00:00 Speaker A
Employee confidence hit an all-time low in February according to Glassdoor’s latest survey, as concerns over the health of the labor market weigh on sentiment. Declines in employee motivation are one of the main drivers behind what better up is calling a performance crisis. The coaching platform calculates that human performance across industries has declined two to six percent since 2019, potentially costing $2.2 trillion in GDP. Joining me now on this, we’ve got Alexi Robichaux who is the co-founder and CEO of Better Up. Alexi, just break down what sort of performance declines you’re seeing from your measurements.
00:58 Alexi Robichaux
Yeah, thanks Brad. We’re essentially asking workers how their performance has been over these periods and we ask on very regular intervals, and we’re able to track that longitudinally. And that allows us to triangulate with peer-reviewed journal articles of how these changes in sentiment about performance map to actual changes in GDP production, labor bureau statistics, and we’re able to put all that data together and then extrapolate, what would that be across the entire workforce in terms of a GDP decline? So what we find is, starting pre-COVID, really in 2017 but most pronounced starting in 2019, you see this decline in performance across almost every type of work, and we’re tracking about half a million workers in this data set.
02:10 Speaker A
You know, as as I think back to some of the readings that we’ve been getting over the past few months here, and I’m thinking about jolts as well. Because if we look at that longer trend line, the longer trend line since what, about 2022 has actually been moving in the downward direction in terms of job openings. So that means that more employees might be getting a sense that there are not as many reinforcements that are that are coming to perhaps help with some of those large tasks, essentially summing up to doing more with less. So how is that impacting the mindset and the performance because what we’ve also heard about is a burnout crisis here too.
03:23 Alexi Robichaux
That’s right. Yeah, we we track burnout as well, and that is approaching crisis levels. You know, in in our model what we find when you look at the data is underneath almost every type of job performance, you can think of it as fuel in the tank, there’s these three primary skills or mindsets that matter. It’s a combination of motivation, optimism, and agency. And these feel really soft, but actually they robustly predict job performance and actually a lot of life outcome. And what we find is, motivation accounts for 82% of that fuel or what’s in our tank as an employee to your point. And motivate motivation specifically has been in decline. And that speaks to our sense of feeling that our work matters. Do we feel we’re being recognized for our efforts? Do we feel that we’re being appreciated? When we don’t feel what we do at work matters, when we feel like we have to do more with less, when we don’t feel like we’re getting a fair deal, our motivation dips and that performance fuel dips, and then that shows up in our actual performance. So this is what both employees and employers are facing, is that with AI, with all the economic froth we’re seeing, people are uncertain of their footing at work, they’re uncertain of how their work contributes, and they certainly don’t feel like they’re getting fairly recognized for all their hard work.
05:18 Speaker A
And so what can leaders do to improve to improve and boost employee retention and reverse some of these declines and boost what’s at the core of this, which is motivation?
05:44 Alexi Robichaux
Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot, but the most straightforward and the first thing we can do as leaders is actually the most cost effective, which is recognize our people. It’s a very swirly time in the world today. People are working very hard, they’re working doing more with less as you just said, and recognition is really free. Our communications to our team actually matters. This can be so simple, it’s almost easy to skip over as a senior leader, but it starts with recognition. It starts with reinforcing why their work will continue to matter in the macroeconomic environment we see and in the world of GenAI, having a clear perspective of that and communicating that we believe in their ability to harness AI and these disruptive technologies to continue to grow as individuals. So recognition and communications are first. The second is actually investing in our people through growth growth opportunities. One of the most predictive things we find of both performance and loyalty to an organization is simply the degree to which an employee feels that there are personal growth opportunities. It’s not rocket science, but again it’s easy to miss. So are we crafting as leaders, and the best companies we work with are doing this, clear road maps for people so they feel that they have a sense of forward progress even if it’s not a promotion, but they have a sense of growth and development in their career that intersects with everything happening outside of the company, what that means economically, what that means in the context vis-a-vis AI.
07:49 Speaker A
Alexi, great to have you here on the program with us. We’d love to continue this discussion at a future date as well with more of these insights. Appreciate it.
08:04 Alexi Robichaux
Thank you.