Why nobody tells the truth on your engagement survey

It is my pleasure to be with you and really excited about the journey we're going to share today together.

That is a great question. In order to understand that, we gotta go back 13 years. I'm 60 now and most of my life has been comprised of being a playful goofball in between my entrepreneurial journeys, but it wasn't until s 13 years ago I had a very dramatic experience here on one of the beaches in Hawaii. and to give that backstory. I had been married once at a very young age, had two wonderful kids, that marriage ended. And then in between, I had a lot of great big business opportunities, and most of them like fell through my hands. And so this backdrop's kind of important because I lost over a hundred million dollars in opportunity from about 30 to 45 years old. And then I got married a second time and and that ended very quickly. I didn't expect it. It was heartbreaking. And so my first 90 days here in Hawaii, I sat on the beaches of Hawaii and stared out at the ocean. And basically on the brink of depression, I, you know, I've decided all my great opportunities in life had passed me up and There was not going to be any more chances for Steve. And I became very, very dark in my thinking, very sad in my heart, and and truly on the verge of depression. And two little kids came up to me and they asked me a question that changed everything. Hey, mister, do you want to play? And I remember in a moment I thought, these kids don't understand it. Like, my life's over. Why are they coming inviting me to do something fun? And But of course I said yes. How do you say no to the infectious energy of like four or five, six-year-olds? So we danced in the waves for maybe 10, 15 minutes. We built a sand castle for another 10, 15 minutes, and then their parents gathered them up and off they went. But something remained. And what remained was this feeling of, my gosh, like I have a smile on my face. Like for 90 days I couldn't smile. I felt like this emotional upwelling of happiness and joy. For 90 days, all I felt was depression and grief. And I asked myself a simple question: if play on accident and in an instant could create that transformation of my being. What would happen if I experimented with play for everything in my life? Your question was: what got me thinking about play as a data-driven tool? That day I began to keep score. Like every single day I experimented with play, and every single time play won. So within six months of seeing my life really begin to transform and breathing new life in and believing something better could be possible. I began coaching and consulting individuals. To date, over a thousand individuals. 99% success rate. And what that showed me was that if you could use play to help somebody in their personal, professional life, whatever aspect of their life was necessary, then why not? Redesign that so that it could be delivered to corporate settings. And over the last three years, with the help of some investors, we've done a lot of research and development, and we're now actively taking our services and experiences directly to companies to reduce attrition, to increase productivity and engagement. And important in all that is to find a set of workers that are actually happy going to work. So that's where it all started. And now the tools we have are very measurable. We can show people, particularly senior leadership in companies, the correlation between what we deliver to a company and how it affects the bottom line.

Yeah. I'm glad you asked that because it's not like we can pull the bus up in front of the office and go for a field trip, right? Like we're not advocating we're not advocating for recess at work. What we're suggesting is, and I think everybody I talked to today, everybody agrees with this concept, the future of work looks nothing like the past. And because of that, how it changes and the rate at which it changes is very alarming to the average worker. So they're going to have to be able to change their mind and comply to whatever's coming next. And what is the single hardest thing for any human to do in any situation? It's 100% change the mind. So think in these terms to start with. Our goal is not necessarily saying, okay, it's 10:15 a.m., this is the time designated for play, or three in the afternoon. It's teaching leaders that having a playful mindset. As they approach their work, creates the much better basis for authentic communication, for innovation, for creativity and engagement, for spiking the curiosity of the work base, so that the end result is throughout the design of the day, the leader is creating a culture that is playful. They may not actually stop to play, but they've reimagined. The workspace because they've redefined what play can be. I mean, I can grab this pen here and I can start clicking on it. And some people will say that's playful. Other people say, Would you stop that? It's annoying, right? But play looks different to everyone, right? So the the premise of giving your culture permission to be playful. Allows for innovation and innovation allows for the rethinking of things. And by doing it with your leadership and inviting the company culture to contribute to its redesign is a very empowering thing. And it takes a very confident leadership set to be able to do that. So currently, there's only a certain segment of the of the workspace that we can actually support. Those who believe investing in their people is important, and that guiding them through change instead of resisting it is the way to lead to the future. So an example might be helpful. Yeah. So every company strategically plans every year, right? Usually it's an annual thing. So instead of putting them in a boardroom with a whiteboard and saying, okay, what's your idea? Go, putting them in a round circle and literally doing an improvisational storytelling. Where one guy has the mic and says, All right, for the next 30 seconds, tell us where it's going and hand the mic to somebody else. And they begin playing off of each other. So it might be, I say, Well, next year is going to be like any other year we've had, and it's going to look like, and the timer says, Stop, and the next person says, a whole bunch of new ideas, and then it goes on and on. And what happens is, is in an improvisational setting, people get really creative. It could be a Elementary storytelling session where we say, okay, the 12 of you around the table are the main characters. Now each of you write the story of what it looks like a year from now. And today's theme is futuristic, or today's theme is Vikings, or whatever. And the point is, is when you give people space to be creative, it's amazing how innovative they can think. And oftentimes the collective consciousness. Of each other's ideas are very, very similar. I'll never forget I did this for a company in England about four three and a half years ago. it was just coming out of the pandemic. They had lost their leader. He had died of cancer, he had survived COVID twice and then came down with cancer. And and this team of about 20 people was was left with no succession plan. And so the second in command had reached out to me. He knew how close the owner and I were. And we literally did a storytelling exercise. And it was remarkable how each of them wrote their own stories and then told them and how similar they were. You can only imagine the sense of confidence that gave this group of people to stay aligned and to keep moving on. And it all came because we said, let's write a children's story about the future of that company. Those are just a couple examples.

