Customer Experience Superheroes - Series 11 Episode 3 - Employee Engagement Drivers - Nicole Kyle

There is a lot of waffle on employee engagement and employee experience. Most of it is puffed up common sense or repurposed HR practices which HR practitioners have been aware of and delivering before CX was popular. But on occasion, and this podcast is one of those, someone steps forward who actually knows what they are talking about. Enter Nicole Kyle. In conversation with host of the Customer Experience Superheroes podcast series, Nicole shares the depth of insight gathered as MD at Customer Management Practice which has identified the primary drivers of employee engagement. This golden source unlocks the secrets of how to structure an effective employee engagement programme. There are few with more relevant credentials than Nicole as becomes evident when you hear the most authentic discussion on this topic you could wish to hear 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:18

Hello, my name is Christopher Brooks, and I'm the host of the Customer Experience Superheroes Podcast Series. Welcome to another edition. In today's edition, we will be meeting up with the quite incredible Nicole Kyle. Now, Nicole Kyle is the managing director of customer management practice. And when I spoke with Nicole earlier, we had a really interesting discussion on the importance of understanding what drives employee engagement. As a researcher, there is no one better qualified to understand the drivers and the factors that are most significant when it comes to understanding how to keep your employees engaged, productive, motivated, and focused on delivering exceptional customer experiences. Welcome, Nicole Kyle. It's an absolute delight to have you with us today on the CX Superheroes podcast series.

SPEAKER_01 1:21

Thank you for having me, Christopher. It's great to be here.

SPEAKER_00 1:24

Now we're going to talk on a topic that I'm really interested to hear your views on because we've had for quite a while perhaps too broad a definition of customer experience. And what seems to have happened again is we move into employee experience and employee engagement, and it seems to be a myriad of different interpretations of what that is. And I worry that organizations are being badly served because of it. You're an expert in this space, so I want to come to you on that. But before we get there, would you mind helping us understand you're currently leading a CMP, which is this exceptional research house, and you're focusing on the world of uh experience, which is brilliant, but you weren't always doing born into that. There's been a there's been a career before that. So I'm really interested to understand where you started from and the journey you've got to, and you know, when that moment when experience was the thing you wanted to focus in on. So could you help us understand your journey, Nicole?

SPEAKER_01 2:22

Yeah, for sure. So I started out and frankly stumbled into the world of customer experience and customer loyalty. My first role at a company called CEB was with the Customer Contact Leadership Council at the time, which is the group led by Matt Dixon that came out with effortless experience, customer effort score, the challenger customer, all those great reframes in industry. I started out as an entry-level person on that team. Continued up the research ranks at CEB. I did procurement research for a little while. I didn't love writing research for procurement. And then found myself actually in what felt like home in the sense of actually joining the future of workplace research team. So working with heads of HR, heads of corporate real estate, heads of employee experience on how do we give employees a great experience in the office. I've always loved research, moved from team to team, but I'm just a naturally curious person. And I had trained as a journalist before that. If you can't make a living as a journalist, research is definitely a way to do it and apply that skill set. I was at CEB for a long time. And then CEB was acquired by Gartner and we became Gartner. And then the universe of opportunity, as far as what you could research, how you could research it, what types of executives you could serve really just blew up. And that was so exciting for me. I continued down my future of workplace path there. And it was really interesting actually advising all executives through the pandemic on what's going to happen to the office. Will it still exist? What is this working from home thing? Really just that future of experience piece being central to me. So then when this opportunity came up at customer management practice to start their first ever research division, it was actually pretty perfect because it was a marriage of something that I'm super passionate about, helping executives navigate the future of work with something I started out with in my career. How do we do that for CX leaders and customer service organizations and customer contact? And what I, as I was thinking about starting this and taking this opportunity, I really realized there was no customer contact, customer service, and CX specific organization focused on that future of work transformation. And the reality is CX professionals, customer contact agents, customer contact leaders, it's a very different function from other corporate functions. And we can't lead them the same way we lead any digital worker or any employee because of the nature of the work. Highly emotional work, sometimes very transient, very systems dependent. It's just a very unique function. So I was super excited to come to CMP, come to customer management practice and start the research division. And yeah, and the rest is history.

SPEAKER_00 5:08

Excellent. And which which sort of uh, you know, without naming names unless you want to, which sort of organizations are you working with at the moment?

