Dr. Angela Jackson, Author of The Win-Win Workplace: How Thriving Employees Drive Bottom Line Success

Van Ton-Quinlivan

Hello, I’m Van Ton-Quinlivan, CEO of Futuro Health, welcoming you to WorkforceRx, where I interview leaders and innovators for insights into creating a future-ready workforce. That describes today’s guest perfectly because Dr. Angela Jackson is a nationally recognized authority on the future of work, and her research has helped redefine traditional approaches to human capital.

Her reputation will surely grow as a result of her brand new book, The Win-Win Workplace, How Thriving Employees Drive Bottom Line Success. The book is based in part on her experiences as CEO of Future Forward Strategies, a firm which provides labor market intelligence to businesses to help them unlock organizational potential. When she’s not busy with that work, she is lecturing at Harvard University and writing for leading journals, including the Harvard Business Review and Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Regular listeners may recall that we talked to Angela two years ago in Episode 51 about reimagining employee benefits and the social determinants of work, and I’m delighted to welcome you back to the program, Angela.

Dr. Angela Jackson

Van, I’m excited to be back here and thank you for the invitation.

Van

Yes, welcome back and congratulations on publishing your first book. What prompted you to write it and how do you describe it in a nutshell?

Dr. Jackson

You know, I can’t believe it’s been two years since we’ve been in conversation with each other, but I’d like to say back when I was talking to you before, I talked about the initiative I led around the Future of Work Grand Challenge. This book, The Win-Win Workplace, actually stems from that research. I got really curious about the people we were able to place in living wage jobs with the Future of Work Grand Challenge, and this was during the pandemic, I got curious about when these employees were placed, which ones were thriving and which ones weren’t.

When I began to follow up with them six months later, twelve months later, I found some people that maybe started at entry level positions, some of them had moved up, some of them were even going into management. I’d go to another set of workplaces and people had already stopped out. They had left or they were thinking about leaving. And what I began to see develop was this pattern around the places where employees were thriving.

You know, I saw investments around centering worker voice. I saw that the leadership in companies were doing deep training, not just for the skills for today, but really looking around the corner, seeing the skills of tomorrow. And Van, what I really found curious is that many of these thriving workplaces had a very specific initiative around measuring this. So they were using data and analytics in a way to drive their decisions around their people investments and also the programs they had and they could actually tell you how those had a correlation to lift on the bottom line.

Van

Ooh, I cannot wait to dive into these topics because I know retention has been a particularly important topic, especially in the healthcare area. So, Angela, one of your central recommendations is that the workplaces actively listen to employee feedback and incorporate it into decision-making because it creates a culture of trust and inclusion. We’d love for you to share some examples of how you’ve seen that play out successfully in the workplace. And I understand you brought 200 employers together recently in a win-win summit to discuss this.

Dr. Jackson

Yeah, we had the Win-Win Workplace summit in Chicago with 200 employers and one through line through all of them is that they were centering employee voices. When I say that, Van, most CEOs or leaders say, of course we listen to our employees. I mean, it’s in fact a billion dollar industry. But what we found out through our research is that while we were asking employees lots of questions — and this is a stat today — most workers will tell you that they don’t feel that their employers care about them.

So while we’re asking questions, my insight from the research was we weren’t asking the questions on what mattered most to the actual employees. And those thriving workplaces I saw, which I call win-win workplaces in the book, they would ask questions to employees about what are the barriers for you getting to work? What are the benefits that matter most to you? What are your ideas around how we could save money or we could make more money?

And they weren’t just reserving those conversations to the highest wage earners. They were doing that at all levels of the organization. And what was fascinating about that is that when employees were actually asked and listened to, they gave answers that were driving the business.

Now, I’ll tell you a quick story because I write about it in chapter one of the book. There was a door manufacturer in the Midwest in Illinois. New management came in and told  employees upfront that we’d like to make this company profitable in the next four to six years. If we make this company profitable, you’re going to share in those profits, but we need your ideas. And so they asked employee rank and file, how can we be more efficient? And there was one delivery driver who said, “I’m glad you asked.” He was like, “I’ve been given this GPS route and it’s the wrong way. It takes longer than the way I know. I’ve grown up in this town and I know this.”

Not only did they listen to him, but they asked that same question to all of the drivers and lo and behold, what they found was the drivers were right. There were shorter routes that were not picked up by GPS and it actually, in turn, made them more productive in terms of on-time deliveries.

