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welcome welcome everyone my name is amitra henry and i'm the senior director of strategic initiatives at the institute for public relations ibr is a non-profit dedicated to fostering greater use of research in public relations and corporate communications today marks our celebration of ipr's 65th anniversary and our first ever ipr give day we are celebrating with special events and surprises for ipr supporters and contributors who make our vision possible we hope you can follow along with us spread the message share on social and donate if you're able to you can learn more about ipr give day at our website which is institute4pr.org before we start if you have any questions at any time please use the q a box at the bottom of your screen to submit our great presenters today will collect the questions in moderate as they see fit so with that let's get to it integral and employee activation agency in the harris poll a market research and analytics company recently released a new report called the integral employee activation index the report explains the impact of societal and political issues in workplace experience unemployed perceptions and behavior this webinar will dive into the key findings leading the webinar is ethan mccarthy ceo of integral and rob gaelic managing director at the harris poll thank you both so much for being with us here today so with that ethan i'm handing you the floor awesome thanks so much anitra and it's such a privilege to be with you all today i i have personally been a beneficiary of ipr's fabulous research you know i spent a bunch of years at ibm and at bloomberg prior to founding integral and i've just been a follower and a supporter for a long time so um i'm just so pleased to be part of today's event to be part of give day it's a big deal for us at integral and it is also just really really fun to get to share the time uh with my friend rob with whom i've had a great ongoing dialogue over the years we have our shared connection through ipr and page and a lot of shared interests so it was a natural it was natural for me to reach out to rob when i wanted to conduct this study for for many years i've been on the receiving end of very interesting studies about employee engagement employee satisfaction various motivating factors different kinds of communications tendencies and so on but in founding integral my sense was that there were still a lot of questions to be asked maybe a little bit differently and so you know we have a point of view at integral that employees are a public perhaps the most important public of any organization and um you know very often you see that employees are kind of treated almost like owned media in a way or something you know like we'll just interrupt people uh with a message and expect them to go take action or like paid media we we own the employees field of view and so we should be able to sort of like push them into this direction or that and by giving them the message one time because they're paid they should be able to internalize that message but we would advocate that um first of all employees are not media at all but if they are in that analogy they're earned so employees must be won over and and uh you know your the way you do that as an employer well one of the key mechanisms for doing that successfully is communicating successfully um so if you have any uh you know if you want to have any chance of aligning employees with a strategy and ensuring that their behaviors and actions align with that strategy not just what they do but how they do it it's really really important to understand their perceptions of what is most important to them so we came up with this construct called employee activation which stands in contrast to internal communications because we have identified a group of people employees who are remarkable for their uh and identifiable for their relationship with an employer and then activation that is the sense of their um their activity so do their behaviors um change do they stay constant and so on as opposed to internal and communication two constructs that are useful maybe in identifying a department for budgetary reasons but not really in line with how people experience work so today rob and i are going to share with you uh a readout from uh the from the research that we did uh as you mentioned the employee activation index uh is what we're talking about today i'm just gonna share my screen is that looking okay to you all right now yes you can see the screen good okay so we're going ethan we can see your screen but you can see your desktop so it's the screen on top of your desktop uh thank you let me just get that right here uh all right okay thanks that's probably looking a little better they'll look sharper all right thanks rob so um in fielding the research you know i want to turn the mic over to you for a second rob um just to talk a little bit about how we went about it and who the resource who the research comprises and so on so would you mind sharing a little bit about that rob yeah uh we'll just kick off very quick so um a very deep representative sample of uh employed americans right so again here what we're looking for is people who have um you know they have an employment role and by getting a sample of 2 000 versus a more kind of typical 1000 we're also able to dig into a lot of underlying demographics so uh clearly we can get into generations there's actually some really interesting mindsets we're going to look at and in addition to a variety of social political issues we'll also be able to go a little bit under the hood in terms of demographics such as racial background right so again we're looking at a sample here that's representative of the working public also representative of white black african-american hispanic as as well as a number of additional demographics but namely rolled up into um asian pacific islander um in addition to that you know again just a clear representation across uh generational groups which is really important when you look at this study right we're looking at both attitudes and behaviors and we really want to see what that intersection looks like based on the the background and and how people are viewing the world today yeah and you know at the end of the day uh you know we we are talking about the workforce uh and so it was really important for us to talk to employed people and so that's kind of the the perceptions that we were trying to gather we did um one of the the place where i would like to start is with this idea of political and