A 15 Year Celebration of the HR Happy Hour Show

A 15 Year Celebration of the HR Happy Hour Show

Hosts: Steve Boese & Trish Steed

Today, we sat down to take a look back at the last 15 years of the HR Happy Hour Show. Hear the story of how the show began, and the many ways it has evolved through the years. From its humble beginnings as a call-in talk show to becoming a staple podcast in the HR community, we reflect on the pivotal changes and innovations that have shaped the show’s growth. Join us as we share some of our favorite episodes, moments. and guests while also exploring our dreams and ideas for continuing to provide insightful and engaging content to HR professionals everywhere. Celebrate with us today!

Thank you for joining the show today!  Remember to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts!

This episode is sponsored by Paychex, one of the leading providers of HR, payroll, retirement, and insurance solutions for businesses of all sizes. Are you a business leader or HR manager navigating the complex world of hiring and retaining top talent? Then you need Paychex’s Essential Guide to Finding and Keeping Your Dream Team to discover how to attract high-quality employees and keep them engaged and motivated long-term. Whether you’re looking to enhance employee career growth, improve your onboarding process, or understand the importance of flexibility in today’s workplace, this guide has got you covered. Grab your free copy at paychex.com/awia to unlock the secret to building your dream team today.

Transcript follows:

Steve 0:30
Welcome the At Work in America Show on the HR Happy Hour Network. My name is Steve Boese, I’m joined by Trish, how are you?

Trish 0:37
I’m good, Steve, how are you?

Steve 0:40
I’m well, I’m excited to be here. It’s summertime kind of almost. If not, officially, it feels like it. And we’re kind of doing a more casual show today. It’s no guest, old school, you and I talking about something that’s kind of important to us. Which is exciting, which is the 15th anniversary season and kind of within a few days or so of the 15th anniversary of the very first HR Happy Hour show, way back in 2009. So we thought we’d take a few minutes acknowledge that talk a little bit about the show some of the high points where we’re going with the show maybe a little bit at the end, and and certainly to sank. As many as we can. There’s too many defang, but just thank everyone supporting the show all these years.

Trish 1:33
Yeah, I’m excited because I’ve been on now since January of 2013. But, Steve, I went all the way back to 2009. And started listening in I believe, the first time I know, I listened to all of them. The first time I called in was on the third episode. And just to hear, and I know, we’ll talk a minute on sort of how it all evolved, but just to hear even what you sounded like 15 years ago, if you’ve not listened, Steve, I think you should go back yourself.

Steve 2:02
I admit to not listening back. And I will admit to not listening back too often to any of the shows, obviously, we’re on the show, I know what we’re talking about. So I don’t typically listen back to them. But yeah, maybe maybe over the weekend, I will for some fun.

Trish 2:16
I think you’d be surprised. The most surprising thing to me was I was still working, you know, in the trenches of HR and the things I thought were important, then, not that they’re not important now, but like I’ve kind of been out of that practitioner mode now for about nine years. And so, wow, it just took me right back to it. And what I was really dealing with, and the stressors and everything in the show was such an outlet for me to think about things differently. And I know we’ll talk about a lot of our guests we’ve had on or just people who’ve been supporters all these years. And wow, I learned so much. So both before becoming a co host of yours, I learned a ton. And then obviously, since joining as a co host, I’ve also continued to learn. So I think that it’s something you should be commended for creating.

Steve 3:11
Of course, thank you, of course, just the first person I will thank you, we won’t have to talk about the two or three times you sit, you talk me out of quitting the show and just one or two number of times. But we also must thank our friends at Paychex. Right, let’s thank them sort of second, if not first, supporting the show sponsoring the show for quite a number of years now. They’re with us again for this coming year. I can’t say enough about paychex.com/awia is our link. It’s always great resources there from buying guides to free reports analysis at the year end that, you know, Tom Hammond comes on and gives all the resources for folks to prepare for payroll year end and your begin all for free all from the community. And they’re wonderful supporters of us, but also the greater HR and Payroll community. So got to thank them first.

