Ellen Frank-Miller 5:48
Thank you for that amazing introduction.
Rolando Rosas 5:51
No, no, my pleasure. Like I said, I play a researcher on a podcast and then and what is it the observational methods, but you know, you’re a real life researcher. And I love that you’re here today, because so many employees as well as employers are seeking information that will help them make a decision on how they approach their work policies, should they be more flexible? Should they be more strict? If that’s the case, or somewhere in the middle? And I’m glad that you’re here to shed a lot of light on this topic.
Ellen Frank-Miller 6:22
Well, I appreciate being here. And I will tell you, one of the things about having a University of Chicago PhD is that you get very used to being the stupidest person in the room, because there are so many brilliant minds. So, you know, there’s there’s upsides and downsides, but I’m very excited to have a chance to talk with you on the topic.
Rolando Rosas 6:39
Awesome. Awesome. Um, we’re glad you’re here today. You know, I wanted to ask you something about this Bucha Dave, and I was just talking about Nike and Adidas. What are your thoughts on that when you have two really big companies, Adidas, is North American headquarters, is in Portland, and Nikes and Beaverton just seven miles away? What do you think happens at organizations like Nike that are basically saying, You got to come in, because only two years ago, we opened up a big, big building in dedication of Serena Williams, who there, they don’t have really, they don’t have the numbers, but I would imagine hundreds of millions of dollars invested in these commercial office spaces, like what Nike has just recently done, and they want to bring people in put bodies in the seats. What do you think about that?
Ellen Frank-Miller 7:27
You know, I think it’s an incredibly complex business decision, when, as you said, you’ve made a huge investment, right? In this real estate, you believed when you built the building, that it was going to improve how your folks work together, you also are probably pretty committed to the community in which you made that huge investment, right. And you don’t want to empty out the business district by having everyone be at home full time. Right. And at the same time, we do know from research, and you know, from lots of stuff we hear in the press that people really like being able to work remotely. And for the most part, it seems that the most popular arrangements are hybrid arrangements, although I will qualify that and say their hybrid arrangements when employees have input into the hybrid structure. So you know, when you look at it and say, Well, okay, four days a week, three days a week, how is that designed? And how did they come up with that structure? So in other words, did they get input from their workforce? Did they just at the top, say, you know, I really don’t like being lonely in the office, and I want to have people around me, I really don’t want to work from home, I’d rather have my lovely lunches at a at a restaurant in downtown. So you know, if I’m going to be here, I want everyone else to be here. I’m sure they’ll enjoy it. So that question of how do you balance competing interests? But in particular, how do you take into account how people prefer to work? Because when people appreciate how jobs are structured, and how employers are listening to their interest in their needs, they do better work. And that means better business outcomes.
Rolando Rosas 9:01
Did you say to me, I think you said that, because we had a we had an opportunity to talk before this. I think you said to me something about that there’s a stat on the percentage of employers that make decisions without any input at all from the employees. Did you say something like 60%? I don’t know if you floated that by or you had mentioned that, in passing regarding that, I never thought you were going to touch on that a little bit more.
Ellen Frank-Miller 9:31
So, I truly cannot remember that particular statistic, but I will tell you that it is much more common for employers to make decisions in a top down kind of a way and that has, you know, a legacy and how, you know, the Industrial Revolution created you know, job structures and you know, a little bit of the stuck in the past, right. So when when companies leverage the voice of their workers when they use that as you know, an intelligence seeking The operation when they get that input when they’re in the process of designing things and making decisions, they make much better decisions. There is actually Patreon, which is an online platform for content creators, they had a business problem regarding how they were handling fees. And they made a decision and they rolled it out. And it was anarchy, from the content creators who are generating all the revenue from the customers are the folks who supported these creators. It was a disaster. And one of their, to their credit, they recognize the problem, they corrected it, they stopped the change, they apologize for what they were doing. And they took one more step, which is that they said, We’re going to we still need to solve this business problem. But the way we’re going to do it, is we’re going to collaborate with you. And you’re going to help us figure out how to solve the problem in a way that you think is effective, not just that someone at the top thought was a good way to do it. And I think the higher you get into a hierarchy, the more you think, well, I rose here, because I’m smart, and I know how to do a great job. So I can make good decisions. And people forget that at the frontline of whatever your business is. That’s where the money happens. It’s that person on the floor, who actually sells your product. So that’s the place where you can make the best decisions is when you get input from workers.