social issues we gave participants a pick list of 25 issues that we thought uh that that we asked them whether or not they thought it was important for their organization to make a positive difference on these issues and you can see it's a very wide-ranging list from you know israel and palestine issues to uh second amendment rights access to health care the environment and so on um and where people landed the top five issues first of all i guess i would say i mean rob i think when we were talking about it it was i think surprising to both of us that environmental issues didn't rank a little higher um because they're you know there's so much i mean even like today i'm sitting here in an office where it's like it's like raining in my office you know new york city is is basically underwater for like the uh fourth or fifth time in the last couple months um so people are really really focused on environment but it it came in at about 18 but the number one issue that people chose was employees good health and well-being and so that's the number one issue 40 of people put in their top five uh that this was the most important issue for employers to take a stand on and to to make a positive impact followed by the cluster in between 20 and 26 but the next one in that list is job creation and so just internally we had a you know we have some hypotheses about this and and the the kind of leading thought that we've got right now is that we're in we're in a moment where many institutions are failing people everything from you know overrun health care or people suspicious of the police governmental you know log jams and so on and meanwhile you know we we have a very very you know in the midst of this pandemic we have a strong need to be taken care of and so we think people are potentially looking at their employers and saying hey i want you to have my back when it comes to my economic security and my health and well-being so it's very important i think many people who are in our profession of communications um have already spent the last year like really doubling down on this messaging i think that this is a strong indication that that's going to continue perhaps unsurprisingly the third on the list is racial inequity discrimination hate crimes uh prejudice and bias and so you know in the midst of particularly in the united states a a really widespread reckoning with uh systemic injustice and systemic racism uh you know it is it makes a lot of sense that this which this would rank highly this is definitely something that's been on people's minds um and absolutely uh people have been experiencing this issue uh in the workplace in uh any number of ways um the one that i think surprised me most is the next one on the list and that's data privacy um i would never have guessed that data privacy would end up being an issue that employees want their employers to make a positive difference on but again with you know the environment in which we're all living where there's a data breach a hack a disclosure you know every day some companies is under attack or the government's under attack or governments are attacking each ot oh my gosh the site you know the cyber um uh sort of environment is very threatening and volatile meanwhile who has more information about you than your employer so i think one of the things that this indicates for folks in our profession is that it may be equally important to ensure that employees understand that you're taking care of their data and build that into your messaging as you do i mean here we are in the midst of cyber security month as you're going about you know creating campaigns to protect your organizations uh you know sort of um you know data privacy and and you know sort of cyber you know surface area um be sure to include that message that you know you've got the employees best interests at heart as well um yeah yeah rob ethan i mean i'll i'll just add on to that right i mean i think when you look at the world today especially in the u.s everything around the like cyber security as you mentioned and ransomware data provided data privacy is more top of mind for americans and especially employed americans than it's ever been you know again an issue that maybe have been has been more centered in certain industries in the past is now kind of ever-present um and i mean what we're seeing here in general i think it lines up really nicely with the bigger perspective on things but especially because we're looking at employed americans um you don't get as much of just the access to health care you know if you look at at a broader public we actually just finished a study with the milken institute looking at 27 different countries and one of the consistent takeaways was access to health care so here it's a bit of a different vein and a much more unique and purposeful perspective for employed americans in terms of well-being um as well as some of these other issues which are so central to american life today that really is an interesting insight and because you know healthcare in the us is so so uh deeply tied to employment yeah i can see how that would drive that number down um the last one on this list of the top five is 20 of people indicated that gender wage and leadership gap uh was a and you know and gender equity in in leadership roles uh was a top five issue for them um the good news here i think particularly is uh that the result like that that result is more or less evenly split between men and women so this is not like a women's issue this is a this is like a human rights issue and so uh if if you had any doubt about how to message that and how to support that um i would say full-throated is a good approach uh rob any insights or perspective on that no again i had it's just a really good kind of uh evaluation of where the minds of americans and employed americans are today and how it fits in with the broader cultural trends you know these are all mission critical right these aren't kind of like sideshow issues these are central priorities that employees really want to understand where you are and you know relationship to employee support based on them yeah um and you know in the full report which is available you know it's freely available on on team integral.com you'll see that we did a number of different cuts of the data um these issues by things like uh you know the self-selected ethnicity um generation and so on um but one of the things that you pointed out to me rob is that um you know that top line issue in particular is so evenly spread uh across uh across the kind of you know ethnic or racial identities