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Zach Chertok on What Employee Experience Really Means
5 Plays14 days ago
Employee experience isn’t an HR problem — it’s a business one.
In this episode of Behind the Build, Curtis Forbes is joined by Zach Chertok, Senior Research Manager for Employee Experience at IDC and faculty member at Columbia University. Zach brings a rare perspective shaped by engineering, public policy, workforce strategy, and market research.
They explore what employee experience actually means beyond surveys and perks, why stress is managed more often than measured, and how leaders can better connect data, communication, and workforce outcomes. Zach explains how vendors, buyers, and investors interpret EX differently and where organizations often get it wrong.
The conversation also covers recognition as a source of performance insight, the future of work in an AI-driven world, and why leaders must focus on augmentation rather than replacement.
This episode is essential for leaders who want clarity around employee experience.
About Zach:
Zach Chertok is the Senior Research Manager for Employee Experience at IDC. There he looks at all aspects of how organizations support, equip, and enable employee journeys to ultimately benefit from them across modeled KPIs. He has been in the labor and organizational management space for 17 years on various sides of the technology and services sectors that enable companies to optimize success with their people. In that time, Zach has had the opportunity to work in and with a lot of different industrial sectors spanning a variety of organizational sizes to understand and advise through various perspectives on tech, organizational management, project planning, and more. Today, he brings that advisory to IDC, leading IDC's EX practice while also teaching at Columbia University.
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Transcript
Introduction to Mustard Hub Voices with Zach Chirtok
00:00:06
Speaker
Welcome to today's Fireside Chat. It's time for another episode of Mustard Hub Voices Behind the Build, where I sit down with the people building, backing, and running better workplaces. I'm your host, Curtis Forbes. Our guest today is Zach Chirtok.
00:00:22
Speaker
Zach is the Senior Research Manager for employee experience at IDC. And there he looks at all aspects of how organizations support, equip, and enable employee journeys to ultimately benefit from them across modeled KPIs.
Zach Chirtok's Background and Career Journey
00:00:39
Speaker
He's been in the labor and organizational management space for 17 years on various sides of the technology and services sectors that enable companies to optimize success with their people. In that time, Zach has had the opportunity to work in and with a lot of different industrial sectors spanning a variety of organizational sizes to understand and advise through various perspectives on tech, organizational management, project planning, and more.
00:01:09
Speaker
Today, he brings that advisory to IDC, leading IDC's EX practice while also teaching at Columbia University. Welcome to Behind the Build, Zach. Thanks for joining me.
00:01:20
Speaker
great to be here. Thanks for having me. That is quite a bio. you And you you teach and advise as a hobby.
00:01:31
Speaker
Is that right? Yeah, when I got into teaching for the first time, it turns out it's it's the best environment to just be in the room with people who are unafraid to to think and promote their ideas.
00:01:45
Speaker
Fell in love with it and just never wanted to stop. And, you know, advisory, I always joke, pays the bills. Teaching is where it's kind of where the the hobby and the interest and the the lifeline is.
00:01:57
Speaker
So being able to do both in the same arena is a great opportunity. again You also teach for Columbia. So it's kind of it's kind of funny that usually hobbies are are things we do when we leave work. But when you leave work, you decide the best thing that I'm going to do right now is go back to work. The best and the best description I ever heard was because I'm ah im a New Englander through and through.
00:02:23
Speaker
is was a description of the Appalachian Trail and the folks who built it that the New Englanders have this weird habit that they like to work for fun. the yes Maybe that's where I got it from all those years when I lived up there. um You have a really interesting career trajectory. And I took a look at your LinkedIn profile before our you know session here. you and I have gotten to know each other just a little bit earlier.
00:02:47
Speaker
It looks like you originally went to school for civil engineering and applied mechanics. And today you're a strategist and analyst at IDC. So tell me, what does that journey look like? How did you?
00:03:02
Speaker
I'm curious to hear about that path. So first of all, it's actually really common for a lot of civil engineers to go the MBA route eventually. Now, i appreciate I didn't do that because my career got me into studying management for a living rather than having to go pay to to learn it.
00:03:18
Speaker
But um the other thing, too, is my LinkedIn is only about a third of of the pots on the stove, so to speak. So, no um you know, so civil engineering definitely is undergrad. yeah i went up to Montreal to McGill and and loved it, you know,
00:03:33
Speaker
got a chance to work on a lot of projects, including the yeah sections of the master plan for the city through my undergrad studies. wow But I graduated in the financial crisis. So what do you do with a you know infrastructure and building design degree when when no one's building?
00:03:49
Speaker
So through i worked for transportation for the city of Boston for a while and crossover with the state where I still have inroads and and do some informal advisory through colleagues.
00:04:01
Speaker
um But through project management, ended up coming into the tech side for the first time with Kronos pre-UKG. um And from there, that was my first introduction into the the HR management and organizational management side.
00:04:16
Speaker
After that, I got my first run at being an analyst. um Decided I loved it because that advisory side came through ah stronger than I was getting on the vendor side. um got exposure to the entire field of vendors and and service and advisory providers. And you know following the litany on the HCM side, that's where my core career got started.
