Adopting Engagement as a Mindset With Ashley Ridgeway-Washington

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Responsibility for Engagement Belongs to Everyone

Ashley believes that engagement is everyone’s responsibility. She doesn’t see engagement as something owned by HR or even leadership alone‌ — ‌it’s something everyone in the organization has to commit to. “Engagement’s a mindset,” she says. “It is behaviors. It is the little things we do in our normal ways of working. It is eye contact. It is leaning into positive intent. It is avoiding assumptions. It is being impeccable with our word.”

HR’s role in this process is to provide the tools and resources that help people show up for each other every day. “I view HR as two things: culture stewards and engagement catalysts,” she says, emphasizing the need to create environments where employees and leaders alike can take ownership of their contributions.

But for that attitude to really catch on, senior leaders must model the behaviors they want to see across the organization. “When your senior leaders have set the tone and said, ‘This is how we’re going to roll,’ they model that and it continues to permeate throughout the organization,” she says. This top-down modeling, paired with grassroots buy-in, creates the foundation for sustainable engagement.

Listening Is Your Leadership Superpower

If everyone is responsible for achieving engagement, then everyone’s voices must be heard. Ashley shares a wealth of strategies for building a culture that values employee voices. “Employees need to see companies show up at the moments that matter most to them,” she said, citing the importance of addressing key life events and workplace concerns with authenticity and care.

At JPS, listening isn’t a one-time event — it’s baked into everyday practices. From annual engagement surveys to quarterly pulse checks, Ashley and her peers in leadership are consistently seeking input from employees. But what really sets JPS apart is how they use the data. Ashley described an “engagement flywheel” that ensures feedback informs decisions at all levels. “Leaders are incorporating that into their agendas,” Ashley says. “They’re listening as a part of their team meetings. They’re listening as a part of rounding.”

Ashley also shared a powerful cautionary tale from the downfall of Enron, where employee feedback warning of issues was ignored. “It is critical that organizations are actively listening and tuning in to the sentiments of employees,” she says, “particularly those on the front line because they are the closest to the work.” It’s a reminder that listening isn’t just about gathering data‌ — ‌it’s about acting on what you hear.

Data and Accountability Make Engagement Tangible

For those who think of engagement as “soft” or intangible, Ashley provides a compelling counterpoint: data. She’s a firm believer that engagement can and should be tied to measurable business outcomes. “Data doesn’t lie,” she says. “There is a real hard cost. We often think about engagement as soft, mushy stuff, but … for the first time in modern healthcare, labor costs are the difference between profitability and loss.”

Ashley shared an example from her time at Christus Health, after noticing consistently low engagement in some parts of the business. To counter this, she introduced a tiered leadership program to hold managers accountable for engagement. Leaders were grouped into tiers based on their engagement performance, and those who consistently struggled were given targeted support. “It became foundational,” she said. “Doing good work was no longer good enough. You had to do good work and engage your team.”

Top-performing leaders were given recognition in the form of symbolic awards, like Yeti cups labeled “Tier 1 Leader.” These simple gestures created a culture of healthy competition and pride, transforming engagement from an abstract concept into a tangible goal.

My conversation with Ashley left me reflecting on how leaders can truly make engagement a part of their organizational DNA. Her approach‌ — ‌anchoring engagement in shared accountability, active listening, and data-driven insights‌ — ‌is a powerful framework for driving real change.

But what resonated most is Ashley’s belief that engagement is a journey, not a destination. “You are really pursuing progress and not perfection,” she says. That’s a reminder for all of us to keep moving forward, learning and adjusting as we go.

People in This Episode

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington: LinkedIn

Resources

The Power of Moments

Transcript

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

So I view HR as two things. Culture stewards and engagement catalysts, right? We provide the tools and resources that the entire organization needs to create the workplace that they all want to be a part of. And so, I often akin engagement as a cultural attribute. Very much like a healthy marriage. Everybody’s got to own it. Everybody’s got to show up. Some days you show up, you like them. Some days you show up, you don’t. Some days, it works well. Some days, it doesn’t. But we’ve bought in and we’ve decided that we’re going to be engaged. Engagement’s a mindset.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Hi. Welcome to another episode of Leading Through Listening, a podcast where we dive into real stories of how leaders have transformed their employee experience. We explore topics like innovative strategies for aligning business and human capital priorities, fostering leadership that truly listens, and actionable steps to drive engagement and performance. I’m your host, Sean Fitzpatrick and today, I’m excited to welcome someone who has dedicated a career to helping organizations unlock the potential of their people through robust culture and engagement strategies.

Our guest is Ashley Ridgeway-Washington, SVP and CHRO at JPS Health Network. She’s a seasoned advisor and executive coach who has worked for Fortune 500 companies, non-profits and startups to develop best-in-class people and culture practices. Ashley is known for her ability to balance business and human priorities, showing leaders how engaged employees drive innovation, flexibility and long-term success. Her unique expertise combines HR, DEI and legal acumen with deep understanding of organizational performance metrics.

Today, we’ll explore Ashley’s insight on securing executive buy-in for engagement initiatives, translating culture into measurable outcomes and using metrics to build a compelling business case for prioritizing people strategies. Ashley, welcome to the podcast.

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

Thank you so much, Sean. It’s so great to be here.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Well, Ashley, tell me a little bit about yourself, personally and professionally.

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

Sure. So I currently serve as a senior vice president and chief human resources officer at JPS Health Network in Fort Worth, Texas. We are Tarrant County’s safety net, and so we take care of those patients that can’t always get care elsewhere. I will tell you I am sitting in my purpose in this role, but it took me quite a bit of time to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. So I’m a reformed attorney by trade, grew up in healthcare HR, and then took a stint in tech and realized that I prefer people to widgets, but I often say that my passion and purpose in life sits at the intersection of people and possibility. And so, I’m happy to be working in that space and sitting in that purpose here at JPS.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

When you started off an attorney, where did that inflection point happen? That’s quite a different career path, though there is alignment with some things around compliance and legal, but that’s quite a change. Is there anything in particular that made that change happen for you?

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

So the reality is I stumbled into my passion. I was an unhappy attorney, like many people, took some time off to have a family and did some work as a legal auditor. And quite frankly, the EEO person at the employer I was with walked off the job. The VP of HR came into my office and said, “You’re the only barred attorney in the building and we have a charge of discrimination due tomorrow. Can you help?” 

And the rest is history.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Interesting. Yeah, sometimes that happens. You just fall into roles and then you realize, “Boy, I really love this thing.”

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

Yeah, absolutely.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

That’s good. One of the things that we do with organizations is try to help organizations improve business performance but also create a great place to work for employees. And sometimes they’re conflicting goals, hopefully they’re not, but sometimes they are. So I guess it’d be interesting to hear how you go about helping the executive teams you work with. How do they balance the people priorities and the business priorities so they’re not always thinking short-term because people issues sometimes take longer. Tell me a little bit about how you go about navigating those types of things.

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

Sure. I think when you start with people at the center, you recognize that whatever it is that you’re accomplishing, whatever you’re going after — and for us, it’s high quality patient care — that it is human ingenuity that drives that. And so, it is in the best interest of the business to have happy employees. What I would also say is that when you have extended goodwill and done right by employees, when you have kept the things that they need front and center, what you will find is that they’re also incredibly willing to reach compromise and go above and beyond.

And so we often believe that in order to advance short-term gains, we’ve got to take a back seat and we can’t always look to the future. But I will tell you, what I have found is that when employees see that there is a mutually beneficial value proposition and when they recognize that an organization actually cares about them as humans, they will go the distance with you. They will sacrifice, they will make swaps, they will do the things that really allow the business to balance both.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

When employees feel that care that the executive team or the organization really cares about them, are there things that you’ve seen that either have pointed to that say, “Oh, there’s a real good example.” They’re saying, “I really like what that executive or leader or manager did” or maybe even ones that really did the opposite and they caused them, the employees go, “Okay, obviously, you guys don’t care about what we think about this organization or our role here.”

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

Sure, we’re human. And so I read, many years ago, “The Power of Moments” by Chip and Dan Heath, and if you’ve not read that book, I would encourage you to read it because foundational to a authentic and positive employee experience is understanding that employees need to see companies show up at the moments that matter most to them. They will take less pay, they will do really hard work, but when someone dies or someone is born or something pivotal happens in their life, they need to both feel and see the support of the organization.

And so I would say generally speaking, that really does create truly goodwill. And then I would also say that in this environment, particularly as it relates to generation Z, our ability to actively listen, to proactively actively listen and make changes or realign based on employee preference and what we’re hearing from employees is really important.

I read an article once about Enron and so the whole journey, the fall of Enron. And there was a researcher that basically went back and looked at a decade of employee engagement surveys and other listening mechanisms. And what they saw in the downfall of Enron is that employees knew it all along and they were sounding the alarm in many ways. And so it is critical that organizations are actively listening and tuning in to the sentiments of employees, particularly those on the front line because they are the closest to the work.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Yeah. I guess when you think about employee engagement and the culture of the organization, how do you get leaders more involved or demonstrating, get the most senior leadership team? So sometimes, not always, you see them, “Okay, yes, we’re on board. We should be doing regular feedback, either an annual survey and then pulse surveys in between, and different listening mechanisms. But then they send it over to often the human resource group, is okay, “There you go, go.” And we’ve seen some of the most powerful surveys is when the executives are driving it. Yeah, HR is still doing all the heavy lifting in the back end, but they’re really driving what they want to learn, they’re driving why it’s important, they’re driving the followup, but not all organizations do that.

So I’m often wondering how does HR, how do they see their role in helping become more positioning as really executive? So if we were asking employees who’s running this survey, who wants to do it, and they’re, “Oh, the executives want to learn about this.” That would be the ideal versus, “Oh, it’s an HR initiative.” Not that HR’s bad but it, in general, not always, has the best perception. So it’s interesting to think about how you would go about doing that.

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

So I view HR as two things, culture stewards and engagement catalysts, rights? We provide the tools and resources that the entire organization needs to create the workplace that they all want to be a part of. And so I often akin engagement as a cultural attribute, very much like a healthy marriage. Everybody’s got to own it. Everybody’s got to show up. Some days you show up, you like them. Some days you show up, you don’t. Some days, it works well. Some days, it doesn’t. But we’ve bought in and we’ve decided that we’re going to be engaged.

Engagement’s a mindset. It is behaviors. It is the little things we do in our normal ways of working. It is eye contact. It is leaning into positive intent. It is avoiding assumption. It is being impeccable with our word. And now I’m leaning into my favorite, the four agreements, but the bottom line is engagement is something that every single person at an organization must own if it’s actually going to be what we want it to be.

And then I view that there are some folks who are part of that mix who I call super influencers or super users, and those are executives. They have the chops and the influence and the authority to be able to really galvanize that. And so we certainly will prepare them with tools, but ultimately, what I found is when your senior leaders have set the tone and said, “This is how we’re going to roll,” they model that and it continues to permeate throughout the organization.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Yeah, I like that concept you mentioned about engagement being a two-way street because It’s not all about the employees providing feedback. “What have you done for me lately? Can you improve this, improve that?” Then they’re just throwing everything back onto they’re part of the organization. Everyone’s part of the organization so if you can make it part of it’s owned by you, part of it’s owned by your manager, part of it’s owned by leadership. It’s not all one team or one group driving it. So I like that perception and I think it’s a really good way to think about it.

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

So Sean, I have to say this. I do a lot of focus grouping and I have committed agreements, so team commitments that we have as we’re having this space together. And I often say when you come to this space, just know I’m not a vending machine and I’m not Santa Claus. You can’t sit on the organization’s lap and lay out a wish list and have no accountability. You can’t put a quarter in and get a bag of chips out. You don’t put thoughts in and get engagement out. This is a journey that we all take together.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Interesting. It reminds me, so sometimes we get invited in to do some of those also, and when you go through the process and you have them, “Okay, clarify what you’re meaning on this feedback and then how would you go about solving it?” And then you ask, “What are the steps this team could take?” Or people that you, all of a sudden, you hear for a while. You got crickets. All of a sudden, it’s like, “Oh, you want us to do something?” But then you get over that hoop or obstacle and then you get to see some people realize, “Yeah, maybe this is not just a venting session.”

It’s a dialogue and it’s an opportunity for them to provide feedback and get feedback and also take accountability for some of the roles. So yeah, I like your “I’m not Santa Claus.” I’m going to have to steal that from you. I’m going to use that probably from time to time. And I’m not a vending machine. You can’t just put nickels in or quarters in and get something out. That’s good.

You’ve worked for a wide variety of organizations and whenever you’re working with executives, how do you get them to pay attention to engagement initiatives or feedback or alignment if they’re not on board or, “We ran a survey three years ago and it didn’t work.” Or sometimes I even hear, “CEO, I don’t believe in surveys, they’re not effective or they’re not useful.” Do you ever run across anything like that? If you have changed their perception, how have you gone about approaching that?

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

So data doesn’t lie. There is a real hard cost. We often think about engagement as soft, mushy stuff, but it is absolutely hard in many ways. And I will tell you, for the first time in modern healthcare, labor costs are the difference between profitability and loss. And so as I speak to leaders within my own organization, even beyond that, I do a fair amount of coaching. I will share the data, I will ask them to provide me the data and let’s look through it. Let’s look at the cost of turnover. Let’s look at your vacancy rate. How long have these critical roles been open and who’s doing that job and are they doing it well? Just look at your cost of voluntary turnover in one year. These are people who negotiated to be with you. Left a job that they were at. They negotiated the salary they wanted. So it’s not that, it’s something else.

And so, often, I will lean in to data to help executives understand the cost associated with poor engagement. And then when you get past that, you really start to talk about the value proposition associated with a culture that feels like we’re all in this together. And so we start with the data and then we come back around to the heart. And what we basically talk a lot about is when you don’t have an engaged staff, you are leaving money and innovation on the table. And who wants to do that? If you had data that told you you could be 30% more productive if you just treated people with basic dignity and integrity at work, who would walk away from that?

Sean Fitzpatrick:

You would think, yeah, it would be very… it’s a fairly low cost. It takes time and behavioral change, but it is not a big capital investment to change over time.

You brought up an interesting concept around the cost of turnover or voluntary turnover. Do executives have a clear picture or a pretty good sense of what the actual cost is? I know it does vary based on the type of role and how easy are they to find. It’s getting harder now with lower and lower people with unemployment being such as it is where there’s still lots of opportunity, particularly in healthcare. It’s one of the fastest-growing sectors out there. But would they be able to say, Okay, for a $75,000-a-year professional you have there, would they know how much it probably costs to replace them, both the hard and soft costs? Would they have that clear in their mind?

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

So I would say probably not, but that’s why strategic HR is so important because your business partner should be bringing that to the table as a part of the standard business review. The days of personnel are over. I mean, that is not the value proposition of strategic human capital these days. Our job is to be managing labor and costs at the P&L level. And so part of that review is looking at the employee, what I call engagement health and talking about these are the number of dollars that we lost. And I’ve gotten a lot of feedback recently from colleagues, other CHROs, we talk a lot about talking about turnover in terms of just full-time employees or just first-year, but ultimately, anyone who leaves your organization and causes a disruption in business continuity costs you dollars.

Now, some of that’s positive. We want some of those folks that are not working to… we want to promote them to patient.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Self-select, yes.

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

Yeah.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Self-select out of here.

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

But ultimately, we should be lifting those costs up to the business and helping to educate on how we mitigate those costs and create a culture we can all be proud of.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

I’ve often heard and seen it, and it varies, but for a professional, maybe not an executive and not a manual, early in their careers, but somewhere 1.5 times their salary. Is that, and I know it’s hard to generalize, but how do you think about those numbers?

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

Sure. So there are a lot of calculations out there. Because I’m in healthcare, I tend to lean into, most of mine are clinical roles, to NSI, which really gives some best in practice. And so what it says on average to replace a bedside nurse is about 60 grand. That doesn’t include the opportunity cost associated with those people working on that. It doesn’t include executive search or any kind of search you might do. It also doesn’t include the cost of temporary vacancy to fill that role when someone leaves. So when you start to look at that, you’re talking about probably all-in $100,000.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Just to replace, yeah, for a loss.

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

Just to replace.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

So it starts that up pretty quickly.

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

It does. It does.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Yeah. Interesting. Now, do you track, in your organization, you track involuntary leaves, regrettable loss, all of those core metrics? They all are somewhat different. You’re right. They all impact the organization because someone left, but they can impact it in different ways and sometimes even on top of that, strategic roles, people are either really hard to find or replace versus less strategic at the time and strategy and direction changes. How do you go about thinking of all of those metrics or tracking all of those? Do you guys typically do all that in your organization?

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

We do. We have HR analytics dashboard, my bible. I look at it probably every other day, sometimes every day, depending on what’s going on. And from my perspective, I believe the data is a part of the story. Data is really important, but it also helps us to give context around what else is going on. And so I tend to pull together both for the HR committee of the board as well as my senior leadership team a quarterly overview of where we are from an employee engagement or employee health standpoint to talk about what information is giving the indications that we need to attend to a certain thing or that we need to lean in a place.

And so everything from exit interview data to one of the things we do is our CEO breakfast, which our new employees really like. About their 60th day, new employees get to come in, white tablecloth, hot breakfast, and they get to converse with each other and executives. At the end of that, we ask some questions about their onboarding experience and whether they feel like they have a best friend at work and they’ve gotten sticky. And so all of that information together helps me to piece together what the sentiment of our teams are and where we need to deploy additional support resources or rethink an approach.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Interesting. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Well, they say the first couple of months of a new employee are critical, because you’re either going to get them connected to the organization both socially and in their job. And if you do a good job there, it really can keep people longer and be more engaged throughout their career.

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

You have 45 to 60 days. In the first 45 to 60 days, an employee has already decided whether they’re going to stay with you in year one. If they are disengaged by day 30, they’re already looking for a job. And in healthcare, a nurse can go somewhere — a bad nurse can go somewhere tomorrow. So the reality is it’s so important to create that stickiness to make people feel welcome and they have wayfinders and buddies and support that just help them as humans be grounded in that space so that they can then start to learn the landscape of the work.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Yeah, because they made a big decision in terms of changing and joining this. So you want to make sure that, okay, yeah, you made the right decision. There’s this concept in buying bigger on the markets like cognitive dissonance. It’s like, “Okay, did I make it? Did I do the right thing?” You’re nervous going in. So the more you can do, I think, upfront, it pays off handsomely. And you’ve probably seen that in the work you’ve done.

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

Absolutely. And you’d be surprised just how little stuff, check in with somebody, send them a note, send them a recognition via email, peek your head around in their workspace and ask them if they’ve had lunch or bring them a packet of M&Ms, things that are virtually free really do make the difference in their first 90-day experience.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Yeah, those little things. It’s not so much the gift or the M&Ms. It’s the concept that, “Oh, people recognize me. They see me. I’m part of the team now.” And it’s that whole area of just feeling like you’re involved in the organization early on, and that seems to make a big difference.

It’d be interesting to hear a little bit about what’s your measurement strategy there? How do you go about measuring? And then if you think, you talked about when you work with a board on the HR committee, they probably look for, okay, how’s the culture there? How’s engagement? How do you go about pulling this? Do you have annual surveys, pulses? Do you do focus groups where you collect data and summarize it in? How do you go about… What are the measurements that you guys use on a regular basis and what do you find most effective?

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

So our primary listening mechanisms are Gallup. We’re a Gallup employee survey —

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Hence, the best friend at work question, yes?

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

Yes, absolutely. So we do Gallup annually and then we do a pulse. We actually listen to every employee, so part-time, PRN, full-time, as well as our clinicians. Last year, we had 95% engagement in the employee and 84% engagement with clinicians, which is unheard of, 75% of our part-time and PRN listen- I mean, share their voice with us.

So those are our two primary ways. But in the interim, we do a lot of other stuff. We work a lot with our leaders. And so, one of the really cool things that we did a couple of years ago, and this predates me so I can’t take credit for this. We’ve just enhanced it, is we’ve anchored all of our leadership development courses to our Q12, which are the questions that we ask and are indicators of engagement.

So every time we teach a new leader any new skill, we ensure that we’ve infused those Q12 behavioral attributes and ways of working into their training. And what has happened is we’ve created an engagement flywheel. So leaders are incorporating that into their agendas. They’re listening as a part of their team meetings. They’re listening as a part of rounding in bedside, shift, report and stoplighting. And so although, we have these big listening mechanisms, we are listening all along at the department level, which is where I think the magic is actually occurring. And then beyond that, we have focus grouping and specific strategies for new employees.

We’ve also started the process this year of isolating where we start to see people cliff that three- to five-year mark in healthcare and how we can start to get into some stay conversations and stay interviews. And so we have two big bangs, but we have infused active listening into every facet of our employee touches so that we can keep a pulse on where employees are expressing concerns and rounding and being able to do some service recovery real time.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Interesting. Yeah, it sounds like, yeah, you’ve got a lot of good core metrics. What I really like is how you’re infusing some of those into that management training, management development so it becomes part of their way of thinking on how… the culture, really. If you’re building that into their thinking, you’re building that into the culture because they represent often an important part of the culture and what it’s like to be working around here. So I really like that. That’s good. That’s powerful.

When you’re in an organization for a long time or you’ve seen it over time, sometimes it takes a while for some of these things to… Initiatives you do, you learn things maybe on feedback or from employees, then you implement them or they inform decisions that you guys are working towards. And there’s some examples that you can point to where some of the initiatives have had great or good long-term business impact. So you’ve adjusted this culture and now we’ve seen changes out six months, nine months, 18 months, two years because sometimes it takes a while for this stuff to show up.

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

Sure. So I’ll go back to my Christus Health days. That’s where I grew up in HR. And I think about when I first came there, I was, I don’t know, 30-something-year-old leader and very, in many respects, idealistic and altruistic. But I had this crazy idea and I went to my senior leadership team and I said, “I’m looking at this engagement data and every year the same people are struggling and everybody knows it. We can name them off the top of our head, but nobody’s doing anything with them. There’s no accountability. And can I submit a proposal that changes that? Can we hold them accountable? Can we actually talk about whether these people should be leading people here?” And my leaders trusted me to build something. And it was a couple of things.

It was a tiering, for lack of better word. So we had those folks who were superstars, we had those people in the middle, had people who were really struggling, but it wasn’t just calling out who was great and who wasn’t. It was really working with strategic business partners, as well as talent management to cultivate some action planning that was really comprehensive and was both at the team level and with the leader. But the other thing that we did was we celebrated those at the top of the organization like crazy.

So we printed Superman capes and we did the Yeti cups and it said tier 1 leader for that year on down. And I will tell you four years later, when we got ready to make the decision that after your third year you would be invited to step away from the organization in a leadership capacity if you couldn’t improve your scores, what I can tell you is this. I believe there were less than three people across the organization of 50,000 people who were invited to do something different. Those who no longer wanted to be engaged, most of them self-selected out.

We found that at the end of the day, many people wanted to be better. They didn’t have the tools. And so we saw a tremendous increase in those folks migrating from the bottom quartiles up even to the top quartile. And I will tell you that cup every year was, I mean, like a bonus. If you didn’t have your cup, it became a cultural thing. I mean, leaders will say, “I don’t want tier 2 leaders or tier 3 leaders on my team.”

So it became this thing. It was this friendly competition that really built the muscle of engagement and it helped leaders to buy in. And four years later, tier 1 leadership was just the way to be. I mean, it was part of the question around whether you got stretch assignments or you got an… I mean, it became foundational. Doing good work was no longer good enough. You had to do good work and engage your team, and you had to own engagement. And that became the prototype for our leadership.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Interesting, yeah. And I like the example of the cups. It’s like a symbol, right?

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

It is.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

If you go, there’s some research that’s out there, you’re like, “What’s culture like in your area?” Well, it’s based on some underlying assumptions we have. And those assumptions then get representative values. And then those values get… you see them as symbols often in the organization. And symbols could be plaques on the wall. It could be anything, but in this case, they’re cups.

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

It’s just a cup.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

And people, they tie into that. And it represents the culture and part of the culture in many ways. So I really like that. That’s interesting.

We work with a lot of what we call small to mid-size, 150, 250, 300, 500-person organizations. And maybe they’re just starting out on their journey on trying to understand employee engagement, get leadership buy-in, maybe they haven’t done systematic surveys on a regular basis and they really haven’t got a listening program. What do you suggest for them? How would they go about getting started or what are the things they might want to look at if you would think of a couple of things so they can build some momentum?

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

So I would say I have three pieces of advice. First, if you’re a relatively new company, build it in and don’t try to bolt it on. What we know about any cultural attribute is when it is infused in ways of working, it works. Trying to layer inclusion on top, trying to layer engagement on top never works. It has to be the way you work.

Secondarily, I would say start asking the tough questions of yourself and of the organization. And actually, even if you don’t have an engagement survey, and I will tell you now, there are a lot of really good inexpensive tools out there. So find one to start to gather sentiments and identify what the strategy will be to listen, share feedback and start a two-way dialogue.

And then the third thing that I would say is something that I started saying, a member of my team started saying it, and it stuck: “Good, better, best — never let it rest until your good is better and your better is best.” Keep pressing forward. You are really pursuing progress and not perfection. So continue to move forward, measure your success, celebrate your success, recalibrate, and go back at it because engagement is a journey. It is not something that happens overnight. It’s gradually, suddenly, all at once, and then it’s super fragile. One thing can throw it off, and so just keep it top of mind and keep moving forward toward it.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Well, Ashley, that’s great. And just some of the things I pulled away from here is how you see, first of all, engagement as a two-way street, right? It’s not just all about, “Hey, what am I going to do for you today or tomorrow?” It’s what are you also going to do to help engage yourself or engage in the work that’s being done in the organization?

And your tip around build it in. You gave it right at the end, but you gave a really good example early on in what you do in your organization on how you build some of those metrics that you ask in the survey into your leadership training and competency development and capability development. Those two points in themselves are fantastic.

And then the last point, and I think I agree with you, is just start, so the good, better, best. Just start somewhere, get going on it because it is a journey. It’s not a sprint. You don’t have to be perfect right out of the gates, but if you’re committed to it and you’re building it into your business, it will happen over time and you’ll learn more about how to build a better workplace that’s great for the employees and also good business at the same time. So thank you very much.

Ashley Ridgeway-Washington:

Thank you. It’s great. I appreciate you.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Thanks for joining us today on Leading Through Listening. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube Music so you don’t miss a future episode. We’ll see you again soon.