Spotting Trustworthy Employers
Job advertisements sell dreams…
But reality? That’s another story. Job descriptions, interviews, Glassdoor reviews—there’s truth in the subtext. Adam Horne, co-founder of Open Org is on a mission: to build a more trusted, transparent world of work. So, we wanted to get him on the pod to talk about how in the hell do you do that? Turns out, it's not only doable (let's start with employees having ZERO surprises around biggies like compensation, benefits, etc), but, when done authentically - can improve (like majorly improve) hiring, retention and overall health of an organization.
Our conversation covers aligning internal and external transparency, the costs of cultural mismatches and the unintentional humor (or not) of hiring managers who promise more than they deliver. Most importantly, this episode is loaded with practical advice for creating genuine, transparent work environments. If you want to avoid the smoke and mirrors and find a workplace that walks the talk, don’t miss this one.
Your Work Friends Podcast: Spotting Trustworthy Employers with Adam Horne
Job advertisements sell dreams…
But reality? That’s another story. Job descriptions, interviews, Glassdoor reviews—there’s truth in the subtext. Adam Horne, co-founder of Open Org is on a mission: to build a more trusted, transparent world of work. So, we wanted to get him on the pod to talk about how in the hell do you do that? Turns out, it's not only doable (let's start with employees having ZERO surprises around biggies like compensation, benefits, etc), but, when done authentically - can improve (like majorly improve) hiring, retention and overall health of an organization.
Our conversation covers aligning internal and external transparency, the costs of cultural mismatches and the unintentional humor (or not) of hiring managers who promise more than they deliver. Most importantly, this episode is loaded with practical advice for creating genuine, transparent work environments. If you want to avoid the smoke and mirrors and find a workplace that walks the talk, don’t miss this one.
Speaker 1: 0:00
So we're of the view that there needs to be some sort of level of openness and transparency to call yourself transparent to a degree, and we provide that level of structure, but we don't necessarily prescribe where that transparency should be and necessarily how deep that should go. So the way that I try and talk about it with companies is work on defining it for yourself first. What does that look like? And that for me, starts of understanding, like why is this word important? If you're putting on your career site or your job ads or just putting it out there, there's got to be a reason why you're saying it, and if there's not, it's just an empty word.
Speaker 2: 0:48
Mel, good Monday to you. Good Monday to you, yes. Yes, I'm going to start saying that. It just feels like a thing, it feels like it could be a thing Feels like Shakespeare Good morrow is good morrow thing, I don't know.
Speaker 3: 0:59
I'm making that up.
Speaker 2: 1:01
Good morrow is a thing, that's a thing.
Speaker 3: 1:03
Good morrow Good morrow to you.
Speaker 2: 1:07
Well, I'm stoked to talk about Adam Horn. Adam Horn is the co-founder of OpenOrg, and what I love about the work OpenOrg is doing is they're on a pretty cool mission to rebuild trust by bringing clarity to the world of work, and they're doing that by making sure that people have zero surprises at work, like when you're interviewing for a job. They want you to have zero surprises around things like comp, culture, benefits and career development, and Mel and I were really taken with what they're doing and we had a chance to talk to him. And Mel, what did you think of that conversation?
Speaker 3: 1:40
I thought it was refreshing. It was really eye-opening to hear the perspective from Adam and his experiences working with organizations and truly the benefits of transparency, which feels like a no-duh situation, but not a lot of orgs are doing it, so I'm just really excited by this work.
Speaker 1: 2:01
Yeah.
Speaker 2: 2:02
The other thing I really liked, too, was his twist on this. This is not open Oregon Adam dictating what transparency needs to look like they're really working with organizations to say, hey, what is authentic, what works for them, what works for you? Yeah, it's a really cool way of thinking about the zero surprise game for employees and whether they're coming into a company or whether they're in a company as well.
Speaker 3: 2:25
And the bottom line for your business.
Speaker 2: 2:27
A thousand percent Packed within this discussion are things that organizations can do, what individuals can do and what can you do if you're leading a team and you want to be more transparent, even if your organization might not be. So here's our conversation with Adam Horne. Adam Horne, welcome to the pod. Thank you for being here.
Speaker 1: 2:56
Thank you so much for having me. Thanks for having me on. It's awesome.
Speaker 2: 3:00
Yeah, adam, you've had a really interesting career, right. You've started multiple organizations. Now you're pulling into OpenOrg. You're a new father as well too, so you've got like a lot going on, probably trying to get some sleep here and there. Just super curious as to how did you even get into this work? How did you get to where you are today?
Speaker 1: 3:20
Yeah, I gave up on sleep a long time ago.
Speaker 1: 3:23
It's like this way, my latest uh child is my third and I've got three under six now and I've navigated the, the three kids and businesses etc over the the period of having COVID and stuff going on as well. So yeah, it's been interesting the last sort of four or five years, to be honest. But yeah, my, my career as a whole over the last sort of 12, 13 years is is all centered around people and talent. So nine of those 12 years as a founder or co-founder myself as well. So I've navigated the complexities and challenges of being a founder and trying to build and run a business, always bootstrapped, always anywhere between sort of five employees up to 70, 80 employees so that size but challenging in its own way but also a lot of that time actively working with clients externally on their hiring and their people strategy. So over that time I've had a lot of exposure to working with startups or scale-ups all over the world hundreds of them over the years and have, from a hiring perspective in particular, I've seen a very clear difference in terms of how companies benefit from being transparent or not. I've worked with some really open, transparent companies and you just tell when you walk through the door and you settle in that this is a very open, transparent environment. I've got resources, information landing on my lap and your job becomes very easy, regardless of what you're doing, but particularly when you are in that role where you're dealing with bringing new people into the business, being able to offer clarity and depth to candidates and applicants before they join, you see the benefit of that when they walk through the door it's really clear and things like attrition, retention, all of those sort of key metrics that businesses look at to try and point them towards some level of organizational health, feel really clear, really nice.
Speaker 1: 5:09
I've also had the benefit on the flip side, of working with companies that are incredibly secretive, some by design but some just through pure chaos and uncertainty and lack of communication. But as an example, I've been parachuted into businesses before where I've been told I'm not allowed to know what funding round we've just done because it's a bit secretive. So if candidates ask an interview, just tell them. You can't let them know. And I've been given about 10 different values from different employees who don't really know what values the business has.
Speaker 1: 5:39
So that end of the spectrum effectively in terms of the way businesses operate and you can still hire, you can still get people through the door, but I've seen what happens after people join and then, generally speaking, you've got that sort of revolving door type situation in those types of business and you see the struggles and the cost and the time it's been trying to just maintain headcount, let alone grow. So over that time I've had a really clear view on what transparent culture looks like and what that benefit is from being more transparent, and I've been lucky enough, whilst running my own businesses alongside that, to be able to pull that experience into how I build my own companies as well, and I've always defaulted to my own level of transparent, my own level of open, and it's worked incredibly well for me. So that, as a bit bit of a backstory, is where I come to today as regards to launching OpenOrg.
Speaker 2: 6:28
We want to talk about OpenOrg because we've seen this conversation about how transparent organizations are evolved, especially, I feel like, over the last and I could be wrong on the numbers, but it feels like especially over the last four years. Five years. Is you need to put this information out there or this is now the expectation? So I'm loving these conversations around now. Transparency is the expectation from a marketplace perspective. So, Adam, what does OpenOrg do?
Speaker 1: 6:51
The way we come in to it really is. I co-founded OpenOrg with an old friend of mine and we've known each other for 12 years, so we've had this talk track for 12 years, even about the world of work and culture and how it's broken and one day we'll fix it. And we've talked I don't want to name names, but talked about the damage that toxic review sites do to employers and to applicants and so on and so forth and how one day we'll find a new way to rebuild trust in terms of that intersection between you know, applying to a role and starting in the right type of business for you. So that's where a lot of the conversation about open org has come up and that's exactly where we sit. We want to get to the point with open org where we can help companies not just become internally transparent with their employees.
Speaker 1: 7:34
That's a really good, healthy place to be, but it only does so much for us. You've got to mirror as much of that as possible externally. There's some things you maybe aren't comfortable doing and that's fine as a limit, but there's no benefit just to being internally transparent For us. There's huge benefits to opening that door a little bit more and showing people under the bonnet, showing people exactly what they're going to be getting when they come in, because without that, people are coming into your business with the wrong expectations. Without that, people are coming into your business with the wrong expectations. So Open Org operates exactly that intersection of employer brand hiring and both internal and external transparency and trying to help employers get more aligned across that spectrum to build healthier alignment across that entire employee journey.
Speaker 2: 8:21
It's interesting when you look at why you should really think about transparency as an organization. I'd like to take it from the employee side a little bit more and also from the organization side, because one of the things you talk about is really to have employees have zero, zero surprises. When you start a new job and I personally felt that I think we all have right where you thought you were getting into a gig, you thought it was one thing, and then into it you're like, oh hell, this is this is not this at all. You talked about this a little bit earlier, but I'm wondering if you can walk us through what the benefits are to have zero surprises as an employee so much across that entire life cycle.
Speaker 1: 8:57
If you look at some of the sort of stats and the research out there around people leaving new hires leaving roles within the first 90 days or so, I think there's a stat out there and I take them with a pinch of salt because you hear different things and different things, but there's so much research on this ultimately around how many people leave roles. I think it's something like 30% of new hires leave roles within 90 days. Such a waste of time for everyone. Such a waste of time for everyone the money you spend interviewing, hiring, the time you spend in the salaries for paying all of that stuff to get into that. It's such a waste of time for everyone involved. And then you have to start again to rehire all because and most of those people leaving site misalignment on cultural role as one of the big reasons for them leaving. And then there's other studies out there that link to that.
Speaker 1: 9:43
Four in ten hiring managers have admitted to lying to candidates about a role or a culture or how business operates. So lying yeah, they actually these are the hiring managers actually admit to lying about this and this is like a resume builder survey study that you can go out there and find online. That's just the people who admit to it. It there's probably more over and above that who haven't admitted to it, but again, just at that interview stage, in terms of attracting talent, attracting candidates, there's a whole lot of problems going on there. So there's a time factor that is being wasted here. There's cost, there's money. There's also well-being and mental health involved here, particularly for the candidates and the employees, but also for the hiring managers, and my co-founder, john, has had this himself as a hiring manager in a larger corporate business, hiring people knowing that he's selling the wrong version of what people are going to get. But he's in this corporate environment where he's just feeling like he has to hire and grow and his own well-being and mental health took real damage because of that, which led to him leaving because of that situation too.
Speaker 1: 10:49
So there's a lot of reasons why transparency really is important in building trust at that early stage. But then, when you look inside the business internally, day to day, there's so many things that point to the benefits of of being transparent and opening, communicative with individuals when it comes. But once they're in, the benefit of being transparent and communicative with your employees is really important as well when you're thinking about to use layman terms like getting everyone aligned and on the same page. That's a lot of what ceos talk about wanting to get and wanting to see. That's all about communication and getting people aligned and understanding where are we going, what are we doing, and that can boil down to so many different things internally in terms of what transparency does look like, and that will differ for different people, but the benefits are there when it comes to productivity, performance, profitability. The research is out there.
Speaker 2: 11:41
What do you think really drives organizations to not be transparent, because we see this so much, especially as you get in these big behemoth organizations. There are some that do this, okay, but I would argue that most of for us, the fortune 500, I don't know if they do this really well. What is holding organizations back from being transparent?
Speaker 1: 12:04
Lots of different factors that could be founder mentality. Obviously that's probably more prevalent in smaller businesses. But if you have a more traditional CEO founder who doesn't believe in seeing employees is that they're equal ultimately and understanding the power of employee could bring when you think about things like co-creation and just communication, they see them as workers rather than, again, equals. That creates silos immediately in how companies are structured and how hierarchies work and those silos immediately cause problems with communication and what's shared and what's not shared. So there's a founder ce leadership mentality, mindset thing that is really common and we see that so much with the people leaders we speak to.
Speaker 1: 12:48
There are some instances where companies in fairness are operating in certain industries or environments where they can't share certain information and that's completely fair. But I think what I see happen there is, if they're operating in this sort of environment or industry where it's a little bit more secretive or confidential, that stops them being transparent in ways that they still could be. They suddenly put the shutters down and they use it almost as an excuse to say we can't share this, so it means we can't share anything else. We try and find ways of showing them actually there's still some really relevant information you can still share.
Speaker 1: 13:21
That's safe and okay, but the default to being closed and secretive because of that and I guess the other one probably is some companies that have just grown either very quickly or very slowly over time, with a certain mindset, with a certain culture, and it's almost too much for them to unravel now, particularly in a larger corporate sort of environment. You've got problems with pay equality and equity across the entire business. Where do you start? How do we unravel that? What do we do? It's almost easier just to keep pushing on in the direction we're going and hope that it never causes us too many problems or assume that if it does cause us problems, it's going to be cheaper for us than having to rework all of this and rebalance salaries and so that there's some companies that may be too far down the road to care about it.
Speaker 2: 14:08
It's just like that big nod of Christmas lights or something that you're like we're just not even going to handle.
Speaker 3: 14:14
Just walk away slowly. Oh gosh, adam. It's so shocking, as someone who worked in talent acquisition, to hear that hiring managers would lie in an interview. And I would say why? Just why, because people are going to find out as soon as they start the job. So it's just an interesting choice to me.
Speaker 1: 14:37
Yeah, I think there's pressure from above. Particularly when you work in a larger corporate type environment, I think you probably are more likely to just feel this pressure from above to hit targets when it comes to hiring for your team. You just do what you need to do to get people through the door and you probably have more resources around you as well, so you don't think about the cost. And when it comes to time that's invested in hiring, you've got a TA team that will. Yeah, they do. They just do their magic stuff in the background and you don't really appreciate how much work goes into that as a hiring manager sometimes. So there's lots of again reasons why people might do it. But yeah, I was shocked to see that as well.
Speaker 2: 15:14
I think I've lied. I think I've lied. Have you? Yeah, I think I have not. Let me ask you all this Is this a lie? Like when you feel like you're probably out the door anyway, but you're hiring people and you're like, yeah, the culture is great.
Speaker 3: 15:29
I actually won't say that. If someone asks me interesting, I will just what's the culture like and I've been honest.
