How can you maximise employee engagement by leveraging feedback loops?

In this episode, we had the pleasure of hosting the brilliant Matt R. Vance, an expert in employee feedback and online reviews. Matt shared some invaluable tips and strategies on how to harness the power of employee feedback to create a happier and more productive workplace. One of the standout ideas he emphasised was the importance of having strong internal feedback mechanisms in place. By addressing employee concerns privately, we can prevent unnecessary drama and protect both the employee and the company's reputation. 

On the note of feedback, Matt shed light on his expertise in managing online reviews. He shared his unique techniques and strategies in optimising both customer and employee feedback to enhance business outcomes. By actively engaging with user-generated content, businesses can showcase their care for customers, job seekers, and employees alike. 

Furthermore, Matt introduced us to his software, Mobrium, which streamlines the employer review cycle and offers a free service of conducting an employer reputation audit. This tool is a game-changer for businesses looking to improve their online reputation and strengthen their company culture. 

Lastly, Matt left us with a reminder to proactively ask for feedback and not rely solely on the hope of positive experiences generating goodwill. By making it easier for individuals to share their feedback and lowering barriers to participation, we can create a more accurate and representative sample of employee experiences. After all, their voices matter!

The main points throughout this podcast include:

• the importance of promptly responding and taking every suggestion seriously
• The difference between internal and external/ public feedback
• the importance of having strong internal feedback mechanisms in place
• the employer review cycle
• proactively ask for feedback

Connect with Matt

Website https://www.thecultureprofit.com/ 

LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattrvance/ 

Twitter https://twitter.com/MattRVance 

TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@thecultureprofit 

YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@TheCultureProfit 

Do you have any feedback or thoughts on this discussion? If so, please connect with Aoife via the links below and let her know. Aoife would love to hear from you!

Connect with Happier at Work host Aoife O’Brien:

Website: https://happieratwork.ie 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aoifemobrien/ 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/HappierAtWorkHQ 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/happieratwork.ie/ 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/happieratwork.ie

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@HappierAtWorkHQ

Matt, I'm so delighted to have you on the podcast today, the Happier Work podcast. You really caught my attention because after a long day of driving around the Ring of Kerry when I was on my holidays, I received a lovely notification from Google that someone called Matt Vance had left me a review about the podcast on Google, and I thought, wow. Who is this guy, Matt? You later reached down on LinkedIn, we connected. We had an amazing conversation, and I absolutely love your story. So do you wanna introduce yourself to listeners? Let them know a little bit about you, your background, and how you got to where you are today.

Yeah. Well, thank you so much for having me, Aoife. And, you know, I figured I I'm all about reviews, so that's the best way to start a conversation.

Absolutely.

You know, I've I've seen your podcast. We feature it on our company's website as, you one of the top premier company culture podcasts out there, and so having the chance to connect with you is definitely a privilege. But, yeah, I I got my start in the world of online reputation in 2014. I started working for A manufacturing business that made pillows, mattresses, bedsheets, everything to sleep comfortable. I was on the online operations department and was told That I'm in charge of reviews. It was a pretty kind of vague abstract, position. But over several years, I ended up developing some Ways to optimize customer feedback and product reviews to sell products better. And then I ended up transitioning over to realizing that The same way that you could optimize customer feedback and product reviews to sell more product, you could do the same thing with employee feedback, Employer ratings on sites like Glassdoor and Indeed, and in the UK, CanoNew, to win best place to work awards, strengthen your culture and increase employee engagement.

So that was kind of the career change. Along the lines, I actually wrote a book. This one that you can see behind me on the shelf, it's called The Review Cycle, and it's all about optimizing reviews because, really, Online reviews is a feedback loop, but it happens to be a public feedback loop, an external feedback loop that everyone can see, And so it has some very unique nuances of how to manage that feedback loop, how to optimize it, and how to get it to, create value for your business.

