THE PATH TO PERFORMANCE: INSIDE THE 2025 WORKPLACE TRANSFORMATION

TRANSCRIPTION 

HOST: What's holding back workplace performance in 2025? Why are senior leaders striving with AI while younger teams lag behind? And how can companies close the growing gap in support and communication across generations? In this special episode, we explore key insights from the State of the Workplace Survey 2025, conducted by SPS and Worktech Academy. Join Claire Ward, Nicole Mangarella and Cassia Maynard as they unpack what's shaping the future of work right now. 

CLAIRE WARD:  Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to the Worktech & SPS webinar where we're covering off the path to performance in the new age of work. And we're going to be looking at some insights from the 2025 State of the Workplace survey. So welcome and thank you to everyone who's joined this webinar, and also to those joining later via the recording or the podcast. My name is Clare Ward. 

I'm the Chief Innovation Officer at SPS and I'm joined by Kasia Maynard and also Nicole Mangarella. Before we dive into the findings, I'm just going let the ladies introduce themselves. 

KASIA: Hi everyone, as Claire said, I'm Kasia Maynard. I'm Head of Research and Editorial at WORKTECH Academy, which is a membership club, but also an independent research hub that focuses exclusively on the future of work and workplace. 

NICOLE: And as Claire said, I'm Nicole Mangiorella. I'm Head of Global Technology and innovation at SPS and I'm really excited to dive into the report. 

CLAIRE: Okay, so we launched the survey at the Connected Workplace Summit earlier this week and there was a lot of hype, a lot of interest and a lot of excitement around the findings. But before we dive into that, I thought it was quite useful to set the scene. I think for the first time ever, we find ourselves in the workplace with five generations of people. We've got the traditionists who are generally in the senior leadership roles. We've got the baby boomers, Gen X, millennials and Gen Zs, all bringing different values, different wants and different desires, which whilst it's great to have a diversity, a multicultural and a multi-generational diverse workforce, it brings tension. And the survey focused on three pillars. There's obviously the environment, there's technology and there's policy.  

I'd like us to just dive into the first aspect, which is around policy and the expectations that leaders and employees have in the workplace. And I'd like, if I may, to put my first question to you, Kasia, and that is how important do you believe it is for leaders to communicate well, to create a positive work culture, especially when you've got people working from home? And in that working from home piece, we've seen lots of return to work mandates, which I think have been badly communicated and often what senior management want is for people to lean into the power of presence and all of the benefits that that bring.  

Whereas often when you're an employee on the receiving end of it, you feel it's built around mistrust and a lack of belief that I'm not doing my job and therefore it's about presence equals productivity or performance. So, what's your thoughts on that? I mean, you've been deep into the research. 

KASIA: I’ve been very deep into the research there. Policy, I think, is crucially important.  

I actually think it's the linchpin that holds together the technology and the space that we work in as well. So, I think it's only right that we tackle this subject first, because you mentioned different generations in the workforce. In the report, we looked at roles. We looked at junior roles, middle management, and more senior roles.  

And unsurprisingly, unlike a lot of other research that's out there, we found a chasm between the two. We found that senior leadership thinks their workplace supports them better, they believe by quite some margin-  67%, so two thirds, I think - it supports their workplace productivity really, really well compared to 45 % of those in their junior roles. So quite a chasm between just how well they think their workplace even supports them. But also in terms of the policies as well.  

So senior leadership, I really think that they have a clear policy for things like AI and flexible hybrid working. And more junior employees do not see those as clear policies. A lot of them say, “I don't know if we have a policy and more say we don't have one at all”.  So again, there's a chasm there and I think that's a real communication issue because the senior leadership are either making the rules or not communicating the rules to the point where those junior employees aren't sure what's going on.  

And you're quite right when you talk about return to office and that erosion of trust and the communication piece about it. It's really important. And that came out in some of the open text. We had a few open text boxes in the survey and middle management and junior employees were saying actually it's one of the biggest inefficiencies of the workplace is unclear communication and leadership. 

So it's clearly something that we need to get right that we aren't getting right at the moment. 

CLAIRE: On the percentage of respondents that felt that there was good communication or their organizations were getting it right, what changes in leadership or company rules have you seen that help bring leaders closer? Was there any, any examples in the server that you could probably cite? Don't worry if there aren't. 

