The Happy at Work Podcast
The Happy at Work podcast explores the intersection of organizational culture, positive psychology, and employee branding to create thriving workplaces. Our expert hosts—Dr. Laura Hamill, Michael McCarthy, and Dr. Tessa Misiaszek—bring diverse perspectives and deep expertise to uncover practical strategies for fostering happiness and success at work.
We engage with various guests, including organizational leaders, HR professionals, psychologists, researchers, and employees across various industries. Through thought-provoking conversations, we delve into:
- How organizational culture shapes employee experiences and drives engagement
- Evidence-based positive psychology strategies that boost both human flourishing and business metrics
- Innovative approaches to align brand identity with employee experience and operationalize company values
Our mission is to give listeners actionable insights and tools to transform their workplaces. Whether you're a CEO, an HR professional, a manager, or an employee seeking to make a positive impact, the Happy at Work podcast offers valuable perspectives to help you create a more fulfilling, productive, and positive work environment.
Join us as we explore the cutting edge of workplace well-being and performance, uncovering the strategies that lead to truly happy, engaged, and successful organizations.
The Happy at Work Podcast
Scaling Human Potential: Jordana Cole on AI-Powered Coaching
Jordana Cole shares her journey as a leadership development expert and how she's revolutionizing coaching through AI with her company ShiftWell.ai. She explains how this technology can democratize access to professional development by providing on-demand, personalized coaching to employees at all levels.
• AI coaching can reach employees who traditionally lack access to development resources, including hourly workers, non-English speakers, and those with busy schedules
• Traditional employee engagement surveys have shown little improvement over 20+ years because they address symptoms rather than root causes
• People's needs shift over time like fingerprints, requiring personalized development that evolves with them
• Human coaches and AI should work as complementary partners—AI providing scale, humans providing intuition
• Organizations should design AI implementations with employees rather than for them
• Environmental factors including workspace arrangements significantly impact performance but are often overlooked in engagement assessments
• Practical AI applications include drafting difficult communications, synthesizing data, and creating step-by-step action plans
Want to hear more? Subscribe to the Happy at Work podcast and leave us a review. Interested in speaking on a future episode or collaborating with us? Email us at admin@happyatworkpodcast.com or follow us on LinkedIn.
To stay connected and continue the conversation, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn.
And don't forget to check out our previous episodes for more tips and strategies to boost your workplace happiness. You can find them on your favorite podcast platform or on our website.
If you have any questions, comments, or topic suggestions for future episodes, please reach out to us. We'd love to hear from you!
Stay inspired, stay motivated, and stay happy at work!
Welcome back for another episode of the Happy at Work podcast with Laura Tessa and Michael.
Speaker 2:Each week we have thoughtful conversations with leaders, founders and authors about happiness at work.
Speaker 3:Tune in each Thursday for a new conversation. Enjoy the show.
Speaker 4:Hi and welcome to the Happy at Work podcast. We are so excited to have with us today Jordana Cole, who is the co-founder of ShiftWellai and the founder of Ignited, and I can't wait to hear about these two organizations. Welcome, jordana. Thank you so much. Yes, it's great to have you here. So I'm going to ask you the question that we ask many of our guests, which is can you tell us a little bit about yourself, your career and where you are today?
Speaker 5:Yeah, absolutely. So. I'm kind of one of those people who have had a windy career path. I've had a lot of roles, I've been in a lot of organizations, but through it all, a couple of things have been true Leadership. I've been leading teams since I'm 23 years old, fresh out of college, no experience whatsoever Focusing on human potential and well-being.
Speaker 5:So I have a master's degree from UPenn in applied positive psychology and really thinking about how do we bring out the best in people in a way that creates behavioral change that doesn't just stick, it spreads. So that's kind of my MO with everything that I do. I joke, I'm not a learning leader, I'm not a development leader, I am a behaviorist. So how do we change behaviors? So, with Ignited, after spending a decade leading internal learning and development and leadership development at a number of different corporations, I now, on my own as a certified coach, as a facilitator, as a consultant, help organizations with leadership coaching, leadership programming, leadership workshops and learning and development strategy. And then what I'm really excited about is the work that I do with my co-founders on ShiftWell.
