How Scheduling Impacts Employee Mental Health and Work Life Balance

530 – How Scheduling Impacts Employee Mental Health and Work Life Balance

Hosts: Steve Boese, Trish McFarlane

Guests: Alison Stevens, Director of HR Services at Paychex and Jeanne Meister, Executive Vice President at Executive Networks

This episode of At Work in America is sponsored by Paychex, one of the leading providers of HR, payroll, retirement, and insurance solutions for businesses of all sizes. Nearly one-third of U.S. employees say their work schedule still remains unpredictable as a result of the pandemic, a factor they report as having a significant effect on their overall well-being – from causing financial stress, to feeling disconnected from family friends. And, this appears to be affecting younger generations the most.To learn more about these findings, and how you can optimize work scheduling to help better support your employees, visit payx.me/schedules today.

This week, we met with Alison Stevens and Jeanne Meister, to learn about new research surrournding unpredictable employee schedules and the impact on employee absenteeism, turnover, productivity, and morale.

– Adverse impacts of unpredictable work schedules on full-time and part-time employees

– How the pandemic has changed hybrid workers’ schedules

– Paychex’s recommendation on how HR professionals can ensure their business practices comply with the law and also increase scheduling predictability

Learn more here

Thank you, Alison and Jeanne, for joining the show today!  Remember to subscribe to the HR Happy Hour wherever you get your podcasts.

Transcript follows:

Announcer 0:26
Welcome to At Work in America, sponsored by Paychex. We welcome a wide and exceptionally impressive array of guests, business leaders, HR leaders, academics, practitioners, consultants and authors to talk about the most timely, relevant and challenging issues that are influencing the workplace today. At Work in America digs in behind the headlines and trends to the stories of real people making a difference in the world of work. And now here are your hosts, Steve Boese, and Trish McFarlane Steed.

Trish 1:00
Hi, we have a great show for you. Today we’re going to be talking with Alison Stevens from Paychex and Jeanne Meister, from Executive Networks about new research just released about the impact of unpredictable employee schedules on absenteeism, turnover, productivity and morale. First, I want to take a moment and let you know a little bit more about Alison and Jeanne. Alison Stevens is the Director of HR Services at Paychex, a leading provider of integrated human capital management software solutions and services for payroll, HR, benefits, and insurance solutions for America’s businesses. Alison leads a team of over 600 HR professionals who are responsible for providing HR outsourcing services to Paychex HR clients across the US. Her career in human resources and leadership spans 25 years in the professional services, and HCM outsourcing industries. Jeanne, who is the founder of Future Workplace and Executive Vice President of Executive Networks, the leading HR peer network company, for the global 1000 is also a longtime friend of the show, and frequent guest that you might have heard before on the show. Jeanne is also the best selling author of three books that have received the Silver Best Business Book Award for human resource professionals, and the bellwether award by the community college futures assembly. She is leading a multiclient research program for executive networks on the future role of the CHRO the future of working and learning and employee well being. So welcome to the show, Allison and Jeanne.

Alison Stevens 2:42
Thank you.

Jeanne Meister 2:43
Thank you. Great to be here.

Trish 2:45
Thank you both. Well, before we get started into the stories, why don’t we just take a minute for the listeners? Alison, if you could just say hello and a little blurb about yourself so people can get familiar with your voice?

Alison Stevens 2:59
Absolutely. Great to see you both. Thank you so much for having me. And Jeanne and I were talking this week about how it’s because of Steve that she and I both met. I think it was early on in the pandemic, we were both on an HR Executive live stream together and developed a fast friendship from there. So it was fun.

Steve 3:19
I remember that.

Alison Stevens 3:19
Yeah, we owe it to you for the partnership and relationship that we’ve built really, really grateful.

Trish 3:26
So I love that. I love that. And Jeanne, I know if anyone’s a fan of the show they’ve heard you before, but if you could say hello to so that they have your voice fresh in their minds.