um that that's one to really pay attention to so there's a lot of discussion these days about whether or not it makes sense to enable and allow and encourage employees to uh to talk about politics at work to use employee uh systems you know your your yammer slack intranet and so on uh to to discuss uh political issues and it turns out that like so many things in the u.s we're pretty evenly divided around this issue so about half of people believe that they should be able to have the ability to express their political views at work and about half of people say they feel comfortable doing so we did see some generational splits on that one rob do you uh want to comment on that um yeah i mean this is this is a pretty consistent split that you see across kind of america today right like it's just everything is a lot of 50 50 and then you you see splits that go kind of more one way or more towards social issues more kind of stay quiet when you kind of go gen z versus boomer as an example um but a very important kind of you know context for for communication and kind of ensuring that we're both kind of you know being very modern and on trend um and also kind of empathetic to you know the different kind of expectations that a variety of stakeholders have you know one of the implications uh of what you just said i think is you know you look at what your long-term hiring and employee experience strategy is going to be and creating spaces in which people can express their political views and be heard uh in the workplace that may be that may become more of a requirement than a nice to have over time uh given the tendency for millennial millennials and gen z's to to want to you know exhibit that kind of behavior in the workplace agreed all right so um moving right along this one uh is going to kind of drive the rest of our discussion this area here around the 6436 split so we asked folks um do your you know do you feel that your organization performs on your personal values so like is there alignment between your personal values and the organizational values and 64 percent of people said yeah actually my organization does reflect my personal values and yet a very substantial number of people more than a third say they do not um does this you know you had some um some thinking about this split i mean from you know when i first saw it rob i thought okay well great at least a majority is you know at least a majority is uh you know feeling that sense of alignment oh yeah i mean 36 of any employee base uh it's like a massive constituency right so if that constituency is with you you have a huge uh edge versus peers right that's kind of like think of this across your organization from the front lines middle management you know how are people waking up in the morning what do they feel like are they energized are they motivated to go or are they feeling that you know they should be looking for something different or just getting through their day so they can get to you know the other important things in their life right so this is like that 36 percent of a workforce that's you know ten thousand a hundred thousand you know several hundred thousand is those those are massive numbers and a huge uh if you're talking about strategy right this is where strategy lives or dies right if you have 36 percent of people who are kind of not kind of following through or giving that extra effort your strategy will surely fail well that's and rob i think that's the linkage that we're looking for too because you know what we're finding is that that um perception of the organization's values translates very much to how people show up in their work how they feel and you know what their sort of you know their kind of waking energy is to coming to work which then directly directly relates to whether or not they're likely to advocate for or to work at cross purposes to a company's strategy so you know the folks who felt that alignment uh you know 43 so more than double we're likely to show up feeling uh confident and you can see the split same thing with grateful and motivated so you have that alignment you show up feeling ready to go whereas if you lack that enviro that alignment it's two and a half more than two and a half times likely to feel tired indifferent or underappreciated you know about three times as likely on underappreciated so um so very very big effect of that alignment on your mindset which then directly translates to the behaviors that you would exhibit so when you're feeling that alignment employees say that they are almost twice as likely to stay with an organization in challenging times um go the extra mile for a colleague or a client back to that discretionary effort that you just described rob help somebody outside of their team or defend the organization engage in mentoring volunteer with the organization or participate in a charitable giving or matches twice as likely to to exhibit some of those behaviors that are positive to the organization yeah i mean this is this is the the key point i think you just made on these last two slides right if you're walking in to talk with your ceo and trying to figure out how we kind of integra like address issues or take advantage of opportunities marketplace opportunities versus fierce competition what kind of employee does your ceo want to be there right what kind of c what kind of employee does does the management team need in place in order to beat uh you know the competition right it's just not going to happen if you don't have it's that two times right it's it's a two it's not a incremental 10 20 30 percent it's a 200 percent yeah yeah and and you look at the relationship to people's feelings of of loyalty their likelihood to publicly advocate by putting up a positive review online their likelihood to stay with the employer that all goes up as they experience that that values alignment this is a little bit um you know a little bit just to give you a sample of some of the tactics that we suggest you can see in this chart it shows that generally speaking employees across generations are ready to give a positive review to their employer online so this is something that we really encourage and we work with uh you know team integral we work with organizations to help construct programs to get employees to do that kind of advocacy on behalf of their employer without getting in trouble with the you know the programs like glassdoor linkedin and so on um that said you can also see speaking of that uh behavior online you can also see a much higher likelihood for those who have that alignment with their organization's