Speaker 1: 15:36
I'll give you the good, the bad and the ugly, because I think you deserve to know it so I had this conversation with someone recently who's a I won't again name names because it's a bit of a delicate one, but it was a people leader. I think there was an m&a event. Their business has been acquired, everything would change. They were basically checked out and said I'm committed to moving on. Now everything's changed. That's not what we've built anyway, because they're in a people lead a role. They were heavily involved in hiring and interviewing.
Speaker 1: 16:04
So we that touched on that discussion of what should I be doing, and I guess my advice was similar to the. What Melza said there is that the most positive thing you can do now is try and make sure that anyone else that walks through that door and joins that business is aligned, because even though you don't think it's a great place to work anymore for you, it doesn't mean it's terrible for everyone, and there are still people out there who really will align with that culture. Even if you think it's crazy, it doesn't make any sense, there are people who might like it. So do what you can to present facts and, rather than being opinionated, try and talk explicitly about what culture looks like here, which I think actually is what so many companies don't actually understand at the starting point is like what is culture here? How do we describe it and understand it, rather than giving an opinion on how fun it is here?
Speaker 3: 16:57
Either happy hours yeah, yeah understood, yeah we have a foosball table. No, I'm just kidding that pods. No, and it's interesting because the cost I thought I read this week that what they previously thought the cost of making the wrong hire was significantly low to compare, comparing to what the actual true cost of that is. And, adam, I'm sure you must have some number that you know about. What is the cost of that at times? What could it be up to?
Speaker 1: 17:25
Yeah, I again chatted about this yesterday. I can't really give you a figure because I just keep seeing all these different figures out there, in different, yeah, but it's high. The one that seems to stick in my mind is up to two thirds of someone's salary to replace. So if someone's on $90,000 a year, it could cost you 60k to just replace them. And again circling back to the benefits of being open and transparent, the more you can share up front, it's not just about getting people aligned to the right culture. It's not just about getting people aligned and to the right culture. But there's so many benefits around onboarding and ramp up time and getting people to a point where they are more productive in the early days within your business. So companies are always looking at like how can we shorten that ramp up time so that people are effectively making us money sooner, which is completely fair? How do we do that? The more share, the more you provide up front, the quicker that happens.
Speaker 3: 18:37
What does a good open culture look like from your perspective?
Speaker 1: 18:43
that's a really interesting question. It's really hard to answer as well, because people ask us quite a lot like how do you define transparency? And this is the whole world that we're in. So we, we don't define it. We were very keen from the outset to make sure that we aren't the ones trying to define what transparent looks like.
Speaker 1: 19:01
That's part of the problem for me, like some of these awards and accolades out there that you can win about we've got great culture or a great place to work. The problem is you're prescribing to someone else's view of what good looks like You're jumping through hoops and like ticking boxes view of what good looks like you're jumping through hoops and like ticking boxes. So we're of the view that there needs to be some sort of level of openness and transparency to call yourself transparent to a degree, and we provide that level of structure, which I won't dive too deeply into, but we've got an assessment and a framework companies can follow. So we do have some level of it, but we don't necessarily prescribe where that transparency should be and necessarily how deep that should go. So the way that I try and talk about it with companies is work on defining it for yourself first. What does that look like? And there's a very high level journey that, for me, starts with understanding like why is this word important? If you're putting on your career site or your job ads or just putting it out there, there's got to be a reason why you're saying it, and if there's not, it's just an empty word. So where I tend to see it, there's two paths.
Speaker 1: 20:00
Typically, when it does work well is it's either heavily linked to your product, your value prop idea you're doing something that's bringing transparency to your customers or whatever that might be, via a platform or a product, and you can lean into transparency as a business yourself, which works really well or it ties heavily into your values and when you dig a little bit deeper and understand what those values are and why, that's when you can start to work with companies to help them understand what they should be leaning into and what they should be sharing more of.
Speaker 1: 20:28
I'll give you an example. Company I worked with recently talked a lot about they believe their strength is in having a diverse team, but they offered nothing around diversity, no transparency externally around what diversity looked like for them. I talked to them about the fact that they talk about strength and diversity and this is a really core value for them. That's an opportunity to be transparent and double down in that particular area. So, long story short, transparency is going to mean different things to different people, but I ask companies to look at their culture, their values, intrinsically to that, and look at where they can double down. You don't have to share everything across the entire spectrum, but think about what it means to your business, find ways you can double down and over index in certain ways, and that starts building a little bit of meaning behind the word for you as well.
Speaker 3: 21:13
So it's more personalized, depending on your business. I know at OpenOrg you're going in. You're taking a look at this with them, so it might not necessarily be like this is what good looks like. But in terms of leading practices, for example, what would something like open compensation what's a leading practice you might recommend, regardless of that company's personal mission? What advice would you offer?
Speaker 1: 21:41
We've still got some like minimum standards that we would say people should try and attain and get to, and then the optional. This is how you elevate it if you want to go crazy and go for it basically buffer style but for us, the minimum expectation, ideally, is to get to the point where you can comfortably put a salary or a salary band on a job advert when you're hiring. Now that, for us, is really important because you're then providing some external transparency, building trust with talent, reverse engineering that. How do we get to that stage? There's a lot of work that goes into that before you can get to that stage. So you've got to work on your compensation philosophy, your bands and your levels.
Speaker 1: 22:19
How do we benchmark our salaries? Where do we get that data from? We encourage companies to share that internally as well, as much as you possibly can, and if you can't, that's okay, but as an absolute minimum, what people really want to see is how is this decision being made? Whatever I I'm being paid, that's fine.
Speaker 1: 22:38
How have you come up with that decision? What data have you used and where have you got it from and how has that been assessed? So it's the why and the how behind the decision is actually really key for me as a minimum requirement. People don't care about what their colleagues being paid, necessarily, as long as they can see what they're being paid is fair and they feel that that lines up with what they should be getting paid. That's really key. So again, minimum expectation provide the how and the why behind the decisions with the things like pay and hopefully get to the point where you can comfortably put a salary on an advert and not have chaos ensue internally where people are reapplying for their own jobs because they see that you're paying someone else 30k more.
Speaker 3: 23:18
I never really understood why that isn't public information, because people are going to find out anyway, because they talk about it. So it's interesting to me that they don't share the process, because it is an in-depth process to go through salary band review each year and it's good for folks when they're talking about their year end and bonus and seeing where they're at and if they have room to grow. It's a good discussion to have with your people.
Speaker 1: 23:43
It's hard work and it takes a long time and that puts a lot of companies off and it won't suddenly mean that everything goes perfectly. You're still going to have some really tough, awkward, tricky conversations with employees who are unhappy about what they're paid, why they're paid it. It's not going to make everything go away, but it builds so much trust as a starting point so that when you have that conversation, people feel like they trust you. They can see it, it's open and it's a starting point for a conversation effectively. And you've got that backup. Most businesses have done their working out. They've got some data source behind them. That should build some confidence in you to have that conversation and say, look, we haven't just plucked this from thin air, this is what we've used, so share it.
Speaker 3: 24:24
It's honest and it helps others really understand the process, because I think if you're not in comp, it does feel like a mystery. Did you just throw a dart at the dartboard and pick this number? So it's good to include that. What about some leading practices in terms of company culture?
Speaker 1: 24:40
yeah, so we culture is one of the pillars under our framework and it's probably like one of the broader ones. What we try and get companies to do is really think about what does culture mean here? What does it look like? Because I think the default for a lot of companies when you look at career pages is like we've got great culture and then there's like a picture of a team playing like crazy golf or whatever they're doing on a team social and that like sums up culture on the face of it. And we're trying to get companies to start moving away from that.
Speaker 1: 25:07
Don't start sharing like all the positive employee stories of it's fun to work here, it's great. Start sharing some facts and reality around, like how do we succeed as a team? What is the sort of unique DNA or blend of how we work, our ways of work that enable us to work well together and succeed? And how do we learn? How do we fail? How do we thrive? How do we like communicate?
Speaker 1: 25:28
There's so much you can gain from understanding how a team communicates day to day. Is it synchronous? Asynchronous Boundaries have reset to communicate. Communicates day to day. Is it synchronous? Asynchronous boundaries have reset to communicate. It might seem like a lot of information, but you can get that across to people really nicely on on wiki or careers page or a job advert.
Speaker 1: 25:46
The companies that do this well do really well and they hire people who succeed really well in their business. So for us, that's culture. It's thinking more about operational excellence rather than that word culture. And when you start breaking it down like that and thinking in that way, you can actually look at some of those areas around communication and documentation and meetings. That's one of the areas under our culture pillar is encouraging companies to talk more about their approach to meetings. Engineers in particular, and others as well. Now, to be honest with you, really benefit and enjoy having blocks of time for like, deep work and focus. They don't want to be sucked into six hours of meetings a day. So start talking to people more about your approach to meetings as a business and people have the opportunity to opt in or out. That's like what we refer to as culture, rather than the coffee, the beanbags, all the other stuff.
Speaker 3: 26:38
Yeah, that's how we work around here. Right, that's all good stuff to highlight. What about benefits? How do you feel about leading practices there?
Speaker 1: 26:46
Yeah, another bugbear, and this is hard right. Like you can only get so much information on some careers page, for example, or a job advert, but they have defaulted over time to just being a little bit vague and shiny and like you can't really see much. So you see, like competitive salary mentioned, like just go a little bit deeper, even if it's an extra line to say we benchmark and pay on the 75th percentile. You can't just say it's competitive and that's going to suddenly mean it's competitive to everyone. Someone could be working for the you know business that pays 90th. Someone could be working for somewhere that's 30th.
Speaker 1: 27:20
You can't just say that and have it apply to everyone. So just add some meaning. So, generally speaking, best practice on benefits when we work with companies and look at this is just really I don't want to say tearing apart, that sounds a bit aggressive but like line by line, going through each benefit that they've listed and actually looking at how can you elevate that and add a little bit more clarity to what that is. And I think maternity leave, paternity leave, is a big one. So many companies write enhanced parental leave.
Speaker 3: 27:48
What does that even mean?
Speaker 1: 27:50
A week and if so, how much? Buy or would you offer 12 months full pay? Just tell people what it is. Actually, it's not a deal breaker for most people. It just helps them understand and plan ahead and think what does that mean for me financially if I do join here and I do decide to have a child? And it's not a deal breaker, but it helps set expectations and it's one of those things, famously, that's always been really hard to find out before you join a business.
Speaker 3: 28:14
Yeah, it's so interesting to me because my experience in organizations one that I was interviewing with or to have worked with although there's information provided, it's so high level and so vague and usually it's not until you get to the offer stage where someone will finally meet with you to get into the details. And I always think that's a disservice, Because if you're just exploring an organization, you want to be able to say what does this exactly look like, so everyone's happy in the end, You're not waiting all the way through.
Speaker 1: 28:44
Six interviews have happened, You've wasted five hours of everyone's time, You're at the offer stage and you lose that candidate because they didn't like the benefit package that they're getting Another example and one company that does this really well and you some might argue it's a bit overkill, but health insurance might work differently in the uk to the us. I don't know whether it's a little bit more comprehensive and everything's covered regardless, but absolutely not over here, like even if you have insurance.
Speaker 2: 29:11
It's absolutely like it's garbage. It's garbage.
Speaker 1: 29:14
I don't want to say I made the assumption. But it's the same here as well. There are some companies that say we offer health cover. Great, on the face of it, brilliant, I'm excited. But then you join and you realize, okay, it's just for me, it's not for my family. I didn't realize that. Or you realize, okay, I've got a very specific, rare condition that's not covered by this particular policy, so that's not a benefit to me. Now, and there's a company called Juro and others do this as well, but I know about Juro. You can, on their notion, you can dig deep on their benefits, click into their health cover and actually look at the exact policy document that they've got for their business. And it's long, it's in depth, but you can actually go and find out.
Speaker 1: 29:51
Is my specific condition covered, which is great.
Speaker 3: 29:54
Yeah, that's fantastic because that's the stuff people need to know when they're moving, especially when it impacts your family, as you mentioned, if you find out after the fact. Oh wait, that actually happened to a friend of mine where she found out with her new job, it only extends to her, it doesn't extend to her family.
Speaker 2: 30:10
So, yeah, I think a lot of organizations are doing really cool things too. I worked for an organization where, after I had my son, they flew my breast milk like overnight yeah Back to my house, which was like $800 a pop, and they did that for every single mother. And that, to me, is I don't know why you guys aren't screaming this from the effing rooftops. Yeah, there's also stuff that the organization could be screaming from the rooftops and they're not. Yeah, there's also stuff that the organization could be screaming from the rooftops and they're not.
Speaker 1: 30:39
Yeah, and this is again it's personal choice in terms of how much effort you want to put into it, but there are companies that will have. You know that we call them handbooks in the UK and try not to refer to it too heavily as handbook in the US, because it's a slightly different, slightly more legal document in the US, but like a wiki or a resource hub for employees effectively to be able to go and dig deep and look at this stuff. And you can keep it high level and say we offer enhanced parental leave. Or you can really provide a heap of depth on parental leave and not just like what do we give parents, but what does returning from maternity leave look like? How do we help you and support you and all that entire journey? There are some companies that do incredibly well, so it's not like to disparage everyone, but the majority don't scratch the surface.
Speaker 3: 31:27
What about with professional development is typically it's not something people think of as falling under benefits, but it's also something that you hope, as an employee, you continue to get, because then you feel that organization is invested in you, they're invested your growth. They want you to succeed. What does a good leading practice look like in terms of transparency around how much an organization is investing in your career development?
Speaker 1: 31:51
yeah, this is again. This you've just said those words as well. I think is like there's such a standard phrase on career sites of like we invest in people and we've got world-class career. If you're going to say that you've got world-class like career investment, whatever that might look like, show it like don't just dangle a carrot and then don't offer anything over and above that.
Speaker 1: 32:12
Really show what you offer people and give some clarity as to what that looked like on a a couple of levels. There's a few things on that. If you're going to list it as a benefit, again, something that we see a lot of companies do is dangle a carrot to say L&D budget, but again just a few more words to say what that budget is. It takes no effort and really helps people understand what they're going to be getting here. So there's tiny little tangible changes companies can go and make that really make a big difference to people. I think the deeper work and the work behind the scenes to really elevate that is looking in depth at how you progress and promote and keep people growing within your business. So career development frameworks is something that seems to be missing in the loss of companies, I think, probably for a reason. It's often it's hard to build. Sometimes if you're a bigger company and get everything in place and something that works and it ties heavily into performance, calibration and compensation and again you've got that big ball of christmas lights whatever we're talking about earlier that you can't unpick.
