108. The Employalty Keynote

Transcript – Episode 108: The Employalty Keynote

Joe:
It’s here! Employalty: How to Ignite Commitment and Keep Top Talent in the New Age of Work. My first new book in five years has arrived. It’s launch week and as a very special presentation for you, our loyal BossHeroes, I’m sharing my Employalty Keynote. Let’s go.

Jamie:
You’re listening to Boss Better Now. This show is sponsored by Joe Mull & Associates. Now here’s your host, speaker, and author, Joe Mull.

Joe:
Welcome back, BossHeroes to the show that aspires to be food for the boss’s soul. And a week that’s been nearly two years in the making has arrived. If you’ve been listening to the podcast for any amount of time, especially in the last few months, you know that I have poured my heart and soul, and expertise into a brand-new book, which is out this week called Employalty. It argues that at a time when most people in the workplace are changing jobs in search of an upgrade to their quality of life, we as employers and leaders have to choose an identity. Are we going to be a departure organization or are we going to be a destination workplace? I analyzed more than 200 research studies on why people quit a job, take a new one, or stay where they are. And I can tell you with conviction that we win at finding and keeping devoted employees when we win in three areas of the employee experience.

Joe:
But before I get too much farther into that, why don’t I invite you to join me in the audience? A couple of months ago I was invited to be the keynote speaker at a large healthcare education conference in Orlando and we ended up pulling a wonderful recording of that event from the organizers that put it together. And so, I’m grateful to them for sharing that recording with me and I am now sharing most of that recording with you. Here is my keynote Employalty: How to Ignite Commitment and Keep Top Talent in the New Age of Work, which outlines the new book outright. Now as you listen, maybe hop online, and order yourself a copy. Here we go. I thought we would start out this morning with Little League Baseball because of something that happened to me not that long ago. I was at home, and I had turned on the TV and I was flipping through the channels, and I just so happened to land on the Little League World Series on ESPN.

Joe:
Anybody here ever watch this on tv? Yeah. And one of the things that’s great about the Little League World Series is that ahead of each of the games, the producers ask the kids in the games questions to learn little nuggets of information about each kid that they can then reveal during the broadcast. And it just so happened that on the game I had found the, that they had asked these kids was, what’s your dream job? Now, I don’t know if you know this, but the Little League World Series is played mostly by 11- and 12-year-olds. And so, the answers given to this question, what’s your dream job? Were the answers you would expect from most 11- and 12-year-olds? Some said, I wanna be a police officer. Some said I wanna be a nurse. Way too many said I wanna be a YouTuber <laugh>, which is apparently a thing. Now I’ve got three kids, and I’m not gonna lie, I have seen my 10-year-old son in the mirror practicing like, Hey, yo, it’s your boy, Miles. Don’t forget to like and subscribe <laugh>. And that makes me wonder if I failed as a parent. I am not sure yet.

Joe:
But during this broadcast, as these kids came up to bat, we heard about all of the answers they gave to what’s your dream job. And most of them are what you would expect except for Brody Jackson from Webb City, Missouri. When Brody Jackson was asked the question, what’s your dream job? He did not give an answer like his peers. In fact, I would argue that Brody’s answer to this question is the single greatest answer ever given to this question in the history of this question. I would bet that half the people in this room would leave with me right now through those doors to take the job that Brody Jackson said was his dream job. Because when asked the question, he uttered these four immortal words, chicken nugget taste tester.

Joe:
I mean, who’s coming with me? <Laugh> Brody Jackson understood the assignment, didn’t he? When he was asked, what do you wanna spend most of your time doing? He reached for the thing that was most interesting to him. He reached for the thing that would bring him the most happiness he reached for the, for the thing that aligned with his interests. And he chose the thing that was the best fit for his life at this stage of his life. And you know what? It turns out that right now that is exactly what so many people in the workforce are doing when it comes to deciding whether or not to stay with your organization or join another at a time when it is harder than ever before to find and keep devoted employees. If you wanna be able to continue your mission of serving a global community, practice enhancing quality healthcare, if you wanna be able to continue your mission of improving patient care, and reducing errors with fresh, talented, dedicated people. If you want them to join and you want those fresh, dedicated, talented people to stay, then you need them to think about your jobs as their dream jobs and how you do that, what it takes is what I’m here to talk about today. Oh, and by the way, Brody Jackson got his dream job shortly after the World Series, thanks to the generosity of his local Wendy’s <laugh>.

