EP058 - How to boost team engagement with AI with Ruxandra Cord at TheCordAI
About the episode
This episode focuses on new avenues for boosting team engagement with the latest tools like AI. Ruxandra Cord and her company are working with distributed teams to improve meeting quality and boost team productivity and overall engagement with the help of artificial intelligence. Her work is based on academic research and the current adoption of ML/NLP AI technologies.
About the guest
A human being of few words, thinking in bullet points and pursuing a journey of meaningful touchpoints:
- I got educated as a journalist and enjoyed that career until it became a tabloid scene.
- I turned to PR and crisis communication for about 13 years - I guess I found it meaningful until I didn't.
- I enrolled in an entrepreneurial MBA with the clear intention of changing my frame of reference - it happened.
- I trained as a team coach and am now trying to serve the entire organization, not only top management teams. My focus is on distributed teams.
- To achieve the above, I founded theCoRD.ai - the AI that coaches your teams in the workflow and reveals how the company runs the business by analyzing how the team members run their meetings while keeping the employees engaged and the meetings shorter and action-oriented.
- I’m learning to see the world in fractals - the magic lies in recognizing patterns and changing them if possible.
Connect with Ruxandra on LinkedIn.
About the host
My name is Peter Benei, founder of Anywhere Consulting. My mission is to help and inspire a community of remote leaders who can bring more autonomy, transparency, and leverage to their businesses, ultimately empowering their colleagues to be happier, more independent, and more self-conscious.
Connect with me on LinkedIn.
Want to become a guest on the show? Contact me here.
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Welcome everyone. Welcome on the Leadership Anywhere podcast. In today's episode, we will discuss two very popular topics in one. One is AI and the second one is team building. I think the main question that everyone has right now, aside from, what AI will do for us, is that how we can use AI in people relationships and in people operations. That's an interesting and emerging topic within the remote work or distributed or flexible work or whatever we call it now space. Everyone is launching AI assistants but not many people are launching AI in the team building space. To discuss, I have Ruxandra Cord with me from TheCordAI and we will discuss AI and team building. Hello, Ruxandra.
Hello, thank you for having me and I am very thrilled to be here and discuss these are certainly hot topics.
Appreciate your time for coming here. Before we start pre call, we already discussed your family name, which is amazing. And you should tell a little bit more about that name and where it's coming from, but also please tell me where are you coming to remote work? What's your story behind the company that you started?
Yes. My family name is Cord. In Romanian, it is the medical word for heart. And I made this correlation because the team is the heart of the company. If the teams are not working, the heart is not functioning. But even more, there is another layer on this family name in the English dictionary, the second definition is spiritual link, spiritual response. Yeah, I searched in my inspiration and named the company. So the name of the company, it's acronym coming from the cord, the coaching results driven AI but also has the heart in it. And the spiritual bond getting out of it. Getting back to AI, it's very important to be intentional how we create this AI, because it's a feedback loop. The AI will recreate us. So we have to be very intentional about how we will create this. So getting back to your second part of the question, how I started my remote journey. I didn't know it was called remote back then because it started in 2019 when I wanted to create a tool for instant coaching sessions. I just wanted to create an app based on a synchronicity concept for everybody or individual to be connected in the moment, with a certain coach in a matter of minutes when the topics for them was hot. So I didn't know it was remote, but it does to connect create this on synchronicity concept. And then the pandemic hit, it was a huge help for us to transform the business model from a B2C because it was a marketplace and very capital intensive to a B2B and we started to promote it in the companies for everybody in the company to join because everybody was home with a lot of problems with the families, with the dogs, with the kids, with everybody. But most of the companies focus their budgets for the coaching services for the late leadership team and or top employees. So I started out coaching managers and while discussing with the managers, we saw a different pain that of managing distributed teams and asking for a different kind of steps yeah, set of skills. But managing managers, it wasn't enough. Because that was not a problem of individual. It was a systemic problem. So me and my colleagues started to join their meetings. Why meetings? Because the meetings, like in the sports, the only place and time when the team is getting together, acts like a team, and you can see those patterns in their interactions. And therefore, the point of interventions. You can see by looking at a meeting, how the team operates. And then you can extrapolate these to the larger organization in terms of patterns. So if you want to make a change, you have to start from the periphery because the core is very resistant change. And we can see now all of the return to office mandates and so on.
