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Newsweek
17-07-2025
- Business
- Newsweek
Why Culture Amp Launched an AI-Powered Coaching Tool
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. Business leaders may know Culture Amp as the software for rolling out engagement surveys and understanding employee sentiment. The company is taking an interesting approach with its new, AI-powered agentic offering: a performance and career coach for employees and leaders called AI Coach. This offering will leverage the data behind years of employee surveys and culture measurement to give people and team leaders actionable ideas and automated outreach. "If we think about our mission of creating a better world of work, we see the power of coaching as being really critical to that," Amy Lavoie, VP of people science experience at Culture Amp, told Newsweek. "But also, coaching has historically been really kind of reserved for a few people in an extremely manual and expensive way." The new tool launches in Q3 2025, according to a company release, which also notes that AI Coach draws on insights collected from over 1.5 billion workplace data points and a large language model (LLM) "specifically trained using industrial and organizational psychology principles to deliver purpose-built workplace coaching that drives impactful behavior change." While Culture Amp has long provided leaders with datasets and survey tools, the purpose of AI Coach is to deliver real-time employee sentiment to leaders and offer takeaways from behavioral data so that managers don't have to parse through dense reports for actionable information. Culture Amp's AI Coach offers proactive advice to managers and employees around goal setting and performance. Culture Amp's AI Coach offers proactive advice to managers and employees around goal setting and performance. Culture Amp "AI Coach is not just about providing advice; it's about enabling managers to develop crucial skills, navigate difficult conversations, and inspire meaningful action within their teams," said Chris Mander, chief product officer at Culture Amp. Richard Taylor, senior vice president, people experience at Nasdaq, said AI Coach "democratizes access to personalized guidance, empowering managers to lead with confidence." The feedback that managers and employees receive from AI Coach will be customized for their department, level and other contextual information. One might think Culture Amp would deploy artificial intelligence (AI) and agentic capabilities to help people make more surveys faster. But Lavoie explains that the company and its product organization saw an opportunity to advance the platform's capabilities. "I don't think the answer is more data and insights, it's actually the story of the data," Lavoie said. "How do you, like, help me weave all these things together alongside the context of my organization, to serve it up in a sentence or two that helps, helps people remember it and want to do something with it." Overworked managers sometimes don't have time to review engagement survey data. Because the data is backward-looking and takes time to analyze, managers are reviewing information that is not as current as it could be. They don't always have strong data judgment to read through graphs and charts to glean the important takeaways for their teams. "Very often, if you just present [managers] with a ton of insights, they actually feel paralyzed, not motivated to work," Lavoie said. "It's that story, that narrative of the data in the context of my organization, that AI Coach can help them do without always needing [a] people scientist who can do that for them." Culture Amp AI Coach can help managers in real-time as they respond to employee questions and requests. Culture Amp AI Coach can help managers in real-time as they respond to employee questions and requests. Culture Amp Advancements in AI and machine learning have allowed for this advancement in Culture Amp's product and potentially the practice of management, if better assistance is available to employees at work. "We can know what the other managers who've done well, what did they do to improve their scores. In the past [...], you just have to go talk to hundreds of people," Lavoie said. "Identifying what are the behaviors that make the biggest difference on improving scores, if somebody is working on, decision making, then we can go look. We can go isolate the teams that have improved decision making and see specifically what they have done and what they've logged in the system, and then bring that perspective back."
Times
19-06-2025
- Business
- Times
What's the answer to all these engagement surveys?
We live in a feedback economy. I am bombarded with endless emails and alerts asking me to rate Uber drivers, shoe shops and even short rail journeys. 'We'd love two minutes of your time to hear your feedback on your recent booking to Watford Junction,' was a recent one. But for many, there is one feedback request that has become as a regular feature of office life as the stressy emails about dirty mugs in the kitchen: the employee engagement survey. Last week, I attended The Festival of Work, which you may think is oxymoronic, but there were taco stalls, selfie booths, a 'wellbeing village' and lots of bunting. It was the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development's annual conference, a shindig for HR executives, held in Excel London; 13,000 people attended and I don't think all of them were there for the free biros and Cadbury Heroes, which — and surely a sign of an impending recession — appear to have replaced Tony's Chocolonely as the free confectionery of choice at conferences. HR used to be about recruiting and firing workers, sorting out their pay and benefits. Now? In the words of Hi Bob, the main sponsor of the Festival of Work, it's all about 'powering productivity, engagement, and retention'. The Holy Grail of all HR managers: engage your workers and they'll be more productive. Or that's the theory. 'Absolutely, you can see that connection between a highly engaged workforce and a higher performance,' says Steph Kukoyi, senior people scientist at Culture Amp, another sponsor. How do you know if your workers are engaged? Well, you survey them. As both Hi Bob and Culture Amp design and undertake employee engagement surveys for companies it is understandable they emphasise the relationship between productivity and engagement — a rather woolly term that can mean anything from 'highly-motivated' to 'not resentful about turning up to work'. The biggest of all these survey companies is Gallup, which claims 'measuring and managing engagement in your organisation is critical to the success of your employees and organization as a whole'. Could there be a link between this statement and the fact Gallup charges thousands of pounds to companies to survey their workers? I couldn't possibly say. What I can say is that the employee engagement industry has become a huge one, supported by company directors. At Lloyds Bank, Charlie Nunn, the chief executive, last year received a £1.27 million bonus, some of which was decided on a 'culture and colleague engagement' score — one of many CEOs rewarded in this way. This, of course, may explain why workers are endlessly pestered to fill in forms saying how happy they are. But is it making any difference? Is asking millions of workers how strongly they agree or disagree with the statement 'my manager genuinely cares about my wellbeing' improving productivity? Looking at Gallup's data, the answer is: no. Its most recent data prompted the slightly hysterical headline from Gallup itself: 'Employee Engagement on the Brink'. This was because the global percentage of engaged employees fell from 23 per cent to 21 per cent. But, if you go back to 2011 it was 12 per cent and had steadily increased since, before reversing slightly in the last couple of years. Engagement has slowly improved over time but we know from the economic data, productivity has stalled. The link between the two is shaky at best, and even companies that can prove a correlation — from their own data — struggle to prove a causal link. Paul Sweeney, author of Magnetic Nonsense: a short history of bullshit at work and how to make it go away, categorises engagement surveys as: 'Let's ask the children how they're feeling, and then we can give them a playdate to cheer them up.' They tackle the symptoms of problems in the workplace, not the root causes. Also, he says, the surveys create 'an unhealthy dynamic where employees think the way to solve problems is to complain about them in the survey, with no responsibility on their part to help resolve the issues'. There are some solutions. One is to forget a big, cumbersome annual survey with 57 different questions to which most people answer 'neither agree nor disagree', with so-called pulse surveys asking just a couple of focused questions once a month. Another route is the AI one. I met an interesting company at the Festival of Work called Inpulse, which instead of asking workers to 'agree or disagree' with rote statements, asks them how they feel by getting them to write a sentence or two into a text box. It then asks them why they feel that way. 'It is super open-ended. It lets them direct the conversation,' says Andrew Nguyen, co-ceo at Inpulse. 'By asking the employee how they're feeling and why, you get a much richer data set.' The company then uses AI to scan the language and categorise the comments so the company can work out how proud, committed or stressed and unappreciated they are. Inpulse is already working with the likes of Balfour Beatty, and Arriva. It is very clever and I can see this approach might get more useful results than asking people to score everything on a five-point scale. But the method doesn't matter if the management uses the data to prove what it wanted to hear in the first place or uses it as a way to ignore having difficult conversations with its staff. As Nguyen himself says, the survey only works if workers can see that 'their input is heard and valued and acted on'. Did anything change as a result of the last employee engagement survey? Were the nightmare rotas sorted? Did someone stop leaving dirty mugs in the kitchen? Because if nothing changes, these surveys are as pointless and as annoying as asking me about my trip to Watford Junction.
The Age
12-06-2025
- Business
- The Age
Want to enjoy your job? Then it's time to ditch the small talk
Here's a statistic that might shock you: we will spend around one third of all the waking hours of our life at work. That's a third of our limited time here working alongside a random collection of people all thrown together by the allure of similar careers and industries. Most of these strangers will float in and out of your life, becoming faint memories. A small minority of them, if you're lucky, will jump across the imaginary boundary to become real, lifelong friends outside the workplace. Work is not your family (and never should be), however the relationships we form between 9 and 5 are still an important part of our lives. But how well do you know the people you work with? And by well, I mean, how much do you really know about them beyond where they live and what their children's names are? If you want to improve your job, one of the best things you can is to improve your relationships at work, and there's a fascinating amount of research that backs this up. Culture Amp, the Australian employee experience platform, recently found that employees who report strong team relationships are 39 per cent more likely to perform at a high level, and that a sense of belonging at work – a by-product of good relationships – boosts performance likelihood by 31 per cent. 'The evidence is clear that meaningful workplace relationships drive performance, innovation and retention,' says Justin Angsuwat, the Chief People Officer at Culture Amp. Building stronger relationships doesn't happen accidentally. It takes a little bit of vulnerability and a commitment to honesty. 'Every leader wants a high-performing team, but as leaders we usually only focus on outputs, metrics, deliverables and deadlines without focusing on the human dynamics that drive those results. Our research showed, time and time again, that those dynamics, particularly strong relationships at work, aren't just a nice-to-have, they're really quite foundational.' There are many ways you can strengthen your relationships at work, like spending quality time with colleagues, creating memories outside the workplace, and striving together towards common goals.
Sydney Morning Herald
12-06-2025
- Business
- Sydney Morning Herald
Want to enjoy your job? Then it's time to ditch the small talk
Here's a statistic that might shock you: we will spend around one third of all the waking hours of our life at work. That's a third of our limited time here working alongside a random collection of people all thrown together by the allure of similar careers and industries. Most of these strangers will float in and out of your life, becoming faint memories. A small minority of them, if you're lucky, will jump across the imaginary boundary to become real, lifelong friends outside the workplace. Work is not your family (and never should be), however the relationships we form between 9 and 5 are still an important part of our lives. But how well do you know the people you work with? And by well, I mean, how much do you really know about them beyond where they live and what their children's names are? If you want to improve your job, one of the best things you can is to improve your relationships at work, and there's a fascinating amount of research that backs this up. Culture Amp, the Australian employee experience platform, recently found that employees who report strong team relationships are 39 per cent more likely to perform at a high level, and that a sense of belonging at work – a by-product of good relationships – boosts performance likelihood by 31 per cent. 'The evidence is clear that meaningful workplace relationships drive performance, innovation and retention,' says Justin Angsuwat, the Chief People Officer at Culture Amp. Building stronger relationships doesn't happen accidentally. It takes a little bit of vulnerability and a commitment to honesty. 'Every leader wants a high-performing team, but as leaders we usually only focus on outputs, metrics, deliverables and deadlines without focusing on the human dynamics that drive those results. Our research showed, time and time again, that those dynamics, particularly strong relationships at work, aren't just a nice-to-have, they're really quite foundational.' There are many ways you can strengthen your relationships at work, like spending quality time with colleagues, creating memories outside the workplace, and striving together towards common goals.
Yahoo
27-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Why Esther Perel is going all in on saving the American workforce in the age of AI
Esther Perel has been a relationship whisperer for decades. The renowned psychotherapist, author of Mating in Captivity, and host of the podcast Where Should We Begin? has spoken extensively about the power of intimacy in romantic relationships. Now, Perel is laser-focused on a different frontier: the workplace relationship. 'People's expectations of work have risen tremendously, like they have risen in the romantic sphere,' says Perel. And still, 'the time and the patience that they allocate to it have decreased sharply.' As more workers contend with return-to-office battles, the looming rollout of AI, and economic uncertainty, Perel says there is no better place to focus her energy. People spend the majority of their adult lives interacting with coworkers, and the relationships that may seem easily dismissed as transactional and contextual are becoming lifelines worth investing in. Perel says we are facing an unprecedented time, as more people yearn for intimacy at work as a way to feel 'purpose, meaning, belonging, and community.' Reflecting on decades of research, Perel recognizes that the same desire for security and belonging that she preached as the pillars of romantic intimacy applies to work. That's why Perel recently launched a new card game, Where Should We Begin? At Work, in collaboration with Culture Amp, an HR tech platform. The game is intended to help colleagues learn more about one another by prompting storytelling, like a time they appreciated a former boss or felt connected to a colleague. 'The world of psychology and emotions has entered the workplace,' says Perel. 'We talk about authenticity, psychological safety, and vulnerability in the same breath as we're talking about performance indicators—and that is fascinating.' In an interview with Fortune, Perel talks about the key issues plaguing workplace relationships and how to feel more connected and purposeful in the modern office. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. : What spurred you to think more about workplace relationships? The workplace is going through a major upheaval, with a very uncertain future. And the meaning of relationships in the workplace has completely changed. It used to be soft skills—stuff that you can admire in principle, but then you disregard in reality. For the first time, relationships are no longer just soft. They are actually part of the bottom line. They're part of the competitive edge. They're part of the one thing that AI cannot yet so easily replace. Tell us about your new game, focused on building relational intelligence at work. It was a logical thing to do. How do we actually create something that is tangible, that you can hold in your hands, that is fun, and that is playful? As one of the people from Culture Amp said, 'You can either have a training on management, or you can hear people's stories about managers who totally influence the way they themselves manage today.' Storytelling is a very powerful bridge for connection. Stories are the way we remember each other way more than data, for that matter, and it's not just your typical icebreaker. It's a very in-depth, layered set of cards that you use in multiple work situations, offsites, team building, and one-on-one feedback sessions. What are people getting wrong when it comes to relationships at work? People avoid face-to-face conversation. People make a lot of noise about honesty, transparency, authenticity, and all this stuff. But in fact, they demonstrate rather little of it in work situations. People have really lost the ability to knock at someone's door and just say, 'Can I come in for a moment?' What happens when people who come to work are more and more socially atrophied and have experienced major desocialization? Basic transactions that used to be part of any social interaction have become really challenging. How does it influence the way people deal with conflict, disagreement, or simple discomfort in the workplace? What everyone understands is that there is a real need to develop relational intelligence or human skills. This is directly connected to performance, and especially to sustained high performance. That data is very clear. How can coworkers have intimacy yet maintain professional boundaries? I think one of the most recent interesting findings about relationships in the workplace is that people's happiness at work is determined first and foremost by the actual presence of a best friend at work. It means that people expect and experience intimacy at work. Friendship is intimacy. It means that there is someone at work whom you can trust, with whom you experience a deep sense of belonging. They wait for you in the morning. You experience a sense of recognition from knowing that you are valued, that you are respected, that you matter, and that you can experience a sense of collective resilience. If there's something that happens, you can together devise a way to handle tough situations. I think the idea that people don't have intimacy at work is actually inaccurate. You're very intimate with your supervisor and with your manager. But that doesn't mean you reveal all your inner truths. Intimacy means that you get me. It's not about how much I have shared with you. I think that's a really important distinction. Can you can be friends with your boss or someone senior to you? I think you can. People seem to always be a little bit worried that there is a power differential, but there are power dynamics in every relationship. Ask any parent of a 2-year-old, and it's not because they have power over the 2-year-old. Power is not always a negative thing. It's intrinsic. The moment you depend on somebody, you have power. And there is power to the mentee, and there is power to the mentor. [At work] we can have elements of friendship, mutuality, reciprocity, shared interests, having each other's backs, and enhancing each other's interests in various areas. How do you build relational intelligence in a toxic workplace? The main thing we have control over is us. You can change, I think, at least pieces, sometimes small, sometimes much bigger, of a culture. For example, this company I saw went to an offsite. And when we got there, there was some tension on the team. Things were not going well. We played a card game, and we just told stories, and suddenly people started to actually listen to each other differently. These people that you didn't really trust at all, or the people that you said, 'What the hell am I doing with you?' softened. Did it transform on the spot? No. I think people have to be a little realistic. But it took the bite; it took the rigidity, the kind of confirmation bias that exists once people don't like each other, and said, 'Hey, open yourself up to other possibilities.' You control your curiosity. You control the quality of your listening. The quality of your listening shapes the type of speaking that is going to come back. This story was originally featured on
