What if your company was as focused on employee happiness as it is on profitability?

BetterCompany CEO Tom Williams believes that it takes more than free breakfast and a foosball table to nurture employee success and retention. Instead, make it easy for employees to share experiences, support one another and collaboratively solve workplace challenges. The key: encourage honesty by enabling employees to talk anonymously with their peers.

In his upcoming ResolveTO talk, Tom will explore how today’s leaders can be accountable to their shareholders, employees and customers by nurturing an “active listening culture”, both internally and externally.

After building his career around technological solutions that positively impact people, Tom rolled out BetterCompany with the sole purpose of helping people have a better workday. Using the BetterCompany social networking app, employees can anonymously connect with their peers in similar roles and industries to chat, support one another and share career advice.

Beyond cultivating relationships, Tom hopes that BetterCompany will empower employees to better express themselves at work and contribute professionally in new ways.

Tom answers our five questions:

What are you working on right now that you are really excited about?

We’ve been working with some incredible organizations this year piloting a new product that is designed to help companies attract the right, new talent to their organizations.

What was the pivotal moment or decision that set you on the path to your current career?

Three weeks after my first child was born and right after Christmas, a simple landing page I had built suddenly generated a flood of signups from C-level executives from around the World. Over the next few weeks, I spoke to hundreds of executives from different industries and company sizes, all of whom were looking for ways to unlock greater honesty from their employees.

If you could give one piece of advice to a tiny, freshly-minted startup, what would it be?

Find out how to make a lot of money as quickly as possible. A lot of startups forget that making money is critical to survival.

What can legacy organizations learn from startups to keep up with the fast pace of innovation required in today’s economy?

Plan less, experiment more. Each executive should be able to run at least one experiment a quarter.

What do you foresee as the biggest tech innovation to impact business in 2017?

I hate to be so cliched but Machine Learning and AI will create the biggest impact for most businesses and will also create the most redundancies in 2017.

See Tom Williams’ talk The enlightenment of the Social CEO at ResolveTO, 10:40am on Friday, January 27th.