- Trust, pride, and a sense of camaraderie are essential for employees to feel like they’re at a great place to work.
- Happy employees have a notable and measurable impact on stock performance.
- To create great employees, organizations must reevaluate their talent acquisition and management functions to focus on skills.
To be a success story with AI, you have to see the world for what it can be, not what it is.
It’s something CEO Michael C. Bush and his organization, Great Place to Work, think about daily. They do this by surveying workers and organizations around the world — 18,000 companies and tens of millions of employees in 2023 alone — to find out how they feel about where they work.
Then they measure their findings to determine if that organization is, indeed, a great place to work. The ones that reach that status are more likely to see success in their business goals.
But the work world is quickly changing, and leaders must spend time implementing smarter practices to keep pace. Part of this change is considering how AI can help them hire and retain the best talent possible.
In his keynote address at Cultivate ’24, Bush shared what he thinks it takes for organizations to reach this place of greatness and how talent intelligence factors into the picture.
Watch Great Place to Work CEO Michael C. Bush’s entire “Becoming Great with AI” session from Cultivate ’24 on demand now.
Trust, pride, and camaraderie are essential
First, we have to start with surveying the current employee environment — and it’s not always so optimistic.
Seventy percent of the employee experience is determined by who that employee works for — not your job title or your salary but your manager.
“As people leaders, the responsibility is a huge one,” Bush said. “We can really make a person’s day or do the opposite, and doing the opposite isn’t good for production, performance, quality, or customer service.”
There are key questions Bush’s team asks to get a sense of trust employees feel:
- Do you trust the person you work for?
- Do you feel like they respect you?
- Do you feel like they’re transparent with you?
- Do you feel like they’re fair and equitable?
- Do you feel like they’ve built a team you enjoy working with?
- Do you feel inspired to keep achieving?
Pride is also an important factor. In an ideal workplace, an employee feels as though their skills are needed to make the organization great.
“It’s important for that person to know how important they are,” Bush said. “Every job has meaning, and everybody should feel like, ‘We can’t be great if I’m not great.’ It’s a leader’s responsibility to do that.”
Next, Great Place to Work looks at camaraderie to determine how employees feel about their workplace. Nearly everyone has had the experience of a new employee joining the team who isn’t quite a fit. Breaking that sense of team can have a big impact on employee satisfaction.
Finally, they look at the idea of a workplace being “for all,” meaning regardless of identity, age, race, or even tenure, everyone is treated in an equitable way.
“We use the analytics [for these factors] to determine if there is any unevenness because what we reward and recognize this is a consistency of experience,” Bush said. “You can have a place that’s really great for a certain part of the company and not great for others. We’d rather be good. We call that great because it’s consistent and it’s equitable.”
How being great impacts the bottom line
Greatness is measured by employee experience, but you can also link it directly to financial performance.
To do this, Great Place to Work looks at companies on Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For list and uses FTSE Russell’s 1000 and 3000 lists to determine stock performance.
“The Russell 3000 is probably 97.7% of the stock market’s value, which is about $52 trillion today,” Bush said. “They run that, and then they look at our companies and their stock performance.”
Since 1998, companies listed on Great Place to Work have consistently beat the Russell 3000 by 3.36%, which means they’re taking on the best places to work in the world and outperforming them.
Great Place to Work CEO Michael C. Bush talks about career pathing — it’s not always a linear path for great talent.
The best talent wins
The next layer in the ability to be great is hiring and retaining great talent.
The problem? We aren’t looking in the right places for them. Many people who possess the talent and skills needed to move into the future of work exist outside the confines of a traditional job description.
“The best talent optimization wins, not this way that got us here,” Bush said. “There’s so much more that we can do.”
The solution to finding these people and their highly sought-after skills? AI-native talent intelligence.
AI propels us to greatness
AI can help us understand and interpret the work that people are doing, interested in doing, and — most importantly — capable of learning in real time.
It gives us an understanding of work beyond job titles and descriptions, which means we change the conversation from jobs and talent pipelines to skills and talent portfolios.
It also means workers aren’t forced into a rigid, linear climb up a ladder that rarely works and prohibits unique skill sets from being used to solve today’s complex problems.
“There’s a lot of people who have this ability, and it’s a good time for this revolution,” Bush said.
The overall labor force participation rate has declined for the last 20 years, which means it’s getting harder to find talent and there’s less of it. Organizations can no longer afford to match people to jobs or use old hiring practices that rely on proximity bias to find workers.
They must make the move to using AI to match measurable skills and opportunities globally and instantly.
“Tomorrow, the best talent optimization wins,” Bush said. “I believe AI companies give us hope, in terms of the world and the way it operates, what I see as I move around with great companies around the world, and the way that things can be.
“I’m definitely an AI optimist,” he continued. “I’m very optimistic about this opportunity for abundance for all and believe that we can make progress.”
Watch Great Place to Work CEO Michael C. Bush’s entire Cultivate’ 24 session, “Becoming Great with AI,” on demand now.