Love that. I love the idea that it's feedback loop, but it's actually in it's in the public domain, essentially. So if I think of reviews, I mostly think of Glassdoor, to be honest. Like, put how many people actually use Glassdoor before starting an organization or how many people believe what they read on any of those sites, you know. It's hard sometimes because if someone's so set on working in a particular organization, even if they read something that's a bit negative, maybe they think, definitely don't want that. And I'm thinking in particular actually and this is nothing work related but, there was a, let's say, a negative review. I don't want scare people and go into too much detail about it, what it was, but it was a there was a negative review about a hostel I was staying in when I was traveling around, around the world. And the review had been from maybe 4 or 6 months prior, so I thought they must have sorted out that situation by now, so no problem.

Anyway, lo and behold, I stayed in the hostel that night, on the same issue that they had had previously that someone had taken a review about existed. I'll leave it up to your imagination. And if people want to get in touch and find out specifically, what was wrong, feel free to do so. But it's it is. It's that it's that idea of of, you know, reviews being in the public domain. And I think of the likes of Amazon, when you can see the star rating and Glassdoor as well, you can see the star rating and then specific feedback about CEOs and and managers and and things like that. How as a how as a company can you manage that? Let's get right in there into the into the niche.

Well, a couple things, before, like, answering that question directly to kinda lay the foundation here. Like, the experience that you had with that hostel, It it obviously wasn't resolved. Someone had said something about it. But I imagine because you read that review, you may be a little bit more, sensitive in looking for that issue as well. I've seen that many times where reviews almost become, the self fulfilling prophecy. Right. Like, speaking with another product example, when I was in the pillow mattress world, sometimes we would launch a new pillow. And when a new pillow arrives, it has a little bit of a chemical smell because it just came from the factory.

Yep.

So you you get one negative review right at the beginning that says, I I smelled this pillow. It smelled horrible. And the next thing you know, there's a string of reviews that's saying, You know, someone mentioned the smell, and the first thing I did when I got this pillow is I smashed my face into it. Sure enough, I smelled something. Right? So they're looking for it Yeah. Because of what they found in the reviews, and the same thing can happen with company culture and employee reviews. That's why it is Critical that you take a proactive approach to optimizing and managing that feedback instead of just Taking this. Well, it is what it is.

It's this byproduct of how we are. I've had leaders, executives, even a a CHRO, respond back to me after we'd been talking about reputation, and he basically said, you know, we're just going to Lead with goodness, do good things, and hope that the goodness follows. Well, when it comes to sharing reviews, it doesn't really work that way. Like, Most people, there's this I talk about this in my book. There's this law called the law of self selecting extremes. And when you don't ask for feedback, all you get is the polar opposites, the people that had a way positive or a way negative experience that are willing to go out of their way to share. Their experience was so strong to one side or the other that they go they find where they should share that feedback. But if you make it easy to share, you invite people to share, you lower that barrier to participation, And you get a more representative sample of what people are really experiencing.

You you kind of unlock this silent majority, and I've seen it over and over again. I've actually never seen ratings decrease on on any use case, whether it's an employer, a product, a brand. I've never seen ratings decrease from Proactively asking for feedback. It always lifts ratings because those people that are just satisfied, they their experience wasn't strong enough to get them To go out of their way to share, you have to go to them, and that's really how you shape perceptions in a a more positive way. You allow everyone to see a more representative sample of what the true experience is.

I love that. Yeah. And it makes total sense. I when you said the law of self selective extremes. I was kinda like, oh, wow. That sounds like something I never heard of. But when you said what it was, I was like, oh, yes. I I know absolutely about that.

So if you have a terrible experience, and, you know, maybe in building on that, when you have a really terrible experience, you're more likely to tell more people. Isn't that case as opposed to if you've had an amazing experience, you might write a review, let people know, but but you tell more people if you've had a negative experience than if you've had a positive experienced.

100%. You you nailed it, Aoife. And every company that, we've ever done a a reputation audit for their company culture, That's typically what we see is companies that are doing nothing or taking very little action to care about their online reputation. They're suffering from the negative side of the law of self selecting extremes, and they typically have a very underrated company culture for that exact reason. They're they're taking no action. They're not inviting employees to leave feedback, and, Quently, they they have a lower score than they could have if they were taking a proactive approach.

