Aoife O'Brien [00:00:02]:

Matt, you're so welcome to the Happier at Work podcast. I'm so pleased to have you as my guest. I know we've been talking about this for a few months now. Do you want to let people know a little bit about your background and how you got into doing what you're doing today?

Matt Shenker [00:00:16]:

Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. Happy to be here. Oh, a little bit about me. So I, I'm I'm a former problem child who turned addict, who turned therapist and behavior scientist. And I've spent well over the last decade trying to apply what I spent years years years learning about the cutting age behavior science in this world and then trying to apply it in workplaces and schools and and training mental health providers. The the key is really I looked around and I was working with clients as therapists, and so many people were struggling in so many of the same ways. And I looked at so many of our systems, whether it's our workplaces, our health care providers, our schools, the overall institutions that we're trusting less and less.

Matt Shenker [00:01:02]:

And I'm seeing the way they're set up compared with what we've seen in the research and what I'm really training people in with the behavior science and seeing the massive disconnect. And, basically, I've just spent the last decade trying to close that gap to make life better from a systems perspective so that we can all feel like we're living in a better world. And, ultimately, that's that's distributed so we can have a more empowered society.

Aoife O'Brien [00:01:24]:

Yeah. You're definitely speaking my language now when you're talking about things like systems and closing the gap. If we focus much more on the workplace, what do you see as the big disconnect? Like, what what's the difference between, say, what people want work to be and what it actually is?

Matt Shenker [00:01:42]:

Yeah. Well, it's a it's a big question. The the simplest way I would frame it is in the modern world, the way that our society has adapted, the number one place that the modern human being spends most of their time is not with their romantic partner. It's not with their children. It's not with their friends. It's not with any other family members. It is time at work.

Aoife O'Brien [00:02:05]:

Mhmm.

Matt Shenker [00:02:05]:

So other than time that we spend alone, which is mostly spent sleeping, the number one place where our attention goes is at work. And yet when you look at the way that the workplace has evolved, you see that satisfaction with our leaders, engagement in work have all gone down while stress levels, levels of burnout have exacerbated. And so work is a place where everyone comes together with other human beings to collaborate to create value that gets transferred to another group of human beings. So inherently we have an opportunity to structure work in ways that can give people the two things that we're lacking most in our modern world, which is connection and purpose. We've seen loneliness skyrocket to pandemic levels, which has all kinds of challenges based on the ways that we're wired as human beings. Connection is our core need, and a sense of purpose has decreased with each generation because of the way that our systems are structured. And so when you look at from a public health standpoint, if you really wanna transform the well-being in our world, the number one system to really transform is our workplaces. And we know how to do it and we have the resources to do it at work, but we end up not doing it because people don't know what they don't know.

Matt Shenker [00:03:20]:

So the leaders responsible for those systems not knowing enough about how humans are wired and the real science of motivation end up structuring the ways that we manage people to be short term focused, which is essentially how can we stress people out and how can I stay stressed out enough to bribe people or threaten people to work as hard as they possibly can with basically driving themselves like their foot is pressed down on the accelerator, which is not an effective way to drive any machinery, but particularly a human body?

Aoife O'Brien [00:03:53]:

Mhmm. And especially not over long periods of time. Short bursts, you know, one day, fine. But I think over an extended period, it's it's really, really bad. It's one of the key things that stood out for me from what you said there, Matt, is the idea that work like, we know what to do, but the people who are leading in the workplace don't necessarily have access to that information. And I know certainly before we started, recording today, we talked about that idea. Like, when I was doing my master's, which is 5 years ago now at this stage, that was one of the big things I noticed is some of the stuff that I was learning about was maybe 20 years out of date, but it was the kind of stuff that that was contemporary from a management perspective, from what you see in in the books and what people are being taught in leadership development programs. But, like, that's 20 years out of date already.

Aoife O'Brien [00:04:51]:

You know? So there there is this, you know, and it takes a while to filter that information through. And I also find that a lot of the research that's done is very academic. So it might be really highly relevant, but it's not accessible to the people who need it because it's written in this very academic language. And then you have the likes of Harvard Business Review, which I love. I love that as a magazine. But from an academic perspective, they're kind of a bit like, well, it's not really academically rigorous, but it's much more accessible, I think, to to people who are leading other people.