Jeanne Meister 3:35
Thank you for inviting me once again, I love being on your show. And I’m excited with the new format and the new name At Work in America. As I continue to do research with Executive Networks, and of course with with Paychex, that you know, we want to bring our research and stories to life on the show. So thank you for having me.

Trish 4:03
Good. Well, that’s definitely what we plan to do here today. I know you’ve both have plenty of data to share as well as some stories so that people can really feel that connection to the data. So why don’t we just start off with setting the stage Alison with the story. I know you’ve brought a really special one from Paychex, so why don’t you take it away and we’ll go from there.

Alison Stevens 4:26
Sure. So, here at Paychex, we have a client. They were they’re located in the Bay Area, at large retailer in the area and they had an employee she’s a single mother, who was initially working 30 hours a week when she first started at this retail store. over a couple of months of time since she started with the company her hours started to grow erratic. So, you know couple of weeks she was working 20 hours instead of 30 then 12, then only 8. And then I think the tipping point for the client was when she was called into work on a Saturday and needed to pivot quickly to get daycare for her eight year old son and also report into work and it was not expected and not scheduled. So this employee came to our client, to the employer, really concerned and expressing some dissatisfaction with the scheduling irregularities and shared with the client that, you know, she may not be able to remain working there and was going to start looking for a job elsewhere. And that was really the jumping off point where the employee called their HR professional and said, I really need some help in addressing this particular issue, because this employee is such a great performer. And what do I need to do to not only turn this situation around, but prevent it from happening any other time?

Steve 5:49
Yeah, I love that story, Alison, and it just highlights why this is such a pressing issue for many people. And for many, then by extension for many employers. Plus, I don’t know exactly where this employer is. But they could even be running up against some local regulations around scheduling. I know, San Francisco, I think was one of the places anyway, that enacted fairly recently, some much more stringent requirements of employers to have a little bit more schedule, transparency and predictability.

Alison Stevens 6:20
Exactly, Steve. So it’s called fair scheduling legislation that’s been enacted, it’s been enacted in the state of Oregon, cities such as San Francisco, New York, Seattle. And so many of these laws are mandating that employers pay workers for last minute scheduling changes, known as predictability pay, also, including for on call shifts. So there’s a lot behind that, and looking forward to not only talking about the details and sort of how this story unfolded and the impact that we had on the employer, but also, you know, how we can talk about the research that you did in partnership with us and some of our findings and how it directly relates to to the story.

Trish 6:58
Yeah, that’s so good. Can you maybe talk a little bit, you mentioned the research. And of course, we have Jeanne on because she’s partnered with you all on that? Could you maybe introduce the the impetus for the research specifically, and and then we can bring gene into the conversation to really talk through some of those details around this, not just this client, but many of your clients who are having similar sort of things they’re up against with, you know, scheduling and unpredictability, that sort of thing?

Alison Stevens 7:24
Sure. So you know, if you take a step back and think about all of the things that employers and employees have experienced over now, the past several years, we’re really, we really started to hear from our customer base, that employee scheduling has just become a lot more complex, we’re in the workplace of the future. So companies have had to flex their approach, even in that definition of what does it mean, when you talk about business hours, right, introducing new strategies that they really may not have previously considered things like flexible hours, job sharing, just offering part time work, that kind of list goes on and on. And so, you know, in talking with my team, we’ve definitely seen a rise, particularly in certain industry verticals that have been feeling the impact of unpredictable, unpredictable scheduling. So verticals like retail, hospitality, agricultural, food, services, cleaning, construction, you know, those are probably the main industries, we’ve seen where that impact has led to income fluctuations, difficulty and employees being able to just schedule personal appointments or second jobs, and challenging for those employees were also parents or caring for an elderly parent or a child having to arrange for care without notice. And that causes ultimately a lot of stress. And, you know, in working and partnering with Jeanne, she was able through her research to really validate a lot of our findings through through her research and conversations with America’s businesses.

Steve 8:48
Alison, thank you for that. That’s, I think that dovetails us nicely into Jeanne, welcome you into the conversation here to tell us a little bit about then, because you, you’ve done a lot of great, great research over the years. So I’m sure you were really enthusiastic about this particular topic, but maybe take us into some of the research and maybe let’s call out a couple of the things that were kind of important from the findings and what those implications would be for folks who are listening to this show.

