Dr. Matt Poepsel - HR Guide to the Future
The future of work is rapidly approaching, and organizations that prepare now will thrive while others struggle to adapt. In this forward-looking conversation with Dr. Matt Poepsel, known as "the Godfather of Talent Optimization," we dive deep into seven critical workforce trends reshaping our professional landscape by 2030.
Links and Resources from the Episode:
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The Bosshole® Chronicles
"Dr. Matt Poepsel - HR Guide to the Future”’”
Original Publish Date: 3/11/2025
Host: John Broer
John Broer: A warm welcome to all of our friends out there in The Bosshole Transformation Nation. This is your host, John Broer, and I am thrilled to share with you somebody on the program today that you know well. He's been on the Bosshole Chronicles twice before and that is none other than the godfather of talent optimization himself, Dr. Matt Poepsel. You may recall, in his very first episode he talked about the killer bees. That was a lot of fun. His most recent episode we talked about his book "Expand the Circle. Both those links are in the show notes.
Today we're going to be walking through some of the trends that are published in the new 2025 ebook from the Predictive Index entitled "The HR Field Guide to the Future. Matt will walk us through some of the major trends that we can expect, based on research from over 200 HR and business leaders about what are the pressing challenges and what can we see on the horizon Something we really need to be thinking about. And who better to walk us through those trends than Dr Matt himself? So let's jump in. The Bosshole Chronicles are brought to you by Real Good Ventures, a talent optimization firm helping organizations diagnose their most critical people and execution issues with world-class analytics. Make sure to check out all the resources in the show notes and be sure to follow us and share your feedback. Enjoy today's episode and share your feedback. Enjoy today's episode. Well, Dr Matt Poepsel, aka the godfather of talent optimization, welcome back to your third visit to The Bosshole Chronicles. Good to have you here.
Dr. Matt Poepsel: I love it. Thanks so much for having me, John. I really appreciate being back. It's great.
JB: Well, I know our audience loves all the work that you do and all of the insights that you offer, Matt, and really what prompted this conversation was the publication of PI's "HR Field Guide to the Future. Immediately, it hit me that, oh my gosh, we have to have Matt on to talk about this Because, as you said before, we hit record. This is a meaty subject and something that is relevant to all organizations and all of our listeners out there. So, Matt, I'm going to step back and give you a chance to really sort of tee this up from a high level and help us understand things like the seven trends that were tracked and help the Boss Hole Transformation Nation understand what we need to be thinking about as it relates to this topic.
MP: Yeah, John, I think it's such a pertinent point that the fact is, this year and when we tore off the calendar for January 1st, it was a little bit different in the fact that it was 2025.
Whenever the year ends in a five or a zero, it kind of naturally lends us to think about the future a little bit more, because if you think about 2030, it's only five years away. It sounds like a long time, but it's going to be here before you know it and, being a futurist myself, an armchair futurist perhaps, I've really enjoyed thinking about how the workforce is going to be shaped. When you think about five years ago, 2020, the world was obviously a very different place in January, before we all went out to work safely, remotely, and then dribble back a little bit in various ways. But the changes over the last five years, we're still digesting them, to be honest. But guess what? As leaders, it's our job to think about what comes next, right? So that's why I thought it'd be important to highlight those trends and think about how it's. You know the forces, I like to say, that are reshaping our world of work.
JB: Okay, and in the context of the field guide, initially, I mean, you're, you're looking at how do we help our HR professionals really navigate this? But this, this is really relevant to every level of the organization and especially the C-suite. And you, you really kind of look at it, I think you've said from the framework of what you're calling talent 2030, because it is just five years away. So where would you like to start? Do you want to start on those trends and sort of work our way through those?
MP: Yeah, let's do that. I think that'll give us some good foundational work to build from, and then maybe we can come back and talk a little bit about our opportunity as leaders in organizations, hr executive, et cetera, what to do about them. So, when we think about the trends, these are really different types of things and I've kind of arranged them, in my mind at least, from a little bit more technical moving towards a little bit more human-centric. And the first one I think that has got a lot of attention in some industries is talent shortages, for example. You could take a simple example like healthcare. We expect that by 2030, we'll have a shortage of over 100,000 doctors who care for our aging population, more than a million nurses that were short right, more than 2 million manufacturing jobs going to go unfilled because of the changes in that industry and the fact that some of the younger generation doesn't necessarily look to manufacturing as the ideal jobs that they want to hold.
