Ep 78 | An Employee-Centric Look at Rebuilding Workplace Trust - Featuring Stela Lupushor and Dr. Solange Charas

Discover how the very foundation of your work life is shifting in an enlightening discussion with Stela Lupushor and Dr. Solange Charas, leaders in reshaping the workforce. Our conversation peels back the layers of the employee experience, revealing its critical impact not just on personal well-being but on a company's financial performance as well. Delve into how the management of human capital can no longer be seen as a mere good practice, but rather as a driver of significant value. Stela and Solange argue that every interaction, from the moment a potential hire encounters a company to the lingering thoughts of a former employee, shapes the evolving landscape of worker agency and organizational success.

As the workforce's demographics transform and diminish, so too must our understanding of what employees crave in their careers. Our experts dissect the importance of programs that transcend generational stereotypes by offering flexibility and inclusivity, addressing the varying life stages of workers. The pioneering potential of GenAI and robotics isn't just science fiction; it's a practical pathway to challenging the archaic nine-to-five in favor of more satisfying, productivity-boosting work practices.

Prepare to be intrigued by the promise of generative AI's role in crafting new job roles and anticipating turnover. Stela and Dr. Solange welcome you to join their mission to humanize the workplace, inviting listeners to connect and explore their series on job redesign with AI—a testament to the undeniable value of nurturing the human element in our corporate worlds.

Find them at:
Dr. Solange Charas : linkedin
Stela Lupushor : linkedin
Book and Blog, Humanizing Human Capital:   https://www.humanizinghumancapital.com/
Article Referenced published by Business Insider;  Return to Work Policies Don't Improve Company Performance 

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Dana Dowdell - Boss Consulting - @bossconsultinghr - @hrfanatic

Transcript

Dana Dowdell: 0:00

This episode is brought to you by Boss Consulting HR and our downloadable products. We launched downloadable products in 2023 and I'm excited to share them with you through the Quirky HR podcast. If you head over to Boss Consulting HR and navigate to the downloadable section, we'll, of course, make sure that it's linked in the podcast description. There you can find resources for small business owners, hr departments of one, new business owners who are not quite sure where to go to get started, all for purchase. Our goal is to provide all the resources and tools for small business owners so that you can make sure that you are doing right by your employees and running your HR function appropriately. With that, check them out over on Boss Consulting HR and we'll get right into the show.

Dana Dowdell: 1:08

Welcome back to Quirky HR. If you've been a long time listener and you listened to episode 35, humanizing Human Capital with Stella Lupushor and Solange Charas, I'm excited to welcome them back to the podcast and we're going to be talking about AI, demographic shifts and the status and nature of the work for us. So, ladies, welcome back to Quirky HR. Great to be back, dana.

Solange Charas, PhD: 1:33

So glad to be in the space again with you.

Dana Dowdell: 1:37

So, for anyone that hasn't listened to the previous episode, can you tell our listenership about the book and what you do?

Stela Lupushor: 1:48

All right. So the book is really an amalgamation of both Solange and I's perspective. I come at the human capital measurement world through the lens of design thinking and using analytics technology to make the worker experience better, so then they can bring their best self, so they can create best products in a way, whatever it is that we want or they aspire also to do, so both organization and the individual Solange comes at it through the business and financial lens because there is a bottom line, direct bottom line impact as a result of having that type of worker experience created. So we bring those two perspectives together in a way that allows practitioners, managers, in a very accessible way understand how to link those small, seemingly changes in the worker experience to the business outcomes that matter to the organization. Because there is a direct relationship, there is sometimes easy ways to make a disproportionately big impact for the organization.

Dana Dowdell: 3:06

Can we talk about this idea of worker experience? Because I think a lot of businesses, especially the ones that I work with, they believe that they create a good work environment. They give people a great, reliable paycheck and people should be grateful to work for them, and I think in the HR world we're very much like. You have to do more, you have to be more intentional about creating a space for employees that is different. So can you elaborate a little bit more on that idea of worker experience?

