First Fridays is a monthly conversation hosted by The Daniel Group. Each session brings a practitioner or researcher into dialogue with TDG’s Bryan Gregory on topics at the intersection of customer and employee experience.
On September 4, Bryan Gregory sat down with Dr. Anna Kallschmidt, an industrial-organizational psychologist recognized by the American Psychological Association for her research on social class as a concealed identity in the workplace. Dr. Kallschmidt is the author of The Unwritten Rules of Work and has led hiring and training redesigns that increased organizational retention by thirty percent across federal agencies, global consulting firms, and higher education. She will be leading a half-day workshop at The Daniel Group’s CX Conference this fall in Charlotte.
The conversation covered employee engagement, workplace culture, and why the connection between how organizations treat their employees and what their customers actually experience is more direct than most leaders realize.
Why EX Is Not Separate from CX
Dr. Kallschmidt opened with a point that reframes how most organizations think about employee experience: leadership is not who customers interact with. Employees are.
“When you don’t have a positive relationship with the employees, that’s when customers get frustrated,” she said. “And if the employees and the leadership don’t have communication — bottom up and top down — then leadership is making decisions without knowing what the friction with customers is or what they’re happy with. So it’s an important mediator between customers and decision makers.”
This matters especially in industrial B2B environments, where a significant portion of customer-facing staff are technical experts — mechanics, parts specialists, field technicians — who were hired and promoted for their deep knowledge of equipment, not for their comfort navigating customer conversations. The gap between technical fluency and interpersonal communication is real, but Dr. Kallschmidt argues it is often handled in the worst possible way.
“A lot of places don’t do that. They just assume — and it’s like, this person has no soft skills. But they could be from anywhere. They could go home and have parents who don’t want them to make eye contact. If it’s not built into the system, you’re not going to see results.”
Culture Is Not What You Put on Your Website
The conversation moved quickly to culture — a word Bryan described as one of the most overused and under-defined in business. Dr. Kallschmidt offered a definition that has practical consequences.
“Culture is not what you said it is on your website. It’s what people know is accepted. It’s what people know is rewarded. It’s what they know will be punished.”
That distinction matters because it clarifies where culture actually lives. It is not in a values statement or an all-hands presentation. It is in the behavior that visibly goes unremarked, and the behavior that visibly gets someone in trouble. If the last person who raised a service problem with leadership was sidelined, the organization has a culture of silence — regardless of what the intranet says about psychological safety.
“There’s a good chance it’s not working for you,” she said. “We don’t usually see organizations with cultures of silence do really well unless they have hit the too-big-to-fail mark. Which is not most of us.”
The Engagement Crisis Is Not a Soft Problem
Gallup’s most recent numbers are stark: global employee disengagement is costing the world economy ten trillion dollars annually. The figure has remained roughly flat for two years.
Dr. Kallschmidt was careful to define what engagement actually means, because the word gets flattened in most organizational conversation. “Engagement is more than employee satisfaction. It’s more than people just being happy at work. Because somebody can be happy at work and still doing the bare minimum. That might be why they’re happy. Engagement is when they’re invested — they actually want to see the business succeed.”
Disengaged employees are not simply less productive. In some cases they are actively working against the organization’s interests — a dynamic Gallup captures in its measure of “actively disengaged” employees. And the root cause, in Dr. Kallschmidt’s research, is almost always the same: unclear expectations, unstated rules, and a culture that does not reward the behavior it claims to want.
“Without clear expectations, performance is just not going to happen. And what I think is a major disconnect I’ve seen throughout my career — whether in private sector, academic, or public — is that especially since the pandemic, there’s been frustration on the organizational end. There’s this feeling that nobody understands professionalism, nobody understands just the minimum. But on the other end, they’re enforcing things that have never been said.”
The Starbucks Warning About Forced Positivity
One of the most vivid examples in the session was the Starbucks mandate from 2020 requiring baristas to write “meaningful connection” messages on customer cups. The intent was to create moments of warmth. The result was the opposite.
“The employees were like, this is another thing I have to do — and you’re not giving me any more time to do it,” Dr. Kallschmidt said. “And the customers hated it because it was taking longer to get their cup. They’d write something nice, but then slam it down and put the pen back. We’ve known in emotional labor research for years that customers can tell when your employees are miserable. They can tell when it’s fake.”
This is the distinction between surface acting — performing a feeling you do not have — and deep acting, which is genuine investment in the customer interaction. Surface acting is exhausting for employees and transparent to customers. And Starbucks compounded the problem by launching a positivity initiative while simultaneously in the middle of significant union complaints and labor disputes.
“To have that going on, unaddressed in the background, and then be like, now you need to create moments of connection — that’s why the employees were like, absolutely not.”
Technical Expertise Is a Strength, Not an Obstacle
A recurring theme in Dr. Kallschmidt’s research is that the qualities associated with working-class and technical professional backgrounds — directness, collaboration, expertise-first communication — are framed as deficits in corporate environments when they are often genuine strengths. The challenge is not elimination but translation.
“It is a strength to have someone in leadership or in customer service who does understand the technical components,” she said. “When I go to the auto shop, I don’t care if you have an MBA. I care if you know how to work on a car. How to blend owning that expertise with — in this environment, this type of language is going to be received better — and how do I do that in a way that’s not draining me?”
The framing that works, she argued, is developmental rather than corrective. “There’s a huge difference between telling someone ‘this is a cultural difference’ and telling someone ‘you have no soft skills and you’re unprofessional.’ Especially with someone who is an expert in something. It’s dehumanizing. I really encourage: this is just a shift. This is not — I can’t believe you don’t know how to do this.”
Bryan drew a direct parallel to how TDG coaches dealers on using customer feedback: lead with what the customer praised, then open the door to the harder conversation from a position of shared success rather than criticism.
AI Does Not Replace the Basics
Late in the conversation, Dr. Kallschmidt offered a pointed observation about the AI-in-customer-service moment we are currently in.
“The most basic things that have always been true — nobody calls a hotel and wants to talk to a phone tree. Nobody wants to navigate AI loops when they have a problem. Before AI, everybody hit zero. And that’s still true. AI can change the medium, but throwing out all of that knowledge of human behavior and the basics of business — I don’t see that going well.”
She also noted something counterintuitive about the class dynamics of work in an AI era: the skills long undervalued as “soft” or “pink collar” — genuine human connection, reading a room, building trust — may be precisely what is most durable as AI handles more of the technical computation that was previously considered high-skill work.
“Everybody hates picking up the phone and it’s AI. And before AI, everybody hit zero. There are just some things that have always been true. And if you have experience in this, that’s even more important now.”
What to Do with the Information
Toward the end of the session, Bryan asked the practical question many CX leaders face: how do you take what customers are telling you and make it land with a leadership team that is focused on quarterly numbers?
Dr. Kallschmidt’s answer centered on translation — making the cost of inaction visible in terms leadership actually tracks. “Sixty to seventy percent of business owners say miscommunication is their number one expense every year. But we keep talking in indirect corporate jargon. When what is expensive is normalized as ‘just business,’ we just keep throwing money out the door.”
Bryan added the tool TDG practitioners have found most effective in those rooms: audio.
“I would start leadership meetings playing a phone call audio from a survey. And it takes over the room. It’s beautiful. Because now it’s not Brian’s opinion based on something that he read from the Daniel Group. That’s the customer telling you the whole truth, nothing but the truth. And you can hear the emotion in their voice.”
Join Dr. Kallschmidt at the CX Conference This Fall
Dr. Kallschmidt will be leading a half-day workshop at The Daniel Group’s annual CX Conference in Charlotte this October. The workshop — focused on the unwritten rules that shape customer experience and how to communicate upward about them — builds directly on this session. Learn more and register at our conference page.
To explore how customer feedback can surface the employee-experience gaps costing your organization, connect with our team.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What is the connection between employee experience and customer experience?
- Employees are the primary interface between leadership decisions and customer interactions. When employees are disengaged, poorly trained, or operating in a culture that punishes honest feedback, those conditions show up directly in the customer experience. Improving employee experience is not a separate initiative from improving CX — it is a prerequisite for it.
- What are the 'unwritten rules of work' and why do they matter for CX?
- Unwritten rules are the unstated expectations about professional behavior that organizations enforce without ever articulating clearly — things like when it is acceptable to speak up, what counts as professional communication, or how eye contact is expected to be used with customers. These rules are often rooted in social class and cultural background. When they go unaddressed, organizations end up labeling employees as unprofessional or lacking soft skills, when the real issue is that no one ever made the expectation explicit.
- What is the difference between surface acting and deep acting in customer service?
- Surface acting is when an employee performs a feeling they do not actually have — forcing a smile or scripted enthusiasm while privately disengaged. Deep acting is when an employee genuinely invests in the interaction and the customer perceives that authenticity. Research shows that customers can detect surface acting, and it erodes trust. Deep acting is only possible when the underlying work environment supports it — which is why toxic cultures produce hollow customer service even with the best training.
- How does Gallup measure the cost of employee disengagement?
- Gallup estimates that the global engagement crisis is costing the world economy ten trillion dollars annually, a figure that has held for two consecutive years since 2020. At the individual level, disengagement costs roughly 34 percent of an employee's salary in lost productivity. These numbers reflect not just absenteeism but the gap between employees who actively invest in the organization's success and those doing the bare minimum to stay employed.
- How can CX leaders use customer feedback to make the case for employee experience investments?
- Customer feedback — especially verbatim comments and recorded survey calls — translates abstract people-management problems into concrete business consequences leadership can hear. Playing a customer audio clip in a leadership meeting is often more persuasive than any internal report, because it removes the filter of interpretation and lets the customer make the case directly. The data from a sustained feedback program can connect specific service failures to identifiable gaps in training, culture, or communication — and quantify the cost in terms leadership responds to.
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