Speaker 5:So one of the things that I realized as an L&D leader and as an external consultant is it's really hard to scale yourself.
Speaker 5:It's also really hard to scale the cost of being able to support your entire employee base when you are a huge organization and so much of development focuses on either executive leaders or frontline management or people who are in performance improvement plans, and there's a whole crop of employees that miss out.
Speaker 5:Yet in order for us to be as effective as possible, we need everybody being able to do and bring their best every day. So that's the problem that we started thinking about at ShiftWell and said, okay, well, how do we figure out what that is? How do we change the questions that people are being asked and get to the root of what people need? And then how do we actually leverage AI at scale to basically give people on-demand access to help them be at their best, to enable leaders to bring out the best in their people and to help the organization make decisions that will really invest in the right things at the right time best in their people, and to help the organization make decisions that will really invest in the right things at the right time to help their people do and feel their best every single day. So that's what I'm about.
Speaker 3:I love the world that you're living in. I've been teaching entrepreneurship for 15 years and everyone has this that you really distilled it down. The same problem that so many founders have how do I scale myself when there isn't this unlimited amount of cash? But now, we have AI. What are you thinking? How are you thinking you can use it?
Speaker 5:Yeah. So the way that we're planning on leveraging AI is a coach primarily, and maybe an organizational consultant as well. I really think about AI as being that coaching your pocket and as a coach of myself, at first, that terrified me, right? Because it's like, oh my gosh, am I putting myself out of business? Am I putting coaches out of business? I truly believe there's a need for both human coaching and an opportunity and need for AI coaching. So AI endless patience, able to store and process all kinds of data and really good about helping you come up with specific step-by-step plans.
Speaker 5:And there are a lot of people who still don't really understand what coaching is and expect coaching to be somebody who's more of an advisor or like a personal trainer at the gym. Want somebody who's there for them when they need it. If that happens like a personal trainer at the gym, want somebody who's there for them when they need it. If that happens to be at two in the morning because you are a night owl, or if it's 6am when you're getting your kids ready for school, that it's there on demand in my pocket and affordable for me and my organization to pay for.
Speaker 4:I'm so fascinated by this topic no-transcript positions, vice president type roles I've never had a coach myself, you know, so it's like so exciting to think about how this could be leveraged to give this type of coaching opportunity to lots of different employees across the hierarchy of an organization. So can you talk a little bit more about your vision for how this is democratizing coaching and how we can make coaching more available and more accessible?
Speaker 5:Yeah, and I thank you for sharing that and I'm sorry that you've never had the opportunity of that coach investment. You're so spot on about democratizing and it's interesting that you bring up that word and access, because the early part of my career was in higher ed and particularly education technology, and I worked for a number of years with the organization that did the technology behind the common application, which is something that existed to democratize educational access to all students so that you could submit one application and apply to all these skills.
Speaker 4:I have a senior in high school who just did this process, so yes, I understand.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So I think that's kind of always been in the back of my mind is like how do we do things like that similar? And over my years I've had the ability to work with global audiences and a lot of coaches are native to one or two languages. Most it's based on their schedule, which may or may not fit with the employee schedule, and I had about six years of experience working with production slash manufacturing staff and realized those staff they're hourly based employees. They can't take an hour and go into a room and have a one-on-one coaching session. They don't have laptops, they don't have privacy.
Speaker 5:So how do we provide things to them just in time? And that's been like a big focus of mine. What's the just in time need? To get people what they need when they need it, and AI is the tool that enables that to happen. So, whether it's app based or browser based, you can have a phone, you can have a computer, you could be anywhere at any time and have a five-minute conversation and just get the one thing that you need or not worry about offending it right, it's there for you, it has infinite patience, it's on demand and, especially in one of the things I think we're really excited about with our product is there's no integration for so many languages instantaneously. So if you're a global workforce where you have employees who speak Spanish as their primary language, or Arabic or Mandarin, whatever it might be, you can get them that coach support immediately without having to scour the world to put together a coach network and do all this pairing. So, from a technology perspective, that, I think, is the way to democratize.