early on is like, wow, this really works. Meaning I thought for a moment in time that maybe I was just a crazy goofball that it really was gonna help and that maybe it wouldn't work for others. And in the first probably 40 or 50 people that I coached, and and to this day, still it's a money-back guarantee. but I gave that guarantee back then because I just didn't know. And so what surprised me early was that play really is the universal, I'll call it like the Swiss Army knife. You know, it has a gizmo and gadget to apply to every human being's life. And that that's amazing because we're all born wanting to be playful. What I have learned over a thousand of sessions with over a thousand people, I would imagine close to ten thousand sessions, easily, maybe more. hands down, that play will never disappoint. Using play as a tool to improve, to expand, to remove things, to increase things, more, better, different, play will always perform. And and when people first come to a coaching arena as an individual. They have to have a dimension of curiosity. You know, I can't help a closed-minded person, which is why when in the business sector today, we're not going to every business. We're going to businesses that are very pliable and people-centric. But I would say, hands down, for the most difficult things in my life, play has always showed up in a way to change my mind, to change my actions, and change my results.

Yeah. to start with, you know, I'm thinking about the businesses that are in our business development pipeline right now. They are generally businesses that express real care and concern for their people. Like, I can't if if you're a miserly business owner who your employees are afraid of you, I would not I would probably not accept your money, right? Our company wouldn't do that. Because there has to be an underlying current of the people, the employees are the first and most important customer. Because if they're not taken care of, they are not going to transfer the value that you want your end customer, the paying customers, to use. So I would say if you're a business owner today and you care about your employees, that's a great sign. I would also say if you're a business owner today, typically 50 to 100 employees or more will work with up to 2,000 right now. but that's that group is super important because that's well past one leader's ability to influence. You know, I've started six other companies aside from this, and the minute those companies got more than 25 to 50 people, I couldn't influence everyone. So any companies over that size, where the people matter, and you want to build your leadership team, those are all great considerations because. The statistics are are alarming. Managers today and leaders today are some of the highest rate of burnout in the professional setting. And why is that? Because yesterday's tools are not working for tomorrow's problems. Play solves that. And here's the really cool thing. You know, in most businesses, and this is something you've probably come to understand interviewing others, you're looking for an MVP, a minimum viable product. That you can rinse and repeat over and over and over. It's your cash cow. We tell people the one thing we guarantee is that our process is always the same, but the outcome from company to company will always be different because the core of our value that we bring is teaching people not to play, but to experiment with play. So it's very different saying, and a lot of companies do things like this. They go out here in Hawaii, we call it a Pau Hana, it's a happy hour. they go out for a happy hour together once a week, once a month, and that's when you know the owner lets loose, loosens his collar, has a few drinks with his employees. That's okay. You can do an annual picnic, an annual Christmas party. Those things are okay. It's not what we're talking about. What we're suggesting is that within the confines of your company, day to day. Curating experiments that create different outcomes or experiences for your leaders and your employee base is how you gain their attention. Think about when you're a little kid. The one that comes to mind for me is the teacher gives us a styrofoam cup with some soil and says, Plant a seed in it. And what do we do at four or five years old? We stare at the cup all day, and the teacher says, No, it's going to take a few days. And then you look and you see something breaking through the ground and you keep staring. That's called the curiosity factor. Curiosity actually releases in the body a neurotransmitter called dopamine. It's a reward or a pleasure system. So if I can Keep my employees curious by allowing them to experiment with different, more or better ways to do what we do currently, then I built an ownership spirit within them. They take a pride in their experiment. They know that not all experiments are going to work, but they keep experimenting. That lowers attrition, increases productivity and engagement. And who was it? Was it Rooters or No, it was Gallup. The Gallup poll recently for last year's numbers said we're at an all-time low for employee engagement. I think it was 18 or 20%. I mean, that's really a low number. That means that eight out of 10 people go to work and they're half-ass in it. They're not totally in the mix. Imagine the possibility of increasing those numbers by even a small percentage. Well, the way we do that is curating these unique experiences, and we don't ever know the outcome. Accept that it increases engagement because they got to design their experiment and see if it worked. And when it doesn't, then they design another one. And that changes the culture entirely. Because now you're giving permission to your people. to help design the most productive workplace. Then that's a novel idea. I mean there's not a lot of CEOs thinking, well, the bottom-up should teach us how to do this. And that's the biggest problem. There's a huge leadership gap. What I think up here and what happens in the real world are two different things.

Play closes that gap. That's a great question. So have you heard of an employee engagement survey?

Okay, so an employee engagement survey, a little education for you. Most businesses with a hundred people or more, on an annual basis, send out the survey to their employees to say, what do you like? What do you dislike? What can we do better? You know, are you looking for another job or can you see a future here? Do you like your boss? Not like your boss. They ask all sorts of questions. And this has been around now for 50 plus years. Fact is a year and a half ago, Wall Street Journal said third-party companies who administer employee engagement surveys for some of the biggest companies in the world, their gross sales in 2024 was $1.3 billion. That's a lot of selling of employee engagement surveys, right? But here's what here's what you see is undeniably true. Less and less people actually fill it out for two reasons. One, they're not sure anything's ever gonna happen. Like they don't know if they'll ever change anything. Or two, you know, they're afraid there's repercussions for telling how they really feel. So we've created something called the Playground Live. It is a one-hour murder mystery. We paid professional actors to come in and record these vignettes. And myself or one of the other key staff members leads each of these. And we have up to 500 people in one. optimal numbers about 100. Because it increases participation. But when these are sent out to companies as an invitation, 70 to 80% of the entire employee base responds yes and comes to it. And the average employee engagement survey is only 30 to 40%. We're doubling the participation. And here's a really cool thing. When we wait, when we say, hey, I'm Steve, and I'm the director of the FBI, and they say, What's that? And I say, That's Funny Business Incorporated. So today you've got three goals: one to have fun, two to talk about your business, and three to be included. Everybody matters today. Now let me swear you in because you're now deputized to help us find out who stole play from the workplace. Dun dun dun dun, and there's all these sound effects and visual enhancements. And then what happens is, as we say, now pull out your phone, because you're gonna scan a code here, and you're gonna sketch out the character you best think describes this, or you're going to participate in an adventure to help us better understand. And by the end of an hour, we've done 13 little fast, fun, playful things, and it gives us over 40 interesting. pieces of data about the participants that you'd never get through an employee engagement survey. So to your marketing question, we say to companies, hey, do you really know how your people feel at work? Are you prepared to you know face the future making decisions without understanding them? Well if you're willing to understand them, then sign up for a playground live. We'll do this, we'll give you the report. And on the heels of that, we've created a learning language model or a piece of AI That drop into the model all the notes from tens of thousands of sessions, all the publicly published periodicals on the power of play in the workplace, including from places like Stanford, Cambridge, Oxford, like really powerful tools. And then, third, we plug in that company's unique core values, their unique KPIs, the boundaries of what's good and not good in their company. And it's called Ricks at Work. And it's literally like having me a coach in your pocket. You ask it questions, it answers audibly or in written, however you prefer, and it's designed to address all the major factors that impact the productivity in the workplace and affect culture. It's a really cool tool. We're just now getting that out to the marketplace. But between that one-two punch, it gives us the ability to say, here's what's going on, and two, here's a tool to do something about it. All designed around. Making people more pliable through playfulness. I know that's a mouthful, but does that make sense?

