Dart Lindsley on The New ROI of Joyful Work

Speaker A: In today's episode of HR Visionaries, we talk to Dart about work experience. We talk about not just hr, but broader terms of where people work, how people work, and how can people be most productive. Stay tuned. Welcome to HR Visionaries, the show where we discover the truth behind contemporary hr. Uh, I'm your host, Benjamin. Join me as I unfold today's talent ecosystem with HR innovators from around the globe. Welcome to the latest episode of Edger Visionaries. I'm very much looking forward to my guest today. Dart.

Speaker B: It's great to have you, great to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me on the show.

Speaker A: Dart, can you tell us a bit about yourself? Who are you?

Speaker B: That's a very broad question. I'm a lot of. I can tell you what I am, who I am by what I do. And I'm doing a lot of things these days.

Speaker A: Lovely.

Speaker B: Uh, I am the CEO and co founder of a company called Elevenfold, which is a work experience design firm which I'm sure we're going to talk about what that is. I am a, um, podcast host for a show called Work for Humans. Um, and I work for a series of um, big Fortune 50 companies, but I don't work for them right now. So that's uh, I stepped out of those roles six months ago. Um, beyond that, live in Santa Cruz, California. Have two 29 year old twins who are fabulous. One lives in Seattle, one lives in la, and uh, my wife and I live in Santa Cruz.

Speaker A: I'm very excited to talk about, uh, work experience. Can you describe work experience in a few sentences? What do you mean by that?

Speaker B: Yeah, my thesis and my taking off point for everything that I do is that um, work is a product that uh, companies uh, build and sell to employees and that to date we have not used the kind of design tools you would use to actually create a great product. Um, and so it's the experience of work is the thing that needs to be designed. And when I say the experience of work, I mean absolutely every bit of it. From, you know, uh, when you take a job, when you get up in the morning, when you, when you drive into work, all of the pieces that you experience and, and then how you talk about it at parties, um, you know, all of those pieces are part of the experience.

Speaker A: It's very interesting when you mentioned, um, well, how you talk about your work at parties. So, um, uh, I used to work in the financial industry and obviously in particular before the financial crisis of 08 09, um, when you were at a party you talked about your employer, you burst off of pride and um, um, it's actually remarkable, um, when you talk to people at a party, what they do and you can quite quickly find out whether they love or whether they are not so passionate about what they're doing.

Speaker B: That's true. And whether or not they're proud of it. Yeah.

Speaker A: Um, how did you discover that topic for you? So what's the origin?

Speaker B: Um, so the uh. I mean there's a couple of different entry points for me into this. Um, but the big one is that for the first 15 years of my corporate career, I was very much a believer in an orthodoxy, um, about what HR was for. And that what HR was for was to create a productive workforce, um, which means that it's going to create the most value for the company at a reasonable cost. And uh, that uh, uh, that was a sufficient framing to actually do the right thing for the company. And um, in fact, I managed the portfolio for some of the companies that I worked for, the project portfolio. And so I was actually the gatekeeper for how we were going to invest in human resources in terms of improvements. And when something came across my desk and it was about employee experience, I always thought it was a good idea. But if I was looking at the bottom line roi, a lot of times I just couldn't trace, uh, that project to the bottom line and to shareholder value. And this was a time in business, especially in the United States, where shareholder value was really the, the main objective of companies, and it was the zeitgeist at the time was to work on those things. Um, uh, and the reason that I couldn't invest in them was usually because there was another investment that had much more traceable roi. And um, that other investment was something like outsourcing or downsizing or uh, something like that. Uh, I was never completely comfortable with the conclusions that the traditional model was forcing me to make in that regard. Because, um, if you can neglect, uh, a whole category of people, uh, there's an ethical problem. And so if, if. If the only thing that I was willing to invest in was something that was going to benefit shareholders, um, if treating people badly would actually be good for the shareholders, then that was okay. M. Basically it opened up the door to, to that idea. Um, and it was through my work in business architecture that I started to realize. So let me say what business architecture is. Um, uh, business architecture is the. Is the discipline that looks at, uh, human resources, looks at business whole. So a business architect has a model of how the whole company works and My job as the head of business architecture for HR was to ask and answer the question, how does HR fit into the whole business? And when a company, um, is going through a transformation, you use that knowledge to make sure that all the different parts of the company transform in a coordinated way. Because if you're going through a big transformation and you only transform 30% of the things that need to change, you're not going to be successful. And so my job was to do that for hr. And it was while I was doing that work that I started to realize that we were fitting into the business wrong, that we didn't really understand, uh, what our purpose was and that our purpose was not, uh, just to maximize an input to production.

