The AI Survival Skills You Need To Stay Relevant With Dan Schawbel

Frank Cottle [00:00:00 ]:
Hey, Dan, welcome to the Future Work podcast. Really excited to have you here today. Gosh, what an amazing background. New York Times bestselling author, hundreds of thousands of followers on LinkedIn, global Fortune 100 companies all clamoring for your advice. Really excited that you’re here to talk about the future of work and in particular, your impact on aih. Of AI. On the future of work.

Dan Schawbel [00:00:31 ]:
Thanks so much, Frank. Yeah, and timing wise, I mean, we just released a new study on AI. It’s obviously one of the bigger topics. Obviously, I know that flexible work, back to office, those are big topics for you and impact to well being. You and I, we live in this space. It’s seven days a week for me. It’s been like 15 years. You’ve been doing this for decades and decades. So it’s just, it’s what we did, what we talk about.

Frank Cottle [00:00:56]:
Yep. No, it is. And I think that our backgrounds mesh nicely in this regard. You have obviously, a much more youthful perspective and a more current perspective, maybe. And my perspective hopefully considers a number of mellowed years of experience. So what skills? You know, the world is changing right now, and it changes every day. It always has changed every day, but right now it’s changing on an accelerated pace. What skills do you think are going to be the most valuable skills for people to develop, individuals to develop in an AI world?

Dan Schawbel [00:01:35]:
You know, it’s a good, it’s a big question because we’re entering this world of more skills based learning, even more so sometimes over degrees, not in all situations, but you have a lot of companies that are, you know, overlooking degrees because it’s very hard to fill their talent pool with, with enough people with the right skills. So they’re looking at skills now, you know, just to broaden their talent pool to be able to fill that talent gap that they have. That’s been a problem for a very long time. Ever since I got into this, the skills gap has been a thing, always.

Frank Cottle [00:02:08 ]:
A battle for talent. Yeah.

Dan Schawbel [00:02:09]:
And it’s always been like, from a corporate perspective, how do we fill the skills gap? And, you know, I’ve done multiple studies with, you know, Wiley and learning house and all this years ago about how they’re using AI to fill the skills gap because they’re so desperate to be able to do that. They’re looking at people with untraditional backgrounds, veterans, former convicts, all sorts of things that we had looked like. But if you think about AI and what it’s doing is it’s really automating more of the hard skills and making that easier on the human, and hopefully more AI will become human centric to enable people to focus on human driven skills, soft skills, emotional intelligence, critical thinking, creativity. But I also think, and ever since we started talking about this, even how I think about this is starting to evolve, and I’m going to be doing more research on this, but I even think that AI can serve as potentially a creative partner, not in terms of just artistry, but in terms of almost brainstorming with a bot to kind of come up with these problems, you know, so, so I wouldn’t completely rule it out, but I do think that the more you lean into your humanity in a world where more and more is being automated, the better off you’ll be. And what’s really fascinating, aside from the core kind of human soft skills, is, and you’ve probably, you’ve seen this, too, it’s, it’s this rise now of the blue collar worker versus the white collar worker. There’s less hiring of interns and entry level. This was just in the Wall Street Journal of, for corporate jobs. But now a lot of Gen Zs are heading into trade jobs. Right, trade jobs, you know, being able to use your hand, plumber, electrician, all those type of jobs. And so, and those jobs, you also need good soft skills. Right. So I think soft skills is still going to be important. But, yeah, we’re seeing this a new split in the labor market, which was, you know, kind of unexpected, and AI is being seen as the reason why we’re experiencing this.

Frank Cottle [00:04:14]:
Well, I think that’s really true. You mentioned creativity. It’s funny because we’ve always had brainstorming sessions. Every company does and every department and every company does, etcetera. And one of the fellows that actually works for all work is associate publisher. He goes and brainstorms by himself now with his AI. He goes into a room, quietly shuts the door, and says, what about this? He starts playing, and he’s very good at his queries. He’s very good at his queries, which is an innate skill set, I think. And he comes back with very, I mean, really good solutions. And it didn’t take five people flying into a meeting.

Dan Schawbel [00:05:03 ]:
Yeah.

