ll be people that will say, “We can’t do this. We shouldn’t do this. Like, this isn’t the time to do this,” like, all sorts of change barriers, sometimes overt, sometimes passive, like passive-aggressive. Now, when you talk to those people individually, they’re not bad people.

Like, I worked with one, for example, where we’re doing this big transformation, and I’m sitting down with this person who started off as being someone that was resistant. And, in this meeting, he sits down and he says, “Neel, first of all, the transformation is going really well. Can I talk about my kids?” I’m like, “Sure, let’s talk about his kids.”

He says, “You know, Neel, before I learned your research and read your book, I was a high-pressure dad. All I would do is exert pressure on my kids.” And he said, “I found that they started avoiding me. They didn’t want to spend time with me. I’d come home from work; I’d see that they would scatter. Their grades weren’t very good. And so, we’re going through this transformation, I’m reading your book, and I thought, ‘I am that. I am that high-pressure dad.’”

So, he says to me, “What I did with my eldest son was, I said to him one day, ‘Hey, if you don’t have to go to school, what would you want to do?’ And I really listened, and he said, my son surprised me, he said, ‘I want to go to school. And here’s why, and here’s what I want to learn, and here’s what I want to get.’”

So, his strategy as a father shifted entirely from pressure on grades, for example, to, “I’m going to help you do the thing you want to do. I’m going to coach you, I’m going to mentor you, I’m going to support you on the things you want to do.” He said, “I started to do that. My kids stopped avoiding me. Their grades in every way went up. And, all of a sudden, my relationship has completely changed. I just want to thank you for that in this conversation.”

Now, my point in the story is the people that I often run into in organizations that are resisting change are not bad people. They’re byproducts of the system that the company has built around them. And so, the challenge is the system is causing people to pretend to be asleep.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Yeah. Thank you. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Neel Doshi
I’ll tell you one that I really adore. Researchers wanted to understand the impact of motivation in the wild, like a natural experiment. Like, is there something that happens in real life that they can actually see and measure?

So, what they found was an interesting case example with sugarcane farmers. So, sugarcane farmers, before their harvest, you can imagine that many of these folks are operating hand-to-mouth, and before their harvest, they have to put out a lot of cash because they’re not actually earning from it. So, before their harvest, most take out loans, most are hawking personal goods to fund their operation, feeling a great deal of pressure. Like, if the harvest goes bad, it’s a real problem for them, and after the harvest, loans are being paid back, their pressure is decreased.

So, the experiment they did was they took these sugarcane farmers, and pre-harvest and post-harvest, they put them through, essentially, a set of intelligence tests, like various forms of measuring cognitive aptitude, flexibility, etc. What they found was that the difference between intelligence for the same people, pre- and post-harvest, was about the difference between going from a 90th percentile on IQ to like a 30th percentile. Same person, just driven by pressure.

What you’re seeing there, by the way, is the vicious cycle of poverty. You’re under a great deal of pressure, economic pressure, like you’re having struggles to make ends meet, for example. Your economic pressure increases, your adaptability decreases. Therefore, your work performance decreases. Therefore, you perform worse, and it’s harder to get a job, and so you end up with a vicious cycle. This experiment clearly showed that, and not even in a laboratory setting, in like a real-life setting, which is one of the reasons why I love it so much.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. And a favorite book?

Neel Doshi
Maybe rather than favorite, I’ll tell you what I’m reading that’s latest. I’m reading a book right now called Pattern Breakers. It’s by a set of seed-stage VCs in Silicon Valley, and they’re laying out the pattern of what they see in ideas that typically result in breakthrough growth. It’s a really good read, especially if you’re an organization that needs to build a culture of adaptive innovation.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Neel Doshi
My favorite habit right now is bedtime with my kids. So, one of the things I’m doing these days, which I think is really fun, is I’ll have my kids come up with a bedtime story, and I’ll ask ChatGPT to make it like a rhyming epic. And so, the kids will write a little story, and it’ll be silly. My youngest is about four and a half, so her last story was about how she and her brother went to the beach, they got their foot stung.

They went to a doctor, they went back to the beach, and there were aliens there, and the aliens were messing up the beach, and they had to fix that problem. That was the story that she wanted to tell. So, I just plugged that into Chat GPT, got this long, rhyming epic of the story of “Sam and Cam in the Beach.” So, this has been my bedtime routine for the past few months. It’s just been a lot of fun.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Neel Doshi
Go to Factor.ai, you’ll see a lot of things there. You’ll see tools to measure your motivation to drive problem-solving your team, to actually just fully manage your teams. You’ll see our research. We publish new research, usually, every other week. So, you’ll see the latest thinking on things like remote work, or burnout, things that are affecting the workplace today, but go to Factor.ai and you’ll find all of that.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Pete Mockaitis
My final challenge is, at this stage of the game, you can find a job that motivates you the right way, or you can turn yours into motivates you the right way. Like, when I first entered the workforce, the reason why I studied this was I was so demotivated in my first job, I couldn’t even tell you why I was. I couldn’t even explain to you the reason that I was feeling demotivated, and I didn’t have the tools to fix that. I didn’t have the tools to understand that.

Thirty years later, we have the tools to understand it. We have the tools to fix it. So, my ask of everyone is if you’re feeling like you’re in a state of demotivation, don’t linger in that. Like, these are now solvable problems. Take a step. Learn more about it. You can fix this.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, Neel, thank you. I wish you much peak performance.

Neel Doshi
Thanks, Pete. I really appreciate it.