Speaker A: Um, well, um, interesting. We talk about, um, um, theories and hypothesis. Um, I do very much think that, well, being, um, a former banker, um, I think one of the major mistakes of, uh, most HR people is they don't talk too much about roi. And ROI in the sense of, well, I could invest, um, let's say $500,000 in something that, well, creates a bit of shareholder value, but makes people's life not better. Not saying miserable, but not better. But you could also invest these $500,000 in something that uplifts everyone within the company and creates a much greater shareholder value. However, it requires a, well, well, a bit of mental flexibility and it requires a bit of, like, well, yeah, being a bit, well, approaching problems in a slightly different way than they used to be approached.

Speaker B: It does. There's an interesting thing about roi, and it's something I've realized really, in the last month.

Speaker A: And bankers are obviously obsessed with roi, right?

Speaker B: Yes. And your finance department is obsessed with roi, which is.

Speaker A: And your CEO is probably obsessed.

Speaker B: The checkbook's perspective is, if I'm going to write a check for 100, you need to give me 110. Um, and if I'm going to write a check for 100 this quarter, you need to give me 110 by four quarters from now. Um, and what I realized is sometimes the problem statement is the problem. Um, and I tell a story. This is sort of a long story. Um, uh, but I think it's worth it. So once upon a time in Germany, they looked at the forests and they said, look, we want to make these forests as productive as possible. And so, uh, what is productivity? They said, well, productivity. We've got a good number for it. And that number is board feet. Um, okay, so it's board feet. So we want to create forests that are producing lots and Lots of board feet of what? What's the most valuable wood there is right now? Spruce. Four feet of spruce. Um, so what are we going to do? Well, we're going to, we're going to get rid of the old forest, which wasn't spruce, and we're going to clear it and we're going to plant spruce, nothing but spruce. And we're going to put them in nice rows. Because then really the formula we're looking for is board feet of spruce per acre. And if we put them in nice rows, we're going to be able to look at an acre and we're going to be able to say, you know what, uh, that acre is going to produce this many board feet. It's fantastic. Um, worked great, uh, at first. So there were a couple things that happened. One thing that happened is that all the people who live next to the forest said, you know, we used to use that forest for lots of things besides board feed of spruce. We used to use it as forage for our cattle. We used to find herbs and use them for medicine. We used to get materials out of it to build our houses and to thatch our roofs. And now all of those other things are available to us. The second problem though was that the first generation of spruce grew great, but the second generation of spruce did not. And the third generation of spruce didn't grow at all. Why? Because the ecosystem that, that they were uh, caring, uh, for, um, you couldn't just extract board feed of spruce out of that soil without the soil being replenished. And so what they had done is, uh, there's a couple lessons out of this. One lesson is if you optimize any system for one outcome, it will come at the cost of other outcomes. The second lesson is if you optimize a complex system for one output, uh, it may come at the cost of that output. And so what we have done with companies is we have done exactly that same thing. What are we trying to get, we're to trying, we're trying to get as much value out of employees, um, per dollar that we put into employees. But the truth is that completely ignores the experience of the people working in the company. And uh, when you do that, so it will come at the cost, uh, the long term cost of the financial benefits of the company.