Speaker 1: 33:14
So career, when we look at the data of all the companies that take our assessment to understand, almost like a heat map of what companies do and don't share.
Speaker 1: 33:24
Career development uh, frameworks are always in the red, but for the large majority of companies they don't even share anything internally.
Speaker 1: 33:30
So there's a lot of companies out there saying we invest in people, but then you walk through the door and you don't have visibility of what's my next step look like or how can I move internally. So, again on our framework, one of our 35 areas that we zone in on and talk with companies about is sharing more information around internal mobility. So can you even share some basic data with people to say that this x percent of people moved internally last year, whether it's latently or vertically for promotion? That gives you a real indication as to like how people move within your business and how people can grow. So anyway, there's a lot of deeper work in depth you can go into there, but I think getting that internal clarity is helpful to people. And then, once you've got it, why wouldn't you share it? There's a few reasons here and there, but you should. And again, there's a couple of companies out there that do really well at just flipping their their internal documentation external.
Speaker 1: 34:26
And then, and it's amazing, who's doing this really well there's a company called cleo in the uk who I don't know. If you've come across a platform called progression fyi really cool, check out progressionfyi. They have their whole platform is about helping companies to build career development frameworks and using their platform. But progression fyi is also like a collective open source career development frameworks that companies share publicly. So clio have got theirs on there. They've shared it publicly and you can go on and look at all their engineering pathways, the salary bands attached to every single role, criteria for progressing.
Speaker 1: 35:04
They've got such a great name, particularly in the UK, for this stuff. And another one is Learnably, who again might not be well known outside of the UK because they're relatively small tech startup scale up, but Learnably are like an LMSms platform, so they major on development and growth for employees and they really drink their own champagne because of that. Going back to what we were talking about earlier with defining what transparency means to you, that a huge part of their value prop is about lnd and growth. So they've decided to major on being transparent about career development at learnably. If you're going to join us, we're going to make sure you know what you're going to get and how you're going to grow, and everything they've done has been crafted around that whole idea of lnd, because that's fed into their, their entire value prop as well where do you see this going in the next five years?
Speaker 1: 36:15
yeah, I am in a bubble. I have to admit that we operate a lot more at the startup scale up end of the spectrum. So companies anywhere from 20, 30 employees up to a couple of thousand starting to get larger. But we don't work with many 30, 40, 50,000 employee businesses and I get they're probably not going to be making the drastic changes anytime soon to how they operate and how they communicate. That's a lot harder. But certainly there's so many earlier stage businesses coming through. It precede stage.
Speaker 1: 36:45
I know a lot of founding teams who support what we're doing. They're a bit early stage to fully embrace and have a lot of this work verified because they haven't started hiring yet. But you see the mindset and the passion and the belief there and I'm not saying every founder coming through is like Gen Z. A lot of them are. A lot of them are coming into this world of work setting up their own companies now and then we will talk about the fact that Gen Z have. Everyone cares about transparency and trust, but Gen Z are more demanding. They care more deeply about it. It's a really important part of how they work, deeply about it. It's a really important part of how they work and they're building their own businesses now with this as a core value. So five years time I'd expect to see, particularly in the startup scale up world, businesses that do default more to transparency, whatever that means to them. They're at least able to say we're transparent and we've defined what that means, and if that's okay, because if it doesn't align with you, then fine, but it will align with certain people and and we're healthy and etc. Etc.
Speaker 1: 37:41
I'd like to see, hopefully, some good progression around pay transparency in particular. There's obviously a lot of movement in the US legally, so that's going to make some sort of change, I'm sure, and then there's some incoming changes across the EU as well. So what's sad is that either side of the UK right now we've got some legal waves happening, which is really enforcing some change, which is great, but nothing in the UK at the moment. So we'll see if we follow suit. But certainly on the pay front, that will change and I think as a knock-on effect to that, going back to what we talked about earlier, I'd heavily to. Pay is performance in career development. You can't suddenly become transparent about pay without giving people some context around how that ties into career development and levels and and how, then, they're going to be assessed to get to that next level, so that, as a trio is going to have to advance together? For me, um, as best as possible anyway yeah, that makes total sense.
Speaker 3: 38:38
I know you're as you say, you're in this the bubble, but with the, the gen z, really coming in and leading the wave of this bubble, those startups could become either clients or partners to these larger organizations. Do you think their approach to transparency may have an influence on some of these large organizations in the future?
Speaker 1: 39:01
I hope so. I hope so. As much as I don't operate so heavily in the large corporate world. As much as I don't operate so heavily in the large corporate world, I have to say some of the larger organizations out there are the ones actually doing better when it comes to things like pay transparency and visibility on career development, probably because they've got the resources there as well to do it from like a people team perspective. But particularly in the UK, the public organizations you like the NHS and you can apply to jobs and you know exactly what grade you're going to be at, what salary you're going to be at. Everyone's on the same, salary gets paid the same. There is visibility in a lot of the public organizations here which I imagine is maybe similar in the US.
Speaker 3: 39:40
It's similar. Yeah, the US government actually does transparency well.
Speaker 1: 39:44
Exactly, yeah, and there are things that you can give a little bit of a hat tip, so you just actually you know what, that there is the structure in place and similarly big consulting firms in the uk and imagine it maybe again similar in the us, like your pwc's, your ey's, etc. They've been around so long, they've got their structure so firmly set that, whilst they may not have the perfect culture for everyone, that's okay. People know what they're getting when they join. They know what they're not going to get and also the grading and the pace is like how you progress in those types of businesses is fairly clear to people and well known because they've been around for so long. So I'm I'm always wary of disparaging like large companies too much, because actually there's some things that they do really well that actually startups and scale-ups could learn from as well. Where they tend to get things wrong maybe is things like communication and day-to-day internal culture starts to get go wrong there because they become this sort of size where things start falling apart.
Speaker 2: 40:38
From that point of view, so funny with this conversation around transparency and even just like your relationship with work. I can't help but think about it like a really any relationship you have with a person, Meaning and I know we've talked about this. But when I think about dating or getting into a relationship with someone, if you're not honest or if you misrepresent yourself from the jump, you're going to have a problem. And when we think about any kind of dating scenario, if you would be like, yeah, they said that they really wanted to have X, Y and Z, but then they didn't, and we talked about how how can people start to get more transparent up above right, Especially at the org level? But I'm thinking here about where this really comes down to is individuals, how individuals are feeling as they're moving through these organizations. I'm thinking here about where this really comes down to is individuals, how individuals are feeling as they're moving through these organizations.
Speaker 2: 41:31
And I'm wondering if we can really double down on if you're a manager or if you're an employee and you're sitting in an organization that may have some opportunity. Everybody has some opportunity Individually. I have some opportunity, have some opportunity for transparency, but you really want to be this person that shows up well for your team or shows up in a way that you feel you need to as a manager. What can a manager do, agnostic of the organization, to drive transparency and drive that kind of honesty on their team?
Speaker 1: 42:06
Yeah, it's very tough. I think in some respects in smaller organizations it's more down to mindset of founder CEO. They're probably still close enough to the individual employees day to day for them to be the driving factor here. I think maybe when you get into larger organizations and most people have never ever met the ceo or know really what they look like or who they are, there is more of an opportunity possibly for managers, middle level managers, more senior managers, to try and direct and formulate some level of team level transparency. Everyone knows that as companies get larger, culture and values becomes lost on a broader level because you end up with your microcultures and across the entire business. You do have this opportunity to form your own microculture, microverse within your team. So if managers do care deeply enough about it and not to say that they're going to suddenly change the entire business and how the business operates, but there are steps that they can take to start understanding how they can build more trust with their team.
Speaker 1: 43:04
And again, this is a whole nother podcast episode, I'm sure, but managers are highly underdeveloped, under supported, under trained.
Speaker 1: 43:12
I think the latest stat that's flowing around now is like 82 percent of managers are accidental managers, like it's completely broken in terms of how management even works itself, and so most managers don't know where to start when it comes to how to manage a team and how to communicate with them, and et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 1: 43:30
So, in terms of like steps you can take, we're building an open manager handbook with our community now building it together like a building public community exercise, which is really cool, but that's going to be filled with a heap of like resources, guidance on like how to build trust with the team, how to communicate with the team, how to run effective one on ones, but all with a lens of how to build trust with the team, how to communicate with the team, how to run effective one-on-ones, but all with a lens of how to do it in an open, transparent way.
Speaker 1: 43:54
It's tricky because some of it will go against the grain a little bit, potentially with what you're being told you are allowed to share and aren't allowed to share. But if you're not able to be transparent ie share the reality you can at least be clear with what you are and aren't allowed to share. So there's a bit of a difference between clarity and transparency. So even if you don't have the information to share with them, you can tell them what you can share and what you do and don't know, and that in itself is at least building some trust with your team.
Speaker 2: 44:21
I've been in. I think most of us have situations where you're leading a team and you're going through something really tumultuous layoffs, budget cuts, the business isn't doing well, et cetera and I've worked with people, colleagues and peers that have been like all you need to say is that you absolutely trust the direction of the company. You're behind this 100% and we're going to move on, and I have found that when I've tried that tactic earlier on in my career, it goes over like a fart in church because people, what they want to know to your very good point is I don't need you to tell me everything, but I need to trust that you're going to tell me what you can and you're going to keep me updated and we're going to go through this together. Yeah, people don't expect you to tell them everything. They don't even expect you necessarily to tell how you're feeling about it, but they need to be able to trust that you've got their best interests and that you're going to keep them updated as they go along.
Speaker 1: 45:17
Yeah, and you've got two examples of companies that do a relatively good job on this. Again, in terms of again, this probably has to be something that is ideally fed from higher up, but maybe it could be implemented in a larger organization by a middle manager. There's a company I mentioned earlier called euro. They're really intentional as a leadership team as how they will approach crisis types scenarios, whatever that might be. Layoffs interestingly, an interesting one, because you can see a layoff coming so you can plan for it. You could think about our comms plan how we're going to approach it. Weirdly, there's no argument real argument for companies doing a really bad job on this because they they always see it coming, they always have time to plan for it and they have the opportunity to communicate it if they want to. But there are things that happen that you can't control and euro was one example. They were backed by, if you remember, the silicon valley bank issue that happened a while ago.
Speaker 1: 46:06
Yeah, everyone sort of just forgot about that a little bit. So sorry if I've given anyone ptsd, but that happened and that affected juro and within minutes of that news being announced, juro's ceo was on slack. The entire business couldn't give them an answer as to what's coming, but there was at least communication there immediately to say this has happened. We could be affected. We will keep you posted and I can't remember exactly how many updates they were given, but there was continual updates very regularly throughout the entire weekend. No expectation for employees to read this, but it all happened over a weekend, didn't it? I think from memory and yeah, that's do committed to slacking the entire business all weekend about what was going on that that sort of level of intentional communication calms nerves, makes people feel involved, looked after as safe as they possibly can be and informed, and they're an incredible business. You have to work hard at that, but that's really great.
Speaker 1: 47:01
Another example, slightly different, is someone like gitlab, who a lot of people know and accept as the most transparent company in the world. If you go on their handbook, when they talk about transparency as one of their values, they're very clear about why it's a value. They're very clear about what they do share and they give you examples of the things they share. But interestingly, there's a line in there that says there are some things we don't share and when we don't share them, we publicly document what that is and why. So you can click a link and they'll tell you exactly what they don't share with people and the reasons for not sharing that information as well. And that is like perfect scenario, like defining transparency but building expectations with employees to understand and get some context for why certain things aren't being shared.
Speaker 2: 47:48
I think that education is equally important. Right, there are some things that it is in everybody's best interest not to share at a certain point in time. Right, there just is in business. But I think the ability to say this is it and to be very upfront about it again, it's so. People know what to expect, they know what they're getting into. Yeah, it's really that. Know what to expect, they know what they're getting into. Yeah, it's really that clear yeah.
Speaker 3: 48:10
It's also just acknowledging going back to the example about the Silicon Valley Bay, it's acknowledging something is happening. We know what's happening. We don't have all the facts, but we're going to communicate to you. So people aren't like trying to fill in the blank. That's what always happens, right? They fill in their own blanks. Conspiracy theories spread throughout an organization, and then it just now you're fighting that and the real information, and then no one believes the real information when you finally give it. So I love these examples.
Speaker 1: 48:38
The comfort it must build of thinking okay, my CEO is on it, like you don't communicate anything. If an employee sees it, that news, and they haven't heard from their CEO on the weekend, they might sit there and think should I tell them about this? Do you think they've seen the news yet? Or, knowing that your CEO is slacking you on the weekends about something like this, I think yeah, the trust in that leader must just be through the roof.
Speaker 2: 48:59
Yeah absolutely, absolutely. One of the things that I think is really important is being able to control what you can control. Is being able to control what you can control and, as an employee, you're either interviewing for a job. Maybe you're sitting internally at an organization and you're wondering what could I be looking at in terms of this organization? And I'm wondering what would you tell people You're best friends interviewing for a job? What would you tell them in terms of figuring out what that company really is?
Speaker 1: 49:26
Yeah, I haven't ever had to answer that. To be honest, we do a few things to try and help folks a little bit as much, as our advice usually is trained more on helping the companies rather than because we think if we can help the companies do better, that will automatically help employees and candidates. But I spend a lot of time personally looking at career sites and job adverts and I think I've gotten very good at just cutting through the rubbish. Basically, that's there, the buzzwords, the vagueness that actually a lot of people maybe read and take for granted and take as accepted. So encouraging people to not just see the words transparent on a career page but actually, if you see that, take that as a signal that you should be looking for some level of openness or something further that gives you an idea. Or, if someone's got a core value of diversity, start understanding whether they share anything about diversity or the commitments, failings, whatever that might be. So just try and think a bit deeper and go a bit deeper on that. That's like the high level stuff. There's basic things on the job adverts that people should be looking for some clarity on and most people do, frankly, is like thinking about like compensation and flexible working, like when will I be working? Where will I be working and can you think deeper around like policy on?
