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From FBI Visits to AI Insights with Greg Fulk
6 Plays30 days ago
Greg Fulk’s career has spanned military service, commercial land development, wealth management, and even a side hustle building saunas—but it was a knock at the door from the FBI that changed everything. That moment led Greg to create OrgIQ, a proactive workforce intelligence platform that gives HR teams unprecedented visibility into what’s happening inside their organizations. In this episode, Greg shares with Curtis how a $5 million fraud case exposed blind spots in internal communication—and how AI can now uncover the patterns humans miss. He explains OrgIQ’s three-layer approach: lightning-fast search, meta-analysis of communication patterns, and sentiment tagging, which together help HR identify both risks and hidden cultural strengths. Greg also reflects on how this technology helps overcome common management biases, like recency effects in reviews, and empowers HR to act with the same clarity and foresight once reserved for compliance teams.
About Greg:
Greg is an accomplished executive known for blending strategic vision with hands-on leadership. He has a diverse background which ranges from military service to commercial land development to wealth management. In his current role as CEO and Founder of Org IQ, he helps HR and Execs find the very best (and very worst) of what's happening inside their company.
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Transcript
Introduction to Podcast and Guest
00:00:06
Speaker
Welcome back everyone. This is another installment of Mustard Hub Voices behind the build. In these fireside chats, I sit down with the people building, backing, and running better workplaces. I'm your host Curtis Forbes.
00:00:18
Speaker
My guest today is Greg Folk. Greg's an accomplished executive known for blending strategic vision with hands-on leadership. He has a diverse background which ranges from military service to commercial land development to wealth management.
00:00:33
Speaker
and his current role as CEO and founder of Org IQ, he helps HR and execs find the very best and the very worst of what's happening inside their company.
00:00:44
Speaker
Welcome to
Greg Folk's Interests and Projects
00:00:45
Speaker
Behind the Build. Thanks for joining me, Greg. Thanks, Curtis. Excited to be here. Man, before we jump in your your background fascinates me.
00:00:56
Speaker
you You read bios, military history, books that might be might be an answer to a question on Gemperdy. You are a competitive power lifter and you build...
00:01:11
Speaker
Saunas and and all of these things we could spend entire podcast on separately. How does one get into building saunas?
00:01:23
Speaker
You know, I think we the the same causes a lot of ah great ideas lately, which is COVID. When you're stuck in your house for a couple months and you go down the ah the internet rabbit hole, i think first, by law, you have to bake bread.
00:01:37
Speaker
um You have to try and rewa rewire something unsuccessfully. ah
Org IQ Overview
00:01:42
Speaker
but yeah, came across the the build plans for saunas and thought, you know, I think that the Hubermans and the Rogans of the world were were pushing it and they were they were bringing all the experts on. I thought it can't be that hard. It's it's a wooden box with a heater in it.
00:01:57
Speaker
And so now the electrician runs the high voltage wire, but everything else is fairly risk free. So I built a sauna in my basement during COVID. ah My best friend's a general contractor. And so we bought a domain. We did that much SEO. And now, gosh, we get inbound leads and calls. It feels like one a week every other week. And so all of a sudden, I guess I'm in the sauna industry, among among other things.
00:02:22
Speaker
I can tell this is going to be a fun chat today. so And I've been looking forward to it for a while. You're the founder of a really interesting company that focuses on some things that we are really passionate about here at Mustard Hub, AI-driven insights. So to to kind of set the tone, share with me, share with the audience, what is Org IQ? Yeah.
00:02:47
Speaker
So OrgIQ is what we call a proactive workforce intelligence platform. And we start with kind of archiving and analyzing 100% of a company's email, their team's message messages, and we're we're building out Slack.
00:03:03
Speaker
But the idea is to really empower HR teams to have full full insight into what's happening at their company, but even more than that, to identify the signal in the noise.
00:03:14
Speaker
you know I think about Jack Welch wrote a book, it's been like 20 something years ago, where he talks about the the number two person at any company should really be a a chief people officer, a chief human resource officer. This this is the executive who's in charge of people, responsible for the success of people.
00:03:33
Speaker
And I've had a handful of roles over the years and yeah hr does a lot of really important things, but they don't often have the visibility, the transparency, the insight into really what's happening.
00:03:45
Speaker
And so IT can sometimes find these messages, but that's always reactive. um i got to wear ah a compliance hat at a wealth management firm and and compliance has full access to everything just from the the risk mitigation. I thought, wow.
00:04:00
Speaker
Why can't HR have that insight? um And so that's what I built. I started with kind of this compliance base and it kind of built it up for HR. So OrgIQ is really in the business of of helping HR see everything, address everything, and really identify, as as you said in the opening, we help you identify the very best and the very worst of of what's going on. Yeah. I mean, I had imagined that even when when he wrote that book and even more than just a couple of years ago, having that kind of access to things and being able to to read and analyze the way we can do it now with ai um it wasn't even possible back then. You you almost had to be reactive.
00:04:42
Speaker
um And you couldn't, you didn't even have the the luxury of being proactive now, right? yeah That's right. um
Target Market and Benefits
00:04:49
Speaker
It used to be keyword lists and you would build, I remember, I mean, you would build, I mean, you think about all the bad words that you don't want your kids to say. You also don't want your coworkers to say them. And I and i hesitate to even when I give, because we we still allow keyword lists because there are If you're in the midst of ah of a merger and acquisition or if you have some named competitors, you really do want some exact matching.
00:05:13
Speaker
But we used to have words that would indicate ah you know anger, words that would indicate policy violation. And again, you can imagine you know the devil's dictionary of everything no one should ever say.
00:05:26
Speaker
but AI has made that so much easier to where you can just take the body of an email and ask AI not only Is there anything in here that no one should be saying? but But what's the tone here? Is it positive? Is it neutral? Is it negative? And when you start grouping tones by person, by division, by inbound or outbound, there's there's a lot of insight you can really gain from that.