Trish 4:04
They make it happen, really, because I don’t know how familiar people people are when you’re doing a show. I mean, you’re paying for your platform, you’re paying for a lot of the marketing and things that go into production. And that’s really how we get the show done. And in addition, we have so many other shows now on the podcast network. And really what they’re doing is enabling us to do that as well. So not only can we sort of, you know, bootstrap things from the beginning to give back to the HR community into the business community more widely, but Paychex really just elevates that ability, I think.

Steve 4:40
Yeah, so. Absolutely. And thank you to them for all their support. So we actually did prepare some talking points and bullet points, things we wanted to make sure we touched upon real quick and one of the things I had talked about with our team and I just haven’t done it yet because I’m a slacker was. We’ve been on this show for so long and doing things we do for a long time. Sometimes it’s easy to forget, we may have new, or newer listeners or newer followers, right as people come into HR, or as new graduates come into the field, right, and we still show up on pretty much every time someone posts like, Oh, these are the top HR podcasts to listen to kind of a thing, right? The shows are always on there, which is great. And I’m appreciative of that. And I sometimes forget, we probably have people listening today who are brand new, right, or they’ve only had a couple of shows that don’t know any of the background. So we wanted to share a little bit of that this show started, as we said, 15 years ago, in 2009. It was so long ago, I didn’t call it a podcast, I didn’t. I guess I knew what a podcast was. But I didn’t realize what I was doing was a podcast. And it kind of wasn’t for a while, it really started as a vehicle to record remote interviews. And since I was so low tech, I didn’t really know any other way to do it. And we found a platform by which we could do that we could have a live conversation via telephone, and record that conversation, and then make it available to folks later, which became the podcast.

Steve 6:13
But at the beginning, it was just that I was teaching a class at the time. And I was interviewing, you know, leaders in the field in HR and HR tech to make those interviews available to the class right as a kind of like an assignment, if you will. And that morphed into a way at the time was also the really the the evolution and the growth of Twitter primarily right as a mechanism for folks to connect, both professionally and personally and socially. And there was a really vibrant, HR Twitter community at that time, which lasted quite a number of years. But certainly back in 2009, there was lots of activity on Twitter, specifically around HR, and people conversing around HR. So we use the platform that I had set up set up for other reasons, right, to sort of take some of that online, connecting and online conversations, and breathe a little more life into them essentially, right, make them more real by virtue of actually having conversation, there was no video, we weren’t doing anything on video, it was just audio and via phones, but we could do interviews, we could have Collins, we could do all the things with this platform that we still use now to actually host the show. And that’s how I started, it really started by on really on accident. And then I just I just happened to have a platform that could do the kinds of things that people wanted to do. And that’s really the only reason I became the host of HR Happy Hour. If I’m honest about it.

Trish 7:44
I love how it started and why Steve and I think to one one of the takeaways for anyone maybe who is more junior in your career, and you’re listening to this, many of the things that we’ve talked about over the years, including you starting this, you don’t have to have a master plan, right? So just don’t wait. If there’s something if you want to use your voice in some way, whether that’s written form, whether it’s you know, audio, video, whatever, do just start it right, you can always we’ve changed we’re going to talk about the evolution of the podcast, we’ve morphed it in so many ways over the years. But yeah, those early days. I do remember meeting meeting, I’m doing air quotes, people on Twitter, and thinking, wow, I have little kids. So I’m not out networking, in in real life at that point. So that was my network that became my people I talked to and really kind of the most you could do then was just get like on a conference call with two or three people and have a conversation. So what you did was you blew that up, you amplify that to, you know, 1010s of people, as you kind of alluded to early on, but but very quickly to hundreds of people, right, we would have you did a live show it was every Thursday night. I remember like, it didn’t matter if my son had football practice, or if I was working late or whatever I was calling in to hear that show.

