Are you interested in learning about the most significant trends shaping the global workforce over the next few years? In this episode of The People Purpose Podcast, Chas and Julie discuss the 2024 Megatrends with guest Dr. Jarik Conrad, who is the Vice President of Human Insights at UKG and Executive Director of the Workforce Institute. Jarik, Chas, and Julie share the upcoming Megatrends and the potential impacts it will have on the workforce.
Are you interested in learning about the most significant trends shaping the global workforce over the next few years? In this episode of The People Purpose Podcast, Chas and Julie discuss the 2024 Megatrends with guest Dr. Jarik Conrad, who is the Vice President of Human Insights at UKG and Executive Director of the Workforce Institute. Jarik, Chas, and Julie share the upcoming Megatrends and the potential impacts it will have on the workforce.
Hey y'all. Welcome to the people purpose podcast, the show that explores all of the ins and outs, challenges and opportunities, HR people, managers and all people face at work every single day. I am with my virtual background julu virtual background today, my virtual background co host,
Julie Develin:Julie Develin Hello. And if you're watching this on YouTube, which we know a lot of you do, all in all, we're just another brick in the wall. So thanks. Absolutely, yes, I decided to go with the brick background today. Just to change things up a little bit. Because why not? Yeah,
Chas Fields:I did the same thing. But it's not for the same reason that you did virtual background it's because the picture of the map behind me actually fell off the wall. So I will be running over to Home Depot later today to fix that. So anyways, not why we're here. Julie, tell me something good.
Julie Develin:She has something good for me. It considering this time of year. You know, I always look at I obviously try to live in the present moment. But I look ahead and wow. UKG has so many great things coming up in 2024. And my something good is just being so excited for the opportunities that are presented to to us to help our potential customers and also our current customers in 2024. So more on that coming up. But really what I think is something good that's what I that's what's on my mind today.
Chas Fields:Yeah, you know, this episode being live in December tis the season, the holiday season, as we all know, the fields household celebrates Christmas. It's a really exciting time for us. You know, my son is now at the age where you can see the wonder, right, you can see the Wonder so much so that we actually put our Christmas tree up really early. I went and bought one of those mechanical trains to run under the tree and I'm telling you good and bad. Because at 5:45am He's really excited to play with said train. Yeah, bad. On the other side is it's a 545
Julie Develin:You did it yourself, my friend. You did it to yourself.
Chas Fields:That's right. That's right. So hey, let's put into it. Yeah, let's
Julie Develin:get into it. Because what I'm so, so excited to talk about what we're about to talk about today. Which is our megatrends. And yeah, yeah, we're gonna get into those. But what I wanted to start with are as we do it every episode our business side of the day, this stat is really staggering. Our megatrends are 2023 mega trends were downloaded and viewed over 3 million times. Yeah, yeah. In in in November of launching in November of 2022. So every year, we launched our megatrends around November. And they are just over 3 million people global reach have had a look at these. And I know that even more they were impacted, because we've had so many conversations in the speeches that we do. I know, I include the mega trends in every one of my speeches, no matter what the topic is, because they're so relevant. So yeah,
Chas Fields:I think it's pretty wild to think, you know, obviously UKG releases these every year. And it continues to expand, it continues to grow. We know that there are a lot of people behind the scenes that help with this. We'll talk more about that in a minute. But what's so interesting is these are malleable, right? It's, hey, this industry may experience the mega trend that we're talking about in January of 2023. And the next industry based on the 2023 mega trends may not experience it until later that year, maybe in 24 or 25. Right? It's it's a really special piece that we do a lot of research behind. And more importantly, we help organizations think differently. And that's what it's all about, right? It's how do we better our business? How do we better our people? How do we better the situations and experiences and culture that they have? And this is one of those things that people get really excited for year over a year? Yeah, and important
Julie Develin:for us to recognize, Chas, that when we do talk about the megatrends, just because there's a year attached to it, we, we put a lot of intention into recognizing that these are what we see coming down the pike. But it's not just for that year. Right? Yeah. It's may be an outlook that we're taking to start talking about maybe having the conversation in winter. The year that we released the mega trends for but but they they're still mega trends that are apropos for today that were released. Only one for example, right?