So these are some forces that are kind of combining in financial services, cybersecurity, other different industries too. So this is a challenge that it varies a little bit geographically depending on where you are in the country and by industry, but it's pretty clear, even globally, that we could have as many as 85 million jobs unfilled worldwide by 2030. And that is a staggering amount of productivity and contribution that's missing from industry.
JB: Absolutely and interestingly enough, on the physicians issue, and of course I'm kind of on the cusp of baby boomers and Gen X, but they've been talking about the silver tsunami for the last 10 years and we're in the midst of it and it will continue to build. Those two data points are moving further apart from one another higher need for care from physicians and fewer physicians. That that is going to put a strain on the marketplace for sure.
MP: A hundred percent. And so when you think about as as talent optimizers and talent optimization professionals, what does that mean for us? I immediately think about some of the different types of inspire tools. When we think about how we can develop our managers to make sure they're providing those experiences, because if it's going to be hard to hire, then you want to really hold on to the people you've got that much more right, because it's going to be a lengthier process to fill roles when you have these talent shortages.
The other thing that kind of fits in that same vein is around career paths. Do your employees in these kind of tight industries see upward progression? Do they see that you're investing in them? These types of things are super important. And the last one probably is around the employee experience. How do we make sure that we have our finger on the pulse through engagement surveys and other types of stay interviews and other techniques we can use to make sure we understand the experience people are having? So I think those are ways to. You can't change the numbers at some point. Talent shortages are a numbers game but there are things you can do through your people practices to try to, you know, become a well-regarded place to work and make sure you keep your arms around the people you've got.
JB: So that's going to influence your employer branding and how you present, but also how you sustain that. The second point, before we move on to the next trend we talk about this a lot with our clients, Matt. You know this, not everybody wants to get into management, nor should they, and you know that's a great way to thrust them into the Bosshole zone, as we talk about. But organizations that are building a really robust individual contributor pathway, you can still have advancement, more responsibility, developing your briefcase or your skill sets, but never actually have somebody to manage and still earn more money. I think more and more organizations are realizing they have to have this, because the pathway into management and supervisory roles actually is pretty narrow and it should be reserved for people that one have a desire to do it, are wired to do it and are prepared to do it. So I think that's really helpful and that is a trend that if organizations are not sensitive to, they're going to find themselves losing talent to organizations that do have it. Yeah, good.
MP: A hundred percent, and I think what a lose-lose to take somebody who says the only way I can make more money is to manage people, even though I don't really want to. Right, and when they're not good at it and we don't invest in them, it's just everything gets worse. So I love what you're saying there, John. Is like let's recognize that individual contributors and highly specialized roles create a ton of value and need to be paid fairly and see and be recognized for their contributions too. That's, that's a great example of how to keep, you know, all that knowledge, all that, all that talent in place. Otherwise, the results. If it was hard before, it's going to be really hard in the light of these shortages.
JB: Oh, for sure, okay, well, what's the next trend?
MP: Next one is probably one that's familiar to all of us. It's this increasing human and technology integration. How much has technology changed? Every doggone job, right when it comes to, you can't think of an industry that technology hasn't affected in some way. And when we look at the statistics and we see that almost two-thirds of companies are already using generative AI in terms of how it's shaping their workforce and the types of work that they do, and 86% of companies expect to introduce those types of AI technologies at some point in the next couple of years, so it's had an indelible impact.
But also other types of technology, like robotics. We're seeing that there's reports of as high as 162 robots per 10,000 human jobs, and that's just a number. But the point is that it's twice as many as there was even just seven years ago, and that's just a number. But the point is that it's twice as many as there was even just seven years ago, and that trend is expected to increase. So humans working alongside robots in certain industries, heavy industries, or using technologies as a fundamental part of what we do this type of integration is fundamentally changing how we approach our work. There's a dark side, of course, too right.
JB: Okay, yeah, yeah, tell, say a little bit more about that.
MP: I think in this area, where we've seen, in some cases, resistance on the part of how we are introducing these new technologies, Okay.
As as intrepid executives, for example. We're very you know I'll use the PI vernacular of being A over C these highly proactive people. We can't you say isn't it so exciting, all these new technologies and the people who are on the floor is like no, it's not exciting, it's scary. And the faster we try to go without taking our people with us, the worse it gets right. We just cause ourselves all kinds of problems.
JB: Well, and I know in the in the field guide you talk about, leaders are split on evolving HR policy as it relates to AI, and I can see that. I can absolutely understand that. So, in other words, our people, developers, have to understand that this is something that's present. It's not going to go away. How do we leverage that within the workplace? Because you're a futurist, Matt, obviously you are familiar with the term, the singularity. I find that fascinating. But a layperson's interpretation is the rate of technology is speeding up every single day, exponentially, so. Well, this is, I think, where people go to the dark side, where it will take over. I mean, am I kind of defining singularity adequately?