Everyone is resistant to change in general, by the way, but especially those who are very well comfortable in their situations already, which are the leaders. So of course, exactly.
And yeah, we started to, we have to start it from somewhere from the periphery, but we have some problems with the budgets. And my goal was, how can I reach as many teams as possible at a fraction of the cost? And me as a systemic team coach, I'm not following the content of the meeting. I'm only following the process. I'm following how they are interacting. For example, how they are starting a meeting is the way they will start a project, how a team is managing a meeting, like facilitation, everything. It's the way the leadership team is managing the business. So for us, the teams, the meetings are just fractals of a higher organization. It's easier to show, to raise awareness in the leadership team on the patterns From the teams and then just ask, do you happen to know to sense this pattern? You can find it elsewhere in your organization. It easier, but getting back to the process, because that's the important part. We have to change the process. And we ask some PhDs in AI and machine learning if they could be able, it was just a thought. How can I scale myself and the team? Is it possible to make an AI, an algorithm to learn the patterns in the teams? Because we focus only the process. And we gathered a team of 20 coaches, team coaches. And for one year and a half, we annotated more than 3000 online meetings. The transcript across 14 team patterns. Starting from facilitation, setting goals, polarities, recurring polarities, stopping the polarities, inviting everybody to contribute. We say passing the ball because that's the real collaboration. The last layer we add on top of those are the managerial skills from alignment informational skills, relational skills, and action. And when are they deployed? Because everybody has those skills, but it's imperative when they are deployed because if you are starting a meeting with action skills you won't have alignment. In this remote world, you have to have these alignments first to know, to put everybody on the same table. It goes hand in hand with async working because yeah, and getting back to what we said, yes, we annotated across 14 patterns and started to train the algorithm and we tested the the algorithm with three remote companies. Now we are open for the public for the public beta but I would like to stress on the synchronous and asynchronous working and what we saw as a result of the benefit of using this kind of AI team coach is that the teams decrease the length of the meetings. And increase the deep work time and most of those the planning before the meeting is crucial. So it goes hand in hand. We are not focusing on the meetings, scheduling more meetings, but make them more efficient and better because we, it's easy to just to cancel all the meetings. It won't resolve the problem. It's a systemic problem.
I see the same patterns even without AI team coaches or team coaches as well. And I want to highlight one sentence that you said, and I think it's super crucial for the audience is that how you handle a meeting is probably the same way that you handle the whole team within your work. And it's really interesting and it's also self explanatory that you're not focusing on the actual content of the meeting, but the process of the meeting, because the process is probably the same or should be the same for most of the meetings. Yeah, content can differ obviously based on the company, the team and whatever, but the process should be like a template defied approach.
Exactly.
Let's talk about that process a little bit more. So because, and also I understand that the AI element as well, because if you approach a meeting from a process standpoint, then you can algorithm it. So then there is a algorithm that can then can be a template. There can be something that can roll out to any company, not just to one team. Or you can roll out to the whole company, entire company, if you have a big corporation. So how can we create a better process for a meeting or what can be a common challenges?
Before starting a meeting, you have to know why you are there. And every single team member has to know why. Otherwise... Just opt out and we had included this into our platform, where for everybody to put in their contribution to the next meeting, the preps. The prep materials for each topic, and moreover, the planned time for each topic. Because when you are intentional about what you are going to say and what would be the outcome for each single talk, which I'm responsible for, I will see if I will be efficient or not. And the algorithm is making this difference, the delta between the planned time for each topic and the actual time spent on each topic. And you can see the saboteurs. There are some in every team. They are not bad people. They are just expressing what the system is repressing. It's like in the families when the kid is just making a tantrum. He's not a bad kid. It's expressing what the parents are repressing. I think this would be one thing, the prep, how do you prepare before the meeting? And what success, how does the success looks like? What do you want to? Do you want to achieve? What are the goals? And how can we make sure that we know how this success looks like? Because we have to design the outcomes. And that's the problem with transitioning from traditional working to remote working, because we are not designing the outcomes. We are focusing on the time working. We work not on the outcomes and we have a saying in our team, a meeting without a decision, a very clear decision. It's a waste of time. So we are measuring the meetings by the number of decisions made and the action points made. Otherwise, yes, for sure, it could be an email or it could be just for relational, but you have to be very clear what's the outcome and the goal of that meeting.
And so there are two ways that people can do that. Especially for example let's pull, everyone will be familiar with this example. There is a weekly what to do type of meeting and there is an agile or whatever coach on the team as well, live person. So it's a human being who's usually have two jobs, two problems to solve. One is getting out from the participants, the most important information, synchronizing that and motivating them to achieve the formalized goals, right? Usually that's, I don't want to like super simplify the agile coaches work but this is pretty much what they do on the bare level. And but if you do have a process for the meeting, sometimes you don't even need the human being to facilitate that because an AI bot. Can actually do that for you. How do you, that's the main question. How do you make sure that the AI bot can deliver somewhat the same results as a human coach placed within the team, making sure that the meeting is not wasted. What can be the main difference?
Yes, the bot doesn't have an interaction with the participant, with the team members. It only sits there and record and analyze after the meeting. So he's a silent partner and he could have they could have a voice after the meeting in a form of a dashboard. So we are delivering after analyzing the team patterns, we spot that the algorithm is spotting which is the pattern that they need to work on so we raise awareness on this pattern and the platform is very transparent. Everything that is happening in the meeting, all the patterns identified, they are transparently delivered all the team members because only in this way you can work around a systemic problem. So after analyzing one to, I don't know minimum four meetings, you can sort a pattern. And for example, if this pattern is a poor facilitation, you can see if this the meeting are for are not well facilitated by a numbers of aspects. How they start, the number of decision, how they they are interacting, the level of engagement of the participants, so they are linked. But if this is the pattern they need to work on, we will start sending them implementing steps for a month to have the time to build this new habit in parallel, we will also track the level of facilitation of the meeting and send them nudges after each meeting. THe same is whether if a new member is joining the meeting, the team dynamic will be changed because you cannot judge a new team member by not being so present, by not speaking. We will take also this into consideration when delivering the coaching recommendations. But the thing is the most important thing is they're transparent. There is transparency in feedback. And it's a moreover, like a feed forward not the feedback. What can you do better next time? So it's not finger pointing. It's focused on the future action.
And it's all driven by data. So pretty much a dashboard is the one that allows the leaders to, to learn a little bit more about their own teams. It's pretty much people analytics in general, right?
Yes.
I know that you tested in in some companies, but did you have any kind of setbacks or challenges from leaders? What are the problems that they are facing with? Why they are trying to use a tool, such tool like that. And do they afraid to use something like, if I would be a manager and I do have problems within my team, I wouldn't say that it's a trust issue, but it's I could have a trust issue to not to be able to record everything that I do during the meeting. So it's you need, it's a leap forward. It's a very much leap forward towards transparency.
We thought of this issue firsthand. Like recording the sessions, but it was a very cool surprise because everybody got accustomed to recording their meetings and these AI assistants just open our way our door because everybody's recording their meetings just to have everything transcribed and so on. We worried a lot about this issue, but we worry too much, so it's not a problem. What we worried also, it's giving negative feedback. Or talking about the elephant in the room that...
That, for example, I guess the, one of the most we haven't talked about this but I can imagine the biggest elephant in the room is that you have a meeting I dunno, five to 10 people gathered around. The goal of the meeting is to, I dunno discuss how things are standing and pretty much it's like a general goal. And at the end of the meeting it turns out based on all data, all metrics and everything, that only the leader was the only person who talked during the meeting for one hour straight.
Indeed, usually our the feedback from our research indicated just that, that most of the meetings function as a stage for the managers. And they are not allowing space and time for the team managers to have a proactive role. Yes. That was a key element, a key learning from us. And we inserted in our onboarding process, like learning nudgets and tips and tricks, both for managers and team members, and especially for managers to speak less. If they want a team that is collaborating they must speak less in a meeting. And another problem would be like yeah, a difficult, let's say a difficult person. Everybody knows they are occupying all the space in the room, in the meeting, or they are interrupting, because these interruptions are also a symptom of the system. Somebody is always interrupting the meeting when the whole team is starting to draw some conclusions, to note some actions.
Even just with a question.
Yes. The same team member, usually just asking a question, asking for more information. So he's deploying the informational skills, but In the proper, in other proper manner and time. Okay. In your organization, when you are trying to fulfill a project, who is interrupting? What are the setbacks? So we can make these links, these correlation from a team meeting perspective pattern to the whole system, the whole organization, and we identify a lot of patterns being related.
Yeah. I think one of the if anyone is listening this this episode, I think the biggest takeaway so far is that how you do a meeting and what happens on the meeting it's pretty much parallel to whatever happens at your company in general. And just to give an example, because this resonated with me really well the interruption the interrupter person. I had this one in one of my previous teams this person, this type of person, I guess everyone has the leader who spends the one hour meeting on talking for more than 40, 50 minutes to enter a day and add the and after a few meetings that person, that leader is quite surprised that why and no one is remembering on what happened on the meeting, he already communicated what happened on the meeting anyway, yeah, people just tune out after 10 minutes. But I had the interrupter, and it's so interesting to see, and I saw it firsthand, that person who always had a question, who treated the entire meeting as a one hour Q& A, for the meeting, it was a project meeting. It was always a project meeting. That was the very same person who formed comments and questions on the project management board as well, very same person, and they were usually not there are different questions, right? Different interruptions. A question can be great for clarification added value and whatever. After a certain limit or type of questions, these are just like, nagging. And I don't know. I don't know what to call it, but it's interesting to see that the same person who does that on the meeting will be doing that same thing on the project management board, in an email, on Slack, on chat, everywhere. So it's a behavior pattern. I'm trying to use that behavior word here. Yeah, that's a behavior pattern that can be quantifiable and it will present on all aspects of the organization.
Yes. And this is the elephant in the room because everybody knows it and no one talks about it. Yes. And now you have the data because you can have a coach in every single meeting and we are human beings. Maybe now I have a bad day and I don't see this type of behavior, but for sure I cannot be in every single meeting in the whole organization. So with this clear map of what is happening in the team dynamics, you have an opportunity for communication for collaboration on a hot topic that's opens the door to for team members to discuss.
I immediately thought about okay, this is this is pretty much backing decisions with numbers when it comes to, I don't know, laying off someone who's withholding a project all the time with the nagging questions. But it also, it helps with team coaching now. So what I feel, correct me if I'm wrong, having an AI team coach on a call that analyzes all the data and everything that happens online through a dashboard is amazing if you pair it with human coaches. Because the human coach can actually coach better with the data.
True. And this is the exact reason we have a community of systemic team coaches that can better analyze and understand the results of the algorithm. And they can dive deeper with the team and accompany the team. Yes. The ones that annotated the transcripts. So it was a collective effort for a collective good. I like to say about the court is like a Robin Hood for the coaching because he's taking the coaching benefit from the elite, from the selected ones and distributed to a cross organization for the collective good.
And also it makes everything transparent a little bit more.
Exactly.
Because it's already, it's already transcribing everything, right? So it's documenting everything. Cool. What do you think, what will be the next what's the future. Where AI can step into team building, team bonding and all the others not just in meetings but in any other elements, what would be the next step?
As I said at the beginning, I think it's very important to have view about how we are designing this AI. With this thought we will just transforming ourselves. I don't know where It will get us because the reality showed us that everything can happen in, I don't know, in six months. But I think it's imperative to be very intentional, like we are intentional in the remote work, we should be intentional on how we are using this AI. And for us it's important because we spend almost two years annotating. We didn't just get out of the shelf and solution build on chat GBT, but it's very important to have this trust to build, to know, to build an AI on a strong basis and with clear intentions. Otherwise, it will be all ruined in a couple of months and the impact maybe won't be on us, but it will be on our child, children. So we should be very aware of this is the reason why we spend all our resources, financial resources, emotional resources, and so on, on having this R and D thick layer. And we are in the in the process of signing some partnerships, research partnerships with organizational scientists, research group from MIT and Charlotte University to co create and to put together a research paper, based on all the data, aggregated data, we can get out of the meetings and see how very flawless process of a meeting of an online meeting can impact our lives.
This is really cool. Congratulations, by the way. And I highly support that. Yes. I think in the last half a year or so we've seen I think now at the stage, I'm sorry for being so ironic. Now we are recording this podcast on early October, by the way, we are at the stage when we have around 40 revolutionary new AI product every day, least that's the PR message. Usually they are just a front of chat GPT and that's it. But yeah it's really hard to, it's called, yeah, it's a gold rush. So it's obviously that, again, that's normal. We've seen this pattern everywhere before. If you are old enough. You remember that there was at least daily 10 different crypto projects that are revolutionary and will change everything or how we do things a couple of years ago. And before that, I don't know what was that before. Maybe we had AR, VR. I don't know.
VR. Yes. Yeah. VR. VR. VR. Before that, maybe I don't know. I've started when social media was the revolutionary change and it changes everything and there are new social media app every week. Yeah, but that's normal. So again, that's normal, but it's really valuable if someone or someone's are taking the actual time to do the hard work first then do the PR later. Let's. Let's close the episode with a recap of the benefits because again you've tested the tool on three different organizations not, I don't want to hurt any NDAs or whatever but how big were the organizations? That's also that's like a big thing, I think, to know because that ultimately defines the amount of data that you had, of course. But also what were the benefits of of using this tool? If there's, obviously it's countable and measurable but if you can highlight some, because obviously that the benefits that you've saw now will be the benefits of the future as well.
True. These three companies are coming from IT and Marcom sector and they are operating fully remote. They have up to 50 plus employees. And they enrolled all the team members in the project, in the beta testing. And in terms of benefits, we measure the benefits in the closed beta program coupled by the benefits we already knew and measured in our live intervention in in team meetings. And we saw that the AI team coach is better perceived and welcome into the meetings than a human coach. And I will give you an example.
That's unexpected, by the way.
Yes, because usually when I join a team in their online team meetings, mostly the manager can talk a lot or they are just getting hyped about the problems and so on. And we have a preliminary alignment, whether I should intervene in the middle of the meeting, or I have five minutes just to debrief and share my perceptions. And usually they are not allowing me those five minutes at the end. They see me like, okay, we don't want to see what's seen, already seen, so we don't want to hurt about it.
It's easy, it's easier to ignore the human being on a meeting and it's because the AI is passive at the end it's easy to forget that it's there.
Yes. Yeah. It's easy to forget that it's there but I couldn't just follow up with my perceptions. In an email, I did that at the beginning and then say, Hey, that's your problem. You don't want to be coached on the problems I saw. So it's okay. But with the AI team coach, all the team members will receive those insights at the end. So the impact of the benefits were just way to way better and couldn't be ignored because everyone. Yes, everybody was included. So in terms of benefits, the length of the meetings decreased a lot. They increased the deep work. It was around 50 percent increase in collaboration level and we measure this collaboration level by the numbers of passing the ball. It's passing the ball between them how they invite to contribute how they are managing and so on, and for sure it's a lot, huge increase in the alignment and that's the my, I'm very happy, the whole team is very happy about this because the way you start a meeting is the way you end the meeting. So if you don't have alignment, you don't have anything.
Of course. And everything is by default transparent anyway because of the AI is present. So obviously alignment just by organically it'll become a little bit better anyway. So that's interesting. And it's so interesting that I thought that it will be harder to ignore a human being on a call, but it's actually the opposite. It's so easy to ignore someone, but it's so easy to forget that the bot is listening in the behind.
Exactly.
It's almost we are recording most of these podcast episodes, by the way, on zoom and yeah, I can imagine now because, we always hit the record button and it's recording in the background. Everything is transcribed, of course, and I do most of the editing with AI anyway. Yeah, it's easy to ignore that something is just present there and there and not with the camera, with the actual human being you need. Cool. These are amazing learnings. Seriously. And thank you for sharing.
Thank you so much for inviting me and offer me the space.
These are super learnings. And I think these are still earlier, earlier learnings, by the way. So we are still at the very early stages of of the mashup of people AI and work. But I think it's super important to discuss and I think it's important to discuss it with you. So how people can find you and if they want to talk more about AI and work and people.
I would be very glad to, to welcome everybody, every team leader, every team member who feels the need to try this AI team coach in their team. Currently we are offering free access to our AI team coach because it's an effective effort both from the team leaders and the researchers. So we want to co create and to learn from from the team leaders, which are their struggles and to get their recommendations, feedback, and so on, so we have a platform where we gather these inquiries is contribute. thecord. ai or on LinkedIn, Ruxandra Cord, so I'm there all the time.
As everyone else.
Yes. That's my second home.
Yes, precall, we just discussed that. It's so interesting to see that if you are publishing daily on LinkedIn, you will know a lot new people. And a lot new people possible clients, customers and everyone else. So it's super interesting to be there. Cool. Again, thank you for your time. It was amazing to talk to you.
Thank you. Thank you to create the space to, to share such insights and looking forward for the next session, just to share our more data on the team meetings, because as you said, it's only the beginning, I will be mesmerized after enrolling 50 companies to see the patterns and how can we have this impact, huge impact on the way people are working and give them back the time they need.
Thank you again.
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.
