Your company just bought a foosball table. Your manager still hasn't given you feedback since March. Gallup says 70% of how you feel about your job traces back to that manager — not the perks, not the PTO policy, not the pizza.

So why do companies buy the foosball table instead? Because that's a purchase order and an afternoon of assembly. Management development takes six months and you can't prove it worked.

Ryan and Daniel get into why we promote our best performers into management and then set them up to fail, why a great manager's personal numbers should be the worst on the team, and the reason good management stays rare: do it well enough and you start to look unnecessary.

00:00 — The 70% Nobody Wants to Hear

02:00 — Why We Ask for Foosball Instead of Better Bosses

07:00 — Gallup's 70%: Your Manager Is the Whole Ballgame

14:00 — Spicy Take: Are Employee Perks Actually a Red Flag?

19:00 — Four Generations, Four Completely Different Perks

24:00 — Work Receipt: The Manager Who Stayed Up All Night

31:00 — Monday Morning Fix: Measure Managers From the Bottom Up

36:00 — Last Word: If It's 70%, What Are We Even Doing?

DANIEL: Welcome to the Make Work Not Suck podcast. All right, Ryan — what if I told you that 70% of the reason you either love or hate your job has nothing to do with your pay, the benefits, the perks, or even the job you do? It has to do with something else. I think a good conversation for us to have today is why perks can't fix your miserable job.

RYAN: It's funny you say that. You said 70%, and it has nothing to do with all of that?

DANIEL: Yep.

RYAN: Yet we've done episodes where the comments were people saying, "Give us the money. Give us the benefits."

DANIEL: Of course.

RYAN: So I think we also need to get into why people think they want the perks and the benefits and more money, but that's not actually the problem. Why is it the 70%? I want to start there.

DANIEL: Maybe we should identify it first. What is the one workplace factor that's more powerful than salary, vacation time, and company culture combined? I think you know what it is.

RYAN: I know what it is. What is it, Daniel?

DANIEL: Gallup says 70% of how you feel about your job comes from your manager. That is the single biggest driver of workplace satisfaction — or of making work suck. It's your manager. And yet companies continue to buy foosball tables. They bring in private chefs, massages —

RYAN: Not at any place I've worked, but I've heard there are places that do that.

DANIEL: They're spending so much more money and attention on perks instead of on training your manager to be a good manager. I think that's a huge miss.

RYAN: There's a lot in there. For one, I have had the massages in the office.

DANIEL: Good for you.

RYAN: We've had that work before. And I think we did a better job on management training too, though I'd have to ask a former employee whether it was actually working. The best perk I've ever had was a Coke machine that didn't take money, and I drank Mountain Dew all day. That was about the best perk I've ever gotten.

But I think it goes back to what people say. It's either the company, the boss, or the job itself. Most people can deal with the job or the company as long as they have a strong boss. But if that boss isn't a good manager — that's where the 70% comes from.

DANIEL: Right. Of work satisfaction.

RYAN: Work satisfaction. And what you're saying is we're throwing perks at the problem. So what you're saying is, throwing results won't fix a journey problem.

DANIEL: I like how you worked the method right into that. Look, if what Gallup is saying is true — that 70% of your satisfaction at work is driven by your manager — then why are we spending so much money on pizza? We should be doubling down on making sure our managers are actually good managers before we start trying to fix burnout or change the vacation policy.

RYAN: I think it goes back to the old Henry Ford line: if I asked people what they wanted, they'd say a faster horse.

DANIEL: Right.

RYAN: That's the problem. When we ask people what they want, they want the foosball table. Those are tangible things. Those are all results we think will make us feel better. But in reality, the problem is the manager.

And you can compound it. If you've got a manager of a manager of a manager — or in a small business, an owner, a founder, an entrepreneur who is the de facto manager of the leadership team and isn't good at managing a leadership team — then the managers underneath could be good, could be bad. That cascades down. So 70% isn't a surprise.