Frank Cottle [00:05:04 ]:
And so the benefit of that, even if it only got halfway there, and then you have the five people fly into the meeting. If everybody did that as preparatory work, it is amazing what you can come up with.

Dan Schawbel [00:05:18 ]:
I’ll give you an example. I mean, for me, I’ve been starting to use it again. This has kind of helped me think outside of just, you know, needing two human beings. To be creative is for even survey questions and like how to build out surveys like we do and we spend so much time on, it’s been now 78 of them over since 2012. It’s, you know, I’m interested in this one area. You know, I want to ask, you know, these questions. What other questions should I be asking? What am I missing here? And AI can actually help steer me in that, those type of directions too, to make me, you know, consider other questions for a specific topic.

Frank Cottle [00:05:53]:
Well, and if you’re diligent rather than a bit lazy, the issue of hallucinations is hugely mitigated. People always say, hey, it quote misquotes this and that. Well, if you know your topic and you read it, you can pretty much.

Dan Schawbel [00:06:09]:
You can self filter.

Frank Cottle [00:06:10]:
You can self filter. Yeah, absolutely. So I think that that is a false flag issue a lot of times for reasons not to use something as opposed to reasons to hone your own skills so that that becomes a non issue. Overall, we’ve seen a huge divergence in the, the trades versus the professions issues as well. We’re seeing a lot of that in our conversations about the future of work. And I’m interested how AI might change the creative and artistic expressions that people apply to both sides of that, professions versus trades structure. And if it can really, if it gives an advantage to one over the other, or if the advantages are very, very equal that it creates.

Dan Schawbel [00:07:04 ]:
Well, just to kind of cap, what we just talked about is I just bought a house, so I’m working with all these tradespeople now. So I’m getting a firsthand experience working with them. And pretty stable pay. They get paid pretty high per hour per project. That’s a huge reason why Gen Z obviously, like fewer corporate jobs means they have to look at other types of careers. And if trades are, you know, you don’t have to go to a four year college and take out loans and everything, and you can just start in the trades and maybe go to kind of a trade school, then that could give you a pretty big leg up and there’s more stability. So I think it’s the stability aspect too, especially when, as you know, and I think I just read your newsletter, it said it, it’s like, you know, like hundred, like, I think it’s like millions of people have lost their jobs so far this year while a big chunk were, was in the tech sector. And these tech, you know, these tech jobs, they thought they were almost like invincible, high paying, everything’s great. They lost their job on a moment’s notice, whereas, you know, probably not happen as much with the trades. So I think that they’re seeing that as kind of like a. Kind of a safeguard.

Frank Cottle [00:08:21]:
I agree with you. When you and you go back in history, too, you know, we always look at ourselves relative to our own life cycle. Yeah, go back in history. Go back to some of the most famous cities in Europe. They were guild cities. They were cities that. The best weavers, the best metal workers, the best this or the best that. That’s how trade started. We talk about the trades. Well, let’s see. The silk road. All of the major cities in the world at one time were trading centers based on the skill sets of the people there to develop things. One of our trades today, really, if you want to break it down, is technology. That’s a trait, if you think about it. It happens to use a computer instead of a wrench, but it’s still a trait overall. And I know Intuit just laid off 10% of its workforce based on new AI initiatives that it has, and it’s found ways to be more effective. I don’t know of a single plumbing company that laid off 10% of its workforce.

Dan Schawbel [00:09:34 ]:
Actually, what’s really interesting is when you talk to the electricians, the handymans, all these different other people, they’re jealous of plumbers because. Because they. In terms of what they get paid per hour, it’s like, it’s higher than almost any of the trades, you know? So just imagine our plumber is, like, doing the most and making the most for his time. So there you go.

Frank Cottle [00:09:55]:
It is. But you imagine that image of the plumber with his head under the sink, and I saw a joke that said, just say no to crack.

Dan Schawbel [00:10:04]:
I like that.

Frank Cottle [00:10:05 ]:
Terrible joke. I know, but. But still, no, it is interesting, the shifts that we’re seeing, and I think AI is just a part of. It’s just a new tool. Yes, that’s all it is, is a new tool that we’re learning how to use the same way in my youth that people learn how to use computers. You don’t remember handwritten letters and carbon paper and things of that nature. That’s the way in the sixties and seventies, we did everything. A mail was critically important before email, et cetera. So it’s purely a tool. But the issue there is, because it’s artificial as a tool and because of the intelligence it carries, how do organizations strike the balance between using AI for efficiency? And there’s even some challenges on that that makes you more efficient versus maintaining a human centric environment overall.