SPEAKER_01 5:14

Yeah, of course. So we're there's a few I can name those who serve on our research board, our advisory board. So we work with MasterCard, which is exciting. So much great work going on there. We work with Aloricus, one of the major BPOs. We work with Shipped e-commerce delivery service, and yeah, and a number of others. It's really interesting. While the three of those organizations are across different verticals, we see some trends in terms of financial services and insurance, for example. We have a lot of clients in that space. And I think they would be the first to tell you like one of the reasons for that is if you look at industries that were perhaps more conservative in the last few years, financial services being one, just known for being a little bit more conservative, those are the industries where that future of work transformation of wow, like now flexibility is the norm, and we need to compete for talent across organizations that are more progressive on the flexibility side of things. And they needed more help. So we see like a lot of FS and insurance, a lot of healthcare, and then of course tech and some of the other sectors. Those sectors that maybe had been a little bit more traditional are certainly most poised to use our advice and our research for these future work transformations.

SPEAKER_00 6:27

Excellent. You mentioned in that piece there curiosity. Curiosity is one of the CX superhero mindset traits we talk about and the importance of being curious. Now, were you always curious as a child, or did you have to train to be curious as a journalist?

SPEAKER_01 6:44

Yeah, no, I would say journalism attracted me because of natural curiosity. I was always one of those kids who was asking why seven times to anyone who was in my vicinity. Sometimes just through the course of my career and even the course of my educational career, the curiosity sometimes felt like a curse rather than a blessing because it meant I was pulled in so many directions and I wanted to learn a lot of things about a lot of things. And sometimes it felt like, oh, life is just easier if there's one thing that you're passionate about and you just go for it. I want to be a doctor or something like that. But I came to really appreciate that being curious and being curious about different things is a skill in and of itself, and it's really useful. And that's how I landed in research. I think it's one of the things that makes me me.

SPEAKER_00 7:30

Sure. Well, I mean, I think in terms of research, you don't get to that second or third level kind of questioning unless you have that curiosity. If you're you're you're satisfied very easily, you miss all the richness, don't you? I understand what you say there. It's one of those things. I'm really we work with some clients where we're trying to help them be more curious. And it's a natural state, it's not something that's easy to say, okay, I'll be curious now then. And and sometimes I think those who want to be curious feel it's almost a weakness to actually need to go further rather than oh, I get the full picture now, even though I've only seen a piece of it, I get the full picture. Whereas the curious type will say, Hmm, I see a bit of a picture, but I'm not quite sure what I'm looking at here. I need to keep going. So it is a real value to have it in a research role. But now you've got the capability, I guess, with CMP to have that insight turned into action. So I'm really interested how you feel about that because quite often, my experience of researchers, the the findings are your baby, and now you've got to give it to someone else and let them go, we know what to do with it. I mean, how does that work? Is that a transitional piece or just stay involved in the projects? How does it work?

SPEAKER_01 8:40

It's really interesting because a lot of the executives I've advised over the years, and certainly the ones that we work with now, I empathize with them because they'll say, maybe not in these words, I'm paraphrasing slightly, but going back to the curiosity point, these leaders are so busy with the day-to-day that they don't always have the time and luxury to be curious and to sit back and think about okay, the strategic challenge that me and my team have been struggling with, what's actually going on here? What's conventional wisdom missing out on? What's the right thing to do? What's the different thing to do? And that's why they work with us. Outsourcing sometimes we'll joke, like that curious part of your brain or that long-term strategic view of your brain, because we appreciate as executives, you have to do the job that's in front of you and you need help sometimes, taking a step back and examining the bigger picture. So that's how we operationalize curiosity for our clients. The but to your other point around research and how do you make it come alive? The great thing about our community is we're a research and advisory service. If we're working with someone within CMP research, of course they get access to all of our research and all of our findings, but it's a continued partnership over multiple years, right? And we always say, look, our research will tell you what to do and how to do it, but our advisory component helps us help you put that into place. We're different from a management consultant. We'll never come in and do it for you, so to speak, but we will partner with you on how to roll it out across your organization and really make the research come to life.

