How Thriving Employees Build Win-Win Workplaces with Dr. Angela Jackson

Ashish Kothari: Hi, dear Angela. So lovely to have you with us on the Happiness Squad Podcast.

Dr Angela Jackson: And can I just say that I'm happy to be on the Happiness Podcast. Thank you for the invitation.

Ashish Kothari: You made such an impression on me almost a year ago when I heard you speak about your unbelievable research around this notion of a win-win workplace. And in fact, you have a book coming out shortly, The Win-Win Workplace: How Thriving Employees Drive Bottom-Line Success. Share a little bit about your research and findings and the main message in your book.

Dr Angela Jackson: When we think about the win-win workplace, how thriving employees drive bottom-line results, we wanted to pick up on a line of research I started almost five years ago, really understanding which employee practices correlate with bottomline firm-level outputs.

I interviewed 1,200 companies—small, medium, and large—and a recurring theme emerged. This especially came to light during the pandemic, where employers could point to a practice and the leader would say, "We've been doing this, and here's what we're seeing."

It was fascinating because we often talk about investing in employees as an expense. No one talks about the business case for doing it globally, or really takes it down to individual practices. It's always more like, "It's the right thing to do, the moral thing to do, so we should do it."

But I was fascinated by this group of leaders and companies that had shifted their language. They said, "We’re doing these things, and we're seeing actual outputs," which made them want to do more of these things. They weren’t seeing it as an expense; they were seeing it as a revenue generator.

So I mapped that across the 1,200 companies, and I could see they had an inkling about this. My latest research, which came out this year, took that framework—the win-win workplace framework and its nine practices—and applied it to Fortune 500 companies.

We looked at which companies were implementing one or more of these practices and whether there was a correlation to financial outputs. For example, reduced turnover, increased productivity, increased assets, and increased shareholder price.

In collaboration with my institute, Future Forward Institute, Just Capital, and the Burning Glass Institute, we took a qualitative and quantitative approach to this. We looked at surveys, publicly available information, and I spoke to employees to understand their sentiment.

We used platforms like Glassdoor to analyze what companies were saying they were doing, how it was operationalized, and how employees actually felt about it. Then we looked at how this impacted the financial outcomes of these companies.

Ashish Kothari: Amazing. So what did you find?

Dr Angela Jackson: This is the exciting part. We always hear about the war for talent, and every business—small, medium, and large—is facing it, especially in this new world of work where expectations are very different. We found one consistent strategy across all companies: centering employee voice.

We hear about voice all the time—360 reviews, surveys, suggestion boxes—but what was insightful about the companies I studied was that they took it a step further. They defined voice as giving employees a say in the matters that matter most to them.

Usually, surveys focus on what matters most to leadership. But when you flip that to understand what matters most to employees, to their ability to do their job, and you ask for their voice on that, you get different results.

One key insight I need to emphasize: It wasn't just about asking. What we heard was that employees wanted to see how their input was operationalized. And if it wasn’t, they wanted to be brought into the thinking about why. That’s a reasonable request, and one leadership should think deeply about.

We’re investing millions and billions in employee benefits and employee thriving, yet 52 percent of American workers feel their employers don’t care about them. With all this investment and listening, 52 percent still don’t feel heard.

If I were sitting in the C-suite and spending that kind of money, I’d think it’s time to consider how we spend it more effectively. It comes down to centering what employees want and changing the relationship with them.

Instead of a parent-child dynamic, it's more peer-to-peer. It’s about understanding mutual benefit. So, I tell CEOs that it's a mindset shift from "My employees are here to serve me and the business" to "How am I serving these employees so they can help achieve the business outcomes?"

Ashish Kothari: Yeah, so Angela, I mean, I grew up in the field of operations. At McKinsey, I spent 12 years on large-scale transformations in manufacturing, procurement, etc. It's really interesting because this is at the heart of the work we do.

And it’s not that different for these leaders when it comes to human flourishing and well-being. Somehow, we almost have two different approaches.

I'll give you an example of what you're highlighting around centering employee voices and creating a peer-to-peer relationship.