Dan Schawbel [00:11:12 ]:
Yeah. So we just did a study with upwork, a global study where we interviewed a lot of the C suite companies and also employees to get different perspectives on worker productivity as it relates to AI. Because when it comes to AI, a lot of the times it’s talked about as driving efficiencies and productivity. Like, that’s the top from a corporate America standpoint. That’s the thing that gets talked about the most in terms of the benefits of using AI in the adoption of the workforce, which is typically, you see adoption numbers, even like, the studies I’ve done, multiple on AI now it’s anywhere from 40 to like 75% adoption rate. Right. Like, depending on the study you look like that you look at. But what we found, which I think is pretty fascinating, is 96% of the C suites say that AI boosts employee productivity. So it’s pretty unanimous. I mean, 96% is like, pretty much all of them, right. But 77% of employees basically disagree. They say it’s added to their workload. So that, to me, it was a pretty interesting gap in terms of terms of what’s actually happening versus what executives think is happening with AI. And the reason is because a lot of these employees have access to the tools. Right. The companies work with Microsoft or whomever to get access to these tools. Or employees are just using kind of free renditions of different tools, but they’re really not aware about, almost half are not aware of how to actually achieve the productivity gains from AI. And what’s really interesting and the reason why we wanted to do the study is because, as you know, this is 2024 is the year of productivity. We, it’s almost like coming out of 2008 in the financial crisis and the economic crisis and downturn, it’s, we got to do more with fewer resources. So with all these layoffs, you know, there’s fewer people, but they have to still do the same amount of work, or if not more. So that a lot. And, you know, we just, in a separate study, we found people, more people working nights, weekends, and even on vacations.

Frank Cottle [00:13:21 ]:
Because of these demands sped up the assembly line.

Dan Schawbel [00:13:24 ]:
Yeah, exactly. And that’s led to a lot of burnout. Of course, that’s the ramification. And then as a result of that, now AI is being used, and this kind of attaches to the Microsoft study as a way to go against burnout because you have so much demand, you have so much workload. But now AI can start to chisel away at that workload that you have to then alleviate some of that burnout. But we also found something really interesting, of course, because it’s upwork. We kind of dove into freelancing. And what’s the impact of freelancing on this? You know, because freelancing is kind of, it’s still booming. It’s still like, I don’t know, keeps increasing every year. Right.

Frank Cottle [00:14:06]:
Well, layoffs, of course.

Dan Schawbel [00:14:08]:
Yeah. So the seat. So one of the ways that companies are trying to alleviate all of these, you know, all these employees that are burned out and have so much on their plate is to hire freelancers who have a lot of these skills to help drive a lot of these efficiencies. And it’s actually helped increase the quality of work, innovation, help them scale and other things, too. So we’re starting to see companies understand that it’s becoming so hard to be able to keep driving this productivity without putting the pressure on workers to a point where they might even leave, especially in a better economy, that they’re like, okay, well, we need more AI. We need to, you know, educate our workers on how to use it properly because it’s not just about, you know, giving them the tools now, you know, more and more every month, it’s always going to be like, okay, how are we actually using it and what are the outcomes? That’s always how things go. It’s, you know, first you have hype, then you have adoption. Now you have to have like, real applications and outcomes. And so we’re seeing freelancers as being part of that solution.

Frank Cottle [00:15:14]:
No, I think that that’s true. But when you go back to your CEO versus your employee groups, you know, CEO’s, particularly public companies that I’m going to generalize here, of course, but CEO’s see change as leadership and they see leadership as having a positive impact on stock values. Employees down at the lines see change as an increased workload of a new skill or a new task they have to do or they have to learn. And to them, it’s initially a burden. Once it’s been learned and the change management has been deployed effectively, they may be more or less effective. They may be more effective, they may be more efficient. But it really doesn’t matter to them. They’re still doing the same thing. It doesn’t matter to somebody on the line that they’re doing 50 units a day instead of 30 units a day. They’re still on the line all day long. It does matter to the CEO, though, and the shareholders in the company. So I think when you look at adaptation initiatives and the leadership to do so, you will probably always historically find that it is initiated at the top of the companies. First, it’s a fear of missing out issue. My competitors doing it, I need to do it. Second, it’s a leadership issue. If I’m not doing this, then I’m not as aggressively leading my company and maybe they’re going to find somebody to replace me that will the board, etcetera. So there’s a whole series of dynamics that really have very little to do with AI. You just say any tool, any change. And change management is the hardest thing for all companies to deal with.

