[Transcript]
Narrator (00:00):
Hello HR professionals. Good news. This episode of the Love your people Podcast is valid for 0.5 professional development credits towards SHRM-CP SHRM-SCP and HRCI recertification. Stay tuned to access your certification code.
John Duisberg (00:22):
Welcome to the Love your people podcast. I'm your host, John Duisberg, and if you're new here, this is the show where we explore how people-first strategies help organizations and their teams flourish. On today's episode, we are honored to be joined by Julian Lute, Insights, Innovation and Strategy Leader at Great Place to Work. Julian brings over 15 years of experience as an innovative and operational leader and global trusted advisor, helping to connect the dots between superior business performance and best in class employee experience. In this episode, you'll learn how to define and create a high trusts culture, the difference between a good workplace and a great one and why investing in your people is the best strategy for sustainable business success with his deep expertise in building high performing people-centric cultures. You won't want to miss this episode with Julian Lute, let's dive in. Really excited to just kind of peel the onion back and learn from you.
(01:17):
Julian and I do want to say, and we're going to get into this in the interview, I think conceptually probably everyone who's joining here understands the value, understands the priority around being that great place to work. But I don't want to forget that there is a real business case for being a top workplace. And Julian, forgive me, but I'm going to share a couple stats and you make sure I'm saying 'em correctly here. But I have for publicly traded companies, those that are certified, certified, and I think that's a key point. Certified is a great place to work, 11% higher stock performance, 15 times more likely for a candidate to choose that organization that's certified as a great place versus not, and two times higher employee retention. So that's real, that's powerful. That is the business case right there. I know we're going to get into more of it, but Julian, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm so excited for this conversation.
Julian Lute (02:21):
Oh, John, it's a pleasure. You've just made my job so much easier just in that moment, so thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm honored to be here with you all today.
John Duisberg (02:29):
Absolutely. Okay, well let's jump in and let's start. So first, for anyone who hasn't been around the last 10, 15 years, make sure just to give us the overview of the context, great place to work as an organization, the work that you do, your leadership role, the insights that you gain working with these organizations. So give us that background and then, okay, in 2025 now looking into 2026, what does it actually take to be a great place to work? And would love to just start there and then we will continue to dive deeper.
Julian Lute (03:04):
Alright, that's perfect. And I have to say, when you're working with a great workplace like ITA Group, people like you, John, I get the treat today to actually speak with a leader in a best workplace. So you know what it means to be here. You know what the ethos is of ITA Group. I mean ITA Group has not just been recognized as a certified workplace, but a best workplace for parents, for women in the professional services category as a company that cares. So this is truly a masterclass of what happens when you get the work, right? So I want to give you your props because this is excellent and this is exactly where I love to be, great place to work. We're the global authority and workplace culture. We've been doing this for 30 years. We've surveyed hundreds of millions of employees worldwide and we're only trying to answer one question or at least where it began.
(04:01):
What makes a workplace great and the answer that we see all around the world is that fundamentally it's about trust. And when folks experience trust consistently, so credibility with leaders, respect from their leaders, fairness from their leaders, pride and comradery with the people that they work with, they are more agile, they are more innovative, and they grow faster and sustainably faster. So we only certify those companies that meet that high bar and then through that we published the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For list amongst others to celebrate those folks that are really leading that way. But what we've learned over time is that this is not just about recognition. I mean who doesn't like a little recognition, but the companies who get it understand that it's about the results. So our mission is very, very simple. We want to build a better world by helping every organization become a great place to work for all.
(04:58):
So what do I get to do? I spend my time doing things similar to this. I get to help leaders build a workplace where people actually want to show up, they want to contribute, they want to grow my background, sales, marketing, leadership development strategy. But I've had the opportunity through a great place to work, to work with companies all around the world, in all industries who understand or are some way trying to turn their culture into their competitive advantage. So I would just say if you're and you care about people, you care about performance and you care about purpose, you're in the right place with us today. So I'm going to keep going though, John, because I think that I want to help people understand the trust index so I don't just show up. People like me don't just show up and say, Hey, you're great.
