The Future of Work with McKinsey's Phil Kirschner

While in the new year, we thought we’d revisit a topic we’ve touched on before on the pod, but one that continues to be important to employers today and that is “the future of work.” More specifically, today we’re focused on how we work within a hybrid experience. So, in this episode Bill is joined by Phil Kirschner, a Senior Expert from McKinsey. Holding both practitioner and consulting experience in workplace strategy, change management and the future of work from his time at WeWork, JLL, and Credit Suisse, Phil has a broad range of experience including best practices from firms in hybrid working models, the latest industry trends related to future of work.

Research referenced in this episode leveraged from the following sources:

• The McKinsey American Opportunity Survey, Dec. 2022: https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/sustainable-inclusive-growth/future-of-america/american-opportunity-survey 
• Women in the Workplace 2022: https://womenintheworkplace.com/

Bill Harmon is a registered representative of Voya Financial Partners, LLC (member SIPC).

Neither Phil Kirschner nor McKinsey, WeWork, JLL, and Credit Suisse are affiliated with Voya Financial.  

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

You are listening to The Hire Through Retire podcast with Voya's Bill Harmon tackling all things from 401ks to HSAs and everything in between. We are talking to the best and brightest in the industry to bring you the latest in benefits, savings, and investment trends in the workplace. Come along with us on our journey to help all Americans become well-planned, well-invested, and well protected.

Speaker 2: 0:26

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Hire Through Retire podcast. I'm your host, bill Harmon, and thank you so much for joining me today. You know, as we're kicking off the new year, we thought we'd revisit a topic that we've touched on before on the pod, but it's one that really continues to be important to employers today, and that is this concept of the future of work, but really more specifically how we're working in a hybrid environment. Well, it seems employers are doing a combination of things today. There's the concept of hybrid work is certainly here to stay, and especially among workers demands today. So to talk more about this, we're here today with Phil Kirschner, a senior expert from McKinzie holding both practitioner and consulting experience and workplace strategy, change management and future work from his time at WeWork, J L L and Credit Suisse. Phil has a broad range of experience, including best practices from firms in hybrid working models, the latest industry trends related to the future of work. So with that, let me welcome Phil and well, Phil. Many thanks. This is a big topic and I'm so glad that you're here with your expertise.

Speaker 3: 1:30

Oh my gosh, thank you so much. Um, thrilled to be here. And I, I think it's great when leading companies that are not in the business of real estate or workplace, uh, help share these stories with, with their kind of clients and partners and listeners. Uh, it's so important to to hear those messages about the fray of, of those who are vested in the future of buildings and and workplace itself.

Speaker 2: 1:51

Who would've thought that three years ago we would be having regular conversa? In fact, I need to go back and watch the Jetsons because everything is coming true, because when he was talking Mr. Spacely, it was on a Zoom call before Zoom existed.

Speaker 3: 2:05

I know, I know. I feel, I feel the same way as having been thinking about the role of the office and workplace and the performance of our companies and our people for well over a decade that everyone has, you know, sort of come to the dinner table now that my, my little topics now, so, so popular has been really, uh, energizing and exciting.

Speaker 2: 2:21

So here it is. You've been kind of thinking about this for a while and this is your level of expertise and I imagine you've been quite busy over the past few years given this evolution of our workforce. So maybe can you give us a little bit more on about your experience, the industry a little bit, your background and how you landed where you are today?