This is how operations transformations work. When we think about physical assets, no CEO or COO says to employees, "This is what I need you to do." We ask frontline workers and supervisors, who are working with those physical assets, "What will help increase efficiency? What will improve safety? What will increase quality?" Because they know it best.

But somehow, when it comes to our workplaces, we roll out these one-size-fits-all well-being programs. We spend so much money on them, and yet the result is that 50 percent of employees feel they aren't being heard.

So, we do it in operations, and I think what your research shows is that there are companies actually changing this. It's a fundamental mindset shift, and it's about giving the power back, enabling employees to say, "Hey, what would you like to see? Where do you want this to go?" I love that part of what you're doing.

Dr Angela Jackson: I really appreciate what you're saying. I'm a professor at Harvard University, and I lecture and teach on this. I use the business case model, which is all about helping people make decisions.

Leaders at all levels need this skill in the modern workplace. It's not enough to have just a few people with information. We need to understand how that information flows up, down, and across. To your point, it’s a mental model shift.

I go back to Frederick Taylor and Taylorism, where the idea was, "I'll give you just enough information to do your job efficiently." If they gave you too much information, it was considered a distraction because they thought you couldn’t handle all of it.

Ashish Kothari: You can’t handle it. You should just stay in your lane.

Dr Angela Jackson: You can't stay in your lane. I think about the shift, and in my book, I call it the "zero-sum workplace." We’re shifting that mentality to one where the better informed you are, the better you can think about your job and how our goals align beyond just a vision statement.

Bring employees into business planning. What are our objectives? Let me, in my role, tell you how I can contribute, and get people thinking that way. That’s what we call ownership culture. It shows up in many ways.

It’s about bringing employees at all levels into the thinking, taking time to update them just like the CEO does with the board of directors during shareholder calls.

We never say board members can't handle information. We expect them to ask questions if we don’t provide the necessary details. Why do we discount our closest "shareholders"—the ones who are operationalizing the work? It’s a fundamental shift.

I share my own story of work. When I started, I did one job, and I did it well. My grandfather worked at a Chrysler factory for over 40 years, putting doors on an automation line. He loved Lee Iacocca, but no one ever asked him how to be more efficient, what training he needed, or what else he saw in the organization.

He just put doors on. At 4:30, he'd clock out, say, "I did my number of doors," and go to sleep. He didn’t know the correlation between how many doors he installed and what that meant for sales and company revenue.

In this moment, we need to give people more credit. Ownership culture gives employees a stake, and we have to inform them. Businesses that do this see 10 to 15 percent higher revenue. So there’s a direct correlation for this. For small and medium-sized businesses, this can be a point of differentiation, especially in the war for talent.

Ashish Kothari: Absolutely. Especially with small to medium businesses, this is what excites me. These businesses account for almost 50 percent of GDP and employment. They are the backbone of the country.

They don't have the scale of larger companies, and it's hard to get capital and attract, retain, and develop talent. But they have agility, and that’s the advantage of their size. Imagine if these practices could help them, and really arm their employees. We could turn these Davids into ones that can take down the slow-moving Goliaths.

Dr Angela Jackson: You’re so right. I spoke to 1,000 small and medium-sized businesses a couple of months ago at the Jim Moran Institute for Small Businesses. Their big worry was becoming obsolete. How do they compete against Amazon, Burger King, and others paying $25 an hour? Through my research, the biggest advantage they have is proximity.

Ashish Kothari: Yes.

Dr Angela Jackson: When you work for a large corporation—whether it’s JP Morgan Chase or Amazon—you’re unlikely to meet Jamie Dimon if you're at the front desk. But at a small or medium-sized business, you do have that opportunity.

I visited a manufacturing company in Indiana called Juergens. The CEO there writes handwritten birthday cards to every employee, their spouse, and their children. At larger companies, you can’t do that.

But when 52 percent of people say they don’t feel their employer cares about them, it’s the small things that matter. Small and medium-sized businesses can operationalize those small actions.

At another company called StoneAge, they have an ownership culture. They provide all the information to their employees. Their CEO, Carrie Siggins, said, "As a leader, you have to be humble, transparent, and willing to be questioned."

That takes humility, but it’s a paradigm shift. Instead of saying, "We’re the C-suite, we know best," it’s about being humble enough to say, "We don’t know everything. This is our best thinking. We’re willing to listen, and if we don’t know, we’ll get back to you."

Ashish Kothari: I love it. So when you look at the big companies, especially small and private ones, we see a lot of this happening. Angela, from your research, what are the barriers to truly creating a win-win workplace? Why isn't it happening?

When you step back, it makes common sense, right? Give people information, leverage their expertise and creativity. Otherwise, they clock out at 4:30, and you’ve got them operating with one hand tied behind their back. Why aren’t more organizations doing this?

Dr Angela Jackson: The big reason is mental models. A lot of us grew up in the old world of work where the boss came in before everyone, stayed later, and face time at the water cooler was how you got mentored. We're hearing a lot of that now with the return-to-office mandates. "This is the way work has been done. We were successful at it, so that’s why we’re doing it."

All that is true, but as the book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There points out, we’re having a generational shift in the workplace. The pandemic illuminated that there are different ways of working. To retrench on that doesn’t make sense to people.

We have employees who were productive, did the right thing, and now are being told to come in just because "downtown needs us," or because it’s expected they spend money on lunch when they’d prefer to save it. We need a different relationship with employees.

The old world of work worked for many of us in leadership. For those who didn’t, myself included, we put our heads down. That’s what we were supposed to do. We saw our parents move up, so we paid our dues. But now, with this shift, we have an opportunity to do things differently and learn to be more humble.

I was talking to Joe Nolan, the CEO of Eversource, an energy company based in Connecticut. He mentioned being around other CEOs who were complaining about Millennials and younger generations.

He’s a straight shooter and said, "I can’t profess to understand them either, but I know they’re the majority of my workforce, and it’s my responsibility to understand them. So I feel as a leader, it's my responsibility to understand them and to take seriously what they're sharing with me and to react with that, because we're only as good as they are happy and productive.”

And when you look at his numbers and his bottom line, he can give you examples of how these practices have been operationalized and what that return on investment looks like. And so that’s a different case. It’s a different skill set.

Instead of HR being seen as just an expense, we can be more sophisticated by measuring and using strategies that work for our companies. We’ll have a business case behind it, and we can communicate it to employees to ensure they’re bought in.

Ashish Kothari: I love that. It’s a fundamental paradigm shift. The research you’re doing, and I’m familiar with Jana Manuel's and Alex Edmans' work, shows the same thing. I was just speaking with Kim Cameron about the science of flourishing. We have all the data we need—this isn’t just about "feel good, be kind to people."

Dr Angela Jackson: Yes.

Ashish Kothari: If we’re not integrating these practices and transforming our workplaces, we’re not living up to our financial fiduciary responsibilities.

Dr Angela Jackson: Exactly, and we have to have that conversation to shift the paradigm. There are headwinds coming, like the SEC looking at human capital and how it's treated, seeing it as material to disclosures.

I tell my clients to get ahead of this by coming up with their own frameworks for measuring and improving these numbers. They can be improved. Some might say, "If we listen, they’ll be unhappy anyway."

But why not try listening in different ways and measure it? How happy are employees? How happy are they with their benefits or work? Can we tweak it and see if those numbers change? How do we connect the dots?

That’s why I work with COOs and CFOs—how do we calculate the direct impact on the business? We know it exists, but many companies aren’t measuring it yet.

Ashish Kothari: That’s absolutely right. You also highlight that a lot of companies say, "We do employee engagement surveys, we listen," but what you’re talking about is a different kind of listening.

Dr Angela Jackson: Absolutely. When we talk about employee listening and voice, it’s about giving employees a say in the issues at work that matter most to them. That last part—what matters most to them—is key. We need to understand what truly matters to them. Traditional benefits, for instance, are not one-size-fits-all.

Ashish Kothari: Yes.

Dr Angela Jackson: One of the main pillars of our framework is reimagining benefits. We say, "Everyone should get a 401k, insurance, gym reimbursements," and we pat ourselves on the back. But when we deeply listen to employees, they might want something different, and many times it costs less than the standard benefits.

For example, we worked with the CEO of a fast-casual restaurant who gave every employee access to a 401k. Yet employee satisfaction was low, and he couldn’t understand why. He said, "I would’ve killed for these benefits! Does your research explain why this is?" I asked, "Have you asked them what benefits they really need and want more?"

We did a survey, and what we found out was clear and there was some hard truths in that. When we try to understand the perceptions around the 401k, specifically at the front line, you think fast casual, we heard from employees that they prioritized food on the table, paying rent, and getting their car fixed to get to work. They were caregiving for both children and parents and needed a different type of benefit.

So, we gave them the option to use company contributions for other benefits, like an emergency fund, which became crucial for frontline workers. When over 26 percent of a worker’s after-tax income goes to transportation, getting to work is a huge issue, especially in high-cost areas like Boston.

In our reporting, businesses that offered more personalized benefits saw reduced turnover. The question "Does my employer care about me?" went from 52 percent saying "no" to over 83 percent saying "yes."

These are major shifts that directly impact turnover, efficiency, and the feeling that employees have a stake in the company because they believe the company has a stake in them.

Ashish Kothari: Absolutely. That’s such a great example. One of the companies I admire is PayActiv, led by Safwan Shah. It shows how disconnected many executives and consultants are from what most employees are dealing with.

We saw this during the pandemic research I was doing—many leaders don’t really know what their employees are going through.

The data is staggering. Nearly 50 percent of workers can't come up with $500 in an emergency, and they'd have to resort to payday loans with 20-30 percent interest. PayActiv lets employees borrow from their own earnings to cover those emergencies.

Dr Angela Jackson: That's exactly it. They would be able to pay it back.

Let me give you an example. There's a company called Comp that provides that flexibility, but we saw during the pandemic that colleagues who made six figures, because of caregiving issues or other pandemic-related challenges, could not be present at work.

I said, if that happened with individuals who have means, imagine what was happening with people who earn $15 or $20 an hour. We've seen this gap between C-suite executives and mid-level or entry-level workers, and they live in completely different realities.

This became clear to me a few months ago when I read a New York Times article about a social worker in Washington who was living in her car with her daughter and dog while experiencing homelessness.

Every day, she would go to work, counsel others, and return to her car. This world of work has always encouraged people to separate their personal lives from work: "Leave it at the door, we’re paying you to focus on work here." We've always known that’s a fallacy.

If you're dealing with a terminally ill parent, a health condition, or homelessness, those issues don’t just disappear when you walk into the office. And so, as we talk about the win-win workplace, the case studies in my upcoming book illustrate how companies are beginning to acknowledge this and are building benefits around real-life situations.

Another key factor is the training of frontline managers—or as I like to call them, frontline leaders—to recognize these realities. Research shows that how someone experiences the workplace is directly impacted by their manager, not the CEO.

It doesn’t matter how great the CEO is. In the traditional world of work, we rarely trained managers on people practices. Managers were promoted based on individual contributions, but being good at your job doesn't necessarily mean you're good at managing people.

However, some companies, both large and small, have been intentionally training managers about people practices, just as they train them about business operations.

It's about answering questions like: "What does it mean to be a manager at this company?" "What are our values and mission?" "How are they operationalized?" "How are they felt by employees?" "How are we assessing managers based on these factors?"

This shift brings managers into an ownership culture. We've seen this movement toward skills-based hiring rather than degree-based hiring, which sounds amazing in theory. But in practice, when you look at the majority of companies that claimed to adopt this approach, their recent hires still predominantly have degrees.

Why? Because hiring managers haven’t been adequately trained or brought into the business case for skills-based hiring. They haven't been shown why this shift would improve efficiency, productivity, and turnover.

To achieve transformative change, we need to bring people along at all levels. We need to understand what's in it for them, whether it's a frontline worker or a middle manager.

What shifts do they need to become leaders? What information do they need? How do we communicate what's important to them? This is what has been missing in the traditional workplace, but it's what we're starting to see in more modern companies that are leading the way.

Ashish Kothari: Absolutely. And friends, if you're listening, Angela, what you're talking about is that we fundamentally have a frozen middle.

People often say we need to get rid of middle managers because they’re in the way. But they’re frozen because, first, we never upskill them, and second, we just push tasks onto them. The middle layer is critical, connecting strategy and execution.

If we help middle managers learn how to get more from the teams they lead, rather than just telling them what to do and feeling the pressure to pass tasks down, we can change everything. That’s a critical skill. If we focus on that, we can fundamentally increase thriving, get them involved in the solution, and improve performance.

Dr Angela Jackson: And one other point I'd make is that I've seen companies realize not everyone is going to be a manager, nor does everyone want to be. In the traditional way of work, the path to promotion was always becoming a manager.

Ashish Kothari: Yes, you don’t need to move up.

Dr Angela Jackson: Exactly. We’re reimagining how people work, promoting them for the right reasons, and engaging them in transparent, mutual relationships at work. It’s exciting to see this happening. Most companies that are leading in this area have operationalized the framework’s nine strategies, starting with deep employee listening.

Ashish Kothari: Can you talk a little bit about them, Angela?

Dr Angela Jackson: Absolutely. The pillar that undergirds the nine elements is centering employee voice—making sure that employees have a say in the things that matter most to them, and that it’s operationalized. From there, if you look at strategies two through nine, you think about what problem or practice an employer sees and where there might be opportunities.

One example is reimagining relationships and thinking about how we build mutualistic relationships. That’s a shift from a parent-child dynamic to a peer-to-peer dynamic. I’m going to bring you in, we’re going to relate differently. I see you as a person with responsibilities at home, and it’s to my mutual benefit to make sure those are addressed so you can be in the right mindset to work.

The third strategy is reimagining benefits. Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach, we need to offer flexibility to workers. Some might say that’s giving employees too much power, but what we’ve seen are leaders who maintain boundaries and are very transparent about what they can and can’t do.

That makes a difference in how they hire, with an eye toward building an ownership culture. That's the screening we do so that we can hire people who want to be part of the business, who understand that while we won’t agree on every decision, at least they know they are respected and have had a say. They’ve been brought along in the process.

Another key piece is transparency and reporting. Not only within the organization but to all stakeholders. When we do annual reports, we talk about these practices, and we’re seeing a higher share value because research shows consumers, especially millennials and Gen Z, are voting with their values.

Future-forward companies, CEOs, and leaders should engage here. They need to pilot, test, and learn which strategies from the nine will work for them, and then measure the results. Once you start with one, the others often follow.

For example, if you focus on building an ownership culture, it changes how you hire and promote managers and leaders. As a manager, if I’m going to promote you, I need to know you’ve demonstrated listening and operationalizing feedback.

This shift also changes how we hire without relying on credentials like degrees. Two-thirds of veterans and the majority of Americans don’t have a college degree, and we know how expensive higher education is. As companies, we need to ensure we aren’t overlooking talent simply because of ease of screening for a credential.

These are all mindset shifts, and we’ve seen that starting with one practice leads to others. There’s a financial case to be made here. Companies can map it back to increased assets, higher shareholder value, reduced turnover, and increased productivity. The numbers in the report show how organizations can have the tools to make this work.

Ashish Kothari: I love it. Angela, I'm curious—based on all your research, how soon do these outcomes start to show up once you make the shift?

Dr Angela Jackson: Once you start with employee listening, that happens immediately. I’ll tell you why—many companies do pulse surveys quarterly to check how people are feeling. As soon as you implement that first survey, which I detail in the book with examples of what companies have done, you have a starting point.

You gather data, and with generative AI, you can analyze it in days instead of weeks or months. Larger companies have already built business cases for doing this.

Over the next quarter, you can measure, communicate with employees about what you’re going to do based on the data, and implement pilot programs. You can get feedback and see if it moved the needle. Do employees feel the workplace cares about them?

You can see results within 60 to 90 days. It’s low-cost, with technology providing fast results that can be operationalized at all levels. So why not take advantage of this moment to implement data-driven research?

Ashish Kothari: Absolutely. It’s interesting that these strategies are so practical. When someone says, "Listen to your employees and involve them in decisions," it seems so logical. Yet there’s often a big gap between practice and knowledge.

Dr Angela Jackson: But it’s hard to change habits.

Ashish Kothari: Yeah.

Dr Angela Jackson: I give a lot of grace when I have these conversations, and while I'm working directly with CEOs, many of the CEOs I've met aren't ill-intentioned. They're trying to do their best. But our mental models—how we were raised professionally—worked for many people. People thrived in this system.

When we talk about reimagining benefits or the return to office, everyone says, "Oh, you should return so you can get face time and be mentored." Because that was how they were mentored. That was how I was mentored.

I made sure I was there early, stayed late. I come from corporate before academia. I worked in leadership positions at Viacom and Nokia, and before that, other companies. I was that ambitious go-getter.

It didn’t matter that my boss was leaving at five; I would stay, even if I had nothing else to do. I just wanted to prove I was committed.

Now, it's going to take a new way of thinking. How do we measure employee investment? How do we measure productivity? What I like about this research and framework is that it gives us a way to do this. It’s data-driven, instead of relying on, "This is the way we've always done it."

Ashish Kothari: "This is the way we've always done it." That’s the science that has now caught up. I always say, I was giving a talk to a board, and I asked, "How many of you believe Earth is flat?"

Everyone looked at me like, "What’s wrong with you?" I said, "500 years ago, 50 percent of you would have raised your hand and said, ‘Earth is flat.’ Even today, 1 percent still believe it."

But now, 99 percent of us have accepted science. I could ask the same question about climate change. Is climate change real? Not whether we caused it, or whether it’s good or bad—just, is it real? Today, 70 percent of people say yes. Fifty years ago, they didn’t even know what climate change was.

This field, thanks to your work, Kim’s, and others, has developed science. We no longer have to think of these things as either-or decisions. Do we take care of our people or do we take care of shareholders? Do we split the pie? We can grow the pie. We can create more value, which is what your research shows.

Second, what I loved about your book and practices is how practical they are. You’ve taken this concept and made it actionable: If you want to do it, here’s how. Engage your people, listen, and choose what will make a difference, starting with employee listening. You’ve made it practical to actually implement.

Dr Angela Jackson: That was really intentional. I just want to emphasize what you said—it's not an either-or. That’s why we call this the "win-win." For far too long, we’ve seen a false binary between these two ideas, but it doesn’t have to be that way. The data and the science, if we listen, show it’s not a binary.

I’ve seen a set of employers truly embrace this, and it’s going to give them a competitive advantage. They need to be nimble and think differently than we have before. It’s an exciting time. I love your analogy with climate change.

What we thought was true 20, 30, 50, or even 100 years ago is shifting in real time. This is an exciting moment for companies that want to use this as their competitive advantage. That’s why we called the report that—because this becomes a strategy and a tool to win in the modern workplace.

Ashish Kothari: Angela, what are some of these companies, and where can our listeners see the full report? How can they learn from these companies?

Dr Angela Jackson: Perfect. The report can be found at thewinwinworkplacereport.com. I’ll send you a link for the show notes as well.

We're also producing a guide to help companies operationalize the framework, which will be released on March 11th along with the book, The Win-Win Workplace: How Thriving Employees Drive Bottom Line Success. It’s a step-by-step guide of how companies have done this.

For smaller and mid-sized companies, I point to StoneAge in Boulder, Colorado. Carrie Siggins is well-known for creating a win-win workplace and fostering an employer mindset culture, showing the financial case for doing this.

I also think of Juergens in Indianapolis. In the report, we feature case studies on larger companies like Intel and Signa. Intel’s CEO doesn’t have a four-year degree—he has an associate’s degree—and his lived experience shaped his belief in people’s potential and the value of employee voice.

They’ve built systems to support that, and it’s their playbook. They started in California and are now replicating that with funding in Ohio. He’s not doing this as a nice-to-have—it’s a business imperative for growing the organization.

Ashish Kothari: I love this, Angela. I know you and I could talk forever. I’m excited to connect again offline and explore how we can amplify each other's work. Thank you for your passion and the operational and financial orientation you bring to this.

Anything we can do to support you, we’ll be happy to. I know our listeners will have gained so much from this conversation. Thank you for staying longer to record this.

Dr Angela Jackson: Thank you!