Chas Fields:Yeah. And I find there's no better segue because plot twist, we're actually bringing in someone very special in near and dear to our team and hearts. Dr. Jarik Conrad, who is actually one of the main people that contributes to this that leads us through this along with Karina Monessen, and so many others. But let's bring him in because this I mean, this is the epic piece, and we're really excited for him to talk about it. So, but there he is. Right, yeah, it was a mic test real quick. Can we hear you?
Jarik Conrad:Hello. Hello, testing.
Chas Fields:Awesome. So Jarik, really excited to have you can you just tell us who you are what you do? Maybe tell us a little bit about the workforce Institute. Before we jump into the megatrend discussion?
Jarik Conrad:Yeah, I can do that. But I really want to start off with kind of a bone to pick. I mean, I'm trying to figure out how it is you all have this popular podcast, you got all these downloads, you're climbing up the charts. And this is the first time you inviting me to participate?
Chas Fields:No, no. Hey, let's take a step back. We've had this discussion on multiple levels. But hey, here's the deal. The prior episode, let's be real. Chris Todd, our CEO just gave us a lot of flack for this too. He's like, does this work and that two weeks ago, first guest ever is our CEO. So you know, maybe we'll just tell Jarik to take it up with him. That's
Jarik Conrad:I guess, if I'm one of those early guests, it's not too bad.
Julie Develin:I'd also say be careful what you wish for.
Jarik Conrad:Just a little bit about me, you know, officially at UKG, I run a human Insights Team, which I get a chance to help wrangle chats. And Julie, every day. also served as the executive director of the UK G workforce Institute, which we like to people call us a think tank, I kind of refer to us as a think and do tank chair, as you mentioned, you know, we you know, we're out there, we're trying to be, you know, forward thinking in terms of the research and the big picture. But also this stuff has to translate to something meaningful for people that they can use on a day to day basis. So, so we try to do that as well. Just by way of background, I am an HR professional by trade is what I went to graduate school for, you know, I spent, man, we're 25 years now, in and around human resources. So I am in the HR tribe.
Julie Develin:That's awesome. Yes, I am also in the HR tribe, I am not the only HR nerd on the team. Jeric, I think would also consider himself a proud HR nerd. Or at least I just dubbed him that. So Jared, what I would what I would love for you to just discuss briefly, for our listeners to understand how do these megatrends how do they come about? What is the process? How do we, because there's so many different things going on in the world? How do we narrow it down?
Jarik Conrad:Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I mean, we this is a really a year long process, once we get these out and know, for the first few months, we may still massage him a little bit. And then we're already starting to take notes for what's next down the horizon. So, you know, we just interview all of our stakeholders, whether it's internal teams that UKG the research that we would have engaged in over the past year, at the workforce Institute, you all are out, you know, our whole team is out speaking, interacting with 1000s and 1000s of people at various organizations, and we bring all that feedback. And as you know, we have these conversations about what are the things that we're seeing. So, you know, it's a combination of the data that's out there, as well as the stories that, you know, help us to really understand what this data is telling us. And we start with a list of, you know, just dozens of potentials. And we start to talk and we start to talk and we start to realize these three are actually all connected to the same thing. And eventually, we end up with a handful of trends that we we felt like, you know, pretty reflective of what's going on out there that people either already know about should be knowing about and certainly should be planning for. So it I mean, it is a is a team effort, really across UKG.
Chas Fields:It's a rather large document to let's be clear. We had to get it down to a large document. Well, that's really exciting. You know, here's the deal. I've given this presentation with Theresa to some of our internal stakeholders. Julie's given this presentation to some external stakeholders. And Derek you just presented this at our customer conference by Got a month ago, you know, to to a broader audience with one of our colleagues, Erika Sandoval. I think it's really important that we dive into each and we can't spend, I mean, listen, I know when all three of us get in the room, and we start talking about this, it could be a seven hour episode, and our audience would hate us for that. But I would love for you and Julie to highlight the first one. Yeah, let's just have a dialogue. And we'll go through all three and then kind of wrap it up. Because we want our people to know, here's what you could be thinking about. Here's what here's what you could be thinking about Jules?