(05:43):
You're a great workplace. What we do is employees have to take the trust index survey, that's our proprietary survey, 60 statements, two open-ended questions, all about their experience of trust. And every year we get over 20 million responses over 170 countries. So we get this data. So I'm not just talking here, I'm talking about this data set, and that's the only way to earn recognition. I can't stand back and say, I think this is a great workplace because I believe in the work that they do. Your people have to say that this is a great workplace and that's truly a superpower for leaders because it's not me, it's not anyone on my team that says you're great. It's what your people know to be true on a consistent day-to-day basis. And I would say as our research shows from the last year and moving into 2026 people, first companies, what they do is they treat culture as a part of their strategy.
(06:44):
So it's just like we think about our performance KPIs just as we think about the other, the investors that we have to make sure are satisfied, culture is a part of that conversation. It's not just a perk. You don't just get it as a byproduct. You actually prioritize building trust and belonging in the decisions that you make. You listen actively. You build on employee feedback on feedback, not just doing a bunch of surveys, and then you try to figure out how do you design systems that help employees and support their wellbeing, their growth, and their purpose. So at a very high level, John, that's leading the way for 2025 into 2026, that prioritization of trust, actively listening to feedback and then wellbeing, people's growth and development, and then connecting to people's purpose very, very tightly. But we can go into so much detail.
John Duisberg (07:39):
Yeah, no, this is helpful. I definitely want to lean into a couple things that you shared there. So first, so the trust index. So this is an annual survey organization's going to sign up to distribute across all their employees. Talk to us a little bit about the science behind the trust index. My understanding is that this is not just a, I don't just go out to SurveyMonkey and create a survey. This is something that I think you mentioned 20 million employees have participated over 20 million, over 170 countries around the world. So that's a lot of data. Talk to us a little bit about how the trust, trust in us, it works, the science behind it, just help our audience just understand a little bit more about how that works.
Julian Lute (08:31):
Sure. So I'm going to go all the way back, follow me in the way back machine and our founder before our CEO of Michael Bush, but the founder of our organization was a labor reporter and he had so much experience dealing with bad, horrible workplaces. So he tells a story that when he would go out, he thought, I'm going to write a book about the hundred worst companies to work for in America. And all the lawyers said, you can't do that. We won't be a company for very long. We'll get sued for that. But what he decided to do, he and his research partner over the next, from about 1984 till the mid 1990s actually conducted a research project to understand what does it mean to build a great workplace? What do people actually want out of their workplace? Not this is my consulting or my theoretical hat.
(09:21):
This is what do people want? So they started with those questions and what it really boiled down to and what we measure today is we measure the credibility of leaders. We measure, do people do what they say they're going to do. We measure respect, and that's sort of qualified by do leaders value me as a person and my contributions to the organization. We measure fairness, just plain old fairness. Do promotions go to those who deserve those promotions? Are people treated fairly regardless of their physical differences? Then we talk about pride because pride is something that people, especially in the beginning of our research, that people really wanted to feel a deep connection towards whatever product or services that they're producing for the world. And there's also this sense of comradery. I've been on great teams, I've been on bad teams, but I do know that having a sense of comradery that people are all in this together is something that holds the glue for an organization even when some of the other elements of trust start to falter.
(10:27):
So when leadership might start to change, when maybe the economy or the macro environment is a little uncertain, you can't underestimate the bonds of people to kind of hold the plane ship steady and help weather those, weather those storms. So we really measure trust and then we talk about, and we use some of those instruments to be able to talk about some of the outcomes, retention, innovation, agility, all of the things that are important on the performance side of a business. We connect all that back to what it means. And we know through the data that you, John, that you described earlier on, that there's the clear, easiest path to get the results is through people. I'll say one thing here, Courtney della Cava she's a Senior Managing Director at Blackstone. She was on our stage this year at our Great Place to Work Summit, and she said, now Blackstone, they invest in organizations for growth. They want their money to produce more money. And they say numbers follow people. So companies that are high performing with their cultures, trust, transparency and engagement, drive better business outcomes. Now you have to have great products and services, you have to treat your customers, but they know the way to get to that is through focusing the trust, the transparency, and the engagement of employees, which leads to those outcomes of better business.
John Duisberg (12:03):
I'm going to probably use that. I like that numbers follow people,
(12:09):
And this is Blackstone. Of course, they're about the numbers, but they got it. Numbers follow people. I'm going to reuse that one. That was a good little thing, Julian, thank you. And thank you for that background and that context. And I think it'd be helpful for our audience just to hear more examples. When do companies get it? What are some of the things that they're doing that are just, whether it's starting from the top, reinforcing it through mid year managers down to frontline, what are some of the things that you've found has supported achieving that level of trust that's so critical? What are some of the things that maybe you found that folks have gotten wrong or they've gotten off track? Because I know for me, I learned from, I'm going to say the F word. I learned from failure probably more than anything else. So just give us a little bit more in terms of some of the examples. So maybe start with some of the ones that you felt were just great models, and then any kind lessons learned from folks who may have gotten off track as well. Would love to just pick your brain on this.
Julian Lute (13:29):
Oh, of course. So I got to see a little bit of the chat and what we have seen and where companies really get it. We always say, and Laura Fuentes from Hilton also says this, listening is your superpower. Laura really says that as a quote, but when we think about all the leadership behaviors that a leader can embody on a day-to-day basis, you have to start with listening. So that's the thing that best companies, certified organizations, they get right. It's not just about comp and benefits. If you were around in the nineties as technology companies were on the rise, ping pong tables, roving beverage carts, all those things were the rage. But very quickly when people weren't trusted, when there wasn't this sense of psychological safety, it's become okay to talk about psychological safety. But people have wanted psychological safety for a long, long time. People want to feel seen, they want to feel heard, they want to feel valued.
(14:35):
I also saw a comment come in around about growth. Not everyone wants to grow to be the CEO or a senior leader, but people want to feel developed. So those are things that I know are true. Now, when do people get this? One of my favorite examples is Synchrony Financial. They're a bank. They are the issuer behind some of our favorite credit cards. So you might go into a store, they have a branded credit card. Synchrony is oftentimes the issuer behind those cards, but the financial market has changed over the last six, seven years, and the change was going to impact their business, and it had the possibility to impact it very, very positively. Even though the short term might've felt like a challenge, their leader decided that we are not going to start with focusing on the KPIs. We are going to start with our leaders.
(15:36):
And so they put their leaders through at least the last two years of sort of reinvigorating the values, connecting the values to actual behaviors of how you're supposed to live the values, and then let's connect that to the outcomes that we want to see as a business. And so they invested in all of their top leaders specifically, and then they started cascading it down to those frontline leaders that you talk to on customer support when you're having trouble to really clearly understand how their values are going to lead the charge. So when you get it right, you think about that C-suite leader, that top line of the organization truly living into it, and then that cascading throughout the organization. Now, I think we may talk about middle managers at a point, but geez, if there was one group, our chief innovation officer, Tony Bond always says that layer is sometimes frozen.
(16:35):
How do you break through that layer of leaders? Because they are oftentimes the ones who are kind of feeling that squeeze. They have to enact everything that you've said from the C-suite, but I also am the cushion and the barrier between execution. I got to get it right. And so the companies that really get that right, truly that's a place that you have to really unstick what they, you got to help them control the story. It can't be, I told you to do this, so you go do this. They have to have the way to make that real for their people. So just not just cascading the message, but empowering those folks to shape that story. And then sometimes middle managers, there's a lot of things, but sometimes they have an ambiguous role. Am I a leader or am I an operator? Am I a coach? It's almost like how do you help them see themselves as what we might call organizational athletes? They're people who can flex between the roles with skill and purpose. So that sense of development and growth is something that I would also say. So when you see companies, hopefully it's your organizations as well, investing in that middle level of leadership, you are on the right track to doing things you want to talk about.
John Duisberg (17:54):
They get it wrong. Before you go on, Julian, that was another, I love that. So organizational athletes, so say that definition again. I just love that right there.
Julian Lute (18:06):
You need to make sure you, that your middle leaders feel like organizational or at least can see themselves, that they can flex between roles with skill and purpose. I think about myself, I was not a good basketball player. I don't think I knew how to make a layup until ninth grade, and I finally made the team as number 12, but I was happy to make the team. But what was cool was I earned the chance to come off the bench to be the sixth person. So when there were a few different roles that needed to get played, coach felt comfortable to put me in to a few different roles. And so that was the skill that they taught me. I'd even say even in my roles today, I feel like I'm not just one identity in my role. I get pulled into many different conversations, and the organization has supported me in that development.
(18:59):
I've seen many, many organizations, I won't name this one, but it's a large insurance organization, and I've been working with their leaders over the course of a couple years, and you could see that those leaders did not feel that people didn't understand their job. So will you go in there and talk about their employee experience or say, Hey, your scores are sort of low here and your people are saying this thing. What do you think about that? The first thing they say is, these people don't even get what I have to do on a day-to-day basis. They just think it's all cascade down what I need to happen. But sometimes that strategy that a smart C-level executives come up with around that nice big mahogany table, once it reaches that frontline employee, they also have feedback about what works and what doesn't work. And if you as an organization can't deal with that tension that I have the strategy and it's got to work, and then the folks that are actually engaged in the strategy are saying, this part does not work. If you don't have that tension, you put your middle leaders in a tough spot and then they don't feel like they can actually participate or get to the performance that we all are out here working for on a day-to-day basis.
John Duisberg (20:12):
Yeah, no, that's great, Julian, and just to kind of round out what you're seeing companies get right, I just want to make sure I'm following on two big points. The first you made was around listening, so just making sure you are getting feedback from frontline to middle manager across the board. So just want to make sure I'm tracking on that. The other point you made was around leadership development, and so I'm just curious, maybe share a little bit more. Is that fairly consistent of something that you see as an attribute across great places to work? They have a dedicated leadership development program. Just maybe touch on that a little bit more. I just want to make sure we understand kind of what you're seeing out there.
Julian Lute (20:55):
So when you think about some of the key drivers of a great workplace, one of the main drivers that we see is people's desire to be involved in decisions that affect their work. So that's a big one. Just am I involved in the things or do I feel like the world is just telling me what to do on a day-to-day basis? But I would say the second most compelling driver for the workplace experience is people's sense of growth in their role. So whether you have a formal leadership development like operation, you've got a person in charge of it and everyone's got a track, that's one way to do it. But for smaller organizations or organizations that don't take that tact, do people feel that they're growing? Do people feel like they're growing in their role, in their responsibility, in their knowledge? AI is huge right now that you've got people on both sides and straddling that fence.
(21:47):
But I've seen over the last six months, there have been people that have felt that their roles or their work was a little stale, and then they got trained in AI and how to use prompting and how to use AI as a thought partner, things like that, that have really opened up and reopened up their world to them, even though their role is still the same. They haven't got a promotion, they haven't got more money, but they feel like they're growing. So people have this just innate sense. Maybe it's because we grow every day by a little bit, but people just have this sense that they want to see growth. I think about Edward Jones, the financial services firm. One of the things that they're really, really good about doing is really aligning that chain of values of culture and of strategy and that sense of resilience that comes from that.