Speaker 3: 2:38

So my background's actually in technology. I, I did not come from architecture design or facilities or anything having to do with real estate. Started my career credit suis and happened to be at the right place at the right time when the CFO f then started to explore new ways of working and had been convinced that their offices were both not well utilized, but also not meeting employee expectations and, and took a risk to establish a, a pilot program for really sharing in the office. Like let's all share when we come in, but think about a much greater diversity and and technical provision of, of spaces when we're here to improve the experience at which is like fortunate enough to be there, to be pulled into that team and got to learn by doing to help establish what eventually became a very large global program. Not only redesigning spaces, but challenging the way the bank thought about the collaboration between real estate, between HR and it, and the delivery of a, a more holistic experience. I then took that show on the road, uh, and led the workplace consultancy from the northeast at jll. So helping other similar firms in, in my region professional services and, and banking a lot to start that same journey, uh, of, of reimagining what, what the daily experience in the office could be like, and how to make it more both efficient and compelling. Uh, and then, uh, landed it WeWork to lead their global workplace strategy practice in the heyday, which<laugh>, if for nothing else, strengthened my backbone about the role of activation and community and connection in place, despite all the challenges. Kudos to WeWork. I think in the years leading up to Covid and really becoming a, a brand and challenging all of us to think about what it could feel like to to co go to the office or go to work. Nobody wanted the pandemic, but it is what brought me to McKenzie is our, our real estate practice was shifting from industry vertical group doing strategy consulting with companies in the business of place to most of the work that I do now, which is helping occupiers across industries with their places and our people practice, which has been advising leaders on diversity and talent and organizational design and agility, and you name it, for decades, but you know, shockingly had never been asked about the office until loosely March of 2020. So both opportunities brought me here and it's, it's been a really exciting 18 months.

Speaker 2: 4:57

That's great. Thank you so much for sharing that background because, you know, is, it was kind of amazing that the whole world simultaneously had to go ahead and figure this out. I mean, it was sort of a, is are we really gonna do this? All right, it's really gonna happen for like a, a month and then we're gonna go back. But no, it, it happened and then everyone had to quickly adjust as to how do we keep the lights on? And then we, it was sort of a, well, we don't want to go back, we've evolved so much, let's continue to move forward. Um, but what does that really mean? And so it was kind of this big slam on the brakes, figure it out quickly and then let's go ahead and evolve and modernize. And so when we think about the future of work and, you know, this growing trend of hybrid work, I wanna talk to you about some of the, uh, research that your team conducted where you surveyed 25,000 Americans across sectors and different sectors and different demographics, and you really covered a lot of different topics including flexible work. So with that, what were some of the high level results of this research and how might those results highlight the overall shift in where and when and how individuals want to work and are working?

Speaker 3: 6:07

Sure, thank you. So, uh, the, the study you're referring to is called the McKinsey's American Opportunity Survey. It's run by our, our global institute, uh, is that it's core function is to understand, uh, our economic prospects, how Americans are, are feeling about the economy and things like inflation now. But we did add this section on remote work, which, uh, we believe is one of the most distinctive and largest studies on this tectonic shift in the way Americans are working because, uh, of the breadth of the response rate, as you said, it's not just white collar work, but also traditionally blue collar industries and people across educational bands and income bands and all form of sort of personal demographic. And the three banner results that came out from the survey, uh, were this first 58% of Americans have the ability to work from home at least part of the time. So that's an equivalent of say, you know, 90 million people. Whereas that number prior to Covid from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics was like a small single digit number. So call it<laugh>, you know, tens uh, 10 times, uh, multiple of where we were before, uh, to get to about two-thirds of Americans working remotely or at least have the ability to. The second was in the number of respondents who when offered the option to work remotely, would take their employer up on that offer. And that number is a staggering 87%, again, across all, all slices of the population. Now, it varies by number of days, not as many would work, uh, sort of a full five or seeking a full five days a week, but almost everyone would offer flexibility will take it. Uh, and finally the average number of days the employees are working remotely, per week is just under three. And there are differences between industries there, say in the sort of technology and financial industries at a, a fullthroated three days a week when you get down into more manufacturing and industrial related industries, while folks with, you know, hands-on equipment in factories may not have that luxury, the average is still in the twos like two to two and a half days per week for employees in those more sort of industrial industries who have the ability to take that flexibility. So this is a, an enormous shift in the way that we were working before. And even if there is some pullback, no way are we going all the distance to what it was before the pandemic.

Speaker 2: 8:31

Yeah, and that is interesting cause I think the very beginning we we were thinking like, right, this is like a temporary thing and then we're just gonna go back. I heard so many people speak to, well why would you go back? That sensing going backwards when we can actually sort of use this as a jumping off point to be more modernized. Yeah. And I, I think that balance of human connection, but yet with the efficiency of being able to work from home or the flexibility, particularly if you're a caregiver or anything like that, that's that, that moving forward piece of

Speaker 3: 9:03

It. Absolutely. I'd say when, when talking about going back, it's usually a little bit of a history lesson for me, firms that weren't studying their workplace intensely prior to covid may not have either known or admitted that not everybody was around before. For most companies in most places, the daily average sort of attendance of their population was probably in the sixties or seventies percent, which is to say that we were all not there. Sometimes it doesn't mean we were working from home. Could be we were traveling with maternity leave or sick or with a client just somewhere else, you know, which means our offices weren't as full as maybe we thought before. Two is that most employees didn't find that their office before provided for most of their daily functional needs, the ability to focus or concentrate or be collaborative with employees, uh, for occupiers who were doing those kinds of surveys was always an issue. Even someone who had a private office with a door might say, I struggle to get focused time because people knock all day long. And finally, uh, something else in, in our, our research for the opportunity survey and, and otherwise is a tremendous and over-indexing on demand for flexibility from diverse populations. Women want flex more than men. Caregivers want flex more than people who don't have children. People of color want flex more than white people. People with disabilities want flex more than someone who doesn't have a disability. Literally every single measure, our women in the workplace, uh, study, which is sort of the largest annual report on perceptions of of, of women, uh, in the workplace had the whole chapter from, from just two months ago on, uh, reduced feelings of microaggressions now that they have sort of flex and remote as an option. So the old way wasn't great for everyone and wasn't as maybe efficient in spaces we might have thought. So we cannot go back. We have to be moving forward into a better future.

Speaker 2: 11:00

And probably didn't even appreciate it until you stepped away from it and said, Hey, wait a second.

Speaker 3: 11:06

Right. I think, I think we all, uh, we all always had the one colleague who was on the phone mm-hmm.<affirmative> for whatever reason they weren't in the room and it probably wasn't great to be that colleague, but now we all know what it feels like to be that colleague who's not in the room. So it's no longer acceptable to have them not feel included and have the same level of experience.

Speaker 2: 11:25

You know, I love how you talked about different demographics, uh, on the pod. We've talked about how this has opened up tons of opportunity for, uh, people's special needs or disabilities now because obviously accommodations are already set up at home and now you can really tap into this very talented, um, and underutilized, um, and underappreciated pool of talent. That's very purposeful. And I know you've talked a lot about purpose, which is something that's a big, big topic for us at, uh, here at Voya as well, but you've talked specifically about the need to define, uh, the purpose of the workplace to help create competitive advantage and further motivate employees to be together, but when it matters. So can you tell us more about what you mean by this and, and what you've seen some companies do to reimagine the workplace when it's the case that it no longer serves its purpose?

Speaker 3: 12:18

Yeah, I I I'm as guilty as anyone in the real estate industry, uh, of building offices for years where the only really defendable purpose for the existing of that office was the existence of employees in that city. Why do we have an office in Chicago? Because we have 500 employees in Chicago. It's not a great reason. And unfortunately then coming out of the pandemic when employers are saying, could you please come back? The employee then says, for what we're now attuned to, I'm doing quite well here in my well appointed home office. Uh, it's po making me think I'm actually more productive than I was before because again, I can control my environment, so why should I go in? And the average office does really underperform the average home for those those functions. So the, the burden is on the employer to say, what role does this place have on our business objectives in on you? The best example I've heard, uh, in my recent travels is the head of a corporate serv, uh, head of corporate services from a life sciences firm who's been saying like, when the book is written about how our company develops the next 10 lifesaving drugs or medical devices, I want there to be a chapter in the book about our headquarters and many in the real estate industry. I think they want to write the coffee table book about the building itself. Look at my building, it's big, it's beautiful, it's efficient, it's technically enabled like, which is all great, but while it feels a little minimizing to move, you know, your building from the book to the chapter, the burden of proof is a lot higher. In that case, just imagine sort of, you know, 10 years of life-saving drugs, chapter one scientists, chapter two patents, right? Eventually you get to chapter three, the headquarters, and how hard will it be to prove that the existence of that building and the people who are moving throughout it, not just employees but partners and clients and candidates demonstrably accelerated clinical speed and drug delivery. That's difficult. But that if you put on the list, accelerate clinical speed for the purpose of your office, and I'm sitting at home, I may say, oh sure I can, I can record a podcast just fine here in my home, but can I really accelerate clinical speed? Could it be better if I was there with access to those people and those tools and those experiences? Probably not. I'm gonna go because I studied biochemistry. I I signed up to work for this company because I believe in this, I'm going in. That's purpose. The other examples we hear most about are several technology companies who are going, what we say it's sort virtual or remote first in their behaviors, telling employees you don't have to come in ever. And perhaps we are going to be reducing our portfolio, but we are converting everything that's left into something that we're not even calling an office. We're calling it an experience center, we're calling it a studio, we're calling it a gathering place. Come for that. And then the burden again is on them to not just design it, but activate it to be the kind of magnet that makes us want to want to go there.

Speaker 2: 15:32

You know, it's interesting. I think about, you know, it was 20 years ago, it was 10 years ago that companies used this beautiful building in the grounds and, you know, waterfalls or fountains to attract talented people to be part of that, the cool factor. And now actually listening to what you just said, it's almost the other way. It's like now the cool factor is that you can, you can do you, you can work however you wanna work and this really cool building is not about the grounds or the fountains and so on. It's about the energy that will be developed by the people that come in and what's gonna be done. And you have to be very purposeful and thoughtful about why you're gonna be there. Otherwise they'll say, well that was a waste of my time. Why'd it get stuck in traffic when we didn't even have a collaboration time, we didn't have, we're not celebrating anything, we're not thinking together when all of that. It's really rethink and I think it'll eliminate a lot of the wasted time that people just as zombies got in their car, went to the office, did their thing clocked out and so on.

Speaker 3: 16:35

A hundred percent. And uh, you know, facilities managers everywhere are subject to the challenges of the experience economy that has exploded around us thanks to technologies, you know, social media and just a general increase I think in our demand for what it feels like to have a good time at a, a restaurant, at a hotel, at any kind of experience. We're just making retail-oriented decisions about going to work. And there are, uh, slide IU sometimes with a picture of the airport in Singapore, which is so stunning that people go there to shop and like when the airport<laugh> is a magnetic and beautiful place to go and most of our offices are stuck 10 years ago, it's, it's not hard to realize we don't go, you know, why we don't wanna go all the time. We don't go to bad restaurants twice. Right.

Speaker 2: 17:24

That's interesting, the experience, and I love how you said that. So let's talk about the experience and so let's talk about this, this virtual office now. And so technology has really been this critical thing in helping so many of us succeed. And it was really evidence like what we were just talking about, like all of a sudden everyone had to be a Zoom expert. So, you know, if you think about even right now we're having this podcast and we're not in a studio, we're in different places and we're doing this through technology. So I'm curious though, when it comes to technologies beyond those that we need to simplify how we do our jobs. Can you tell us more about your perspective on how virtual works accelerating innovation in today's workplace?