Julie Develin:Yeah, important also to recognize, you know, we're going to have a conversation about this. But we're also going to provide you links to some resources for the megatrends. And, you know, we'll make sure that the conversation certainly doesn't end here. In fact, I think in some ways, this conversation is just starting, as we're just starting to dive into what's going on in the world of the mega trends. So Jeric, our first one redefining the employer and the employee relationship, ah, the age old. The age old problem, right, by the
Jarik Conrad:way, that's not the make that's not new. We know that's not new. Yeah.
Julie Develin:Yeah. Yeah, it's not new. But you know, I think when we're talking about these new conversations, or the conversations we have to have, we can take a topic that's age old, and we can have a new conversation based on the world that we're living in now. That's what's important. Would you agree?
Jarik Conrad:Absolutely. And, you know, the headline is not new, but the, you know, kind of the after the, you know, semicolon, like, that's the, or after the colon, that's the part that is the new point, it's that, you know, there's not one size fits all. So we're learning more about people who do work, right, when we're starting to understand that, you know, we can no longer use these, these categories, you know, generations has been the thing, right? Oh, Gen Zers. Compared to, you know, I'm not gonna say Gen X's because nobody talks about us. And even if
Chas Fields:you're forgotten, you're forgotten.
Jarik Conrad:Never see articles about Gen X. Completely over us. But, but, but we can no longer use these broad categories to really understand what's going on in our organization. It's just not enough. I mean, it's it's an overgeneralization to say, Gen Z does this or millennials do this? It's one factor. And, you know, maybe it gives us some interesting insights. But then, you know, what about age, you know, whether you're looking at somebody, you know, 50 years ago, 40 years ago, 30 of when people were in their 20s, they kind of had a lot in common just being young or right. And so age is a category. You have, despite, you know, what generation you might be in a hole you might be, there's a personal personality style that you can have you remember, the Big Five extraversion introversion, opening?
Chas Fields:I've never, you
Jarik Conrad:know, so my personality style is going to help to dictate, you know, what I want from work, what I'm willing to give to work, how I see that relationship. You add to that, my lifestyles. And so if I'm a young single person versus somebody with a growing family, you know, how I looked at benefits from a company might be different. It The other thing is just overall life experience. So we always talk about dei MB. And, you know, from a diversity standpoint, that's a whole nother category, or set of categories that now inform how I look at all this stuff. So you really got to put all those elements together, and probably some that we didn't even catch. And that really determines what somebody's work style, or what their expectations would be. So, you know, we just got to we can't take the shortcut anymore and say, you know, women want this. Millennials want six people over six feet tall, want this? Yeah. What if I'm a millennial who's a woman who's over six feet tall, they went, where did we go with that?
Julie Develin:Right? So really what it is it's avoiding reductionist thinking. It's, it's, it's, when we look at statistical data, there's so much statistical data out there. And really, when it comes to individual circumstances, it's a lot of times that data doesn't mean much, because we talk a lot about how we have to have an employee experience that's unique for each person. And really, every person is unique, obviously, and their wants and their needs, etc. are unique. That
Jarik Conrad:aggregate data gives us an interesting starting point, you know, on aggregate, here's some things that we found, but you can't stop there because it has nothing to do with the person that's next to you. That person could be an outlier. So you got to now the reason that I think it becomes a mega trend this year, is because we can finally do something about it. You know, technology It is now allowing us to really understand people at at a scale that we couldn't in the past, right back in my HR career. I mean, you know, we did
Chas Fields:a survey, paper survey, maybe.
Jarik Conrad:What do you think this means? Well, it means this. I mean, you know, technology is allowing us to do that real time. And, you know, we can get closer to understanding you as an individual. What are your patterns of behavior? What are your expectations? What are your likes and dislikes, what makes a great workplace for you. And if we can get that information now we can start to customize and we can intervene in a way that's appropriate for an individual instead of for group that that person may not may or may not have behaviors or expectations consistent with? Yeah, go ahead. You
Chas Fields:know, what I what I thought was interesting that you mentioned in your, in your description earlier of the worker, is, you never mentioned the actual workplace or the function or the tools, it was solely focused on the person. And at the end of the day, you know, whether it's our continuum of needs, which I know you've done a ton of research around the workplace and work life technology or life work technology. One of the stats that I found interesting, as we delve into the megatrends was we found from Gallup 8.8 trillion and untapped productivity exists. And that begs the question, are organizations looking at the person versus the worker? Right, and I think 8.8 trillion is a large number to, for us to take a step back and say, Whoa, hold on, maybe we're onto something here by looking at the person first, what they like what they dislike, if you are the female, who's six foot that, you know, whatever, whatever it is, based on the example that you provided, right? It's it's, it's no longer in the box thinking. I also think it is probably a great segue to trend too. But I'll pause there and let y'all comment before we go to turn to.
Jarik Conrad:I mean, I'll just say, You're absolutely right about that. It, you know, all that lost revenue. I mean, that's discretionary effort. I mean, right. The difference between a, you know, a good performer and a great performer is often that Discretionary Effort, Right? And the degree the to make some inroads to understanding who I am as a person, that means you care about me. And if you care about me, and you're invested in who I am, and who I can become both inside your organization and outside your organization, man, I'm willing to do some stuff for you. That I might not if the situation wasn't like that. So I think there's some, you know, this is not all just for the employer. We just want everybody to be happy. I mean, that's right. But that translates into real business results. Yeah, absolutely.
Chas Fields:Yeah, I think that's a, that's a great point for us to kind of talk about the second piece, because productivity skills, alignment skills gaps, the widening of it is really, they're they're interconnected. Right. They're mutually reinforcing, if you will. And the second from buying and borrowing to building and mining, which is Trend number two, focuses is on that traditional skill set, or not focusing on that traditional skill set? Can you talk a little bit about what we mean from buying and borrowing to building and mining when it comes to skills in the workplace?
Jarik Conrad:Yeah, so that, you know, really the the new piece of that is the mining is really emphasis on building. But introducing this new option, and that is money. What do we mean by mining, we mean that look, we, if you laid a context, we know that these they're going to continue to be more jobs out there, there are people who can fill right when you look at the population demographics, and this is a persistent function of the labor force. Now, we're always going to have that. On the other side, you got the other half of this, what we call them, a double whammy, is that the people that you have, the leaders say they don't necessarily have the skills for the future. And they themselves say we don't think we have the skills that are necessary for the future. And so as an organization, you got to be thinking about this now you have the war for talent is continuing to be heated up, you got people who have options out there, and the people that you have may not be skilled in a way you need to be skilled to move your business for I mean, that is a challenge. So you're not going to be able to just use the traditional methods.
Chas Fields:Nine box. Here's the nine box Good luck, you know, you're
Jarik Conrad:gonna have to be creative and we think one of the best ways to be creative is thinking about people you've already invested in their deep down maybe in some, you know, frontline On job, you know, in your organization, maybe they do a customer service, you know, the call center or something like that. But it turns out, and they love a county. And they do everybody in the family, everybody and neighborhood, they do all their taxes, they love it, they're great at it, they didn't get a chance to go to school to get a degree in accounting because of XYZ. Why don't we figure that out? And if we understand who can we pluck that person, can we run them off, give them the education, they need to give them some internships in our finance department, can we start to grow them to fill a job that we're going to need something that they really want to do? Now to make that happen, we're going to probably have to relax some of the educational requirements, and really focus on skills, you know, and they do the skills necessary for the job versus do they have a piece of paper, who, you know, says that they, you know, got, you know, a degree of certification. So we're gonna have to think differently about all of our people, what they might be able to contribute long term? And what does it mean to be qualified? Is it just a piece of paper? Or is it your demonstration of skills, like we can see you do it? Plus, you know, our culture? You know, you you know, we've invested getting you on board, and you know, who we are and how we operate, and you have a positive impact on the people around you. You're the exact kind of person that we want, why would we roll the dice and continue to go on the street to get somebody when we can invest in you? Right.