Speaker 5:Now, I think where a lot of people struggle with AIs is how do I actually use it?
Speaker 5:And it's also only as good as the data you're giving it or the level of kind of awareness you have or the self-awareness.
Speaker 5:So, with one of the things that we're doing is really focusing on connecting our AI to a lot of the research and science of what enables somebody to be at their best, from a combination of human performance, human motivation, well-being, human engagement, distilling that to core elements and enabling individuals to take an assessment to identify their unique blend of what they need, where they are in relation to that right now.
Speaker 5:And then the AI takes that data and that's what it uses as a starting point, while giving the individual different avenues that they can engage with it, whether it's to learn more about themselves, whether it's to create a plan, whether it's to get recommendations of things that they can engage with it. Whether it's to learn more about themselves. Whether it's to create a plan, whether it's to get recommendations of things that they could do or even role play, how they have conversations like this with their boss or with their spouse about what it is that they actually need. So, rather than being completely open-ended and relying on the person to be able to be fluent in the language of AI or technology, we're helping to focus their path to what's going to create meaningful, impactful behavioral change for them that will lead to positive results for them in their business.
Speaker 3:I love all this, and now I'm going to ask a question on behalf of the executive coaches that are listening now, who are saying to themselves this is great, but what do I do and how do we work together?
Speaker 5:Yes, yes, first off, I love you executive coaches. I'm one of you executive coaches. I'm not putting you out of a job, executive coaches so I tend to think of like we need both. There are some. I don't know if either of you are familiar with Dr Cornelia Walther, but she writes for Psychology Today a lot on the topic of AI and human merging. She has had two fantastic articles in the last two weeks actually get published. One is on hybrid humanistic leadership and the other is about psychological liberation through AI.
Speaker 5:Yes, that's a mouthful, but ultimately what she's getting at is that we need a partnership between humans and AI. It's not about AI replacing humans and that what AI is best at is synthesizing large quantities of data, helping to create those insights, really helping us to understand what we need from a wellbeing perspective, but not replacing that human relationship, building that human innovation, et cetera. And I think that what it doesn't replace that a human coach brings to the table is a couple of things. Ai doesn't notice what's not said. It's very literal. So, as a coach, there are moments I literally had a coaching conversation earlier today where my client suddenly got a grin on her face when we were having a conversation, which was a complete shift of energy and I could notice that I could pause her and call that out and we could talk through that and what that meant in the moment that you can't do with AI.
Speaker 5:Ai doesn't have coach's intuition where you get that kind of deep, unexpected question or insight, where you're getting below the surface and really challenging the thinking, and it's only as good as its programming Right. So it might anchor back to pleasing you or how you're training it. So I can sometimes become what you want it to be rather than what you need it to be, and I think that's where human coaches still are. No one can replace them on that. So I think a human coach paired with this AI tool could be really valuable in helping to create some of that below the surface knowledge.
Speaker 5:I also think in the lens Tessa that you brought up about democratization. I see, with medicine as an example, there are now things like concierge service of doctors where you get more dedicated time. You get a different fear of care if you pay for that particular price point, but if you could only afford, you know that copay, you have urgent care as an option that you can go to or you have telemedicine that you can go to. There's a market for both and I see that being the place with coaching to human. Coaches have specialized a lot of times in the organizational space, as you brought up at the executive level, or certain use cases, and that's going to continue to be a need. This is about democratizing.
Speaker 4:I love the metaphor of the medical system and really thinking about because, honestly, executive coaching has always been that gold standard that you might think about. That's reserved for a select few, just like concierge medicine might be. But the AI coaching really does make it more accessible the way that urgent care centers and other types of access to medicine has become more accessible over the past decade or so. So I really love that comparison. I haven't heard that one before and I think it's really effective. But I'd love to ask you a little bit more about the assessment.