Steve 9:03
It was super important, like a live radio show on the internet. So we did that for a long time. We did that for a couple of years, somewhere around Episode 100, or maybe right around episode 100. After a couple years of doing that, we took the show from the live iteration and we made it what’s now classically considered the podcast format, which everybody knows now but back then nobody knew or fewer people knew. And we’ve been doing the pre recorded ever since. The podcast itself, as you mentioned, just has evolved as well. Right? The original HR Happy Hour still exist in podcast form. We added the At Work in America podcast, which is the title of this show today. We have other podcasts that that posts on our network as well. And we’ve we we’ve evolved in terms of content topics themes. We’ve done so many shows now we stopped counting them right and but I know we’ve evolved in really trying to get into, especially on the outwork in America show, really trying to learn more about the people, right, and their stories and their experiences at work. And, and, you know, and we still have room and space for things like AI and the latest in technology and employee engagement trends and those things, we saw room and space for those on the network, we do those things. But on our show on the network in America show specifically, we’ve been able to really get into some super interesting stories in the last couple years, which I’m pretty proud of too.

Trish 10:30
Yeah, I think that we’ve had to change and grow as the needs were changing and growing, right, we still, you mentioned, the HR hub, our podcast itself that still exists. But, you know, we got to the point where like, we want to talk about things beyond technology, right. And so but we didn’t want to lose the technology piece either. So we still do those HR Happy Hour, classic type episodes where we really are digging in on the technology on architecture, sort of why it’s built, the way it’s built, and what what it can achieve. And you’ll see those more actually, as live when we’re at events, you know, as I’ve looked back over the years of all these shows, and we’re actually approaching our 4 million download, which is amazing to me. We’re very, very lucky. And I’ll even say we’re blessed that we have that much support over the years on what we’re doing. But you’re right, when we it’s about three, I guess it’s three and a half years ago that we kind of added that brand about work in America. And we’ve we’ve covered like a recent one I know that we would have never covered was about menopause. Yeah, and how employers can help so many women in the workplace, right, who actually start into perimenopause, like in their 30s. I didn’t even know that until we had a show about it. Right. So when you think about shows like that are around hiring people who are maybe typically not your first thought, right? Someone who might have neurodiversity or a different physical challenges, or formerly incarcerated or veterans, you name it, right? We’ve done sort of all those shows, and tried to open up the way that people think about what work should look like, how do we be more inclusive?

Steve 12:16
And I think we were somewhat either, if not ahead of the game early into the game on some of those things I just saw and read it yet, but I bookmarked it. This morning in HBR. In Harvard Business Review, there was there’s a piece today about making your interviewing process more accessible for people who are neurodiverse. And I’m thinking man, we’ve done like five shows on that the first one was probably four years ago, right. So I think it’s great that it’s being covered in lots and lots of places. But I’m also a little bit proud, I’ll allow us to say, of some of the things we’ve done in those areas, too.

Trish 12:51
I think because it’s our show and we embrace like we can talk about what we want when we want and whether that ties to work or not. That’s up to us, but and often it does. But I’ll give you another one. Steve, I was watching CBS. I didn’t know I think it was Saturday morning. And like a week ago, Saturday, and they were showing an upcoming interview they were going to be doing with the gentle barn, which are several locations, but one of them is outside of St. Louis. And it’s been years ago, since we did that show where we really went out. We went out a couple of summers. And for anyone who hasn’t listened, please go back and listen to the gentle barn show. But it’s really about how these rescued animals are used in therapy in therapeutic ways with whether it’s children who have come from really difficult, you know, abusive homes, working with elderly who just need to be able to go and hug a cow, right? But you can also bring your work force out to do these things. And so it was fun to see that okay, now CBS you know, Sunday morning or whatever is going to be getting on the bandwagon and like interviewing who we did years ago.

Steve 14:00
I totally forgot about that. I mean, I remember now of course it was hugging cows. We did. We ought to maybe reach out to those folks and maybe go back out there again. That was a lot of fun. And, and even things like we went out to the farm. Warm Springs Ranch, right, right. Where the famous Budweiser Clydesdales are actually born and raised right before they go into their training to become the famous Clydesdales. You see on Super Bowl commercials and holiday commercials. So an awesome experience as well. So we’ve done a lot of cool things like that. That’s a little bit of the backstory of the podcast. We are sort of evolving all the time. We’ve got some new things coming up even even now that we wanted to talk also church. That’s where again, it’s our show, right? I’ll throw this one to you first, and I got a couple of thoughts, but we thought we thought we should hit what were a couple a couple of memorable episodes that stand out in your mind just like I don’t know. 123 however many you want.

Trish 14:57
Yeah, I’m gonna run through them really quick because again, I didn’t go back and listen to everything that’d be impossible to do. But I kind of went all the way back to the beginning. So it was it’s not even necessarily when I was your co host. Okay. Shana Morkie was your first co host. And one of my favorite shows I know you get sick of me telling you was Matt Stillman. The show episode for anyone interested is called creative approaches. And I was, I was heroes at home and I was struggling with one of my kids not seeming as grateful as I thought they should be or could be. And Matt was this guest you had where we could call in and ask those questions. And he was giving us creative approaches to all of our problems. So fascinating show. One I loved. And again, I wasn’t the co host, officially, but I was co host on the show was on live from Gettysburg. Yeah, we went. We went to, to Gettysburg with a training group, I guess you would call leadership training.

Steve 15:57
Yeah, experiential training, experiential learning. Technically, I think you’d call it.

Trish 16:01
We had gone through, you know, two and a half days of crawling on our bellies, through the woods, and the leaves and twigs and our hair and everything else, learning about Gettysburg and actually feeling and experiencing it. And then we recorded the podcast live from Gettysburg. That gives me chills. The last one, I’m gonna say that was super important to me. There’s so many, there’s so many fun ones are HR horror stories, things like that are fun. But the very first one we did, again, I was not a co hosts, I like to pick none that I was co host of now that I’m looking at it was HR evolution. I think it was about episode five or six of the podcast. Way back, several of us again, had had decided, You know what we’re going to conferences are too expensive, we’re going to start our own, we’re gonna band together and start our own. And it was not just the birth of HRevolution as an event, which we had nine of them over the years, which I love. But it was more of like the movement behind that. And so many people, over the years have have maintained those connections they made through that event and through that HRevolution community. So those are my favorites. What about you, I mean, we’ve got so many to pick from,

Steve 17:17
I just kind of used my memory. Honestly, I didn’t really look back to the archive too closely, certainly one I had talked about in the past as being my favorite show at some point. And it’s certainly among my favorites was, we had the author and professor Sherry Turkle on the show some years back. And she had written a book at the time, recent book at the Times called alone together. And it was really one of the most earliest kind of looks at the effects of technology, ubiquitous use of smartphones, ubiquitous connectivity, social media a little bit even back then. And the impacts those were having on kids, like kind of pre teens, teens, and even into the teenage years. And that was the focus of her research. remarkably interesting book, and she was a fantastic guest talking about the book. I hadn’t reread the book in a long time, the books probably now 15 years old as well or close to that. But at the time, I thought, boy, this is really awesome, because we’ve got this MIT professor doing this really, really important research on an important topic that I was curious about, but also one that was certainly important to not just people in their considerations in the workplace, but also just in their lives and how they might be dealing with their own kids. And I thought, boy, that’s really a cool thing that we could do. So that was one, then. And if I look back to we were definitely even before we sort of spun off the podcast, we were still doing some interesting things. And out of the box things and I had connected with an author, you probably will remember her chest. Her name was Kaya Oakes, who’s still around still writing books. And at the time, I was like, I was one of those people who was always like, Oh, I like to alternative music and all that. And so I had read her book, her one of her early books were happening about the alternative music scene, which was a part of she was a journalist. And it was just a chronicle of that scene. And I somehow tried to finagle a way to tie that into the world of work in the workplace. I doubt I did effectively. But I had her on to talk about the book. She was I think, stunned when I reached out to her. She had no idea who I was, or what this was, but she did the show. And she was great. And the book is great, too. And then years later, she came out with another book, which is about religion. And we had her on again to talk about that. And so again, not a normal topic for our show, but a super interesting conversation. And so I thought maybe we’d reach out to her again. I did look her up just to double check on. You got a new book coming out in July high it does. Perfect. It’s on forgiveness, right. And so the kind of the thesis of the book, I just read the blurb on Amazon. The book comes out in July. Was that Maybe we shouldn’t always be so quick to forget, right? Like we are sort of trained and cultured. And there’s a little bit of a religious undertone as well to for forgiveness and expressing forgiveness and granting forgiveness. And I think the thesis and the idea in the book and again, I have not read this book, it’s not out yet, but is maybe we ought to rethink some of that. So I’m fascinated to get that book when it comes out. And we’ll, we’ll try to get her back on the show.