DANIEL: It seems to me a lot of companies are focused on the symptoms and not the disease. You look at employee turnover or burnout and you say, "Our people are burning out, we need to fix the vacation policy." Which is honestly not easy, but it's way easier than fixing the culture or training all of your managers to be good managers. I think it's a giant waste of resources, because changing the vacation policy, casual Fridays, pizza on Wednesdays — none of that changes the core of the issue, which is the relationship employees have with their managers.

RYAN: You've got two compounding problems. One, management training is a green-line path and we want an instant result. If I have to send them to training, then they're not qualified to be a manager yet. So I send them to a 12-week program, then it takes another 12 weeks for it to be effective, and now I'm 36 weeks in. I'm three quarters into the year before I get results. And I need management today.

The other side is you've got HR departments trying to build employee success and retention, and they're not the managers. So what can they do? Unlimited PTO, because people need to take more vacation. Let's put a policy in place so people can take more time off. But HR isn't in control of the people. They're the ones saying, "If we had a foosball table and encouraged people to play, that'll help our engagement problem." So you've got HR departments that aren't aligned to the problem, trying to solve it in a silo, and you've got executives and founders who don't want to invest in management training because it's too much time and energy.

DANIEL: The other problem with management training is that it's really hard to know if it's working. How do you measure a good manager? How do you know if somebody is good at that job? And how would you make them better? Maybe a little off topic, but I think it's relevant.

RYAN: It goes back to what I just said. It's a green-line effort. If you don't take the time to benchmark it and connect with the people — a perfect example, if we roll out [Simplaphi tool name — confirm] at an organization, we can measure the vibe of the culture. We can see whether we're trending up or down. But that takes the time and energy to roll out a tool to measure for it. And it's over time. One variable in a snapshot in time does not give you a trend. If you're not willing to do that, you'll never get there.

DANIEL: I've been part of a lot of organizations that do 360s as their attempt to evaluate whether managers are good managers. But 360s just become popularity contests. You end up finding out who the most popular manager is, and that doesn't mean they're actually good at their job. It just means people like them.

In their defense, it is a challenge for organizations. It's easier to say, "Foosball table purchased." You can see it in the break room, $1,000. That's easier than saying, "I'm going to spend $20,000, $50,000, $100,000 on management training programs and I have no idea if it's working."

RYAN: You don't even have to spend that much. There are resources out there — books, groups, Slack communities. You can find decent management training. Don't get me wrong, a $100 course is not the same value as a $10,000 coaching engagement. But there are plenty of resources available to jumpstart something, even if it's just everybody getting a book and discussing it.

You called it out, though. It's a lot easier. I can go to Costco or Amazon and click a few buttons — buy foosball table, build it, install it, done.

DANIEL: Right.

RYAN: But it's a red-line solution.

DANIEL: So what's the most surprising thing to you about employee engagement? The most common mistake you see?

RYAN: A false sense of it. I think sometimes we get too attached to the individual as a person and we have a false sense of employee engagement because we have a friendly relationship with them. It's, "We can hang out after work." But that doesn't equate to performance in the business. Then we try to augment it with the foosball table, or beer in the office, and we're not getting to the heart of what we're trying to do.

People are people. And we want to red-line things for speed, or red-line past the mistakes. Any time you're trying to shortcut employee engagement to get a quick win — this isn't a discount code. You don't drop in the employee success promo code and save 20% and suddenly have this magical thing. This is hard. It's deep. It's people-driven. If we were plugged into the Matrix, sure, there'd be a program we could load and we'd all be on the same page. But there isn't.

DANIEL: Related to that, the thing I find most surprising and most common is that management is undervalued. Most people don't understand what good management really is or why it's valuable. I've seen organizations make the classic mistake of promoting the best salesperson into the sales manager role, or the best engineer into the engineering manager role. But he's an awful manager. He's a great engineer and an awful manager. You're going to make your whole team miserable by having them report to that guy.

It would be better to have him report to somebody who knows nothing about engineering but is at least a good manager. That would be better for your team. But that is not how most organizations think. I think they systemically undervalue management.