Joe:
And now what does it take for someone to think that their job is a dream job in a word in loyalty? This is a word that I made up. I made it up. I made it up after 15 years of teaching leaders how to be better bosses and create the conditions at work that lead people to thrive. And I made it up after a challenge I took on almost two years ago now to come up with a one-sentence answer to the question, where does commitment come from at work? And this word is not what you think it is. Employalty is not employee loyalty. Employalty is employer loyalty and humanity. It’s a commitment to creating a more humane employee experience because that’s what triggers commitment at work. It is harder than ever before to find and keep devoted employees in part due to a massive recalibration taking place around how work fits into people’s lives.

Joe:
But also, leaders don’t always know or engineer the conditions that lead people to join, stay, care, and try. And when we understand what those conditions are, we can start fixing the right problem. Nearly everything I’m gonna share with you this morning comes down to a pretty simple premise, and that’s that people generally do a great job when they believe they have a great job. And so, if you wanna figure out what it takes right now to get people to join your organization and stay long term and give it all they’ve got when they’re there, that starts with a pretty simple question. What would make this place the very best place to be? A blank. A waiter, an engineer, an educator, a simulation specialist. Now I have spent the better part of the past year and a half analyzing more than 200 research studies and articles and pouring through decades of hiring and quitting and jobs data to get crystal clear on what the conditions are that lead people to join, stay, care, and try.

Joe:
And I can tell you with conviction that if you wanna find and keep devoted employees, your organization must win in three areas of the employee experience. Do you wanna know what they are? If yes, say yes, yes. Fantastic. I’m going to tell you what they are in about 10 minutes because before we can start doing the work around those three areas, we have to stop trying to solve for the wrong problems. We need to debunk several myths that are out there about what’s actually happening in the job market. And here is the first one that we need to fix. The idea that everyone is quitting. Now, unless you’ve been living under a rock for a while, you have heard a lot about quitting, you’ve heard about the great resignation, you’ve heard about quiet, quitting. If you turn on the news or you read any business media, you should be alarmed because everybody is quitting.

Joe:
But that’s only half the movie. Yes, it’s true. In 2022, more than 50 million Americans voluntarily quit their jobs in the United States. This number is at an all-time high as tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But you know what, would it surprise you to learn that in the same period of time, there was nearly 50% more hiring. In fact, in every single industry category tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there was more hiring than quitting. And so, we can look at this picture, we can see in the data that what’s happening isn’t that people are quitting, it’s that they’re switching. In fact, I bet every single person in this room knows somebody who has switched jobs in the last say, year to year and a half, maybe it’s you. And so, I wanna ask you a question. Why are people switching? And I wanna hear your answers. In fact, I’m gonna come down here and I’m gonna come to this front side of the room. And in a word or less, why are people switching? Somebody yelled an answer. Work-life balance. Work-life balance. Money. Money, something new. They’re not happy. Passion project. Thank you. Okay, I’m gonna run over to this side of the room now. This is almost as long as a walk from the hotel. <Laugh>.

Joe:
See, you saw, thought you were gonna sit on the wings and be invisible. So sorry, somebody in this section, why are people switching? Flexibility. Flexibility. Go ahead. Early retirement. Early retirement. Disengaged. What else? Burnout. Burnout. Location. Better location. I’m coming to you all. They were sitting in the back. They thought they were gonna be completely invisible. Somebody else. Happiness. Happiness. What else? Respect. Respect the middle. You have had more time to think about this now <laugh> than anybody else in the room. Why are people switching? What is something we haven’t heard yet? Organization. Don’t say someone’s name. That’s not nice, that’s not polite. I heard organization. What else? Feeling valued, feeling valued. Management.

Joe:
It feels good to get it out a little bit, doesn’t it? Think about all of the answers that you just heard. If I put a piece of flip chart paper on the stage and we wrote them all down, we’d fill that flip chart paper pretty quickly, wouldn’t we? It would look and sound that we had dozens of answers for why are people switching. But I would argue there’s only one. I would argue that every answer you just gave rolls up to a bigger idea. And that bigger idea is this. People are switching to improve their quality of life. For some people, that’s an upgrade in pay. For some people, it’s an upgrade in commute. For some people, it’s an upgrade in their work environment or what they’re doing, or who they’re doing it with. It’s an upgrade to their boss but in every single way imaginable.

