Episode 262: The CHRO Playbook for Employee Experience in an AI Era (with Jacob Morgan)
Is employee experience due for a reset?
For much of the past decade, employee experience has been framed as a competitive advantage - a way to attract talent, boost engagement, and strengthen culture. Yet in today’s environment, shaped by economic pressure, evolving workforce expectations, and the rapid rise of AI, many organisations are re-examining whether their approach is still sustainable - or whether, in trying to improve employee experience, they may have inadvertently diluted it.
So, in this episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast, host David Green speaks with Jacob Morgan - author, keynote speaker, and Founder of The Future of Work Leaders - to explore what an employee experience reset looks like in 2026 and beyond.
Drawing on insights from interviews with 100 CHROs, Jacob shares why this moment may mark a turning point for accountability at work, and what leaders must do to balance empathy with performance without undermining either.
Tune in to learn more about:
Why 2026 may be a turning point for accountability in employee experience
Whether wellbeing programmes have diluted performance expectations
How leaders can balance empathy and high performance standards without appearing anti-employee
What the evolving power dynamic between employers and employees means in practice
How AI is redefining how work is measured, managed, and valued
Why HR must lead - not just manage - the responsible and ethical adoption of AI
This episode is sponsored by Hibob.
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This episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast is brought to you by HiBob.
[0:00:00] David Green: Is employee experience reaching an inflection point? After the pandemic, many organisations tried to be everything to everyone, more flexibility, more perks, more promises. But as economic pressure returns and AI continues to reshape how work gets done, I can't help but wonder, have we really strengthened employee experience or diluted it? Today's guest doesn't tiptoe around that debate. My guest today is Jacob Morgan, author, keynote speaker, futurist, and one of the earliest voices to bring employee experience into the mainstream over ten years ago. Returning to the show for the second time, Jacob is here to talk to us about the employee experience reset and getting back to the fundamental eight laws of employee experience, which coincidentally is also the title of his recently published book. We explore why he believes 2026 could mark a turning point for accountability at work, what a healthier balance between empathy and performance actually looks like in practice, and whether the power dynamic between employers and employees is shifting to the former once again. We also examine what this means for CHROs navigating AI, not as a tool to manage, but as a force that could redefine culture, decision-making, and the human experience of work itself. There's a lot to unpack. So, with that, let's get the conversation started.
Jacob, welcome back to the Digital HR Leaders podcast. We last had you on towards the end of 2023, when you had just published your book, Leading with Vulnerability. But for those listeners that didn't tune in last time and don't know you, although I can't imagine that's many, can you provide a little bit of an outline of what you do and walk us through the journey that's shaped how you think about work today?
[0:02:02] Jacob Morgan: I can't believe it's been three years since the last time. It's a long time. A lot has changed in the past few years. So, for people not familiar with me, I started off in this space around 16 years ago. And like many people who graduate college and join the corporate world, I had these big ideas, these big dreams, that I would climb the corporate ranks inside of an organisation, go get my MBA, and then one day become the CMO of an organisation like an IBM or a Coca-Cola; at least, in my mind, that's what I thought. So, I double majored in economics and psychology, I graduated with honours from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and my first job out of college in downtown LA, I moved back home with my parents after college. And I took this job working for an organisation in downtown LA. And when I interviewed there, I was told that I would be doing all these really cool and amazing things and meeting with entrepreneurs and executives and traveling across the country, and the typical story that we tell new graduates.
[0:03:04] David Green: Sounds amazing!
[0:03:06] Jacob Morgan: Right? It sounds great. I mean, people listening to this are like, "Wow, sign me up for this". So, I took this job. I was commuting three hours a day, so an hour and a half to work and back from work every day. But I took the job because of the story that I was told. And a couple of months into my job, I'm doing data entry, I'm doing cold calling, I'm doing PowerPoint presentations. And a pivotal moment for me came when an executive comes out of his beautiful corner office and he tells me he has this really important project for me. And naturally I think, "Okay, this is the moment, I've paid my dues". And he gives me $10 and he says, "I'm late for a meeting, I need you to go to Starbucks and get me a cup of coffee". And after that moment, I was like, "Oh my God, this is what my life has become". And I remember right after I got him coffee, I came back to my desk and I started googling right away how to work for yourself, how to make money without having a boss; I was so mentally just out at that point. I still kept doing my job and making sure I was doing a good job, but any free moment that I had, I was learning how to not work for anybody else ever again.
I had a couple other jobs obviously since then, but eventually I ended up going off on my own. And I started off in search engine optimisation. So, for people not familiar with that, it's how do you rank websites in search engines like Google? And so, I started off in that space, I don't know, 18, 19 years ago. I learned about social media marketing. That was the cool thing when these social tools were first becoming popular. And then, people might remember that moved internally inside of organisations. So, there was Salesforce Chatter, there was Jives, there was Yammer, all these internal tools, and I got involved in doing that. And it just kind of evolved over the years into employee experience, into future of work. But it all started with that cup of coffee and me having this terrible job working for an executive in downtown LA.
[0:04:58] David Green: You're probably very grateful to him now, given everything you've achieved since. Although, it sounds like it was inevitable that that was going to happen at some point.
[0:05:06] Jacob Morgan: Yeah, probably. I don't know. I don't think I'm good for the corporate world. And so, the second part of your question is, what am I doing? So, I speak at a lot of events, I write books, I have a podcast, I have my own CHRO group called Future of Work Leaders, creating content, working longer and harder than I probably ever would have had if I had a full-time job. But because I'm building something that I own and I create and it's my ideas, it doesn't feel like work, as I'm sure you can relate with a lot of the stuff that you're doing.
[0:05:36] David Green: Yes, most of the time, yeah.
