Speaker 2 (00:09.656)
Welcome to the Management Under Construction podcast. I'm Dee Davis and this is Brad Wyant. We're here today to talk to you about the changing cultures of business and how things that happened five, 10, 20 years ago are no longer the norm today. Thanks for joining us. Companies, cultures and changing views. The workplace has changed a ton in the last 20 to 50 years and I can
attest to that because I've watched it happen. I'm sure that it's changed even more over longer periods of time. But what I can say about what I have seen change in my lifetime of working and watching other people work, like my parents and my grandparents. My dad worked in the same place for 42 years. That was normal at the time that he worked. He retired in the early nineties.
He went to college, he got his engineering degree, and he went to work for an employer, and he stayed there his entire career. And that was very normal. 60s, 70s, 80s, into the 90s, that was very normal for companies to have really long tenured employees. And my husband is retired now, but he worked at the same company for 37 years. So same thing. And that was at that time.
And that's my husband and I met at that employer. We worked on the same job site together and that's how we met. And when I started working there, I only worked there for 12 years. And I think that for men and women, the expectation of tenure is quite a bit different because let's face it, men have had the career jobs longer than women have. men, that expectation is 30, 40 years at the same employer.
And it's rare to find women who have had that really long tenure. Although at that particular company that I'm talking about, I worked with a woman who worked there over 50 years when she retired. And another gal that I worked with, she was there over 40 years when she retired. So it can happen, but it's more of the exception than the rule in those generations for women to have that much tenure at a company. It's a lot different now.
Speaker 2 (02:36.994)
The average tenure now is three to five years. People are changing jobs every three to five years now. And I would say that I have seen a lot of resumes in the last five years where people are changing jobs every one to two years. So the idea that you work in the same place for your entire career is pretty much dead at this point. I don't think that's even a conversation or an idea that people have anymore.
But one of the things that that idea had, it started putting all of the cards in the employer's deck. An employer knew that when they went out and they hired you, the plan was for you to be there for a long, long time, especially if you were male, you had a family. It's kind of almost like they hooked you. they're, they're married. They got a couple of kids. They're not going anywhere. So it put a lot of the cards in the employer's deck.
which was good and bad. was job security for the employee, but the employer kind of also knew that in a lot of ways they could take advantage of you over time because they could use you and abuse you and you're probably not going to leave. I was having this conversation about this podcast episode with a colleague and friend of mine who came over yesterday. We were talking about the topic of this podcast and he was telling me that in Japan,
If you decide to leave an employer, you have to write a letter of apology to your employer, explaining to them how it's all your fault. Sure. Leaving. And in some cases they call a company meeting and you have to stand up in front of all of your colleagues and verbally self abuse yourself about what a terrible person you are and how you're hurting the company. So.
results people don't leave, right? No matter what the company does to you, they don't leave, apparently. So I don't know how pronounced that is. I actually want to do some more research on this. I just between the conversation last night and this morning, I didn't have time to research it. But it's the polar opposite of the cultures that we're experiencing in the United States right now.
Speaker 1 (04:51.118)
That is just fascinating. I mean, I would love to be a fly on the wall in one of those rooms. I mean, I almost wouldn't though, because it'd be so uncomfortable. like, this is just a person going about their life. They're moving cities or something. What are you talking about? I have a colleague at my program who's Japanese and he is being sponsored by that company to come to my business school, Michigan Ross, to get his MBA. And then he's going to go back and presumably continue his career there. But he's been thinking, you know, maybe.
I'll stay here with my family for a little while. The salaries in the United States are a lot higher. The opportunities in the United States are a lot greater. If I could find a job here, that'd great. But I wonder for him being Japanese and having this Japanese company having sponsored him, how much shame and all the other stuff there would be associated with that. I got to ask him about that because that's the NBA thing is you'd be at a job for two or three years. That's a big name organization that looks great on your resume. And then you jump and you jump and you jump and you constantly move.
to keep enhancing your resume, to keep putting things on it, to keep broadening your network. But I just can't believe that he would make that leap with it. The company would let him come to an MBA school in the United States where that culture is so prevalent. That's so fascinating that that's the way they do it.
Well, like I said, I don't know yet. We'll learn. Maybe we'll give you guys a little short update, a little bonus episode update on that when we've had an opportunity to look into it. But I found that fascinating and I wanted to share that. The dynamic shift is the job hopping. And this used to be a bad thing on your resume. I was raised in the business world where of course we were still reviewing paper resumes for the most part back then. Every time I say things like this, I'm like,
man, I sound like I'm ancient, but it really wasn't that long ago. review stack of resumes. And one of the first things that I was trained to look at was did they stay at places five years or longer? 10 years or longer. And that was considered a good thing because as an employer, it is a massive investment for you to hire someone. It really is. It's not just a trust investment. You're presuming
Speaker 2 (07:02.476)
that you're going to be investing in training in this employee. There's a learning curve. Anytime you start a new job, anybody who started a new job knows this. takes weeks to months to learn who the people are, what their systems are, how things work. Who do I go to when this happens? How does everything function within the organization? Because every organization is a little bit different. As a consultant, I go into new organizations constantly.
and have to learn how they function. And there is absolutely a learning curve. I do it so often though that I've got it down. can figure most of it out within a few weeks, but still they're paying me those few weeks and not getting as much production as they will later down the road. So there's an investment, whether you're an employee or otherwise. I'm using the word job hopping, which might not be the right term in my...
experience has got a slightly negative connotation and that's not really what it's meant to convey in this case. The idea that people are moving, they're moving around, they're changing organizations every two years, three years. Now, when I look at a resume, if somebody has been at a place more than five years, I'm like, wow, they've been there a while. Which is really very funny when I think about how quickly that dynamic has changed. They're looking for better positions, better salaries.
And I've seen it happen. I've been that person that stayed at the organization, saw somebody left and they come back and now they're making way more money. They've got a promotion. And I did, I sat there and I said to myself, why am I still here? This is ridiculous. I can't get promoted within the organization. I can't get more than small raises within the organization. But if I leave,
and I come back, all of a sudden I get a promotion, I get a big raise. That's kind of messed up.
Speaker 2 (09:05.09)
That what's happened in the industry is that companies were so used to that old mentality of nobody ever leaves. I'm going to hold onto these people. They've got a big investment. And it was a investment on both people's parts. The employees job security for the employee. And it was, it was company security for the employer. Both people were secure. And maybe that's overall not such a great thing. A little insecurity maybe is okay.
But now the pendulum has swung the opposite way and nobody's secure. The employee's not secure, the employer's not secure.
People are starting jobs and leaving two weeks or a month later, less than a year later, they're barely figuring it out and they're gone. And so there's this turbulence within an organization and how do you grow a company culture when you have that much turbulence in an organization?
What do you have to say about all this,
Well, a quick interjection because there's an interesting point you made about this. There's a tool for the young people listening to this podcast you can use. Remember what Dee said about the fact that the early days at your company, you're just going to be learning the ropes, you're going to be learning the practices, you're going be learning the job. You're not going to be contributing. There are a lot of people I talk to, especially younger people who are like, I just want to be knocking the cover off the ball the moment I sit in that chair. I want to be getting raises every other week.
Speaker 1 (10:40.814)
Yeah, rah, rah, look at me. One of the things that I did right, one of the few things I did when I got my first job in construction, I was in the interviews, I was like, look, I realize that for the first six months, I'm not going to be profitable for you. I'm going to be a burden. And I'm not here to talk to you about how much you're to pay me tomorrow. I'm here to talk to you about how much I'm going to make you in three years. And that conversation is one we're going to have to renew in a year.
we talk about how much I've learned in that time and how much I am able to contribute, how much you think my future is worth. But for now, initial starting salary is not the conversation I want to have, but the conversation we will have is later salary increases. If your goal, which it should be, is out of your career is to gain financial reward from it, to get paid, having that kind of an attitude with an employer is going to turn somebody on and say, okay, this person's thinking the way that we want them to think. They're thinking in a way
that works for both of us. They're having empathy for our position as an employer, taking a risk on an employee, but they're also passionate about creating value. And we need to pay attention to that. Then when it comes to that conversation a year, when you're talking about your bonus, when you're talking about your year-end raise, you can say, hey, we had this conversation a year ago. I knew that I wasn't going to be all that I could be right off the bat, but look at how much I've learned in this time. How much my learning compared to the other people that you brought on this cohort of people.
how much value do you think I could bring to this organization? And then it becomes the kind of conversation that really excites an employer and makes them more amenable to paying you more money and keeping you on. And then you don't have to do the job switching thing, which I don't know how a lot of people do it. To go back to the topic here, the every two or three years thing, I have a buddy in real estate here in Denver who switches jobs every year or less and getting another job, finding a new job.
is its own job, all the networking, all the resume work, all the interviewing. mean, and you're trying to keep those interviews from the employer you're working with. So you're calling out sick and all the stress. I mean, it's a lot of work to go pitch yourself to a company to go sell yourself. So the benefits of it are great if you can pay it off, if you can make it work. But I think
Speaker 1 (13:03.586)
the jobs, which I think only works if it's a lot more money. And if that company is growing so quickly that all they can do is to get more people and pay people a ton of money to do that. I've taken that leap before where I had a chance to increase my salary by 20 % by making a jump and looking back on it. Now I can see the pros and cons of like, okay, I leapt into a fire where they were paying me more money, but there was a lot more being asked to be and there's a lot more time investment there. So when it comes to
The old way of thinking where you're gonna work for this company, you're gonna get a pension, you're gonna be there for 25 years, they're gonna give you the gold watch when you retire. That has just fallen out of fashion because the tech industry has said no. We're gonna have young 23 year olds, we're gonna pay them a quarter of a million dollars out of college for doing computer science, and they're gonna invent the future. And we're gonna do these things that no one's ever thought possible. We don't need people to stay for 25 years to learn our company. Our company's changing too quickly for that.
We're going to have an evolving culture. We're going to have this growth mindset that doesn't fit with that anymore. And besides, the financial obligations of those pensions are no longer tenable. For a public company like General Motors or General Electric or Ford to have these pension obligations on their books, the stock analysts have been saying, this isn't a good return on your investment. You're not getting the value out of those pension.
benefits that you're paying your employees that you used to because other companies are demonstrating better financial performance without offering those benefits. So there's a whittling down of the long-term benefits of staying with a company and there's an increase in the value of switching careers of going to different companies, of seeing how different people do it to round yourself out as a human being, to find a better fit, to take risks that pay off because more companies are growing.
at greater rates and you can really capitalize on that increase in salary that you can get from an organization that's just like, we're growing so fast that we need to pay somebody so much money, it's impossible to say no. And then you go and you figure out how much that sucks, but it works for a while.
Speaker 2 (15:17.232)
Yeah, you bring up an interesting point with the software companies significantly contributing to changing that dynamic. also think that the hundred year company is so rare anymore. Back in the day, companies being around 50, 60, 80, a hundred years rare, but not incredibly rare. Now it is exceptionally rare for a company to last 50 years.
So who's going to retire from a company? The only way you can get a pension anymore is to work for city, state, federal government, or a union. Those are the only pensions that are available anymore. My husband, being a union retiree, he gets a great pension and that's wonderful, but those are the only options for pensions anymore. There may be a very tiny handful of exceptions out there of private pensions still available, but
I don't know of any, there may be a few out there. The last four to five years, the demonizing of the employer has really kind of taken over. And I don't like that idea. I very much understand how it came to be because there were so many employers and probably still are.
that are taking advantage of people underpaying people. And I've been in these positions where I took a job because it was good benefits. had young kids at home. I couldn't get promoted. I didn't get big raises. I just heard excuse after excuse about why I couldn't get promoted, why I couldn't get a bonus or why I got a 2 % raise or a 3 % raise instead of a bigger raise. Even though the things I was doing, I felt justified it.
puts the burden on the employee to be a really good advocate for themselves, if you're a really good negotiator, which doing that on behalf of yourself is so hard. Some people are really, really good at it. Most people are not. And so this divide just kept widening between the employer and the employee. And whatever all happened during COVID is the psychology of that. think you could just do studies on psychology of what happened during COVID.
Speaker 2 (17:35.33)
But that wedge became the Grand Canyon during COVID. In this case, it wasn't the employer's fault. They were told they can't open. People were told you have to stay home, you're not allowed to go to work. A lot of companies were not prepared for that. They did not have the tools and the things to have people working from home. Their managers didn't know how to manage remote workers. We're still dealing with a lot of that kind of stuff.
The inflation went crazy and the conversation became more about we're not paying people enough. We're not paying people. The buzz term became living wage. Well, I don't know what that means. There is no definition of a living wage. It's, it's an idea. It's an opinion. It's nebulous. What is a living wage? I don't know. massive inflation in the last four to five years has turned the conversation around to employers need to be more flexible. Employers need to pay more.
employers need to give more benefits. There's been tons of laws and bills and things that have passed in the last five years that require employers to pay more to have employees because all these benefits in Colorado, they adopted this thing called family, FAMLI, which is very similar to some programs that have been in place in other states for a number of years, but it has to do with medical leave and different benefits that people get.
Those things are all great. What people don't think about is all of that costs the employer money. As an employer, they have to contribute to all that stuff. For every hour you work, for every payroll you run, you have to contribute to that. And that's where it all comes from. The cost of employees has gone up substantially. Those are hidden costs of employees in addition to the salaries.
and additional benefits and things like that the employees have been demanding for the last four or five years.
Speaker 2 (19:36.92)
Are we in the right place? I don't know. What I don't like is this demonization and this mindset of the employer is the enemy or the employee is the enemy. Nobody's the enemy. Employers and employees are a symbiont relationship. You can't run your business without your employees and you can't be an employee if there are no employers. So beating up the employers at a certain point, all of it.
contributes to inflation, by the way. So it's a little bit of a cyclical thing. If it costs more money to keep employees and to give them all these additional benefits, then the cost of everything goes up, which contributes to the inflation, which everybody has to pay. It's a simian relationship. We need each other as employers and employees. And so how do we bring that conversation back down to a reasonable level?
of you're getting what you need and I'm getting what I need and we're not fighting each other so much.
Exactly. I think that's the tough thing to do. It's because we've gotten to this point of it, of you versus me, it's hard to get out of that adversarial mindset. When I was working in construction, I had the privilege to move from the California market to the Colorado market with the same company. And I took a big pay cut to do that. It was equivalent to what I was paying in a year in rent. It was a pay cut I took.
was from the Bay Area, right? From LA, okay. When we talk about cost differences, California is an expensive place to live. There's parts of California that are even more expensive. So I want to talk about where, so you're talking about moving from LA to the Denver area.
Speaker 1 (21:20.142)
Right to Colorado. Okay. And this was in August of 2020 when inflation in real estate costs in Colorado had hit an apex. I mean, I remember a friend trying to move to Denver from Chicago with her husband, and they put down an offer on a house that was like 125 over asking and they were gonna let the couple stay in the house for another three months to be able to
get their affairs in order and finish their kids school year out and all this kind of thing. And they got beat by an offer that was like 200,000 over asking. And they were letting them stay in the house for six months after closing. mean, the Denver real estate market was having a bubble moment. It was just exploding. It hasn't really come down. That's an aside. was cost of living in Colorado was increasing at a very high rate associated with pandemic related drivers. So I took a...
pay cut equivalent to $13,000, which was what I was paying in rent for a year when I was living in LA. I was sharing a house to some guys out in Monrovia. So I was living pretty cheap for LA. But I go take this pay cut, move to Colorado, and they give me this after the year end, hey, Brad, you did a great job this year. You really knocked the cover off the ball of this project going great. A lot of people are attributing the project's success in part to you and how you're communicating and how you're doing your job. We're going to give you a 3 % raise this year.
I was like, cool. Do you know what inflation was this year? They're like, yeah, it was higher. I was like, okay. And, know, I'm doing the work of a assistant project manager. Don't you think? Yeah, yeah, you kind of are. And we'd love to be able to promote you right now, but we can't, you've only been in the role for as a senior project engineer this many years. And well, hey, this is the most we pay any senior project engineers in the whole Colorado area. I'm like, okay, great. That has no bearing.
on how I value the amount you pay me just because I'm being paid the most of any senior PE. I could be providing a lot more benefit than them, I think. And this isn't really what my expectations were. And they were like, okay, well, we'll try to take Curio in the next promotion cycle. And that kind of thing where it's like this nebulous, we may elect to do this kind of thing, even though was checking all the boxes on their proficiency.
Speaker 1 (23:39.758)
list of what they wanted me to be doing to get to that next level. I was just like, then I have no control over my fate here. I don't want to be somebody who just waits for somebody to tell me that I'm doing the job I already know I'm doing. And that's where that adversarial conversation comes in. It's like, well, if an employer were to share with me what I know now that they have people they report to, who they're responsible for adhering to company policies with, it's like, look, it's not in our control either. Well, then
it becomes, is this the company to work for? Is this the organizational structure that the company should be in? Then that becomes a tougher conversation for organization to deal with because I left a couple of months later for a big salary bump and a huge opportunity bump, even bigger opportunity bump than salary bump. What I was going to be able to do on a daily basis, how quickly I was going to able to grow my skillset and my career. And they were like, we can't believe it. Why would Brad leave? You know, nothing to cover off the ball here.
There was this huge runway of things we had planned for him. Yeah, but that wasn't communicated. I didn't understand that time. I didn't understand the value that you were trying to build for me on this runway. So I would be stressed if I were that person across the table trying to retain an employee, give out a bonus check, give out a salary raise letter to try to say, hey, we valued you. Having that conversation with an employee to say, we recognize your talents, we recognize your potential, and here's how we're going to reward it.
is such a tricky thing. I don't know how much training there is for people in that role of trying to keep people on, but I think that's an undervalued part of being a manager, of trying to tell people, here's the benefit of you staying, of explaining that value proposition, because I certainly didn't get it hardly at all in any of the companies I worked in construction.
you bring up some really good points, there's these, I'm going to just call them artificial constructs, right? within organizations that say that if you're at this level, you're a project coordinator, project manager, you're a project executive, you're an end project engineer, whatever the title is some title, there's this artificial construct of a floor and a ceiling of what that position and that title will offer you. So
Speaker 2 (26:00.29)
the goal ends up becoming to get the next title because there's this ceiling that you can't break through no matter how good you are, no matter what kind of value you're bringing the company, you're not going to get through it. And I think it's a hangover from the old ways that companies ran where they had to have some limits of this is the ceiling for this position. I also understand that there's an HR component to that because in an organization that I was in, I was doing all the work.
I was doing all the right things. was carrying a heavier load than most of my colleagues. was grossly underpaid compared to most of my colleagues. And, you know, I think, I think that was a combination of being a female in a male dominated industry, but also probably not being the best voice and advocate for myself. There was a company policy and that I don't know how common this is anymore, but in at least in the construction industry, it was very common at the time. You're not allowed to talk about.
you make with anyone. It's a fireable offense.
Really.
Yes, it was a fireball offense to talk about how much you made. And it was a strategy that kept people in a box. People still talk. I found out how much some of my colleagues were making and I found out how underpaid I was for the work that I was doing. But I could not go say anything about it because by acknowledging the fact that I knew that I was underpaid.
Speaker 2 (27:30.934)
I was subjecting myself to being fired for just knowing that and bringing it up. So I couldn't say anything.
A lot of companies used to have those kinds of policies. I don't even know if you're allowed to have those policies anymore.
I think that's got to be illegal because I've talked to people who've said no no there's a law that protects us from talking about this I was like okay this is some serious stuff I mean just to be fired for knowing what somebody else makes at a company I mean that's that that is some real big brother we're in control you just need to do your work and we know everything kind of policy that's crazy
That feeling that you just projected right there, that whole, know everything and get back in your box. That's exactly how it felt as an employee was just sit down, shut up and go do your job and you don't need to worry about it. We got this. It's not a good feeling as an employee. It's a, it's a terrible feeling to have in the communication that you mentioned earlier. We've got all these big plans for you. Great. Have you talked to me about those at all?
Are those plans in line with anything that I want to do as an employee? What about what I want? That was the conversation that I eventually started having with this employer was, you know, look, here's what I want. I have no idea what you guys got going on, but here's what I want. Well, next year, next year, next year as the years went on. And I eventually ended up talking to HR about.
Speaker 2 (29:03.32)
these artificial ceilings and not being able to get promoted. And I was told there's no position available with that title. And then I'd see them hire someone from the outside, a male from the outside. And after a while is the only female in the position that I was in. You have to start asking yourself, is this because I'm a woman? Is it because I'm not playing the game? Is it because of something I'm doing or not doing? You start asking, what is happening here?
I did go talk to HR and I said, what's the deal? And they explained that this artificial construct of having salary limits within certain titles, part of it's to try to level the playing field so that you don't have one project engineer, one project manager, one whatever title that's way up here making all this money and everybody else is down here and you have all these people and you know, can be viewed as favoritism.
things or a whole area of expertise that I know almost nothing about.
But it plays into the conversation of how these constructs put us in a little bit of a box sometimes. And all of it just funnels directly into the job hopping.
Right. It's like how they're to go to their monthly report, their year-end report and say, yeah, I know we've got this senior production engineer who's making way more than anybody else, but trust me, they're worth it. It's like, okay, prove it. How do you make that case? That person is in such a tough position. mean, anybody running a company, trying to, or running a division, trying to justify to their bosses, yeah, we're going to pay these people so much more because they're exceptional. They're delivering more value for us. The amount of hoops they have to jump through.
Speaker 1 (30:47.042)
the mental gymnastics, the financial analysis and calculus they have to do to prove, that is the right choice to pay these people this much more. It's much easier as an employer to just be like, yep, we pay everybody at this level this much money and that's it. And we don't wanna take any risks ourselves. We don't wanna take a risk of us getting fired. It's easier to have those boxes. Like you're talking about with HR, it's like, I don't know anybody my age. I don't know anybody period who thinks, yeah, the HR at this company is just the best. I feel so valued.
I feel so taken care of. feel like they're being honest and faithful and open with me. No, that's not how people feel about HR. They feel like HR is the enemy because they have all the cards and they're not letting anything out. Another story briefly that I was job searching. One of the big parts of the NBA is getting another job. And I was lucky enough to secure an offer from Procter and Gamble to go work in their consumer market knowledge group. And I went and did the
congratulations, you have an offer come get to know us day. And I met a bunch of people from the company. I was guided around by a woman who was a little bit younger than me who was in HR. And at the end of the day, I had made it clear over email correspondences that I was like, hey, I get the offers this much, but I want to talk to you about the salary potential I have in this role. I want to talk to you about what you can do in terms of bonus because this is really a lot lower than the market rate for somebody with an MBA. And she was like,
Well, okay, well, I guess we'll have that conversation. We got to the end of the day and it came time to have that conversation. And I said, hey, so here's what I'm seeing in the market. Here's what is normal for this kind of position in other companies. And I get that you have this cost of living difference here. And I was really going to the details and trying to make a case for why I thought just a small increase was going to be the thing to do. I hadn't even started saying what my number was going to be that I wanted to get. She was like, yeah, we have no willingness to negotiate on this position. I was like.
Well, you just paid $1,000 for me to drive my car down here to stay in a hotel last night to be here. And you're offering all these different benefits, but you're not willing to have a conversation about salary or a bonus or anything. No, I have no authority to do that. I'll put you in touch with my boss who can have that conversation if you really have to have that conversation. I was like, well, yeah, I do. Cause we talked about this that we were going to have that. That's a big part of the arrangement we're about to make here. I'm going to be a lot happier as an employee.
Speaker 1 (33:12.046)
I'm happy with salary. So I finally talked this one and she's like, yep, we're not negotiating. No room. Sorry. Take it or leave it. It's like, well, okay, goodbye. Because if that's going to be the company's mentality going into a conversation about salary, what's going to be like in a year? It's going to be the same thing all over again. I think companies like people tell you who they are. And when they do, you got to listen. Procter and Gamble is one of those big organizations that gets to say, we're PNG. People who last here have careers that
put many, many kids through college or put a second and third house in your portfolio. But the people that don't get proctor and gamble on their resume and they get to go off and have a great career somewhere else. We know that our stamp on your resume is so valuable that we don't need to pay you a lot of money. And I was talking to some friends in the NBA. I think that there are a lot of people, a lot of companies that work that way that are going to find themselves out of people who are the exceptional top of the top talent.
if they continue to think that way. We're so great, we have so much to offer you. Our name means so much on a job switcher's resume that we don't have to pay a lot of money. That kind of attitude of like, take it or leave it, we're the greatest when it comes to those conversations really turns a lot of people off.
I can't even imagine, I can imagine it, but I guess I'm blown away that in this day and age, people are still approaching with that attitude of take it or leave it. I'm not even going to have the conversation with as much pushback as the marketplace is giving about that kind of conversation. I'm amazed that anybody is still doing that because yes, it's an extremely old school.
mentality slash I have known a lot of people who've worked for big companies. They've worked for Apple and Microsoft and some of these big tech companies that same thing, they, they stayed two or three years, got it on their resume off. went, they're very quiet about why they didn't stay. They just kind of give you a look. I, the impression that I get is that maybe it's the job where they pay you low. They work really hard.
Speaker 2 (35:29.066)
If you last, then there's potential opportunity that's probably very, very valuable from a salary and bonus and all those kinds of things. But you got to be willing to go through the fire to get to the honey. And a lot of people these days just are not like life's too short. Why would I do that? Let me get it on my resume. Let me get out or just skip it like you did. You skipped it. You're no, no, thanks. Not interested. Their loss. A hundred percent.
So my question for you then, Diaz, when you get that question from somebody, where are these other people going? Why are they stealing my employees? What can you tell a middle manager who has those constraints of, well, I can only pay people in this title, in this role, this range, and I can only do these things. How does that person with those constraints solve the problem of retaining great talent, of encouraging them to be their best self, and encouraging them to see the growth and the...
runway that you're trying to build for them.
It is a tough position because having somebody leave your organization is tremendously impactful. Even if they weren't a major contributor at that point in time where they decide to leave, whether they stay six months or they stay a year or five years, replacing them can cost up to five times their salary.
You have a vacancy, that load is distributed, because was the person leaves, they're going to leave with two weeks notice, right? That there's a lot of people that don't even give that anymore. They just leave, they just stop coming to work or they just say, you know what, I'm going to go. So the most you can hope for is really a couple of weeks. Well, that's not enough time to replace somebody. You got to either promote from within, you got to...
Speaker 2 (37:19.864)
put out an ad, you got to start the interview process, gathering resumes, it all takes time, it takes months. So you're going to have a vacancy. That load that that person had on their plate, whatever load that is, has to now be distributed between the remaining employees to cover it while you're trying to find a replacement. Then you have to spend a lot of time and energy going through this. You have all the HR stuff that has to happen when you're bringing people on.
And now, and then you have that learning curve that we talked about earlier, you know, that, that starts off very slow and builds over time. Losing somebody is the worst thing that can happen to an organization, but we're losing people in record numbers. Building a culture, a positive culture in your company is the best thing you can possibly do. It truly is better.
to give that person that five or 7 % raise that they want and keep them there, than it is to let them go and try to bring somebody in that's the same level or cheaper. I don't think we're in that marketplace where you can really hire people cheaper anymore, unless you're getting rid of somebody that has a lot of tenure in a senior position, then you might be able to bring in somebody younger at a cheaper cost. if there's somebody that's kind of in a workhorse position, holding onto them is
far better than replacing them and going through that constant cycle. What a lot of companies are doing is they're just not replacing people. That has been going on for a very long time. The just, you know what? I'm just going to wait and see what happens. Let's just not replace them. And so when I had seven people doing that job, now I have five people doing that workload. We'll just redistribute it and it'll be fine. And they don't say this. They don't announce it. They just do it.
And so the five people that are left are like, hey, now my workload is even heavier. Where's my raise?
Speaker 1 (39:20.526)
But that manager looks like a genius because it's like, hey, my cost basis on this work has gone down, whatever two over seven is. And it's like 28 % or something like that. Look at me, I'm crushing it. And they're just put that on my annual review. I'm going to get a raise out of this.
Nobody charges to overhead. Everybody's job costed. That overhead number, whatever that percentage is.
has to stay within a certain range and it cannot, it will not go over. They'll start letting people go before they let it go over. Nobody gets to charge to overhead. You have to find a way to get as much of your time job costed as possible and know job level people are 100 % job costed no matter what. There is no overhead.
Bonus structures at the executive levels are based on keeping that overhead contained. They're based on reducing overall operating costs for the company as a whole. So if you save 28 % on labor, guess what? At the executive levels, they get bonuses based on reducing that operating cost. There's no trickle down economics here.
It stays at the very upper levels of the company. There's so much creative accounting that goes on at the upper levels of companies that I did not know for the longest time that this stuff was going on. We don't call them kickbacks anymore in industry because that has a negative connotation, but they're rebates. We have deals with these other companies and these other organizations where if we use their stuff, we get rebates.
Speaker 2 (41:04.302)
quarterly, annually, whatever the setup is. And none of that stuff is in the job level accounting of work in construction. have each project has its own little cost basis and budget, and that's all managed on that job all by itself. And all the overhead is managed separately. Well, this stuff that I'm talking about with the rebates and whatever, that's all overhead level stuff.
So the job bears the cost if it's more and it often is, it's sort of like government purchasing, right? When I was in the Navy, we'd say that government negotiated hotels and you look at the sign outside and the rate that they're paying on the sign is less than the rate that the government's paying for me to stay there because you have these deals and I mean, who knows what goes on at those levels, but it's the same kind of thing. It's exactly the same thing. It might cost me
six or $800 for a scissor lift if I go through the company I'm supposed to go through. But I can go negotiate it myself for $300 or $400 a month. And that benefits my job costs, but they don't get the rebate. So there's all these internal politics that are happening within an organization that it took me a long time to figure that stuff out. I didn't know that was going on.
Oh yeah, I mean that kind of thing. It just dawns on you. It's this thing of like you, you do this archeological expedition to find these truths after a while and you're like, well, okay, this is how the games get played. I had an interview with somebody here in the real estate world who will remain nameless because of the content of this interview and the story. He basically divulged that his job was to try to find a way to do the project he was being set to do by his real estate team.
without following the instructions he was being asked to follow. So one of the requirements that they gave him was you need to have three bidders on every project, which is a very typical construction requirement that if you're to have a general contractor bid a project, have to be at least three bidders to assure that a competitive process is in place, that you're getting competitive pricing. Well, this guy said, what I do is I base my competitive number on design development documents, which I know
Speaker 1 (43:29.558)
are nowhere near what the project is actually going to cost. That way I can finagle and find the right thing and find the person I actually want to work with, who I'm going to trust to be honest with me. And then once we get to CDs, I'll figure out how much it actually costs and go back for that money. And we'll still make money. Just the hoops that people jump through to get through this seemingly sensible requirement that's counterintuitively
not the way things actually work. I guess what I'm trying to say is there's more nuance to these issues than people give them credit for. The nuances of hiring, of the value of retaining an employee, of the value of working with a contractor who you know is going to be upright and honest with you. But to get into those nuances is to take a lot of time and to stand in the box and make an argument using numbers, using math that is going to require a lot of time and effort. And
Great managers, I think, are the people who are able to say, no, no, no, we do need to do this. This is the right call. I know that they're more expensive. I know that they're asking for this raise, but look at all the value they're bringing us. And then to make that case for that value is worth it in the end if you can retain the employees that you know are going to propel your company into the place it needs to be. If you don't work that hard for your talent, you're not going to get great talent. If you don't work to defend them internally.
then you're not going to retain the people that you want to retain. You're going to retain the people who will accept lower salary. And it's not a zero sum game the way that these executives manipulate the math to be at the end of the day. Just keeping your costs down on that project is a short win today and you're going to get a bonus out of it. Whoop-de-doo. But if you don't retain the people that made that project successful, that made that job site a successful place to be, then
the next project's not gonna make you any money no matter what you do, because you're gonna be stuck with the B and C team players, and you're not gonna get that bonus next year. I think that it's a very American idea to try to squeeze as much as possible out of the near term, and then move on and try to do it the next time. companies from other countries like Japan have this 100-year vision of what are we gonna be in 100 years? What kind of company are we gonna be?
Speaker 1 (45:52.066)
that we just can't seem to wrap our heads around here because stuff happens in those hundred years and you may be gone because the industry may change. It's more selfish, it's more short term over here. So finding a middle ground of like, I need to find something that works for me right now, but that also works for us longterm, growing that pie instead of looking at it as I get my piece that's as big as I can make it and you get whatever's left is a mentality that...
A great manager tries to take on everything they do, including this hiring and retaining area.
you hit on a point there that is one of the main points of the difference between management and leadership. It's being there for your people, supporting your people, having their back. You're part of the team and you go defend your team. That's one of the greatest compliments I've ever been paid is that I care about my people and I work for my people. Absolutely. That's what a leader is. A manager? Maybe not. Maybe they're in for the
the short-term quarterly gain. And you also hit on another really good point is the long game versus the short game. And I think some of this comes from the public versus private sectors to some extent. When you, when you're working for a public company, a publicly held company, you have stockholders. It's a very, very short term measuring stick. You're, you're measuring quarter to quarter. Cause that's when the returns are measured.
You suddenly become a machine that is made around fiscal quarters. The whole world comes to a screeching halt at your year end, whatever, however that's structured within your organization. I have a lot of clients that operate that way. They're large publicly held companies and whether we get things right within the quarter, within the fiscal year matters a lot because they have stockholders to report to.
Speaker 2 (47:51.32)
So you get people in these management positions, leadership positions, that they're looking for the bonus. They're looking for how can I make my quarterly reporting look as good as possible for this quarter? And I'll deal with next quarter, next quarter, and I'll deal with next annual, next annual. It becomes a very, very short game.
That all works in the very, short term, but over long term, you can be hurting yourself. You probably are hurting yourself long term if all you're looking at is the short term. So what's the long game versus the short game? I would say you have to look out at least 10 years for a long game. I mean, minimum. And I think this is a problem within companies and in organizations right now because
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (48:45.24)
These folks don't plan on being there in 10 years. A lot of times. How do you get somebody to look at what is best for the company? What is best for the people, the organization in 10 years when you plan on leaving in two?
Speaker 1 (49:02.7)
think that's the thing that you lose. If everyone is thinking short term, then your organization is thinking short term. Maybe it's trickled down. Maybe managers thinking short term has caused employees to think short term. But maybe the market was the thing that started it. In the 80s, when quarterly reporting became the way that companies were evaluated for the first time in this country at least, maybe that's where it all started and it trickled down.
I think of the companies that I've worked for in the past and the way that they've compensated me. A lot of people think, with these millennials, it's all about the money. They want nothing but more money and beanbag chairs. When you ask a 23 year old what they want, if you're not going to give any more money, it's like, well, beanbag chairs, that's great. If you can pay somebody in recognition and compliments in training, in positive feedback, in deep critical thinking about what they could have done better in mentorship.
That's the kind of thing that's going to make somebody step back and say, this is a meaningful career. This is a place I want to be. This is an environment that is rewarding who I am and that recognizes who I am and what I bring to the table. I look back at my time at Swinerton, the time the company I worked for between Southern California and Colorado. And the difference between that company that was paying me not a very high salary and the company I left to work for was that Swinerton
spent a ton of money on my training. They sent me to conferences and events where speakers came and talked about leadership. In my reviews said, hey, this was something you really knocked the cover off the ball with. This is an area you need to grow. And this is an area where you've made some mistakes. Here's what we think you can do to grow in that area. When I went to work for the next company, they were like, so tell us why you think you deserve a promotion. And I was like, well, okay. that was just, I had never been in that kind of a conversation before at 27.
didn't realize that I had to make this case, that I had to fight back and forth with this pie argument. I'm still glad I'm where I am. I've learned lessons that I'm thankful for. But I look back on that and say, if I had just stayed at that company, there was a big runway there for me that I didn't see at the time. There were things that I wasn't valuing properly when I was making that decision, It's all about demonstrating that your employees have value to you in ways that you can. If you can't compensate them,
Speaker 1 (51:28.13)
with the salary bump that they're expecting, trying to find ways to demonstrate to them that they're valued, that they are people you want to keep around. I think just that kind of a commitment is big for young employees especially.
It is, and simply the act of sitting down and talking with your people, however many people you're leading, sitting down for just no real reason. I'd say, Hey, how are things going? What do you want? I'm a big proponent of servant leadership. was something that we learned in the Navy to some extent, and I've taken that and pushed it forward a lot in my career.
Over the years, the people that are doing the work eat first, whether it's your crew, whether it's your grunts, whatever it is, the people that are doing the hard work and making it happen, your people that you're, you're running, that you're in charge of, they eat first, you eat last is one of the big ideas behind it. It's they are first, always first. You take care of them. That's your job. One of the things that I implemented on my project sites at one point was.
sitting down and having one-on-one interviews with every single person on my crew, 50, 60, 70 folks. And I'm going to say guys generally because mostly they were guys. When you get a whole bunch of people together in a room, and this is the psychology part, you get a bunch of people together in a room, whether it's a meeting or any other thing, nobody wants to talk. Nobody wants to say what they really think. They don't want to be judged. They don't want to be the one that's speaking out.
So I can put 10 people in a room and we can try to have an open dialogue. But unless you've spent a lot of time building that trust in that dome of silence and that nothing you say here is going to be held against you. You can do that in small groups, but generally people won't contribute and people will tell you things one-on-one that they would never say in a room full of people. That's the way to get at what is going on, what's making them tick and how can I help them stay here?
Speaker 2 (53:38.338)
How can I help them get where they wanna go? So I set up one-on-one, each person got an hour on the schedule. Some people took 30 minutes, some people took an hour and a half, but I scheduled an hour for every single man, woman and child on my project and sat down one-on-one. I had a list of questions to prompt them with, but I let it organically flow.
I took notes while we were talking and I would tell them this at the beginning. Look, I'm going to you're going to see me write some notes. Nobody's name is on this piece of paper. Nobody's ever going to know what you said here. This is you and me. I'm just taking notes so that if you say something important that I want to go back to, I note it down so that we can make sure we talk about that.
Speaker 2 (54:30.99)
That was singularly the most successful strategy I've ever implemented for building trust, building loyalty. People knew I had their back. I was working in their best interest. There were people who were saying, I don't want to work in the field anymore.
I want to be a detailer. I want to be a project manager. I want to do this. I want to do that. I'm not sure I want to stay in the industry. I had one guy, I still keep in touch with him. We have lunch every now and then. He's like, I don't think I want to be here anymore. I want to stay in the trade, but I don't want to be on a construction site anymore. How do I do that? And we spitballed some ideas and he's still in the trade and he's still working, but he's not like on a construction site anymore. Another guy wanted to be a detailer.
He was like, you know what, I've been doing this a long time and it's great, but you know, I'm getting on in years and I really, really want to be a detailer. How do I do that? I said, well, I'm not sure, but let's see what we can do. He's a detailer. So I listened enough to hear what they wanted. Like, it's not just this presumed role of, know, you're an apprentice and now you're a journeyman and now let's push you to a foreman. Well, not everybody wants to be a foreman.
you
Speaker 2 (55:47.072)
Not everybody wants to be a project manager or project executive. Their heart might not be in what they're doing. Okay. Well then what is your heart in? Let's explore what that is and how can I help you get to where you want to be? Even if that's not with you and in your company or on your job site or in your organization, that's okay. Because if that person's heart isn't in what they're doing, they're not going to last anyway. Let's just help them get to where they want to go. I still have people.
that I stay connected with that talk about it. They come back to me and they say, nobody's ever done that with me before. Nobody ever asked me what I wanted. And it made me realize that in all the years I spent as an employee, no one ever asked me what I wanted either.
Speaker 1 (56:35.084)
And it's a short street, no matter what business you're in, the reputation that you build for your company, the investment you make in that through those kinds of actions, through servant leadership will make you that company that everyone says they about when they say, are stealing my employees. If you're the kind of company where it's like, hey, we just couldn't take care of you this year, sorry, but we'll try next year. And that's the reputation that you earn.
People talk, people are gonna share salaries, people are gonna share bonuses, where it's gonna get out. But if people say, God, I just had the greatest conversation with my manager. They asked me what I want out of my career. Can you believe that? I've never had somebody ask me that question. They're gonna remember, boy, that guy works for that company. That's very interesting. And that's gonna stick in somebody's mind. So building that reputation, it's not gonna pay off in the moment. And you still gotta make the business decisions that anybody has to make in a position of management of authority.
to keep the company running. can't just give away free money. But those kinds of investments in your company's reputation and your reputation as a manager are going to pay off because there very few and far between that have the ability to go out on that limb and take that time, the way you're talking about. I think that's so great.
It is a massive time investment and obligation, but it was worth every second. And I do it again in a heartbeat. I love when I start working with new people on new projects. I love to take them out to lunch and go, tell me about you. What, what do you do when you're not doing this? When you're not building great things, what do you do? Who are you and what makes you tick and what makes you excited? What are you passionate about? Where are you from? And just get to know people a little bit.
It's not a false thing. I'm genuinely interested in the people. And sometimes you find these synergies with people that you never imagined. It's a hundred percent worth the investment. And whether your sphere of influence is tiny, this big baseball size, or it's huge and company-wide, you can make a difference in your company culture and the culture that you're providing for your team by
Speaker 2 (58:48.13)
doing some of these things by being there for people, by listening to them, by asking them what they want, helping them get to where they want to go. And I do want to circle back to who are they? So who is they that we keep talking about that they are stealing my employees? They are your competition. 100 % your competition, in case that's not clear. I just want to say in words, there are no secrets in industry anymore, really.
I crack up when I go to some of these different contractors and owners. And of course, there's still such a thing as trade secrets. Absolutely. But when you're talking about general industry things like project managers, project engineers, project executives, if we're shedding our skin and getting a new job every three to five years, two to five years, whatever the average is, there's no secrets anymore, folks.
These people are taking what you think is a secret. And by the way, it's not a secret because everybody's doing the same thing you're doing. Just, just so you know. I can't hire an outside consultant because they're going to know my secrets. Well, they already know your secrets because they've been in five other companies that are all doing the same thing. It all looks a little bit different, but your, employees are moving around. So the secrets get out very quickly.
that whole idea of having somebody working for you for 20, 30 years and your little dome of silence is within your company and nobody ever leaves. So nobody else knows what you're doing. Those days are over. They're over. So we need to kind of get over ourselves a little bit, I think in industry and say, look, they are stealing your competition. Well, guess what? Your employees are not your property. They're human beings. They're people.
and they have their own needs, wants and desires. And the sooner we recognize that, the sooner we'll be able to hold on to these people that we need and that provide the value to our organizations. If you treat them like a number, they're going to treat you like a number. So employers are getting back a little of what they've been forking out for a long time. They're treating people like a number. And so the employees are treating them like a number and they don't like it very much.
Speaker 2 (01:01:09.166)
It's not a lot of fun.
And conversely, as just as much as the great leaders were just going to get around that people want to work for them, that people want to be around them, the word's going to get out about the people that people don't want work for too. I had to leave a company over a relationship with a manager because we don't quit companies, we quit managers. I quit a manager because I thought that his management reflected the company's culture because they were going to stand behind him. And during my exit interview, the woman from HR
It's like, well, this is so troubling because we've never had a complaint against this person before. And then in conversations afterwards, I learned that many of my coworkers had complained against this person to HR. That was the single eye opening moment where I was like, okay, not only does it get around, HR will do whatever they can do to make themselves look better. They will tell whatever lie they need to tell to defend themselves in that moment to you, to get whatever they need out of you, to build some case to make you.
Just another complaint or just another whatever.
bad managers, people figure it out. And if you're feeling this way, probably a lot of people are too. So don't feel alone. Don't feel like you're the only person that in those shoes and speak up. If you're having an issue with somebody before, because becomes worse before it's because it could be that somebody above that person is trying to build a case to get that guy out of there. You know, you got to be careful and you got to build that case without bias. And you've got to try to be as
Speaker 2 (01:02:35.298)
Mm-hmm.
Speaker 1 (01:02:42.72)
logical as evidence-based as you can. But you've got to stand up for yourself. If you love everything about a company except the manager and you think you're the only one, you're not.
We brought up HR a couple of times and I made a note when you were talking about it earlier because I did want to circle back to how HR has changed over the years. HR used to be the employees friend. They used to be there for the employees. They were kind of that liaison between the employees and management.
And yes, they would deal with disciplinary issues or performance issues or things like that. But for the most part, they were somebody you could trust as an employee. You could go sit down and talk to HR and be like, Hey, I'm having that I'm concerned about this. I'm having this issue in my life. I worked in a company. had a fantastic HR manager who again, in the construction industry, bad things happen sometimes. And there was a fatality within the company, not in our branch. was a different branch, but we shared an HR manager and this HR manager.
hopped on a plane, went out there, met with the family, guided them through. mean, this person was just empathetic, compassionate, did everything that you would hope that an HR department would do. And was there for all of us and provided counseling and everybody, the family, the company, the employees, the management. In my opinion, that's what HR should be. That's not what HR is anymore in most companies. HR is
a benefits coordinator, partially a legal department that handles the legalities of firing somebody or hiring somebody or disciplinary action as it needs to happen. They're all about compliance and legalities and covering your proverbial hiney. And
Speaker 2 (01:04:39.948)
I don't know who they're working for anymore, to be honest with you. A lot of it's being outsourced to overseas companies. My daughter works for a very large company that has locations around the world and she has no idea who her HR manager is. There's no person in an office that you can go sit down and talk to anymore. It's a phone number or a website. And that is just tragic.
I think that is so wrong. We've taken the people out of so much of business anymore. Can you think of a single company that has a human being answer the phone anymore?
Well, and that's just it. It's this cost focused mentality. mean, you see this in consulting all the time from the MBA side. It's like, look at how well we did by hiring McKinsey to come in. We cut our cost basis by 20%. Let's all pay ourselves bonus and go to the bar. But how much value did you cut out of your company in that 20 % of your cost? How much reputational damage have you done? And it goes back to short-term thinking.
It goes back to, I need to gain today. I need to, I need to make my quarterly numbers. need to demonstrate that I'm doing something worthwhile here. need to, and making that case for, look at the value of having a human being answer that phone. It's a great example of somebody, a human being answering a phone. One of my neighbors here has a classic car, a DeLorean. He bought himself a DeLorean, he's a kid of the eighties and it's like a
You know, super cool car for him, but he bought this DeLorean. It's been a basket case ever since he bought it because it's not the driven very many miles and every time he tries to start it, it just has something wrong with it. But there's a company that bought the rights to the DeLorean name that sells all the parts from the cars they never built. They built seven or eight thousand of the cars and they've got enough parts for another five thousand cars. So there's a huge shelf. We were talking about how great this company has been to work.
Speaker 1 (01:06:45.154)
with for him, even though he hasn't gotten the car run yet. Hopefully, fingers crossed he get it run soon. How can this guy afford to be on the phone with my neighbor, working on the details of this car and diagnosing and chatting with him? But they must be able to because they're selling enough parts. They're making money. He's going to buy parts from this guy because this company has this phone number that explains and works through these problems with him.
there's nobody else buying DeLorean's except people who own DeLorean's. They're not making it anymore. They're not trying to get repeat business by him telling his neighbor, boy, I bought this DeLorean. You should buy one too. That's not how it's going to work. You got to keep this guy and keep him buying parts from them. great customer service, great management, being a great company to work for. These things are hard to make the financial case for on a quarter to quarter basis, but a skilled manager with the tools of
Financial analysis can do it and the best managers are doing it because they're keeping the best people.
I've toyed with the idea of opening a brick and mortar for my consulting company. On and off over the years, I toy with the idea. And one of the things that I've always told myself is if I cannot afford to put a human being at the front desk answering the phone, greeting people, I'm not doing it. It's a prerequisite. I cannot even tell you how much I automated phone systems. I had a situation on a job site last year.
It's a small company that we hired to do some third party inspections for us on behalf of the owner. And there's only a handful of people in this company and a few of the people had left. I really don't even know who's left except the guy running around doing the inspections. I mean, I think there's probably a couple other people, but he's so busy. He doesn't answer his phone. He's out in the field all the time. So I was trying to get some stuff from the office. I was trying to get a new proposal because I needed to add some services to their scope.
Speaker 2 (01:08:47.808)
I emailed the emails that I had and I got returned saying that those people didn't work there anymore. So I called the phone number. looked up their office and I called the phone number and it was an automated system. You had to know the person's first and last name that you were trying to reach. I didn't know who I was trying to reach because I just needed to talk to a person. I didn't know what was happening in this organization. The only names I had were people who I got a return email that said they didn't work there anymore.
I don't know who works there. I had some questions. Who do I talk to? How do I get a new proposal from your company? I called five or six times, automated 100 % every time. I just started randomly hitting buttons and trying to get to somebody's extension. Not a single person answered their phone. I left messages that never got returned.
It was like, you've got to be kidding me. How are these people in business? I don't understand. I don't know who works at your company. And this is a little bit of a post COVID problem too, because companies laid off a lot of people or people left and went and got other jobs or whatever, all the movement.
Virtually nobody has a human answering their phone anymore and office is closed. So there's no office numbers anymore. This happened with a lot of construction vendors like vendor reps and stuff. There's no office anymore because everybody's working remotely. How, how do I figure out who's working for your company and how to reach them? I don't have a phone number. I don't have an email. I was going on LinkedIn trying to find who works.
at these different companies now because everybody moves around so much. I was on LinkedIn searching the company names trying to figure out who worked in what branch so that I could contact them and get a quote, get some bids on some work.
Speaker 2 (01:10:46.848)
No idea. There were some companies that I had to give up on because people were not responding to the LinkedIn messages. I had to call people who I knew were the wrong people, but just to find out who the right people were. We've pulled the humanity out of these organizations to the point where they're nameless, faceless, address-less things. I think all of this is contributing to this ripple effect of how people feel disconnected.
They feel disconnected from their organizations. They feel disconnected from their bosses. They feel disconnected from all of this. And it's circling back into this really bad culture of negativity and blame. The employers are blaming the employees. The employees are blaming the employers. And we have this short game economics that is going on in all these companies.
This is a complicated problem and I don't think we're going to have the answer here for you today. Acknowledging it, talking about it and thinking about how within your situation and your organization, how can you influence the change? A long-term friend and colleague of mine named Jesus Ledesma. I knew him when he was a little baby inspector out at University of California, San Diego. When I first met him, his first project was one of my projects when he came on board as an inspector.
We've remained friends and colleagues. We've worked on lots of jobs together over the years. I went out on a job walk a couple of days ago on one of his projects and well, he's, he's over all the projects now. Went out to go help the client with some things. Jesus has the same that he says all the time. And I've heard him say it hundreds of times over the years and somebody printed it out and stuck it in the trailer. He says, be hard on the problem, not the people.
Right.
Speaker 2 (01:12:42.51)
I love that saying. It's one of those things that makes you pause for a second, of course. And then you go, oh, wait a minute. Oh yeah, we are working with people. Oh yeah, we have a problem and we're a bunch of type A's attacking the problem, but we're hard on the people often when we're trying to solve the problem. So be hard on the, on the problem, not the people. It's a little bit of a thinker because then it makes you step back a little bit and go, okay, it's the problem we have to focus on. And
We have so many problems in business and industry and construction and everything these days. It's sometimes a little hard to focus on what's the first problem we need to deal with. What's the biggest problem that we have right now? Well, the biggest problem we have right now, in my opinion, is people. The attitude that your employees belong to you is incorrect. It is an unhealthy attitude that needs to go away right now.
It's a bad, bad leadership and management attitude that needs to go away. And the people that are stealing where your employees are going, they're going to your competition. So if you have a mass exodus in your company, if you've had a lot of turnover, you should be asking yourself why. You should be looking in the mirror and saying to yourself, why is this happening? Not saying those people are bad or
My competition is stealing people and you're externalizing the issue. You're saying it's somebody else's issue. It's somebody else's problem. No, it's your problem because it's affecting your business right now today to the tune of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars. So you have to figure out how to address this in your organization and you need to do it right now. This is where the majority of the bleeding is happening in every organization right now is that massive turnover of
employees and how do we stop it? How do we stop that bleeding? First, we have to stop blaming everybody else for the bleeding. We can only control what we can control.
Speaker 1 (01:14:50.456)
except.
And then we have to look in the mirror and ask ourselves genuinely when we do an exit interview.
I think the funny thing about exit interviews is all of a sudden now we're listening. Now that they're leaving, we're listening. We should have been listening the whole time. When I gave my notice at a company that I worked for for 12 years, I sat in the president of the company's office. He wanted to talk to me about it. And he was mad that I was leaving. And he said, I cannot believe you're doing this to me. This is unprofessional of you.
to read. Listen to that.
Doing this to me, this is unprofessional of you. How come you haven't said anything before now?
Speaker 2 (01:15:39.906)
And then I got a little steamy and I said, you have to be kidding me. I am in my manager's office every week. Every week. If you go back and look at my reviews for the last five years, I've been screaming out loud for five years and no one will hear me. And now you're surprised. mean, come on. We have to take some responsibility here.
People are talking and we are not listening.
Management and leadership are not easy. They are hard. They are. That's why they pay the big bucks, as one of my friends says. It's not as if anybody ever promised that these kinds of jobs, managing people, leading an organization, no one said that would be easy. But you got to get there, you got to do the work, you got to own it, and you got to accept when things are not going well and not just live in this world of, well, no, that can't be true. That's not real.
Park.
Speaker 1 (01:16:47.284)
Listen when your employees tell you things are wrong. Go deeper, take ownership, get after that problem. Don't ignore those problems because they will get worse and worse.
And you must create an environment of trust where people are secure enough that they can tell you what they really think and what they really feel. Because if you don't create that environment, if they feel they're going to be punished for saying something, they're not going to tell you. It has to be that one-on-one, this is between us, and I'm not going to hold anything you say against you, environment. And if you don't create that environment for your people, you're going to get a bunch of yes men.
Yep.
bunch of people telling you what you want to hear because they're afraid to tell you anything else.
And then you're not going to be very profitable because yes, men are only in it to stay employed, not to create the most value they could, not to change the world, not to be part of an organization that knocks the cover off the ball. They're there to cash a paycheck and kiss your butt. And if that's all you want, that's all you get.
Speaker 2 (01:17:49.912)
Wow, I feel like we have explored the well of why we're having these employee retention problems, both sides, the employee side, the employer side. It is incredibly complicated, but I think the takeaway is that we always have to pull out our mirror and look at ourselves and say, okay, stop pointing everything outward. Let's look at ourselves. Let's look at what we can do. How can I create an environment for people?
that is better, that is helpful, that's supportive, that's trusting so that I can build a better team, I can build a better business. And from the employee side, don't go in there with your short game. You gave an excellent example of how to go in with your long game and you will find out very quickly whether you're dealing with a short game or a long game, manager, company, whatever. And if you're in it for the long game and they're in it for the short game, it's not a match.
It's not a match walk away and they're going to get short game people and not that sometimes playing for the short game might be okay. might be the right answer for you. If you're just looking to get that position or that company name on your resume, maybe a short game stint is okay. But if you're in it for the long game, I think people are looking to not be looking for a job every six months. It's too much work. We've got to meet in the middle there somewhere.
Absolutely. People want the path of least resistance. People don't want to be full-time employed and full-time employed with another job which is looking for another job. It's too much work. All other things equal. They'd be much happier working at a company where they don't have to work so hard to find happiness, find career satisfaction, fulfillment, the right amount of money.
I think we're gonna have to do another podcast at some point in the future about remote working and flexible employment and that kind of stuff. There's so much there. It is absolutely something that people are demanding these days in a lot of industries. And I think it's very possible in lot of industries, but as a manager, as a leader, managing remote employees is a whole nother ball game. So we'll look at into all that stuff at another time, but.
Speaker 2 (01:20:07.352)
Thank you guys for joining us. This has been a wonderful experience talking through all this, Brad. Thank you for your wonderful insight.
Thank you Dee. think you shared some great stories there, things that people are going to really be able to use.
All right, we'll catch you guys next time. Thanks.
at managementunderconstruction.com.
