The Future of Work and Reinventing Work | Ep 110

The old deal with work is broken. Leaders today are looking for a way to get their company’s culture back, but an expert in the consulting space argues that rather than returning to old ways, we should be reinventing work from scratch.

In this episode of The mbaMission Podcast, mbaMission Founder Jeremy Shinewald and Executive Director Jessica Shklar sit down with Debbie Lovich, a BCG managing director and senior partner with 32 years of experience, for a conversation about the future of work, the collapse of the traditional employment bargain, and why the most successful companies of the next decade will be the ones that learn to make work human again.

Debbie is the author of Make Work Work: The 5 Daily Practices of the Employee-Centric Leader, available for preorder now. She has spent 32 years at BCG advising global organizations, and this book represents a lifetime of lessons she wanted to pass on before retiring at the end of 2026.

Whether you are a current or aspiring leader, an MBA candidate thinking about organizational culture, or someone who spends most of your waking hours somewhere you wish was better, this episode will give you valuable insight into what the future of work could look like.

Preorder Make Work Work today: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/831079/make-work-work-by-deborah-lovich/

00:00 Introduction: The Old Deal with Work Is Broken

01:27 What Is Employee-Centric Leadership? 

08:12 Joy Is a Business Value Driver

11:51 The Five Daily Practices: An Overview

12:06 Practice 1: Celebrate People – Be Specific, Be Timely, Know Your Person

14:53 Practice 2: Go See and Help – With the Intent to Assist, Not Judge

16:43 Practice 3: Be Interested in the Person – Curiosity as Leadership

18:51 Practice 4: Co-Create Everything – Take Pride, Not Credit

23:07 Practice 5: Do First – Never Ask Anyone to Do Something You Have Not Done

37:09 AI, the Employee-Centric Imperative

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Transcript

Introduction: The Old Deal with Work Is Broken

Debbie Lovich 0:00

Joy is a business value driver. And that's what I'm trying to prove. People spend most of their waking hours at work. And for that to suck is terrible. You think something positive about someone, don't keep it to yourself. Tell them.

Jessica Shklar 0:16

Is co-creation only about bringing people into the process or is it also about sharing credit? 100% sharing credit, right?

Debbie Lovich 0:23

Take pride, not credit.

Jeremy Shinewald 0:25

You walk into a big company with thousands of employees. How do you get people to be more thoughtful than others and thank them?

Debbie Lovich 0:31

They have to care about being employee-centric.

Jeremy Shinewald 0:46

For about a hundred years, we've had a deal with work. You show up, you sit in a specific chair for eight to ten hours, you do what the person above you says, and in exchange, you get a paycheck. But over the last few years, that deal didn't just crack, it shattered. Between the sudden explosion of AI, the tug of war over a return to the office, and a generation of talent that refuses to be treated like a line item on a spreadsheet, leaders are being forced to change their perspective. They're asking, how do I get my culture back? Our guest on the NBA Mission podcast today says that's the wrong question. She argues we shouldn't be trying to get back to anything. We should be reinventing it from scratch. She offers five clear

What Is Employee-Centric Leadership?

Jeremy Shinewald 1:27

principles that are today's CEOs or an entire firm's true north. Debbie Levich is a senior partner at BCG and a global authority on the future of work. We're talking about why the most successful companies of the next decade won't be the ones with the best algorithms, but the ones that actually figure out how to make work human again. Please enjoy our conversation with veteran BCG consultant and the author of Make Work Work, Debbie Levitch. Debbie, thank you so much for being here. And it's a real pleasure to be the first ones to talk about your new book. Yes, a real honor for us. And the book is called Make Work Work. And it's it's basically, you know, can I simplify it by saying, you know, lessons from how many years of BCG?

Debbie Lovich 2:13

32.

Jeremy Shinewald 2:14

32 years of BCG compiled, and and uh sort of the key lessons?

Debbie Lovich 2:18

Yeah, it's the it's called Make Work Work, the five daily practices of the employee-centric leader. How's that for a mouthful of a subtitle? I was like, isn't that a little long that like we'll use small fonts? Can you define employee-centric for us? Yeah. So the way I define employee-centric is treating and thinking about and working with your employees as if they're as important as your customers and shareholders. So I could give you a little history lesson on that, if it helps, that I find helps make it come alive. So we're old. We started, I started working in the late 80s. And in the late 80s, in consulting, everything was about shareholder value creation. We got to make profit for the shareholders. BCG, where I work, invented the experience curve, get big scale economies, low cost per unit, high profit. And that's what created market value. And in fact, the most valuable companies in the world were these huge industrial companies that spent a ton of money on big assets, oil fields, car manufacturers. You got it. Then people would say, well, what about the customer? They need more products, more features, more service, more personalization, more high touch. And we're like, no, no, no, you can't afford to do that. In fact, my early work in consulting was simplifying product lines to say, okay, all those small products that don't sell a lot, get rid of them. Just focus on your big moneymakers. That's what we sold our clients because you can't make the customer happy and make the shareholder happy. In the 2000s, the tech industry, who didn't have any assets, came in and said, it's not only is it not a trade-off, you could create market value by delighting customers, right? And it's all about personalization, you know, your app, your site. They had a zillion permutations of products, and they proved that if you delight your customer, you can make your shareholder happy. And they replaced on the list of the most valuable companies in the world, it's now Facebook and Apple and all these, Microsoft and all these companies. And consulting firms have spent the last couple of decades helping the industrialists catch up. How do you be customer-centric like you learn from the tech people? Okay, why do I give you that history lesson? Because still today, we treat employees as like a cost to be managed, like an input, like a cog in the machine. And we think we can't afford to make employees happy. All they want is more money and less hours and more flex.

Jeremy Shinewald 4:56

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Debbie Lovich 5:28

And so I believe, I know, actually, I've proven that if you flip, like the tech industry did back then, and you say, employees, if we make our employees happy, actually our customers and our shareholders will be happier. They will help generate more value for customers and shareholders. And you may think, like, duh, of course, like, you know, happy employees will work, bring their all to work and work harder. But even though it's a duh, companies don't do it. Like if you look at where management teams spend all their time, it's on cost and productivity and cut market share and product. And then when it comes to talking about employees, HR has like five minutes on the agenda. Happy actually does not mean paying them well. And that's the huge insight, right? Like what I tell um companies like if um if people thought about customers the way they think about employees today, Starbucks wouldn't exist because nobody would say, I want to pay $7 for a cup of coffee. That's kind of mediocre, sorry, that I have to wait on not one but two lines for, right? One to order, one to get it. But what Starbucks tapped into, and if you asked customers what do you want in coffee, they would say hot, fast, cheap, decent. Okay, not Starbucks. Yet Starbucks is a multi-billion dollar company. Um, because what customer insight has enabled the world to do is understand the unknown needs, right? That are not in your cognitive mind. And like Starbucks invented this like third place where you hang up, the feeling you get when you hold an overpriced cup of coffee, like you feel like you're treating yourself, right? Guess what? Employees also have emotional needs, like another place to hang out, a feeling that you get. And if you take the same tools that you do customer research with and you're applying to employees, guess what? Money, pay drops to the bottom of the list. What employees want are to uh they want to feel valued, they want to feel respected, um, they want to feel supported, and most importantly, they want to enjoy their work. So I use that word joy a lot. Like, and people think joy, that's so flakely. I'm like, actually, no, it's an awesome word. Like, if you enjoy what you do every day, do you guys enjoy your work? Right? Do you work hard? Yeah, right. If you hated it, you wouldn't. You would just like dial it in, phone it in, whatever they call it.

Jessica Shklar 8:06

And some jobs can't be phoned in and be good at it. You just can't be good at your job when you phone it in.

Debbie Lovich 8:11

So

Joy Is a Business Value Driver

Debbie Lovich 8:12

joy is a business value driver. And that's what I'm trying to prove.

Jeremy Shinewald 8:17

So funny, you use the example of Starbucks. I have this habit of when I have amazing service, asking people why they deliver service that well.

Jessica Shklar 8:24

Yeah.

Jeremy Shinewald 8:24

And I remember asking this woman who was just such a delight and so much happiness in the way she was delivering her Starbucks orders, why, you know, like what is it about this? And she said to me, I love the fact that when I make a mistake here, I get to reward someone. She's like, I screw up someone's order, they get an extra coffee. She's like, it's such a nice place to work. And I was like, oh, that that really is such an interesting perspective.

Jessica Shklar 8:48

Didn't have to ask permission for that. It was just really it's like Disney, you know, they empower their people to just make delight customers. Yeah. And that feeling of empowerment gives you creativity, gives you autonomy. So, how did this book come about?

Debbie Lovich 9:00

Well, it came about for two reasons. One, well, all the same reason. I'm retiring from BCG after 32 years at the end of the year. And I thought about what I want to do after I retire. And I really like this book represents, like you could say, like a like a lifetime of work. So it's a little bit, so it's a little driven by nostalgia, right? Just like looking back on my career and saying, okay, the initial idea for the book was I want to pass on everything I've learned to like the next generation of consultants, right? And like write all my advice. And almost, I didn't even think about publishing it. I thought about giving it as a gift, right? To, you know, there are 30,000 people at BCG, you know, like maybe I make it available to all of them as here's a gift. If my insight is worth anything to you, here's a gift. But then I started thinking about this notion that I just talked about about employee centricity. And I really think it's the next wave. Like, I really, in my heart of heart, I don't even think I know, I've proven it with um experiments I did as part of BCG's research arm, the um BCG Henderson Institute, demon after our founder. And so I've proven that if companies really flip their mindset and say employees are as important as customers and shareholders, not more important, that not only can they create more value for the entity, and there are great companies that show this Delta Air Lines, right? Costco, Trader Joe's, right? There are companies that have just proven this because they have that mindset, but it's also a societal good. Like people spend most of their waking hours at work, and for that to suck is terrible. Like Adam Grant, very famous, well-known uh bazillion LinkedIn followers, he's so good. He says, and I write this in my book, he says work shouldn't suck. And I'm like, that's a pretty low bar, famous Adam Grant. Like, work should be enjoyable. Like, and so like just think about it like you come home from a day of terrible work, you take it out on the people around you. You come home from an inspiring day of work. Like you celebrate the people, you celebrate it and you want to share it. And so, even though I'm wrapping up my consulting career, it's time, 32 years, like make room for the next generation. I still want to do this work. So I figured like if I write a book, that's a good way to get this concept and my name, thank you podcast, um, out there as because I want this, I truly believe it will catch fire, but I want to help it catch fire. And so the book will help with that.

Jeremy Shinewald 11:50

So there are

The Five Daily Practices: An Overview

Jeremy Shinewald 11:51

there are five, the book's organized into five principles, five, I don't know if it's five chapters, but it's practices.

Debbie Lovich 11:56

The five daily practices of the employee centric leader. You didn't get the subtitle.

Jeremy Shinewald 12:00

That's right. So take us through each of the five, if you will. Yeah. We'll start with one and then we'll Yeah, we'll start with one.

Practice 1: Celebrate People – Be Specific, Be Timely, Know Your Person

Debbie Lovich 12:06

And I will say that all these practices will feel like duh. Like, of course. Like, of course, people should do this. But I'm telling you, after 32 years at BCG and 35 years in consultants, most leaders don't do these every day. Maybe you do it once in a blue moon. They have to be done every day. Okay, first celebrate people. It's as simple as you think something positive about someone, don't keep it to yourself. Tell them, send a text, send a WhatsApp, even pick up a phone call them. I know young people get freaked out if a senior person calls them, but it's a positive freak out, right? Like, if you think anything positive, tell the person and tell them why. Like it's not that like Jeremy and Jessica, I think you're great. No, it's I think you're great because you've created this space and this podcast and you're helping so many people. And without you, like be specific. Okay, so that's number one. The other thing though, you should think about is not everyone is comfortable with praise, right? Like giving or receiving or both. What's that? Giving or receiving. Receiving.

Jeremy Shinewald 13:10

I hate praise. I I feel like I want to hear from someone. I I I'm worried that they're not giving me the truth. I'm worried that they're trying to, it's they're trying to um flatter me and that I'm no longer getting the real message. I'm like, just tell me tell me the raw truth here.

Jessica Shklar 13:24

What the whole thing that Debbie's talking about, someone who gives you that praise unsolicited and with specifics. Doesn't that make sense? And if you want to relate it to our right, with specifics. And if you relate it to our work, we tell our clients when they write why do they want to go to the school, we tell them be specific. The school wants to hear exactly how you think they're great and how they will help you. They don't want to hear this generic platitude that you can say to anyone. So I think that the specific, you would find it more credible.

Debbie Lovich 13:49

And and and the good news is, Jeremy, is that most leaders are very comfortable giving negative feedback. So if I'm giving you positive feedback, but I also give you negative feedback, then you'll believe the positive feedback, right?

Jeremy Shinewald 14:02

If you give me some negative, I will probably believe the positive.

Debbie Lovich 14:05

And and and and this is advice for leaders. So we have a relationship. So over time, I'm not giving you a negative with every positive, but you're gonna get a mix from me. Right. Now, behavioral science says you need to hear at least three positives for every negative to feel engaged. You may not be the norm, okay? But um, but but some people like, you know, are just really uncomfortable, especially with public praise. So, like for most people, public praise is like rocket fuel. Let me announce at the meeting, like I'm gonna say in front of this whole podcast how amazing you are, Jessica, right? Like that would make you happy. Some people, it actually really makes them uncomfortable, like they're introverted. And so you need to know your people. But the point is behavior number one, think something positive, celebrate it, let the person know and be specific. That's one. One, okay,

Practice 2: Go See and Help – With the Intent to Assist, Not Judge

Debbie Lovich 14:53

two, two, go see and help. You know, so think of the executive team in the boardroom or the boss behind their computer all day. Get out, go to where the work is happening, help the people, right? Like, oh, like you're busy at the cashier, let me help you. I'll I'll fold and put in the bag.

Jessica Shklar 15:16

Isn't there a trend called management by walking around? Yes. So it's similar, but that doesn't have the help act.

Debbie Lovich 15:21

It doesn't have the help because management by walking around could be like, mm-hmm, tuck in your shirt, mm-hmm, tidy up, right? It could be judgment by walking around, right? It is the so it's a combination of the going and being with people where the work happens, learning about what it's really like, and helping and helping. I had a pharmaceutical client where the, you know, they have thousands of sales reps out in the field. So they always have open positions, territories where there's no one calling on the doctors that week or whatever. And because there's always turn in um their staffing. And so the executives would take a week, a quarter, and go out and literally carry a bag and sell, right? And the district manager's like, really? Like you, Mr. CEO, is gonna come and sell and report to me? Yeah, it's an empty territory and I could help. What message does that send, right?

Jessica Shklar 16:21

And it's so good for the executive to understand what the customer problems are, what the employee process is like. And it tells a lot to the customer too. So there's no doubt.

Debbie Lovich 16:30

It's like win-win-win-win-win. It's win. All of these are win for everyone. By the way, giving people a compliment and seeing their face shine, you feel like a million bucks. It's addictive for you, right? Like, so win-win-win. Okay, so that's two.

Practice 3: Be Interested in the Person – Curiosity as Leadership

Jeremy Shinewald 16:43

Number three, number-I feel like we should announce it. Three. Three. Yeah.

Debbie Lovich 16:47

Number three, be interested in the person. Ask people about themselves. Like people like show up at work and like, and they have so much about themselves. Like, there was a guy on my team working with me, and I tend to be curious about people and like, where are you from? And what do you do on the weekends? Turns out this guy was a former professional football player in Canada. And he's like the most junior person. He replatformed his career, and he's so good. And the project leader on the team said, You know why he's so good? He was played football. Like, he's a team player, he's an athlete, he's driven. I'm like, really? And I asked him, You played football? He's like, Yeah. And he like he was shy about it. Like, so first of all, people love when you're interested in them, and you get to learn so much more about the people on your team. And so just be interested. And so it's both about people on your team and also what you said, Jeremy, about asking people if they like their job, right? Like, what gives them energy? Like, I tell a story in the book about JFK and the janitor. Um, and this is a well-known story if you haven't heard it, right? The JFK's mission was to get a man on the moon, um, President Kennedy, and he was taking a tour of NASA. And on the tour, he stops the tour and says, he sees the janitor, and he goes over to talk to the janitor and say, Mr. Janitor, what do you what do you do here at NASA? And he looked at the president and said, I'm putting a man on the moon. And people love that story, and they love the story because of a different reason, how every single person connects to a mission, which is important.

Jessica Shklar 18:26

And also the fact that NASA obviously had one very clear focused mission, which is a lesson for companies. If you're scattered too many missions, no one knows.

Debbie Lovich 18:33

We're all about getting a man on the moon. Right. What I love about that story is President Kennedy saw the janitor, stopped his tour, and went to talk. That's the C part of go see and help, right? And so that's the third. Go see and help.

Jeremy Shinewald 18:46

Okay. Four. Do you want to stay? Do you want to stay on three? Okay.

Practice 4: Co-Create Everything – Take Pride, Not Credit

Debbie Lovich 18:51

Okay.

Jeremy Shinewald 18:51

Four.

Debbie Lovich 18:52

Number four is co-create everything. Um, so that means any improvement or any initiative you want to take, any project, you need to think of the people who are gonna have to live with the results of that project. And you should take those people and put them on the team to help. That's what co-creation is. And so I tell a story in the book about um, I did a lot of work in pharmaceutical companies. So there's this thing in pharmaceutical sales where they switch to a concept called mirroring. So instead of Jessica selling all the company's products to Jeremy, the doctor, um, we said, yeah, let's say you have five products, we're gonna give three reps to call three sales reps to call on Jessica's customer. And they each have a primary product and a secondary product. So all the five products get covered, but in case Jeremy says no to Jessica, Sally and Jim might get in. So it increased what was their, you know, what they called share a voice with the customer. And it just became the way of selling pharmaceuticals. Like switch everyone from you don't own the relationship with Jeremy. In fact, three of you go call on him with different pitches. And overall, one of you may not get in, but this way at least the company gets more market share of his mind. So they rolled that out globally. Everywhere it's working really well, except Japan. Sales aren't going up in Japan. So they hire one of my colleagues' teams in Japan to say, to figure out what's going on here. Like maybe it's the sales support, maybe it's the sales materials, like something's going on in Japan. And it had been rolled out for months, right? And they were seeing just no uptick, no uptick in sales. So my colleagues went out riding in the field, and guess what? He found these meetings they had every week called the alignment meetings. And the sales reps were getting back together and splitting up the customers to go back to the old way of selling. They weren't bought into it. They were like, you know what? We have very deep personal relationships. I don't want Jessica calling on Jeremy. Like, Jeremy, we have a thing. Like, he's my customer. I get a lot of self-value out of our personal relationship. Why would I let two other reps call on that? So they would take the targets and the list coming down from headquarters and every week systematically undo them. Did they realize they were consciously going against the plan? Yeah. They realized they were going against it, but they thought that's the right way of doing it.

unknown 21:26

Right.

Debbie Lovich 21:27

So it's organ rejection. But and guess what? Maybe mirroring the way it was done in other countries was a bad idea in Japan. Like maybe relationship does trump. Or maybe instead we call on Jeremy together for a little while, and then eventually I fade back, and now I helped you establish your relationship. Right. So imagine if the company went to the sales rep and said, listen, this has worked in every other country. I know Japan's different, but you know, can we brainstorm like, does Your doctor ever say no to you? Yeah, and then you miss him that week. And what can you do? Can we brainstorm if like maybe another call another day when you're busy would help? Like, can we come up with a model? Not only would the model be better, but everyone would adopt it because it's their idea and they feel pride in it, right? That's co-creation.

Jessica Shklar 22:20

Is co-creation only about bringing people into the process or is it also about sharing credit?

Debbie Lovich 22:25

100% sharing credit, right? Take pride, not credit. Yeah. Like, because have them roll it out. So imagine if you did the co-creation and then corporate rolled it out again and said, here's a good, better way of doing it. We customized it for Japan with some input from your friends. Imagine if instead of corporate rolling it out, there's a group of 10 sales rep Japanese sales representatives, they announced it and said, we did this thinking of you. We're gonna help coach you. We know this is gonna work. It will take so much better. So it's about the credit and the limelight, of course. So that's co-creation. Okay, right? Help people, have people build the house they're gonna live in, right?

Jessica Shklar 23:06

Four or five

Practice 5: Do First – Never Ask Anyone to Do Something You Have Not Done

Jessica Shklar 23:07

on five. That was four. We're on five. We made it.

Debbie Lovich 23:09

Okay. So um five I call do first. Don't ask anyone on your team to do anything you didn't do first. I love this one. Right? It's like I start the chapter with the CEO of Starbucks, who very famously, when he got the job, said, Listen, I'm not moving to Seattle. I live in Southern California. I'm gonna work from home and take a private jet when I need to be in the office. And shortly thereafter, he issued an edict telling all Starbucks employees they have to be in the office four days a week. Okay. What is happening to Starbucks business? We talked about the cup of coffee. Well, that was like a decade ago. I was going, okay. Not necessarily because of that, but it's part of it. It's like, you know, you see executives saying everyone has to adopt AI, meanwhile, they have their secretaries print out printed copies for them to read. It's like, don't ask anyone to do anything you haven't tried first, right?

Jeremy Shinewald 24:07

So so thinking about this, like, do you think that do you think this is truly applicable to all cultures? Uh in the sense that like there are certain cultures that are just, you know, at least the stereotype that means they're not designed for this. So I think about the bear, right? Uh you know, everyone watched the bear and everyone got an insight into how you know relentless and unforgiving a kitchen could be. Could a kitchen be, uh could that kitchen operate if everyone was acknowledged instead of feeling, you know, pressure and time constraints. I mean, I you can't take the pressure and time constraints from from food, but like, you know, like that, like, like on TV, that's TV, that environment seems so harsh.

Debbie Lovich 24:43

Is there a way to Did you see the menu? That movie? Oh gosh. I didn't see that. Yeah, I watched that. Yeah, it's about that environment too, but it goes bad.

Jessica Shklar 24:50

Oh, so bad.

Debbie Lovich 24:51

It goes bad.

Jeremy Shinewald 24:52

So can you make an environment like that a I mean it is those people are happy to work there? I don't I don't know. I'm not sure if I'm if I'm getting my questions.

Debbie Lovich 24:59

Yeah, no, no. I do high pressure environments work. I think they work in the short term. I think um you could think of like investment banking, right? High pay environments, but high pressure, um, you offset it with a lot of money that works for only a period of time. People burn out right. If you offset it instead with not just the money, obviously that's important, but also the enjoyment. Yeah, and then you're in it together. Like there's this concept I coined at work called good intensity, because my first client in making work better was actually BCG. Um, it was totally random. 2008, a Harvard Business School professor approached me and she was an ethnographer and studied how people worked and wanted to see if she could take a notoriously difficult industry, one she actually worked in and ran away from because of work-life balance issues, and make it better. And so that's how I ended up trying to make work better at BCG. And you could imagine a high-pressure consulting, upper out, you know, you have to get you're up for promotion every two years. And if you don't get promoted, you have to leave very nicely, supported, um, you know, once a BCG or always a BCG, or but you just don't have it for the next level. How can we make that pressure cooker more sustainable? And she initially thought it was just about balance and control over schedule. But then people are bored. And so we came up with this matrix, like in consulting, everything's by the two by two matrix, right? And there were two axes. One was control over schedule, and one was sense of accomplishment. It was how much control you had over your life and the sense of accomplishment. And sense of accomplishment was a combination of learning, growing, client impact, value delivery. Like it's the high you get when you're really, you know, kicking it. And what we found is we have different zones. You could have the perfect zone, is what we call good intensity. You're high impact, but you have high control, right? Like you're not burning indefinitely, and you know there's an end, and you're not killing every weekend and evening, right? That's good intensity. There's bad intensity, which is low control, um, low impact, right? Like it's just burnout. But then there's also high impact, low control. It's unsustainable. So you have the high, right? That's the bad intensity, actually. Like you have the high, but there's no end to it. Every weekend, every night, you know, it's part of your stress dreams. That's bad intensity. And then high control, low sense of accomplishment, boredom, right? So we can't just solve for the work-life balance. We had to solve for your learning and growing and delivering impact.

Jeremy Shinewald 27:55

So, what about like you talked about tech companies early on, and you know, they have such, I mean, at least reputation for such distinct cultures of uh, you know, everything from ping pong tables to meals and gyms and and yeah, and and and beautiful offices that are sort of, you know, make you kind of want to stay or kind of like read a book, whatever it is. Obviously, you can't like just transpose a culture like that on an industrial for By the way, tech companies don't get it right.

Debbie Lovich 28:20

So, all I would say that stuff is nice, but they are offsets for keeping you there working all the time.

Jeremy Shinewald 28:28

For sure.

Debbie Lovich 28:29

Right? And when I talk about making work work and these habits, these habits have nothing to do, these practices with ping pong tables and great lunch and great facilities. This is about telling you you're awesome, helping you out, involving you in stuff that's gonna impact you, you know, trying things, right? Being interested in your life. That's not ping-pong table some food. Right, right? This is reinventing, and I think that's where companies get it wrong. They have the intent, and then they go tell facilities in HR to take care of it.

Jessica Shklar 29:06

Well, I imagine that if this takes fire, I can see companies saying, okay, these are now the new buzzwords, and the trickle down isn't there. How do you implement it? How how long do you think? And I know you're this is just the beginning of this process, that a, I don't know, decent-sized, medium-sized company would take to change its culture following these processes.

Debbie Lovich 29:25

I think it takes a year. So we're doing it right now. I'm doing it, I'm doing it with clients. I'm doing it with clients right now. Like I, this book isn't a theoretical thing. I've spent the past three years implementing employee-centric practices at clients. And it's um it's contagious.

Jeremy Shinewald 29:46

So make it real for us. Like, how do you get you walk into a big company, the thousands of employees, how do you get people to be more thoughtful about others and thank them? Like, like how do you teach that behavior?

Debbie Lovich 29:57

They have to care about being employee-centric, okay? You can't just say one day, okay, everyone is gonna start being better leaders, more employee-centric leaders. They have to have a proof case that it matters. So I'll give you a very real example. We're working with a retail company. Um, we're about to have a paper out in the next couple of weeks in Harvard Business Review. I bet it'll be out by the time this podcast comes out. And 5,000 sales reps across their stores. And, you know, and they're transforming their stores to be more productive. And they were willing, because they do care about their employees, to explore this topic with me in a research manner. I worked with uh Professor Hubert Jolie at HBS. Wonderful. He wrote The Heart of Business. He was the he turned around Best Buy with an employee-centric mindset. He calls it employee magic, right? Like when the dot-com online was taking away consumer electronics, Radio Shack out of business, Circuit City out of business. Best Buy's still here. Why? Because he took this mindset. So he and I worked with this company together, and we I have a survey tool I use. And it's not like an engagement survey that asks people, you know, what do you like? What do you hate about work? And what would make you happy? Those surveys, it's their cognitive mind. They say more money, less hours, and then the company says, we can't afford to make you happy. Okay, fast forward. We do real consumer-like insight, and we did the survey across these 5,000 reps, and it's a long survey, and we had like 90% plus compliance, right? So people filled it in. What we found was that employee, we asked the question, do you enjoy your job? That's it. Very simple. Not these, these 12 questions mean engagement. What is engaged, right? Um, do you enjoy your work? And then we correlated those answers. We had employee IDs, so even though it was anonymous, we were able to tag sales per hour to every survey. So employees who enjoy their work sell 25% more per hour. Okay. So even if you don't want to be a nice person, even if you don't care about making work enjoyable, even if you only care about financial performance, 25% more per hour. So now we're doing work with that company, a real project, by the way, not just an experiment, a real project to say, how do we mine the insights from that very sophisticated survey to understand what employees really need? So again, back to the Starbucks cup of coffee, there are ways to do consumer research, like conjoint analysis, max diff, regression analysis, correlations to see what really matters. And when you're that when you do that, you find out pay for this client dropped to 21 out of 22 attributes.

Jessica Shklar 32:56

And if they had asked, just asked the question, they would have number one. Right.

Debbie Lovich 32:59

Number one. Right. Right? And we also were able to do segmentation. So not just like not all customers are equal or the same, not all employees are the same. So, like if you again, I'll just keep using Starbucks as an analogy. You have three types of customers. I'm making this up in Starbucks. You have the mobile order, I just want it ready hot, right? You have the this is my we work, I'm gonna sit there all day and sip really slowly and work all day. I need good internet and a comfy chair. And then you have like the social gathering. I'm here to get a cup of coffee and yak with my friends. And Starbucks needs to create operations to deliver for all three. Well, guess what? You have different segments of employees who have different needs. So I did this segmentation analysis. We did this with this retail company, and we actually found their happiest employees are these two segments that happen to be older, later in career, more there for community, or they love the brand. And they're recruiting mostly young students to work, right? And all of a sudden, this insight says, Right, actually, it's it's not people who need a job, it's people looking for community or people like the brand. And so they could recruit and shape the experience differently. And so part of these, like I say, they're very simple, like five behaviors, but you know how to shape them based on I know my employee, like just like a great sales rep knows you're coming in the store, you're a price shopper, you're a relationship shopper, you actually you want status, you want the most expensive thing in the store. You have to size up your employee and say, you know what, public praise makes you uncomfortable. I'm gonna pull you aside and tell you that, right? Or, you know, these are the types of things that you find difficult. I'm not gonna just help you with anything, I'm gonna help you with that, right? And so it's that's maybe the next book. This book is just the basic five practices, but being able to really understand your employee and how to get the best out of each of them takes some nuance. Wow. So the next one. I can talk about this forever, by the way. Can you tell?

Jessica Shklar 35:10

The title of the follow-up will be Implementing Making Work Work. Yes, exactly.

Debbie Lovich 35:14

Not all employees are the same.

Jeremy Shinewald 35:16

I can guess the answer, but is there is there any environment where government, uh nonprofits, um, an ice hockey team, whatever it might be, that uh where it's just like this is just it's not gonna work. This is it's gonna be resistant to this type of this type of culture or this type of of thinking, the military, maybe like the military mission command.

Debbie Lovich 35:39

I think the military does it. I I so I think the only place where it doesn't work is where the top of the organization doesn't want it to work. Okay. It like if a client comes to me and they like, Debbie, we love your work, we want to roll it out. I'm like, okay, so where is your like it's it could be HR that comes to me. And I love HR people, they mean so well. But I'm like, until you bring your CEO, don't even bother trying. And and so it could be like 25% more per hour. Okay, we could convince your CEO to care, but you need any organization can to use Hubert's words, can unlock magic by tapping into what I call employee centricity and creating joy at work. Um, any organization, but it's not for the faint of heart because you actually have to show up differently. So I say these five practices are like, duh, but if you're not comfortable giving compliments, if you're not comfortable asking people about themselves, like it's a crazy thing. You like talking to like people in all sorts of jobs. When I'm in the elevator at work, like most people pretend they're on their phone and look out. I say hi to people and I ask them, so what do you do at BCG? Like we have five floors at BCG. So as soon as I know they're BCGers, I'm like all social. And I'm like, people are pulling out their earplugs, they're like, sorry, uh, I'm like, yeah, what do you do here? People love it, right?

unknown 37:08

Right.

AI, the Employee-Centric Imperative

Debbie Lovich 37:09

Is the world of AI changing this approach? Ironically, the world of AI needs this even more. Unless you are gonna have a completely automated organization with zero humans, you need your humans to embrace the technology. And what happens when we say, here's all this new technology, I want you to use it. What does a human respond? Uh, I have to learn something new. I love mastery, I'm really good at what I do. Or is this gonna put me out of a job? Like, as soon as I embrace it, are you gonna fire me? Or even if I learn it and um and you don't fire me, you're gonna use it as an excuse to give me more work to do and less resource to do it with. It's a way to cut my budget. So it's like humans are not adopting it. And you see all the reports out there, like MIT came out with a report, like it's not having impact on productivity. It's because people are not adopting it. A piece of research I did with Professor Stefan Meyer at Columbia Business School, who wrote a book. He's like, he and Hubert Jolie and this professor Zaynab Tom at MIT Sloan, they're like my soulmates. She wrote good jobs. Stefan Meyer wrote The Employee Advantage. Like, we're all Hubert wrote The Heart of Business, I'm the last to the party with my makework workbook. Professor Meyer and I did a piece of research where we asked people how employee-centric is your company? And we gave them 15 questions about how are they on these dimensions, and that rolls up into an employee centricity index score. And then we asked them how AI advanced. And again, they have like 15 questions, and it rolls up to an AI maturity score. And what we found is that companies that are employee-centric are seven times as likely to be AI advanced. Okay, seven times as likely. So this stuff is not only is it relevant to technology, it's critical. Right.

Jessica Shklar 39:09

Right. Right. So fascinating. Oh, I feel like we could talk to you forever.

Debbie Lovich 39:12

I could talk about it forever.

Jessica Shklar 39:14

So we could talk about this forever.

Jeremy Shinewald 39:17

Uh, we'll have to have you back when it's launched and get some hear some of your uh the feedback you're getting on the book. I'm sure you'll be exhausted by podcasts at that point. I imagine people will be clamoring to hear from you. I'm looking forward to reading the book. Absolutely. Yeah, we can pre-order the book. And we look forward to reading it.

Debbie Lovich 39:32

Yeah. Thanks for being my first podcast to talk about the book. This is amazing. I hope it's the first of many.

Jessica Shklar 39:38

First of many.

Jeremy Shinewald 39:39

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