[0:05:39] Jacob Morgan: There's some tedious days, but you know.
[0:05:41] David Green: We've known each other for, I think, over a decade. I think you interviewed me when I was at IBM, on your podcast, which proves how long. You've had your own podcast much longer than me.
[0:05:52] Jacob Morgan: That is, yeah, how long ago is that? I'm actually trying to pull it up as we're speaking, but I'll find it while we're talking. 2017, I just found it.
[0:06:02] David Green: Yeah, nine years ago. So, I've got a few more grey hairs since then, that's for sure.
[0:06:07] Jacob Morgan: That's crazy, almost a decade, my goodness.
[0:06:10] David Green: And I know, obviously, I think around that time, you published a book around employee experience. We're going to talk about your new book about employee experience as well. So, employee experience has been a passion for you for a long time. And actually, when you published that first book around employee experience, it was before lots of people were talking about employee experience. I mean, you describe yourself as a futurist; you've always been at the cutting edge of where we're going with the world of work. And that leads me to the next question, really. With everything that's been happening in the world of work, have organisations lost their way when it comes to employee experience?
[0:06:47] Jacob Morgan: Yes, 100%. And my tone has changed quite a bit since that book in 2017 as well. So, the book came out in 2017, but I started doing research on that probably in like 2015. So, it's a little over a decade. And that book did very, very well at the time. And so, what started happening is I thought, "Well, it's been over a decade and maybe I should do an update to that book". And so, the plan was never to actually write a new book, it was just to take some of the concepts from the old book and make some updates to it, make some tweaks and have it come out as like a second edition. But the more and more I started writing and speaking with CHROs and kind of looking at what's going on, I realised that, wait a minute, there's enough here to just have a whole new book. And so, that's what led to the whole creation of the new book, The 8 Laws of Employee Experience.
Yeah, I think a lot of organisations very much have lost their way during and post-pandemic. And it's largely because during that time, organisations tried to be anything and everything to anybody. And as a result, they became nothing to everybody. And that, to me, is a very stark difference. It really, I think, started because the balance of power shifted so much into the hands of employees. And this, I think, is one of the pivotal things. During and post-pandemic, I'd say it was maybe 70%, 80% of the balance of power was in the hands of employees. And so, they had the opportunity to say things like, "Well, I want more money. If not, I'm going to jump ship. I want better benefits, I want more bonus, I want more equity. Oh, and by the way, I never even want to show up to the office ever again". And a lot of organisations were kind of like, "Well, I mean, what else are we going to do? So, yeah, you can have whatever you want". And that's how it was for a lot of employees inside of a lot of organisations. I think standards fell and dropped dramatically.
So, now what we're starting to see, and I wrote an article on my Substack called, "2026 is the Year of Accountability", is now the balance of power has shifted back into the hands of organisations where I think it should stay. And to be honest, I don't think it's going to leave organisations ever again. And that's because now, if an employee threatens and says, "Well, I'm going to go somewhere else", the company is going to say, "That's fine. I have a bot that can probably do a lot of the work that you're doing. I've got no problem with that". And so, I think the balance of power should be in the hands of organisations. Probably 70%, 80% should be in the hands of organisations, 20%, 30% in the hands of employees. And I know sometimes I say that, people freak out and they're like, "Oh my God, what are you talking about?"
But if you think about it, it's the organisation that takes on the risk. It's the organisation that pays your salary, that pays your benefits, that pays your bonuses; they make the investments, they pay for the space in which you work; they bring in the clients. I mean, they do everything. And so, the idea that there should be some sort of equal say between the employer who's paying you and you as the employee is nuts. And I always use the analogy that I have two small kids, a 5-year-old and a 9-year-old. If one of my kids comes to me and says, "Hey, for dinner, we want to eat ice cream and candy", it's not my job as the parent to have this be some sort of a debatable conversation. I'm not going to say, "Well, you're right, you talked me into it. Here's birthday cake, ice cream and Skittles", and whatever. No, it is 100%, "You are not eating that for dinner. It's just not going to happen".
Now, I listen to my kids, I hear what they have to say, I'm not mean to them, but it's not an equal balance of power. And I think the same thing should be true inside of organisations. You should, of course, as an organisation, as a leader, create a place where your employees have coaching and mentorship opportunities, where they're doing challenging work, where they are respected, where they feel valued. I'm not saying you shouldn't do any of that. You should, of course. But you're under no obligation as a leader, as an organisation, to have a debate with your employees about coming into the office, about anything for that matter. You can hear what your employees are saying if they have feedback for you, and let them feel heard. But it's also important to communicate with them and say, "Look, I hear what you're saying, but to be honest, this is a new policy that we're enforcing going forward. And you either have to do XYZ or unfortunately, you're going to have to look for another company". And this is exactly what Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase did. And I think we're seeing more and more organisations doing this going forward.
During the pandemic and post-pandemic, there was too much of an emphasis on inclusivity. And I'll unpack what I mean by that. Inclusivity in this sense meant that we were trying to create an organisation where we felt that anybody can show up. It doesn't matter what your values are, it doesn't matter what your beliefs are, it doesn't mean what your work ethic is, "Everybody, come in, come in, come in". That's not what an organisation is about. Leaders need to create organisations that are based on exclusivity. In other words, you don't want anyone to work at your company. You want a very specific set of people to be at your company who align with the values, with the mission, with the standards, with the policies that you set into place. And so, I mean this is what an organisation is about. Not everyone is a good fit to work at SpaceX, right? It's a very exclusive organisation to be a part of that kind of a company.