RYAN: I agree. And in that same scenario — that guy's a top-performing salesperson, so what do we want to do? More commission. Let's get a new comp plan for everybody that gives everyone a bigger piece of the pie. Everybody's going to love it. He's a horrible manager, but everybody loves him because he got a new comp plan in.

DANIEL: Right. It has nothing to do with professional growth. And very rarely are your highest performers going to be good managers. They're just wired differently.

RYAN: Let's take that one for a second. There's a possibility for them to be a phenomenal manager. But they're not going to be an overnight success as a manager. They're going to fail, and there's going to be a learning curve. If you take your highest performer and expect them to be an overnight manager, you're setting yourself up for failure.

DANIEL: I've almost never seen that happen overnight. I can't think of a time.

RYAN: It's very rare. It goes back to red line versus green line. And don't get me wrong — everybody has to come from somewhere. Everybody starts out as a performer, hopefully a high performer, and then decides they want to teach more people and be part of building the system. That's the natural progression of climbing the ladder. There's nothing wrong with that. It's when you do it as a red line, expecting that person to be a manager immediately.

It's interesting, because it goes back to the IBM model. At one point they realized the only way up the ladder was through management, so they created two tracks — skilled individual contributors and people managers. That's been around for decades. And we still get this wrong in everyday business.

DANIEL: It's a very common mistake. Why do you think that is? Why do we still get it wrong even though we know it's wrong?

RYAN: I think it's a red-line-for-results problem. I've seen so many jobs — I've had these jobs — where it's, "Your job is to deliver this, this, this, this, this, and this. Oh, and by the way, you're also going to be managing this team of five people." Whoa. A team of five people is a significant set of responsibilities. I don't think anyone's going to be successful managing that team, caring and feeding for those people, making sure they've got what they need to be successful, and then delivering the ten other things you want them to do.

So they're red-lining for results instead of building a healthy culture with good managers who know how to engage and get the most out of their people. And you end up in a self-fulfilling prophecy. The managers suck, they grind their people, people quit, everyone left has to take on more, and it becomes a death spiral.

I want to give you an example I saw — a real-life example from this past week. And this is definitely in the small business space. I love KPIs, I love results, but it's got to be in balance. A great manager will have the best team KPIs and the best individual KPIs for their direct reports, but the worst KPIs on themselves if you hold them to the same measures — because their job is to elevate everybody else and get the most out of their skills.

DANIEL: Yep.

RYAN: So many leaders and executives put a performance metric on the manager — we call them a player-coach — and then ask, "Why aren't you hitting your stats?" The only way for that individual to be successful is to be an individual contributor. And then it's not their fault they're a crappy manager. It's their manager's fault that they're a crappy manager, because you're holding them to a KPI on their own throughput. What you should care about is their team's throughput. If the team is happy and performing, do you think the manager is doing their job?

DANIEL: Absolutely.

RYAN: Absolutely. But we want to look at their individual KPI and say they're not hitting their performance metric.

DANIEL: Maybe you're measuring the wrong thing. I had a large training and coaching engagement with a client a couple of years ago, training a bunch of first-time managers who were all technical people. Everybody I was working with was staying up all night to make sure their team's deliverables were correct.

I remember asking one guy, "You're a first-time manager. How would you describe your job?" He said, "To make sure my team gets everything done. If that means I've got to stay up all night to do it, that's the success metric."

I challenged him. I said, "I don't think that's the right way to think about your job." He said, "Well, what's a better way?" I said, "I think you need to measure yourself on your team's ability to deliver great work without you."

And I got to watch it blow his mind. He said, "What do you mean, without me?" But that's really the trick of management. Coach, train, develop, give feedback — do the things your team needs to elevate them so that they don't need you.

But that's also scary. Because if you build a team that doesn't need you, there are a lot of organizations that would say, "Great, we can get rid of Ryan and save on headcount." So maybe that's one of the root causes of why organizations get this so wrong. It's scary to manage well, because people who manage well end up appearing — not being, but appearing — unnecessary.

RYAN: That goes back to the greatest manager being in the background. You appear irrelevant. So there's a fear factor of losing your job, because you don't want to be irrelevant. You're doing your job well, but if you come off as irrelevant, you'll get replaced. And that means the manager above you hasn't built the criteria for success. That cascades down.

