Name: The Great Place To Work Effect Live: Scaling High Trust Leadership for Frontline Performance with Wegmans
Uploaded: 2026-02-19T18:31:10.079Z
Duration: 57 min 22 s
Description: The Great Place To Work Effect Live: Scaling High Trust Leadership for Frontline Performance with Wegmans

Transcript for "The Great Place To Work Effect Live: Scaling High Trust Leadership for Frontline Performance with Wegmans": This is not an opinion. It's not a perspective, or a belief, or a philosophy. This is trust. This is leaders we can believe in. This is civility, decency, respect. This is listening like you give a damn. This is bigger than identity or politics. This is prosperity. Closing gaps, opening doors. This is growth, scale, resilience. This is not controversial. This is business for all. And this is how it's done. Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's event, the great place to work effect, scaling high trust leadership for frontline performance. You know we're so glad to have you here with us today. My name is Julian Lute. I'm the insights and innovation strategist here at Great Place To Work. And today, we're gonna get really practical. We're gonna show how trust building behaviors translate into true business performance, things like agility, things like revenue per employee, and things like retention for the frontline. But, of course, before we dive in, there are a few housekeeping notes to enhance your experience with us today. Number one, please go ahead and add your questions to the q and a tab at the top right corner of the screen. This is also where you will find other event resources and where the polls will appear during the session. You can also chat with us and other attendees live using a chat function. Please use it. Closed captioning is available, and you can access the session on demand through the unique link provided in your registration email or calendar invite. We have so much goodness packed into a relatively short period of time, and we're focused on talking with the experts that we have on the call with us today. Essentially, we're gonna cover three things, the data backed business case for trust, how Wegmans operationalizes high trust leadership and communications to support a mostly deskless workforce, and culture coaching, how to read your data for leadership behaviors and scale them with simple frontline rituals. And we're interactive today, so get your questions in on the q and a, and let us know your thoughts in the chat. Let's jump right in. I'm joined today by three of the best in the business. Eunapark, who's the partner in Great Place to Work's global advisory services, Peggy Riley, who's the vice president of employee communications and engagement at Wegmans Food Markets, Inc., and Natasha Barrotti, a senior culture coach here at Great Place to Work. But to get us started, I wanna share an earlier conversation that I have with Uni Park to walk us through the business context and what truly separates great businesses from the rest. Let's hear what Uni had to say. Wise words from Julian, and I'm loving the activity in the chat. Very inspirational. Please, please keep it up. But joining us next is Peggy Riley, vice president of employee communications and engagement at Wegmans Food Markets, Inc., a perennial 100 best company. Wegmans knows how to turn the high trust behaviors into everyday communication and leadership practices. So let's see how they do it for a large deskless workforce. Peggy, it's so great to have you here with us today. How are you doing? Hey, I'm doing great, Julian. It's wonderful to be here with you, and thanks to everybody who logged in today to join us. So cool. Alright. So let's get started. You all do so many things well at Wegmans, but let's start at the very beginning with your values. You all are employee first, and this is reflected in how tightly connected your employee engagement strategy and your communication strategies are. You handle both of these functions, and I know that this is a very intentional combination. Can you talk about how being employee first influences the push and the pull of communications as you describe it? Yeah. I'd I'd love to, and thank you for the opportunity. You were right that everything at Wegmans starts with our values. And your values are caring, high standards, making a difference, respect, and empowerment. And they are the starting point for everything that we do. And as a family company for over a hundred years, we know that when we lead with our hearts, live by our values, and put our people first, success follows. Success with our people, follows with our customers, our business. So that is really the foundation of our employee first philosophy, caring about our people and living by shared values. And our leaders do that every single day, shoulder to shoulder. That's the most important part, as you said a little bit earlier, that our leaders bring that employee first mentality to every relationship and every interaction, across our entire organization. But when it comes to my role in the team, you know, purpose in the organization is to facilitate that relationship with our, people at the enterprise level, while our leaders are doing it on the face to face level. And I think we have a slide that kinda speaks to this because we love the nine leadership behaviors from Great Place To Work. We learn so much and get better every year because of, you know, studying this and and using our our trust index and things to get better. But we keep that listening and speaking at the center. It's this two way conversation. So the whole reason my team exists is to drive employee engagement and retention by deep learning our mission values and priorities and fostering this ongoing two way communication. So you say the push and the pull. The push is the speaking, values based messaging, sharing one trusted voice of leadership, and then listening. Trusted and accessible channels, a variety of different channels so employees can use their voice. And we believe facilitating this two way dialogue and having them both under one team, it helps us, to flatten the organization, keep us feeling small as we continue to get big across a 120 locations and 55,000 plus employees and, you know, folks at all levels and in different lines of business. So, we just feel really fortunate to be able to play a role in representing that conversation that's happening 55,000 times across the organization but across the enterprise. Oh, I love it, Peggy. I mean, you have all these folks that are still, no matter where they are, highly distributed, you know, all across your stores, all across the region, and they're still all sort of moving in the same direction. And I really appreciate, and I'm sure folks in the audience also appreciate, you know, a person in your role that's able to combine the communications and the employee engagement functions. I'm sure many folks for many folks, that's a separate those are two separate functions. So if you're sitting out there and you're thinking how can we get more tightly aligned, with our employee engagement and our communications, This is one strategy, and it works for Wegmans, but it's also something that you might wanna consider how you might even be able to work more closely together with your comms folks and your, employee engagement team if they're not already connected. Alright. You also talk about something that I really appreciate. You talk about moving at the speed of excellence. How do you decide when it's when to move fast versus when to slow down, and what does that mean operationally for your team? Yeah, that's a really important question for all of us. We do talk about moving at the speed of excellence, and we work very hard to always use that as the measure of how quickly we can move. And what it means is we all understand how much pressure there is to move quickly in today's marketplace, and especially in comms. I mean, I think comms teams feel like they have to be the first out with a message or they have to, you know, work really hard in speed. And there's a lot of pressure externally too. The social commentary could be pressuring organizations to move more quickly, act, or communicate about things more quickly. And we're fortunate as a family company at Wegmans to take a long range view of the business, and we try to allow that to inform every decision to be well balanced. And putting our people at the center of every decision, whether it's big or small, filtering it through our value, and considering how is it going to affect every employee? Is to this be a challenge? Is it going to be easy? Is it going be fun? Is it going to be hard? And then we by quickly considering the impact it's going have on our employees, that's the speed we move at. We. have to move in a way that our whole team of 55,000 are coming along with us and no employees left behind. So sometimes you can move really quickly, and sometimes you have systems in place where it's a rinse and repeat kind of a a model process you've already had that went really well, and you can, you know, turn on it quickly. But if it's a new challenge or if it's a brand it's new shift in something that people really are impacted by or if it's a difficult change, then we go to great lengths to collaborate across and, get varying perspectives. So we've thought through as many of the unintended consequences as we possibly can before we bring it to our people. So it's smooth and easy for them, and it's informed by their voice. And that's where having the listening channels, you know, in partnered with our communication, it it naturally organically brings in that employee voice. And these are just a couple of our listening channels here. You know, we're proud to have a variety of them, many different ones, because at scale at 55,000, we we don't ever want a mistake that an employee doesn't know how, doesn't know where, or doesn't feel comfortable sharing their voice. So we want them to be able to access any of these, starting with the manager right in in their, work environment and their employee advocate, their HR folks that are right in each business unit available for, our people. But also they can send an email to the COO and ask, you know, make a suggestion through our Ask Blame program, or they can attend a focus group, or there's a variety of channels. But it's important to us that we have many and that employees know that they can use any of them to help share what's on the mind. One thing I wanna follow-up here because one thing you mentioned, especially when you and I've had conversations, you talked about that, the ability you can even if you need to move at speed, you can still collaborate. And I know that some folks might sacrifice collaboration because they want to move quickly. Can you just briefly share your philosophy or the organization's philosophy about how you can still move quickly and you can collaborate at the same time? Thank you for mentioning that. I think that is so important because I think it's an easy excuse to say we don't have time with Clever. And I think if in our environment, if you're putting your people first and you're rolling out a change that's going to impact your people, there is nothing more important than quickly huddling up, making that your first priority, and being able to assess, okay. We we know the what what has been on our employees' minds, and we will ask them through the process as well. It's not it's not like we assume we know. We it's it's something that is an ongoing two way dialogue. But by collaborating across, it makes it better. In our experience, it has created, well balanced decisions because. every we know everybody comes at things with a different perspective. And the operators and the HR team and the comms team and they all you know? And and every other person on the team is going to have kind of a different lens through which they're looking at this decision. And if we can assemble quickly, which we do, that just helps us tighten up that people plan and the message. And it just it becomes so much more, of a unified message. And and it's so much it's something that all leaders and HR folks can get behind because it's representative of a lot of different viewpoints. I'll I'm so happy you shared that because I know many of us have been on the receiving end of many different messages coming from many different parts of the business, and we have to wade our way through what's the priority here, which one should we listen to. My business leader sent this message, so I should probably do that first. Having. that unified sense of communication and also priorities adds to that sense of consistency and that actual need for consistency to really create a high trust and high performance business. Yeah, Julian, if I could follow-up on that too. This is not easy. You have to have discipline to be able to move at the speed of excellence. And your whole you know, the whole leadership unit that is pertaining to a particular change has to be on board with that. Because, you know, in large organizations, it's easy for one group to get ahead of another. Right? And, we just feel so fortunate that by using that employee first philosophy as our guiding light, all leaders are already attuned to, okay. We're we're gonna we're gonna connect. We're gonna, you know, figure out how we can do this in an employee first way. Okay. So that's perfect. That's a great transition because I wanted us to talk about the power of simplicity. I mean, I think we're kind of moving in that direction, through how you've described the ability to collaborate and move fast. The power of simplicity is a key operating principle that you all have at Wegmans. How do you simplify messages so managers spend less time trying to translate and more time actually coaching employees? Yeah. Particularly in comms, we feel that bringing simplicity to our messaging is a sign of our care and respect for people. Everybody at every level and every job is busy. And we know that especially our frontline leaders, they are, one, likely, new to leadership and new sometimes in their careers, and they've got a lot of competing priorities, not just outside of work, but even within our four walls. Right? Department A manager might have merchandising department and marketing department and comps and HR and their operators all, you know, trying to bring information to them. So, the first thing is is we put strong support structure around our leaders. It's always about the the leaders who model the way for the frontline leaders with our tried and true practices. But then we bring simplicity in a couple specific ways, and one is our mission board. Our mission board is the one sheet of music that all of us, every all 55,000 of us will lead to, And it brings in our philosophy and our belief statements. Our values are right at the center. Our innovation statement with our our, we are merchants, and then how we go to market, all with this north star of always helping others by Robert Wegmans. And the first piece of simplifying a message is tie it to this. These aren't aspirational. These are everyday behaviors that we hold ourselves accountable to, whether we're a cashier or as a senior executive or anywhere in between. And. if you take a message and you tie it directly to this, then we know it has meaning and context for how what we believe and what we do. Then we, you know, our team plays a role in prioritizing messages. We have an annual calendar. We try to, we try to avoid large messages that could, you know, bump into each other and try to pace out things and bring a little bit more prioritization. And, simplicity is also about the the uniform message that it creates. So we write a lot of talking points, especially through change management. We write talking points so the frontline team leader in Pennsylvania is saying the same message as the team leader in Massachusetts and New York and North Carolina. So. we're all on the same page about what we're doing, why we're doing it, how it connects to our mission and our values, and the employee's integral role in delivering on it. So just some practices, you know, like tying it to the mission board or or, talking points. And then the other thing is, one pagers. So. and this is for the planners, the people who are building strategies and bringing things to the front line. Mhmm. We work really hard about challenging leaders to get a strategy onto one page. And that's that's very difficult to do. It's much easier to do a five page document or or a, you know, or a 30 PowerPoint presentation. It's hard to crystallize what's so important and how it ties to your mission and values into one page. Mhmm. And so we we we that's a best practice for us, and we, try to do that as much as possible, and then socialize that one page. Again, collaborate quickly with different points of view and different business units to make sure that's resonating with, you know, our ultimate goal with that particular project. So it's, it's not easy. I challenge anybody to to to practice that and to, you know, to show the respect to your audience that you've given the time to simplify something in at the right altitude and in the way they can best receive it. And that does save time for your frontline leaders so then they can work on coaching and developing their teams. Oh, Peggy, you dropped so many gold gems there, in in terms of how to make sure that, you know, you do the hard work up front, right, of of simplifying the message that people can move very quickly. We talk about agility. You know, that's what happens. That's a result of that. When we talk about how much employees can then do after that with revenue per employee, I think about that as well. Like, can can I move more quickly and make decisions more quickly to connect to the performance of the organization? I see it happening, you know, through through some of the ways that you've described. Many of us are on this Great Place to Work journey, and I know that you all take the annual Great Place to Work process very seriously, and you don't oversurvey. Right? How do you give us a bird's eye view of how you turn trust index results into a clear set of people priorities and what the impact of that is on the business performance. You got it. We feel so fortunate. We've been on the journey all the way since the trust index was out there and, you know, since twenty eight years on the list here. So we have lots of rich data with that survey tool, and and it's it's near and dear to our hearts. But speaking of simplicity, we do take a Covey approach when we get our results. So we'll get the survey results. We'll cast them across our leadership team, our senior leadership team. And as a group, really in the third quarter, we'll talk about what are the three statements on the survey that we see aligning with the other things that we're hearing from our other listening channels and that we know are kind of on into these minds. And then we take a global and local listening approach where we will, take these only three. It's hard to choose three when they're 60, and you see scores across the board. Right? Only choose three. And then company wide, the whole company is working on that. And then locally, at a store or in vision, they can choose one more. So it goes to four. But we conduct focus groups, and we engage employees in the process of continuous improvement. We ask them, what are we doing right here? What can we be doing differently? And we share our findings, and then we keep after it. And we've been doing this since 2014, this process of identifying three questions, conducting focus groups every location. And, you know, we all remember what it was like coming out of the pandemic and the great resignation. And we feel, so proud of the work that we did, coming emerging from the great resignation. And, by taking this approach of the three questions, we think we had a part in impacting two really important measurables. And what you see here on the screen is our retention, our employee retention, part time retention, and our staffing or our openings. And, the three questions we chose was a sincere interest. My manager takes a sincere interest in me. Work life flexibility, I feel, balanced, personal and work. I'm encouraged to balance my work life and personal life and, tools and resources to do the job. But you can see with those results that this concerted effort, the whole company crystallizing on these three things that we thought these were the these were the things that we thought were most special about our culture. We wanted to deep root them even further to capitalize on our strengths. I mean, the results of, in our retention or staffing, we're all just so so proud and grateful, and, our employees help us help that you've there. seen companies in every stage. of the business that, every year we get questions and leaders their culture to achieve their objectives. we start, what are the things that we should do when you see all the all what the survey statements doing differently varying, than their, competition? levels of consistency, Absolutely. people are are unsure. So it is true. in my line of work, just stated I'm, working with our certified can start with three things. our world's best companies pick three top of our list, on them, all of them are striving actually make tremendous success. as much as possible. really appreciate includes that you shared that. I'm sure, that's helpful for the participants, to know sometimes that's true. frontline employees, if you're on the call, which I think this is a great thing. needs to hear that, is incredibly can actually focus. in because look at what what Wegmans often ask me is how do I scale. the kind to skip business to the last question, I, see, because one, of the questions that has, come up for that we were going to talk about is actually in our Q, and A. So especially going to skip us? just to the last one because we're running through time, in one place, and I want want make make sure that we do have some. space for that. And the answer is the great place. to work effect. Wegmans Food Markets, Inc. does a lot, able to build trust people are probably absorbing with all this. employees, including the frontline, have one last piece of advice that you'd give to listeners, all employees, right, before we frontline. wrap up today, And so employees you tell them based Best what you've done and what you know to be true about doing this work? than a typical US company. Well, I saw a lot of folks on the line who came in from folks with a lot of deskless workers. And I appreciate the hard work that anybody, anyone is doing to lead that that area. And, you know, for us, it's been such a blessing to have palms and engagement under one roof and a reflection of the day to day leadership behaviors that are happening one to one with the people every day. But I guess my advice would be if you don't have a team like ours, you can still build on some of those principles. Right? So if you're a comms person, but you don't sit in HR or you're an HR person and you, you know, you you don't have that mechanism that there's collaboration across your teams, you know, try to establish that. You know? Use your own agency to build that within your own team to connect with your peers and look at it through the principles that we use on our team about what is the impact to employee? What would an employee define as the speed of excellence here? And what is the the the employee sentiment that we already know is might be out there or that that could be out there that we wanna that we wanna check-in with before we just roll and execute. Mhmm. And so if you don't have a team that does it or who who who you know, a a large organization that has those things so deeply rooted that we do, you could do that at the local level. And I think it you know, hopefully, you'll you'll see some payoff on that in terms of engaging employees in the process and and their satisfaction, you know, through it. I appreciate that. I mean, I know the audience does too. You know, you've when you start with something like your company values and and you invite what it is that you know is happening in the organization, you put it all together, you can do that anywhere. I remember you saying that yesterday and and also today that you can start low locally. You have that agency. So I appreciate you re reiterating that for folks today. And, Peggy, on behalf of all of us at Great Place To Work, thank you so much. You've truly given us a clear picture of what it looks like when values, communication, and leadership are all fully aligned. And what we've also heard is a powerful reminder that reaching the front line isn't about, like, more messages. It's about establishing a better connection. And when communication pulls as much as it pushes, trust can scale. And, you know, I look forward to our next conversation, Peggy. Thank you so much. Me too. Thank you. Alright. Now let's bring in our expert, Natasha. She's going to help us take everything we've heard from Julian and Peggy and make it practical for you. So this is where insight really turns into action. Natasha is gonna share expertise and how to interpret your trust index results and in. pricing and use it to scale frontline behaviors that drive things like agility, RPE, and and retention. Natasha, you today. How are you? Doing amazing. Thank you so much for having me here today. And I have to say, I'm so excited. I see you on the I've seen the chat a lot of clients, so the chat's like, we don't stop. Right? I see clients from Brazil, other countries. So thank you for being here. What a what a joy. We are international, so that's. a good thing. I'm gonna hand it over directly to you because I know people are eager to dive in. Let's go. Let's do it. So first thing I wanted to say, you were there probably thinking. Right? Okay. I understand all the concepts. I'm excited about them. But how do I measure trust? Or even more, you probably are thinking, what I how I see that in my own business? We are talking about the nine leadership behaviors. And then, probably, you're also thinking, how can I see the impact of the nine leadership behaviors in agility, retention, and how can how those things affect my business? And I think those are all fair questions. And if you look at the first slide that I'm showing to you right now, this data is one of the first ways we start making trust measurable, specifically through speaking and listening behaviors that we were talking about today. So those four statements you're looking at your screen are the statements that I typically use with my clients when we begin working on those two behaviors. One of the reasons why is because they have a straight connection to agility and retention. So what you see here is a simple demo across different measurement levels, but the trend is very real and clear. We see this all the time across companies of all sizes. So if we're thinking about your business now, it's possible to get at the data and use it well. So if you look at to if you can look it on the right, you see the executives are rated as strongest across all behaviors. But as we move closer to frontline management, trust starts to drop. What I wanted to say here is that this is the measurable version of the trust falloff research. Euna mentioned it early. And why this matters? So I could stay here forever sharing a lot of reasons why this is so important to know and to see, but I will share one with you today. Our research shows that leaders influence 70% of employee experience. It means that when trust drops at the frontline level, it does impact agility, retention, and, of course, the performance of our business. But we have to talk more about this data because it's so important that we are looking at this now. Look at the biggest drop in business statement here. Management makes expectations clear. So look at the employees' number. They rate it six to one, while our executives, nine seven. We are talking about a 36 gap here. Why this is important for us to know? So look at the overall, the biggest drop we have is in clear understanding of expectations. So the insight, one of them is that it's hard. It's a challenge for us to drive agility and retention when expectations are not clear. And we can just get at those insights when we can see the numbers. So this is what I also wanted to share with you today. It's not a leadership capability issue. It's a translation issue. So senior leaders may truly believe they are being clear and inclusive. And at their level, they probably are. So what I really wanted to give, like, a message for this specific slide is that when we look at the data, it becomes very clear to understand that a trust is not just a soft concept. It has a measurable business impact. I mean, I, myself, and others in the the chat are completely drawn into this view of the data, this heat map view. And you just talked about the reality of the trust falloff. Una mentioned that as well. If I'm a leader looking at this at this high level, how do I know where to focus once I see this pattern emerging? Mhmm. I love that. So let's go to the next slide, and let's move to to another level here. So what are you looking at is the heat map by individual leader. Why this is so important for us to see it today? The first thing you can notice is the strong variation between them. Right? You see numbers like the green numbers, white, red, dark red, light light lighter red. So why we see those variations? In fact, the data shows that the variation between leaders is larger than the variation between management levels. And I see this all the time with my clients, and it's telling us something important. Trust outcomes are not dictated by job title and job levels. They are shaped by behaviors. So it's not just only the variation that we see. What is already amazing that we can get that from the data, but that the data is giving us even more direction. For example, we can see the statement with the largest gap across management levels. 51% gap between employees and the the executive teams when we talk about our message being clear. So management makes expectations clear. So without the numbers, Julian, we would not know how to start or things that we should folks folks first. Right? At the same time, the data is telling us a different thing. So we see the variation. We see the topics we need to start working first. But it also is is sharing with us the positive thing about the organization. We do have strong models here. So look at all the green colors of the data. So leaders here, they are already showing their capability. They are already showing that they are inspiring people. As a human being, we know that we always focus in the lowest scores, like, what is not working well, but we cannot forget to look at those leaders. We cannot forget to look at the internal benchmarks we have. So here, we can clearly see that as some of our leaders, they are already listening well. They're keeping their team well informed. We need to use that. And what is the result of those leaders leaders in our organization? They have more engaged in teams, and, of course, they did they are performing a higher level. We see that through our data. The goal is like the data is telling us we can also learn from those leaders. Like Peggy was sharing with us before, I would say what I recommended to my clients all the time when I see those cases, run small folks groups, one on one conversations, or even short surveys with specific questions with their teams to understand what they are doing differently. If I can give you just one takeaway today about this slide is that scaling best proxy leadership is much faster than trying to just invent a new solution. So it's also the simple way Peggy was sharing with us before. The capability is already there. We can see it. We just need to scale it. Natasha, thank you so much for underscoring that point. I mean, I've seen that over and over as well in my work with organizations. No matter what size they are, most companies already have the leadership and the tools that are required to scale. Once I understand what the data is telling me from this view, how do I turn that insight into action? What else are the best questions, Julian? As you know, we hear all the time the question. Right? Natasha, I need an action plan. How can I do it? I see all the information, but it where do I start? Right? What what are the companies they are doing? One example of how to start is the data you see here. This view shows the gaps between locations and the measurement levels. In some areas, we see stronger trust index scores, meaning more consistent culture of listening, for example. It also highlights leaders who inspire listening and create impact in their in their business environment. And believe me, they are internal models, examples we can scale across the organization. This is the power of the data. It allows us to go deeper. So I would say it shows that trust is not abstracted. It is measurable and scalable. So look at this. You can identify gaps across leaders, locations, and then you will prioritize where to focus first to create more consistency. When you know where to start, you drive performance faster. Right? I mean, that's what I've heard, and I think that's what our research also shows is that you're absolutely right. Every organization has strengths, and we also know that every organization has opportunity areas. When I look at this chart, I understand what the blue and the dark gray on this chart are telling me. How should leaders interpret the light gray? How should that shape their priorities? Another great question. I would say this is also super important when you're looking at our data. My clients, they ask me, Natasha, if you could tell me just one thing, one takeaway from this data to help me to grow, to impact the trust faster, like, in a in a in a way that we can move the needle faster. Right? I would say, first, as we all know, when we talk about trust, to build trust, it takes time. But I would say I would say what I recommend is that focus on the light gray zone. We call the move movable needle. So in this area where, like, employees, they are sharing with us, they are inconsistent. So they we have more inconsistent perception here. They are not clearly positive, but they are not clearly no positive either. This is where we should focus on our energy. This is where we change. The changes most possible. Instead of concentrating first on the strongly no positive zone, where you can see perception is already very low, we can create a faster impact by moving the people who are undecided. We don't focus in the low perception. We focus on the inconsistency. So this way, we can improve trust with better results. That's clear. So if I if I can get to those folks in the organization that are having that inconsistent, not necessarily positive, not necessarily negative, but right there in the middle and make a more positive experience for them, a more consistent experience for them, then we're actually moving the needle in the in the right direction. We're building upon something that we've we've already started. Very right. helpful. Very, very helpful. Peggy talked about narrowing the focus to three things, and I understand Wegmans has a deep twenty eight year history of using and acting on their data. If someone is listening and they wanna take action right away, what would you give them as advice for the best place to start? If I had to simplify just one action, it would be listen to your people. But listen to them intentionally and consistently. And do it the way Peggy was also sharing with us today. Do it in a very genuine way, but a methodical way. So use your internal listening channels. Like, use your internal best practice communication. These are not just engagement tools. They are performance drivers. So when we listen to our people in, like, in a very consistent way, it reinforce the values that we have in our organization and aligns behaviors with strategies. So it's not just about culture. It's about business results. This is so excellent. I still find myself thinking about how those are real people. When I see those data points, these are, like, real people and real people's experiences. So when you see inconsistent results or folks having a not positive result, you know, that is impacting your business. It's it's it's like Julian described earlier. You're leaving performance, you know, on the table. And so I I hope people will look at the data and realize that those are real humans responding to the survey and sharing their experience and that they have more to give the business. This has been excellent, Natasha. Even for someone like me who's deeply familiar with the data, there's so much value here. The heat map view, the demographic views are very, very powerful and especially focusing on the movable middle. So thank you for joining us and sharing your expertise with us today. Thank you. Thank you for having me here today. It was a pleasure. Of course. Alright. We've spent our time today connecting the dots, right, from leadership behaviors to frontline communication to the data and what the data is really truly telling us. Now we wanna hear from you, from you all. What questions are coming up? What feels clear? What still feels unresolved? This is your moment to ask questions. Many of you have already been asking in the chat, so I've got some. Just surface what's resonating for you or name the tensions that you're actually trying to work through in your own organizations. Continue to drop them in the q and a, and we can explore as many as we can while we are together. So I'm gonna look through the chat. I find a few that I think are already, already already here. Oh my gosh. There's so many. I think one of the ones I'm going to, I'm gonna ask Peggy. Let's see. This is a great one, and this is for a real question that people wanna know. It might be a little bit of a soft softball one. When are you opening up more stores, especially in Washington State, Peggy? Washington State. I'm sorry that's not on the plan just yet. Yeah, we operate down the East Coast, and we're so grateful that people, our customers love what we do and our people and and ask for more. Okay. But we're really excited about opening up in Charlotte, later this year. So that is our celebration for 2026. that at the chat too. I figured I'd throw that out because the, you know, curious minds want to know. But I will follow-up with this one as well for you, Peggy. The question is what are the metrics that resonated most with your leadership team? Right? Out of all the things that that you could study, all the things that happen in the business, you know, how can someone on the call present the benefits in a way that that leadership can actually hear, the benefits of investing, as you all do, and employees. Yeah, that's an important question because they might change. There are some basic metrics that you're always gonna follow, right? Any HR folks on the line and operators are gonna say, what's my retention? I know the cost of turning employees over and the benefit of having high retention, productivity, and providing employees careers. I mean, that's why we exist is to help our people learn and grow. Mhmm. So you can't get away from those big ones, and you can't, you don't wanna disconnect kind of your smaller initiatives to the lag impact on those. But what I mentioned earlier about coming out of the great resignation, we were very thoughtful about choosing sincere interest and encouraging work life balance as our two. focus questions because the world had changed dramatically. Yeah. What employees were looking for had changed. So, you know, the most meaningful metrics, you know, beyond the the big ones like retention, and, you know, we have five measures, sales contribution, that kind of thing. But, is what's what's the biggest metric to your people? What what is what is going to make the biggest difference in their lives that then will engage them in a way that it can help them benefit your business. Wow. I mean, that's almost like an inversion of the pyramid for some people. Right? They may think, let me think of what the business metric is I need to change and, like, try to cross, cross reference that back to the employee experience. But you all truly have this employee first approach. So if you start with the thing that means and matters the most to your people's experience, you will see the results through the business performance as well. It deeply contributes to that. Would that be fair to say? It is. It is. And just again, going back to simplicity, on that mission board we have, we have five measures: sales contribution, retention, diversity, and development. And every single employee can do something on the you know, in their day to day work to improve one of those. So connect you know, keeping it simple, but also connecting it to everyday every employee's everyday work. Beautiful. Okay. Great. I'm gonna ask this question first for Natasha, and then Peggy, you could follow on. Folks always ask about survey fatigue. We're surveying too much, bringing too much information. Our employees are tired of surveys. Natasha, in your expertise and in your role, how do you advise folks around survey fatigue? And then, Peggy, what is your perspective on survey or information fatigue? Such important questions. So first, I would say your here at Great Place To Work, we always help our clients with it because we we know they have internal surveys. We do have our Great Place To Work survey. So I would say first, you already have your plan. Right? You know what you wanted to listen from your from your employees. So we should be carefully thinking about those questions in a very strategic way. So I would say, look at your surveys. See the timing of the you were listening to your clients and your employees, and you do it in a way they have space to also process the changes that you are applying in your organization. So give them time, you know, give them time to see it, to experience your voice, because you already heard from them. So I would say always is is related to the each one business. But one thing I would I would also add is that the small surveys, they're also good things for us. So we don't need it also to apply this survey for all our organizations, but we can also apply postal surveys for in specific times of the year that we wanted to get a specific insights to work in our action plan. So listen to your people. Give them time to process what we are doing, and give them give the leaders time to do the action plan. And then we do, again, the small surveys when we needed them. So I would say listen to your people first, set up a plan, and give space through those answers. Excellent. Peggy, what's been your approach? Yeah. So I think that's important. I totally agree with Natasha Barrotti that you've got to give the time and space with the leaders to consume, to reflect, and then build a plan that can engage the employees in the process of continuous improvement. Because if we don't follow-up and have a feedback loop and a continuous improvement loop, then they're gonna lose trust in completing surveys. But the only other thing I would add is, we don't over survey. We look at the Great Place To Work Trust Index as our annual checkup. It's almost a lag measure of all of our other listening programs. And I would just encourage people to think about, you know, don't overly rely on surveys as your, you know, take it to the bank kind of insights. You it's gotta be in the context of it really should be a reflection of, you know, how is the day to day listening happening at all levels? And survey can help point in the direction of some of those, but the more meaningful channel is, we believe, the face to face, but also the fact that, you know, how are you consolidating your survey results with the other insights you're hearing? So it doesn't feel like, you know, you're checking a box with just a survey, and and it's it doesn't live in the employee's experience of, you know, their whole experience with you. And I hope that makes sense. No. That makes perfect sense. I mean, we have a few more questions that folks are asking, but we're getting short on time. Our team will present the questions and the ones that we can respond We will do that. Peggy, Natasha, you all have been brilliant. Thank you so much for sharing everything that you did today. I know folks are walking away, with something that they can do differently today. You don't have to wait for your next survey cycle to do the things that Peggy and Natasha have already described. So you can start on that today and make a real change in your organization today. Have a great rest of the day, Peggy and Natasha. I'll see you all soon. Looking forward to it. Thank you all. Everyone here is literally trying to do the same thing. They just want their workplace to be the best place for all of their employees. So people that care about, you know, being a good coworker, good manager, good leader, you're going to find people like that at this conference. This isn't just a summit. This is a critical mass of companies that are gonna change the world. We're here to help you be your best self. There is no monopoly on intelligence. It creates a level of imagination. It can plant seeds for long term transformations. The way we can make the biggest difference is by being an example. What is happening here? The party of the decade. At the center of it, it was gonna be not how much you're worth, but your self worth. Trust in your people, believe in them, invest in them, and they'll give you the right results. The point of business is to make life better for all. There's only one way to do it. A future where business works for all. That's it.