The 8 Laws of a Future-Ready Organization: Jacob Morgan on Leadership, AI, and the Next Decade of Work

All right, everyone. Welcome to today's live program with Achieve Engagement. Already love the activity going in the chat. If you haven't already, let us know where you're calling in from. This is a community learning experience. I think one of the biggest powers of this community is the social learning aspect. So as we go through this program, I'm already excited to see that activity. We're going to be opening up the door to ask a lot of questions, to discuss these things as a group, and unpack these in a peer-to-peer format. That's part of the social learning experience. My name is Zach Doms. I'm President of Achieve Engagement. As your Community Lead, I'm so excited to continue crafting a better employee experience and building a better world of work. And as we, HR leaders, people leaders, or maybe you're just someone that's passionate about the team and the leadership you're developing in yourself, I appreciate you coming here to sharpen your craft. So that's what we're going to do today, and I love seeing this in there. Let's see what we got in the room with us right now. We got Laura in Milwaukee, my hometown. That's my spot. I'll actually be back in Wisconsin at the end of this month. Gregory in New York. Lisa, good to see you in here in Reading. Okay, we got LA in the house, New Jersey, Bangladesh, Manhattan. Yes. "Here to learn and teach." I love that. "Steamy downtown Chicago," Robert, good to see you in here. We're coming to Chicago end of August. I'll share more info in a second on that. Brazil is here with us. Hi, Alba. Welcome in. Rayleigh, okay. British Columbia, Long Beach, California, Illinois. This is awesome. Tampa, Florida, Nancy, good to see you in here. Vegas. We got such a good footprint. So as we go through this today, again, I always reaffirm this, we really believe in those intimate peer-to-peer experiences. So yes, we have some amazing leaders who join our programs, and we bring authors, practitioners, researchers, subject matter experts, people in the field. We always get to learn from these amazing individuals, and that's what we're going to do today. But there's also the aspect of learning from each other. So as we unpack these different topics, I encourage you to share your own experiences, your own ideas, frameworks, strategies, things that maybe you've leveraged in the past. I'd love to learn from you as we go through that. And then on the other hand, if there's anything specific that you're dealing with right now and you would love to get some expert feedback, coaching, strategy, or just perspective on it, put those questions in the chat, too. We'll have time to field questions. We'll work them into the fireside discussion as we go, and we can talk through some intimate things that you might be personally dealing with. So I encourage you to do that. Couple of quick announcements, though, before we jump into it. One of the things that I loved recently as a community, we brought our entire network together in Atlanta last week. It was awesome. It was part of the launch of our Achieve CPR framework and philosophy, which is all about breathing life back into our organizations through the pillars of culture, performance, and retention. We did this with our awesome partners, HiBob, which are also sponsoring the program and supporting today's event. So if we can, let's give a huge shout-out to HiBob in the chat and make sure to check them out. But if you didn't make it to Atlanta with us and you would still love to check out some of the learnings and the experiences, we're hosting a little bit of a watch party. I've just put the link in the chat. This is where we're going to play some of the highlights, the main clips from the event, and we're just going to have some of the speakers come up that were with us live, and it's going to be just a really cool experience where virtually we can take some of the best learnings and frameworks and strategies that were shared live at the program and share it with all of you virtually. So check that out. That's on June 23rd. And then we're hosting our next CPR program live in Chicago on August 28th. So I just put that in the chat as well. So if you're in Chicago, if you're in Milwaukee and you're in the region, or if you just want a good reason to come to the Midwest in the summer, which honestly, being a Midwesterner, I think it's obviously probably the only and best time to travel there. It's going to be a blast. We're going to spend a full day, again, together as a network, getting really intimate about the pillars of culture, performance, and retention, and hearing from different practitioners on how they're doing these things today. So check out Chicago. I just added it in the chat there. Super excited for how those programs are coming together. Look at those photos. It was such an awesome day. We had people getting into the depths of the challenges with driving performance in a world of work today or keeping people excited and engaged about the work that they're doing. These are big challenges, so as a group, we can intimately unpack these together. So join us in Chicago or at least join us for the watch party in a couple of weeks and we'll keep growing that framework with you all. All right. For today, though, I am super pumped about this because, one, personally, I've been a Jacob Morgan fan since my early days building my own career within the employee experience space. One of the first books that I actually got when I became a people officer in 2017 was his book, "The Employee Experience Advantage." That started my whole personal journey in this space. He's also another author of a great book, "The Future Leader: The 9 Skills and Mindsets to Succeed in the Next Decade." And now we're really excited to help share and talk directly with Jacob about his new book that came out in February, I believe, of this year, "The 8 Laws of Employee Experience: How to Build a Future-Ready Organization." And I think he had a really great tagline that I saw in some of the descriptions about how organizations around the world have lost their way, and it's time to get back to some of the main basics, the eight laws that really focus on driving performance and engagement within our people. So super excited to unpack that with Jacob live. Jacob, it's good to see you here with us. I appreciate you doing this. And on top of this, HiBob has supported giving out 200 copies to our community for free. So all of you basically joining today can get a free copy if you'd like. There's two steps, though, that you need to do that. One, I'll put in the chat firstHelp support also In Good Company, which is kind of like our neighbor community that HiBob supports and runs. We're going to be doing a lot of activity in there. So one, go to In Good Company as they support this book launch as well and this book giveaway. Go in there and just make