We're literally hitting on why it's 70%. Because we value the wrong things out of managers. Plain and simple. We want results, we jump to results, and in the absence of doing it right, we check a box and throw perks at it. Pool tables. Treats. Pizza.

DANIEL: Right.

RYAN: Which at the end of the day is just a downward spiral, and it makes work suck. "Great, I get to play pool in the middle of the day, but I'm going to get a lecture from the VP for missing deadlines. I might as well take the lecture, because I know it's coming and there's nothing I can do about it." And then I go home and talk about how much work sucks with my friends and family.

DANIEL: So how do you think we got here? How did we get from train, coach, develop, elevate your people, to throw pizza at them and hope they don't quit?

RYAN: I have one theory. Greed.

DANIEL: Yeah, probably.

RYAN: And this is more stock-exchange-based, public companies. What do we do? Every 90 days we're checking the stock price. Every annual evaluation, we're checking the stock price. So we look at what's going to squeeze the profits, and we squeeze the people. We throw a foosball table and a pizza party into the mix, squeeze the profits, and look good on Wall Street. And 18 months later, when that CEO can't throw any more pizza and pool tables, they get fired, and the next guy comes in and does it with cornhole and beer.

DANIEL: I think the short-term focus on results is a big driver, and it probably correlates with greed. There's also a lot of selfishness. The CEO is maximizing his payout, which is tied to the stock price. But that's not tied to building a great business or taking great care of your customers and your employees. It's about getting the next promotion or the next wave of stock options.

RYAN: When you're getting ready to make an exit, what's the easiest way to increase EBITDA? Increase free cash flow. Increase pricing, decrease expense. If I can cut 30% of the overhead and theoretically maintain the same throughput, my EBITDA goes up, my multiple goes up, and it's the next guy's problem.

DANIEL: Right.

RYAN: And who's left with the pain and suffering? The everyday employee. That's what makes work suck.

DANIEL: Would you say that a company waving the flag on all of its employee perks is actually a red flag? That it signals a company that doesn't value management and would rather distract you with bright shiny objects and pizza Fridays — versus a healthy company that maybe doesn't advertise all the perks?

RYAN: That's hard to say, because I don't think it's that black and white. There are companies that do it well. They have good management training, good glide paths, all of those things — and they have perks and benefits. I don't think there's anything wrong with having those. It's your motivation for why you have them.

So if I'm evaluating a company, I'm going to look at the glide paths for job progression. Great, they've got all these perks and benefits, unlimited PTO, they're using Bonusly, and so on. But what are my glide path options? If I want to be a manager, are there training opportunities? And if what you see is all shiny stuff and nothing on career progression — heck yeah, it's a red flag.

DANIEL: I'd look for training budgets. How much money do you have set aside to help your people become better versions of themselves? If that number is zero but the foosball count is high, that's a red flag.

RYAN: It goes back to Richard Branson — he may not be the greatest example here, but he's done a few good things. He's always said employees are a company's greatest asset. If you take care of that asset, it will take care of the customer, which will in turn take care of the business. If you invest in your people wholeheartedly, they will take care of the customer. That increases revenue, that increases retention, that increases everything across the board.

Now, this doesn't mean throwing things at them. Taking care of the employee is not foosball tables and pizza parties and Starbucks gift cards.

DANIEL: Yeah. That's just hope.

RYAN: That's hope. It all comes down to why you're doing it. What's the vision behind it? What's the journey you're trying to create? Those perks might be results that come out of it, but why are you doing it? If you're not clear on that and you're expecting a result — or you're using it to wring more out of your people — you're not going to get the desired outcome. Plain and simple.

DANIEL: So let's talk about why this makes work suck. Your manager sucks, but rather than fixing that problem, leadership is going to institute shorts on Fridays. How do you feel about that?

RYAN: I don't give a crap. People can see through it. The real question is whether this is a single manager who sucks while most managers in the business are good and this one just needs to be dealt with — or whether it's the management expectation across the whole business and it's toxic everywhere.