values to interact with the company's channels online you know facebook instagram youtube so people are much more likely if they're feeling really positive about their own um sort of their own values and the work workplace values being aligned they're gonna follow on facebook they might share stuff on facebook they might you know do those kind of things like on on linkedin almost twice as likely to uh to to uh interact with and follow the organization on on these um external channels and then the same thing happens internally so much more likely to participate in things like slack yammer intranet discussions and so on yeah and ethan i would just kind of double down on your point on just a lot of these behaviors right i mean today we're talking about attitudes and behaviors and how values have a big impact right behaviors are such a critical component here right as we know if we get employees to start uh starting to behave in ways that really kind of line up to the company and in ways they can express their their their values right that's how you get that self-reinforcing cycle right and you also get you're getting the right people to opt in um and showcase the kind of place that you're that you really want to be and you want to bring in top talent to and we've talked about culture we've talked about strategy quite a bit but culture is also affected as well so you know those who who feel that alignment are much more likely to describe the culture in an organization with positive descriptors like supportive safe caring purposeful and innovative um which again leaves those behaviors yeah go ahead ethan i think we should just leave this one up right i mean how many of us at the company we work at have in you know in our in some boiler plate or somewhere on our website or somewhere kind of on our wall a set of these words or composition of these words yeah right so these are the things we are we are striving for um and we've spent a lot of time and effort kind of reinforcing that this this is what makes us the unique this is what we need to do in order to succeed right so what we're talking about today is one of the the clear pathways for for getting kind of engagement and real kind of action behavior and stealing your your term active activism and activation right this is this is the critical key piece right you know it's um i'm really glad you brought that up i i think there's uh you know any good research answers a lot of questions i think it also asks a lot of questions i think when we and we do we do plan to you know do this uh research again or some you know maybe some variation of it um there's deeper probing i think i would like to do around culture um you know the perceptions of culture but also how the uh you know how the cultural attributes also lead to you know some of those actions that you were just talking about um that the inverse of a lot of these positive behaviors also happens to be true and so we asked people if they thought a colleague or a teammate would do any of these actions and uh things like warning a candidate away or quitting the organization and so on and what we found was that yeah lo and behold people who lack that values alignment they're much more likely to say that a teammate would warn a candidate away so 25 percent would quit not comply with organizational policies protest or walk out which of course we're seeing i mean just in the last few weeks you know pilots from united employees at uh netflix um you know there's unionization efforts i think underway at kellogg's i mean there's a number of um actions that are taking place on behalf of that employees are taking a number of actions because of their sense of misalignment with their organization um and so uh you know we see things like disclosing confidential information or even sabotaging the organization which could be you know any kind of thing i mean it could be uh you know um you've seen we've all seen the youtube videos of people doing you know terrible things in food service industry or um delivering packages by throwing them over a fence and these kind of things that's the kind of stuff that just you know we believe will happen a lot less if you really put the effort into making that values alignment happen i want to go through a couple slides just right now about some distinctions we found with uh those with kids in the household and those with kids not in the household and then we'll open it up for questions in just a moment i will say if you have any questions go ahead and pop them in the q a right now happy to take them um and um we'll just keep moving along here um so uh in general uh folks with kids in the household are generally more likely to be activated so taking behaviors against or for their employer so you can see twice as likely to advocate for unionization nearly twice as likely to write a negative review online those with kids in the home but also significantly more likely to be involved in a mentoring program or um to volunteer at work um or even to buy company stock we don't know one of the things that we don't know about the no kids column it could be empty nests it doesn't mean that they're not parents it could be empty nesters it could be people who are very young and just haven't had children yet it could be people who've chosen not to have children we don't know much about that but what we do know is that those who have children in the household are much more likely to want to return to the office i see you smiling rob because uh both of us as dads very eager to get out of the the home office and away from our children um and then uh but also strangely and we have i have no idea maybe rob you have a theory on this but those with kids in the household are less likely to show up at work saying that they feel tired uh rob does that carry uh for you too do you just not feel tired in the morning uh i mean i i think it's a mixed bag right like there's um it must be your fault yeah exactly it depends uh i think you know having a bit of a break is always is always helpful i think you know where we are today and coming coming out of the summer hopefully there's a lot more normalcy in a lot of people's uh houses right so i think it's been it's been uh i'm sure you could you you can share this experience it's been up and down right you've both had these uh opportunities to be like really close to family especially with your kids you're you know again you're spending more time and it's fantastic you're getting to see a lot of things and then there's also certain things where you know there's just a little bit more