Speaker 4:So, you think about? There's a zillion assessments out there Gallup to Myers-Briggs and so forth so do you think specifically about the assessment that you all developed and how that actually informs AI and informs the coach? Is it more around learning and development? Is it more around personality and managing conflict? I mean, like, what are you actually assessing for? And then how is that informing the coaching process?
Speaker 5:Yeah. So really, what we're assessing for is the root of human motivation and performance. So, look, I'm a fan of assessments. I've been a Gallup strengths coach for over a decade. I'm a huge fan of StrengthsFinder Actually, my co-founder was on the team that built the StrengthsFinder assessment back in the day, so we are all huge proponents of that.
Speaker 5:There are some limitations, so one of my challenges with a lot of the assessments that are out there are they're personality-based, which means they're fixed, even though there is research lately that personality does shift a bit. Part of the reason we're called ShiftWell is because we recognize that people's needs while we have core needs as human beings, that they are as unique to us as our fingerprints and that they shift over time. That based on the environmental factors that we're in, based on the different life changes that we have. So it's not a fixed point and you're done. This is actually something that you should take multiple times and multiple ways to see what changes, particularly when you have significant life changes or there's significant changes in the world.
Speaker 5:The other challenge that I see I'm going to take engagement assessments for a bit, because this is an area that we really are looking to disrupt. What's amazing to me is, if you look at the Gallup State of the Workplace report, engagement is always somewhere between like the 28 to 32% range. No matter what else has changed in the world, even with COVID, like it's just gone up and down a little bit In what other world, in a business setting, would you be doing the same thing for 20 plus years and getting 30% of the 100% returns that you expect, and keep doing it? Yet we keep doing this with engagement surveys. We keep doing the same things we've done 20 years ago. We haven't changed them at all.
Speaker 4:I have to ask you a question.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Just to get clarification.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Do you fundamentally believe that engagement surveys are broken?
Speaker 5:Yes.
Speaker 4:Okay, okay, so tell me more.
Speaker 5:Yeah, I fundamentally believe engagement surveys are broken because I think they get at a symptom, not the root.
Speaker 4:Okay, okay.
Speaker 5:Engagement is a half step to performance. It's not something causes that engagement, it's not some. There's a need that's generally fulfilled or unfulfilled. That means that you are engaged or not engaged. Now, some engagement surveys do a good job at getting at some of those things like relationship with your manager, but they're also point in time. Many cases it's just once a year and by the time you're acting on it it might have changed, particularly the amount of change that we have organizationally, and organizations tend to look at the lowest score, which might not be the most important one, and tend to also action on a one-size-fits-all when engagement is really one-size-fits-one, and that's again using AI at scale to help enable what engages me versus what engages you.
Speaker 5:I see a lot of people get frustrated where they gave feedback but they don't see anything changing, either because we're not asking the right questions or because they're not actioning on something that's personally relevant to them. I think if engagement surveys weren't broken, we would have seen changes in those results. I think the 20 to 30 percent consistency is how we know that it's not working. So what we're trying to get at is what's at the root of engagement. What are things that are being fulfilled or not fulfilled for that person. That's either helping them to be engaged, not engaged, which is driving performance, or not driving performance.
Speaker 5:The other thing we're recognizing is that's a whole person, whole system thing. So the challenge with engagement surveys is a lot of times they are focused 100% on what's going on in the workplace. But if there are significant things going on in my life where maybe I'm not in a safe place at home, or maybe there's something going on in my relationships, or maybe I don't have any hobbies or I don't have any time for those hobbies, that's gonna change my level of engagement and how I show up at work. But we don't ever ask about that. We try and focus on pieces of the person and pieces of the puzzle instead of the whole person in the whole system.
Speaker 5:So that's what our assessment is doing differently, both in being a fluid, dynamic thing, but also looking at that whole person's needs and then identifying some of the trends that are coming up at the team level and the organizational level. One of the things that we're doing that's unique is looking at not just what you need but where you are in your current state in relation to that and where the gaps are. So our name ShiftWell is making. It's about making intentional shifts. How do you shift what's in your control to shift for the gaps that matter to you, to matter to your team, that matter to your organization right now?
Speaker 3:This is really interesting. You really caught my interest when because I love Gallup information as well and I look at the graph and I'm like this number hasn't moved since you've been tracking it. It's been the same and we try all these different games and you talk about getting people's unique fingerprint, about their own engagement, and I'm curious, from the people that you have met and you've gotten to see their fingerprint at the root of engagement, have you seen any commonalities or themes that have emerged that we should be thinking about? That we really aren't.
Speaker 5:Yeah, I mean, I think each person is unique. I think it is based on a particular point in time, rather than you are this, you are always this, you know. I think there are a couple things. We know that relationships are important, but it's not just, you know. Relationships at work, relationships at home, matter too.
Speaker 5:A lot of times in engagement surveys we might ask questions about whether or not people have the tools that they need to be successful in their job, but we don't actually ask about the overall environment and the work environment. And particularly I was having a conversation with somebody recently how, when COVID hit, we were having all these conversations about your work from home environment. A lot of organizations were investing in things like ergonomics or you could get X, y and Z amount of dollars to spend on things to make your surroundings better, but we kind of have stopped that and we don't actually find out what people need in their environments to be effective. And especially with return to office, things like well, it creates great collaboration space, but how are we thinking about people who are neurodivergent, where, for them, actually working from home is enabling them to be able to do their best work, because they really struggle with a lot of sensory input or a lot of people.
Speaker 5:What about people with social anxiety? They can be fantastic employees, but we're trying to put them in this box. Can be fantastic employees, but we're trying to put them in this box and especially in work environments where we're going. We're returned to office because of collaboration. We're having open floor plans that works for some, but for others, that actually can make them less productive. For other people they actually need a comfort zone at work where, like this, is my dedicated space. I hotel. Like me personally, hoteling does not work for me. I have so much anxiety about I need my space where I feel comfortable with that. If I'm spending so much time thinking about where I'm going to sit, I'm not spending time being able to do my best work. So I think that's a miss in a ton of the engagement surveying today that we're bringing to the forefront and again, not just thinking about in the workplace but holistically for that person, their environment.
Speaker 4:So I want to come back because there were two organizations you mentioned at the top of the podcast ShiftWell which I would love to have you back to talk more about it, because I couldn't agree with you more and I feel like I'm a personal example of someone who has evolved quite dramatically over 30 years of my career.
Speaker 4:Yet I you know, if I had taken that, that personality assessment, at 22, I am sure, I am quite certain it would have been quite different than where I am today at 50. Um, but that aside, you also are the founder of Ignite, so can you talk a little bit?
Speaker 5:about your work there, yeah, so I like to joke that I'm a learning and development triple threat I can coach, I can facilitate, I can consult.
Speaker 5:So, as somebody who has often Scrappy as a team of one been able to really bring from scratch leadership development and team development that has had actual impact and sustainability.
Speaker 5:I love bringing that to other organizations.
Speaker 5:So, whether it's through workshops, whether it's through coaching or whether it's through actual strategic design, a lot of work I've done actually with organizations is partnering with them and how do they transform their leadership development and learning and development from that traditional classroom-based model to something that's more behavioral-based, to something that's more bite-sized, just-in-time, reinforceable? And how can we actually leverage AI intentionally within your organization to do that, rather than just being okay, here's AI, go use it and hoping for the best, or focusing our AI training on just how people can use AI, how do we actually leverage AI in the right way to get people what they want when they need it? As an L&D professional, I joke that 100% of what I focus on is about 1% of what my customers or audience that I serve focus on, and often I'm fighting for that bandwidth with other things. So how do I make it effortless and effective for them, and I think that's something that a lot of HR and learning and development teams struggle with, so I'm there to help them figure that out.
Speaker 4:So can I ask a quick follow?
Speaker 5:up yeah.
Speaker 4:Because I have spoken with CHROs around the country in the past six months about the integration of AI into the workforce and into the L&D and kind of journey of their employees and I really think HR for the first time is being seen as really being on the front line of this transformation, because really CEOs are looking to CHROs to say, okay, so how are we integrating AI to increase productivity? And CHROs are like I don't know really how to do this. And so if you were to give say one or two like really practical tips on I am an employee, I want to increase my productivity, what AI tools would you recommend that people get started with to really think about how it could make an impact on their daily life or their daily work?