So, I think now what's happening inside of a lot of companies around the world is they're realising the mistake that they made. They're realising that they lost control. And now, they're getting a lot of that control back, which I think is a good thing. And even in my CHRO group, we have 30, I don't know, 35 CHROs in there from some of the world's biggest companies. In our last meeting a couple of days ago, this was a recurring theme. CHROs want the return to accountability and responsibility, but nobody wants to talk about it publicly. I mentioned, I interviewed 100 CHROs for my book, and one of the big themes that I heard is that the entitlement culture is real. Nobody wants to talk about it. CHROs do not want to go publicly and say, and no leader wants to go publicly inside of an organisation and say, "We messed up. We lowered our standards, we lost sight of what mattered. Our accountability dropped, and we need to get back to what makes this organisation work". Nobody wants to say that. And when I would ask CHROs, "These are great stories. Why don't you want to let me use your name and company in the book?" "We don't want to be viewed as anti-employee. We don't want to be viewed in a negative light".
So, I think for this year, we're going see more courageous leaders, more bold leaders. And they're not doing anything mean, they're not doing anything unkind. They're just saying that we need to get back to standards, we need to get back to accountability and responsibility. And I think that's actually a very, very good thing.
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Let's talk a little bit about the book first though, Jacob, because I think as you said, you were actually intending to effectively write a second edition of your book on employee experience which came out in 2017. And obviously, lots of things have happened that would warrant a pretty good update to that, given things from a technology position, the fact that we've been in and out of a pandemic since 2017. As you said, it does seem a long time ago. I think a big central part of the work that you did for this is you interviewed, I think, 100 CHROs. I've seen the press, the media pack for the book, and some of those companies are happy to be named, like Hilton, IBM, Delta, Verizon, LVMH, and probably others as well. What you've just actually walked us through there is based on those interviews; it's based on data that you've collected and interviews with CHROs as well. It's not just your opinion, which I think is important; it might be your opinion, but it's not just your opinion. Your opinion has been formed on the data that you've heard. And you talked about The 8 Laws of Employee Experience.
So, maybe if you could unpack those eight laws first, what those eight laws are, I know we're going to probably talk about at least one or two of them in a bit more detail, but I'd love to hear those eight laws. But then also, maybe even before that, what surprised you; and then, how did that inform the eight laws and what are the eight laws?
[0:16:17] Jacob Morgan: I think a few things surprised me. The first one was how many CHROs and leaders want to see more tough love and a return to accountability and responsibility, yet are scared to say it. And this is the idea of the entitlement culture is real, but nobody wants to talk about it. Nobody wants to go out there and say that the past few years were just kind of a big tornado of chaos and that it's time to get back to work. They would say that to me, but when I would ask them to use the quotes in the book, nobody wanted their name or their company name associated with that. So, I think that was one big one.
Another one is just how much of a critical and pivotal moment the pandemic actually was. There was a lot of talk during the pandemic, "Oh, we were able to still be productive, we were still able to get work done". But now that we're looking back at it, and when I talk to a lot of the CHROs, I realise how catastrophic the pandemic was to workplace practices, to how we think about culture, to how we design our organisations, to how we think about people. I mean, the whole idea of shifting from an exclusive environment to being an inclusive one where we don't care about anything, we just need bodies in the door, I think actually hurt a lot of organisations going forward. And so, that was another one.
The impact of AI and how little CHROs and business leaders are thinking about the impacts of AI. I mean, everyone that I talk to approaches it from a very surface level of productivity or cost savings. Nobody's thinking about any long-term potential implications, and we can talk about that too, as far as outsourcing critical thinking, as far as what this means for their talent pipeline at the beginning of the funnel. Nobody's thinking about the deeper consequential aspects of what happens when you give AI to thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, depending on the size of your organisation, when you give this tool to just everybody. And so, that to me was also, I think, a very, very interesting element as well. And there were a couple other titbits in there, but those were some of the big ones that came to mind.
Maybe one more, the need to return to basics. This was a theme that I heard from a lot of CHROs. We need to get back to basics. And that's really what these eight laws are. So, the eight laws that I write about in the book are a return to basics, but with a little bit of a futurist twist. So, I took all these eight laws, I unpacked them, I infused the role that AI would play in them, and I kind of looked out over ten years to give people a picture of what these things can and potentially should look like over the next decade. And so, that's really what these eight laws are.
But I think there's a lot of very interesting and dramatic change happening especially for the CHRO role. One of the things I talked about in the book is CHROs are now the CEOs of people. They are the Chief Future of Work Officers inside of organisations, and very few of them actually think of their role as such. And I think that's a very, very big mistake, and it's putting a lot of pressure and a lot of challenge on the CHRO and just the HR function in general.
[0:19:51] David Green: What do you think makes a really great CHRO in 2026? Obviously, you talked about them being the CEO of people. I guess that's a central part of it.
[0:20:00] Jacob Morgan: Yeah. Understanding that their role is the CEO of people, I think, is a critical one. Thinking of themselves as the Chief Future of Work Officer. The HR, the CHRO, and again, when I say CHRO, you can also kind of interchange that with the HR function in general, used to be very much a support function. Hiring, firing, compliance. It was there for legal purposes. It is now becoming, I think, one of the most important and critical functions inside of any organisation, because it's the only role that kind of fuses and touches every single employee inside the organisation, and not just thinks about the present state, but also the future state, and not just from an individual perspective, but from a company perspective, where is the future of the company going? And so, it's a very unique role in the sense that it thinks about the micro on an individual level, it thinks about the macro in terms of on a company level, it thinks about the present and the future state of both of those things, and it's also one of the only roles that is kind of blending together different competencies.
So, a lot of CHROs now are having to think about AI. A lot of them are in the conversation or running AI strategies, they're running culture, they're running team performance, they're running leadership. So, they have their hands in pretty much every aspect of how the business functions. And that is also a very, very unique role. It's no longer just about the traditional compliance aspects of HR. It's really about how the business operates. And so, we actually had in one of our CHRO meetings, this was maybe, I don't know, a month or two ago, we had the COO from an organisation join us. She used to be the CHRO, and it was from UniFirst; her name is Kelly Rooney. So, she used to be the CHRO of Waste Management. She's now the COO of UniFirst. And she came in and we did a candid Q&A with her. And she was talking about how CHROs now need to have a strong level of business acumen that they didn't have before. So, you can't just rely on things like engagement metrics anymore, you can't just rely on things like satisfaction, you can't just rely on things like turnover. You're now sitting at the business table with everybody else and you need to speak in the language of dollars and cents.
So, that, at least for a lot of the CHROs during the meeting, was kind of a revelatory eye-opening moment, because they realised how their approach, how the language, how their function itself is evolving to being more of a kind of strategic business function instead of a support function.
[0:22:41] David Green: And yeah, I mean we've definitely seen that with the work we've been doing Insight222 over the last decade. As you said, what was predominantly a support function is much more a strategic function or certainly should be. And you talk there about being the Chief Future of Work Officer. The role's got bigger, more complex or challenging. And as you said, it's not just about thinking about the employees, it's about thinking about the organisation. And probably, maybe one of the challenges that we're facing and maybe why employee experience is changing and maybe why we need to have a better balance, maybe that we'll talk about as well, and from what you said earlier, is work is changing. I mean, obviously, as a futurist, when you've be looking forward and looking at how these eight laws are going to evolve over the next decade, I mean it's obviously hard to do that because no one can predict that with that much certainty what's going to happen with technology because things are developing so fast. But I mean, I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. Work is changing, isn't it? And I sense that most CHROs are struggling with that, and HR professionals, and frankly, CEOs as well.
[0:23:55] Jacob Morgan: Yeah. I mean, work is changing. And it's sort of like the value of work is changing. How we define work is changing. I mean, I think one of the biggest ways that we're seeing this is that traditionally, the way that you could tell if somebody was working or contributing is you would see like, are you in meetings; are you online; are you submitting your presentations? That's kind of how you can tell if somebody was working. They're creating whatever the product is and delivering it to you. But now, a lot of organisations are going to shift from that way of measuring work to measuring it more in terms of what is the impact that you're having. Because if AI is able to do the support functions of your role, that really means that you as a human are now having to demonstrate the impact that you're having. And so, the way that we think about changing performance, the way that we think about changing team structures, I'm trying to remember which company it was, I think it was Meta recently, somebody can fact check me on this, but I believe it was Meta that said that they had one employee and a team of agents, a team of bots, as a team, that was being more productive and more efficient than a traditional team that you would think of.
So, work is fundamentally changing in terms of how we think about work, how we define the value of work, the role that humans play in work, and even viewing work more as a product. And so, if you think about it nowadays, when you do work with these AI tools, you can kind of test and iterate the work the way that you would as a product before you deliver it. So, you can have multiple AI, like if you're in marketing, you can have AI generate multiple marketing campaigns for you, multiple types of messaging for you, create multiple scenarios for you. It can do this kind of analysis for you. And so, the work that you're delivering is now actually a product and lives inside of an iterative product cycle. And that's also a very unique way to think about work. And so, I think there are a lot of really interesting and fundamental changes that are in there. Of course, you're managing AI agents as a form of coworker now; whether you look at what's happening with entry-level employees, we could talk about that as well, the entry-level kind of career ladder, what's going on there.
I mean, there's just so many interesting different angles that we can take when thinking about how work is evolving. But I think it's clear that it is changing, it is evolving, and a lot of people are trying to figure out what this means and how and what do we do to keep up.
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What are the best CHROs doing to help their organisations meet that challenge?
[0:27:58] Jacob Morgan: I think there are a few things. So, a lot of organisations, I find a lot of CHROs are still very much playing defence. They themselves are trying to figure out what this means. And there are a lot of trending -- there was a gaming company and I don't want to say the name because I don't know if it was this company, but there was one gaming company I don't think it was Riot Games, it was one of those gaming companies where there was a meme that was going around that ended up getting leaked online, where in internal Slack channels, a lot of employees were just making these funny memes that were just saying, "More AI, more AI, more AI". And that seemed to be kind of the theme that a lot of organisations are pursuing. In other words, they don't know why they are going down the AI path, but they know they need it.
I always like to ask CHROs, because the ROI question always comes up, which I think eventually will become a moot point, because AI is going to be viewed as a tool just like any other, your laptop, your phone, your whatever. And you know the ROI of your laptop or your phone; AI is going to be the same thing. And I asked CHROs, I said, "If I could tell you that you're never going to be able to prove the ROI of any of the AI tools that you're using, you know, subjectively, your employees might tell you that it's helping them and you might see subjectively better quality work, but you could never put a dollar and figure on either productivity or cost savings, would you still make the investment?" And pretty much every CHRO, he says, "Yeah, we would still make the investment because we know the implications, we know that our competitors have it, we've seen what it can do".
So, to your question around what are CHROs doing, I think number one is you need to have a very clear 'why' behind your AI strategy. So, employees need to know what's going on. You can't just go to employees and say, "Hey, use AI". Employees are like, "Okay, well, am I still doing the same amount of work? Is my performance structure going to change? Am I automating myself here? Am I supposed to be competing with AI? Help me understand, what is the point here?" And so, being able to communicate that, I think, is critical. The second is CHROs need to be able to themselves, and also to teach the leaders inside the organisation, teach them how do you pull out the human element from AI? And so, for example, one of the five futures that I talk about in my book is this one called the Algorithmic Enterprise. And in the Algorithmic Enterprise, it appears that the organisation is collectively smarter, it appears that the emails are getting a little bit more polished, the presentations are better. Everyone feels, at least the way they communicate, you're like, "Wow, our level of knowledge and expertise really went up". But really, what's happening is that you're just becoming the physical manifestation of your Chatbot. And when you're pressed and when you're pushed, you're not able to defend your positions, you're not able to think critically.
So, one of the critical skills that CHROs and leaders need to be able to possess is knowing that your teams are using AI. How do you challenge them and push them to get the human element? So, for example, if we're on the same team and I know you're doing work and you submit it, I might say, "Hey David, did you use any kind of AI tool for this?" And you'll say, "Yeah, I did, I used ChatGPT". I'll say, "Great. Did you think that ChatGPT missed anything? Did you agree with all of the analysis that ChatGPT put together? Did it make any mistakes during this process? If you didn't have ChatGPT, would you have come to the same conclusions? Help me understand, how did you frame this? What prompt did you use to get this information?"
So, you need to be able to pull out the human element and to be able to press on employees who are using AI tools. Because otherwise, what's going to happen is that let's say we're on the same team and our company, our team, is making a new potential strategic change in direction. I want direction A and you want direction B. And so, I take all of our company documents and information, I put it into ChatGPT, and I say, "Make me a bulletproof argument for why we have to go in direction A". You do the same thing, and you say, "Make me a bulletproof argument for why we should go in direction B". And we both present, I'm presenting what ChatGPT told me, and you're presenting what ChatGPT told you. And so, now what's happening is that it's just ChatGPT arguing against itself, and there's no human element in there. And so, this is a worry that a lot of organisations are not thinking about, is when you give these AI tools to thousands of your employees, and if you don't communicate with them the right way and you don't pull out the human element, you're just going to have the Borg from Star Trek inside your organisation. And the scary thing is you're not even going to know. You're not even going to know unless you actually press and push. And so, I think that's a very, very critical element for CHROs.
I think another one is being able to create very strong partnerships between the HR and the IT function. That goes without saying, because these two functions are getting responsible for all the AI implementations inside the company going forward. So, those are probably some of the places I would start as far as what makes a great CHRO for 2026, and also making a big push towards accountability and responsibility for this year going forward. And one element of that is I would love to see more CHROs shift the conversation away from, what does the company owe you to what do you owe the company when you show up; meaning, I would love to see the conversation shift away from employees who show up to work and complain and assume the company has to provide everything to them, to the conversation moving towards, as an employee, what is your responsibility and accountability when you show up? What is your responsibility over your own engagement, over your own life, over your own wellbeing? Can you just go home at the end of each day, play video games, drink, smoke, gamble, and not make time to go out and then spend time with your friends and then just show up to work and say, I'm lonely, I'm depressed, I can't manage my money? Is it the company's responsibility to do that for you if you're an adult a grown individual? No.
So, I would love to see CHROs coming out and say, "Look, we're going to do everything that we can to support you and to help make sure that you can succeed here. But at the end of the day, you're an adult". It's funny, I was listening to, I think it was Dennis Prager, a while ago, and he had this great formula for unhappiness. He said, "Unhappiness equals your image minus reality". So, in other words, unhappiness equals if you have this image in your mind that your organisation is going to be Pinocchio's Island, but the reality is that it's not, you're going to become unhappy. So, we need to reframe the image of what an organisation is about. It's not Pinocchio's Island, it's not unlimited food and perks and hot yoga, that's not what the organisation is. And so, leaders around the world need to collectively step up and say, "We need to change what the image of work is, to change what the image of our organisation is, and kind of rebalance". And I think that's actually going to help a lot with employee engagement and employee happiness around the world. When you tell employees that you are actually more responsible over your life and your engagement and your happiness than you think, I think we're going to start to see a lot of positive improvements.
[0:34:68] David Green: Let's break that down a little bit, Jacob, because obviously this is, I think, the key thing that really struck me from the book, and obviously listening to you as well, and also the fact that you interviewed all those CHROs and worked with those CHROs, and they're saying they wish that they could talk about this accountability, this shift and making it maybe more weighted towards the employer rather than employee. And you talk about striking that balance. You're not saying it's going to be all completely one-sided. You've talked about the responsibility around coaching and mentoring and giving people opportunities, etc. So, that balance between empathy, as it were, or experience and performance, can you share more on that binding, and maybe talk to how leaders should think about achieving that right balance without sounding, and again, to one of the words that you used earlier, that anti-employee thing; because obviously, that's not good, because at the end of the day, you still need to be able to attract, develop, and retain the right talent in your organisation relative to your competitors, whether that's your industry competitors, your geographic competitors, etc. So, you still need to strike that balance, I presume that that's the case.
How do you do that so that the company wins and the employees win as well? Because at the end of the day, it's mutually beneficial -- that's my view, tell me if I'm wrong -- it's mutually beneficial if employees and companies win, because then companies are more successful.
[0:36:37] Jacob Morgan: Yes. And I realised I never answered one part of your question. You asked me about the eight laws. So, maybe I can answer this one and then I give you that?
[0:36:42] David Green: Yes, because that might help actually with this, yeah.
[0:36:35] Jacob Morgan: So, law number 1 is, "Decode the human signal", which is this idea of knowing your people. And you know your people on a human level, and you also know your people on a technology level. And within that, in the book, there's kind of a ten-year lookout on what that looks like, the AI component that goes in there, but it's really know your people. Law number 2 is, "Act with empathetic excellence", which I think is the one that you were referring to. And 'act with empathetic excellence' came about because there was a lot of pushback around DEI, there was a lot of discussions around merit and competence, all that sort of stuff. So, this is a kind of a very simple framework. 'Act with empathetic excellence' means there should be three things you focus on: competence, merit, and empathy. And we can kind of go back and unpack that.
Law number 3 is, "Grow or go". It's the idea that learning withinside of your organisation is a new form of job security. And so, it's no longer a nice to have, but the idea of 'grow or go' basically means that either you give people the opportunity to grow and develop inside your organisation or they're going to go. So, 'grow or go'. Next one, "Design for flexibility", and flexibility not just in the sense of where employees work, but I kind of have this image in the book of almost being able to turn up and turn down knobs on a dial for your career. I want more mentorship, I want to work more hours, I want more money, I want to be in a leadership role. So, imagine having all these different dials where you can customise your preferences. And so, that's kind of the ultimate layer of flexibility. I acknowledge some of these things are not possible now, but again, we're looking out ten years.
The next one is, "Make people the first principle". It's something that everybody talks about, but very few organisations do. It's not just about the values that you stick on the walls. The next one is, "Lead like the experience starts with you". And this is a tough-love approach for all the leaders out there, all the managers out there, that you shape employee experience. And then, the next one is, "Use technology to amplify humanity", so to unlock the unique human capabilities of people. And the last law is, "Run culture like an operating system". So, just like on your phone, on your computer, you have an operating system, culture needs to be run the same way. So, again, those are the eight laws and they should sound basic because it is a return back to basics. But the book unpacks what these mean, how to do it, the frameworks, the role that AI plays and ten years of what this is going to look like.
[0:39:19] David Green: Great. And the book's out now, it's just come out, hasn't it?
[0:39:23] Jacob Morgan: Yes, sir. Yes. Very exciting.
[0:39:26] David Green: So, that probably lends us to, let's talk a little bit about the 'act with empathetic excellence', if I could actually say it properly. You said there's three components to that. So, maybe let's walk through that, because I think that will help us with this conversation around getting that balance right between employer, employee.
[0:39:45] Jacob Morgan: Sure. So, 'act with empathetic excellence' is a little bit of an equation. I call it the "Empathetic excellence equation". So, it's competence plus merit plus empathy equals empathetic excellence. So, competence is a combination of your skills, your knowledge, your talents, your abilities, "Can you do the job and can you do the job well?" Merit is about the recognition and the value that the organisation places on your competence, whether it's your equity, your bonus, your compensation, whatever it might be, it's how you get rewarded. And empathy is kind of what binds everything together. This is seeing the full person, challenges that maybe you had to overcome, the obstacles, your aspirations, your growth potential. And so, those three things are what empathetic excellence is all about. So, the argument that I make in the book is that when you're looking at talent, whether it's current, whether it's future talent, existing talent, those three things, that should be kind of the equation that you use. And I'll give you just an example of what happens, because I have a Venn diagram in the book of those three components and how they overlap and what happens if you don't have all three.
So, for example, look at what happens when you have merit and empathy. And I think this is what we saw during and post-pandemic. And again, merit, people are getting rewarded and paid and compensated; and you have empathy, where everyone feels good. But you don't have competence. And so, in that kind of an environment where you have the merit and you have the empathy, but not the competence, you get what I call the "Coddled mediocrity trap". And this is exactly what happened during the pandemic and post-pandemic. We created the coddled mediocrity trap, kind of Pinocchio's Island, so to speak. I'll give you one more. Let's say you have merit and competence, but no empathy. So, you only focus on getting the best people all the time, work, work, work, and we're going to pay you really, really well, but the human element isn't in there. Then, you get what I call the "Performance treadmill", and eventually people burn out. So, you're on that treadmill, and it's sort of like the incline is going up, the speed is going up, incline going up, speed going up, boom, boom, boom, and eventually you fall off the treadmill.
So, the ideal is that you want all three of these things to be there. You want to have competence, you want to have empathy, and you want to have merit. That's kind of the ideal.
[0:42:12] David Green: This 'design for flexibility', I'd love to hear about this because this is, I think, something that probably will strike a chord, I think, with a lot of listeners.
[0:42:21] Jacob Morgan: Every company should do what works for them. And I know there's all these studies and things that keep coming out around work from home, work in the office. I always tell companies, "Listen to that with a grain of salt". You have your data, you do what makes sense for you. You want employees back into the office? Great. You want employees never to show up? Great. Do what works for you? I don't care about what anybody else says. So, the idea of 'design for flexibility' is the idea of, how do we one day create maximum flexibility inside of organisations? And in the book, I have a framework called CORE, which is sort of four elements that are required to make that happen. So, the C is a cultural evolution. So, obviously, flexibility in the degree that we're talking about requires a change in how we think about work, for an employee to be able to adjust, "Do I want to be in a leadership role? Do I want to make more money? Do I want to travel? Do I want to be in the office or not?" Being able to just do that, for a leader and for a team, requires a lot of just cultural, how do we do that?
The O is an opportunity marketplace. This is like the internal talent marketplaces. I wrote about this over a decade ago, I know you've been talking about this for a while. But the cool thing is that it's now actually starting to happen and AI is really enabling that. So, how do you create marketplaces inside your organisation, where employees are matched based on skills, based on preferences, based on the work that they want to do? How does AI help with that? The E stands for enabling technologies. And so, what are the different technologies that we're going to need to be able to make that happen? And of course, whether you look at AI powered talent systems, blockchain-based skill credentials, again I mentioned the internal talent marketplaces, real-time learning ecosystems, micro-credentialing. There's a lot of technological foundations that have to exist inside of an organisation, digital twins, which I'm sure you've talked about, I think I've heard you talk about before, collaboration tools. There's a lot on the technology layer that has to sit to be able to make that happen. Quantum computing, another one.