Trish 20:26
I love it. You know, it’s funny is I didn’t know what you were going to choose as your favorites, and you didn’t know mine. But when you think of all the ones that we’re choosing, it’s nothing that is immediately makes you think of work, workplace or technology. So I do think that is something that’s helped everyone learn not just us, but by bringing in whether it’s authors or speakers, even those in our industry, Dave Ulrich, we’ve had him on the show several times and very, very brash, you know, when it comes to human resources and understanding the workplace. He’s excellent at that. So, but I like that we’ve always sort of done our own thing. Yes, it’s about HR. Yes, it’s about work. But we do it our way. Right. We’ve done a lot of shows on basketball. On other sports. We do. I look back, Steve, we’ve had politics. We cover politics and religion have been.

Steve 21:16
We laid off politics in the last few years, probably on purpose. And I’m not sure I’m wanting to go back there. But I do we talk about unions, or a lot, too. And that is an important issue. And that does have a tinge of political angles to it. But is there someone you’d like to have back on the show? I mentioned, Kyle, try to get back on the show. Is there someone we had on that person back.

Trish 21:40
There are so many good people? I was thinking back to this actually, I do have an answer. It’s Don Weinstein, here’s why. So if anyone’s been listening to this show for a long time, we have several people who are like five timers or more, right, kind of the five timers club. And there is a gift that they all get. It’s not like the green jacket. You know, the PGA gives for the Masters but but it’s a set of steak knives that are very nice. Right?

Steve 22:12
I have no idea really. It’s a reference to Glengarry Glen Ross to the Alec Baldwin stuff. You know, lecturing the salesman. Second place is better steak knives.

Trish 22:26
A set of steak knives. Well, anyway, so can I just mentioned so we had, we talked about Don Weinstein, we’ve had Gretchen Alarcon, Cecile Alper Leroux, Ben Brooks, and Lisa Sterling have all been on five or more times. And the reason that I think they’re important is because these are people who have made remained relevant over the last 15 years as their careers have just taken very different twists and turns. And they’ve worked with different companies and in different roles. And so I just feel like we haven’t caught up with Don for a while he, he had been an executive with ADP for a very long time. And he’s now in a very new, exciting role. So I think it’s time we get Don back on the show.

Steve 23:08
Well, we will talk to him soon. As a matter of fact. Yeah, that’s great. I think those are those are all great people. And honestly, there’s a reason why we’ve had them on so many times. Right. They have a lot to say they’re interesting. They’re there. They’re friends of ours. They’re cool. So yeah, so we’ve got a couple of shows coming up to kind of acknowledge that. So we’ll have some of those OG folks that you mentioned on, we’ll have a few other kind of interesting folks from back in the day, the early days of the show on we’ll do a little retrospective. We’ll be recording those shows in the next few weeks. So she’s there a dream guest. Okay. And we’ve we have had quite a few out of the box guests. Is there someone? What can I do? I do think I know who you’re going to say.