just a little bit more friction in the mix 100 and i wonder too i mean this will be really interesting to watch over time how these data change as more folks are just like they're back in the office and schools are open and so on in person so uh so we'll see how that uh we'll see how that plays out again here's another little breakdown uh oh sorry go ahead rob we were about to say i think there's there's a lot of um employers who actually are going out of their way to figure out ways to help kind of working parents and figure out how to make that work as well right so i think they're they're they're a group that's definitely gotten a lot of kind of attention and effort during the the covid period um i don't know if enough but like certainly there has there have been a lot of different efforts for sure so you know we'll see i guess over time uh you know this is a obviously it's a it's a point in time piece of research uh that's you know during a very unusual time uh for the united states for the world um so we'll see what carries through but you know as you said on another conversation we are in rob if there's one thing you walk away with walk away with that 2x number uh you know those who have that um that feeling that their organization's values uh reflect their personal values are just twice as likely to feel positive feelings about their job uh twice as likely to feel those uh positive or believe you know carry those positive beliefs about the company's culture and twice as likely to take action to to mentor to you know to uh help somebody outside of their team to go the extra mile for a client and critically during this moment of the great resignation uh they're you know almost twice as likely to uh to stay with the organization during a challenging time um rob any uh final thoughts before we open it up for questions of which i do not see many um there's activity in the background there's some some parenting going on maybe in in the home there's a lot there's lots of parenting going on yeah it's a bit of a blur no it's all good uh i mean again i think the 2x thing is just such a mission critical as we're thinking of business success and strategy right like it's you know to the point you just made the the great resignation the the the war for talent right now is fiercer than it's ever been right so if we're stuck in just kind of like short-term benefits like pay yeah i think there's a there's a ton of research um over you know a long period over the last couple decades those are real like hygiene factors right those are not differentiators you know if you can improve pay you basically get people to be like oh i don't hate the company and i feel it's being fair to me right these are the kinds of things where you're looking at real differentiators where what you're what you're really getting to is being able to enable employees to feel like they're part of something bigger something something that they actually should be proud of something that they should be investing their their resources in right that they should feel you know very good about like you know spending time away from their family doing right and then feeling very confident coming back to their family and feeling very kind of grateful and motivated versus you know depressed or underappreciated or tired right so this is this is kind of this is the territory and especially as we're looking at you know the path forward again we're not looking at a 10 incremental impact we're looking at a 2x benefit it's such a good point and you know the one of the ways that i've been thinking about this for a long time i mean even in the in the founding of integrals that we're often asked to spend our days believing two things that are more or less opposite you know our personal beliefs may be in one direction and then we come into the workplace and we have to you know conform to the beliefs of the workplace and the kind of behaviors of the workplace and there's a there's a term in psychology for the stress that one feels when having to hold two conflicting concepts in your mind at the same time it's called cognitive dissonance and i really do believe it is possible for organizations to listen to their employees understand what is most valuable to their employees and not necessarily crowdsource the company's policy or values though i mean there's i think there's a model there too but emphasize within the organization's uh programs uh within the organization's philanthropic effort within esg efforts and certainly within uh the way executives and leaders show up in the organization the ways in which that organization uh will value what employees value will put their time energy and reputation at stake to support those things and that's what you're talking about rob that's that um strategic differentiator that is completely available i would say uh to any employer um and and yet um you know the opportunity let's say remains very very broad absolutely i mean for a lot of people you've just brought in a lot of talent where you've where you've added whatever it is 20 30 40 renumeration right you've now really invested in a lot of people like using hard earned resources how are you going to keep them right is that going to be is that going to be enough so uh and then also what are you going to do to continue to keep the the top talent that that's you know that's seeing all these people coming in in many cases knowing there there's a lot of you know additional remuneration and incentives or whatever right right this is kind of like the um this is this is the battle church this is the territory that we're in right now this is where leading companies really differentiate themselves from the rest um so with that i'm opening it up for questions in nitra um not sure if you have any or if there are some that are coming to you through chat that i don't see and over to you oh thank you guys so much again for being here so um i don't think that i have any questions per se but more or less more of a deeper dive i am just really curious about the whole employees being willing to sabotage their companies like um what differentials did you see across generational um or were there any were there more gen xers that were willing to do it than say um these or millennials did you notice any of those differences are you projecting are you a gen xer so you're are you ready to should we be talking with okay we wanted to talk with the boss here i don't think i have that cut by generation in front of me i don't know if you do rob but i you know i think it's a really it's an interesting question i think the