Joe:
What’s happening right now is not that everyone is quitting, it’s that they’re upgrading. They’re upgrading their quality of life. And when you understand that that’s what’s happening, you start to see the path forward for fixing the right problem. And now for the second myth, the second thing we’re getting wrong about this, which is that Covid caused it. It feels like that, doesn’t it? That we had this massive world-changing event and then as we move through it and have started to come out of it, everybody’s quitting. But that’s actually not true. And we know that’s not true. We have the data to prove it. Friends, this is how you know I came to party; I brought you a jobs data chart from the US Department of Labor, calm down.

Joe:
But what we see in the data is what has happened since the Great Recession in 2008. Everybody remembers that. I imagine in 2009 we get our economic feet under us a little bit. And in 2010, nearly 2 million more people voluntarily left their jobs than in the year before. And then it happened again in 11 and then again in 12 and 13 and 14. And like clockwork. Every year since 2009, more and more people have voluntarily changed jobs. It is more than doubled in that period of time. And so, this will bend your noodle, folks. We were gonna be at 50 million voluntarily quits this year, whether there was a pandemic or not. And look at the hiring. Same thing. We have seen dramatic increases in hiring as well throughout this time. And do you wanna know why? It’s because Covid took an already exhausted workforce and broke it now was at an all-time high in the workplace in 2019 before Covid arrived, we worked more hours a week and took fewer vacation days a year than every other developed nation on earth before Covid.

Joe:
There are 140 countries on the globe that have laws limiting the length of the work week. We’re not one of them in every other developed nation on earth. The average worker gets 20 paid vacation days a year in Finland and France, it’s 30. In the United States, the average worker gets nine. Oh, except for the 25% of workers who get zero paid vacation days. People are upgrading their quality of life because we’ve spent more than a decade being overworked and underpaid and people have had enough. And I show this data to you now because I want you to understand that any struggles we’re having with filling positions, whether it’s in your local restaurant or whether it’s in a white-collar accounting firm, or whether it’s in your healthcare organization, didn’t start with covid. This is not a blip or a fad. You can see the data. This has been happening. The Great Resignation is really The Great Upgrade. It’s not two years old, it’s 13 years old. So, let’s understand the truth. The truth is what’s happening right now is not an event, it’s an era.

Joe:
I will tell you right now that the era of trying to find the best person for the job is over. What you have to do now is create the best job for the person because people are upgrading their quality of life and they have been for years. And that takes me to the third myth that we have to debunk. I’m not sure if you’ve heard anybody say this, I’m betting you probably have maybe some people in the room have said this out loud themselves. No one wants to work. <Laugh>, haven’t you heard by a show of hands, how many of you in the room today belong to a community Facebook group? Where you live? Anybody? Okay, about half the room, right? And if you belong to a community Facebook group, you know this can be a mixed bag, right? There’s good there isn’t there? People are like, I lost my dog and I need help finding my dog.

Joe:
And look, they found the dog update asterisks. The dog is back with the family. People are amazing. And then right under that, you’re like, that’s the most racist thing I’ve ever seen. <Laugh> in my community where I live. We have a small business owner who owns several restaurants and retail locations. And for the better part of two years, he has constantly posted positions in our local community Facebook group. And he always does it the same way. He asks for help, need to find good people, no one wants to work anymore. And then he lists the pay and the hours <laugh>. And it’s been an interesting thing to watch people come back at some of these posts and say, no, no, the problem isn’t that nobody wants to work. It’s that nobody wants to work for you <laugh>.

Joe:
And that is a key piece to understand about this. Think about restaurants and retail, right? What’s it been like to work there? The last couple of decades typically have lower wages, lousy benefits, crappy hours, rude customers, and bad bosses. And I’m not trying to paint with too broad of a brush. There are absolutely some great leaders at your local Applebee’s, but what we know about those industries is that they don’t typically invest in leadership development, right? There’s no manager training program at Scooters Roadside Diner, <laugh>. Pretty sure about that. We really want to tell this story that no one wants to work, but it turns out this is one of the most tired, most uninformed, most generational tropes in human history. There was a researcher in Canada last year who found this phrase going back in newspapers, 120 years in North America. This is bunk.

