If I gave you a treasure map, you'd probably be pretty excited. The reason why is that the treasure map would have a giant X on it, and your greedy brain would instantly assume that there was jewels, treasure, or money buried beneath. You might be right, but the point is that the treasure map itself isn’t worth anything. There's only two values that you can get from that treasure map. The first is that you can actually go and try and sell it to somebody, on the prospect that whatever might be there could be accurate. You can obviously see the problems with this. There's a lot of risks associated, and you may not find a buyer. If you do, you're going to be compromising the value of your treasure map at part of the price. Nobody is going to ever pay you full price on the prospect of doing anything. The other option of course, is that you would go and dig, and see what's underneath that X. If it does, then voila, you've got some treasure.

Sentiment data is absolutely critical to understanding the employee experience.

This is exactly what Holistic does as far as sentiment data from an employee survey, an alumni survey, or a leadership survey. Sentiment data is absolutely critical to understanding the employee experience, but it does not tell you the entire story. Rather it is a treasure map that allows you to see where employees’ heads are at, where leaders’ heads are at, or where you should look.

There’s a huge difference between an employee being underpaid and feeling underpaid. Thinking about that for a second. If somebody tells you that they’re underpaid, one of two things is happening: either they’re actually underpaid, (which is a huge problem that you need to identify and rectify it immediately) or they just feel underpaid but they’re actually paid appropriately, which is an even bigger problem because now it's about internal communication. Now you have to explain to the employee that they’re not actually underpaid, they just feel that way. Bad can be much more difficult to address. But if you, for example, you had a website that allowed you to post anonymous feedback about a company with no ability for the company to respond, then you might think that an employee was underpaid because why would they lie? Or at least you might think that the feeling of being underpaid is tied to actually being underpaid.

I'll give you an example from a recent employee survey that we did. A number of employees at this particular company indicated that they didn't like the 401k plan because they didn't have a match, which is a pretty reasonable expectation for employees. This is a standard benefit that virtually everybody has. Here's the really righteous part, the company did have a match, it was actually better than a match. They had a 3% contribution to people's 401k, whether or not the individuals were in the program. In this particular case, employees were receiving money from the company. Not only were they not realizing that they were receiving the money, but they were actively angry at the company about it.

However, if you would have only listened to the employees, you would have thought that this company was shortchanging its staff, which couldn't be further from the truth. And so the result is that that company had a communication problem, not a compensation problem. And guess what? If you have a communication problem that big in one area, you're probably gonna see it in other places around the organization. That's a scenario where Holistic would work with the company on internal communication mechanisms to make sure that people understood the nature and value of their benefits rather than chucking more money at the problem, which many organizations would have thought about doing

We applied this methodology across the board. Your opinion is valuable. It's necessary and it needs to be considered, but that's it. It is not the end all be all. It is not the only piece of information that you need to make a good decision, and it is not something that as soon as you hear somebody's opinion about something, you should run out and do something about it. Rather it is a treasure map like I described earlier. It's a path to understanding. Sometimes when you dig, you find a pot of gold. Sometimes you don't, but you always know the truth and that's really the key point here.

Have you ever heard of a maternity leave party? This is where a company gets together to celebrate an expectant mom and people are given the power to give her some of their vacation days. This is a really interesting concept because it's a very unique way to get employees to engage with one another and to give them an opportunity to help out an expectant mom. Who doesn't want to help out an expectant mom, right? If you have ever seen a maternity leave party, it's a really nice event and the expectant mom loves it. She gets presents and comes out of it with vacation days that she needs so that she can have a proper maternity leave. Everybody wins, right? Not so fast. Let's flash forward to nine months when John’s, in accounting, mother-in-law is having her retirement party after 35 years of teaching in the public school in Cuyahoga, Ohio.

Guess what John doesn't have anything left of? Vacation days. You know why? Because nine months ago he gave them to Michelle in accounts payable for her maternity leave party and guess who’s really pissed? You got it, John's wife! She can't believe that John doesn't have any vacation days that he can spend to go to her mother's retirement party. So she's pissed at John, but she's also pissed at John's company, and rightfully so, because she puts together in her head in very real fashion what John was having trouble putting together when the decision came to it, which was that this company was too cheap to give the expectant mother proper benefits and so they took from their existing employees through this mechanism.

So the existing employees get screwed and their morale declines, but not at that day, not at that moment. It declines nine months later in a private conversation in their house with their wife and this is really the problem in the situation.

If the dramatics played out in real time and everybody could understand the ramifications of what they were doing, then this wouldn't exist at all.

Let's play it out one step further. Let's say that this conversation happens in pretty much everybody's house and the company has a hundred employees. One thing or another leads to somebody being upset about the maternity leave party. This person can't go to the Fyre Festival, that person has to drive separately from his family because he doesn't have an extra vacation day around the 4th of July, and John already missed his mother-in-law’s party. The result of it is that across the board people's lives are inconvenienced and they start to attribute it to the fact that they were invited to share their vacation days with somebody who didn't have them and they get pissed and they decide to leave the company. Let's say that on average everybody leaves the company one month, just one month, before they would have left ordinarily. You just treated a hundred months worth of employee time — almost nine years — for six weeks of that expectant mother's salary. Good deal? Absolutely not! But the low level HR person who was in charge of the party and got it approved doesn't realize any of that or doesn't even have the capacity to realize it. She didn't have the information because you didn't have any way of tracking the impact of this behavior. She just thought she was doing some nice thing based off of some idea that she saw on a Pinterest board or an article on an HR magazine.

By moving the point where you have all the information that you need earlier in the process, we give you the facility to make more nuanced, thoughtful decisions and to avoid going down rabbit holes and stepping into traps and creating problems for yourself and your company.

What Holistic is trying to do is to put some science behind these processes so that companies can make better decisions. If that employee, when faced with the calculation of you can do this for this one employee, but it's going to increase the morale of one person, it's going to lower the morale,ultimately of 99 people and it's going to cost you nine years worth of employee time, would never make that decision. That's what we're trying to do though, is we're trying to move the point where you have that information from where it is now, which is years from now, and in some cases never up into the moment where the decision is made, and then even before you make the decision itself. By moving the point where you have all the information that you need earlier in the process, we give you the facility to make more nuanced, thoughtful decisions and to avoid going down rabbit holes and stepping into traps and creating problems for yourself and your company.