Julie Develin:And I always say, I always say to my audiences, you may have an internal pool of talent that you don't realize that you have, because we're not having the conversations to find out what it is that makes people tick, or what other skills they may have. So I love that. I love that Jarrett,
Chas Fields:my big thing is curiosity. Right? Like that's, that's what's driving this and you had mentioned, I mean, think about it, right? Let's think about our careers, if we were to simplify it. We did not know that 20 years ago, or however long ago that you were going to be the executive director of the workforce Institute and Vice President of Human insights, right?
Jarik Conrad:I knew it, I knew it.
Chas Fields:Or Julie, hey, I'm gonna spend 17 years as a VP of HR and then go inspire HR leaders and public speak, right. So the reality of it is we evolve. The workplace evolves, and we like new things. We want to be challenged by new things. We are curious to learn new things, and ironically, oh, here we go. Oh, we got Oh, yeah. Julie. Julie's at a hotel Julie's?
Julie Develin:No, not.
Jarik Conrad:Yeah, no, I didn't plug chat to say that. You know, this the story behind curiosities. Every year, our team picks a theme. And was it last year's theme? Last year's theme was curiosity. And this is something that everybody on the team got for our team retreat. And just to remind us to stay curious. So you know, that that's really important to me, and something that I you know, in every job, it matters, but I don't want to get on a tangent. I don't wanna break, you
Chas Fields:know, but it's tapping into that curiosity. Right. You know, you have a frontline worker who may be producing, you know, meat, right, but they are doing everybody's taxes. I don't know what situations. Manufacturing, it's, it's so innate to me to say one
Julie Develin:thing, before we carry on for those of you who are listening to the podcast, head over to YouTube to see a picture of the video of what Mozart is holding up. I'm not even gonna attempt to describe it.
Chas Fields:Yeah, it's the thing. It's the thinking. I don't know. Yeah, there you go. But the bottom line is where we mind those skills I clearly learn outside of the workplace. Julie, you clearly learn outside of the workplace Jarik, you clearly learn outside of the workplace, it is not UKG all of the time for us. And as we evolve into our next career, our next position or whatever, who's having the conversation about what we're curious about inside the organization? And I think that's what you're driving home. Am I missing that? No,
Jarik Conrad:you're absolutely on top of it. And again, we got to think we have something we've been talking about it UKG enterprise thinking, I mean, really encouraging all of our leaders to think about not only your particular organization you responsible for but but other parts of the organization. And we have to think about talent that way. You know, I've got to know that there are people on my team, who as much as I love them, they may need to go outside of my organization to get a different opportunity, right, learn something else, and maybe one day they can bring it back but right but I can't hold on to them. So if we're going to mine, we're going to have to be really open and have this enterprise mindset that these are people Both who work for our organization. And at the moment, maybe they don't report directly to me anymore. But, but we're gonna have to think a little bit differently about which as I think it does, we're carrying in a lot of things that we write about and talk about, it's almost, we're thinking about the white collar, you know, salary, you know, we're not always thinking about the frontline person. And it's almost like we have this class society in our organizations. And that's got to be shattered. If we're talking about talent, that's going to take us to the future, there is no first and second class. I mean, it never was. And we got to make sure that people on the frontlines understand that and open up opportunities for them to do other things in our organization. He
Chas Fields:actually highlighted Julie, before I give it back to you the intrapreneurship. Right, we actually just launched that program that UKG. Just another reason why we're an amazing place is that we are now taking talent who are interested in other areas of the business to go learn other areas of the business, something Julie and I've shared on previous podcast episodes, I don't know year ago, and now the program has come to life, which is really cool to see. Because, look, we want to keep talent just like everybody else, right? We want we want the best we want to attract and retain top talent. It's just another way that UKG does it. So Jules, yeah.
