Season Recap and Predictions
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Welcome to the HR Data Labs podcast, your direct source for the latest trends from experts inside and outside the world of human resources.

Listen as we explore the impact that compensation strategy, data, and people analytics can have on your organization. This podcast is sponsored by Salary.com, your source for data, technology, and consulting for compensation and beyond. Now, here are your hosts, David Teretsky and Dwight Brown. Hello and welcome to the HR Data Labs podcast. I'm your host, David Teretsky, alongside my co-host, best friend, buddy, pal, partner in crime...

And without crime, Dwight Brown from Zower.com. Dwight, how are you? David Teresky, I am good, and I'm especially good because these are such fun episodes to do. So all of our episodes are fun, but these kind of stand alone. So I'm excited. What Dwight's talking about is today is the wrap-up for Season 8. Can you believe it? The wrap-up for Season 8. Man, you're not kidding.

Wow. We were just doing season one. No, we weren't just doing season one. That was four years ago. Literally, that was 200, more than 200 episodes ago, if you can believe it. I know, but it's kind of like our kids growing up. You reach a point and you look back and you're like, holy crap. It is. That time just flew. Well, our kids go into kindergarten soon. So we got a budget for school. Yeah.

Yeah, hopefully we have to create a 529 plan for the HR Data Labs to go to college. Yeah, yeah. And by the way, that reminds me, I have to pay my kid's tuition bill for college, so...

Yay. That was a great thought that just went down my mind. Yeah. Just when you thought your day was looking all right. Yeah, no. Yeah, no. I need to sell more stuff. Anyways, so welcome, Dwight, and welcome, everybody, to our season recap and predictions episode. We love it, as Dwight said. But first, before we get started, as we always do, Dwight, what's one fun thing that no one knows about Dwight Brown? Everybody knows Dwight Brown, but what's one thing that no one knows about Dwight Brown?

Well, in season eight, I feel like I'm running out of content here, you know? Why? You're constantly evolving as a human. Yeah, some might describe it in other ways, but yeah, that's... Evolving? You're correct. I am evolving. Yeah? I'm not sure I've made it past the Cro-Magnon stage, but, you know, I'm evolving. Yeah, but besides that, what else is going on? So...

And I think you know this already. I think I told you about this. We're not going to talk about jumping out of planes, right? Or jumping off a cliff. No, no, no. No danger. No adrenaline sports. Wow. Quite the contrary. In fact, I used to sing soprano in the Rochester Boys Choir. Wow. Wow.

I didn't know that there was a play for Tony Soprano that had a part for you. Sorry, that was a joke. Really? So you got vocal chops. Yeah, I used to. I can't sing to save my life these days, but I especially can't sing soprano. Come on, belt one out. Yeah, exactly. I swung from one side to the other. Yeah.

Okay. That's another new thing we know about you now. Yeah, exactly. I polished rocks. That was my one. Yes. Yes. That's right. I remember that one. That was a good one. I don't know what you're going to get with me. You really don't. You really don't. I'm an enterprising guy, I guess, but you are very. So how about you? What is your one fun thing that nobody knows about you? No, let's see. Let's, let's,

let's dig a hole and see what I can find with my metal detector. So I've decided to move to New York, which people may not know. I'm going to take care of my mom. She's getting older. And so I'm uprooting my kid and my stuff and the dogs, and we're going to be moving to upstate New York.

Got to pack it all in the vehicle and the multiple vehicles look like the grapes of wrath going down. Yeah. Well, yeah, not, not a mattress. Yeah. It's not a dust bowl scene. It's well, maybe it will be, I don't know. Who knows? It hasn't rained here in a while. Um, but yeah, so I'm moving to New York. I'm uprooting from Franklin, Massachusetts and going to New York city, New York state, New York city. Man, that's a big move. It is. What's your move date?

Probably around the summertime, late summer. Okay. All right. But we'll see. Planning it out now. Big stuff. Yeah. How long have you been in Mass? 21 years. It'll be 22 next July. Next. No. No. Earlier than that. No, next August. That's right. Next August, it'll be 22. I mean, I guess the good part is you won't be so far away where you'll really, really miss it, but...

I'm sorry, Miss Massachusetts. I'm from New York, so I miss New York right now. I miss my food. I miss my family. I miss the New York Rangers. Okay. So, yeah, then maybe you won't miss it in Massachusetts. No, no. I mean, I have friends here I'll miss, but I'm a New Yorker.

Anyways, on that basis, let's get into our first topic for today. So Dwight, now that we know all of that about us, now we have to do a little bit of a review of season eight. It was a phenomenal season. Yeah, we covered a lot of ground.

We really did. And Dwight and I were talking about some of the episodes and we were like, wow, that was season eight. I can't believe it. It happened so long ago. It feels like forever. No, it just happened not too long ago.

And yeah, I mean, some of the ones we had, like I talked to Jason Albert, who is the global chief privacy officer at ADP. That was actually one of the most downloaded episodes. It was on the EU AI Act, which really kind of set the tone for most of the year was about AI. Right.

And will continue to be about AI. Oh my gosh, yeah. I mean, everything AI has been influencing a lot of HR. And so we've had lots of discussions, whether it was before HR Tech or all the HR Tech episodes really had something to do with AI. There are 14 HR Tech episodes. Each one of them had something to do with AI. Crazy. Yeah. I mean, it's just top of mind and...

And kind of the, you know, kind of the what's how do I want to describe it? The end thing to do our product as AI, you know, and trendy go buy a candy bar at the convenience store and it's an AI generated candy bar, you know, that kind of crap that you see. I hear they have less calories.

Yeah, well, you know, it's all like a hologram, you know, you don't get to taste it. It's just right. Well, you get the guilt from eating it. But then at the end, you're like, still makes you still makes you obese. But, you know, you don't get the flavor that goes with it. Yeah, it's chat, chat, GBT flavored. Exactly. Although you could get a Google one that would be Gemini flavored.

True. Yeah. There are lots of other varieties now. But then there were some other really cool conversations we got into. You know, we still had conversations about inclusive leadership and inclusive language. We had a really emotional couple of episodes where we talked to Dr. Mark Scherer as well as Brandy Muse. And the Mark Scherer episode was really about learning about our emotional intelligence and what drives it.

Right. And the Brandy Muse episode was about mental health and very powerful, very emotional. You know, it's interesting because Mark's episode, I kind of went into it like, okay, is this going to be a lot of psychological mumbo jumbo? Yeah. I went into it a little bit skeptical, to be perfectly honest, but...

Man, it didn't take long for me to realize it was something totally different. He's a brilliant person and really kind of, you know, whether he played a Jedi mind trick on us or not, I don't think so. He's just brilliant. He's brilliant. And his advice was very sage. Right. Exactly. He has definitely dialed it in with that. Yeah.

So that made that episode a lot of fun. Yep. And Brandy Muse, that was definitely...

an emotional episode and it was hard. Yeah, it really was. It really was. I mean, I, I'm sure there's not a listener out there that was not personally impacted by listening to both Mark and Brandy's episode. There's no way you couldn't be because we're all impacted by mental health and in one way or another, whether it's our family, whether it's us, whether it's our friends. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Yeah.

And the Brandy episode really focused on mental health and suicide as well. And I think it was actually part of, if I'm not mistaken, Suicide Prevention Month. Correct. Yeah, September. And it was just hard. I mean, that episode should have been sponsored by Kleenex. Exactly. Or Scott Tissue, not to...

But it was the conversation that needed to be had. Oh, absolutely. You know, the one of the things when I was when I was posting the episodes on on LinkedIn, I made the statement and I still stand by this, that we have got to start talking about this because it's around us every day. And.

It's a shame that we're in 2024 and it's still such a taboo subject. But we're all impacted by it. So, you know, it defies logic. Well, I think it comes from the fact that death is such a hard subject to talk about. Yeah. Just flat out. It's just hard.

Whether you are feeling down or depressed or whether you have someone who you know who is, who may have actually thought about suicide, it's something that...

deeply, deeply upsets us and we try and shut it off. And that's why we use humor. We use laughter. We use all different types of mechanisms to kind of shield ourself from it. Right. When your point, and it's a really good point, we've got to be human about it. We've got to be honest about it and we got to face it. It's hard. Right. It really is.

Sometimes I wonder if it's the actual repercussions or the fear of repercussions that come from talking about it. And I'm not sure there's an answer to that, actually. I don't think there is. But I am glad that through this podcast, we were able to get it out there and at least be able to start the conversation here. Yeah.

Well, we don't shy away from difficult topics. That was a difficult topic on lots of levels from an emotional perspective. Right. But, again, to your point, I don't think any of us have ever... I don't think any of us have been isolated from someone or something that has either threatened suicide or has...

talked about it or has thought about it. Everybody, you know, gets affected by that. So, right. Yeah, you're right. It's important. It was an important episode. Definitely.

And then we had some that weren't quite as emotional as that. No, no. We had some more lighthearted ones. But, you know, the one that was actually quite factual, very, very intelligent, Chris Fusco from salary.com, who talked to us about job satisfaction and how to measure it. That was an interesting conversation. I didn't know where that was going to go either. But that was fascinating. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Chris has got such an interesting way of looking at things and it really is genius in so many ways. Oh, yeah. Because I think

I think organizations have been trying to measure satisfaction for ages and they've just never found the secret sauce. And granted, we didn't, it's not like we came up with the whiz bang secret sauce from our discussion with Chris, but he looks at it in a little bit different way. And hearing him, hearing his thoughts on it and how you go about it and how you look at it.

just gave interesting context to the entire conversation. - Absolutely. And then the other conversation that I thought was quite fascinating was Kevin Yates with the L&D's impact to the business. Again, we had been kind of trying to get more learning and development

experts on the program and i think we had hit a home run with that one kevin was phenomenal and it really gave us a great way of thinking about the investments we're making in lnd and then to kind of piggyback on that we had a good conversation or great conversation with stacy crevins um about upskilling and reskilling employees and yeah those those two episodes kind of went hand in hand they were like right next to each other yeah stephanie crevins what did i say

Stacy. Oh my goodness. I know who you're talking about. I'm sorry, Stephanie. I apologize. I haven't had my last cup of coffee for the afternoon yet. Yeah, no, the, um, it, it was good. The rescaling and upscaling that conversation is hitting a lot. Um, I'm actually going to talk about that at the end a little bit. Oh, Oh, preview preview. Spoiler alert. Spoiler alert. Um,

I don't want to miss Wendy Sellers and Alyssa DeVere. We had really great conversations with them about a couple of really interesting things. One of the things you highlighted last year was, or one of the last seasons was ERGs and the benefit that employers get from that. And, um,

And Wendy talked about the good old topic of attraction and retention of employees and how that has changed over time. And that was fascinating. And then the entire HR tech series, which again, 14 episodes that I recorded out at Mandalay Bay in Vegas. Oh my gosh, Dwight, it was busy. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I'm looking at them on my screen right now and it's just like, see it scrolling and scrolling. Yeah. What was fascinating is every discussion, again, every discussion pretty much focused on AI and its impact to HR.

But every, every conversation was just kind of came from a different perspective and just brilliant. Like I can't even mention one of the people because that would be kind of unfair to the rest because they were all phenomenal episodes. And I learned a lot from them and I enjoyed every one of them because every single person that we interviewed was a friend. And if they weren't a friend at the beginning, they were definitely a friend at the end. So it was just, it was just wonderful. Just a great set of conversations.

Yeah. And a lot of context for a lot of different topics and the context of how they all weave together. They're not all independent from each other. Although I do have a, I do have a question for you. The, you know, um,

Looking at the fact that you and Adriana DiNeno recorded at HR Tech, the, all right, so listeners, for those of you who don't know, David and Adriana, every time we record, I swear they're brother and sister because they're just at each other.

We had a little bit of that. I wondered what it was like. I mean, you guys didn't drop the gloves and... Oh, no, no, no. We had a fun time. There was no fisticuffs, no roughhousing. It was just a lot of fun. No, it's good to have good friends like that. By the way, we were in the middle of the show floor. So even if we did come to blows, I mean, that would have to get broken up quickly because people would have been like...

why are they fighting? So no, we didn't. No, but every one of these conversations had a different spin on how artificial intelligence was really affecting the world of HR. And it was just a great set of conversations. I was very excited about every single one of them. Yeah. And coming from a genius crowd, you know. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

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So that's the look back. I think the look ahead is pretty fascinating because we have a lot of really cool episodes that we've already done and some that we're going to be doing. I actually think we've recorded fully a half of next season already. And if we haven't recorded them, we're going to probably record a lot later.

in the new year. And the reason is because obviously we had just gone through a presidential election, which everybody knows about by now. And, and there'll be a lot of repercussions from that. And some of which we may talk about in the predictions, but that we actually held off on a lot of the recording until after the election, because so much will change based on the new administration and how things might work. Right. Or not work. Yeah.

or not work we'll see there are a lot of predictions on how it won't work but yeah but not ours but we'll see so now Dwight is our really fun time where we get to look back at the predictions that we made during season seven's recap are you ready I am ready

Are you really ready? I don't know. Ready as I'll ever be. Let me put it that way. That's all I commit to at this point. All right. Well, you're ready. Oh, I'm ready. I'm always ready for that. I was ready right after we recorded the season seven recap to do season eight already. I was already had my, you know, my thought of what was going to happen for the next six months. Couldn't could have predicted this.

But anyways, your first or your prediction was that we're going to see pushback against companies doing surveys for anything and everything consumer and otherwise. How'd that go? Well, I have seen different news articles that there's a backlash of, uh,

You know, people really getting the survey fatigue. Now, can I say that it was significant the way that I predicted it? Probably not. Then again, that was six months ago. Oh, my God. That's a rant that I have. Don't get me started. Every little... All right. Anyway, I'll stop. Don't get me started. Don't get me started.

Poor Dwight. He must have just gotten off of one of those survey calls and was like, yeah, running into the Hulk. Every time you go buy something at the store, survey pops up somewhere or somehow. Well, you could just not go to the store. Actually, that wouldn't help because then you get stuff from Amazon or

Uber Eats or wherever. Yeah, the AI-based surveys would find me some way or another. Yeah. Well, you have to serve the AI overlord, so... Yeah, exactly. So how do you think you did on that prediction? Oh, God. I'll give myself a...

Let's say a B minus. You know, I think the six-month time frame is a little too short to really see more significant backlash. I think we have to take that into consideration for this set of predictions that we do. Yeah. Just six months. I think for a lot of the predictions that we do, it's hard to come up with something that you're going to see. Not much changes in six months. Right. Right.

All right. Well, let's hit mine now. Mine was that more companies would start taking pay transparency as de facto, no matter where they operated from and actually start posting ranges. Yeah. Yeah. And not sure that really came through a hundred percent. I think that many did, but not from a miserable perspective. So I'm going to give myself definitely a C on that one.

See, I'm going to disagree with you. I think that you deserve a higher grade, and here's why. But you always think I deserve a higher grade. You're a terrible grader. I know. There's a reason I was never a teacher. And that's only one. That's really only one. One among many. So I don't think that we can ignore the effect of the FLSA rule.

And how much that disrupted and overshadowed everything. Everything else. Including and especially pay transparency. So I think we have to give some context about that, though. Because, you know, you have to tell some people who don't know what we're talking about. Because I think you're right. Yeah, I mean, the new FLSA rules were proposed and put into effect in

starting with one tier in July 1 and the second tier at January 1. And so companies were having to scramble to determine whether or not their employees should be exempt or non-exempt, what the threshold should be, should they have to pay them more? So they were busy turning through that. The legislators were busy worrying about that. So

there probably wasn't as much pay transparency enacted legislatively. Yeah. So that's where I say I think that kind of overshadows things. That's possible. And just so we're clear, there was a ruling just recently that

From the Eastern District of Texas, which basically said that FLSA rules should not be on a salary basis. There should be on the duties tests where if someone passes a duty test, then they are exempt from getting paid overtime. And that was the right. That was their ruling that.

whether it was the 2016 legislation, the 2019 or the 2024, not legislation, the rule setting, the 2016, 2019 or 2024, that they should not be based on salary. They should be based on the duties test and thus overturn both the July and January increases to the federal minimum for exempt status and exemptions.

Yeah. Many companies were really worried about that, as Dwight said, and they basically now need to rethink everything. So I not only agree with you that that may have prevented them from worrying about transparency to their detriment, but also now they're going to have to start thinking about what do we do now, given the fact that that exemption change is now off the books? What do I do? Right. Yeah. Yeah.

So it pushes companies are really going to wrestle with that big time. Yeah.

Yeah, I don't think they're going to wrestle with it over Thanksgiving and definitely not over Christmas. Yeah, maybe around the Thanksgiving table with plenty of wine flowing. Yeah, and the ultra-fans, as they sleep, they're going to have nightmares about the FLSA status. Hey, are you listening to this and thinking to yourself, man, I wish I could talk to David about this? Well, you're in luck. We have a special offer for listeners of the HR Data Labs podcast.

a free half hour call with me about any of the topics we cover on the podcast or whatever is on your mind. Go to salary.com forward slash HRDL consulting to schedule your free 30 minute call today. So now we come to that part of the program where we talk about what our next prediction is for the next six months that we will review at the end of season nine. Again, six months. So let's make it a six month prediction.

Dwight, what's your prediction? You always go first. I'm having trouble with this one being a six-month prediction, but actually, with the pace of change, it's possible. So here's where I'm going to go with this. I'm going to talk about AI. I know that it feels like a dead horse that we beat over and over again, but it's...

It's not going away. So here's my take on this. Okay. I just did a piece on AI and the impact of customer service personnel.

And I think that, number one, there are some pretty solid stats on what's happening with customer service positions. It's actually been a downhill slope for at least the last 10 years when you look at the BLS statistics. The total numbers were going up, but the growth rate was actually going down. So now we've reached this peak. Wow.

We've got this data that tells us that, and we have a lot of data that indicates that AI is becoming much more entrenched than customer service. We all feel it. Every time we call for customer support, we're probably talking with an AI agent or if we're interacting via text, it's a chat bot. And so customer service is really being hit with this. And one of the... So my prediction is...

The downstream impact of this is that HR is going to have more of their work cut out for them in terms of, you know,

Helping strategize on reductions in force, which actually I don't think we're going to see mass reductions in force. I think we're going to see a shift and I'll talk about that in a second. The the other area where they're really going to be challenged is the.

evaluation of reskilling and upskilling positions. And that's where I say I don't think that we're going to see massive reductions in force because with the implementation of AI, what people don't realize is you need significant resources for the care and feeding of that AI. So you're going to see a shift in the kinds of positions, but that's really going to up the pressure on people

HR for implementing good rescaling, upscaling initiatives. And I think with the pace of change of AI, I do think we're going to see pretty immediate results with that. And when I say immediate, I mean that six-month timeframe. Okay. So that's my long-winded prediction. I like it. And hopefully in six months, we'll see some movement on that.

Yeah, definitely. And how about you, sir? I'm going to go to the economic slash political world. And I'm going to say that the new incoming Congress, the Senate and House, and the new executive branch are going to make sweeping changes to a lot of the things, a lot of the HR-facing regulations that had changed recently.

in the last four years and overturn them. That's not rocket science. We all knew that was going to happen. But I think one of the areas that it's specifically going to hit is DE&I. And I think we're going to see some significant movement in that. And I take it from the perspective, I don't think that's a good thing. Now, we've talked a lot about DE&I and some of the

repercussions from the Supreme Court's rulings recently over the last, actually the last four or five months. And one of the sage people that I get to work with every day, Lena Turner and I had a conversation about this and there's an upcoming episode on it in season nine and not to steal that thunder, but I think one of the things that we're going to start seeing is companies are not going to be talking about the E&I.

But it's already built into their DNA. And having a fair, equitable, inclusive workforce is going to be just part of what they do. So my prediction is that a lot of regulations, a lot of rules, a lot of norms that we had taken for granted over the last at least four years around DE&I are going to start going away. But they're going to be replaced by regulations.

The way normal operations already are happening, which is with the spirit of the EMI. Okay. So it's my hope, at least that at least the spirit will still be there. It'll be challenged. Um, you know? Oh yeah. Very hard challenges with it, but yeah, I'm hoping you're, I'm hoping you're correct. Let's pray. Yeah. Yeah.

So that's our predictions. One on AI in the world of business and how business gets done and how people get retrained and whether DE&I becomes part of the soul of how companies operate despite changes in legislation and rulemaking. Doing the right thing for the right reason. Yeah, way to...

Wow, I took a turd on this podcast episode, didn't I? No, but it's, I mean, it's good. We've got to talk about it. Yeah. I think a lot of people are trying to figure out what that's going to look like in the future. Let's say this, that the world of work has been evolving rapidly.

For decades. It's not a new thing. Whether it's PCs on desks in the 90s, whether it's the internet in the late 90s, early 2000s, whether it's chat GPT in 2022, 2023. Yeah. All those things have led to an evolution of how work gets done.

So, you know, these are somewhat baby steps. And as we said, six months is tough to see lots of change, although the pace of change is happening really fast year one before. And we've been so, we've been living in it. We've been swimming in it for so long that we're kind of numb to a lot of the change that we've seen. Right. Exactly. We don't even realize it's happening. It just. No, we're just, we're just doing it. Yeah. So fascinating. Yeah.

And hopefully for the better.

Hey, listen, one of the things that you and I really do need to celebrate, and I really am appreciative of your partnership in this podcast. And we just passed 200 episodes that have been released, which is just an incredible milestone for most podcasts because most podcasts don't get that far. They get one season in or a couple of seasons in. They publish, you know, a handful of episodes and they go away. Yeah. We've at least...

produced, as far as I know, maybe 220 or 230 episodes. And we've got a playful... We've actually got, if I looked at the spreadsheet, I think we have like 60 guests lined up. 60. Yeah. And that's not just episodes, because we know that sometimes we get repeat guests or guests coming back to do repeats. We literally could do another almost two or three seasons with the groups that we have and...

And I got to tell you, you and Carissa and Carl and all the people involved and Stella and all the other people involved in getting this podcast done, I am so grateful for all of you. Well, we're grateful for you. I mean, this was your vision. And we're realizing that I just appreciate the opportunity to...

be along for the ride that you've taken me along for the ride on this. And it is great working with Carissa and Carl, our incredible engineer. Yes. From Alpha God, Alayna.

Yeah, exactly. And he's been with us not the entire time, but almost almost the entire time. Well, yeah, we had people before him in season one and they were not good for us. And that was not working. I'm not going to mention names. Yeah. But but Carl was a breath of not only fresh air, but he really did reenergize us to be able to do other things and be able to get other things accomplished. So, yeah, not have to wait for a podcast episode to come out.

Two hours after we first chose to post it. You missed another deadline. Yeah. Gosh, there was so much stress there. We've never had any of that with Carl. He's always been right on. Matter of fact, there have been times where

he's kind of prompted us for stuff where we've forgotten about it. So we're lifting a glass to you and to everybody else who's helped us get to where we are. Carl, Stella, Marissa. But again, thank you, Dwight. And thank you, everybody else for listening. We love you. We appreciate you. And if you need anything, just reach out to the podcast. We'd love to hear from you. And stay safe, everyone. Thanks, everybody.

That was the HR Data Labs podcast. If you liked the episode, please subscribe. And if you know anyone that might like to hear it, please send it their way. Thank you for joining us this week and stay tuned for our next episode. Stay safe.