KASIA: Yeah, I think in the survey, we didn't touch on those specific examples, but there are definitely things I've seen in other research and just in some case studies I've seen as well in terms of clear communication. There’s actually one case study of Miro's headquarters in Amsterdam and I was speaking to the head of real estate there and he was saying a whole communication strategy is built on open communication with their employees, right down from the move as soon as they were moving, they told their employees straight away so they weren't finding out in the news. And that was just the baseline communication that they were offering. And then when it came to moving into the new building, they had two architects and they said, well, you vote, you pick. And then every single decision that they've made in the workplace, they've consulted employees. So I think that's a great example of clear communication in the workplace in a physical way, but also other research shows that just talking to people, getting focus groups together, getting the focus group around certain communities together is really important just to understand what's going on beyond just a survey  

CLAIRE: That's a really interesting point. At the summit earlier this week, had Dame Inga Beale talk about the journey that she went on at Lloyds of London when she was CEO there. And she really doubled down on this idea of empowering and involving people in the decision-making. That was a real-life example. Just turning to Nicole, from a technology point of view or perspective, how can technology play a role in supporting communication effectively, meeting people where they are? 

NICOLE: Yeah, I think there's a few different ways it can play a role, to tag on to Kasia point, the thing that surprised me most out of the survey was around the usage of AI and automation tools and the difference where it was 74 % of senior management was using some form of AI or automation to help make their work more efficient and only 40 % of junior staff were tapping into that same potential and I’m curious. 

My thought was that the two were related as a senior leader. You know, you are a bit more empowered to feel like you can go out and you can test new things or you're the one that's writing the policies who of course you know that this tool is approved or this is available to you. And if you're a junior member of staff, maybe you don't have that same level of confidence or you don't have that same level of competency to know that the tool that you're using is actually giving you the right type of support and the right answer and it's leading you in the right direction. So I think it's really interesting because typically you would flip them to your point on different generations in the workplace. You would think the junior staff were all up on the automation, on the AI, that they were basically, you know, waking up in the morning, logging in, typing, you know, two commands or prompts in and go in and having lunch. But that doesn't seem to be the case.  

And I think from a communication perspective, there's so much that you can communicate digitally, but it also doesn't replace walking the floors and seeing how people are working. Because if they don't know to ask for support, or they don't know that there's a potential for a technology to help support them, they can't necessarily raise their hand for it. And I think there is, across all industries, that sort of common thread of, if you shadow somebody and you really see why they're working that way and what they're trying to accomplish, you can do a better job of supporting them than if you're sending them an electronic survey once a year and asking them what they think.  

CLAIRE: I think it's two interesting things that you said there that really struck a chord with me and that is the more senior generations of people who've been in the workplace longer probably have more confidence. And we know that AI is moving at a pace and you've either got to get on it and you've got to get with it and you've got to stay on top of it. And so yeah, there's a confidence thing, more senior we are.  

And you're right. Anyone who's in a senior role has a role to play in supporting the next generation come through. That was the first thing that struck me. The second thing is this idea that we think of the Gen Zs as tech savvy, and they probably are. So in their personal lives —and even millennials and some Gen Xers—are incredibly competent and very comfortable using technology to order our groceries, to order anything, whether it's Amazon or whether it's shopping, whatever, we're very, very competent.  

But the minute we walk into an office environment, we almost go back 20 or 30 years and we have to seek permission. it's, so I think what you're telling, what I'm hearing now is the importance of guide rails and the importance of frameworks where people feel once I know what the rules are and once I know what my parameters are that I can work comfortably within, that I'm free to roam. 

I'm free to roam, I'm free to explore, I'm free to innovate, I'm free to ask questions and it's okay for me to say I don't understand or it's not clear to me. But without those guide rails, people are actually...working in the dark, I think, to a degree. So I guess it sets the culture and it sets the tone and it sets the path to engagement. It’s interesting. 

"The thing that surprised me most out of the survey was around the usage of AI and automation tools and the difference where it was 74% of senior management was using some form of AI or automation to help make their work more efficient and only 40% of junior staff were tapping into that same potential." - Nicole Mangarella 

KASIA: Definitely and to add to that just on the acceleration of AI, just Chad GPT alone, think a couple of weeks ago, they reached 1 billion users per week. And that's just 17 months. So, at the end of 2022, it kind of came to fruition. So, 1 billion people are using it a week. That means pretty much everyone in your workforce is probably using it, whether it's in their work or their personal lives, there's no distinction there. But it took Google a decade to get that many number of users using their platform. So the acceleration is there. People are using it, but you're so right. It's the policies and the guidelines and the culture isn't quite keeping up, especially not in the workplace. 

