Bill Kerr: The premise behind people analytics is simple enough. By taking the pulse of its workforce, an organization can identify problems and opportunities. Like any tool, it works best when the user knows how to handle it and wields it responsibly. If you’re asking the wrong questions, looking only for predictive data, or breaching employees’ privacy and trust, chances are the results won’t be positive. Done right, the exercise can provide important insights to give workers more of a say in the process. Covid-19, the Black Lives Matter movement, digital transformation, and the rise of the gig economy all raise the stakes. But how can businesses and workers benefit from this emerging blend of social science and data?

Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m your host, Bill Kerr. My guest today is Didier Elzinga, founder and CEO of Culture Amp, an HR analytics platform company based in Australia. As Didier explains, Culture Amp aims to distill decades of organizational development research into an accessible platform and services. Its customers include Airbnb, McDonald’s, Oracle, and Etsy. We’ll talk about the importance of organizational culture and how companies can profit by fostering employee wellbeing. We’ll also look at how people analytics is changing the role of the CHRO and business leadership, generally. Before founding Culture Amp, Didier ran Hollywood visual effects company Rising Sun Pictures, whose credits include Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, The Hunger Games, and Superman. Welcome to the podcast, Didier.

Didier Elzinga: Thank you, Bill. Pleasure to be here.

Kerr: Didier, you may be the first person we’ve had on this podcast with some connection to Hollywood, and so you’re going to raise some of our sort of social scores here. Tell us about your background and how you came from Hollywood to start Culture Amp.

Elzinga: Yes, my pleasure. So I am a software engineer by training. And straight out of uni, I started at what was then a very small company—six people doing computer-generated imagery, websites, things like that. And over the next 13 years, I grew with that organization and ended up as an artist, as a supervisor, and then, ultimately, as the CEO, as we went on to work on all those films. And we became one of the top Hollywood visual-effects companies in the world. And so I love making films, I love image making, I love storytelling. But the more I did it, the more I realized that, at its core, the thing that I cared about the most was, actually, people and culture. And I used to joke that, as a CEO, I was a glorified psychiatrist. And so there became this opportunity where it was, if I wanted to make a big enough change in the world, was I going to make that by working on Expendables 27? Or was I going to make that by actually turning back and looking at this field of people and culture and then going back to my roots of software and combining those two to start a company?

Kerr: So tell us a little bit about the platform that you’ve created, and what are some of the common use cases and themes.

Elzinga: The mission for us at Culture Amp is to create a better world of work, and the Culture Amp platform is a platform to help organizations to do that. We help them understand what matters to their employees and then take action on that. So, collect data anywhere in the employee life cycle—whether it’s people joining, leaving, engagement surveys, pulse surveys, culture surveys—and then we take that all the way through to the end of, what do you do with that? How do you act on that? What’s the highest return on action if you need to focus your energy and efforts? And how do you guide people on that journey? We also do the other side of this, which is helping people humanize the way they think about performance management. So if you think about employee feedback as being organizational listening, how do we give individuals the same tools? How do we enable them to collect feedback, to give feedback, to use that data and that information to craft their careers and their journeys inside organizations? And then lastly, how do you take all of that information and use that to really drive employee development? So when we think about the process of, if we’re going to grow our companies, we have to grow our people. What’s the software platform to support that? So that’s the Culture Amp platform end to end.

Kerr: And you have part of this that’s very company specific, but part of it it’s also uniting the information that you’re collecting from all your clients around the world. Talk to us about that independent data set and the benchmarking exercises.

Elzinga: So we work with over 4,000 companies around the world, and so we have the world’s largest independent data set on what’s going on inside those organizations. We have millions and millions of data points of people on the experiences that they’re having as they’re going through the world of work. And particularly in the last year, that’s been incredibly valuable to start to see, as people’s perceptions around return to work and all these things have changed. So if you think about engagement, what motivates people? How engaged they are in the office? How do they feel about their managers? How are they thinking about communication? Et cetera. We’ve done a lot of work in the inclusion and diversity space as well, so looking at attitudes around those things. And we collect all of that data. And, actually, if you go to our website—if you go to cultureamp.com—you can actually access most of those benchmarks and see all of the different regions, all the different segments, all the different industries that we have benchmarks for, and what we’re learning about all of those. And this is important, because often organizations get in, and they get their data back, and they’re like, “Okay, what do I do now?” A big part of that is looking internal, but some of that is also looking external and going, “Well, is this a problem that just we’re having? Or is this a problem that’s happening for our whole industry or for everyone?” And particularly, as we’re navigating new things, sometimes that understanding of what experience other people are having is critical in knowing how you also need to respond.

Kerr: Who is your first typical contact at a customer client site? Is it the CHRO? Is it a vice president or manager of a division? How’s Culture Amp being integrated into their companies?

Elzinga: The usual use case is, it’s a head of people. And so it could be the CHRO, it could be somebody that reports to the CHRO. And often they’ve been tasked with either trying to address an issue, like, “We’re losing too many people, attrition is too high,” or they’re trying to do a cultural transformation, or often they’ve come into the company because the company knows that. And so one of the first things they’ve done is say, “Okay, well, what’s going on? How do I know what’s actually working, what’s not working inside the organization?” That is often when they’ll reach out to us, say, “Okay, we want to use the Culture Amp platform to do this and to understand where we might focus our energy.” And so it becomes a bedrock tool for that leader of people to both work out where to focus their energy but also to determine what works, what doesn’t work. Are we getting a return on the things that we’re doing? Should we be adjusting our plan as we go?

Kerr: And to what degree do you focus on kind of monitoring, implementing action plans? You can imagine first you’re creating awareness of where an organization is. You could also be tracking sort of groups and people over time and how their attitudes and behaviors are changing. How far down that stack do you go?

Elzinga: So we go all the way down the stack. I think the data and the listening is critically important as a starting point, because without it, you’re often flying blind. A platform like Culture Amp brings data to the table. It allows you to sit down and say, “Well, I know we thought this was working, but if you look at the data, it’s not.” Or “We really do have this issue. This issue we thought was a big problem. Actually is a massive problem, and that’s what the data is telling us to do.” But of course, if you’re just asking all the time, and you’re not doing anything, nothing’s going to happen. So in the platform, we help people go, “Here’s all of your data. Firstly, where should you focus? What does the data tell you will make a difference? And then once you decide what it is that you want to focus on, how do we help you go on that journey with your employees?” And so what we’ve done is we’ve pulled together thousands and thousands of insights from the research, from the organization, from research from our team, but also from all of our customers of what have other people done that made a difference and move the needle on the thing that you’re focused on. So we sort of crowdsource all of that and share that back to people at the point when they need it. And then actually going through and doing that with people and then completing the process. And we often talk, it’s a loop. It’s not like you only do it once. It’s you ask, you focus, you act, and then you ask again.

Kerr: Yeah, it’s fascinating because it sounds like under the Culture Amp “hood,” so to speak, you’ve got both big data going on, you actually listen to academic research—which I commend you for, being an academic, we like to hear that occasionally—but then you have almost bespoke parts of the solution. Then you have kind of this experience of over 4,000 customers, and you can kind of make commonality points across what people have experienced and how they’ve been able to improve.

Elzinga: Yeah. That becomes so important when the world shifts, because we’re now starting to see some really interesting research about what the employee experience has been like for the last 18 months, as we’ve gone through this whole Covid experience. But what we’ve been able to do with customers is actually collect and share that data in real time—“Here’s the perceptions of going back to work across your industry. Here’s what people in your country are feeling, generally, so that you can compare that with your own.” You’re not having to wait one or two years to see the research come out. And then two years later, we’ll also be pulling that research in when that comes out, too.

Kerr: Yeah. Well, I’m sure many listeners would love to hear what’s the latest pulse on Covid-19, on the future of work-from-home, work-from-anywhere type arrangements and the flexibility going forward, and other attitudes about the future of work.