IDC's Role and Influence in the Tech Industry
00:04:38
Speaker
But during that time, outside of what's on LinkedIn, I've done economic development advisory for cities, including Providence, Rhode Island. i've done I continue to do policy advisory for...
00:04:48
Speaker
um Yeah, for colleagues who serve as as city chief engineers. um So I've kept up the civil engineering side as well, which ultimately, if you take the two career tracks together, led me to do my master of policy administration at Columbia, which during that time is when I got exposed to their HCM program, which is where I've taught since I graduated.
00:05:11
Speaker
Which kind of brings us to today. um And by the way, you make a non-linear route sound very linear. So you did a great job of explaining that in a way that made it sound super obvious. Like, why wouldn't you go in this direction? Of course. um I think it's also emblematic, you're given what we're talking about today. It's emblematic, too, of what a lot of career journeys are going to look like.
00:05:35
Speaker
Yeah, and you have to always be in touch with what your core skill sets, competencies and the applications of them are so that you're not fixating on what others are bringing to you for roles, but what you can bring to a variety of positions.
00:05:49
Speaker
yeah First of all, i I love that. Thank you for centering ah centering us in this conversation for today because I think that that's like super relevant. um Talk to me about what you do. What does your role entail? Tell us about IDC, first of all, and then what is what does your day-to-day look like?
00:06:09
Speaker
So IDC is an interesting organization. it's um one hand, it' you know we do a lot of industry research around different vendor landscapes and what's going on in the tech sector and translating what different vendors are doing into practical analyses of value for companies in the market.
00:06:27
Speaker
To that end, we talk to vendors all the time um to help advise some of their yeah packaging, pricing, brand and branding, and go to market and help them understand who their strategic buyers are when um when they may not be landing as well as they hope to.
00:06:43
Speaker
yeah But we also work with it by at investors and buyers. We do a lot of buyer advisory to connect the dots on the other side. um As an industry analyst firm, we don't necessarily shortlist for them because we don't recommend certain vendors over others.
00:06:57
Speaker
But we help them strategically understand what the characteristics of their shortlist are going to be relative to the problems and the challenges they're trying to resolve.
The Complexities of Employee Experience
00:07:05
Speaker
um and on the investor side, we then connect all those dots together to try to help um yeah the market really understand where the opportunities are going, how the tech sector is evolving.
00:07:17
Speaker
And more importantly, how the if in the HCM side, how the services and strategies are adjusting at different organizations um and and what those trends are leading to in different stakeholder sets, how different technologies are evolving so that they can get a little bit of a future foresight on where the value is going.
00:07:35
Speaker
So we advise all three sides. When I was outside IDC, I used to call it the IDC triangle. um in terms of the model that that the company you know caters to. So we do a lot of survey based research, a lot of buyer engagements, a lot of, ah you know, we attend a lot of vendor events during the year to get exposure to different customer bases and talk to and engage with as many customers, vendors and investors as we can to provide that triangulated pulse on the market and where it's going.
00:08:04
Speaker
um In my little corner of the company, On the HCM side, I'm one of a team of three that reports into our future of work practice. um And within that team of three, we're also looking at the organizational strategy side to talk about best practices as well.
00:08:23
Speaker
I love that. um I think that kind of gives us a pretty clear picture. So, it and it I feel like I have so many more questions. It's turned into a whole bunch more questions. What an industry analyst does. It's like, okay, you know, who, how much time you got? You know, I'm curious who ultimately turns to IDC. So, you know, you talked about folks on the buyer side and you talked about, you know,
00:08:49
Speaker
what How and what you evaluate you know and how these things you know provide value to to those in the market. But what kind of organizations actually come your way and what are the outcomes that they're actually hoping to see? Mm-hmm.
00:09:04
Speaker
So technology vendors, as well as um you know so service and and business change and transformation providers, so you think about the Deloitte's, PwCZ-Ys of the world will will work with us um to understand you know validated third-party trends. We were the provider of those that To understand not just where their customers are going from a buyer sense, but really actually dig into what the strategic challenges are.
00:09:29
Speaker
Because a lot of times being more independent from that set, we can get customers and clients to tell us things that they wouldn't ordinarily directly tell their vendor or their service provider.
00:09:41
Speaker
um So the way they'll answer surveys from us, the conversations they'll have with us, the things that they'll disclose, whether we're doing things like an IDC Marketscape, which is a vendor landscape map, or we're doing you know custom work like analyst spotlights where we'll run features on different vendors and what they're trying to bring to market.
00:10:02
Speaker
We'll have a little bit more of a realistically grounded story that we can tell apart from a vendor's own marketing. And that helps customers understand on the buyer side what they should be considering, when, why, and how.
00:10:15
Speaker
It helps them understand pricing and packaging expectations. It helps them understand what is strategically going to mesh with how their organization is building its mission and vision and its culture.
00:10:26
Speaker
um you know what's going to help people and augment and augment people at work rather than wholesale replace innovation teams that they that you don't want to lose that value. um And then again, all of that triangulates back to the investor side where we can convey direct insights about value in the market and where it's going. in a clearer picture than what you can sometimes glean from the mess of organic information that you could just search for. So it's on the one hand, we're pulling back in so insights direct back from the human side that will guide all three of those parties.
00:11:03
Speaker
But it's also the analyst's interpretation to have that that foresight and the human-to-human relationship with each of those, the vendor, the buyer, and the investor, to to really drive home some of what a you know a chat GPT just won't because it can't look ahead into what hasn't happened yet.
00:11:21
Speaker
Yeah. And it's it's almost a fourth. you know I understand the the vendor, right? They have their interest in to be able to promote things in the marketplace and you can help them do that.
00:11:32
Speaker
There's buyers who need um you know products or services, right? they're looking for a trusted organization that can kind of help them understand what's going to fit those needs that they have. It sounds like there's also advisory firms who help others in the market that essentially need that market research or the expertise so that they can advise on some things that they might not have the same kind of insight.
00:11:58
Speaker
So, yeah, I mean, and that's, you know, I kind of joke when people ask me what the difference between us and a consultant is. We'll go right up to the line of consulting without being prescriptive. Will, in essence, if you think about instead of fishing you know, for the layperson, we'll teach the layperson how to fish.
00:12:13
Speaker
Yeah. So bring the insights, the guidance, the best practices, the selection criteria for how to narrow things down. And once they identify their needs, they'll have a better window through some of the other materials we do with the vendors as to how to narrow down their scope.
00:12:26
Speaker
Um, so we, we really teach the, the stakeholders how to be strategic and how to approach and, and look at the market for what they need and sift through that information because we're looking at it every day.
Stress, Motivation, and Workforce Satisfaction
00:12:40
Speaker
So, I mean, specifically when it comes to, let's talk about employee experience. You're. domain, right? what What are these pain points that clients are looking to solve, right? What solutions are they exploring? Basically, what are they trying to accomplish?
00:12:59
Speaker
So this is this is a good one because it's a bit, <unk> bits its on the one hand, it's squishy. On the other hand, it's defined. i Another sort of stigma for me is One of the things that I hate that they did to my space is call it employee experience because it relegates it to an HR problem and makes it just about the squishiest thing that finance and operations folks don't want to touch.
00:13:21
Speaker
The reality can be further from the truth. It's every remit's challenge. Yeah. well Each different stakeholder has a different perspective on the problems governing how employees connect, engage, and ultimately perform at work.
00:13:34
Speaker
On the traditional HR side, we've got yeah a dual mandate where HR has to look at how managers are incentivized and empowered and enabled to go address issues of employee performance with the fullest context of how what the employee wants meets what the organization needs to deliver and how that's constantly fitting together. At the same time, hr needs to aggregate all the insights around performance productivity, integrate that with business performance value modeling, and try to make a case to
00:14:08
Speaker
at the very least finance and the CEO by way of the finance ah team to say, here's the impact the workforce is having on outcomes. So if the business is succeeding, great, invest more.
00:14:20
Speaker
If the business is having difficulty, don't take that out on the workforce first. Look at the whole picture. yeah um So context is a really, really big challenge that HR leaders are learning how to broaden their scope on what they look at.
00:14:34
Speaker
to identify data sets that are strategic to say, you know how do we identify the characteristics of success, failure, and everything in between? How do we learn what makes the individual tick so that we can better place them according to where they're most likely to succeed?
00:14:50
Speaker
yeah Is that place with our organization or is it something that we're creating? um Connect that back into the mechanics of workforce design, position placement, development, workforce planning.
00:15:02
Speaker
and then even map that out to what current and future pay scales are going to look like. For the operations team in IT, for IT, t there's a data mandate back there as to how all this fits together, particularly as AI modeling is now table stakes.
00:15:19
Speaker
But for operations in IT too, there's a physical resourcing side. As we move people around, as they change skill sets or develop new skill sets, as they change role definitions, responsibilities, How do we make sure every individual at every point in time has the tools and resources they need to fluidly continue succeeding at what they're, you know, yeah achieving what they're responsible for? and then on the finance side, how do we pull all that together to know that we're properly managing the balance sheet while financially incentivizing the right parts of the organization to keep moving forward?
00:15:55
Speaker
i First, want to point out, I think I understand why you are teaching at Columbia University.
00:16:04
Speaker
um But I guess this is kind of a sweeping generalization, but based on that data, do you see, do you think that employers are...
00:16:17
Speaker
Overall, know, giving the workforce the experience that they want, or at least even a good experience. And again, i know it's a generalization and and, you know, the things that you talked about, right, are so, um just seem to be so so granular. So if we take a higher level look at this, um I'm curious, how would you answer that question? or when you think of the workforce overall, do you think that they're satisfied with what their experience is with their employer?
00:16:45
Speaker
I think satisfaction if we're measuring satisfaction, the answer is, oh, God, no. But if we're measuring orientation, yeah is HR oriented towards an experience-first engagement with employees? Are managers focused on it in the right ways?
00:16:59
Speaker
Yeah, that needle has has moved, that that you know ship has turned in the right direction. For some organizations, it's still turning. But by and large, you know, table stakes for for a good place to work or a great place to work, not to co-opt ah a product name here, but um is that your your business has to, to some extent, be focused on empowering managers to at least be sensitive and aware of employee satisfaction and stress factors um and and understanding when you've got the wrong puzzle piece in the wrong place.