MP: Yeah, it's about the pace and the trajectory that we're on, and I think that what's happening in the here and now is that people are having different reactions to it. Some are interested in the novelty of it oh man, look at all these cool things I can make. Others are looking at productivity gains, of saying it's actually helping me do my job better in some ways because and others are fearful about what it really means and what does it mean to be human? I think there's this the reality that we tend to dehumanize the work if we let the machines take over things that should be reserved for people, right? It's one thing if you take a, if you're not a strong writer and you ask an AI tool to say can you tighten up my writing, that's one thing. But if you say I have to have a really difficult conversation with somebody, can you do it for me? That's.
JB: You know you're crossing over at that point there in terms of job ad optimizer, creating a job target and then optimizing your job ad. That's all driven by AI, and also within our perform module, how it helps managers provide more effective feedback based on data input and what they hope to accomplish with their individuals. It's not abandoning who you are. It's helping to enhance or bridge a gap in what I think is a helpful way. So I think when people can embrace that, it just becomes a little bit more approachable. Okay, that's awesome. That's awesome. What's next?
MP: This one's a little bit different and I call this one the liquid. Labor market goes by different terms If you think about flexible work, if you think about a gig work sometimes we call it which is basically freelance work. It's always been around. People have always had sort of part-time or contract roles, for example within business. But what has really changed recently is the transparency, the technology, the shift towards virtual, the increasing specialization of certain types of jobs mean that there's this move towards flexible work arrangements in a much bigger way than we've ever seen before. Sometimes, for example, we're noticing that more than a third of Americans do some sort of gig work, and a lot of times that's to supplement their normal main source of income, and so they either have a little bit of extra time and life is expensive, let's face it and maybe they have the capability to go and to have a part-time type of work through this flexible arrangement, through either one of these work platforms like Fiverr or Upwork.
JB: Pinterest 100% yeah.
MP: And so that type of work is really important. But the question becomes then, from the employer side, what's the advantage? Well, I have a much more flexible workforce means I can adjust to shifts in market demand much more quickly, because I don't have to terminate employees that are W-2 when I'm using it. The other thing I mentioned specialization. What if I really have just a little bit of a need for somebody with a really highly specialized skill set? Maybe I don't want to hire that person outright or ask somebody to learn that skill. What if I want to go to a freelance or an independent contractor who's already got the skills, plug them into an existing full-time team of mine and let them go and do good work together?
The questions that that raises for us as people, people is what responsibility do we have for the welfare of these independent contract workers? Do we want to assimilate them onto our teams through the traditional forming, storming, norming kind of things? Do we have a responsibility to make sure that they're not overstressed or worked out? Do we want to provide their behavioral profiles to one another too, so we know how best to work to each other? I encourage us to say yes. Yes, because they're a fundamental extension of our team and we, should you know, stop short of providing legal advice, obviously, and law, but I think that, in terms of team dynamics and behavioral dynamics, I'm very much a fan of treating them like an extension of a team that they are.
JB: And and we've done that at real good ventures, I mean with contractors that we've that have been part of our process. If you will maybe not on a day-to-day basis, but we will we will use a behavioral assessment and share ours with them, because I mean, otherwise you're just guessing. So why not take that mystery out of it and make sure you understand the people with whom you're working? I think that's. I totally agree with that, Matt. I absolutely, absolutely.
MP: And you think about, even a small to mid-sized business is going to have multiple contractors who are doing meaningful work alongside their teams. What do you think that looks like at you know, mid to large size organizations? You're talking about a lot of contract and flexible work, and it makes good sense, but not if we're not going to approach it the right way. I think this is a trend that's only going to increase by 2030. You're going to see much more specialization, and the other thing is a lot of these independent contractors are making lifestyle choices. They want to live where they want the flexibility that they want. They're perfectly fine being 1099. And there's an entire group of vendors who are working to support these types of groups with either access to health care that's affordable through group programs, all kinds of things that make the gig lifestyle and the contract lifestyle even more tenable than it ever was before. So this is a trend that's going to continue.
JB: All right, I think we're on number four now. Is that correct?
MP: We are, we are. We're up to something you've already touched on a little bit here, which is the generational drift. Every time we see it, with every passing year, the workforce gets a little bit older, and that just means that we have to be aware of these generational differences.