Matt Shenker [00:05:28]:

Yeah. You know, I I really I I don't necessarily wanna point blame at the leaders of our modern workplaces because what I find is, you know, we work with thousands and thousands of of managers and and c suites. And what I find is the vast majority of people want the same things which is they want people to live a generally good life and they want to do productive things to help them live a generally good life. The challenge here is really a modern challenge which is we have access to so much information. We are drowning in both data and content. And so from the data side, the modern workplace moves so fast and is distributed across so many different platforms. It's hard to really continuously be aware of what are all of the needs of what everyone has, in order for us to really structure work well for everybody. And it's hard to keep pace with what is the cutting edge information about what is effective for actually helping people to get work done to manage people.

Matt Shenker [00:06:27]:

Because ultimately, like you said, that information is often up in ivory towers and it takes a while for that to trickle down into the highways of everyday life, and that's a real challenge. And ultimately, our opportunity now with things like AI is we can organize both the data and the information that we have so that we can actually solve this problem. Because like you said, it's it's not a knowledge gap problem. This is an implementation gap problem. How do we take what we know works, and then apply it across every single sort of workplace? Because we have good examples of it working. If you look at cutting edge sports teams, what and you go and you see the ways that coaches operate, the the sports teams that have 1,000,000 to spend on how they operate, they apply the the cutting edge behavior science. And what you'll see is consistent, continuous feedback with needs based motivation and personal development and high rates of engagement across those athletes on those teams and high levels of trust with their leaders. So we know that it works.

Matt Shenker [00:07:29]:

The challenge is having it distribute at scale continuously within every workplace.

Aoife O'Brien [00:07:35]:

There's so much that I want to unpack there from what you said, Masha. I can dive into some of the different areas. So let's get going. I love what you said there that it's not a knowledge gap, it's an implementation gap. To me, it's like it's the knowing doing, isn't it? We know what to do, but there's something stopping us from actually doing it. So we know that the information is there. We know that it's accessible. Maybe it's completely overwhelming that there's too much information.

Aoife O'Brien [00:08:01]:

And I love the idea of structuring that in such a way that it makes it much more accessible for people in real time. Like, this I need this information, and this is when I need it, rather than, like, what I see a lot of the time is people are getting trained when they don't and I find this as an entrepreneur as well. Like, this is when this webinar is on, so he should attend now because this is when it's on as opposed to, I will attend this webinar at a time when I actually need it and can take action on the back of it. That was the kind of the first idea. The next one is about this idea of the the sports teams. And I've seen this analogy multiple times that so many different facets of our life have evolved over time, but how we work hasn't necessarily seen that same type of evolution. And we're still kind of a little bit in the I was gonna say the stone age is probably not so bad, but we're we're still quite behind in terms of evolving how it is that we do work. The other thing that you talked about is needs and how it's all needs based.

Aoife O'Brien [00:09:08]:

The research that I did for part of my as part of my master's, it will feature in a huge part of my upcoming book as well, is this idea of our need satisfaction. I've changed language slightly to talk about our drivers at work. So what is it that really drives us? Like, what motivates us at work? And it's not what you might think. And it's definitely not money. You know, you don't just throw money at a problem. Once people are paid enough to feel like they're they're being compensated fairly and, you know, compared to their colleagues especially as well, then it becomes about more than just money. And then the other thing that you said was about doing this at scale. So, again, what I find with the organizations I work with is you work with one small pocket of a team.

Aoife O'Brien [00:09:59]:

And that same knowledge doesn't get passed around to the entire organization in the way that it could and should be. So let's discuss any and all of what I've just said there.

Matt Shenker [00:10:14]:

Yeah. You know, there's a there there's a there's a myth within our modern world that is really at the core of why we haven't really solved this implementation problem. And the the myth is what I call the techno productive optimism myth, which is this lie that we've been sold by technology companies and by our politicians for, the past 30 years, which is you you can go back and you can look at magazines and newspapers and news articles from the nineties, the mid nineties, late nineties, and the early 2000. And what you'll see is how the promise of the Internet and software is going to radically transform the well-being and happiness of everyone in the world. It's gonna make us more free, and it's gonna magically enhance well-being. Why? Because the speed, scale, and scope of information sharing is going to rapidly accelerate. Because we have these tools where now we can speed up how we communicate. And that is the vast innovation that has happened since the printing press.