SPEAKER_00 10:13

So I read from Gartner actually, now with the capability and the recognition of its importance, 95% of organizations collect feedback from their customers, either you know, kind of primary research or some form of continuous relationship study, but 95% of it do that. But only 10% of organizations take that information and apply it. And only 5% of organizations then go back to the customer to inform them of the changes that they've made on their behalf. I was staggered to see how we're still in this very what feels to me quite outdated piece, which is let me get the research just to mark my own homework, mark my scorecard to see, aren't I doing well? As opposed to no, this is an experience for the customer or the colleague that you're researching. It's an experience for them and they're part of the process. I I guess the luxury of having the connection with the advisory pieces, that never happens at CMP. Any insight is gold and it's treated with respect and is put into play in terms of either we're gonna act upon that or consciously we decide not to act upon it.

SPEAKER_01 11:15

Yeah, no, I exactly right. And it's interesting too because that same in the drop you talked about 95 to 10 to 5, we see the same trend with gathering employee feedback internally. So, you know, your annual surveys and whatnot. And that really just creates over time a dilution of the survey itself. If an employee sitting there and thinking, yep, I went through this initiative last year, didn't really see any changes. I'll just maybe give half my thought, half my energy into putting in the responses this year, but I don't think anything will come of it. And that's probably the best case scenario. Worst case scenario, people are disengaged, they were upset that they weren't heard, and maybe they don't take the survey at all. It's it's a trend you see on the employee engagement side of things, and it's particularly dangerous in a world where, like the world we're living in, you know, roughly half of CX and customer contact professionals are not satisfied in their current role. It's definitely an opportunity.

SPEAKER_00 12:08

When you think about it, I'd imagine from an employee perspective, one of the common things you hear is that I'm just not listened to. And if that's the case, if you then do an internal survey and you don't go back on it, you're just reinforcing that fault that the organization has. And it's you know, in the end, as an employee, do you just say, I'll tell you what, I'm just gonna be quiet here. I'm not happy, no one's happy, but I'm not gonna bother because you just don't act on the insight that I provide you. And that's the worst thing, isn't it? When you get to that point where I'm not gonna respond because I don't believe you'll do anything with it.

SPEAKER_01 12:43

Exactly. And perhaps by that point you're starting to get into quiet quitting territory, right? Or someone's just clocking the hours they need to clock until they find a new job. Yeah, it sets off this whole cycle of disengagement that is really, really dangerous.

SPEAKER_00 12:57

So when you're working with clients, is this the first thing to ascertain? Just what is the appetite for feedback? Because I guess if you start working and say, let's run a survey and then you get nothing back, you're like, ah, okay, we got a challenge here. Or it might not be a survey, it might obviously be interviews or what have you. So is that the first thing you have to do is kind of get a litmus test in terms of where are we in terms of how you engage with your employees at the moment?

SPEAKER_01 13:22

Yeah, absolutely. That litmus test is important and it's certainly where we start, but we try to uh take an informed shortcut, and I'll explain what I mean by that, which is as we kicked off our work around agent experience, employee experience in today's CX and customer contact world, we're working backwards from this question of what will engage and thus retain your talent. And as we did that, and we created a statistical model and surveyed a representative workforce, we were able to deduce the drivers of engagement. And what's helpful about that is so like the conventionalism typical approach across the CX leader space when they're thinking about employee engagement is to deploy a survey. Everyone deploys a survey. 90%, maybe 85%, if I'm being generous, 85% of execs who are doing that are like, yeah, we deploy the survey, but it doesn't really tell me much that I don't already know, or I just get either really happy feedback or really loud, you know, negative feedback. And then I don't really know if that's actually representative. So these surveys that are reactive and frankly lagging indicators of engagement rather than leading, they're not giving execs the information they want. So we can charge ourselves with figuring out if we can figure out the drivers of satisfaction with someone's job and less likelihood to stay, then we can start with rather than this open-ended question of how satisfied are you, we can create a tool that helps our clients ask more for more specific feedback about the drivers that actually drive engagement. So to be more concrete about it, the top three drivers of employee satisfaction are manager dynamic, flexibility, and career development. Rather than surveying on how satisfied are you, we've built a tool to help our clients survey on those three things. And we've actually been able to, using those drivers and some of the subdrivers underneath it, we've built a predictive attrition model where rather than figuring out, okay, just current state today, how many people are you know said that they're likely to leave in this next six months, or how many people say that they're dissatisfied with their job, by asking about these very specific drivers. So getting into manager dynamic, for example, a question will be you frequently feel heard by your direct manager, right? And for flexibility, it might be you're satisfied with the variety of work that you do. You're satisfied with the shifts and hours that you work. If we're talking about customer contact, especially. So by asking about those very specific questions, we're able to then give our clients a score of, hey, your attrition rate today is let's say 25%, based on the predictive tool that you rolled out in the next six to 12 months, it could be 33%. We'll do a cost model for them. And then we're also able to pinpoint exactly where in the organization by the demographic that predictive attrition is coming from. So it could be your new hires, it could be your tenured people, it could be something else. Yeah, anyway, that's a long story, but just helping our clients using the research, using the frameworks, helping them get beyond just the checkbox exercise of let me survey my employees to figure out how satisfied they are, but actually getting into let's help you collect information with things we know move the needle on satisfaction and retention. Because if you can understand the current state of satisfaction with those drivers, you're actually going to be out in front of and you're going to be engaging with employees before they get to that point of I'm so dissatisfied with my manager that I actually think I want to leave, or I'm so dissatisfied with my manager, I'm kind of unhappy at this job overall. So it is about catching that earlier and helping our clients do that.

