All right, everyone. Well, welcome. We are so excited to have you here today. For those who don't know me, I'm Isabel McDonald. I'm a leadership coach and culture consultant at The Perk, and we are all so thrilled to spend our morning together. First off, huge thank you for being here today. We have an incredible session in store. Who are we? We are a group of people who are passionate about being great leaders and intentionally building thriving cultures and communities. The space is designed for growth and connection, a place where you can develop as a leader, engage with like-minded people, and walk away feeling inspired and ready to create positive change in the world. Where Do We Meet? Culture Community gathers monthly via Zoom. And get excited because next month, the amazing Emily Smith will be leading us in Being the Guide, Mastering the Three Essential Leadership Leadership Mindsets. I will drop the registration link in the chat, and you can sign up, learn more, and we cannot wait to see you there. I'm going to pass it over to my incredible teammate Steph to talk a little bit throughout The Perk.

Thank you. I think it's Jess today, so I'll pass it right over to Jess. That's all right. Yeah.

Hi, everybody. If you have not met us before, we are The Perk, and we are a Premier Leadership and Culture Development Studio. We're based here in Madison, Wisconsin, but we work with organizations all over the nation and actually in other countries as well. We're international, and we're on a mission to build the world's best leaders. You can see a few of the companies we work with But what we really want to highlight is, actually, you can keep going. We know there are other groups that do this type of work and lead these types of conversations, but we are really passionate about making it fun. We know that we learn the most when it's really fun. We want to make it human and safe so that people can bring their real ideas and questions. We make it custom, so we customize our programs to really meet the needs of the folks that we work with, and we really make it last. So we don't want to be just a single shot of inspiration. We want to make sure that it's something that people can take away and use those actionable skills the same day that they learn them.

Then here are a few of the things we do. So our custom leadership development programs, some team workshops. We do a mix of live and virtual training, one-to-one leadership coaching. We also are really known for our CLEAR leadership operating system, which is a wonderful foundation for experienced and emerging leaders alike, and Trust by Design, which is our leadership training program about the five core trust behaviors. All right. And now I will turn it over to Steph to teach us about the three culture metrics to measure.

Awesome. Thanks, Jess. So I have you all on a second screen. If I'm looking over here, I'm not checking my email. I just want to see all of your faces, and I also have the chat over there, too. I just like to put that out there. But I'm so excited to be here to talk with you all today about the three culture metrics to measure in 2025: trust, belonging, and burnout. This is going be a little case study. This is what we measure at the Perk. This is what we measure with our clients. We really just wanted to bring this to you all to help you be able to learn a little bit more about how we measure culture at the Perk. Before I get started, Can everybody see my screen before I jump in? Okay, great. Before I get started, whose first time is it at Culture Community? If you could just raise your hand to give an emoji. Thank you so much for being here. We're so excited to have you. We love having everyone come to Culture Community. This is a space for anyone and everyone. So please feel free to invite your friends, your colleagues.

We would love to have more folks come for Emily's session next month. So we're so excited that you're here, and we hope that you keep coming back. So what I like to just start off with is some ground rules and expectations for our time to We do this a lot in culture community. So some of this, if you've come before, might be a little repetitive, but we just like to make sure that everyone feels like they know how to show up and how to engage today. So we ask that you're present as possible. So just a Eliminating those distractions, giving yourself the gift of this time and space to learn, to grow. Just asking you just to really be here as much as you can. Obviously, life pops up, work pops up. If you have to jump off, we will send the recording out to you. So don't worry, if you miss anything, you'll get the recording afterwards. Please ask questions. Engage, participate. We'll do some annotate today. We'll do some group sharing. And if you have any questions, you can pop it in the chat. My team will monitor that. I'll try and look at that as much as I can.

And you can also use the raise hand function. But we just love when you engage, ask questions, because if you're wondering, I'm sure someone else's, too. So there's no such thing as a stupid question here. We ask that you're open-minded. Maybe some of these things you've learned before, maybe it's brand new. We just ask that you're open-minded to what you're learning today. Our good friend Michelle Ventcherini, taught us this mantra of everyone has something to learn and everyone has something to teach. So we love learning from all of you when we do culture community, just as much as we love showing up and being able to teach you a couple of new things as well. And last but not least, if you know anything about us at the Perk, you know that we love to have fun when it to leadership development, culture development. So we're here to have some fun today, too. And then I'll ground us in our purpose for the day, just so you know where we're going, what's our roadmap for the next hour or so. And so what we're going to do together, we're going to talk about why it's important to measure culture.

We're going to talk about how we measure the three metrics of trust, belonging, and burnout at the perk. And then you'll learn the details of those metrics. So a little bit more about what what they are and why they're important. And then I'll also go through the survey questions that we use when we're measuring them as well. But I will say, most of all, I just want you to feel leaving inspired to take action in measuring your culture. And if that's with trust, belonging, and burnout, that's awesome. If it's in a different way, that's amazing. But just really want you to feel inspired to be able to take some action from today. Sound good? All right. Awesome. So we're going to start with some annotation. And if you've never done annotate before, how this works, there's a little black circle in the bottom left corner of your screen with a bright green pencil. If you click on that, a toolbar will pop up, and then you can choose the text option, which would be like third from the top. And then you can go ahead and start typing into the box that I have on the screen.

And so the question that I have for you all is to think about the best workplace culture that you've been a part of, and how did you know that it was great? So I would love for you to share on the screen with the text Annotate for how you knew this culture was great. And if you can't figure out Annotate, you can use the chat as well. That's totally fine. Oh, didn't have Sunday Scaries. That's such a good one. Collaboration, really big. Belonging, good communication, didn't drag going to work. Supportive team, everyone was excited and engaged. I could just be me. Yes. Love spending time together. I didn't always feel like I would get in trouble. Huge. Yeah. Oh, so many good ones. Transparent communication, lots of informal camaraderie, transparency, felt listened to. Look at all these amazing ways that you knew that you had a great culture. There was engagement. In the chat, we have, I truly never feel dumb asking a question. That's so huge, isn't it? It was high trust and fun. No toxic positivity. Yes, I love it. Amazing. Why we're here today is because these are all great behaviors, actions, maybe feelings that you felt.

And how amazing would it be if we could actually measure some of these things? Some of you all called out trust, belonging that burnout or not feeling burnt out, not having those Sunday scaries. And so what if we could actually measure them? That's what we're going to talk about today. And then I have one more. So I want to hear from you all. You're here because I would assume you believe that measuring culture is important and you want to learn more about these three culture metrics. So I'd love to hear from you all what's important about measuring culture. This is from your perspective. So there's no right or wrong answer here, but what's important about measuring culture for you? You'll do the same thing with annotate. If you need to close the toolbar ever, there's an X at the bottom of the toolbar. You could talk about real challenges. It feels subjective. How can we quantify that exactly? We want to be able to have maybe some numbers, some data that we can use. Being able to identify trends, tracking progress. It puts the culture out front. Yes. What else do we? We are a growing company, so as we grow, how can we ensure our culture grows positively?

Being intentional about that growth. Wanting to identify psychological safety. What gets measured or displays gets improved? You don't know how to improve something if we're not measuring it. Culture is built all the time. We need to be working on it daily and adjust as new team members join us 100%. Great. I'm excited that you're all here. I love that. This is our why, right? This is why building culture, why measuring culture is so important. And so I just love being able to read from your perspective why this is so important, because then that just helps me to understand, okay, where are we going together? And I love that you all have your different whys for it. If someone from my team could just clear the annotate for me just so we can move forward. Amazing. Thank you so much. Those are all amazing reasons why we should measure culture. And I probably don't even need to go through the slides that I have of why culture metrics matter, because you all covered so much, but I still will. So this is why we believe culture metrics matter and why you should measure culture, because culture is the foundation of engagement and performance.

But as a lot of you said, it doesn't improve by chance. It really does improve by design. We have to be intentional it. Without that measurement, culture can just remain a good intention rather than a strategic priority. We love this quote from James Clear from Atomic Habits, We don't rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems. If we're not measuring culture, we might have a great goal to have high engagement or to have that high performing, high belonging culture. But if we don't have a system to measure it, we're not So it's not going to rise to that level. So that's what we'll talk about a little bit today, is how can we create this system for measuring some culture metrics so that we can make sure that it can be strategic and not just a good intention. Another reason why measuring culture is so important is because the workforce has changed so much in the last couple of years. Hybrid and remote work are on the rise. They're really here to stay, and they've really transformed how trust and belonging show up for a culture. Employees are navigating new ways to build relationships, whether they're hybrid or remote, it just looks a little bit different.

Burnout levels are also at an all-time high. If companies don't figure out how to address this or face this, they can risk that turnover and losing their best people. And then the last piece here, with the many generations in the workforce now, expectations have really evolved. So Employees want workplaces that support them holistically, not just professionally. People don't just want to be a number. They want to be seen as a human, as their whole self. And so those expectations have really evolved. So because of that, our metrics must evolve, too. And so I'm curious, again, to hear from you all, what metrics do you measure at your company for culture? And again, no right or wrong answers. I'm just curious is to hear what we're already measuring for culture. We survey a lot with Gallup. Nice. And if you're not measuring anything for culture, you can put that in there, too, and there's no judgment. It's okay. Staff satisfaction, a yearly survey, Gallup 2. Engagement surveys. Custom questions in a Pulse survey. That's amazing. Brgs are surveying their membership. Employee Wellbeing and Satisfaction surveys. Nice So a lot of engagement surveys, a lot of surveys is what I'm hearing, which makes sense, right?

It's the easiest way to get to everybody. Great places to work survey. Yeah, Leah, and that's okay if there's none, right? Like I said, today we're just here to learn, and so hopefully you can get some ideas as to what you might be able to do after today. Awesome. Yeah, so a lot of engagement surveys and a lot of surveys, retention or turnover. Oh, yeah, being able to track those or attrition rates, those are great ones to be able to utilize as well for measuring that culture or measuring that engagement. Perfect Anyone have anything that they want to share verbally before I keep diving in here to the rest of what we're going to talk about? Either why culture is important for you, those metrics, what metrics you measure or any questions that you have?

I just have a question because I feel like these surveys are great, but I'm curious if there's any people that work for companies with 20 people or less, because I feel like then the surveys I don't know. I just wonder how effective they are or if there's a unique way to measure for smaller companies or these committees. We don't have enough people to have half the team would be on the culture committee then, which I guess we could. But I'm just curious in this unique situation, what culture and building that up and all of that looks like.

Yeah. Anybody have any good suggestions or insights for Leah? That's a great question, Leah. Yeah, I would share Leah, just hearing that my feedback would be applying the same concepts just a little less formally, I'd say in a one-on-one conversation that you have with a team member, something that isn't this big formal committee or survey, but still going after asking the same question gathering the same information, but in a little bit more of a right-sized way that fits well with a small team.

Leah, I'll also mention, I know Steph is going to allude to this later. Our team is small, so we have less than 10 people, and we have some ways that we do this, too. I think later we'll get to this, but we keep a pulse regularly, and then it's also a conversation that we have in one-to-ones as well.

Mujila.

Leah, I was just going to suggest, when you're in a smaller team, it's really difficult. But one thing you can do is skip-level meetings. So in addition to your one-on-ones, do you know what skip levels are? So essentially offering the people to meet with their boss's boss and making it a regular standing meeting so that There's no indication, don't make it ad hoc. So if it's standing, then they discuss issues. It's ongoing. And that way, there's an open forum to have discussions. And I found that to be very helpful in the past.

Thanks, Mikaela. But yeah, Leah, like Jess alluded to. So everything that I'm going to be walking you through and teaching today and walking you through what we do on the perk team would fit within your question of having that smaller team. So let me know if you still have questions at the end or how you can maybe tailor this to your team specifically. We're happy to chat more about that, too. But you should be able to apply this to that smaller team as well. All right. So like we shared on that last annotate, there are so many metrics that you can measure for culture. And what we found just time and time again, internal for ourselves at the park, externally with our clients. These are the three metrics that just really hit home. They really do give a good picture for where your culture is at and where the health of your culture is. So again, measuring trust, belonging, and burnout. So these are the metrics that we're going to dive into today, just based on our experience and what we find to be really impactful for us and our clients. And the reason why we focus on these three metrics is because we've just found that they really do reveal the truth.

So for trust, this is really the backbone of a healthy workplace. Without it, pretty much everything suffers. Productivity, innovation, retention, could probably list 50 more things that suffer if you don't have a strong, trusting culture. Belonging. Employees who feel like they belong are three and a half more times likely to be engaged. And then with burnout, even the best culture will fail if employees are exhausted. So if we can measure that, we can be proactive and we can prevent that disengagement before it leads to any turnover for your team. So we'll again dive more into these in-depth as to why they're important, what are the questions that we ask? How do we really get to the bottom of measuring these metrics? But these are the three that we really focus on because we've just found that they really do reveal the truth when it comes to the health of your culture. So we've talked about why. We've talked about why it's important to measure the culture. Now, I would love to dive into our how. So how we measure these three metrics at the perk. So what we do, we use a bi-weekly survey to track these culture metrics.

And I'll walk through what that survey looks like in detail. And we also review and discuss the insights in three key formats just to make sure that we're taking action. And so we do that as a leadership team. We do in one-on-ones like Jess alluded to. And then we also do it as a full team. Diving in a little bit deeper, what does our bi-weekly culture check-in look like? We use a ranking style survey to measure real-time trends in trust, belonging, and burnout. With that, it's a scale of one to five from strongly disagree to strongly agree. And we just utilize a survey platform called TypeForm. So we don't use anything super fancy. You could use Google forms, you could use Microsoft terms, but it's just being able to really have that survey where people can rank on a scale of one to five. And the goal is to just spot early signals before they become major problems. So we're just trying to be proactive in the culture that we're building at the park. And so making sure that we're able to really intentionally shape our workplace experience, our culture, and really just being able to have that real-time pulse as to where our team is at in these three areas.

And I know that people are going to ask, is this anonymous or is it not anonymous? And we do non-anonymous surveys, and there's nothing wrong with anonymous or non-anonymous. And so what I'm going to walk you through is just the pros and cons of each so that you can choose for your team for your culture, what's going to be the best for you? So I've got the pros of both. So if you have an anonymous survey, you probably have a possibility of some more honest feedback, maybe higher participation, depending on the size of your team. And you can really spot broad culture trends if you're using an anonymous survey. If you're doing a non-anonymous survey, this enables meaningful one-on-one conversations because you have the person's name tied to their scores, so you can really engage in that conversation. It does build a culture of transparency, and then you can track both individual and team progress. So you're really, again, in those one-on-ones, able to have the conversations coach through and be able to track the progress for where individuals are, and of course, where the team falls. But there are cons to both as well.

So the cons of anonymous is that you don't have any personal follow-up. You can't necessarily take that data and go have a conversation in the one-on-one, like directly from the survey data. Obviously, you can ask them and you can still engage in that conversation, but you're not going to have the visibility to it right away. There could be a lack of accountability if it's an anonymous survey, and it can just be difficult to track progress on that individual level. And then the cons of non-anonymous. There might be a possibility some folks might feel like there's a fear of repercussions. If I'm really honest about the score that I put in, is that going to be held against me in some way? So I like to just put out there that if you have a non-anonymous survey, it does require a strong, psychologically safe culture where there isn't that fear of repercussions. And so, again, that's what we use at the perk. We've been really intentional about building a culture of psychological safety that is trusting. That's where we fall is in the non-anonymous survey. But if that doesn't work for you, an anonymous survey, you can still get really good data.

You can still measure your culture. There's just pros and cons of each. Questions, thoughts. This is always a hot topic when it comes to surveying is anonymous versus not. So what questions or what comments do we have about that Comment on this. We use Anonymous at our organization, and I really like that I think we get truer responses. And I dislike that we use the survey tool and you'll get a comment, and then often people won't respond. They'll put in a comment and you say, I want to talk more about this. We can talk here, we can talk in person, and you don't hear back from them again, and you don't know how to track it down from there. And so that is a frustrating part of anonymous for me. I'd rather know that it's out there, but then you sometimes lose the ability to follow up. Yeah, absolutely, Emily. It's like a double-edged sword, right? You love that you got the honest feedback, but you can't necessarily follow up with it if they don't engage back with you, right? Yeah. I think that's important to remind employees of that, too. I mean, communication is a two-way street.

So if I am doing what I can to communicate with you, you have to meet me at least halfway so that we can have that open line of communication and then I can help you. What we had done most recently was we did try to get everyone to put their names on the surveys because we got a lot of that where it was just throwing things over the fence and we couldn't follow up with the appropriate people to get clarification on some of this feedback. Then we did get some names. We were able to then follow up with those individuals, and we even posted some action items from the survey for all employees to see and what we were doing about them. Yeah. Thank you, Crystal. That's amazing. Courtney. Just wondering how you deal with engagement on the survey itself. Yeah, same model. Well, do you run into difficulties getting lots of participation in the survey? Is it mandatory? Is it optional? Is it really want you to, but some people don't? That problem. Yeah. I can speak from two different angles. For internally at the Perk, it's a big goal that we're tracking as a team.

We do typically get 100% participation, but again, we have a smaller team. We're a team of under 10 With our clients that we do this with, it depends on what are the success metrics, what's your why for wanting to measure these culture metrics. Just one example that's coming up for one of our clients is they have a monthly all-team meeting where they're reporting out on their survey results for everyone to be able to see and also reporting out on the participation rate. And so they have a goal, a specific goal of that participation percentage that they're going for. And so then that's really on the people leaders, leadership to make sure that their team is engaging and participating as much as possible, talking about the why, tying it back to big picture items. So that's how that client that's popping into my head, that's how they handle it, is being really transparent with what are the results of it and where are we at as a team from a participation rate level, just to hold that accountability because their survey is anonymous as well. So it's not a non-anonymous survey, so we can't follow up individually with people, but we're reporting out on that percentage for them.

We've also had good luck, I think, with really short pointed surveys that don't take a long time. So it's not a huge time commitment You can do it in three to five minutes and still give some really good feedback, and add comments, if you have specific feedback to give unrelated to the questions. So I think helps get engagement higher Yeah, that's so true, Jen.

That's a really good point. And I know that there's a couple of questions in here. An employee count threshold for anonymous versus non-anonymous. That's a great question. I don't know if there's research that shows that or not, but that one. And then I think there was a question about doing a blend. Yeah, healthy blend of both. I think it's maybe just figuring out what works best for your culture, what works best for your team. So try an anonymous survey, see what results you get maybe for a quarter, then flip that to on anonymous, see if there's more engagement or less engagement, more honesty, less honesty, and just being able to see what works for your team. There's really no right or wrong. It's just what's right for you. So being able to figure that out, I think, might just some trial and error. But I'm sure that there is some research that shows the different thresholds. But I don't know. That's a great question. Yes, 85 % participation is an awesome participation score, especially for 7000 employees globally. That's amazing. All right. So diving back into what we do at the park. So again, we have the non-anonymous survey, it's bi weekly.

Again, that might be too much for you. You can do it monthly, you could do it quarterly, semi-annually. This is just, again, what we're doing and on our team. And so then from there, once we do the survey, we have leadership team discussion. So that's where we're really analyzing trends and making strategic decisions. And so, for example, if we notice that our trust score has maybe dipped from the last time that we did the survey, maybe we're looking at communication, our leadership behaviors, our core behaviors as a team. What are we maybe not following through on that maybe is causing that trust to dip. And then we're bringing it into one on one conversation. So this is really where people leaders on the PIRC team can coach. We can tailor support based on what each individual team member needs. And so if someone's reporting high burnout, then we're able to really pinpoint for them and facilitate a conversation and coach through what needs to change, how can we best support you? So again, being able to have that non-anonymous survey allows us to be able to have one on one conversations and then also in team meetings.

So we do weekly team meetings at the perk. And so we like to be able to discuss themes as a team, if we need to brainstorm any solutions if some of our numbers are lower, because being able to have that transparency just builds that collective ownership. Culture is built by everyone. It's not a leadership exercise. It's really built by the behaviors of everyone on your team. So being able to have that transparency and discussions as a whole team is really important for us. And you'll notice that I have a little asterisk here, and I'm sure my perk team is like, Steph, are we just pretending to be perfect here? No, because we're not perfect. We started doing this once we were measuring these metrics, we started sharing it out at team meetings, but we weren't consistent in it, and it fell off at the end of last year. And so for my perk teammates that are on this call, we are putting a better process in place because we know how important it is to be able to hit on those three different methods of discussion. So we really want to make sure that everyone knows where we're at as a team.

We're not just doing it in one on one conversations or leadership conversations, but truly as a full team. So Dan on our team is building out a little dashboard for our team to be able to see that in our Monday meetings that we have. But I don't want to pretend like we've got it all together here at the park because we definitely don't. So we're not perfect. This fell off for us, but it is really important. And so We're going to be bringing it back here shortly into our team meetings. So that's our how. That's how we do it. And then we can, with our clients, like I was giving that example, we can tweak things to match for you, but a little bit of a case study as to how we internally do that at the perk. Next, we'll dive into the details of each of these three metrics. I'll share the survey questions that we do, and we can talk a little bit more about why these metrics are important. But before I do that, any questions about how we measure these three metrics at the perk? All right. Everyone's just ready to dive right in.

Let's do it. So we're going to start with trust. So if you've been to any of our culture communities in the past, trust is a really popular topic that we love to talk about. And so there are five core trust behaviors that we focus on when we're talking about building trust in your culture for your team. And so I'm going to dive into each one very briefly. And then I have a resource. If you're interested in learning more about building trust for your culture, I have a resource for you at the end of this section. The first one, the first behavior to build trust is to connect. We trust people that we feel connected to. When I feel seen, heard, and valued, I really trust you. That's how I build. That's how we build Trust. That's what research shows. The next one is to create safety. This is that psychologically safe culture that I was talking about when we're talking about anonymous versus non-anonymous. We trust people that we feel emotionally and psychologically safe with. What I have on the screen here are what we have coined as our safety sentences, safety phrases. This is how you can create safety on your culture or on your team and in your culture is by saying things like, I made a mistake, or I need help, I don't know.

We don't need to necessarily have all the answers. And that really does model and show that we have a psychologically, emotionally safe culture. The third one is to commit. We trust people when they do the things that they say they're going to do. Whenever we talk about trust, when we ask, what's a trust breaker for you? Not following through is usually the top answer that we get here. So when we're talking about commit, you can think about what's your say, do ratio. So how often are you saying and doing something and following through with that? What's that ratio for you? That's really going to build trust for those on your team. And if you're not able to follow through, that's okay. We're not saying that you have to be perfect, but just be able to communicate that proactively and let whoever the stakeholder is or your teammate know that you're not able to follow through on that, that builds trust as well. Our fourth core trust behavior is to be clear because we trust people who are clear and consistent with their words, intentions, and actions. Ambiguity and confusion in all forms lead to distrust.

That's where people start to create stories in their head or having those saboteur thoughts, or they're just not really clear what they should be working on. And so when we're able to be clear with expectations, with our actions, that's really going to build trust on our team. Our last one is to celebrate because we trust people who believe in us and our abilities and want us to be successful. Those who demonstrate that they can recognize, appreciate, and celebrate what we do, who we are, that is a big, big trust builder and something that's needed so much in the workplace today. So these five trust core behaviors, this is really where you can focus if you're wanting to build that high trust culture and that high trust team. And so that's really what we lean on when we're measuring this metric as well Ky, I love that you love to celebrate. Me too. So why is trust important? I alluded to this at the beginning when we were talking about these three metrics being the ones that really show the truth of the health of your culture. A lack of trust affects the bottom line more than anything else.

So trust is really going to affect every area of your organization. If you don't have trust between your teammates, you can't collaborate, you're not going be able to maybe figure out those innovative solutions. The communication isn't going to be as clear. So really affects every area of your organization. That's why we love to focus on trust. You're a numbers person. We have some great staff That's for you here from the HBR with the neuroscience of trust. This, again, affects productivity, engagement, satisfaction. Folks that have high trust companies, there's 74% less stress and 40% less burnout just by having that high trust culture. Being able to, again, measure these things allows us to really see what are the game changers here? What does this do when we have a high trust culture and a high trust company? Trust really does drive engagement and retention. Like I talked about, it really impacts collaboration and innovation. If that trust is low on your team, you might see silos start to form. You might see that us versus them mentality, and that communication is really going to break down. So again, being able to focus on trust is just a really great way to make sure that you have that engagement, collaboration, innovation, and it is measurable.

So how do we do it? How do we measure it? These are the survey questions that we utilize. And I will say we double-dip on some of these. So you're going to see some of these questions in each section because some of these just really share the same sentiments throughout when we're measuring trust, belonging, and burnout. So it's not necessarily that we ask all of these questions, and it's a really long survey, we can combine some of them as well. So I would love to hear from you all through just a self-assessment, again with Annotate, but this time you're going to use stamps. So when you stamp, you're just going to click on the checkmark instead of the text box. And you can go ahead and say, agree, you're unsure or neutral, or you disagree. And so you can stamp as I'm talking through it. By all means, go for it. So these are the questions that we ask to measure trust on our team and with our clients. So we have one question for each core behavior. So for commit, I feel that my team is committed to doing what they say they're going to do.

Be clear, the expectations and objectives set by the team are clear. Create safety, I feel emotionally and psychologically safe to express my thoughts and ideas to the team. For connect, I feel connected to my team members on a personal and professional level. And celebrate, I feel seen, heard, and valued by the team. So again, when we do this, it's a ranking of one to five. Easier to do a self-assessment just with these three stamps. So go ahead and stamp on the screen here for where you fall with each of these questions. Lots of green agrees, which is great to see. Looks like there's maybe some opportunities with clarity and expectations and objectives. And so, again, because we have these five core trust behaviors, now we're able to really dial down and measure that. And so that's really, again, what we use as the backbone of our survey for ourselves and with our clients. And so if this is an area where expectations or clarity being clear is something that we need to work on with one of our clients. We're able to step in, maybe do an overall team training or something like that. But again, you can't fix what you don't know is broken.

And so being able to measure this really can help pinpoint where in the trust formula or in those trust behaviors do we really need to focus because trust can feel really big. So when we're able to maybe narrow that in and really be able to see, okay, maybe we have a clarity be a be clear opportunity here, then we can hone in on that. Perfect. All right, if someone from my team could just clear that for me, thank you so much. So we're going to end each section, each of the three, with a little lock it in exercise. And I would love for you to just do some self-reflecting. And why we like to focus on self-reflection is because it can help us make meaning of what we're learning. Like Jess said, we really want to make it last. We don't just want this to be the learning that you had that one time in one ear, out the other. So when we self-reflect, we're really able to make meaning of what we're learning and how does this actually come into my role, into my organization. So I would love for you to reflect on what's important about measuring trust from your perspective, and then which of these trust behaviors do you think has the biggest impact on your team's overall culture?

I will type what they are in the chat just because I don't expect you to memorize. Them just because you've seen them once. If you're more of a visual person, too, I can go back one more and let you look at this for a second. Those are in the chat now. I know it is hard to prioritize one over any other, isn't it? Yes, and each person is totally... Yes, it's 100 %. Each person is different. So what is coming up for you is going to be different than anybody else. No right or wrong answers. This is all just from your perspective. I'll give you about 30 more seconds to just reflect. And then if anybody wants to share, you can share in the chat, you can share out loud, either one of these questions, what's important about measuring trust for you, or which one of the trust behaviors has the biggest impact for your team, for your overall culture. So Michelle put in the chat, be clear. Maybe the behavior that would have the biggest impact on your team's overall culture. Love that.

Our organization, we're really working hard to build a high trust environment, but we have a lot of people who've come from workplaces where that just hasn't existed for them in their career. And so it's a big paradigm shift for people to believe it. So I think that's a priority to figure out how to be true to that and get people to believe it.

Yeah. Yeah. Because everybody has their different experiences, perspectives, and it sounds like maybe there's some baggage around it, right? How do we shed that, focus on rebuilding it, and what does that look like at the organization now? Thanks for sharing, Jen. Mikaela.

To piggyback off of what Jen said, I think for me, the create safety is first and foremost because I think before you can even be clear and commit to what you're doing, you have to be able to feel safe to say what those priorities are. And I think even within an organization, I work at a pretty big organization, and people move from team to team. And it's not uncommon for someone to come to a team. And like you said, we all have our own baggage. So what one person's experience was on one team, maybe the psychological safety or the amount of that safety was different on that team than the one that they're coming to or from. So even if you have great psychological safety on your core team, if someone new is coming in, you have to reassess that baseline. So it's constantly, it's dynamic. And so I think I don't have the answer, but I think it's treating it as a dynamic situation and constantly reassessing is good. But I share in Jen's question and frustration of how do you get someone to trust you when they're coming in with that PTSD, for lack of a better term, of they're coming from a bad situation into a good one?

How do you get them to trust you? It is hard.

Yeah, it is. It is hard, right? And just because we have maybe some questions on the screen or what we do, it doesn't mean that it's easy. These are all hard things to focus on. I'm curious from the group, is there anything that anyone has done in this situation for helping teammates come in and really being able to build that trust when maybe there is that baggage from a previous experience or previous workplace?

I don't know if this was intentional, and I'm just speaking from my experience. At my previous company, it was a terrible culture and no trust, and it was really, really bad. Then I found this job, and my boss does really good job. I think I mentioned in the chat earlier of just not making you feel dumb ever. You can ask the same question several times and be like, I'm sorry, I'm just really still... It's not clicking. And he will take his time to walk you through it, and he's the founder of the company. I think he sets a really good tone that there is always time to help us all understand and digest and answer one another's questions. And I think that really trickles down well so that the team is really able to trust one another and come to each other. Nobody is like, I'm too busy to answer your question. I feel like that he's really done a good job of setting the tone of, We're all here together to work hard and have a good time. And I think that really built a lot of trust in me. But I've seen it with other new hires, too, of just like, they're not afraid to say, I'm sorry, can we go over this again?

Or raise their hand if they have a question.

The That's huge. Thank you, Leah. Emily.

Hey. So I as well have worked with some really interesting cultures as both a coach as well as lived experience. And one of the principles that's coming to mind right now for me is in coaching, we talk about get in the reps. So with that, what I'm using with two of my independent coaching clients, as well as likely a leadership client coming up soon, is this idea of get in the reps. But from a perspective of what you were sharing, Leah, notice what's different, and be like, Okay, it's different than that here, and it's okay. And encourage your people to acknowledge the lived experience that's different, and build the reps of what safety feels like. Because if you've been laid off twice in two years, like me when I was in corporate, just a number of horrific things that are in this job market in this world right right now. So I say, do all the things, but also build the reps and have that intentional conversation about what are you feeling and what's good, either with yourself, learning to be safe again, if anybody here is training like NLP or anything like that. But yeah, get in the reps and you can extrapolate all the different ways that you can use that principle.

But that's what came to my mind. Get in the rep of how it's different.

Thanks, Emily. Could you just share a little bit more about... There's just a question of what does build the reps mean? Can you just share a quick definition of that?

Yeah. So like repetition. So if you're learning how to lift a weight in the gym, you build the reps and it gets stronger. What that looks like with my one-on-one coaching clients is, Hey, so what feels different? What feels different that's good? What feels different that's... Because Because our brains are wired to what they know. If what they know is panic, trauma, survival, it's really hard to thrive in even a good environment. What I mean by get in the reps is either as a leader, intentionally ask, Hey, what feels different here? Yeah, that's who we are as a culture, and I really want to make sure that you're able to grow roots here. So ask Asking that question to provide the space, and it can be awkward, but honestly, if it's positive in your building rapport, I think it could be really, really constructive. Then as a individual in a new environment, notice what you notice in terms of just actually call stuff out. Label it to yourself. Oh, wow. Okay. I don't have Sunday Scaries. Why do I not have Sunday Scaries? What are all the things that are awesome? And how can I continue to look for that proof of belief and that proof of positive and reinforce that muscle versus the trauma response, which is nine times more stronger in our brains.

Hope that helps.

Yeah. Thank you so much, Emily. That's amazing. And I will share, too, what we do Internally, what we do with our clients whenever we talk about trust is really... Because it's personal for each person, what builds and breaks trust for them. So just being able to talk about that. We, of course, have the five core trust behaviors that are more universal or what research shows is what builds trust. But for each individual person, it might be something different. So being able to just talk about that. If you are a people leader, you have one-on-ones, being able to talk about what breaks, what builds trust for you can really just help you to understand their perspective, understand maybe where some of that baggage comes from, so you can make sure that as their leader, that you're intentionally building trust and not doing something to break trust just because you didn't know that maybe that breaks trust for them. So asking those questions can be really helpful, too. Steph, just one closing comment there, just to close out what you were saying is I think acknowledging, respecting that there is baggage and there was trauma is so important, and to not minimize that, but to really lean into it, because I think that is a first step to building all of the trust aspects that we're discussing.

Yeah. Thank you, Chris. All right. If this is your jam, if you want to learn more about building a high trust team. Isabel is going to drop into the chat. Leah spoke about this last February, so February in 2024, we dove into these five core trust behaviors. If you want to learn more about this, you can go ahead and watch the recording or there's a transcript. Just to be able to dive in deeper to each of these, we teach actionable skills that go along with it, too. So if you're interested, it is in the chat and you can go ahead and watch that later. All All right, so let's trust. Let's dive into belonging. So when we talk about belonging at the perk, what we utilize, what we're rooted in, is the four elements of belonging. And this comes from Coqqal, and they are a global nonprofit that focuses on DEI. And so how they define these four elements. And the four elements are seen, connected, supported, and proud. So for seen, when you're seen at work, you are recognized, you're rewarded, you're respected by your colleagues. For connected, that's when you have positive, authentic social interactions with everyone, peers, managers, senior leaders.

When you feel supported at work, those around you, again, from those peers to your senior leaders, give you what you need to get your work done to help you live a more fulfilled life. When you're proud of your work in your organization, you feel aligned with its purpose, its vision, its values. These are the elements that we really focus on when we're talking about building a culture of belonging. Why does belonging matter? Why is this something that we measure at the perk? We can bring it all the way back to Maslow's hierarchy of needs here with this triangle on the screen. This is a human need. It's the human emotional need to be an accepted member of a group. This goes all the way back to being part of a tribe versus being exiled. You did what you could to, again, have that safety to be part of that tribe and not feel left behind. And so you'll see on the hierarchy of needs here, belonging fall on the same line as love, so friendship, intimacy, family, that sense of connection. So this is essential. This is essential for human well-being. It's essential for our survival.

And so that's why when we're talking about building a culture and a culture of belonging, why this feels so important is because it's really a human need. It's really outside of the workplace as well. This doesn't just fall into the workplace, but being able to have that feeling of being accepted and feeling included is so important. And so that's why we dial it down to those four elements to make sure that we're able to measure that. Again, if you're more of a stats person, we have some stats here. So there's a 50 % less turnover risk. Huge, huge number here for if you're focusing on belonging and if folks feel that they belong in the culture in your company and organization. Six times more innovation, 56 % more job performance, three and a half higher engagement. There's just a lot of stats to show and back up why you should be focusing on building that culture of belonging and inclusion. Then the last example that I'll give. So Google's project, Aristotle. This was a multi-year study, and it found that the most important factor for a team's success, so whether they were successful or not, is not IQ.

It's not the talent of its member members and who is there. It's truly the psychological safety of that team, of the culture that you have. This is just so important. We talk a lot about psychological safety, creating safety when we're talking about trust. It also can't exist without inclusion and belonging. You can have a high trust team, but if you don't feel like you belong, if you're constantly having that brain, if your brain is constantly wondering, Am I included here? Am I going to be exiled from this group? You're not going to have that psychological safety. So belonging is really central to success in the modern workplace and just being able to really focus on that. And again, being able to measure that so you can understand where your team falls can just be really impactful for your culture. It's a key predictor of engagement, retention. We've found that unless you have specific questions, maybe that you're customizing, traditional engagement surveys might not fully capture this. Because maybe an employee is engaged and with the questions that you're asking, there's high engagement scores, but they still don't feel like they belong. And this is something that's actionable.

We can take action. We can focus on these four elements to help someone feel like they belong or to build that culture of high belonging and really make sure that people feel included. So being able to ask pointed survey questions that go back to those four elements can just really be a great way to see the health of your culture from that level of inclusion and belonging. So We'll do the same thing here. You can self-assess. And again, some of these questions are repeats. So feeling connected. Connect is a core trust behavior as well. Some of these we're able to double-dip with. But go ahead and just self-assess for each of these four elements for belonging, for supported, I feel a sense of belonging on the team or within the organization, and I have supportive relationships. For proud, I am proud to be part of this organization. Seen, I feel being heard and valued by the team, and then connected. Again, we've seen this one already. I feel connected to my team members on a personal and professional level. Perfect. Thanks for self-assessing with us. My team could just clear that for me. Thank you.

And again, we'll lock it in. So same questions. What's important about measuring belonging from your perspective? And which one of the four elements of belonging do you think has the biggest impact on your team's overall culture? And I will put the four. Seen, supported, connected, proud are the four elements. I'll just let you reflect on this one. For the sake of time, I want to make sure that we get to burnout, so we won't do a group share, but you can feel free to pop it in the chat if that feels good for you. All right, and if you want to learn more about belonging, and you're not sick of hearing me talk yet, you can come to Culture Community in July. I think it is Isabel, right? This one's in July. And so I'll be talking about how to create a culture of belonging. So we'll be focusing on those four elements, some actionable skills, tips, mindsets, all of that. And so Isabelle will pop the registration link. So this one is not a recording that you can watch, but you can come and learn live with me this summer. All right, let's get to our last one, which is burnout.

And I do want to say we didn't always track all three at the perk. For a while, we just focused on trust and belonging, and we had a really highly engaged culture that was... We had high trust. We had that my sense of belonging, but we could feel that there was still something missing. And that's when we decided to add in burnout, because we noticed and we saw we can still have a high trust team. We can still all feel a sense of belonging and feel burnt out. That's where we were tracking as a team. And so we were heading towards that burnout. So we wanted to figure out why. What was it that was maybe affecting that? And we knew that it was maybe beyond just trust and belonging. And so being able to really focus in on this helped us to be able to, again, get the true health and measurement of our culture. We brought in Nina Nestle. She actually spoke at Culture Community in 2023. We learned a little bit from her there, and then we brought her into our organization to teach us more about burnout. There are six key areas when it comes to measuring burnout.

Again, how can we break it down and not just say, okay, I feel burnt out, but what is it that's maybe causing you to feel burnt out, or what's the combination of these areas that's causing you to feel burnt out. So the first one is perceived lack of control. So if you're feeling like you lack autonomy, access to resources, or a say in decisions, that can take a toll on your well-being and can lead to feeling burnt out. For reward, if the extrinsic and intrinsic rewards of your job don't match the amount of effort and time that you're putting into them, that over time can also lead to burnout and can affect the well-being of a full team, of an individual, because it just feels like maybe the investment of your time and your energy is not worth the payoff. Then workload, this is typically the big one that people think of when we think of burnout. So when you have too much on your plate, you're not able to actually focus on being able to maybe take breaks for that rest and recovery, being able to find time to grow, do professional development. When you don't have that balance, that's really where, again, burnout can come into play.

And Again, it can be one of these things or it can be a combination of some of these things. But workload is often what we think of when we think of burnout community. So this is a common theme, right? Feeling connected, supported, having that community. That can really affect your well-being and can affect the level of burnout that you are feeling. And burnout can be contagious. So being able to really pinpoint that or track that so it doesn't spread to other team members. Being able to really focus on is the community that we have supportive and trusting. Fairness. So this is all about thinking, do I have fair and equitable treatment within my team, within the organization? That, again, can lead just to It can lead to mistrust, but it can also lead to burnout. So being able to make sure that you feel that you're receiving that fair and equitable treatment. This is something, again, that we measure when it comes to burnout. And the last one is values mismatch. So if you value something that your company does not, your motivation to work hard and persevere can really drop. Just really being able to understand what are my values, what are the values of the organization, are those in alignment?

If not, that can oftentimes lead to that burnout. So why burnout matters? Again, I'm sure that we've all either experienced a form of burnout or know people that have experienced burnout. It has such a huge impact on your well-being, on a company 50 % of employees have left a job due to burnout. There's more team conflict in high burnout cultures, more sick days. So really being able to, again, be proactive and spot when this is happening will just allow you to be able to really focus on the the well-being of your team, the well-being of your culture. And again, this is preventable, but we need to track it. So a lot of times it's a reactive situation. People are feeling burnt out. What can we do to fix it? But when we're able to track it and maybe we see a trend that's starting to go down from a burnout number, then we can be proactive in our solutions before it's too late. And like I said before, this is something that affects the entire team, not just the individual. And so for the sake of time, I'm not going to have a self-assess, but here's the questions that we ask when it comes to burnout.

So there's a question for each. So really focusing in on that workload, rewards, your values, that fair and equitable treatment, having control over your work and your tasks, and then, again, feeling that sense of belonging, having the supportive relationships when it comes to that community. So these are the questions that we ask when we're focusing on burnout. And again, workload is usually the thing that people think about, and it's our lowest score as a team. We noticed that this was consistently our lowest score. So we're going to start diving into this a little bit deeper and having a follow up question, either in our survey, in one-on Is it that there's too much volume? Is it the pace of our work? Is it the predictability of our work? Is it resourcing and support? So workload can feel, again, like there's a lot that goes into that. So how do we dive into that a little bit deeper and break that down So we can understand as a leadership team, what is it that we need to shift when it comes to workload? So that's something that we're going to be changing this year for our team when we're measuring burnout.

So you can lock it in again with what's important about measuring burnout from your perspective? Which one of these burnout areas do you think has the biggest impact on your team's overall culture? You can do that now. You can do it after you log off in a couple of minutes. But what I want to make sure that we really get to. Isabel will pop this in the chat as well. If you want to learn more about burnout, we have Nina's recording that you can learn more about burnout, how she describes each of these key areas and the tips and the tricks that she has. But I want to make sure that everybody gets to our actual culture survey that you can take. So there is a culture optimization survey, and I know folks were asking for Can I have a copy of these questions? Absolutely. You can email me and I'm happy to just send these over to you. And if you want to actually take our survey, we made it live for you to be able to take. So Isabel popped it into the chat. Choose theperk. Com/cultureoptimization, and you will be able to rank yourself on a scale of one to five for each of the questions that we walked through today.

You will get the Culture Optimization Self Assessment Report to your email. And so with that, it's going break down where you fall in each of the areas. It'll give you some action items, some tips, some tricks that you can focus on to maybe raise some of the numbers that you have if they were an opportunity area. And so you'll get that right to your email. And if you have questions about the report that you have, feel free to reach out to me, too. But we wanted to make sure that we gave you all an opportunity to actually take the survey that we utilize. So this is truly the survey that we use internally at the park with our clients. And you can use it, too. You can take it So I know that I don't have much time for questions, but I don't have anything until 10 o'clock, so I'm happy to stay on if anybody has questions, just because I know I went right till the end because there was so much good stuff and we were having such a great conversation about trust. But thank you all. If you do need to hop, I really appreciate you being here.

You can connect with me on LinkedIn, email me if you have any questions. But I'm still here. If anybody does want to ask a question out loud, I'll say I will include the Culture Optimization Self Assessment in the thank you email and a copy of the slides and the recording.

If you miss anything, it will all be there.

Thanks, Isabel. That's super helpful. Any? Thanks, Chris.

Steph, we did have a question in the chat from him about the sources for feedback. That's something I can email him there, though, too.

Okay, perfect.

I could jump in and ask the question, Steph. When you were providing those stats, they were awesome stats because people always ask, Well, why does it matter? Why does it matter? Who cares? How can you show that these types of teams outperform teams that don't have these stats. So I love those stats. One of your slides had Harvard Business Review as a source, but a couple of the other ones didn't necessarily have a source of those stats.

Oh, Yeah, they were from... Maybe it was just cut off on my screen, but it was from Better Up, Deloitte, and I don't remember what the third one is, but Yeah, the one, I guess the two that I was in, Why Burnout Matters and Why Does Belonging Matter?

The first one around the high trust in the lower right at the Harvard Business Review icon.

Yeah. And so for all of our stats, so that was better up Deloitte and Gallup. So any of the stats that you saw for belonging or burnout, that's where we got those from. And then for why should we measure belonging and where that was just text or our analysis, that's just from what we've seen.