The other thing I say and what I thought was evident from the conversations…when you went back and talked to those actual drivers, they’re like, finally, someone listened. I’ve been saying this for years, but they’re telling me be quiet and drive. What that opened up in those conversations were other opportunities for workers to actually share their ideas, because they felt like the ideas were actually going to be heard, considered, and acted on. And it is a real powerful lever — especially in this moment, when companies are trying to think about how they can be more effective and more profitable against the current headwinds — to really listen to employees at all levels, see them as experts at their position and where they are in the company, and that they have value that they can add by bringing them into some of the business and the strategy.

Van

Well, I was wondering if you could just give some advice on what systems need to be set up to capture that employee input. And kind of a part two of that is, I’m sure a lot of employers have the experience where once the employees give the input, they expect it to be acted on. So where’s the balance between giving voice but also figuring out how to prioritize what to act on?

Dr. Jackson

That’s a very good question. In all of these companies — and these were small companies to large companies — the listening was done by using current platforms that employers already had. The biggest thing is making sure you’re asking the right questions. So, really understanding from that employee’s perspective, what are the barriers to work? What are the ideas that they have from their seat that could help the company? And the second piece of it that I saw was the insight is the closing of the loop. So many times we ask for ideas, even if it’s as small as a suggestion box and someone’s putting it on a post-it note, we don’t close the loop. We don’t go back and say, this is what we heard. This is what we can do and his is what we can’t do right now, or this is what we won’t be able to do and let us bring you into the thinking. That closing of the loop is huge.

I write about this in a story in chapter nine of the book with the CEO of StoneAge. It’s an employee-owned company. And the CEO, Kerry Siggins, talks about this. When she first embarked on this, she said it was scary to ask people their opinions, because she goes, “What if I can’t do it all? What if I have to tell them no? What’s going to happen?” And one thing that she said that I see across leaders who are actually leaning in and asking employees about their ideas, is that when you bring them into your thinking, they may not understand the reason why or they may not agree with it, but they can respect that you actually closed the loop.

When I say they may not understand, an actual worker told me that. He said, “You know, I just appreciate that they took the time to come back to me and tell me the reason why. So many times, I see decisions made and I’m not even brought into the thinking on that.”

And that’s what I talk about in the book, Van, is just mutual respect. How do we build relationships across that and treat people like they are adults? Most adults know when they’re coming to the workplace, you’re not gonna be able to do it all, but when you bring them into your thinking, they feel respected. And that’s one key pattern that we saw in all of those thriving win-win workplaces. There was a level of respect and mutualistic relationships that were present.

Van

Angela, because the concept of employee feedback and engagement committees or other types of committees to improve processes, for example, are not new, but is there a heightened expectation in our workforce these days to be able to have voice? Are you seeing that pattern?

Dr. Jackson

They’re not new concepts, but what I’d push on here is, do we really listen to them? I’m gonna give you a quick example. I was working with a client and they stood up a group of younger professionals because they have a five generation workforce. And they said, we’re gonna get a new generation committee and we’re gonna ask for their advice on how we should think about hiring, how we should think about implementing programs.

This committee met over six months and they came up with a set of eight or nine recommendations that they’d like to see implemented. The CHRO at the time, you know, looked at those recommendations, he took them back to the management, and they decided that they weren’t going to do any of them. And in fact, they were going to go against one of the recommendations.

So, what the CHRO did is he went back to them and said, “I know that you spent the last six months looking at this and you gave us eight to nine recommendations. In fact, we’re going to do something completely opposite because that’s what management has decided.” That happens so often. And what that does in the process is it erodes trust. You don’t have the respect that’s there and you’ve not really explained it. It’s almost like ‘because we said so.’.

This company would tell you they deeply listened and they did for six to eight months. But then with one decision, they eroded all of that good work. The point that we’re trying to make in this book is those companies, even when the decisions are hard, even if they have to go a different direction, they’re giving employees an audience. They’re not saying because I said so, they’re bringing them to the thinking. They’re telling them why it’s a financial decision or why in this moment, it might be a political decision.

There’s some hard decisions being made every day and it’s the way we go about making those decisions and communicating them that makes all the difference.

Van

I was wondering if you could coach us a little bit on how to effectively close a loop especially if what is being implemented is different from what the recommendation is, or some hybrid solution in between.

Dr. Jackson

I’m going to give you a real world example that a lot of folks are facing right now. We know with the current administration, a lot of DEI programs are being eliminated. One company that had many different kinds of ERG groups, had eighty federal contracts. ERGs (Employee resource groups) are affinity groups that are along the lines of identity. So, it could be working parents. It could be the black employee resource group. It could be the care group for people with young children. And what this organization did, it centered employee voices, and the employees wanted them to create these employee resource groups so they could meet with other employees who have shared identities, shared challenges, to be able to support each other, to help each other, to navigate the world of not only work, but also life.

And so they were looking at these federal contracts and they received a letter and it said, if you don’t move away from these programs, you’re going lose all eighty contracts. That’s 80% of the organization’s funding. So, the CHRO was like, this is a terrible dilemma. She deeply believes in diversity, equity and inclusion. She was a champion. A lot of these programs came from the rank and file. They had done listening. They were employee centered. They were thriving, but she was faced in the management with a real dilemma.

If 80 % of their funding comes from government contracts and this administration says if you keep these programs we’re gonna take away 80 % of that funding, they could have said no to the administration, but the choice was that they would have to eliminate a lot of jobs in doing so. They went back to the rank and file and said, this is what we have to do. We don’t like it either, but this is the choice we have. Either we change these programs or we’re going to have to lay off a large percentage of the company. What should we do?

So, in that moment, in bringing them together, what happened in that company — and I’ve watched this and it’s really powerful — they’ve come together around this. They’ve come together and said, even though it’s not going to be labeled diversity, equity, and inclusion, we still believe in belonging. We still value every employee. And they’ve come out of it stronger versus management being in its own silo making decisions that they think are more paternalistic or what’s best for the employees. They brought them in together and said, OK, what’s the core reason we were doing these programs in the first place? How do we make sure we maintain the spirit of that and everything that we built even in the face of these political headwinds?

Van

So Angela, in your opening comment, you suggested that employers should treat investments in people with the same rigor as investments in product development or sales by having metrics. Tell us more about what you mean.

Dr. Jackson

So there’s this whole business out there, Van, around people analytics. And what’s been interesting about that is that we know that employers have a lot of data about their people, but as I sit in many boardrooms, as I sit in many C-suites, how many times are those people analytics looked at with the regular cadence that you look at product sales or service sales?

So, what we’re trying to put forth, and what we saw in the win-win workplaces, is that they put the effort and the measurement that they would do with a product and service into their people. When you say that human capital is the most valuable resource, how often are we talking about it? Are we measuring it just once a year? Are we doing it once a quarter? Are we actually looking more frequently… around monthly?

We know that headwinds are changing drastically. Have we checked in with our people to know how this is impacting them day to day? We hear about tariffs. How is that impacting the ability for your workforce to buy that new car that they need to go to work? What does that mean when they’re going to the grocery store, but we haven’t given them a raise since last year? Knowing the health of your employees and how they’re faring inside and outside the work has a really big impact on your business.

What we saw with these win-win workplaces is that they knew the metrics and all the metrics weren’t the same. What these C-suite leaders did was they identified two to three metrics that were really important for them to know if their workforce was healthy. They wanted to make sure that they knew that people were healthy outside; they want to know that they were financially in good shape being able to work; they want to know that if they were caregiving or their health status was strong, and this is something they talked about on a regular basis.

Up there with those metrics was training. How did they ensure that their incumbent workforce were trained for the jobs that they know they would need in the future? And how many people were trained? How many people did they need to train? These were on a dashboard that you see.

One example — and this is a great presentation that someone from Sanofi Pharmaceuticals gave, her name was Kathleen Mattie — she showed us at the Win-Win Summit a dashboard where they’re tracking these metrics on a weekly basis, checking in with their people. She’s able to type in and find out who are all the people trained on SaaS, and she can pull up the number of people down to the name who’s trained. She knows how many people aren’t trained. So if there’s a new technology that they’re planning to leverage, she’s able to see who in the workplace is doing it. Who’s ready? How frequently were they trained? How recent was the training?

And this is what I’m talking about in terms of people analytics. How do you know about their well-being and health? But also, how do you know who they are and how they’ve changed over their tenure in the organization so you can actually use that information, and that’s what these companies are doing, Van. They’re using this information to drive their business decisions, and that’s how they’re able to track the ROI of these programs — of the trainings, of the programs they have around well-being — because they know how they’re driving bottom line outputs.