Rolando Rosas 11:27
I remember, I remember what you mentioned, you and I were talking about the decision at grinder and the return to office and how they just made a decision without the employees. And they said, Well, if you’re not going to come back to the office, then we don’t want you and basically half of the staff left. And they ended up giving severance packages anyways, so that if they were looking at as a tool to reduce the workforce and downsize, it really wasn’t a great tool, it wasn’t the best way to do it. Given that they said come back to the office or else and then they still ended up having to pay out to those employees, because you use an Elan use this tactic months ago where he announced, you know, we’re gonna bring everybody back. And if you don’t come back and people left. And so when people leave and quit is, you know, there’s no severance packages given out if they voluntarily quit,
Ellen Frank-Miller 12:23
and come back to the office or else is a great way to make the remaining employees feel really good about your leadership. Right,
Dave Kelly 12:31
right. You know, you talk a lot about happy employees, you know, happy employees are more productive at work, there was a study with, I think it was a call center, a customer service team, people that were prospecting or making phone calls, but about happy employees making more phone calls. And I’ll tell you, if you’re not being considered as a frontline worker, when these decisions are taking place, it’s just a quick way to be completely miserable. Like why wouldn’t they ask us? How are they not considering this group of people when you know this, when you’re bullying a group of people to come back to the office, or whatever the change might be? It seems like even even some effort to a survey or something to get their input goes a long way.
Ellen Frank-Miller 13:18
Absolutely. And there’s really interesting research that shows when employers, for example, conduct a survey to get input from workers that if they conduct the survey, and then they communicate nothing back to employees, they actually undermine themselves with workers. If they communicate back to employees and say, You know what we heard you, we hear your priorities, we can’t do what’s most important to you right now we’re going to work on it. Here are the things we can do. But when they even when they deliver bad news, the fact that they say We heard you and they communicate back, improves business results.
Rolando Rosas 13:56
Wow, wow, you know what, let’s, let’s, I’m gonna, I’m gonna jump off of that right now and roll into a video and I want you to react because this is somebody that I think it’s not listening to what his employees are saying. And then you and I will discuss it on the other side, or he rolled that footage.
Guest Speaker 14:17
office buildings in the United States, to some degree also, around the world because the pandemic, people got used to, you know, staying at home. And it was actually more profitable for them to stay at home because, one, they didn’t work as hard regardless of what they tell you. And the second is they don’t spend money to commute. You know, they can make their lunch at home. They don’t have to buy expensive clothes and so their incomes are higher. So so just one or two quick statistics. In the US in the office market, buildings are 20%. vacant. Leased, actually, there’s another 20% that somebody’s leased, but the people don’t come in. So you’re looking at office buildings that basically are 40% unused. So I expect when those leases roll off, the companies will cut back the amount of space. So say you have 30%, unused space and office buildings. That means those office buildings are not survivable, you know, as economic entities. Now that the exception is office buildings that are 10 years old or less people like being in those, so that’s going to have a very bad ending.
Rolando Rosas 15:56
Okay. Oh, and then the queue up after that was a Jamie diamond clip. But he’s probably you could almost put those two interchangeably with their views on remote work. What do you think about what you just heard?
Ellen Frank-Miller 16:07
I want to be sure that I heard that correctly. Did I just hear a private equity executive criticize the pursuit of profit? I mean, he just did employees are pursuing profit by working from home. And this is a bad thing. Isn’t that what private equity is all about? Right. Right.
Rolando Rosas 16:25
Right. It’s it’s your own equity. Right. Your own personal equity is at stake here, if you’re an employee, and I’m sure he has employees that fit that bill that he’s talking about.
Ellen Frank-Miller 16:35
And I will say the claim that productivity declines. When employees work from home, I don’t believe that’s well supported by the research, at least the research that I’ve seen and read. You know, there’s a research study that we just did with large healthcare systems in the Chicago area. And one of the reasons why the most interesting jobs to folks in frontline health care jobs in terms of jobs they wanted to move into were jobs that enabled them to work remotely. And part of the rationale was that it made it more manageable for them in terms of, for example, balancing pickups at childcare, where they didn’t have to go as far on public transit to make sure they pick their kids up on time, which is expensive if you’re late, right. But the other reason one was that it was effectively an a pay increase. So the employer did not have to increase their pay, but it was a pay increase for them because of reduced commuting, reduced expenses, just like the ones he pointed out. Now, these employees managed to give themselves a pay raise, how do you think they feel about staying at that job? Pretty good. What did it cost the employer to give them a raise only the permission to work remotely in that role? Now, frontline healthcare jobs, many of them cannot be done remotely. But for those that can be, this was a boon to the employer, no doubt. And,
Dave Kelly 17:56
you know, what I find is interesting. At the same time, we’re able to hold on to a little more of our income by not by not commuting into the office, at the same time, we’re giving ourselves a raise, the cost of living is going through the roof. So we’re as employees, we’re still not, we’re still not coming out above. You know, I feel like he’s separating himself from regular people. He keeps saying the word they, they gave themselves a raise a are more profitable. And I tend to say, I just disagree with that piece. Because if the cost of living is going up, just because we’re not buying more gas or going out for lunch, doesn’t mean that we are more profitable, but I love how he separates him. He separates himself real quick there. It was a little bit,
Ellen Frank-Miller 18:43
it was a little bit distressing, that he seemed to prioritize the the well being of the commercial real estate that was affected by vacancies over the well being of the workers who have a more profitable life when they have the opportunity to work remotely. Not sure what that’s about.
Rolando Rosas 19:03
And I think I don’t think he’s heard your research that happy employees make for more profitable companies. And I’m really struck by every time I hear a new CEO that comes out against flex, let’s just call it flexible work, especially for folks in the keyboard economy. Obviously, if you have to flip burgers for a living, I did that in high school. And I’ve served I was a waiter in college. That job has to be done on site on premise. But for everybody else that’s in a keyboard economy and you sit at a desk and you type on a keyboard or pick up a phone. Those jobs can be done anywhere. And I recall a conversation you and I had we were talking about low wage workers and call center workers that fit this bill as well. You know, if you’re a call center worker, you’re not getting you’re not a rich person by any stretch of imagination. But if you can be a call center worker at home, take care of your kid. Take care of your spouse that may be sick or take care of your a loved one that’s not feeling well, you can do that. And and it’s not an order but and you can also do your job. And you do it well because now you’re at home doing the other things that are on your mind and stressing you out, that contributes to the bottom line that makes for better workers that makes for job stability that makes for reduced turnover. And I don’t hear any of that being argued, when you hear a CEO that’s very prominent, they always default to something else, rather than the profitability of the company being negatively impact from remote work if that were true.
Ellen Frank-Miller 20:39
Yeah. And I think you raise a really important point, which is that there’s there can be a little bit of talking out of two sides of your mouth here. Right? So changes that are going to be increasing profit for the business, those are good changes, right, but changes that are going to increase profit for the business via making jobs better for lower level workers. Somehow those don’t seem as appealing. And I find that very confusing. And you know, when we look at, you know, are your is your labor line item on your balance sheet? Is that a cost? Or is that an asset? Now, we have a problem with accounting in this country, right? Employers don’t own their workers. So they don’t get to write them off on their taxes the way they do if they were, for example, to invest in new machinery in a in a manufacturing environment. But yet, when you look at where is profit generated, where are sales generated, where’s customer satisfaction generated, and we know there are empirical relationships between these things, and the bottom line on your balance sheet? The connection is, it’s not just an intuitive connection. There’s really good science behind this. So it is sometimes a little bit baffling. And I do wonder if part of it is you know, that we do live in a country where we have a lot of segregation, based on things like income, where we don’t necessarily interact with folks who are different from us. And so you know, if you’re at the top of the heap at a large private equity firm, you might not see on a day to day basis, why the importance, for example, you go to the grocery store, and if you have a surly checkout person, apparently aren’t enjoying shopping there. You might go to a different grocery store, right? But do these guys go to the grocery store? I don’t know. Maybe they don’t? If they did, they’d be like, Wow, good customer service that affects my bottom line.
Rolando Rosas 22:27
Yeah. And, you know, I want to get your thoughts on something else here. Because I’m, I’m, like I said, I play researcher on a podcast sometimes, but you’re a real one. So want you to help me draw a correlation, if any, with what I’m about to say here, you know, I was looking at companies and where they’ve put major investments into commercial real estate into the way of buildings and their relationship to return to office policy, and I found some that are really been coming out tough like a hammer, you got to come back to the office no matter what, for four days, in some cases, five, so I’m gonna rattle off some names of some companies and dates. Google 2020 San Jose project. So these were either announced or already built. Mehta, 2017, Menlo Park, Willow campus, Amazon 2018 HQ, two in Arlington, Virginia, which is kind of our backyard, and they pleased base to have that project on hold. And they’ve also announced a slew of other buildings as well throughout the country. JP Morgan, New York City in 2018, announced the 270 Park Avenue Project, which is going to be one of the tallest skyscrapers in New York, Twitter 2020. new lease on 1330 3013 30, Broadway, Nike, which we just talked about 2019 and the new Serena Williams building on the campus. Salesforce, which has a beautiful office tower in San Francisco that was announced in 2018. BlackRock Hudson Yards worth billions in New York, also very strong, anti flexible work, and probably the most famous right now more than Jamie Dimon is Elon Musk, who in 2021, opened the Austin facility for the new headquarter and he’s equating remote work to something being morally wrong. And those were his words. You are the doctor here, tell us where the correlation is, if any, with commercial real estate, and some of these mandates,
Ellen Frank-Miller 24:40
you know, if you call me Doctor, I’m gonna have to diagnose you with something
Rolando Rosas 24:45
with bad science.
Ellen Frank-Miller 24:47
That’s fine. You know, I think you raised a really important point, which is, when you look at these massive investments in real estate, we, you know, for the most part, there’s some rationale behind investment decisions. So you If you invest in, in plant in real estate, you have certain tax and accounting benefits that are available to you. Right. So there are incentives for and you know, real estate tends to appreciate over general. So that looks like a good investment, right will invest in real estate will get these tax benefits these accounting benefits. And you know, over time, our, you know, our assets will appreciate this seems like a good thing. Now, if we turn that around and say, Okay, what about investing in our workforce, now, we don’t get the same accounting benefits, right? And the appreciation on people? Well, people can leave, now will they leave, if they are happy at work, and they are getting a good work experience, and they have opportunities to advance and they get respect, you know, you can argue that those people who are retained become more valuable and appreciate in the same way that your real estate does. But when you’ve made such a substantial investment in something, it’s very hard to cut your losses, right. And it does have a potential impact on your balance sheet. Right. So there’s this sort of resistance to actually realizing a potential loss of any sort. But you’re not looking at the other side of the balance sheet, which is what happens to your workforce, what happens to their productivity to their loyalty? What happens to your turnover? Now, turnover isn’t a line item on the balance sheet? Right. But if it was, it would be pretty easy to lay it down and say, I think that’s kind of an expensive decision to tell everybody they got to come in five days a week, unless you’re colluding with your competitors. And then everybody’s making you come in five days a week, right? It’s it’s a winner, right? Yeah. Yeah,
Rolando Rosas 26:40
there’s a lot of tech companies as I rattled off, and a lot of financial companies in that list. It’s interesting that the incentives if I were to paraphrase, the incentives are very different. Are you incentivized, because the line item balance sheet and the tax incentive, which you can count, you can say, yeah, next year, we’re gonna get these 100 Millions written off, or we’re gonna depreciate or whatever other line item is coming. So we know that income is going to come in, or we’re going to it’s going to be offset by something else. It’s hard to quantify that with employees. And so maybe the incentives for some I don’t know, I don’t know their motivation. I just know what I see. And so I just see that maybe, to possibility that the incentives for these companies is that we’re going to protect the assets we’ve invested in from just a few years ago, at at around or before, right before COVID. Versus Well, we can always replace employees if they don’t want to come in too bad. Yeah, I agree with that. Wow. Wow. And from a researcher Dave, she says he agrees with my pseudo science. Okay, great.
Ellen Frank-Miller 27:49
Well, I think what you’re saying, though, is really grounded in economics, which is where we, where we structure incentives, we see behavior follow, not all the time, right there. There are many incentives, and they compete with one another, but where we create incentives, we expect rational behavior. Now at the same time, we, we have different standards, right? You just heard a private equity executive, criticize employees for pursuing profit. Okay, if there’s incentivized to pursue profit by working from home, that is somehow a negative one, and, you know, company that’s made a major real estate investment is incentivized to protect, you know, the, the value of that asset? Well, that’s rational. So we do need to look at that, you know, these are very basic economic principles.