Dan Schawbel [00:17:13 ]:
People hate change.

Frank Cottle [00:17:14]:
They hate people change. We do.

Dan Schawbel [00:17:17]:
And they think it’s a threat too.

Frank Cottle [00:17:19 ]:
Well, it is a threat. It is a threat because anything that’s new that you have to learn, you don’t initially understand whether you’ll be able to do it well or not, or someone else will be able to have an innate skill that allows them to do it better than you. You know, we’re all comfort in our zone. And so I can see that as being a major issue. Being that disparity between those two groups. How do you bring it together?

Dan Schawbel [00:17:50 ]:
I mean, you definitely brought up a key point.

Frank Cottle [00:17:53 ]:
So where’s the convergence or the change happens so fast in some companies that the employee base cannot move quickly enough and in essence, you have to replace them.

Dan Schawbel [00:18:10 ]:
Yes, I think that that, and again, it’s like a lot of the companies are going to have to hire for this new skill set too. And so it’s like partially who out of your workforce can catch up, as you’re saying? So we’ll promote them or incentivize them to continue to, you know, move up the hierarchy or at least stay at their jobs versus, hey, we might have to look outside the company to find people who are already investing in the, in these skills so that when we hire them, they’re going to onboard more easily. They’re already up to speed in a sense.

Frank Cottle [00:18:44 ]:
Well, you know, it’s funny, I know one fast food company in the US today has about 100,000 employees and this is a, a fast food company selling hispanic foods. And in order to sustain 100,000 employees a year, they have to recruit 140,000 employees. So their churn rate per employee, seven, eight months, call it eight months. Well, that industries, okay, that’s a nature of the industry. It’s not a comment about this particular company, who I won’t name, but in talking with them on their HR side of things and talking about training and this and that, and say, oh, we’re deploying this and that he said, well, you’re training your old people. No, we’re not even bothered to train the old people. They’ll be gone. We’re just training the new people as they come in. Now, that’s an entirely different approach to change management. Just as well, you know, people cycle so fast, there’s no point in causing anybody to cut to change. We’ll just cycle the new people as they come in, and within eight months, everybody will be trained. That’s a different approach. But how much, when you talk about using freelancers that can self train or do self train to stay competitive, will companies start taking that type of model?

Dan Schawbel [00:20:09 ]:
I mean, I think you spelled it out, but I want to revert to something you said before, 100%. Like every CEO over the past what year has been asked, what’s your AI strategy? Let’s be honest. Every CEO has been asked, and you better have one, and they better have an answer. Right? Like everybody even, hey, even like every Chro is probably like, what’s your HR AI strategy? Like? Even per, like department area, I think they’ve been asked that. But yeah, there’s enormous amounts of pressure, as you mentioned, competitively. The example I give is, hey, if McDonald’s is using AI in the restaurants and Wendy’s isn’t, well, Wendy’s is going to start doing it. Or Burger King or whomever, in and out burger. Enormous pressure. Because when one company industry does it and they have created efficiencies or they benefited somehow, it’s going to force the other companies to do it to stay competitive. And that’s why, that’s how you really get the industry wide or the global adoption.

Frank Cottle [00:21:14 ]:
Well, you know, there will be a backlash. Let’s use fast food for a second. Let’s use two of your examples. Wendy’s versus in n Out burger. Okay, in n out burger may, generally, Wendy’s may put in AI driven robots to flip burgers and cook Friesen Flippy.

Dan Schawbel [00:21:36]:
I think it’s called flippy.