SPEAKER_00 17:03

Well, what an incredible input to have. If you're in that senior leadership team, you recognize there's a transformation required in the organization, maybe to really connect up with this very different trading environment we have now, or maybe it's simply an IT upgrade, whatever the transformation is. If you start on the basis, well, if we do X, Y, or Z, everyone will you know come along. To find out that actually a third of your workforce are not engaged with you as an organization in the first place, helps you appreciate well, maybe it's going to take longer than we thought it would. Because I think probably I'd love to think there are execs out there who say, No, I can tell you different. A lot of organizations don't connect the two pieces, they go ahead with the transformation, and maybe at the end of it they'll then understand they'll go and ask um how was it for you? But what they don't start off is with is how likely are we to succeed based on it the attrition potential of our employee base at the moment. And if we don't get that right, why on earth are they going to say, yeah, let's make all these changes? You know, the the chances that the very thing you're gonna change is actually the thing that is keeping the scores down is very unlikely. So a really valuable tool. So let's move on with this then because what I'm really interested in is that point that I mentioned on employee engagement. I see now so much commentary and so many articles on this topic, and then when I hear the orators and the influencers then expand upon it, it seems to go off in like a firecracker in any direction you want. It seems to be anything and everything to do with employees, and you'll have you know one organization then saying, and that's why you need a reward program, and then another organization saying, and that's why you need training. It seems to be these, it's almost I fear to say this, but it's almost kind of like vendor-driven because it's we do training, so therefore we are an employee engagement specialist, and it's a much broader, I mean, I'm right, aren't I? It's a much broader piece of that. Are you seeing confusion out there, Nico, in terms of what employee engagement is?

SPEAKER_01 19:09

Absolutely. And I think what's dangerous too is we use a lot of these terms, employee engagement, culture as catch all terms, and then they they kind of cease to lose any meaning. So for us, employee engagement, like very straightforward and statistically for our studies, we look at two factors. We look at job satisfaction and likelihood to stay at the organization, and those two things are engagement overall. What came out of our work, and something that you know I pass on to Xecs all the time, is when you look at those drivers that I talked about of managers, flexibility, career development being the top three drivers of satisfaction. The driver with no additional impact on job satisfaction is culture. And I'll tell executives that and first they'll say, aren't managers part of culture and isn't flexibility part of culture? And I'll say, well, first we have to step back and define culture really specifically, because unless you have a specific definition in your quant model, like your quant model doesn't make any sense. So for us, the way we define culture was the fun that you have at work. So the reward programs, the free lunches, the virtual happy hours, in-person happy hours, those things that create social and emotional connection between employees and between teams, which is part of culture. And so that's how we define it first. That has no additional impact on employee satisfaction, which came as a real aha moment for us and for our executives as well. But then the second lesson that comes out of that, and I really tried to reinforce with the leaders we work with, is we define culture. One of the biggest pitfalls in this employee engagement space is using culture as a catch-all term, using culture as a non-specific term. Don't say the word culture if you actually mean have a good leadership dynamic. Don't use the word culture if you mean, you know, the fun at work. Don't use the word culture if you mean having career development, right? So it's a little bit of a pet peep of mine when I just hear this word culture thrown around and I'm like, but what do you actually mean? What are you talking about? How are you defining it? That's my challenge to executives is stop using the word culture, try to get a click more specific, and I you'll see better results because people will know what you're talking about.