Julie Develin:So I'd love to, we could talk about each one of these for an entire episode. We probably will at some point, but just in the interest of time and for the audience. Let's talk about the third mega trend. And the third mega trend is the impending ESG gut check the environmental, social and governance initiatives that have become standard business practices for so many organizations, more than 90% of the s&p 500 companies now publish ESG reports and 70% of Russell 1000 companies publish ESG reports. So this is a big deal. But the real question is are organizations delivering? Jerry, what are your thoughts on this?
Jarik Conrad:Yeah, so it's, it's a little bit of a question mark, still picking on who you ask. You ask. And that's really the point of this mega train is that look, the C suite is in a different position. I mean, that job is completely different than it was a decade ago. Because of these, you know, these outside focus this outside scrutiny in areas like ESG, and you get this push pull going on. There has been over the past, I would say past year or two, an uptick in backlash against ESG, like you're only getting away from the purpose of a business is to deliver shareholder value. And all that other stuff is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, we were given too much attention to that stuff. Let's go back. On the other side, you have people saying, Look, you talked about this ESG stuff, but I don't see you doing a whole lot during the receipts, what have you actually done. So not only do we not want you to talk about it as much, we want you to actually start doing more about about it. And so you can pull, you know, on both sides, and it's got to be a difficult place for leaders who just didn't have to respond to this stuff in the past. So that's what we mean by great chat. It's like, okay, who are you really? And why are you doing it? Are you doing it because of the pressure you're getting from the outside? Are you doing these things because you feel like they make sense for your employees, they make sense for your customers, they make sense for your, your shareholders, you know, your your stakeholder community at large. So it's interesting, the numbers are mixed, particularly in the areas of dei and be interested, while we hear about some great successes, sometimes they're outliers. When you start to look at the numbers, the investments have not added up to what people kind of pledged they would be, we have not seen dramatic changes inside organizations from a demographic standpoint. I mean, we, we have not gone through this transformational process that some people had hoped we would have gone through over the past few years, given all the the George Floyd and you know, stuff that was so high profile. So what we're recommending is like, look, what can you what can you count on? We know that culture is important. We know that culture is important for you employees, we know that culture is important for your business and profitability. So a great place to work has all kinds of data on that. So we're saying look, stay true to who you are and who you say you're going to be. What is your values? What what is your culture that you're trying to drive the states to stay strong with that whether it's good times or bad or Again, great place to work has data to show in these really challenging times when the economy is down. And we're dealing with some kind of crises, a crisis, those organizations that stay true and continue to invest in that culture, they come out higher on a profitability standpoint. So, so that's what our recommendation is. And, by the way, Julia, I probably should have mentioned, part of what goes into the megatrends is first exploring what's going on in the world. And so these broad societal issues, we talk about them, and then we think about, okay, well, what are the workplace implications for these and, and that's really where this, this third megatrend comes from. And it, it's a global phenomenon, but it's particularly challenging here, especially as we start to get into this next presidential election cycle.
Chas Fields:Here, meaning the United States, we do have a global audience here, the
Jarik Conrad:more we're gonna see more stories about this, there's gonna be more debate about this, this is probably going to intensify even more.
Julie Develin:Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I just wonder also, if the conversation also turns to if the receipts are due, let's say the receipts, aren't there, the amount of transparency that organizations can provide, just saying, Hey, we missed the mark here. But here's how we're going to do better, I think is really important, especially in a world where rumors can run so rampant. No, they said, they were going to do this, and they didn't do that didn't do that, and et cetera. So just that transparency, I think becomes important.
Chas Fields:I also think it's really
Jarik Conrad:quick to to I mean, just timely. This morning, we sat in on a meeting with our marketing department to talk about, you know, how are we doing versus how we said, we're going to do relative to some of these issues. And, and, you know, we see, you know, exactly what's going on from a number standpoint and all that. And our whole team gets a chance to our leadership team gets a chance to weigh in and talk about, you know, how do we course correct, if we're not going in the right direction, we celebrate our successes, and we try to figure out, you know, how do we make sure that this is sustainable? Because, again, this is not, you know, we're responding to a trend. And we're, this is we have a fundamental belief that these are the right things to do for our business over the long term. And so how do we make sure these things are sustainable? Go ahead. No,
Chas Fields:I think people just have a threshold or a meter, have you said you were going to do this? And you and you didn't, right? And then companies have their hands up and saying, Well, why can't we, you know, achieve better profitability? Why can't we, you know, get the culture that we want, why can't we and employers are like, well, you just talk out of both sides of your mouth, and then attrition rates go up. And you see you kind of see it all with the domino effect, right. And that goes with any issue beyond ESG. And what I find so reasonable about this, is that this is also a major contributor to the culture that you want to perpetuate. Right? And it's, the more you invest in it, right? The better the result, the more you talk about it and don't do it, the end result is not going to be what you expect. It's not that difficult. But I love the point that both of you made is if you say you're going to do it, just do it. Right. And if and if you can't, then communicate that right, and the why behind it, you know, the
Jarik Conrad:why behind it people generally, man, and they feel respected. And they trust to more. And obviously, trust is the buzzword for us. I mean, it's the basis, the foundation for building a great place to work. So and you got to be intentional and consistent. That's because sometimes it may go like this, but you got to stay the course. Yeah,
Julie Develin:well, I think stay the course. I love that. I think that's a great part a great segue to an ending here. Because Derek, you know, you asked it, you said, why did it take so long? Well, this conversation has told us we need to have you back. So I think there's a lot more that we can discuss. And maybe as the year goes on, we can do a sort of a gut check for ourselves to see where we are with these trends and six months from now. Yeah. And then you'll have a conversation, etc. So yeah, so I think with that being said, Chas, what did you find your purpose and today,
Chas Fields:I tell you, it's always good to work with bright minded folks and creative people and I just appreciate your taking the time out of his busy schedule to record this and more importantly to continually allow us to space Julie to think differently and challenge our own curiosity and say, Hey, go do something that for for the company, so we I appreciate that. Jarik, Julie?
Julie Develin:Sure. No, I'm gonna
Chas Fields:I was gonna let him have a little extra time to say Well, let
Unknown:me say I don't say it enough, let me say I'm proud of you all for, you know, the work that you're doing, you're doing a great job with this podcast, I continue to hear great things. You know, I'm excited for you and your success in this. So, so thank you for that. And I guess in finding my purpose, I mean, I, you know, I, I've always loved HR, I mean, I went into HR, because I thought it really had an opportunity to serve this unique role that nobody else could do with an HR team can do for an organization, I mean, just use this unique role to touch so many aspects of the organization. And, and I've always enjoyed that. And, you know, as people probably can hear my voice, I still get excited in talking about these things. So I guess that's my purpose is that I, you know, I'm doing that thing that I felt like I felt like I was meant to do. And it makes it exciting to think about what what what is the 2025 mega trends going to look like? And how they're going to affect what we do as a company. And what we're talking to our customers about?
Julie Develin:Yeah, thank you, Jarik, for that, you know, I, I, my purpose is that these megatrends, every year I see them, and I lean into them. And I really try to dive deeper. And what I want our audience to know, and UKG customers and prospective customers, and everyone is that we're going to be taking these mega trends and talking about them in a little bit more of a micro scale as well in terms of industries, in terms of, you know, different size organizations, et cetera. So more to come. And I will end the show here by first thanking you so much, Jarik, for all of your support, and you're championing the podcast, and you're leading the workforce Institute and your leadership. We I know Chas, and I really appreciate it and our whole team does. And also want to say thanks for coming on the podcast. And also, don't forget to those of you who are listening to like and subscribe and use the hashtag people purpose pod on social media sites, but also, please don't forget to visit workforce institute.org And at workforce institute.org. You're going to see all of the mega trends stuff, and a lot of other research as well. So with that, thank you all and have a great day. Thanks, Jarik.
Jarik Conrad:Thank you, everybody.