Speaker A: And in particular these days where, um, well, companies have changed so dramatically, um, it's probably even more relevant. Well, 50 years ago, uh, well you looked at factory, uh, or a company, uh, which was probably mostly a factory. Ah, so you had like um, admin people who did repetitive stuff. Um, you had like, people on the production line, they did repetitive stuff. So you could gain efficiency quite quickly by changing a few things. However, nowadays, um, so many companies, uh, have, uh, well, have stuff that doesn't do repetitive work, that does creative work where you can't replace one with the other easily. But it's like a much, uh, more complex ecosystem.

Speaker B: And so much of it is mental work, so much of it is knowledge work. And so the thing is that if the work I'm doing, what's my main tool? My mind. Um, and that's true for somebody in my role where I'm this, you know, big analyst, but it's also true for somebody who's in customer service. What's my main tool? My mind. If I'm in customer service, it's my attitude, it's how I express myself, it's how I, it's how I receive customers. Um, when you, uh, put that tool into a state of despair or into a state of feeling, uh, objectified, uh, or irrelevant or any of those things, you are harming what your company is made out of. Um, but, but. And this is why I think it's important to say that the problem statement is, the problem is that I don't want to tie it back to. If you invest in people, you'll get more roi. You will in the long run. But as soon as you say that, you need to stop thinking about it and start thinking about what do people really want from work? You know, uh, uh, what is it that they come to work for so that I can provide that in a way. Um, and I worry about what they want, not how it's going to relate to roi. So you get to think about ROI once and then you have to start thinking about your customers.

Speaker A: Um, well, how do you kick off this process? Is it like, first of all, uh, a lot of research surveys around finding out what people want and then, well, not fall into the trap to ask the obvious questions, but more the, um. Ah, well, check for the underlying problems.

Speaker B: Yeah, I don't love surveys as an approach. And the reason is surveys work like this. Um, you ask a bunch of people what they care about, you figure out what the majority say they care about, you then roll that up to the center of the company and then you come up with policies to solve for what people care about most people care about.

Speaker A: And if you ask for the wrong question, uh, ask the wrong questions at the first place. Garbage anyhow.

Speaker B: Yes. And, but what this ignores, that's totally True. But what it ignores is if I produced a survey and I asked everybody in the world what they want from a car, um, they would say, well, uh, everybody would agree that all cars need to have tires. Some people really care about the handling, and some people really care about economy. But what we're going to see is that everybody cares about tires. Um, and, uh, when I aggregate it, I'm going to say, you know what? Tires are the most important thing about cars because everybody. But the truth is all cars have tires. And so that's what we do with work, which is we, we take these big aggregate measures of what people say they care about, and we take the thing that's the biggest hitter. And that thing is, is actually, in my research, uh, the commodities of work. People want pay, that's true. Um, why they want pay is different from person to person. But also the dollar that one company gives to me is identical to the dollar another company gives to me. That's a commoditized aspect of work. Um, the same thing is largely true of benefits, is that benefits are largely the same from company to company. Um, and when you actually ask people what they want from work, it's a lot more than that. And the, the things that they care about most, they are most different from each other. And they're not going to roll up into a survey. You're not going to find them that way.

Speaker A: When you talk to companies about, um, employee experience or the. Or is it actually correct? Um, um, if, um, employee experience, is it the same as, um, work experience, or is there a difference?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I, I do make a distinction between the two, and I think that the wording is not very good at making that distinction. Um, psychologists focus on the experience, designers focus on the product work. And so the history of, of IO, uh, you know, industrial and organizational psychology has been, let's figure out what state of mind I need to put you in to be productive. And that's been a psychology problem. Um, and it's hard. It's a very hard problem to solve. Psychology is hard to use in the field. Um, but if we can instead say, what kind of work do you want to consume? Um, and you just tell us, I like to consume work where I get to solve unique puzzles. Well, now we have a problem that's not a psychology problem, it's a product design problem. How do I create a system that's going to deliver the kinds of puzzles you like to solve to you? And so when I say work experience or work design, I'm making a distinction between the history of employee experience, which has been essentially, what state of mind do I need to put you in to be productive for me? Okay.