Stela Lupushor: 3:39

I'll start defining and then I'll let's Solange later the next kind of, the next set of complexity, because it's not one size definition. It is really the small and big touch points that an organization has with its workforce. Sometimes it can be as small as hey, my Wi-Fi is not working and I don't have a stable connection, therefore I'm not able to work. Sometimes it's as big as what is the position of the company's leadership on certain social issues and then everything in between. And all of those touch points make an impression Lasting, sometimes, sometimes ignored at the first and then over time it builds up that relationship between the worker and the employer brand and it starts with before you even become an employee.

Stela Lupushor: 4:37

It starts with very early stages of discovering what the brand is all about. Do I consume their products? Do I respect the reputation in the market, do I believe in the mission or in the sustainability of this organization? Or maybe they came to my school when I was in a high school and they had a really interesting and dynamic speaker talking about the company and that made the lasting impression and over time I wanted to come, bring my talent to this.

Stela Lupushor: 5:06

And then, as you progress through your journey towards the employment, how you are treated and how you feel you were handled during the recruitment and application process. Did you get a confirmation of applying? Did you get a response when you followed up with the interviewer? And when you didn't get the job right, how were you treated in the process? How were you told? All of those little moments create lasting impact. Even after you quit, right, you still have an impression of whether or not you want to continue to stay a shareholder or you want to continue to buy products from the company. So creating that positive experience and looking at it through the lens of the worker, not through the lens of the HR processes, is the differentiating factor for thinking here.

Solange Charas, PhD: 6:02

Excuse me, and I would add to that really just to highlight the lens that both Stella and I bring to a topic. So Stella looks at it, excuse me, through went down the wrong pipe. Stella looks at it through the lens of the employee, through that design systems thinking lens, employee experience. What do we need to do to think about how to address the needs of the employee? And we're seeing. You know we started this theme with employee voice, so I think of it in terms of employee agency, how much power they have to have their voices heard and we'll talk in a second about the demographic changes and also what's going on in the US labor supply and I think that's one of the core ways that we can explain the rise of the worker voice.

Solange Charas, PhD: 7:00

My point of view is we spend a lot of money on employees and there's an increasing amount of pressure from stakeholders, investors, employees, customers, governance monitors you know, people who are looking at how well you run your company, communities in which organizations work, and also partners, trading partners around transparency related to human capital, and this transparency is important because it provides some insight into how well employees are being treated, but more importantly and again this is from my financial perspective how effective and efficient human capital programs are in managing people and driving value through those people. So I know this is a podcast, but raise your hand if you've heard CEOs say people are our greatest asset, Right? So everyone's out there raising their hands all the time and the truth of the matter is it's lip service, because nobody until recently has really had a framework away to measure the impact of human capital, people and people programs on corporate financial outcomes. Really to say, if we're going to invest in people, we need a return on investment. We need to be able to measure that. And let me just say one more thing before I turn it back to you guys on this topic. This is not just a fadd. This is not a passing thing around trying to measure the return on investment in human capital, which is what our book really focuses on. From my lens right, Stella's lens is around the future of work and that experience employee experience and mine is are you getting a bang for the buck for the money that you're investing in people? This is not a passing fancy. This is a reality, and the reality comes essentially from two areas.

Solange Charas, PhD: 9:14

The first is legislation that's already been passed in Europe. There's legislation that requires companies that trade their stock on European exchanges to disclose human capital performance and how much companies spend on human capital, which until now, has been a trade secret. No one can. You can't really see how much companies spend on HR and people because they're not required to disclose that. In the United States, by 2025, large companies are going to have to comply with this new regulation and it's going to be a big thing.

Solange Charas, PhD: 9:53

The second big thing that's happening is in April of this year. We are anticipating that the SEC is going to disclose their is going to release their disclosure requirements for comment about human capital disclosure, and if you're a public company and you're traded in the US, you're going to have to disclose this information. And the big disruptive shift is that companies are going to have to aggregate their cost and report it on their financial statements. So we will be able to see how much money companies are actually spending on people and, relative to their total expense, to see how much they're investing in people and, because of the data that they're disclosing, we will be able to calculate the return on investment in human capital. So are you making, are your investments generating economic value creation or destroying economic value in organizations. So that's going to be a real game changer. And then the last thing if you're a US company that trades your shares on the European exchanges, you will be required to disclose that information. It's coming, you can't hide.

