The ZIZO Effect

How Empathy Shapes Culture with Negra Tutundzic

• ZIZO Technologies Inc. • Season 2 • Episode 4

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Welcome to Season 2 of The ZIZO Effect!
This season, we explore the unique experiences of agents, managers, and executives in call centers, uncovering valuable insights and lessons they've learned along the way.

Episode Overview:
In this episode, we speak with Negra Tutundzic, the Employee Engagement Team Lead at Wayfair, who shares her invaluable insights on how empathy, engagement, and recognition are key drivers of workplace culture. Negra discusses the crucial role that frontline managers play in building and maintaining an inclusive culture, while also addressing the challenges of burnout and the impact of remote work on productivity and mental health.

Negra offers practical strategies that Wayfair uses to foster employee growth, celebrate internal mobility, and create a strong sense of belonging within their teams. Whether you’re interested in learning about culture-building, employee retention, or balancing work-life in a remote setting, this episode provides a wealth of insights to help you navigate today’s workforce dynamics.

Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction and Personal Background
13:04 Defining and Communicating Company Culture
21:01 The Role of Leaders in Maintaining Culture
24:30 Engagement Strategies and Tools
32:24 Addressing Burnout and Mental Health
42:32 Remote Work and Work-Life Balance
45:02 Opportunities for Growth and Movement
49:59 The Role of Incentives in Work Culture
51:31 Recognizing and Rewarding Behaviors
52:28 Challenges of Creating Inclusive Incentive Programs
55:14 The Importance of Understanding Performance Metrics
57:35 Categorizing KPIs for Incentive Programs
59:29 Balancing Behaviors, Effort, Skill, and Results
01:05:00 Trivia Game

Guest Information:
Negra Tutundzic - Employee Engagement Team Lead at Wayfair. Connect with Negra on LinkedIn.

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Don’t forget to subscribe, like, and comment to join the conversation. Check out our other episodes and follow us on our social media pages:


Don't miss this insightful episode. Tune in now to The ZIZO Effect – It's Game Time!

Jimmy Chebat:

Welcome back to the ZI Effect podcast. This season, we're all about getting fresh perspectives from every level of the call center organizations, from the folks on the front lines to the decision makers at the top. Today, we're really excited to have Negra Tatunzik, the employee engagement team lead at Wayfair, joining us on our show. She's got some incredible insights on what truly drives engagement in this space. So sit tight and get ready it's game time. Well, hello everybody, and welcome to the Zizzo Effect podcast. I'm your host, Jimmy Shabbat, and today we have a very special guest with us, Negra Tatunzek, who is the employee engagement team lead at Wayfair, which is going to be really exciting. We're really excited to talk to you. Thank you for joining us today, Negra.

Negra Tutundzic:

Thank you for having me. I'm excited.

Jimmy Chebat:

Of course, we'd love to share with our audience a little bit about our guest personally. So why don't you give us a little bit of background of who you are and what your interests are, and we'd love a nice little fun fact about you as well.

Negra Tutundzic:

Awesome. Okay, so I am based in San Francisco. I've lived here for about eight years. Right now I'm wearing a sweater because it's foggy weather. We don't get a real summer in San Francisco. It's foggy and windy, so I'm a little chillier than the rest of the nation. So if anyone's wondering why I'm wearing so many layers, that's why.

Negra Tutundzic:

But before I moved to San Francisco, I grew up in Rochester, new York, which just last week or a couple weeks ago, jimmy and I realized we are from the same area in New York, which is a really nice way to kind of connect and talk about the Buffalo Bills for a second. But I grew up in Rochester, new York. But I was originally born in Bosnia. So my parents and my sister and I moved to the US when I was six years old, landed in Rochester. That explains why I don't have an accent. I'm very Americanized at this point. I started my career in Rochester and then ended up moving to the West Coast to kind of explore different options with my career. To kind of explore different options with my career and obviously a lot going on, especially in San Francisco area, as far as the type of clientele and the type of thinking going on. So it really kind of attracted me out to the West Coast for that reason, aside from the library, how long ago did you move to the West Coast?

Negra Tutundzic:

It was about eight years ago.

Jimmy Chebat:

Eight years ago. Okay, so were you in Rochester for that whole time, up until eight years ago.

Negra Tutundzic:

Yep, yep. I lived in Rochester most of my life, since about first grade, all the way through like college, and then a couple of years after college, and I worked in Rochester for a couple of years full time and then transferred out to the West Coast at my company at the time.

Jimmy Chebat:

Nice. So you were born in bosnia, so correct me if I'm wrong. Is the language called bosnian, or is it another?

Negra Tutundzic:

language, yeah, yeah, so like, I think, like, historically it's been yugoslavian, but obviously the historical context, yugoslavia is no longer a country. So, um, yep, you've got your croatian, serbian, bosnian, but at the basis they're the same, just the dialects a little bit Gotcha.

Jimmy Chebat:

So do you speak your native tongue.

Negra Tutundzic:

I do yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean not like super well.

Jimmy Chebat:

Yeah, so fun fact about myself. So I'm first generation here, so my parents were born in Lebanon, immigrated for some reason to Buffalo, new York, of all places.

Jimmy Chebat:

We always wondered why it's cold. But in any case, I also grew up learning the Lebanese language before learning the English language. But I'm pretty sure, like you, I've forgotten more than I remember, could definitely carry a conversation, understand more than I can speak it. But you immerse me in the culture. I'm right back to where I started. You know, let's switch over a little bit to your, to your career life. So you moved to San Francisco eight years ago. Give us kind of your career track. Uh, walk us through your journey and how you arrived at Wayfair.

