Fresia Jackson & Justin Angsuwat on the trends impacting the world of work in 2025

Damon Klotz: This is an absolute minefield. What is the data showing us about this trend?

Fresia Jackson: What an organization needs in a role right now is going to be vastly different than a year from now as AI continues to change the actual tasks within roles.

Justin Angsuwat: Fresia and her team dug into a lot of data. And you looked at what, is it like a quarter of a million managers and more than a million data points.

Fresia Jackson: I feel like we are at a really interesting inflection point.

Damon Klotz: These are the things that we feel like we should be spending a little bit more time double clicking on.

Justin Angsuwat: We have so much in the works to unlock incredible insights.

Damon Klotz: Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Culture First podcast. I'm your host Damon Klotz. As we close the chapter on 2024 and begin a new year here in 2025, it's clear that the world of work is changing faster than ever. But let's be honest, 2024 wasn't all innovation and opportunity. Week after week, headlines were dominated by mass layoffs and DEI initiatives faced challenges across industries and regions. In addition, there is a rise of employee tensions fueled by things like work talk trends. Maybe you've heard some of them like Act Your Wage, and it's clear that leaders and companies are navigating a complex landscape. If all of that sounds overwhelming, it's okay. I feel the same way. But don't worry, for this episode, we're going to explore the trends that are shaping the world of work. And I brought in a few friends to help me with our annual predictions episode at Culture Amp we've been looking at the data. And we have a lot of it, 1.3 billion data points. And we've taken a deep dive to make sense of the year that was and look ahead at this year, 2025. So what does the future hold? Well, we will get to that, but first I want to introduce my co-hosts for this episode. So my first co-host is a well known voice for longtime listeners. Fresia is the Director of People Science Research, and she has a Master's in Industrial and Organizational Psychology. At Culture Amp she works with our research team to run research projects, craft hypotheses, and analyze data about the employee experience. Fresia will once again be sharing the latest research with our listeners, which you have come to love. And then next up, we have a first time guest. And I've known him for a long time in the HR industry, and he's finally agreed to be part of an episode after saying that podcasts are not his thing. But I finally convinced that person to join, and that person is Culture Amp's Chief People Officer, Justin Angsuwat. Justin shapes the people strategy here at Culture Amp, as well as helping us with our own product roadmap as customer zero. He brings a wealth of experience to the world of work. So, Justin and Fresia, thank you so much for joining me.

Fresia Jackson: Thanks for having us.

Justin Angsuwat: Thanks for having us, Damon.

Damon Klotz: And we have witnessed the first part of the hard part of having a three person episode where no one knows who speaks first. So that is completely fine. I will, for the listeners going, why was there an awkward pause? Or if you're listening at 3x speed, there was no awkward pause. It's because there is three of us on this episode. We're doing it live. Here we go. I want to start with some of my go-to questions that podcast listeners can, you know, have come to expect, which is How you describe what you do to a curious 10 year old. so Justin, I might start with you as a first-time guest on the show. How do you describe to a curious 10 year old has walked up to you on the streets of Melbourne and said, Justin, what is a chief people officer?

Justin Angsuwat: Oh, I love the question. I would say, you know how your teacher makes sure everyone in their classroom is doing their best? It's kind of what I do, except for adults at work. Except for the imaginative play Crayons and Legos, it's mostly spreadsheets and emails. except actually, there's a bit of a resurgence on the crayons and Legos at work right now too. So, actually, we might include those back in.

Fresia Jackson: Yeah, they were at the offsite, wasn't there?

Justin Angsuwat: There was Legos at our offsite, so we're kind of halfway there.

Damon Klotz: Yeah, I feel like Lego has like, is really critical at the start of your life. And then like 15 to 20 years ago, buying, you don't think about it. And then like one day you wake up in your thirties and forties and you just find yourself buying Lego again.

Justin Angsuwat: Yeah, it's back.

Damon Klotz: Yeah. It's right behind you. There you go. For those watching on YouTube. Awesome. I won't ask you what's harder to manage, you know, children or employees, but maybe we can do a different version one day where we actually ask two people officers all of the curly questions that they refuse to answer because they've all had media training anyways. Fresia, onto you. you've had a role change since you were last on the show. So does this curious 10 year old need an updated answer to go with it?

Fresia Jackson: So I listened back at my previous answer, and it's still the same. So I'm still doing research, making sure that your parent or family friends are more fulfilled and happy at work so they can truly switch off, be joyful when they come home to you. But I'm just doing that at a little bit higher level in the organization. So I was trying to think about like how to explain hierarchy to a 10 year old. I was like, okay. In a sports team, like I was previously a player and now I'm like an assistant coach. I get to make some of the play calls.

Damon Klotz: I like that you went that route and you didn't go there, you know, like in like the yard, how there's kids who are like at this level. And then there's kids who like hold themselves at a higher level and they have more power because then that comes down to like, what is power? Is power given or is it received or is it structural or is it, do you choose it? Which is a whole nother conversation.

Fresia Jackson: That would be a long podcast.

Damon Klotz: That would be a long but we are not here to talk about power. We are here to talk about. Predictions. So let's cut the suspense. We do have five that we've come up with for 2025. So Fresia, do you want to run through the five and then we'll start to double click on them?

Fresia Jackson: Sure. Yeah. So the first is that performance management is gonna shift from thinking about the individual to the team context and really that's recognizing that high performance isn't sustainable alone and really emphasizing collective success. the second is thinking about the employee employer standoff and that's the, that's going to continue, through 2025, and companies really need to adapt to employee demands for better well being amidst some difficult economic constraints. the third is around leadership and that this, like, do it all leadership, trying to be everything for everyone. Hopefully will decline in that leaders will really be focusing on co-creating priorities and, and leveraging employee experience, data and opinions to align those efforts with organizational goals. And the fourth is around decision intelligence. which perhaps we'll define that a little bit more, in our, our discussion. but that, that will become so crucial that AI can really aid leaders in making. Smarter, faster decisions by analyzing all that vast amount of data that we have access to, and I have access to. and then the final is that, you know, AI in the last year has been about like the shiny new products and services that companies are making. And this is hopefully the year that it really goes internal improving workflows and really, decision making within the organization, making information more accessible and efficient to get it. Those are the five.

Damon Klotz: Yeah. And obviously, you know, this is not, you know, whenever people do put predictions or trends out there, there is obviously many, many, many things impacting the world of work. I think these are just five that when we're looking at our data really stood out. I think there's also some ones that from a mindset shift are going to be really interesting. The performance management one, this employee employer standoff and what we're sort of seeing, especially with, like we said, the way social media is really documenting, a different type of power surge back from, you know, employees with voices versus the sort of the power struggles during COVID and leadership. There's so much to dive into, but, you know, We want to respect your time. It's the start of the year, your brain's still warming up depending on where you are. So that's why we're going to try break it down and make it as easy as possible to understand. So, Fresia, I might go back to you. Can you give us an overview on the data that we looked at, that helped us come to some of these conclusions? I know everyone always loves to know how much did we look at for all those sort of, you know, quasi people scientists out there. They're like, tell us exactly how much data, what are we looking at here?

Fresia Jackson: Well, I'm glad that everyone loves to know that because I love talking about it so Quantitatively, you already mentioned those 1. 3 billion data points. and that includes just over the last year, we've had over 300 million employees from over 4, 700 companies who have responded to a CultureAMP survey. And so we looked at how the employee experience has been changing. Both this year and then over the last five years, and then qualitatively, we hosted sessions with our 50 plus people scientists in each of our regions. Um, and they're always talking to customers every day about what they're experiencing in their organizations. And so we were able to marry those two things and whittle it down to these five. That's where they come from.

Damon Klotz: And I think one of the macro sort of themes was this whole idea of reinvention being key to survival. And, you know, maybe people might have sort of gut reactions to this whole idea of reinvention and like change being a constant. We've heard it in the world of work for a long time. I think, you know, obviously COVID and the pandemic was the largest accelerator of huge change, but we're sort of still in this kind of like reinventing what does the world of work need to look like through this next phase. So. Justin, as a chief people officer, I'd love to kind of get your take on why you think reinvention is going to be so key.

Justin Angsuwat: Well, I think we're in this unique environment right now with a few things happening all at the same time, which is pretty unprecedented. You know, first we have a lot of uncertainty, which you mentioned before, Dave, on like around COVID and that's created a lot of that. Like people weren't prepared for it. People didn't know how to deal with it. And like, since then there've been this sequence of events, sort of, things that were uncertain and that kind of sharp shocks to the system. And so it's pretty. It's hard to operate from playbooks in this type of environment. So one, there's a lot of uncertainty. Two, we're seeing these massive technological advances, and we touched on AI just a moment ago. You think about the past few years alone, we've seen AI go from basically being like a useful assistant to really interacting and solving problems, almost human like now. And so there's, you know, the technology's improved. We're seeing more capital constraints in the market and a market that's much more focused on performance. And, you know, Fresia discussed that as one of the themes as well. And so when you add all of this up. Its organizations do need to really rapidly evolve in 2025. And so I'm seeing that in a few key areas. You know, one of them is better use of data and analytics, kind of moving down this curve from going from descriptive data to diagnostic, to predictive and then predictive. And that's, sorry, to prescriptive. And that's so important. It's not this nice to have anymore, seeing organizations needing to move down that curve wherever their starting point is. The second one is using AI to automate lower level tasks to free up time to do higher level work, and that's an expectation now. The third is using AI to connect more disparate data sources to create better insights at scale. So, like, help me work out in this world of uncertainty what's going on in my organization and what do I need to do about it. And specific to the HR space, kind of, given all of these conditions, seeing a move from specialism to much more generalists, in that space as well to be able to tackle, again, a broader set of problems. And it speaks to the kinds of things that I just talked about before. So, the key drivers, I think, for reinvention in 2025.

Damon Klotz: Yeah, it's always funny when there's that, like, that push to specialization and then that pull back to sort of, you know, becoming a generalist and expanding your skill set to be able to adapt to everything versus in the way that the economic market sometimes allows for more specialists in certain companies. So yeah, hopefully if you're in a HR role or a leadership role, and you're like, how do I help navigate some of these things? You know, this is just one piece of content we're making in a series that will help you with some of these. But in order to kind of dive into these in a bit more detail, and with Fresia and Justin here with me today, we wanted to kind of really look at some of the ideas and actions that will help people better understand these trends. So, let's dive into it. Maybe we'll start around this first one that we mentioned, so the whole idea of performance management going from me to we, which is really interesting, especially with, you know, talking about reinvention performance is also one of those things that seems to be constantly on the agenda of how do we reinvent it? What sort of a system should we look at? So, Fresia, I'll start with you, with the data. So what sort of data were we looking at to sort of back this up or performance going from me to we? And if we are looking at more of a collective team performance, what role do you see things like rest and recovery, impacting sustainable high performance culture as opposed to individualism, where it's if one person steps out, then, you know, they have to take time off and their performance changes. So I think this whole idea of the way is really interesting here. So, well, what have you got for us?

Fresia Jackson: Yeah, so we just completed really big research project focused specifically on this sustainable high performance. And by looking at the performance data from over 1500 companies, what we found was that11 percent of employees are rated a high performer once, and only 2 percent are rated a high performer twice in a row within three years. So first that tells us that sustaining high performance is really rare, but what's more interesting is that 5 percent were rated a high performer twice. twice over three years, just not repeated, right? So more people had, were a high performer twice. It just wasn't consistent. So it's much more likely to cycle in and out of high performance. And one potential reason could be stress. So we found that high performers were much more likely to report being stressed. they were also less likely to believe that their workload was reasonable. and less likely to feel like they could truly switch off from work to rest at the end of the day. And when we looked at those people who were a high performer who then declined versus those that were a high performer and were able to sustain it, we found that they were significantly more favorable on those workload questions. So people who were able to sustain had a workload that was also sustainable. So I think this data really exemplifies a beautiful metaphor that our CEO Didier uses of the peloton. Not the bike, but the bike formation, um, where the person leading the peloton is really taking the brunt of the force and making it easier for everyone else behind them in their slipstream. So you can't stay in the front for very long. You have to cycle in and out so that you can rejuvenate when you're in the back. and then give a reprieve to others when you're in the front. So I think that rest and rejuvenation that you just talked about is really key to creating sustaining high performance, but what that means is a huge mindset shift of thinking about it at the team level, like where is the whole peloton versus where is an individual within that structure.

Damon Klotz: Yeah, like when I first read this research, it was really eye opening for me because like, especially, you know, if you identify as a high performer, if you identify someone who is like, you know, yep, I put my best out there. I was trying to do good work, you know, whether it's peer recognition or industry recognition or whatnot, when you really look at it, go, how hard is it to sustain that level of Multiple years in a row. I remember at one of our events a couple of years ago, we had the CEO of you know, sports apparel company and they were like, you know, athletes understand that rest and rejuvenation is how you get high performance. You're like, you are not in the gym at your max every day. You are not also competing every day, but in the world of work you know, maybe through our own perception of what great work looks like, think that we can achieve that. So I think for me, it was just a really human check in. I just ran it like. What does high performance mean? What does it mean for an individual to have sprints of high performance and then have a team around them to actually support them do well and the importance of that sort of collective performance. So I think this is going to be a big one. Obviously, Justin, to move to, uh, you know, a brand new performance style or to tell everyone, Hey, we're shifting from individual goals to we goals and people like, what the hell are we goals? How do you measure we goals? So how do you think about, I guess, implementing team focused performance evaluations? Yeah. like, this is one of the things that, and why it's interesting to have you on this episode, usually Fresia and I get to pontificate about how we want to change work. And then like, it's been a decade since I worked in HR. So I don't have to be like, yeah, but how do you actually do something about this? So Justin, how do we actually do something about this?

Justin Angsuwat: I'm not sure I'll be able to completely, uh, solve this one, though. Um, but I love the topic. You know, high performance, I think, is a thing. that you've done and it's not a thing that you are. And so I think the cycling in and out kind of really speaks to that. And the collective success that we're just talking about also speaks to that. It's like a thing you've done, not a thing you are. And we think a lot about that Peloton analogy, a lot at Culture Amp. We think a lot about this team focused performance that you just talked about, Damon, but it hasn't been widely cracked yet. And that probably comes as no surprise to anyone. and I think the reason why is because it needs us to move from this very traditional process of annual reviews to something more dynamic. Because the problem with the annual review or even the biannual review is that, well, it happens annually, but the team itself is constantly changing. And so if you're doing a static annual review on a team, it just doesn't work when you have a team that continues to change throughout the year. So, you know, the team itself might look different all the way throughout the year. So if you're doing an annual review, what are you actually assessing? Like, who are you assessing within that team? as part of that team, which part of that construct? Look different because the team would have been performing differently at different parts of the year. And separately, as an individual, you might actually be parts of a few teams in the year. And so how does it work? And so for it to work, we need to move to a way we can surface feedback at a team and an individual level. in real time or near real time, which might mean collecting traditional types of feedback like reviews, but also combining with other signals like impact data, and we're getting much better at collecting like output and impact data. And so I think to be able to unlock team based reviews, you need to be able to surface near real time performance signals. as the unlock to be out of better measure team performance. And I think that's two pieces. One is like, what are the performance signals that we want to be able to surface that aren't just like the annual reviews that people have written up? What are those other kind of day to day, week to week, month to month performance signals? And the second piece is like, how do we actually start capturing them? So I think as organizations move towards doing that, they're going to have to work at how to do those two pieces and move away from the annual review process.

Damon Klotz: I'm going to add one of the most. non sexy replies to this as well, which I think is something that allows something like this to be unlocked, which is the importance of like really clean data. Like if you have organizations who are constantly trying to understand who's on what team, how old is our HRES data? Do we have like a people analytics layer that can help us understand Who's shifting around what? Who's moving on what projects? What locations have changed? Like if you're spending all your time just trying to clean up data to make sure you know who's working in what state, who's gone accidentally remote in Hawaii and like, where are they? Then you're never going to be able to shift to something like a weak performance model because you're too busy trying to clean data. So, so, if you want to do the sexy stuff like the we performance systems, get your data clean first. Otherwise, it's going to be a nightmare because you're going to have all of these fake teams trying to report on collective performance, which will probably just frustrate employees more. A thousand percent.

Justin Angsuwat: Like that applies to everything across the board that we'll discuss. Like we talked about it on AI as well, and we'll come up later on, I'm sure in our conversation, but organizations are sometimes thinking about like what are the most advanced insights I can surface, but to your point. Step one is just having clean data because we've seen the pain of organizations trying to jump too far ahead on any of these spectrums. And without clean data, they're just spending so much time going back in and revising things. So, it's a very no regrets move to just go and clean up your data.

Fresia Jackson: But it can also be difficult to clean your data. Like, I think knowing what those performance signals are tells you what things need to be cleaned up and where you should start. So I think that's also key.

Damon Klotz: Well, we need to make some new Culture Amp branded swag, like clean your data, and then you get to do all the other stuff. So, All right, let's move on from cleaning data, which people probably were not expecting us to talk about in a predictions episode. We're going to get on to something a little bit more edgy, which is the employer employee standoff marked by work talk trends like coffee badging. So if you're not familiar with that, it's the whole idea of walking all the way down to your Soho office in New York. Swiping your badge, picking up a coffee, and then turning around and going straight back to your apartment to put your sweats on. We're talking things like Act Your Wage, Bare Minimum Monday, I've been promoting, like, marketing entering HR for, like, 15 years now, and I think marketing's entered HR, and they've just come up with Don Draper one liners about, like, how everyone doesn't want to work anymore, which is interesting, so. this is real. It's happening. It's a pushback against people feeling like they've been undervalued, underpaid, that, you know, the systems and processes at their workplaces aren't really recognizing this, but also on top of this, there's also a bunch of people who were scared to leave their roles due to economic uncertainty, which means they don't just have time to watch all these TikToks about the work talk stuff. They also have to do some part of their job to keep their job. Fresia this is an absolute minefield. What is the data showing us about this trend?

Fresia Jackson: Yeah, it's so ubiquitous. It's hard, like, you can't be on social media and not see something like this. And there are of course, so many things contributing to this, but first we were just talking about stress for high performers, and we see that over half of employees are either neutral or disagree with the statement, I rarely feel overstressed at work. So people are just feeling that work is a place that is creating stress in their lives, and relatably, we see that how employees have responded to, I believe employee well being is important at the company, so the company prioritizing employee well being has declined every year for the last five years. So they're not seeing it getting better, and we see how employees talk about the company. Previously, the majority of comments in employee surveys were neutral, and now they are negative. So this work talk is like definitely we're seeing that in employee surveys as well. It is a reflection of what's happening. It's not that we should think, oh, that they're just talking about that there. That's not really what's going on. It is. and when we look at what employees are saying, not just the sentiment in employee comments, a lot of it comes from. The perception that companies are expecting employees to do the same amount of work but with less resources, like when they've had layoffs, or the same amount of work but for less money since the company is not giving raises and there's inflation, and of course, that means that real wages are essentially going down. so I'd say the underlying message is employees feel like they're being taken advantage of and they At least perceive employers to be thinking of them as a transactional relationship. And so they're only going to give what feels equitable to them. Of course, there are economic headwinds that are creating this situation. But that's from the employee point of view, at least what we're seeing.

Damon Klotz: And given this ongoing tension between employees and employers, do you have advice for leaders who are listening and going, how do I like navigate this sort of standoff while trying to think about things like engagement and productivity, especially like, you know, for someone who's trying to run a team and maybe sees these articles and they're like, what, what can I do to actually help my team right now?

Fresia Jackson: I think one potential, like if there is a compromise for this standoff, it would be that companies, since they're grappling with Reduced budgets and employees seem like they are less likely to kind of see work as a primary source of identity. It's potentially leaning into creating more part time roles or more contract positions, and these roles can really offer a way to renegotiate what work looks like, like clearly AI is already going to do that. So if employees are part of that process. They can, you know, decide which pieces they want to be a part of, their work life, essentially. so it gives the flexibility for employees, but it also provides more cost efficiency and agility for organizations. Since, you know, what an organization needs in a role right now is going to be vastly different than a year from now. as AI continues to change the actual tasks within roles. Thanks.

Damon Klotz: All right, let's move on to trend number three, fashion trends come and go. And I've certainly been a fashion victim of some of these trends over the years. And I don't know if people are going to be wearing Adidas Sambas again, you know, this year. I never bought them. I never jumped on that trend. I want to put that on the record. I'm still rocking my leather sneakers and my boots and my classics and my loafers and all the, all the other Fashion TikTok, things that I follow, but we're not here talking about my fashion trends. We're trying to work out what is potentially going out of fashion, which is do it all leadership. And also, Frasier, I know I was looking at some of our research recently about the decline in the perception of leaders, that, that COVID bubble of like leaders are everything, leaders understand us, leaders care about us. And then like that got burst and do it all leadership is also going out of fashion. So, obviously this is a podcast that's listened to by a lot of leaders, company leaders, senior leaders. What is going on around the perceptions of leaders?

Fresia Jackson: Yeah, so as Damon mentioned, so I'll just do a quick piece of that. We saw this really rapid increase in how employees perceive leaders during the pandemic with employees really like rallying behind them. Despite of, or because of the increased demands that have were placed on leaders during that time. But since then, we've seen a slow decline back to pre pandemic levels. And I think there's, we could have a whole discussion about why is that? but it would derail this conversation. but what's really interesting is while the perception of leaders overall has dropped, The driver strength has not. So what I mean is how correlated the questions about leaders are with employee engagement are still incredibly high, even though the perception is decreasing. And so the question specifically, I have confidence in the leaders at the company, that is the number one driver of engagement. Full stop across the board. Over a hundred questions, number one driver, but what's been so interesting is that we see companies are choosing not to ask that question anymore. So we've seen almost a 20 percent decline in companies asking it, over the last five years. So it seems that organizations themselves are also showing a lack of confidence there. Of not even wanting to broach the topic. So it seems like they aren't even sure what leaders should be doing, right? They're like, let's not even ask. Cause employees are not going to be happy with what's going on. So that's some of the data that backs up that trend around leadership.

Damon Klotz: If there are any journalists listening, the decline in leadership and companies removing that question because they don't want to know whether their employees trust it. I'm like, there is a whole series on that, so like You know, Quartz at Work, New York Times, Forbes, Fast Company, if you're listening, call Fresia, to talk about it. So Justin, with Do It All leadership going out of fashion, and I know you follow fashion trends closely, but we're not here to get your fashion tips about what's going to be on your t-shirt this year, but what we are going to talk about is do it all leadership going out of fashion. What are the skills or approaches that leaders should be prioritizing if they do want to foster trust and engagement in their teams? Given that Fresia just sort of dropped all of that data on it saying that like, oh, it's not really working right now. So what advice do you have?

Justin Angsuwat: Well, first of all, don't have any fashion advice, as you said. I'm wearing a plain t-shirt today for something different. And, for what it's worth, Damon, if it helps you feel any better. I don't have any sambas either. I'm not sure what it says about me if I'm still wearing beiges. So, we'll find out later in the year. But when it comes to leadership specifically, we did something pretty cool recently. as a kind of a quick, backstory before I go into to answer the question, because we're thinking about people not leaving companies, leaving managers instead. and we think about that a lot in 2025, especially given some of the things you just talked about and Fresia and her team dug into a lot of data. And, you looked at what is it like a quarter of a million managers and more than a million data points. And the TLDR learning from that is when people are making a decision to stay at a company or leave it. The leader has a bigger influence on that position than a manager does. And then you rerun the study again and the results were even more pronounced,later on. So like the TLDR from that was like, leaders are incredibly important and probably even more so than we ever thought before. And so. In terms of like, what should they prioritize instead of kind of do it all leadership, and you talked about trust as well. Number one is start the basics, really, like, and I think the best basic to start with is give effective feedback. And what I mean by effective feedback doesn't mean give praise, it means give feedback using a proper framework, like SBI, like Situation, Behavior, Impact, or whatever framework you, you choose to use. Because we looked at leaders who gave effective feedback, and if they gave one piece of effective feedback, we saw performance grow. If they gave five effective pieces of feedback, performance grew more. And if they gave one piece of ineffective feedback, performance actually declined in individuals. And so, in fact, giving ineffective feedback is worse than giving no feedback in the first place. So one thing I want to say, though, as leaders have kind of responded to me on this question was the advice is don't give feedback at all because it's better than giving ineffective feedback. It's learned to give good feedback. And so for the leaders, we think, well, you know what, I've been doing this for years. I'm pretty good at it. When we also looked at the data around basic manager behaviors, the longer you've been the leader, the less likely you are to do those behaviors. And it's pretty pronounced drop after six years. So number one, start with the basics. Give effective feedback. Everyone can do a little bit better on that front. Number two, you talked about, you know, do one thing around psychological safety. And there's so much research and great stuff around this. We can do a whole podcast series on it. But if I had to give one piece of tactical advice you can use today, I'd say, think about the neural pathways that someone goes through during a psychological safety kind of mental equation. And that simplified pathway is really, do I speak or do I be silent? and if I speak. There's a benefit to the organization, which is over a longer period of time. It may not impact you straight away, but if I speak, the risk is to me and that risk is immediate. If I stay silent, there's no benefit to the organization, but they won't really know this. And it's safe to me, which is immediate and 100 percent guaranteed. So it's really common for us to default to being silent. So one thing you can do as a leader is really help shift that burden by not putting the burden on someone on your team member to kind of keep making that equation and have to make that call. If you invite them participate, really the burden is on you. And so you can simply do something like, even say something like. I'm probably missing something here or like what's a different perspective when you're inviting them in, they're no longer having to make that speak or silent, be silent equation. And so that's one simple thing you could do as a leader to encourage more of that conversation with your team.

Fresia Jackson: I love that and I would add once you create that psychological safety to listen to the feedback of those around you as a leader, because one of the other things we find is that,the employee experience of being a leader, is much higher. It's elevated compared to those that are at the individual contributor level.

And I think that can contribute to this, like employer, employee standoff , because they are just not experiencing the same things. And part of that is potentially, you know, just where they are in the organization and what they're privy to. but so once you've created that psychological safety, listening to the feedback and taking that on, because your gut might not be in alignment with what is actually happening in lower levels of the organization.

Justin Angsuwat: Oh, a thousand percent. That's awesome. And it's like having watched leaders them asking for individual coaching around this in the past. That's exactly the next step. They're like, well, I asked the question, but I kind of just moved on or just disagreed and moved on or didn't seem like I was paying attention. And so just that active listening is so important. Even just a small piece of advice to leaders of just put your phone away. Like, don't be texting someone like while the person's giving you that feedback that creates a lot of psychological unsafety. Lack of psychological safe is probably a better word to use there,

Fresia Jackson: You can coin that, psychological unsafety.

Damon Klotz: About is, uh, the role of storytelling with leaders. So like think about all of the ways that people consume content from your leaders. And it's one of the things that I'm really focused on this year is the role of storytelling in workplace culture and when people receive messages from leaders, how well articulated is it? How much do you think about story and the arc of it? So, yeah, think about the moments that really, where you're really focused on the messages that you're putting out. And it's like, yeah, You know, some of my other sort of crazy predictions are HR teams will be hiring way more internal comms people, marketing strategists, campaign managers, head of events and experience design, thinking about how companies get together in person again. So bring all of that world in because when leaders speak, It impacts people and you can probably do a much better job on the message as well as how it's delivered. So, all right, let's keep it moving. We've waited until the very end to talk about AI and technology. And I know we're now mandated by everyone around the world to speak about AI and any thought leadership piece of content for the rest of our life. we've moved on from the, you know, are we going to be working in the metaverse and now we're like, how does AI impact us? So I thought it'd be useful to look at four and five together cause they are It's quite linked when it comes to technology's impact on work and AI, and with these trends, you know, we share how this is the time that AI is going to be, you know, really starts to go internal and improving things like workflows and the importance of things like decision intelligence, which we'll talk more about. And yeah, like we said, there's a huge amount of data, hopefully clean data, flowing around organizations. How do we make sense of it? How do these tools help us? So, Justin, I don't work for the media, but I'm sure you get this question a lot from the media when people want to know what is the CPO of Culture Amp think about things like Gen AI. So we're becoming probably more of a necessity in 2025. How do you see this technology maybe reshaping the culture of work, especially in terms of things like collaboration and decision making?

Justin Angsuwat: Well, in the near term, I don't think AI should be making any decisions for us. Otherwise for those who've been, you know, looking at the viral AI, early AI results. I probably need to go eat a rock a day. I think that was the advice or put glue in my pizza, as a viable topping, but in the decision making space, I think we just need to know what's good around AI and how we can use it to help us. And I think what it's really good at doing right now, it's great at connecting the dots between disparate pieces of information at scale and then distilling the inside of, out of that, at scale. So for example, if I give you a specific example in the HR space, you know, one thing we've done a lot in the past is look at attrition indicators. You know, so who is likely to leave in the next year, or who's likely to leave the next one to two years and what is driving that? And so we could say, look, there's this high likelihood that 30 percent of the women in your organization will leave in the next 12 months. And, you know, here's the most impactful action you can take to go address that. But really, that's one demographic, and that's gender. But what if we could combine three demographics, like performance, gender, and function? So, like high performing women in engineering, for example. And we did that at Culture Amp, and so we identified trends out of that and actions for that specific group, so we could give that leader a much more specific insight that they can go and address. And so we did that here at Culture Amp, but we had to manually test these combinations by pulling all the data together. So AI can now run all of our demographics in all different combinations and tell us what matters right now and the things we can do to address that for each leader in the organization. And so I think that's the power of AI is being able to create these insights at scale, but customize it as well. But going back to the decision, it's not going to definitely tell us what we absolutely have to do. It's going to be great at pointing us to a hotspot. So now we can focus all of our teams, their time, their attention on the decisions that we need to make within that hotspot. And so the human element that he's talked about is still knowing, like, number one, what to ask AI. You know, what insight do you want? And then, so in that example, we were looking at an attrition design. And then number two, when AI points you to the area, like working out how you can get to the core of that issue and do something with it. And so kind of where our time and attention goes really shifts now with AI because we can level up to start to tackle insights.and when people don't trust decisions that we hear in organizations, I think it's rarely about, like, did someone make the perfect decision? It's not about the decision itself. In many cases, it's how you got to that conclusion and how you explain that conclusion to people that gives them greater confidence in how you got to that decision and saying, well, AI told me this is not really going to increase your trust in decision making. So I think there's still a huge human element to how we're going to make decisions, at least in the short term, midterm.

Damon Klotz: Okay, so I said at the start, these are not every prediction, every trend, every, you know, thematic thing that's going to be impacting the world of work. These are just some of the things that when we were looking at the data that we have access to here at Culture Amp that really stood out to our research team and our content team and saying, these are the things that we feel like we should be spending a little bit more time on double clicking on. You know, we would also love to hear from you, like if you're listening on Spotify, you can leave comments about what are the sort of trending topics for you. Follow Culture Amp on LinkedIn and like, respond to some of the, you know, blog posts about this topic. We want to make this like an ongoing conversation for the year, but I guess to really wrap this up. What excites us about the future of work? I know the future of work is such a lofty, loaded term. Everyone speaks about it all the time. And. You know, obviously a lot of people turn to Culture Amp for inspiration around where work is going from a technology perspective, from a research perspective, a lot of HR leaders, you know, sort of turn to our team to look at, you know, help us understand where is work going. And Justin, you are really kind of the shining light, the beacon of light as our Chief People Officer, which puts a lot of pressure on you. So what excites you about the future of work?

Justin Angsuwat: what I'm most pumped about is how HR is going to completely shift with this combination of better data and insights plus AI. You know, it's something that we're starting to see across some of our customers already. And we're excited at Culture Amp to keep building out our own analytics and insights horsepower. But just from these early previews, I'm really pumped about like the path that we can take and where HR can go. So as a CPO, I'm really fortunate to lead our customer zero efforts here within Coltrane, which means we get to test our products early on and kind of define like what the vision of the product is going to look like. And we have so much in the works to unlock incredible insights that as we've started testing it, you know, CPO is really excited about and actually CEOs and other CFOs and C suites are really excited to see these types of insights. And so that's a really strong signal in terms of the, the importance of HR going forward and the types of signals that HR teams will have. And so I think if this continues down this path, we're going to see the HR function accelerate really quickly here as a critical decision making part of any organization. But to do that really well, there's a few pieces that need to go in place first, as Fresia talked about, and you talked about Damon like around cleaning your data, having that data ready, being able to leverage technology to go find the insights from the data, and then really focusing the HR team. to shift, to be looking at insights, knowing what insights to ask for and find, and then what to do with those insights. And that suddenly becomes much more of a core function of the HR role as a key business decision maker. And that's what I'm really excited about.

Damon Klotz: Yeah, it feels like we're really at that moment where a lot of these sort of things we've been speaking about for a while are coming together and also expectations from employees arising on a greater employee experience and pressure is on leaders more than ever to deliver it. So I feel like hopefully to the people listening, this has been useful from a contextual perspective at the macro trends, but also tactical in the way that. There's things that you can do to, you know, actually help solve some of these things. Fresia, I won't make you be the beacon of light for future of work and how does Culture Amp solve the world's problems, but what excites you about 2025?

Fresia Jackson: I feel like we are at a really interesting inflection point where, you know, AI could improve all of our lives by like automating all of that drudgery, all the things we don't want to do and allowing us to spend more time on what we want. Or it could be the catalyst for like a very scary future of like immense job loss and existential questions of purpose and despair, probably both. but I think what will determine which way we go is, is how much we really put people at the center of the decisions that we're making, and that's the heart of what Culture First is. And so I'm really glad that I'm at a company that. takes not only that mindset, but also has the resources of like a brain trust of organizational psychologists and the data and the tools that companies can use to create a better world of work and really use that to help push the needle towards hopefully that, brighter version of the future.

Damon Klotz: Well, it got a bit heavy there with all this existential crisis, but then we really brought it back to that shining light at the end. So I want to thank you both for joining me on this episode. I think it's a great way to kick off this year and it's got me thinking about all the different conversations that I'll be having with people when it comes to workplace trends. And I'm excited for the Culture First moment. Podcast listeners to hear from you, for both of you more. Justin, now that you've, you know, been on one episode, like, you know, you've got over that first hurdle. So I'm excited for you to sort of be a more regular voice here in Fresia you are obviously gunning for that, you know, number one position of most frequent guests. So that's still yours for now.

Justin Angsuwat: Amazing. Thank you, Damon. Love being here. Thanks, Fresia.

Fresia Jackson: Thank you.

Damon Klotz: Thanks so much for listening, everyone.