00:17:36
Speaker
um so So, yeah, that the orientation has shifted. So the the intent now is in the right direction. um But there are still long roads ahead of a lot of companies to get to what ah a successful outcome looks like. But that means that ESAP is on the rise.
00:17:52
Speaker
I like that you you mentioned stress factors. Um, which I think historically, I mean, even still currently is just entirely neglected.
00:18:05
Speaker
Um, you know, I'm curious, what, what do you see in data with relationship to that? Right. Um, you know, are, do you see, are the particular trends that that that you see, whether it's about employee experience or not, you know, that that you've been following with, with it's ah about how employers are able to measure or see that type of um sentiment data, right. Or at least understand motivation, right. Behind an employee's decisions. Yeah.
00:18:40
Speaker
I think it's important first to note that yeah know stress and and motivation or stress and you know disengagement, these are not synonymous. These are not all the same things. These are individual parts of a bigger equation.
00:18:53
Speaker
And so when we measure motivation, we measure engagement, we measure satisfaction, the business definition of those is you know is oriented around where can i put an employee to drive towards success?
00:19:07
Speaker
It's all focused on the employee delivered outcome and how the business can better partner to facilitate that. um and oh and And still in the context of the business first KPIs, you know retention,
00:19:20
Speaker
um you know increasing tenures, which goes hand in hand with retention, but also the the yeah the employee's ability to deliver to deliver more efficient outcomes because they're actually motivated to do what they're doing.
00:19:33
Speaker
um And we put them in a position where where we've homed in on those metrics. We've we've looked at what those factors are and we're setting them up for success. The stress side is a little different.
00:19:46
Speaker
Okay. The stress side is something that's historically, they historically companies have tried to manage rather than measure. And the reason for that is, is because sources of stress are highly organic.
Emerging Trends in Workplace Well-being
00:19:59
Speaker
They're highly individual and they're hard to to quantify in an individual sense. So we've, the field of wellbeing has emerged yeah with with has proliferated with a myriad of solutions to try to manage for different aspects of this.
00:20:15
Speaker
And I would argue that that field is still very much maturing because there isn't a central framework, despite the fact that we've had some vendors emerge to try to centralize some of it or centralize access to some of it. um There's, again, that there's a lot of different individual reasons why an employee will incur stress. Some of it's workplace, some of it's home, some of it's job security, some of it's financial issues. Could be sleep, could be you know it it it could be uncertainty around where their skills development is going to i mean we could have this bipolar effect where an employee is being given skills development so they know their employer's investing in them but they don't see where the direction is so they're stressed about relevance it's there's there's a lot of complexity built into that so it's still focused on managing versus measuring you um
00:21:06
Speaker
is kind of at the beginning, you started talking about some of these factors and and and and it's safe to assume that there are many that impact the experience. um And I know that everything could be a valid answer here, but I'm curious if you can highlight, you know, what do you see as the biggest or some of the biggest or some of the bigger factors that leaders have to be aware of when it comes to positively or negatively impacting that experience?
00:21:36
Speaker
I think I'll start with the negative side because it's a little easier. and i like finishing on a high note. So, you know, tear things down, build them up. um On the negative side, I think that employers have to become a little bit more aware, particularly in their leadership teams, just how much uncertainty impacts individuals. And, you yes, it impacts employees.
00:21:57
Speaker
But the reason it impacts employees is because individuals need some sense of security and control. Now, the old adage that change is the only thing that's certain.
00:22:08
Speaker
Yeah, you know, there's the truth is is that uncertainty is something that as humans, we have to get a little bit better at um at getting comfortable with. But there you run away uncertainty where you have feel have to have absolutely no sense of control.
00:22:24
Speaker
Yeah, that's not fair to do to your workers. And employers really do have to get more sensitive to how to manage that and build an environment where employees have tools, have resources to to get a better sense of control. And just shoving everything down for self-management to an employee is not enough.
00:22:42
Speaker
And frankly, it's it's not a it's not an answer. I mean, I've worked for a number of companies and advised even more about the fact that self-service is great for a lot of things.
00:22:53
Speaker
But if you're constantly throwing tools and resources at employees while giving them the time to manage it, then the tools are useless. It's not giving them more certainty. It's overwhelming them.
00:23:04
Speaker
So at some point, the employ yeah employers have to sit back and say, what does my infrastructure look like? um Am I throwing too much at the employees to manage themselves? How much yeah do I have to partner with them better? Do i have to enable them better? and And do I have to be there for them a little bit more?
00:23:19
Speaker
And it's not this, should my workplace be a family thing? It's more just that the employer has a responsibility to to be in the balance for that with their workers.
00:23:30
Speaker
um Otherwise, they're not going to see the performance and productivity that they want to see. Yeah. um On the flip side, when we're looking at success, we've gotten a lot better about, you know, skills, equity, talent placement and starting to get in the groove performance wise around what employees want, what their goals are yeah and but and fitting that into what the organization needs to see for itself.
00:23:53
Speaker
So we're getting the quantifiable side done really well um and new tools and resources or even updates to your existing core solutions um or partner solutions.
00:24:04
Speaker
yeah like I love to highlight the voice of the employee in recognition space because it's that those are the tools where employee experience transformation begins yeah um that are starting to really tell us not just how our employees performing, but why.
00:24:19
Speaker
Yep, and not a yeah that behavioral graph that's so critical. Yeah, like how do we manage against the negative and set them up for the positive um within the confines of of skills related to performance and goals related to performance? You all the stuff that we used to track annually with manager on one side of the table, employee on the other. where now we now have a flow of of data where we can see that, you know, continuously and start to set employees up for success.
00:24:46
Speaker
And so that part, we're we're getting really done really well. that's That partnership is strengthening in in droves.
Industry-Specific Strategies and the Role of AI
00:24:54
Speaker
I would love to know, you mean, if you're giving advice, you know, or you're teaching business leaders, you know, how to get better at understanding the realities of their businesses and what their workforce is really up against on front lines.
00:25:13
Speaker
You know, how do you differentiate based on you know, business vertical, size, the scope of the organization or what they do? i'm you know, or do you find the problems to be pretty homogenous ah just across the spectrum?
00:25:33
Speaker
weve I would say things end up being homogenous, but how they play out is very different by industry and then by size within industry. And I would say that that size and industry kind of form a matrix.
00:25:46
Speaker
um It's not that you just subcategorize for one and then the other. um And so so, yeah, I mean, know, when we talk about these themes, you know, better partnerships on the on the emotional and human side, while man and while measurement for performance is strengthening on the other side.
00:26:02
Speaker
um You know, that's a broad theme that that is somewhat industry and size agnostic, but the methodologies and the challenges for execution in that are very different by industry and size. You know, the mid-market and small businesses don't have the same digital and automation proliferation that their enterprise counterparts do. yeah And now that we're transitioning to ai their stories of how they're going to get from point A to point B are incredibly different, and we can't treat them all the same.
00:26:29
Speaker
um But some is being democratized to some extent, right? So that they can now compete a little more easily, or at least use some tools that have some similar capabilities. Well, yeah, I mean, when you think about AI's ability to create light versions of, you know, more expensive platform based tools and capabilities. Yeah, some of those are being have stronger capabilities to come downstream into smaller businesses.
00:26:54
Speaker
They definitely have the ability to to do automated intake of at least policy and regulatory nuances across industries and geographies. um But still, that that that doesn't discount the fact that the state of existing data in different organizations of different size and in different industries is going to be of different quality, that the strengths of the players and the stakeholders needed to drive solution deployment and adoption is going to vary wildly, not just widely, but wildly. um And the expectations and the level of trust yeah at a cultural level that the organization's built with its employees
00:27:32
Speaker
is going to be incredibly company specific. So just as much as we want to personalize, know, delivery and engagement on the HR side, i think vendors and solution and service providers also have to be aware just how much they have to take advantage of personalized CX in their own pipelines ye to get to know their prospective clients as quickly as they can, because there is an expectation of hyper personalized delivery and configuration.
00:28:00
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, amen to that last part, especially. i think that's kind of a ah critical piece there. um Speaking of, because I think you just sort of started touching on this.
00:28:14
Speaker
I think that, well, with all this stuff in mind, what do leaders need to know in order to set up people's success from day one? either Either of the businesses, right, ah themselves that are managing their people, or...
00:28:30
Speaker
the platforms that are supporting the infrastructure that the businesses use, right? And so what what how do they set them up for success for day one when it comes to their employee experience? What should they be doing for the workforce to experience individual and and collective success?
00:28:49
Speaker
So the first thing before you do anything, before you try to improve the organization, come up with a strategy, any any of that stuff is figure out your communications. No one likes to have blanket change thrown at them and be blindsided by it.
00:29:02
Speaker
yeah no one Even if it's a new tool that's supposed to help them, you're going to get resistance if you're not project planning or communications. So you got to have a calm strategy of some kind. And even if you're a small business of 100 or fewer employees, you still have to figure out how you're communicating with your workers, you know, to whether they have a seat at the table are they just influencing what you're doing?
00:29:24
Speaker
You know, what's the timeline going to be? Because you've actually bothered to ask them. um So there there has to be something there that's going to reach out to them and include them in the process. um it's that's It's key to making them feel more certain.
00:29:38
Speaker
It's key to making them feel like they can do this. They can embrace what you're going to offer. um And it's key to also understanding whether or not your perception of your business challenges is actually what the challenges are.
00:29:50
Speaker
um so So figure out your comms, make them two way, make sure that the frontline you know, and and the folks that are in your line of business execution with your clients are connected back to your senior leadership, and vice versa, to make sure that loop is closed.
00:30:06
Speaker
that whatever the ELT wants to do to realize whatever opportunities the shareholders or the business owners think they want to realize, that the CEO is the one guiding you know what the realistic configuration for the business is going to be, that you're not just leaving it to finance when CEO says, here's the goal.
00:30:25
Speaker
right So consult your organization, work with them, build a comm strategy. Once you've done that,
00:30:33
Speaker
Yeah, go ahead. Pull them out. ah they're They're no longer the bat the guys in the back office in the back cave, you know, just configuring your laptops when you hire somebody new. They're actually, they're in charge of your data strategy. You got to bring them to the table. You got to ask them what's possible. what do we what What insights are we working with? You know, are our people insights actually part of our financial modeling and reporting? You know, are we modernized across the board? What does our hot mess look like?
00:31:01
Speaker
And can we build our data strategy to match our comm strategy towards what we want to do? So make sure that the data is a true mirror of your organization to the extent that you need it to be before you decide what you're going to do next, before you talk to a vendor and say, that sounds nice, let's try it.
00:31:20
Speaker
um And then from there, you can think about your gaps, talk to your stakeholders, you know, try to break down some of this ownership autonomy and, you know ah within your finance, hr um yeah operations folks.
00:31:35
Speaker
Yeah. And try to kind of convince them, you know, hey, you can own your processes, but we got to start bringing your insight sets together.
Leadership, Honesty, and Accountability
00:31:43
Speaker
um ah All that makes a lot of sense. I, you know, going back to what you were originally saying about improving comms, having a communication strategy really sounds like a key element is empowering your people to have a say.
00:32:00
Speaker
yeah um So you can really better understand what your problems are, right? And and how to fix them. What about environments that are negative or toxic, right? There are a couple of key questions that i'm I'm curious about here. The first is, how do you determine if the experiences the employee experience is toxic?
00:32:22
Speaker
And then second would be, if it is, how i mean what are the steps to turn it around? So toxicity can be a tricky one to get some honesty about. i mean, there are times when I've had ah across my career where I've had buyers that have come to me to say, you know, we think this is going on, but we think they'll tell you things they won't tell us.
00:32:42
Speaker
And I've actually done focus groups with um with buyers, employee sets to understand you know, talk to me and tell me, I'm not going to name any of you in the report, but you know, just, just tell me what's going on. i need the themes here.
00:32:54
Speaker
um And then there are times that innocuously we can just say to leadership teams, the first thing you have to do is be a little humble, fall on your sword for the fact that you may not have been managing or paying attention to this part of your organization.
00:33:12
Speaker
admit that the hands got a little bit away from the head so the head doesn't necessarily know what the hands are doing And so you're coming down to the lines to really just understand.
00:33:22
Speaker
you know In some cases, that requires a little bit of an undercover boss type scenario to know what's going on. yeah in other cases, just a little honesty goes a long way, a little honesty and accountability.
00:33:35
Speaker
yeah um I've seen CEOs, particularly at at small to mid-sized businesses, even change their accountability frameworks. To make the CEO, even for a short time, accountable to certain sentiment and performance measures in the in the front line so that whatever the employees do, the CEO is immediately accountable for. It's not just about business performance.
00:33:59
Speaker
And when they rebuild that into the contract and they can show that and display that to employees, they get more honest answers. That's really interesting. um Actually quite compelling. And like I can understand how, you know,
00:34:14
Speaker
given that kind of responsibility, you know, might make leadership change how they they behave, right? It's kind of like bringing in the crown under the constitution. Yeah. Yeah.
00:34:25
Speaker
So employee recognition, appreciation, it's something we focus on here a lot at Mustard Hub, right? I have a lot of thoughts on how appreciation and recognition can impact workers. But I mean, what role do you think recognition plays in the employee experience? What are your thoughts?
00:34:40
Speaker
I think it's incredibly important and I think its title is why it sometimes gets undervalued. Tell me more about that. Recognition like employee experience immediately gets written off to this HR thing. It's touchy. It's line of business. It's just to make people feel good. Yeah, that's when you talk to a non-HR person, that's the first instinct they get about it.
00:35:01
Speaker
And they couldn't be more wrong. There's so much more to it than that. um Yes, recognition is crowdsourcing success measure markers where they show up.
00:35:14
Speaker
On the one hand for the individual, it's giving them a chance to earn some non-fixed compensation um for a good job well done. So it's destructuring bonuses a little bit um without replacing them, shouldn't replace them. But- um Potentially even mitigating tax liability, but that's a whole other conversation.
00:35:32
Speaker
um And it's giving employees a little more freedom to to exercise even how they cash in on them. So there's there's a structural benefit, absolutely. But on the data side, it's recognition data has been advancing the efficiency of voice of the employee towards transitioning businesses to an experience first, you know, employee journey orchestration.
00:35:57
Speaker
And it turns out is really kind of useful in that regard towards advancing underlying, you know, AI driven talent placement. oh yeah So you think about voice of the employee, you collect a lot of employee sentiment, whether you do it through fixed surveys or continuous feedback loops, however you do it.
00:36:14
Speaker
All of that data is great, but you're looking at both um a mixture of the positive and the negative. And you're sending either your AI engine or data analyst or a combination of the two to sift through and separate the markers so they can direct managers to mitigate the negative and incentivize ah hr to drive further into the positive, whether through workforce orchestration or or again, manager enablement.
00:36:36
Speaker
um saying, yes, we can promote employee a or yeah whatever the the result is. Recognition has a built-in incentive for employees to participate and and actually use the the solution in terms of the the points exchange and the value drivers that are built into recognition systems.
00:36:54
Speaker
But because you're crowdsourcing performative enablers and markers of them straight from employees in terms of how they yeah lift each other up, you're automatically filtering for those markers of success.
Recognition and Personalization in Employee Experience
00:37:06
Speaker
So when you integrate that into your understanding of employee performance, yeah, as a manager, I can see, okay, employee A and employee B may be in the same role, but employee A tends to work better under these conditions and in teams under this format, whereas employee b works better in these situations with teams under that format.
00:37:28
Speaker
So maybe I should kind of split their direction And path their journeys a little bit differently because, and that's going to help me drive, you know, drive them into different success, you know, trajectories from this one starting point.
00:37:43
Speaker
How they, and that's going to impact skill skills and training direction. That's going to impact team assignments, shift, you know, giving giving different shifts. it's It's going to mean a lot. i mean, leaders are constantly looking for ways to improve themselves. You're literally talking about a cheat sheet.
00:37:59
Speaker
Here are the clues, right? and here's Here's exactly what you need to do. To do better. So, I mean, I don't i don't need you to say mustard up here, but I'm curious what avenues you see for leaders who want to do better by their people when it comes to recognizing the great work that their team does. When it comes to crowdsourcing those success markers, what do they need to be doing to show their people that not just that they're appreciated, but that they're listening to all of these things, right? I mean, the workforce obviously wants it.
00:38:26
Speaker
they need you know the the The businesses need it. The folks involved need it.
00:38:34
Speaker
What do the leaders need to do? People today, and it's not just about employees, I think just about in everything that we do, because we we get so sort of emotionally involved and and triggered by everything around us because of of digital proliferation and the resulting isolation.
00:38:50
Speaker
People need to see results, not just hear words. So on the one hand, yeah that's another beautiful thing about recognition is that it it does result in an action. you You actually get rewarded at the same time that somebody's saying, hey, you did a good job.
00:39:06
Speaker
yeah and Ideally, in that moment that matters. Yeah. so So there is a direct result attached to it. um there And it allows employees even to set momentary goals for themselves. So yeah let's say my company allows me to exchange points for an extended yeah extended vacation time or a paid time off.
00:39:27
Speaker
um And I'm setting myself up for a vacation that's going to be that I want to be 10 days, but I only have seven days. yeah I can set a goal for myself to to outperform on my usual targets and try to drive towards that. um I'm not going to, you know, there's very little incentive to go to my colleagues and say, hey, could you throw some points my way if it's undeserved? Because that'll show up as outliers in the bigger data set.
00:39:51
Speaker
But there is a direct incentive for me to try to perform towards that target. um In the bigger picture, there's also a results driven outcome for management teams to get employees towards their best configured work environment faster.
00:40:07
Speaker
um because that has a direct impact on business outcomes and success. So starting to organically surface what an employee's journey should look like, we can measure that against, yeah hey, did they set their goals realistically around what they're good at and what they strive towards?
00:40:23
Speaker
Did I understand their goals in the context of what they are striving to? So maybe the way I'm thinking about what they told me they were isn't right. So how I might have set up their career journey, maybe I need to rethink that and maybe the system is giving me insights to fix that.
00:40:38
Speaker
um So that I don't lose them somewhere in the future while I'm riding this high on their engagement today. um So, you know, as as a business leader, it just it allows me to hyper personalize their journeys while still keeping my eye on the on the ball towards, know, whatever the aggregated business outcomes are that I need to see or exceed.
The Future of Work and Technology's Role
00:41:00
Speaker
Yeah. do you Do you see this changing as the world of work evolves? I mean, do you think leaders need to change what they're doing when it comes to supporting and acknowledging ever-changing workforce?
00:41:14
Speaker
workforce I think this this goes back a little bit to the beginning of the of the track here where, yeah, they need to, you know, where the dual mandate between balancing between employee engagement and business results was um was HR, has been HR's responsibility. I think that now also needs to be at the very least shared with the CEO's vision, responsibility for the vision.
00:41:40
Speaker
yeah You can't let it be subsumed under the paradigm of finance who's going to be immediately concerned with controlling costs and sit between the CEO and the CHRO. You need to make sure that these concerns are reaching the business vision orchestration at the top.
00:41:56
Speaker
So let's let let's keep looking ahead. Predictions on what the future of work is going to look like from this from this standpoint. Yeah. ah It's going to be incredibly messy. And in a good way. I think, you know, we've got in one camp, we've got the, you know, everything's going to go to gigs.
00:42:13
Speaker
We've got, you know, can we get to shift based, you know, task management within systems. We've tried this experiment called skills, which it turns out we can orchestrate around, but we have a hard time valuing.
00:42:24
Speaker
So we still have a role based value structure with skills based orchestration structure. um Yeah, we've got full time jobs, we've got You know, agents now coming into the mix where companies mistakenly think they can automate out entry level talent in five, 10 years time, those same companies are going to realize they have no innovation pipeline from new workers. So it's, um you know, we're going through a huge period right now where we're rethinking the human contribution at work.
00:42:54
Speaker
um And i my the advice that I have to organizations as they're doing this is don't think about what you can replace in the immediate because the future of technology is not automation, it's augmentation.
00:43:06
Speaker
um And I know that that narrative has been spun by so many HR folks out there, but you know i'm not I'm not an HR originalist. I come at it from the engineering side, the financial side, the ops management side, and the and the workforce management side.
00:43:20
Speaker
looking at how determinist how probabilistic systems fit into a business, which is what AI is, that is how you augment humans to stay focused on the things they want to do that deliver value to the business versus the things they have to do.
00:43:39
Speaker
You made a comment just you know a second ago, gigs, shift-based, How do folks engage with team members who are so much more disconnected, right, to to the organization, right? It's almost like you have these, it's inherently um misaligned, right? We talk about wanting to better engage our employees. We want talk about wanting to create this experience for people. And yet the future of work may look like inherently disconnected,
00:44:14
Speaker
People, how do you do that? How do you create a system that is essentially worker classification agnostic? So believe it or not, we've been doing it for years.
00:44:27
Speaker
We just haven't been thinking about it. So you know when I was, you know I don't know, by a two years up to up to the point of two years before when COVID shut everything down,
00:44:39
Speaker
yeah I mean, we were all studying studying the dissonance and the replacement theory of contingent talent versus full-time. And this was about yeah when when people were finally throwing the the word yeah know the letters VMS around, like all of a sudden it was something new to the market and and hyped. and yeah meanwhile, it was a 30, 40-year-old technology and or concept, at least on the BPO side. Yeah.
00:45:02
Speaker
And today we see those systems integrated. We see contingent and full-time talent really being treated the same, having the same opportunities. One can transition to the other freely.
00:45:13
Speaker
um And so the engagement strategy for people in the organization, if you're building it on a human level, really can be the same. And the incumbency on the vendors is to make it easier for employers to decide what resources can be extended to them to each different classification and just turn them on and off at will without these complex ingestion and outflow requirements. I mean, a reason why you didn't have you know temporary or contracted employees going deep into the HRIS, they live in the VMS, was because it was complex and time consuming and a data burden to put them that deep in the system.
00:45:52
Speaker
So you had to have a secondary record system. We don't have to do that anymore. So the technology yeah know should be enabling record management, promotion, engagement, and development the same way for every person, regardless of how they're brought into the organization, because it's not as crazy deep and complex to enmesh them in these in these tools. Consequently, if everybody's enabled the same,
00:46:18
Speaker
there shouldn't be really any cultural dissonance between how I treat employee A or employee B because of how they're with the organization. I shouldn't be able to tell the difference. um If the company doesn't make a big deal about it, I won't.
00:46:32
Speaker
Yeah. So, you know, I love that, by the way. And um I don't think a lot of people think about it like that, right? That we've been doing it, we just don't think about it that way. and I think to some degree, I would agree with that. I think that there are instances, right, where, you know, those those contract workers are treated very differently, right, depending on the type of organization or the industry that you're in, right, or the way that the that the business might be configured and what it is that they're doing. But um but I think, all you know, by and large, I think that that that's a really great observation.
00:47:09
Speaker
um Well, kind of rabbi i last we the last bit I just want to put a plug again, comes back to comms. So let's say you've got a high turnover position because you're constantly contracting for it, you know, and it's not on renewal that you're bringing somebody new in every time, which is expensive, but some companies do it. um Just make sure that the teams that are dependent on them have enough, you know, four time and aft time to be able to understand, know, person A is going out, stand maintain maintain your personal correspondence with them, but we're going to onboard you and the new person to each other.
00:47:45
Speaker
Yeah. To keep the flow going. So again, you got to reduce that uncertainty. Yeah. Good advice. um Always super curious. Love to kind of wrap up with this question. You know, if leaders come to you, i know and I know this happens, right? So when ah when or if a business leader came to you for advice on really how to get it right with...
00:48:05
Speaker
You know, when it comes to building alignment across an organization, engaging their workforce, you know, you're, you only have a minute, you're on an elevator to the top floor before the doors open and they walk right out the
Conclusion and Invitation to Engage with Mustard Hub
00:48:16
Speaker
door. What is that very first thing, that one thing that you tell them?
00:48:20
Speaker
You get two things you get tend to data and people. You got to make sure your data is in order so that you can identify gaps and strategically fill them. And they have to be filled in accordance with what your communication strategy is returning to you that your employees feel is missing.
00:48:36
Speaker
You've got to manage both concurrently. You've got to drive towards outcomes in each, leveraging each into the other. And most importantly, you have to build a strategy to do it before you do anything about it.
00:48:50
Speaker
If you're going in blind, you're not going to succeed. I love that. Build a strategy for it before you build a strategy of what you're going to do about it. I like that.
00:49:02
Speaker
Thank you. Thank you so much for speaking with me today, Zach. I really appreciate you appreciate you taking the time. This was great. Thanks for having me. Yeah, was a lot of fun. For all of you who are watching or listening to this episode, thank you for tuning in to Mustard Hub Voices Behind the Build. Subscribe, like, share, and comment. Be sure to check us out at mustardhub.com to see how we help companies become destinations for workplace happiness and turn culture into a competitive edge.
00:49:27
Speaker
And sign up to get started with Mustard Hub for free while you're there. Until next time.