CLAIRE: And it needs to be ethical as well, you know, there's so many, we could talk about this for hours, but you know, there’s a risk of turning this into an AI webinar [laughs] 

The key thing for me is this idea of performance and productivity. I mean, productivity at the moment is a buzzword. You know, we need productivity to kickstart the economy. I think in the survey it talks about that we've seen a slump in productivity for the first time since 2020 and we've got to see an uptick. But the survey talks about performance and the outdated metrics around performance and how we need to shift to more of an outcome based culture. 

I'm really interested in your thoughts on this. I'll explain that a bit further and then Nicole, about how technology can help us to make that leap that closed that chasm. 

KASIA: Yeah, so in terms of productivity, it's an interesting one. I was almost reticent to even use the word productivity in the survey because it comes with so many question marks, like what is productivity?, is it GDP? Is it output? Is it presence in the office? And I think it's been a bit of everything, but what I think is that we wanted to look at was, well, what's performance? What does that mean for your organization beyond productivity now? It is output.  

Traditionally we would say you're in the office for eight hours, therefore you're productive eight hours. If you stay an extra hour, you've been an extra hour of productive that day.  

It’s so tied into being in the office, productivity was so tied to being in the office. It just didn't, it just doesn't make sense anymore. Not in the world that we live in. Most, I think 85 % of the top Fortune 500 companies are working in a hybrid way. being in the office and equating that with productivity just does not make sense anymore.  

So, what we wanted to look at was, what are some of the other metrics that can equate to performance or that might mean productivity? So we asked people, do they feel more or less productive since the pandemic? It's a very self-prescriptive answer. So you have to take it with a pinch of salt, but we found that about 40 % of people said they feel more productive. About 50 to 60 % of people said they feel about the same since the pandemic and a small number, about 10 % said that they feel less productive than the beginning of the pandemic.  

So that's just one metric of how we looked at productivity. But then we also tried to put some perimeters around engagement. We looked at things like collaboration with the team, how connected you feel to the company culture. And do you feel like your contributions are heard within the company? And those were the perimeters we put around engagement. So we're looking at things like that.  

And then I also think another metric that people are looking at, we didn't explore too much in the survey itself, which is experience as well. So putting metrics around some of the softer metrics - I'm reticent to say softer metrics because they are very important;  these kinds of slightly more fuzzy concepts, but trying to look at performance as a whole rather than just time spent in office. 

CLAIRE: Yeah. And I think there's a concept that was really interesting in the survey itself. We talked about the squeezed middle, and it is the middle management that are experiencing burnout. Was there anything that you think it's worth exploring on that side? 

KASIA: Yeah, I draw a lot on Gallup's data here to support some of our findings because Gallup's engagement survey that was released in April this year found that engagement has dipped for the first time since the pandemic and for the second time only ever that they've done the survey, which is about 16 years. And they said that that disengagement is mostly attributed to the squeeze and the pressures of middle management.  

Also, that level of engagement is costing the global economy 430 billion in lost productivity, which is huge. It's costly. Then we looked at what role does the workplace play in that then? Then we asked people, would you look for new employment if you had an inefficient or frustrating workplace? And it was the senior leaders and middle managers that mostly said yes, around two thirds of them said that they would leave if their environment wasn't supporting them. And then, you know, going back to Gallup's research, to replace those senior leaders will cost around 200 % of their annual salary. This very quickly becomes a very costly and expensive problem for organizations if the workplace isn't linking up with the engagement and we're not having those conversations with management. 

CLAIRE: I guess Nicole, from a technology point of view, it can either be a curse or a cure because there's this, we either feel connected by just staying on teams all day, but when used correctly, it can be a great sense of connection. What are your thoughts on that? Not just about technology, but generally, I know you've got views on this. 

NICOLE: From the technology side, was actually, there was really interesting research that came out at the end of April around, I know there's conflicting research on the effectiveness in technology and AI and how it can either make people more productive or hinder their productivity or make them less creative or diminish the quality of it. And the study that came out of Oregon State at the end of April was around creativity. 

And they found that when people were just given access to an AI tool or a technology to help them, they performed more poorly than they did without a tool at all. But when they were given the tool and then they were given guidance and instruction on how to use the tool, their creativity soared and their work product was of a higher quality in the same amount of time. I think from my perspective, productivity has always been more of a what can you accomplish at a good level of quality in a reasonable amount of time?  

Because to your point, eight hours in an office, you may not be productive for all eight of those hours. And usually when we build out things like labor models, we assume a declining percent of productivity because you go to a lunch break, you come back, you have a conversation with a colleague, you come back … All of the constant task switching can diminish that productivity overall as far as output as concerned.  

I think there are ways that you can use technology to help you be more productive. Technology just thrown out into the organization without policy, without clear guidelines, without some sort of a supportive community where you can really talk about how you're using it and what's working and what's not working is almost worse than no technology at all. 

CLAIRE: Absolutely, I mean, we might digress slightly, but some of the conversations you and I have had about point solutions and the speed at which technology was deployed during the pandemic, and now we've got this confused ecosystem of different bits of technology that do different roles that are not really joined up. I'm really interested to hear your thoughts on that. 

NICOLE: Confused is a great way to put it actually because it's confusing for the user. It's confusing also for the technology company to be sitting there in that little silo of here's what you do, but in order to complete the full task or the full ask, there's other systems that need to be involved. And I do think it's really interesting just to see, you know, we have a lot of clients from a workplace perspective that hired people during a pandemic that never came to the office, had no idea what type of support was available. And one client comes to mind, this was a pre-pandemic situation, but they found that they had groups. This is a huge investment bank, a global bank, very strict security regulations, very regulated industry. And they identified through a finance audit, oddly enough, that people were going to the FedEx Kinkos down the street and running pitch decks, and having them complete the pitch decks.  

Obviously not security vetted, not within policy, if anybody knew what the policy was. They had a world-class print center in the basement that would do high-quality marketing, slicks, pitch books, everything compliant within the same building. But there was such a disconnect to your point on the communication, on knowing how to access those resources that not only were they not using what they had already invested in, but they were putting themselves at enormous risk. 

CLAIRE: You know what, that's what I love about the premise of the SPS Nexus platform, the workplace platform that we built is that its real purpose is to provide an environment where interoperability is at the heart of it and the technologies talk to each other and it's been built around the user. So it means I can get what's the job to be done. It's a straight through line process that gives me visibility. 

And I guess it's your learning from that as product lead that's given you that perspective. 

NICOLE: Yeah, think, I mean, we're a bit spoiled in the fact that we can go to our teams on site that are delivering the services, or in some case, our teams off site that deliver the services, and we can get that perspective and hear what would help them from a visibility, from an accessibility standpoint. And then we can also talk to our clients. We have incredible clients, incredible technology partners that help us to understand from that side of the table, what would make that access more frictionless, what would make that more seamless, or how can we enhance what they already do in the workplace in a way that's meaningful to them because we can't design without that sort of input would be. 

CLAIRE: It's that shift towards human centric technology design, as opposed to point solutions that are often top down initiatives, as opposed to bottom up. What do I need to do my best work? What do I need to take the handbrakes off? What's stopping me from doing my best work? Which kind of links into that question in the environment. 

Just as a quick one, what kind of tech or tools do you see helping people do their best work in the workplace? I mean, I know it's a really forward ranging question, but you you've been on the journey with SPS for like over 10 years. You've seen it all. I think there's obviously the lifting information from the surveys. You know, there's a real ask for, I think there's a lovely line in there that talks about technology is not the silver bullet. You know, it's that piece around if it's deployed over a badly designed organization with poor communication, it's just going to amplify problems. 

NICOLE: It's a catalyst, not a cure. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know who came up with that line, but it is, it makes a lot of sense. I mean, I think even before I was at SPS, I was in ERP software and transforming, okay, how do we break down the silos of a business and give them data that talks to each other, that's useful where it is when they need it and not overwhelming. And I think there's a lot of different ways that you can look at tools that will make you more productive depending on what you need to do either faster or at a bigger scale or to a higher level of quality. I think the key for me is to look at it from the use case and understand why you're looking for a solution before you start to pick the tool. Because I do think, especially with things like AI, with workflow engines, with ticketing systems, people sometimes think that “well, I don't have this and I had it in the past, so I need this”. And then they go out to your point, the point solutions, they go and they buy it and they think that's gonna work really well. And you have to really understand, okay, what am I trying to accomplish? What problem am I trying to solve?  And then you can work backwards to say, actually what I'm struggling with is being able to get information to my support team in a structured way that helps them prioritize what needs to be done. And okay, there's a few different ways that you can solve that problem. And there's a few different tools that you can use for that. And then I think the other side of the coin and the key is really involving the people who are going to use it in the process of designing it. So, we do a lot of focus groups. 

We don't do as many surveys because we kind of like that off the cuff feedback. We like the conversation back and forth. We do a lot of pilots to test it out and say, this is the marketing. This is the reality. Where's the real truth of how this is going to function in the environment? But I think that gives you a better perspective on it. And then you can go and pick from that toolbox of what's going to help. 

CLAIRE: I love that the idea of involving people who are doing the job is so important and that's not new. I mean, I remember reading Maverick by Ricardo Semler back in the nineties, and there's a particular chapter on that where he allowed people in the workforce to actually design the way that the floor was set out and the way that the machines and everything was used because it reflected the way that they did their job. 

I mean, we talk about technology and we think about softwares, but even some of the basics, think the survey talked about the people that felt most engaged or supported. talked about their workstations. Do you want to expand on that? 

KASIA: They did, was the people that felt most engaged and most productive. They had generally a more positive outlook on the spaces that they worked, but we also looked at specific work areas, like cafe areas, touchdown spaces, meeting rooms, workstations, things like that. And they all had a generally more positive feeling towards, especially workstations. 

But I wanted to just touch on the kind of technology side of that as well again, because I think you're so right, having the right technologies and talking to people and building those technologies with people is so important. The technology is already there. It's when it doesn't work, it's always human behavior that breaks it down. It's always human behavior. We use AI to make us more efficient.  

What do we do with the extra time we have? We put loads of meetings in. You know, we, instead of going to our colleagues, we go to our AI and then communication learning breaks down. I think not leaving that time for contemplation, for creativity, for innovation is really damaging, but that is a human behavior. We're not scheduling in that time for ourselves because we're over relying, I think, on the tools and not using them as well as we should be using them at the moment.  

And again, I think that's the policy, that's the guidelines, that's the, are we meant to be using this and what's important at this point, is it important to just get as much work done as possible? Then fine, we're doing an okay thing. But if innovation and creativity is suffering, is one of the primary reasons people want to get their employees back to the office is to build innovation again. And if we're just filling that time with meetings, yeah, that's not good. 

CLAIRE: So people need permission. I mean, you're absolutely right.  We talked a lot about just outsourcing. And for me, outsourcing isn't about cost cutting, It is about removing clutter and creating time and space for creativity, for innovation, for connectivity, for reading… and for learning different perspectives, and then using that time is priceless about how you then bring that back. 

But I guess it has to start from the top and it's about learning behaviors, which often we can only see when we observe. I keep coming back to think one of the people on the panel on Tuesday, it was Quentin from Canon had said that those in senior positions have a responsibility to be present, to be able to be a source of guidance, but also to learn. 

I learn as much from people who are at the start of their careers as I do from people who are coming maybe towards the end of their careers through choice. And that happens through presence, not on team's calls. We need permission to say it's okay to contemplate and to think. 

KASIA: Absolutely. I think that almost needs to be, if we're scheduling everything in, that needs to be scheduled into our time. But it was also interesting, you mentioned there that people are coming in to see their leadership. We asked that question in survey;  we said, “what are the reasons that you're coming into the office?” and senior leadership said that they're coming in to meet other leaders. They're coming in to talk to their peers. Whereas the more junior employees that was on their list, it was important to see leadership, but the top things that they were coming into the office for were access to technology and access to their workstations. 

They basically just want to come into the office to get stuff done. And the leadership is there to talk to their peers and be around their peers. so there's, again, there's another demonstration of a disconnect of why are we even here? Because if leadership are coming in to socialise, then yeah, let's make this a huge collaboration hub. Let's let loads of open plan spaces. That would be great. But if you're just trying to come in to get your work done and access a monitor and a workstation, and leadership have just made this huge open plan space and there's so many different areas and you no longer have access to it. That again is a huge barrier and a miscommunication between senior leadership and employees of what should the office even be and that's a barrier to return to office strategies I think. 

"Technology isn’t the silver bullet. It’s a catalyst for productivity, but only when it’s deployed with the right policies, clear guidelines, and supportive leadership." - Kasia Maynard 

CLAIRE: You know, it's interesting you say that. I mean, I'm at an age now where my peers, people I was at university with, their children are now in the workplace. They are 23, 24. And I've been doing some mentoring. One hugely bright young woman had been working with a traditional building society. She's mathematician and had huge anxieties because everything was remote.  

And she said, she left and she's now joined a big global bank. And she joined the global bank because she was promised three days a week where she could go into the office, she could meet people, she could learn, she could be part of something bigger because there was a social anxiety about being at home. I think we underestimate that. And your point is really well made that, but you still need to be productive when you come into the office.  

And the thing we haven't touched on, I'm not sure we do touch on in the survey, but it's huge, isn't that? And that it’s neurodiversity and the different ways in which people like to work. And we need to be respectful of that.  

What I love about certainly my team, I've got a hugely creative, smart group of people that I work with, but all over the spectrum and can be easily distracted, but brilliance, utterly brilliant when the task's in hand and creates some amazing work. 

We need to create those environments where people can go and be. 

KASIA: And again, to have permission to go to those spaces as well. If there's a library space, do you have permission to go and sit in a library space for an hour? I think I take your point that neurodiversity is huge at the moment. Every conversation I'm having with workplace leaders, that is a top of mind, front of mind concern. And despite anything going on with DE &I across the world, neurodiversity inclusion is still a huge, huge topic. 

Kay Sargent of HOK speaks very eloquently about this. She's done a lot of research, but she talks about people who are hypersensitive to space and hyposensitive and everything in between. And how can we design spaces where we're not giving every individual their own space. That's impossible. We only have so much real estate. It's expensive. But how can you create a spectrum in the workplace where people feel like they have permission to go and move around and if they want to sit at a desk all day and that's suitable for them and that should also be allowed as well. So, it's about the permission, I think, of how to use space with it. 

CLAIRE: Interestingly at SPS, we have workplace ambassadors within our teams. You we have sometimes 300- 400 people working within organizations doing all kinds of business enablement, non-core activities. One of the biggest growing cohorts of people are these workplace ambassadors who will be there to support, to ensure that people are where they are when they want to work. I can only see that growing in them in presence.  

Just going back to AI and technology, and we talk about the way that we can measure engagement. If we're moving away from traditional - you've tapped in and you've tapped out, therefore you've been there for eight hours in the day. And if there was Olympic gold in answering emails, I'm sure I'd win it, but that's not necessarily a sign of my productivity. What other ways, Nicole, have you come across that might be able to measure engagement? 

NICOLE: Yeah, I think it's different depending on the culture of the office. I think sometimes in-person feedback works really well if you have a really open group, if you have that sort of open communication style and if that's part of your company culture. I think where I've seen enough technology help to humanize is in the way that people structure their employee surveys and the way that people access them.  

Historically, you would have that sent out once a year, asking set questions, and  they're very quantitative. They don't have a lot of open text fields because mining that data takes a lot of time and it's a bit difficult sometimes to quantify those types of open-ended questions. But we've seen several companies and several partners of ours work really hard at being able to open that up and say, okay, first, let's open up the different channels. Let's not make it a just a digital survey, let's allow for voice input, let's allow for other interactions, and let's make it an on-demand experience. 

So, let's put that request for feedback where that service is happening, where that employee is working, or let's make it easily accessible so that we can get it on a more regular basis and get more frequent sort of temperature taking of how our employee population is feeling.  

And then behind the scenes, because we have the ability to now analyze large amounts of text and large amounts of voice in an unstructured way, which AI is really, really good at, and it can pick out the patterns and sort of give them back to you in a way that's actionable.  

Let's open up that sort of experience and that feedback and say, okay, I don't need you to rate on a scale of one to five how happy you are with your workplace because that there's so much variation in what I consider a five versus what you might consider a five. 

Let's just ask the question instead, what do you like about your workplace? What do you not like about your workplace? And we've seen a lot more of a mix of how do we take that temperature and the frequency of that temperature taking, and then the flexibility of being able to adjust the service models, the support that you give people, the communication, the tools that you have based on that feedback. So people seem to be getting more more proactive with how they think about the employee experience. 

CLAIRE: I absolutely support that and I love the speed at which technology is moving to allow us to do that. The biggest handbrake or inertia is engagement and the people wanting to get involved without thinking that big brother's watching me and am I going to get what's going to be the repercussions of me sharing feedback. So it always comes back to human behavior and how can we get people to engage. Now we are again, very fortunate SPS, we have very, very high engagements, more than 80 % of our global employee, around 8,000 - 10,000 people globally will and 80 % of them will take part in our survey. But that has taken years of trust that's been built over time. So, I'm sure there's going be lots of people who are watching thinking, how do we move people? How do we make people feel that they're not going to be judged or they're not going to be watched? Like it’s not big brother watching me.  

How can we help organizations navigate that shift to a trusted organization? I mean, it's a big question and I don't know whether either of you got any thoughts on that. 

KASIA: I have some thoughts, but I don't think I any solutions [laughs] . It's so true. It's something that a lot of organizations are struggling with. And if you look at larger organizations, I mean, the survey looked at 1500 plus size organizations of employees. That it's very difficult to ask everyone in that company what they want and make them feel included and personally reach out. I've seen examples of middle management or leadership taking the role there and talking to their teams and making sure they understand what's going on and having conversations, but there's no central repository for all of that information to go.  

So how do you know what's going on a national scale, let alone a global scale? that quickly, I think that's a first port of call if the managers to have that open dialogue with their employees to make them feel included. And that works on a team level, but on an organizational level, I think this is much more of a struggle. I think we talk about empathetic leadership a lot. We talk about a lot of leaders that are very good at the operational side of things.  

They understand how the business works, but are they good at the relational side of things? So how can we develop the training to make sure that leaders have the skills to be able to develop those relationships, to have those conversations that's not just about the business, it's about people. 

NICOLE: Yeah, I do think that there's a lot of focus on hospitality and sort of bringing that into every interaction, and because a lot of those interactions also happen digitally, doesn't mean that it doesn't have to be an open experience, something that encourages people to share what they're thinking and things like that. So, there's sort of the small training tweaks that you can give people to kind of create that environment on a regular day-to-day basis. 

CLAIRE: Okay, well, we've got a question. I think we're probably coming up to the end of our webinar, but a fascinating conversation. The question is: From the survey, focus is the biggest frustration in the office, which I suffer from that as well, is do we have enough solutions to overcome that frustration and how does technology help? I'm going to go to you, Nicole, on that one. Any thoughts on it? 

NICOLE: It's funny because this is the point that resonated most with me because not only was difficulty focusing the number one frustration, but the second one was limited flexibility. And I think there's what I might think is a good environment for me to focus on a given day might be, you know, lots of people around, but a big set of noise canceling headphones and a big dual monitor and everything like that. 

Whereas some days it might be a quiet pod environment where I don't see any other people and I've kind of got, you know, the low light and everything like that.  

I think it's, there are some technology solutions that you can bring in depending on what focus looks like for people. I think it's about giving them options and a variety of options depending on your workforce and the type of work that they're doing. 

CLAIRE: So, in simple terms, ask people what it is that they need in order to bring some focus to the task in hand. And the task changes regularly. So, in summing up, I think it's a fascinating piece of research and it's available to download,  and both Kasia and Nicole are available for questions directly through LinkedIn. 

And we've got some more, we've got a roadshow coming up in over the summer months into September where we'll be taking the research to different communities, whether that's a legal community or banking insurance, both here in the UK and in Switzerland. But in wrapping up, is there anything that you would like to share with people who are listening in? 

KASIA: It's just going back to what we talking about at the beginning of the discussion really. I think AI always swallows a lot of the conversation at the moment. It's a huge topic in it and it is manifesting in the workplace in every facet. But if you don't get the communication and the relational bit right, the engagement and the productivity will suffer. So, it's sort of leading - it sounds very cliche,- but leading with the people first approach. 

NICOLE: Yeah, I think that the human-led tech-enabled piece is the key. I've seen a lot of technology transformation, in the change management that will make it successful or not successful. And that is people, that is communication, that is good planning, that's feedback mechanisms. That is really what drives making the workplace productive. 

CLAIRE: Yeah, I totally agree. And for me, it's kind of leaning into this power of presence for the right reasons: that's to unlock the capability of human connection and to make sure everybody feels that they've got a voice, irrespective of gender, background, neuro type, and also the level of which aware you are in the organization. Everybody deserves to be heard, not just listened to, but to be heard. 

I think that's the key takeaway from me, and then everything else follows the environment and the technologies to enable people to do their best work. I think that's what will drive performance, which drives productivity, which drives competitive edge, which drives commercial growth and success within organizations.