Frank Cottle [00:21:37]:
Flippy. They may do something like that. I don’t know if they are or not. And then in and out burgers say, no, we have people that have craft, have skill, and therefore our burgers are better. There is going to be a craft versus artificial real intelligence versus artificial intelligence kickback that certain companies will use as market positioning and will succeed at.

Dan Schawbel [00:22:10 ]:
And, you know, it’s a cost thing, too, for the human touch. It costs more, but you potentially get more. You have that type of experience, right, versus robot. Maybe because of those efficiencies, the customer doesn’t have to pay us more, and that’s something different. And, you know, both can work, too, like, depending on what you want, when you want it from a consumer perspective.

Frank Cottle [00:22:31]:
Well, you know, I think that that kind of takes us over to the workplace a little bit as we talk about that. And one of the big battles for the workplace most recently has been return to office or not return to office, hybrid versus remote, remote versus distributed, all these various terms that are bouncing around. Overall, do you think the return to the office mandate that a lot of companies have had, do you think that’s a failure?

Dan Schawbel [00:23:04 ]:
The research shows, especially in the past few weeks, that it has failed and that a lot of employees have either wanted to quit or quit or have been dissatisfied with return to office. Because I think it really comes down to during COVID you had so many people who’d never work remote or gain flexibility in their whole careers. Get that? And they made big choices, especially as, you know, a lot of millennials, 80 million millennials in the US, you know, a portion of them, you know, during that period of time when they got to work remote, bought a house, you know, because they were, you know, that age where they bought a house, you know, they had kids. They were kind of planted. And now with return to office, that’s being uprooted. So people got so, like, you know, and people invested so much in their home office and all this equipment and maybe a house with four bedrooms instead of three bedrooms, because knowing that they could work remote, they’d have a room for their office that’s designated for that. Some companies gave a stipend for that office, some didn’t. It’s kind of mixed. And now companies pushing employees back to the office part time or full time. And actually, behind the scenes, a lot of these executives are saying, hey, we’re doing hybrid to get people used to go back to the office, but our real goal is five days a week, and a lot of employees kind of understand that, but it’s still so over the place. I have one friend who has to go in the office one day a week. I know people in New York working in finance five days a week. We did a study with Deloitte Finance, which was really big. Like, it really blew up, because what we found was we interviewed people in finance, and they said, if we have to go back in the office five days a week, we’re more likely to quit. And so that was during the time when a lot of the big banks said, we want to get people in the office full time. And I had spoken to all these hedge firms back then, and it was just a huge thing because people are used to that flexibility, and now you’re stripping it for them. And flexibility is like, it’s not a new thing, let’s be honest. It’s just that during COVID it skyrocketed and.

Frank Cottle [00:25:17 ]:
But the demand curve, it is a new thing. It’s like everybody recognized, oh, flexibility is good. But people, like, 20 years ago, to have a successful company, you had to have a product that the company, the people would buy a good product and had have access to capital. So you could scale those two things. That’s all you needed. Today, you have to add flexibility if you don’t have a flexible workplace model overall, not just people in the office versus not in the office, but if everything isn’t flexible and take that return of the office, those people that want folks five days a week back at the office, historically, they’re only at their desk 42% of the time. Wasted asset to begin with. The office place was a wasted asset to begin with. It was, you know, an icon of success that we have four floors in the major building in Manhattan or our names on top of the.

Dan Schawbel [00:26:18 ]:
And all the research is wrong, too. Like, do you remember when Google, Google and like, all those, like, architects were like, oh, open offices lead to better outcomes. And then 70% of organizations worldwide went to open offices. And then what was it like three years ago? It came out that, I think it was by Harvard that open offices actually lead to worse outcomes or less productivity.

Frank Cottle [00:26:40 ]:
There was Herman Miller, all the change in furniture. But no, it is interesting how we jump on these proverbial bandwagons and we do it without research. You mentioned Deloitte. It’s interesting. The original pioneer of hot desking was Deloitte. In the early mid nineties, they were the first major company that put in hot desking structures so that people could work and come and go and do project work because they recognize the inefficiency of their own offices. So it’s ironic that you see this turnaround of larger companies like Deloitte wanting to bring everybody back in.