thing that really jumped out to us was it wasn't a low single digit number uh i mean 17 is is absolutely shocking to think that you know if if i don't if i don't have a sense of that um support and that my identity seen that my values are reflected in in my organizations that i think 17 of my colleagues are ready to throw a spanner in the works um that is that is a uh to me that was a huge eye-popping issue rob did you notice anything about that um i've we'll certainly double check the data to go back into it i don't think there's anything that popped off from like uh from a generational perspective um i can say from from other research that we do most typically where you're seeing um those types of things emerge if they do it's in large employee populations and it's people who are feeling that they're further away from kind of the center of the organization whatever that means right if the center of your organization is more like a centralized force then that's what it is right but again you're it's more typically you're seeing you know frontline workers who don't necessarily so i mean i think that's really important is we're looking at a lot of uh we're not just looking at you know hourly employees here or whatever right there are a lot of like full-time employees but you're looking at a lot of frontline workers right they have very different perspectives than you know for a lot of employees cove it's been very different right you know we're here on kind of like a virtual call if you will for for a lot of you know comms people there you know if you're at you know kroger or walmart um a lot of different organizations you know you have you have a huge diversity of employees by their background but also kind of the roles that they're playing right and they and again sabotage can be like a very small thing or it can be a very large substantive thing so but the numbers in general are very distressing to see that at 17 right absolutely so i do have a question as we talk through this that i want to pose to both of you so ethan i'm going to ask you first because you mentioned in the beginning that you were shocked by the absence of or where actually um environmental issues fail right what other major takeaways really shocked you as you went through the data in this and then rob i'm going to ask you the same question well i think um thanks for that question i think the i mean one of the big things that kind of stands out to me there are two uh actually there's more than two but two that i'll mention right now one is just how heterogeneous our workforces are i mean that was definitely a you know that was definitely kind of a an opinion i held previously that we need to do a better job particularly in organizations that have thousands of employees of segmenting the communications and segmenting and personalizing the experience that employees have based on things that are relevant to them so like my identity or you know my schedule or my needs or whatever unique characteristics of myself that i bring to work so that's one thing and this i think the data here just show like we really need to be thinking like one size fits all is rarely a good communications approach within an organization and then the other thing was that the you know i've spent the last 20 plus years of my life i mean like i was working on ibm's values jam you know almost 20 years ago and this is and you know i've been doing the values work for a long time and it has always been my sort of hypothesis that we should include employees in the formulation of an organization's values because at the end of the day they're the ones who've got to live it and um you know and it to some degree uh most organizations do that uh but at the end of the day what often ends up happening is you know kind of the uh you know the tablets get passed down from the from the holy mountain and here are the values and now you must conform with them um and that's kind of the message that employees get uh i think we're in a moment where that approach is probably perilous it probably makes sense for employers to do a lot more involvement of employees in their the formulation of their values how they're expressed and then also understanding how the organization shows up in society in the community and is there alignment with people's identities so it's kind of the inverse it's almost like that listening capability most organizations massively over index on their ability to interrupt employees with messages and under index on their ability to pursue to understand the perceptions of employees and what employees care about rob i was actually so enthralled with ethan's responses that the the ques i've repeat the question for the question i just want to make sure that now so as you went through the data for you all to compile this report what were the major things that surprised you that just really stuck out to you that you were like huh that's an aha i didn't realize this this is not what i was thinking i was going to find as i go through the data yeah i mean i think the the number one for sure is just the 2x impact right so as you're looking at that kind of values relationship that for sure is the the standard feature and i think that one that that a lot of um communicators managers uh hr folks can take away in in a very kind of actionable way um i mean i think the the big piece of it that's just as you're looking at that as being kind of the key ingredients making sure just to the points that ethan was making that you're you're really understanding it in a much more contextual fashion right so again you know obviously we're i'm a huge advocate of research but the whole kind of idea of being able to segment people into groups is critical um and i just i would just reinforce especially when we're into the spaces that we're talking about here um you know qualitative insight is just as important as anything quantitative right qualitative is a good validator and you can have these big kind of overarching takeaways that we're talking about now um but really kind of understanding how this fits in with people's lives and different kind of personas of employees is just a a mission critical for being able to really kind of make it work in ways that you know feel right and that people can really get behind and and understand versus it being more of like an esoteric concept yeah so again that the whole point of personalization that's so smart and i think well i was just going to say you know we integral we work with a bunch of clients where we help them to develop these listening programs and you know it always starts with okay let's go field a survey and i'm like okay well probably we should have a survey of some sort and um but you know you know the actual interaction with employees on an ongoing basis in a dialogue uh is like you can't replace that and and to the extent that that can be um that you know the leadership of the organization can be visible and part of that process is also really really critical because in the asking you're also telling something you're saying look i actually i care i'm going to spend the time you know the ceo or the chro or some senior vice president is going to sit down and take time out of his or her day and actually listen that is a powerful message of itself and you can't really get that just from a qualitative and from a point quite a quantitative but that is like one of the biggest misses it's not the biggest misses but you know whenever you do research you also you want to make sure there's a feedback loop right if people are telling you something you want to ensure that you know you're telling people you've heard them and this is how you're actually going to change action in ance to it um the other thing i'll just reinforce is more of like a tactical thing um from from a lot of the work i've been doing over the years it's like middle managers are also the critical ingredient to all this right really really being able to address and figure out what's going on with middle managers how do you motivate them what do values really mean how does it translate from kind of a concept in terms of day-to-day work because right for better for worse those are the folks that are translating kind of like the the pillars from on high to kind of like the day-to-day job right so it's where the rubber hits the road and all this stuff turns from kind of a data point or a concept into something that really works or it doesn't it actually you know it empowers people people feel good about it they kind of dive in they feel confident they feel motivated or they feel underappreciated and tired um there's a question in the chat here from barry bartlett barry thanks for the question the question is how do the results speak to the comprehensiveness and effectiveness of hiring onboarding orienting of new employees to ensure values are aligned out of the gate would appear many organizations are not doing a good job here i tend to agree with your assessment barry having looked at many uh onboarding programs uh in my uh career but um we didn't i we didn't pro i think we do have tenure as one of the questions that we asked folks but i don't think we did a cut on uh tenure against values alignment but i think that's a really interesting question and one that i definitely want to go look back at the data on uh rob um again i think it's it'd be good to go back to the day to give you a firm answer but i can give you there's a general like anecdotal trend that i can refer to again a trend that we've seen that you see many times when you look at employees that are first you know first year or two in they tend to be kind of like most high energy most optimistic that's kind of like the honeymoon period right they basically joined they've really bought in they're like i'm in i'm joining i've made a choice you know we found a good fit um for for some companies you're able to actually sustain that and you don't get like a plateau or dive your problem is is that a if people come in and they don't feel very well aligned and then it just drops off after that kind of year or two year period like there's and you can see that in some companies pretty dramatically like those are huge risk in the air issue indicators um but to the point you're making i i you know good on boarding is just you know it's mission critical right like it's not just it's it's you want people to feel good about it but you also want to make sure that people understand how the company works how it operates what it stands for you know and how that gets operationalized in terms of decision making right like what are the kinds of decisions that really get rewarded based on character and integrity versus don't right so it's yeah it's it's really good onboarding that goes beyond just the benefits package is just such a mission critical i've looked at um dozens over the years dozens maybe maybe a hundred i don't know onboarding programs from companies i've worked with and for and so on and um it's really remarkable because i think there is a huge opportunity i mean a lot a lot a lot of them have a moment in the uh in the onboarding process uh and it's usually like orientation like you have to go sit in a room for a day or online for a day or whatever and ingest a lot of powerpoint and at some point they say here are our values and maybe there's some storytelling around it here's why the founder loves the values here's why the employees love the values here's why our clients love the values i think that's that's fine but i think it kind of meets minimum um the best examples uh look at the values and bring those values into the like into the candidate and even pre-candidate experience some of our clients were working with them on the overall employee experience reaching back into like all right well how do we show up as an employer does our employee value proposition contain the you know our organization's values does you know on day one i mean we're just a small tactic we're working with one uh client right now where um you know as they introduce new employees they put you know kind of a screen up at the town hall and they have a picture of everybody in their role and what we're helping them change to is you put the picture up they put their um title up and those kind of things but they also have asked employees in the candidate experience which one of our four values resonates most with you and why and so they actually get a verbatim you know like okay well this person joined this company because this value was important to them and so getting people to i mean that's just like one small tactic but getting people to actually interact with and you know translate for themselves the values of the organization is as important as anything you know it's more important i would say than you know employees being able to recite them so do we anticipate any other changes in culture in the near future oh yeah i mean i think we're all we're we're in the midst of it um one of the things that i think happened thanks for that question i think it's a fabulous question given the topic that we're on um one of the things that happened in the last year and a half is that uh the remote workforce um