Speaker 3: 18:03

Yeah, that's a great question. And innovation was one of, one of the topics raised first for leaders who were concerned what wasn't happening if we weren't all together. Our research in this space again comes back a little bit to the history lesson, pointing out two things. Uh, one, that much of the innovation that our companies have had to go through to exist in this, in this hybrid and forced remote future. And even the sort of vaccine and drug development, much of it was happening with people who have never and may never meet each other in person and some of the most disruptive technologies, uh, today, if you take the sort of broadest category of cryptocurrencies and digital assets and the metaverse is like a super set of technologies, much of that whole underlying ecosystem was scrapped together by people completely distributed around the world. So it's possible. And also something called the, uh, the the Alan Curve, uh, for who studied sort of, uh, social psychology and anthropology, which said like even when we were all in our big campuses together, the odds of you innovating and collaborating with people, you know, further than some small number of feet away from use, where you sit most of the time that just doesn't happen. It drops off pretty dramatically. It's even been studied in university settings looking at professors who author papers together. It correlates with how cl literally how close their offices were before. So without some kind of serendipity engine to force you to bump into more and different people in the built environment, it's very hard to create these kinds of new connections and to have that condition where we're all looking for someone to help us solve a, a problem or, or to partner with us on something. And actually digital platforms can make that easier. We stumble on a document, we find someone in a Slack channel, we are nudged by an increasingly sophisticated set of tools from Google and Microsoft and others to say like, oh, you know, bill, do you also know Mary? Like maybe you should know Mary. And that's just gonna get better. And not only building and and fostering our networks, but ultimately helping to accelerate innovation. I think by crossover ideas and exactly what you said about unlocking new populations through remote work. Maybe it's disabled workers, maybe it's a worker in a different country, but, uh, there's a payments technology company that even just at the beginning of of Covid said, they started exploring having what they called a remote hub, hiring some employees deliberately, remotely. And they actually said because they're, they're trying to innovate and deliver payment services all around the world, having, you know, a single human, no matter what department that person works in, working in some far flung country where within, you know, not within 10,000 miles of an office lets them know what it's like to be a citizen in that country. They're like, they're contributing ideas about the local culture market that we had no idea about and we only got access to that person's diversity of thought by allowing them to be distributed and remote.

Speaker 2: 21:09

And I love that cuz that isn't what happens is that now if I was in a location that may not have been as diverse for potential employees now when we can go and access globally, it really does. I've been in more meetings where I think, whoa, how'd you come up with that idea? That's brilliant. I, yeah, never would've thought of that. And I think that we've become so a one we all had to learn how to be very flexible. I've been asked so many times like, Hey Bill, what are you thinking about dot, dot dot, you know, about kind of something's gonna happen a year from now. I said, I, I don't know. And I've had to become very comfortable about not having the answer because this world has forced all of us to be flexible and open to something that we never would've thought of before. And I love even how you talked about the metaverse, because to me that's this interesting way of connecting in a way that I never would've thought of connecting, you know, that I'm inside of the metaverse, but I'm connecting with somebody who could be in another country. But we're gonna chat and

Speaker 3: 22:11

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 22:13

And almost feel like we're next to each other.

Speaker 3: 22:14

Exactly. And look, in person still matters. I just saw someone this week who lives in London. I only met them because sort of the internet put us together. The beginning of Covid is thought leaders and have just stayed on each other's radar enough to know when, who is, who is traveling. And I'd love that I can now meet him for lunch, but like we would not have met had it not been for a completely digital context.

Speaker 2: 22:35

And I'm glad you did say that because you know what, I think humans still starve some more than others for human connection. So this is conversation by no means is saying that the human connection, you know, face-to-face is going away. But what I do love is what we've been talking about is that it will be much more effective and thoughtful and purposeful than before of, you know, my ran to you at the water cooler. Hey, how, how was your weekend? Da da da da<laugh>. Yeah, zombie back to my office.

Speaker 3: 23:05

So someone said to me recently, he said, uh, when I was in the Chicagoland area, they said, I think people used to, or were like, don't you think people used to like coming into the office to talk about the Bears game? To which I said, don't you think it's possible? They were talking about the Bears game with their colleagues to make it more palatable to be in the office around the water cooler. They actually would prefer to talk about the Bears game with they're like friends and family and everyone else out in the world or go to the game. That doesn't mean just because they were talking about it there, that that's what, what brought them in.

Speaker 2: 23:32

So let's kind of keep going with that right there about, you know, collaboration in the office. So you, from an employer perspective, many companies certainly saw great success and in some cases even more collaboration like what we've talked about over the pandemic, particularly in the sense of meeting both employers and employees when, where and how they wanted to be met. But as we talked about hybrid, what are the opportunities to ensure work is getting done while in this new workforce it shows many of employers saying, I don't even know what you're doing. And so you kind of say like, are you still staying productive? You said something that recently struck a chord, which is the shift in flexible working preferences guarantees that some colleagues will be collaborating remotely all or most of the time. This means companies must set an intention that all work is inclusive of those who may not be present at the same place or same time and saying we're hybrid now does not sufficiently address the necessary changes to the way work gets done. So how might companies today go about setting their intention? We've talked so much about really being purposeful and intentional, but how do they do that in appropriate matter that doesn't disrupt their workforce?

Speaker 3: 24:41

Yeah, that's a great question. So, you know, we, we have been through two or three years of making hybrid palatable, like workable, but not doing the hard work to get us to a future where, as I say, I I I think we will be or must be as an imperative virtual first, but by no means place less, which means like two things have to be true at the same time. For the virtual first part, that means sort of behaving, working and organizing as if, as you said, everyone is sort of remote or distributed, someone will not be around at the same time or the same place. So to be inclusive of them, we have to do a couple of things. All of these practices, uh, are taken from the companies which have most successfully been completely remote before Covid never had an office, then don't have an office now. And in most, uh, measures in our research and working with them, uh, often outperform many traditional office-based companies are now hybrid companies around organizational health and and engagement. So the things that they do the best, which even comes back to, to the innovation point a little, is a bias towards not just hybrid, but a bias towards asynchronous work with very strict requirements for when we do things in real time together, either virtually or physically the bar to have a meeting, which we are terrible at<laugh> in terms of like the effectiveness of meeting culture long, uh, before covid, the bar's very high. So we bias where I do things on my time in a time that works for me and then you can consume them or react to them at a time which works for you. This requires a second point, which is around brutally like administratively documenting the culture, the communication norms, and really the operating model for the company in a handbook or playbook that everybody can see. I may not be in the marketing department, but I should be able to know what makes the marketing department tick, how to get in touch with them, how to work with them, how to find out what's going on with them. That leads to focusing on sort of output and not time spent working to know how, how work processes are going on. Taking the post-its off the wall and putting them on the screen, so to speak, as a manager should be able to yeah, ascertain what's up without having to ask someone or b with them. This leads to sort of very clear decision making rules, helping people if, if they are acting very much asynchronously and flexibly having a constant kind of bias for action, like always looking like I should know what to do next, I should be able to take something off the pile and start working on it because it's on my time, not necessarily your time. And then aligning with everybody around you, the sort of informal, all the way up to urgent communication protocols. We, we all check our inbox all day long obsessively because we might get an urgent email, but these companies have taken the step and it's, it's simple to do but, or simple to say, may be difficult to do institutionally of saying when urgent bad things have happened, we have all aligned with ourselves from like executives on down. I will call you unannounced, just like the old days when bad things happen, I'm not gonna send you an email so you don't have to look at your email and worry that something urgent is coming in, you can focus on, on your work. So all of that and really making kind of remote friendly employee journeys from being interviewed and hired, onboarded, engaged and trained and promoted lets us like get command back of our time, but puts much of our output in writing. It allows for, you know, recall of knowledge and constant training or the ability to find someone in some other problem that's happening because we've written it down instead of defaulting to, I have to tell you in real time in a meeting where for all intents and purposes it never happened. But then with that newfound freedom, we also should be building and occupying better places than ever for truly purposeful presence, more diverse space types, more hospitality, more intelligent, healthier for us personalizable and increasingly something that is neither my home nor my office. The ecosystem of, of like third places mixed use places with a healthy dose of technology to help us make the decisions over time. Where and when and why should I go to eliminate the fairly staggering decision fatigue we all feel at the moment about, you know, should I or shouldn't I go today? Is Bill gonna be there? Is the weather nice? Is the transit running? Is room A available? All those things are hard to do and we will need help, but if we're behaving one way, have the places for the other and the technology to support the decisions in between, I'm very optimistic for that intentional future.

Speaker 2: 29:37

And you know, and it's interesting too, even at Voya we had concerns that because we've eliminated some of the barriers, like e even just the time to drive oftentimes, you know, to the office was the time that you could do your own thinking. You could, you could decompress on your way home, but you don't really have that. And the voy was very, um, thoughtful and intentional of saying make sure, like when you step away, step away, it's awfully convenient for you to go walk right down and log in. But you need to have that balance and that was a new discipline to learn. We all had to be flexible. Yeah,

Speaker 3: 30:13

Yeah, yeah. And we wanna get out of our homes. I, that's why I think of those third places, like, I mean live in a nice house within 10 or 15 minutes of, you know, my small downtown and it's still good for me and we still need to get up and go like have lunch and shop for a little and then be able to maybe stop in town and take a call and that should be convenient. Then go back. So you've had a break. Maybe it's not your hour commute, but it's something to psychologically like, break up your day or we, you know, we go, we go notes

Speaker 2: 30:41

<laugh>. Yeah, go outside, get oxygen. Right,

Speaker 3: 30:43

Right, right, right.

Speaker 2: 30:45

<laugh>. So, but I wanna thank you for your time. This is, this has really been great dialogue and some incredible insight that I am sure our audience will find to be impactful and valuable. And I wanna wrap up by asking one final question. Uh, and that's this, you've talked about serving a purpose and for setting an intention, but when it comes to culture and overall employee satisfaction, that's the ultimate driver for success for any company because without it, you, how can you attract or retain quality employees to the workforce? So what advice would you have for our employer listeners out there when it comes to prioritizing flexibility within the work models while still creating this good company culture?

Speaker 3: 31:27

Yeah, that's a great question. I, I'd say, um, first and foremost, there isn't going to be a fixed answer to this very flexible problem. We should be thinking of the experience, engagement of our, you know, and in sort of attraction modalities for our employees, much like we do for customers. There's an enormous amount of sophistication, uh, at a company like Voer otherwise to understand changing consumer dynamics, to test and learn and fail and scale and be always looking for what's next. How do we get kind of ahead of the, the puck, so to speak, right? And we just often haven't plugged that energy internally. We have to think of employees are making a retail decision to come, especially the younger you are. Gen Z is, you know, taking that first or second job as an opportunity to learn something and not with an intention to stay that the generations that came before them. Maybe they're more willing to, to leave with a slightly better offer and to blog on the way out about that experience and to know that the job one is just a step in the ladder or the jungle gym of their future, very flex, flexible career. And if we think of them making retail oriented decisions every day with their journey and treat them like we would a customer, hopefully that leads us to some success, uh, in adapting to these new and, you know, more digital and flexible expectations.

Speaker 2: 32:50

Bill, I wanna thank you again for your insight and thank you so much for being here today. It was

Speaker 3: 32:53

Great job. Thank, thank you again and again, I, I really applaud you for helping to, you know, provide some steer to clients and other leaders, uh, who are sure are inundated with this message from the workplace community holistically. And it's important to hear it direct from kind of people, leaders, and employers.

Speaker 2: 33:10

And thank you. Thank you. And I also want to thank our listeners for joining us today. As always, please stay well.

Speaker 1: 33:16

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