Joe:
We really wanna make the problem work ethic. When we have trouble filling positions, what we wanna say is it’s the people when the problem is the work. And we have the data to prove that too. Unemployment in the United States right now is below 4%. There have only been three months in the last 50 years when it’s lower than it is right now. If every single unemployed person in the US stepped into a job today, there would still be 4 million unfilled jobs tomorrow. There are simply not enough people to do all of the work that we have created and added to our economy. And so, this is the mindset shift that is required. If you wanna find and keep devoted employees, there is no staffing shortage. There’s a great job shortage. And when we live in a moment when people are upgrading, we know that that is the problem we should work to solve.

Joe:
As soon as you flip this script and you stop blaming people and you start fixing work, you turn the mirror inward and you start solving the real problems internally that prevent you from becoming a destination workplace, you stop. You start solving the problems that have perhaps led you to be a departure organization for a while. So, let’s recap to make sure that we are all working together and off the same information. We know that it’s not that everybody is quitting, it’s that they’re upgrading their quality of life. This wasn’t something that’s new, it’s been going on for a while. We are in the middle of an era of upgrading. And the issue is not that nobody wants to work. The issue is we need better jobs for people that prioritize their quality of life. Oh, and by the way, the people who haven’t switched yet, they’re thinking about it.

Joe:
It’s estimated that 50% of the workforce right now is considering a job switch in the next year. Oh, and by the way, your competitors, many of them have figured this out and they’ve gotten a little bit of a head start to engineer the kind of employee experience that leads people to depart from your organization and join theirs because in one way or another, they perceive it as being some kind of improvement to their quality of life. Are we all on the same page? Is that an accurate recap? If yes, say yes. Yes. Now I think I know what you’re thinking right now. Boy, as motivational speakers go, this guy’s terrible <laugh>.

Joe:
Some people were like, man, I was gonna see the lecture then maybe get some pool time and now I’m just depressed. <Laugh>. But believe it or not, inside of everything I just shared with you is good news because inside of all of this, upgrading is an opportunity. Folks. We are living in the biggest period of worker-free agency probably ever. And there are so many talented, dedicated, devoted people, experienced people out there looking for an upgrade. And that means that your organization can upgrade. Two, if you are willing to commit to changing the things that make you a departure organization and turn you into a destination workplace. And that brings me back to this Employalty creating a more humane employee experience because that’s what triggers commitment at work.

Joe:
The next sentence I’m gonna share with you on the next slide took me 15 years to write. It required me to synthesize all the work I’ve done with organizations in healthcare and non-healthcare organizations, teaching leaders how to create the conditions at work that lead people to have an emotional and psychological commitment to their work. And to that place, it led me on this journey to research more than 200 different studies and articles and decades of job data. And it led to this made-up word, and it led to a framework I’m gonna show you in a second. And it’s led to a 60,000-word book that’s coming out in May. And it’s led to a model, a simple model for leaders that I’ve been sharing across the country these last few months. And so, here’s that one sentence. We know that commitment and retention appear in an organization when employees are in their ideal job doing meaningful work for a great boss. These are the three areas of the employee experience where your organization must excel these three experiences when named by an employee, turn your organization into a destination workplace for them. This is the single most important sentence in the presentation. If I see you on the sidewalk somewhere tomorrow, and you only have time to say one sentence to me, it should be why are you here? Your flight left last night.

Joe:
But if you have time for two sentences, I wanna hear you say, commitment and retention appear when people are in their ideal job doing meaningful work for a great boss. Hey, what’d you learn? Commitment and retention appear when people are in their ideal job doing meaningful work for a great boss, ideal job, meaningful work, great boss. Now, there are dimensions to each of these. So let me explain. First, ideal job. This is about what you get in exchange for what you do. And what we know is that when we get people’s compensation, workload, and flexibility, right, that job fits into their life like a puzzle piece. When my compensation is right and I don’t experience financial stress, this is my ideal job. When I have a manageable workload and I am not absolutely a redlining engine all the time, this is my ideal job. When I experience flexibility around when, where, and how I work, which is now the number one most requested workplace benefit in the world, this becomes my ideal job.