00:05:48
Speaker
So tell tell me about the kinds of organizations that come to Org IQ. Are there any particular industries you focus on? What do those what are those customers like? You don't have to name any names, but tell me a little bit about what those customers look like.
00:06:01
Speaker
Sure, sure. So when I think about companies that have between... 50 and about 500 employees. And in my experience, 50 employees is about the time you really need a dedicated ah HR professional.
00:06:15
Speaker
You absolutely benefit from one sooner. But I run a startup and I know I just can't afford an ah HR professional today. So I'm going to do that. Of course, I'm also the the CFO and the electrician and the janitor. So I'm going to do all the things.
00:06:29
Speaker
But I know as a company grows, the sauna builder, the sauna builder, right workforce intelligence and saunas, um I'm getting it to take off. we ah There comes a point there where you really hire an ah HR professional and and that's when we're going to be a great fit because you need that professional mindset of, you know, I'm in charge of protecting the company from risk and elevating my people and somebody focused on it.
00:06:52
Speaker
And then we grow up to you know five, six hundred employees where HR is finally at that size, I find, really starting to get the resources that they need. So hopefully they've got a you know a benefits administrator and some other folks on their team.
00:07:06
Speaker
um And I know the HR people at five and six, seven hundred person people firms are like, really, we have the resources that we need now. And I find that what I offer, what OrgIQ does is really able to to elevate so much of that, their ability in the interim.
00:07:21
Speaker
And in one of the ways, as I mentioned, archiving, we really are retaining 100 percent of all that correspondence and emails and the teams. And so that saves institutional knowledge. So um but but firms at 50 to 500 space, we love professional services, accounting, consulting, insurance, wealth management.
00:07:41
Speaker
folks that front of their keyboard all day long. If email is a good measure of how you're running your company or what's happening at your company, ah we're going to be a great fit. the there are um you know Healthcare tends to be very different in that email is is not central, manufacturing is not as good, but really anything in that professional service is a good fit for us.
00:08:02
Speaker
what what tell me So when these folks come to you, what are the kinds of solutions that they're looking for? in other words or or Or what particular challenges are they trying to solve specifically when they come to OrgIQ?
00:08:15
Speaker
I think there's a couple of things. One, if if a company's ever had a call it a negative legal experience with an employee, whether it was your fault, whether it was the employee's fault, I think many of them recognize that email is exhibit a What were the things that we put in writing?
00:08:33
Speaker
And maybe an employee said, hey, I feel unsafe. Maybe I feel harassed. Maybe a supervisor, ah inappropriately denied vacation and there were some FMLA concerns, but what was being put in writing? So they're they're coming to me saying, holy smokes, a complaint did come in It never got escalated. We missed it.
00:08:53
Speaker
It spiraled. It exposed us to risk. The other side is is true. I know i tend to to talk about the negative, but the all those thank you notes that your sales team gets for really doing a good job, they they never forward that to their manager or their supervisor.
00:09:08
Speaker
annual review, promotion, opportunity seasons come and go. and And we help HR really highlight some of that. So would say the first half of of what ah what age what teams are coming to me with is is, hey, really help us with some findings, finding some signal in the noise.
00:09:24
Speaker
the the the The information retention is the other piece is, hey, an employee left. um Maybe they deleted their inbox. Maybe IT deleted their inbox. But we really need to find that contract from three weeks ago, three months ago, three years ago.
00:09:38
Speaker
And we have it. We have it all. Everything
Origin of Org IQ
00:09:40
Speaker
is saved. Nothing ever gets deleted. We you know we we built it so we'd be... SEC and FINRA and HIPAA compliance, we save everything forever. It's immutable, so it can't be changed.
00:09:50
Speaker
And now HR kind of gets to look like a rock star in the a head of sales. That contract that ah that you're looking for, we could find it. Or or even the you know maternity leaves start early sometimes.
00:10:02
Speaker
ah Sometimes vacations, get you get stuck because of hurricanes. And now all of a sudden HR, instead of joining in the panic of we can't reach this person we can just pull up their inbox and we don't have to send a request it t we don't have to use outlook search which is uh at best so we're really you know amplifying hr's ability to to solve problems so i think our clients today are seeing that sending the inbounds of like holy smokes you know this is a great great feature i didn't know existed that's incredible so i mean you're you're it's the
00:10:36
Speaker
like the the file storage capabilities, um you know, are pretty, but out even outside of the the the insights that you get, just having that, it's pretty remarkable. And it sounds like, you know, you talked about managerial assessments and all these things that that typically, you know, where they wouldn't have insight into certain things, you're also almost helping remove or at least mitigate to some degree this this recency bias, right, that that you'll find a lot of a lot of managers fall victim to, right?
00:11:10
Speaker
um That's right. Yeah. yeah That's awesome. I think they know, I think HR and supervisors and managers, I think they know and they're they're working their best to avoid some of these these recency bias, these halo effects. the Everybody's review is based on their last 60 days of performance, not their last six months.
00:11:31
Speaker
um It's just so hard to to grow out of that if you're if if you're just searching an inbox or searching an employee file or searching some notes. yeah I'm going to be able to i'm go to be able to help proactively categorize and tag some of these positive sentiments, some of these best ofs that hopefully make it easier.
00:11:50
Speaker
So what kind of insights specifically do the users get with org IQ? is it Is it solely for administrators? Is it for users? How do they get them? How do they access these insights?
00:12:02
Speaker
yeah We yeah obviously don't have to get super far into the weeds, but at a high level. and Tell me about how it all works. Oh, you're getting every technical detail starting now. So I think of it in in three layers. And the first is is good old fashioned search, right? Being able to just search for something. So if ah if you get a, maybe there's and and ah an anonymous rumor or a complaint that, hey, you know when when when Greg talks to his group, boy, he is he's not as professional as we hope, or he's saying things that we just are not in line with the culture.
00:12:36
Speaker
hey, in in about a fraction of a second, HR goes in and does a search, show me everything Greg has sent his team in the last 30 days. And I'm just going I'm literally going to click through and read some of those emails to see if I can find what we're looking for. So we can write searches, we can write automated searches, we can have searches pushed to our inbox that are alerting. So that that search layer, ah not amazingly sexy. There's a a number of cool search tools out there, but we do it well. we do it very, very quickly.
00:13:04
Speaker
The second step is we like to zoom out and we like to look at work patterns as determined by email and team. So show me you know the number of emails you've been sending over the past six months, over the past year.
00:13:17
Speaker
um i think work from home is is really, really great in a lot of situations. But I know sometimes the executive team, they just wonder, gosh, we used to see Greg all the time and now he's not here.
00:13:29
Speaker
And he's not very loud. I'm very loud. But the other Greg in this alternate universe is not very loud. but Is he, is he like, how is his, how is his output today compared to his output then? And I can just show you on a line graph, like it used to be here and he worked from home and it went up or it stayed the same or it went down.
00:13:47
Speaker
um And then we can do it on a heat map and show me the times of day folks are working. And this feels big brothery. and And I know it is, and I've got a good, I've got a great story about how all this came to be, but I just want to highlight that for every,
00:14:03
Speaker
lack of productivity allegedly that you can view, you can also view the folks that from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. are working their tail off to catch up. And the folks that you know are getting up Saturday morning and and trying to get everything done to be ready for the next day, ah every bit of that is as true. So you can see the burnout. you can see the ah You can see the folks putting in the extra time. And it just it it gives you data.
00:14:28
Speaker
i tell I work with a bunch of HR consultants. And I tell them, I'm not really in the business of solving problems. But I provide a lot of data. I highlight. i can show i can shine the flashlight. And you can decide what to do with that.
00:14:40
Speaker
talked about search, we talked about
Improving Communication with AI
00:14:42
Speaker
some of that meta-analysis, and then our sentiment tool, every email is getting tagged with positive, neutral, or negative sentiment tags. When you look at your internal emails or only your your coworkers, when those are positively tagged, you're gonna find signs of healthy culture. You're gonna find people living your core values.
00:15:02
Speaker
The opposite happens too. When you see those negative tags, you're gonna find, are we feeling some stress? Do we have a bad apple? Are we just not nice to each other? And some of that is is really easy to fix.
00:15:14
Speaker
Similarly, on the inbound side, we talked earlier about the thank yous, the kudos that come in. the client complaints come into, right? the The negativity, hey, this is broken. Hey, this feature doesn't work. And I know the executives in particular like this this idea of, i talk about a Saturday morning CEO, right? Your CEO is Saturday morning. what do you want to know?
00:15:33
Speaker
you have any angry clients? Did that big deal get signed? Any feedback from our biggest customer? I've got a tool. And if you're a good CEO, hopefully you're not blowing your people up on the weekend with text and email, but you want to know, right? It's your livelihood.
00:15:45
Speaker
You probably took a ah disproportionate amount of the risk. um so So you want to know, and this is a tool where you can just find all these answers immediately. So that's those are the the three big layers, I think, about search and the analysis and then ah some of the sentiment and the AI tools. and it it Fascinating.
00:16:05
Speaker
ah so Makes me super curious. You know, given you know your history and your background, what led you two know, founding Org IQ? I'd love for you to share that. You mentioned there's a ah story about how it kind of came to be.
00:16:21
Speaker
So if you could share a bit about your career path and how you ended up a founder, that'd be amazing. Sure, sure. i so I can tell you like what time it was with this idea happened because it was, so it was February 6th, 2022 was a Sunday night I'm in Indiana, so it's cold in February 2022. But ah there's ah a ring at the doorbell, which doesn't happen in the suburbs as much these days as when i was a kid.
00:16:48
Speaker
But I opened the door and it was the FBI. And they've got badges up, just like in the movies. ah They were were very, very kind. And they start with, hey, are are you Greg? You feel the the blood just drain.
00:17:00
Speaker
And then they ask, hey, do you work at you know this wealth management firm? And do you know this guy? Because we need to talk to you about a coworker. So they came in, ah which in retrospect, my lawyer says I should not have invited them in, but I did. And we sat at my kitchen table and we offered them tea, which they declined.
00:17:19
Speaker
But they they opened their manila folders and they proceeded to provide overwhelming evidence that a partner of mine had stolen a lot of money, almost $5 million dollars from ah from one of our clients.
00:17:32
Speaker
and i And I missed it. I was the chief operating officer, was the chief compliance officer, and I i i did not know. i didn't see it coming. And fast forward nine, 10 months, and between the FBI and the SEC and the IRS, federal, or the criminal investigation department, they kind of reflected and said, Greg, don't take it so hard.
00:17:53
Speaker
There's no way you could have caught this. And I didn't buy it. I was like, no, i'm I'm smart. I know how things work. And they said, no, this was a multi-layer entity structure.
00:18:05
Speaker
You know, the client, it wasn't stolen. The client was tricked. It was defrauded. ah But you you couldn't have caught this. And I just didn't buy it. So I spent the next couple of weeks really downloading, you know, tens of thousands of emails. that's That's what I knew how to do. That's where I started. And to that example, a minute ago, i wanted to see those emails on a line graph. And I wanted to see them on a heat map. I just wanted to see what was this person doing every day?
00:18:27
Speaker
And sure enough, you can kind of see the day or the timeframe where a gambling addiction really starts to take over somebody's life. and when you look at that heat map, I mean, Curtis, when you and I get up in the morning, we get up, we send a bunch of emails, maybe there's some time for lunch, we keep working. The evenings are, you know, we work out, we go sit in our saunas, right? We hang out, but in the in the evening, we we catch back up again, but that's kind of the normal pattern.
00:18:50
Speaker
Well, this guy was one to three in the morning, manic, manic, just sending hundreds of emails and then nothing for two days. And then a random evening from eight to 10, hundreds of meals, and then nothing for two days.
00:19:03
Speaker
And I don't know that those patterns are in and of themselves indicative of like, well, anybody who sends email to him is you know doing something wrong, but they're very much red flags. And i I want to believe that had I gone in and said, well, here's some level of analysis, here's a tool to visualize That is so out of pattern for what literally the other 100 or 200 people at this firm worked did like i would I would have said, okay, i need to call a couple of his clients, which which is a normal activity. I just never called his.
00:19:31
Speaker
I need to call a couple of his clients. I need to go to a couple meetings with him. I need to schedule. like I just would have zoomed in. I would have focused and said, I've got time for you now. We're going to spend a lot of time together and I'm going to uncover this. So That's he's in federal prison now has been and will be for for quite some time. So I i guess that's kind of sort of silver lining. um But that's, that's how it came to be. And as I thought about, you know, that this is with my old investment advisor compliance risk mindset.
00:19:59
Speaker
That's where i so I thought, well, you know, most firms don't have compliance officers because most firms aren't regulated that way. might do this? Well, that's where the hr input happened. my I've got some friends and family in HR and they said, God, we would love that. we We really want to protect our firm from risk.
00:20:16
Speaker
We want to protect our employees from risk. And this was a tool that that helped really highlight that. that's an amazing story. I mean, most of the great, you know, but most most great startups have ah an awesome story. they don't They don't start with the FBI showing up at your doorstep.
00:20:34
Speaker
ah But ah that's one that i I imagine you enjoy telling, at least just to see the reaction on some folks' faces when ah when you tell them that's who wound up at your door. and will be i' ah There's one piece. So I will say it started with a bunch of phone calls from numbers I didn't know. So I just didn't answer them.
00:20:52
Speaker
But you get one, you get two. yeah have Sunday night is not the time I get those. Well, they they did leave a voicemail and I do have the voicemail saved. And I'm not sure if this is the most scammy sounding voicemail or like the most legit. But as soon as I'm done listening to this, this is such and such with the federal, you know, at the FBI, we need talk to talk As soon as I'm done listening is when the doorbell rang and it was right out of like central casting. Like you can see somebody made a movie about end voicemail. Ding dong. Like, oh God, what is happening?
00:21:23
Speaker
i think um I think being a movie director is probably going to be the next stop in your in your nonlinear, circuitous professional route. But I want want to shift a minute into people and and the workforce. And a lot of organizations seem to not understand what drives their their employees, their people. And there's...
00:21:46
Speaker
You know, a disconnect between leadership and the workforce. um I mean, would you agree with that? And and and if so, how do we start bridging that that gap? You're obviously analyzing tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of messages.
00:22:01
Speaker
what's your What's your suggestion? you know i I start and I'm i'm no by no means ah an expert ah communicator. I think my wife and children are here. They would be nodding in agreement with that statement.
00:22:13
Speaker
um So i can start with with highlighting it. i do get i get a chance to work with a number of HR consultants that really specialize in culture. and i So I asked them this type of question, and and a lot of them, so there's a couple couple issues at play. We have a larger multigeneraterator multi-generational workforce now than than we've had in the past. We have folks working well into their 50s and 60s, and then we've got our 20-somethings who have grown up communicating digitally in a very different manner than, we'll say, me and even even those senior to me.
00:22:50
Speaker
And i think we all remember the the first time we started getting texts where words weren't sp spellelt out spelled out and lacked punctuation, we kind of bristled like, hey, we we were former college educated. I know how to communicate. So what are you doing not using full words? And we've seen that bleed over into And we've and If you ever had a chance to work at a job before email, you wrote memos and you edited memos and and memos were were truly professional writing. And so when you adopted email, you adopted that professionalism that really maintained for 20 years.
00:23:26
Speaker
And now you have a group that is so comfortable communicating with their fingers on on keyboards, it never occurred to them that that should be a college term paper. And so you have this conflict.
00:23:37
Speaker
Right. And I wanted to build a tool that said, hey, when ah when Sarah complains that her boss, Greg, just doesn't like her. I want HR to like go right to the source.
00:23:47
Speaker
Show me all the email between Sarah and Greg, because Greg's you know nearly 50. Sarah's 20 something. And what's going is Greg might be a jerk. And Greg could probably stand it to say please and thank you a little bit more.
00:23:58
Speaker
um But there might also be a little thin skinned and the truth is always in the middle. So let's just look. And so that's that's some of the the the insight i I share with my clients. But really, I get to partner with these HR consultants to say we can make such a huge difference by just having our our managers and our leaders and and folks at the top replying with a heartfelt thank you every now and then.
00:24:19
Speaker
even if even if you're pasting it into ChatGPT and saying, hey, help me write a sincere but concise thank you, um like it's going to give you a great template. i don't I don't think we should outsource our brains to these AI tools, but gosh, they're just so stinking helpful yeah that I know I've written a number of handwritten thank you notes based on what Claude, what ChatGPT have kind of helped me verbalize because i can we can all come up with, I don't know three bullet points of of sentiment or of of emotion on what this impact of of this event had. So I think we can go a long way towards improving our communication, but we got to know where to start, right? and So i I tend to default to we start where, you know, the um the risk is the highest, the signal is the highest, the negative sentiment is the highest. Those are the things I can find.
00:25:08
Speaker
um So we start with, and those are the, maybe the easiest things to fix. Now, should management be communicating their financials and being transparent about their, their strategy? I have a mountain of opinions about those. And I, I tend to always defer to yes, more transparency is better, but I don't think that's a a panacea type answer to to communication issues.
00:25:31
Speaker
Well,
Workplace Culture and Transparency
00:25:32
Speaker
I have so many things that I want to add here. You know, it's interesting how you you you sort of gravitate towards the, um you know, that that negative sentiment first, right?
00:25:44
Speaker
um But what's really interesting about that, and and um I'm going to step a little bit out of my depth here, you know, I know that there have been some really interesting studies that, you try to understand what can have a greater impact, um you know, either more positive thinking or less negative thinking.
00:26:07
Speaker
And maybe if you ask 100 people, you'll get 50 to say one thing and 50 to say the other. But actually, the data is overwhelmingly clear which provides the greater positive impact.
00:26:24
Speaker
Do you know which one it is? i I feel like I've read this story and forgotten the conclusion. ah so yeah Is it less negativity? It's less negative thinking.
00:26:36
Speaker
Less negative thinking overwhelmingly provides a greater positive impact than more positive thinking. Not that they're, I mean, they're both obviously incredibly valuable and I think we need both, but it's interesting that you go there and I think, you know rightfully so, whether it was a gut instinct or that's, you know you actually found that in the numbers,
00:26:56
Speaker
it's where you're goingnna it's where you're going to wind up having you know a greater positive impact. the um you know Communication, obviously, is you know super super important. you know You touched on that ah a couple of times. You mentioned it a couple of times.
00:27:12
Speaker
You seem to be doing great here, so I don't know if you're... Maybe your wife and kids are totally looking at that through a different lens. But... you know It's one of those things that is critical for you know that transparency that you talk about, the communication, right? you You need it in order to have this culture of strong retention, right? Being able to engage your folks, to be really transparent with them, to communicate effectively, both the positive and the negative.
00:27:44
Speaker
um you know, is important, not just for keeping people, but also for getting talent in the door. A lot of organizations totally miss the mark. You probably work with some who've come to you with the problem.
00:27:57
Speaker
um Why do you think that so many places struggle with that? and And how how can these these organizations and their ah HR teams begin to fix it?
00:28:09
Speaker
Yeah, I think there's a number of factors at play. I think corporate stress ah kind of bubbles down into management stress, can bubble down into people stress. And I i mean, I know that the worries of the top executives are probably very different.
00:28:27
Speaker
than the worries of maybe some of the more entry-level folks. um But that doesn't let the executives off the hook to kind of addressing that. I remember when ah when we were really small at my old employer, were 20 employees.
00:28:39
Speaker
I was employee number 21. So I got to do everything from finance and accounting to HR and recruiting. And ah during this interview process, I used to always offer to them, hey, if you like this is an interview, we both know you know this dance we're doing where I'm telling you how great you are and you're telling me how great you are. And we both know neither of us are this great.
00:29:01
Speaker
But I really like I want you to find people at this company and reach out to them and just ask them about their experience. And and and don't even tell me. Find them on LinkedIn. Of course, I'll introduce you to literally anybody. but Folks are busy.
00:29:14
Speaker
um But i will I will connect you to literally anybody. ah Because i want them to know that everybody we is a little bit on them, right? Because we we want everybody to be part of this culture. And I want you to know that if you become part of this place, like that's what we're kind of going to expect of you. So there's a little bit of this.
00:29:35
Speaker
kind of we're all in this together. i know that that sounds good. And I know I've worked at many places where they that was said, but I never really felt that. um But it's it's becoming increasingly difficult on both the objective and the subjective side to evaluate people, right? I used to, um when I would talk to my team about interviewing I never wanted to win an interview.
00:29:59
Speaker
Like there's nothing like when the interviewer walks away and says, ha ha, I asked the how many windows are in Seattle question and they didn't know the answer. I i just won. And I'm thinking, God, what did you get out of that?
00:30:09
Speaker
What benefit is it to to win? I really want that person to have their best possible day in this interview. Cause I really want to know like, what does that look like? What does somebody at their best look like? And then once they're on board, how do we create environment where at least some part of every day gets to be them at their best. I mean, at the end of the day, somebody still has to reconcile bank accounts, right? Which is just mind numbing, right? Somebody has to receive feedback on their art, which God bless the artists that put up with people like me in the world that, you know, want a logo moved.
00:30:41
Speaker
Um, But the idea that there's something here that you know, can bring you fulfillments a lot, but can bring you joy, at least contentment is is something I think companies need to focus a lot more on and and hopefully they can find a way to get there.
00:30:57
Speaker
It's a really great way to approach. I think when you, when you have new people that you've brought into your, your sphere, your ecosystem, maybe you've hired them, maybe you haven't yet, but even just in interviews and, and,
00:31:13
Speaker
having the confidence in your culture, um even if you don't really, I mean, the you know, it just goes a long way to show the kind of culture that you're trying to create.
00:31:24
Speaker
um And that's a level of transparency that you don't really find very much. um So that's ah that's a really great start on how to fix some of those things. Very good.
00:31:36
Speaker
Some good suggestions there. um and if i need like just it i would throw in i would throw in one more thing. I had a great... i think I read it in a book a long time ago, as I'm off to do, is when you when you plan a new initiative as you're planning it, before you execute, just ask yourself, what will this look like if it's successful?
00:31:54
Speaker
And what will it look like if it's not? And spell out those scenarios. We're going to build a new work from home policy. We're going to roll out new laptops. We're going to change the way our CRM works. If this work if if we're successful at this,
00:32:08
Speaker
what will that look like? People will X, employees will y systems will Z. And if it doesn't work out, what's that going to look like? Oh yeah, it'll be frustrating. Okay. Now we have things to measure. And I think so many things, even on the culture side, i've I've sat through many a core value exercise and just ask the question, you know, what first, why are we doing this? Not to suggest we shouldn't, but why are we doing this? And if we do this well,
00:32:34
Speaker
what will we expect this, you know, how will we measure this in three months or in six months or in nine months? And let's just define that now. And so all of our effort is going into the outcomes, right? Nobody needs another set of ignored core values or core values that even the executives can't, ah you know, can't name, ah but just, you know, it's classic Stephen Covey stuff, right? Like begin with the end in mind, like where do we want this to be?
00:32:59
Speaker
I love that.
AI Transforming HR Practices
00:33:00
Speaker
And that's definitely a mindset that I can appreciate on just about every level. um We know that a ah breakdown in communication, you know, can be indices of a lot of issues, right, in an organization.
00:33:18
Speaker
i mean, what do you given your experience so far, what you've seen through, you know, analyzing millions of of records for the organizations that you currently work with, um what have you seen that breakdown in communication cause.
00:33:35
Speaker
and And then give me give me some other warning signs that you know companies could be in trouble when it comes to their workforce. I worked for this crusty old Lieutenant Colonel in 2004.
00:33:50
Speaker
ah She's delightful. And and ah her she reminded me of, I think it's called Hanlon's razor. And it's never a tribute to malice, which you can do incompetence. That's bit harsh. It's very much something you'd expect the military to say, but never assume somebody's, the the light version, I would say maybe more appropriate for an HR setting is never assume somebody's mean or angry or hates you.
00:34:13
Speaker
Just assume they're busy and overwhelmed and don't have time. Because that's something we see that I see in the data. That's something my clients see using our tool is you know the the sharp one word replies, no.
00:34:28
Speaker
Or can you redo slide four? Or this isn't going to work, right? And and it's it's again, we we talked about the written context versus the relationship building and the personal context.
00:34:39
Speaker
That is something we see regularly. and and And those types of phrases, I will say, get flagged on the negative sentiment side all the time. And so I just always exercise caution to say, first, what you write needs to be you know fully evaluated in the sentiment. So if you have the time to say, hey, really great effort on these. I think slide three missed the mark.
00:35:00
Speaker
I know it's not possible, although we do have voice to text now, which makes that easier. ah We do have you know some LLM tools that can make your communication friendlier. All that stuff matters. All that stuff's important.
00:35:12
Speaker
But when you're on the receiving side of it, getting the no, this is bad, whatever that number, whatever that feeling is, taking the mindset, A, that it's it's about the work. It's not about me, that they're not mean. They don't hate me. i hope ah that they're probably busy.
00:35:30
Speaker
They're probably overwhelmed. They probably have four or five or 10 of folks like me vying for their attention, vying for their time. um And it's just they're they're distracted. So i would I would say that that's an example of something we, we I see the terse replies regularly.
00:35:47
Speaker
um And I mean, I think that's the only type of communication we get in text messaging is those terse, you know, the like, know you know, it's a text from my 75 year old mom, when she says, hi, Greg, comma, enter like mom, it's a text.
00:36:01
Speaker
I know it's from you. And then signs it as mom, right? That's right. but Love your mother. um but ah But I do think there's something to be said and and i and there's so there's so many ways to to fake it now, Curtis. I mean, apple i mean if if you just put you know h comma space, you can have that text expand to like, hey, there was just thinking about you like or the sign thing.
00:36:24
Speaker
thanks so much for your time. Hope this wasn't a bother all the best, Greg. I mean, again, that's a couple keystrokes and just have it auto fill in it. it It's a little disingenuous and I know, but it's better than the opposite of yeah like Greg out done. Right. Which just feels, it can, can feel a little more aggressive.
00:36:44
Speaker
Um, I want to, so I want to, I want to pivot and talk AI right now. It's, um, It's, i'm I'm absolutely like in love with what you guys do.
00:36:56
Speaker
um I know that AI driven insights can help get, you know, leaders lot of perspective around data, allowing them to see, you know, the story that the data truly tells.
00:37:11
Speaker
How do you see AI providing this context?
00:37:19
Speaker
I think, so first is a couple different layers. um And I, you know, in the context of org IQ and helping ah hr and executive teams identify and prevent themselves from risk, um which which often means, of course, following the law and treating their people above board, immediately identifying the examples where those things didn't happen.
00:37:45
Speaker
are are areas that AI is going to be a lot better, I think, or at least provide a better screen than people. So couple examples. so um Is there anything in this email that indicates sign of harassment or discrimination or workplace violence or wage theft or FMLA denial? These are all filters that we're about to go live with.
00:38:08
Speaker
um we can just and And not only can we take one pass at those sorts of language, we can instruct our agent to return its confidence interval as well and say, um I'm 20% confident this was a sign of violence. And you might read it today and say, this is just some football related trash talking, nothing to worry about here. And I don't even want to see things at the 20% confidence.
00:38:35
Speaker
I want to see things at the 80% confidence. right I do have a client now that ah HR wants an alert anytime PTO is denied, right? Doesn't mean they're going to act on it. They've got good supervisors, good managers. But if a supervisor puts in writing like, hey, have to deny your PTO request, HR just wants to see that and catalog that. And if they find, so first we're going to give them tools so they can detect patterns. But if they see in the language, the, oh, this was clearly an employee need time off to bring my mom to the doctor's.
00:39:08
Speaker
Now you're thinking hr knows that might be FMLA protected. i need to do the quick research to see if that's something we need to address because this was a good supervisor who followed our you know PTO approval policy.
00:39:20
Speaker
But now I've got an additional you know amplifier to my a my HR ability that can really dive into that language. Or maybe I can find some of those patterns. So I'm very, very bullish in the short term on ai as you know brilliant language assistant.
00:39:38
Speaker
um There's a wrong, I mean, but for every good use. So again, I'm a data provider. Like I wanna analyze everything and provide dashboards and data. Absolutely nobody should hire anybody or fire anybody based on my tool.
00:39:53
Speaker
Nobody should lay off anyone in the HR department because we can look at this. in fact, this is
Future Impact of AI and Final Thoughts
00:39:58
Speaker
gonna make the people you have even more powerful. They're gonna make them more capable. I call it an amplifying tool. It's gonna make them, give them capability they didn't previously have.
00:40:07
Speaker
um But it it requires human beings to review the output, to to thoughtfully you know go through. And if if you're not going to respond to the data, like i like I can't fix that. do do employees get um are are they made aware that all the communications that they're having is being read and analyzed and cataloged? Do they have to sign off on that? Is there some sort of permission granting mechanism that has to be in place or do leaders not even need to tell them? I think 80% of the employees of my clients don't know a tool like ours is in place. I think 10%
00:40:51
Speaker
probably know because they're in a regulated industry, something's like in place and then 10% are pretty transparent with it. i do I do have an executive that told his whole team they don't need to worry about BCCing him on all this stuff anymore because he's just going to go in and search for things that are interesting to him. and They were like, oh, so you're going to read all our stuff? He's like, well, yeah, I mean, I own the company. I'm going to read all your stuff.
00:41:12
Speaker
um You don't have to bother BCCing me. um On the legality front, there's no reasonable expectation of privacy in the United States when you use your corporate email. we don't I don't install anything on anybody's laptops, anybody's phones. I don't have access to Facebook or Gmail. We literally just plug into the mail servers. So Google or Microsoft, and only the things that pass through that mail server are the things copied over to my system. So we really are just retaining corporate info, institutional info.
00:41:44
Speaker
um If you log into Gmail and say like, I don't have any insight into that. So i there's... There's a little bit of ah of a big brother, you know dystopian future future of of the tool that I have. um But when you've seen some of the risk it can mitigate and some of the opportunities to improve culture and to improve habits, um I mean, it's a trade-off that is not going to be a perfect fit for every business, I do not. I think you should we should all sign up immediately.
00:42:12
Speaker
like but i But I recognize this is just out of line. The companies that have built great cultures might not see the ah value in this sort of tool other than the the institutional knowledge retention piece of it. might They might find that ah that's pretty useful.
00:42:27
Speaker
I want to dig into that for a second because...
00:42:34
Speaker
there's there's like a whole bunch of questions I'm just going to squeeze into one here. You know, I understand how divisive the topic can be. <unk> I'm curious about, i mean, not just AI's overall application to the world of HR, you know, and how that's impacting workers, but even your tool specifically, like,
00:42:53
Speaker
i'm i'm this may be ah a question for your roadmap or maybe even what the future looks like, right? Because there's a real world I could see where if you are able to ingest this this kind of information, then in theory, right, if if there is a leader who leaves or an employee, the the amount of institutional knowledge that you've been able to retain and that you've probably been able to in some way – even you know, organize, um can be used to potentially even train the next person that comes in the door, possibly even replace them.
00:43:32
Speaker
Not really sure what that looks like. um But I'm kind of curious, like, how how is this all impacting workers? how What does that roadmap look like for org IQ? And is there going to be a possibility for organizations to use everything that they've you know, been able to to build with this software for, you know, future workforce training and planning.
00:43:58
Speaker
Yeah, that so you're you're right on it. And so when we think about ah going into Q1 of 2026, we've got we got some stuff to finish this quarter. When you think about an employee who has left the company, that has left behind a year, two or three years worth of correspondence, will be able to train an agent based on that on their email, everything they sent, everything they received. And then HR will be able to say, hey, help me write a job description based on what this person actually did.
00:44:28
Speaker
right It'll really be able to highlight the short, the medium, the long-term things. And then help me build an interview guide to really tease out the skill sets that either this person had and we want to replicate or they didn't and we're going to need.
00:44:42
Speaker
And then help me build a training plan based on what's the most important thing to train ah train them on. Because if if they're expected to produce a ah report every single week, that might take precedence over you know some more quarterly goal.
00:44:57
Speaker
And then deploy an agent based on the previous employee to the new employee. So now the new person has a training buddy. And so when the boss says, hey, we need an XYZ report, they can just ask, say hey, what the hell is an XYZ report?
00:45:10
Speaker
And the agent's like, oh yeah this is something Greg used to do every week. Here's the last three. It's just an Excel. Here's the copy. Well, where does he get the the data for these? Oh, well, here's how you know here's three emails he would send to the finance department. Clearly, that he's asking them for the data.
00:45:25
Speaker
Perfect. And you think about what that does for employees getting up to speed quicker, growing their skill set quicker, adding value quicker. And and those are the folks that as soon as you figure out, basically you shouldn't change something until you figured out what to do. Well, a lot of things need to be changed, but figuring out what to do can take an awful long time.
00:45:42
Speaker
We can get you up to that place a lot quicker. So that's that's where we're headed is really the you know that that ah that exoskeleton that the person wears that makes them stronger, faster, quicker, you know lift a little more weight type of thing.
00:45:56
Speaker
I, I, I'm fascinated by this. Do you think that employees see how this AI can benefit them, you know, can be beneficial or do you feel like they're still wary? Do you feel like their jobs are, do you think that they feel that their jobs are at risk?
00:46:16
Speaker
um Fear is a powerful motivating factor. um you know There's ah a book that that dropped here a couple weeks ago ah called, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies right by Eliza Yudkowsky. It's next up to read. I've had a couple people recommend it. This idea that you know there are real risks with super intelligence.
00:46:36
Speaker
When you listen to our our smartest thinkers on the subject, some are unbelievably bullish and some are absolutely terrified. And I don't i don't know which is right. um We're seeing hiring start to take from what the recruiters of the world are telling me, hiring starting to taper, maybe even decline.
00:46:55
Speaker
I don't know how much of that is economic cycles, political environments, you know tariffs, normal economic stuff versus impact of AI. So I guess I am sympathetic or empathetic with the fear that this could make things worse. Change is always, I think i think that's something HR people know better than most, change always drives fear.
00:47:17
Speaker
right So whether it's change for the better, change for the worse, um I'm still pretty bullish. right We know ai chess can beat any human alive, but we also know humans with AI assistants can beat AI chess.
00:47:33
Speaker
And so the partnership between you and your tool ah should ah be the most powerful outcome. and just, I mean, I think about, gosh, my ability to start and create this company is because of AI. I mean, it's it helps write you know the bottom half, the easiest half of our code. it It drafts our marketing updates. It analyzes our click data, stuff that If I do poorly, probably means the company fails. And if I do well, it means you know we live to fight another day. And without the AI tools, I wouldn't have it. So it it is it is creating opportunity and educational opportunity for me and my coworkers, my peers and our clients that didn't otherwise exist.
00:48:15
Speaker
So and that's the, what do they say? ronald Ronald Reagan used to say one day, I just want a one-handed economist because this is on the one hand and on the other hand. yeahs That's where it is with AI.
00:48:27
Speaker
You know, that it's um it doesn't surprise me that that the hiring is probably tapered a little bit. You know, I think that that's economic cycle in in the sense that, you know, I think the same thing happened, you know, at um at other turning points, right, in, you know, ah in in modern, you know,
00:48:49
Speaker
innovation history, think the industrial revolution and how it changed it it changed so many jobs. It replaced a lot, but it created, the amount that it created right was um incalculable at the time. And and i have a feeling that AI is probably going to do something similar. Right now, it's replacing a lot of things, but it will, ah in the end, probably create right a lot of new jobs.
00:49:14
Speaker
Right now, we don't know what those look like. What was that latest ah Nobel Prize that was in economics that just so awarded to those folks who you know drew those correlations between innovation and economic development? So you know I think that it's ah it's a matter of time between how we figure out what the new um economic mobility looks like, and then everybody will then start to get hired. hopeful Hopefully that's my, that's my positive spin on all of those things.
00:49:43
Speaker
i think so. But I mean, tren so, I mean, there'll be plenty of risk, plenty of reward and, but transition periods are always, you know, fraught with, fraught with fear and discomfort, which I doubt either of us are stranger, the stranger. yeah ands Do you, do you think that there's,
00:49:58
Speaker
Something leaders should be doing in order to incorporate AI the best way, like the ideal way that they infuse it into their organization when it comes to their ops or processes, workflows, etc.?
00:50:10
Speaker
I mean, you do have to start with risk and thinking about what is the risk of of just use just use the simple, that the large language models. um If you wanted to have a chat GPT, rewrite a memo, draft an email, the superhuman email client, if folks aren't using, is pretty amazing where...
00:50:30
Speaker
You type in the four bullet points you want to communicate, it drafts the letter or it drafts the follow up. I have no affiliation Superhuman, but I'm pretty impressed with it. um I don't think you can ignore it.
00:50:41
Speaker
I think there's ah I will say if there's an inefficient process in your company. ask AI how to fix it. If you're paying for an AI tool, so 20 bucks a month for ChatGPT, 30 bucks for Grok, I think Claude is 25, it doesn't matter.
00:50:57
Speaker
But all of their contracts are pretty clear that if you're paying for it, you're not training the model. And that was the major fear when this all came out in November of 22 is folks were uploading it and you could ask Microsoft what its earnings would be. And because their analysts were using it, you were getting that data.
00:51:12
Speaker
So now all those contracts are pretty clear in that if you're paying for it, ah It is not training its model based on what you're what you're uploading. But if it's if you have protected health info, PII, you should maybe anonymize it before you do that.
00:51:26
Speaker
So I would say ah ask it how to be better, ah whether it's a business process, a communication issue, um There's a world where if you can dream it at this point, like it can happen.
00:51:37
Speaker
yeah yeah cool A lot of calls like this are often on Zoom. I can drag the audio into a folder where some Python script, i don't know how to write Python, but sure enough, it will take the the audio, it'll transcribe it It'll send me, it'll email me a summary of the call. It'll draft a follow-up letter for me.
00:51:55
Speaker
And so literally as soon as I'm done with a sales call, oh, it'll give me feedback on how I am as a sales rep, which is just average. ah But I'm working on it. like So it it will tell like, oh, hey, Greg, you know you didn't kind of close without asking what next steps were. So um the the realm of personal improvement, and you've got the world's greatest teacher in every topic, literally your fingertips. So I would...
00:52:17
Speaker
encourage that. If I was a ah leader, I would say everybody should be you know learning the things that are important to them, finding ways to do their job faster, easier, more automatically. I think that's great advice.
00:52:29
Speaker
um i will i will look forward to getting the the email after this, the email follow-up. Just to wrap up, if you had a single piece of advice, I'd love to ask this question at the end. I'm just really kind of curious if you had a single piece of advice.
00:52:44
Speaker
for business leaders when it comes to their people, you know, you're on an elevator up to the top floor. You only have a minute before they, you know, they walk right out the door. What's the one thing that you tell them? What do you leave them with to how to get it right from day one?
00:53:00
Speaker
uh, like, Leaning in and engaging with individuals just always seems to be the right call. the ah Whether it's 15 minutes in the morning with your developer in India, the weekend before the festival. like I got to meet some of my people last week, literally. It was just the 10 minutes of what are you working on? are you feeling about it?
00:53:21
Speaker
How's life in general? That goes so far to now when I leave feedback on a design or send a follow-up email, I have this picture in my head of ah of ah of a person and a family and a town and an event.
00:53:34
Speaker
I know as companies get to 500 and 5,000 and 50,000, a CEO can't do that with everybody, but can certainly empower their their managers, their supervisors to say, look, you should really know your folks as as best as you as you possibly can within reason. They're ah you know grabbing the beer, grabbing the you know the coffee in the morning, like that that human connection, that matters and AI can't replace that. So yeah value human connection.
00:54:03
Speaker
I love it. I really appreciate you taking the time to join me today, Greg. Thank you so much. Thank you. This was great. And of course, thanks to everybody for joining us. This is Mustard Hub Voices Behind the Build.
00:54:16
Speaker
Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss the next episode. Also recommend visiting mustardhub.com. There you can lower learn more about Mustard Hub and get started for free. Discover how we help companies become destinations for workplace happiness and turn culture into a competitive edge.
00:54:33
Speaker
Until next time.