Dana Dowdell: 11:19

You can't hide this is. I feel like this is very exciting because we do. We talk about it all the time in investing your team members. But then there's like this undertone of golden parachutes and heavily inflated bonuses for executives, and I see it on the micro level in terms of pay transparency laws that are being passed, at least where I am, and I'm very I don't hate it. I think it's actually fantastic in terms of not only the worker experience and understanding what a position pays before getting into the process, but I love this idea that employers are going to be encouraged and some might even have to by regulation look at the financial impact of the dollars they're spending in payroll and training and development.

Solange Charas, PhD: 12:12

Right, and it's about providing the kinds of programs that support employees right, support that experience where they're going to want to stay and they're going to want to be productive. But the metrics as we talk about in the book help you figure out where to invest money. Don't invest money in programs that don't foster any good feelings and employees Right. So, and when I teach my students come up with these ideas right.

Solange Charas, PhD: 12:45

Let's put money and training and development. I said what's your evidence that that's the right place to spend money? Maybe you should be spending money someplace else, right? And the other thing that I teach my students is you have to understand your employee demographics, and we can talk about that in a second. If you look at the prevalent sort of surveys around what employees want or what employees value, they shift all the time, and they shift because the demographics are shifting.

Solange Charas, PhD: 13:14

So in 2017, the top three things that employees wanted were to work for a company with a great reputation, to feel heard and have emotional safety, and to be able to work with new technology. That was 2017. And that in 2017, the largest demographic in the marketplace were the millennials. 2023, the top three items, the top three things that employees value, were interesting work, good work-life balance and job security, and the predominant generation in the workforce today are GenXers. So you have to understand what your employees want, to be able to engender that high level of work, of employee experience, that ultimately generates value for the organization, and then be able to quantify that value in dollars and cents.

Dana Dowdell: 14:17

Let's talk about the demographics of the workforce and this idea of worker voice. I hear from clients post-pandemic no one wants to work anymore and they're making all these demands. They want higher compensation, everyone wants to work from home because they don't want to be held accountable and they want to wear their sweatpants. And then CEOs are saying it's not good for their mental health and there's so many opinions I won't even say data, because I think many of those are just opinions not based on data or fact. What's actually happening with the demographic in the workplace?

Stela Lupushor: 14:58

I think we think about demographics as this, very clearly defined, with clear edges, groups and segments of the population that have certain characteristics, and instead I think we have to kind of reframe our thinking in terms of the life stage. You have a child. Therefore it's much more. You need flexibility, you need a little bit more ability to take time off during the day and work at night and maybe not come to the office every day just because you have responsibilities at home to care for. Or you may have a link parent that will require the same type of caregiving responsibility and flexibility, but it's a different life stage. So when we design programs from a child perspective, we first of all assume certain parameters. We say we're going to give parental leave, but why should only parents benefit from that and why not anybody else who has caregiving responsibility benefit from that? How can we make some of these programs and workplace offerings more inclusive? The other component of this is trusting people and giving them the agency to decide what they need to be the most productive.

Stela Lupushor: 16:26

Some days I need focused work and I don't need to spend an hour and a half each way in my commute time only to get to the office, to be frustrated and be on Zoom calls all day long. There are certain types of work that are more benefiting from working from home versus. You know you come to the office to socialize, to create bonds with your colleagues, to learn and absorb tacit knowledge, especially if you're earlier in your career and you do not know how things work in this organization. So giving a little bit more nuanced set of offering some more flexibility to people will go a long way, as opposed to assuming that you know this generation doesn't want to work or making you know broad statements about a broad segment of the population that is never uniform and it's never the same where it doesn't have the same characteristics.

Stela Lupushor: 17:20

Last thing I'm going to say is the jobs themselves, right. A lot of times we hear about bullshit jobs, right. If we really carefully think about what needs to get done and question why is it so? Does that really need to be done? Do we really need a pay perform to be printed out and signed by somebody, or do we really need to? You know, do many old things that can be automated or can be eliminated altogether that may create that desire for people to actually do what they need to be doing?

Solange Charas, PhD: 17:58

We can talk a little bit about the impact of GenAI on how jobs are going to be redesigned in the future for knowledge workers, even for non-knowledge working roles. We're already beginning to see robotics. It's all very threatening, but it shouldn't be. Let's talk about that in a second. To highlight what Stella said about really giving employees agency in your mind, what's the normal working day? What are the hours of a normal working?

Dana Dowdell: 18:31

day. In the United States it's typically nine to five.

Solange Charas, PhD: 18:35

Nine to five Okay, does that work for a mother? No, why are organizations so rigid in the way that they're designing the requirements for work that don't meet the needs not just of working mothers but of millennials and GenZs, who think about who frame the way that they work and their relationship to work differently? I had a call the other day with the Chief People Officer for a fast food organization. They have something like 80 percent turnover. I said is that across the board? He goes. Well, no, actually, for our new acquisitions we have between 150 and 200 percent turnover in the companies that we just acquired, in our companies that have been around for a while, we're at about 70 to 80 percent. I said well, before COVID, the National Restaurant Association said the average turnover is 60 percent. I don't know what's going on post COVID, but that seems a little high. And he goes yeah, it's really high and we have targets around. I said well, do you have a specific job where you have lower turnover? He goes not a specific job, but a specific shift. The shift from 930 to 230 is our most stable shift. I said is that the one that has the most mothers in it? He goes, yeah. I said well, can't you redesign your shifts so that it appeals to different segments of the workforce? He goes we're working on it. But that kind of a new mindset that accommodates the employees versus making the employees accommodate a rigid way of working, that may not even make any sense If they had to do an eight-hour shift. They can do a few hours in the morning and a few hours in the evening and let people actually have their lives. It's just a new way of responding to the worker needs.

Solange Charas, PhD: 20:58

I don't remember if we said this. The workforce in the United States is shrinking. The old idea was well, if somebody quits, we'll just find somebody else to hire them. Stella and I gave a presentation at a conference board event where there are about 300 people in the room. Stella, we had them raise their hand and we said and they're all HR people and we said how many of you have open jobs that you are having difficulty filling? Like 90 percent of the people in the room raised their hand. Why make it hard on yourself? Maybe another time we can come back and talk about skills-based and how companies need to drop this crazy notion that you need a bachelor's degree to be able to do jobs that don't require bachelor's degrees. It's like my things get institutionalized and they hurt the business instead of helping the business.

Dana Dowdell: 21:53

You guys talk a lot in your research about efficiency and productivity. I was pulling up an article I read recently. University of Pittsburgh Katz Graduate School of Business did a study and they determined that a lot of the return to office mandates are because of ego or controlling managers who want their workers back. One of my team members. I sent this to my team and we started having a conversation about productivity, because I think what a lot of organizations do is they don't actually understand and are on the same page about how they measure productivity. I think a lot of times it's productivity. Is me seeing you from nine to five versus? What is the end goal? What is the end goal of this position? Can you guys speak to that a little bit about why? Why we have this antiquated view of productivity?

Solange Charas, PhD: 22:48

Let me start and then I'll get over to Stella. I agree with you that I think that there's something in returning to work because of control issues and because of this belief that if I can watch you and you know that I'm watching you you're going to be more productive. There's actually a theory about the watched worker is more productive, but there are ways of watching people without having to actually be co-located with them. Number one. Number two productivity isn't about how busy you are. Productivity is about what you produce, how quickly you can produce results and the quality of the results that you're producing.

Solange Charas, PhD: 23:39

My second thing and I'll give it to Stella is I'm not sure that the return to work demand is purely driven by this control. I also think that underneath it is this expense concept, which is I pay for an office space and I pay every month for space for you to use. If employees are not using the space, then it is a wasted expense. There's this notion that if I'm going to pay money for office space, I want that office space to be utilized, or else it feels like I'm throwing money away.

Solange Charas, PhD: 24:23

But organizations need to think about the balance between the cost of real estate and the cost of replacing employees that are going to leave you. If you force them to come back to the office full time and that doesn't work for them, the time that a job is open is lost productivity for the organization. There's utility analysis, which we talk a lot about in the book cost benefit figuring out what your cost is, figuring out what your benefit of accommodating employees in a different way Is their productivity going to be marginally higher than the cost of real estate? But real estate is a fixed cost, so CEOs and CFOs need to rationalize and justify that cost to their boards and their stakeholders. I think that's a lot of the reason why we have this underutilized real estate. We have to use it.

Stela Lupushor: 25:19

That comes also with the push from municipalities to drive businesses to bring their people, because the local small businesses are dependent on all of these office workers going to lunches and consuming, shopping around. So there is an economic push back from the.

Solange Charas, PhD: 25:43

S&A.

Stela Lupushor: 25:43

Yeah, but also I think, in addition to what Solange was describing, I think there is also a word structure that is so ingrained in how we manage the organization. So unless we change some of those principles, it's going to be very difficult to change the workplace practices and norms. And to me, I was a road warrior all my life. I worked remotely, virtually. I knew when I needed to go into the office. I had the autonomy to manage my life around the times when I needed to go somewhere as a consultant and as somebody who never had an assigned office per se to show up for, and I know all of the challenges. Right, you need to have discipline and infrastructure to set up your office at home. You need to have good, stable Wi-Fi access, you need to be able to rearrange the schedule should something happen and therefore you have babysitters, you have the support structure around you. So that's on me to get myself organized and be disciplined.

Stela Lupushor: 26:57

On the organizational side, I knew that I needed to be very strategic in when I show up for what meeting. So I have that show face value. So stakeholders who make decisions about my career, my salary, my promotion know who I am and have seen the job that I've done and can vouch for me in the right forums. So there is a lot of different kind of organizing your work. In order to be able to be successful and people are it takes time. It took me a very long time to get adopted and understand how things work when you're remote and virtual and hybrid. So therefore, it's something that HR can help people to get themselves organized instead of trying to push the same type of. Well, let's go back to the norm, the old norms, the way we did it before the pandemic, because the cat is out of the bag. I think we're not going to go back.

Solange Charas, PhD: 27:58

And it requires trust Trust on both sides, right, or organizations need to trust employees and employees need to trust organizations. And I think that trust has really been eroded and I don't know why it's been eroded. Maybe social media, maybe whatever is going on politically is not engendering trust between organizations, between institutions and individuals. And if you followed what was going on in Davos, there was a lot of talk about trust. It was one of the fundamental themes that came out was around trust. So how do organizations rebuild or build trust with employees? And that has a lot to do with the employee experience and has a lot to do with employee agency. So, you know, we're sort of skirting around Daniel Pink's work around mastery, autonomy, purpose that generates high levels of commitment and high levels of innovation and high levels of productivity and employees. And maybe we need to think again about how do we create environments where there's organizational justice, where people feel like they're being treated fairly by the company, by their boss, by their peers, and get reengaged in the work that they're doing to drive purpose.

Dana Dowdell: 29:22

I think almost in a way it's. I think about this idea of trust. I remember when, my first class in my master's program, my professor said to me the general assumption you need to have in HR to be a great HR practitioner is that you want to go into everything, assuming that people want to do well. Having this assumption that people want to do well and I see time and time again with leaders, managers, ceos, presidents all it takes is one employee to you know, stab them in the back or make a poor decision or perform poorly, and then they develop this cynicism around employee performance that they apply to everybody. And so I look at this problem as like. I think that that's a management leadership problem in terms of training, accountability and allowing leaders to continue to hold the entire workforce responsible for the behavior of one, and like it's almost like a leadership maturity in that we're not mature enough to say sure, this was that experience with that employee, but the rest of my team is doing amazing. Any thoughts on that?

Stela Lupushor: 30:29

Such an amazing point and I think we really have not developed that muscle yet.

Stela Lupushor: 30:35

Because, if you think about managing in a hybrid environment, what we've seen throughout the pandemic how I think a lot of leaders became and how more communicative and they showed up in their homes with kids running around, so they showed the human side of them and suddenly, after the pandemic is over, everybody is trying to go back to what it was that divide between the worker line and the management.

Stela Lupushor: 31:07

And managing in a virtual environment requires different skills. Right, it's more of a coach versus managing by observing. It's more about eliminating roadblock and helping you, as a worker, perform your best by helping you get access to the resources or dissolving conflicts that you may have with peers, and we have not built the content and leadership development practices to train managers to manage that way. Right, it's still if you think about the performance structures, and it's not about managing teams. It's more about managing individual performance and getting the most out of the people. So I think we have a long way to go and it's time to stop thinking what the next generation of leaders need to look like and how they should adopt their behaviors.

Solange Charas, PhD: 31:57

Yeah, and don't talk to me about teams, because you know I'm definitely completely monopolized, because that's what my PhD is in. We've never held leaders and leadership accountable, and I think that's the problem, right. We've never asked companies to disclose information about leadership stability or leadership efficacy or leadership performance. The top of the house, right, executive comp they have some metrics there, but you only see the top five people pay and what the criteria is for their performance. But and it's usually financial and usually tied to the company and not about leadership, right, because you assume you've got good leadership skills if you're producing these outcomes. But we've never held accountable organizations to disclose information about how well their leaders lead, how long their leaders stay there, how much they invest in leadership development and the efficacy of those leaders as measured by how long people who they manage stay with the company. The mobility of those employees to other groups, because the manager has done such a great job of training them that now they can advance or they can move laterally.

Solange Charas, PhD: 33:12

But those days are over because the ISO standard and the ESRS standards are going to ask companies to disclose information about that. So all of a sudden, we're going to have some insight into how leaders lead and how effective they are and how well they manage people to drive value creation for their, for their own enterprises. So the days of being able to hide behind stuff they're gone, and companies that start thinking about that now are going to be in a much better position when they have to start disclosing than the ones that are going to scramble in the 11th hour to say, oh my God, we're going to have to disclose this information. Do we even have any of it Right? They won't be able to create this powerful narrative about. We're measuring this and we're taking action and we're doing continual improvement for stakeholders to get value from things that we do.

Dana Dowdell: 34:09

I think about that concept of like starting now to look at that stuff because it'll be here before you. I think that's how we look at AI, right, Everyone was nervous about AI and they were worried it was going to take jobs and all of these other things, and so they kind of just kind of put it to the side and it's here before you know it. Right, we're not a lot of employers, businesses are not ready for it. If I think about the pandemic and this idea of the great resignation, my concept on that is that employers didn't do enough work beforehand to ensure that they were an attractive employer to people. There's so much to unpack here and I feel like we could chat for 3,000 hours about this topic, but I just want to talk quickly about what's happening with the decline of population working population. For anyone practicing in HR or any leaders that might be listening. What do we need to know right now so that we can start to prepare and strategize an action plan for the future?

Stela Lupushor: 35:11

You start? Sure, I'll start. As Solange said earlier, there are just few working age population. We have the fertility rate declining. We have women deciding not to have as many children and while everybody was expecting pandemic to be the baby boom again, it never happened. It was the baby bust. We see this not just in the US. China is declining population Now. India is the most populous country in the world. We see a lot of mature economies experiencing this.

Stela Lupushor: 35:47

I think we're on a trajectory that, at least demographically speaking, the world population is expected to peak by 2100. And then it's going to continue to decline. What the reality of that type of environment is? We will have fewer workers, we'll have a smaller tax base, we will have people living longer because of all of the advancements we're making in healthcare and well-being and longevity. How are we going to support, from tax perspective, from social systems that are put in place, this aging population? How are we going to keep them busy and deliver services and adapt services to their needs? So I think there's a lot of complex issues that require systemic changes and we are not necessarily addressing them heads on, unfortunately.

Stela Lupushor: 36:44

The other thing we from work environment, we're not thinking about all the opportunities, a lot of this automation that you mentioned are bringing. My favorite example was so the former CEO of Chipotle. He started the new company that pretty much automated a lot of the vegan burger production and every store has only about three employees and on one side, everybody's well, isn't that cutting and loading jobs? On a flip side, I would say who wants those jobs? Some of their jobs in fast food production should be automated because they are unsafe, they are not paying well, they're not aspire or desirable jobs and the benefits of this type of automation also allows him to create really well-paying jobs. That increases the worker stability. So, yes, you're going to have three workers in the store, but those workers are going to stay and continue to delight the customers. You don't need to invest a lot in their upskilling and retraining all the time. So it's a perfect example of how automation and technology can make the work better for people but then also help organizations deal with some of this declining worker population.

Solange Charas, PhD: 38:06

Shortages exactly Interesting. I think AI is a perfect or Gen AI is a perfect example of how it's becoming exactly at the right time. So if you look at the studies from the World Economic Forum and McKinsey, they actually say that Gen AI and AI in general is not a work killer. Not a job killer, it's a job creator and in fact, over the next 10 years, net net, there's going to be about anywhere between 58 and 90 million jobs created because of AI. And when you're creating jobs globally and your workforce is not growing, that creates even more shortages in terms of talent. So we need to be smart, we need to work smart, not work harder. Right, which is the mantra of the millennials I don't want to work hard, I want to work smart.

Solange Charas, PhD: 39:11

And there are all sorts of examples like JPMorgan Chase is using generative AI to understand learning and development and match people to courses that they need to take, so it's automated.

Solange Charas, PhD: 39:25

Ibm is using Gen AI to actually predict which workers are about to quit so that they can have an intervention and retain those workers. So there's all sorts of applications for Gen AI that we can talk about for a long time, and I can also say that Stella and I are going to be working on a series of blog posts that unpack this idea of how to redesign a job, how you should think about it, how you unpack the tasks, how you repackage those tasks and apply Gen AI to do some of that work, to make work more interesting and more productive for workers. And when you have more interesting work for workers, they don't go any place. They'll stay because they like the work, and you know the generations that are in the workplace right now. As I said before, they want interesting work, they want work-life balance, they want to work with new technologies and they want job security. Give that to people and they'll stay with you.

Dana Dowdell: 40:31

I want those blog posts. I would like to read those blog posts, so please email me when they are ready to go, because I think that they would be a great tool in my profession for my students. For this is incredible. You guys are amazing.

Solange Charas, PhD: 40:44

Well, you can I'll say it because Stella's not jumping in but you can. What's the word that I Subscribe? Subscribe to our newsletter by simply going to the book's website, www. humanizinghumancapital. com, and sign up to be on the list, and we push out the newsletters every month, and when you go to our website, you can see our past newsletters. How many do we have, stella? At least a year's worth, if not more. Yeah.

Dana Dowdell: 41:13

Okay, good, I mean.

Solange Charas, PhD: 41:16

I'm always talking about this intersection that Stella and I represent around workers and workplace right, A future of work and worker experience. And then my side, which is how do you quantify the impact of the money that you're spending on workers and worker programs, employee programs?

Dana Dowdell: 41:37

You guys are amazing. This is fantastic. I know you just said it, but just remind listeners again where can they connect with both of you and find the book?

Stela Lupushor: 41:46

We're both on LinkedIn and the website. Wwwhumanizinghumancapital. com is the destination, and you can find our links and contact information there as well.

Solange Charas, PhD: 42:00

Amazing and luckily, there's only one Solange Chara, and one Stela Lupushor , in LinkedIn, so you don't have to look too hard for us.

Dana Dowdell: 42:10

And I'll make sure that the website and your individual LinkedIn, as well as that the Business Insider article, are all linked in the show notes. Stela and Solange. Thank you guys, so much again for Quirky HR. I'm so grateful to know you and have you be a resource for our listeners.

Stela Lupushor: 42:28

Thank you so much for the opportunity. It was such a pleasure speaking with you. I'm loving being with you, thanks.