Episode 59: Rethinking Workplace Performance with Melissa NG Goldner CEO of Malu Journey

Speaker A: Workforce performance when optimized is when people feel psychologically safe.

Speaker B: Welcome back to the Troop HR Podcast. I'm your host, Taylor Bradley. Today I sit down with Melissa Ng Goldner, founder and CEO of uh, Malu Journey. Our conversation today is centered around what's happening right now in hr, centered around performance, engagement, and productivity. But often we overlook important questions such as, what does sustainable performance actually look like for human beings? Melissa has spent years helping organizations rethink how they support employees through transformation, burnout, and change. In a world shaped by layoffs, AI disruptions, and growing workplace anxiety, she's challenging many of the traditional metrics that leaders rely on today. So, as always, Melissa and I start at the ground floor by first asking her, how does she define workplace performance?

Speaker A: You know, that's a really loaded question, Taylor, because. Because it depends on, uh, who you're asking. For instance, workforce performance. If I were to take an organizational lens, it's about output, it's about hours worked, it's about butts and seats, you know, compliance and things like that. But when I think about optimizing for workforce performance, that is not a definition at all. And I don't think that people are defining it correctly or measuring it correctly at all. Workforce performance when optimized is when people feel psychologically safe. They feel like they can innovate and really put ideas on the table that may not agree with other people in the room. It's when people are able to leverage their creativity and not move forward day to day with fear, anxiety, identity crisis, or feeling grief of losing potentially, um, some people from workforce reductions.

Speaker B: Such a great definition, actually, of what we're going to be diving into today. And one word, that or buzzword that I didn't hear is work life balance, but instead reframing this as more about sustainable workplace. So I saw a reaction. I know our listeners aren't, uh, on video here. When I say work life balance, what emotions come up here?

Speaker A: I felt an influx of, like, anger, frustration, and the ick. Because quite frankly, I do not believe work life balance exists. I think that for those that have family or caretaking needs or fill in the blank of responsibilities, real life, you're pulling on different levers at different times. It's never going to be a, uh, perfect mother, a perfect worker. Sometimes I'm pulling my child care lever more and work is not 100%. And sometimes it's a project with a deadline. I'm, um, pulling the work lever and maybe I'll be missing a child concert. But I hate when people say Work, life, balance, because the systems, the organizational systems in which we work in don't actually help people find balance. So there's so much work to be done in that space.

Speaker B: I agree with you. I want to start there. These buzzwords also give me a similar type reaction and with many of the executives I've worked with or spoken with over the past year alone. That's not a word that resonates with any of them, and it's almost a bit of a lightning rod at this point. But a conversation I had with a CEO this past week in Palo Alto was diving into the support network that exists of your employee that makes it possible for them to execute extremely well. And I gave the example of I wouldn't be where I am today without the support of my wife. And how we support each other in our careers by, to your point, pulling on and supporting those different levers at different points. But how, when you're in discussions with executives on this topic, do you reframe their thinking on this?

Speaker A: There's a couple of different things when you're, uh, telling me about the conversation with the executives. I so do believe the support systems that we have, and some people don't have the privilege of support systems. I was talking to my therapist, and she studied sociology in the past, and she mentioned that in previous times, when they say it takes a village, there was literally a village. You were able to just drop your daughter or son to an auntie. You know, you are able to have these huge support networks. However, in modern times, even though it's ironic that we're more digitally connected than ever before, we are more lonely, more stressed out, and more anxious than any other generation prior to us. And I think that's because we are expected in society to go through a lot of the hardships and the emotional GR anxiety on our own. And so when you're talking about reframing, I want to reframe. Even outside of the conference room, I want to reframe that. Gone are the days where you can leave your personal life and all these things are happening in the world at the door before entering your manager meeting. Right. Gone are those days. But the way that we treat and support our employees are still archaic in the fact that they're expecting us to just be like robots without understanding. A normal human being requires psychologically and physically requires repair, time to think. And so when I think about that reframe, I want leaders to think about the holistic human being and addressing that versus the worker with employee ID number 7259.

Speaker B: And I appreciate the highlight too, of not everyone has that support network. And I'll go into my bubble, the Silicon Valley. I recognize not every company can do this, but I've seen an evolution even within Silicon Valley of the types of benefits that people are now providing to folks. And it's. I won't pick on any one company, but it's not a LMS platform to go upskill. It's now I'm seeing companies starting to pay for laundry services or cleaning services, or cover babysitting, all sorts of more tactical things that provide support networks to people that may or may not have them. I found that interesting. The other thing that I'm hearing more of as we move away from maybe buzzwords like work life, balance, is engagement. I'm curious, when I say the word engagement, what comes to your mind and how has that been evolving?

Speaker A: I have to admit that I was drinking the Kool Aid and I've been in employee, quote, unquote, engagement and workforce transformation for over 20 years. And we as change practitioners were provided and trained a specific playbook on how to, quote, unquote, engage our employees. However, now that I've done, uh, a plethora of transformations, I started to question whether or not those metrics are even viable to begin with. And let me tell you why. Engagement, especially right now during a time where there are massive layoffs, many things happening in the organization, AI transformation, the fear of losing your job, engagement surveys are actually not trusted. And so the quality of data that you're getting in these surveys, especially now, often are not correct to begin with. Also, if you're measuring engagement, a person can be engaged, but engaged in the wrong thing. So just because someone's engaged doesn't correlate to workforce performance. Going back to what you were saying in the beginning of this chart, engagement metrics is really just. I mentioned this before, butts and seats. It's called, quote, unquote, adoption. Adoption is just another word for compliance. That is not engagement. Right. And so I started to ponder this, um, this last year, especially because I created a program that really encapsulates leadership development that brings in the whole. So there are executive coaches with your typical leadership development programs, but coupled with therapists and psychologists that walk you through what grief could look like, walk you through how to name those emotions. And so I also had the opportunity, and very humbled to have had a chance to self fund, um, some research with Stanford faculty on the topic of the impact of the fear of irrelevance and some of the Things that we found was we aren't paying attention to employee sustainment because engagement measures enthusiasm. Right. But sustainment can really answer, okay, you know, does this person have the right capacity? Engagement also is, you know, you have to look in the past. But if you're measuring for sustainment, it's actually a leading indicator that helps you identify and leaders identify, ooh, what are certain signals that are going to come before burnout, attrition, engagement issues and things like that. And so I would love for any of the HR practitioners or talent leaders or CEOs out there to realize we are not supporting the people with the right support mechanisms in this day and age. And our metric systems are absolutely outdated. There was a leader that I was talking to who was frustrated because he had a pizza party for a team after a layoff occurred with that said team the week before. And he was shocked why people weren't engaged because he went out of his way to do a pizza party. Pizza party is not going to get your employee engaged when they're going through grief of losing their BFFs at work or a leader that they really looked up to. So I would love for people to start shifting the conversation to what does it take to sustain employees in this modern day environment?

Speaker B: The pizza party gets me every time and it reminds me of a conversation I had with an HR leader. They were concerned about the impact they were making leading their HR business partner team inside the organization. So I asked if I went around to your executives and asked them, what is the brand? What are the HR business partners known for? Their response was, well, I think what we'd be known for is ice cream Thursdays. Like, well then that's probably you're doing it wrong, right? The pizza parties, the ice cream are great, but it's not reading the room. It missed the mark completely. On what sustainment, if I'm interpreting correctly, would have been with that group of people that just went through a, ah, traumatic event of losing friends and colleagues and likely over budgetary concerns. And then to throw a party after that just seems like home death.

Speaker A: Yeah, right. And this is a Melissa point of view, but I really feel like true leadership now is understanding how to be a regulated leader and also how to create a regulated team. Those are things that leadership development or manager trainings have not equipped us with. Oftentimes managers, it's an identity shift. You're thrown in and all of a sudden you have to manage a bunch of people. But the only training you've had was how to populate that Excel spreadsheet, how to create 18 versions of a PowerPoint present internally to get approval six months later. You know those aren't viable skills to help people thrive, I like to say in the workplace today.

Speaker B: I've often found too as an HR community we tend to do things that are defensible and safe. And I don't mean safe in like a physical form. It's just if I suggest going to do an engagement survey with my elt, they're all going to agree to it and then we'll attract those scores. And I'm with you on people don't trust those surveys even if you say they're anonymous or whatever recently. And this is not something original, but I'd love your input too of what I can do better. I suggest it. And then we executed on something that was wildly inefficient. Instead of doing an engagement survey which we felt like we weren't getting a lot of action, we'll signal. Myself and our uh, head of IT business partner sat down with every senior leader of the company to start with and we asked a set of six questions that we did not come up with. They're called the magic questions, if someone's familiar with those. But it was a lot of work, it was a lot of one on one meetings. But it led to some transformative things in our business. And it was the first time where even people which normally were concerned with providing feedback because of, oh, it's going to be attributed to me is this survey actually anonymous were giving extremely candid feedback. But it was because we, I felt we had a human element to it. And so what I'd be interested in, selfishly, Melissa, uh, is when I go and meet with these folks again and I want to ask sustainment type questions. What are questions that you would ask folks if you're attempting to get some good signal, candid signal from your employees?

Speaker A: I actually can answer this pretty, pretty specifically. So the research that we created ended up becoming an um, index, what we called the Fit to Thrive index. Right. And that is a measurement of sustainability versus employee engagement. So if you think about it, there's four different domains in this uh, assessment or index. The first one is role capacity fit. So one thing to ask your leaders is, is this person's energy matched to their role? For example, let's say that there was a recent reduction. The team went from eight to four. Okay. So every single executive I've talked to is like, we gotta do more with less, gotta do more with less. Right. What does that mean exactly? It means the eight people job are now on four people's shoulders. Right. And so if you're providing 200% of expectations when somebody only has up to a hundred and a hundred isn't even you need thinking time, you need processing time. You're really not setting up that person for success. Not only are they going through survival guilt, you're now adding an impossible situation from a capacity perspective to them. The next domain is work value fit. So you know, you've seen all the values placated on people's walls and one can, you know, determine whether or not some organizations do it well or not. But I'm talking here about the person's personal values. So does their work actually align with what they personally believe that matters? And I think that shows up. So for example, for me, I had returned from maternity leave to a toxic workplace and the incentives of being a successful partner, you're literally actually pitted against other partners. And I'm a collaborator. I'm a daughter of two Chinese immigrants. I'm a we person, like let's help the community, you know. And so that I was starting to feel so much anxiety that it felt like I was on the verge of a mental breakdown for three months in a row. And so that's ah, an example of it showing up in a somatic kind of physical way for me that my personal value system was not aligned with my environment five days a week. And then the third domain is accountable safety or psychological safety with accountability. And I say that because can people be real and be held to a high standard at the same time? I've heard managers misuse psychological safety mean like they can tell me anything and if something fails, there's no accountability. So I always try to emphasize the accountability portion. And then the last one is readiness to repair. And so that's where we really found there was a key unlock to unlocking the whole person in the workplace versus just the robot. Just like focus on the outcomes and the activity. It's when disruption hits either at uh, the org level, the team level or the individual level, do they recover or do they retreat? And how fast? What's the velocity? So those are the questions that I would ask.

Speaker B: They're great questions and definitely going to be adopting that. Not to use the compliance word that we mentioned before, but you're such a quick learner with these types of questions. It's just an aside. They lead to such interesting conversations. What became so passionate for me is I did 60 of these sessions over a matter of weeks. Yeah, it was an Aggressive amount. That's why it was wildly inefficient. So we had to get the ELT bought into. It's going to be inefficient. But what became so interesting is you had essentially six prompts that you would ask people, but then the conversations would organically evolve in ways that you would not imagine. And you learn so much about folks. And what I had found through that Melissa, was folks do want to talk, they do want to share what's going on in their lives and, and how it's interacting with work and what their career trajectories are. You just have to ask. And I feel that maybe my hot take and I want to speak for you, so I'll take the blame on this hot take as hr. Some of us have become too comfortable with what historically the norm is for asking these types of things or fixated Even in the, in the realm of AI, I think it's becoming even more challenging on how efficiently can we do something rather than what's the best way to get signal. Now I'll ask you for your hot take and maybe it's complete disagreement with mine.

Speaker A: Oh, I think it's in a similar vein, um, maybe just a slightly different flavor, but I think it's inserting the human back into everything because the mechanisms that we're used to obtaining this information and the metrics, right, we lost our way, you know, and we need to ask better questions like what is the quality of data that you're receiving through these mechanisms? You know, the time that we have in these modern day society, are our metrics still viable? You know, and, and where shall we shift them? You know it's interesting because there's a statistic about a lot of executives were saying these transformations were successful. You know, they were 96% successful. But then if you ask all the people that it impacted, they wouldn't say the same thing.

Speaker B: They wouldn't.

Speaker A: I'm known as a systems breaker. You know, I would be like, why don't we create the metrics together as an organization, not just what we've done in the past so that you have the employee voice in the success metrics. And uh, what they want to see may be different than what you want to see, but it could uh, make you have an expanded understanding of what it is to serve a human being. Because humans still at the end of the day are going to get the business from A to B. And I think sometimes people are forgotten that.

Speaker B: I completely agree. And as someone that's an executive at AI Co. I also will double down on Humans are the ones that are going to drive this progress. This is essentially a human endeavor. Now, Melissa, perhaps the most important and easiest question is if folks want to connect with you and take this a step further, what's the best way to reach out and get a hold of you?

Speaker A: Find me on LinkedIn, Melissa Goldner or email me at melissamalujourney.com I would love to chat. I would love to figure out a way to partner and change the narrative together.

Speaker B: Absolutely. Thank you so much for being on the podcast today.

Speaker A: Thank you for having me.

Speaker B: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Troop HR podcast. If you've liked this episode episode, we would encourage you to like and subscribe. If you would like to learn more about the troop HR community, you can reach out to troophr.com in the meantime, keep living the dream.