Elzinga: Boards, executive teams, everybody is actually talking about, “What are we going to look like as we sort of start to come back from Covid-19?” And what the data’s telling us is not very many people want to come back to full-time in-the-office work. Less than 20 percent of people want to be in the office five days a week. Now, most people still want to come back to the office in some shape or form. There’s a desire for human connection. There’s one big group of people that just want to be around other people because they get energy from it, and it’s something that is really powerful and meaningful to them. There’s another group of people that really want to get back to the office because there’s nowhere for them to take the quiet call at home. And so the idea of having a space where they can do that is fantastic. But they want to do it in a more flexible way. And it’s not as simple as just going, “We’re remote first; everybody works remotely” or “Everybody has to be back in the office.” The future, I think, is some sort of hybrid. And one of the ways that I think this is actually going to play out is almost an inversion of what the office has been. So if you think about historically, an office was place where you sat and did work, and then when you wanted to create or collaborate, you went offsite. I think increasingly what we’re going to do is think about, well, if you’re just sitting at your desk doing work, you can do that at home. But if you want to create and collaborate, come into our office, come into our hub where we can come together. And that’s going to necessitate change in the way we run our offices.

Kerr: One of the big trends the future of work is toward kind of part-time hybrid arrangements, gig workforce interconnections. Do you survey out from the full-time-equivalent type workforce into the gig workplace? Are there interesting trends about how gig workers are looking toward the future?

Elzinga: Yes. We do and we get that through a lot of our customers who have all of those people in their workforces. So not surprisingly, casual workers are more keen to come back to work than full-time people are. So what we’re seeing in many places is almost a hierarchy of needs. There’s a portion of the workforce right now that is very focused on safety and security. And to a degree, they’re actually willing to sacrifice their own safety and security to achieve that. As you go further up—so as you go to part time and then you go to full time—full-time people are the people that are the least interested in coming back to the office, because they’re the ones that are going, “Oh, actually this is a whole new world. This is different.” And we’re starting to see those shifts. Like, one of the big changes, when you look at the data, is that historically people tended to fall neatly into one camp or another—like, you talked about hybrid work. So it was, “Oh, I’m either in the office full time, or I come into the office two days a week, or I do this.” What we’re seeing now is people are like, “Well, I’m happy to come into the office full time sometimes, and then other times, I only want to come in one day a week. And I might not know which of those it is going to be, because I want the ability to see what comes.” And so we’re seeing the data start to shift in that direction as well.

Kerr: One of the things you’ve written about is employee wellbeing as a holistic concept. So can you talk us through what employers can do to promote that? And is there a business case for doing so?

Elzinga: This is another big topic that we’re starting to see, particularly when you think about wellbeing as inclusive of mental wellbeing. So depression as an illness has now, I think, taken over cardiac as the No. 1 cost burden for the world worldwide. And historically, if we think about mental health, I think the organization’s perspective was, “I hope no one in my organization has a mental illness.” And what we’ve seen over the last 10, 15 years—and what we’ve seen particularly through Covid, as it puts people under so much pressure—is, that’s a completely unrealistic expectation. Everyone is going through something. All of our organizations have people struggling to some degree with anxiety, with depression, with a lot of these things. And our workplaces are often, actually, contributing to that and not being as supportive and powerful as they could be in helping. So we’re seeing organizations start to turn around and go—it’s not just a matter of, “Hey, if I help with my wellbeing, I’ll get greater profit.” There is definitely a connection between an understanding of wellbeing and high performance, but there’s also the reverse. We’ve been blind to the cost of people not being able to cope in our organizations and suffering through sleep and physical ailments. We’ve done a whole bunch of research around how people’s attitudes around wellbeing have changed. And so one of the big things pre-pandemic was people wanting more flexibility, more flexibility at work. And so we’ve seen that lift through Covid, as everyone’s moved home. And so that’s been good thing. But on the other side, we’ve seen people find it harder and harder to switch off, harder and harder to create boundaries around their work. So even though they’re at home working flexibly, they’re now actually working more than they’ve ever worked before. And they’re finding it really hard to detach. And we’ve also found that, as they’re pulled out of the offices, and they don’t have necessarily some of those social interactions and social contracts that they used to have, they’re not actually enjoying their job all the time. So we’ve seen how you feel about your job, itself, jump up the charts in terms of what is a predictor of how you’re feeling about your wellbeing. And it’s kind of interesting that somebody might go, “I was actually quite happy with my job when I was doing it in the office, but now that I’m sitting at home, and that’s all I have, this isn’t actually what I enjoy doing anymore.”

Kerr: I know many managers are terrified of trying to talk about some of these things. They have all the intentions and desire to be able to help their employees, but it’s just something that business school and other environments really have not adequately prepared them for. Can Culture Amp help make those conversations stronger, better? In what way does it empower the manager to be able to intervene on behalf of the employees?