Dan Schawbel [00:27:22 ]:
We did a study, so you probably remember this. April 2021, Microsoft did their first mega 30,000 person study on the workforce. And it was a huge deal. I mean, every study they do now annually, is like a big, big deal. It gets covered by everyone. We did a study with Wework that came out the week after that study, but ours was of 1000 c suite, 1000 employees, and it was really focused, of course, on hybrid and the office space, kind of trying to define weworks like new model going forward because so much has changed, as you know. And what we found was people want to spend about a third of their time in the corporate office. This was back then, third of the time in the corporate office, third of their time in third places. So co working space, you know, Starbucks, wherever, and a third of their time at home. So basically, the whole premise of how I would communicate this is people want freedom. I mean, it comes back to human needs, let’s be honest. Like, people want the freedom to choose where, when and how they work. And, but if they want that, they still work for a company and therefore they have to deliver results. So that’s really the trade off, let’s be honest. It’s like if I give you results, if your company benefits financially or lowers expenses or increases productivity or whatever those metrics are, then why can’t I have some degree of flexibility?

Frank Cottle [00:28:45 ]:
Well, I mean, you’re talking results driven versus presentee driven issues.

Dan Schawbel [00:28:51 ]:
And now there’s employee monitoring. There’s all sorts of things. We have a study coming up about this too, of course. And yeah, it’s super interesting all the ways that employers are tracking employees now. You know, clicks and brow your browser and, and obviously, like, you know, badging into the office has been a thing for a long time. And it’s, it really comes down to like, you know, you know, on the conversation on social media, it’s like it’s big brother. Like, no one trusts us. That’s why they want us back in the office. They don’t. They want us back in the office because they have these office leases. They say it’s for kind of creativity and innovation, but it’s not like there was no creativity and innovation during COVID when people were working from home. So employees still don’t buy a lot of the things that companies are saying.

Frank Cottle [00:29:43]:
I honestly don’t think they should. I think if there’s a gap there, this is a whole different subject. But there’s a gap. It’s on behalf of the corporates, the management, if you will, not establishing objectives, that they can track the objectives through metrics, and instead they try and track the people. And that’s not going to work. That just ultimately that will not work. You have to have your objectives in your goals, tracking and the metrics to support that, and then to heck with everything else if you’re achieving that. But that’s very hard in a company, a major company that has maybe five or six layers of management to get that going completely up.

Dan Schawbel [00:30:37 ]:
That’s why you see, startups are more likely to be fully remote. They’re not going to, they don’t need an office. They don’t want to fund an office. They need their money going elsewhere. You know, for, in terms of growth and innovation, these are a startup, a.

Frank Cottle [00:30:50]:
Good example, and I’ve used this before, but if you’re going to start a company, I’m going to start a company, and we each need a million dollars to start a company. We’re both going to go see a VC. We’re going to say, hey, I’m going to start a company. And I go in there and, you know, the first question that VC is going to ask is, what are we going to do with the money twice? Okay? So I go in there and lay my business plan down, and I say, hey, I’m going to start this company. He says, what are you going to do with the money? Oh, I’m going to get an office and I’m going to buy some computers and I get some imaging equipment, some furniture, hire a receptionist and hire some engineers and build this damn software. He goes, oh, cool. And then you walk in and he says, what are you going to do with the money? You say, oh, I’m going to get a virtual office with alliance, I’m going to get a virtual office and I’m going to hire some engineers. Where are you going to hire the engineers? Remotely. Why? I don’t want to pay the overhead. Oh, okay. You can have the money. You’re going to get the money for the investment. I’m not, and that’s the truth. And so the question is, are we going to, are older, larger companies going to change or are new companies, oh, this is good. Happened 40 years ago as the computer revolution came up. Are newer companies going to supersede them as a result of not having to change?

