Today I'm joined by Dessalen Wood, Chief People Officer at Thoughtexchange. Dessalen has used the Thoughtexchange product to gather deep insights about employee motivations, and has used the data to determine the gap between what employees report is most important in a role, as opposed to which factors actually lead to increased retention and job satisfaction.

Key Points From This Episode:

• Dessalen explains what the purpose of ThoughtExchange is.
• The transformational first experience that Dessalen had using ThoughtExchange.
• How Dessalen came to work at ThoughtExchange.
• What Dessalen learned from doing a ThoughtExchange asking people what would prevent them from quitting their job.
• Reasons that people want more out of their job now than they did in the past.
• Four themes that Dessalen ended up with when she ran an internal ThoughtExchange on what employees want more of.
• The value of being transparent as a company.
• How the most attractive elements of a job have changed over time.
• Why being a leader now is more challenging than ever.
• An explanation of what Dessalen calls the "from-for" balance.
• Dessalen shares an example of what it means to be transparent as a leader.
• Self-awareness isn't enough, you have to be able to self-manage too.
• What Dessalen learns about a person from asking them about decisions they made that they regret.

Tweetables:

"If you're using ThoughtExchange early in the decision-making process, you're actually getting ideas and you're actually improving the decision that you're going to make by iterating with a large population." — @dessalen [0:03:47]

"We are a purpose-driven company. What we're doing is really important in the world by bringing a way to have an unbiased and diverse conversation inside large organizations.." — @dessalen [0:10:59]

"Actual happiness often is linked to autonomy and unhappiness is linked to feeling controlled." — @dessalen [0:21:58]

"Self-awareness without any self-management is irresponsible. Self-awareness with the ability to manage what you're aware of, that's actually a tremendous strength." — @dessalen [0:31:25]

Links Mentioned in Today's Episode:

Dessalen Wood on LinkedIn

ThoughtExchange

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