a comment on that post that I just shared in the chat. And then in order for you to receive your book, we obviously need to know where you live. So if you can add your address, your mailing address in that survey form that I just put in the chat, we'll make sure to capture that, and we'll send you a copy of your free book. So let's jump into it. I think we'll unpack it a lot today, and then you can get your free book and go deeper into it, use it for your book clubs, your peer discussions internally. I think there's so many ways that you can follow up this discussion today. So let's jump into it. Let me stop sharing. Jacob, good to see you. Appreciate you doing this with us. And yeah, thanks for being here. Yeah, thank you for having me. Looking forward to it. So let's jump into, I guess, some of the earlier parts of building this book to uncovering some of the key lessons that you learned, defining and understanding what the eight laws were. You talk about how you spent years, two years really, it sounded like, interviewing and talking with over 100 CHROs, having these conversations when you were writing this. Could you just first tell me about what triggered you to start exploring with these CHROs and start these conversations? Well, originally, it wasn't supposed to be a new book. It was just supposed to be an update to my employee experience book that came out in 2017. So I was just going to make a couple updates and changes to that book because it's been a decade, and so I get a lot of CHROs and people who read that book asking me if I was going to make any updates because the world changed quite a bit. And as I started doing research for that book and interviewing CHROs and hearing what they're working on and what they have to say, I realized that I actually have a lot more here. So beyond just an update, there's actually a whole new book here. And so that was kind of the first moment where I realized, okay, this shouldn't be an update, this should be an entirely new book, new frameworks, new ideas, and that's kind of what led me down this path. Yeah, it sounds like you just shared it was originally going to be an iteration off of your old book. Yeah. And now you called it more of a reset in many ways. Yeah, tell me about that. Yeah. So, as I started doing more and these interviews with CHROs, I realized that so many of these organizations completely lost their way during and post-pandemic. They tried so hard to be anything and everything to anybody that they became nothing to everyone. Mm-hmm. And so I realized that it's time to return back to basics. And so the whole point of the book is to get back to the eight most important things that employees care about and that organizations should value. And the pandemic, I think, really pushed and tore apart a lot of organizations as far as how they think about culture and performance and values. And they lost sight of the things that matter at work because they were so desperate to keep people working inside their organizations. And so this was just kind of a back to reset, back to basics kind of book for what these eight laws are. I can imagine as we've talked to CHROs or even organizations, they're probably desperate for a little bit of a reset, right? Because I think, as you shared, maybe this happened during COVID, where people were like, "Okay, all hands on deck" just to kind of maintain and stay afloat for this time being. And then the Great Resignation came and it kind of continuously created this, at least perception, that we need to just cater to everyone as much as we can, and that's kind of the focus of our employee experience. So as you bring up this reset, I'm just curious, as you talk to CHROs about it, what is the testament that how they react and is that to them exciting? Do they find themselves scared about it? Even in the chat for people listening, do you feel like you need a reset? Where are you with this? But yeah, what's been the appetite or response so far? A lot of organizations completely agree. They fully acknowledge that they've lost control, and they lost sight of what matters at work. They drifted so far off course that their standards were lowered, but their perks went up. They were scared to have conversations about certain things. It just became a very fragile corporate culture for most of these organizations. And so they're actually very glad to get back to these basics. And I presented this to my CHRO group, I presented this to the various conferences of CHROs, and when I was sharing the insights originally, I wasn't also sure how people would respond and how they would react to this. But thankfully, the feedback I got was a lot of nodding, a lot of people coming up to me after my events and telling me, "Hey, we agree with you. We can't really say this in our company, but we completely agree with what you're saying here." But more and more, as 2026 went on toward the end of 2025, beginning of 2026, we see more companies publicly coming out and saying these things. That they want to get back to performance, they want to get back to basics. They're getting employees to come back into the office. They're really getting back to these core things around work. I love that. And I would love to, maybe later we could start talking about how organizations can start to have these conversations or shift the tone and the direction. And I know you mentioned there's a few even directions that companies should take their employee experience, so we can get to that. Sure. But let's start with some of the rules and start decoding and talking about that. And your first law that you talk about is decode the human signal Yes And you said leaders are stuck relying on surveys that tell them very little about what their people actually need. I feel like I've also heard many times media headline cultures, right? Like you kind of see all these things- Mm-hmm ... that people are doing, and you just want to model and mirror whatever you see some of the big players or what you think people are doing. So tell us about that first law, and how do we maybe start to figure out what are some of the real signals that we should be focused on versus the noise that's out there? Yeah. Decode the human signal is basically this idea of knowing your people, not just on the tech side, but also on the human side. And I feel like in a lot of organizations, we're so dependent on surveys and pulse surveys and engagement surveys, which are not bad, but they don't give you real-time insights, and they don't give you the details that you would get from actually getting to know your people on a human level. And so one of the things that I'm constantly encouraging organizations and CHROs is don't be so reliant on technology that you forget to actually talk to your people as human beings. Because that's really where most of the insights and the value is going to come from, especially if you're leading a team. There's one thing that if you collect a pulse