Matt Shenker [00:11:14]:

We had the printing press. We moved on to the telegram and the radio, the television, the telephone, the Internet, the smartphone, social media, all of these amazing innovations which have connected our economy, which has made it so that we can innovate with more people faster, and that's wonderful. And what we've discovered is simply getting out of tech companies' ways to allow them to innovate as fast as possible, the speed and scope of information sharing, actually isn't the correct incentive structure to then enhance well-being because depression is now the leading cause of disability worldwide, overdoses and suicides or death by cirrhosis of the liver, what we call deaths of despair, have all skyrocketed in the last 20 years, continued to go up, Mass violence continues to go up. Mental health challenges continue to go up. So what it looks like is actually us optimizing for just innovating the scale and scope of information sharing isn't enough. It's not just about speed and size anymore. It's about how do we actually design the ways that information flows so that we can get things done well and quickly while also regenerating well-being. So understanding the human needs and the component of work that has to get done.

Matt Shenker [00:12:31]:

And so it's it's us as people taking a greater responsibility and expecting more from ourselves as leaders in workplaces and expecting more of the leaders within our lives in every single realm to be responsible not just for profits and not just for accelerating work faster and bigger but also taking responsibility for the systems that structure how that work happens. That that's our responsibility too and, ultimately, you can get more done that way when you stop optimizing for short term speed and you start optimizing for sustainable high performance.

Aoife O'Brien [00:13:08]:

I love that. When you talk about needs and our well-being needs at work, are there specific ones that kind of stand out to you? Are there ones that you're seeing across the board?

Matt Shenker [00:13:20]:

Sure. Sure. So I one of the challenges with well-being is something I discovered years ago when I started talking to academics and interviewing them, thinking about getting into a PhD program, which is if you get 10 well-being researchers in one room and you ask them to define well-being, they'll give you 10 different definitions. And so it's sort of it's sort of hilarious. Right? We have this modern society where we're talking so much about wellness. So many of our TikToks and Instagram reels are all about mental health and optimizing, longevity and wellness and meditation and mindfulness. And so we're talking more. We're having more of these conversations, and yet people have different definitions for what well-being is.

Matt Shenker [00:14:01]:

So one of the things I've done is I operate with a biopsychosocial spiritual model of well-being that we call empowered well-being. And it structures everything about fast. Right? Right? So but it's it's really simple, which is all of the needs that make up what we are as a body. So biology, bio psycho, so also what our mind needs, and then our social needs because we're social creatures, and then spiritually because we're spiritual beings. And so ultimately those needs aren't different buckets. They all connect with one another. And at the core, there's basically just 6 needs that we all have. There's 6 inherent drives that are intrinsic within us that every human being yearns for, that if we are developing those 6 drives as dimensions, that ultimately we build a fulfilling life.

Matt Shenker [00:14:50]:

And I I break them down. 1 is connection. We are naturally wired for connection and to develop that, we need to develop belonging. So the the longest longitudinal study ever, I'm sure you're aware of it, is the the the the Harvard study that has studied now 4 different generations to see, well, what are the greatest predictors of both success and longevity? And it wasn't how little you smoked or how little you drink or how much you exercised or how much money you made, It was the quality of your relationships. Mhmm. Young infants, if they don't get enough human touch early on in their life, we saw this with the Romanian orphanages in the nineties. Babies literally die without enough touch to help them co regulate stress in their bodies. So we're wired for connection.

Matt Shenker [00:15:34]:

We have to develop belonging. 2 is coherence. Our mind is constantly making stories and it's optimized for trying to make sense of all the information and data we already carry within us and how that connects to the information we're having around us. And so we need to develop insight. We need to develop meaning about our experiences. Another is sensation. We are data processing machines. And so through our 5 senses, but also with our emotions, we are processing our experience of being alive.