Van

Well, you mentioned employee well-being and of course that’s so much more front and center ever since the pandemic. What are some key measures along employee well-being?

Dr. Jackson

So the big one that we look at is just health. We want to understand who’s taking advantage of health benefits? How many people aren’t taking advantage of health benefits? I was working with a hospitality company that was based in Brooklyn and they came because as we began to look at their metrics, although they offered health insurance, what they saw is that their younger demographic was not taking advantage of it and they want to lean in to understand more. What were they doing if they were not taking advantage of this? What was happening when they were getting sick? Where were they actually going?

What they found out is that these younger emerging professionals couldn’t afford the benefit and so they went without it. And what this company was able to do once they learned that, they were able to create a different type of plan so that these individuals would actually have access to health benefits. They did this via telemedicine. What they wanted to make sure is that if someone got sick, they weren’t just staying at home being sick, that they could actually get the medical attention that they needed. And this is the health that I’m talking about.

So many employers have this data. We know how many people are participating in the plan. We need to get curious why people aren’t participating in the plan and making sure that they get the help that they need if we’re going to actually have a healthy workforce that’s able to show up and be engaged in work.

Van

That’s another good example that you just shared. And you had talked about the training dashboard, who’s ready, who’s completed training, how recent was it. You had made another core point in the book, which is the value of building equitable pathways to advancement. Would you elaborate a little bit on that goal and what can be done to remove barriers?

Dr. Jackson

Yeah, absolutely. In the book, it’s chapter seven, we call it building a deep talent bench. What we’re seeing in this moment now is when I’m talking to CEOs and CTEAMs multiple times a week — and we researched over 1700 companies for this book — I’m going to say the quiet thing out loud: people aren’t talking about hiring right now. Things are tight. There’s a wait and see approach. That’s a forcing mechanism for companies to look at their incumbent workforce and say, how can they do more? How can we think about training them? And that’s the good part of it, right…they are looking at the incumbent workforce in a different way and seeing the value there.

The challenge is for so long, we haven’t followed people. When people come in, they give us a resume. We know what they did when they got hired, but we’ve not stayed in touch to see how they re-skilled, that they get a certificate, that they take a class. We haven’t really invested in those mechanisms to see how people have grown over their tenure.

Some of the best companies that we saw in Santa Fe are are checking in with their employees regularly and incentivizing them to talk about what they’ve learned — what community college class, what Coursera class, what experience they had — because they understand as their employees are growing within their job and even outside, all that skills and expertise can be brought to bear for the business. That’s what we’re seeing in this next wave of people analytics. It’s just not about collecting data. It’s really thinking about in this new world of work where new opportunities and job roles are being created every day that we understand what our deep talent bench looks like.

We know who’s in the C-suite today, but who’s next up? Who’s at the front lines that is learning and growing that we should keep our eye on — not because they’re socially connected or they’re good at water cooler talk – but because they’re actually putting in the work to grow. So, having that data to use to inform the business decisions makes all the difference and that’s why these companies, frankly, Van, are more profitable. They have higher retention because people feel like they’re being seen, that their expertise and the fact that they go out and learn new skills is being valued, and that they’re being systematically promoted because of that.

Van

So Angela, a lot of companies are wrestling, as you mentioned, with that practical example of the employee resource group and DEI. That example was about the company having 80% of its revenues coming from federal contracts. As you are thinking about the major pushback on DEI initiatives, what advice do you have for us listeners?

Dr. Jackson
So I’m probably going to say something a bit controversial here, Van, but for me, DEI…I’m never going to fall on the sword of an acronym. When we go back to what was the real intention behind DEI in the workplace, it was really created so people could actually show up fully and give their best self to their job. Why? Because that’s better for the company. And so when we think about looking around the corner, that’s ever more important today… that people can show up and that we’re addressing the barriers that they have to work.

I just want to just make this very plain. I live here in Massachusetts. We’ve got some of the worst traffic in the world, we have the most expensive housing, and we’re losing a lot of our young professionals because they can’t afford to live here. They can’t find workforce housing, and this is at all levels. I’m not talking about nontraditional talent. I’m talking about traditional and middle class folks who can’t afford to live here. I’m talking about middle class folks who, with the worst traffic in the country, it’s taking them two hours to get to work, and they’re spending upwards of 30 % of their after-tax income on transportation. These are real realities. And when we’re talking about the win-win workplace, what we’re seeing companies do is shift the paradigm.

In the past, we’d say, well, I give you a paycheck. You figure the rest of that out. You’ve got to get to work. What we’re seeing with these win-win companies, they’re saying, we understand that wages are not rising like inflation so what else can we do to ensure that our employees can be really engaged in work?

There’s one company that we have here that’s called Zelo. What they’re offering, and a couple of companies they work with, is transportation as a benefit. So think about the transportation buses you see in Silicon Valley, but they’re doing that for rank and file employees. Those who can pay more, pay more. Those who can pay less, pay less. But what they’re recognizing and what they’re signaling to their workforce is, we see you. We know that this is an impediment to getting in the job, and we want to work shoulder to shoulder to make sure that you can get here. When we talk about the win-win workplace, this is what we’re going to need more of.

These are the companies where you’re going to see higher retention because employees feel like they’re being taken care of. What we’re hoping for, and I write about in this book, is a reimagining of that social contract today and what that means in the day of AI, agentic AI,  tariffs, etc. We still need to know and understand deeply, what does it take for someone to show up at work? They need to be healthy. They need to be able to go into the doctor. They need transportation. They need safe housing that’s not three hours away from their work because then they’re worried about their kids if they have to go home in an emergency, and that happens. They need flexibility.

And so if you see employers who are looking at those old playbooks where like, ‘you have to come in, no excuses, three strikes, you’re out’, two things are gonna happen. One of my students at Harvard just told me he turned down a job three times with a company, but he was gonna have to take it because he has college loans. I said, “But how long are you gonna stay?” He was like, “I’m not staying. I’m trying to find the next job as soon as I can get it.” They’re gonna lose the A players, because A players will always have optionality.

Two, they’re going have a workforce that comes in sick and afraid. My colleagues at Harvard put out a report a few weeks ago that said that 32% of people with a critical illness in the workforce today, have missed a critical doctor’s appointment. How can someone who has a critical illness miss a doctor’s appointment? And you expect that person, be productive?

Yeah, we’re sleeping at the wheel if we think that’s true. So those old playbooks…we’re going to see companies still operate with them, but they’re going to lose their A players. They’re going to see people who are building new companies and re-imagining work surpass them. And we’re already seeing that right now.

So, I’m just encouraging people to look at these practices, not because it’s theory or it feels good. What we put in this book, Van, is we looked at real case studies, real ROI, and talked about increased share price.

We talked about sales. We talked about increased productivity. The companies and the case studies in this book… it’s not fluffy. It’s not soft. These are real hard numbers. More and more, when you’re looking to find value for companies, and you’re asking ‘how can I get my share price up by even fifty cents’, these things begin to matter at scale, and they are in our control.

Van

I am so glad you have put out that call to action to move from the old playbooks to the new playbooks and that you have written your first book, The Win-Win Workplace. Where can our listeners find a copy of your book?

Dr. Jackson

The book is available wherever books are sold. They can go to www.readwinwinworkplace.com  That site is evolving. We’re creating even more case studies than were in the book and we’re also introducing a community of practice around this. As I mentioned at the top of our conversation, we had 200 employers show up at our summit. There are a set of workplaces, despite all the headlines we’re hearing, that are doubling down on their investments in people, and they’re reaping those kind of bottom line inputs, and they want to be in community with each other, to share practices. You know, they’re not worried about losing their employees, they’re more concerned with when they come back.

That’s what the win-win workplace is about. It’s treating people good, it’s investing in them, it’s having those people, your workers, your most valuable employees, return shareholder price and profitability and if they leave and go somewhere else and they come back because you’re a good workplace, it’s a win for everybody. That’s what this new world of work, I hope, looks like in the future.

Van

Well, thank you very much, Dr. Angela Jackson, for being with us today as one of our few two-timers on this podcast. We’re so delighted to have you and see the fruits of all of your research and your writing.

Dr. Jackson

I’m honored, Van. Anytime, and I can’t wait to see you hopefully in person soon.

Van

That would be great. I’m Van Ton-Quinlivan with Futuro Health. Thanks for checking out this episode of WorkforceRx. I hope you will join us again as we continue to explore how to create a future-focused workforce in America.