(22:43):
So their people, even though they've had, I think they called it seven generations of financial turmoil, they've been a part of our financial system through ups and downs, their people are resilient because their people are always growing. They're transparently giving information to their people about the macro and the micro and how they can uniquely participate in the purpose. So you are here because you have the skills, you have something that we need and you are valued. That message unlocks people. They could be driving back from picking their pet up from the groomer, and they're thinking about what they could do for the business. That type of, that's what you want people to be involved in, engaged in a way that they've got you on their mind when it's appropriate and those contributions are meaningful and you're able to recognize those contributions.
John Duisberg (23:40):
I feel like you just described the perfect definition of employee engagement right there. I love it. That's great, Julian. Okay, so going back to the F word, and I'm not trying to throw any shade on any organization here, but are there certain things that you've seen where you just feel like you've seen gaps, you've seen people get off track, or those missteps just want to learn from organizations where they didn't get it right or some of those lessons learned that we might be able to apply as we navigate these as people-first leaders as well. So the flip side here, what are you seeing on that side?
Julian Lute (24:21):
Yeah, so I'm going to use a broad example, but hopefully we can pull it back to an individual's experience. So large organization that we've worked with sort of missed their financial targets for a few quarters. They were projecting services and sales to be X. That didn't happen. The analyst, Wall Street downgraded their projections, and so they had to have a reduction in force, and it was a lot of people that they had to let go of and they did not get that right. So they knew it was coming. I think the senior leadership did a good job of positioning sort of like why. But as we talked a little bit about cascading of messages or involving particular parts of the business and the leadership around this, they did not get that right. By the time that message left the C-Suites lips to the frontline leader or the person who was actually conducting the exit interviews, it looked like it was a financial decision versus a strategic oversight.
(25:28):
So people's public statements around this RIF (reduction in force), they just got that they got it wrong and people were outraged. So that's a big thing that many of us don't have to necessarily deal with on a day-to-day basis. But the connective tissue in that is the power of communication, the power of transparency, the power of investing in those systems and those lines of information and the power of getting feedback early. So what you don't do is you bring 29,000 people into a couple of rooms on one day and let everybody go. You start to stress test your messaging. I've seen companies that have had to do this. Think about some of the largest hotels when the pandemic hit, Hilton, Marriott people, they had to shut their doors. Now, do hotel doors ever actually lock? I've never seen a locked hotel door. But what you do see is that ability for them to, what they were able to do in that moment of the pandemic, they had so much care and concern for their people at that time that folks on the survey said, Hey, we know that this is a unprecedented event in human history.
(26:42):
When said, hotel is ready to have me back, I cannot wait to come back and work for you. And so that's a very different message because of the care, because of the communication, because of the transparency and the training that folks were able to get that message, that key message, and that you can see where the hotels are now. You can walk in any hotel. People are still, they have the same desire to be there as they did pre pandemic, and they really appreciate these chains for allowing them not necessarily to just come back, but creating an environment in a space where they know that they're cared for and taking care of whether or not they're actively employed in the business.
John Duisberg (27:22):
Yeah. Thank you, Julian. As we wrap up today, remember this, the insights you've gained are only as valuable as the action you take leadership and culture transformation. Start with each of us at ITA Group. We help people and brands thrive together because creating a workplace where people feel seen, valued and inspired is how we drive meaningful change. For more strategies, tools, and insights to help you lead with purpose and build people-first organizations, visit itagroup.com/insights. Thank you for joining us, and until next time, keep leading with your heart and making a difference as a people-first leader worth following.
Narrator (28:09):
Thank you for listening to the Love Your People podcast. As promised, this episode is valid for 0.5 professional development credits toward your SHRM-CP, SHRM-SCP, and HRCI recertification. To claim your SHRM credit, please visit itagroup.com/shrm-podcast. For your HRCI credit, visit itgroup.com/hrci-podcast. Complete the quick form to receive your certification codes. Again, that's itagroup.com, forward slash SHRM, dash podcast, and itagroup.com/hrci podcast.