Matt Shenker [00:16:04]:

And so being able to be in our body, connected to the signals within our body, to be able to harness them and use them as wisdom. Wisdom is simply embodied insight for living. And so embodying, being in your body. And then the other drive is orientation. Where and when am I? So to to cultivate mindfulness so that you can have power over your attention in this modern world where the greatest machines in the world at the richest companies are all competing and this attention economy to try to harvest your attention towards their platforms. Now more than ever, we need this skill for being able to cultivate presence towards what matters to us, which brings us to the 5th drive, which is autonomy. All of us, we we develop as hunter gatherer nomads. For 97% of the time we've been on this planet with the bodies we have as homo sapiens, hunter gatherer nomadic tribes, which is why connection is our core need.

Matt Shenker [00:16:58]:

And that's where our dopamine systems come from. We didn't know agriculture for the vast majority of time we're on this planet, so you had to keep moving. So you didn't use up all the resources. So we have this wiring within us to feel a sense of agency in our world. The way that you develop a sense of autonomy is by developing purpose, meaning you define what matters to you based on processing your emotions, understanding your self story, and understanding what really matters most to me and then taking actions towards that which then the next drive is mastery. We naturally want to master parts of our surroundings and we want to cultivate confidence so developing that dimension is accomplishment So that ultimately you can fill yourself with confidence. Accomplishment is just the Latin word which means with trust. And so to fill yourself with, to fill yourself with trust, that's accomplishment.

Matt Shenker [00:17:49]:

So ultimately, if everybody goes through their life auditing those 6 drives and how much time they are investing in those sort of buckets, what you'll get is you'll unlock massive amounts of motivation, you'll process trauma that you carry within yourself, you'll diminish depression and anxiety. You'll cultivate greater energy within your body, a greater ability to make progress and create things. And ultimately, leaders can empower people to do that. Leaders can empower people to do that by simply showing up with purpose, with people skills, and by building processes that allow people to regenerate their energy and process stress. So it's really simple as a leader. You follow those 3 p's to help people cultivate those 6 drives and that's not about fluffy nonsense of walking on eggshells or just being nice to people because you believe in rainbows and unicorns. It's about actually having high performance. And having sustainable high performance actually ends up making people happier and more well.

Aoife O'Brien [00:18:48]:

Yeah. Again, so much to to unpack there. I I love that. And 3 of the needs that I talk about are covered within there, but you have it kinda goes a little bit more beyond with the spiritual and the kind of the embodiment side of things as well. Can we talk like the something I'm I'm quite interested in is when our needs are not satisfied, like, what happens then? Yeah. And maybe how do we become aware that our needs are not being satisfied through, well, work especially given the the nature of the podcast?

Matt Shenker [00:19:24]:

Yes. You could imagine those 6 drives and the 6 dimensions basically create like a hexagon that all have a thread that connects to all of them. So like this matrix. Mhmm. And any sort of moment in your life, if you were to just sort of sit back and reflect on it where you feel you're most full, you're most yourself, and your your truest most grounded full alive self. Ultimately, what you'll find is fulfillment in probably all 6 of those areas and maybe a few more than others. And when you look at for moments of suffering, you'll find depletion in those different areas. So it shows up in different ways depending on which needs are lacking.

Matt Shenker [00:20:03]:

If you're not processing enough of your emotions, if you're not building an embodiment practices, opportunities to be in your body, meaning to to get sunshine, to eat appropriately in ways that your body needs, to process those emotions consistently. You're gonna build up trauma. Your body's gonna begin to shut down because it's just gonna get overwhelmed because it's not getting what it needs. If you're not developing insight what's gonna happen is you're gonna be anxious. You're gonna be anxious with the uncertainty and you're gonna sort of feel like you're in this strange fog and if you're not developing connection and belonging your your window, your stress tolerance window of what you're able to experience will shrink and shrink and diminish because ultimately we all carry this relational regulation matrix within us at all times of all the people that we are connected to particularly our core attachment figures and the strength of those relationships expand our window of tolerance. If you don't ever define your values, you'll you'll build a life similar to many of the clients I saw early in my work, which is you'll get to your late twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, and you'll say, you know, I played this game by the rules, and I built the big bright shiny life, but it feels hollow on the inside.