Yeah, I think and I'd and I'd add this: like whether your audience has any interest in getting in touch with us or not isn't why I'm here today. I'm here today because I'm certain of two things. There is an enormous problem in the workplace. There is a revolt, if you will, amongst the younger generation, which is you, right? They don't appreciate the way the older generation is approaching work. And if the if this continues to fall on the deaf ear and then there's no changes made, then work is going to suffer, in one sense, an enormous renaissance. And in another, it'll be the great thing. One way or another, work is going to change. And smart business owners are going to surrender to the idea that no longer do they have all the answers. And maybe the best answers come from the people who serve them every day. So the only question is if you believe that, how are you going to extract that from them? Play is the safe haven to allow people to relax, to allow people to feel psychologically okay in sharing their ideas. It's the place that honors D DEI. It's the place that everyone is treated the same. Right? You know, you think about kids on a playground today, you know. A three-year-old skins his knee, and before the parent can even notice it, two or other three-year-olds are, hey, are you okay? I mean, like, the playground is a brilliant model for how the workplace can be more effective. Think of this way: When my people are as excited to show up on Monday as they are to leave on Friday, you've created a playground workplace.

I'm not sure I could change it because I'm not sure the world was ready for it. I think the pandemic had to happen to accelerate and magnify the enormous challenges with work as it exists today. But my heart for people is such that we're on the verge of making a huge difference the next decade in hundreds, if not thousands, of workplace environments. And think of this. People spend half their waking hours as adults in work. And then they spend the other half of those waking hours in social or family settings. The world is burned out, not just at work. They're tired of political, geopolitical issues. Why does one man have to go and mess up another man's country? And they're tired of all the religious divisiveness. Why do these people have to hate these people? They're exhausted from financial insecurity. People are tired. If our company can take 50% of their waking hours and make it a place where they grow, where they connect, where they feel at peace, where they're proud to be productive, then maybe just maybe we can put a stop gap measure. That makes people say, wow, maybe I can go home and be happy. Maybe I don't have to go have a drink afterwards to numb myself out before I go home. And maybe, maybe the home is is not good too, and and like work could make home better. I wish all of this was happening sooner because both in my own life I see it and in the lives of people everywhere, I see heartache, I see pain, I see disappointment, I see. Should have gone left when I went right, kind of things. And at the end of the day, I think Play Lab is an entity that will be worth a lot of money. However, that is not what drives me or the rest of the partners of Play Lab. What drives us is leaving a legacy that said, when this company showed up, the paradigm for work changed, people got happier, people got healthier. People got more wholesome. And so yeah, that'd be the one I wish I could change kind of thing is just to accelerate everything we're doing. But aside from that, everything else has had to happen the way it's happened because it's all experiments. Yeah.

That's a good question, by the way. How would you do it? Yeah. So two things. I do this on every podcast. One is it's super simple. You can go to www.experimentwithplay, just like it sounds.com. Check us out. There's a contact form if you want to learn more. you can also email me directly at steve at experiment with play and make sure they note that they were listening to your show, because it'd be great for us to have that feedback. And thirdly, I actually give out my cell number. And it's real simple. If you feel like, man, I just need to talk to you, that's great. But understand this, I never answer a call that I don't have the number stored. So take this number, text me, say you heard me on the show, and then we can set up a little 15-minute chat. It's 808-321-0729. I know your show's international, so I think it's plus one here in the U US or plus zero one. but yeah, I I'm happy to have a conversation with anybody who's passionate about making a difference in the world, especially in the workplace, through play.

My pleasure. It's been a wonderful experience.