Speaker 1: 50:36
Someone just says hybrid three days a week. What does that actually mean? Their questions you won't have answered pre-application, but taking that into an interview to actually like really dig deeper on that and understand is it just three days a week or is it a monday, tuesday, friday, like whatever that might be? We built and shared what we call like our interview question index and which is like an open resource on our website and it's I think it's 60 or 70 questions. We just we did it for fun, to be honest, but like opportunity for people to understand that the tougher questions they could ask employers and interview to dig deeper on things like culture, like understanding, like, and what one of the questions on there is like why did the last three people leave this team?
Speaker 1: 51:14
Or what was the last mistake your ceo admitted to which I got some flack for and people said you should be a bit softer with that like and maybe like. So maybe someone could ask what was the last thing your ceo shared you that they learned, which for me became a bit fluffy. It could be like I've read a book and learned this, so I want to understand how open are CEOs and leaders about their own mistakes, their own vulnerabilities? It gives you a real indication of psychological safety and how people communicate and share information, and if an interviewer can't give you certain information, it's not necessarily that you should run for the hills, but it might give you a bit of an indication as to how communication and information is shared in that business. If they haven't even genuinely been given the information themselves. As a recruiter of 12, 13 years, that would signal some alarm bells in my head alarm bells in my head.
Speaker 3: 52:08
Yeah, I always tell people to ask the question what brought you here and what keeps you here? Because it's the what keeps you here, where the honesty starts to come out for folks, or if you see them. Oh, I don't know yeah, yeah, that pause tell is telling yeah, there's.
Speaker 1: 52:20
Sometimes I have to, like really work hard to find out why I'm still, why I'm still in this business is, but then and even the danger with that is there's almost very opinionated. So what, what's keeping someone else in the business might not be the thing that keeps you there as well, but understanding it's hard, because so many of these things could be linked to opinion. But again, understanding, like, who is the last person that failed to thrive here and why? Like what are the factors that leads to failure in this company, rather than always saying, like, why am I going to love it here? What do do you do for fun? Like always trying to find all the fun stuff. Understand who doesn't thrive and help you understand whether that might, you know, connect the dots for you as well.
Speaker 2: 52:59
I think it's really important to dive way deeper than most people do in their interviews and to not be afraid to ask those questions. I've had many conversations with people that they really want to know X, y and Z, but they're afraid to ask or they feel like if they ask then they're going to get penalized somehow in the interview process. And I feel like these are questions that you should be asking to really get a sense of what is the organization like, but also if you're getting any kind of pushback about those questions or even asking those questions, that's also information as well.
Speaker 3: 53:33
That's when a rejection is protection. Yes, ultimately.
Speaker 1: 53:39
The hard thing right now, at this moment in time, is it's such a hard thing to advise on because they're ultimately braver questions for people to ask, slightly scarier ones, and the mindset that so many people are in right now is I've just got to find a job.
Speaker 1: 53:53
So, like at the moment, people are just trying to find, prioritize finding jobs, even if they're not perfect, and it was a similar back in 2020 with, with covid, people were joining companies as a stepping stone, knowing I just need security for now and when the market improves then I'll move. So right now, this stuff isn't always a priority for people, but I've known a good few people in the last number of months who have jumped to jobs just for a job's sake and they've left them in weeks. There's no point in joining a business and going through onboarding and ramp up and hope if your gut is telling you that this is not the right place, because nine times out of ten it won't happen and you're better off still investing your energy and your time into trying to find the right place. But it is hard.
Speaker 2: 54:35
It's a really tricky time to be doing that and I hate to put it on an employee to say you've got to go through this journey, but I think it's really great, though, that people have these tools and these questions to ask to see what situation are they getting into, what's?
Speaker 1: 54:47
really sad is it's often the TA teams and the recruiters who get the flack for this. They're useless at giving me the information I need. They're really vague and the poor recruiter that's nine times out of 10, they just haven't been given the information. I've had this myself, like not being told what funding round we just done. How am I going to do my job properly if the leadership team won't give me the basic information I need to interview? So it's not usually the TA team's fault. Honestly. They don't sit there openly trying to hide things. It's just we're working with what we've got. But again, it's a huge indication really of like how does communication happen in this business?
Speaker 2: 55:20
A thousand percent, yeah, and quite honestly, most TA teams are armed with the sexy ass information and all the information they can have so they can get those folks through the door. So if they don't have it, again I think that's a really great call out that it might not be as clear in the organization. The other thing is, if the hiring manager we talk about this sometimes there's a difference between talent acquisition, like your recruiter, and then the person that's actually going to be quote, unquote, your boss, and if either of those people don't have that information, or I think it'd be very interesting if they give you different information as well, again, I think it's just, it's a big archaeological dig.
Speaker 3: 55:56
Put on your curiosity and critical thinking hat during the interview process the rapid round, here we go adam, no pressure, by the way, try to make this as fun as possible and not terrifying. So terrible, at least yeah, all right, I going to dive right in. Some of these could be yes or no, or true or false, and some might have broader explanation, and that's totally okay. I wanted to ask of the open org companies that you are working with, are there similar characteristics that you see in their leadership teams?
Speaker 1: 56:44
yes, I can divulge a little bit more if you want yeah of course. Relatively progressive, a younger generation less precious about titles and flatter hierarchies and structures in their business.
Speaker 3: 56:58
Okay, what is the next lever being added to the list above? We talked about comp benefits, career development, culture. What else might get added?
Speaker 1: 57:10
Flexibility is another thing that I think is just such a big topic at the moment the lack of clarity on are we working from home? Is it return to office? How does that look? Is it different things to different employees? There's a lot of problems around that at the moment. So, like clarity on that should be really simple, but it's terrible at the moment, so that should be a big one.
Speaker 3: 57:34
Okay, okay. We see a lot of large organizations today talking about social impact, environmental impact. Do you think, given the age of climate change, that companies should be transparent about their environmental impact, even if it's not flattering?
Speaker 1: 57:45
Yeah, I do so. The gen z, gen z, sorry big topic for them around, like esg and environment and climate. So it's a big thing that a lot of them are looking for, apparently, from employers when they join companies. So it will signal to me that the longer that it goes on and the worst things get out there, the more important this is for companies to talk about. The downsides is the pressure of greenwashing, etc. And everyone's talking about just doing something or trying to make it look as good as possible, and that's happened with diversity over the last few years. Definitely is like huge calls to do more on diversity, but it's become very performative. So yes, definitely, but but be careful okay, okay.
Speaker 3: 58:25
Do you think social media is going to make companies be more transparent or just more cautious?
Speaker 1: 58:31
hopefully both, hopefully both. So a trait I see from the really transparent companies that I follow and watch is very vocal ceos. On linkedin, for example, they post regularly. They post about whatever they want and they're not afraid to to either be vulnerable and share failings but also like really celebrate stuff. And it's interesting the the slightly larger or secretive companies. You never hear from a ceo and the fact that they don't post about anything starts making you think are they waiting for someone to comment on a post and call them out? And this happened with bupa very recently. The ce CEO posted about an award they won for women in their leadership team and there was a comment made that went viral and it all blew up. So more cautious if you're not able to be fully transparent, but hopefully that transparency will remove the need to be cautious.
Speaker 3: 59:22
Okay, true or false? Every company should have a public fact sheet about how they operate, true, okay? And is there such a thing as too much transparency?
Speaker 1: 59:37
There could be. Arguably no, but in certain instances there could be. And again it's a bit like the greenwashing example just now. Don't make it become like a performative exercise just for pr. Make it like embeddable. Don't overreach.
Speaker 3: 59:51
As soon as you can't model certain behaviors, it will start to fall apart what's one organization either one that you're working with or one publicly that you've seen do this really well, like you think they're a pillar example of good transparency.
Speaker 1: 1:00:14
A company called PostHog. Posthog is a small-ish tech business in the UK. I won't drone on because I'll talk about it for hours, but check out PostHog. They've got a public handbook. They share their roadmap. Their CEO is posting on LinkedIn all the time. That's so open, so transparent. They're amazing.
Speaker 2: 1:00:26
Adam. I love the work you all are doing. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. Thanks so much for joining us today. Subscribe. Wherever you listen to podcasts, you can come over and say hi to us on the TikToks and LinkedIn community. Hit us up at yourworkfriends.com. We're always posting stuff on there and if you found this episode helpful, share with your work friends.
Jobs, Politics & Policy at Work
Elections shape work…
A second Trump administration could bring major changes to your workplace—whether you're an employee, a leader, or in HR. From labor rights and healthcare to immigration, DEI, and workplace safety—this episode dives into how political policy directly impacts your day-to-day work experience. No spin. Just straight talk on what’s potentially coming, and what to start paying attention to now.
Your Work Friends Podcast: Jobs, Politics & Policy at Work with Ryan Stygar & Harrison Newman
Elections shape work…
A second Trump administration could bring major changes to your workplace—whether you're an employee, a leader, or in HR. From labor rights and healthcare to immigration, DEI, and workplace safety—this episode dives into how political policy directly impacts your day-to-day work experience. No spin. Just straight talk on what’s potentially coming, and what to start paying attention to now.
Speaker 1: 0:00
All right, I think we're live.
Speaker 2: 0:02
Yeah, yeah, Okay. Well, hey, we're here Welcome to your work friends and we're here to talk about jobs, politics and policy in the workplace and what you might expect with the new Trump administration coming in. I'm Mel Platt, I'm the co-host and co-founder of your work friends and owner of Cordelia Consulting, and with me is my partner in crime, Francesca Francesca.
Speaker 1: 0:28
Hey, I'm Francesca Ranieri, co-founder and co-host of your Work Friends pod with Mel, and I'm also the founder of Frank.
Speaker 2: 0:36
Yeah, yeah, and friends, we have been doing this work for a long, long ass time and what we want to do is connect you with the best experts.
Speaker 2: 0:47
With us tonight, we'll introduce those folks in a second to really break down all this work stuff to help you stay ahead, and that's our goal for tonight. With us is Ryan Steiger. He's an employment lawyer with Centurion trial attorneys in San Diego, California, but you also might know him as attorney Ryan on TikTok and Instagram, and he's also a former wildland firefighter, which he's incredibly proud of. We're incredibly proud of him too. And then with us is also Harrison Newman. He is the VP of HR benefits at Corporate Synergies in New York City. He's also the VP of communications for New York City SHRM and a budding harpist only for one night, from what we understand. So welcome to you both. Thank you both for being here and with us.
Speaker 2: 1:34
So here's the deal. We are going to be talking about five core topics around work policy, and those include labor and wage policies, healthcare and benefits, immigration, DEI and workplace safety all of the hot topics everyone's hearing about. We have about five minutes for those five topics each. We're also going to be making some bold predictions here along the way all speculative, of course, because we don't have crystal balls, but we're going to be ripping things from the headlines and making our best assumptions to help you think through things. Going to be ripping things from the headlines and making our best assumptions to help you think through things. If you are joining us live, please, please, please drop your questions in the chat. We will be monitoring them and we have some live Q&A at the end. But we're going to jump right in with a nice little question for you both.
Speaker 4: 2:18
How's that sound? Right on, let's do it.
Speaker 1: 2:20
Yeah, I actually want to do this for all of us, because I'm really curious. I know we all have a point of view on this. If you were to think about one word that would describe the workplace in 2025, what's your word? A single word, a single word, or what you're expecting?
Speaker 4: 2:37
what you're expecting. In a single word, I'm going to go with burnout.
Speaker 2: 2:41
Oh, that's a good one.
Speaker 4: 2:42
Yeah, I hope it's not tired at this point. It's been going around quite a bit, but the general consensus I get from all the employees I represent, the people I talk to is people are tired, things are more expensive than they've ever been, wages are going up but they're not keeping up. And that creates a bit of a conflict, because your employer is sitting there saying my costs of business are going up and I'm paying you more than ever. The employees are saying, yeah, you're paying me more than ever, but it's really not a big increase, boss, and meanwhile my rent has gone up like 50% over the past eight years. It's getting rough out there and now, with what many anticipate will be fewer worker protections, not more, that burnout could turn into apathy. I certainly hope it doesn't, but burnout is my word of 2025 so far.
Speaker 1: 3:29
Yeah, good one Harrison.
Speaker 3: 3:32
I'm going to cheat a little bit. I'm going to use a word, but I'm going to give it a slightly different definition than typical. I'm going to use disruptive, but I'm not going to use disruptive in a bad way per se, because I don't know if disruptive is necessarily bad. I think you're going to see a lot of disruption in the workforce. I think you're going to see a lot of people wearing hats they've never worn before, because I think there's going to be a lot more responsibilities thrown on HR, thrown on executives navigating things in real time, because things might move very fast, because it might be one morning this is the cool thing and the next morning some other idea comes up and everything changes, and I think we're going to see a lot of disruption. Um, but I'm not going to use disruption as a negative term, because sometimes disruption leads to good things. Sometimes you need to burn something and I should not be using that word right now with everything going on but sometimes you need to burn something down to build something else new, and I think that disruption is really the word, but I'm going to tweak it a little bit and disruption which could be positive disruption, yeah all right, can I change my answer to seesaw because now that I'm thinking about it and it's pertinent to some of the things we're going to talk
Speaker 4: 4:38
about um anyone following nlrb guidance, eeoc guidance, dol guidance we're going to talk about that in detail. Everything that Biden just undid is going to be undid again because we're dealing with a Trump sandwich. The problem is, the Trump we're getting this time is a little different than the Trump we got last time. He has new people in his ear with new ideas, and a lot of those people are mortal enemies with conflicting ideas. So I think we are going to see disruption is a great term, but I think, seesaw, we'll see press conferences where he boldly declares one policy and then the next day something totally different comes out.
Speaker 1: 5:18
Ryan, my word was whiplash for the exact same reason.
Speaker 3: 5:21
Oh, there we go.
Speaker 1: 5:23
Yeah, Mel, before we, before we.
Speaker 2: 5:25
I actually was going to pull from our good friend, uh, Ashley Goodall and say blender. I feel like we're all going into the blender. It's just going to feel like we're in a constant blender. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: 5:37
I uh, I had a lot of people say you know, francesca, get yourself centered, get yourself grounded, get your chakras out. This year You're going to need it. It's going to be a lot of change. We all know that. What that change will be, hey, you know, we're not sure, but one of the reasons why we're here is to think about what could happen and what we're already seeing. Let's get into it with our first topic, which is around like labor and wage policies, and, ryan, I'm going to take this over to you first. What are you thinking, again, when we think about labor policies, wage policies, things like overtime have been talked about, all this good jazz. What's 2025 going to look like?