00:32:22 ]:– Dan Schawbel
Maybe. I think that’s an interesting prediction. I do think in terms of flexibility and other benefits, even in pay, I do think it’s about the labor market as well, in leverage. Right. So, for instance, if it’s a booming economy in a very hot job market where an employee has confidence that they could switch employers relatively easy instead of having to spend eight months job searching, then that puts a pressure on employers to add more or to beef up their employee benefits and take that more seriously. Otherwise it’s going to be a massive attrition rate. But in an economy that’s a little bit more, I guess, contracted, or the job market where there’s fewer options and there’s been a lot more layoffs. Employers can get away with a lot more. So I do think it’s this pendulum that constantly swings over a certain period of time that gives employees more or less leverage when it comes to things like remote work. But I always say it’s like during the times where, where employees have less leverage in a worse job market. It’s not like they forget how they’re treated during that point in time. So they might be holding, like right now, it’s kind of the great stay after the great resignation. And now I think employees are like buying time. And when things get better, if they’re not able to work remote or have flexibility or aren’t paid enough or whatever, they’re more likely to switch employers. What do you think of that?

Frank Cottle [00:34:00 ]:
This is cyclical. It’s always been cyclical. Yeah, you just said good times, bad times. Okay, we experience both. And right now you might say we’re in one of the between times because cycles go flat consistently. Also, long memories. Yes, I think so. But I’ll consider that if companies, there’s two sides to what you just said, a company might said, yeah, well, let them quit. My AI has got to the point where, and I’ll use company as an example. Last year in June, we had an executive meeting. We got together and we decided to have a hiring freeze. We said, we’re going to have a hiring freeze. Why? We think we can gain big AI comment. We think we can gain more efficiency rather than just have metrics to say for every 5000 customers or 2000 customers, we have to have one service rep. We have metrics that drove our employment growth, our employee growth. We changed all that and said, no. We believe that we can handle more with less by improving processes, whether they’re AI driven or not. Overall, we think we can do this. We grew 35 40% last year. We have less employees than we had when we started the hiring freeze.

Dan Schawbel [00:35:34 ]:
This is definitely the other perspective. And with remote work, what they do is they say, hey, we don’t have to pay severance if they quit, we did.

Frank Cottle [00:35:43]:
But our view on this was that now these people have more value to us than they did before. As a result of which we can be more generous in the way we compensate them. So we still made better profits, better margins on everything. However, we also were able to reward our employees for this change management process overall. And I don’t think many companies are doing that.

Dan Schawbel [00:36:20 ]:
No, exactly. That’s what I was gonna say. But what actually adding on what, you made a really good point. Right. Like, sometimes, like, forcing remote return to office is a way to lay people off in a sense, or to not have to pay severance packages because, you know, they quit depending on state and all this stuff. But. Yeah, yeah, no, that’s definitely the other side of the equation is it can be used for layoffs as well, but it really depends on the company. It just depends. Yeah.

Frank Cottle [00:36:47]:
Well, what do you see as the biggest threats as we go forward to the individual employees personal well being in today’s world? What’s their threat?

Dan Schawbel [00:36:59 ]:
There’s a lot. One of them is, well, just the big ones. I’m going to give you the big ones. Yeah. I mean, one of them is clearly digital overload. I’m guilty of this, too. Like, people are always connected. They’re always using their phone. That has kind of led to some of the isolation that people have experienced in loneliness. We did a study with VSP a few months ago. Now, we’ve done so much this year that it’s like a blur. But what we found was 82% of Gen Z’s work nights and weekends and 54% report declining eye health as a result. So that just gives you example. That’s just one layer, eye health. But it’s also like you, physical, mental, all these different emotional. There’s so many aspects of it. The other thing we studied was financial stress. Obviously, with today’s economy, a huge factor, you know, that is just everywhere and everyone’s talking about is economic instability. You know, young people, you know, the housing crisis, you know, inflation, greedflation, you know, cost of car, cost of house, all these different things, interest rates, a lot. Financially has definitely happened and has impacted people. But what we found was 86% of people are financially stressed and are losing 8 hours a week in productivity as a result. So when you’re thinking about your finances and not making enough money and are worried about the future, that can impact your productivity because you’re chronically thinking about that and are worried which impacts your mental and physical health.

Frank Cottle [00:38:33]:
I mean, these are threats, but a threat. If I’m in the jungle and a threat tiger, I create a way to defend myself from the tiger. So the threats that you’re referencing are threats that the individual can’t do much about. You can’t do much. You know, Dan, you’re cool, but you can’t do much about the economy or the housing.

Dan Schawbel [00:39:05 ]:
I mean, digital detox for digital overload. Right?

