Latest / Humanity Working / Bonus Episode: The Retention Trap: Why Talent Flow Beats Talent Hoarding, Featuring Mark Peters

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Bonus Episode: The Retention Trap: Why Talent Flow Beats Talent Hoarding, Featuring Mark Peters · Humanity Working

• 0:14
  SPEAKER_02: Hello, welcome to Humanity Working.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_02: So, a quick confession before we start.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_02: On this podcast, we've tended to look at the world of work through a pretty specific lens, I guess, based on my background and my biases.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_02: So our examples come from big companies, from tech environments, or from well-funded startups.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_02: And yes, there are some great lessons you can use from those types of companies, but it can also be a bit of a blind spot.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_02: About half the workforce in the US doesn't work in places like that.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_02: They work in companies where margins are slim for those companies, and margins are often kind of slim for the people who work in them.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_02: Not everyone's a knowledge worker, and being stable on a day-to-day basis can matter just as much as career development.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_02: And I've been thinking about that quite a bit, and it's why I've been so interested in the work of our guest today, Mark Peters, who is the CEO of Butterball Farms.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_02: He leads an organization that is in that world, and his views on employee centricity come from working on a day-to-day basis with people whose lives might be really tightly shaped by transportation challenges or medical stress or childcare issues and things like that.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_02: And as part of that, Mark's been involved for a long time now with an organization he founded called The Source, and we'll talk about that in a little bit of detail.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_02: There was a book that he wrote sometime back called The Source, which I read and would recommend to people.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_02: We'll talk about some of those issues today, but we'll also talk in some detail about his new book, which is focused on talent specifically.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to the podcast, Mark, and we'll get into your book and the and the details of it as uh as we go in, but really happy to have you with us today.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: Paul, thank you.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: I'm excited to have this conversation, especially after our little pre-conversation.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm looking forward to where this is going to take us.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, absolutely.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_02: So let's uh let's start, I guess, with that world in which you live on a day-to-day basis, your day job.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um why don't you take us inside Butterball Farms?
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_02: What does daily life look like for people who work there and how do the pressures that they face outside of work show up to what happens inside the workplace?
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's a great question.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: I I think that, you know, and your introduction was kind of interesting because I do live in that world.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: I live in a world where there's a lot of people that come to work for me that struggle to make ends meet.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: And we don't live in the software knowledge worker world.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, I would say our executive team probably maybe more so, but our culture is such that we're very aware of the lives of the people that come to work for us every day.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: And so I'll just give you a quick example of how that works in our business.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I mean, everybody that provides healthcare for employees knows healthcare costs just keep going up.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, a lot of probably not in your world, but in in companies like ours, it's not uncommon for a part of that healthcare premium to be passed on to be shared with the employee.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: And the last two years, when we've seen our increases, our insurance brokers say things like, well, you know, on average, this is what companies are asking employees to take on.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, I sit down with the executive team and say, look, I know that if we increase the premium that our employees have to pay by$20 a paycheck, that's a decision that that's$20 they're not going to have for something else in their life, which could be clothes for their kids, it could be transportation.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: You mentioned transportation, it could be at the end of the month the difference between making rent or not making rent.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: And so we literally have probably a hundred people in our workforce that come to work every day, that literally$20 over a two-week period of time makes a difference.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: That their daily decision-making margins, as you said, are that slim.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_01: And so, and I'm really happy that you referenced the source because that was one of the struggles that I had was like, how can we, if we can't raise our pay rates enough to make this unimportant to people, um, what else can we do?
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: And so we sort of set out on this journey to find community resources to fill some of those gaps.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: And the source as an organization has now become a trusted, knowledgeable relationship for our employees.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: So when things, when they're having trouble making those ends meet, or they need transportation or childcare, they have questions, even about how to use their healthcare program that they do have, the source becomes the organization they go to to get those answers and then enables them to stay at work.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, can you go into a little bit more detail as to what the source actually is?
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_02: Because I think it's gonna be fascinating for our discussion here.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_02: Because I I got a real sense, having read both of your books, that that the stuff in the source is a strong clue to the thinking in the second book.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_01: This may be a longer conversation, I don't know, but I would say the thinking is very similar.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_01: But the source really so we didn't want to replicate any services.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: We didn't want to become a financial coach, we didn't want to be a transportation company, we didn't want to be a child care company.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: But what we wanted to do was solve that problem for the people that worked for the member companies.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: So one of my learnings early on was that what I think society doesn't really realize is that when somebody's living in poverty, society puts a time value, a value on their time of zero.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_01: So if they're not working and they have to go meet with their, you know, their Department of Health and Human Services caseworker, or they have to go to a local provider to sign up for child care, or they have to go get whatever services they need to go get.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: They have to go and stand in line, you know, and it's it's like take a number and wait.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_01: And a lot of those offices aren't open if they're working a full-time day job, you know, so they end up with these really inconvenient choices of having to take time off work to go get this benefit that they need, and then they have to wait, and then maybe they don't get in and they don't, so then they have to go back another time, right?
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_01: There's so the source is it's it's really interesting because they'll get people to the front of the line, so they'll set appointments.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: So people go in, they've got an appointment time, and then the source will follow up.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: Did they get what they needed?
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_01: Did the person show up?
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: So there's an accountability piece that happens both on the provider side and on the individual side, and it makes that it it basically says to the individual, your time is worth something, and we're gonna we're gonna make sure that you get these services efficiently when you need them.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and that's been that in and of itself has been huge, but it it's also helped us figure out which service providers are really good at what they say they do.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, some of them aren't great, some of them aren't great at.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_01: So we've been able to stabilize people in the workforce, which then reduces turnover, of course, um, and increases engagement.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the the suite of things that they do, and this is why when I talk to other employers about the idea of the source, I tend to try to dissuade them from doing it on their own.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_01: And lots of employers have great programs, but they tend to be sort of single issue focus.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_01: And the reality is people show up, I mean, we all have complex lives and we all have our own lives and our own issues.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_01: And it doesn't matter what socioeconomic tranche you live in, it's the same for all of us.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's hard to say, hey, if we just focus on housing, that's gonna be enough of the market.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: We're just gonna focus on transportation or child care or accessing medical care.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: But they get into um, I mean, those are the big housing, transportation, child care, food.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: We've seen food insecurity come up quite a bit more recently in the source here in West Michigan, as as in sort of the top six things.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: But accessing the medical system, even help with prescriptions, reading them, understanding them, what is a doc, you know, preparing for a doctor, a meeting with a doctor, encouraging, encouraging people to take their kids to parent teacher conferences.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_01: But there are there's a whole group of people in our population who have a little bit of anxiety when it comes to going and talking to one of their kids' teachers at at school.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_01: So even things like that, the source um resource navigators will get involved with our employees and with source member companies' employees to help navigate those situations, which is huge.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it if you help give somebody a language to go talk to their kid's teacher, it's a different way of investing in their life, right?
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_02: And Mark, for me, one of the things that's interesting about what you're doing at the source is that it represents, if you like, a lower but very essential layer for people.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_02: It's the it's if you like, recognizing a layer of stability.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_02: You could have centered it around, it's almost like a Maslow view, right?
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_02: Let's fix these things first and make sure that we're reducing the amount of stress associated with the basics of being able to show up for work.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_02: Um but you also talk about the fact that this hopefully creates stability, and on top of stability can come growth, uh, which is really some of the stuff that you explore in your new book, The Retention Trap, right?
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so before we move on from the source, one of the things I wanted to I wanted to point out is that the the source is funded by the its member companies.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, a lot of a lot of times you see some of these programs like funded by again some sort of a policy grant or nonprofit grants.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_01: And the source does get some of those sometimes, but the employers are aware of the full operating cost of the source, and that's sort of how we architect the way fees are paid into the source.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_01: And we've been able over 22 years to demonstrate a 300% ROI to the employers, which is kind of insane if you think about it.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_01: And and that comes from agreeing on a cost of turnover.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I when we started the source, it was 3,200.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know what the number they're using now.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_01: And then three touch points with any individual was considered a job save.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: So those were you have to have some agreements in place to try to attach a value to a non-event, which would be something that takes somebody out of the workforce.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_01: I just wanted to make sure that your listeners understood that this is not some government-funded organization that this is actually paid for, and we demonstrate and can communicate an actual return to the members, the member companies, which is really cool.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_01: But yes, you're right.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know, you can't, and again, so there's a lot of there's a lot of stuff that goes into getting somebody stable, but if somebody is constantly living in crisis, they're physiologically unable to think about the future because they're living under the influence of cortisol.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_01: And cortisol, by its very nature, it limits your options as as to what you think you can you can accomplish.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_01: So for me to ask somebody who's living in crisis, like, well, what do you think you want to do in three years?
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, like, dude, I want to pay my rent on Friday.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, don't ask me what I want to do with well, if you could go back to school, what would you go back to school for?
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_01: Like, I I can't in no, I have no possible way of thinking about that in any productive way.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_01: So again, we have this whole population in our society that is kind of stuck.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_01: And even if they had opportunity to grow, they don't even know how to go about doing that.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_01: So if we can get them to stability, then we can ask them, what do you want to do a year from now?
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: What do you want to do three years from now?
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and this is where I think it starts getting really exciting, especially for small to mid-market companies that have proximity.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_01: And again, like your introduction, I have proximity to the people that work for me.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_01: I hear the stories about their lives, I hear about kids, I hear about graduations and weddings, and you know, so I have proximity to my workforce.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, you get into some of those big-scaled companies, and the CEOs have no proximity, they don't know what's going on with people's lives, and you're it's it's statistics, right?
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_02: But at the same time, you're the you're the guy that runs the business, and you don't have those same day-to-day pressures of the people that are in the business.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_02: No, and your dad ran the business before you did, which means and the business was uh, you know, in in reading your book feels the business was quite successful back then as well.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_02: So it was very interesting for me to learn a little bit more about your your own formative experiences, including when you first started at Buttable Farms, that really appeared to help you get that sense of empathy for the employees in a way that you may well not have got otherwise.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: Could you talk a little bit about that?
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: 100%.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, my dad made me go to work at age 12 and basically told, you know, told people, the supervisors, hey, if my son does anything wrong, just fire him.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_01: Don't come talk to me.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_01: And my dad didn't bluff.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that sounds funny when I say it, but the reality is I he just he just didn't he didn't bluff.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so I figured I had to make I had to make friends with with people because I probably was gonna do something wrong and I didn't want to get fired.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_01: And what I what I learned was these are wonder, I mean they're wonderful people, and they have like families and dreams and aspirations, but they have a very they had a very different lived experience than I did.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_01: I never worried about clothes, I didn't worry about the cost of my education.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't worry if there was going to be food on a table.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_01: We had a very stable home life, uh, a very regular, uninterrupted schedule.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_01: That is not the lived experience of the people I got to know in our in our workforce.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, and I and I grew up in a in a um in a family environment, you know, a religious family environment, and there's this idea of like taking care of your fellow man, and then having having um you know resources that you're supposed to put to work, and then I would see my dad come and run this company, and I didn't see the translation of that philosophy to the people that worked for them.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, well, this is this is what you this is what you this is what you've been given to steward.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_01: So what does that actually mean?
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think that I've spent most of my life trying to figure out how to be a steward of this resource called an enterprise, and the people that come to come to work for us.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_01: And it's and so our business's mission statement is enrich lives.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's that's it, that's what we try to do every day.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, it's it was very eye-opening for me to see the difference in the lived experience between the people that worked for us and what I experienced at home.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_02: So let's say that we get the people in our organizations to a point where we're minimizing the parts that make their work lives unstable.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_02: And we get to a point where they can they can actually, they do have the luxury to start thinking about um about themselves as talent, and you have the opportunity to start thinking about this ecosystem of talent that you're building.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_02: You point out, I think so interestingly, um that many companies today take what I would call a defensive posture around talent.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_02: So protect it, retain it, um, reduce turnover, which is funny because the source has turnover as a major metric.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_02: But you seem to believe in something uh a bit different, which is if you invest in people as humans, you're enriching an ecosystem which itself uh can help your organization and the other organizations as well.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_02: Let's start with the why the current state.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_02: Why do you think that leaders and organizations get stuck in this sort of defensive mindset when, as you say, when it comes to the other aspects of their business, many of them are like, oh, let's solve this problem, let's solve this problem, let's solve this problem.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_02: And this defensive mindset, which is centered around the, well, let's not, let's not lose anybody, you know, and all that kind of stuff.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_01: So, so, Paul, I have a theory about this, and I'm I'll I'll tell you my theory.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: I don't have any data that says this is true.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm gonna just disclaim my theory right from the beginning.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_01: But here's here's my working theory.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_01: My working theory is that we we don't we set out to when we start a business to solve some kind of a problem.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_01: We we build a product, we build a piece of software, we have a better service than the guy down the street, um, whatever it is.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_01: And if we're good at it, people pay us for it.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_01: And if we get enough people to pay us for it, we need more people to help us deliver it.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_01: And so we don't really get into business thinking about how can I be great at hiring people and getting them to help me do this.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_01: So we get whoever we get to get started, and as our organizations grow, we start to realize that oh my word, having humans come into my workplaces is way harder than I thought it was going to be.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_01: And so then we hire HR professionals or attorneys, and they're all very risk averse.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_01: So all of a sudden, it's like, okay, we need, you know, we need these rules and regulations, and we need these policies, and we need to, you know, and so without really thinking about it, we start developing what I would call sort of a fear-based or scarcity mindset around people and talent in our organizations.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean, I've listened to a couple of your podcasts, and you've had some, you know, great guests who who I think are demonstrate that that's not true for all organizations.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_01: They're organizations that from the beginning do a great job at people.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: But you look at the statistics of how many people really hate going to work, and you realize that there's a lot of us that don't do this well.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_01: And so I I think that my working theory is because most people don't get into business to do talent well.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, and so, you know, oh, we so and so's not coming at work anymore, or you know, now we need to have you it's just the stuff that comes up ends up being more um subtractive.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_01: Uh huh.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: When it comes to delivering, you know, taking your time and delivering your product, doing what you got into business to do, and and and somewhat irritating.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and and you don't you then you don't tend to look at it as an opportunity or a problem to solve.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I and I think that's my hope.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_01: And and when I when I wrote the book, The Retention Trap, that I actually threw the first manuscript out entirely because I was going down sort of this fear-based scarcity mindset track, it's like we need to do this different.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_01: And it hit me one day that this is an opportunity.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: This is an opportunity for small to mid-market companies in a very fast-changing talent market to set themselves apart and to build a new way to attract talent.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_01: And we're gonna need it.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna need it to compete with some of those big companies for the best and brightest people to help us deliver our value strategy.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um, because and I highlight some of this in the retention trap, there's some big system work going on um in our country to help large-scale companies define that talent pipeline all the way into the middle schools.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_01: And small to mid-market companies are not thinking about this.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um, yeah, I get as far in the book as to talk about or to contemplate talent flow, which to me is intentionally partnering with other employers to build um a talent ecosystem beyond single companies.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_01: I know because I've been talking about this for a while, that's a difficult conversation to have with other employers.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I suspect that what's happening here is that organizations are sort of caught between two possible approaches.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_02: And I what I love about when you're talking about talent flow here is you're highlighting an alternative approach.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_02: But I think where employers potentially get stuck.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_02: I agree with your assessment, by the way, as to the fact that it's that it's not core to what they do.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_02: And I think the clue is in the name human resources, right?
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, human, human, even even though companies are changing their names to cheap people offices, HR is still the function.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_02: And human resource suggests you got a bunch of resources and humans just happen to be one of them.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_02: Now, I think that where organizations get stuck is they will they form their businesses in the way that you've said that you said they form their businesses.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_02: Then they sort of have this realization that somewhere that whole statement of people are our most important asset, somewhere that's sort of true.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_02: And so therefore, the business school stuff tells you that anything that is core to your success is the stuff you focus on, and anything that isn't core to your success is the stuff you kind of outsource.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_02: So because of that, they tend to think of like all of the human stuff as being their secret source.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_02: How do I hire, how do I retain, how do I promote, and so on and so forth.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_02: But then they don't do it very well.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_02: And so um, and after they after they're not doing it very well, then they start to do the natural thing, and something you do point out in the book, which is the sort of finger-pointing thing.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, we're not getting the we're not getting the best people because of the schools, or not, we're not getting the best people because of society or video games or the family or whatever it would happen to be.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_02: We hear this, by the way, all the time ourselves.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_02: So versus, which is I why I love you're so into systems thinking and all this kind of stuff, versus pointing out that even if all even if any of that or all of that is true, that system that you've just been blaming, you're part of that system.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_02: So therefore, therefore, so therefore, there are things that you can do in being part of this part of the system.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_02: And I think you point to something very interesting, which is the idea of just as you do with the source, you you can create, you can build an ecosystem where the talent itself is improving holistically, and you get to reap the benefits of that.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_02: If you believe that, if you believe that, for example, the colleges aren't producing the people uh people of the necessary quality, or the high schools are not, or anywhere else is not, you can sit on the sidelines and blame them for six years, or you can or you can actually start taking efforts to make sure that at least inside your organization that people are learning and growing and so on, and as they flow into the ecosystem, that might benefit other people.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_02: But hopefully, if you can persuade other companies to do the same thing, then that will benefit you as well.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_02: I'm really interested, I guess, in the fact that you talk about blue ocean strategy.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_02: That's a very blue ocean strategy approach, as in let's just grow the pool more broadly.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_02: But it's very interesting that even in organizations that that think in terms of blue ocean strategy when it comes to their commercial strategy, often do not when it comes to their own human, the humans who work inside their organizations.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_02: So you said you've spoken to people about this, and you've talked about talent flow and so on.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_02: What are the pushbacks that you're getting and why do you think those pushbacks exist?
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_01: So it's it's kind of interesting to me, and you there's a whole lot of things that you in that that you just said that I want to respond to.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_02: I know that was a horrible question, Mark.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_02: It was like the it's like like like interviewing 101.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_02: I broke about 17 versions of it because I think I had six questions in there and three points of view, and so apologies.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_02: So just take whatever you want from it.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_01: No, I love it.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_01: I think that you know, there's this, there's just this mindset.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I honestly, Paul, I so I've run into it inside my own organization, and and I I'm gonna go back so I I want to I want to tell you a story, but you know, like what's it gonna cost us to do this?
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm like, I don't think it's gonna cost us that much.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you know, we got to put it in a budget, and like we're gonna like pay for people to go back to school and then they're just gonna leave us.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_01: Like, yep, that's kind of the idea.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_01: Well, what's the return on that?
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, well, if they stay longer and they're better problem solvers, I guess we have to figure out what the value of that is.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_01: But if they leave us, we know what the we we know what the cost of replacing them is.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_01: So let's let's try to keep them as long as we can and educate them to go do something that is way better for them than just going to another employer that looks like us, because that doesn't do anybody any good.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you know, and so if I can get people, and and and my working theory right now is people that are coming in the front door of our of our business, you know, our our turnover is probably between nine months and 12.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_01: But if I could get them to 18 to two years, and then they go on to a much better job, there's a value to me in keeping them in our workforce that much longer.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_01: What is that value?
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_01: That's what we're trying to figure out.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_01: And so this is what leads me to the story.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_01: When I launched my book, The Retention Trap, in June, I made a statement at the launch party that I was hoping to get five to seven companies to come together and work with me to make the benefits cliff irrelevant.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I don't know if you're familiar with the benefits cliff, but for people why don't you explain it?
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, high level and and between say somebody making$18 an hour to between$28 and$30 an hour, depending on what subsidies they're getting, every dollar they earn, they lose more in subsidies than they get in what they're taking home.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_01: So if you partner that with what we talked about before, with people living complex, destabilized lives, the chances of people getting out of poverty, like literally becoming not working poor anymore, are very close to zero.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's there's people that you can you can say, oh, I know somebody that did it, but it is the system is not set up for people to successfully transfer or you know, move out of legitimately move out of poverty because that's a tough skill set to move.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_01: The skill set at$18 an hour to the skill sets at$30 plus an hour are very different in our working world.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_01: And you start getting into the$30 plus dollar an hour jobs, and you're into more technical level kinds of jobs, more education.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_01: So I actually, right now, we will be actioning our first pilot.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I didn't have a pilot when I launched the book, and I wished I had, but we are gonna move 15 people from our company into facilities jobs at one of the local healthcare systems within 18 months.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_01: And we're gonna sign them up and we're gonna pay for all the education and all the training, and the the healthcare system is is gonna be involved in the whole process so that when they get done, they will move into they will have$30 an hour plus jobs waiting for them.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_01: And we're gonna try to launch small pilots every two months.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, since we started with the first seven companies, we've now had two new companies just in the last week sort of join this effort.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so I'm super excited about actually, like, if you invite me back a year from now, I'm gonna have some data around what this looks like and what participation looks like, and you know, starting to define what kind of value gets created in our system if we can do this.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_01: And part of like the education piece is we're not victims to the education system.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_01: We can go to the education system and say, this is what we need.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_01: And these are the sound bites we needed it.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_01: And oh, by the way, all of the there's the software delivery platforms.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_01: We've got a platform company that's that's allowing us to use their platform for free because they're so in intrigued by this test model that they're letting us use the delivery platform.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_01: And so we're, you know, now we're in the process of trying to find a couple of education institutions that are willing to deliver content in the bite sizes that we need.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_01: But we're driving, the employers are driving, and we're saying this is what we need, and we've got this vision to get people legitimately out of the working poor.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_01: This is the first time I've said this on a you know more public platform because um we just we just hit some milestones in the last couple of weeks.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_01: So um you're the first to sort of hear about it.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_02: Well, Mark, I'm I'm super glad we're breaking news on that.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_02: What I think is what I think is really, really intriguing by this, and I I think I think this is going to be the hardest thing, but the most important thing.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_02: What you're saying here is is a bit of a variant to there was the uh Henry Ford quote.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_02: The the one I like is the is the Richard Branson one, the more recent one, the train people well enough so that they can leave, treat them well enough so they don't want to.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_02: It's but it is an interesting variant on this because you're even sort of almost going beyond that and understanding and embracing the fact that there will be a shift from people that are in roles inside your organization, whereby inevitably what you're training them for may leave may cause them to leave your organization, but they will do so in a way that in the aggregate, in the round, over a period of time, um will benefit the community in such a way that it will also benefit you as well.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um that's that's some long-term thinking in a world where it's really, really difficult to do long-term thinking.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_02: So how do you um how do you go about telling that story in a way that can appeal to the other small to medium businesses that need to stay relevant in this new world of work in the same way that you do?
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so so again, I I I think a couple of a couple of points I want to make to that is I think the you know, for the small and mid-market companies, which tend to be more closely held and have proximity to the people that that work for them, this is our opportunity to stay relevant.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_01: This is our opportunity to to attract people.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_01: My my writer also had asked me, like, you need an analogy for this book.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_01: I couldn't come up with it until I visited Salt Lake City and I went and saw the Great Salt Lake.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_01: It's yeah, it's a it's a terminal lake, right?
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_01: Four, I think there's four or five rivers that flow into it, none that flow out, and only two organisms that live there.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm fortunate enough to live in the Great Lakes region, which is one of the most biodiverse places on earth, and water flows in everywhere, and water flows out everywhere, and we've got all kinds of you know interesting plant life and fish life and and all the rest of it.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, well, do you want your business to be like the Great Lakes or the Great Salt Lake?
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_01: So I do think that's an interesting way to think about the flow of talent.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_01: But since we've announced the launch of this um this project, and it's it's called Inexus, is the name is what we've named it.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I've heard you talk about this with some of your other guests about creating more purpose at work.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_01: What's interesting to me is like the people in our organization who um, you know, are running scheduling on the platform, on the plant floor, or who are, you know, the the guy that runs our entire operations group, they are so excited about being a part of this and making this successful and seeing because now part of the reason that they're coming to work is to create a different kind of opportunity for people that come to work for them.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_01: And the energy that we've created, and we don't even we don't even have the 15 people identified yet.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_01: They the sort of the application process is going to be happening in in December.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_01: But there we've unanticipatedly unlocked, like I get to go to work and I, yeah, I do this job and I run this plant, but I also get to help people get that next success step.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's really gratifying for me to see them be so excited about helping co-workers get to a better place.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_02: I think you're on to I I really genuinely do think you're onto something profound here, Mark.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_02: The um we recently had uh a guest on the podcast, uh, which you will not have heard yet because the uh it's not been released.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_02: I'm looking for the uh for the book here.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_02: Here we go.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_02: Nature's Blueprint for Business.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um harnessing the hidden power of edges.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so uh that'll uh for those that are listening, it should be in your feed just before this episode with uh with Mark goes out.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_02: But that um in in that book, she talks a great deal about this idea of diversity and where diverse ecosystems thrive.
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um and the idea of being able to create, she talks about flow an enormous amount, and the idea of uh of flourishing environments coming out of flow.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_02: And so what was the name of that again?
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_02: Nature's Blueprint for Business, Harnessing the Hidden Power of Edges by Ines Garcia.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_02: Um this is uh very, very, I think, forward-thinking in a way that is uh that is gonna be really, really important as we move into uh into or the future of work.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_02: Because as we kind of finish up here, I want to talk about the I don't know if it's an elephant in the room or not, but it's a um it's a really, really interesting scenario that is being painted by future of work experts and future of work economists and so on, whereby you potentially see a lot of job growth happening in and around tech hubs.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_02: And then you see potentially some stagnation inside the parts of the country that are that are not those tech those tech hubs, where more in quotes, I don't know, for want of a better term, where more traditional work happens, if you like.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_02: I think what you point out here is that the if you go to work for my old company, Microsoft, you go to work for Apple, you work for that for a for that type of organization for a particular reason, and it's not the same reason that you work for a company like Butterball Farms.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_02: So the question then becomes what is the reason to go work for these uh for these types of organizations?
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_02: And through, I think, the source and through this new work that you're doing now, you're hinting at what that can be.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_02: You're hinting at the idea that the companies that are in that environment, if they can find better ways to enrich the communities in which they live, if they, as the entities, as the leaders inside those organizations and the organizations themselves, can themselves improve the community beyond the ways in which they've traditionally uh looked to do it by, I don't know, sponsoring a sports team or something along those lines, but actually realistically make that place to be a better place to live, then what you have is a bunch of people that want to live in that environment and want to work for those uh organizations because it allows them to have a complete work-life experience that includes the company and includes an enriched community.
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's really the heart of what you're what you're pointing to.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_02: My last question is related to that.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you've discussed uh in the book about how sometimes leaders will get to a certain point in their in their evolution whereby they've done the I'm gonna make money through my company thing, and now I'm gonna go do good in the broader world.
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_02: And you point out, hang on, you've got this thing that you've made successful that you can use as an engine to do uh to do exactly that.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_02: So my question for you is as you look towards the next chapter of your career, yeah, what do you want to do in order to be able to continue this work beyond writing an interesting book and starting uh and and starting a very interesting experiment that I hope you will come back on the podcast in a year and talk about.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_01: So honestly, I um years ago, I heard somebody speak who was talking and he had retired from the aerospace industry, and it was a great company that he'd built and then he sold.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_01: But he was kind of on a speaking circuit, and he told you, you know, his story was all about these great things that they used to do in that company.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_01: And the farther away he got from that event, the less relevant he became because he wasn't a practitioner anymore.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so for me personally, I want to take our mission statement, which is enrich lives, and I want to use the platform of the of my enterprise to go out and really encourage other people that run enterprises to think differently about this interaction with talent.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_01: And a word that I've been using is resilient.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_01: Like if we really focus on helping the people that work for us be more resilient in a complex world.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_01: And so you can define complexities as destabilizing stuff at the bottom.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_01: You can talk about people that are now living in fear of AI destroying their jobs that may be somewhere in the in the in the middle.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_01: But as an enterprise, to stay relevant, we're gonna have to deal with all of these issues.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_01: And we want to build resiliency.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I think if we start by understanding what our people need to be resilient in a complex world, it's gonna help us as an enterprise unit be more resilient in a complex world.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_01: And then the higher order is if we're good at if we get good at doing that, then we're all gonna be more resilient as a community in this fast changing world.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_01: And so, but I think it's gotta start with our people, and it's gotta you've gotta understand what the drivers are.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_01: And so the source, you know, we're trying to understand the complexities and and how to solve it.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_01: But when you start talking about people's success, like, Paul, what is it you want to do to be successful next?
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_01: And how can I help you get there?
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_01: Mark, what do I you may so for me?
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's like I want to go out and talk to more business leaders, and I and I want to wrestle with them around the costs and the benefits of this stuff, and I want them to see that being curious about the people that work for them and understanding that they have agency in solving some of these problems that they want to blame on the externalities.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I would go as far as to say given the demographic work that I've done for small and mid-market company leaders, if they don't get smart at this, they don't get good at it, they're gonna have a really hard time being relevant in the future economy.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_01: I just I just think they're not gonna be able to compete for talent.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_02: I completely agree.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_02: That's a chastening moment to end it on, but I think also a call to action.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_02: So really, really appreciate your time today.
• 45:25
  SPEAKER_02: We have included in the show notes all the details of Mark's two excellent books, plus we'll include some information on on how to get in touch with Mark if you're interested in moving forward with him.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_02: I hope I know you and I, Mark, are going to have some additional conversations about this as well.
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_02: I think you're doing amazing work and uh and I hope we can help you uh meet your goals.
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you very much.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_02: This was fun.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_01: I appreciate the invitation to be here.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_00: Humanity Working is produced by Matt Neal.
• 45:56
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• 46:02
  SPEAKER_00: It makes a huge difference in helping others find us.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_00: And don't forget, you can find all episodes and get our weekly newsletter at humanityworking.net.
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_00: See you next time.