Speaker A: It's actually very interesting because, um, well, if, um. I'm certainly not an expert on, um, both. And, uh, well, hearing that this distinction is super interesting. And if I can ask you, um, what is a good experience look like to you? So, um, not necessarily, uh, a perfect. If there is anything, uh, anything like perfect, but a very good starting point where you think, okay, well, that is like a benefit for, um, for employees, for shareholders, um, for the company, um, itself.

Speaker B: So my good experience is not going to be the same as your good experience. In other words, what kind of work experience product you want to buy is different from the kind I want to buy? How do I know this? I know this because once I realized work was a product, I started doing research into what people want from this product and using product research tools to discover what it was. And so I've asked many hundreds of people the question, um, probably over a thousand, um, what job do you hire your job to do for you? And, um, I mean, there's a very diverse range of answers to that. Um, everything from, you know, almost everybody agrees that they want their job to pay them. Um, almost, you know, almost everybody agrees that they want to make a difference, but the kind of difference that they want to make is different. Um, so some people say I hire my job to solve, to give me interesting puzzles to solve or interesting things to build or to make me look good at parties, or to get me out of the house, or to give me worthy opponents to compete against, or, uh, to sponsor my visa, or, uh, to see others shine. And so you go through. To give me a stage and an audience. You go through and you get this, this compilation of essentially all the features of work experience that different people want to consume. Um, and the findings from this work are really interesting. One, there's about 35 different things that people want from work, and that's the value they get out of work. When you ask them a different question, what does your work cost you? You'll get another 20 things. And it's different for different people. And so when you were buying a product, you want to buy a product that gets the job done for you, and you want to buy a product at a reasonable cost. And that's what people are looking for in this product. But 35 Things is a lot. And if I'm a company and I'm thinking about designing a product with 35 different, you know, things I start to worry. And uh, it's actually more complex than that, which is that if you get 100 people in a room and you ask them to select from those 35 things what they care about most, you're going to get 100 different answers. It's almost 100 different answers. You're going to get 98 different answers and two people are going to agree on what they want. Actually, it's what the data show, but basically it's 100 different answers of what people want from work. Um, and so a good experience of work is, is work that delivers those, that gets the job done that you want to get done. For me, I want to discover the unknown. I uh, want to build things, I want to invent. And I, uh, uh, actually this is one I care about. I want my job to give me tickets to exclusive clubs, um, which, which you work for top companies and you, you get invited to things that you wouldn't otherwise be invited to. I hire my job to make me look good at parties. When people say, what do you do? I say, I'm the, you know, some big title. Um, uh, and uh, but centrally for me, the experience I want is I want to discover the unknown. And so any job that puts me on the forefront of discovering the unknown, I'm going to be all in. And for you it would be different. For you it would be different.

Speaker A: Indeed, it might be different. However, um, what we just listed is also in some ways shockingly similar. So, um, um, it's great to think about it. So like, okay, what do you want from work? And um, it's probably a question one should ask him or herself much more often since, well, we spend 60, um, 70, 80% our uh, time awake in the office working with people. So therefore it should match our personality quite well. Um, otherwise we may be very unhappy over the long run.

Speaker B: And I'm going to say two things. Some of its personality and some of its situation. So when I buy a product, I'm buying a product because it solves a problem for me in my current context. So, um, uh, for instance, with my cars, I, um, have a truck that solves the problem for me of getting to fishing that's off road someplace. And I have a sedan that solves the problem for me of getting great mileage and uh, being able to park in the city. So I have two different products that solve different jobs to be done. If I stopped fishing, I wouldn't need the truck anymore. Well, um, there have been times in my life when taking, uh, care of my Family, which is one of the jobs that everybody, most people hire is take care of myself and my family now and in retirement. So that's like one of the things that people say. Well, the truth is my risk profile when I had little kids or kids about to go to college was way different than my risk profile is now when they're 29 and self supporting. And so it's a contextual need. It's not a personality trait. Some of it's personality probably, but it's one of these things where the psychology approach to employee experience has wanted to say that you're this kind of person. And the work experience product approach doesn't say that. The work experience product approach says, um, you have a context, you have a job to get done in that context. And either one can change.

Speaker A: Uh, how do you think perception of work will change over the next few years? Um, um, um. Well, I read something recently, probably you too. Sam Altman commented on, um, how AI will change the way how uh, we work. And um, he brought a very interesting example, um, that if you took a farmer from a thousand years ago, um, into our working life, he would not consider what we do working. And I found that quite an interesting and um, very good um, example of how things change over the long run. AI may change things even in the very short term.

Speaker B: The way I want to look at that problem from a work experience product perspective, from a work as a product perspective is uh, when I'm doing work, I'm in a relationship between myself, the work in front of me and the tools in my hand. Um, I'm going to. When I build, I build wooden boats. I have built a wooden boat and um, I use a power sander. Um, I could hand sand it. Um, but, but for me the moment, the delightful moment of building a boat is that moment where it's all sanded and I apply the varnish and all of a sudden it turns from this dusty thing into this, you can see down into the grain and it's golden and it's beautiful. And you get to see the grain that you haven't seen maybe ever. And it's revealed to you. And that's going to be the grain of your boat from now on. Well, that's. Is that moment enhanced or, you know, damaged by hand sanding or power sanding? I use a power sander sanding. It's not about the sanding, it's about that moment. Well, the. So first of all, I think that uh, uh, most situations, uh, where we are going to use AI are Going to be like that, which is I'm going to use the power tool to create a moment more quickly for myself. Like right now, when I'm writing, when I'm writing things, um, I collaborate with AI and I do that.

Speaker A: Why?

Speaker B: Because I want to get to some beautiful writing sooner. And that's great. And so I look at it that way. And one of the interview questions I ask a lot of people is, what's your favorite tool of the trade? And so I talked to, uh, I was just getting, I was at the dentist, I said, what's your favorite tool of your trade? Uh, and she said, you know, it's this little scraper thing, this little pick that I use. And she says, you know, this is the only thing in the building that I own personally. Um, and I bring it because it makes my job better. So there's this relationship between the work, the person and the tool. And why do you like it? Well, it fits my hand really well, she says, and it gets into spaces that I can't get into otherwise. So it's more effective and it's a better experience in her hand. And so what I want to know, one of the phrases I came up recently is that we all need to design our companies like double sided tape. It needs to be sticky to customers and sticky to employees. And um, so, uh, the tools that you put into my hands as, as an employee are going to help me to be sticky or not. Um, um, because they're going to make the work better for me and they're going to make the work better for you. So that's the way I look at that question is I look at it as a, you know, a lot of what people talk about with AI is am I going to be replaced? Am I going to be eliminated or am I going to. Well, yeah, I mean that's the most fundamental thing is do I have a job or not? But once I have the job, um, the next question is how does this tool fit into my experience and how does it make it better for both me and the company and for me and we're. So the problem with the traditional problem statement of ROI is that it, because it has a tendency to dehumanize because it says I need to get this, these 10,000 people to be productive. And so I'm going to try to do all these scaled things to make it happen. That mental model does not create two sided tape, it creates one sided tape. And um, so, um, uh, um, Hang on a sec, I lost track for a second. Uh, um, what we're going to do this is, I think this is Thoreau who said this, that improved means with unimproved ends does not create better outcomes. And so when we go into the problem space and we say this is an ROI problem, and we actually say, okay, great, we're going to start replacing people with AI, that's our main objective. Well, that's improved means. But the, but the productivity objective is still going to create dehumanized work and that's not going to create the outcomes we want. So I though my question about AI is always, um, you know, how's it going to feel in the hand of somebody doing the work?