survey, it's another thing to observe how employees are acting, the conversations that they're having, how they're responding to each other, observing any kind of tension, doing check-ins, just noticing things, paying attention to the signals that you might see. And the problem with engagement surveys and pulse surveys is they don't give you information that's below the surface, right? You're asking directly to your employees how they're feeling, what they're doing, et cetera. But you miss a lot of the context, you missed a lot of the subtleties, and you miss a lot of the human element that an engagement survey simply just won't pick up. Right. And so the whole point of this is I feel like over the years, companies have become so reliant on technology, they're using it as a barrier between employees. So instead of having a difficult conversation, instead of doing a check-in, instead of being human, so to speak, it's kind of like, "Hey, do this pulse survey, and that way I don't need to talk to you." And that worries me a little bit. And so I think good leaders out there, good employees out there, do those surveys by all means, but don't forget about the human element of work, because I think that is actually what matters more. I think I've also heard a kind of an ongoing theme, and I don't know if this... I would be curious of your feedback or thoughts on this, but I feel like a lot of organizations are also trying to get into this more of this term of predictive analytics and being more in tune with where people are and how that predicts future results, whether that's their performance challenges or performance, or whether it's engagement and things that are at risk. And you can't really do that with the traditional pulse surveys or listening mechanisms that people leverage today. Yeah. But I think if you're a good leader and you're having conversations with people, you can also do a lot of predictive analytics based on the things that you observe, and you don't necessarily need a dashboard. Yeah. So for example, my daughter is a competitive chess player, right? She's nine years old. She plays chess. When we go to tournaments, I don't need data to tell me whether or not she's going to perform well in a tournament. I can see is she working hard leading up to it. Is she doing her tactics puzzles? Is she doing training games? I can see the work that she's putting in, and so I can predict, just through my own observation, how she's going to be doing in this tournament. Yeah. And so for a lot of leaders out there, you too can be your own sort of predictive analytics dashboard. You can observe the behavior of your employees. Are they showing up to work burned out, stressed out? Do you hear murmurings that they're looking for roles and jobs elsewhere? Or are they showing up and they're excited to take on opportunities? They're asking you to do bigger projects. They're asking you for stretch assignments. We rely so much on these tools to give us information that we as human beings, if we're paying attention, should already have a good sense of. And that to me is the irony for a lot of these tools. Now, the benefit of these tools, obviously, is that you can do it at scale, right? If you have a team of 50 people, 100 people, or an organization of a few thousand, it's very hard to kind of bubble up the leadership observations and intuition that you get from people, which is why these tools are useful. But on a more human level, you should be pretty good at kind of predicting what is happening. Yeah. Yeah, it's like being these always sensing mechanisms to really just be actively listening and engaged with your team and your people- Yeah ... in a way that gives you true insight. Which kind of goes into this next maybe question or theme and something that we've been talking about a lot with HiBob and their community is kind of skills and learning and developing our people to be relevant and impactful in today and the future world of work, right? Yep. You mentioned and talk a lot about how in this next era, employees and, well, employers, I guess as well, obviously need to evolve or they become obsolete. And that can be a strong line to kind of reaffirm to your people sometimes for those especially who are not maybe growth-minded or energized to learn and evolve, and they want to continue staying in the same place as they've always been, but in this AI-driven world and we're evolving, I'd be curious, what does that actually look like for the workforce? And some of your thoughts, and it sounds like we're already packing a few pieces of like leadersNeed to grow the skill of sensing and being able to be predictive coaches, strategizers, and leaders of their team. But yeah, tell me more about this evolve or become obsolete, maybe challenge that a lot of people and organizations are in right now. Well, the broader evolve theme, you can tie that back to anything. I think the broader theme around that basically means that you have to teach yourself the things that you need to be successful. Mm-hmm. So for example, I recently gave a talk at MasterCard two, three weeks ago, and they're going through this big transformation inside the organization, and one of the messages that they wanted me to give to their employees was that they have to be responsible for their own career trajectory and path and learning and development. Yes, the organization, like a MasterCard, can give you certain tools and resources, but things are changing so quickly, new AI models, new features, new plugins, new companies that are emerging, that an organization like MasterCard is not able to keep up and give you new training curriculum, new course pathways, new anything, at the speed that's necessary. And so the message for a lot of these organizations is that you have to learn how to learn yourself. And the company can assist in any way that it is able to, but you can't wait for the company anymore to kind of guide you and tell you what you need to do and what you need to learn. So the whole point of this evolution, this evolve or become obsolete is that if you're going to wait for somebody to come to you and give you an opportunity, if you're going to wait for somebody to come to you and tell you what you need to learn, you're going to be in trouble. Because a lot of the times, the companies themselves don't even know what you need to learn, how your job might change, what your role might look like in the coming years. So you have to be a little bit of a detective in your own role, in your own job, and in your own function, and then go to your leader. Tell them what you're observing, tell them how you're evolving. Tell them what you're thinking about. Tell them what role you might be interested in the coming years because you see AI or automation making its way down the road. So you have to be much more of a business owner over yourself and your career as opposed to assuming that you're just a passive participant. Yeah. Which