Aoife O'Brien [00:21:12]:

Mhmm.

Matt Shenker [00:21:13]:

That's where midlife crisis comes from, which is you started following a life that was a blueprint somebody else handed you, but it wasn't actually connected to your needs. Mhmm. And so, ultimately, suffering comes from a a lack of 1 or or combination of those needs being cultivated.

Aoife O'Brien [00:21:31]:

I love that. And it's the I suppose the suffering is the someone said or or nowadays, I think social media has a lot to answer for in relation to this when people post their best life or they're gone on holiday or a big house or a new car or a relationship, like, all of these things are are what society tells us are the the really important things for us to have. But if that's not what truly, truly satisfies our needs, then it's it's gonna cause us suffering when and Yeah. Like that. You could get to your forties, and you're looking around going, I thought

Matt Shenker [00:22:07]:

it was something different. And how tragic. Right? And, ultimately, it makes sense when you zoom out and you look at us as human beings and how we've developed. For the vast majority of the time is that we've been on this planet, we have solved the need for purpose and insight and community by coming together, and usually with religious practices.

Aoife O'Brien [00:22:28]:

Yeah.

Matt Shenker [00:22:28]:

We're gonna come together. We're gonna explore the deepest questions about why are we here? Why are we alive? Mhmm. We're gonna do that with other people. Now there are all kinds of problems that came up with organized religions and some hypocrisies within them in ways that trust has been broken down. And ultimately, what has happened is as that trust is broken down with institutions across the board, not just religions, people have connected less with going to those places. And what's happened is we haven't necessarily filled that void. Coming together with people to explore what matters most in the world is an important need that we have that we can't undermine. So what has happened is tech companies have swooped in, and they've hijacked that need now with social media.

Matt Shenker [00:23:09]:

And so now what you have as kids grow up and the signals and stories they get about what should matter most to them, they're getting from influencers who are influencing their story of what should matter. But ultimately, that's not connected to necessarily the day to day relationships that you have in your very life and it's a one way conversation that that content isn't connected to who you are and it's not it's not helping you become more of what you are or and it's not helping you necessarily process what you're carrying. Scrolling through social media videos is not you connecting with your embodied experiences and trying to define for yourself what really matters to you. Mhmm. So it ultimately doesn't quite fill the need, but it does trigger the pain point within it.

Aoife O'Brien [00:23:55]:

Yeah. And dare I say that it's it's a way to dumb down and numb your feelings, and it's a way to avoid doing that kind of embodiment work. It is the you know, you're just scrolling mindlessly.

Matt Shenker [00:24:10]:

And and endlessly. And it's and it's understandable. When again, when we're in this world where trust in institutions has continued to decline for the last 50 years, we have this growing sense of uncertainty. And when you have concentration of wealth that has continued to accumulate, this sense of social and financial mobility has also started to diminish for many people. So when you have a lesser sense of hope that your life can be different, when you have a greater sense of uncertainty because innovation seems to be happening faster and faster and faster and faster, and yet you don't have shared places where you can come together and make sense of what matters most in your world, of course we're so susceptible to wanting to spend so much time on social media, seeing how other people are making sense of what's going on in the world. But the point is, there's no end to just searching for those stories if you're not also investing time and connecting with who you are.

Aoife O'Brien [00:25:06]:

Mhmm. I love that. I love that explanation. Matt, can we bring it back to leaders? You talked about this idea of purpose, people, and processes. Maybe let's start with this idea of purpose because, you know, in in linking back to what we were talking about about the scroll and about finding, like, what really matters to us as individuals, how do we go about finding what that purpose is and and connecting with that? And just to to caveat this question by saying, on the podcast, we talk we've talked several times about this idea of the big p purpose versus the little p purpose. So big p purpose being something like save the whales, something grandiose like that. And then little p purpose being much more focused on the people around you, your community, the people that you interact with.

Matt Shenker [00:25:51]:

Sure. Sure. So our emotions are signals about what our needs are, and our values are our shortcut answers for how we get our needs met. And so within all of us we carry wisdom about who we are and who we want to be. And so simply by exploring what makes you come most alive? What makes you feel smaller? By exploring those sort of questions or asking yourself when I'm on my deathbed, how do I wanna think about and reflect on my life? How do I want people at my funeral to talk about me? When I think about the people I respect most in the world, what do I respect about them? Those are good signals for what really matters most to us. And that's how you really carve out the sense of purpose. I I really call it like, you have one purpose and you'll have many missions. And the key is for yourself to figure out what is that one purpose? You know, for me, I I became an addict really early early in my life.

Matt Shenker [00:26:50]:

So from my adolescence into my teenage years, my number one value was cool. I wanted people to just think I was cool. Everything that I was doing was really optimized for feeling to myself like I was cool to other people and maybe tricking other people into thinking I was cool. But that then developed this, like, disconnect between this persona that I played out and the actual experience inside of me that I wasn't connecting with. And so then I became an addict to push down and suppress all that stuff I'm carrying. And then ultimately, that led to this massive suffering and I went through withdrawal, I contemplated suicide, I got out of that, I got all kinds of support, I started really exploring everything about behavior science and what I then started doing was I started chasing down comfort. I started endlessly searching for answers. And then eventually I had to give that up.

Matt Shenker [00:27:40]:

You know, I sat up in bed one day and I realized, oh my God, I'm just spending all my time trying to like look for answers to try and, like, fix all the bad problems out there in the world because I don't know how to deal with the bad stuff within me. So comfort had become my number one value. My whole life was getting designed around that. And then it became knowledge. I wanted to seek out knowledge to make that better. But that really wasn't quite working either when I looked at my life that wasn't necessarily fulfilling. What I then started to realize was the people I respected most were people who were brave and courageous and did things that were scary, but were also honest and real. And so it shifted from knowledge to what I call heart, like refusing to do things half heartedly, to do them full heartedly, to really be vulnerable.

Matt Shenker [00:28:23]:

So my number one value is heart. And so I know if I start to feel depleted or I start to feel not quite like myself, I know that I need to be doing more things that feels like it is aligned with pulling more of my heart out of me. And so by being able to define for ourselves what is, for me, my number 1 or my number 2 deepest value so that then I can design my life around that? So that's the personal. And then as leaders, what we get to do is we get to think, what is the mission of this company? What kind of impact do we wanna have this this business? And then it's my responsibility as the leader to communicate that to my people, what we're doing as a business and why I care about it, and then to connect that, to build a tether from what we're doing as a company down to what matters to each person because there is nothing more motivating in the world than trying to get evidence for yourself that you are who you think you are. And so if you can figure out who everybody wants to be and what matters to them and you can connect that to what your business is doing and you can support them with opportunities to become more of themselves, they're gonna work harder and more creatively. And so that's this piece of purpose of can you actually build an infrastructure of purpose where you can understand for yourself what you care about, what actually activates your motivation. Can you weave a story that can activate a deeper sense of purpose with the people that you work with and that you work for or that work for you?

Aoife O'Brien [00:29:45]:

I love that. I think it's so powerful, this idea that making that direct connection. This, again, is something I talk, quite a lot about on the podcast, is making the connection between what an individual does on a day to day basis and the impact that they have, whether that's internally or whether it's on customers. I love this step further that it's it's a reinforcement of the story that we tell ourselves about who we actually are and who we want to be in the world. And as a leader, really personalizing that experience for people at work. You know? And it's really disheartening when you see that if someone is managing, say, 10 or 12 people, it's really hard to actually do that on a one to one basis if you have so many people that you're responsible for. But if you have, you know, 4, 5, 6 people, then it makes it much easier to make that overall experience of work much more impactful.

Matt Shenker [00:30:43]:

Totally. And in this modern world where we have mostly hybrid workplaces, there is now so much data that is continuously flowing about what people are doing, what their behaviors are doing that can allow us to actually design better workplaces so that people can collaborate and reinforce, explore, and support that story together. So there's not a log jam of every manager of every team having to constantly manage the motivation of every single person on their team. You can actually build in to the ways that people work to be self reinforcing systems so they're collaborating in ways that deepen their connection with the story of why they're working.

Aoife O'Brien [00:31:23]:

Can we talk a little bit more about because we've kind of touched on it a couple of times during the conversation, but this idea of the structure of the work and the systems that we have to support us to be able to do that.

Matt Shenker [00:31:35]:

Sure. Sure. So there's there's all all sorts of ways we think about the the structure of work. Right? One hot button issue right now is this idea of, could I work in the office and make everyone that works at my company work in the office, or should we be fully remote, or should we let everybody be flexible? And so it's really an oversimplification of the question for a business. Yeah. Because it it really depends what is your business. You know? If if you're manufacturing cars, that's not something everybody can do from a computer, and and they're at their house. Right? And, ultimately, if you're building software, maybe you can.

Matt Shenker [00:32:08]:

Maybe everybody can do that fully remotely. But it's actually figuring out, 1, based on your business and based on the flow of what needs to happen in your business in a given quarter, month, week, who needs to work together at which points and which touch points would be the most valuable to be in person versus fully remote, what sort of work can happen asynchronously by people messaging and emailing or tracking things and data tracking platforms or inputting things into Salesforce and taking notes, and what sort of things need to happen synchronously where people are coming together on a Zoom call or in person on an off-site or in person on, like, a 3 day sprint working together in the office. Mhmm. And there's so much data out there that people already give while being hired or onboarding, about what they care about, whether that's happening in conversations or that is happening in surveys and assessments that you give people. And there's all sorts of data out there around, how people are managed with performance reviews and people again talking about their needs and their skills and what they're good at. And then c suite strategically thinking about what skills that they need. The struggle is so much of that data is siloed off in different departments and across so many different platforms. It's hard to actually harness it continuously.

Matt Shenker [00:33:27]:

Usually, what happens is the CDO has to go to different department heads and say, hey. What kind of data do you have that we can look at to try to make more strategic decisions? And you have to use people as a filter. But what we can do now with having AI, the greatest data processing and organizing tool we've ever gotten, we have this opportunity to harness more of this data and connect it to be able to give a more continuous visibility to all of us as leaders about what what do we actually need in order to accomplish certain projects? Who needs to be working together at which points? And based on what we know about each of our employees, what do they need? It's like, oh, well, we need to get this project done. It's gonna be a a 90 day sprint. And we we know that everyone that works on this project, 60% of them have a family. And so we're gonna structure it in this sort of way to accommodate for these folks that work that and like to work these 4 day weeks. But ultimately, allowing more voice and dialogue and insight for how we harness that data and then structure the ways that we work even in the very ways of where we're working, when we're working, and how we're communicating about work.

Aoife O'Brien [00:34:32]:

Mhmm. That I I must say, I use or started using AI quite a bit in the last couple of years, but that's not something I have thought about. You know? And I will use AI sometimes to help me manage my own workload, but when you put it into a system like that where it has access to all of those different platforms, all of those different data sources, and it can, I presume, churn out this kind of information relatively easily? You know? And you have it there at your fingertips. I I I love that as as a an opportunity for how to how to do better work. Now this idea of remote versus hybrid versus in office, etcetera, etcetera, it's just one aspect of it. Is there another kind of aspect of the structure of work that's that seems to be a challenge or that's coming up quite a bit?

Matt Shenker [00:35:19]:

Sure. Another is just based on touch points. Right? So one one really core touch point within every business is when is a manager having synced up meeting times with the people they're responsible for? Because ultimately, the number one person most employees have conversations with 1 to 1, whether it's the call or an in office meeting, is with their direct manager.

Aoife O'Brien [00:35:41]:

Mhmm.

Matt Shenker [00:35:41]:

And the number one reason people leave jobs is because of a bad relationship with their manager. So the one touch point you really ideally want to make really effective is that manager to employee 1 on 1.

Aoife O'Brien [00:35:52]:

Yeah.