DANIEL: Right. Systemic versus a one-off.

RYAN: Say a company has 250 employees and they're going to do summer hours, where you work until noon on Friday and get the rest of the day off. Awesome. If it's one or two managers who suck inside a 250-person company, that's an isolated issue to deal with. If it's every single manager, then great, I'm going to take advantage of it — but I'm probably going to work on something outside the business. I'll either use it to complain, or I'll go advance my skills personally and look for a job elsewhere.

DANIEL: Perks are especially frustrating when the hard work of leading an organization hasn't been done. When we're not clear on vision, journey, culture, and results, and we're just trying to distract you with Starbucks gift cards and ice cream parties. If the hard work has been done to align vision, journey, culture, and results, then perks are very well received. Most of the time, in my experience, people appreciate that. But you've got to have that foundation.

If you don't, there's really nothing you can do to distract people from it or overcome it. It ends up being lipstick on a pig, because you're trying to convince me this is a better place than it really is. So my recommendation, particularly to senior leaders, is focus less on the perks and more on fixing the guts of the business.

How have you seen attitudes toward perks vary by generation?

RYAN: Now you're talking about something that can really screw a company up.

DANIEL: Or win, the other way.

RYAN: There's a level with the older generations — the boomers are grinders, they're all about results. I think that's where some of the older management style of just throwing results at it comes from. When you look at the different generations, you get different perspectives wanting different things. Millennials want more work-life balance: "I want to be able to blend my work and my personal life interdependently." Whereas a boomer wants you in the office at 8 a.m.

DANIEL: Try 7:30.

RYAN: I was being generous. That's them trying to meet you in the middle.

But right now, because lifespans have increased and the average age of workers has increased, we've got what, four different generations in the workforce? I think that plays a factor, especially when upper-level leadership is the older generation and the frontline managers are the younger generations. You've got two totally different styles — technically four.

DANIEL: Right.

RYAN: And that creates a rift about what leadership training even is. A boomer probably wants a Gen Zer to go through leadership training on VHS and cassette tape, whereas a Gen Zer wants to watch something on YouTube or TikTok. You're not blending there. So there are generational differences that definitely contribute to the 70%. But a good manager, regardless of their age or any other factor, would figure out how to connect with their people.

DANIEL: That is the job of the manager — to understand your people and understand how to communicate, how to incentivize, how to train and elevate them in a way that works for them. Whether that's a generational difference or a cultural difference, finding a way to meet them where they are is the skill of management that so many organizations dismiss. They don't think it's a thing, and then it kicks them in the tail, and they don't understand why.

RYAN: I'm going to say something that's probably very controversial.

DANIEL: Bring it on.

RYAN: There are a lot of Gen Zers, especially younger Gen Zers, who are willing to quit their jobs and walk away. How much of that stems from — let me set this up. Twenty, thirty years ago, when you turned 18 you were on your own. You didn't come back into the house. Parents weren't funding your living, you weren't on their insurance, they weren't paying for your cell phone. You turned 18, you were self-sufficient day one.

Now the average age is 26 or 28 when people move out from their parents [source not stated — verify], which means their entire twenties are a lot easier. They'll say it's harder — "life is so hard" — but when your parents are still paying a lot of your bills, life's not hard.

So I wonder how much of this is younger Gen Zers who still have that foundation. And this is where the helicopter parent comes in, which gets into a whole other problem around accountability. This is coming off a college orientation where they were telling the parents, "You have to let go. You can't look for any excuse to bring them back home." There are families out there who would love to have their 20-year-old still living at home and to help provide for them. That's the nurturing side.

Well, how much is that fueling Gen Z? "Fine, I'll just quit my job." And they will, because they've got a safety net. Now, I know that's not every situation. There are people who are hardworking and can't afford it. Let's say it's 50/50 — I don't know what the real percentage is. There are hardworking people who are on their own and can't afford to quit. They've got to suck it up with the crappy boss. And it is what it is, and work ultimately sucks. And then there are the ones where it does suck, but it's easy for them to quit because they have a safety net.

DANIEL: Right.

RYAN: So you're in a catch-22. One can quit and leave like it's nothing. The other one has to suffer.

DANIEL: Some of that's age and stage, right? I'm sure Gen Xers would have given the middle finger to their boss and walked out when they didn't have a mortgage and kids. But at some point you get to a stage where you can't afford to walk away. So I do think there are dynamics there where social safety nets for younger, early-career professionals make them more likely to entertain it.

Let's go back to the top. We talked about boomers — grinders, probably valuing results as the perk because they're more results-oriented as a generation. What about Gen X? Are Gen Xers just cynical about everything?

RYAN: Gen X is the rebellious group. They were middle finger to the world.

DANIEL: I'd say Gen Xers are disillusioned. They know what this is. The corporate nonsense is what it is. And sure, if you want me to wear shorts on Fridays, or we're going to have an ice cream party, or leave at noon — fine, whatever. I'm just here to do a job and keep my paycheck, because I've got a family to support. I'm going to show up, do what's required of me, and walk out the door. If you want me to check that box, I'll do it, but I'll do it begrudgingly and just enough to check the box.

RYAN: They're not going to sell their soul for it, because they did that years ago and they saw how it worked out.

DANIEL: Right.

RYAN: "Wait, I make a hundred bucks every time I check that box? How can I gamify this system, check it a thousand times, and get the money?"

DANIEL: All right, so what about millennials?

RYAN: Millennials are the ones in the middle. A little bit of "here's the middle finger," a little bit of grind, and a lot of "it's all about work-life balance." Why can't I do this better? Why do I have to do it the old way when I can do it a better way and still hang out with my friends and my family?

DANIEL: Right.

RYAN: So especially the older millennials, there's a little bit of Gen X in there. The younger millennials are a little more Gen Z.

DANIEL: Here's a question. What perks do you think play best? If you've done the hard work — you've laid the foundation, you've aligned vision, journey, culture, and results — and you really want to give meaningful perks to your people, what would you give to a boomer, a Gen Xer, a millennial, and a Gen Zer?

RYAN: Boomer's easy. It's cash.

DANIEL: Who's going to go gold watch?

RYAN: Gold watch — well, that might be the generation before, where they wanted the gold watch.

DANIEL: Yeah, that's probably a little older.

RYAN: Okay, boomers are cash. You can give them the gold watch, but they're going to go sell it for cash.

DANIEL: All right. Gen X — is that more like work separation? I can disconnect from work?

RYAN: I could see that. It's not really a work-life balance thing, it's maybe extra days off.

DANIEL: For the millennial, I think it's going to be flexibility.

RYAN: Okay.

DANIEL: I want to be able to work while I'm in Europe. I might take a day or two off, but I'm going to blend my work. I want freedom and flexibility.

RYAN: I like that. I don't want to be chained to the desk, I don't want to be chained to an agenda. I want to be able to travel to Japan for a month and work without restriction and balance my life.

DANIEL: And then for Gen Z, I think it's mental health — flexibility on the mental health side. Actually, I think Gen Z is a combination of all four. They want the money, they want the days off, they want the flexibility, and they want the mental health. And there's a lot I'm hearing from Gen Z about career progression, coaching, mentoring. They want to get promoted every nine months.

RYAN: Nine days.

DANIEL: Nine days.

RYAN: You know what's funny? And I do appreciate this, even though I'm making fun of it a little — it is forcing something. I always think Gen Z is the iterated version of millennials. We started it all, they're just trying to make it better.

But there's a level of disillusionment with Gen Z that I'm noticing that I didn't see with previous generations. It's, "I showed up, I checked all the boxes, I deserve a raise." Well, just because you're doing a job doesn't automatically entitle you to one. Are you adding more value? "Well, I've learned how to do this process." Great, you've learned how to do your job. But how does that equate to deserving a raise?

And sometimes it's, "I want $20,000 more a year." Is your job creating $20,000 more worth of value for the company? "Well, no. I've been here and I've mastered this job, so I deserve more money." You're just doing your job.

DANIEL: Yeah.

RYAN: So I do appreciate the desire for career progression. It's almost like we've come full circle — it's climbing the ladder. They want to climb that ladder, they want those raises. But sometimes it's disconnected. I don't mean this in a mean way, but it's like entitlement. They almost come in feeling entitled to promotions regardless of business performance. Revenue's down, but "I killed it, give me a raise."

DANIEL: It's disconnected from the reality of business management. I've got clients saying this, where they've got Gen Z employees coming in saying, "I want $25 an hour."

RYAN: And it's, what job can I give you that adds more than $25 an hour worth of value?

DANIEL: Right. You're worth $10 an hour because all you can do is greet customers. If you want a livable wage, you need to have livable skills. And that disconnect is most evident in the Gen Z and Gen Alpha employees coming up. They don't understand how this works — that if I'm paying you $25 an hour, you have to create more value than that so I can pay you and pay the rent, the power, the utilities.

RYAN: So let's take this back to the management problem. You're a poor manager, you like your employees, and you want to do good by them. They come to you and say, "I want the raise." And you say, "Yeah, I'll get you that raise." You go to your boss and your boss says, "You're nuts." And then the manager comes back and says, "Well, they're not going to allow it."

DANIEL: Yeah.

RYAN: That's a buddy-buddy relationship instead of a management relationship. Instead of working through the management side — how can we get you there? What does that job look like? And sometimes that's because they don't want the employee to have their job.

DANIEL: Right. They don't want them to succeed more than they are.

RYAN: Or maybe they want to be liked. There are all kinds of variable reasons. Or they don't want them to quit, because they know Gen Z will just quit over a bad phone call.

DANIEL: Yep.

RYAN: So it's interesting how the different generations and the expectations play into how we throw those perks. The new one today is mental health days, mental health perks, which do appeal to Gen Z.

DANIEL: I think that appeals to everybody, to be honest.

RYAN: Sure. The boomer's going to say, "I didn't have a mental health day in my career in the past 40 years. Why do I need one now? I just take a day off."

DANIEL: Right.

RYAN: "I just take a day and go fishing." Why do you need a dedicated mental health day? Anyway. But if you looked at all four generations and what each one really wants, they're much more aligned than most people think. On the surface, the results look very different. But if you look at the components, everybody wants a little bit of all of it. There's a component of mental health, a component of bonuses and incentives, a component of flexibility and schedule. If you can bring balance to that, the perks side can actually meet all four generations well.

But it's the management, like we started with. If they don't know how to effectively manage, then those perks are just checking the box.

DANIEL: We've picked on Gen Z a lot. I will say this. We've said none of these perks really matter if you haven't done the hard work to align vision, journey, culture, and results. I'd say that's most true for Gen Z. My sense is that boomers kind of don't care about the purpose. It's, "Look, if you're making money, I want a cut of it, and I'll show up and do whatever you ask as long as you're giving me a paycheck."

Gen Z is not like that. Gen Z wants to know their job is making a difference, that they're making the world a better place. And throwing pizza parties at them will not keep them engaged if you haven't done the hard work to align vision, journey, culture, and results. That's true for most generations, but it's most true for Gen Z.

So if you're looking to hire people in their twenties — and Gen Z is now starting to move into their thirties — if you need to capture that next generation, hire them, keep them, and motivate them, the foundation is becoming more important, not less. I would spend more time on how your business makes the world a better place, who you're helping, the good you're doing. You're going to get a better return out of that than out of Starbucks gift cards.

Improvement strategies. What can we do to actually make employee satisfaction better through better management? What would it look like if organizations spent the perks budget on developing good managers?

RYAN: I think they'd have less of a problem. It's obvious. If you've invested money in proper leadership development and training, that's a game of numbers. You're going to improve. Any time you better yourself — what's the old phrase, if you're not learning, you're dying. So if you want your company to grow, invest in learning and development. It's going to work.

You might have some uphill battles. You might have to let some managers go, you might have to reshuffle the deck. But you're always going to improve by investing in the people.

DANIEL: Management is an underappreciated skill, and it's going to become more and more important as AI becomes more prevalent in the workplace. That EQ skill of managers is going to matter more. So it's a smart long-term investment to make sure your managers are good at their jobs.

RYAN: Especially when you introduce more AI into the workplace, managing people becomes even more prevalent, because you don't need to manage the throughput. If you have AI as a coding companion or a task companion, it's going to be more about the human relationship side. So if we're bad at it now, we're going to get worse as AI gets more into the mix.

DANIEL: And the question of motivation. It's so much easier now to do things as AI capabilities advance. Training over time becomes less important because AI can do it for you. It's more about the softer skills — motivation, engagement. How do we keep people caring about what's going on and wanting to improve? That's going to be harder, but more valuable over the next 10 years.

RYAN: You can use ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude to prompt for management training and get your own training. But applying it with people is the hard skill. It's book smart versus street smart. Anybody can get the theories from ChatGPT. Having the street smarts to actually apply it and be effective — that's the key part.

DANIEL: Absolutely. All right, here's my prediction. In five years, manager quality scores will be as important as salary ranges in job postings, because companies will have to publicly report how good their managers are. What do you think — buying it or not?

RYAN: That sounds great in theory, but that's like trusting Glassdoor reviews for hiring people.

DANIEL: Glassdoor is a biased sample. It's usually just the people who are upset who post.

RYAN: It's the people who got the $25 Starbucks gift card to give a five-star review. And they give a one-star review when they quit.

DANIEL: Like the company that keeps begging people to fill out the best-places-to-work survey. If you have to keep begging us and paying us to fill out the survey, are you really one of the best places to work? Shouldn't the people want to do it? I get reminding them every now and then, but if you're bribing them?

RYAN: What I love about those is: pay $2,500 and you can get on the best-places-to-work list [source not stated — verify]. We ask people a few questions and, oh, by the way, everybody makes it on the list. Some of them are legit.

DANIEL: Sure, some of them are.

RYAN: And some are just a company's way of making money.

Back to your question. Done well, it can be valuable. But at the end of the day, what it comes down to is any way we can educate candidates on the right questions to ask when they're interviewing — about management style and everything else. That's going to be more impactful: empowering the everyday employee with the right interview questions so they can be effective.

DANIEL: Last question. How can companies measure the effectiveness of their managers? How do you know who your good managers are and who's driving off your good employees?

RYAN: It's easy. Measure the employees. Measure the satisfaction of the people. Take a bottom-up approach. The aggregate score of your people, using a legitimate tool — not a made-up survey on SurveyMonkey, but a legitimate employee engagement instrument that takes a bottom-up strategy — will tell you whether your managers are effective, because the scores of the people will reflect good management or poor management.

DANIEL: But it can't just be a popularity contest. It can't be "my boss is my buddy," because that's where a lot of them make the mistake. I like my boss — that's good, but it doesn't mean they're good at their job. You've got to actually be able to measure it.

RYAN: That's why I said the right tool, and not just made-up questions on SurveyMonkey.

DANIEL: Right.

RYAN: The questions and the measurement do matter. What you really need to ask are employee health and employee engagement questions about how they're engaged with the organization. With good employees who are well engaged, you'll see the manager who shines. And you might have a manager with 10 direct reports where one sticks out like a sore thumb and everybody else is happy. Okay, that's one individual problem. But when you see the aggregate of all the employees under one manager with low scores, you've got a management problem.

DANIEL: Right.

RYAN: Right.

DANIEL: All right, final question. If 70% of employee engagement comes from management, what does that say about our entire approach to building healthy, effective, successful organizations? Love to hear your thoughts. Drop them in the comment section, and thanks for joining us. Make work not suck.

---

OUTRO: Make Work Not Suck — the podcast that talks about exactly that. Through our process — vision, journey, culture, and results — we present real-world business solutions that make the difference. Our goal is to make work not suck. Hosted by Ryan Hodges, co-hosted by Daniel Steer. Join us each episode, and make work not suck.