I think, and hopefully, I'm sure everyone listening here, you all are already learners, you're already taking time out of your day to attend something like this. So you are, in many ways, controlling your own destiny in this sense. But I hope for a lot of talent, we can communicate in the way of you do have control over your development, over your future. But how do we also drive that accountability in them where it's not just HR's job? Which I think you also talk about that and reaffirm how the employee experience as a whole is no longer just HR's job- Yep ... and it's a mission-critical leadership priority. So, and I know our community will love this, of HR leaders who are like, "Finally, please give me some help beyond our department." But yeah, talk to me about that. One, even for HR leaders that are in the room today, how can they even help reaffirm that to be like, "Hey, this is a larger mission critical leadership priority that you all have a responsibility and accountabilities around as well"? Yeah. I've long said, even in another book that came out in 2017, that employee experience is not just an HR thing, it's an everyone thing. Yeah. Now, I do believe that HR is kind of like the... They can be the champions, they can be the leaders in certain areas, but HR can't be the sole function that's responsible for it. Right? Leaders are responsible for employee experience. Any employee inside the organization is responsible for their employee experience by speaking up, by sharing ideas, by participating, by not just pointing out problems, by trying to identify solutions. And I think we're actually starting to see more and more of this, inside of organizations. I especially see this in my CHRO group. We have around 42 CHROs in there from some of the world's top companies. And more and more, we're hearing conversations about CEOs getting involved, COOs getting involved, CEOs, CTOs getting involved. Everybody shaping the employee experience, not just the HR function. But I also think the HR function broadly is evolving, and they're becoming the chief future of work officers. Who was it that came out fairly recently? I think it was Uber. They let go of 23% of their HR function. Bolt, which was a startup once valued, I think, at $10 or $11 billion, let go of their entire HR function pretty much. And so what you're starting to see is that if people associate HR purely with bureaucracy, purely with the transactional aspects of work, they're going to be much more likely to treat that role and function as one that can be automated and replaced. And to be honest, I think there's probably around 50, if not more percent of the HR function right now is transactional. Right? Compliance, job descriptions, hiring, firing, reviewing candidates. For most organizations, that's a large part of what the HR function is. And so you have to imagine when a lot of executives are now using AI, they're saying, "Wait a minute. Why do we need such a big HR function if we have AI to do this?" And so HR really needs to start to think of themselves as the future of work team. Right? You're not just shaping kind of the legal and compliance elements, but actually shaping the future of the business, of people, of talent, of how work is going to get done, of what work even means.... looking at AI, redesigning roles and functions. This is a lot of really cool and exciting stuff that most of the time HR has not been thinking about. Yeah. And I kind of hear the voices of our community already thinking and saying all these things like, "Yes, I would love to spend the majority of my time on these type of activities and these more strategic focus areas, but I'm bogged down by this transactional work." So how do we maybe enable and support the automation and the delegation of those things- Yeah ... to technology so we can get to this higher value work? Yeah. Absolutely. And I think some organizations are already moving in that direction. I did a post on my Substack maybe three, four weeks ago. And one of the things that I talked about is I think by 2030, overall, the HR function is probably going to shrink by around 15% to 20%. And I also think that by 2030, we're going to see around 15% to 20% of the HR function have new roles that don't currently exist. Mm. So there's a fair amount of transformation, I think, that's happening in that function. I love that. Something that came up in Atlanta, which you talked about how do we create this shared accountability and buy-in from other leaders that they're responsible for the employee experience and these aspects of engagement. We were talking about the performance pillar and performance management came up, and I don't know if this is the best practice or so forth, but people shared a lot how they're starting to hold leaders accountable in their performance practices for the leader of the engagement and the health of their team, right? It's not just performance anymore. They're also saying, "Hey, we are measuring the engagement and the cultural health of your team, and we're looking at certain indicators, and you are also held accountable of those things." So I love the idea of, how do we spread accountability for these things and not just centering them on one department like HR? Yeah, and also leaders are being changed the way they themselves get evaluated. I think Salesforce in the last one or two months, they basically said that they're not going to just be giving raises to everybody anymore. They're going to be giving equity. And so basically as a leader, what they're saying is that, "We're going to reward you based on the impact that you're able to bring to the business. And so if you can bring impact to the business, we're going to make you more of an owner inside the company. And the more of an owner you're going to be, the more vested you're going to be in making the company succeed." That's very different than giving everybody what they call the peanut butter raise, right? Where every year everyone gets the exact same amount, 2% or 3%, regardless of what you do. And so I think more and more as companies go forward, a lot of these raises, whether it's equity, whether it's salary increases, they're going to be focused much more on impact, not just on time, not just on tenure. Yeah. I love that. It's like, okay, how do we get more skin in the game? And people are always saying, "I can't get my leader to buy into this." Well, if you start talking about someone's pay and equity and compensation packages, you capture people's attention pretty quick. Yeah. There used to be a way where you can kind of hide inside the organization and do a lot of performative work. How many meetings you attended, how many presentations you made, how many comments you left on the internal collaboration tool, how many messages you were a part of. And you could do all of those things, and people would say, "Wow, Jacob is so productive. Look, he's always available. He's always doing presentations," and