Trish 23:53
We did not talk about. Who do you think I would pick?

Steve 23:56
I think you’re gonna say the host of Survivor Jeff.

Trish 24:01
Yes, I want Jeff Probst on the show. I don’t know I don’t know what my fascination is with survivor but it’s, it’s on Pluto TV now, like 24/7 on the survivor channel, and it’s just sort of like, you know, we work at home we’ve worked at home for I’ve worked at home for nine years now. And it can get quiet. So I need something on in the background. Sometimes it’s not music, it’s got to be just something that like that. I’m not going to just sit there and get sucked into because I don’t want to watch TV while I’m working. So I put survivor on so Jeff Probst. You’re my co worker, my colleague. I want him on the show. You know why to I think with survivor and he has his own podcast called on fire, which is excellent where he talks all about the show with different contestants. But I think what’s fascinating is watching how survivor morphs into you know, they’ve done specific seasons for example, on based on the type of worker you are. I was just rewatching when the A day where it was like white collar versus blue collar versus no collar, like a whole season.

Steve 25:05
What are the no collar people?

Trish 25:06
Just like the free spirits. Oh, gotcha, gotcha. Maybe they’re artists or maybe they do their own thing, right musicians, things like that, where you’re, you know, maybe you’re an exercise guru or whatever. But I think that they’ve always done a good job of getting people of all ages, right. They always incorporate different generations, all backgrounds, all ethnicities, and then finally, all different types of workers. Yeah. And sometimes people disclose what they do, and some don’t.

Steve 25:34
It is not a just a survivor thing, right. It’s more of a reflection on American society, though. But I do know this on survivor and many other of these kinds of shows. When they they have like an interview or a little confessional with one of the contestants, it’ll say, Mary Jane, comma, 37 years old and right under it, it’ll say whatever her job is, what her job is right? marketing, or sales or waitress or whatever it is, right? Whatever. The things we do for work are such a, like the three pieces of her identity that survivor producers think we should be reminded of when we see her her name, her age, and what her job is.

Trish 26:10
Right? I would like why aren’t we asking like, you know, her name, her age and what her favorite movie is, or her favorite band or her favorite color? Right? Yeah, it’s it’s so random as to why we and when we introduce ourselves to people, the one of the first things you’re asked is, well, what do you do?

Steve 26:27
It’s usually question number two or three, right? Yeah.

Trish 26:30
So I do think that it is fun to think about from a show perspective. I know we’re kind of talking also about plans for the future, but it’s like, work is so ingrained in everything we do that I do think it’s important, and you can morph it any way you want to. Yeah. What about you?

Steve 26:48
The big one is way out of the box. We’ll never get this person in no way. No one we ever shot. So, I the best book I’ve read in the last few years. years is a book called Clara and the sun it’s a novel and that’s Klara and the Sun, by Caswell Ishiguro Trish, who is a Japanese author who has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He has written a number of very famous books, including The Remains of the Day, which made a movie and another book called, which I’m reading now called Never Let Me Go, which also became a movie. But Klara and the Sun came out a couple years ago. And it was on like, you know, top lists of the year kind of thing. And at the end of the year, a couple years ago, I picked it up. And it’s it’s really, it’s a novel all about artificial intelligence. And it’s set in kind of a near distant fictional future where artificial intelligence robots essentially humanoid, though, look, they look just like people are developed to become companions for children. Okay? It’s okay. Klara is the robot or the AI, they call them artificial friends in the book. And she gets adopted, essentially purchased. But they adopted into a family where she becomes the artificial friend of a girl who has had a lot of issues with her house and things like that. And it’s a lot it’s a longer story. And it’s a great story, though. But it really makes you think a lot and really hard about where technology is going, what it suggests about us and our relationship with technology. And it’s fascinating. It’s a good story as well.

