Innovative Work Models for the Future with Ryan Scott

**SPEAKER_1** (0:03)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:17)
We've got another guest from Atlanta this week. Atlanta is representing, you know, I just remembered when I was back in my twenties and living in Atlanta, our car had no air conditioning. And the only way we could get around was you had to make sure you had a cup of something with ice in it, because otherwise you would just die.
Martha, before the show was talking about 100 degrees, but it's dry heat, Martha, it's dry heat. Atlanta was sweltering. Welcome back to The Bliss Business Podcast, everyone, the show where we explore how empathy, connection and purpose transform business from the inside out. I'm Stephen, joined by Mike. And today's conversation dives into the future of work and the new models that are reshaping it. I've mentioned this in the past, but, or and quite often and frequently when I'm a guest on other podcasts, but a Gallup study in 2023 showed only 23% employees worldwide are engaged at work. And in 2024, that dropped to 21%. So disengagement is going the wrong way here. It's costing billions of dollars in productivity. And not to mention, who knows how many people out there depressed, not feeling well, and really not happy with the fulfillment they're getting in their work. So meanwhile, the flexible human first models are rising in popularity for a reason, I think, because of, partly because of this. And our guest today is someone who works on the front lines of this shift. Mike, introduce our guest today.

**Mike Liwski** (1:49)
Oh, Stephen, I'd be happy to. Today we're thrilled to have Ryan Scott with us. He's the head of product at DNA Behavior. Ryan brings with him deep experience in behavioral intelligence, workplace innovation and go to market strategy, which we know are key to the success of our listeners. Then also through his work at DNA Behavior, he's really helping companies shift how they understand people, both inside and outside of the business, so that they can create a more adaptive, a more inclusive organization that is as well more scalable. Ryan, with that, welcome to our show. We're super happy to have you with us.

**Ryan Scott** (2:36)
Yeah, super happy to be with you guys. Thanks Mike and thanks Stephen. Yeah, so I'll just give a little bit about myself and what I've been working on, and hopefully that can drive the conversation.

**Mike Liwski** (2:46)
Sure.

**Ryan Scott** (2:46)
I love AI, so that will be a theme that's coming up now, and a lot of the work that we're doing just to make sure that people aren't left behind in the organization, and we can keep everybody trained up on all the AI initiatives. That's one of the things we're really seeing now is that as technology is changing, a lot of people can be left behind if we can adapt to them. That's one of the things I'm passionate about. As was mentioned earlier, I'm in Atlanta, born and raised.
I went to school in Atlanta, Georgia Tech, and I was introduced to DNA Behavior, actually, whenever I was still in college. DNA Behavior, we're an enterprise behavioral data analytics company. Think of personality testing, but on a whole enterprise or organizational level. We do personality testing on an individual level. We give reports just like you're probably used to with seeing results from Disc or Myers-Briggs or CliftonStrengths. It's very similar to that. But we roll up all the insights so that anybody in the organization can see how they better can work with their co-workers, their team, or the C-suite can see everybody's personality insights on an organizational view. So I was very passionate about finance and big data whenever I was at Georgia Tech, and that's what my specialty was. And DNA Behavior came across as an interesting internship opportunity for me because they were doing some very early machine learning. So I was quite excited about that whenever I learned about it. I had actually never heard about machine learning, and this was back in 2010 So pretty early in those days for a small business dealing with this. So I signed up as an intern, and I started out in product management as an intern there. Early on, not all of our clients were even using a computer system to do the personality test. We had people that were completing the forms on paper and faxing them in or emailing them in in some cases. So we were having to process a lot of the results manually, score them and send them back to our clients. And then since that initial internship, I've grown to now be the head of product 14 years later, but we're doing things much more scalably with AI. We have 4,000 different insights that we can pick up on any individual. And we have some really cool dashboards and sophisticated, customizable reports that can be built for individuals and teams. So just very interested in how psychological safety, making sure everybody is heard and communicated well in the company, and then giving all these insights to the C-suite so that they can report on everything and get a heat map, if you will, on how everybody is performing psychologically, emotionally, and with the workplace.