this and that. And that was all performative work. It wasn't actually meaningful. Yeah. And so the argument that a lot of senior leaders are making is that, "Wait a minute, we have AI that can do all this coordination better than you. So if AI is going to take care of that, well, what are you actually doing now?" It's like that scene from "Office Space" where the two Bobs come in there and they interview employees, and they say, "What do you actually do here?" And that is the question that a lot of people are going to have to start to answer. What do you actually do, and how are you making an impact? We don't care about any of the performative work. I don't care about how many Slack messages you're sending, how many comments you're contributing. What impact do you have? And if you can't answer that, I think you're going to be in a little bit of a tough spot. Yeah. I think that's a great transition for one of your other laws, which is all about using technology to amplify humanity. And we see a lot of organizations at least communicating how they're deploying AI for efficiencies and replacement, or at least media headlines are talking about the doomsday narratives of using AI to replace X amount of jobs when you argue they should be using it to multiply our people, to expand our people. And I know one of our global chief people officers who's done really well with integrating AI throughout their organization. She talks about it more on how they can expand people's role and impact and not necessarily replace them. So I love that message, and I love that focus. But yeah. Can you talk to us about that rule and what that actually starts to look like and mean? Yeah. So the whole idea of this particular law is the... I think to your point, I think there have been a couple challenges with technology. One is a lot of people kind of throw technology into anything and everything that they can, and sometimes it actually creates space between employees or between employees and customers instead of bringing them together. And then a lot of times, of course, we hear this automation conversation that's happening. And so in the chapter, Use Technology to Amplify Humanity, the argument that I make is that by all means, use technology to take care of the mundane aspects of work that a lot of people have to go through, whether it's analyzing data, whether it's looking at spreadsheets, whether it's, I don't know, drafting a job description.And use AI to take care of those parts of work while unlocking the unique human capabilities that people have. Judgment, discernment, building relationships, creating trust. And so I think that there are a lot of things that technology can do to unlock more of the potential that we have. And that's essentially the argument that I'm making in that book around use technology to amplify humanity, not replace it. So use technology to make people better, make them more productive, help them do things that they weren't able to do, but don't use it as a way to just say, "Hey, I have an AI agent here. You're gone." I was going to say, what are some of the pitfalls you've seen people fall into or organizations fall into with this so far? And it sounds like that kind of last message is it. Like, okay, hey, we're just going to, in this other third-party way, develop and design these agents or resources and then all of a sudden it's a full-on replacement. But yeah, are there certain pitfalls or things people are specifically doing wrong right now with this? Well, I think the big thing is everyone has the shiny toy syndrome. Yeah. And that's the big challenge that a lot of organizations have. They are so quick to just use any and every technology and deploy it across the entire company and give it to everybody, that they're not actually thinking through the implications of anything. And so it's being deployed in a massive way, but not necessarily in a thoughtful way. And so that to me is the biggest pitfall, is that we're so quick to rush to deploying these AI tools that we're not thinking through the implications, the positive, the negatives, the redesigning roles. There's a lot that goes into it that I don't think a lot of people are just thinking about. Yeah. I'd love to shift a little bit here to another theme that I really saw stand out. We already started talking about this a little bit, which is kind of the power of leadership and leadership's role as a multiplier, being the ultimate multiplier. And that came up quite a bit, again, for us at Chief CPR in Atlanta, talking about how leaders can really be a multiplier in both a positive and a negative way when it comes to team performance or their team's engagement and impacting both those pillars. So especially for HR and people leaders who are listening today, yeah, talk to us a little bit about unlocking maybe leadership as the ultimate multiplier, and are there certain habits or shifts that we could start with that create that multiplication on whether it's performance or the experience and these different elements? So I'm assuming you're referring to the law of the book that lead like the experience starts with you? Yes. Yep. Okay. So the big call to action for this chapter, and this is before we hit record, I mentioned I'm giving a talk to a bunch of dentists next week, and the whole presentation that I'm doing is around this particular law and the five archetypes that I have in there. And the entire point of this law is that I feel like a lot of leaders assume that employee experience, again, is an HR thing. And so this is a big call to action for any leader that's out there to say that you act like you are in charge of the employee experience for your team. Because in a lot of ways that you are. You are the biggest touchpoint for a lot of your employees inside of the organization, and I have these five archetypes that I walk through in that chapter which we can go through if you want. But it's the leaders who shape the employee experience more than any HR team, more than any HR business partner. It is the direct leader that you work for, that you report to, that you engage with on a regular basis. Yeah. I've heard it, we've all heard it over and over again. I'm sure all of us have experienced it, situations where we've stayed at an organization or on a team because of a leader, and we've also left or dreaded an organization or a team because of the leader, right? And it's like it's such a multiplier over everything when it comes to how you perform and how well you're engaged and excited about the work you're doing. I think one of the challenges, and we talked about this earlier already, is performance has been coming up a lot with our community this year. How yeah, we're trying to flip the paradigm or the coin onto more performance. People are trying to figure out how we hold people accountable. How do we hold people to a higher standard? Yep. But in many ways, that feels rude for us to do, right? Like it feels rude