The TRUST Show

S8E8: A Few Hard Truths About Employee Engagement Surveys (Part 2)

Employee engagement is essential to companies. It affects many things in the company culture as well as company performance. But it has also declined in the past several years. Because of that, many companies conduct employee engagement surveys. However, before you set off to conduct an employee engagement survey, there are a few things I want you to know and consider, because you may end up not really hearing what you need to hear, but rather only what you want to hear, and because you might do more harm than good with those surveys. I’ll explain, with examples and research data, and at the end, I’ll tell you what I think you should do to keep employee engagement high. Because, after all, that’s your goal. Right? And yes, it has everything to do with trust.

This is part 2 of this two-part episode. 

S8E8: A Few Hard Truths About Employee Engagement Surveys (Part 1)

Employee engagement is essential to companies. It affects many things in the company culture as well as company performance. But it has also declined in the past several years. Because of that, many companies conduct employee engagement surveys. However, before you set off to conduct an employee engagement survey, there are a few things I want you to know and consider, because you may end up not really hearing what you need to hear, but rather only what you want to hear, and because you might do more harm than good with those surveys. I’ll explain, with examples and research data, and at the end, I’ll tell you what I think you should do to keep employee engagement high. Because, after all, that’s your goal. Right? And yes, it has everything to do with trust.

This is part 1 of this two-part episode. 

S8E7: The Formula that Makes Companies Trusted and Profitable—Revisited

Customers are willing to pay a 30% premium when they buy from companies they trust. With the continuously increasing new customer acquisition cost, keeping loyal customers has significant financial value to the company. Customers are loyal when they trust the company, and not only loyal—they recommend the company to other customers. There are five variables that have a significant impact on the trust that customers have in the company, and on its profitability. It starts with the company costs, and continues through the perceived price the customers believe they will pay and the value they believe they will get, and ends with the actual price the customers realize they had to pay, and the value they actually got. In this episode, I will analyze the relationships between those variables that make customers trust the company, and make the company profitable.

In this episode, I’m revisiting the topic of episode 11 in the 5^th season. I brought this topic in the entrepreneurship class I teach at SMU, and gave my students the opportunity to reflect on it. Their comments helped me improve my own thoughts about the topic.

S8E6 Part 2: Should ChatGPT be Banned from the Classroom?

ChatGPT took the world by storm. Then, one day, I was asked this question: how could you tell, as a college professor, if your students are cheating by using ChatGPT, and how would you be able to prevent it? I can’t tell you how many different thoughts came to mind simultaneously. I decided to conduct a LinkedIn poll and ask people in the education field what they thought of ChatGPT in the classroom, specifically the college classroom. This two-part podcast episode will give you my position on the issue.

This is the second part of this episode, and will focus more on the educational aspects of the question. It will start with a discussion of cheating, the purpose of education, ChatGPT versus Bloom’s Taxonomy, and finally, give my position on whether we should encourage, allow, discourage, or ban the use of ChatGPT in the classroom. The episode will end with the opportunity I see for education stemming from using ChatGPT.

S8E6 Part 1: Should ChatGPT be Banned from the Classroom?

ChatGPT took the world by storm. Then, one day, I was asked this question: how could you tell, as a college professor, if your students are cheating by using ChatGPT, and how would you be able to prevent it? I can’t tell you how many different thoughts came to mind simultaneously. I decided to conduct a LinkedIn poll and ask people in the education field what they thought of ChatGPT in the classroom, specifically the college classroom. This two-part podcast episode will give you my position on the issue. This is the first part of this episode, in which I discuss ChatGPT in general, the insights I got from the LinkedIn poll I conducted, and our approach (and sometimes fear) to adopting new technologies.

S8E5: Can you Trust Remote Employees?

We didn’t ask for the COVID-19 pandemic. We didn’t ask to work from home. But, in March 2020, it was forced upon us. At the time, it didn’t look like there was going to be an end to it, and that this was becoming “the new normal.” We are now out of the pandemic. Many companies have gone back to work at the office, but we also learned the benefits from working from home, both for the company and its employees. Should we go back to the office full-time? Should we work remotely full-time? Should we deploy a hybrid mode? And, in the context of this podcast, should you trust employees who work from home? Or, even better, what can you do so you could trust them?

S8E4: AI (Artificial Intelligence), ChatGPT, and TRUST

You have heard the term Artificial Intelligence (AI) and, more recently, chat GPT. The simplest definition of AI is “the simulation of human intelligence in machines that are programmed to think and learn.” Chat GPT is “a large, pre-trained language model developed by OpenAI. It is based on the GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) architecture, which uses deep learning techniques to process and generate natural language.” In this podcast episode, I will give examples of what chat GPT does, but also discuss AI at a higher level, and, most importantly (and somewhat obviously)—how it affects trust, and what to do to ensure it doesn’t cause people to distrust you.

S8E3: Decision-Making and TRUST

Last week we witnessed the process of selecting the house speaker in the U.S. Congress. This position is the second in order of succession for the Presidency. I’m not going to offer any political commentary except to say one thing. The process was not a consensus focus, trying to get as many supporters out of the entire house with its 435 members, but rather to get to 218. Just enough to be more than 50%. We know that our political divide is only growing and becoming worse, but this is not the topic of this podcast episode. The topic is decision-making, and the relationships it has with trust. This episode will discuss three decision-making processes (consultative, majority, and consensus) and their relationships with trust. 

S8E2: Organizational Silos and the Wall of DISTRUST

If you work in a company with more than 10 employees, you did. If you worked in a company with functional units with more than one person in each, you did. If you work in a company with multiple business units, you did. In this episode, I will explain what are the negative consequences of those silos, what causes them, and how to break silos down. Obviously, it is all about trust.

S8E1: How to Build Trust and Transform the Organization (and my 2023 Plan)

This episode will answer one simple question: what do I have to do this year to move the needle (upward) on the level of trust in my organization? Over the years, I have developed a process, which this year will be complete. It is made of four phases: launching the process (showing that the company is committed to building trust), helping the HR department (or whoever will champion the process) be more trusted by the organization, training them on how to help others (through a 3-day masterclass), and then launching a company-wide effort, with support. 

This episode will also finally tie my own personal-professional efforts and plan to put all those pieces in place, and the status of them.