Dave Kelly 5:13
was gonna say that best you’re gonna get some, some one below. Sorry, some Wonder Bread, maybe the giant, maybe the giant size Wonder Bread, but I’ve cooked in and out of like dollar stores Dollar General. First of all, nothing’s a buck anymore. And yet, if the that might get you pretty basic bread. That’s interesting. So I mean, Henry Ford’s a pretty interesting guy’s super progressive. He was he was an ally for the for the American workers, right. He fought for what he fought for, for a minimum wage, federal minimum wage, but he had set his minimum wage that What did he set that at?
Rolando Rosas 5:49
So so he paid his workers around $5 an hour, and that equates to around 62 cents per minute, is that right? I don’t think that was $5 an hour $5 A day that would have been that would have been awesome. Back then it was $5 a day, it’d be good to make them with that GPT put out for $5 per day and 60 Something cents and 62 cents an hour in he in 1914 instilled the eight hour workweek at his assembly lines as his factories he was ahead in the minimum wage was not established in the US until 1924. But let’s talk about Henry Ford. There we go. Alright, thanks for putting it up. So if you’re following us on the video side, we got some nostalgic throwback to that era. Henry Ford did something that was not common back in 1914, over just over 100 years ago, which was his philosophy was that he wanted his workers to be able to afford the cars he made, which is crazy back then, given that not that long ago, this country had been through the Civil War and the fight for slavery and all that. So just off of the backs of that not too long from that. He said, You know what, I’m going to do something different, I’m going to have workers that can also work an eight hour workweek, which was uncommon back in those days. And so this standard was not yet a widely adopted, because it wasn’t really until the 1940s, after the World War Two, where we had some rights and some movements towards establishing some kind of worker minimum wage and some standards around the work week, and how long we should work within the week. So he was at least 30 years ahead of his time when it came to that’s employment. And when it came to workers, when it came to their wages, and how they were
Dave Kelly 7:51
that’s insane to me, you know, it’s it’s, it’s humbling to think that it took so long for employees to figure out, Hey, we should treat our we should, the happier our employees are, the more we can take care of them, the more they’re going to be more productive, retain employee retention, just happy you know, people that are actually bringing something of value to the table. Why did it take so long, everyone was just just work? Just what am I saying? hands? The hands to the ground? Some knuckles, right? Something? Yeah. I mean, it why was he Why did I was Henry Ford, the first one to start thinking about happy employers, happy employees in the value that it would bring?
Rolando Rosas 8:34
I don’t know the exact reason why. But I could take a guess at it, you know, the automobile was a new thing, a new invention still in the early 1900s. He had competitive and if you’re trying to find an advantage in the in the labor pool in the marketplace and set yourself apart, you got to find some either you get the best product or the cheapest product or you say we’re going to have the best workers to give us to make the best products right? Because back then it right the the output was directly related and correlated to the workers that worked on the assembly line. You know, what if workers made errors, you know, put the wrong lug nut put the wrong parts in the car. They they put things backwards or reverse all those errors cost money. And still today, you know, errors of that think in the medical field. These kinds of errors. medical errors are a generated because people are overworked. They work too long or too long shifts or whatever those things add up, you know in terms of liability and costs and an unsure sadness to people that are on the end result of medical errors. So why not have workers in the case of Henry Ford’s time have workers that are in the assembly line and can produce at a rate that is healthy for the bottom line, as well as for the work true
Dave Kelly 9:53
and you know, in that industry back in 1914 is ever we’re seeing 1914 There was hit a lot of competition. So it’s Ford, GM Dodge Brothers Chrysler, who
Rolando Rosas 10:06
the Baker was the narrative Baker.
Dave Kelly 10:08
Yeah, Studebaker was was certainly snuck in there not what I think that they were all kind of in that same area right in that
Rolando Rosas 10:17
area. Yeah, the Midwest, the Upper Midwest became the hotbed for the auto industry. So I could also imagine that there were, you know, trying to get the best workers, I can only imagine, because if he’s paying, let’s say, 62 cents an hour, which, which is what $5 A day comes out to in 19, I think was a 1934 1938. When Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act, that established the federal minimum wage, it was at 25 cents an hour. So, so 1914 to 1938. That’s 24 years later. Well, I was so far ahead, that he at 1914, he paid 3x, three times the labor rate that the federal government established in 1938. Can you imagine how many people tried to get into that factory and world as a worker there? And can you imagine the life changing quality of life, that those people that manage to work at those factories for Henry Ford would have had, being able to command three and probably if you adjusted for inflation could have been three between three and four times? Because again, 24 years before the federal minimum wage established the 25 cents an hour is paying 62. So yeah, those people could live a very good life, and why wouldn’t he be loyal? You know, the workplace was totally different than it is today. But they would be loyal to Henry Ford’s cause and making the best automobiles in the world. Hmm,
Dave Kelly 12:01
I wonder if that was driven by competition. You know, one of the things that I love about capitalism is competition drives innovation. So I wonder if Henry Ford was competing for employees, or he was always progressive. But, you know, that’s why I love these competing industries, because people want to do more to attract that workforce. You know, there’s a lot of there’s, there’s a lot of options today. But even right there, just in that particular market, there was a lot of options. They were centralized geographically, they were all competing for automobile production and sales. I’d love to dig a little bit deeper in this, when it makes sense to see, you know, more about, you know, the sales of Ford and the competitors, just to see if there was a correlation between productivity and paying more for the employees more for the workforce.
Rolando Rosas 13:03
I think back then, you know, and we’re gonna talk to economists Nick Bloom here soon. And he can give us the exact numbers, because economists tend to know these things. But I believe that back in the day, it was more common to pay by the widget. So if you produce 10 widgets, today, you get paid by the widget. And that turned out to not be the best model, because the incentive is just to crank out widgets, whether they’re good or bad, or otherwise. So your quality assurance could go down the tubes, right? If I know I’m gonna get paid $1 widget doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know when you have hundreds of workers what their what they want to do, right? Absolutely.
Not, they’re gonna crank out crank out at that point. Yeah.
But you know, the backdrop to this, Dave, I know for a fact that before Henry Ford started paying that $5 an hour, it was common in the US to have towns and cities where you would have an employer that basically dictated the rules where workers worked, and what they did with that money. So they basically set the stage for workers to work, where the employer said, You should work near around the place close by, and it was still common to have those wages be low, and then tell those workers you can only shop at the stores. Because these are the stores affiliated with us, kind of like the Canvas environment. If we were to call that where, you know, you go to that your bread store, that bread stores connected to us, you go take your dollars over there, or whatever they used. And you go over there to this meat place, and that’s the place to be or to shop. And so the lawyers weighed heavily on how the work was done, where the workers were doing the work. And basically the fabric of For those workers was their employment location because everything revolved around that. And that got me to thinking about today on, you know where we are in this moment in history, you know that people are saying, hey, it’s time for something different, you know, it’s time. If I do work here on a keyboard like this one, do it anywhere, right? I don’t, I’m not at a factory, stamping out parts and tires and, you know, an assembly line. And for people that need to do that work, obviously, they need to be in person. But for everyone else that’s in what I would call the keyboard economy. They could probably do that anywhere. You can get an internet connection today. So how did we get here, Dave? With this five day workweek eight hour workday? Why not? Six? Why not? Seven? Why not? Four?
Dave Kelly 15:54
Well, I know that we know people that do work multiple jobs, or they’re not part of the keyboard economy, and they are working, you know, 8090 100 hours a week. But listen, I want to tell you something. The Harvard Business Review, they did a study recently, and there’s some sobering facts in here. Employees in this keyboard economy, did you know that we switch between 22 different apps nearly 1200 times daily?
Rolando Rosas 16:19
Whoa,
Dave Kelly 16:20
whoa, let it sink. Yeah, a
Rolando Rosas 16:23
lot of switching. Dave, listen, it
Dave Kelly 16:25
happened to me earlier today. We were working on writing a script, something had that diverted my attention. And it did, it took me a couple of minutes, that mental juggling of getting back to the other task. It’s something that people are doing often now it takes its toll on employees and increases stress, it slows productivity, it really undermines focus. So now here comes Global Teck Worldwide, Global Teck Worldwide has over two decades of experience in business communications, they’ve mastered the art of unifying communication tools, from voice to SMS, video, email more. When you integrate these disparate systems, they cut through the clutter, and it reduces the effects of context switching
Rolando Rosas 17:11
makes sense? That makes sense, right?
Dave Kelly 17:13
So in this age of optimization, efficiency isn’t a dream. It’s a reality with global tech, book an appointment and talk with Global Teck about your needs. You can find them at global-teck.com. That’s global-teck.com. Check them out, they can help tie together some of your systems, help with efficiency and reduce the effects of context switching, like a lot of us are doing all the time. But as we get back into that we were talking about well,
Rolando Rosas 17:47
we were talking about the about how did we get end up with this five day workweek. Right? Right. And while you were doing the read, I just looking at something here were in 1916. The Adamson Act was enacted in response to a nationwide railway strike. And it had the potential to disrupt the whole braking economy take it down, Dave, because everything moved by rail. And to avoid further labor unrest, it says that the government passed this law establishing the eight hour workday and overtime pay for rail road workers. And I would imagine at that point, the groundwork was laid down, right. So if you’re gonna give railroad rail road work, I’m having a hard time seeing rough railroad workers. My tongue can’t say that. rail road workers, you give them that. Right, because because of the law, you say, Okay, what about factory workers? What about farmworkers? I’m thinking of the 30s or no 1916. So farm workers, factory workers and other workers in other parts of the economy. They gotta be scratching their head. Why can’t I do that? Right? Yeah, I
Dave Kelly 19:13
know, go ahead. If I was making car if I had an opportunity back then to have a high to have a a job that had a fair wage. That allowed me to kind of have some of this work life blend. Like it’s funny. We it’s not a foreign concept to us in 2023 work life balance work life blend, but 19 1916 That that was in 16. That was just a foreign idea. It’s like, No, you work until you die. Work as much as you can. You’re miserable isn’t
Rolando Rosas 19:48
it was common to have a 70 hour workweek it was common. In a lot of these early factories in the US, they put a lot of women textile factories. And the working conditions weren’t great. And I can only imagine if we go back to our Henry Ford thing, if he says, I’ve established, I planted a flag here where my workers are eight hours a day, and five days a week, he had to be one of the earliest corporate titans of the time, that is establishing a standard me whether he knew it or not, that would influence only two years later, this act of 1916. I’m sure he played a small role in some of that. Because Ford, the big corporate Titan, you know, as cars are everywhere, right. And so, I don’t know, I don’t know if everything could be attributed to him. But I’m sure they somebody may have drawn some inspiration there from what he was doing. Right. And established that eight hour workday, because it’s what Henry Ford had been doing. Just two years before that. Sure. Well,
Dave Kelly 20:58
I’m sure that the bears competitors had no choice but to follow suit. Why work over here for $2.06, seven days a week, when you can make double over here and have some time off to be a person and raise a family and live your life. Life shouldn’t be work? What did you say at the beginning of this? Session, off, off recording, you mentioned, Americans
Rolando Rosas 21:27
live, we live to work, we live to work, other parts of the world seem to be on a different page when it comes to work. And I was listening to a webinar yesterday with a bunch of people talking about the differences in different parts of the world. And we’re still far behind our European counterparts when it comes to non work things like you know, hanging out with our family, taking vacations, enjoying just the day, and you know, I’m out of work. We don’t talk about it anymore. Because it’s my free time. And I like to do X, I like to hang up. I like to enjoy the nature, whatever. So it’s definitely more American, and more, to live to work. And I think I think we may be just turning that corner a little bit with within the last couple of years, people are starting to reevaluate. I think that’s why this is such a big deal for people when it comes to flexible work. Sure. But you know, David doesn’t end there. Because there’s more. There’s more when we’re looking at this and trying to understand, okay, so the flag was planted early, was it widely adopted, and did not take off that eight hour workweek, even though the railway rail road workers got that into law. It wasn’t really until 1938. We were just touching on this a little bit 1938 Dave, that’s when the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed and signed by President Roosevelt. So it took 24 years after the Istat after Ford had come in, and then it took 22 years, when when the when the other Act was passed, let me go back here when the Adam sins Act was passed, to then establish a minimum federal wage, and at that it was at established at 25 cents a lowly 25. A low bar, a very low bar. And our when, again, some 20 plus years prior to that 24 was already paying his workers three times sick down since
Dave Kelly 23:48
he was 24 years earlier. He was paying them over 60 Was that when he says explicitly
Rolando Rosas 23:55
cents an hour at the 62 cents an hour 62 cents
Dave Kelly 23:59
an hour 24 years earlier than the first federally signed minimum wage of 25 cents an hour. And
Rolando Rosas 24:09
I think for inflation purposes for folks listening, what does that represent? $5 a day is roughly 100 Let me let me do my math here. 154 hours, if you’re using the calculators that adjust for inflation, it works out for you set out and 5400 I want to pay workers more $154 A day day of live. I keep receiving an hour and I think awesome we’d all be rich if we could make $154 an hour but $154 a day. And going back to you know go back to our bread analogy milk get this Dave milk back in the day 1914 When workers were making at Ford $5 a day. Milk was too 12 cents 12. So would take a worker 12 minutes based on that $5 A day at the Ford plant 12 minutes to buy a gallon of milk. That’s crazy. I
Dave Kelly 25:17
bought a gallon of whole milk the other day, I don’t usually buy milk. I think it was over four bucks. Well $4 for that down on milk.
Rolando Rosas 25:26
And so just doing some quick math, based on the 725 minimum, that would be something close to 30 minutes by the gallon of milk. That’s crazy that in 1914, you could buy a gallon of milk and it would take the worker at Ford 12 minutes. And today’s worker in America in America at earning seven and a quarter, which is the minimum wage 30 minutes, half an hour. It takes longer, longer to buy that gallon of milk than it did in the 1940s. Sheesh. Perhaps? Well, the
Dave Kelly 26:08
good times guy I thought was aggressive and we were moving forward. Everyone knows that $2 not going as far as it used to go. But this is very eye opening for sure.
Rolando Rosas 26:19
Well, Indeed, indeed. And I think that that speaks a little bit, you know, a sum. Most of the folks that are making 725 An hour are not the ones benefiting from remote work. Let’s also state that. Sure, right. They’re not. But I think it also speaks to a larger feeling that we’re all feeling right now, for a lot of workers that are white collar workers in the keyboard economy. And that is like what you said they the dollar isn’t going as far as it probably used to. And one of the biggest things that a worker can do. And I was talking I was hearing Nick Blum talk about this recently was that it’s an immediate pay raise to the employee. When you’re able to work from home, because you’re saving gas, you’re saving the need to go dry clean, weekly, you’re saving the need to pay for lunch while you’re at work. All of these things add up and anywhere between 25 to $40 a day that you’re easily spending on, on moving back and forth or commuting. It’s not cheap to take the Long Island Railroad to from Long Island into the city or from or from a Tarrytown down to the city or from Newark into the city. It’s not cheap to go into San Jose, and do that commute every day. Right? Or the Bay Area. And so people are saying, You know what, I can put a little more money back in my pocket. And at the same time, employers benefit from productivity gains, because employees are happier. And there’s some parallels there. And that was the thing that motivated me today. Do we have some parallels and some patterns, because human behavior doesn’t change a whole lot, Dave. I studied psychology in college. And one of the things that you and I are not so different than the people from 200 300 500 years ago, they want to be loved. They want to be safe. People want to be secure. People still want to be respected. And they want meaningful work. They want their work to be dignified. That is still the same today as it was 100 years ago, 400 years ago, five, whether you’re on a farm, and you’re raising crops, or you’re in a factory line, you know, you want to have dignified work, right. And that’s what people were trying to fight for back in the day. And today, it’s not about factories so much although the the guys and gals that are on strike today in the US again, we’re repeating a bit what happened in the 60s where there was a lot of strikes. We’ll get to that in a minute. But can we learn anything from these patterns? And it seems like we can, because people are wanting the same thing. They didn’t want to stay in those company towns that the company dictated back in the early 1900s, late 1800s. The workers did want better living. They wanted healthy working conditions or safe working conditions. We saw that as we were doing some research here that there were a bunch of there were factories like textile factories that had very unsanitary and unsafe conditions. All these things pushed the work week changes to the forefront, you know, fighting for the rights to work of minimum wage fighting for you know, not not working over 70 hours a week, child labor laws that went into effect and I think all Have you started shaping our work we can. It wasn’t until the 40s that that standard finally started to stick highway started going in after world war two suburbs were being built. And people in cities changed. Work, they’re started now living in the suburbs, they started coming in to the city for work. And that was the norm, you know, the 40 hour workweek for those people.
Dave Kelly 30:28
I feel like we’ve come a long way in a short period of time. So just to recap, we didn’t have a federal minimum wage until 1938, less than 100 years ago. That’s two generations, three generations. It’s like, you know, when you learn about history, sometimes when I’m learning about history, and I’m doing some real basic numbers, you know, I’ve been watching. Yellowstone has two prequel stories, my 19, that one’s called 1928, and one’s called 1889, or something like that. But you do the math, you know, you’re looking at this period of time. And they didn’t have the technology, they were just getting cards, you know. And when you do the math, you’re like, Oh, that was 100 years ago, 100 years ago, 110 years ago. So in such a short period of time, we’ve now come to this new keyboard economy, we’ve adopted the five day work week. We have good working conditions, we’re safe, we have workers comp insurance, you know, that was something that we didn’t really do a lot of research on. But that had come up around that same time of Henry Ford between 1914 and 1938, workers comp, somehow came a standard, it became a mandate. But some people think that that was 1,000,010 million years ago, it was at the same time dinosaurs. And that was actually not not long ago at all. So when you relate it when you’re like, you know, we today here in 2023, we’re still human, we feel the same way as the people that then the, the, the job market was different. We respect that. But it’s still that wanting to do meaningful work, wanting to be a provider to our families, wanting to have a family wanting to have free time, you know, this balance. And of this progressive nature, people are continuing to ask for more and have more conversations. You know, people are now talking about the four day workweek.
Rolando Rosas 32:41
There’s studies there studies. Oh, and I can’t wait for Professor Nick Bloom to come and school us on that. There are studies that right now there’s a several 100 companies around the world participated in, and they did a four hour workweek. And they all did it a little bit different where he either the hours were front loaded, or they work the same amount of hours each day, or they did an equivalent of 40. Or they reduced down to 32 hours and then spread that out. No matter how they did it all. Almost all the participants in this study saw gains from a four hour workweek. And it’s gaining traction in different pockets around the world and in different organizations because of the productivity gains. And I would imagine in in high labor markets in terms of the cost like we are we’re in a tight labor market in the US, in a lot of parts of Europe, where you’re paying your cost of employment is higher relative to Asian countries or Latin American countries. If you can gain productivity without having to add headcount, you would do that as a as an executive, you’d be like, boom, push that button. And we’re in that point right now where we may be shifting to a whole new type of workweek. Five workweek was the standard from the 40s will actually go back to 1914. So we give some credit back to Henry Ford for a starting it. But that’s over 100 years ago, right? The economy of this whole world was different. So why shouldn’t we revisit that playbook? Right? If I were to put it in football or sports terminology? Let’s look at the playbook. Is this the best option to make profits today, but I’m looking at this as the CEO, is this the best playbook to have happy employees to have retention to have in productivity? Is this the best playbook for that? You have to ask yourself the question. Well, how did we get here? And I think we’ve provided a little bit of that, but then where can we go because we certainly are not in 1940 Team are not in 1936. And we’re not anything in 1960. Dave, we’re in 2023. There were no keyboards back in 19 1914. There was no Internet, right? There were no cell phones, there was no zoom, there was no teams, there was no ability to do what you and I are doing right now. We’re talking hundreds of miles of of work, and we’re able to get work done. Right. And we can work simultaneously on something, a product, an idea, right, a collaboration, it could take instantly. We can have collaboration that couldn’t that didn’t exist back then. So shouldn’t we, as an economy, as leaders, as a society really have that discussion about what should work look like for the next 100 years? Right? We did this for 100 years, five day work week, eight hours a day. And that was productive. That was better than before. Right? Now, what’s better than today? Right, and I think we had Sandeep, Sandeep, the former president of BlackBerry come in, and he said, that’s what it takes to win. You want to win, you have to ask yourself, as a curious leader, what is it take to win? How can we be more productive? What’s the best playbook going forward? It may not be that five day work week, it may be something different. But if you’re not curious enough, I don’t think you open yourself up to the possibility that there’s a better play than the one we ran for the last 100 years. Right?
Dave Kelly 36:36
Yeah. And when Sandeep was speaking about curiosity, we have more data available at our fingertips today than at any time in history. So if you’re an analyst, you know, your money person, the numbers are out there, you can, you can gather them, you can analyze it. What I find interesting is when you when you consider Sandeep he wanted to he was, like, naturally an employee advocate. And when we think about some CEOs today that are implementing the return to Office policies, I feel like they’re strong holding the workforce there, they they’re neglecting all of this data that’s at their fingertips. And they’re, they’re more of an adversary, so that they’re butting heads with their workers. And they’re like, they are the bully, they are saying this is the mandate, and they’re trying to drive it down people’s throats. And then you know, when you think about Sandeep, he was completely the opposite. When you think about Henry Ford, was the opposite of that. He was already thinking about his workers. And I’m just wondering, you know, when we take some of these people that are so quick to say, you know, what, wrap your head around this, everybody, you’re coming back to the office? I think there could be but also on the flip side, when I think about the auto unions right now, that are really fighting for this four day workweek. They are being the tough guy in the room, they are being the bully in the room, because they can understand what what happened to a manufacturer. If things halt, it’s funny, we’re finally kind of through this pandemic, manufacturing, we have product, all this and now the workers are like, Oh, no, we’re actually very important piece of this. And now we’re gonna put our foot down and we’re gonna stand up for ourselves. There needs to be a common interest on both ends for success. And I like Sandeep’s thinking, I like Henry Ford’s thinking and it’s completely the opposite of musk. And
Rolando Rosas 38:53
Bill, he called it morally wrong.
Dave Kelly 38:55
He calls it morally wrong. Yep. And I don’t know if he was considering one part of his workforce. You know, the the engineers, the people that are there on site, the the ones that are hands on? Yeah, those folks obviously can’t be working at home. But there’s still so many people in
Rolando Rosas 39:13
their salespeople, either in an organization or as large as Yeah, as large as as that you’re going to have various roles. And something that I’m just gonna go back to what I heard, just yesterday in a conference call with a bunch of leaders that were talking about remote work, they were talking about Stanford University, and they were talking about how Stanford has, obviously, they have professors, they have students, they have people that work in in craft services or making food and the fear limits landscape realities, people steal facilities, right. I teach it all the rest. So they have a lot they have, like 20,000 employees. What’s fascinating, Dave is that Stanford allow was for all three versions of work totally in person for all those people that have to be there. Now, and some of those people are also professors because they also want to be in the classroom. They also have people that are completely remote now like, That’s it, they’ve gone 100% remote, maybe they they lived further away from the university and love, you know, staying away, you know, not making that commute. And then they have hybrid, some people that come in and out that that are employees that are there for a couple of days, and then work the other days at their at home, it really got me to thinking about how, Oh, interesting, the needs, for different roles, like you’re talking about in an organization are different. And so mandating just a three hour workweek returned to Office, or four day, four day returned to office or even five day you know, you gotta be all on in person doesn’t really speak to the moment of where we’re at right now. You know, some workers that are young, as was pointed out in this conference, some workers that are young, they do want to go in person, if you live in a in a in, it’s very common for, you know, Latino households, it’s very common in some Asians household, especially a lot of immigrant households, you have multi generational folks living under one roof. And imagine sharing everything under one roof and everybody fighting for that Wi Fi. You don’t want to do that. If you’re you know, you got to get on a zoom call. So you want to go into the office, but their side of the spectrum, right? Maybe you You’re half of home, you’ve got space, you know, you’ve got a kid or two or three. And you know, one of them’s sick. You want to be able to work from home when you need to. You want to be or you have a loved one that’s not well, you want to be able to care for them for an extended period of time. So the needs of the workers are different. You’re an empty nester. If you’re an empty nester, I’m sure your needs are going to be different than the guy or gal that just graduated from college and started working for Tesla, or working for Goldman or working for Google or working for Nike. Right. So I think that flexibility model is interesting. But I would imagine, that’s why Nick Blum is in high demand, because how do you pull that off? Right? If you have various workers different roles, how do you set those policies? And we don’t have a lot of muscle memory for this. But I would imagine that those curious leaders, those CEOs that are like the, you know, I really want the bottom line, I want the top talent, I think they’re going to figure it out. I think HR departments are going to be able to figure it out. But it is going to take a new playbook. Right, right.
Dave Kelly 42:50
I think about I think about young organizations who are hiring. They’re hiring people from school. So they have some entry level jobs, the hiring kids back to college, early, early 20s. In my opinion, it’s so important for those folks to have mentors that have been in the business for 10 plus years, so that they can just get a better idea about the organization, how businesses done, what a meeting, you know, how to conduct yourselves within a meeting. Just mentorship. And I’m thankful that I had an opportunity back in 2000, to have an office to go in to be part of this community of org of people, because I certainly learned from them. And I think that that’s a big, big part of I feel that some leaders feel that that is going to get missed the mentor ship might fall to the wayside, if everyone is working remotely. With the technology that’s available. I think that there will be ways to create a culture where it can still talk amongst each other, even if it’s not walking into the office and running into them. You know, grabbing a coffee in the in the coffee area or lunch. But I gotta say I am concerned about the workers who had to start jobs during the pandemic and they’re spending it at home. The reality you know, because then when they we actually were talking about this the other day, the younger generation that started in the workforce during the pandemic, with the freedom of working remotely, maybe they moved further away from the office. But when that company starts mandating Alright, it’s time to come back in. And then those younger people are now getting an idea of Oh my goodness. So it’s eight hours of work. Plus three hours of commuting, plus $30 for breakfast and lunch. minus social life minus, you know, all these other pieces of you, you’re getting a lot when you are mandated 1% To be in office. Yeah. And it’s
Rolando Rosas 45:13
not a reality check. And I think there was something in thinking mostly of the times were the poster. Maybe it was on LinkedIn that I saw this, somebody posted that one of the biggest contributors right now to relocations is folks that are reverse migration, they moved away during the pandemic, because they thought they could remote work for forever. And they’re having to move back in closer to town or close to the city. And a good chunk of those people that are doing that are upside down in their equity in their home. So they’re selling hair loss. So it’s not a good, it’s not a good thing right now, I would say, for those workers that are having to come back to the office because of the mandate, because A, they either leave, leave or come back to work where we tell you to work, which is an interesting parallel, Dave, but we’re talking about earlier, the company towns of the late 1800s. That’s exactly what they mandated. You work here, we tell you where to work, or you shop at these places. That’s what’s affiliated with us. So this feels a little bit like obviously, it’s not exactly the same. But conceptually, the idea of the employer mandating where you should work. Sounds a lot like the late 1800s, when employers exerted that much influence over towns and cities in America. Yeah, it’s incredible. It’s incredible. I mean, it’s a new day, but it sounds a lot like
Dave Kelly 46:58
I didn’t live during that era. But if, if that gave the people a sense of stability, you know, if you lived, and you worked, and you spent your earnings all within this area. I don’t know if that’s a form of socialism. But you know, it was it provided some stability, and people are always looking for stability. When it comes to work. It’s always been something that’s been discussed. People want to know that they have a job tomorrow. They don’t want to think that world is always ending and this might be our last paycheck. But it’s it’s an interesting concept and of keeping, keeping that spending, you know, together. I think about some of these large insurance companies that are near me, so I’m, I’m based in southern, I’m based in Southern New Hampshire, in New England, Connecticut is right near us. Connecticut is home to some of the largest American owned insurance companies. And when you go on to these campuses, they give you everything, they don’t have housing, but they do give you everything that you would need. They give you a bank, they give you they have a restaurant, they give you the maybe artisanal bread, hey, that you know, now they’re speaking my language. They’re trying to get employees to come in so they want to make it convenient, want to make it convenient. I had visited one of these insurance companies eight years ago, and it was lunchtime, and I said why don’t we go out? Like are we going to go out and grab a bite? And they said no, no What let’s stay in our cafeteria. Like okay, I thought there was they actually is great in this particular area. There’s a New York deli is a New York Jewish deli that has like the best Reuben sandwiches the best bread that the marble right I got about it. I wanted to go get one of these Reuben sandwiches but their homemade marble right. Marble marble rye breads,
Rolando Rosas 49:02
your That’s your problem. Mine was railroad. I want to say railroad railroad.
Dave Kelly 49:07
But you know, what was funny was, he said that it’s frowned upon to leave during the workday.
Rolando Rosas 49:15
Hold on, hold on. Hold on. Dave say that he did it. What that what what it is frowned upon to leave.
Dave Kelly 49:27
I was told part of them providing you all the comforts of life. Everyone roof banking, hair cuts, no grocery stores, but there was multiple food options, the gym everything. They really were doing that it didn’t want you to leave the office. It was almost like these. These employee tanzer, were talking about they wanted to keep all the money kind of circulating within within the walls of the vacancy
Rolando Rosas 50:02
cutting both ways, right, you could argue we do this for the convenience of our employees. So they, you know, they don’t have to worry about driving, getting in their car and going over here and going over there. But you could also see that very clever way to also just keep employees very close to work. Right? I mean, it’s great because it hasn’t been of convenience. But it also is like, why can I go to this other restaurant? Why can I go to XYZ place this? Red Lobster? I’m just gonna name Brad laughs
Dave Kelly 50:40
I love and you certainly could be Si. La Red Lobster. I think the only ones left are down in Connecticut or Rhode Island. That’s not getting the same reaction
Rolando Rosas 50:51
in a way where you have really good lobsters. I’m surprised they’re even around.
Dave Kelly 50:55
Yeah, they don’t exist here. I have been read last year once in Rhode Island. And I almost think I went online a couple years ago. And that was the only one around we had commercials for Red Lobster we have. They don’t exist. We have commercials for Sonic. There’s never been I’ve never seen a sonic in any of the states here in New England. You got Sonic sound, anyway? Yeah,
Rolando Rosas 51:22
we do. No, no, but you were saying Yeah. So all these nice, beautiful parks that some of these companies, some of these companies have. It’s frowned upon that you should leave the facilities. Yeah, it was
Dave Kelly 51:34
like you don’t want your manager see you going out to your car in the middle of the day during a lunch break.
Rolando Rosas 51:43
It was good, right? Yeah, right that the stuff is there. But again, why can’t What’s from a worker standpoint? Why would you want to be limited in your options on where you want to eat? It’s your 30 Minute, break time, hour, whatever it whatever that work deems necessary for you to take a break for lunch. Take it the way you want to take it right. Yeah, exactly. Maybe you have a particular food that you can eat. And there’s a lot of people today that have allergies to all kinds of things. Right. And maybe you can’t eat what’s being served there. I agree. Interesting. Interesting. Interesting. Take, Huh? Huh? That that’s uh huh. That’s it’s a, it does sell. I’m telling you sounds just like these company towns. And it’s an interesting parallel, but I think people even with that, even with all of those perks, Dave, it’s beautiful as Stanford’s campus is like, when I was hearing this webinar, some people say, No, I can make my own lunch. I can make it the way I want to. And not only that, the perk for me working from home, I have my own private bathroom. Anybody? Oh, and I’m all that with anybody.
Dave Kelly 53:04
I’ve never I never said that aloud. But I’m saying that all as well. Yeah, it’s not exactly private, but it’s sure it certainly is not public. The little things in life, the small victories Rolando this small.
Rolando Rosas 53:20
So yeah, so we will take this small victory. And, you know, let workers and employers know, you know that there are other avenues. I encourage you to look into Nick Bloom, Professor Nick Blooms work. There’s so many others that are doing exciting work and research around this field, you know, and I heard something encouraging if we want to leave our folks, our audience with something encouraging. He said in this webinar that I was on yesterday, that he had a conversation with the CEO of Goldman, and he said something that really struck me was that is that the sale to the CEO and the C suite is actually very easy. Not as hard as we think it is. He said that managers in the middle mid level managers are the ones that have experienced most of this difficulty. But the CEOs, they get it they understand they understand productivity. Productivity doesn’t go down as a result of remote work and flexible work and, and Professor Blooms got all the data around that to support that. And it’s great for the bottom line. And Dave is great for worker retention in this tight labor economy. recruiting new workers is harder. And the last thing he said which was impressive, is like you know, if you care about the the world and you want to leave this a better place, it’s greener. So it’s proving land, right. And so that’s an easy sell to a CEO. That’s making decisions based on data. And so I offer that up to our audience, because you want to dive into Professor Blooms work. Please do. There’s a lot of great information out there that he has on studies from around the world, with different organizations experimenting with flexible work, hybrid work, remote work all of the above. And they could serve as a guidepost for where your organization needs to be when it comes to this very, very hot topic right now.
Dave Kelly 55:33
Right? You know, I’m wondering if middle management is less attracted to the idea of remote and hybrid work, because it will be up to them to implement a strategy for motivation, productivity, mentoring, you know, they have a lot of things that they need to change, they’ll be the ones that are touching the people that has been say, like that. They’re the ones that are close to the actions of the employees. So it’d be up to them to kind of implement the just process, the process of everything. Yeah,
Rolando Rosas 56:12
usually they’re the implementers. Right. They’re the implementers. And in some cases, in some cases, right now, the enforcers, there’s several companies that have now given the green light for managers to terminate employment based on lack of attendance and adherence to the, the mandate for three or four day workweeks. And some have also made it part of performance review. So it can would lead to termination if you are not going and checking in or swiping your badge at the at the building that you’re assigned to. So it’s going to be very interesting, Dave, I think, I think if history has taught us anything, once workers get a taste of some freedom and rights, like we talked about in the 14th 1914 1930s 1940s they’re gonna want that to go into perpetuity. And we’re at that point where, what’s going to happen, you know, are we going to stay at a four day workweek or go to a four day workweek? We’re gonna stay five? Are we gonna see? Well, I’m way more hybrid? All of the above? I don’t know. But it’s certainly a very interesting time right now. As
Dave Kelly 57:33
does the New York Stock Exchange. So if you’re a publicly traded organization, here in the States, you operating at a four day, work week, but you’re trading five days a week. Is that Is that what is the correlation between Stock being exchanged and sold and bought? And the work week? I always thought, you know, my wife had asked me why, you know, what would happen if it was four days a week? And I just went, I just went right to the Stock Exchange. I’m like, I think this is where the paranoia is. It’s the shareholders it’s retraining five days a week, how can you train five days a week, but you’re only working four days a week? What’s the correlation between that?
Rolando Rosas 58:17
I don’t know, Dave, but I can tell you this. This is just anecdotal. I remember the first time we were doing business with companies in Europe, in Israel, and August rolls around. You know that in Europe, the people in Europe, they get, they get two, three, sometimes four weeks of yearly vacation, right way more than HIPAA take all of the exact same time. They all go at the same time. Now, if it were the case, that workers going on vacation for an extended period of time was bad. All a lot of companies big and small, would go under every single year, when all these employees go on their extended vacations, and it doesn’t happen. We in the US think that way. Because we are programmed to think if I’m not at my cell phone and my computer at my desk, I’m not immersed in work. That’s bad. That’s bad. And it’s bad for the organization in that mentality is from the top down, right from leaders all the way down to the entry level person that that mindset is pervasive. But I remind you of Europeans and countries in Middle East also in Latin America, they go on extended vacation, and things do not fall apart. Those companies come back after vacation, and they keep doing business because people know and understand there’s a rhythm to the work that’s this way. We’re trying to make some of those changes. You know, we don’t have I would love if there was a four week mandate in the law in the US because then people may not feel so stressed About about work. And there’s there’s some benefits and some cons and but in the end, business won’t fall apart if we go with a four day workweek because we will all eventually adjust. Right? We went to a five day workweek things didn’t fall apart, we actually had some of the biggest booms in American history that followed after World War Two, in the 40s. When this was instituted, right, things decided not fall. That’s what I’m trying to say. Once the full five day workweek was adopted, became the norm. The eight hour workweek became the norm. The sky did not fall. We experienced enormous prosperity as a country during that period after World War Two, I think. I think there’s just me, it’s quite possible, we could see a huge productivity boom, with some of the numbers that are out today around the four day workweek that I’ve seen. So we’ll have to see how many organizations actually incorporate that into their organization?
Dave Kelly 1:01:05
When do our employees start asking us when we’ll start implementing a four day workweek? You know, one thing I do want to I do want to leave you with is it’s interesting that back in 1914, auto industry, right. Henry Ford fighting, you know, for federally mandated minimum wage. Here we are in 2023. Same industry, the auto workers industry, the auto work, I don’t know the name of the Union, but they have the same industry and they are looking for. They have they have some very aggressive requests that include a four day work week. So we’ll keep our ear to the ground. It’s just crazy that it happened to be the same industry. Yeah,
Rolando Rosas 1:01:58
it’s a good pickup. This is
Dave Kelly 1:02:01
one of those words that industry. And and they’re not it’s not the keyboard economy, or the keyboard economy. I think we have more opportunity to have flexible hours, four day work weeks, like flexible hours, I actually knew someone very early on their business did for 10 hour work days. And they he loved it, everyone he worked with, they loved that job. And they didn’t mind working, you know, they just banked it all together. So they did the for 10 hour days. Still being very productive. They weren’t working on to the bone. quality work was there the business still is there today, I was just talking to him recently, they still work those hours. Again, they’re not giving people 32 hour work weeks, but they’re also recognizing that they can get a little more out of more for less and keep productivity keep their product quality, but also take good care of their employees and the employees are still they send out satisfaction, skies in nature. So they send them sad as employee satisfaction surveys. And it’s, it’s a it’s a low paying or a low skill factory. But they’re working they do things kind of out of out of the norm so that they can just keep their employees happy so that they can have all those things that Henry Ford was mentioning, retain employees, keep them happy and keep them safe and normal and have better quality of life than than their competitors. MIT
Rolando Rosas 1:03:35
agrees with you on that real life. Absolutely. DJ Khaled, real life. We want to thank you for hanging in there on this episode of work, work productivity, and how would we start with this five day work weekend the origins around that. And if you want more and you want to nerd out on more facts about remote work, flexible work, I invite you to go check out the episode where Dr. Ellen Frank Miller, formerly of the University of Chicago, she had numbers around workers and how they contribute to the bottom line when they’re happy. So go check that episode out with Dr. Ellen and Dave and I will see you in that episode.
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