Speaker 5:Yeah, so I'd love, if you're up for it, I'd love to give a recommendation to employees and I'd love to give a recommendation to CHROs.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 5:So for employees, I'd say less about what specific tool you're using and more about how you're using it, because I know that each organization has their own policies of what you can use, and you should absolutely follow that, because there you a draft that you then edit. So, whether that be there's a difficult email that you're trying to write, or you're trying to implement something in six months and you have no idea how to turn it into a project plan, or you're trying to make a case for resources for something specific, ask AI for help in creating that draft and then add your voice to it. It's also really helpful for synthesizing data. So really simple example performance reviews. Give it your one-on-one docs and say, based on this list out what you think my accomplishments are, what you think my growth opportunities are, so that you can do now in five minutes what maybe it used to take you hours and hours before of searching and it's much more effective. So that's kind of that blank page place to start from, and then I do think about helping you come up with that action plan. Ai is really great about that step-by-step on what to do, when and again not taking it verbatim, but actually tweaking it to what's best for you.
Speaker 5:Now here's what I'd say for CHROs a couple things. One I spent the first part of my career actually in the business versus on the HR side, and I'm really glad I did, because I feel like it helped me really understand how people operate and what the needs of the business were, and speak the language of the business. And when I became an HR leader, I never lost sight of that. I think too often for HR, we design for people rather than with people, and it's really important to understand what the day-to-day work reality is for your people, actually shadowing and watching that. But bring them into the conversation.
Speaker 5:Your people are already using AI, source some of those people who are champions of it. Bring them together because of that, ask them their best practices and use cases and then codify that into instructions, rather than you trying to create it yourself or enforcing AI to them. And then the other thing that I would recommend with AI is every single organization I work with, their knowledge management systems are out of control. You can't find anything. They've just become these unruly messes of data. Leverage AI to help people source through that but not just based on topics what their actual need is. So if you have leadership development frameworks. If you have leadership training, help the AI learn. If somebody says I need help with a difficult conversation, here's some of the resources that we already have in the organization that can help you get better at that. It's helping them solve from the problem they have, not from what you need them to do.
Speaker 3:I love that. This is really, really practical, and what I'd like to do as I close this out is invite you back in six months because AI is moving so fast. I want to know what's going on, but I think it might be moving so fast we have to have you back in three months.
Speaker 4:Exponentially fast.
Speaker 3:But, jordan, thank you so much for being so generous with your information and your practical advice. Good luck with your business. I really want to see how the coaches are getting along with the AI and how things are actually moving, and I'd love to see what's sticking. I know with coaching, one of the big challenges is really getting things to stick, so we'd love to have you back in a few months and see how things are going.
Speaker 5:The sticking piece is important, right, and that's where AI can be your accountability partner. In a way, I think it's hard from a personal coach. So, whether as a coach, you're using AI to nudge people or remind people, or if you're using a product like mine, where that AI is your accountability partner, we don't live in the matrix. I can't plug in and know Kung Fu. It does require habits and practice, at least not yet. Not yet Tomorrow, in three months, when I'm back.
Speaker 4:I might know Kung Fu. Who knows? I really hope not, but thank you so much, jordana. And I love the name of your company, shiftwell, because now I understand it and I couldn't agree more that it really helps move with the shifts that we all have within our careers and within ourselves and our priorities. So, wishing you all the best with this, I'm excited to see where it takes you.
Speaker 5:Thank you so much, I appreciate that.
Speaker 3:Thanks, Jordana. We hope you've enjoyed this episode. If you'd like to hear future episodes, be sure to subscribe to the Happy at Work podcast and leave us a review with your thoughts.
Speaker 2:Are you interested in speaking on a future episode or want to collaborate with us? Let us know. You can send us an email at admin at happyatworkpodcastcom and lastly, follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter for even more happiness. See you soon.
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