R is a real-time command centre, where I basically imagine a dashboard that an employee has and the leader has. And on that dashboard, you can see, you log in, you see, "Here are potential opportunities that are suggested for you from AI, here's potential courses that you should take if you want to transition". It's all AI powered. It's like every employee has their own AI career assistant, that every day is interacting with them and engaging with them and talking to them and asking them, "Where do you want to go? Here are opportunities. Are you interested? Here's how you can apply. Do this". And then again, the E is enabling technologies that sit at the bottom of all that.
So, that, I think, will one day happen. I mean, if I had to guess, I would say four or five years from now, we're going to see a lot of that kind of stuff being infused inside of organisations. And having that kind of flexibility, I think, will be very, very fascinating for employees and organisations and leaders. So, a part of that flexibility also, and I can't remember, I think I talked about this in the book, is expectations. And we were talking about the return to office and stuff like that. I think one of the biggest challenges that we see in organisations today is there's a mismatch in terms of expectations. And so, if you're an employee in an organisation and you realise, "I never want to show up to the office. I'm happy to just work 32 hours a week from home", okay, that's fine. But then don't expect that you're going to get promoted into a leadership role. Don't expect that you're going to get the same bonuses and the same compensation that somebody else, who's maybe working 40 to 50 hours a week, who's coming into the office.
So, the expectations, and I always tell my daughter this because she plays competitive chess, and I say, "Anything in life, it's not that difficult". The inputs that you put in should ideally result in the outputs that you get. And so, all the leaders that I've talked to, and I'm sure you've talked to many of them, you've interviewed many of them, they work 60, 70, 80 hours a week. They work like crazy people, but they work like that because those are the rewards that they want. They want the equity, they want the high compensation, they want the senior executive role, they want the responsibility. It's not for everybody. And so, I think now in 2026 and beyond, if you are one of those people who have aspirations of leadership and you're willing to work hard and you're willing to step up and you're willing to make sacrifices, you have such an opportunity right now to communicate that to your leaders and say, "Look, I don't care what Joe's doing over there. I'm happy to show up to work. Put me on the hard projects. I'm happy to put in the extra time. I'm happy to make the sacrifices. I'm happy to go to this place or that place to relocate. You tell me what I need to do. I want to be a director or a VP in this company. Tell me what I need to do to get there". If you're that kind of a person, the sky's the limit for you.
But if you're the opposite kind of a person where you're like, "Well, I really want that work-life balance. I don't want to be in the office that much, it's kind of a lot". That's okay too, but you just can't expect the same outcome as the other person.
[0:47:45] David Green: Jacob, we've got time, three questions we're going to do reasonably quick. We're going to look at one more of your eight laws, I'm then going to ask you where people should get started with their reset, then we're going to do the question of the series. So, let's start with, let's go to the technology one, law 7. So, "Use technology to amplify humanity". I love this because you've looked ahead ten years. As AI becomes more embedded in how work gets done, what does 'amplifying humanity' actually look like in practice?
[0:48:15] Jacob Morgan: Yeah, this is a big topic of conversation. It's happening all over the place now, especially when we think about automation and replacing human jobs. It's a huge, huge area of conversation. I look at it as kind of three unique ways that technology amplifies humanity, and those three ways are connection, insight, and enablement. So, when you look at the connection piece, for example, so technology allows humans to connect with each other, right? So, we connect on a human level through collaboration platforms, you get the personalisation at scale, you get proactive support if an organisation thinks you're going to be maybe a turnover risk, you kind of understand the why and what's next inside of an organisation. So, it's the connection. It brings people together using these tools and technologies.
Insight. Insight is exactly what it sounds like, it's the data that you get from inside your organisation. So, feeding data that you have in these AI tools, having it analyse, having it interpret for you, having it make sense of certain decisions that you can or shouldn't make inside the organisation. So, you get a lot of fundamental and powerful insight inside your company, what makes a successful team? What makes a successful employee? I mean, skills, what skills do we need in the future of our organisation? What skills are going to be outdated? What roles should we be creating? So, you get a lot of fascinating insight.
Then, the last element of this is the enablement piece. And enablement is really what highlights the human capabilities. Enablement is, how do we use technology to remove the mundane aspects of the work that you're doing, to allow you to focus on the unique human aspects of the work that you're doing? So, maybe you're in marketing, maybe you're in HR. Instead of producing documents, instead of doing reports, instead of doing analysis, compensation bands, and this and that, you have AI doing all of these kind of non-human elements for you, and now you are focusing on the human side of things. You're selling the vision, you're selling the dream inside the organisation, you're building the relationships, you're creating trust, you're using judgment, you're using critical thinking, you're challenging people on a human level. And so, AI, I think, has tremendous capability to actually make the organisation more human and not less human.
It's funny, because a lot of organisations, they use AI, but it creates more distance between employees and between the organisation and employees, or employees and customers and the organisation than it creates closeness. Even the other day, we were having an internet outage and I called our internet provider, Spectrum. And I had my wife record the conversation because it was so funny. You dial a number, you get a phone tree and you get the phone tree, but the phone tree goes to a dead end. And so, the phone tree says, "Would you like an update on when the guy's going to come to your house to fix your internet?" I said, "Yes". And it says, "Great". And then it says, "One second, I'll transfer you". And then it says, "Sorry, we don't have enough information, you didn't give us your phone number. Goodbye". But at no point during the call does it ask me for my phone number and it just hangs up. It's like ramming your head into a wall. So, here's a company that's clearly using technology. I don't know if they're using AI internally, but it creates more distance between me as the customer and the organisation than it creates closeness.
But companies who can do it correctly and who can do it well, I think are going to see a lot of unique benefits here. So, again, the enablement, unlock the empathy, unlock the creativity, the innovation, collaboration, team-building. I think this is going to be a very, very exciting time for organisations.
[0:52:07] David Green: And that leads nicely, Jacob, I think to the question of the series. So, this is a question we're asking every guest in this series of the podcast. How can HR lead the responsible and ethical adoption of AI, not just manage it?
[0:52:21] Jacob Morgan: Oh, that's a very good question.
[0:52:23] David Green: Lead, not manage. What's HR's role?
[0:52:27] Jacob Morgan: I think it's asking the right questions. I think HR's role should be asking the right questions in terms of, where do we want this to go? What's going to happen if our AI tools get challenged? So, the way that I like to think about it is a lot of people assume that the culture inside your organisation is set by your leaders, it's set by the behaviours, it's set by the training that HR is responsible for, which as of now is true. But what HR needs to realise is that going forward, the culture is going to be dictated by what the systems inside your organisation allow. And so, for example, if the systems are going to be responsible for training, for hiring, for performance, for trying to figure out who should be let go, for all these different strategic human decisions inside your company, if AI is going to be responsible for that, then AI is essentially shaping the culture inside your company, because depending on who it promotes or why, that's culture.
So, CHROs need to ask themselves, how do we make sure that AI is helping us create the right culture that we want inside of our organisation? And not only that, but HR also needs to understand that employees are going to ask questions when AI makes certain decisions, why did David get promoted and not me? "Oh, well, AI said…" Well, I want to know, what did AI use, what are the variables that AI used to decide that David is a better fit for this role than Jacob? Because if you're asking a leader, a leader can explain that to you and say, "Well, I spent a lot of time with David. David's just a little bit better in ambiguous situations and scenarios than you are. And we have some turbulence coming up in the business, and I think David is just a little bit better at managing that and staying cool and level-headed. You're close, but you're not there yet". How is AI going to explain that?
So, HR needs to make sure that it's asking the right questions, both in terms of how AI is making certain decisions, and also how is AI going to be shaping the culture and the values inside of our organisations, because that's something HR leaders don't think about. What your systems allow is going to dictate and shape the culture that your organisation creates. So, I think those are two big ones. And obviously, building better relationships with IT teams, trying to figure out the skills that are going to be required in the organisation and kind of building those out. So, there's a lot of pressure and a lot of opportunity, I think, for CHROs out there.
[0:55:07] David Green: You're right, Jacob. Last question. So, CHROs listening to this, maybe heads of employee experience that are thinking, "Yeah, maybe it's time that we revisited our employee experience", where should they start with their reset?
[0:55:20] Jacob Morgan: So, if they want to start with their reset, I think there are a couple of places that you can start. So, one of them is in the book. There are a few places, but this is probably the one that I would start with. So, in the book, I have a framework called STEEPLE, and I've done this exercise with a lot of CHROs and organisations over the years. It's an acronym. It stands for Social, Technology, Economic, Environment, Political, Legal, and Ethical. And these are basically external forces that are impacting organisation and your business. And so, one of the first things that you can do is go through each one of these forces and identify what are the key trends underneath each one of these forces that we should be paying attention to. So, let me just give you one example. Underneath the social force, there are a couple of trends that are underneath the social force. So, number one, the purposed-first workforce, right, purpose meaning, that's a trend underneath the social force; the loneliness epidemic, that is a trend underneath the social force. Underneath the technology force, we see AI augmented workflows, continuous feedback, ecosystems, those are trends underneath that force. So, go through those forces, identify what are the most important trends underneath each one of those forces that we should be paying attention to, and which ones are hype that are not worth paying attention to. I think that's probably a very good high-level place to start, and it'll kind of help you branch out from there.
[0:56:56] David Green: Jacob, I always enjoy talking to you. We've had a great debate, I think. It's fantastic. I definitely recommend The 8 Laws of Employee Experience to anyone listening, really. How can listeners find out more about your work, find out more about The 8 Laws of Employee Experience and all the other great work that you're doing?
[0:57:16] Jacob Morgan: Yeah, thank you first for having me. It's always great to speak with you. Hopefully people listening to this, I hope I did upset some people, because if I come on the podcast and everyone is just kind of like, "Yeah, I agree, that's fine..." I want people to feel upset and challenged and pushed and stressed. And so, if you disagree with me on anything or agree or have comments, I like to give my email. It's Jacob@TheFutureOrganization.com. The book URL that we made is the 8exlaws.com. And then, the CHRO group, if anyone is interested, is called the futureofworkleaders.com. And then, I'm pretty easy to find on social media. My main website is thefutureorganization.com.
[0:58:00] David Green: Jacob, that's great. And we'll put those links in the show notes as well for those of you that aren't able to jot them down, because maybe you're out for a run or you're listening to this in the gym or driving. We don't want you writing while you're driving, definitely not. So, Jacob, it's an absolute pleasure. Hopefully, we'll see each other in person at some point this year, either in the US or in Europe, perhaps. But thank you very much for being on the show.
[0:58:22] Jacob Morgan: Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.
[0:58:25] David Green: Thank you again, Jacob, for joining me today. I really enjoyed our conversation. For those of you listening, I'm curious, what stood out for you the most from today's episode? I'd love to hear your thoughts. So, do head over to LinkedIn, find my post about this episode, and let me know what resonated with you. I always read the comments and love learning about the different perspectives in the field. And if this conversation got you thinking, please subscribe to the podcast and pass it along to a colleague or friend who might benefit from hearing it too. It really does help us continue to bring these conversations to HR professionals across the world.
For those who would like to stay in the loop of what we're doing at Insight222, follow us on LinkedIn or head to insight222.com. You can also sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter at myHRfuture.com to get the latest thinking on HR, people analytics and everything shaping our field. Right, that's all for today. Thanks for listening and we'll be back next week with another episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast. Until then, take care and stay well.