Steve 28:26
So I thought, oh, man, this is the best thing I’ve read in years. And then I looked up the author who I didn’t really know. But oh, Nobel Prize for Literature. That’s probably why the book is so good. So I’m right now reading, Never Let Me Go, which is an older book, it’s probably a 15 year old book itself, but I never read it. So I started that. So that’s my dream guest will probably not be able to make that happen. The other guests those Trish is somebody similar to Jeff probes, someone we’ve seen on our TV screens for many years. And I’ve actually met because he keynoted at HR tech a few years ago, which is micro. So dirty jobs most famous for Dirty Jobs. He also has a series called how America Works, which is similar ish to the concepts of Dirty Jobs. He took a keynote at HR Tech, before the pandemic, so 17 or 18, or 19, I can’t remember what year but we got to need him got to hang out with him. Super nice guy. Great stories, great point of view about the value of the skilled trades and the blue collar jobs that you mentioned earlier. And not everybody shouldn’t necessarily go into hundreds of 1000s of dollars of debt, right for a college degree. There’s lots of other options out there. And certainly that happens. We see this still in industries in the US today. There are lots of those kinds of jobs that have shortages of workers, and more and more Gen Z people. I did a couple of workplace minutes on this topic recently, more and more Gen Z people are choosing to go into those fields for a multitude of reasons. But it turns out micros probably been right all along on a lot of things he’s been saying for years and years. And he was is a suit and on top of all that nicest person I’ve ever met in the context of famous people coming to do keynotes at our conferences? Absolutely a jam, wonderful guy. So yeah, Mike Rowe would be a guest I’d love to have on the podcast. Excellent.

Trish 30:17
Well, you got two, can I do one more? So I won’t go into it. But I had the opportunity to meet Randy Travis and his lovely wife, Mary, not too long ago, and spend time with them at the ranch. And for anyone who doesn’t know, Travis, obviously, Country Music Hall of Fame, Jim. But his wife, Mary, actually, she’s from Texas. She’s from Plano. And I think she would be a good guest on the show. And here’s why she actually went to Baylor and studied Marketing. Okay. And, you know, and she’s she had worked in that, you know, out of college and whatnot, and done some, you know, fairly significant jobs. But once she got married to Randy, she’s really managed his career and he had a stroke about it was in 2013. And so when you look at someone, we’ve talked about caregiving, for example, just as how that relates to us as workers, but when you think about it’s not only your loved one, but it’s someone you’re helped managing their career, right, when they need a caregiver. So it’s being able to use sort of the skills that she went to school for that we always think like, wow, okay, we’re trying to use the skills we went and maybe get a degree in or trade school or whatnot. But then how do you morphed that when when life circumstances change? I think it’s a fascinating story if we could ever get her on, so she should make the assets to Yeah. So Mary Travis, she’s awesome.

Steve 31:50
So we had some, so we’ll, we’ll try to see if we can make some of those things happen in the next year or so. But yeah, I think it’s been Trish I plan for the future was the last thing we wanted to talk about. We’re doing more video probably, as we get into this year more and going forward. And that’s no surprise, given what’s happened in content and media in general, right. And we’ll probably look to do even more of that in the back half of this year, especially once we get out into the into the fall season of events and conferences, and we bought some new equipment that I need to learn how to use before going out to Sherm for a day. So I’ll try to do some things there with the camera. Hopefully I can I can figure it out. But that’s one thing you know, we’re going to try to do is try to evolve our presentation a little bit to try to meet people where they’re at.

Trish 32:38
Yeah, and I think just in terms of evolving the show, we’ve done we’ve tried to do a really good job over the years. You mentioned at the top we you know, we have other shows in the network. It’s become more than just our podcast or your original podcast now network. Of course, we have the two shows we talked about you did mention you do the workplace minute. So a little two to three minute shorter version of a podcast right on Amazon Alexa as well. We do YouTube,

Steve 33:02
on YouTube, as well as going out to YouTube.

