Workmorphis Founder Emily Fabiano recently appeared on the Workforce Insights podcast, hosted by Dr. Kimberly Moore of Envision Moore Consulting Group. The following is a condensed version of their conversation, edited for brevity and clarity. The full episode can be found here.
Dr. Kimberly Moore Welcome to another episode of the Workforce Insights podcast. And I am so excited to have with us today Emily Fabiano, founder of Workmorphis. Emily, welcome, and thank you so much for being here.
Emily Fabiano Thank you, Dr. Moore. I’m super excited to be here and to be joined by a fellow entrepreneur and innovator like yourself.
Dr. Kimberly Moore What drove you to entrepreneurship and what inspired you to start Workmorphis?
Emily Fabiano Well, this might sound cliche, but I think the entrepreneurial spirit is within all of us. Some of us know that we have it from an early age and others discovered it along the way. My journey was more of a discovery.
My first taste of entrepreneurship was when I was 20 in college. I had a couple of friends come to me wanting to learn more about weightlifting, meal planning and prepping, and things like that. And from there, a personal training and meal planning business was born.
I like to tell that story because it’s a fun part of the journey, right? That was the first time I realized that I had a skill set that enabled me to bring value to other people’s lives and help them in a way that improved their quality of life. As my first journey into entrepreneurship, it gave me a taste of what’s possible.
But as far as my background in workforce development, I am very fortunate that I found my passion in workforce development very early on. Workforce is something I feel like a lot of people stumble into, myself included. But, fortunately, I stumbled into it early and loved it because it is just such a unique intersection of policy, business, education, and economics — all subjects that I feel very drawn to.
I started my career working in the office of workforce transformation of former Ohio Governor John Kasich, where I got exposure to workforce policy and program design. A few years later, when Governor Kasich was leaving office, I was asked by the new administration to be the interim director of that office. I was 24 years old at the time.
It was an incredible experience that involved working with stakeholders from across all different agencies to design programs, including some of Ohio’s most prominent workforce initiatives.
What compelled me to start Workmorphis was the realization that the most effective workforce solutions involve collaboration across sectors. After getting a taste of this from the public sector side, I wanted to help more organizations achieve solutions through cross-sector workforce and policy consulting, which is what Workmorphis does today.
Dr. Kimberly Moore So amazing and such a neat journey.
As I think about Workmorphis and the work that you’re doing, there’s such a demand for innovation now. Scaling is something that we think about as well. How has Workmorphis incorporated innovation and scaling into your approach to serving clients?
Emily Fabiano Yeah, I love that question. And it’s fun to be able to talk about the business itself.
As you know, we’ve been in business since 2021 and a lot has changed since then. I think our approach can be boiled down to working smarter, not harder.
Growth as a small business is difficult. And when you grow, you want to make sure that it’s sustainable growth. And so we operate with a small but mighty team that is very highly skilled and made up of “doers” across different domains.
And then we also have a scalable team of experts that we bring in on specific projects who are the best at what they do, be it data visualization or a specific type of program design. That allows us to serve the unique needs of our clients and to scale up depending on what that need is without really changing the organizational structure in a way that might be a little bit too specific for where we are right now.
We also use a lot of technology that helps us be more efficient in our operations. We use Notion for all of our internal brainstorming and content creation. We also use a tool called Gamma, which is an AI-driven slide deck platform.
Gamma is amazing and I recommend it to anybody who makes a lot of decks because the last thing we want to do as a company is charge clients for hours spent moving boxes around on a PowerPoint deck. I just don’t think that’s a good use of time. And because we’re using tools that help us be more efficient, we spend more time thinking creatively and less time formatting slide decks.
The last point I’ll make on this is having a very intentional meeting culture. Some might say that I’m pretty fiercely protective of our schedules, but that is for a reason. We strive to only have meetings that are action and decision-oriented—especially with our clients—to avoid losing valuable time for strategy work.
Because this is ultimately what we want to be doing, right? That’s how we create the most value for our clients and our partners. And so we always provide updates asynchronously via email or video tools like Loom.
And that helps us to protect our time for where it matters most: strategizing, team building, brainstorming, engaging stakeholders, or any other form of meaningful opportunity.
Dr. Kimberly Moore I love it. As we know, company culture plays a significant role in employee satisfaction and performance. As a startup founder, how do you ensure that you maintain that positive and supportive company culture?
Emily Fabiano This is something that my team and I are working on every single day—and something we’re still learning! I would love to pose that question to a lot of people, including yourself, and learn from you as well.
But I think one of the key components is transparent, clear, and regular communication. When you have a small team, everyone has a lot going on. So it’s critical that everybody is getting clear communication and that they know where the business is headed.
I also maintain an open-door policy. Being accessible and visible to the team matters to me, and I try to create space and time for meaningful interactions, including both one-on-ones where you can learn from one another and connect on a personal level, and team-building activities.
Despite being a remote, distributed team all living in different cities, we recently had the opportunity to get together in person. This setup can be challenging, but it makes it even more special when we’re able to get together, brainstorm, and just get to know each other better as people.
The final point that I’ll emphasize is making decisions that align with our core values. Our team is actively updating what those are and making sure that they’re very clear. We all—whether it’s our team members, our contractors, or our clients that we work with—contribute different perspectives and come from different backgrounds, but we share a set of core values and to have those defined as a company makes it a lot easier to build the culture that you want to uphold.
These values help ensure we’re working with the right clients and that they’re working with the right consultant because Workmorphis is not the right consultant for everyone. Having those core values and putting them front and center is one way to find the connections that work best and the areas where we can collectively make the most impact.
Dr. Kimberly Moore What’s in the future for Workmorphis? What are the goals and priorities that are going to drive positive impact and growth?
Emily Fabiano We are looking to expand our portfolio of national policy work. This is something that we do right now, and we’ve been learning as we work with more national nonprofits and policy-focused clients that there’s an opportunity here. And when we talk about core values, this is a really fun area for us.
When we connect with a national nonprofit or a policy group that is laser-focused on a policy cause that we believe in—such as addressing the benefits cliff or opportunities for those who have been impacted by the criminal legal system—it is such a great opportunity to bring that policy perspective and work to new markets. So one of our key services and strategies moving forward is helping national policy organizations with state market entry strategy. This might entail helping them bring their work and their cause to states and make it actionable where it’s being implemented from a policy perspective or with employers in the community.
And these are all workforce and economic growth-related policy priorities. I will be relocating from Ohio to Philadelphia shortly. Being much closer to DC and making regular DC trips is something I’m very excited about.
Dr. Kimberly Moore I can’t wait to follow the journey of Workmorphis and the impact that I know you’ll have.