Rolando Rosas 28:35
Dave, you didn’t say something
Dave Kelly 28:37
I want to jump in. And, you know, I need to say that we are all doing it. Picture a hectic workday where toggling between applications become second nature. You know, we’re switching between our teams meetings, our zoom meetings, we have other video applications that we’re using, we have CRM, we have our email, business text is huge. So we’re jumping between all of these things, but the cost of this constant app switching might have escaped your radar. You know, we were talking about studies recently, the Harvard Business Review had a study revealing a sobering fact, employees can switch between 22 different apps nearly 1200 times a day. This mental juggling takes a huge toll. It increases stress it slows productivity and undermines focus. Now enter Global Teck Worldwide, two decades of experience in business communication, they’ve mastered the art of unifying communication tools from voice to SMS, video, email CRMs. They integrate these systems so that it unleashes a more efficient way to cut through the clutter. Global Teck can help reduce context switching and produce a more focused workforce. So in this age of optimization, efficiency isn’t just a dream. It’s your reality. With Global Teck Worldwide. Are you ready to liberate Your team from toggling from the toggling tax and supercharge your efficiency. Take the first step today, visit global-teck.com. Or click on the link below to transform your workplace your journey to streamline to productivity starts here, book an appointment and talk with Global Teck Worldwide today. I had to sneak that in. Sorry.
Rolando Rosas 30:24
All right, no great job of getting that in Dave. I just, I love it. Okay, that. So thank you, Dave, for those words. And if you’re just joining us, right now, we are talking to the clean V when it comes to research on the topic of jobs, and how can those jobs be improved? And Ellen has been so kind to drop some knowledge already, but I know you’ve got more to share when it comes to this topic, because you have some things in order, you know what I want to jump into? I want to jump into our top three secrets. And actually, maybe I think we have some bonus secrets from her. So go ahead and roll the top three secrets.
AI 31:06
Well kept secrets, well, secrets, gotta keep them safe. And sound. Well, let’s see from Cyprus, just like Dima.
Rolando Rosas 31:22
Right, if you don’t know, the professor is going to give us some lessons. So take some notes. This class is in session, right Little John. I’ve got my pen ready. And my notepad why cuz that’s the old school way, I got my laptop, and I’m ready to take some notes. So already go ahead and put up the graphics on where we want to start on top secret number one, when it comes to improving lower level job quality and getting better business outcomes. Ellen reducing operational errors, you’re seeing something that helps every company, everybody wants to reduce those types of errors. That’s right.
Ellen Frank-Miller 32:03
When we make lower level jobs better, the science demonstrates that we reduce operational errors. And I’m given given example from research that was done with ups with their part time drivers. They were having turnover problems. And they saw they set out to reduce the costs associated with turnover. So recruiting and training, that was their goal. But to their surprise, they also discovered that they had a 75% reduction in delivery snafus as a result of improving the quality of their jobs.
Rolando Rosas 32:35
Really what Oh, my goodness, I love that that’s a big nugget makes a big number 75%.
Ellen Frank-Miller 32:44
And that was not what they set out to do. They said we have expenses associated with turnover, we’re going to reduce those turnover costs by making these better jobs. And lo and behold, because companies are so good at tracking certain kinds of production and business outcomes, they were able to detect it and said wait a second 75% reduction in errors by these part time drivers. That’s a big deal. That’s a big deal for our bottom line.
Rolando Rosas 33:08
And not only that, but think about this. Ellen, I know, if you order from anywhere any.com Let’s call it any.com. You know, you’ve probably gotten a package delivered that wasn’t for you, in that cost ups and every every courier that delivers money, right now they’re returning the package picking it up all of the rest, frustration, you know, angry customers calling into the call center. So reducing those kinds of errors are huge.
Ellen Frank-Miller 33:38
And we actually saw a great case study that was done on a cell phone manufacturer, where again, significant turnover problems. This is cell phones that were failing in the field. So this is not you come off the line and you’re caught you don’t pass quality assurance. This is a customer bought your phone has been using your phone and it dies. This is no bad, right? There’s associated with shipping it back expense associated with either repairing or replacing it expense associated with shipping it back to the user not to mention what can happen when someone decides to post online about their displeasure with your phone. Right, fine. You reduce that turnover by making jobs better a huge impact right on the business on the bottom line.
Rolando Rosas 34:20
Yeah, absolutely. That’s lucky we we have to do as part of our business, we deal with all of those shippers. And when you when you make those errors, because they’re kind of unforced errors. If I were to use a sports analogy, there are unforced errors. That can be they’re preventable. If you have a preventable error. Those are unforced errors. And in business, instead of getting the Yellow Flag like in football, you lose money and losing profitability is not what business are about. So let’s roll into number two. What What was it about number two, I believe you had mentioned something about increase in sales.
Ellen Frank-Miller 34:57
Got it. So best kept secret about making jobs. And this is specifically in retail, there was excellent research with the gap retail stores, where they looked at the scheduling practices of their workers. So if you’ve ever worked a retail job, you may know that it’s not at all uncommon to find out your work schedule for the week starting Sunday on a Thursday, right? So lots of instability, how do you, you know, plan your life, and especially if you have a part time job, right. So, turnover causes all kinds of problems and in the operation. So they said, We’re going to look at how we schedule our workers, and they worked with us work, researchers from the University of Chicago, including my dissertation chair, Susan Lambert. And what they did was they did a really rigorous experiment, they took a group of stores and kept their scheduling practices the same. And then the other stores, they changed the way they did work schedules and gave employees employees more input into when they weren’t and what their schedules were like. And they found that they had a 7% increase in same store sales and increase in of $6.20 per labor hour. Productivity, right. So this is, you know, if you know anything about the retail interest in industry, a 7% increase in sales is almost unattainable and massive operational change that made jobs better for frontline workers.
Rolando Rosas 36:18
I can’t see why. If you’re not in the retail sector, like I said, earlier, I was I flipped burgers at Wendy’s. And I also worked as a as a waiter in college. And I, I completely, I am having a little PTSD, when you mentioned about the schedules coming out only days before, you know for the week, and that little small shift, if it’s going to improve the bottom line, but because that’s why you have these almost hourly, I remember, you know, working in this in retail, and by the hour, they’re tracking sales, Okay, who wants to go home first. And that’s because, you know, the sales have dropped, and whoever wants to go home first gets to go home first, or whoever is less senior. They’re the ones sent home first, right? And so having more stability in something and then think, oh, yeah, by the way, we can make more money by doing it this way. It’s amazing.
Ellen Frank-Miller 37:15
And you just you just hit on it, which is when we look at workers as a cost to be minimized, right? Oh, sales are down, we don’t need as many sales folks on the floor, let’s send them home. When you look at workers as a cost to be minimized, instead of an asset that can improve the business results, you get very short sighted, you know behavior, you say to yourself, well, turnover is high and retail, it’s just the way it is we can’t do anything about it, let’s build it into our business model. And we’ll work all of our financials around that. But when you say, you know, maybe we’ll make managers work a little bit harder in taking their workers preferences into account and how they build those work schedules. For the week in their stores, we’ll ask managers to step up and do a better job of managing. And we’ll see what happens and look what happens. You leverage that frontline workforce, and you sell more clothing that impacts your bottom line. So do you want to treat your workers as a cost to be minimized? Or do you want to treat your workers as an asset that can help deliver value for your business?
Rolando Rosas 38:17
This is amazing. Because these are facts. These are facts in real life, real life. Absolutely, that any retailer can take as a template, probably even dive into the study a little bit more, see how it was done, and see if they can put it into practice. So I love that that helps businesses, but you know, in helping businesses, no investors want to help themselves. And they’re probably saying, Ellen, but how do I take that to the bank? How do I take that? How do I see my portfolio? My stock? Is there. Is there any relationship there? And I think that’s where your secret number three, where you’re going to talk about stock returns? And how that relates to what you’re just talking about?
Ellen Frank-Miller 39:02
Yes, yes, top secret number three, improving job quality in a way that makes employees more satisfied with their jobs improves long run stock returns, there’s a terrific study that came out in 2022. And it looked at stock returns from 1984 to 2020. So this is really long run. And they looked at companies where employee satisfaction was high, and companies where employee satisfaction was average. And they found that those publicly held companies had better returns on their stock. And Other research has demonstrated things like reduced credit risk, increased return on equity. These are real numbers that are tracked in financial circles very closely, and it was strongly tied to human capital management and employee satisfaction.
Rolando Rosas 39:50
I love that. That’s just awesome because people are I know their other owner says that’s just fluff. Yeah, that’s just like a ribbon. Give In a Ribbon Award out in a competition, where you gotta be, you know, Doggy Dog law, the law of the jungle, you know, the shark eats the little fish, you know, with employee relations. But there are some real benefits as well constant, tangible benefits that you can literally bank on. So I love that. The other thing I think you wanted to bring up was the next one was about increased productivity as well. What was that about?
Ellen Frank-Miller 40:31
We were talking about call centers earlier, right. And call centers are, you know, there’s so much data that can be tracked about outcomes in call centers. And there was a great research study done by the good jobs Institute with quest diagnostic. And they looked at, yeah, they are very big. And those call centers are serious, right? Quest Diagnostics, is talking about, you know, medical test results, this is serious stuff, what they found, and if you imagine, like you are calling in, right, you’re a patient, you’re you’re anxious about something, their goal was to reduce turnover in their call centers, because that’s expensive, right, as we’ve been talking about, what they found is that they reduced wait times for their customers, they increased customer satisfaction by improving the quality of those call center jobs. So when you have customers who are happier, it’s a much easier interaction for the call center worker, right? If I get on the phone with you. And you asked me a question, and I give you an answer, and I make sure your needs are met, I’m on to the next call right away. But if I answer the phone, and you’ve been waiting for 20 minutes, the first thing you’re going to do is go off at me. And now I have to spend time bringing you down so that you can tell me what you need so that I can meet your need, and the time spent on that call has doubled. Right. So improving that customer satisfaction improves your bottom line, improving jobs, improves productivity,
Rolando Rosas 41:58
you know, in call centers, because this is kind of where we spend a lot of time as a company selling solutions. We know from talking to the quests of the world and other large call centers, every they measure things by the second, they know down to the second how much things cost them in terms of time. And if you’re reducing even a call by 10, to 30 seconds, multiplied over all the entire call centers that they have in their footprint throughout the country. In some cases throughout the world, you’ve just saved the organization millions of dollars per hour. So if you can take a call and reduce it by half, because the moment you’re patient, or customer comes in, and they’re not having to wait nearly as long because I gotta tell you, I don’t know about you, but I call stuff and you know, Hey, what happened in your, you keep hearing the same song and the same message, your your Our call is important to us. Your call is important to us. Please hold doo doo doo doo doo doo doo, doo doo doo doo. And just like hold on. It’s just ticking time, you’re just like, I could be doing something better than waiting 20 minutes on a call. But that’s impressive. So productivity gains, when when you implement some of these things, and you have happier, better employees. And there was something last that you want to leave us off. And I love the fact that you gave us five tips. And it has to do with corporate citizenship. What was that about?
Ellen Frank-Miller 43:32
So when we think about like, what is citizenship behavior, right there in our, in our public lives, that’s do we vote? You know, do we do the things that we are, you know, expected to do to contribute to our community? Well, corporate citizenship behavior, and research refers to the kinds of things that we do in the workplace, because we’re being a good guy, right? I’m gonna help my coworker when they need help. It’s not, it’s not in my job description, I’m just here to do my job, and I’m going to lend a hand, I’m going to notice something that could be done better. And I’m going to go to my manager and say, you know, I’ve got this idea. I think it could make it better for our customers, or I think we could save money if we did this. I don’t have to do that. That’s Discretionary Effort, Right? When we see improvements, companies do things to make the quality of frontline jobs better, we see an increase in corporate citizenship behavior. So people, for example, in a total quality management framework, people making suggestions that can improve production. If you if you make jobs better, you get people stepping up, to help someone gain a skill to make the suggestions and improve business. These are small and I think what you were just saying about the tracking of, you know, down to the second of what is the cost or what is the savings associated with you know, how call centers operate. So, you know, if you reduce that amount of time on the call, it has a big financial impact. So, then then people say, Okay, well how do we What is the mechanism through which we can reduce the length of that call? And people then do things like, Well, if we just watch those workers more closely, if we monitor them with technology, then we’ll be able to find out who are those malingerers, and we’ll be able to get on them and make sure they make those calls faster. Okay. That is what if you believe that the mechanism to reduce time is to crack the whip at your employees, I can see how you think that was a really great solution. But if you believe that the mechanism to reduce the time on that call, is for an employee to come to the call, you know, in a, in a great frame of mind ready to serve that customer knowledgeable because they’ve had good training, you know, not having to cover double the number of calls because their co workers are out because there’s high turnover, if you think that’s the mechanism, then the way in which you solve the problem is entirely different. And the outcomes look different to
Rolando Rosas 45:58
No, no doubt, I’m gonna, I’m gonna back you up on that. Because we work with some of these really large call centers, I’m not gonna say the name of the customer, that they’re one of the big, large telecom companies. And I remember a couple years ago, this just right before the pandemic that we went in, and they had several employees on the floor that were struggling with their metrics. And, and they really wanted to do something about that more than Do you like what you’re saying, crack the whip. So they tried everything under the sun, and nothing was making the numbers budge. So we went over there. And we thought, well, you have a problem, because it’s too noisy. And here’s what we’re going to do. The following day, after we had put in place some measures and some solutions for some of those employees that were struggling, the supervisor of the floor came up to me on day number two, and he says I can’t believe the difference this has made in our numbers, because that’s what they’re concerned about. We immediately saw improvement in all the metrics across the board. And what you’re saying about happier employees was a result of putting things in place that allowed them to do their job a little bit easier. Their note, they weren’t as distracted from all the different noise or different co workers that were loud. And the supervisors were happy because they’re there, the pressure for them is to make the numbers, right. The people at corporate saying hey, we your your wait times are too long, or, or you’re not getting enough calls through the day. And so the observation that we can do something to improve our numbers, besides cracking the whip contributes to the bottom line is very true. Especially in the call centers, there’s so many different avenues to attack a problem versus we’re going to monitor more strictly and those that don’t do the job where we’re going to send somewhere else, we’ll send them to another location or, or we’re demoting them. So. So yeah, absolutely. I agree with you on that. So better citizenship in the corporate environment. These are all things that that businesses can start putting in place right away. What What would you say? If there was some low hanging fruit that an a company could put into place? That wouldn’t take a lot of heavy lifting, but have an outsized outcome? What would you say that would be?
Ellen Frank-Miller 48:27
Raising worker voice? No question about it. Now, there are lots of ways to get input from workers. And if you’re in a very large environment, you might say, well, we’d have to do a big survey. And it’s really hard, and it’s expensive. But there are many other ways to get voice, right. You have supervisors who are responsible for managing a team of people. Now, span of control is important, right? How many people do you have reporting to you, but they are interacting with employees every day, if supervisors are supported by their managers to gather input from their workers, and feed that up the up the ladder? There’s great intelligence that comes from that. I was talking actually with a private equity professional who was talking about an incentive program in one of their portfolio companies, and they were trying to make a decision about how far down the org chart, that incentive program should go. And there was some discussion about you know, this is a healthcare chain of health care clinics, how far down should this go? Should the receptionist really be part of this incentive program? Because, you know, they’re, they’re just receptionists. And they’re, you know, that the if you’re, if you’re at the high level of an organization, you’re not on the ground, you might miss this. But when you sit in a waiting room, and you are not happy about how long you’ve been waiting, you talk to the person next to you and you complain about that. That is a customer service problem, right? That is someone who says I’m not going to this clinic anymore, and it’s the receptionist who know if that’s happening or not. So if you tap into that intelligence from your frontline workforce So let’s say hey, you know what, there’s a problem. Why are the wait times long at this clinic? What could we do to correct that, that is a way to improve your customer retention, which is profitability, right? They ultimately decided to bring the incentive program all the way down to the front line to the to the receptionist, that’s business, that’s good business.
Rolando Rosas 50:19
Awesome. I love it. I love it. I love it. Because you’re validating what I think instinctually people know to be true. With actual facts, information, research data, this all makes the work environment better, I think we have four in front of here we are on screen, if you want to nerd out a little bit more, we’ve got a QR code with where you can get some more information, as well as some of our other podcasts. So, Ellen, if folks want to reach out to you, and they say, you know, come help us out here with with what we’re doing, where should they go?
Speaker 1 50:55
Well, I love when people connect with me on LinkedIn, of course, and our website is worcimpact.com, that’s worcimpact.com. That’s another way to reach us. We really appreciate the kind of feedback that we get from companies that are actually struggling on the ground with these issues. That’s what we love about the research we do. And it allows us to bring solutions on the ground to portfolio companies of investors and to employers. So we’d love to hear from ya.
Rolando Rosas 51:24
Awesome. So we’ve been talking to Dr. Ellen, Frank-Miller, Pioneer researcher, you want to get your organization on the right path when when it comes to these worker relations. This is your chemical, your cow? Well, it’s not offensive, I call you go that route. She’s based in Chicago, which is a great windy city, a city that I love, but everybody’s virtually connected. So you can get a hold of her any way through her to her website, as well as on social media on social media to right, we’re on LinkedIn.
Ellen Frank-Miller 51:58
We’re a small organization, you can’t find me on Instagram, but you can find me on LinkedIn.
Rolando Rosas 52:02
All right on the on the business platform where business gets done, love it. So go ahead. And I invite you if you want to nerd out on more information that like this is helpful for an organization, I invite you to go check out the episode we did with former LinkedIn HR Pro, Steve Cadigan, super guru to Fortune 500 companies when it comes to HR matters. And we’ve also got an episode on the state of remote work. You’ll find that wherever you consume your podcasts like Apple or Spotify, and I want to thank you for tuning in today. And we’ll see you in those episodes. Now for all of those that are on YouTube. I’ve got a couple of episodes right up here on the screen, where Dave and I will be meeting you where we’re going to be talking about how to grow your business faster. So Dave, and I will join you in those episodes. See you then
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