David finds the courage to address a topic he’s been putting off for awhile, as he is seeing more agency principals struggling to maintain both healthy and productive work environments by leading the ongoing process of resolving tensions within their teams.

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"Adapting to a Modern Workforce" by David C. Baker for punctuation.com

Transcript

Blair Enns: David, we make a point of trying not to do timely episodes. The topic of today's episode is Dealing with Today's Employee. Is this a timely topic, or is it a timeless topic?

David Baker: Oh, shoot. We did fall into doing something timely here, but it's not like a hot take. It's more of like the last 10 years. Are we allowed to do those? I don't know.

Blair: I think we're allowed to do whatever we want. I'm just curious. I know you get into it in this post because this is a post that has dropped already. You've received a lot of feedback from readers on it. My take on it, it's a little bit timely. It's something that has been building in you. I know from personal conversations we've had over the last few years. It may also be a somewhat timeless topic, too. I think maybe we can let the audience figure that out.

David: Yes. There's parts of it that are absolutely timeless. You hinted at just a second ago, I've been sitting on this thing forever because I'm a wuss, essentially. It kept getting thrown in my face, too, because when I'm talking with clients during the lead gen module for the consulting side, I would sometimes share my screen because they would ask, "How does this work for you? How do you write things?" And so on. I say, "Oh, well, let me show you." Okay, here's a folder of the things I've sent to Emily to get an illustration. Then here's the folder of all the articles that are ready to go. There's 60 of them. I'll sit down on a Sunday morning and I'll just pick one that I'm motivated to write."

This one was originally titled Activist Employees. It will alphabetize to the top. Inevitably, somebody would say, "What is that about? I'd say, "Oh, I'm going to rename that." I just haven't had the courage to write about that. That's the one that's been sitting there longer than anything else because I've just been a wuss.

Blair: I don't know if you've been a wuss. I think we're going to talk about issues that you probably couldn't have spoken about a few years ago. I think that's the reality.

David: Oh, that's true. We were at a point in history where this was not have been a welcome observation for sure.

Blair: Yes. All right. Hopefully, we're through that point in history.

David: We'll find out.

Blair: We'll see.

David: We'll find out.

Blair: We'll see if we still have careers after this. I'm just the interviewer, so I'm going to be fine.

David: I'm the one to be canceled, not you. Yes.

Blair: Okay. Dealing with today's employee, the implication is today's employee is a little bit different than yesterday's employee. You make this first point in this post, this idea of switching first and second place from clients to employees. I really like how you talk about what used to make you tired. Unpack this idea, switching first and second place from clients to employees.

David: Yes. Because you'd have a just a casual conversation, or maybe it was a deeper conversation about an engagement. We would, with our clients or prospects. You do the same thing. You would start to hear, after the pleasantries, it's like, "So tell me what's going on. Why are you thinking of making a change, or what are the pressures that you're feeling?" And so on. Inevitably, up until about maybe four or five years ago, I don't think there's like a firm boundary, but up until four or five years ago, inevitably, the thing that brought people to taking a deeper look at their engagement at the firm was clients. It's like, oh, I'm just like, "Their payment terms," or "They don't get back to me. Their expectations are crazy. They keep asking us to do more and more work and not pay for it." All the stuff that none of it would be unexpected to hear.

That has changed over the last few years in that those pressures are still real, but they're number two. Now, number one, what's moved up on the leaderboard is challenges with employees. I will hear this from many, many, many people who talk to me, either clients or just prospects or just people I'm connecting with. It's like this is the most challenging thing about running my firm is the team. I would agree with what you said at the beginning about the marketplace of people changing. I think the leaders have changed as well. You can definitely see that in the changes in parenting style, and that carry over to management/leadership style as well. While how you feel about clients is still up there, it's been displaced by the challenges of running your firm, those challenges that come with the people in it. That's what's changed.

Blair: I'll make a generalization and ask if you agree with this or disagree with it. It's more of a hypothesis, but let's say 10 years ago just to make this nice and clean push it far back in time, the number one comment you hear around their culture or their team is like how great their culture is, how great their team is, and Today the number one issue is they're just so fucking tired of it all.

David: Yes.

Blair: Is that about right?

David: Yes, it is including the language, I would say. Where does this come from? That part is a lot harder to really unpack. I believe it's indisputable that there is a difference in how we interact with our team. How do we explain that? Some of it comes from the whole purpose thing. There's something I didn't even write about in this article that I want to write about down the road once I get a little more clarity around it. Humans, in general, are looking for meaning. They're looking for purpose. Some of the things that supplied that to them in the past have crumbled a bit. The nuclear family is a little bit different. The role that religion and church played is a little bit different. At the same time that all of these things have changed, politics are becoming more important for people, and social media is a way to express yourself. It's just a different world.

Cultural expectations. If you just go look at the websites of firms and you pull out the one or two observations that occur on almost every website in this industry, it's about how welcoming we are, we want you to bring your whole self to work. It's about accommodation, about work hours, where you can work, what you can believe, what you can say, so people are doing that. They're bringing their whole selves to work, and now principals are saying, "Oh, could you leave a little bit of yourself at home?"

Blair: That part right there, leave that at home.

David: Yes.

Blair: Yes, that's interesting. A misunderstanding or misapplication of purpose and your point that's not in the post is that, yes, maybe the sources of purpose or the places to express it or to find it, they're not as solid in people's lives as they were before. We're looking to get that done through work.

David: Yes, exactly. I think that's more true with young men than it is with women, and there's all kinds of data about that. Scott Galloway talks about it all the time. Listen to this. This is an activism that illustrates the point. Now this is not happening in our industry. I want to make it clear. This is simply an extreme example of what's happening on the media side, which is not true for us, but it's an example of what's changed in the workplace. This is a quote, says, "Members of the Times," so the New York Times Tech Guild, "which represents approximately 600 workers, went on strike on Monday over stalled contract negotiations. The strike threatens to interfere with the paper's election coverage. The workers of the Times are demanding a ban on perfume in break rooms, unlimited break time, and accommodations for pet bereavement."

This is reported in Semafor just a few months ago. What were workers worried about in the past? It was like, "Let's not die on the job. Let's not be exposed to chemicals at work." Now we're talking about perfume. I guess that's a chemical. We have our lives so much more settled and in control, and we've just lost, I think, this sense of gratitude, and now it's like, "No, this work environment is really great, but I don't think about that. What I think about is how it's not oriented around me and what I want. You have told me, as an employer, that this business is built around me, and so here's what that's going to mean for you. Now that is an overstatement, I realize that, but it's just a light on what's happening in the field.

Blair: I was speaking at a conference a few months ago, and there was this really interesting confluence of events that happened. The chief creative officer from Wieden & Kennedy was doing a talk, and he showed the Nike ad they did for the Paris Olympics. I forget the specifics of the ad, and I'm not a big consumer of broadcast television, so I'd