Jeanne Meister 9:16
Absolutely. Well, first, I want to say that we landed on this topic because of Alison and her team of 600. Right? Have we had a virtual focus group, a very large virtual focus group. And what were the issues that these HR coaches HR VPs were facing day in and day out on the ground with Paychex customers, and this was one that really unanimously came to the top. So from that we devised a survey and surveyed. I think it was 603 workers so we are focused entirely on the workers, right? What are the issues of the workers of the sample? With this piece of research, we did things a little differently, we included part timers, actually 48% of our research sample were part timers, and they make up about 20% of the workforce, and 63% of them are women. So with the example that Alison shared of a single mom, she’s very representative, right, signing on to a new job in a retail organization, thinking she’s going to be working 30 hours a week and sort of organizing her life and her daycare, around 30 hours a week. And then you heard from the story, it doesn’t take long before she’s working eight hours on a Saturday, right. And so we, we polled this group of 603. And three out of 10 said they were either slightly or extremely impacted with unpredictable work schedules.

Jeanne Meister 11:10
And so what was this impacting? Well, first of all, their, their mental health, right, their increased stress and burnout, trying to juggle lots of balls. Importantly, the second with the example was financial well being, you know, they’re not able to really meet their bills, if they’re, if their hours go from 30 hours to 8 hours a week. And then for the youngest workers, the future workforce, the big issues there were, they just didn’t have enough time to participate in training and development. I mean, this is they’re early in their career, and they’re trying to map out their career journey. And with all this unstability they weren’t, they’re not able to do that. And it’s very difficult. So you know, those were, you know, and then I think with that we also segmented the research by how an individual worked, was it hybrid? Was it remote, or was it in person. And interestingly, and I’m finding this from other research as well, hybrid workers are feeling the most stressed here. And it makes sense right there juggling between working at home working at a client location, working at the in the office of company location. And they’re finding that they’re really strapped for time. And it’s increased and increased stress on that.

Trish 12:46
No, I’m so glad you broke down kind of all of the different ways that you were able to sort of slice the data, because it’s really, as I was sort of reading this before we started recording, I was thinking it’s a really unique approach right now that you’re making, because we wouldn’t have had maybe all of this focus on the different places people work, right? Or the fact that you’re bringing in part timers. And quite frankly, workers actually asking workers what they think. In the past, we traditionally asked HR or the business leaders what their employees think. So first of all, just a kudos to you and the team for creating a study that actually looks at at this from the workers perspective.

Trish 13:32
I know there’s so much data to dig into the one thing I would say is what would be some of the most surprising findings? Was there anything whether that was based on where whether they’re doing like hybrid work or in the office work, or whether it maybe it’s a certain industry? Or maybe it’s female versus male or part time versus full time? What would you say are some of the most maybe surprising impacts are findings from your research in this particular case?

Jeanne Meister 13:58
Disconnect in the office. I think the impact on wellbeing, financial and mental health is pretty obvious, right? But, but on a social note, and a personal note, I think workers were just feeling disconnected by having these vast changes and with the in unpredictable work schedules, that they couldn’t really feel part of the team. And that has major implications on employee engagement, and the overall employee experience that the organization is delivering. So when you’re, you know, when your schedule changes so drastically, you just don’t feel connected to your team and to your employer.

Trish 14:50
Yeah, Alison, are you finding that when you talk to your clients, they’re sort of echoing that whether they’re HR leaders or business leaders themselves? Like I would think it’s a little bit of a disconnect for them, because they’re probably thinking, Well, I’m trying to schedule the best I can because I don’t have enough people. Right? So they’re seeing it maybe from a different perspective, like, what are you hearing from your clients with regard to this?

Alison Stevens 15:14
Yeah, we’re we’re hearing some of the same themes that Jeanne described. And I would agree, you know, I think, I think we’re gonna have to zoom in a bit more on, you know, what is the impact of hybrid workforce and the fact that employees that employee experiences leading to that feeling of disconnect? And what are going to be some of the, you know, additional short term and long term implications of that impact? So does that ultimately roll up to, you know, how the company performs, whether you know how, how an employer is or isn’t successful with respect to retention of those employees, and then also being sure that employees really feel the sense of purpose, right. So if they’re feeling that disconnect, what can employers do? And I think we’re finding our hearing from our clients, right now, like that desire for more support on things that kind of enter into more of that culture realm? Right? How can I create an or improve my culture so that my employees are excited to come to work? And I think it I think it is starting to all wrapped together. And the conversations need to continue.

Steve 16:14
Yeah, Alison, you kind of hit on something that I want to I want to just talk about just for a minute. And this is going back to sort of pre pandemic and certainly influenced largely by advances in technology. Right. But I feel like for for a decade plus, right, the the conversations that I maybe was a part of, or at least heard about, around employee scheduling were very one way, right. They were very employer focused. And they were at 9%. I made that up that number. That’s not research.

Trish 16:48
N equals one, right?

Steve 16:52
89% focused on how do I minimize labor costs or optimize labor costs, right, that was largely what employers cared about. And I get that, like, we we have a business too, right? We have to care about costs. But it was not at all subtle. It was not at all kind of nuanced. And so when you’re talking about things like culture, and burnout, and connectedness, right to your, your team members, or your other team members, and your colleagues and your managers, and that’s much, it’s just a much more nuanced, subtle and complex conversation. Now, technology can certainly still help you, and help you organizations still do a much, much better job. But we’ve got to make sure that we’re sending that message to employers as well. Okay. If this is all you’re doing, right, if you’re trying to optimize schedules to minimize labor costs, and that’s the goal, right? Well, you’re kind of you run the impact of some of these really adverse outcomes that we’re describing here that the research shows.

Alison Stevens 17:51
Couldn’t agree more, you have to you have to reach all the way down to the employee. And that one to one conversation, right, in this case, if the, if the employee hadn’t approached her manager, right, to really express her concerns, what if she just didn’t say anything? And left? Right, what, you know, where would we where would we be as a relates to, you know, the impact that this particular company was able to have on both the employee and just overall? So yeah, I, I think this is a conversation we’re going to continue to have.

Trish 18:20
And I think you’re right, I think that people are, are probably a lot of people have left without having that conversation with their leader. Jeanne, I mean, as you’re doing this research, and kind of, you know, collecting the comments and everything from him. Are you hearing that there are people seem to be more willing to stay and have those conversations? Are you getting a sense that they really are maybe, maybe they’re leaving without dealing with it? Are they thinking they’re going to find it better somewhere else? Do you get a sense of that at all?

Jeanne Meister 18:48
Well, I think that employers are starting to do things like pulse surveys to uncover what’s happening with the scheduling and what’s the impact on individuals? I think, sadly, what we’re seeing with the great resignation is unpredictable work schedules, is clearly one of the reasons why people are switching are moving in the workforce, right? I mean, it’s not just to, you know, compensation, it’s, I think, I want to have better control over my life. I think, since the pandemic, workers are starting to ask themselves, what is it worth it? Right, you know, what, what am I willing to give to my employer and how can I, you know, retain a work life integration, that is a better fit for me and my family. So there, you know, and if they can’t answer that favorably, they’re leaving. And this study points out that that unpredictable work schedules are a significant cause of workers leaving their jobs in search of greater certainty in their day to day work lives.

Trish 20:08
Yeah, I’m glad that you mentioned control, I wanted to ask a little bit on that Jeanne, because I hadn’t really thought of it in that way. But you’re right in such a period of time, where we all are very out of control on major aspects of our work and personal lives that we’ve never experienced to this level, I can understand that an employee would feel like that might be how I can control my situation a little bit more. What would you recommend for for those people sort of feeling that lack of control? Is there something that you think they can do in their current employer, because I’m also starting to read some things where people who have moved on are finding the grass isn’t greener on the other side of the fence? Because they’re also going through the pandemic and all of the effects of great resignation? Right? What would you say to someone who’s maybe having some of these unpredictable schedules? Is there anything that could be done to help them?

Jeanne Meister 21:07
Well, I definitely think they have to find their voice. And they have to go to their direct manager and share their issues. Right. And there, if that doesn’t happen, they will leave. And and they, you know, and employers will be faced with recruiting and training someone else. I think employers are starting to look at ways to you know, and examine what’s the root cause of their company’s turnover. And once they start to do that, I believe that unpredictable work schedules for those industries where it’s very, it’s a very big concern, as Allison said, in her population, with retail, with grocery stores with hospitality, those employers have to get to the root cause and use data to look at what’s happening. And are they doing the pulse surveys and they could be doing a survey like we did, right, segmenting by generation, segmenting by work my environment, whether your hybrid remote or in person, and taking a pulse of what their workers are experiencing day to day.

Steve 22:30
That’s a good segue, which I’d like to make in a second year, back to Alison directly talk through some of the ways that you and the team, right, the HR coaches that work with the clients are actually coaching clients and client organizations through some of these challenges. There’s some very specific steps that you recommend. And I’d like to go through some of those because I think, even if, even if you’re crazy, not a Paychex client, but you’re listening to this show, you could still benefit from some of the advice and counsel that that the Paychex HR coaches give to give to the clients, which we should probably should just call out where to find this research.

Steve 23:04
And, of course, this episode of At Work in America is sponsored by our friends at Paychex, one of the leading providers of HR, payroll, retirement and insurance solutions for businesses of all sizes. As we’ve been discussing here on the show today, nearly 1/3 of us employees say their work schedule still remains unpredictable. As a result of the pandemic, a factor they report is having a significant effect on their overall well being from causing financial stress to feeling disconnected from family friends. And this appears to be affecting younger generations the most, you can learn more about all of these findings and what we’ve been talking about today, and how you can learn to optimize your work schedules to help better support your employees. All of that information is that payx.me/schedules. That’s payx.me/schedules. This link will be in the show notes, of course, where you can download all the research that we’ve been discussing today with Jeanne and with Alison.

Steve 23:57
Okay, so we have talked about some of the research talked a little bit about how it directly impacts individual people down to, you know, a woman working in a retail store, who’s now suddenly thrust into finding daycare and showing up to the job, not knowing how much he’s gonna make in a given week. And that’s really rough way to live. And I think those of us who’ve been kind of accustomed to being salaried people for a long time, forget about that, to be totally honest with you. But, Alison, I’d love to maybe have you share from what you guys have learned from talking with your clients about these issues from some of the research findings as well. What are the things that you in the coaches there, work with your clients and help them walk through trying to get a little bit more scheduled predictability a little more certainty and try to try to support employees who are going to have a difficult time?

Alison Stevens 24:44
So I’ll take you through what essentially were the five steps that we provided to this particular client but I think applies to many businesses that are facing some of the issues we’ve talked about today. First, was creating policies right. So if the client is a covered employer, we talked about predictability pay earlier. And if that, you know, the employer falls under a jurisdiction or location in which that applies, they’re going to need to create policies to adhere to that new regulation, as well as creating templates or forums to make sure that advanced scheduling and schedule changes like they have that process. And that kind of leads me into step two.

Alison Stevens 25:21
So make sure that the client audits those processes. So at the one hand, you’re communicating, here’s the process. Here’s how it works so that both employees and managers know what to do with respect to what are the ramifications of making schedule changes? And how do you go about making a schedule change? Right. And then once established, making sure that the, you know, the employer routinely audits their processes for their if they have multiple locations, or even one location, just making sure that they’re checking and inspecting things are working the way they intended, then of course, training. Right, one of the things we talked earlier about is, you know, what can employees do? They need to speak up, they need to find their voice. And for me, I think one of the questions they can ask if they’re looking for employment is asking, what is the training process? What is how does it work with respect to my schedule? What do I need to know? And how am I going to learn about navigating the schedule process at this particular company? Right. So managers who are scheduling employees, make sure they are providing detailed training on how things work, make sure managers and leaders understand predictive scheduling laws that they apply, and make sure that they understand managers and leaders understand you know how to make changes and employees know how to make changes so that not only are they compliant, but really, to me, most importantly, is making sure that that employee experience is sound, and that the employees truly understand what is the process, what can they expect? And how do they go about making changes or asking for changes or in fact, receiving changes, making sure employers review those related regulations, right. So those predictive scheduling laws like don’t exist in a in a vacuum. So implementing a new procedure that complies with something like predictive scheduling may overlap with other existing processes like hiring or even employee discipline. So that’s another factor to consider to make sure that employers are taking into consideration kind of that holistic view on all of the regulations, they may have to follow, particularly if they fall into having to comply with that predictive scheduling requirements.

Alison Stevens 27:21
And then last, but not least, let’s go back to the conversation around technology. So you know, making sure that employees have access to the ability to understand how to schedule time, and how managers can intuitively create and manage schedules that best fit the desired schedules of their employees, right, leaning into what are their preferences, what are their needs, things like shift swaps, right, making sure that employees can schedule changes easily by going into a system. And of course, you know, you’re familiar with paychecks and our flex HR capabilities, our clients and their employees are able to go in and perform things like shift swaps, whenever things arise. And we’ve talked about that, like things are going to come up particularly now I think people’s schedules just have become increasingly variable. Time Off management, right, making sure that an employer knows when their employees have scheduled time off and being able to record that in a time off tracking system is going to make it inherently easier for them to be able to manage their workforce and know, you know, when are their employees and and when when are they out? And then lastly, you know, over time, making sure that they can automatically identify using technologies and the best way to do it is making sure that they’re recognizing, appropriately paying for overtime, but also incorporating that into their overall workforce.

Steve 28:38
Yeah, and you can’t and you can screw this stuff up, honestly. Because if you do well, there’s we know what happens when you do when you screw this and someone just told me that and then I’m gonna call out the person who specifically but someone I’m acquainted with, who was working in like a retail kind of part time situation. And they were told by their employer that they were not eligible for overtime, because they didn’t work over something like 80 hours in like a biweekly payroll, and I don’t know, labor law person. Exactly. But I’m like, That felt really wrong to me. Like, I don’t think that’s allowed, I think like, you can’t just decide what the schedule, what the overtime laws are like, they’re there. They’re actually kind of codified, right, in most places. And so I did encourage this person to push back hopefully, that they they did, because they were essentially getting stolen from from their employer kind of sucks.

Alison Stevens 29:27
I think, you know, that’s a good example. And I think, again, like talking about some of these unintended consequences of Jeanne and Executive Networks research, that I think again, like our employers just faced with the employee experience needs to improve but in employers just the same I think, you know, at times have their backs up against the wall. If they’ve got no employees reporting to work, they’re getting desperate. They’re not sure of the rules. They’re not sure of the regulations, and really need to take the time to be sure they understand them are communicating properly and accurately with their employees on what to expect, and wage and hours a biggie.

Steve 30:04
Yeah, absolutely. That’s great stuff. Alison, I really appreciate you taking taking us and the listeners through those steps and those key considerations. And certainly, you can find more of this stuff over. And we’ll give links to all the Paychex resources from the research as well as, and all the other great resources that Paychex makes available to the community. It’s been, we started talking about this a couple years back when COVID started really, really focusing on it hard and it hasn’t stopped at all for just the the wealth of resources, information and support right from from you and the team. I can’t believe that team is 600 people, by the way, that’s an organization.

Alison Stevens 30:41
We’re growing, we’re growing. And of course, it goes without saying that our partnership with Jeanne is invaluable. So grateful for our partnership, or relationship and all the work she does with the team has been a immensely fun. And so interesting. We’ve learned so much from Jeanne, it’s been fantastic. So want to take a quick moment, say, thank you so much.

Jeanne Meister 31:02
And as I said, you know, we landed on this topic, because it came from your team members on the ground who said they flagged it, this is an issue. And we just took, you know, took action. And I’m kudos to Paychex, because not enough research is focused on hourly workers and part time workers, they are absolutely right.

Steve 31:29
I’m like nodding and waving because I’m in such a free moment with you on this. And I’ll put myself in that category, too. We have not spent enough time on it on this show. And I feel badly about that. And I want that to change. before the show started. I was reading through the notes and looking through some of the highlights of the research. I tried to get like a hard number from our friends at the BLS and their website cut lesson. It’s a lot there. But it’s a little hard to work through. I was trying to get a number on just what percentage of the US workforce right now is hourly versus salaried? Right, it’s pretty simple data point, I could not find it, I could only find it from about five years ago, when the estimate was about 60% of the workforce at that time was hourly, 40% salary, I have no reason to believe that significantly moved or have been altered in the last five or six years. But it’s probably around that number. So more than half at least right or the workforce, and we don’t spend enough time thinking about them and talking about it.

Jeanne Meister 32:23
It is a call out to each of us on this show. Right? And we really need to spend more time working on on research and on the list of recommendations that Alison pointed out for employers, because that’s, you know, these are the essential frontline workers and the pandemic put a spotlight on these essential workers. And we have to sort of take the lead and say the spotlight will continue.

Steve 32:56
So that’s great. That’s a great kind of summation, I think Jeanne of kind of why we wanted to do this show why this research was important. I think why? Why the teams that Paychex surfaced it as an issue from hearing back from the client community and and then what Jeanne you and your team, were able to put this together and share with us today some of the key findings and and share with everybody right, so we’ll the we will put the links to all the Paychex resources in the shownotes. Right, there’s quite a few of them. There’s the news release, there’s the report itself, there’s actually a really good blog post that kind of hits the high points. I read it this morning before the show. So we’ll link out to all that stuff. And just saying thank you to Alison and to Jeanne for doing this, for surfacing this conversation and allowing us to have it here with you today. I really appreciate it.

Alison Stevens 33:41
Thank you. Thank you so much.

Jeanne Meister 33:43
Thank you very much.

Steve 33:44
All right. Good stuff. Trish, loved it. This was great. I don’t know if it tops your show you did with the Missouri’s oldest employer. But we’re close. Hopefully.

Trish 33:53
We’re very close. No, you know what, back and listen to that show.

Steve 33:56
By the way. If you haven’t yet, go back and listen to that show.

Trish 33:59
Go back and listen. No, I think what makes this one also really different is because we’re looking at it from the employees perspective, which is so different. I think that’s why what Jeanne is doing. And Jeanne, you’ve been focused on this for so many years, right? The whole future workplace and, and you’re bringing us interesting information that we’re not getting from anyone else. So I think that’s really important that you take the look at it from the employees perspective. And you’re you’re giving them a voice, maybe some of them who don’t have much of a voice right? Or don’t feel like it. And Alison, I want to say too, as you were sharing all of those kinds of things that the employers can be doing. In my head. I was thinking you know, what else? If you’re only working your people who are supposed to be there 30 hours a week and you’re only given them eight hours a week, they’re using the rest of their time to go out and learn this stuff. Right. Exactly. So your employees are becoming more and more educated through this pandemic on what are the laws, what are the regulations, how should they be paid?What are your competitors going to pay them? So just keep that in mind. I would say if you’re not working your employees, there’s there’s other things they are doing with that time. So anyway, I’m excited to hear more about what Paychex is doing in partnership with your clients. And then Jeanne, obviously, just your continued research on giving employees a voice and not just employers. So thank you for that good stuff.

Steve 35:24
All right. That’s it. I think we’ll wrap it here. Thanks to of course, to our friends at Paychex, thanks to Jeanne Meister, Alison Stevens. Trish, thank you great stuff. All the show archives, everything HRHappyHour.net for all the media operation here is expanding remarkably. So it’s quite something everyday to go to HRHappyHour.net. Thanks so much for listening. We will see you next time and bye for now.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai