The Win-Win Workplace, with Dr. Angela Jackson

Dr. Angela Jackson, the founder/CEO of Future Forward Strategies and a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, reveals the lessons learned from studying Fortune 500 companies, the REAL cost of turnover, why top-down decision making is dead, and the two main takeaways for small business owners.

About Dr. Jackson:

Dr. Angela Jackson is the founder of Future Forward Strategies, a labor market intelligence, design thinking, and strategy firm that assist leaders with transforming organizations and human capital infrastructure necessary for public, private, and non-profit organizations to maintain competitiveness while creating positive impact. Dr. Jackson is also a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education where she teaches the next generation of students about entrepreneurship in the education marketplace.

Dr. Angela Jackson is an expert in impact investing and Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG). As a leading voice on the future of work, Dr. Jackson has deep knowledge of the technology trends that are transforming organizations, and the human capital infrastructure necessary to ensure long-term profitability and sustainability.

As a Managing Partner at New Profit, a Boston-based venture philanthropy, she was the architect of the Future of Work Grand Challenge, an initiative that reskilled 25,000 workers impacted by COVID-19 and placed them in living wage jobs, and resulted in the development of an innovation ecosystem of over 60 employers, foundations and education operating partners. She is an advisor to Guild Education, Freedom Learning Group and Education Design Lab, and serves on the boards of Beyond 12 and Summer Search.

Dr. Jackson is passionate about modernizing the public education to employment system, and advancing academic and professional opportunities for women, people of color, and veterans. Her work and writing has been featured in CNN, Forbes, Fortune, Huffington Post, Newsweek, Stanford Social Innovation Review and Harvard Business Review.

Learn more at DrAngelaJackson.com.

The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

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(Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

Host
Dr Angela Jackson is the founder of Future Forward Strategies, a labor market intelligence, design thinking and strategy firm that helps leaders transform organizations and develop human capital infrastructure, as well as a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, teaching the next generation of students about entrepreneurship in the education marketplace. It’s wonderful to have you with us. Dr Jackson.

Dr. Angela Jackson
Wonderful, excellent. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for the invite.

Host
Your book, The Win Win Marketplace, How Thriving Employees Drive Bottom Line Results, is a practical guide for leaders looking to bridge the gap between engagement and performance by empowering employees, turning them into decision making, catalysts for equity and growth catalyst that word obviously got our attention. But let’s talk about how you found yourself in this space. How did you come to recognize this problem in the workforce? Certainly, you’ve studied it at an academic level, but did you encounter any of these issues firsthand earlier in your career, even as far back as your time with Viacom or Nokia?

Dr. Angela Jackson
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think there’s, there’s two pieces to this. Before I became a researcher and academic. To your point, it was based on my lived experience. I was, I was raised by my grandparents. My grandfather worked at a Chrysler factory, and it was like back in the day when it was like a union shop. You know, you started your job there. You worked for 2030, years, and then you left. And I remember at the time when he was about to retire, but Chrysler was having some economic issues, and so they had a reduction in force. And not only did my grandfather have to retire early, a lot of the people did in my community. And that really struck me, because at that time, as young as I was, I was, remember I was like 1011, years old, I just remember thinking how important work was in people’s lives. I saw when people had purpose and when they don’t, and even when I go back to that town now, I see once those good jobs left, what that has meant. And again, that’s always stayed with me, and even with my work in the private sector. You know, you shared. I worked at Viacom and Nokia, building new businesses domestically and internationally, and doing that work, that experience for my grandfather, I thought, you know, you just put your head down. The exchange between a company and a person is that they’re paying you. I was one of those people, you know, I was type A worked 1015, hours a week. You know, I had a million miles like up in the air the movie. And I literally, you know, had an accident, a car accident. And I remember after that car accident, I was on a work trip, and I thought to myself, Oh my gosh, I’ve been working 15 hour days. I have not seen my family. I’ve not seen my friends. This is not sustainable. And I remember going back to work after the doctor said, you know, take some time off, you know, try to keep your stress low. And my stress went back up. And the job at the time was like, You know what? We’ve got lots for you to do. Hopefully you’re okay. But, you know, get back to, you know, business as normal, and I just begin to think that there has to be another way, a more humane way, to do work. And that was my curiosity. Then I went on to found my own company, which I was able to create the culture, and then being an academic, being able to go back and really study that more professionally and academically.

Host
So we’ve talked to a lot of leaders on the podcast. We know that the classic top down decision making is no longer effective today, but a lot of leaders think it still is. What are some of the biggest misconceptions leaders have about employee engagement, and what are some of the most common mistakes companies are making based on those assumptions?

Dr. Angela Jackson
Well I love this question because, and I write about this in the Win Win workplace book. I call that the Win Win workplaces. This is where leaders are really thinking differently and reimagining those old norms of work. And to your point, the same time, we’ve got people who are just holding on with dear life, you know, to that world of work that worked for them. The biggest misconception around work is that pay is everything, and it’s kind of what we started this conversation with. You know, I give you a paycheck. You should be happy to be here. And that’s like the end of our social contract. But what we’re seeing with millennials and Gen Z and even, you know, some Gen Xers is that they are willing to take a pay cut to have more flexibility. They are willing to take a pay cut to work for a company where there’s values align. So the paycheck, yes, while still important, is not the only thing. And I think the biggest thing I’d like to share with your listeners are what we’ve heard from actually. Surveying workers, and again, we looked at over 1700 companies. We’ve talked to literally 10s of 1000s of workers. The biggest thing that we’re hearing from them is it’s the small things that matter most, than the free lunch at the office or the paycheck they’re looking to understand that the manager in front of them, that their employer, actually sees them as a human and what goes on beyond just the work, World of Work, and I’ll give you an example of that. Of I was called in by a fast casual restaurant, and they had set up a really new, generous 401, K plan, and they had opened it up to all workers at all levels. The CEO was concerned because more junior workers, some of the frontline workers, weren’t participating, and so he called me, and he’s like, Dr Angela, you know, I would have killed for a benefit like this. You know, we’re matching up to 10% this is amazing. You know, they’re gonna have money down the line. I said, Well, have you asked them? And he goes, Well, I haven’t. And that’s the work that we did together. We went out and surveyed those workers, and what we found was, while they appreciated the 401, K, they had other issues top of mind for them. You know, people are talking about that they were still trying to pay back their college loans, right? People talked about, you know, they had children and caregiving, and they were killed giving for elderly parents and and so what we heard from them is that they needed access to more cash today. And so that CEO did two things. One is the dollars that he was going to put in the match of 401, K, he gave those same employees the optionality to use those in ways that would matter most to them. So they allowed them to use them on child care to pay back college tuition and other like kind of life emergencies when they happen. I’ll give you an example. There was another worker whose husband died unexpectedly. They were able to use that fund to actually pay for the funeral. And we went back six months later and interviewed the employees again just to ask, you know, How are things at work? You know, how do you feel like your employer cares about you? And this is one of those kind of questions a lot of researchers ask that percentage went up dramatically, and it wasn’t even about the number. It’s about the comments that people said. People were like, I know that this employer cares about me because they did x, they helped me with my transportation. And I think the biggest thing that we need to understand is when we actually asked employees what they want, what matters most to them, and then in our ability as an employer to say what we can do and what we can’t do, that’s what workers are looking for today. They want to know that they matter and that the work that they do actually matters. And I think it was him realizing that what worked for him as a 65 year old man, right? Is very different. If your workforce is in their 20s and 30s, you know, we’ve got people are thinking about their families, thinking about buying their first home apartments. That’s a different, very different life stage. And I think as leaders, more senior leaders, we need to take a step back. You know, how we grew up, you know, professionally, 80s, 90s, you know, 2025 is drastically different. And so unless we’re really acknowledging that as leaders, there’s always going to be this difference or friction that we see between generations, right? Because the context really is completely different. And so using that old playbook, it’s just going to really put you in a position where you’re left behind. Or I tell you know, CEOs all the time, you’re going to lose your A players, a players always have optionality. You know, in a tight labor market, in a not tight labor market, these people always have options.

Host
So obviously, empowering employees in this way is going to be beneficial psychologically and in terms of equity and morale. But a lot of our listeners are going to want to know the more tangible impact, the profit impact. Explain how this really can be a profit driving tool, not just a compliance or an HR thing.

Dr. Angela Jackson
Well, and that was the most kind of interesting point that came from the research, and we just replicated this study with Fortune 500 companies back in October of last year. So we looked at which of these companies were implementing the strategies that we advise in the book around centering an employee voice, making sure that you are giving them benefits that matter most to them, and some of the other principles. A couple of things that we saw when we looked at private companies, the ones that were implementing these practices, had a higher share price, they also had a lower retention rate. And when you talk about the cost of turnover, which I would argue, a lot of employers don’t really know, the real cost, the the idea that you can retain people for six months, longer, a year, longer, two years, especially in some of these high turnover, entry level roles. We’re talking about savings of millions of dollars that these companies were saying. I tell a story of one company in the book around centering worker voice. It’s called ch I doors. What they went in and did with their workforce. This was a manufacturing plant. They create doors. They went in. The new management said, Okay, we bought the company. We’d love to, you know, over the next four or five years, turn this company around, make a profit. We’d love all of your ideas. And they went to some of the drivers, and I remember, I talked to one of the drivers, and he goes, You know, I’d give him my ideas before they didn’t listen. I decided to give, you know, this new management the benefit of the doubt. And basically, what he was saying was the route that you’ve been given. On the GPS is wrong. And not only that, they check his route, but they checked all of the routes, and what they found out was the software was actually there was a glitch. The routes were wrong. There were new streets in place, and this was kind of an old model. And what they were able to do was not only save the money right, save the frustration from the workers, but then they took those dollars saved, and they said to the employees, What other ideas do you have to make us more productive? And you know, another person came with the idea of, you know, why don’t we put, you know, air conditioning in the plant. And what the management had seen is, during the summers It was hot, wasn’t good, ventilation. Productivity went down. They took this idea of productivity went up. So I would say to the cynics in the audience is one, if you’re working with a company, first go in and ask them how much turnover cost. See if they could actually give you a figure, even if it’s wildly off. Talk about what would happen if you could reduce that by 10% think about the dollars that are there. What we saw with these companies is that, again, when they had 80, 90% turnover in certain roles. When we talk about call centers dropping, that by 20% we saw by one reimagining benefits. We talked about using training. We call it in the chapter, developing a deep talent bench, showing people that there’s actually a career path. These things had tangible impact on the financial line.

Host
Again, not trying to be cynical, but a lot of our leaders are also small business owners. They might be thinking, Okay, it’s easier for a big company or a corporation to put these kind of changes in place, but that doesn’t really apply to me. How can small businesses or resource constrained businesses adopt these strategies as well?

Dr. Angela Jackson
So two things, I just spoke to 1000 small business owners. I’ll tell you two things. Small business owners, it’s actually easier for you to do this than large companies. So and the reason why large companies are matrix, the costs are extraordinary, and when we talk about small and medium sized businesses, the competitive advantage is that you are small and medium, that you can actually be in proximity with your team. And a lot of the practices that we saw here, they didn’t cost extra money, per se, it was a reallocation of resources based on what employees actually met. So that’s number one, listening doesn’t cost money. It takes time, and now, when we talk about, you know, analytics, you can do a Google survey, five to six questions, asking people what they want, put that in chat, GPT, and you actually have the results. And what we saw, going back to that idea of time, is a lot of times employees are asked what they want, what they need, and the loop is not closed. And so we spend billions of dollars on listening, right? Employee, listening. But you’ve got most people who say that their employer doesn’t care about them, and so it’s these small and tangible things that a small and business, small and medium sized business, can do. One, you’re the CEO. If someone goes to work for a big company, they’re not going to be able to work shoulder and shoulder with the CEO or the founder. Two, they actually have a chance to advance and get to know all areas of the company because of the size of it. So thinking about how you use that as a benefit to actually engage people, maybe you can’t increase their wages, but maybe what you can do, and we saw again, 30% higher retention with companies who gave career opportunities and training small and medium sizes can actually do that, and we need more people who are cross trained to really more deeply understand the business. So I would push back and say, small and medium sized businesses, this could actually be your competitive advantage, where someone will go get lost at Amazon, you’ll know their name, and they’ll know that someone is actually investing in them.

Host
So if it is easier for small businesses to put this into place, what are some of the barriers or particular complications that larger businesses have enacting this? What do they need to know as far as how they can get the ball rolling on these sort of things that might be more unique to a business of their size?

Dr. Angela Jackson
Yes, so absolutely, when you’re looking at small, larger businesses, the challenges, and we’ve seen this over and over time, that you may have leadership buy in at the top at some of these practices, but how they’re felt in the middle of the company is very different. And most people tell you, your experience of any job is really based on who manages you. And so what we’ve seen time and time again and when we did this research with over 1700 companies, you know, we saw people companies that did well, the ones where these practices didn’t stick. We had a mandate at the top. And then in the middle, you find managers who might still be again, not investing, not doing the listening, not taking the insights, and I think, most importantly, not measuring the impact. Then the biggest thing that we say about any of these practices, to know they work, you need to have a baseline and that you need to be measuring this periodically. In the Win Win workplace, we had certain employers pulsing and checking in with their employees on a monthly basis, not all of them, but they would do small percentages. And the reason why is that once they implement. At one of these strategies, they want to understand who is it working for and under what conditions, and who is it not working for? What do they need to do differently? And if it’s not working, how do you try again and go back and think about re envisioning this? What we saw with these large companies are that some of these managers, when you went and actually interviewed them, they say, Okay, we know that our employers, that we should, you know, get away from hiring with degrees. We should look at more skills based hiring, which showed, you know, higher productivity. But I’m responsible for that person, and I want to hire the best person. And so unless large companies are really thinking about the change management at the center of the organization, it’s going to be hard to make these types of shifts. And I write a case study of one global financial firm, which I had to anonymize. But one thing they saw was so important with their middle managers. And this organization has over 50,000 middle managers, they had basically put them into thirds. They had a high performing third they had a kind of middle of the road that were doing all the things. They had an underperforming kind of bottom and this was based on assets under management at the bank locations that they had, and what they were able to do through surveys and employee listening, they were able to gage that managers who had employees who rated them more highly had higher assets under management. And so that indicator of how someone’s direct reports felt about them really showed impacted the assets that the bank had in each branch. And so what they were able to do was to realize that they needed to do more training on their actual managers. And this is something that we’ve talked about. Many people are promoted into management because they’re a great individual contributor, not because they’ve been managed or a people manager, a good people manager, you know, myself included, when I think of my early 20s. And what this bank did, to their credit is that they actually did a manager training for anyone that was promoted or for anyone who’s brought externally from the organization. And so they started to say, what does it mean to be a manager at insert company’s name? And so they went over the values, they went over the ideas around hiring and how we find the best talent. And they realized, when doing that, that third of managers that were underperforming, two thirds of them went up to performing, and then a portion of those went up to high high performing. And then I always tell people, nothing’s perfect. We had about 20% of those people who exit the organizations they shouldn’t have been managers, and this is something that we really have to realize and grapple with. And this company’s thinking real time about, how do you promote people without having to promote them into managers? Because, again, everyone doesn’t need to be a people manager. And is there a world of work that you can advance without having that type of responsibility,

Host
You know, change, and especially this type of change, change is slow. What is something that our listeners can do today, like, what’s step one, literally, today or this week?

Dr. Angela Jackson
Yeah, change can be slow in organizations, but what we can do is get some quick wins right. And what we saw with the Win Win workplaces, there’s nine strategies we talk in the book that showed a correlation to lift on the financial side. I want to be clear that not one employer that we researched was doing all of the things. Most of them started with what was either a problem of practice that they had around talent or an opportunity that they saw with talent, and then they applied one of the strategies. And why that’s important is because many of them started with just a pilot. They wanted to show if we’re thinking about hiring differently, what would that look in one department? I’ll give you a quick example. There’s a hospital New York Presbyterian. They had a really hard time in high turnover with nurses, and so they said, we know what we want to make sure that we’re retaining the nurses that we have. They started with a lot of employee listening. The one thing that they found out, and this is the case with many hospitals and healthcare centers across the country and globally, that the shifts you get are based on your tenure. So those who have been at work longer, they get the prime shifts during the day. Those who are newer, you know, get the midnight overnight shifts. And what they saw was that they were turning people out because of that. The shift that they were able to do was to be more fair in their scheduling, and meant that everyone had to rotate right through the third shift, the second shift and the first shift. They were able to pilot that with just one department. They were able to see in a year market like they were able to retain 96% of their nurses. That is incredible when you think about the nursing shortage. And so getting those early indicators, they went from one department to a second department. Now they’re up to 12 departments, and the CHRO there has now mandated that for all departments. And this is what I’m talking about. You can do a pilot, get some indicators on what it’s working share that with others. So you’re building buy in, and then go to your next department. Go to your next pilot. We need to understand right like and many of us who sit in these HR seats and we’re talking to our people, we say, Okay, what does mine to do right now? Now, and I think the biggest thing that we can do as HR leaders, and as I talk to them across this country, you know, many of the HR leaders are losing a lot of their budget to agentic. Ai, a lot of them have pressures to fill positions, and we know that pay isn’t rising. So what can we do if there’s an HR person listening right now, I would advise them to get with your business unit leader, get with the one that’s having the hardest time filling positions that has the highest turnover. And these are the ones that you should experiment with. These are the ones who are feeling the pain, who will be more apt to actually partner with you and want to be creative. And then once you get that proof point, you can begin thinking of other areas where you can apply it.

Host
Dr Jackson, where can our audience learn more and get a copy of the Win Win workplace or get in touch with you?

Dr. Angela Jackson
Well, two ways. So one is go to read Win Win workplace.com that’s where you can find the book, or wherever books are sold. If you get the book from read Win Win workplace.com you get a signed copy from me. You also get a discussion guide on how to use the book, and then they can go to the Win Win workplace summit.org. This is an annual summit that we do with people leaders, where we’re bringing together who are actually practicing these practices, measuring the ROI. We’re building a community around how you do this work, so we can actually, you know, together, think about how we reimagine workplaces for thriving.

Host
Perfect. Dr Jackson, thank you so much for making some time for us.

Dr. Angela Jackson
I love it. You’re so you’re so good and very succinct. I really appreciate it was a pleasure to meet you.