to kind of ask more of someone when we're already spread thin or something like that. So, how do we get back to the performance culture while we also maybe look to maintain the other aspects, like the value of empathy when those things- Yeah ... feel like at tension with each other? I don't think empathy and performance should be at odds with each other. So I have a whole chapter in the book called, it's all about empathetic excellence, which is one of those laws in there. And at least one of the things that I found from a lot of the CHRO interviews that I did is that during and post-pandemic, the performance completely disappeared. Mm-hmm. Employees were getting performance increases. They were getting bonuses regardless of how work was actually getting done. One CHRO that I interviewed actually told me she created a Pinocchio's island in her company unintentionally, where basically anything goes. Nobody gets in trouble. Nobody gets laid off. Performance isn't an issue. Meanwhile, everybody keeps getting bonuses, and employees are also saying that they don't even want to show up to work at the same time. And I think a lot of organizations, especially at the end of 2025 and 2026, are now kind of saying, "Hey, wait a minute. That's not scalable, and it doesn't make sense." And this is why you see so many organizations trying to take back control.Get employees back to the office, removing certain perks like free food, telling employees, "What did you work on? What did you accomplish last week or last quarter?" The balance of power during and post-pandemic was around 80% in the hands of employees and 20% in the hands of organizations, which I think is completely out of whack, and it should be the opposite. It should be 80% in the hands of organizations, 20% in the hands of employees. And I think that is sort of the return that we're seeing now. And the reason for that, I always tell people, I have two kids, a six-year-old and a nine-year-old. If they come to me and they say they want to have cookies and ice cream for dinner, that's not happening. This isn't an equal-- I am paying for the mortgage here. You're six years old and nine years old. You're not going to have cookies and ice cream for dinner. And so I will hear what they have to say, but then it's my house and my rules. And I think the same thing is true for organizations. Listen to your employees, treat them respectfully, give them opportunities to learn and grow, but this isn't a 50/50 negotiation. The company's paying your salary. They're paying your bonuses. They're giving you equity. They're paying for your tools and resources. They're paying for the infrastructure. They've built the business largely before you got there. And so the idea that there should be some sort of 50/50 equal share of voice between the leaders of the organization and the employees, to me, seems pretty crazy. So I think organizations should have the majority of the power when it comes to decision making. I do think they should treat employees respectfully. I think they should treat them well, right? I'm not talking about being a jerk and doing whatever you want. But things during the pandemic and over the last few years just got completely out of whack. And so I don't think there's anything wrong-- I run a small team, you run a small team. There's nothing wrong with keeping your employees accountable for the work that they're doing. You don't have to be a jerk about it, but you can still maintain standards. You can still have conversations about requirements, about what the expectations are, and making sure that employees are able to deliver on those things. But you can also do that in an empathetic way. Yeah. I've had plenty of situations with members of my team where maybe they're working overseas and there's a flood or a hurricane or there's a family tragedy. I'm empathetic to that. We make extensions for deadlines. We make exceptions for things that need to get done. People make mistakes all the time. I don't like to rip people's heads off for mistakes that they make. So you can be empathetic but still hold your people to certain standards and requirements and performance. And I think this is happening in a lot of organizations around the world. I wrote that 2026 is the year of accountability and responsibility, and we're seeing this more and more every day. Organizations are coming out and making announcements on this. And I think it's actually a good thing. I agree. I'm excited about it. I think a lot of people, even though they may not say that, do want to be held to a higher standard. They do want to be held to higher accountabilities and are expected to perform or- Yeah ... operate from a higher level. And I think once you get past that uncomfortable state- Yeah ... I think it's actually a very energizing factor for people because it gives them a little bit more energy and excitement into the work again because they're being held to something that has impact and value and importance, and it's not just like, "Oh, this doesn't really matter. I could just flow through my day." I don't think that's fulfilling for people in the long run. So I think it's actually good for humanity to be held to a higher standard from even a mental health and fulfillment standpoint. Well, not only that, but if you work for an organization that prioritizes accountability and responsibility, it is tremendous opportunity for you- Mm ... to go above and beyond, to get access to certain opportunities, to get promoted, to do certain things. So I would want to be a part of that company because I would know that there's tremendous opportunity in that kind of a company. Yeah. I would love to now talk about, okay, if that's kind of maybe the vis- or actually the call to action, right? This is 2026, the year of accountability. You talk about these frameworks and maybe future potentials when it comes to the employee experience. And there's kind of two things that I saw in there. You talk about the framework of the cone of possibilities and maybe the art of going through mapping out multiple employee scenarios that an organization should go through. And then you also talk about five potential futures of the employee experience. So I don't know how those two relate or if they are, but I'd love to just unpack, okay, if this is maybe the direction that we're going when it comes to the employee experience, what are those scenarios? What are those five potentials that organizations should be rowing towards right now? Sure. So where do you want me to start? Do you want me to start with those- Let's start with the five, yeah. Okay. So I talk about five potential futures based on the direction that a lot of organizations are going. So one is called the empathy paradox. So I'll list them out, and then I'll maybe give you a sentence or two about each one. Okay. The empathy paradox, the algorithmic enterprise, the loyalty rebellion, the cult of purpose, and then the integrated organization are the five futures that I came up with in the book. The empathy paradox is, I think, the one that a lot of organizations lived through during the pandemic. And in this kind of an organization, you have maximum psychological safety, wellbeing budgets are skyrocketing, leaders get trained on trauma leadership, leading with the heart. You hear and see all these different types of conversations. And on the surface, this sounds likeGreat. Employees are always seen and heard and supported. Workplaces are so much kinder. Engagement scores maybe are going up. But what ends up happening is that in the quest to avoid any kind of discomfort, organizations actually become the new parents to their employees. And this is what happened in a lot of companies and organizations around the world. And so you start avoiding growth, standards go down, feedback gets diluted and sugar-coated, you can't have difficult conversations. And so on the surface, it seems like you're actually creating these great, kind, loving organizations, but the reality is that you're slowly eroding it because you're creating a dependency environment where employees look at you as the parent, and you don't have any adults in the room anymore. The algorithmic enterprise is a little bit of the opposite of that, where you rely so much on data and algorithms. Emotion is not really a part of the conversation. It's like, what does the AI say? What does the data say? From hiring to performance to reviews, everything is data-driven. And then here too, at first, this seems like a pretty cool idea because there's no biases of any kind. Everything is purely efficient. But again, what ends up happening is that you lose any form of humanity in that kind of an organization. Employees just start to copy and paste what the AI tells them. Like you go to a meeting and then you just memorize what ChatGPT tells you, and that's what you say during the meeting. And so people become the physical manifestations of the bots and of the AI tools that they're using. And so humanity gets completely lost. The loyalty rebellion is a future where loyalty of any kind does not exist, and instead, employees view career success not as staying at one company but as having multiple roles, kind of like portfolio lives. Maybe you're combining part-time work with some full-time work, you have some side hustles, passion projects, freelance projects. It's kind of a big mix. Next we have the cult of purpose. The cult of purpose is the idea where organizations don't stand for something, they stand for everything, and the values replace any form of debate. And so what ends up happening, ironically, is that the purpose of the organization and the values of the company, they are no longer just statements that are on walls, they are the filters through which every single decision inside the organization is made. And so employees across all levels, you are expected to live and breathe the culture, the values. And here too, again, at first glance, this seems to create deep engagement, and people are there because they really believe in the work that they're doing, and the culture feels really magnetic. But over time, what you start to see is that employees are afraid to speak up, not because their organization is toxic, but because it's so pure that anything that you say that goes against a value or that challenges an idea or challenges a concept, people look at you like you're out of your mind. And so inside that kind of an organization, the roles that get filled, the senior roles that get filled, are not by the most capable people, but by the ones who best match the company's worldview and who can best memorize and kind of regurgitate the values and the culture of the company. And then lastly, we have the integrated organization, which is the ideal state. And the integrated organization is the one that takes the best elements from the AI piece and the best elements from the human piece and brings them together. It's not a company that is identified by a single trend or a culture shift. It brings the best parts of all of these different futures together. So from a high level, that's what those are. I love those. I need to spend some more time breaking those down. And I'd be curious for those even listening, if you're able to kind of jot down and take note of the different types, which one do you feel like your organization is falling in today? Do you find yourself living in the empathy world where everyone's kind of nice to everyone, and it's very built in harmony and engagement's high? Are you in the data-driven world? What'd you call that? The algorithmic one, where everything's built on data and algorithms and automations, and you're just kind of living off of the data, and everything drives that. I'd be curious, which one you're living from right now. And I have a couple closing questions. We're coming up on the last 10 minutes, though. So Jacob, this conversation's been great. You've been dropping some amazing ideas and insights. So I'm excited to dig into the book more in depth. But, yeah, talk to us now to follow that up around the cone of possibilities. And it's a framework that you talked about to map out multiple employee scenarios, and I wonder if, is there value in, okay, if the vision is to be that integral, the integrated version- Yep ... do you use that as kind of the North Star when you are trying to map out employee scenarios, or at least employee strategies, I guess? Yeah, the cone of possibilities is a pretty cool framework. People can type that into Google. I did a YouTube video on this around how it works, but it's basically a framework that a lot of futurists use to help not predict the future, but to identify potential future states. And so the idea of the cone of possibilities is if you look through the narrow end of a cone, that represents the closest time horizon, and the farther out in the cone you look, the broader the cone becomes and the longer the time horizon is. And so the idea is that these five potential futures that I talked about fit into these cone of possibilities over the coming years. Because a lot of people have a good sense of what the next few months or weeks or maybe a year might look like, butWhat does the future look like in two years, in three years, in five years? And so this is just a really useful framework and a tool that anybody can use to think through the future. And whether you're talking about these five potential futures that I talk about in the book, whether you're using it for the future of your business or strategy implementation, it's just an overall useful framework for people to think through in a walkthrough so that they are not surprised by what the future might bring. Yeah. I was just glad also in the chat, I see Becca, she's like, "I worked at a cult org that was empathetic, but then taken over by a data-focused org." And I'm like, I'm sure that happens all the time, right? Oh, yeah. Especially in the M&A world. Oh, yeah. You see a big mix of these different types of things that come around. And for those even like-- So one, just to bring it back to the cone of possibilities, I think that'd be a really interesting exercise for a lot of you to go through and just think about, like, okay, where our organization is today, and can we start to map out and look for the cone of possibilities based on what we're doing today. And where could this potentially take us? And then that might maybe shine a light on, like, I don't like those possibilities. We need to make some decisions and evolve how we're doing these things and start living from a more productive future right now, because of what the possibilities are showing us. A lot of times, that can maybe show a very limited future, I'm assuming, and you're going, "Whoa, we need to change our trajectory right now because of these possibilities that are coming up." Yep. Okay, so we got a couple minutes left here. For everyone listening, though, I just want to reaffirm again, shout out to HiBob and Good Company, their community. They are giving out 200 copies of the book from today's discussion, Jacob Morgan's "8 Laws of the Employee Experience." So let me re-share that in the chat here. One, leave a comment, question, emoji in this comment section of this post, and then in order for us to send your book, we also need your mailing address. So, yes, I think I saw some stuff, some questions. Is it US-based addresses only? Yes, it is. We can only send to US-based addresses. If you are out of the US, make sure to make a comment in there. We can maybe send a digital copy, or we could figure out a way to maybe get you something. So, okay, two closing questions for you, Jacob. One, I was just curious, you have these conversations all the time. You work with your network of CHROs. Do you find that certain laws often get skipped over or skimmed, right? There's eight laws. Do you find that certain ones seem to get most or forget about that's actually like, "Hey, you can't forget about this one. It's pretty important?" Yeah, it depends on the company, actually. One of the big questions that people always ask me, "Well, if you can only pick one or two laws, which one would they be?" And I always tell them, "Well, you can't just pick one or two laws. The whole point is that you should be acting on all eight of these." And so, yeah, it's a hard question to answer. I don't think there's one law in particular that people gloss over. Sometimes if I talk to a tech company or I'm speaking to a bunch of dentists next week, or accountants, depending on who I'm talking to, I also like to poll the audience, and I get different responses from each. But, no, I don't think there's one in particular law. Depends on the maturity of the business, depends on the industry that they're in, depends on the type of a leader or CEO that they have running the business. All those things play a role. So yeah, it's hard to say off the top of my head. Well, for those of you listening then, I need you to read the book and see, okay, which ones are you doing well at? Which ones are you glossing over? Because depending on, yeah, your company, your strategy, industry, who you are, yeah, you might have some gaps there that you can fill in. Yeah. There's no shortcuts. Yeah. Well, let's close out with this, and if there's any last-minute questions, this is your time to post it in the chat. We got Jacob here for just a minute or two left. But I really love your law around run culture like an operating system. And this was an interesting thing that came up during our CPR program last week. We kind of sometimes got into these pitfalls of talking about the pillars of culture, performance, and retention and how they're separate. Yep. And slowly we got into this actual realization of how they're integrated, and culture can be this operating system for the pillars of performance and retention. Yes. We still haven't really understood what we meant by that, so I'd be curious of, yeah, like when you talk about that, and especially for the HR leaders and the people leaders listening, and they're saying, "Okay, how do we maybe build an operating system from our culture?" What does that actually mean? What do we actually build there? And yeah, can you talk to us about that final law there? Yeah, the law there is that culture is just like an operating system that you have running on your phone or on your laptop. And so that's sort of the analogy that I have, and I have a little image, I think, in the book in there as well, where I basically say in an operating system, you have your kernel, which is kind of like the core values that power everything inside of your company. Then you have the processes that sit on top of the kernel, and the processes are your business norms that are built on top of your values. Then on top of the processes, you have your interface. This is how employees actually see and feel and engage and interact with the culture, how it shows up on a regular basis. And then on top of that, you have updates. So these are the tweaks, the upgrades, and the fixes. And so your culture needs to be thought of the same way as that kind of an operating system where you have to have your values, you have the processes that you build on top of that, you have the ways that your employees engage with your culture, and then you have those updates that you make as well, whether you get a new CEO, you're merging with a company, acquiring a new business, you're making a pivot, but your culture should evolve and update just like software does on your phone or on your computer. And so that's the metaphor, the visual that I think is very relevant for the world of culture today. Thank you so much, Jacob. Appreciate you taking an hour out of your time to join us in our network. Excited to give the book out and dig deeper into that with our network as well. Make sure for everyone listening, also follow HiBob and In Good Company and join that community. I'm actually helping launch their Denver chapter because I live in Denver. I guess closing thoughts, Jacob. Any way, how can the maybe community follow you, support you, and then, yeah, any closing thoughts for the network? I'm pretty easy to find. My email for people is jacob@thefutureorganization.com. My newsletter is futureofworknewsletter.com. I have a podcast called futureofworkpodcast.com, and then I'm on LinkedIn and social media, so pretty easy to find out there. Awesome. Well, thank you, Jacob. Really appreciate it. Thank you everyone for joining as well, taking time out of your day to sharpen your craft. It means the world. And yes, get the book, share it with your team, get your free copy, but then, yeah, buy an extra pair of copies for the rest of the team so you can learn the laws together. Thank you, Jacob. Appreciate the time. Thank you. Bye-bye. All right, everyone. Have a good rest of your day, and we'll see you at the next one. Bye, everyone.