Speaker 4: 6:15
Well, we're going to see a massive shakeup in the beginning, and that's not unusual for when we have a new administration come in. But I want to dispel any myths that Trump is at all a normal candidate. He is not a normal presidential candidate. We're going to see big changes. We're going to see him fast. So the agencies I'm looking at the most are the National Labor Relations Board, the EEOC, the DOL, of course, and OSHA. So the first thing we're going to see is a complete change in leadership. It's going to start with the National Labor Relations Board's general counsel, jennifer Abruzzo.
Speaker 4: 6:51
Now what we've seen in the past four years is the NLRB greatly expanding their interpretation of the National Labor Relations Act. We saw things like a ban on captive audience meetings. That's where the employer requires you to come into some kind of hallway and they explain their position on unionization. Thanks to the NLRB's most recent ruling on those captive audience meetings, employers can't do that anymore. They can have meetings about their views on unionization, but they can't track attendance. They can't punish you if you don't go. It has to be voluntary, but all the people advancing that expansion are going to be fired and we're going to see a new general counsel. We're probably going to see a Republican majority because on December 11th, the Congress did not extend the terms to 2026 like we had thought they would, so we're going to get a Republican majority in the NLRB. We're going to get a Republican majority in the EEOC.
Speaker 4: 7:53
And what's interesting about the EEOC, particularly and I know we don't have a lot of time so I'll wrap this up quick what we saw in 2020 was something really groundbreaking. What we saw in 2020 was something really groundbreaking. We saw LGBTQ status, gender expression, gender identity being protected. For the longest time. It was actually legal to fire someone because they identified as trans in some states, but the EEOC reinterpreted that. Well, not the EEOC, I'm sorry. The EEOC issued guidance after the Supreme Court's ruling in Bostock v Clayton County, georgia. The thing is the most likely person to chair the EEOC. Now she let me pull up her name again it's Andrea. Do you guys know who I'm talking about?
Speaker 1: 8:41
I do not.
Speaker 4: 8:43
I'm blanking on her name for a minute.
Speaker 1: 8:45
But that Andrea Andrea thing, that's always a, that's a tricky.
Speaker 4: 8:50
Yeah, well, anyway, here I'll pull up her name in a minute. I'm blanking on her name for no reason at all, but basically what's going to happen is she has expressed a serious dissent with the EEOC's interpretation of Bostock v Clayton County, georgia. So we are going to see a retraction, a restriction, a neutering of protections for LGBTQ employees. The reason we're going to see a retraction and not just a cessation on progress is because she has Andrea I can't remember her last name has expressed many times that she feels Clayton County, georgia that decision was a mistake. She feels that LGBTQ quote unquote special interests are an attack on women's rights and an attack on religious freedoms. We can debate whether we think that's true or not, but what's not up for debate is the EEOC is going to greatly restrict its expansion of those LGBTQ protections. We also may see some restrictions on the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act and how the EEOC interprets that.
Speaker 1: 9:50
Harrison, what would you add?
Speaker 3: 9:52
Just going back to the LGBTQ, I think you're going to see a lot in.
Speaker 3: 9:56
So MySpace obviously is in the benefits side, but I think you're really going to see a huge change or shift in DEI initiatives and we're going to talk about that a little bit later on probably, but we're going to see a major shift in and I hate the word wool culture, but I think a lot of the election was based on that.
Speaker 3: 10:11
I think that's really going to impact the workforce in general because I think people who feel a certain way might feel empowered by the results to act on that more. So I think it's going to be the role of businesses to balance that out and see so a little bit, because some of the C-suite who might've felt a certain way but acted differently because the culture and the trend was going one way, the results of the election, the way the election was run, might empower those same people to start shifting work environment and the culture inside of works. I think it's going to be important that the people inside of the businesses HR specifically, but everybody there to help navigate that culture and make sure there's still an inclusive culture inside of the workforce.
Speaker 1: 10:50
Yeah, that makes sense. I'm wondering just to go back specifically, really quickly before we go on to our next topic around labor and wage we got a lot of questions around overtime and Mel and I did an episode on Project 2025, trying to interpret that largely thought of as the Republican platform right right around some of these things. Are you all seeing anything around overtime at all in terms of it retracting overtime or going to that like four-week look?
Speaker 4: 11:18
I think it's possible, though remotely like not really likely, remotely likely, leaning towards unlikely that we'll see a change to those overtime rules. If anything, we would see something like the Project 2025 80 hour rule rather than the 40 hour rule. There was some discussion about that, but I really don't think it's likely. I think it's right up there with no tax on overtime and no tax on tips. I think Mr Trump was just saying what he thinks his base wanted to hear. Most of his efforts it's this. It's, on one hand, look, no tax on overtime. I'm going to new rules at the DOL. He's going to throw out most of the inclusivity efforts at the EEOC. So really, what we're going to see is a major change of leadership and then the people in those leadership positions are going to make small changes over time. Something sweeping with the overtime. I really don't think is likely.
Speaker 3: 12:25
Yeah, I think we might see multiple changes in leadership. If this is anything like the first administration, the people in his ear right now might not be the same people in his ear six months from now. So I mean, once again, we talk about that whiplash, but if it's anything like the first time around the people in his ear, he sours on them very quickly and that can change. So what we see right now could be very different six months, one year, two years, for good or bad, but it could be very different as we go along.
Speaker 1: 12:50
Super fair, super fair Mel.
Speaker 2: 12:55
Yeah, we're going to talk about healthcare and benefits. So, harrison, I know like you love this topic very, very much. A lot of people stay in their jobs for healthcare and insurance. I can argue until the cows come home. Those things should not be tied together, but they are. Let's talk about what you're seeing here. How could employer provided healthcare change?
Speaker 3: 13:18
So we don't know what's going to happen. For the most part, there's a lot of talks around the ACA and how the ACA is going to go away. As you go, attack the ACA. I don't see that happening. With everything else, he might change the name of the ACA. I mean the fact that it's referred to as Obamacare I'm sure bothers him. If it was like the Gulf of Mexico, maybe we'll change the name. But besides for that, I don't see the ACA going away because in the first administration they removed all the parts of contention. For the most part, everything that people really didn't like is already gone and in some capacity, the ACA is working. Will we explore different ideas, as he said during one of the debates, if somebody comes up with a better idea, will that happen? Possibly, but I don't really see that.
Speaker 3: 14:01
Where I see the workforce really changing is going back to what we talked about before is from a culture standpoint and balancing that culture and the results of the election. The culture I see people looking at more broad based benefits and more flexible benefits because we don't know what's coming up next. His actions indirectly the repeal of Grovy Way and companies have to pivot to have travel benefits, because if you lived in one of the states where abortion was illegal, you had to pay for employees to travel and stay elsewhere. There was a Supreme Court I don't know the exact ruling if it went through regarding gender reassignment surgeries in certain states being illegal. I think Tennessee was one of those. So you might see an expansion of those benefits and travel benefits to start covering other aspects. But I think the biggest change I look at benefits and you would talk about benefits being the reason people stay at a job. I look at benefits as one of the easiest tools that a company has to create a culture. It's one of the things you can build on and manage completely and if you're offering a benefits, the benefits is a culture of the organization. It speaks for the values of the organization and I think you're going to see that more because the outside values might be very different. There might be attack on LGBTQ rights, there might be attack on abortion rights, women's rights, and I think you're going to see an expansion of benefits, whether it's through lifestyle accounts that have very broad uses, potentially, where you could use it for multiple different things, through HSA accounts and stuff like that.
Speaker 3: 15:29
I do think you're going to see companies look more towards their benefits package to build the culture that they want, because there are other regulations and other things coming down the pipe that might prevent them from doing that. So I don't think the ACA is going away a pipe that might prevent them from doing that. So I don't think the ACA is going away. I do think we will have an expansion on HSAs and these pre-tax benefits. Interestingly enough, I do think towards. One of the last things he did from the benefit standpoint was extend leave. So I do think we might see more leave management and paid leave, whether on a state level or federal level. But I think, overall, if you're looking for the global biggest change to the benefits, I think and it's been happening overall, but I think it's going to be more important now than before because of external sources it's going to be those broad benefits that help build a culture within the organization.
Speaker 2: 16:18
Yeah, Francesca and I were talking right before we started the live about that. It's like the employers who are going to be kind of winning in terms of the talent marketplace in a few years are those that create benefits packages that benefit their employees and really retain employees and attract new talent in their organization.
Speaker 4: 16:37
Yeah, that brings up some other interesting points too. I mean, as we discussed, my world is really more in the EEOC. By the way, our current share is Charlotte Burroughs, who's fantastic in my opinion, and, by the way, the person who I predict. This isn't certain. There's been no announcements. I predict it's Andrea Lucas is her last name. She's a Republican, she's the only Republican there right now and she'll probably be the new head of the EEOC, which could be problematic for anyone seeking things like gender-affirming care, protection from LGBTQ discrimination, the right to use a bathroom that they're comfortable with. Also, there's some other issues that come up.
Speaker 4: 17:16
Remember, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act was passed in 2022. That instituted sweeping, pretty exciting guidance on how to protect pregnant women at work or women seeking fertility treatments. Those fertility treatments that were protected under EEOC guidance included things like fertility treatments and abortions. No way in hell is Andrea Lucas going to let that continue. She is going to either decline to enforce any actions under that guidance or issue new guidance is what I expect. So, unfortunately, what I think we're going to see is a patchwork.
Speaker 4: 17:54
They keep saying that they want to return all of these questions to the states, but I think anyone with two brain cells to rub together knows. The ultimate Republican agenda is a nationwide abortion ban, no exceptions, and we know that's where they're headed. So what we're going to see, at least in the short term, I think, is a patchwork where employees in California have more right to access things like IVF or an abortion, if you need it, than an employee in Florida. So we may see a tug of war with people wanting remote opportunities or relocation, but certainly we talk about access to employer-sponsored benefits, your employer's right to maybe deny certain benefits based on your fertility treatments. There may not be as much recourse as it as we'd hope to see. That's my current prediction. No, and it's going to be difficultourse as it as we'd hope to see. That's my current prediction.
Speaker 3: 18:43
No, and it's going to be difficult, as you mentioned, from the state level. You're going to have state by state and there are very few employers right now that are single state. Most of them have multiple states, so you're going to have different rules and regulations for each state. It's going to come on. It's going to add a lot more work to the HR departments and the finance departments, even because it's going to be state-by-state regulations. Having these culture benefits or these travel benefits. I mean we might get some good out of it. Look, we've got ICHRs, we've got the individual HRAs the first time around. He's shown a tendency to think outside the box when it comes to benefits. Maybe there'll be some changes in the prescription standpoint.
Speaker 3: 19:16
I'm optimistic. I don't know if I'm optimistic because there's a reason to be. I'm optimistic because you have to be optimistic, so there might be some good that comes out of it. But going back to my first word, I think it's going to be disruptive. I think you're going to have a lot more hats being worn by HR and finance having to navigate different rules on a state-by-state basis, because I don't think we'll have a federal ban. I don't think there's enough push for that right now. I don't think they want a federal ban 100%. They want the argument of a federal ban. I think they like having the conversation more than the actual doing of these things. But I do think, on a state by state basis, you're going to have states where these laws are going to be very. California and Texas are going to be very different when it comes to what's covered and not covered.
Speaker 4: 19:57
Forgive my ignorance.
Speaker 4: 19:59
Harrison and I did want to say Mel. When we talk about optimism, one thing to be optimistic about is Mr Trump has talked about concepts of a plan to repeal disastrous Obamacare. Let's not forget who he is. He is a performer first, and everything else second. He knows that his base hates Obama. Doesn't matter why they hate him, he just knows they hate Obama.
Speaker 4: 20:28
So if he says I'm going to destroy Obamacare and liberate all the poor people affected by Obamacare, most of those followers of his do not realize he's talking about the Affordable Care Act and a lot of those people have health benefits because of the Affordable Care Act and I would hope that any advisors advising Mr Trump would let him know hey, if you take away your voters' health care, that is going to be an immediate life change that they notice and it's going to be really hard to blame Democrats for that. So I think one of the things we can be optimistic about is ACA fundamentally is probably not going anywhere. It would be pretty self-destructive to attack it head-on. So many people's benefits may stay the same, although abortion and healthcare-related benefits may be harder to access. And I'm sorry about the jump. I have a dog who wants to go on a walk really bad and he's giving me little nips on my knee, and that's why I keep jumping around.
Speaker 2: 21:20
Turn the conversation.
Speaker 3: 21:24
What's that, mel? How do you ask a question, or yeah?
Speaker 2: 21:27
I guess I I wanted, I wanted to follow up on the abortion um ban because I'm curious when it comes and forgive my ignorance because I'm not very closely related, tied to this work. But, um, you know, I imagine, if there are regulations in place in a state-by-state basis, can employers be? Can employers be held accountable if someone receives an abortion? That's on their play role and what? What kind of legal implications might they face if they are providing access to resources for that service if it's like, illegal in their state?
Speaker 3: 21:59
So what's interesting is in Texas you have to offer benefits that cover. The employee has the right to choose whether their benefits cover or do not cover abortion. Now, whether you have abortion, whether abortion is so, I can opt out. If I feel abortions morally wrong, I can say I do not want abortion being covered under my policy. Where somebody else says I believe abortions right, I want abortion covered, it's the exact same benefits, except one covers, one doesn't. Even though in the state of Texas you can't get an abortion anyway. What that means is based on my policy, I can't go to a neighboring state where it is legal and do that.
Speaker 3: 22:35
So far and I'll leave the legal questions more to the attorney so far we haven't seen any litigation about allowing them to travel outside of the state. In theory, that would be against the Republican theory of state rules, because if a state wants to do it, you can't do that. Now, we all know people don't play nice in the sandbox and because something doesn't fit a narrative doesn't mean they won't go against it. I don't see them penalizing in that regards. But I do think that you're going to see an expansion of these travel benefits, which might cover more LGBTQ or what they call the woke benefits aspect and some of these things that might be banned in certain states and allowed in others. I think you might see very, very different benefits in different states across the board.
Speaker 2: 23:16
Ryan, what do you think?
Speaker 4: 23:18
Definitely. I was trying to find the Supreme Court case that sort of reaffirms this, but I'm just going to say it, you're going to take my word for it. We have a constitutional right to free interstate travel, ok, so one of the things we're finding is states really throwing up lots of restrictions around abortion for many reasons and some liability for the employer who offers a benefits package that theoretically covers some of those treatments and you take it out of state. That's an open question. I haven't seen any litigation on that, but we do see things like Texas's $10,000 abortion bounty hunter rule, which there actually was at least one successful prosecution under that law that we've seen so far. So what is going to happen?
Speaker 4: 24:06
Optimistically, I would say that a near total abortion ban and a total ban on employer benefits across state lines for fertility treatments may not happen, because we have a constitutional right to interstate travel and the whole point of that right is that Americans would, in theory, have the same fundamental rights in Tennessee as they do in Louisiana, as they do in Colorado. Now we know in practice, especially over the past 10 years, that's not really the case. Unfortunately, we have a pretty far right Supreme Court right now, and it's a Supreme Court that has demonstrated over and over again that they're not afraid to legislate from the bench. They're not afraid to take precedent and throw it out the window. They're not afraid to give a president criminal immunity. They're not afraid to overturn Roe v Wade. They don't really need a lot of justification to do it.
Speaker 4: 24:54
So why am I going on that rant? I think that what we will most likely see is attempts by the federal government, with their Republican majority almost everywhere, to do a total abortion ban. Any way they can do it, and they might first attack things like employer benefits, maybe trying to hold the employer accountable, deny them certain federal funding, deny them certain benefits or taxes, or fine them or sue them if they offer any kind of fertility treatment or anything like that. But that would immediately be challenged by the coalition of attorneys general in blue states that are trying to protect those rights. So I think the optimistic take is that it would be tied up until Mr Trump's term is over and then hopefully a new president could take a new DOJ and end all of that. But I do think that those reproductive rights are going to be the first thing under attack starting this year.
Speaker 2: 25:53
Okay, thank you both. On to the next topic.
Speaker 1: 25:56
All right. So we've talked about labor and wage. We've talked about health care. The next topic up we wanted to talk about was the latest of du jour between Elon Musk and the constituents on the right, where he told someone to F his face immigration. So I want to talk about immigration.
Speaker 1: 26:15
For those that may not know, especially as it relates to employment. There's two types of visas that typically people work under right when they come to this country. There's an H1A visa, which I believe is typically more seasonal work, agricultural work, and then there's the H1B visa, which is much like, seems to be much more skilled work. You're for longer periods of time, you're sponsored by a company and it could be like Silicon Valley basically mostly Silicon Valley, some professional. Silicon Valley, basically mostly Silicon Valley, some professional. Quote unquote the argument this week or last week I have no sense of time anymore is that they wanted to get. The Republican Party said we want to get rid of these H-1B visas. Elon Musk said hell, no, over my dead body. I want to know we're not even in week two of the year, so we're not even in week two of the year. What's going to happen with?
Speaker 4: 27:07
immigration this year. Harrison, I'm going to go you first. Yeah. Harrison please Give me the hard one.
Speaker 3: 27:12
No, I mean, who knows? Like I said, it goes back to who's in his ear at this day. Elon Musk is in his ear right now and I do think he has a lot of power and I don't know what he is politically, but he's not a Republican. He's for him, basically, but he's for innovation, he's for growth, he's for disruption and going back and might not be the positive way we were talking about earlier, but he's for these things. I don't see them taking those full aspects.
Speaker 3: 27:40
I think a lot of these things and I think Brian mentioned it earlier a lot of these things are campaign talk because they rile people up, but I don't know how practically speaking, these things are, because illegal immigrants are one thing and he's going to target and he's going to do that, but getting rid of these visas, these people use these employees, they need these employees and if they don't have these employees, their business is going to be expensive the money they're going to have to pay a lot more for somebody else who doesn't have these visas. And we already have a work shortage. I think there's, for every 100 jobs globally, there's 95 employees at this standpoint. So there's already a work shortage in that standpoint. So I do think, practically speaking, while it sounds great in a bumper sticker, the people in his ears right now must be one of those main voices who I do think does have his ear. I don't see major changes from the visa standpoint of getting them out of the workforce, because they're necessary for the workforce in many ways.
Speaker 1: 28:34
Yeah, I heard a stat I can't remember what, I'll put it in the show notes, though that for every H-1B visa holder it creates 1.86 jobs. So to your point, it's not only about the job shortage, but it's also about job growth, sometimes with the H-1Bs. But, ryan, you were trying to hop in there, sorry about that.
Speaker 4: 28:52
Well, there's an interesting sort of exponential effect Creating more jobs actually leads to creating more jobs. It's a funny thing, kind of like how you make more money when you put more money in a high-interest savings account. That's kind of the effect we see. So I believe you, francesca. That makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 4: 29:07
Now, h-1b visa I don't think it's going anywhere. I actually don't. I'm not an immigration attorney. This is just based on my tangential knowledge in employment law. I don't think it's going anywhere and I don't think there's going to be many restrictions on it, for two main reasons. Number one national security. Trump is one of the first presidents in my lifetime to want a military parade and he wants to invade Greenland and he wants to invade Panama and he's going to need a big giant military to kick off World War III. If we are going to have any hope of national security during whatever he wants to do, we need the best and brightest engineers to make our F-22s and F-35s and battleships and stuff work, and the defense industry is heavily dependent on skilled labor like that. Boeing alone has thousands. And speaking of thousands this is the second consideration Trump's most important allies rely on H-1B visa labor for their companies. Musk alone has, I think, 2,000 that he's employed across his companies.
Speaker 4: 30:06
And Musk has Trump on a pretty tight leash. Musk has a lot of power. It's quiet power compared to Trump's, but it's a lot of power. And then we look at people like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg and all the big billionaires who are trying to curry favor with Trump. They rely on those engineers and mathematicians. And that kind of leads to a third point. If your goal is to eliminate or declaw, the Department of Education and the United States continues to slip in science, technology, engineering and maths compared to other industrialized peers, we really have no option except to get that talent elsewhere other industrialized peers we really have no option except to get that talent elsewhere. So if we want to remain an economic and military superpower, H-1B visa is an essential part of that.
Speaker 3: 30:49
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You can't get rid of it. You need the workers, and the people in his ear are not going to let him get rid of it, so not unless you don't want your missiles to launch when you hit the button.
Speaker 4: 31:01
I mean it's going to be a consideration.
Speaker 3: 31:03
unfortunately, it might be a good thing from our standpoint.
Speaker 4: 31:07
Yeah, you know that's something we can debate whether it's good or bad, but the point is I don't think H-1B is going anywhere. What I do think and this is a bit more concerning to me one thing that we see in OSHA anti-retaliation statutes and US Department of Labor anti-retaliation statutes is employers cannot take advantage of undocumented labor, also known as illegals, is what Trump supporters call them, but I call them undocumented. Undocumented labor and pay them less than a minimum wage or not pay them at all and threaten them with incarceration, them less than a minimum wage or not pay them at all and threaten them with incarceration, violence, reporting them to ICE, things like that. The reason those anti-retaliation rules exist is so that no employer can benefit from human trafficking or straight up kidnapping. That's actually a really big problem. Even here in California, I've been in cases where we have 20, 30 undocumented immigrants who don't want to work for the employer, but they have been threatened and intimidated into staying there for subminimum wages. Now why is that so important? Trump is borderline violently.
Speaker 4: 32:14
Anti-retaliation statutes against undocumented people are not enforced, or perhaps reduced or rescinded when, basically, if you say, hey, I'm undocumented, but I'm working in this warehouse and they're not giving us safety gear. They're paying us $4 an hour. Sometimes they don't pay us at all. Um, the new osha, the new dll under trump, is going to say hey, that's really interesting. By the way, you're under arrest. Uh, that that's what my biggest fear and concern is. That's worst case scenario for me yeah, it's interesting.
Speaker 1: 32:57
I was reading an article the other day. It was a article, but it was about how do you handle workplace raids around immigration as a leader, and you know the fact that we're talking about that as something else that might be happening in the ether is just on a human level.
Speaker 4: 33:16
It's upsetting, that's why I opened by saying I want to dispel any notion that Donald Trump is a normal president. He is not George Bush, he is not Mitt Romney. He is an entirely different creature that operates on a completely different system than any US president I have seen. Because, whereas other presidents sure there was corruption, ineptitude, certain moral decisions that we might disagree with, certain moral decisions that we might disagree with, the sort of seesaw, whiplash, unpredictability and violent rhetoric Really it's the violence in the rhetoric that's so different about Trump.
Speaker 4: 33:51
What it creates a concern for employment rights advocates like me is listen, even if you're here illegally. Yes, you might have broke the law, maybe you were trafficked, I don't know. That's a separate issue. But but even so, I do not want a legal framework that makes it possible for employers to exploit your undocumented status to extract free labor from you. That is a serious human rights concern and, and one of my biggest predictions is that a lot of those protections may go away. Right now they're still intact. So if you are undocumented and your employer is taking advantage of that, you should report it or at least talk to an attorney about your options first.
Speaker 3: 34:29
I'll just add on one thing. You're talking about the civility, the incivility, and I agree 100%. It's a crazy world we're living in, but I'll be the optimistic and I'll keep my optimistic eyes and glasses on. I think, mel we were speaking about this when we first spoke is the one thing we didn't see was the massive incivility after the election that we expected from either side and once again, obviously one side won. But I think there's something to be optimistic about is the workforce is almost controlling itself.
Speaker 3: 34:57
We were prepared that whichever side won, we were going to see massive incivility and, truth be told, if the other side would have won, we probably would not, would have seen it and a couple of days ago, January 6th, might not have been exactly the same and there might have been other results that the other side would have won. But we're seeing the workforce really take that step and not showing up to work and reacting differently. We're seeing a much more mellow, civil reaction where, all right, we can do this and I think the workforce HR specifically is a really good job of building that culture with an organization where, whatever comes, we're going to help and we're going to control it and we got your back, and I think that's my optimism is hopefully that will offset some of the external craziness, and it's another role HR and the businesses are going to have to run is keeping civilian workforce. But optimistically, based on the election results, using that one snapshot, they might be getting the hang of it and doing a good job at that. Hopefully at least. Yeah.
Speaker 1: 36:06
I also like the idea of business potentially as a check and balance that unwritten check and balance, I guess on culture it might not be a bad thing for sure.
Speaker 3: 36:15
Yeah.
Speaker 1: 36:16
Mel, you want to go into our next topic? Let's go, let's dive, right in DEI.
Speaker 4: 36:23
Oh boy Cool, More good news.
Speaker 2: 36:25
More good news. Yeah, more hot topics we saw in 2024, DEI was certainly under attack in the corporate sector. We know SHRM even removed an element of DEI as well, which had a lot of interesting backlash, which had a lot of interesting backlash. Do you think this continues in 2025? And can there be? Do you expect there to be further rollbacks and challenges with DEI programs in workplaces under the administration's policies that might be coming?
Speaker 4: 36:57
I can go for this, but I feel like I tend to jump on these. Harrison, do you want to go, or shall I run? I went first last time. I'll give you the easy one. I got the hard one. Right now. Swing very far to the right, very quickly.
Speaker 4: 37:17
We're going to see a majority Republican commission and my prediction that I would bet money on is Andrea Lucas to actually chair the EEOC, and that is very much a case of the fox in the hen house. The EEOC arguably exists to improve diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace, and we will have the I guess we could call them the anti-woke people in there. The most serious immediate concerns I have is the EEOC rolling back protections, rolling back enforcement, but also the federal government punishing certain employers who have DEI initiatives, because the current chatter on the right-wing side of policymaking is DEI is inherently racist and anti-American. I know that sounds insane, but they've done many mental gymnastics to justify that position. So what they want to do is say that well, if you have a program that promotes equity, diversity and inclusion, what you're really doing is being racist, you're being anti-white, you're being anti-male, you're promoting people based on skin color, and that's not OK. So we will see.
Speaker 4: 38:34
I think federal guidelines that punish employers for having DEI initiatives. A great example would be anyone accepting federal money, anyone with a federal contract. They would be required to disband any DEI initiatives they have. But on the flip side of that we have companies like Costco which are basically coming out and saying no, having diverse viewpoints is actually part of the reason we're winning, it's part of the reason we're so successful, and that's not going anywhere.
Speaker 4: 39:03
So there is the sort of hard policy and soft policy tug of war we're going to see, and I think what we're going to see on hard policy is a lot of initiatives by the Republican majorities to punish DEI programs and discourage them. But soft policy will have companies that say well, what do our customers want, john Deere? Those companies very proudly disbanded their DEI initiatives because they know who their customers are. Costco also seems to know that their customer base tends to be middle upper class, young professionals, educated people who tend to lean more liberal, and that could have informed their decision to put their feet down and say no, dei is here to stay. I will say this regardless of the federal government's new direction on being anti-woke or anti-DEI, the Civil Rights Act is not going anywhere. Its enforcement might change, its interpretation of some details will change, but, straight up, discrimination is still going to be illegal, at least for the next couple of years.
Speaker 3: 40:07
I'm curious if you're looking from the legal standpoint, where I look at it is more from the practical employer standpoint of the mindset.
Speaker 3: 40:15
I look at the last election and one of the things I saw was I think it was definitely a statement of one side and I hate the word woke, but one side ran on an anti-woke culture, dei being one of those initiatives where they're running where it's, it's it's. We want everybody to be equal. I don't see color, which I know is one of the worst things you could possibly say, but that's what they're running on that standpoint, say, but that's what they're running on that standpoint. I'm curious to see the employers, the C-suites, the people higher up in the companies, what message they take out of the election results. Does that free them to do like there was a lot of pressure from a lot of these CEOs and executives to instill these DEI initiatives? Even from the legal standpoint? Just to me, that's the way the culture was going, that's the way society was going. Do they see this election results where Trump won most of these states and we could debate whether it was a landslide victory or a lot of small victories, but one significantly and one without a shadow of a doubt. Do they take it as a mandate to do what they want to do from the first part that these initiatives are wrong or do they take it as a mandate?
Speaker 3: 41:18
I'm curious if you're going to see those hiring standpoints and once again going back to the role of HR and I'm a benefits nerd I'll roll it back into employee benefits like I do everything else. I think it's going to be the role of the workforce to offset that. I think you're going to see going back to your CISO. I think you're going to see a CISO between some of the CISO level executives and the old school higher up executives who might have one view of the EI and the people on the ground in the workforce, and it might change state by state of business by business.
Speaker 3: 41:45
But I think the businesses are going to have to create a culture and employee benefits is one of those main aspects where you might start seeing more DEI initiative benefits inside the workforce. You might see more benefits focusing on the LGBTQ plus community. You might see more benefits that have mental health solutions, more ERGs, employee resource groups coming up outside so they can talk and have safe spaces and once again, another word I hate, but safe spaces discuss these issues and talk so, even besides the legal standpoint, I'm curious what the election results not even the Trump presidency, but the message that people take out of the results. I'm curious how that trickles down to the workforce of a DEI initiative, and that's really what scares me the most.
Speaker 4: 42:29
Yeah, I think whether employers interpret it as some sort of mandate is honestly going to depend on their biases. You know, I think a mistake we all make is we look at big corporations, big institutions and think that they're these sort of ultra-rational things and they really are not.
Speaker 3: 42:46
They think everyone's right.
Speaker 4: 42:48
Yeah, there's a lot of hubris, that's for sure, and they have their own biases. What is the Walt Disney Company going to do today? Well, let's find out what kind of mood Bob Iger is in. He's a person, he's not a machine. Uh, so here's what I think we're gonna see. I think, if you want to look at what the next few years will look like, look at the past few years, and it actually starts with believe it or not. I want to quickly talk about rings of power produced by amazon. Did you guys hear about that show or see that show?
Speaker 1: 43:16
rings of power rings of power.
Speaker 4: 43:19
It was an amazon adaptation of jr tolkien's the lord of the rings.
Speaker 1: 43:22
I knew this. I knew this was going here. I'm like he's gonna be talking about lord of the rings.
Speaker 4: 43:27
It supposedly covered events thousands of years before the original trilogy occurred. Now the quality of the show, in my personal opinion, is atrocious horrible writing. They spent a billion dollars. The sets look like my niece could have made them, like I don't know where all that money went. It's a very poorly produced show.
Speaker 4: 43:45
But that aside, one thing that really upset a lot of people was a black elf, a black female dwarf, a female lead who was accused of being a Mary Sue, and having watched nine episodes I agree she was a Mary Sue, very poorly written character. Many of the main characters from Tolkien's work who happened to be men were completely written out of the show. So what happened was? That show, I think, is a perfect specimen of the culture shift that we're going to see, and this is a sort of soft policy. This is not hard policy. It's a soft policy where people, because of pop culture productions like Rings of Power, rightly or wrongly believe that America has become too woke and has started doing diversity, equity, inclusion for its own sake and at the expense of better qualified men and white people. Whether you agree with that is one thing, but whether that's the prevailing wins right now.
Speaker 4: 44:40
I don't think is up for debate. I think it's very clear. That's where we're at. So what I think we're going to see is a very strong quote, unquote anti-woke culture in a lot of businesses, in a lot of media, especially with Trump at the helm, where we're probably going to see some. Really, we might see some rational discussions, really we might see some rational discussions.
Speaker 4: 45:00
Like Rings of Power should not have written out very important male characters to Tolkien's work just because they didn't want too many male characters dominating the scene. They should not have completely rewritten Galadriel's character to suit a political agenda. That was a mistake. So we'll see little changes like that. But we might see more aggressive things like joking about racial slurs is now okay. Don't be so woke, don't be so soft. You know women aren't the same as men. Everyone knows they're more flighty, irrational, emotional. Let the men handle this. Uh, perhaps that won't be seen as outrageous and rude as it ought to be. So I think what will happen is the pendulum will swing very far right. I think a lot of companies are going to go anti-woke for a while and it may trigger more instances of incivility, insensitivity, straight up, jaw-dropping instances of discrimination, and then that pendulum will left again, hopefully to a rational center, where it belongs.
Speaker 1: 45:59
Oh go ahead.
Speaker 2: 46:01
Oh, I was just going to say, Harrison, to your point about the election results. What I thought was so interesting is it wasn't a landslide. By any means, I have the final numbers up. Do you want to tell my?
Speaker 4: 46:11
dad that.
Speaker 2: 46:12
Yeah, because Kamala, you know she had 48.3% of the votes and Trump had 49.8. So when you look at those numbers, that is a very like almost 50-50 split in terms of what representation looks like and who people wanted as a candidate to represent them.
Speaker 3: 46:31
When you think of People see in statistics in general. People see in statistics what they want to fit their definition.
Speaker 2: 46:38
A hundred percent, I'm just. It's curious, though, when you think about the workplace, or like CEOs thinking about these policies and how they're going to react to their workforce and support their employees or the culture they're trying to build, like they need to almost look at the workforce as it could be this 50-50 split.
Speaker 3: 46:56
So that's where it's interesting and that's where I think the biggest challenge and I keep picking on HR, but it really is HR that's going to be the biggest challenge with HR, because you're going to have certain people, honestly, probably the billionaire owners or the higher up people in these corporations not to pick on the billionaires, but who see the results one way, who see the results that this was an electoral landslide and we're going to use that mandate of this is what the country wants, based on those results. And then you have the fact that, yes, it might have been an electoral college landslide but, as you said, the actual employees, the boots on the ground. If you did a straw poll of the employees who they're working with, it could be 50-50. It might even be a little bit more more in some states. It's probably a lot more new york, california, it's a lot more where they don't care. So it's going to be. Hr is going to be stuck in the middle there. So hr is going to have such an important role of balancing that and it's it's going to. It's going to be I hate to use the word fun because it's like fun which is disruptive, disruptive fun, but it's going to be fun to watch the HR role grow in 2025, because they're going to be balancing that out a lot more, because it's exactly what you said.
Speaker 3: 48:08
It's two statistics that are both. It's two truths. You won the election in the electoral landslide, but the actual vote count was so much smaller. So, from the CEO or the high-level executive standpoint, this was a mandate of anti-woke, but 50% of your population still feels that he was the wrong candidate and voted the other way. So HR is going to be an interesting pickle or conundrum, or whatever cool word you want to use to do that. But, brian, the one question is should I watch that show or not? You're saying it's horrible.
Speaker 4: 48:43
Watch a YouTube review of the show Listen. As a writer myself, I care very deeply about things like plot, structure and character development. Rings of Power is a masterclass in how to do the opposite of all of those things.
Speaker 3: 48:59
So not on my net, not on my not on potatoes one or it's.
Speaker 4: 49:03
It's just a badly written show. I I don't know who the chief writers were, but they need to try another profession.
Speaker 2: 49:10
I love it. Thank you both for for uh talking through that and we're going to move on to the next final topic kind of talked about this a little bit earlier, but I do want to talk about safety and workplace safety.
Speaker 1: 49:22
Mel and I have talked a lot about like child labor laws. We've started seeing some of this eek out already in florida, for example, of some of these child labor laws, labor safety regulations getting loosened already under the biden administration. Um, what, what happens with, again, regulations, safety?
Speaker 4: 49:43
2025? We're speculating, of course. We don't have crystal balls. We don't know what is going to happen.
Speaker 1: 49:49
I have a magic eight ball if anybody wants it. Oh lovely.
Speaker 4: 49:53
And then I'm not going to pretend I don't have a strong anti-Trump bias I do. I think he's a grotesque human being, apart from his policies. So I tend to look at him with a strong lens of distrust. I don't trust the guy. I don't trust he's going to do the right thing. I don't trust he's going to act in people's best interest. So with those disclaimers out, let's take a look at the past.
Speaker 4: 50:12
In his first term, donald Trump greatly reduced OSHA protections. He reduced OSHA investigators to a historic low. I think there were only something like 600 and something OSHA investigators during his term, which sounds like a lot. Until you realize, I believe the statistic that they released later was it would take those 600 something investigators over 60 years to investigate every covered employer in their jurisdiction only once. So not enough investigators, a record low of actions taken to protect employees, and there is at least a correlation I don't want to say a causal effect, I don't think I'm qualified to say that but there is a correlation of higher instances of workplace injuries and workplace deaths when we have fewer OSHA actions, because the truth is most employees are too scared or they don't know their rights or they don't have the means to access private representation. So it really is up to OSHA to assert workplace safety.
Speaker 4: 51:11
The other thing that we're going to see much less activity from OSHA creating new protections for workers. A really unfortunate example is OSHA's heat safety rule. The United States is one of the few industrialized nations that does not have a unified heat safety standard. It's a patchwork across the states and some states, like Texas and Florida, have even banned heat safety protections. They said we don't have a heat safety protection rule Cities, cities and counties. If you make one, you're in big trouble. It's void. So that's pretty weird that the right-wing republican agenda seems to be not just not creating a heat safety standard but banning it.
Speaker 4: 51:50
So what I think is going to happen? The osha heat safety proposal is gone. Uh, anyone trying to enforce an osha action is more likely than not going to have to rely on the general duty provision, which is that employers have a general duty to create a workplace free from unreasonable hazards, not anywhere near as profound as we'd like to see. If an actual hey, if your employee is really hot, you should give them water, that would be nice. So we are going to see fewer investigators, we'll see fewer new rulemaking and we may see more lax interpretations of rules in Rocha's jurisdiction. I think that general duty statute, as loose as it is, is going to get a little looser.
Speaker 3: 52:29
Yeah, I mean, this is not my area by any stretch, but just based on basic logic. He's pro-business and anti-litigating business and letting them do what they want, and he's looking to cut money from the federal government and cut as much money as possible. Which is going to cut these people investigating situations. Put those two together and you're not looking for it's not looking at great results. Once again, I'm not being optimistic over here, but you're not. The optimism is that businesses will do the right things amongst themselves when not being asked Fingers crossed, who knows? But at the same point, from a federal standpoint, he's looking to cut as much as he can from the federal budget and cut as many jobs that he sees unfit, and he's going to let businesses do what they want. So I don't see outside of maybe state laws and maybe on a-state basis, they're implementing some rules and regulations. I don't see that being a good idea.
Speaker 4: 53:22
State-by-state. We'll see, Harrison. And the reason I brought up the Texas and Florida bans on heat safety proposals is, you know, depending on how zealous Republicans decide to get with their policymaking. Remember, I come from a far-right background. I was raised in a very conservative home and I worked for very conservative employers in a red dot in the blue sea that is California. So I'm pretty familiar with their interpretations of these things. They genuinely see departments like OSHA as unconstitutional.
Speaker 4: 54:01
In fact, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has even opined that if a challenge to the existence of OSHA comes before the Supreme Court, he would like to strike the agency down. He thinks the entire existence of OSHA is unconstitutional. Now, does he actually think that? Or does Harlan Crowe think that? And Harlan Crowe took him on a yacht trip? That's a totally different discussion. But the point is, the people with a position to eliminate OSHA or greatly restrict its rulemaking authority have already made their intentions clear and we're already seeing challenges in the Fifth Circuit. Harrison, I think I detected that you're in Canada. Our court system has federal circuits. The Fifth Circuit is in Texas, Louisiana. It's the Deep South and that's known as a Republican stronghold rule, saying that they're affected by the rule because they know the Fifth Circuit will go their way and now they're going to try to go up to the Supreme Court. So there is a risk that OSHA will have its authorities severely restricted or the agency even disbanded. That would be pretty extreme. But severely restricted, I think, is more likely.
Speaker 3: 55:15
Go ahead, Harrison. He's going to target the administrations that targeted him. He's going to go after first. I don't think there's been any OSHA attacks on him, so I think we might limit that a little bit. But yeah, he's not going to invest into it. I don't think it's going to go away per se, because I think there still is enough push from people and even though they do have a Republican majority, it's such a thin majority at this point.
Speaker 4: 55:35
I think he's going to hopefully pick his dad, I'm talking about the Supreme Court's majority, which is 63. The Supreme Court has the authority to say oh, this whole OSHA experiment, it was unconstitutional. The executive branch overstepped their authority by creating this horrible network of unelected bureaucrats I'm doing quotes for everyone listening Unelected bureaucrats, when really Congress needs to make these rules. Congress created OSHA and empowered it to enforce Congress as well, which is important because when Congress writes laws, they are intentionally broad and intentionally vague. There's been this narrative in the Trumpverse that, oh, congress is so bad at their jobs. Look how broad the legislation is. They do that intentionally because the lawmakers cannot foresee every possible hypothetical that may occur under that statute. So it makes a lot more sense to have an agency tasked with enforcing that statute, like how the EEOC enforces our Civil Rights Act, to help address those little what-ifs and hypotheticals and niche situations as they go, because, as we've seen, congress is really really, really bad at reaching a consensus on niche, specific issues.
Speaker 1: 56:48
Yeah, you know, the thing that I hold true to that is that just because some of these whole departments and or some of these regulations might get lowered or just gone away, go bye, bye. Basically, it doesn't mean that a company needs to lower its standards, right oh?
Speaker 4: 57:03
absolutely not. And I will say the more probable thing if anyone in Trump's camp is even remotely intelligent and I hope there's at least one smart person there if they want to affect their agenda with the minimal pushback, the smartest thing they can do is put certain people in charge of those agencies and they simply decline to enforce. That would be the more probable thing. I see where Andrea Lucas at the EEOC might see a very egregious gender pay discrepancy at a company and just say, oh, didn't see it, don't know anything about that. Because what better way to get your way without rocking the boat than to simply take charge of the agencies and have them do nothing? If they do nothing, it's like they don't exist at all. I think that's a possibility as well.
Speaker 2: 57:49
That's interesting.
Speaker 4: 57:51
Yeah.
Speaker 1: 57:52
Mel over to you.
Speaker 2: 57:53
Yeah, well, we have some listener Q&A and we just touched on OSHA, so I'm going to skip that question, but some of the stuff coming in. Someone said I'm a parent and I'm interested in what we might see to support families. Trump pushed a very family-centric policy with his messaging. Do you think things like on-site child care will be a greater priority in workplaces?
Speaker 3: 58:16
Yes, so on-site I don't know, but you definitely are going to see it. I say you're definitely going to see as definite as anything can be in a Trump administration, but I do think that they run on family values and a lot of this is family values. So a lot of it's going to be an enhancement of parental leave, child care support. You might see stuff like dependent care, fsas limits be enhanced significantly. I mean, obviously you're going to see tax incentives for families. You're going to see a lot of enhancements on the quote unquote family value benefits, a family value workforce. For some that's going to be very beneficial, as a parent is going to be very beneficial.
Speaker 3: 58:59
I do think you're going to see paid leave In New York. They instituted I'm going blank on the word, but not maternal leave, pregnancy leave, prenatal leave where you actually have hours where you can see doctor's appointments paid in New York. You might see stuff like that be expanded. It's a very Republican, very evangelical presidency right now. That's what we're seeing.
Speaker 3: 59:22
I do think stuff that all of the family value title really be enhanced and I do think that's where you're going to see a lot of the change, a lot of the growth which could benefit some people significantly. Once again might make it a little more complicated to administer on the employer's behalf, but I definitely do see that being a focus to appease his base and show that he's doing something positive for at least some people in that situation. Yeah, childcare is expensive man it is and pre-taxing that is definitely going to be a value. And paid leave is one thing. I think america I'm not going to pretend I know the numbers, but I do think the um attorney and paternity leave in america is one of the worst in the world and we don't take advantage of those as much.
Speaker 3: 1:00:02
So I do think it sucks, it totally sucks yeah, yeah, so enhancements that significantly, and he started doing that at the end of his last term.
Speaker 2: 1:00:13
Okay, there's been significant talk about raising the federal minimum wage. Absolutely not happening. We have a better shot.
Speaker 4: 1:00:23
We have a better shot at paid parental leave, and the reason for it's actually not crazy to say this. I know that Trump gets painted very negatively by people like me. There is actually a not zero percent shot at paid parental leave under the Trump administration. It's very slim for a number of reasons we could get into, but in 2019, he actually signed legislation to approve paid parental leave for some federal employees, which is shocking because, oh my God, you're spending money on people who have nothing to offer you. Mr Trump, that is not a character, but we welcome it, so it's possible that we could see more of that.
Speaker 3: 1:00:56
Yeah, but it doesn't affect him specifically. But you're seeing where he's going. Once again. He doesn't have views. He was pro-abortion before. He was anti-abortion. He has views based on the people around him and you're seeing the pro-family values really chip in. And I do think if you're looking to invest in benefits or buy stock in benefits that are going to do stuff, whatever that might be, in any capacity, it's going to be the pro-family values. It's going to be the parental leave. It's going to be, once again, we want you to have more kids. We want you to have these values. We want you to have the family. We don't want the abortions Stuff like that.
Speaker 3: 1:01:39
I definitely do think he is going to invest because, even though it doesn't help him specifically, I do think part of this term I'm hoping that he realizes this is his swan song. He's not running again. He at some point in this presidency. He is so egotistical and this is a good thing. In some ways he's going to look at his legacy and he's going to look at what he can do from his legacy standpoint and I think things like paid leave and family value issues will tie into that and I do believe strongly that at some point in this presidency he's going to look at his legacy and I do think that's going to be one of the ways he's going to try enhancing it universal health care in there.
Speaker 1: 1:02:10
Man just like wrapping up up yeah that he's not gonna do I definitely know on universal health care.
Speaker 4: 1:02:18
Uh, if, anything he'll try to create something to give uh private health insurances some kind of benefit or leg up on government sponsored health care. He wants to get as many people off government health care as he can yeah, I mean, and he's done some good stuff like that.
Speaker 3: 1:02:31
Once again, he's done in his first can, in his did the ICHRAS, which are the individual HRAs, which is surprising because he's pushing people towards the Obamacare marketplaces. But he allowed employers to create these health accounts to buy. Instead of having an employer paid policy. We're going to give you money to buy money off the exchanges. That was something we did in the first term to enhance stuff like that, the HSAs.
Speaker 3: 1:02:56
He's a tax man. He's going to look at the financial aspect. So when it comes to things that are tax benefits and things that will help the rich hide money in certain regards and his buddies and himself hide money he's going to do that. So let's take full advantage of those situations. So I do think, when it comes I don't think it's all doom and gloom when it comes to health care yes, certain things abortion rights, fertility, dei rights, 100% those are going to be under attack. But I do think stuff like parental once again I hate to say it, but the family values aspect of the benefits, things like ICHRAs going to the individual marketplace, benefits to help child care, paid leave and stuff like that I do think we might see a major growth, specifically towards the tail end of his presidency, where he is looking to build a lot of legacy.
Speaker 2: 1:03:40
I know we are over time, so I'd love to jump to our crystal ball. Well, it's all been a crystal ball, but our closing crystal ball predictions here, if that's okay with you both. It sounds like the theme of the night is workplaces really are going to have to take charge in terms of setting the tone for what the experience is, and Francesca and I talk about this often. Do your due diligence when you're choosing your employer because, guess what, you're choosing them as much as they're choosing you. So with that, in 60 seconds or less, share your boldest prediction for how jobs, politics and policy will evolve under this administration by 2028. Boldest your boldest. You're big and bold. We'll come. Well, I'm gonna rock the vote right now.
Speaker 4: 1:04:27
Unless he dies or is literally too sick to put up a fight, trump will not peacefully relinquish power in 2028, and I know that because he tried not to do that last time. I mean, that shouldn't even be bold. That's like beyond obvious to me that unless he is dead or too sick, he's going to cling to it. He's not going anywhere. But let's look at how that affects people at work.
Speaker 2: 1:04:52
If we will.
Speaker 4: 1:04:53
We are going to see tax cuts. Uh, they're going to probably favor corporations and the wealthy and what they choose to do with those tax cuts. Hopefully we see enough pushback on soft policy that the downwind effects that trickle down that we've been promised since the 80s that should come any day. Now I hope we actually will see some of those tax savings invested into the workforce. I hope, but that may not be likely because we will see a retraction of union power.
Speaker 4: 1:05:23
Donald Trump has said that he will veto the Protecting Workers' Rights Organized Act, the PRO Act. He is definitely going to scale back NLRB efforts. There are cases on the docket now which could dismantle or greatly gut the NLRB. So we are going to see much more diversity of protections, state by state ton of litigation of federal agencies under the Trump regime trying to curtail certain rights and protections and the coalition of democratic AGs trying to fight that. So we're going to see a lot of lawsuits, a lot less union power, probably some tax cuts and maybe, hopefully, as a result of those tax cuts, your employer offers some kind of enhanced medical or other programs for you. Those are my predictions currently.
Speaker 3: 1:06:18
Okay, you took the dark side.
Speaker 3: 1:06:19
I'll take the light side of things, please do. I think, my biggest prediction. Well, I think if we ran this podcast every six months, our answers will change every six months for the next four years. That's the boldest prediction. I think that's not even bold. I think that's obvious.
Speaker 3: 1:06:33
What I see and I think interesting is, I think the HR world and my focus is on HR and human resources and, as a benefits consultant, those are the ones I deal with on a daily basis I think the role of HR is going to skyrocket. They've wanted a seat at the table for years. They're slowly starting to get it. I think you're going to see, over the next four years, them really have a larger seat on the table for all the reasons we've spoken about. There's so much going on in the workforce where HR is going to be so necessary that they're going to need to have a seat at the table. So my bold prediction is we're going to see a significant growth in the human resource space, and there's going to be good, there's going to be bad, and there's going to be good, there's going to be bad.
Speaker 3: 1:07:16
Our hope and optimism is that the businesses are able to take the good and benefit from the good and will work around the bad. I think it's going to be a lot more pressure on the workforces. I think it's going to be a lot more reliability and it's going to be more important and this is really where HR comes in. Employers are going to be much more specific of picking where they work. I posted on my LinkedIn today the famous thing from Jerry Maguire show me the money and that's where you chose your job and that's where you chose you're going to work. That's not going to be in four years. The next four years. That's not going to be what employers are looking for. They're going to be looking for culture, because they're not getting it anywhere else. And the employers, hr, finance, the CEOs, the C-suites.
Speaker 3: 1:08:00
It is going to be so important to build a culture within your organization that you're going to help attract and retain, because there are going to be a lot of obstacles against you and their roles are going to be done significantly. And show me the money is not going to be the answer, it's show me the culture. At this point, I just made one catchphrase.
Speaker 2: 1:08:14
The culture we got gotta make some bumper stickers, harrison, I'm already making shirts.
Speaker 4: 1:08:17
I'm I'm stealing that and I will not be giving you credit.
Speaker 2: 1:08:20
Harrison, I'm sorry we're gonna work on that statement, harrison, we'll give you, we'll put your photo next to it. Uh, francesca, what about you?
Speaker 1: 1:08:33
you know I I will go out. I just to be very candid, I vote on like predominantly on social justice issues and after the select, I voted for kamala. I'm sure that's not. That's probably obvious. Um, I try to write an rfk, but after the election, the feeling I had was know, when you're dating someone and you're like I think they're cheating on me, but I'm not sure. And then you find out they're cheating on you and you're like well, now I know.
Speaker 1: 1:09:05
And there's a freedom in kind of knowing. This is what you're dealing with and what I think will be very interesting over 2028, and this is not an optimistic or negative I think what you're going to see, especially in organizations and Harrison to your very good point around culture is now it's going to be very clear, for whatever reason, what your company stands for or not, what kind of culture your company has or not, and you can opt in to whatever that is as an employee. And that's where I'm actually kind of like that meme eating the popcorn and just walking it, because everybody has the opportunity to choose their lane at this point. Yeah, I'm excited about it, the clarity that comes with knowing that someone's cheating on you.
Speaker 4: 1:09:54
I agree with and I do think that the big winners over the next few years, um, spoiler, big shock. Uh, women make up a large percentage of the workforce and they are incredibly talented. Uh, I am one of only two men in my organization. Uh, that's not for any discriminatory reason, just the most qualified candidates have happened to be women. So I think we are going to have a very strong trad culture that's pushing back that sort of oh, men are in the office, women are at home. But organizations that open up their culture, open up their doors to female professionals, are going to be the big winners, because if you make that kind of talent feel comfortable in your organization, you have a leg up on the people who make them uncomfortable.
Speaker 2: 1:10:37
Yeah, I would say the research out there shows also that women are better leaders. Sorry, I did a whole episode on this based on a recent report, but also we lead the buying power in this country, and so I think when corporations are making decisions about how they treat employees and how they show up in the world, they're going to have to really think about that. Women are more than 50% of this population and we have the power to impact their bottom lines for each.
Speaker 3: 1:11:06
Now we need to teach the voters they're better leaders, but that's it.
Speaker 1: 1:11:09
By the way, women buy on all sides too right by the way, women buy on all sides too, right.
Speaker 2: 1:11:19
So I guess my bold prediction was going to be that I think overtime is grossly going to get thrown out away completely. They're really trying to get rid of overtime and paying people overtime. I feel so passionate about this subject, but I agree with Harrison, I agree with all of you actually. I think culture is going to be at the center, and I don't think it just falls on HR. It falls on every leader within an organization to run culture. It's not HR's job to lead culture, and, in fact, organizations that lean too much on HR are going to lose, because it has to trickle down from the top, and so I think if you are paying attention to your employees and you're caring for them, through all of the whiplash, you will come out winning, no matter how things go.
Speaker 4: 1:12:00
That's a really good point, mel, and I think one thing employers should realize is just because the federal government says you can do something doesn't mean you should. There's a lot of things as an employer I could do to my employees if I wanted to, and they have no redress. But guess what? They're just going to leave. If you're going to be a bully and point to the rules and say, oh, the rules say I'm allowed to do this, it's like you're allowed to do it but it's not a good idea.
Speaker 3: 1:12:22
The other interesting thing is they might benefit from that. The fact that it's not mandated gives them an advantage, because not everybody's doing it. When it's mandated, everybody's doing it because you have to do it. If you're not mandating and you're doing it anyway, you're going to get a leg up on the good quality talent, because they're going to want to work for you guys. Yeah, 100%, that's the glass half full.
Speaker 4: 1:12:45
It's a positive, that's fantastic, Harrison, I agree, and not to gloat, but I have a really fun sort of rule at my firm that's different. We comply with overtime rules in California, of course, but we have a special overtime rule that is not required, but it's the rule here. If you're ever asked to do something that is outside your normal job duties, regardless of how many hours you've worked, we pay time and a half for that. If you are an office manager and I ask you to take on a role that maybe the intake specialist would normally do, are an office manager and I ask you to take on a role that maybe the intake specialist would normally do guess what Time and a half. The reason we do this is to help avoid things like people feeling scope creep and then they wake up one day with a million new job responsibilities they never agreed to and no raise.
Speaker 2: 1:13:26
Duties as assigned.
Speaker 4: 1:13:29
Exactly. I don't do that because I know firsthand the resentment that that can create. So I'm not trying to say, oh look at me, I'm the best employer in the world.
Speaker 4: 1:13:37
It's smart to say you're doing something outside your job duties time and a half. So employers who are always looking for a way to nickel and dime their own employees they're going to lose and you know what's going to happen is those employers are going to go to people like me and look for anything. Any violation they can to sue those guys over is going to go to people like me and look for anything, any violation they can, to sue those guys over.
Speaker 3: 1:13:56
Disruption creates success. Disruption does create success. Look at COVID, look at everything the people did really well during those times because they adapted. People are going to adapt to what's going on with Trump. There's going to be people who are going to be very successful and there's going to be people who are going to fail under the Trump administration. It might not be the people you think. It might be the complete opposite of people you think. It might be people who see differently than him, because they're adapting to what's going on and they're making themselves better because of it, and we're going to see a lot of success. We're going to see a lot of failure, like everybody, and we just hopefully all your listeners now have to listen to this.
Speaker 4: 1:14:34
They're going to be on the successful side. Yeah, I think the people who can be pragmatic despite any moral or personal outrage we see to what's going on will be the winners.
Speaker 2: 1:14:40
Absolutely Adaptability. Yeah, protect our peace too. All right, thank you both. So much, Francesca. I'm handing it over to you.
Speaker 1: 1:14:48
All right, everyone. Thanks so much for joining us today. Please like and subscribe, and follow us on your work, friends, on the platform of your choice. Also, feel free to join us on any of our socials on Instagram, tiktok or LinkedIn as well. Harrison Ryan, thanks so much for joining us today. Appreciate you both.
Speaker 4: 1:15:05
Thanks so much for having us Always great talking to you, Harrison. You're a lot of fun too. I guess we'll hang out more.
Speaker 3: 1:15:10
Well, we'll definitely talk Ryan. More Well, we'll definitely talk Ryan. I'll follow you now and I feel bad. You're attorney, ryan. I should have been employee benefits Harrison but people don't forget what you do.