Matt Shenker [00:35:52]:

So then it becomes a question of, well, how often should we do those? And what what should those look like? What should happen in a 1 on 1? And so the the structure of how 1 on ones happen, the structure of when people on a team actually connect together, and the structure of how do you create either a workplace architecturally, like an actual building to allow for informal touch points. One of, the things Steve Jobs was working on in his last days alive, was the the Menlo Park Apple headquarters because they wanted to structure the entire building and to create this, environment that allowed for collaboration to happen as organically as possible. Because ultimately, what you want is for there not to be a log jam between your sales team and your marketing team sharing information about what's happening and what they're doing. You don't want just your CRO and your CMO to be having conversations about what's happening. Ideally, if other people on that sales team are talking to other people in that marketing team at the water cooler or in the cafe or at lunch or they're hopping on Zoom calls, that now gets to save you all kinds of time. Because now you don't have to have a trickle down from the managers to be updating people about what's happening and what they're learning. To be able to share insights, not just top down, but horizontally across an organization. So even just looking at touch points such as frequency, but also what actually happens on those touch points.

Matt Shenker [00:37:21]:

One of the things that we found is one core behavior that is crucial to train managers on and then to give them feedback on continuously is the number one behavior that most employees report not getting enough of. That would be the number one behavior that would transform their relationship with their manager, which is recognition. Am I getting timely, authentic, relevant recognition from my manager?

Aoife O'Brien [00:37:48]:

Yeah. Is that a case of feeling valued? I feel like my contribution here is valued and I'm actually being recognized. Even if it's just to say thanks, even if it's just to say, I noticed that you worked a couple of hours extra, you were online late last night, whatever it might have been, I see you. I notice you. I understand that, and I appreciate you.

Matt Shenker [00:38:10]:

Yeah. That that's a human need that you can't expect people to show up and collaborate under this business umbrella to work with and for people that ultimately we work with and for people. And so our relationship with the company is defined by the ways that we perceive the relationships that we have within that company. So you can't ignore the fact that human beings need recognition in order to feel a healthy relationship there. And we can see that with our friendships or our romantic relationships. Imagine never getting a compliment or a thank you from your partner or your friend. That's somebody that you're gonna stop hanging out with or you're gonna end a relationship with.

Aoife O'Brien [00:38:47]:

Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. Matt, we've covered so much today. Is there anything else that you want to get across before we wrap things up?

Matt Shenker [00:38:57]:

No. You know, one thing I wanna name is I I really just wanna thank you for the work you're doing to have these conversations. Again, in in this world, it is it is a tough time of transition that we're in where we know so much, and yet we're we're suffering at such great scale. And so to be able to pull people together to have honest conversations that allow people to see more about how we're exploring these challenges, but also how how are we as humans struggling and how do we make sense of this together? We need to be having these deep conversations. So I I wanna I wanna just thank you for the work that you're doing.

Aoife O'Brien [00:39:29]:

Thank you. I really, really appreciate. Thanks for saying. And, Matt, the question I ask everyone who comes on the podcast, what does being happier at work mean to you?

Matt Shenker [00:39:40]:

Being happier at work for me is about feeling like I am growing and learning, and I'm working on things that matter to me. And the people I work with and that I'm responsible for are also growing and feeling like they're working on things that hap that matter to them.

Aoife O'Brien [00:39:56]:

Brilliant. Love that. If people want to find out a little bit about a little bit more about you, about what you do, what's the best way that they can do that?

Matt Shenker [00:40:07]:

Yeah. So they can they can find me on LinkedIn. You can look up Matt Schenker. You can check type in my name there. You can also go to our company, mattermore dotai. That's mattermore as one word. And we're we're working on how do we harness the best of behavior science and how do we harness all the siloed data to actually structure work so that managers suck less and work can be better for everybody because humans have always worked and we will always work, but there's a way for us to structure work so that it feels like we actually matter more within our lives. And anybody that's curious about that work, feel free to shoot me a message.

Matt Shenker [00:40:40]:

Would love to chat anytime.

Aoife O'Brien [00:40:43]:

Brilliant. I love that. I love that as an explanation. And making managers not suck as much, I think. No one

Matt Shenker [00:40:48]:

That's right. I think we can all get behind that.

Aoife O'Brien [00:40:50]:

I don't think it's it's not something that people do on purpose, but, like, yeah, you have to recognize that it does happen.

Matt Shenker [00:40:56]:

That's right. Amen.

Aoife O'Brien [00:40:58]:

Really appreciate your time. Thank you so much.

Matt Shenker [00:41:02]:

Thank you. Thanks, everybody.