Elzinga: That’s my big thing at the moment. The role of the manager has gotten really, really hard. We did some research with RedThread Research, and they showed that 30 percent of the conversations that managers are having today were not conversations that anyone even expected them to have to have two years ago. It’s talking about race, it’s talking about politics, it’s talking about climate. It’s talking about people’s personal anxiety and insecurities. And a lot of managers are ill-equipped for that. And so when we look forward—when we talk about how do we build a compelling culture, how do we build a more successful organization?—a lot of it has come down to, how can we equip managers to deliver on that? How can we equip them to uplift the capability of the people around them? So one of the ways that we help inside Culture Amp is that we have a part of a platform called Skills Coach, where we’ve collaborated with a company out of New York called LifeLabs. So Dr. LeeAnn Renninger and Tania Luna, we’ve worked with them for years. And they are sort of leaders in the space of how to change behavior, particularly around key managerial skills. And so we’ve been taking their content, looking at what our data is telling us managers need. So they need to be better at giving feedback. They need to learn how to use coaching mindsets and coaching questions. Adaptability and resilience. Strategic planning. Those types of things. And then we’ve taken that content and, through the platform, we deliver it to people in under two minutes—once a day, under two minutes, in a sort of behavioral-science–driven way—to actually anchor that in behavior change because it’s not just enough to go, “Yeah, here’s your skill. Here’s a document, read that and you’ll be good at it.” You actually have to take people on a journey if you’re going to help them do this over time. And software is a lever to do that at a scale we just haven’t been able to do it before.

Kerr: That’s powerful. A couple of points we’ve touched on—race—and, in the wake of the George Floyd case, tell us about diversity inclusion initiatives and how can Culture Amp sort of aid a workplace in these important issues?

Elzinga: Where we often start with organizations is helping them understand what are the different experiences that your people are having. So can we use the data that you have available to start to look at those experiences and look at your majority-minority splits? It could be gender, it could be race, it could be invisible disability, it could be anything, could be age, education. And then you look at the data, and you start to go, “Oh, this group of people is having a profoundly different experience. What can we do to change that? How can we help them have the experience that we want them to have?” At its core, what you’re doing is, you’re defining an experience you want your people to have, and then you’re measuring if it’s occurring. We’ve done some research in the backend showing that companies that were making progress on this—companies that were committed to that and were actually creating that experience with their people—were the companies that snapped back the fastest through the last year and a half in the Covid crisis. So interestingly, there was a short-term, almost negative correlation with share price on whether organizations cared about and were invested in the belonging of their people. But there was a medium-term, very strong, positive correlation that they were the organizations that adapted the fastest, that responded the best, that went the furthest with the people that they have. And so we help organizations understand that experience and then start to equip people with the things they need to do it to move forward. A lot of organizations right now are just focused on, “Are we hiring enough people of the right demographics?” But they’re maybe not spending enough time going, “What are we doing to create the culture so those people are going to want to stay?”

Kerr: You’re collecting a lot of data, individual-level data. Talk to us about ethical issues with data—who owns the data that you’re collecting for a company—and how do you talk to employees about the privacy of what they’re providing you with?

Elzinga: We’ve always seen privacy—and, particularly, confidentiality—as critical to the platform, because what we’re trying to do is create a space for people to tell organizations what the organization needs to hear. So from the very beginning, that’s been built in; that, if we’re asking you to complete a survey, we need a certain amount of specificity on where that data’s come from—in terms of which department or which team or which tenure band does this information come from—so the organization can properly focus its energy and efforts. But we’re going to aggregate that data up. We’re never going to show that individual response. We have to think about things like GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation]. We have to think about things like right to be forgotten and so on. But we also have to think about how we train people to use that data in aggregate. So the first thing is, we want to help create a confidential space by not just sharing what Bill said, but sharing what 100 people said. But when people are consuming that data, not everybody’s well equipped to understand how to use that in a safe and effective way. And, of course, that’s statistical learning. We can tell what’s going to happen to the population, but that doesn’t mean we know what your experience is going to be. And we see that play out time and time again, where somebody... we can tell you in the data that women are more likely to leave your engineering team than men, and that can be true. But then, if that gets delivered to a manager, and that manager has a team of five people, and they have four men, one woman, the manager will want a report that says she’s at risk. Mary is not at risk. One hundred Marys are at risk. But Mary, herself, is not. And it’s not an appropriate way to use that data to try and make that conclusion. And so I think there’s a lot of ethical questions to be asked on us in the HR space—how are we helping people use this data? How are we equipping them to use this data? And it’s not going to be easy.

Kerr: Are there ways that you try to work with organizations to create safeguards so that the wrong inference isn’t made about Mary and that people are using data in the correct way?

Elzinga: We do a lot of sophisticated analytics beneath the hood to help people to go, “You’ve got limited resources, where do you apply those resources?” So where is it most likely to use those resources? In terms of helping people do that properly, the core of that is obviously people science, so everything we do is rooted in people science. We have a team of people who come from that background, and a lot of their job is not only to help our customers, but also help us as we build the product and go, “Actually, is that a safe thing to do? Should we be suggesting that? Or should we be suggesting something different? How might we frame this so that somebody will approach it in the right way in the right mindset?” And we also do that in terms of consulting some of their customers, where they’re, like, “Oh, we should do this.” And we’re like, “That actually makes sense at one level, but let us just walk you down the line so you can see what the conclusions of that will be.” And there’s a little bit of that process. And when we go back to talking about diversity, inclusion, take that up another notch, because then you’re really starting to talk about some things where you have to be very careful around people’s views of identity. These things can sometimes be fluid. There’s fear of reprisals. In some countries there’s actual legal issues that people may have if certain views are known. And so we have to be very careful with how we support and prepare that data. So we try and do as much of that thinking upfront as we can so our customers don’t have to. And going back to what you talked about at the beginning, that’s one of the benefits of doing this across so many companies, is that we get to kind of aggregate those best practices and give them to people.

Kerr: Yeah. You work with some very large companies that will obviously have operations in Europe and the US and all around the world. Do they tend to want to work with you in a consistent way across all of those environments? Or do the operations in Europe that are under GDPR play it differently than what is happening in the US? Or are most of the solutions localized, or are they more whatever the main common denominator would be across the operations?

Elzinga: It’s a bit of a mix. I mean, I think a lot of people will want to present... will want to have some sort of shared view on these things. And I was speaking last night with Nico Barea from Unilever. And so they are 150,000 people, globally. They work on our platform. And he was talking about one of the powerful things that they’ve really focused on is this idea that the only way to do stuff at scale is through simplicity. They’ve really focused on, “How do we create simple systems that people can adapt, can change to their local usage?” That said, there are specific things that you need to be aware of. So we have a European data center and a US data center. That’s important for different customers—where their data is based. If you’re collecting demographic data around diversity inclusion metrics, for example, in the Nordic regions you’re not actually allowed to keep that data, which is different to what it is in somewhere else. Most organizations are trying to do the same things. To start with, “Where are we? Have we got reliable sensing? Do we know what’s going on?” Once they kind of get that bedrock in place, then using that data they focus energy and effort. And this might be a 12- to 18-month journey just to build that piece out. And then, once they’ve got that, they can then start focusing on, “Okay, are the things we’re doing making a difference? Can we show an ROI on the projects? Can we show that the training we’re doing is leading to the outcomes that we thought we were going to lead it to?” And then finally—we sort of talk about this as a people-maturity curve—the sort of the Zenith of all of this is pulling that all together to start saying, “Well, actually, what are we going to do in the future? And how might we redesign our organizations to be more successful?” And I think you’re seeing now the companies that have been able to do that well are the companies that have adjusted the fastest and come back into this new world and are thriving while others might still be stuck in surviving.

Kerr: Didier, you’ve taken us on a very fascinating journey about 4,000 clients and their experience. I want to bring you back closer to home. You’re an entrepreneur running Culture Amp. How did Covid-19 affect your company, its work environment? How did you, as a leader, step in to make sure that your employees were engaged? Talk to us about the journey of the last 18 months. And then, what do you see as the big events for Culture Amp in the near future?

Elzinga: I think, like everybody, we go back a year ago. We didn’t know what was going to happen. We were looking at the world imploding. And I remember talking to the board saying, “Is this going to last six weeks, six months, six years? We don’t know.” And I think we really probably have to go back to the world wars to see a situation where everyone in the world was dealing with the same set of issues at a level that just kind of cut through everything. And so last year we kind of paused for a bit—early last year—and then what we saw, as we got into the second half of the year, is there were certain areas like online collaboration that just exploded overnight. So companies that went from having 1,000 users to having 1 million users in a week. People and culture was not bad. It wasn’t like there was a switch flipped on Wednesday. What happened, instead, was, every month, every week, every day, it just got a little louder and a little bigger. And then what we start to see is, we saw things like the George Floyd murder. We saw things like Asian hate and violence. We saw things like a lot of the geopolitical issues. And all of these things start to unravel and explode outside the companies. In Culture Amp, we were looking at all of this going... it was amazing to me that Covid was the fifth- or sixth-biggest problem on a lot of my employees’ plates. And so, a lot of what I was doing last year was trying to communicate and create space for everyone. I was actually doing a video every day for the whole company for almost six months. And one of the critical things we did is, we actually started doing a daily situation room, where we’d bring people together to make decisions and figure out what needed to be done, because we had to move really quickly. We’ve actually held that. So even today, we do three sessions a week, and they’re open to everybody in the company. So we’re 500 people globally, anyone who wants to can join. And it’s a way of sharing context. It’s a way of sharing, “Here’s what’s going on. Here’s what we’re worried about. Here’s what we’re focusing on.” And it’s been a way for us as an organization to try and make sense. But we’ve also been forced to confront the reality of that world. So we made a commitment last year—from a BIPOC point of view and from people of color point of view—that not only were we going to continue to try and improve ourselves, we also wanted to support people going on this journey. So we have an initiative where BIPOC-owned companies—so companies that are owned by people of color and indigenous descent—will get our full discount, which is like a 38 percent discount. And that number was developed by one of our teams internally, because that is the difference in the average wage between a white man and a Black woman in America. It’s 38 percent. And so, so much of unwinding this is us starting to unwind all those little things that hold people back and that compound over time. And so my own personal journey in learning of the last year, is I’ve had to learn so much about the history and the injustices of the world that I didn’t even know existed two years ago. And I’ve had to figure out how can I show up... I don’t have answers—I can’t have answers to all these questions—but I have to create space in my organization for my people to figure out how we’re going to process this, and what can we as a company do to try and make the world a better place. I mean, that’s our mission: to create a better world of work. And so, it’s not just about what are the tools we put in the hands of our customers, but what are we doing at Culture Amp to create that culture inside our organization and inside the world that we live in.

Kerr: That’s powerful. Thank you for taking us on that learning journey. It’s one where we’re all engaged in. Maybe as a final question: The whole HR space field is changing substantially, was already in a big kind of inflection moment before Covid began, and obviously that’s been further accelerated. What do you anticipate as being the big kind of things over the next decade for HR and for people analytics and kind of for the future of a successful workplace?

Elzinga: I think the future of HR we touched on earlier. The future of HR is not just the HR processes that we’ve had today. And so when we think about running engagement surveys or running performance management cycles or building employee development plans. These are all things that HR has done and done very well. But if we’re going to be successful in this new world of work, if we’re going to be successful going forward, we believe that’s going to come from, how well can we equip managers to create that employee experience? How can we give them the skills and the capabilities to shift that employee experience to be what we needed to be in the other side? To be more inclusive, to be more diverse, to build high-performing teams, to deal with all the challenges around mental wellbeing? So when we think about HR as a practice and as a discipline—and also HR tech that supports that—how do we make HR successful by making managers successful? And that’s really what drives us at Culture Amp is, how do we build a platform that allows managers to do their job better and that takes them on that journey and to drive the behavior change that we need to drive at scale if we’re going to have the sorts of organizations that will be successful.

Kerr: Didier Elzinga is the founder and CEO of Culture Amp. Thanks so much for joining us today.

Elzinga: Thank you, Bill. This has been a pleasure.

Kerr: We hope you enjoy the Managing the Future of Work podcast. If you haven’t already, please subscribe and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts. You can find out more about the Managing the Future of Work Project at our website hbs.edu/managingthefutureofwork. While you’re there, sign up for our newsletter.