Negra Tutundzic:

Yes. So, um, it actually all started with a course I took in college called consumer research. Um, it's really a light bulb in me. I really loved the combination of taking data and input and feedback and making business decisions based on that from consumers. So that's actually kind of where my career started was consumer research and insights. I did an internship when I started in London at a research firm, really learned kind of the different questions clients were asking things like that and really at the basis of it is how do our customers feel about our brand? How do they respond to our brand, what is relevant to them, what resonates? And I just really liked that blend of numbers and psychology and human behavior. I've always been like a very observant person. So that was actually the last 15 years of my life was consumer research and insights and strategy.

Negra Tutundzic:

I worked at a comms agency called Edelman for about 10 years before I came to Wayfair. So my job really there was to really develop a conversation, a relationship with our was to really develop a conversation, a relationship with our clients to really understand what do they really want to know and what's the best way to ask it, what methodology to use, how do we get creative with our questioning to get the insight that they need to build, whether it's a communication strategy, a campaign, a marketing strategy, things like that and so I've really really loved that work. It's very dear to my heart. I love looking at numbers and finding a story and a narrative. That's kind of that magic sauce that kind of kept me there for a long time or kept me in that career for a long time. So it's kind of funny how I actually ended up at Wayfair, in a completely different field. It's not consumer research at all, it's a completely different target audience, if you will.

Negra Tutundzic:

But how I ended up kind of in this realm is, as we know, during the pandemic, a lot of these big corporations who had offices went virtual. It wasn't safe to be in office anymore. So when I worked with clients like Facebook and Salesforce and Microsoft, you know, and traditionally they would come to my team and say, hey, we're rolling out this new product or we want to know our customers' thoughts on XYZ, it actually turned to how do we talk to our employees? They are now also our customers. We need to keep them here. We need to keep, keep them happy.

Negra Tutundzic:

How do we navigate this new employee space, work, workplace space when everyone's working. I mean, for all those who have been impacted by that, like you, know how different it is to collaborate, to communicate. I mean I don't think I was on slack that much in my whole career until after the pandemic, because you could just walk up to someone's desk and be like hey, quick question right, or you jump into a conference room to brainstorm. So a lot of the work, at least that was falling into my lap at the time, was how do we talk to our employees? How are they feeling? Like, what is our culture right now? What is our employee value proposition? Essentially to keep these people, because a lot of people are also leaving the corporate space and now there's a lot of industries too. So it was a sort of sudden urge to understand, like how do we retain people in this new environment and treat them like human?

Jimmy Chebat:

I love the transition because you know the two aspects of your career, kind of take you on both sides of the conversation between customer and frontline worker Right and you first learn the psychology and the data that supports that psychology from the consumer aspect Right Now you know your role as team engagement lead is about engaging the other side of the conversation, a person on the other side of the phone which is the employee of customer service. And we're going to get into a little bit of the number of people, because the people that roll up to you are the departments that you're in charge of. It's pretty vast. It's close to 2,000 users, agents, is that correct? That's a pretty large number and I want to really dive into some of how you handle that. But first, specifically, what is your role? If you were to describe your role at Wayfair in one paragraph, how would you describe it?

Negra Tutundzic:

how would you describe it? I would describe it as culture building. My job is to build culture, which is very amorphous and buzzworthy term, but to kind of break it down as team engagement lead, I have also team members that work with me, so it's not just me but our remit really, like the programs that we develop and the experiences that we design in Wayfair is meant to engage the customer service, wayfair customer service teams. So that's the 2000 or so folks you just mentioned. So they were call center call center frontline roles. It's a tough call center frontline roles.

Negra Tutundzic:

It's a tough, not stress-free environment. It's a lot harder to have time to interact with your coworkers. You're on phones, you're on chat, you're on email servicing customers, because Wayfair service, that's our number one priority. So really my team is there to navigate their current workflows and their day-to-day but infuse a little bit of culture and peopling. I like to call it. Let's just be humans for a little bit every quarter. So kind of how that comes to life through a bunch of different programs is recognition programs. Those are definitely table stakes at any company. So that's a lot where our time and money and investments goes and details and tools that they have to navigate in one single customer conversation. There's so much else they also do, so we try to make sure that our leadership is talking about that. It's thanking them. There are formal structures set in place. Everyone's busy, but there are formal programs set in place to say thank you at the end of the day.

Negra Tutundzic:

so that's really a lot of of my time, at least from a strategy perspective, is are we using the right tools? Are we using the best practices? How do you say thank you authentically? And it's such a nuanced, complex tech environment. Um, so yeah, that's kind of your culture.

Jimmy Chebat:

You know you had said that's part of your role is to build, develop, maintain and curate culture in your organization. In Wayfair there's a statistic that came from an article, great Place to Work that companies with high trust culture see 50% higher employment productivity and 74% lower stress levels. Now, how does your company define culture? How does Wayfair define its culture, or what is the type of culture it's trying to create, and how does it communicate it and cascade that messages down the pipeline?

Negra Tutundzic:

Yeah, that's a great question Because, yeah, culture is such a big umbrella word, how do you build tactical work around that? What does it mean to do culture? So one of the first questions when I entered this role I mean, I've been at Wayfair for two years, but this official team lead role I entered in January and one of the first few questions I asked of service leadership was when you think about Wayfair service, what do you want to be known for, like from your employees? And that started kind of getting us thinking about okay, we want people to feel recognized. We want people to feel like they belong to something bigger. We want people to feel like they can say and give us feedback openly, without repercussion. So that kind of started giving us categories of efforts that we need to build in formally as part of my team scope.

Negra Tutundzic:

So that's kind of the exercise that we took to define culture. It really is, at the end of the day, what do we want people to think of when they think of working for a wayfair service? They want to feel supported. They want to feel like they belong. Those are the intrinsic things. Right, there's, of course, compensation and benefits and shift schedules. That's all the stuff that my team doesn't decide or define. Those are obviously factors driven by business decisions outside of my realm, but what we control and what we can help strategize with our leaders is outside of the mechanics of work. What's the intrinsic value of staying here? Right, that's really the culture.

Jimmy Chebat:

Sense of belonging you said that is one that I keep hearing, you know, especially with the younger generation. You know, a lot of times decisions are made to work for a company due to compensation packages. Right, it may be a factor, but a bigger factor is starting to happen. It's like what does this company believe in, what is the culture of this organization, and that's what will help retain the talent in there. So I know that Wayfair is a very progressive company. They have a team dedicated to engagement with their staff, which is great to see. Dedicated to engagement with their staff, which is great to see. And you're seeing more and more companies doing this, because the cost, the alternative cost, is high attrition, right. What are some of the initiatives I mean you've heard from your customers being your employees? Right, because that's who your audience is, that you're asking these questions. So what are you doing to implement, to create that sense of belonging, to build that sense of purpose?

Negra Tutundzic:

Yeah, um, yeah, we're learning every day on how to do that, so I don't think I have, like you know, top five things you should do to do this. Um, it's definitely, uh, it's navigating a landscape that's changing really fast at wayfair service because there's you know, I'll give you an example. When I first joined wayfair service, we had mostly just phone call centers and email. Then, over time, we became more omni-channel, right. There's chat, there's AI bots now within certain customer contact situations. So the types of employees and their skills were also changing, and so we had to kind of make sure that we were speaking to all the different types of employees and departments that were springing up to meet customer needs and basically inserting that into how we talked about culture and who we included. So kind of a broad statement. But to answer your question specifically is how do you create a sense of belonging? It's, honestly, what I found is successful and where I see the excitement is when people learn about other teams. What's that team doing? That's cool. How can I get a part of that? Wow, that project that just launched, what's the point of it? How can I contribute to it?

Negra Tutundzic:

All the different changes happening in the Wayfair business and all the initiatives and the program rollouts that are happening on the business side, so that we can be like, okay, if there's an appreciation event coming up or there's some sort of networking event coming up that my team's already planning, let's pull those details in. Because the more people know what's happening at the company and what other people like them are doing, it inspires them to maybe reach out to that person and be like, hey, how can I get involved? That's a great development area, right Upskilling yourself. It also is like, wow, this company's, to your point, really progressive, they're really testing out new things or they are trying new things or whatever. So I think it just it widens people's lens of like what's going on outside of just like your team, those lens of like what's going on outside of just like your team. So that's, I think, like one of the things I always strive to do as far as belonging, because it creates just a bigger world for people. I think um two.

Jimmy Chebat:

You're probably the third or fourth birthday, so in part of our theme this year for season two is to listen and to learn. You know from people like yourself and you know also the frontline workers, the managers and the executives, and one of the topics or the points that have been made that I've heard multiple times now is exactly that is that there is a future beyond the current position that they're at. I don't know how to categorize that and how to label that whether it's hope, whether it's, you know, career tracking. It's, you know it could be a feeder, because frontline workers really it's not something that people want to build a career around, right, so they want to know that there's a higher purpose to their career with that organization, especially if they believe in that organization. Talk to us about kind of like is a call center a feeder into some of the other leadership roles or other departments?

Negra Tutundzic:

Yeah, organically speaking. I mean all of our frontline managers I want to say all, because don't quote me on that but most of them, as far as I know, anecdotally started as an entry level frontline agent. They show promise, they show leadership skills, they get into a frontline manager position and then from there so forth. So I know I think literally half my team has come from the frontline. We're now on the support side, so teams like myself support frontline agents in their workplace experience. They came from the frontline space and their experience is invaluable.

Negra Tutundzic:

Because I came in from outside of Wayfair completely different career. I bring kind of the strategy and decision-making, but they, they keep it real for me. They're like well, that's actually not how we talk about it on the front line or that's, you know, way out of left field. So that organic growth and development is so, so valuable and it's, I think, definitely something Wayfair Service can hang their hat on is that they've done that really well. It's a huge. I think it honestly happens organically. My team doesn't have any sort of effort behind that. I mean. I think that's definitely a learning and development and training.

Negra Tutundzic:

And that's kind of their remit to make sure that people are put in positions where they can grow like that. But yeah, in my experience definitely a huge thing.

Jimmy Chebat:

So we see a lot of management level people coming from the frontline space and sometimes that translates very well. Sometimes it doesn't, because there's a certain skill set people skill set that sometimes individuals don't have. They're highly skilled in their role as a frontline worker, but they're not as skilled in people management. We find that part of the leadership role is to continue to maintain company culture. Tell us about the role of leaders in maintaining and developing culture within Wayfair.

Negra Tutundzic:

Yeah, if not. All, most of the programs, aka structures, processes that my team builds is for the frontline managers. So yes, at the end of the day, our target audience, our customers, are the frontline agents, but they're not the ones engaging with my team's programs and my team's events. It's the frontline managers because that's where the cascade happens right. So, for example, we have a monthly program called Moments that Matter. It gives frontline managers access to gift cards, swag, gifts, whatever they would like to personalize for their team member who maybe just got a new dog or is moving into a new house.

Negra Tutundzic:

We work with them to make sure that they know that these resources are available to them and the right way to use it to create those deeper, trusting personal connections and culture on their team. So really, at the end of the day, the target audience for what my team is building and designing from a programmatic standpoint is actually for the frontline managers, because they are the boots on the ground of the team culture and they get to decide how they want to use this stuff too. Every team is different, different personalities, different preferences, and every team like that's really where the flexibility needs to come in from from my team standpoint. But yeah, like you hit it now and add like it is the managers, the direct managers, who are coaching D&D, now having their team meetings a weekly. Like I'm not in those spaces, I'm one person, I can't be, you know, but my team can at least help build the resources, the tools, the platforms through which the managers then engage and basically bring that cultural piece to life on their team.

Jimmy Chebat:

So that's a good point there, the point of engagement, right. So the point that you just made kind of touches on three different subjects, right. One is how do you personalize, right? So you're talking about incentives, you're talking about rewards, right, but that's just a mechanism to engage, right? It's a way not just to reward, because I think people love the reward aspect of it. But when you personalize the reward where you have the manager, go and talk to an individual, not for the purpose of figuring out what reward, but hey, let me get to know you on a personal level. You know what's going on in your life and you know, when you create that connection, that emotional, personal connection between the manager and the agent and then you supplement it with the reward that is again personalized for that individual, I think that's where you maximize the culture building aspect of it is because they feel like, hey, they're listening, they understand, they care. The empathy component of it plays a role.

Jimmy Chebat:

But engagement is a really, really important part of culture, right, because you can try to build everything. If your employees are disengaged, nothing is going to stick. There's another statistics Deloitte has a study that shows that highly engaged teams show 21% greater profitability and 41% reduction in absenteeism. How do you foster a culture of engagement across the organization? I know, like you said, you're one department, you're providing tools, but how has that messaging cascaded down? You just mentioned a very good example, which is the reward aspect of it. What other examples do you guys use, or what other techniques or strategies do you use to engage?

Negra Tutundzic:

I mean, communication is kind of fundamental right being really understanding where our audience is mostly on Slack. No call center agent is going to be like checking their email, right. So it's really understanding where are they, where can we meet them and how do we make sure that they're aware of the culture that we're building, what they have access to? Sending a lot of reminders. Everyone's busy. There's a lot of Slack channels. Just understanding the flow of work is a big component of how we engage. Where do we, where can we meet them? How can we make it exciting, also relevant, like real time. Um, for example, I have a team that is on deck during business hours to distribute those awards in real time to managers when it's time to say that, to say that thank you to the, the person that they get that reward pretty quickly because that's where you get the biggest impact, right, it's like-.

Jimmy Chebat:

The real-time feedback loop.

Negra Tutundzic:

Not the three-week delay, like where's my gift, kind of thing. So there's a lot of like. I think it's just like timeliness, really clear communication, also making sure like it's genuinely expressed and it doesn't sound too businessy like a robot wrote it. Like you know, we really try to bring the human aspect to how we engage with people. So be like. You know we have themes and seasons we can play into.

Negra Tutundzic:

It's back to school season right now, so we kind of play on that to kind of get people to sort of catch their eye in some way on maybe, an event that we're running and make it feel relevant to their lives. A lot of parents right now are in back to school shopping. So really understanding our audience of like, who are they, where are they, how are they, what's the zeitgeist right now? One kind of tactical example is I'll sit on these weekly business reviews every week and I will listen to all the frontline managers talk about where their metrics are, how their KPIs are doing, feedback that they're getting from their team members in their team huddles, and that gives me a lot of great context into. You know what about to roll this event out, but they're really stressed out. Their sites are focused on something else. Maybe it's not the right time to engage them. They don't have time, and that's a great way for me to know when to engage too, if that makes sense.

Jimmy Chebat:

Yeah, absolutely. Technology plays a pretty vital role in today's workplace, especially with it being remote or hybrid. You mentioned Slack as a key tool that you use. What other technologies do you use outside of that? I mean, are you collecting information through surveys? Is there a survey tool that you use? How are you cataloging this data? I mean, you're a data person. You've collected data to analyze that for the consumer side of things. What tools are you using for the agent side of things?

Negra Tutundzic:

side of things. What tools are you using for the agent side of things? Yep, so there's a biannual kind of employee voice call it employee voice survey that's designed and, more so, administered by our talent management team. But, being in the engagement space and really needing to understand our employees, I work very closely with them to get that data and make sure that questions are added to that survey that are relevant for my team, that are actually actionable. So that's kind of the big one, right Biannual, that really then determines and defines action planning and where do we prioritize?

Negra Tutundzic:

Okay, recognition is really falling short. Let's amp it up a little bit. Whatever Other tools, I would say we have multiple dashboards that I've built for with and for my team to track the utilization of our programs, because that's a good pulse check on. Are the managers engaging with the tools that we are giving them? Where are the hotspots? Which departments, which teams are really using them consistently and how can we compare their voice results to that? Are they seeing a higher employee experience score? Are they getting more positive feedback in this survey if they're the managers?

Jimmy Chebat:

who are?

Negra Tutundzic:

consistently leveraging the resources that we're providing them versus like the lower users, the resources that we're providing them versus like the lower users, right, so there's a couple of dashboards and sort of all kind of marry the data together to say okay here's the input and here's the output.

Negra Tutundzic:

like, hey, leaders, this is um, it's technology, but it's, you know, just kind of leveraging, you know data that we're already getting and collecting anyway, um utilization with our programs. Marry that with the voice survey, that's a great way to see the impact on the input. Another technology I would say qualifies as technologies, but it's constantly looking for partners to work with in the employee community type space. So, for example, a big partner we have is Confetti. They have these like amazing hosted interactive events that they set up for you. There's a professional host and they do like trivia games or get to know your coworker or coworker feud, and so we're just like fun things that we'll do on a quarterly basis to build just some fun into the workplace and get people to get to know each other in different ways, so it's a technology that we leverage.

Negra Tutundzic:

I mean, it's really more kind of a virtual event offering, but they have some awesome tools that they kind of takes us out of like the normal standard, like Google Meet space, and puts people in a little bit of a different virtual interaction.

Jimmy Chebat:

Yeah, so there's, I mean a bunch of different.

Negra Tutundzic:

There's not kind of one solution to engagement.

Jimmy Chebat:

You got to have to do a bunch of things, yeah, so I'm going to challenge you here. I'm going to challenge you to be efficient with your words and if there was a takeaway or that our audience could take from you in terms of a strategy for engagement. To put it as succinctly as possible, what are the key ingredients to building a strategy, to implementing that strategy, to continue to check the pulse of that strategy and rinse and repeat what would you say is something that our audience can use.

Negra Tutundzic:

Understand your audience, understand what motivates them, understand their work day, understand why they came to work and what they're looking for. So I think that kind of goes back to the motivation piece. But really there because you're trying to get it to the human level, right? Um, that's kind of what I would say is start with knowing your people and work from there.

Jimmy Chebat:

Work back from there beautiful switching topics we talked about. You had mentioned something about didn't use the exact word burnout, but you had mentioned hey, there's, it's a lot of stress in frontline workers. Right, most of the time you're probably dealing with disgruntled consumers who maybe want to do a return and you and it could be kind of a heavy burden to roll You're the frontline worker, you're taking all that anger. You've got to convert that into consumer satisfaction. The pandemic how are you addressing is number one. Is that? Do you see that as being a real issue? Does the numbers translate to your, to what you've seen in the organization? Is that a real thing?

Negra Tutundzic:

It's just being a stressful job. There's so many other factors that I tend to hear about that contribute to burnout, especially in the service call center space. I mean, it's a lot of emotional, emotional cargo you take on to. You're interacting with somebody else on the other side of the phone and it's hard to not let it get to you, you know especially if it's an emotionally charged one.

Jimmy Chebat:

So so quick pivot, because that you mentioned emotional issues to have to deal with, and that is, I think, the context that you're putting it in, is the conversation between the consumer and the frontline worker, which leads to burnout, which is what we were just talking about. But it's related to mental health and it has an impact on mental health and it has an impact on mental health and there's other issues outside of work that again can create other mental health issues. So you know, there's another statistic from Deloitte that I've got here I'd like to share Eighty-five percent of employees say they would more likely stay in their job if their employer showed more empathy. So is that part of the strategy? And is that the part where you talked about engagement and reward kind of fit into that category of empathy?

Jimmy Chebat:

Or is there a little bit more trying to understand the challenges that each individual is facing and trying to create a unique solution for that individual.

Negra Tutundzic:

I mean, I think from from my team standpoint, it's it's it's a little bit of education for leadership and frontline managers to understand that sometimes saying thank you isn't enough. Like be more specific, really be genuine with what you're recognizing this person did, Because people can see right through a template, you know, boilerplate. Thank you so much for your help. You know, like some of the trainings, for example, or some of the resources that we developed for our recognition programs, is how to write a quality nomination, and those tips and pointers included in those trainings are be empathetic, showcase what the impact of this person's contribution actually did, helping you meet your project goals.

Negra Tutundzic:

In this way, recognition it's not the only ingredient, but I think knowing actually what it took that person to do that above and beyond behavior, and empathizing with that, makes recognition that much stronger. So, like from a, to put it from like a tactical, like what my team's responsible, like we'll implement those types of reminders and just be like, take a moment and be real with this. It's not a check the box activity. Don't do it while you're on calls. Take 20 minutes and write a quality nomination for a monthly program or monthly award and it sounds transactional because you have to write it and you submit it, but the content in there needs to be human. It needs to have that empathy.

Jimmy Chebat:

So how realistic is it to scale that? I mean you have what I would call an enterprise-size level workforce in Wayfair Services and there are much bigger organizations and then there are much smaller organizations. So how much resources would need to be put into it to be able to do that at scale effectively? I'll put it that because you could still do it. It's just to do it effectively and to scale it across the workforce.

Negra Tutundzic:

I mean honestly, it's like it's all about how we talk about stuff and, like you know, there's certain leadership and I'm not saying at Wafer Service, just in other corporations like all they talk about is numbers and the business Right, and they're not infusing any of the here's what it took us to get here. And so, going back to our conversation about like culture building and what goes into a culture, it's also like, as you're providing updates in an email or presenting in a town hall as a leader, where are your slides about the people who are behind this right, making sure that that content and that sharing and they're actually talk, tracking that empathy and living it. I think that's how you scale it, like you can-.

Jimmy Chebat:

Embed it into the culture and then make it visible to everybody.

Negra Tutundzic:

Yeah, exactly, I think it's like how you talk about stuff, yeah.

Jimmy Chebat:

Yeah, yeah. I think that's a really good point. If the entire workforce, if that messaging is cascaded down through leadership, but it's embedded into the culture and everybody sees it. You don't necessarily need that pat on the back each and every day, that personalized pat on the back, but you know that it's happening and when your time comes it's going to happen with you as well, and I think that's more of a culture. Would you agree that it's more of a culture aspect, that empathy, that personalization, because to scale it, I think you would need two or three full-time people for every 10 people. I think it's very tough.

Negra Tutundzic:

I mean the other piece of it too is scale it. It's the frontline managers in our case. They know their team, they know what is going on, the level of work happening, so they'll tap into the resources we give them as far as the moments that matter gifts or whatever and they use their judgment on when do I leverage and say thank you in this way or say thank you that way, so they really help us scale it in their own way. We're just not there like monitoring every move, but it's built into their expectations. As a manager, I would say that's kind of the other side of it is umbrella leadership culture, talking about it, making sure it's living and breathing and content that they're presenting. But it's also the managers knowing that this is an expectation of you, that these resources exist. Use them at scale. You know when you feel like it's going to make an impact on your team. And that's sort of been kind of ground up and then bottomed down.

Jimmy Chebat:

The ways that you're able to I'll put this in quotes bend the rules is to work from home. Right yeah, are you guys fully remote? Are you fully in-house? Are you a hybrid? What is the current setup at Wayfair?

Negra Tutundzic:

So Wayfair's service is, I'm gonna say, 90 remote. We have um a call center in athens, georgia, and then we have um some folks in galway. Um, it's part of like the service teams.

Jimmy Chebat:

But yeah, mostly, mostly remote and mostly remote and have you found that to be beneficial with respect to nimble and also span, a lot more different?

Negra Tutundzic:

time zones. I think over the last few years, definitely our customer base has grown at Wayfair and so I think a big bit of the decision making behind that was we need to meet our customers where they are right right, which is sometimes 24 7 because they're in so many different markets. So I think, um, that was definitely a a decision that was made, I think, in lieu of some of the customer needs. Um, I don't have a lot of context of like why we don't have more brick and mortar. Um, that's not sort of my, I don't have visibility into that, but um, I have. You know, my understanding is definitely just being a global um service force has helped us meet our slas and really be kind of a top competitor, I think, in the market.

Jimmy Chebat:

Do you work multiple shifts, like is it a 24-7 department, or do you use the time zones to help?

Negra Tutundzic:

Yeah, I mean they're outsourced, like in India and such, but I'm not sure, honestly, what their time zone or what their coverage is. But as far as the North America-based teams, those are not 24-7 technically.

Jimmy Chebat:

What specific successes have you observed with remote work in your organization? Is there something that you can say, hey, we've been better off since we went remote and I know that you haven't been there too long over a period of time, so it's probably hard to remember a time pre-COVID or pre-remote. But is there anything that has kind of stuck out where collectively leadership at Wayfair says you know what prior to this we weren't able to do that?

Negra Tutundzic:

I think one thing that I've heard is definitely you hear it from a lot of people when you ask them what's your Wayfair story? And a lot of people are like I, I was on this team, that I was in this department, that I was in that team. So I think the remote landscape helps people like just move about a lot easier, try new things, get exposed to different teams, because you don't have to be in the same place as them. Everything is virtual. So I think that's a huge part of a lot of people's stories at wayfair, um, in the service space, you know, even before I came, that was happening, um, so I think there's always been sort of a virtual element anyway built into I think the culture, um, but yeah, I think it's a lot allowed a lot of people to remove barrier, like physical barriers, and go and figure out where do I want to take my career here and get to network a little bit easier too, a lot easier, actually Get exposed to a lot.

Jimmy Chebat:

We talked about it earlier in our conversation. You know about giving people those opportunities to change departments. You know one of our focuses and our value propositions at CISO is that we help reduce attrition because there's a cost to it. Is there a cost for people moving from one department to another? Is there additional training? Is there that now you have to replace that person? Is the benefit also have its consequences?

Negra Tutundzic:

I don't know the money answer to that, but I will say that we try to celebrate anytime anyone moves. So it's a big part of our comms strategy, in partnership with the internal comms team, is get that information from the HR department who has been promoted, who moved departments, who stepped into a new role, and so let's celebrate that in our newsletters. Because, going back to what is the culture we want to build at wayfair, it's you can grow here. So from my experience I haven't seen any grumblings about like well, that person left so I have to replace them.

Negra Tutundzic:

It's oh my god, amazing like let's celebrate the fact that this person could go into this new space and now they have a whole new career.

Negra Tutundzic:

So it's awesome that's kind of been my experience with like that type of um, that type of movement, and it's definitely the last few months been something we've been honing in on in partnership with the comms is let's engage people with the actual like development space. Um, and going back to the point of like frontline agents, that's not their dream job, like it's. Oftentimes they need the money, they don't have experience, something else, maybe they're just really loyal to the brand whatever. There's a lot of different reasons, but it is. It is a jumping off point for a lot of people. Sure we, we celebrate that at least.

Jimmy Chebat:

Yeah, you, you had said something, I don't know. Is it your motto uh, you can grow here. I love that uh, it's such a great saying, one of our people principles.

Negra Tutundzic:

So people principles is kind of our core values, right, that we live, uh, you know, way for way for wide, not just service, and so it's something that we um build into our monthly recognition program. So that is, which people principle is this person embodying? Why are you nominating them? One of the people principles is adapt and grow, like it's built into the DNA, if you will, of like how the founders, stephen Neerich, talk about Wayfair as a whole, right, so it's definitely not something I think that anyone is like oh no, this is a cost. It's hey, this is great, we are a place to adapt and grow.

Jimmy Chebat:

How big is Wayfair as a whole organization? I mean Wayfair services, a couple thousand?

Negra Tutundzic:

Last I heard it was like 15,000 total.

Jimmy Chebat:

Nice, and how many countries?

Negra Tutundzic:

Six countries.

Jimmy Chebat:

Six countries. It's beautiful, and how long has it been around? It's not that old of a company, right.

Negra Tutundzic:

I think about 22 years now 22?

Jimmy Chebat:

Oh, it's a lot older than I thought. Yeah, because I know it was their 20th anniversary when I started.

Negra Tutundzic:

It's been two years since I started, so about 22. Yeah, it's not very old at all.

Jimmy Chebat:

Yeah, but it's grown considerably and they've got a great product.

Jimmy Chebat:

We furnish most of our offices here with Wayfair, so we're very familiar with the company and we hope to partner with you guys in the near future here, which is a good kind of last point here which, as you know, we've been working with you here open. We help engage users through managing an inclusive, fair and objective incentive program through gamification, and I know you guys have a budget for incentives that you use to distribute rewards and you know, I think, part of your objectives is to try to get as many people involved as possible and that's, I think, one of the reasons why we're hopefully attractive as a solution. But compensation versus incentives I know that compensation I mean people needed. The cost of living is going up considerably and people make their decisioning based on what sort of compensation that you offer. But how do you value incentives as part of that? I mean, does it play a role? Is it a kind of? Do you feel like it should be I don't want to say mandatory but an important and integral part of attracting and retaining talent?

Negra Tutundzic:

Yeah, I think it's definitely a tool to create a place where people are rewarded extra for doing the extra and I think intrinsically, as humans, we want to be doing good, we want to be patted on the back and, yeah, everybody makes a paycheck, I mean it's necessary to live, right, that's stable stakes to having a job.

Negra Tutundzic:

That's what having a job means. But I think the incentives piece is a tool to recognize the behaviors that we want to see at our company. That's kind of how I would summarize it and in my opinion yeah, I think that's mandatory because if you want to build a culture and a place of work that fosters innovation and growth and all the sort of like stuff outside of just your daily responsibilities because that's where you become a successful company is the smart thinking, the agile decision making, the team collaboration, all that stuff you're not getting paid for, that's not part of your hourly salary paycheck, right. But that's where incentives comes as a tool to foster those types of behaviors. And so, by incentivizing and rewarding people for showcasing those behaviors, that's where you see the long-term benefits as a company, right, and that's also where your culture comes from. So I think marrying what culture you want to build with the incentives, that's the how we're incentivizing it. That's a nice little marriage there, in my opinion, yeah no, I, I love it.

Jimmy Chebat:

I think it's an ingredient in the recipe of building culture. Yeah, exactly, and you know, one of the things that know we, we try to do is try to scale that Right and, you know, to try to get it to as many people as possible and try to keep it fair and objective so that way it's not abused because it's. We found that even in our organization, when I was running a call center, that it was the same people that were winning it all the time and you know you're alienating and kind of just demotivating the rest of the staff and so trying to make things more equitable, more fair, more distributed across your workforce, do you find that as a challenge in your role and how do you address that?

Negra Tutundzic:

Yeah, huge challenge. You address that. Yeah, huge challenge. You know it's really our frontline leadership that tends to decide whether there's any contest they want to run or you know those kind of monetary incentives as far as driving performance.

Negra Tutundzic:

But where my team comes in is have we thought about all the different nuances of who's going to be actually part of the contest and is that fair? So there's so many different departments and teams and service, and they all have different metrics. I think the one that everybody shares is customer satisfaction scores, because they're interacting with customers. That's the commonality. But every other metric there's different goals, there's different cadences where they report those numbers, and so it's really really hard to have a one-size-fits-all network-level incentive, because then you'll get people being like well, that's not fair, my shifts don't account for that type of interaction, or my team doesn't focus on that type of KPI, so that means we don't account for that type of interaction, or my team doesn't focus on that type of KPI, so that means we're just, we don't matter, right?

Negra Tutundzic:

So, yeah, you have to be really careful about scaling for the sake of scaling and forgetting the fact that, like, there's just so many nuances in performance specifically, or the KPIs rather, and it kind of goes back to one of the points I made earlier. It's knowing your audience and knowing you're the people that you are building these programs for. You got to do your own work, you got to understand, like, what are all these, how do all these teams work and how do they sync? And because, if you don't have that context and this is where it definitely leaned on our frontline leadership, because they're in in that space, right, but it's just calling that out and making them making sure that they're thinking about that, um, which it's not that they don't, but that's the challenge, right is how do we set up something that everyone can feel?

Negra Tutundzic:

part of yeah, participate in, but it actually does it drive our goals or does it drive impact? No, not, unless you create nuanced ones, because they're all different pieces of the puzzle to the greater goal, right? So, yeah, it's definitely a challenge. It's like efficiency, scalability, yeah, a lot of complexities.

Jimmy Chebat:

One of the things that we've been doing with our current customers and some of our prospects and I feel that this has been very successful for us in helping categorize KPIs, and something that we hope to work with you and your team on is we've identified five different categories of key performance indicators. One is behavioral right Things like showing up to work, showing up on time, availability, especially in a remote team if you have to log into a system to be available for customers. These are measuring behavior and those can be somewhat universal right across all departments. And then you have the second category is effort. You know effort doesn't require skill, it's a work ethic, right? It's how many? You know, what are your effort-based KPIs? How many number of phone calls did you take? How many phone calls did you make? If you're an outbound company, how many chat messages did you respond to? These are effort-based KPIs. Then you have your skill.

Jimmy Chebat:

So skill and results are the next two and they're very, very related, right? So if you're handling a phone call, what is the customer satisfaction score? That's a result. It also requires a skill to be able to do that, and maybe part of that skill is if you do some call recording and call scoring right. Did they introduce themselves? Did they use their first and last name? Did they say the name of the company? You know a lot of different companies use different scorecards depending on the. You know the department's roles and responsibilities collections uses mini, miranda and things like that in their scorecarding. And then the fifth one being engagement, because we feel that engagement with your work helps develop the culture, because it's not just about you, it's about the team, it's about the customer, it's a lot of stakeholders involved. But do you guys do that? Do you guys have categories of KPIs? And, if so, how are they different and what are the ones that you emphasize on outside of customer satisfaction?

Negra Tutundzic:

So not completely expert on the KP, like all the KPIs in frontline, but they're the ones that can kind of come to top of mind for me is did we resolve the issue for the customer the first time? So we're just reducing the callbacks, reducing the callback loop. So that's definitely one big category of KPIs that Frontline definitely has their eyes on in service at Wayfair is did we provide the right solution for that customer the first time? Because at the end of the day obviously we need a job like we're in service. But ideal stay is no customer calls us ever because they don't have any problems ever. But that's obviously not realistic. But the more we can reduce the number of times they contact us, the better. That's one category.

Jimmy Chebat:

So I guess I should have asked the question a little bit differently, which was no, no, no, no, I asked it the wrong way. No-transcript ignore results. You just don't want to put the emphasis on it. And so, just if, from a perspective of customer service and an unregulated space, I'm sure you know there can be lawsuits if they say I mean, this is your frontline workers, they're dealing with your consumers, things can happen right. But do you feel behaviors or effort is more important than skill and results, or do you feel that they're equally balanced?

Negra Tutundzic:

It's tough to answer that. I want to say they're equally balanced. Yeah, no, I mean, it's a great, great like esoteric topic. Skills are trainable, right, that's something that we can build into our onboarding and our training and our recurring coaching. I think behavior is something that isn't necessarily taught, but it's emulated, and that's why I feel like incentivizing behaviors like that is actually more important than the skill piece, because you're again building like these are the, this is the type of feeling that we're exuding to our customers, right? So like yes, everybody has to introduce themselves to the customer first contact resolution. But how did we treat that customer? Did we empathize with them? Did we provide them with multiple different solutions and give them the, the autonomy to choose what works best for them? That's the behavior part that I think incentives should actually be more focused on, because that's the relationship building, the trust building, both with your team and the customer, which, down the line, obviously has business impact. So hopefully that answers your question. That would be my-.

Jimmy Chebat:

Yeah, no, no, it was an unfair question. It's, I think, more of an operational side of things question because they're dealing with the KPIs directly, but we are close to running out of time here. I really appreciate you coming on our podcast and sharing your insights and your experience, and I love the unique approach that you came from customer or consumer analysis and analytics and now you're dealing with the other side is with the frontline workers and combining those two. It's awesome. I want to give you an opportunity. Do you have any questions for me?

Negra Tutundzic:

I wasn't prepared for that. I think what? What lights you up, jimmy? What lights you up at your job?

Jimmy Chebat:

You know what? I'm a very passionate person. I love. I'm a solution oriented person. So I love finding the challenges and, like, when I see unique challenges, new challenges, I love finding a solution for them. And you know it's a good type of stress. You know, whether it's in my business operations how am I dealing with my own business challenges? Or for our customers, where, hey, we have, as I just explained, we cannot incentivize results because it's regulated and this, that and the other. So finding a solution for that to me is what lights me up. I like a good challenge. I'm very competitive and you'll find that here very shortly when we do our trivia game together.

Negra Tutundzic:

But it's a great question yeah.

Jimmy Chebat:

I love a good challenge.

Negra Tutundzic:

Love that.

Jimmy Chebat:

Any other questions?

Negra Tutundzic:

Oh.

Jimmy Chebat:

We'll give you one more if you have one.

Negra Tutundzic:

What's your biggest accomplishment to date that you're most proud of?

Jimmy Chebat:

Wow, that can happen. So many different I can take that. I think my number one purpose in life is being a father, and raising two amazing kids is probably the thing that I'm most proudest of. Building a company, building a team, creating a family with that team is, I think, almost as fulfilling to me, because it's still. You know, family is part of our core values and it's, you know, I built the organization is the same way I try to build my family and run my family is, you know, through empathy, through pushing, you know and encouraging. It's like, hey, you know, we, when you fall down, you get up. You know you've got to be persistent. Being a father and being a leader at an organization are my two biggest accomplishments.

Negra Tutundzic:

Love that Good one, thank you.

Jimmy Chebat:

All right. Well, the time has come. I mean, if you just heard, I'm very competitive, so this is a trivia we're going to bring.

Negra Tutundzic:

I might flip up really badly on that.

Jimmy Chebat:

No, you know what We've got, emma. Emma, are you going to join us here? You are going to set us up with the trivia. We'd like to do either first to five or best to five. Emma's going to read the question. It's a trivia question. If you know the answer, just buzz in and just spit out the answer, then we'll keep score. Emma, you ready?

Negra Tutundzic:

What is the national bird of the United States? Bald eagle. What language is spoken in Brazil?

Jimmy Chebat:

Portuguese Portuguese, oh nice, you got it first.

Negra Tutundzic:

Who directed the movie Jurassic Park, steven Spielberg.

Jimmy Chebat:

You're crushing it.

Negra Tutundzic:

Child of the 90s. Gotta know my 90s trivia what is sushi traditionally wrapped in?

Jimmy Chebat:

Seaweed paper. I knew it. I love Jimmy's one.

Negra Tutundzic:

What is the main ingredient in hummus?

Jimmy Chebat:

Chickpeas.

Negra Tutundzic:

Who is the author of the Harry Potter series? Jk Rowling. How many players are there in a soccer team? Ten.

Jimmy Chebat:

Eight I don't know soccer, it's not my sport.

Negra Tutundzic:

What is the highest grossing film of all time?

Jimmy Chebat:

Titanic.

Negra Tutundzic:

And what decade was the internet created?

Jimmy Chebat:

70s 80s.

Negra Tutundzic:

How many teeth does an adult human have?

Jimmy Chebat:

32 32.

Negra Tutundzic:

Who invented the light bulb?

Jimmy Chebat:

Edison, that's an easy one. He actually didn't invent it, but he gets the credit because he patented it. But it's another conversation. So 4-4. This is it. Next one wins.

Negra Tutundzic:

What is the hottest planet in the solar system? Mars, mercury? Who composed the music For the Nutcracker?

Jimmy Chebat:

Tchaikovsky, I'm just making that word up.

Negra Tutundzic:

No, Zero class, I mean Not zero, but very low. Oh nice, okay, I took a guess. Oh wow, okay.

Jimmy Chebat:

That is an interesting way to win Negra. Thank you so much For coming on our podcast. It was great. It's such a pleasure To have coming on our podcast. It was great. It's such a pleasure to have you on our show. Hopefully we can have you on again in the near future.

Negra Tutundzic:

Awesome. Thank you for having me.

Jimmy Chebat:

What a fantastic and insightful conversation with Negra Tutundzic from Wayfair. She really highlighted how engagement and recognition work best when they're personalized, and how rewards are just one of many tools to build a strong, positive culture. Negra also shared how Wayfair is committed to celebrating growth by offering their agents opportunities to explore and move across departments, reminding us that fostering internal mobility is key to maintaining a motivated and dynamic workforce. Thanks for joining us and we'll be back with more great discussions soon. Remember it's game time.

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Andrew Reimers

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Jimmy Chebat

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