SPEAKER_00 21:15

I love that expression. Um I might steal that a click more specific because it is it is so important. But this is that that value of being curious, Nico, isn't it? Because a lot of people just hear these platitudes and they will have in their mind an understanding of what that is, and that they'll assume is just what the other person's got in their head. But as you've just so eloquently demonstrated there, culture can mean different things to different people. And you know, that you've got those who are informed, like yourself, who have studied it, to understand, well, this is what culture is, and it does not drive satisfaction, and others who will have culture is a very different thing, maybe putting under there just say, Oh, it's the leadership's behaviors that create the culture, it's the brand that we have, and they'll say, And of course. That's what people are satisfied. That's why they join it. It's like, well, it's a very different thing. So no wonder this isn't a space where I think we've got some we've got some time to go before we actually get it right. You mentioned agents and contact centers. So is that a particular focus for you? Is that an area that you've done a lot of work in?

SPEAKER_01 22:18

Yeah, it's definitely a particular area of focus for us. It's such a specific type of job, it's a unique type of job, and we've seen massive amounts of churn and attrition there, and especially like new higher attritions who people leave in the next six months that we do focus a lot of our a lot of our research there. Uh, and it's been really fascinating to look at that group because of the nature of the work and the nature of the talent base as well. It's been a challenge for a lot of our execs, so that's why we spend our time there.

SPEAKER_00 22:47

Do you um I mean you said it's a very specific sort of role? So, I mean, um, I've been around far too long, and I remember working as head of direct marketing with the head of the contact center, and the head of the contact center for an insurance company said, My staff turnover is high. That's just how it is in contact. You know, it was just kind of an accepted thing. They're students, some of them look at these individuals, they're clearly not going to be here for some time. And it always puzzled me that was just a given, as opposed to understanding how why would they want to, yeah, how could you make them stay? How could you make them want to be here more often? Do you find that there is a there's still a high churn, or or are the better contact centers the ones that then retain their staff? I honestly don't know on this one. So it'd be interesting to get your view.

SPEAKER_01 23:34

Yeah, so in in short, the better, more progressive customer contact organizations are the ones that are able to retain their staff. And even if not, retain them within the customer contact org, at least retain them in the company. So seeing positive attrition, customer contact becomes the feeder for other parts of the business rather than negative attrition or people leaving the entire company or organization altogether. And what's really interesting, you said something about for a lot of heads of customer contact and contact centers, it's just a given that people will leave and that there's always high churn. Not only had churn gotten so much higher, certainly like through the pandemic and in the year or two since, where it's getting so costly to the business that we can't sustain that level of churn anymore. But secondly, one of the myths that our research has busted is that at least with today's customer contact workforce, the majority of them say that they view their role in customer contact as a career rather than just a job. And that was so like eye-opening for RXX because we've had some on our research board even tell us hey, like I'd always assume that they were just always going to leave within two years maximum. And but the reality is, and I think this does come down to these future work shifts that we've seen now that like flexibility is pretty normalized in customer contact and people can work from home or work at least hybrid. They're saying, Oh, wow, like I do have pretty good flexibility with this job. Let me consider making more of a career out of it. And I can commit to it for a bit longer because I know that this job will fit my life for a bit longer. So that's probably driving this renewed sense of, I want to have a career in customer service and rather than just clock my hours and leave in two years. But then the other thing is I think it really speaks to how much more valued a customer-centric skill set is becoming by every organization and every role that you know, town is starting to see if I can really make a great opportunity out of this role and stick with it for a while and either move up the ranks or have different experiences, I'll just become that much more marketable down the road when I do want to switch into something else. So, yeah, it's definitely been a shift, but it's exciting and it creates a lot of opportunity for us. And I think it's another reason why we see career development being the third biggest driver of employee satisfaction.