became went from being the minority the kind of forgotten minority to the majority and very central and many executives i think the leaders uh really had for the first time their taste of being like a remote employee not just being you know in the corporate jet and needing to like dial in from there or something but like actually being at home and having to interact with colleagues a hundred percent of the time uh you know through virtual mechanisms um i think that that is having a profound impact on our relationship with work um and culture and the development of culture particularly um it can't it can no longer be the case that culture is you know pizza fridays in the office or something like that that's not enough um the failure of the foosball table i think is epic like we already knew that uh prior to the pandemic i mean you know when my team and i would do a site visit and we'd see a room full of foosball tables we're like okay there's a failed culture initiative and now i think there's going to be a whole new set of of indications of whether or not your your culture is thriving people are going to look for signals in entirely different ways um that may be you know frankly much more mediated through digital uh mechanisms such as what we're on right now rob what do you think yeah i i mean i think right now you're just you're in a massive uh culture inflection point right i mean what culture looks like i mean what does collaboration look like right i think there's you know again we're i mean this fortuitous position that we do lots of research on different topic areas so i mean what you've seen happen with technology during covid has it's some of it's really you know it's really hard everyone's stuck at home but for a lot of people in terms of collaboration there's actually been a ton of benefits right there's like if you're going into um you know a collaboration session you can actually get a lot of people from a lot more areas like both a lot of backgrounds a lot of different geographies and in many cases you now have a lot of people who may have more of like they're not necessarily the most vocal person who actually have an equal voice right and technology is like a huge enabler for this right so you there's actually a lot of really interesting inflection points that are happening right now um and and hopefully for for the better kind of coming out of some you know obviously a lot of the terrible stuff that you know has been happening over the course of the last two years yeah i think it's really interesting too like the the kind of uh you know the the kind of uh psychological profile of organizations i think is also going to be impact and what i mean by that is um there is a bias in most workplace design towards certain personality types um and so you know like the round conference table where you know the most vocal person wins or you know what have you um and um you know that is going to be under that it already is under a lot of pressure and one of the things i think is interesting is it does i mean like this whole you know this whole situation that we're in that we've been going through with the pandemic um may have some very interesting implications for people who have different personality types introverts may have a completely different experience and platform now likewise we are looking into literally looking into people's homes um and i think the impact of of that is profound there is a you know a um you know there's an implication for what you know about me when you see me log in from home and my children are running around my identity is quite different and so i think there's a a potential um you know positive impact i hope for um issues of inclusion um in the workplace to really be able to relate to people as humans in profoundly new ways that we never would have when we put our masks on you know our metaphorical mass not our actual k-95s when we put on our metaphorical mass and show up at the office um some of that i think is being is being pulled down and that will have it already is having a real impact on um organizational culture yeah i mean and not to mention people who have like real like physical disabilities right i mean it's actually it's pretty huge yeah we have um one of our um our senior consultants she's a she she has a physical disability um brought about by a brain injury when she was a child and um she recently wrote an essay a couple months ago that it was just really fascinating her year of not being disabled you know because she shows up on a uh on a zoom and you don't see that she walks with a limp and so on and so um presenting in a very different way and then showing up as we did together on uh in person at a client site um was like oh right like they didn't you know they had no reason to think of her differently uh you know and um that changes the dynamic in some very real ways that you know i hope there could be some silver lining to the cloud here that people may be able to say oh wow i just loved interacting with you and now i see that you have some physical disability and it's like that's not central to my understanding of your identity at all are there other ways that the two of you think that these findings might change in the next few years what's your prediction rob let's take some best addiction yeah if we if we run this survey next summer what do you think changes um all this stuff continues to get more important right i mean i'll just think that like oh okay yeah i mean what you're at right now is people like if anything over the last two years there have been there's been a lot of reflection on you know what am i doing with my life right like why was i not i think for a lot of you like why wasn't i spending more time with my kids like why i was like you know why am i i've heard this story like especially in investment banking right where suddenly you had people who were you know like uh first couple years of investment banking and they just got thrown home because everything went so crazy and like people around them were like what are you doing they had no idea that someone works in 100 hours or 120 hours a week they're like what are you doing with your life and they're like what do you mean this is normal they're like no it's not like that's insane right but it's a no but it's it's people just been like okay what do i what should i be doing what's really what's important to me right i mean i think that i you know um if i'm sure many of you guys know people who've written like uh essays for entry into really you know high end whether it's ivy league schools or mba you