Joe:
This is why organizations have spent considerable time in recent years committing to more generous compensation, upping staffing levels, levels to create more manageable workloads, looking at ways for people to have flexibility, not just remote or hybrid work, but around start times, end times, shift lengths, where they work, who they work with, what kind of work they do. When I’m in my ideal job, my commitment goes up. The second factor is meaningful work. Now, what one person finds meaningful about their work obviously differs from another person. But the concept of meaningful work has been studied by social science researchers since the seventies. And what we know is that most people find their work meaningful in such a way that it influences their commitment when they experience some combination of these three dimensions, purpose, strengths, and belonging purpose. Do I believe my work matters? Can I clearly see the difference I’m making in the lives of others? Strengths?

Joe:
Does the work I’m doing align with my unique talents and gifts and skills? Am I getting to do that in my job and belonging? Am I able to be who I really am at work, my authentic self? Am I accepted and celebrated and valued for who that is? This is why so many organizations nowadays are spending time looking at job crafting, where we align people’s duties more closely with their strengths or investing in the critically necessary and long overdue DEI and B initiatives that help us recognize the differences that occur in human nature, in the ways that we are victimized by bias at times. Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging initiatives help us create environments that aren’t just inclusive, but stop being exclusive because as important as inclusion is, exclusion is cancerous. And the third and final dimension is ideal, or excuse me, is Great Boss. By a show of hands, how many of you here today are somebody’s boss? Okay, so many people in the room if you raise your hands, congratulations. You are the topic of dinner conversation at other people’s houses, <laugh>.

Joe:
I’m not sure if you ever thought about it that way, but it’s true. By the way, if you’re seated next to your boss and I just created a little bit of an awkward moment for you, I am really sorry about that. You’re like, no, no, no, we’re not talking about you. No, we talk. No, we only watch Netflix. That’s it. We watch Netflix when we eat <laugh>. Every person in here knows that there are dozens of things that we have to get right as a leader for anybody who reports to us to call us a great boss. But it turns out that three, the three things that might be the most important are often the most neglected, trust, coaching, and advocacy trust. Do I grant trust to my people? And do I earn trust? Do I give them space and freedom and faith to explore and learn and be creative and fail?

Joe:
Do I demonstrate the competence and the caring necessary to earn their trust? Trust is a two-way street coaching. Have I done the work to develop this essential leadership skill? Coaching is not answering someone’s question every time they ask and telling them what to do. Coaching is asking the right questions in the right order to develop that person in the moment. If the moment is appropriate for coaching, hey, what did you want me to do with this? Well, what options do you see? Well, I’m not sure. Well, where do you think you should start? Well, I suppose I could. That’s coaching. Coaching helps us access many of the other things in the circles here. And then the third is advocacy. What’s an advocate as somebody who acts in the best interests of somebody else? So, I don’t just care about the work, I care about the person outside of work. I don’t just care about them doing their job. I care about their career. I care about making sure that as their boss, I provide the materials and equipment and the information they need to be able to do their job well. When I do those things, it’s very likely they’re gonna tell others that I’m a great boss.

Joe:
Now, what I hope you can start to see here is that these three factors, they do not stand alone. These three factors work together to create the diagnostic tool. You need to assess what it’s gonna take for you to become a destination workplace. Now, my friends, I have had a lot of great days in my life, and I’m not gonna lie, one of them is when I figured out how to make my slide do this, come on.

Joe:
When it finally worked, I’m not saying I did a cartwheel in my office, but I thought about it. And you have never seen somebody so excited about a Venn diagram. <Laugh>. What you see in front of you is the Employalty Scorecard. Every single person in every single job, in every single company on earth is walking around with a kind of internal psychological scorecard. And when we fail to check the boxes for the things that they require in order to have their emotional and psychological commitment sparked, their commitment wanes, they become less attentive, they deploy less effort. Their eye starts to wander for new opportunities. So, we have to start thinking about how do we check most or all of these boxes for people. If you have changed jobs, I would bet that it was because one or more of these boxes was not being checked.

Joe:
In fact, after so much research and writing, I will stand up here and tell you again with conviction that every story you hear about why someone quit or stayed is about one of these nine dimensions or more. Every piece of research you’re gonna encounter about retention and turnover and hiring speaks to one of these nine dimensions. Every story you hear about in the news about what people want from their employer today comes back to one of these nine dimensions. And if you can engineer experiences for the people in your organization and they can check most, if not all of the boxes on this scorecard, you create an extraordinary competitive advantage for your organization and team. First of all, you become impenetrable to poaching, right? An organization is not gonna be able to suck a talented person away from you and onto their team if they’re getting everything, they wanna get from your organization.

Joe:
We also know if you check all of these boxes, commitment goes up when people come to work every day and they say, wow, this is my ideal job. My money’s right, my workload’s right, my flexibility’s, right? I have meaningful work. My boss is great. They look around and it’s like they’ve gotten a lottery ticket in their hand, and they say, let’s go. And when commitment goes up, everything else you care about goes up to quality, service, reputation, revenue, safety, it all goes up. And so, let’s be clear about what we’re talking about today because creating a more humane employee experience, that idea sounds kind of soft, doesn’t it? It sounds kind of touchy-feely, but it’s not. This is a business imperative. It is a health and safety imperative. This is a commitment that organizations make because it produces a massive ROI for that organization, for the teams that people work on.

Joe:
The good news is you do not need to try to attend to all of these things because you’re probably already doing some of them quite well. And so, let’s assess, let’s make that the first step, right? Let’s go back to our organizations and start asking questions. You could very easily turn this scorecard into a simple nine-question survey. Couldn’t you please rate the degree to which you experienced the following in your work? Generous compensation, a meaningful workload, flexibility, purpose, strengths, belonging, trust from your boss, coaching from your boss, advocacy from your boss, but, but that’s probably not enough, is it? That’s why this scorecard exists to act as a kind of checklist for you to use at an individual and at an organizational level to try and figure out what’s missing and what’s not. And at the heart of this really is that question I asked at the beginning, what would make this place the very best place to be? A blank? And now you have the checklist. You have the tool that you can use to ascertain where you might be falling short at an individual level or at an organizational level, and then you lean into your spheres of influence.

Joe:
There are people in this room who have no influence on some of the things on this scorecard, right? Frontline and mid-level managers often have little influence over compensation, but yes, sure as heck have influence over things like trust and coaching and advocacy and belonging and strengths. And if you’re in a senior leadership role, we may have to advocate more strongly for the things that live within your sphere, influence sphere of influence like compensation or policies around flexibility. But that’s how you start. You go back and say, how do we make this place the very best place to be? A blank? I told you at the beginning of our talk that I was here to talk about how what it takes for the people in your jobs to believe that they are their dream jobs. But I hope you figured out that that’s only half the movie too.

Joe:
And that what we are really here talking about today is making work, work for everyone. When you commit to Employalty to a more humane employee experience that gives people their ideal job doing meaningful work for a great boss, you make work, work for everyone. Employees, employers, business partners, customers, patients, and families. When we stop making work, something that people have to endure or dread and it becomes a fulfilling part of their life, we create societal change. When we create a workplace that stops treating people like a commodity and starts treating them as a fully formed human being, you don’t just crack the code of commitment, you make a massive difference across society. If we were able to make work, work for all, imagine the incredible transformation that would take place around mental health, around relationships, around finance, around life on earth. Thank you for having me today.

Joe:
So, there you have it. Friends, if you’re wondering how to level up the commitment of your workforce and Employalty is the way, if you’re wondering how to attract people to the open positions in your organization, how to give them exactly what they need to say, yes, I wanna be a part of what you’re doing there. And Employalty is the way. And if you wanna understand what you have to do to get your most talented employees to stay and wanna be a part of what you’re doing their long term and Employalty is the way. As you heard me say in the keynote, people generally do a great job when they believe they have a great job, and this new book teaches you exactly how to create jobs that people will see as great jobs. I would be so grateful if you would go online and order yourself a copy of Employalty today. Thanks for listening. I’ll see you next time.

Jamie:
This show is sponsored by Joe Mull and Associates. Remember, commitment comes from better bosses. Visit joemull.com today.