SPEAKER_00 25:56

It's very interesting you say that because we're big fans of customer ambassador programs where you know you make sure you get what you're trying to do a lot of the time is just get the voice of the customer represented in those quiet spaces in the organization so that you have a conscious decision and discussion around is the value for the customer considered in this decision we're about to make. And who better to actually bring that voice than contact center agents who have lived and breathed with customers on their at their the best of the worst moments of the organization? They're perfectly equipped, and I agree. And I've I've as I spoke to uh a director, HR director who was managing the account exec program, the high fires coming in, and I looked at where they were going, and it was great. So, why are they not going to the contact center? Why would they go to the contact center? They're sitting in finance, they're going to product development. Oh my god, how are they going to get an appreciation of the user experience of those products unless they're there understanding what they're like when they go wrong? And exactly, yeah, and you know, and it was the HR direct kind of I would say they were treating it as a second-class role, but actually they didn't look at it as being as I would look at it and say this is the perfect uh inner conscience of the customer that you can use in the organization. And I'm delighted to hear you say that more people in the contact centre are saying this is a career, this is a springboard for me to take what I know and take it elsewhere in the organization, and hopefully we'll see more and more of that as we go forward. So let's talk about engagement then. What are the ways that organizations need to change to engage their employees? How close does the employees' value set need to be to the company's purpose? Are those things really important? Is it down to the recruitment in the first place, or can I join an organization and then fall in love with it?

SPEAKER_01 27:45

I go back to our driver analysis. Our research shows that the playbook for engaging your employees is optimizing manager dynamic, offering and operationalizing effective flexibility, and offering career development. When you speak about the point of values and brand, um, I we see that coming into play a little, probably mostly in the career development space of career development is about seeing your own professional progression, but seeing alignment between that progression that the company offers and the skills and values that you want to develop, right? So there's a little bit of alignment there. It's those three things. I tell my clients like that's the playbook, the three things you need to work on in order to make sure people stay and are happy and thus performing well. And it's interesting too because there's been research before, I think on across many corporate functions that shows people stay for managers and people are most engaged due to their direct manager. But it was really eye-opening to see that that holds true for the customer service, customer contact, inbound sales, kind of CX specific world as well. That's that's what we help our clients optimize those those three things in that order.

SPEAKER_00 28:55

You talk about those three things. I would imagine it requires the organization to be capable in order to provide those things because the idea of the interactivity with the management, I mean it requires both people coming to the table, doesn't it? It's not just then, okay, my door's open, the employee can come in then. Oh it's a very it requires a yeah perhaps a change in the leadership's style and approach. If they're serious about engaging employees, this is how you need to transform in order to make it a bit palatable here and make it something of value here.

SPEAKER_01 29:30

Yeah, Christopher, you hit the nail on the head because when we dug into okay, how do we get each of those three drivers right? And let's start with managers since that's number one, became apparent to us very, very quickly. And I think if you just think about it, it makes sense. Which part of the organization in the last three to four years has been the most stretched and which part of the organization has gone through the most change with perhaps the least resources to make it through that change? It is the middle manager. It's crazy. It's it's not just being responsible for other people at a really difficult time, pandemic, but it's also being responsible for outcomes, of course, but then also being responsible for leading in a totally new work environment. Again, coming back to these future work changes that are the backdrop to all of our work, that normalization of flexibility, great for the individual contributor, the individual employees love it. That's the second biggest driver of satisfaction. Great for execs, right? They can figure it out, certainly. Asking someone to lead now a team that's not all co-located in a physical space, that is a totally different type of leadership. And it doesn't come naturally to everyone and hadn't really been given much specific attention on what is a fit-for-purpose, remote, flexible hybrid leader look like, let alone look like in the CX space. So that's what we've worked on. We've developed a competency model for highly effective leaders in today's flexible work environment. There's competencies on there that you would expect, but there's competencies that are new and fit for purpose for this work environment. One that we call mindfulness, which is all about proactively understanding how your team is spending their time and proactively managing and mitigating agent burnout, like getting out in front of it. That's yeah, that's something that really hadn't been incentivized, defined on manager scorecards historically, partly because they didn't have to. You could just see it when you're all in the office together. Yeah, it's been a lot of fun and it's a big, it's a big challenge, but that's why we're we're so excited to have something to say about it and be working with our clients on it.

SPEAKER_00 31:28

Really interesting. And if I might just get you to look into the crystal ball, what I'm very interested to understand is obviously we've gone through a dramatic change in flexibility over the last kind of two or three years for force on us. Uh and some I've got a friend who's whose boss really coped badly when the pandemic kind of died down and he'd bought a big office in London and he wanted all his staff back in, back where he could see them, and kind of you know, his child director said, We yeah, honestly, you can't behave like that anymore. Things have moved on. But my question to you is when it comes to flexibility, uh we at the start of a revolution in flexibility, or do you think we're over the hump? Because obviously it seems like a lot of change, but it makes me wonder is no, this is just the start, you know. Could we have a situation where employees work for multiple companies at the same time and you know have very different roles and responsibilities? What's your thought in terms of the research you see, where things could go?

SPEAKER_01 32:27

As a future work researcher, this is like one of my favorite things to copy on. So I'm glad you asked the question. The short answer is yes, we're just at the beginning. And that normalization of flexibility that was frankly always coming, it was just accelerated by the pandemic, and the acceptance of it was accelerated by by the last two years. It is the key ingredient, the catalyst, whatever we want to talk about, for all those other future work things we talk about, the gig economy. So, as you speak about normalizing employees working for multiple companies, and this probably sounds really scary to executives, but it's just the nature of change in 10 years when someone can work more flexibly, they're working more flexibly, so they probably have more hours to work. Are they juggling multiple things? And is that accepted? I do think we're going to go in that direction. And I don't think that's a bad thing. I think uh it's certainly good for employees and it's gonna be great for innovation. I do think right at the beginning, it's really interesting to watch, like with any revolution, there's going to be people who want to maintain status quo. So I live in New York, and for example, like you hear about like the big banks of financial institutions are like, you're all coming back every day, five days out of the week. There's financial incentives that they have in their real estate portfolios to have that happen. But I mean, the the will of the people, so to speak, the will of the workforce is such that I can work from anywhere or I can at least work from home as long as I'm hitting like my outcomes and whatnot. That's, you know, with this exception of some roles, but I really don't think that mandate piece is going to fly. And you're kind of already seeing it. So yeah, it's really fascinating. I think there's some speculation, oh, of like in an economic downturn, leverage will shift back to the employer. And we're kind of in that economic downturn and we're kind of still hearing that employees and employers are continuing with flexibility. You're seeing in New York, for example, a lot of office buildings are being converted into residential buildings, like the tides are shifting. And frankly, it makes sense. There's been at least three industrial revolutions in the last like 200, 300 years, and it all comes because of new technology. Frankly, I'm surprised it took this long with computers and the internet and all of our security technology and whatnot. Like it just makes sense that the work would change and what work looks like would change. And yeah, I think we're going through it right now, and it's creating a lot of uncertainty, but it's also creating a lot of opportunity.

SPEAKER_00 34:49

I think opportunities are definitely. I mean, I've got a friend of mine who was able to do something they've always wanted to do, which was give back to the local community.

SPEAKER_01 34:57

Amazing.

SPEAKER_00 34:58

And by being able to work four days rather than the five, the fifth day is now used to serve the community. And as you say there, we've got a crisis of shortage of residential properties. You've got a solution for it there. It just creates great opportunity, doesn't it? It's a fascinating topic, Nico. It's been an absolute delight talking to you. I mean, there's so much in here, isn't it? It's wonderful. Now, Nicole, as I'm sure some people will want to, how can people get hold of you? And you know, some of the information you're talking about, do you have papers and things that are available for CX professionals and employee engagement professionals to look at?

SPEAKER_01 35:33

Yes, absolutely. Anyone can go visit cmpresearch.com. We have a few free white papers up there for a download so you can see what we look like and what we get up to and what that research really is. So I definitely encourage you to go there. You can find customer management practice on LinkedIn, just at Customer Management Practice. Uh, you can follow me on LinkedIn if you want. I'm just Nicole Kyle on LinkedIn. Yeah, that's us. Yeah, cmpresearch.com. And we just launched a certification program as well, which is pretty exciting. CMP certified. You can learn about that on cmpresearch.com slash cmp certified. Yeah, that's us. Come and find us.

SPEAKER_00 36:10

Thank you so much for helping us appreciate there is a high standard in this space that you can achieve. And there are individuals and organizations like yourselves out there helping organizations achieve that. So it's just wonderful. Really enjoyed our conversation, Nicole, and hope we uh we catch up soon. And I'm gonna certainly go and dive into some of those resources if you love it.

SPEAKER_01 36:33

Thanks so much, Christopher, for having me. I've really enjoyed our conversation, and yeah, stay in touch.

SPEAKER_00 36:38

Thank you. Thanks, Nicole. Bye bye.