Frank Cottle [00:39:11 ]:
And, you know, here I’m obviously not a millennial. I fall into the late boomer category, but I’m working nights and weekends.

Dan Schawbel [00:39:21 ]:
Yeah, but you’re a business owner, too.

Frank Cottle [00:39:23 ]:
Yeah, I’m a business owner. So I’m building something and I love it.

Dan Schawbel [00:39:26 ]:
You have to. I worked, yeah, you got, but for like the average person working a corporate job or trade, like, it’s, I think it’s a little bit different in terms of ownership and responsibility and maybe I’m.

Frank Cottle [00:39:37 ]:
Goofy, but because I’ve never really had a job working for anybody else, but I did work as a partner for Deloitte for a few years and doing some, some specialized work in the breakup between the consulting and the, the accounting sides of the companies in the late nineties. And I remember back then when I was, you can imagine I was actually wearing a suit. I was thrilled with the excitement because what I was doing was I still looked at it as a building that I was building something for me. I didn’t look at it as working for the man. I was still working for my family and for me. And that to me was exciting.

Dan Schawbel [00:40:21 ]:
So I think the attitude, truthfully, I.

Frank Cottle [00:40:24 ]:
Think, have people lost that? I’m advancing myself and my family and my ego is involved in what I bring home to my family. It’s not involved in my job. It’s in what I bring home to my family. That’s where my ego is. Have people lost that?

Dan Schawbel [00:40:43 ]:
I think the attitudes around work have changed significantly post Covid. Covid really shook up things to an extreme level. I think people have a very big dissatisfaction with work. You know, the number, it’s still about 80% of people are either disengaged or very disengaged in their job. And because of these economic, all these different factors that are going on politically, socially, economically, it’s driven people to say, hey, we just got to find. And this has kind of led people into the trades again. It’s like we just gotta instability. We need more money because we have to offset the rising cost of everything around us. So I think that that’s kind of led to it. And it’s like, I think people, so we did studies with like, oracle during COVID We did four, a lot of them around AI and different topics like, you know, wellness, well being, all these different things, career development, etcetera. And what we found from, with the career development one was people reprioritize what matters to them in life. And so the way you’re thinking about it, I agree, but how they think about it is like, it’s like, you know, family, you know, health, like those things got like prioritized at the top and work really fell off. I mean, I think that that’s it. That’s why this also discharged globally, as you know, for the four day work week and all these. I was, I actually just did a TikTok of, like, in India, they’re trying to do like a six, I think it’s like a 16 hours workday, six day work week. So.

Frank Cottle [00:42:16 ]:
But when you talk about a four day workweek, that’s a real great thing to say in some economies and in some countries. But then you have to flip it around and you say, well, you know, countries are really like corporations. They have to compete for market share with other countries. Okay. That’s the simple.

Dan Schawbel [00:42:34 ]:
I mean, I mean, you know, this, too. You have certain countries that are saying, we’re going to make it easy to get a visa here so you can work remote. So they’re trying to take advantage of this remote work revolution and people want flexibility.

Frank Cottle [00:42:48 ]:
Yeah. Is a country that goes on to a four day workweek or a three day work week where they say, well, we’re actually cutting the hours. We’re not just cutting the days. Is that country going to be competitive on a global scale against countries that say, no, five day workweek, ten hour days. Hey, welcome to China. So are you going to be competitive and is your economy going to sustain itself? This and that. Those are questions that I don’t think too many people really. It’s a big question. You can’t do anything about it. But that’s really what it comes down to when it comes to global leadership. And global leadership defines economies, and economies defined I, our personal lifestyle, et cetera, et cetera. So we have to think of those things and not just be in our own little bubble because bubbles do burst, you know, there’s no question of that. Well, Dan, I really appreciate your comments today.

Dan Schawbel [00:43:48 ]:
We could have talked for hours. Let’s be honest. Like, everything you say, I’m like, well, we could pivot to this topic.

Frank Cottle [00:43:54 ]: We’ll pick this up again very soon, I’m sure. I really appreciate it. And I look forward to following your studies, which I do. And I’m grateful to you for sharing everything with our audience today.

Dan Schawbel [00:44:06 ]:
Thanks so much for having me, Frank.

Frank Cottle [00:44:08 ]: Take care. You, too.