Trish 33:06
H3 Live, also on YouTube as well. But we also have our I want to say just a shout out to all of our co-hosts because we have George LaRocque, who has been doing this for years now with Work Tech, Madeline Laurano, does Radical Research where she talks about all of the research she’s doing, but also she’s a talent acquisition specialist. So when you know not that you and I don’t ever do a talent acquisition show, but boy, if you want to deep dive that’s catch her shows. Sarah Morgan, the Inclusion Crusade. Sarah has been doing this for a few years with us too. And I swear, it’s like when you listen to the first episode till now, she is a phenomenal interviewer. That’s a career building skill when you start doing podcasts as part of your, your day job, if you will. So here’s our great, Mervyn Dinnen, has been doing it for a couple years with us now on HR Means Business. He’s based in London covers a lot of what’s going on in both Great Britain as well as you know, Europe and even how that impacts kind of global organizations but with the European twist, and then one of my favorites, The Play by Play, which is our Gen Z podcast with host Jack McFarlane, my son, and Nick Schlemmer, my nephew, so they just recorded yesterday, as a matter of fact, and it’s not out yet. But like, I think, you know, they’ve been doing it about a year and a half. And again, as you know, Nick is 20, almost 23 here in a couple of days. Jack is 20 to hear how they have improved their interviewing skills. They’re doing real hard hitting shows on things like finance. They’ve done them also on some of the trades, you know, with carpentry and other you know whether you choose to go into the military, if you don’t go to college, like there are just other outlets. So they’re kind of the perfect guys to talk about that.

Steve 34:56
It’s great. I mean, everyone’s talking about Gen Z, including me, I talked about it a lot on some of them. We do. And it’s good to hear actual Gen Z people talking about how they feel, how they think, what’s on their mind, and what’s important to them. So I love that show as well, those guys are doing a great job. So yeah, everyone’s doing a really good job. And I’m excited for that. I’m excited for where we’re going. We’ve got a couple of like, kind of retrospective shows coming up with some of the guests that Trisha mentioned, and some other guests coming up. So that’s really exciting as well. I do want to say real quick, just before we go, Happy Pride Month, pride has started on June, my pride shirt today. And so we will probably be doing some stuff on that soon, too. So anyway, this has been a lot of fun. Thanks, again, everyone for bearing with us for all these years, it’s been quite quite a ride. And we’d love to hear from you as well. You can find us easily on LinkedIn, you can find us on I’m still on X, although I don’t check it as much as they used to.

Trish 35:50
But Facebook, YouTube, everywhere

Steve 35:55
I heard I have a TED talk now even search this. You can find this there. And HRHappyHour.net is the place where all the shows all the shows all the network stuff all comes together. So Trish, thank you for almost 15 years of great partnership on this.

Trish 36:13
No, thank you for the opportunity. And thank you for creating this. I know again, if you’re new to listening to this, at least go back and check out an episode from 2009 It really doesn’t even matter which one because they’re actually really really good. I think the only thing can we talk about one thing. We talked about evolution of the show. The music has evolved quite a bit. I personally my favorite intro music you ever had was the was it? Come on get happy. I don’t know if that’s the technical name of the song. It was a happy hour. I love that. But we went through like you started. Yeah, Partridge Family. But at first it was a very like hard rock music at the beginning. Then you’ve kind of done alternative for a while. And so I think as you’ve grown and morphed it’s also morphed with you.

Steve 37:00
Now I only listen to Kentucky bluegrass. So that’s it. Oh, well.

Trish 37:04
Sounds like we’re going to need a new song maybe.

Steve 37:07
Good stuff. Thank you again, everybody for listening. Go to hrhappyhour.net and thanks to our friends at Paychex. Thank you Trish and thank you Karen Steed, of course our producer. She does wonderful job and yeah, that’s it. I think we’re done.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai