Jennifer: Let’s start with the basics. Who are you?
Jazmyn: I’m Jazmyn Friesz and I’ve been with Culture Index for three and a half years. Before that, I spent a little over seven years with Target, running retail locations in both Florida and Minnesota. A lot of my focus was on operations, helping stores build stronger operational foundations, and improving logistics and processes.
In late 2019, I was running a small format location near Florida State University. Because of that, I did a lot of work with the university, guest lecturing and supporting the internship program.
When the students went home during the pandemic, my store had less foot traffic than traditional retail, which gave me space to focus on other things. I started working on executive and business development programs with my district leader, building sessions focused on how to retain leaders and develop talent. I really enjoyed that work.
I’m originally from Minnesota, and I wanted to try to make a broader impact at Target rather than staying in one region. So I moved back, ran one more store, and then found Culture Index by accident. The timing was right, and the work aligned with everything I cared about. Culture Index helps business owners and leaders make better people decisions so they can build a stronger foundation in their business.
Jennifer: I can personally attest to that. But for anyone reading who’s thinking, what is Culture Index, can you explain it?
Jazmyn: Culture Index is really about helping business owners make better people decisions, and those decisions ultimately drive better business outcomes. It gives you a way to understand seven work-related traits at someone’s core and how they perceive they need to modify those traits to show up to be successful. But the real value is what you do with that information.
Are we putting the right people in the right seats? Do we have the right people in business development? Do we have the right balance of drivers and supporters across the organization? Those questions affect productivity, growth, team dynamics, and ultimately the financial performance of the business.
And that’s why it can be valuable across the entire people lifecycle from deciding whether someone is the right fit for a role, through onboarding and development, to succession planning and the bigger decisions around how you build the organization. At the end of the day, it’s about taking some of the guesswork out of people decisions so business owners can build stronger teams and make better decisions for the business.
Jennifer: I’ll be honest, I came into this as a skeptic. I’ve always believed people are either good at their job or they’re not, and assessments felt like a lot of noise. But after switching to Culture Index and seeing the same patterns show up over and over again in our highest performers, the data won me over. So let’s dig in. You mentioned the assessment looks at two different things, who someone naturally is and how they feel they need to show up at work. Can you explain that distinction? Because I think people hear the word assessment and immediately think it’s about passing or failing.
Jazmyn: I’m glad you picked up on that because it’s something I care a lot about. There is no passing or failing. The assessment takes about seven to ten minutes and has two parts.
The first tells me about who someone is at their core, how they’re hardwired, and what predictable behaviors I’d expect to see from them in a role.
The second part is about perception, specifically how someone believes they need to modify themselves to be successful in their current role. I like to use this analogy: if you match someone to a role that naturally fits their hardwiring, it’s like showing up to work every day and writing with your dominant hand. Everything flows. But if the role requires them to consistently operate against their natural wiring, that’s like asking them to write with their non-dominant hand every single day.
Jennifer: I love that example.
Jazmyn: You can do it. If you break your dominant hand and have to write with the other one, you manage. But it takes longer, it’s less efficient, and it’s more draining. Over time, with a lot of practice, you can get better at it. But what’s most natural will always be writing with your dominant hand. And that’s the point. It’s not impossible to operate out of character, but doing it for extended periods is exhausting. It burns through people in ways that don’t always show up immediately.
Jennifer: That’s exactly what I find so fascinating compared to other assessments people might know, like Myers-Briggs. You introduced me to this idea of gas in the tank. The person who has to write with their non-dominant hand all day is going to be completely depleted by the end of it, even if they did everything right. That’s a very real cost that businesses aren’t accounting for. So talk to me about the natural side of the assessment, specifically why it stays consistent, because that’s something we’ve actually tested internally.
Jazmyn: The natural part of who you are does stay the same. People ask me, well, I’m not the same person I was ten years ago, so won’t the results look different? I’ll typically pick out one of their traits and ask about it showing up 10 years ago and still showing up today. For example someone with high autonomy is competitive, independent, driven to win and chasing a goal. I’ll ask if that was true 10 years ago, and the answer is yes. Maybe the goal was different, but the internal drive to win is the same. That part of you hasn’t changed. How it shows up might evolve, but the underlying wiring stays consistent.
What does change is that second part of the graph, the perception of how you need to show up. As the work shifts, as you take on a new leader, as the business goes through busy seasons or stressful periods, how you believe you need to modify yourself can shift significantly. That’s the part we watch over time to make sure we’re not pushing someone to operate out of character for too long. A short burst of that is fine and sometimes necessary. But a slow drift away from who someone really is at their core is a warning sign we want to catch early.
Jennifer: That’s exactly how we use it. We ask our team to retake the assessment as part of our review process. What it’s shown us is that when someone’s results shift significantly, something is usually going on, perhaps a client relationship has shifted or maybe a personal stressor. It’s not a replacement for having real conversations, but it gives us a starting point. Sometimes people come into a review and say everything is fine, but the data tells a different story. It opens the door to a conversation we might not have had otherwise.
Jazmyn: That’s such a great way to use it. You’re essentially being a detective with your team. Only they know how it actually feels to make those modifications every day. Some people will tell you directly that they’re pushing hard right now and it’s not sustainable long-term. Others won’t say anything, but you can see it in the data. Having that information helps you show up better as a leader and support your team more effectively.
Jennifer: And it’s not a magic solution. We’ve had Culture Index in place for about a year and a half now, and we’ve built enough hiring data to see real patterns. But it hasn’t eliminated turnover entirely. People still leave for more money or their life circumstances change. What it has done is significantly reduce the turnover that was happening for the wrong reasons. And when something doesn’t work out, we usually understand why.
Let’s talk about the seven work-related traits. Without giving away the secret sauce, can you walk people through what those actually are and why they matter?
Jazmyn: And I’ll add on what you said first: if you ever find a tool that gives you a perfect result every time, please let me know. It doesn’t exist. A perfect match on paper still doesn’t tell you if someone is creepy in the interview. Culture Index tells you a lot, but it doesn’t measure everything.
The seven work-related traits we measure are autonomy, social ability, patience, conformity, logic, ingenuity, and mental stamina. There are no good or bad results in Culture Index. You can’t pass or fail your personality. But there are good and bad results for specific roles.
Take autonomy as an example. Someone with high autonomy is self-driven, goal-oriented, and motivated by winning. If you ask them what success looks like, they’ll give you a very personal, individual answer. Someone with low autonomy thinks more in terms of how we win together. They’re team-oriented, humble, supportive, and collaborative. The communication styles between the two are very different. High autonomy tends to be blunt and direct. Low autonomy wants more clarity, more specificity, more collaboration.
So if you’re hiring for a role that requires building consensus and bringing people along, the data tells us that statistically, someone with low autonomy is going to be a better fit. They naturally think in terms of we. A high-autonomy person in that same role might leave their team behind while chasing their own goals.
Jennifer: What I love about that is that it flips the assumption that you always want the highest possible score across the board. In our world, for example, we want people with high attention to detail and moderate autonomy, but not so high that they’re constantly trying to reinvent our existing processes. We’ve had people who come in with strong backgrounds, their own firms even, but they struggle to operate within a structure that someone else built. That manifests exactly the way you’d expect, and it’s reflected in their results every time.
Jazmyn: That actually leads perfectly into ingenuity. We’ll see whether someone is more literal or abstract in their thinking. Whether someone is a master of rip off and duplicate or inventing something from scratch. In accounting and finance work, more literal makes sense. You do not want someone who’s going to try to reinvent how the work gets done.
Jennifer: That’s something I’ve actually seen play out in real time. We have standard templates for a lot of our work. Every once in a while I’ll be reviewing something and think, where did this even come from? And sure enough, when I look at that person’s ingenuity score, it’s higher than what we’d typically look for. They weren’t trying to cause problems. They just couldn’t help themselves. It’s literally how they’re wired.
And I want to be clear with anyone reading this: Culture Index is a tool, not a guarantee. We still have turnover. People are still people-y. But it has genuinely changed how we hire, how we manage, and how we think about fit.
Talk to me about what it actually looks like to bring Culture Index on, because this is not something you just buy and plug in.
Jazmyn: You’re right, and I think that’s one of the most important things for people to understand. A lot of people want a quick fix. Something off the shelf that immediately makes everything better. And if that’s what someone sells you, a year later you’ll look back and realize you invested in something you never actually used.
With Culture Index, you work with an advisor. The onboarding starts with a two-day executive development workshop. Think of it as an intensive knowledge transfer, how to interpret and read the results, how to apply them to your specific business, and how to start making more data-driven people decisions. It’s a lot of information in a short period of time, genuinely like drinking from a fire hose. But it also builds the foundation of the relationship so that you feel comfortable calling me when something comes up.
And the use cases are different for every organization. What you’ve focused on in your business is different from what I might focus on with a CEO who’s planning their exit and needs to identify a successor in the next year. The data is the same but how you apply it is specific to where the business is.
From there, there are check-ins and ongoing support. You’re never left to figure it out on your own.
Jennifer: For us, the ongoing relationship has honestly been the best part. Staffing is the number one cost and the number one challenge in a professional services firm. If you don’t have that dialed in, everything else is harder. One of the most valuable things you’ve helped us think through was defining the Manager role. We were using almost the same profile for managers as we were for individual contributors, and that was a mistake. You helped us rethink what a successful manager should look like in our organization, separate from what a successful bookkeeper looks like. We even had managers and associates fill out what they thought an ideal manager should look like, and the data that came back was genuinely useful and different from what we expected.
This is not a set it and forget it tool. It’s for people who are serious about building a real people strategy in their business.
Jazmyn: I love that you call it strategy. That’s exactly what it is. And I think the most important thing I’d want people to walk away understanding is that this is a strategic tool used at the highest level of the business. We’re not just talking about which candidates to hire. We’re looking at the full picture: how does this impact top line revenue, how does it help manage the bottom line, where are the gaps in the organization, and what does the long-term people strategy need to look like to support growth?
And on the point about individual contributors becoming managers, that is one of the most common mistakes I see. Just because someone is exceptional at their job does not mean they’re wired to lead other people doing that job. Recognizing that distinction can save a business from a lot of painful and expensive lessons.
Jennifer: Absolutely. And for anyone who’s on the fence about having this conversation, I’ll say this: Culture Index is now a non-negotiable part of our hiring process. Our job descriptions literally say in the first line that you must complete a Culture Index survey to be considered for the role. About half the applicants skip it. That’s completely fine. You cannot work here.
When I got my renewal, I didn’t think twice about it. That says everything.
Jazmyn: Thank you for having me. I’ve genuinely loved working with your team.
