What Lessons Can We Learn From 2022?

[ANNOUNCER]: Breaking down everyday workplace issues and diagnosing the hidden sickness not just the obvious symptom, our hosts James and Coby.

[COBY]: Did we lose a patient?

[JAMES]: No that’s just my lunch.

[COBY]: Hey thanks for joining us. I’m Coby, he’s James. Let’s get started with a question. What lessons can we learn from 2022?

[JAMES]: Oh boy. How do you condense an entire year into 30 minutes? I think the best place… I think what we want to do is actually look at what are kind of two or three big lessons, big pieces that we can pull out of… kind of some of the things that have been going on in 2022. I think one of the… where I want to start is actually building on our conversation from our last episode. Because there’s a lot of things that have gone on in 2022 that really accentuate our conversation around the Fragile Grip Principle. And there’s… so I that’s definitely a big one that I think we can learn a lot of lessons from. But we’d be remiss if we didn’t stay topical and what’s happening right now or at least what’s been happening for over the last several weeks and talk about the… call it what you want, flaming dumpster fire or real time case study, that is Twitter.

[COBY]: Right. Yeah, well and I think that actually that’s probably an excellent place to start, for one. But also I think going back to the Fragile Grip Principle, which was you know, the idea of the fragile relationship that exists between employers and employees. And that the way that you handle that fragile relationship is very diff… is a great sign of your long-term success. And in one of the options in the Fragile Grip Principle is what we call the Harsh Grip. Where you squeeze too tight to maintain control. And I think that there really couldn’t be a more, you know, or a larger example of the Harsh Grip than what has happened with Twitter and Elon Musk.

[JAMES]: Yeah I mean it’s, it’s almost too good of an example because it almost it makes the argument way too easy. And to be clear like we’re going to use this example because it’s happening right now. Everybody is paying attention to what’s been going on with Twitter, whether you subscribe to Musk’s leadership style or not. People are paying attention. So it’s a really good example to kind of dive into. But to be clear, this is not the only way that the Harsh Grip plays out in businesses. This is almost a cartoon villainish example of the Harsh Grip. If you haven’t noticed yet, you can probably pick up where I fall on the pro or not pro Musk conversation. So let’s talk a little bit about what’s been going on. We’ll start with kind of just before Musk acquired Twitter. And kind of… so the media machine that is Elon Musk was talking about how he’s going to take this unprofitable company and make it a world leader. It’s going to be profitable, it’s going to be a beacon of free speech, it will be the Next Generation, the next… it will evolve into this ultimate social media platform for good. That’s a lot of how, not in that language, but that’s a lot of how the arguments or the conversation was presented in the media. What happened is as soon as the business was acquired, massive layoffs happened across many, many key fundamental departments. We’re talking even things like the moderation teams being completely destroyed on Twitter. Which already has a bit of a reputation for being a hot mess. Communications, PR, development teams, like everything just started getting slashed. People were being fired, people were being fired over Twitter, anybody who disa… anybody who was working for Twitter and did not subscribe to the Musk Kool-Aid, he would fire his employees over Twitter, no questions just done. There’s a whole bunch of things that happened in intervening weeks. One of the things that I kind of… the piece that really exemplifies the Harsh Grip is what happened when he started, when he sent out these mass, company-wide emails saying that Twitter needed, we all need to be hardcore. You know, you’re going to be working long hours, you’re going to be working really hard, and you’re going to be… you’re going to help save this company. There were articles and pictures of people sleeping at their desks because they didn’t have like… because the workloads were just so incredible. Their teams have been cut, but the work hasn’t gone away. And this email comes saying “You’re not getting anything out of this, but I’m gonna force you to work harder, and I’m gonna force you to work longer hours, and it’s all going to be for the benefit of me and the shareholders”. So what did this highly skilled group of employees do? Not only highly skilled but with a skill set that is in high demand, they took severance right before Christmas and left. You know squeezing every single drop of productivity out of people, as we’ve talked about, like this exemplifies that Harsh Grip of “I don’t know what to do, so I’m going to just hold on tighter”. It drives people away.

[COBY]: Yeah and I think a good way to, like almost like the psychology behind the Harsh Grip  and maybe even, if I had to like you know say what I thought Elon Musk must have been thinking, a lot of this was he kind of saw himself as the hero. As the Knight there to vanquish the enemies. Which unfortunately, he was the hero and those he had to protect were almost those who were banned from Twitter previously. Or you know, the people that had their, or feel like they had their speech, you know like taken away from them, their free speech. You know, he was the hero, they don’t have shareholders because he’s the only, he’s the only owner. It’s him and the people that feel were left out of Twitter, for whatever reason, and their speech was taken away, they were the heroes. And the villains were employees. They were the thing they were  what was standing in the way of Musk’s vision and the free speech for all attitude that he had. And so he had to crush the villains in order to be the hero. And I think that is kind of again the very cartoony way to describe it, but that mentality, that psychology, that psychopathy almost, is kind of where the Harsh Grip kind of grabs hold on people. Sometimes it’s what have I done, I don’t know how to handle this, like you said, so I’m going to squeeze tighter. The more control I have, the better I can handle this unfamiliar territory. Or sometimes it’s just a matter of, well the employees are the villains, so I have to vanquish them. I have to control them, to own them, and that’s how we’ll get to what I want this to be. And I kind of think that’s the, again, at the heart of a lot of it. You know, I mean because Musk is a brilliant guy, but he’s not… but I wouldn’t necessarily say that he, you know… that being intelligent and being a good leader are not the same thing. And he’s really taught the world how visionaries can be, you know, great in some areas and terrible in others. And leading people and building sustainable leadership practices, and organizational structures, and cultures, and habits is something that you can’t just figure out as you go. You have to have that as a core fundamental part of the way that you understand the workplace, otherwise you end up squeezing the life out of people.

[JAMES]: Yeah and I mean what’s what fascinates me about, Musk kind of put out this call to the big advertisers who were using Twitter’s platform asking them what they… what Twitter needed to do to be better. You know, which is a great initiative. Something that as a new leader coming in, going to the people who are using your platform, who are your customers, and saying “what can we do better?”. Fantastic. This gentleman who the Vice President of a major advertising company, that represents some of the biggest brands in the world, wrote this incredibly articulate response outlining why he felt that advertisers were starting to pull out of Twitter, and what Twitter needed to do to reassure people that it would be… that it’s valuable to actually continue to put money into it. Musk block him. It’s the same mentality it. It’s this, “I’m always right, I’m going to do what I feel is right, and I’m just going to keep hanging on and squeezing every bit of value that I can go to something.” Whether you do it with, when you do it with your employees they will leave, as we’ve seen. When you do it with your customers, they will leave, as we’ve seen. Like Twitter is just a phenomenal case study for what not to do in leadership.

[COBY]: Yeah and I think that, it’s not that the Harsh Grip concept is only, the only thing that’s happening with this. But I would definitely say the fundamental psychology of what is causing all of this, it does have I would say its roots in the Harsh Grip from the Fragile Grip Principle, because this is largely the “I don’t know what to do in the situation so my move is going to be one of these two things, it’s either to give up or squeeze tighter, so it’s always squeezed tighter.” But I really do think though that, like you said, this is almost too good of an example of what the Harsh Grip may be on the extreme end looks like. But moving away from Twitter and Musk there’s lots of other companies that have, you know, put the Harsh Grip into practice and really has caused people  to leave and, you know, and damage their reputation within their consumer market and the labor market. And it’s something that I think, that if we wanted to remember what the Harsh Grip does look like, Twitter is a great example of that, you know, it’s fresh in our minds. We’ll always remember this kind of dumpster fire or case study, however you want to think of it. That is Twitter as a good example. But my hope is that the lesson we’re going to learn from from this, and it’s great example of the Harsh Grip is how damaging it can be, and how doesn’t matter how big you were, how well hyped you are, how much momentum you have behind you, it’s the same kind of fundamental problem that can take down a massive $44 billion dollar corporation, or the small Mom and Pop shop on the corner. That same fundamental Harsh Grip will can be just as damaging regardless of your size.

[JAMES]: Well it’s because on in both examples you’re dealing with people and this is the thing that businesses forget about is that your employees are not a commodity, they are people. And people will respond, an individual person is hard to predict. People as a collective have patterns of behavior. We can predict how a large, how generally speaking, how a large group of people will react to different situations. And whether you’re talking about Twitter, or a Mom and Pop shop, when you forget that your employees are people, and you just try to… well we’ve talked about the Fragile Grip being a relationship, right? Relationship between the employer and the  employee. You don’t build a healthy relationship by squeezing too tight.

[COBY]: Yeah absolutely. And you don’t, and you can’t maintain sustainability when you see the employees as the enemy. But I think moving on from The Fragile Grip to some good examples of the next part of the… or sorry of the Harsh Grip, moving on to another part of the Fragile Grip Principle, and what you said about about employees being commodities, let’s talk about the Weak Grip. So the Weak Grip is when you, is when you don’t hold on to, when you’re too loose, and you neglect the relationship that you’ve established with employees, and you end up dropping them. So I think, and layoffs are a great example of that. Now we’ve seen some big layoff announcements come from some major companies. Meta, Amazon, Google, Lyft, Stripe just to name a few. These are some companies that are laying off a significant part of their employee base, and it’s actually disproportionately affecting both HR and DEI positions. But I think it’s something that when we have these companies that we were revere, and Google’s a great example of a company that has been hailed for a long time as the pinnacle of a great employer. But when we see these companies that are, we say “well, you know, we’re not Google, but we’re still pretty good”. And that kind of, you know, that kind of fame, or that kind of respect, but they’re actually just as bad about about making these fundamental mistakes. Especially with the Weak Grip as much smaller, again, companies that that exist in our home towns. And I think it’s really important for us to really take special notice that sometimes these companies have more of a reputation, than actual have, actually walk in the walk of being a good employer.

[JAMES]: Well, and that’s a good point because, you’re right. Google is often hailed as the employee experience leader, right? They are who you should emulate. What they do is right, and you should, if you don’t know what to do, look to them, right? They are hailed as this pinnacle of engagement and experience. And they do a lot, like they do a lot for their employees and they have some really great initiatives. However, they are just as guilty of this the moment something starts to go wrong, let’s lay people off, right? This is what I find really interesting about both the Harsh Grip and the Weak Grip is that this response is so ingrained in so many businesses that it happens all the time. Any time that, like leading up, we’re in or about to be in a recession, right? There’s really no denying that at this point, we’re halfway through December 2022. It’s no longer an if, it’s a when and businesses have been preparing for that, right? And yes, you need to prepare, you need to figure out how that’s going to affect your business, and so what Google, Meta, Amazon, what these big companies have been doing is mass layoffs to prepare for the recessionary period. They’re going to turn around in 18 months, because recessions don’t last forever, and they’re going to be looking to hire back employees. They’re going to be looking for to get back up to speed. We saw this with COVID, was a great example. Businesses just, yes there are a lot of businesses that legitimately had to cut cost because COVID was so disruptive and damaging to their business. But there were many that were seeing huge increases in revenue and profits, that were still cutting people, and cutting employees, because they could. And then, you know, moving past 2020 into 2021 and into 2022, we started hearing people say “well nobody wants to work anymore”. And it’s not that people didn’t want to work, it’s that they didn’t want to work for you.

[COBY]: Yeah and I think that’s a good point, and we’ll come back to that because that is something that, you know definitely the lessons learning from this phase of COVID is something that will absolutely be something to come back to, for sure. But I think though that when it comes to some of these companies that we hail as being these leaders, or these taste makers, in employee experience. That there’s a bit of a, there can be a bit of a, you know, the ’emperor has no clothes’ kind of situation. Because, I mean we’ve always been skeptical when we hear about companies boasting the perks and benefits of the fun work environment. And again, as Workforce Experts, you know, we always are,  yeah there’s value, and having free food and scooters in the hallway and…

[JAMES]: I like free food, I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna crap on free food.

[COBY]: And it looks great when you see like air hockey tables or pinball machines in the break rooms, and those things are fine. But those things as like as your entire engagement, or your entire employee experience strategy, are hollow. Because they are not what makes a good work environment. I mean if you put massage chairs, you know, in people’s offices and you allow dogs in the office, those are cool, and fun, and great, but that does not make up for bosses who micromanage you. Or make up for the fact that you may not feel like your thoughts and opinions matter. And we can’t, you know, buy off employees long term with these benefits and these perks. And then not provide them the actual culture environment, that’s not things. That’s respect, that’s trust, that’s, you know, encouragement, inspiration, we can’t expect that those be the same things. And when you have these big tastemaker companies, like Google, and you know Meta, and all that kind of stuff. Then you know, but they’re just, it’s almost like they do a lot of great stuff, but they promote what they do way better they actually deliver on what they do. And I think that we need to realize as with some of these companies, the layoffs affecting, that’s coming from the Weak Grip and them not really respecting the relationship that they have with their employees, and the fragile nature of it, is a bit of ‘the Emperor’s not wearing any clothes’.

[JAMES]: Yeah and we’ll get into it, you mentioned how it’s affecting HR and DEI disproportionately, and I want to dive into that, specifically in more detail. Not quite yet, but I, more a reminder to myself and to you to bring it back in, because it’s during the hard times that we find out what your actual values are, right? It’s in the hard times that we see a person’s character, and it’s in the hard times that we see a company’s character, right? So let’s talk about, let’s talk about the Stable Grip because we have had opportunity to see some really good initiatives happening in 2022. There were experiments with four day work week which went really, really well. There’s a recent NPR article that talks about the, you know, the anecdotal feedback of firms that actually implemented the four day work week, having 86% of them saying that they were likely to continue to provide that. Which I think is fantastic, right? An CNN article indicated that the companies that actually did this, the companies that participated in this four day work week experience, rate their own experience overall a 9 out of 10 for productivity and performance. Which are the key indicators, right? It works really well, we know that a four day work week is going to go over really well with your workforce, but can you maintain productivity and performance while you are doing this? And you know the companies giving themselves a 9 out of 10, saying yeah, we we are maintaining and providing this great benefit, I think those are just really nice examples of that Stable Grip principle of what can you do during the difficult times to make that relationship with your employees more solid, right? Not squeezing too tight, to support the relationship rather than squeeze or let it drop.

[COBY] Yes because, I mean, and thank you for bringing that up. Because it is a really important to say, it wasn’t just dumpster fires and pink slips that was 2022. That there were some great examples of how companies were trying to provide that stability, and provide that support in the relationship they have with with employees. Because, you know and the thing too is like, this is maybe a sign of how we could look at the cost reduction piece that often inspires the Harsh Grip and the Weak Grip, that you know maybe by reducing the cost of utilities from a four-day work week, it could be an example of how we could maintain our staffing levels, give people more support, but still be able to reduce costs. So I think that there was a lot to learn around the Fragile Grip Principle and examples of the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, when it comes to seeing how the Fragile Grip Principle has worked in 2022, and then ideally we can learn from this for 2023. But let’s actually pick up on the point that you made about, that we talked about more than once about the DEI and HR roles hitting layoffs, so why don’t you go ahead.

[JAMES]: Yeah so this is a big one for me because it didn’t just happen this year, but with tech, a lot of these big companies Meta, Amazon, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, yeah most big major corporations over the last couple years have been increasing the language that they use around diversity, equity, and inclusion. Talking about how important DEI is. How it is a core value of their business, and how they are dedicated to ensuring that they become more representative. That they become more inclusive, and that they create this sense of belonging in their workplaces. This has been the language that we have heard from these large companies for well, unfortunately for ages, but it seemed over the last few years it really has ramped up as society has started to say, “you need to be more inclusive, you need to be more representative”. Why we take such exception to the layoffs hitting HR and DEI, specifically, is that it puts a lie to everything that they have said, right? It’s not that these are the most important parts of your business, they are crucial parts of your business, absolutely. There are lots of crucial parts of your business, but what drives me up the wall, is that we have this, they’ve received such praise for “Oh Microsoft has this great initiative, and they are dedicated to increasing representation, diversity, equity, inclusion”. You know, we celebrate the announcement and then we forget about it, right? If you want to know what a company values, watch what they do during a recession. Watch what they do when they run into a little bit of trouble. Laying off your DEI departments, your HR departments, after spending so much time and energy promoting the fact that you are, you know, this is a core value for us. Well that’s a load of garbage, right? You cannot have… if it was a core value for you, you would invest in it. If it was just a marketing exercise, yeah you’ll cut it when it’s no longer important to you. Which is what we’re seeing, and it just it’s such hypocrisy that is largely going to go unnoticed. And that’s what drives me nuts.

[COBY]: And the thing is, is that we’re, you know, like these cuts are happening now. It’s not like it’s 2023, and things are really are really, really bad. It’s that these are, cuts happening right now.

[JAMES]: And they’ve been happening for weeks.

[COBY]: And what’s concerning is that its not only that they’re saying one thing and then doing another, but it’s that when you have these big taste maker companies, you know that are hailed for their leadership in the future of work and corporate culture, you know then they’re the ones cutting this, then other companies, smaller companies look to them for leadership, and then they’re saying “Well if you know, if Facebook, and Google, and Microsoft, you know are are making these cuts, then may be we can too”. But because a lot of companies made really big diversity pledges, you know in late spring 2020, especially after the George Floyd murder, and then reversing on this and after hailing DEI and HR employee experience as being what we are all about, this is the the DNA of our company, to you know dropping any related initiatives and cutting staff, or even, like there’s even articles in SHRM like about whole DEI departments that are being closed and laying off pretty much everybody. And this is again happening now in 2022. And I think like you  made an excellent point. Because if you want to find out what companies are really made of, the ones that are saying “We are leaders in the future of work, employee experience, and inclusive and diverse workplaces.”, turning around and then saying “Well the first to go is DEI”. Is a sign that the companies don’t see diversity, equity, inclusion as a core component, as their DNA, it’s an appendix. It’s not an essential part of their culture, and I think that there are some, and we said this early on lots of other people did too, that some companies are using this these pledges for diversity, especially you know, after the joy, George Floyd, sorry George Floyd murder, that are saying, you know, that their companies were using it as a branding opportunity, as reputation management. And they weren’t going to walk the walk. Well the ones that have the DEI as the first to go, they are the ones that obviously are seeing it as a branding opportunity. Because they, you know, because they’re cutting it as soon as things get slightly difficult, or in the potential of getting difficult. And it’s, if you want to find out if the emperor’s wearing clothes, then that is going to be probably one of the best signs right there.

[JAMES]: You’re right, I mean in the two years since  George Floyd’s death we’ve seen this huge increase in commitments. Commitments to being more diverse, to representation, to companies calling out on social issues, and social injustice, and really positioning themselves as these you know Innovative… or innovator is the wrong word. What am I looking for?

[COBY]: The word tastemakers is what I used.

[JAMES]: Yeah, right. Like it’s just, it rings so hollow. And what drives me, like I said it before, what bothers me so much is that we as consumers, since the general public have such short attention spans, that this inconsistency, this hypocrisy is never going to reach mainstream knowledge, right? The awareness of it will always take a back seat to the marketing and promotions that these companies, you know the public face that they put forward.

[COBY]: Yeah and I think that is something that, like to me, I always find it surprising when we get into difficult times, that they cut HR. Like you know, we’re going through cuts, we’re going through downsizing, we’re going through highly stressful workplaces, we are going through higher burnout, so let’s cut HR. And I’m always like, to me, that’s like a trucking company, the save money the first thing they cut is their Maintenance and Service Department. It’s like, I mean, like it doesn’t really, it doesn’t really kind of make sense. That you would think that if, you know but again, part of it too is maybe how they respect, or don’t respect, or even use HR properly,

[JAMES]: if they see HR only as an expense, as purely as, just making sure that you’re barely legally compliant, so that you don’t get sued, and then doing as much as you possibly can to take advantage of that. Yeah, okay you’re a garbage employer because you treat people like garbage.

[COBY]: Yeah so I just think though that there’s something very that is very telling. We can learn a lot this year especially around who truly values the employee experience and DEI by how they prioritize cuts. And I think that we as consumers should be taking more attention, putting more attention into looking at that. And hopefully that won’t be a hard information to find. But it’s something that we need to definitely be aware of.

[JAMES]: Yeah absolutely.

[COBY]: So I think kind of the third thing that we might want to say is kind of the the big lesson that we can learn from this past year, is kind of about how we maybe need to put more effort into training our leaders and managers. So going back to Musk again and and other owners and managers, there’s a lot of people that, I think, that think leadership is easy, or I think that leadership is something that you learn once when you’re 20 and then it carries on through forever, not realizing that as things evolve, as things change, how you manage, how you lead, how you understand those that are in your charge; that has to evolve too. And we need to be better preparing and better training our managers. And a great example of that is talking about, and you kind of mentioned this kind of earlier on, talking about the about the return of the office that we saw in the spring and summer. Because when we did a whole episode on Work From Home, the problem of the solution, so check that out that episode too. But a lot of businesses claimed that going back to the office, and reducing remote work was about improving, about improving the company or bringing everything back to to how things ran well. But a lot of it, and we’ve even had discussions with people that’s there’s some information about, you know, how people in work better in the office, and this and that. And one thing that we always come back to is to say whether the information, the stats, the data tells you people work better in the office, or people work better from home, those are actually beside the point. The real question is, are the managers, and leaders, and owners trained and able to inspire, motivate, and improve productivity,  whether people are at home or at the office? Because if say, everyone works better from the office, was that because the managers only know how to manage them from the office? Then that doesn’t prove, if so that doesn’t prove that working from the office is superior. It just proves that we’re not properly investing in training our leaders and managers.

[JAMES]: Yeah and you said something that, I think gets to the heart of part of the problem, they want to go back, right? We hear this all the time around businesses wanting to get back to normal, get back to business, get back to the way things were. Here’s the reality, you cannot go back. Things have changed, full stop. Expectations have changed, full stop. If you, what we have seen in many instances, and with businesses, that we’ve had direct communication working with and businesses and what we’ve seen in kind of mainstream communication media. The businesses by and large, the ones that were forcing everybody back to the office, regardless of productivity, regardless of preference, generally we’re using the arguments of we need to get people back to the office. We need to get back to business. We need to get back to normal. People need to return to the office to get back to the way things were. We need to change the way that we approach business, the way that we approach our employees, right? Expectations around competitive, sufficient, and equitable, that’s what the workforce is looking for, right? Competitive, sufficient, and equitable in compensation. Competitive, sufficient, and equitable in the way that they engage in work. And if you are not willing to change the way that you approach things, if you keep trying to push people back to the way things were in 2018, 2019, you will not be as successful as you should be. You will continue to run into significant resistance because you are not meeting the expectations of your employees. Getting back to normal is not the goal, it’s finding out what is the new normal. How can I adapt? How can I meet people where they are? and that is the fundamental problem that we’ve, that I’ve seen with businesses that, using the remote working as the example, just forcing people back to the office. Because that’s what they’re, that’s what the manager is comfortable with. To your point about training, we haven’t done, we’ve done such a poor job as businesses in providing management skills to people. We think that success in a position means that the person will be successful managing. We’ll promote them, and let them manage that position. Management skills are a unique skill set, that can be taught, that some people are naturally gifted in, and they can kind of figure it out on their own. The majority of people need to be taught how to effectively manage people. Especially as so many factors of our workplace have changed because so much is going on, and there’s constant evolution and constant change.

[COBY]: Yeah and these are points that we definitely do bring up an awful lot, because the idea of, you know, of preparing people to have success in their role is something that often we say, “Well yeah, you have to do that with employees,” but you have to do that with managers, you have to do that with  leaders, you have to do that. And that should happen all the way at the top. That the skills you learned how to lead people 20 years ago are not going to translate in the new realities of the future of work and this new, in this new need to improve employee experience as a fundamental business activity. You know, the old traditional ways are not going to work, and if you think that you can just figure it out, or you think that we don’t, that only employees need training and managers don’t, then you are grossly misunderstanding how how organizational culture and everything works. Now one thing I think that we should also, I’m going to jump into the recap soon because we’re our time’s almost up, but one thing I also think that is important for us to mention and celebrate is that our conversations seem to be having a lot of success. Our listenership is steadily increasing, and we even ranked, on Feedspot, our podcast ranked on Feedspot’s 15 top Canadian Workplace Podcasts. We’re number 6, pretty good for you know having less than 10 episodes.

[JAMES]: Thank you to those who are listening, because that’s you doing it.

[COBY]: Yeah absolutely, yeah and you know, we’re we’re very excited as well what we’ve also learned is these are important topics, and important insights, and the fact that we bring a psychological and historical perspective, and new ideas to these issues, I think is really kind of resonating. So yeah, thank you to you listening, you know you’re inspiring us with paying attention and really making these important to you. And we’ll put a link to that list in the show notes, and both on YouTube and on our podcast. So I think I’ll wrap everything up and kind of cover, I guess we covered kind of three main areas.

[JAMES]: I ranted enough you can you can wrap up.

[COBY]: Yeah so the three main areas of, the three main lessons that we can learn from 2022, can first be really described as great examples of the Fragile Grip Principle that really played out and will continue to play out as you move into 2023. So when it comes to the Harsh Grip, you know the realities of Twitter and Musk and Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, really are great examples, maybe a little bit too good of examples, of the Harsh Grip. The layoffs and everything that are hitting Google and Meta and other big tech companies are kind of the great examples of what happens with the Weak Grip, even these companies that we look to for leadership are making just the same fundamental mistakes that our Mom and Pop shops down the street. And there is some hope that things like the four day work week and those types of experiments are great examples of the Stable Grip, and how we can better support the fragile relationship that we have with employees to maintain prosperity and success, combined success, long term. Another great lesson that we can learn from this year are what companies really think about DEI and the value. Many of the biggest players that wanted to lead change, were also the first to cut their DEI departments, and teams, and positions. And what this does is, this makes a very clear picture to all of us about what they really wanted from DEI. And to many it was more about brand management, than actual transformative change. And I guess the last lesson is that we clearly haven’t been training our managers and leadership to handle the future of work. So things like work from home and remote working or the shift towards improving work, employee experience, and most importantly understanding the new employee expectations. Because things like forcing people back to the old normal are great examples of how we are prioritizing the comfort level of our of antiquated management skills, over the future of work in our long-term success. So I think that pretty much covers it. Anything else James?

[JAMES]: No that’s good.

[COBY]: All right so that about does it for us. So for a full archive of our podcasts and access to the video version hosted on our YouTube channel visit our website at roman3.ca/podcast. Thanks for joining us.

[ANNOUNCER]: For more information on topics like these don’t forget to visit us at roman3.ca. Side effects of this podcast may include improved retention, high productivity, increased market share, employees breaking out in spontaneous dance, dry mouth, aversion to the sound of James’s voice, desire to find a better podcast…