In today’s ever-evolving work landscape, where the thin line between job satisfaction and frustration can often be traced back to the employee experience, we dive deep into a topic that touches nearly every professional.
In this episode of the Making Business Art, Ezequiel Williams and FOUNT’s Co-founder and CEO, Christophe Martel talks about what workers expect from their jobs today, the hurdles HR leaders face, and why it’s important to thoughtfully design how employees experience their workplace. They will also discuss how improving this experience can really benefit a company, and the key role that using data and telling compelling stories play in making work better for everyone.
The discussion around “The Great Resignation” is particularly timely, highlighting how the pandemic has accelerated shifts in work culture and employee expectations. Christophe points out that employees today are looking for more than just a paycheck; they seek purpose, flexibility, and a positive work environment. This shift calls for a reevaluation of traditional HR practices and leadership approaches, pushing for a culture that values intentionality in every aspect of the employee journey.
“Employee engagement is really a conceptual measure of people’s loyalty to the organization…how much later am I ready to go stay past my work time to solve a difficult problem? How much do I want to stay with the company as long as I can? So, for intents and purposes, engagement is very similar to customer loyalty in the customer world…”
The FOUNT’s approach to improving the employee experience involves a blend of data-driven strategies and compelling storytelling. By leveraging data, companies can gain insights into the pain points and pleasures of their employees’ experiences, enabling them to make informed decisions that enhance work life. Meanwhile, storytelling helps to humanize these data points, creating a narrative that resonates with both employees and leaders, fostering a deeper connection to the company’s mission and values.
FOUNT is not about making incremental changes but about sparking a movement towards a more enjoyable and friction-free work environment.
You can listen to the full episode on Spotify. A transcript from the episode appears below.
Transcript
EW:
This is making business art, a podcast for curious people where we draw lessons and inspiration from creative leaders, entrepreneurs, artists, designers and scientists about making a beautiful business in life. I’m your host Ezekiel Williams. I am an entrepreneur, innovation strategist, facilitator, and business designer. Join me in conversations about how to create a powerful connection with the people we serve, while making aircraft and engine for personal growth. Let’s dive in. Have you ever been in a situation where you like your job in principle, but the conditions within your organization may doing your job difficult, or maybe even soul crushing? If you can relate to that, you know what a bad employee experience feels like.
Fortunately, there are people like my guest, Christophe Martel. We’re working to make the world of work a much better experience for everyone. Christophe is the co-founder and CEO of two take companies focused on improving the employee experience by taming the jungle of redundant policies, processes, functions, and workflows that frankly just suck the joy out of work and life while creating waste for organizations. In this episode, Christophe and I discuss the difference between employee engagement and employee experience, the great resignation and the shifting expectations about the experience of work, leadership, and the challenges of HR leaders, bringing intentionality to designing the employee experience, the benefits of a better employee experience for an organization and the importance of combining data with great storytelling.
I resonate with Christophe’s desire to bring more joy to work, and I agree with his position that we can do so by bringing the same focus and intention we might use to design a great service to the design of work itself. About our guest, Christophe Martel is the CEO and co-founder of TI people and FOUNT, two companies that help large organizations enrich people’s experiences at work by unleashing the power of experience data intelligence, prior to TI People, Christophe held a variety of leadership roles at Corporate Executive Board, now part of Gartner, most recently serving as Chief Human Resource Officer and member of the executive committee, following many years as Executive Director for Europe, Middle East, Africa region. Prior to joining the Corporate Executive Board, Christophe held business leadership roles in the software industry in Europe, North America and Asia. Christophe holds a Master of Science and DEA in geophysics from the ENSG in France. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Christophe, welcome to making business art. Very excited to have you on here today. How are you doing?
CM:
Good, how are you?
EW:
Excellent. Thank you so much for coming on. I think you have a really interesting background. So, we’re gonna get into that today. And today, we’re gonna be talking about your world, which is the world of work and employee experience and organizational culture at some level. But first, I’d like to ask you something a little personal, more about culture and society at large since you have worked and lived in different places in your career. What’s been your favorite place to live in so far? And why?
CM:
I can’t answer that question very well. Unfortunately, I tend to enjoy places where I live regardless of where they are. So, there hasn’t been a place where I was like, oh my God, I can’t stay here. Really got to get out. So right now, maybe just because of recency effect, DC would be it.
EW:
Yeah, I think you’ve spent, you spent a bit of time in DC throughout the years, like on and off, right?
CM:
Just. No, actually, I spent time in the US before but mostly in New York. DC, I visited once just being a French tourist and, but I’ve been living here since 2014 and I like living here, yeah.
EW:
Any place where you are experienced culture shock by chance?
CM:
Yes, let’s say where perhaps the harshest one was moving to Asia from France and having never tried to travel there before so moved to Singapore, which was okay, but spent a bunch of time in China at the time that was back in the 90s and that felt like a culture shock. That’s really and Japan too. Singapore, not too much but.
EW:
Any takeaways from that, like they do kind of take away or learn anything from that experience?
CM:
Yeah, that you’re, what it feels like to be a real foreigner, actually, there’s a, an experience in Tokyo where I actually got lost in the middle of the night, simply because I left my jacket behind with all my things, and actually could not read any of the signs to get back to my hotel. So that’s what it feels like, I don’t know, being on Mars or something. It’s like, where do I go, nothing is telling me where to go. So, you can imagine that I was born in Lyon, France, that, you know, if you’re showing up in France, being a Chinese immigrant, you probably just feel exactly the same, the same thing and I’d never saw that before. It took off more than 30 years from user experience.
EW:
I mean, this I thank you for sharing that. I think this is a really valuable empathy building experiences a lot of the time, precisely because now you feel you can really feel in this by embodied way, like what it is like to be out of place. No clue what’s going on.
CM:
No, exactly, so.
EW:
Well, thank you for sharing that. Let me just poke around your professional journey for a little bit before jumping into present day, I see that you’ve had in the course of your career sales roles, and well product development roles in IBM sales roles at HP, PTC, various director roles, including Corporate Executive Board, and then you went on to these Chief Human Resource Officer at Corporate Executive Board. And now you’re a founder and CEO of a couple of things. But before all of that, you got a master’s in geophysics, and they did some postgraduate work after that. What drew you to that discipline in the first place, like? And then do you still use or apply anything that you learned way back then into your job in present day?
CM:
So, what got me into it was just to early fascination when I was a kid with rocks with the way earth was formed, dinosaurs, how stars were born and disappear, all kinds of how the sun was just gonna eat all of us at some point. Okay, all these things were just a big, nerdy concern of mine when I was a kid, I. And the one that I ended up spending most time investigating on my own, was this, this plate tectonics continental drift thing, which just fascinated me because it meant that everything that’s on the maps, actually, it wasn’t always as it is now. And even the story of the gentleman who discovered continental drift, the very first time was a German meteorologist, who just was just a sharp guy, and just looking at a map of the world realized that the Europe and Africa side actually dovetailed into the America side like a puzzle piece, and said, Well, what if one day there were these things were together, and then they’d split out and did a bunch of work to confirm it, and eventually went to present it to the Academy of Science in London in the early 20th century and got laughed at because he was not a geologist. What was like that whole saga was just that’s really cool. So, I just, and then earthquakes and volcanoes and now are suitably spectacular to go and want to understand and get closer. And yeah, so I just made it my field at the time and then I realized actually, after the fact that it would lead to a career in the oil industry, which as a geophysicist, you end up you know, being in a, on a platform somewhere, and you know, interpreting seismic data. And it’s not a fun life, to be honest. So, I after doing a tiny bit of that, I was like, maybe I need to reconsider options and then moved into another direction. Interestingly though, when I started working after that, on my first product projects. So outside of the geophysics world, I ended up renting a room with a very famous geophysicist who actually had to build the not built, was the first one to have mapped with her husband, were husband, research partner had mapped the bottom of the ocean. So, if you ever seen this map of the ocean floor with the Mid Atlantic ridge in the middle of the, of the Atlantic Ocean, she was the one who built this map, and her research partner actually died in a submarine, exploring the bottom of the oceans. And it was, it was a really cool capstone to my geophysics career to, to live there for a year and a half. Anyway, so that’s geophysics for you, and you have any further question on it. So, I’m happy to go into it. I don’t use any of it, except maybe the math part, which comes in handy when doing Excel things. But the thing that is actually connected to some of the work we’re doing now, is this idea that there is real value in cross discipline connections, right? Because you had all these very expert geologist, geophysicist, staring at the same map that this guy stared at, and not seeing anything in there. Because in their mind, it was so impossible that these things would have been together, ever, that these continents would have been together ever. And it’s it took another perspective to actually open that box up. And then I think for, for businesses, that’s, that’s one of the almost unexplored things, you know, for people to just get out of their swim lanes to go and look at other problems.
EW:
Yeah, absolutely. No, thank you for sharing that. I like to just poke and inquire and learn about people’s backgrounds, and early influences, just to see how that percolates into present day life. I suspect that perhaps there’s modes of thinking or asking questions or looking at the world that you’re carrying over from your curiosity in science and your studies and science that maybe informs what you do in some way? Or maybe not.
CM:
Yeah, probably it probably does. I mean, everything informs everything else afterwards, right. So, the one thing for sure, though, is that after this, the one of the other motivations for me to be in geophysics was that I didn’t really want to spend much time with people. So that was a great way to not spend time with anybody. And you know, just being a little truck somewhere in the middle of nowhere and been a part of the decision to move away from it was because I figured it wouldn’t necessarily be good for my personal growth or balance, if I really went into a complete tunnel. And that’s when I actually, after spending some time in product, I moved to sales. Just which was the most horrible thing in the world for me to go to at the time, because it was very painful. But it felt like a really healthy kick in my butt in terms of getting myself out of my comfort zone.
EW:
Yeah, well, sales will do it to you. Yes. Well, it’s definitely hard and so many challenges.
CM:
Talk about art, the art of rejection.
EW:
Among other things, No, indeed. You know, Christophe, I just realized I didn’t ask you the first question I asked in every podcast, and it’s very apropos because it’s, it’s gonna connect to your I didn’t want to be around people comment. Where do you work? And what do you get paid to do?
CM:
Right now?
EW:
Yes
CM:
I work at a company. I work with two companies, actually. One is called TI People, and the other one is called FOUNT, and both of these companies get paid to help large companies typically do a better job with the experience they provide to their employees. So, most of these large companies struggle to even think in experience centric terms and to organize around it. So that’s what we help them do.
EW:
Yep, And this is, you know, adventure that we could send evolution in your career from having had director roles in at Corporate Executive Board, then being Chief Human Resource Officer at Corporate Executive Board, and then evolving into this before discussing TI People though, I did want to just pause and spend a little bit of time, I’m reflecting back on your role as CHRO at Corporate Executive Board, I’m just curious, like, what, what did you learn there about, on one hand HR, but also just about human being, and especially that being a research organization, perhaps you were also, you know, a lot of data passing through your hands about industry and what was going on and in the world of business at the time.
CM:
So, at CEB so in short for Corporate Executive Board, which is now part of Gartner, I spent most of my time as a business leader there. So as head of Europe for a long time and based out of London. And the it turns out that like in many knowledge worker-based businesses, that our ability to help individuals perform at the company, which would then in turn, increase the amount of time they will spend with the company and prevent attrition and to have all kinds of good things, that ability was really the number one input into our P&L in terms of growth and, and profitability. And whilst it was important, it was also really difficult to manage it, to accept that, you know, besides what you’d call leadership instincts, right, that you, you have, and you don’t have across the organization, with your managers and leaders, etc., etc. And so, it felt like a really, very unstructured thing, right, to try to help people perform better and stay longer with the company. I thought at the time that HR would have the answers, because I assume that’s kind of their job. And it turns out that HR doesn’t have the answers no more than business leaders have the answers, because the answer is actually shared between the business HR and everybody else, cross functionally, that creates experiences for employees. So, I can’t say that I learned more about human beings in HR than I had learned as a business leader, I just learned that the job of a business leader was difficult, is as difficult or perhaps a little bit easier than the job of HR, which is to actually support an organization without having almost any real decision power. Right. So, it’s a true to cost center, right? So, you’re spending company money to try to create value, but you don’t really control anything, you work mostly by influence, or the matrix, and try to do a good job and you see HR professionals who are just unbelievably expert at their jobs. But in and you know, they’re great folks, just like, you know, what you have on the business side. The question is really, from an employee perspective, how do you combine these different sources of experience into one cohesive ecosystem that works for employees. And so, I actually didn’t really manage to do that, as a business leader, I didn’t quite manage to do it as, as an HR executive either. And that’s what prompted the formation of TI People. Because it is a big business problem and looking at attrition numbers that are rising right now. And what it’s reflecting is the fact that people want the experience that they want, that they have a certain expectation. And if it’s not met, they’ll just go looking elsewhere. And companies are still not wired that way yet. And so that’s what people this was built to help them.
EW:
Yeah, So, let’s transition to talk about TI People. And first off, let’s just define some terms, which are going to come up here very quickly. What is the difference between employee engagement and employee experience?
CM:
So, employee engagement is really a conceptual measure of people’s loyalty to the organization. And so, to use the CEB definition, it’s a combination of discretionary effort and intent to stay right, so in other words, how, how much later are my ready to go stay past my work time to solve a difficult problem? How much do I want to stay with the company as long as I can? So, for intents and purposes, engagement is very similar to customer loyalty in the customer world, so how loyal am I to the company? It’s quite useful to I mean, to understand what’s people’s state of mind, of the organization. Experiences is different, because it really doesn’t have much to do with what people think about the company. It has to do with what happens when they try to do something at the company. So, when they tried to do their work, how many obstacles do they encounter that don’t need to be there. And usually, when you think about doing your work every day, there’s a ton of those that are, you know, some of them are controllable, some of them are not, but the expectation from most workers is that the company tries to remove as much friction as possible from my path when I tried to do my work. And so that’s experiences about action and what people are trying to do, what they interact with when they do it. Whereas engagement is, when I think back to all my experiences and how I feel about the company, do I want to stay here? And so experience drives engagement. And that’s why there’s much attention right now, I’m trying to manage it effectively, because it’s actually the root cause of engagement, attrition, and all kinds of important things on the back end.
EW:
Yeah, that does, that reminds me of a client that we were working with in 2019 and part of what they were looking at were the first 30,60,90 days of a new employee and it was fairly common for employees to not have a desk the first day or the first week or two that they were there in, and there were just like really old employee manuals floating around, it was fairly chaotic. And people knew it was chaotic. But there was value in a design team kind of bringing all those stories together, and looking at those issues in a cohesive way, right. And this is more from like a qualitative perspective, and I know that you all do more quantitative work.
CM:
If it’s the same problem that you’re trying to solve, right. So, most of the, you know, that’s something that I saw, both from an HR perspective, and as a business leader, most of the most of the experiences that people have, when they do their work, or when they onboard, or when they’re candidates or when they exit the company, are not designed, right, so they’re literally left to chance. And if when you think about the complexity of work, so when you, you know, when you’re a candidate or a new hire, it’s a simple, nice linear set of steps. But when you work, you do everything all at once. You know, you think about your career at the same time as you check that you’ve been paid at the same time as you solve a customer problem. And all of these things are happening. And so, you have a very complex, complex set of activities happening in the diabolical ecosystem of processes, and policies and workflows and functions that are all matrix. And it makes it very difficult for employees to exist actually. So pretty, it’s like a jungle, right, where you have like, vines everywhere. So, the idea of actually clearing up as some of this method people have, you know, can have a proper run and the things that you’re trying to do is very powerful, even business wise. Because imagine what people could do, if only you removed all this nonsense from their way.
EW:
Right. Before we really dive into some issues here, like what industries is TI people and your other company working with right now?
CM:
So, any industry where talent is a big P&L driver, and that is to say pretty much every industry, the there are some factors that may make it more easy for these organizations to come to employee experience. And one of them is for example, if they have a successful customer experience program, and, you know, extending it to the internal customer is, you know, it’s not too far-fetched. But you also have companies that don’t have any kind of customer experience program but have a real big talent problem that all the tools that they’ve used so far to try to address it, basically failed. An example of that is a logistics company in Utah who just couldn’t retain people in their first six months of the company, and which essentially creates a big business issues and the kind opened and managed to reduce turnover from like 120% annual to about 60% annual by doing proper design around, you know what, what it takes to get to work there, and how these new hires could become successful. So, it’s really a variation in industry, financial services, technology, logistics, retail, so there’s no rhyme or reason, really.
EW:
So, you’ve been working with some global companies, right? So, you’re, you’re actually reaching beyond the US. You’re actually, you know, analyzing, touching people in Europe and Asia and beyond. What are what are kind of common problems or complaints that your clients are bringing to you, you know, in specially in the last year and a half with the pandemic, and everything that’s been going on around the pandemic, right, retaining talent, etc., like, well, what are you seeing?
CM:
Yeah, so as some as a company, we actually have a dual headquarter, one in the US and one in Hamburg, Germany. So we do cover both sides of the pond, first very consistent challenges that actually companies don’t know how to prioritize opportunities to make a difference on people’s experience, when you really think about it, the realm of possibilities of experiences to go and improve is, you know, by town segments, and then hundred-thousand people organization, there’s a lot of times segments, times geography times business unit, times, the experiences that people have, and whatever stage they are in their life cycle, times the touch points they interact with when they do certain things. It’s such a complex matrix that people don’t know where to start. And so usually what they do is to start by what’s easier, or by alphabetical order, or based on insight from I don’t know, the CEO decides to go and do something about something they care about, it’s very rarely employee driven to say, we know, overall, what are the experiences that you guys think is most important, and also is currently not delivering to expectations. So, some of the candidates for experiences like that are people doing their job, that is, when you really think about it, it’s the lion’s share of the time you spent at work is like doing what you do. And if that’s not working for you, then that’s a problem. Second, a close in one that rose to the top was commuting. So, during the pandemic, that was not really a concern. But post pandemic, that became a huge issue with people not feeling safe commuting to work and then even resenting having to spend time in their car or in transport for an hour to go to work and go participate to zoom meetings, they’re like, what’s the point of doing that, and also finding themselves quite productive being at home and therefore not feeling the need to go back to the office. A third one is anything that touches career mobility. So internal career mobility, where people have no expectations of, of choice, right of saying, I’m doing this job now, I want to have visibility into the next and the one after next of opportunities that could have here. And that goes along with what kind of skills I need to pick up, what kind of comp I’m able to, to achieve there and you know, where I want to work. So, if I decide to go work in the mountains it should be okay, too. So, it becomes really a buyer’s market for employees where yeah, just like travel has become a buyer’s market where you have a choice of the airline, you fly and the hotel you pick, it’s a little bit the same thing for employers now and these decisions are made based on experiences like the ones I’ve described.
EW:
So, what’s your take on this “The Great Resignation” and people quitting and then so forth? Beyond what you already shared, do you have any other thoughts or hypotheses or questions that you ask yourself around that issue?
CM:
So, I, so we believe now, I’m biased, but we believe that what drives it is the fact that we, that employees, live in an experience economy. Right. So, in other words, they are educated by the Amazons, the Netflix and the experience of the world on what good service looks like, on the freedom of choice, on transparency of quality of information you need when you make choices. And now they port that into their expectations at work. And, you know, when, when ordering, returning something on Amazon is as simple as saying, I don’t like it, I want to return it. And you see some, you know, some of the experiences you described where onboarding to a company, you have to go through three dungeons in the basement to go and fill out paperwork. People, the contrast between these two things is so sharp that doesn’t meet people’s expectations. That’s it. They’re like, this is not, we know that this should, this could be better and why is it not? Like how incompetent can you be that you don’t provide me at least a decent experience when I do these things? So that’s what drives it. And my view, and it drives employee behavior in the same way that it drove customer behavior at the beginning of the customer experience, you know era where marketers were wondering what the hell’s happening? Like, why are customers like what why are they doing what they’re doing? And that was the beginning of the experience economy, and it’s just now expanding to the world of employees.
EW:
Can we, can we just take a moment to just reflect back on when, when you started your first couple of professional jobs after grad school, back in the day. I mean, what’s, how would you contrast that experience with the expectations that young people have now? What does that look like?
CM:
Well, yeah, you know, you’re lucky to have a job so stick with it and, and whatever the company puts in your way, it’s really a test of character to see if you’re really worthy. Whereas today it’s what you want me to do this nonsense. I’m not having any of it. I’m not working for you. So that being said, there was a behavior that I saw in my career of people having bad experiences. And not necessarily leaving the company but turtling in place literally. So okay, you know, I don’t have the energy to go find another job and who knows, maybe it’s going to be worse over there. So, I’ll just do minimal effort for this one. And I’ll just coast for as long as I feel I can coast until something better comes up. And by the, and that’s a huge tax on the performance of the organization that is completely invisible. And you can’t make people that have decided to act that way change their approach once you, once they’ve done it a few, you know, for a few years, it’s almost impossible to train. So, I think there was a lot of that kind of behavior in the past. I think now people are more actively managing their career and therefore more, and there’s more jobs available too and therefore just manifested in attrition.
EW:
Well, and the flow of information too. As you were sharing that, I was remembering, I think a couple of mentions that I’ve seen in articles over the years where there, you know, there might be groups of people at Google, some other places that there’s like some Google spreadsheet with anonymous salary information type of position. So, there’s
CM:
Yeah, the TripAdvisor phenomenon is now out in for employers too, right? So, and I remember a conversation with a large organization and contrasting their Glassdoor rating and CEO approval versus their competitors, glassdoor rating and CEO approval. And if you’re a candidate and you want to go work somewhere, you know, it’s just like, I’m looking for a hotel, which hotel I’m going to stay, the one with the nasty rating and people complaining about the bathroom or the ones where people seem to like it. That’s transparency of information.
EW:
Coming back to your work at TI People, how, you know, what, how the conversations look like when, when you’re working with clients and you’re communicating insights that you’re gathering through quantitative analysis and some other tools that you have and other resources that you have available to you.
CM:
So, the shift to an experience centric organization is a hard one, right? Because organizations are wired to be focused on the success of the organization, not really wired to focus on the success of individuals that work in it. And everything, all processes, budgeting, planning, all the entire infrastructure is really focused on the organization itself. So, asking the organization to go focus on employees is a challenge. Very much like how CX practitioners have managed to move.
EW:
And CX just, it’s just, just to the find terms as customer experience.
CM:
Its customer experience practitioners have managed to move the dial in their companies towards customers by using data. We use a similar approach to help these massive organizations understand where they’re not delivering on their employees expectations, which experiences, which touchpoints are really breaking down for people and without data and I know because from, you know, having been both as a business leader and an HR leader trying to have conversations internally about people’s experience, it becomes squishy very quickly and you, you end up in anecdotes of I talked to somebody who said that their computer didn’t work, and I, well, I talked to somebody who said the computer did work, so we know we’re, we’re even. Whereas if you can actually have real data that shows how much friction people encounter in specific moments and what impact it has on their overall retention, because you can correlate that, that data becomes then the currency that internally people can start measuring things by and little by little you start shifting the organization towards the notion of experience, even if initially people don’t quite understand what it is, but they know that if you get a CSAT score for, I don’t know, people getting paid of 50%. It means that 50 percent of people are really unhappy with the way their pay is calculated, and that’s something you can fix without being, you know, necessarily a designer. You can already start having an impact just by using common sense. So, our approach is very centered on collecting data that represents people’s experiences in the best possible way. Never at the level that you’d get from a proper interview, but at least close enough that you get a sense of focusing on the right things and then using design tools and design teams to go and fix some of these things.
EW:
What are some, some things that leaders need to really be paying attention to, I mean, you’re, you’re, you’re touching on this, but if you’re actually having a conversation with somebody who acknowledges I’m having a hard time. What does the conversation with that leader, how might that go? And let’s just say it’s somebody very open, like they’re very open to feedback and changing, and they’re very coachable and they just, they just really want your help. What might you point their attention to on what things might you emphasize that they need to embrace?
CM:
Well, so there was a huge amount of airtime for the term empathy during the, you know, the pandemic. And great leaders, the open type that you’re talking about, typically is instinctively empathetic, right? So in other words, they, and with the real sense of the word, not because they’re nice to people, but because they know how to adopt somebody else’s perspective and usually you see these leaders being the ones who spend a ton of time with frontline teams to understand what it is, what it’s like to walk the walk every day and to try to figure out opportunities for to make their experience better. The problem is that, that is the attribute of a few leaders and when you have a very large organization with hundreds of thousands of people, even if some of them practice this, sorry about that, many of them don’t, right, and you still have employees who are experiencing a ton of friction, and no one knows, right, never, you know, floats back up. So, for two things, number one, so great leaders that are open, it’s almost a way of, you know, the practice of experience as I described it is a way of institutionalizing empathy. So, it’s almost don’t rely just on conversations, but actually have data that is going to reflect what these people are experiencing pain with and give you data so you can drive action in the company. Because that’s the other thing with empathy is something that leaders feel very strongly internally. But then when it comes to drive action, they have to push back and pocket vetoes and all these things that data really helps to punch through because no one can argue with data. So, it’s almost a recognition that many of them have the right instincts, but they don’t have tools that help them extend their scale of understanding and of diagnosing, if you will, and prioritizing with the right areas of impact so that they can act more effectively. The other thing is, leaders are very concerned with performance of their business, right? So how effective are their systems and their processes and actually, at the end of the day, their teams, right? So how much output do they get out of the system? For them to understand that the other side of the coin of effectiveness is actually experience for the people that are producing whatever it is they’re producing. And we recently did work for engineers so in that operate that work in agile teams, so coding engineers and software engineers to try to understand from the perspective of those engineers trying to do the agile, you know, to participate to the agile process, where are the points of friction from their perspective? And when you understand that, it actually shows you opportunities for improvement from a productivity perspective. So, in other words, experience is not, it’s of course good for people that work there, but it’s also really good for optimizing areas where there’s a ton of energy loss and many business leaders typically understand that, particularly engineers. But it’s a bit harder for HR executives, because HR executives are very attached to process, because that’s, you know, the job, what the job of HR has become over the years.
EW:
Let me go back to data. I mean, I have this provocative position that data is meaningless, and it takes people to make it meaningful, right? It’s like, if there’s a binder of data in the forest and nobody reads it, it doesn’t mean anything. And that is to say that data, we need to be good storytellers with data, or I would suppose that, you know, we need to be. How do you approach storytelling with data and trying, you know, what’s your approach to make it come compelling and convincing and really tell a story that gives people deeper insight into what’s happening in their ecosystem?
CM:
So. This is really a change management question for all these internal teams that are creating experiences for workers, usually with no clue that they’re actually creating experiences. Usually, they’re building processes and things to get things done and then workers have to go through these things, and then everyone hopes for the best. So, the change exercise is a combination of one giving data so that executives have a robust frame to lean on, to report on, to measure progress over time, to be able to tell the story of overtime on how we’re doing things better and without it, actually everything peters out and that we’ve seen this, especially with the very complex universal experiences that you have for an employee, but unlike customer experience, where, you know, if you think about it, our interactions with Amazon are numerous, but definitely not as numerous as our interactions at work, right? So, and so it’s much more simple ecosystem to understand and set of activities than what we have at work. So, when it’s so complex, you need to have data to be able to tell the story consistently and not just have a story to tell. That doesn’t, that just says, yeah, we impacted Christophe’s experience over there, we think, because he said it was better but that’s not enough to get an organization to move. Much of the storytelling actually, it should be directed to people, HR, IT, and business people that are building these scaled experiences to show to them what it means when they, what’s the story of improvement? So, for example, in a recent work we did with a big pharma company, candidates, what one of the big gaps in that candidate experience is actually background checks. It doesn’t sound like much, but when you ask candidates, they’ll say, I almost have the job, pending the background check, and it’s going to take three weeks and during those three weeks, I can’t accept another job or decline one, because I’m not sure that it’s going to, it’s going to come through. I’m also not sure that they’re not going to land on that thing I did in college. You know, 10 years ago, and, you know, it’s basically three weeks of anxiety and most of background experience is actually poor because it’s outsourced to some company that just does that transactionally. So, you now have a highly emotionally charged moment for somebody who really wants to join this company and you have a contractor who couldn’t care less and that gives pretty, you know, pretty poor experience overall. So that, that kind of the ability to take problems like this, make them better. And then to give data to say the experience of people at this particular moment went from 40% to 90%, and the team actually cross functionally resolved that together. Now the story is about this team and how they’re heroes for looking at the problem in the right way, being able to solve it and that then inspires a bunch of other internal teams to go do the same thing. So, it always has to combine the two of a story about the team that did it. The impact it’s had, and then the data thing that keeps reinforcing that, yet you do have to pay attention to that data.
EW:
You’ve also mentioned design and I know there’s a moment, there are moments where then you call in qualitative research and design teams. When do you do that? And, and can you explain why?
CM:
Well, I mean, ideally you would do it for everything, right? Because that’s how you would be able to create the best possible experiences ever for everybody. Unfortunately, you don’t have unlimited design resources in big companies. So, people tend to prioritize these resources for big, hairy problems that where there’s no obvious solution, or even if the solution is obvious, it’s probably going to miss the mark and, and where you have to have a thorough design approach to get to a much better place and literally reinvent entirely the experience that was never really invented in the first place. It was just accidentally there.
EW:
What’s the limitation with the quantitative data where you need to send in a design team to dig deeper, like what’s happening in that moment and what are you looking for?
CM:
So, the quant data is really good at telling you for specific talent segments, specific moments in
people’s life at work, and even specific touch points that they interact with. There are, you know, both important and painful issues. It also gives you verbatim feedback to at least give color around what these things are. However, as you know, people don’t really know how to express their needs or how to really get deep enough to be part of a design process unless you have proper researchers spending time with them to understand. So, the role of the data is essentially to zero into these areas of high friction and high level of angst around these points of friction, probably high level of business impact, for example, customer facing teams that can’t do their job because of yeah, whatever stupid things get in their way that damages customer experience. It damages the retention of these customer teams. So that’s a clear hotspot and you see people then just concentrating design resources and things like this and the data just helps you understand which business unit or which region to direct these resources and to have the best initial impact.
EW:
So, then the design team goes in to explore perhaps really the detail and the richness of the human experience and the little things that are not easy to catch.
CM:
And to understand the problem behind the problem, and understand, you know, what could this experience be if we really just reinvented it. Right. So that’s, you know, you don’t necessarily want designers to be engaged in just identifying, you know, two or three obvious things that even showed up in the quant data, but to go deeper, because, you know, you need a bigger fix than just a touch up of a few things. So, the example I gave of customer facing teams where you usually have you know, five, six, seven customer data platforms that are in play. You have processes, you have compliance processes that are in play. All of these things combining to make the job of you know, a customer service person very difficult. That’s the problem you’re not going to entangle just by looking at data. You actually need somebody to just explore it by hand.
EW:
You also mentioned all the different touch points or experiences or things that your tools can explore, does your toolkit also surface conversations and data around culture and like what people are feeling, not just with equipment or the physical structure, but just the relationships with each other.
CM:
Well, yeah. So even though it’s not a very nice term to use, but we consider humans as a touch point in many of these experiences, right? So, if you think about the experience of work, managers appear as a touch point of supervisors or managers as a touch point in 75% of people’s work experiences and interestingly, managers perform either really well or very poorly, depending on the moment. So, for example, they tend to perform not very well when it comes to discussing compensation with their team member because they usually don’t know how to talk about it. They don’t have the right frame of reference, and honestly, companies don’t equip managers with the right things to have these conversations. At the same time, you see that they perform surprisingly well on things like coaching and things that usually they get blamed for not doing. So, the game with the culture thing is really what we pick up is essentially if the company is delivering on its culture promises, right? So, if a company says our culture is a culture of growth and development. And you come here, you’ll have a world of opportunities at your fingertips, because we’re huge and we’re global. And then you show up and you spend three years of the company doing your work, and you try to go find a new internal job and then all hell breaks loose, because I don’t know. If you’re an engineer, let’s say, and you’re a female engineer, and you start looking at job descriptions, most of which are written by male engineers, you’re like, well, that’s not really the kind of job I would want and as even as you try to reach out for some of these things, your manager actually tells you, well, I think it would be better if you stayed in my team because I’m planning on you to stay on my team so now you’re discouraged from going and exploring other things. So, the, where the culture, the cultural promise initially of career mobility and inclusion, which is usually part of the stated culture, when it comes down to in reality is, well, I’m a female engineer trying to find a new job internally. A, I don’t find one because I’m female, and B, even if I get over that hump, I still can’t find one because my manager won’t let me and that means that the promise you’ve made to me with your culture, you don’t deliver and that makes me mad and usually go look for a job external.
EW:
Wow. So, is that, is that a story that you see fairly often or?
CM:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. We are. So, for like looking for a new job internally for engineers, and most organizations that we’ve done this with, there’s a gap of about 30% in ease of if you’re a female versus male. Yeah. That’s why data is powerful because it’s actually showing daylight that otherwise you just know anecdotally.
EW:
Do you have any thoughts around this term toxic culture that’s kind of been floating around the last couple of years?
CM:
Yeah, I mean, I think that you know, how we think about culture is, it’s kind of a two geared concept. There’s the thing that the company declares to the world and say, this is our culture and then there’s the reality of what happens. And the more gap there is between, the promise and the reality, and the more things get toxic, right? Because you have a similar phenomenon for brands where there’s a brand promise and then there’s the brand delivery, right? So, when Apple promises to fix my iPhone in a really nice way, in a nice, you know, genius bar, with, you know, good wait times, et cetera, et cetera. That’s what I expect and if you don’t deliver on that, then you’re now making empty promises to me, which makes me mad at you. So, when that happens at a company, and too many people are disappointed with the way the company meets its promises, then people don’t care. Like they’re put in a situation where it’s like, you don’t deliver it to me, I won’t deliver it back to you and it kind of brings out the worst and I would almost say rightfully so.
EW:
Yeah. So interesting. So, I think this is a good segway to transition to the name of this project, which is “Making Business Art”. Just curious what comes up for you when you hear that phrase? Just gut reaction.
CM:
So, I would back up 10 minutes ago in our conversation about the powerful combination of data or analytics, whichever you look at it. Let’s say data-based insights and stories. So, where I think either one of these two things on its own fails to change modern organizations. I mean, so smaller ones change on stories all the time. Like that’s, you don’t need data. When the scale gets out of, you know, let’s say at the 20,000 people mark, things just get too complex to if you don’t have data to describe it. And so, for me, the marriage of business and art is really the marriage of analytics and storytelling, whether that uses images, metaphors, stories of real things that have happened and companies that do that well, I think can move much faster.
EW:
Yeah. I mean, out of curiosity, this is totally a personal question. What’s some sort of arts related experience that you’ve, that it’s memorable that you’ve really enjoyed and that could be theater or a movie, or a live concert, even like a really like fine restaurant. Is there anything that comes to mind?
CM:
Yeah. I mean, I’ve just watched the Batman movie, which I found really good and actually the experience was one of I’m just surprised at how good it was compared to how much I didn’t expect it to be that good. But most of the experiences that register with me are music related typically. So that’s where, I don’t know, I listen to music most of the time.
EW:
Part of the impetus of this project is to find ways to build richer connections with the people we serve and that is to say that we’re really working with emotion, which I think the world of art, when it’s, you know, at least talented people in the world of art know how to do that fairly well and get some emotional result. So I’m also curious just to poke around in terms of emotion. You brought up emotion several times, right? During a conversation about people being disappointed, also people being uncertain and uncertainty is interesting. I was having a conversation with another guest we were talking about. I think it was after the recording, how human beings, we hate being uncertain generally, but we love managed uncertainty, meaning like sports, sports game, right? There’s rules. You’re going to be okay. It’s safe, but it’s uncertain. So it’s exciting or in storytelling, like building tension, releasing tension, like in a movie, right? That’s also like managing uncertainty but not knowing where we’re going at all, that is kryptonite for the human brain. So.
CM:
Yeah, what this is translating into right now is what people expect of work today, is that kind of managed uncertainty, right? So, we, you know, the hybrid working thing is a big challenge for companies, right? That’s a huge change and there’s expectation, see change from individuals who, as we talked about earlier. And so, people don’t understand why they have to go to the office just because it’s the rule. Right. And so that’s kind of like the managed certainty is like, what are you, what are you doing, why are you doing this to me is really their reaction, where what they want is to have the ability to go back to the office, to do things that they don’t get to do at home, like be together with their teammates, but then it has to be orchestrated so that, you know, cause otherwise it won’t happen and, but it also can’t be too rigid because if it is, then it’s yet another thing that you go have to. And so, there was actually a recent article by the CEO of Airbnb, who basically said for anyone who works out of a computer, going to the office is like, why would you want to like, if you treat it as a design problem? What human goal are you trying to fulfill by going to the office? And if it’s to be with your mates, then orchestrated as a go and meet together and be for a week together somewhere and enjoy each other’s company. Maybe do some work once a quarter and the rest of the time. Yeah, don’t need to go. So, it’s a really interesting question of creating an environment that is kind of tight and loose at the same time, but tight around the right things and loose around the rest for people to be happy nowadays. And we see in our data, huge deltas between generations. So, I’m a boomer, so boomers don’t really care either way, like happy to have a job anyway as when you go down to millennials and Gen Z, you see like violent rejection of anything that sounds like something you just have to do because we just tell you to.
EW:
Yeah, it seems like especially with the younger generation, it’s just the expectation that their sense of, just autonomy and self-efficacy is way higher than because even when I, when I was growing up in, I grew up in Ecuador and that was very conservative society was, it was just, it was just top down and you didn’t, you were just thankful for what you have and you shut up and you take it and you put your head down.
CM:
Yeah, France is the same way cause like you, you just like do what you have to do. Then you do a revolution once in a while just to like shake things up. But in between, you know, you keep quiet, you know?
EW:
Yeah, absolutely. Through this making business art project, I’m also just thinking through how do I create some frameworks and tools and approaches to help leaders and organizations and just, just teams in general? And this mission statement that I landed on, it sounds very romantic, but I’ll throw it out to you. See what your reaction is. And it’s about, you know, inspiring people to make their work more beautiful and enchanting and that in part is because, there’s a resonance with what you’re saying is you, you almost have to, you can’t tell people things. So, you have to like draw people in and make them buy in and like you and it’s kind of, it’s almost like you have to, you have to create a following or fans, right? People have to want to follow you willingly and they’re not a lot of orders.
CM:
Yeah, I don’t, so I don’t know about the fandom thing of, you know, creating a cult behind yourself because then there’s a little bit of that with fans. It’s like, oh my God, just, you know, this person is so amazing. I’ll follow him or her anywhere. I think where it gets powerful is if an organization is able to create fans because of the way it behaves and so it’s not personalized. In other words, to your point about, you can’t tell people what to do. Look at me with my dog clearly, it doesn’t work. And it’s the same thing, I have a 21-year-old son. It’s the same thing. Like you just can’t make people they’ll actually you can if you deploy enough power, but it will actually end up biting you in the butt later. Right. So that particular philosophy, which and by the way, I think even in modern armies, they’ve actually understood that. Which is, you know, a very hierarchical environment, that’s not the way to lead people like, you know, great military leaders actually lead from, from the center, they don’t lead from the top. So, this, the shift in leadership approach is one that goes with this question of experience, which is my job as a leader is to remove as many obstacles from your is to be like your mom actually remove as many obstacles as possible from your way so that you’re as successful as you can be. That’s really, that’s really what a good leader should do, to do that with everyone, and you’re able to channel everyone’s energies, so that it creates value for the company because they’re shareholders. On that side, you’re, then you really be like, you’re the leader that gets out of the way to get things out of people way you end up creating a ton of value for individuals and then for the company, the, you know, the Jack Welch time of, you know, the supernatural leader is kind of. It’s kind of over from that perspective.
EW:
Yeah. But I think the type of leader that you’re describing, they, somehow, they do end up creating fans in some way. Cause I
CM:
They do.
EW:
I’ve known people that do that in a small way. You know they’re not world, you know, leaders of global corporations, but they can call anyone who’s worked for them, and they’ll answer the call, and that person will bend over backwards to help them out to help.
CM:
Yeah, I think that’s I yeah, what goes around comes around, right? There is you know, an inherently paternalistic thing about organizations that if you’re a senior leader, you’re sitting above people that are sitting below you. Right? And that particular setup is one that gets in the way of leaders actually, to do that because they believe that their job is to lead from the top and make big calls, et cetera, where actually it’s what we’ve been talking about. And when you do that, then people just go yeah where their job takes them to do it the best in the best possible way. Right. So, the enchanting thing that you’re describing, that’s what it’s about, right? It’s like I’m actually having a great time doing my job. It’s a really good way to spend my time. Like when I go back home, like, okay, I didn’t waste eight hours of my life. Maybe I wasted an hour. That’s acceptable. But for the other seven, like. That was time well spent for me.
EW:
So, if the CEO nice to you?
CM:
Which, oh yeah, well, no, but I, because of the two companies, I’m like, I don’t, I don’t know. No, actually I, no, I’m not very nice to myself.
EW:
Yeah. Just to clarify something on, on the fandom, because you introduced the word cult and I had not thought about it from that perspective. I’ve come up, you know, something that I’m fascinated by fandom is when there’s these bodies of work, like Harry Potter or Star Wars or Game of Thrones or fill in the blank and then there’s like all this fan fiction and people, you know, are writing fiction and are doing all of this for free, which to me, it’s amazing. It’s mind blowing because it’s still work. You still have to know, you know, good story structure and good writing and all the things right to make this fan fiction compelling and effective. And nobody’s getting paid, right? it’s just people are just super passionate about that thing. And I wonder like, well, you know, what if we could add back or, well, I don’t know, add back, but maybe just add more meaning to work and just.
CM:
Yeah, the term meaning is kind of what, you know, is the Lord of the Rings really meaningful? I don’t know, but like, I read the book many times and I still enjoy reading it, or do, and same thing, read it many times, I still enjoy reading it. It’s not about the meaning, it’s actually about the entering that world and being in it, and discovering new things, and new ways of thinking about it, and so it’s kind of an active thing where I feel, I mean, I could do something much more productive with my time, like, I don’t know, playing cryptocurrency market, or, but I find it less interesting than immersing myself in that, or like, you know, playing like strategy games or like, so it’s in a way a waste of time, but it doesn’t feel like a waste of time. And I think work is a little bit like that. If you adhere to the environment in which you are and the people you interact with, and the actual work that you’re doing, so the actions that you perform, then it feels like a valuable way to spend your life, actually. And that in itself creates loyalty to, actually to some extent, CEB for at least a part of its life as an organization was a company like that where people were just like, I don’t want to go anywhere else. Like even the time that Gartner acquired the company, there were many people for whom CEB was their first job. And they’re like, oh my God, I’m like, I’m now no longer working for CEB. It’s Gartner. It’s different. And what determines that, and it wasn’t by no means a perfect place to work, but it is. And I don’t know if you can call it meaning, but its people feeling like they’re, they’re not wasting their time when they’re doing their work. And that there’s a common ground with other people that are doing a similar job and that they’re leaning in together out of will rather than out of just collecting a paycheck. And I think that’s the same thing that drives you to play a stupid strategy game for like, you know, through the night, just because you just want to do it.
EW:
It’s well, it’s just, the understanding, the complexity of the human being. I mean, we could throw around terms of meaning is one, but I think, you know, in hearing your story that the word significance comes up for me, like you you’re feeling, maybe you’re feeling you’re doing something, you know, significant or that has an impact on, on other people. What do you feel is most rewarding about your work at TI people these days? What are the good feelings you have around that I know you’re very passionate about it.
CM:
So good feelings is when we managed to help some of our clients actually have an impact, right? And it’s the hardest thing to go and, you know, do the tests. When you speak to HR folks and ask them, can you give me an example of impact that you’ve had in your work on the experience of your employees? Most of the time, HR leaders don’t know the answer to that question. They often you haven’t even asked that to themselves. And it’s a shame because the reason why HR executives got into HR in the first place was because they want to do good things for people, right? But then over time, it tends to devolve into a much more process centric organization serving sport rather than being one that really serves people’s experience on the back end. So, when we manage to have some of these experience leaders actually have an impact on the experience of employees. That’s like, that’s pretty great. Maybe the second one is define that field because actually the although the world of customer experience is pretty well charted and you know, there’s a ton of literature and vendors and it’s pretty well covered. And the world of experience, employee experience, there’s actually a very little good work to lean on to go do stuff. That’s pretty exciting because it’s like, I don’t know, that’s just a new field.
EW:
Yeah, I’m hearing, I’m hearing the excitement of the scientists, the younger scientists from back, back in the day. It’s discovering things and bringing things to light. It’s kind of goes back to that same, that same driver, you know.
CM:
You know, there is a thing, in the cross functional, the cross-discipline thing is I think what’s going to take this thing forward. It’s like if you blend human centered design principles with kind of organizational development principles, because you have to serve the needs of organization. Otherwise, no one has a job and three, what’s happening in the people analytics world and what you can do with the AI etcetera. You bring these three things to bear on the problem of how do we make people’s experience better? Like that’s how it’s going to happen, but the thing is that these three disciplines are very isolated from each other. And so, it’s interesting to bring all that together.
EW:
That’s kind of what this project is about. Also adding art, because at the end of the day, music and color and so many other things from the world of art is what really animates us and activates our emotions.
CM:
Well, so actually that is part of the kind of part of the experience that people have, right? So even the surroundings in which they work, the stories that are told internally in the company, things that are, how often do they have the opportunity to even share experiences together, right? So, I don’t know if you remember the days of Christmas parties and, you know, like ridiculous things like that. What these are, it’s just shared experiences for groups of employees. And that may be why I like the Brian Chesky article is because he actually validates the need for these things but validates the need to actually engineer them or design them as real shared experiences. And, acknowledging the fact that it’s probably no longer going to happen in the flow of work, but going to happen in specific moments. So that’s an opportunity for art and business to really combine.
EW:
For sure. And, you know, just reacting to that too, I think the situation that we’re in just sets up a different conditions and constraints to be more deliberate about bringing people together. Because state of the art world of work, as you’ve pointed out, is not very deliberate a lot of the time. It’s just kind of stuff that.
CM:
It’s sedimented over the years.
EW:
Yeah. And sometimes that just creates a daily, just a daily grind, literally for just some people just ground down. Day to day.
CM:
The burnout phenomenon, right? Which is what’s happening across most of the organizations and burnout is the result of friction, but it’s literally I have too much friction in my work and friction is defined as stuff that gets in your way unnecessarily, but it’s not just a problem to solve as part of my work. It’s like, there’s this, you know, this nail in the sole of my foot that every time I take a step, boom, it’s there and it’s painful. That kind of thing, it burns you out pretty quickly and people have no more tolerance for that.
EW:
Is there something about the world of work in your own life? Right. Looking back at when you started your first professional jobs up to now, is there something that has changed that you’re happy about? You’re like, you’re so relieved that X thing is different these days? Something you would not want to go back to?
CM:
I think Glassdoor is actually a remarkably powerful transparency mechanism and whether it’s Glassdoor or any other platform that does that, the ability to see people’s reviews on companies. And many of them sharing the experiences that they’ve had. And even though it’s not, it’s always, you know, somewhat biased, et cetera. I think that transparency is amazing because you never had that in the world of work. So, it was always this kind of. So, I don’t know, it’s like, you know, law, it’s like this protected area that you can’t go into until you, unless you’re a specialist. Work was a very hermetic, cloistered thing, and so that’s really changed. I think, and it’s what’s motivating people to say, well, actually, I may have a choice. So, I wouldn’t want to go back to the time where most people actually felt like they didn’t have a choice.
EW:
Yeah. And I, you mentioned your son and that he’s 21, what’s I assume he’s getting ready to go into the world of work professionally in some capacity soon, if he’s not in it already, what’s your reading on what that experience is going to be like for him, you know, short term, and maybe five years out the first five years of his career, like, what, what do you make of that?
CM:
I don’t really care. I’ll just tell him what to do. No, I, I can tell that his approach and it’s actually not, you know, not particularly revolutionary with them, but his approach and as is the approach of his friends, very much in line with what we’ve talked about, right? So, they don’t want to join just any company. So, I think there’s just that expectation of, you know, they’re going to do something interesting with the work they do, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a super prestigious. There are some that seem to be kind of prisoner of their dad’s career and that they’re going to have to go work at the bank or, you know, things like that. But many others who are pretty free thinking about what they want to do. And maybe it was always that way because I probably felt that way initially, but it got beaten, beaten out of me from working at some of these big companies. It’s like, oh my God, this is really not, you know, what I wish it could be. So, and actually what’s, good news is that there are choices, right? There’s so many startups out there. There’s so many, you know, organizations that are doing good work that you know these kids can go and have a good experience and that what’s cool about that is I think people that have good experiences learn faster. They grow faster. They just. You know, they exist better, so that’s all, you know, good news for them. So, yeah.
EW:
Okay. Well, we might, we might have to get an update later on, like how, how that is going and hear the report back.
CM:
Good point. Yes.
EW:
All right. So, we’re going to wind down our time together here Christophe and I am going to ask you a lightning round of questions and feel free to pass if you feel like they’re too silly, but here we go. First question is, I do invite you to play though. First question is describe your closet and what state it’s in.
CM:
Messy.
EW:
That’s it. Is that?
CM:
Yeah, I mean, I can describe further if you want, but yeah, it’s a mess. It’s the reason why it’s a closet. It’s where you close the door and this way it’s not, you know, my room is actually not messy, but the closet is.
EW:
Yeah, we, well, we think alike there, Christophe. Next question, what’s the last piece of media that you love that can be a book, a movie, a podcast or anything else?
CM:
It was actually a piece of music. It’s a Murray Perahia, the pianist, who just recorded some list sonatas that were just, and I’m not a huge classical music fan, but just amazing music, so yeah, listen to it for.
EW:
Who’s the artist again?
CM:
Murray Perahia. He’s a classical piano player. Yeah. He’s very talented. He’s about 70 years old now, but that was the last.
EW:
Okay. What is something that inspires you?
CM:
The idea that organizations are creating poor experiences for their people accidentally, and that I think maybe some were just evil to begin with, maybe, but for the most part, it’s actually accidental and the idea that we could potentially reverse it by getting, you know, giving these organizations visibility into what’s really happening there is very inspiring to me because it would be, kind of like removing pain for workers that doesn’t need to be there. Because when you actually show these things to executives, like, oh my God, I never, I never knew this was going on. Let’s go fix it.
EW:
Oh, that’s beautiful. What’s a song you must play during a road trip where it could be a band?
CM:
It’s probably one song by Serge Gainsbourg, who’s a French singer from the sixties. One song, just because I don’t know, it’s kind of the French thing for me is kind of channeled into what he does as a singer. If it’s an American song, I think it would have to be a Led Zeppelin song called Delay.
EW:
There we go. And the French singer on the song again, what was that?
CM:
Serge Gainsbourg. Good luck with that one.
EW:
Let’s see, I might look it up if I figure out the spelling. I might, I’ll send you an email.
CM:
It’s the French spelling of Ginsburg.
EW:
Okay. Last question. And what do you want to see more of in the world?
CM:
I think more, more joy at work. There’s something about doing good work that’s a really healthy thing. So, I don’t think that doing work is a bad thing, even though the way we’ve inflicted it upon people for many years made it that way, but it doesn’t have to be, I think, so, and you use this sentence in our last call when you mentioned, you know, we design ergonomic seats and chairs and desks, but we don’t design ergonomic jobs. That’s I, you would want more of that because people actually, I think are, can be fully themselves when they do the work that they’ve chosen to do. And, you know, it would be nice if it was a shared experience for everyone.
EW:
Absolutely. Just. That would bring more joy to the world in general, because we spend so much of our lives.
CM:
Well, exactly. That’s true. Yeah. So, yeah, which would kind of obsolete the notion of retirement, because why would you retire if you actually are really enjoying what you do, right?
EW:
That’s true. All right. So, we have come to the end of our time together, Christophe. Do you just want to, again, shout out TI people and what you all are doing? Why would people want to seek you out? Like, what are the keywords that people should think of you and TI people and where can they find you?
CM:
Okay. So, the keywords are probably larger company, 5-10, 000 people in over trying to make their people’s experience better and not making enough progress fast enough. We’d be good people to talk to for that, where they can find us, TIPeople.com or just in Washington DC somewhere walking around, that’s it.
EW:
And people can connect with you on LinkedIn as well.
CM:
Absolutely.
EW:
Awesome. Christophe, it’s been such a pleasure to have you on today.
CM:
Same here.
EW:
We might have you back to hear an update on the kid and how things are going in the world of employee experience. But until then, have a great one. We’ll see you soon.
CM:
Thank you so much Ezekiel. Bye.
About Making Business Art
The Making Business Art is a podcast for curious people where they draw lessons and inspiration from creative leaders, entrepreneurs, artists, designers, and scientists about making a beautiful business and life. This podcast is hosted by Ezequiel Williams. He is an entrepreneur, innovation strategist, facilitator, and business designer. He helps leaders and teams see their challenges differently and find ways to deliver value that are more desirable and satisfying for the people they serve.
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