This episode features an interview with Jordan Katz, Chief Insights Officer at Simpplr. Jordan advises organizations on the influential use of data and analytics to develop strategies that predict outcomes and increase performance. Prior to Simpplr, he was one of the Heads of Employee Experience Strategy at Qualtrics and has consulted hundreds of SaaS companies and global organizations. In this episode, Shawn and Jordan dive into Simpplr’s Future of Employee Experience Report. They discuss the importance of personalized and efficient communication platforms, analyzing diverse data sources to create a seamless employee experience, and taking a human-centered approach to AI.
This episode features an interview with Jordan Katz, Chief Insights Officer at Simpplr. Jordan advises organizations on the influential use of data and analytics to develop strategies that predict outcomes and increase performance. Prior to Simpplr, he was one of the Heads of Employee Experience Strategy at Qualtrics and has consulted hundreds of SaaS companies and global organizations.
In this episode, Shawn and Jordan dive into Simpplr’s Future of Employee Experience Report. They discuss the importance of personalized and efficient communication platforms, analyzing diverse data sources to create a seamless employee experience, and taking a human-centered approach to AI.
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“87% of professionals are passionate about their current jobs, but 64% of them frequently feel stressed or frustrated at work. We have a primed and ready to go race car with rocket fuel in the tank. We load up a bunch of sandbags in the trunk that represent crappy tools and inefficient processes. There’s no reason for that. The more we study employee experience, the more we learn how critical it is to think holistically about the work people do, the task distribution they have, and how we can operationalize great efficiency. Using systems and AI to free up people to do the strategic work that will catapult our organizations into the next level from a performance perspective.” – Jordan Katz
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Episode Timestamps:
*(03:11): Jordan defines employee experience
*(05:00): Rapid fire questions
*(14:36): What the report says about frontline workers
*(22:54): Creating a personalized employee experience
*(34:11): What prevents companies from implementing an HR stack
*(41:05): How AI impacts employee experience
*(51:49): Jordan’s golden rule for work
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Links:
Connect with Jordan on LinkedIn
Read Simpplr’s Future of Employee Experience Report
Connect with Shawn on LinkedIn
Shawn Pfunder: Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Cohesion. And today I'm joined once again by Jordan Katz, Chief Insights Officer at Simpplr.
Shawn Pfunder: He advises organizations on the influential use of data and analytics to develop strategies that predict outcomes and increase performance. Now, last time, we discussed Simpplr's 2024 State of Internal Communications Report. Today, We're going to get into the future of employee experience. So last time, a lot about internal communications, those departments, what they work on, and a little bit of like what we see sort of moving forward.
Shawn Pfunder: Today, a little bit more about employee experience broadly. Jordan, welcome back.
Jordan Katz: Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. Glad to be back. This is going to be a lot of fun.
Shawn Pfunder: This is a big topic. And before I get too far, like what
Shawn Pfunder: I want to do is, I don't know if it's Socrates or Plato, it's one of those where they're like, okay, define your terms.
Shawn Pfunder: Now that was before they started debating. I don't think we're getting the debate.
Jordan Katz: Maybe you think employee experience is completely unimportant. We should just bring every bit of productivity out of a human regardless of how they feel. Maybe. Bring it on. Let's debate.
Shawn Pfunder: Maybe. Yeah. Let's, what do we talk about when we talk about employee experience?
Shawn Pfunder: What do we, like, what is, I guess, employee experience?
Jordan Katz: Well, employee experience is a combination of everything that occurs around employees. And two employees, right? So we talk about employee engagement a lot. That means different things for different people. When we think about employee experience, employee engagement is sort of the study of the level of connection they have with their manager and their company and the likelihood that they're willing to give discretionary effort or be more productive.
Jordan Katz: That really is just about like the employee themselves. But employee experience is more holistic. It's more comprehensive. It's about their interaction with technology. It's about their interaction with people, the policies of the organization, processes. All different types of things that occur, including interactions with customers, can make up the employee experience.
Jordan Katz: So when we say employee experience, it's like the, you know, the atmosphere around the earth. And when we talk about employee engagement, maybe it's like your local town and where you live and where you sit at your desk, right? Though, elements of sitting at your desk can impact your employee experience.
Jordan Katz: And we'll get into that certainly later. As there's a, there are a lot of nuances to that. Right. Atmosphere around the earth.
Shawn Pfunder: Sure. That's a, that's a, that's a good example. Well, I, I know a lot of people, myself included, can get lost in employee experiences, just the, like, are you happy or not at work or how do you feel
Shawn Pfunder: about your job or what do you think about, but it almost gets.
Shawn Pfunder: Sort of pulled in with sentiment, maybe a little bit. And that's important for measuring, but it's not the whole thing. Okay. So employee experience, atmosphere, and then employee engagement, things like that, a little bit tighter. Well, then that's good. Establishing a baseline, but you know what? I forgot, Jordan, I have some rapid fire questions for you.
Jordan Katz: Great. Let's break the ice.
Shawn Pfunder: Personal Oprah Winfrey questions. Barbara Walters. Okay. Question. So if you can tear up a little bit on one of these, that would be fantastic.
Jordan Katz: I'll get emotional. I'm a terrible actor.
Shawn Pfunder: No pressure. All right. So the first one, if you could know the answer to one unsolved mystery, which mystery would you want to know the truth about?
Jordan Katz: One unsolved mystery. Oh, I know this is not, it's not helpful to anybody, but I've always been very interested since like they came out with it in discovery, like the search for the colossal squid or the giant squid. You know how sometimes they do those documentaries where they're like, we went down, you know, 10, 000 feet, we're searching for this animal that can, like, attack blue whales, and like, somewhere down there they find a tentacle and it's as big as a bus?
Jordan Katz: Like, I really want to know what's going on deep in the water with the, you know, the most massive squid pot. I, like, every time that comes on, I'm really, like, get deep into it.
Shawn Pfunder: That's super unique. Like other people, I would guess aliens, Bigfoot, JFK, like, but no.
Jordan Katz: Well, I'm pretty sure they're starting to like, aren't they talking about aliens now?
Jordan Katz: I feel like that's going to be released. There's congressional hearings, so we're on the verge. That one, somebody's taking care of that already. But like, you never know. No? Was it supposed to be something a little bit more like highbrow? That's what I said, maybe?
Shawn Pfunder: No, I don't think, I definitely don't think that's a highbrow question.
Jordan Katz: No, no, well, let's also go with, like, alternative proteins. Like, let's unlock the value of feeding the world so I don't come off as too much of a kook. Alright? Let's go with that.
Shawn Pfunder: What was the most impactful piece of media you've consumed this year? What have you seen, what have you heard that's like, wow, that's changed the way I look at the world?
Jordan Katz: Well I think you're going to hate this because I'm going to like kind of bunt it. But I, there's two things that happened. Okay. Over the course of the past, let's say 12 calendar months, right? I've worked on two pieces of research that I think are really important and really transformative in terms of what I'm doing and, and the companies I work for, one is understanding the perceptions and perspectives of nurses and doctors, like closely post pandemic.
Jordan Katz: And specifically what drives their employee experience towards less burnout and greater retention and greater productivity. Oh, interesting. And so I worked on, you know, employee experience for healthcare, and we ran one of the largest nurse and physician studies, you know, in recent times, specifically post pandemic.
Jordan Katz: And found, you know, a number of the different drivers and factors that actually predict whether they're likely to stay and whether they're likely to be burnt out, how likely things are to create great clinical outcomes for patients. And then the second one was, you know, the first great research study I worked at for Uh, worked on for Simpplr, the state of internal comms report, which we just reviewed in, in the previous podcast.
Jordan Katz: And what I found was like, you know, I talked about it both uplifting and positive and kind of depressing and negative at the same time, right? That there are teams who absolutely leverage modern tools and holistic platforms and generative AI to deliver great employee experience, communications, behavior change, et cetera.
Jordan Katz: But there's also, and it's certainly stratified. On a distribution, but there's also like a large portion of teams that are for whatever reason, and I don't think it's because they don't want to, but they absolutely are hamstrung and not delivering the value and impact and targeting and modern tools, a usage that they would want.
Jordan Katz: And so I think I thought I would see a little bit more skewness to the right, like. A larger portion of the distribution, like, we're using great tools, we're targeting people with very personalized communications, and we're using dynamic channels to reach people where they are, when in actuality it was much more of a normal distribution as, since, you know, I have studied statistics, I should have assumed, right?
Jordan Katz: Foolish me, but there's people on both ends. I, you know, I'm forever the optimist. So, you know, I thought maybe we'd be in a different place, but what I loved about that was despite discovering things that maybe I wasn't so thrilled about, we're able to put something together with very specific action.
Jordan Katz: Recommendations, what to do, how to do it, not like, Hey, you've got to spend millions upon millions of dollars on software, but, you know, get the right fundamental motions in place, support yourself with great software platforms and tools and do your best to do some of the basic. Now basic at 2024 stuff that probably in 2019 would have felt very high tech, but now you have at your fingertips the ability to do the things that great teams do without, with sort of minimal effort.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, well, easier to have something to say than somebody saying like, yeah, we're doing that. So we're doing targeting, we've got sort of unified, we're doing personalized comms, and it's not working.
Jordan Katz: Yeah, oh yeah, that would have been, that actually would have been horrible. Okay, fair, fair, that would have absolutely been way worse than what I experienced, okay.
Jordan Katz: Let's not have that happen. At least you'd be like, High five, you're measuring. Congratulations. Great. Everybody has a good job of charter and well communicated goals. All right.
Shawn Pfunder: Before we go on to the final sort of, sort of personalized professional question here at the top, the nurse and doctor thing is really, really interesting to me.
Shawn Pfunder: And have you found like in doing that kind of research where it seems, I don't want to say easy, but it's like, Everybody knows doctors and nurses. So when we talk about kind of the way that they work or what goes through, have you found that, that their experience has been a canary in the coal mine, so to speak, or a predictor of, does it equate with what we're seeing, say, in tech or manufacturing or in other industries?
Shawn Pfunder: Are, do they have similar employee experience struggles? Do they have similar feelings about work and the future of work?
Jordan Katz: So a couple of things. First of all, it's very hard to reach nurses and physicians. Right. And to get their actual perspective for a couple of reasons. First of all, super busy. Second of all, don't sit around on a laptop all day or even answer phones.
Jordan Katz: Right. So their job is mobile minute to minute. You know, it's in a specific building, but you're not sitting doing paperwork or fielding phone calls that aren't outbound to just give results, right? So.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah, yeah. Well, that's good. I mean, my femur is broken. I don't want you taking surveys that Jordan sent you, right?
Jordan Katz: True, true, true. That said, like, that means you asked if there are canary in the coal mine, like, maybe not so much because we don't really, Get their opinion very often. I would more likely call them like one of the great mysteries that you were hoping I would say that I could solve in the sense that there's a lot going on in the head and under the skin of this absolutely critical population that we don't know about, but that we should strive to
Jordan Katz: understand, take action on, and optimize. And I think I might say the same for teachers and probably for first responders as well, right? These are all populations that absolutely would greatly benefit from a decluttering of their workspace and workplace. And I don't just mean like physical items. I mean, if the average, uh, office worker receives 120.
Jordan Katz: One emails per day. That's probably the same for physicians and nurses or more, and they don't have the focus time in front of their computer or handheld to even field those. So we need, and God forbid they have Slack and instant messenger or whatever, right, that we need to think about those types of people.
Jordan Katz: And, you know, take a human centered approach, which is to say, yeah, don't message them a thousand times, a thousand items, every message to them should be condensed, should be in a centralized location, should be easy to access, and shouldn't just be generalized, right? You should be served up in a personalized way, leveraging AI to have when they open up their handheld or their laptop, every second is precious.
Jordan Katz: And we should respect that and coordinate the way we talk to them in such a way.
Shawn Pfunder: So listen, I still have a personal question for you, but I'm going to ask it at the end because this leads perfectly into this stuff I saw. Yeah, do whatever you want. It's your show. This leads really well into this report about employee experience.
Shawn Pfunder: And when we're looking at labor shortages, we're looking at job satisfaction, we're looking at the way that people work all the way through this report. And when you talk about. Nurses, first responders, teachers, doctors, you're naming all of these things that are in high demand, labor shortage, burnout, people want, like, they don't last, you got teachers that, you got teachers that quit and become Uber drivers because they don't want to be a teacher anymore.
Shawn Pfunder: It says something about employee experience. Are there things that we uncover in the employee experience report that I think you mentioned a few of them that sort of speak to that in how to improve an employee experience with these types of employees? Because I know, I know that it stretches to everyone.
Shawn Pfunder: You've got, you know, technology workers, we've got frontline workers at McDonald's, and it kind of covers these pieces. But is there anything else that you noticed in that report that would speak specifically to these frontline? You know, essential workers and sort of improving perhaps their employee experience.
Jordan Katz: I mean, so maybe not specifically, I think there's all kinds of. And I'm going to say this in a way that turns it into totally specifically using them as the edge case, right? I'll bring it around and probably, yeah, using them as the edge case will enable us to handle the elements of employee experience that lift, you know, lift the positivity for everyone.
Jordan Katz: Okay. So, and I like to say, and I've been saying it for many, many years, maybe it'll catch on employee experience is both rapidly changing. And hyperlocal. And what I mean by that, rapidly changing, like every experience you have, every interaction you have, flavors how you are feeling in that moment. Right?
Jordan Katz: It flavors your employee engagement, it flavors your morale, it flavors your sentiment. So if you have a positive experience, maybe you get peer to peer recognition, we know that social recognition or peer to peer recognition has a very positive impact. on the way you feel, then the, and in fact, you know, I read a research report about Symantec that found when there's social recognition or peer to peer recognition, that resulted in a 14 percent increase in engagement scores, right?
Jordan Katz: So there's real ROI in having, getting recognized by people around you. Now, you know, the converse of that is where you have a negative interaction, like maybe your manager yells at you or somebody says your work sucks, whatever. That has a much more negative effect than positive reinforcement has on, like, how long you feel.
Shawn Pfunder: So, so even, even more negative than 15%, 15 percent increase, but even worse on the other side?
Jordan Katz: I don't have a great stat on that at, at hand right now, but as you look and research, like. The, you know, the effect of negative interactions, you'll see that it lasts much longer. Um, so it's rapidly changing. And the other point is, like Hyperlocal, you'll notice, I don't say like, you know, the company came up with a new mission statement and then had a positive or negative.
Jordan Katz: effect on my employee experience in the moment. That's much more of a, like a holistic, longer, longer term or longer affecting type of impact. So, yeah, like hyper local, meaning it's within your work group. And we know that work group effects and who your direct manager is. It has an absolute long term effect on who you are, how you experience your workplace, and certainly like is directly correlated, perhaps 70, up to 70 percent correlated to how you feel in employee engagement.
Jordan Katz: And so when we talk about sort of that frontline worker, right, if you solve their problems, you solve everyone's problem pretty easily because they're harder to reach. They're harder to change. They spend less time with their boss, maybe less time with their peers. So the couple of things that are, you know, come out of this report or that come out of Research that we've studied recently is like U.
Jordan Katz: S. employee engagement has pretty much rain, but range bound like 30 to 35 percent of employees are always a fully engaged, right. Acro for the past 15 years, 20 years. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. At the same time, 16, you know, 15 to 18 percent are actively disengaged. That sort of disgruntled, you know, having negative impact on their peers.
Jordan Katz: That group, always about the same. And that group in the middle, sort of not engaged or leaning one way or the other. That's the group that where I think you're going to get the most juice from the squeeze. Okay, given that since the year 2000 and everyone has been working on employee engagement or most great organizations really focus hard on improving the employee experience, given that it's range found for that period of time, there must be something else going on.
Jordan Katz: And what it is is the ecosystem around And that's what we're People that really affects their experience over time with their work, with their peers, with their manager, et cetera. And more and more and more, we're finding that technology, particularly as we've moved into a hybrid working paradigm, technology is the stuff.
Jordan Katz: that truly flavors and is moving the needle. And the cluttering or decluttering of technology and interactions with your tech can have a very strong effect. And really what I mean by that is like, if you've got a great digital workspace, then negative effects of broken processes or systems or non optimal interactions with tech or having to, like 70 percent of employees.
Jordan Katz: Say it takes an average of four to seven apps to complete one HR task. And somewhere around 38 apps or programs touched per day. And so you can imagine just in itself, Regardless if you're sitting at a desk or somewhere else, that amount of switching and context switching and tools finding and back and forth from form to form is just gonna degrade whatever positive interactions that you're having or positive momentum or passion that you have about your work.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah, yeah. It's like you're at a, at a party. Right. But you keep having to like step aside
Shawn Pfunder: to take a phone call, step aside to take a phone call, step aside to take a phone call over and over and over again. I think we, I don't know if it's somebody from person or if it's somebody from Simpplr, but you refer to it as digital friction.
Shawn Pfunder: I think in the report that makes sense to me.
Jordan Katz: For sure. Digital friction is absolutely a great way to say this. And I know that we talk about, and Will Stars Watson put out a research report and Miriam. Connaughton from Simpplr, our great CHRO and Chief Experience Officer, talks a lot about digital friction because it really describes the slowdown you experience when you have to context switch or toggle control
Jordan Katz: between an app or a piece of information, or God forbid, you can't find it because it takes like 23 minutes to recover your focus after something like that happens. And that creates one of the things we found, you know, back in another past research study that I worked on was the linkage between that type of interaction and burnout, right?
Jordan Katz: 38 percent of employees are experiencing burnout right now. And the number one driver of burnout is ineffective processes and systems, right? It couldn't be more clear if you're an organization and you care about employee experience, and you're trying to increase employee engagement, employee productivity, employee retention.
Jordan Katz: You have to look beyond just serving your employees and giving the managers the results and have them talk about how to create an engaging work, work group. That's absolutely critical, but you have to go beyond that to understand the atmosphere, the ecosystem, everything around the employees. Because if I'm sitting at my desk and I'm on a video conference and I can't, you know, can't get my mic to work because there's a zoom update that hasn't been pushed out.
Jordan Katz: Right. Which we all experienced over and over.
Shawn Pfunder: And that's it. So I laugh cause it's so real.
Jordan Katz: It really asked me to update every time I'm like one minute late to the most important meeting in the world. It's like, Oh, we got to push an update. You can't get around it. I can't delay this. Nope. It's going to take four minutes minimum and you're going to look like an idiot.
Jordan Katz: All right. Thanks, Zoom. Thanks a lot. Yeah.
Shawn Pfunder: One way that I'm thinking about it from what you're saying right now is that Employees that really, so people that really love their job, really love their work, I would even say really love their life, they're able to experience success. Maybe it's just not, I don't mean success capital S, I mean success meaning I'm moving the needle a certain direction, or I'm making an impact here, and scrolling through your, Your inbox and just replying to emails isn't that, or, or just having meetings isn't that, like, it just makes you like, why am I being paid kind of thing that you never think that slow down.
Jordan Katz: I know I'm being paid. Come on, man. People are going to listen to this.
Shawn Pfunder: I mean, I've been paid to look at email. I've been paid to post emojis in Slack. That's yeah, no, I totally, I totally get it.
Jordan Katz: So, I mean, you make a good point, which is if you think about email as just the evolution of actual mail, the world we live in right now is every day we go to our mailbox and we have 121 on average letters, and then we stack them in our office in chronological order.
Jordan Katz: And then when we have to search for something, we read, you know, 40 percent of them. And then we have to reference back to that. And write someone a letter, someone a letter. We have to search through them in chronological order. And yes, we have a little bit of a catalog, card catalog system. Like we're in the library, but like, I cannot think of a less efficient
Jordan Katz: approach to doing communications broadly to people when it's absolutely critical. Versus, we wake up in the morning, we walk, let's say it's the future, we walk over to our, you know, stand up monitor, we click the button, and every message that's absolutely critical to us is right on the first page. And then tasks we're supposed to complete are must reads right over here.
Jordan Katz: A conversational AI that we can interact with, say, Hey! You know, conversational AI of your choice name, I need to register for leave, or I need to submit my expense report, or I have, I'm having trouble with my, something's going on with my technology, like my, you know, my podcast mic doesn't work. I need you to send me a, you know, a replacement or a fix and that conversational AI, instead of.
Jordan Katz: Then pinging an HR person or an IT person and making them work on like non strategic tasks. Computers or AI, that's systems, that are very good at completing rules based tasks can handle that for us. And we're all more productive as a result and we have a better experience. Versus, if I had to register for a leave at prior companies, first I'd have to go find the policy.
Jordan Katz: Like, what's my leave policy? Right. Right? Then I'd have to figure out what forms do I have to fill out, contain the exact information that you already know about me, because I'm in your HRAS system, but I would have to refill out those forms to then submit them, probably via fax. To whoever, right? And who has a fax machine, and why do I have to re enter information that you already have of mine?
Jordan Katz: And why do I have to go search my email, which is already, you know, just stacked letters in chronological order? It's just a terrible system that creates a scenario in which, and Deloitte did a great study on this, 87 percent of professionals are passionate about their current jobs, but 64 percent of them frequently feel stressed or frustrated at work.
Jordan Katz: Like, we have a primed and ready to go race car with rocket fuel in the tank, and then, you know, we load up a bunch of sandbags in the trunk that represent crappy tools and inefficient processes. We, there's no reason for that. And the more we study employee experience, the more we learn how critical it is to think holistically about the work people do.
Jordan Katz: The task distribution they have, and how we can operationalize great efficiency to free, using systems and AI to free up people to do the strategic work that will catapult our organizations into the next level from a preventive. Yeah, yeah.
Shawn Pfunder: This really resonates with me because I think about the, so we talked about it a few minutes ago and led to this, but to create a really great employee experience, you've got, you mentioned employee personalization, that makes sense.
Shawn Pfunder: Like my front page news is different than your front page news. And right now, a lot of, a lot of places don't do that. I know I don't. I fight to make sure that the, this executive doesn't send something to the entire company on this day so that this executive can send something. But what I'm saying is everybody's front page is the same and that's not true.
Shawn Pfunder: So personalized experience, peer to peer, like recognition, like that creates a great employee experience. Great managers, like they're empowered, they're good, they connect with people, and like this sense of belonging. And I can do that. If my company is made of three employees, like without anything, because we're all going to hang out and we're going to give high fives.
Shawn Pfunder: We're going to go get burritos and we're going to be able to do that. But as you, this is the crux, like what you're saying with employee experience at organizations that as soon as you even get to 30 employees, how are you going to be
Shawn Pfunder: able to do that? Cause it just takes an extraordinary amount of time.
Shawn Pfunder: If you're just going to try to do that. One on one, one on one, one on one, one on one.
Jordan Katz: You're going to have to have something. Even with 30 employees, it's not possible. But if you could start from scratch, building up your infrastructure, you can really orchestrate something that hums. That's great. Right?
Jordan Katz: You leverage AI, you unify all your technology in a way that's integrated for each employee, create a great experience. Right? So we have, everybody's going to have to have a tech stack. Let's be super strategic about a, what technology we use. But B, how do we put a layer on top of that, that allows everyone to access everything frictionlessly, that serves up information and allows you to search across the entire organization in an easy way, and reduces clutter by commute, use, you're creating a communication and social interaction hub for those employees, and then prioritize the experience beyond technology, just like you said, great managers.
Jordan Katz: Regardless of how they work, because what's not important is where people work, what is important is how productive and how excellent they work. And then finally, the piece that we haven't really talked about is how do you enable employees and empower employees and give them a voice in everything that happens?
Jordan Katz: Or everything relevant that happens without creating like, we have to give them surveys every two days or like a, I mean, I have worked with companies that wanted a daily pulse survey. How you feeling every day? It's just too much unactionable data, but if you create a scenario in which people feel empowered to share their voice and that there's a feedback loop that will result in at least their perception of that their idea was considered.
Jordan Katz: Or action was taken, then that raises their employee engagement, their connection to the business, their ability to work productively, etc. Yeah, yeah.
Shawn Pfunder: Wait, what do you mean just their perception? Are we revealing something here?
Jordan Katz: I mean, kind of. Let's be pragmatic. We're telling you that we listen to you.
Jordan Katz: Honestly, like, let's be pragmatic, right? Like, if someone comes to you with a terrible idea, You can't just implement that idea because you have created a policy of empowerment, but you can indicate that I've ingested and considered your idea. And it's, you know, you've educated me as a leadership team. And while we're not going to take that specific We're not going to give everybody brand new Jordans to wear every single day in your coal mine, right?
Jordan Katz: Because that's just impractical. Everybody will get their shoes dirty and hurt their toes, right? But I understand maybe you're looking for something related to footwear or something better, right? So yeah, not every idea is amazing. But every employee should have at least the ability to share feedback and to have a voice.
Jordan Katz: And yeah, I know from research that I did with prior clients that that has a positive impact and it makes life easier for managers and leaders because they don't, they either feel compelled to ignore everything, which has a depressive impact on the employees and their engagement. Right, right, right.
Jordan Katz: Exactly. Or they feel the need to read every comment and then react like, hey, I heard your idea about Air Jordans in the coal mine. It is a bad idea because you're going to hurt your feet, right? No, just we gather the information. We hear your voice. We're open to your suggestions and we do. Pay attention to them.
Jordan Katz: And then here's some of the actions that we've taken as a result of employee feedback. That's what you need to do so that people legitimately, I don't want you to lie about it, but legitimately feel heard. And then when you do these things, you definitely see pronounced impact on performance levels and the bottom line.
Jordan Katz: So, Forrester did a great research study specifically on the impact of Simpplr's employee experience platform, and they looked at productivity savings from Improved search, right? The ability to search across all of the technology and resources within the organization, productivity gains from reduced number of emails, cost savings from eliminating legacy platforms, and HR labor cost savings from self service enabled by the things that I talked about earlier, right?
Jordan Katz: It was just for like an average size organization. These aren't representative numbers that you should use if you have a 200, 000 person organization, or if you have a 250 person organization, but The total was, you know, over 3 million a year, almost 4 million a year, and represents, you know, a multi times return on investment, just based on very simple, not like, knocking the doors off the performance of, you know, Changes to the employee experience, right?
Jordan Katz: So you spend money and time and not even that much time figuring out how to center everything you're doing from a technology perspective, a recognition perspective, listening perspective in one very powerful employee experience layer, and you immediately retrieve significant gains monetarily, but even more importantly, in the way people do work.
Jordan Katz: The way they feel about their work and the way they're able to accomplish goals in alignment with the company mission and vision.
Shawn Pfunder: There seems to be a challenge that because that, that feels very no brainer to me and being able to do something like that. The the the. I'm not saying the one ring to unite them all for everything, you know, your email, your development and everything.
Shawn Pfunder: But for this particular. But we we. quick. From the report, I think it says only 18 percent of companies have an HR tech stack. Like you mentioned tech stack and when we talk about this, what prevents,
Shawn Pfunder: I guess, companies from doing that is because they've got legacy systems and we have to use these. Is it we just don't have the resources to move forward?
Shawn Pfunder: Like what's What's preventing like a 90 percent yeah, we have an HR tech stack, like we have a marketing tech stack, like we have a developer tech stack. What's stopping that, do you think?
Jordan Katz: Yeah, good question. So just to be fully clear to our listeners, it's 18 percent of companies have an HR tech stack designed to optimize employee experience, right?
Jordan Katz: Got it, So everybody has something that they're using for technology. Unless you're a very small organization, I mean, you outgrow an Excel spreadsheet or QuickBooks, Very quickly, so you're going to need HR information system, you're going to need a recruiting system, you're going to need, you know, all different types of technology in order to manage the transactions that are just inherent to having employees, right?
Jordan Katz: So everybody's going to have that, but it's only been in recent days, though, very much accelerated by the pandemic and the move to remote and hybrid work, that leaders, HR leaders, And much more slowly, no offense, IT leaders have even had to consider the employee experience impacts of the tech stack, right?
Jordan Katz: The IT budget is folk, and this is where a lot of the money comes from, usually, In the tech stack is focused on effectiveness and efficiency, security, integrations, cost, et cetera, and to, for a CHRO to go into technology and for a chief, uh, you know, information systems or systems or technology officer to push into the HR realm.
Jordan Katz: It's never easy. It's not, I mean, depending on how big your organization is, you could be, feel incredibly siloed away, but when those two leaders are strategic and unite to think about not just like, how's this going to fit in with our, you know, layer of bricks of technology, but how is this actually going to inspire the right behaviors to increase and drive productivity to decrease burnout and decrease friction and center around the way the most important resource in our organization needs it to, you know, Act and interact your employees.
Jordan Katz: Then you get the, that 18 percent of companies, which I suggest if we do, when we do longitudinal studies of those types of companies, we'll have much greater returns on investment or return on equity or earnings per share if they're a public company or, you know, All the different types of monetary positive outcomes, similar to the early 2000s through like 2015 when research was continually uncovering the fact that if you focused on creating high employee engagement within your workgroups, you would yield extremely positive financial returns as a result.
Jordan Katz: And so we'll see the same, my prediction, you know. It's on the permanent record is that we'll see when people focus on digital employee experience and creating great comprehensive EX platforms, then we'll see, you know, similar types of research come out, it says. If you did this five years ago, you vastly outperformed organizations that did not.
Shawn Pfunder: In that regard, getting a platform together that has all of that, and have that kind of a, like, Simpplr is a perfect example. I talk like I'm not going to say, like, Oh no, let's be agnostic. No, Simpplr is a perfect example for this working. You know, I've got an interesting question that I've run up to professionally, or run into professionally.
Shawn Pfunder: Regarding this, and it's, it's, of course, adoption, you know, change management, that can be difficult and everything else, I'm just going to call it the Slack question, like Slack and Teams, like those two, and I think partly the way they've been positioned, partly that, like, as people moved over to it, and by the way, I like, I heard you bad mouth Slack a little bit with a heaven forbid, you did it quickly, but I heard it come through, but you have, especially engineering, like I've been in organizations where Engineering decided on the communication tool, the employee engagement tool, because they're like, we'll quit unless we use Slack kind of thing.
Shawn Pfunder: How do you sort of address, I guess, the existing, is it you have a platform that's really good at integrating and pulling all these things into one place, so you still only have one place that you need to go, or is it flipped and you say, You're in Slack, and if you need to chat with the chatbot that's part of Simpplr and where the data is that you do it that direction, like, how do you
Shawn Pfunder: either overcome something like that and say, okay, we're done, or do you integrate something like that in some way to make it easier for people?
Jordan Katz: Yeah, so I'm so glad you asked that because it's completely self serving to me, which is to say that I've been hammering on my soapbox about dynamic channel strategy. It's just because I don't like getting over too many messages in Slack doesn't mean that Slack. And that I apparently badmouthed Slack on a podcast that's going to be broadcasted to millions upon millions of listeners, right?
Shawn Pfunder: Howdy, Salesforce!
Jordan Katz: Not a good play for my future career, but fine. There are people who only use Slack and do not use email. And there are people who only use email and do not use Slack or Teams or whatever. And what it's about is not Creating a scenario in which one is better than the other. It's about a computer system and artificial intelligence, a platform, a technology, understanding what you prefer based on your actions and interactions with tech, and then helping serve up the message.
Jordan Katz: That needs to be delivered, or the knowledge, or access to information, or access to apps or tools through the channel that makes most sense for you, for your best employee experience, for your most productivity, and for, you know, the best outcome for you and your team. So Slack is like a breakthrough technology for engineering teams.
Jordan Katz: I know for most, you know, engineers that I talk to, and that's amazing, but is it the perfect productivity tool for me? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe I'm not good at Slack. Maybe I'll get better and it'll be better for me. But that's the way I feel. And so the, you know, the systems or platforms that you integrate into your organization should be Able to determine that on its own without like too much human intervention.
Jordan Katz: No, there shouldn't be a human going, well, Jordan ignores a lot of Slack messages. We shouldn't send Jordan messages like critical messaging through Slack. We should hit him in his Simpplr, you know, homepage.
Shawn Pfunder: Well, that happens now. I know working with say a group of executives, you've got to communicate and you'll, you'll learn quickly.
Shawn Pfunder: This one prefers email. This one prefers Slack. I have to send a text message to this one. How would it be, imagine a world where. I just have to put it in one place. And they don't even have to opt in. That's what's amazing and what you're talking about. They wouldn't have to say, listen, Shawn, or listen, Simpplr, listen, Rufus, the AI, this is how I prefer my communications.
Shawn Pfunder: It could, or it just watches and says, Hey, guess what? Jordan doesn't like Slack very much. I'm going to, I'm going to send it to him on the platform because that's what he uses all the time.
Jordan Katz: Wakes up in the morning, opens up. It's Simpplr, it's called Backyard, and I see what kind of messages I need to read, and it says these are must reads, so I prioritize those first, and maybe I'm a slave to the machine.
Jordan Katz: Yeah. But like, I'm fine with that right now, because that's one more thing I don't have to think about, right? I'm managing all these different things both inside my work life and outside of my work life. It's very anecdotal, but like, I don't want to have to make a decision about what I read first. If somebody's just going to say this is what you should read first, boom, you just saved me, you know, 60 seconds.
Jordan Katz: And that adds up day over, you know, throughout the day. Maybe I'm saving an hour each day. That's amazing. That's amazing productivity. This doesn't always work. Like, I'm not necessarily the perfect representative sample here or example here because the American Psychological Association did just release the study that I think was really interesting that and they basically measured the percentage of workers reporting negative attitudes about work.
Jordan Katz: More positive attitudes about work, depending on whether they are worried or not worried about AI. And so, I talk about, a lot about ambiguity and lack of clarity, and how communication and certainty really accelerates an employee's perspective and feelings. In a positive manner, right? It makes them feel better.
Jordan Katz: So, if you're living in a world of complete ambiguity or non clarity about whatever your role or what you're supposed to work on or your future, then you're going to feel stressed and you're not going to give, be fully engaged or have a positive employee experience. AI is a real trigger for a lot of people.
Jordan Katz: And the American Psychological Association has some really great stats. So, if you're worried about AI, you know, making your, some or all of your job duties obsolete, then You are almost twice as likely to believe that you do not matter to your employer. Almost, you know, two and a half times more likely to feel like you do not matter to your co workers.
Jordan Katz: And you're absolutely feeling micromanaged at work, and worried that new forms of technology will take over. Some are all of your work duties in the next 10 years, like three times more likely to be with. That's devastating, right? So many critical things are happening. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so what's the salve for that?
Jordan Katz: What's the solution to that? In part, it's just telling your employees, like, here's how we feel about AI. Here's how we're going to use AI in your role and in your job and where we. Imagine it will impact everyone. And for those who are deeply studying AI and, you know, technology trends and evolution over time, big, giant, massive shifts in technology almost never result in like the devastation of people's careers and jobs.
Jordan Katz: Yes, it makes change, and yes, skills need to be adjusted, but we're at 3. 8 percent unemployment, and probably, you know, higher than that in underemployment, but not to an alarming extent. And we've had technology change, you know, hundreds of times over the past, you know, Several decades. So, the worst has not come to pass, but if you're able to communicate to your employees, and it's an imperative right now, about the way AI should be used within the organization as an accelerator.
Jordan Katz: As a, you know, an inertia lifter. We talked about that in the other podcast and object at rest stays at rest. Well, AI can be that extra little force to get you rolling downhill on your task. Can AI can help you and systems and technology can help you get busy and administrative work done. So you're freed up to do the strategic stuff that really makes an impact and can give you access to better information faster or better people faster.
Jordan Katz: As well. So yeah, I don't think people should be specifically scared of artificial intelligence, but if their leadership are not communicating about that in a very clear way, or if they're not using AI ethically in an ethical manner, in a way that's for the best of their business and their people, then you're going to create friction and you're going to create stress amongst your employees.
Jordan Katz: And you're going to create a scenario in which people aren't giving their best or having their best time. at work resulting in negative performance.
Shawn Pfunder: Well, when you have something this big and your leadership and at any company
Shawn Pfunder: is just quiet about it, then the assumption I think for any employees is they're thinking about something, they're doing something, something's happening behind, even if they're not, even if they're just worried about something else with the bottom line or the that's happened in the industry, people will start to, I think, create those feelings of not only distrust, but what's going to happen to me, what's going to happen to me.
Shawn Pfunder: There's a word. And I don't think it's a typo, but it's in, in the report. That's the first time that I've seen a phrase and it's another AI. And this one was augmented intelligence. And that really resonated with me, like when I saw that and you, you alluded to that in this, getting the ball rolling. So instead of it just being artificial intelligence, it's this unity, this binding, this, whatever, this augmented intelligence.
Shawn Pfunder: So me having augmented intelligence to do my job and be successful in my work. That was really cool. Compelling.
Jordan Katz: Yeah, I agree. And imagine having like a personal assistant that is not about doing your dry cleaning or something like completely innate. Augmented intelligence is about surfacing findings, surfacing insights, giving a critical timely alerts that enable you to take more focused and impactful action.
Jordan Katz: So when we talk about augmented intelligence, which I also, I absolutely love that phrase as well. It's about empowering people leaders by giving them the information that they need from like the core perceptions of their work groups mind so that they can actually. deliver a great work group experience, a great work group operational structure and strategy so that they rise to the top of their performance goals and that everyone wins and everyone performs better.
Jordan Katz: Because when people are winning, when analytics are, you know, aligned to your goals and capturing sentiment and providing you with the information you need to make sure that each person is like really humming. And really delivering great experience and performance, then everyone's going to feel better.
Jordan Katz: And sometimes having a great big win can offset some of the like small, you know, needling that occurs just by being a human being in the work. Like if you're worried about AI taking your job, but your team just like, Nailed some big deal or big manufacturing project. Like, eh, you're not so worried about AI taking your job anymore because you just crushed it, right?
Jordan Katz: You just nailed it. And so there's like that balance and that dichotomy between like. Feelings are facts, and what am I feeling, and actions are also facts, and impact and results outweigh a lot of, like, smaller, more minor, uh, concerns.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So how do we remove, then, any of the friction or the things that are distractions, or take the time to, to prevent people from just being able to win?
Shawn Pfunder: Right. Uh, so that we make that so it's possible for them, that personalization. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. is really, really big. I don't know if you saw, do you watch, do you follow CES, the big electronic, that was a consumer electronics show each year? This year, there was a, there was a device called Rabbit R2 or Rabbit R1 or something.
Shawn Pfunder: It was similar in what you're talking about, and it seems to suggest where technology is going in general, is this, Here's your device.
Jordan Katz: Was it the little AI thing that goes on your collar?
Shawn Pfunder: It is, yeah, the little red thing that you
Shawn Pfunder: wear. And you could just say like, Hey, I need a ride home. Great. Here's how much it will cost.
Shawn Pfunder: It's connected to Uber, but you don't have to open the Uber app and then choose it and then get it and go through, or can you play this song for me? You don't have to say, play it on. Apple music or play it on Spotify. It knows what you listen to. So it just grabs the song and plays it. So having an, having something like Simpplr or having this unified place where that's where the data sits, that's where the report sits, that's where we capture the sentiment and what's going on with employee experience and things like that.
Shawn Pfunder: But I can choose how I want to get my information and be able to still measure all that type of stuff. That's, you know, Seems to be the direction, like, I think that AI is taking us to be able to do something like that.
Jordan Katz: I strongly agree and I think you'll find over time we get closer and closer, you know, not just in employee technology, but in our lives to the point where like, you know, Star Trek, like computer Do X, Y, and Z, and it just does X, Y, and Z, right?
Jordan Katz: We're there in, in little ways in many regards, the more, so let's bring it back into the workplace, right? In order to do that, you need to build a very solid and integrated infrastructure, right? You have a whole tech stack. You have all different types of data flowing in and flowing out and exhaust data, all kinds of different information happening.
Jordan Katz: And it's, this is not an easy, I make it sound easy, it's not an easy thing, but integrating more and more systems together so that the information is there. And searchable and analyzable. The more you do that, the better you do that, the more the, you know, interaction layer will be able to mimic sort of an all powerful computer that can, you know, get you what you need and make you a dinner out of the, you know, artificial dinner, you know, whatever that thing was.
Jordan Katz: So I'm glad you brought that up.
Shawn Pfunder: That's when we're in the future, is when I can just order a turkey dinner in the machine and some ice cream.
Jordan Katz: But we're, you know, incrementally stepping in that direction, which I think is really great.
Shawn Pfunder: Very exciting. Final, uh, personal question that I promised, that I could probably guess.
Shawn Pfunder: What's your one golden rule for work, professionally? What's your one golden rule?
Jordan Katz: I don't know that I necessarily have a golden rule, because like, my golden rule is to treat everybody, you know, as amazingly as they should be treated. The golden rule. The actual golden rule. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Largely because I like, come from a center of like, feeling good, wanting people to like me and want to like, people and.
Jordan Katz: Build people up and all that, but the real golden rule is like, I like to, and I expect people around me to like give a hundred percent at all times. Right. And if I'm not proud of an effort, then that leaves me feeling really bad. And I feel like I let people down around me and I don't love it. I don't love that feeling, but then I don't love the downstream effects because somebody else is going to have to clean up that mess or do something as a result of it.
Jordan Katz: Right. So. And my golden rule, and I think for the people around me, like, are you proud of what you just did? Right? Did you put all your effort or your good faith effort into whatever work product you're trying to create? And if you're feeling proud of that, then great. If you think like, maybe I could have done better last time or we'll do better next time.
Jordan Katz: Also great. I don't like sit around and go like, that sucked you're out. If you're giving your all and you, and I say this to my kids, right? Right. Right. Full effort, you know, try to be strategic, do things in a way that you're going to be proud of. And like, let's say, say you get a C on a test, but you like worked your butt off, like, fine, I'm not going to yell at you for getting a C on the test.
Jordan Katz: I'm going to think about like, what strategies can we do to make it better next time? But if you like, you know, played, uh, On your tablet for six hours, instead of studying, like, hopefully you're not proud of that. And then we're going to have a different type of conversation. And I expect people to do the same to me.
Jordan Katz: If I like you're really slacking today, Jordan, like maybe we need to have a little convo. Hopefully I don't do a lot of slacking. It doesn't feel like I do a lot of slacking.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah, play to win. I love that. I love that. Well, dude, thanks again. We'll put in the notes where to go to get the reports. Take a look at this and the other one that we talked about, but yeah, it's a pleasure.
Shawn Pfunder: I love chatting with you, man. Thanks for joining us.
Jordan Katz: Thank you. Listen, I love it. I love sharing information. I love talking about employee experience and statistics and sometimes about science fiction stuff. So. I'm in for whenever, .
Shawn Pfunder: Right on. We'll talk to you again soon.
Jordan Katz: Thank you.