Speaker A: Yeah, I think it makes mix a lot of sense since um, well it's um. Well it could be the, could be our superpower for the next decades, for the decades to come to focus on what we actually love about our job and um, not to worry about those things that we don't like. So um, when you were talking about, well, with actually your favorite tool, super interesting question. And um, it's of course, well, it's those tools that either, well, clear the way for you or that create some fun, some enjoyment over the course of your day. And it's actually quite uh, interesting to think about it. Um, and I think AI can be that superpower, that perfect, perfect tool or one of um, many, many AI solutions can be those perfect tools for you. So that's a very interesting picture. Uh, you paint there. Indeed.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean it's um, there's so many things that we can pull in from design to the experience of work. One of them is the idea of a detect. Um, when I put the pen on this, the cap on this pen, it goes click. That tells me I've completed the action. And pens that don't do that are unsatisfying. They're not as good. Well, um, if your job, if you hire your job to help others, how do you know when you have um, can we put a detect on it? Um, so that, and in fact I did a study once where I went and I looked at everybody's cube at work on the weekend. It was a little creepy and I felt pretty invasive. But I went in and I photographed everybody's cube and I, and I cataloged everything in their cube, um, to see how they modified their out of body, out of box work experience to make it better. And one of the most common things was thank you notes. And so people would put stick on the side of their cube, thank yous and especially thank yous from teams where everybody on a team thanked them, and that was an incredibly important part of their. Of what they wanted from work. That was the detect. And, um, I've thought a little bit about how would AI improve my detect on my cognitive work. And. And I think it can. It's already doing it a little bit. Gemini always says that's a great question. Okay, that's. That actually, you know, I know it's just an AI, but that makes me feel good about myself. And then. And then, uh, could it. Could it tell me when the question that I am, um, the ant, what I've written is novel or not? Since I like to invent. They could say, this is not novel. This is actually something that you've done that lots of people have said, and here's how they've said it. Or it could say, you know what? Nobody's ever said that before. There's ways in which we can take these design concepts like the detect, and we can build them into work in ways that make it way better.

Speaker A: That's awesome. Um, thank you so much for your time. I'm now a bit worried that someone will drop by my desk later tonight and we'll see how messy, uh, all my workplaces are, unfortunately. Well, it's. I think it also tells a bit about me as a person, but, uh, I need to clean up now.

Speaker B: Yes. Some creepy researcher is going to come in and photograph your desk. I know.

Speaker A: I sincerely hope nobody. Nobody comes to my desk.

Speaker B: Nobody does that. I know. What would they learn about you if they did? What would they see? What's on your desk right now that you put there because it makes you feel good?

Speaker A: Well, I, uh, think many bottles of water. Um, um. Uh, you see that. Lots of papers flying around. Because I, well, love to be creative, writing stuff down. Um, and, um, I can, I think, express my thoughts much better with a pencil than on a Miro board. Um, no offense, Miro. Um, but, um, I think that it's. That it's very much me.

Speaker B: Creative supplies. Yeah. Do you have any family photos?

Speaker A: I actually don't. Um.

Speaker B: Do you have any? Um. I like creative supplies. I like that. So what I would take from that is that you're. You like to be on the edge of creating new things and you're excited by the new things you create, and you want a platform to do that with.

Speaker A: Indeed. Yeah. Well, it's actually quite a great analysis from, um, about probably 12 to 14,000 kilometers away. So, um, I love that very much.

Speaker B: Cool.

Speaker A: Dot. Thank you so much for your time was amazing talking to you. I learned so much about, um, this, how work can be designed, and, um. Well, I really appreciate our time.

Speaker B: I really enjoyed being on the show. Thanks so much.

Speaker A: Thank you so much, Dodd. And thank you so much for listening in and see you next.