That's really interesting. So for anyone who's listening today and wanna increase your score on the likes of Glassdoor or whatever type of of employee review platform thought your employees might use, then first step is to actively proactively seek out that feedback. It seems it seems obvious when you say it like that, but why are more people not doing that?

Well, I that's a good question, and, A lot of what I hear from people is they don't know first of all, they didn't know that they can ask. A lot of people assume that it's against the rules somehow

Yeah.

Which is not the case. As a company, you have every right to ask for employee feedback on sites like Glass soar, indeed, comparably, and more. And you should, but I would also say there are a couple things you shouldn't do. Number 1, you should not incentivize reviews. You should not give away any type of reward whether it's monetary or, experiential or not? Like, nothing because, that's against the terms of service of most of the platforms. And if you were to incentivize it, even if it was allowable, you you would have to have a disclosure of connection at least in in America according to the Federal Trade Commission. There has to be a statement in the review that says, I received this in exchange for my feedback. And if that statement isn't in there, that's actually illegal, to incentivize a review.

So that that kind of Tides over UC things like that that apply more to the product review world. But then I would also say just a couple of quick Tips on asking for reviews. Do not ask for them all at once. Like, think about this from a consumer standpoint. Let's say you sent an email blast to your entire company, and a 100 people write a review all in the same week. But then

before that, it was like

yeah. There was nothing happening on your profile before. All of a sudden, there's this huge spike in a 100 reviews, And then there's, like, radio silence after that.

Yeah.

Well, the BS radar is gonna go off. It doesn't look natural because it's it's not. Like, would you buy a product that had A 100 reviews that were all written in the same week a year ago, and that's all that you can see on on the listing. Like, it feels off. Right? So Even though that's not illegal, you totally can do that. It's fine. It doesn't feel good. It looks manipulated, And so you want to have an ongoing flow of review requests, almost like a a drip.

Right? You're just continuously asking a Small percentage of your employees on an ongoing basis, and, the best way to do that is on repeat. Another huge Thing that I see is most companies don't know that you can leave a review more than once.

Oh. You can

write a review once per year. Now, that that applies to Glassdoor comparably and Indeed. Those 3 sites, you can leave a review once per year. In her site, Which is one of my favorite platforms. It's it's kind of like Glassdoor, but for female friendliness in the workplace and is, targeting the female demographic for Lots of different elements of the employee experience that you can rate and evaluate companies on. They allow you to leave a review once every 3 months. In my opinion, that's a little too much. So I stick to the every 12 months, you can ask employees for a new review.

So if you're running a program like this in house, it requires that you need to track when you asked which employee to review on which site So that you know when you can ask them again. Mhmm. And that's how you're gonna maximize the volume of reviews you can get, which is the number one way to keep ratings high and also to be eligible for best place to work awards. So Glassdoor, Comparably, and InHerseight all have some pretty prestigious best place to work awards that are all awarded Based on quantity of reviews in the past 12 months, they have, a window of time where they're looking. You have to hit the minimum number of reviews, And then they look at quality of reviews both in ratings and the actual content. I'm sure they're using some AI to do some sentiment analysis Of the actual text, both for, polarity and and, sentiment as well. But Yeah. So you want you wanna qualify for those awards because they're huge.

I like, the 1st company where I started this effort at, Within our 2nd year, we won 8th best place to work on Glassdoor in the small medium list, which is out of over a 1000000 employers. So you think about, like, The you're in, like, the top 0.001% of employers, and all of a sudden you have this national award. Like, everything changed. Like, The perspective of the employees inside the organization was just like everyone was walking around the halls going like, holy cow. I work for a top 10 best place to work in the nation. Like, All of a sudden I mean, nothing changed. It was the same company the day before, but all of a sudden, everyone's saying, wow. This is a special place.

Like, Man, everyone's gonna wanna work here, so I better do a good job at my job because other people are gonna be knocking on the door. And sure enough, our application rates grew from about 20 to over a100, for every job that we posted. Some jobs were getting over 300, and this is well before COVID. Was 2018, so we didn't have the crazy volume of applications that were coming from layoffs. So, Like, talking to other companies around that time period, we were getting exponentially more applicants, just as a result of that. We ended up winning 7 more awards about the next year, 18 months or so just because we were optimizing our reviews and a couple from some other surveys. But, Yeah. It really did become a self fulfilling prophecy, and it was driven primarily by employee reviews.

Mhmm. Brilliant. I love that. And, like, if I think of my own experience of leaving reviews, it was basically when I had a terrible experience at 1 organization, and I wanted to let other people know and to save them from joining that organization. So I love this proactive approach of actually asking people, and I never would have thought that you would ask people when they're still working there. I always kind of assumed that it's after people have left an organization that they they continue, or sorry, that that's the time that they leave the review that it's it's only when, they've left the organizations. They don't do it when they're still working there. So that's that's interesting, I think just to learn that you can do that.

Yep. You definitely want to be a little bit more proactive and A side note on what you're saying about, like, the former employees. Statistically, this there are stats that Glassdoor has around this and comparably. On average, former employees will rate their employer a half star lower than current employees.

Yeah.

And so speaking from the, The company standpoint, it's definitely in your best interest to ask the current employees. I mean, sure, I a 100% support asking former employees as well, But that's probably a one time thing. You don't I mean, the relationship ends and you're not gonna hey. 3 years ago, you worked here. Can you write a 3rd review? Like, no. You don't do that. But you can do that once per year with your current employees as, Hey. Your experience is changing on an ongoing basis.

How's it been? Share your feedback.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I suppose I'm thinking so that's kind of publicly pay for the likes of Glassdoor or some of the the other, sites that you've mentioned. And I kinda feel like, oh, maybe this episode needs to be sponsored by Glassdoor, but that's a that's separately. That's a conversation to have. The other thing that I wanted to ask was what about internally? So what can you do internally to kinda manage the information that you get back from those external sources or alternative kind of internal feedback loops as well?

So a best practice would be to have internal feedback loops running simultaneously with your external feedback loop, right? So requesting reviews on Glassdoor, Indeed Comparably, and these other sites, That's one component of your employee feedback program. A best practice would be to have a once a year detailed, in-depth engagement survey that goes into every facet of the employee experience so you can benchmark year over year Based on demographics and all these different experienced drivers, I would also say that having An always on, anonymous feedback or suggestion box is the 2nd piece of your Feedback program, that should be there. You don't want that, like, connected to a request. You just need employees to know that it's there and they use it when something's top of mind to them. And then, the third one is 1 on ones. That's a more personal, human component of employee feedback, and from multiple different Organizations that I have worked with directly, I've seen that that's the number one driver of individual care and employees feel feeling, connected To their manager, into the company. Now if you have those at least those 3 internal feedback loops Operating on an ongoing basis, the annual engagement survey, the suggestion box, always on suggestion box, and 1 on ones. A lot of those hot topic issues that are negative are going to actually come through in those channels because there's existing trust, and it's going to protect your reviews, your employer reviews from some negativity.

And one example of that is, when I was working at 1 company right when COVID started, there was a lot of uncertainty, a lot of unknown, everything was new, And we had to take action. I was in the HR department at this point managing employee feedback and company culture, And we had to make some changes. Some people didn't like the changes. Some people did. We ended up getting 26 negative, Submissions through our internal suggestion box that related to COVID in a very short period of time. In that same time period, we only received 1 review to Glassdoor that mentioned something negative. So because there were already there was already trust in the system of our internal feedback loops working, like we responded to every one of those Suggestion box items, people didn't feel like they had to go Share it publicly on sites like Glassdoor and Indeed. So if you have those internal and external feedback loops operating, And you're really operating them right by following up with employees, responding back with what you're learning, replying where you can, Then it protects your reputation at the same time.

Mhmm. I love that. I love that. For me, it's kind of almost an outlet that people have. So I think if you don't have that iPad internally, you might take to somewhere public to tell people about the terrible experience that you've had or that you're having or the terrible decision that management made or leadership made. But if you do have that outlet, if you're constantly seeking got feedback from employees that gives them that outlet to to download and to vent and to say, listen. I'm not happy about this and, you know, all of those, really important things to do. I think back to when we had an anonymous box, and this was it wasn't an email.

It was a physical box in the office, and someone started, it was almost like, I it's so hard to explain for someone who wasn't there. But, basically, what happened was someone submitted a typed note because, obviously, they weren't comfortable going to their manager or they weren't comfortable speaking to someone about what was going on. And I think the request was for meant to be able to wear short pants in the summer. And Okay. It was addressed. It was spoken about in the leadership team. You know, I was there. We were talking about it and the decision was can let know it's not appropriate.

And if you're going out to clients, you can't be wearing shorts. And so we said shared this at the you know, we had, a kind of a standing huddle, and we shared this feedback. So the person received an answer. Lo and behold, again, a typed note. Are not happy with this. And, you know, so it went into this cycle of them not being happy with the response. So rather than creating this place of trust where you can feel free to talk to people and to share who you are and what it is that you're looking for, it created this divide and this almost comedy about the fact that it was being read out at this huddle, and then the response was being Jared, at the huddle as well. After having had a discussion, I think there was maybe, it went on for 3 or 4 months with this kind of back and forward.

Go to winter. You don't

even wanna wear shorts.

And then it's winter, and the summer has gone already, and it's it's not relevant. But I think then it the point was made that is, well, this will be relevant for next year when the sun comes back and, you know, all of those things. But yeah. Like, you know, I think the main thing was that it went against the the dress code policy. I think that was the kind of the big thing. And then it it gets you thinking of, well, is the policy out of date, or is it that we don't want people to be seen wearing shorts going into clients and and things like that? But then why is it okay for women to wear dresses? You know? It it opened up this absolutely huge divide, but I suppose what I'm trying to say from this and hopefully people get a little bit of a laugh about the situation even though you weren't there. But that level of trust wasn't there because the you know, certainly in the time that I was there, there was, engagement surveys, there was feedback being shared, but the top pain points of the employees weren't necessarily being actioned. So I think the really critical thing, you alluded to it, Matt, is that once you ask those questions, they have to be about things that you can action.

And you have to be shown to actually listen and take action on the feedback that you're getting so that it's not just a case of were asking you questions about what needs to be improved. We're listening to what you're saying, but we're not doing anything about it. Any any thoughts share on on what companies can learn from situations like that.

Yeah. You know, I've experienced something very similar to the, shorts, dilemma there. And, actually, at 1 company, I was in charge of managing The suggestion box and our v one our 1st iteration of this program was Posting every single suggestion that came through in the break room for everyone to see. We also posted it on the employee Internet so everyone that wasn't on-site could see it, and then we would respond to it from a company standpoint. Well, what we realized is by doing that, we were inadvertently Creating a podium of negativity for people to say, hey. I have this problem, and I'm gonna go stir the pot. I'm going to create some drama, and I'm gonna, you know, share this negative thing. And what we saw was it almost created this echo chamber of other people being like, oh, you're right.

You said you hate the music in the bathroom. I hate it too. This is horrible. Like, even just something that, you know, still

is horrible. In the bathroom? No. I want music

in the bathroom. We did at this, place, and, you know, it was a good thing, except there were some very specific preferences of what you listen to in the bathroom, which, Yeah. It's a big deal, apparently. But later on, we ended up taking a different approach to the suggestion box where We responded. We used some software to do this. We responded directly to the person. So we had, some software that maintained anonymity.

Okay. Yeah.

Went through a third party, but we were able to respond to the submitter. And what that did is it We were able to address the concern in a comfortable, confidential, private way to the individual that had the concern Instead of broadcasting it to everyone and creating unnecessary drama and even introducing The idea to others that maybe they should be dissatisfied with whatever it is this person is concerned about. Now We would be very purposeful in showcasing positive change. So we would summarize, Hey. We received x number of suggestions in the past quarter or the past month, and here are all the ones that moved to implementation. And then we would we would share those. We would say, here was the suggestion, and here's what we did about it. And then we would also broadcast in our report to employees that We had a 100% response rate.

And sometimes the response was, hey. Thank you for this. This is a complex Submission or idea that you're sharing, I don't have an idea or I don't have a response immediately, but we're looking into it. The the status of this suggestion has been moved to pending or researching, And we'll follow-up with you when we have new information. So that way, you can buy some time and still show a high level of responsiveness to your employees While not just letting your employees tell you what to do either. Like, you need to be realistic with business constraints and the direction of the business. And sometimes when the answer is no, it's all about packaging that no in a very, caring And, way that shows that you validate the concern, you listen to it, it was handled with a great degree of, interest and concern, and you encourage them to continue sharing ideas and feedback because that's how we grow collectively as an organization. And if you have a pattern of doing that, responding quickly, taking every suggestion seriously even if it is about Music in the bathroom or The Dress Code, if we can wear shorts, what that does is it increases the level of trust in the employee to employer relationship.

Ship. So when there is something of even higher concern, both negative or positive, like, you want to capture those really innovative creative ideas as well Or something really bad that could turn into a a legal issue like harassment or something. Like, you wanna you wanna maintain trust for the Streams because those really matter. It it matters to address the small things as well.

Yeah. Brilliant. I mean, those little small things help to build that trust that allows you to to foster trust at that kind of bigger scale, I think.

Yeah. Definitely.

Absolutely. Matt, anything else to share in relation to maybe this process or any insights from the book that you'd like to talk about?

Yeah. So the name of my book is The Review Cycle. The Review Cycle is also the name of the model that I developed. It's a consumer behavior model that has 4 steps, and it's a cycle that repeats. And, essentially, it starts the 1st phase is consideration. We consider a decision whether that's to purchase a product, to visit A hostile to change jobs and start looking for a new employer? That's step 1, consideration. Step too is engaging with OGC organizational generated content, branded content, that the company or the brand is publishing about themself or their own product online. We see the profile on Glassdoor.

We see, No. A a product listing on Amazon or something like that. That's engaging with the OGC, and you're you're learning about the product or or the company or the brand. Step 3 is if we like what we see, like, oh, this is a cool company, we wanna validate our decision with UGC, user generated content. That's when we look to the reviews. We watch unboxing videos. We check social media. We see what other people are saying About this product, this brand, or this employer.

And if it checks that box, we feel that other people, you know, validate this is a good selection, then we move on to To purchase the product, to visit the restaurant, visit the hotel, or apply to the job. That's the purchase decision. And then phase 4 Is the post decision phase where we actually have a lived experience with the product, with the brand, with the company if we're hired or we go through the, you know, the hiring process. And at the end of phase 4 is when we have the right to ask for a review. When we ask for that review, It changes the landscape of what the next person finds as they go through that same process. And so the the whole premise of the review cycle is you have this ever changing landscape of user generated content online, And as you're aware of the decisions that your consumers or job seekers are going through, you can be purposeful in Influencing those behaviors for your own good and for your own gain as a business. In the book, there's 1 chapter dedicated to each phase of the review cycle, And I talked specifically about elements of influence. And so there's an inner circle of this 4 phased cycle Of what you can do to directly affect the behaviors at each of those 4 phases.

So you actually work through this backwards. So the last phase, post decision, the element of influence is asking for reviews. That actually fuels every other action you can take. We need Volume. We need as many reviews as we can get. The name of the game is increasing our review rates, and that alone is one of the biggest drivers of Strengthening our ratings, increasing sales, increasing application rates. The next one is in conjunction with engaging with user generated content, That's responding to reviews. We want to showcase the level of care that we have for our customers or our job seekers or even to our employees, as we're responding to employee reviews on sites like Glassdoor, and that becomes a showcase piece where other people seeing that interaction gain perspective of how they could be treated if they were in a similar situation, and so we wanna be very deliberate.

It's a very specific Niche form of written communication that's highly persuasive and needs to be, taken care of very strategically, and And I have an entire chapter. I've written over 2,000 pages worth of reviews review responses, and, I've got a very dialed in approach of how to To do that. And then the third one is we wanna harvest insights. So as we learn from our reviews, harvesting insights, learning what people love and don't love about the experience we're providing, whether it's employee experience, customer experience, That helps us reverse engineer our product. It helps us change our the way we shape our experience, and it also informs are marketing. The the information that we share on our Glassdoor page about why someone should work from us, Those top five reasons should a 100% be the top 5 things people are actually saying They like about us. Not the top 5 things 1 manager or the CEO thinks that people love because he he or she may or may not be right. But if you let the entire sum of your employee voice tell you and you just see statistically, like, Most of our reviews are mentioning this thing first, this thing second.

Flexibility, paid, you know, and paid time off, Career development, whatever those top things are, those are your company culture advantages that you need to Showcase. And as you showcase them on your career page, you're attracting people to work for you for the right reasons. You have confidence that if people are coming to you because they're trying to achieve that work life balance that your employees are saying is going really well. You know that person you hire is more aligned and more likely to stay longer and be satisfied because they were attracted for the right reasons. And then the very last 1 is a top of funnel. Right? Step 1 was consideration. We're at the very beginning of the decision making process. The correlating element of influence is marketing with reviews.

Anything we ever say about ourselves and our own companies is considered biased because we have something to gain. And there's studies around this, but user generated content has exponentially more trust and influence. So instead of saying, Hey, I'm a recruiter. I love working here. You should come work here too. You can say, hey, I'm a recruiter. You shouldn't believe me Because you probably think I'm biased, I work here, right? So don't take my word for it. Instead, here's our Glassdoor Profile and indeed, and comparably in Intersight and CanoNew, go see what people are really saying and form your opinion around that.

And if you've set up your whole system where you're proactively asking for feedback, the numbers are gonna play in your favor. They're going to find more more of the positive that's real, and we want the real. We we have no reason to try to tell our employees to only write 5 stars. We want true, honest, genuine feedback, And then let that shine. And the the the smaller degree of negative actually increases authenticity and influence of the positive. But if we select a review or some stats around our reviews, like total number of 5 stars since COVID or, percentage of reviews that mention Flexibility positively. Like, those are the types of stats that we wanna shine a light on because it's the voice of the online community saying we're awesome Instead of us saying we're awesome. And so those are really the 4 steps, of the review cycle, and it's also on Kindle and Audible for people who just like to, You know, listener are digital only and, yeah.

So it's it's there.

Brilliant. Love it. And what you were saying about the, the response to the user generated content, you know, I, I all I'm thinking is the opposite of what you should really say is, well, we never want you to come back to this restaurant anyway or you're a terrible worker. Right? You know? And this is in the public domain for other people to see. And I know certainly when I see things like that on Google. It's really off putting. So

Yep.

I love that you have a very specific approach to how to how to phrase that in such a way that it's like, thank you so much for this valuable feedback, and we'll take it on board, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. I'm not sure

Yep.

What else you say, but also harvesting the insights and taking taking on that feedback to inform your marketing efforts, so don't take my word for it. Here's what here's what everyone else is saying, but actually really using that. And I and I suppose, for me, I love to make this so practical, and there's been so much practical tips in this. If someone wants to get started for the 1st time. If they're not doing this currently with their organization, maybe they have an internal annual engagement survey, but not really doing anything with the results. What would you say is the 1st step that people can take to to start going down this road?

I'm glad you asked that, Aoife. It's a great question. It's one of the most common questions I get. Where do you start? A lot of companies that have internal feedback already happening, they already have this wealth of data to lean on, which is great, But that's all internal, and it does not shape perceptions, and it does not shape behaviors. Right? Like, say you have an incredibly strong History of a high net promoter score, e NPS, like an employee net promoter score, that really is irrelevant, Because job seekers don't see it. Your employees likely don't see it. Well, in some cases, let's share it. Your customers don't see it, And the general public doesn't see it.

But what do they see? They see your star ratings. And especially for higher consideration Purchases, employee reviews, and ratings actually spill over to influencing buying behaviors of customers as well. Like, imagine a a home builder. You do you want to know how that homebuilder treats the people that are going to literally build the house you're gonna live in?

Mhmm.

Well, you might be looking at Glassdoor to see, Do I want to use this home builder? Like, do they treat the people that are going to be building my house nice? Because I I wanna make sure. So I I here's what I say, in direct response to your question, Aoife, is you need to do an audit Of your employer reputation. You need to understand where you are right now and draw a baseline so that you can document where you're starting from And then make a proactive plan to move forward. And, the the business that we're starting, we're 1 year in. It's called Mobrium. Essentially the software version of the review cycle for employers to streamline every phase of the review cycle in Collecting employee reviews, responding to them, learning from them and harvesting insights, and then identifying, employee review stats to use in marketing, we do an audit. That's a free service. So and if there's anyone that wants that, you just Go to morim.com and you can request a free employer reputation audit, to draw that baseline of where you're starting from.

Brilliant. I love that. Absolutely love this conversation. Really enlightening as well. And considering that we have spoken a couple of times prior to this, I'm still learning some new stuff from this and from the whole process of the review cycle. And I, for 1, am really looking forward to to reading the book and to learning more as well. Is there anything else that you would like to share before we wrap things up?

No. Just that, you know, to everyone listening, this is one of the best podcasts out there. Company culture, it's it's the gold standard. Like, you may have other podcasts on your list, but this should remain at the top. The quality is Impressive, and Aoife does an incredible job bringing in some a variety of perspectives to give you a wealth of knowledge about all different facets of, helping your employees be happier at work. So I'm I'm honored to be here and grateful for the opportunity.

Thank you. I feel really shy and embarrassed and all the rest now, but thank you. I really, really appreciate that. I do try and make it the best that it can be from both from a guest experience as well as a listener experience. So you will have gone through the guest process. There's still more go through now as well, so I do try and and make it that it's really high quality and always looking to improve and always looking for feedback on the podcast as well. The question I ask everyone who comes on is what does being happier at work mean to you?

You know, I was thinking I knew you're gonna ask me that question, Aoife, and here's my answer. I would say being happier at work Is having a healthy level of comfort and discomfort.

I love it.

And I would say a happy level of a healthy level of comfort, meaning There's psychological safety. You feel like you belong. You feel like you can be yourself. You feel welcomed, supported. But then a healthy level of discomfort, Meaning, you're challenged. You feel like you can innovate and be creative and push yourself to learn and grow and do things that you haven't done in the past. I think sometimes we focus too much on the Comfort and, oh, yeah. This is awesome.

Like, well, work isn't a vacation. Like, you should be learning. You should be growing. You should be doing new things and Pushing the envelope. Although, no matter how much you push the envelope, it will still be stationary. I'll mention that. But I would say I would say you need to be comfort comfortable, But you also need to be uncomfortable in a way.

Within the Happier at Work framework, I always talk about this idea of balance. And from a need satisfaction perspective, it's finding that right balance. And I think if you have the right balance in what you're talking about between comfort and discomfort. So in the context that I talk about it in, it's, the difference between being complacent and bored in your role, and being challenged to feeling sufficiently challenged, which is kind of a nice balance, versus being overly challenged where you're stressed and maybe you feel like a little bit of a, an imposter. You you're in over your head. So I think in all types of scenarios, it is finding that balance, and balance will be different for different people. It'll be different for you as an individual at different part points in your life as well. So understanding and recognizing that and being able identify quickly, I think is is really important.

Like, I'm too feeling too comfortable here. I need to challenge myself a little bit more versus I'm feeling too challenged here. I'm a bit over my head, and I need more support. So, I love that you brought that perspective. Thank you. Matt, you've mentioned the name of your company already, Mobrium, so people head on over to check it out. I know you have another brilliant podcast, which I was also featured as a guest, so feel free to to share about that and how people can connect with you as well.

Yeah. Thanks, Ipa. Yeah. Our podcast is The Culture Prophet. My wife and I are the cohosts. We're about 12 episodes in right now. We've got up to 20 episodes scheduled and some pretty Incredible guests in including Aoife, which we're really excited to release that episode coming up. So, yeah, just check out The Culture Prophet.

And then our business, MOBRIM, is your one stop shop for strengthening and streamlining your employer reputation.

Brilliant. Love that. Thank you so much for your time today, Matt. I always come away having learned so much from our discussions. I really really appreciate your time. Thank you.

Thanks.