A fun statistic I saw was that and it makes total mathematical sense 100% of baby boomers will be over the age of 65 in 2030. An entire generation that will be over the age of 65. And it's pretty incredible to think that this is a generation that was very large, the baby boomers and in some cases, has entered retirement but realized that healthcare has led to increased longevity, but it's expensive, and who can afford to retire and live indefinitely, right? And so a lot of them have come back into the workforce, and I call them baby boomerangs, because they left but came back. And the reason is but they're coming back on their terms. They're not going to work, you know, the same way that they did when they were 20 years ago. Yeah, and it makes total sense. And so now, all of a sudden, though, when you're a millennial manager and you have a part-time boomer who has really sophisticated experience and expertise and can be a mentor, but you also have Gen Z on your team, like you're in the middle of that and you're the manager.
So guess what? You better figure it out of the working workforce today, based on their size and based on their current position in the lifespan. 35% of the workforce is millennial today, which makes sense. These things tend to happen, but when you think about Gen Z, there's actually more Gen Z than boomers in the workforce right now. Oh, are there really Okay, even though it's a smaller generation, based on the amount of them that are still of working age who have gotten to that adulthood age where they're, you know, working in that way.
It's uh, they're starting to take over. That just happened last year. They crossed over to be a little bit larger in terms of workforce participation and, you know, unlike the boomers, more than three quarters really prioritize work-life balance. And uh, that's something new, right.
JB: That is huge. Yeah, we, we just had and I'm going to put this in the show notes we just had Carrie Williams. I met Carrie a couple of months ago. She's here in Columbus. She and I co-presented to an EOS group.
A friend of ours, Roy Goetz, is an EOS implementer here in Columbus, but she talks about at her work at Doyle HCM. She talks about the different generations and she was on specifically talking about Gen Z and the whole point was just get ready, um, I, we. It was entitled "Gen Z's power move, because they are a very significant influence in the workforce, not only by numbers but also in terms of what they need, and they are the first generation that has had technology from the day they were born, and so it is an entirely different way to work and think about work and our managers and supervisors need to navigate that and I can appreciate, like as you said, for our managers that are in their 30s or 40s right now. They're dealing with two ends of the spectrum and that can well. No wonder that we can see some burnout in that level if we're not careful.
MP: Yes, very true, and I think it's one of those things where this always happens. Every generation, including boomers, brought new values into the workplace when they entered the workforce, and so this doesn't that part's not new. No-transcript. This is the first generation that was born exclusively in this millennia, so 2010. Okay, and the iPad generation, sometimes they're called, and so you talk about access to ubiquitous technology, right, right? And in fact, John, here in 2025, we've had the first generation beta baby born, so even the next generation after Alpha is on the planet now it's on the way.
JB: It's going to be a while before they join the workforce.
MP: We hope.
JB: But just-, I will be retired, or maybe like permanently retired by that time. But go ahead, go ahead. You just never know.
MP: But the point being that the change is constant. So any temptation we have as boomers and Gen X people, you tend to leading organizations to dig in our heels and say other people have to be like us, they have to take our ideals, they have to have our approach to the amount of work, the type of work, the reason to work, all these things that's not leadership, right. Leadership is about the mission and it's about the other people. So we have to recognize that this is always shifting and I like to use those realism and the statistics behind it just to remind ourselves that we're all on a moving treadmill here.
JB: Absolutely Okay. Take us on to the next one.
MP: Well, so we're getting. You can see how we're moving from some of the more technology and demographic items into some of the more human centric ones, and the next one I'd like to talk about is something that I call wholeness at work. So we've seen this tremendous amount of intense interest in things like DEI, as well as workplace wellness.
And we know, for example, that wellness is really a priority, for example, for Gen Z and millennials who are considering employment decisions. They'll look at the wellness aspects of the benefits package and see that that's really, really important. Or when we start thinking about the nature of mental health when we think about isolation, loneliness, burnout, stress. 84% of respondents in one survey I saw had said that the experiences they were having at work were contributing to mental health challenges that they were having, whether it be anxiety, burnout, depression, et cetera, and at the same time, the wellness programs that we offer to employees aren't always taken up very well.
You know, fewer than half participation in a lot of those types of programs. So something's not working and I predict and this is just my own personal prediction, John that the nature of inclusivity when it comes to DEI and when it comes to the nature of well-being itself within the workplace.
I see these being two parts of a whole, and that's why I use the term wholeness. I think that the reality is that we feel hollow when we feel excluded. We feel hollow when we feel not at our best because of the conditions that we're in, and I think that employers have an opportunity to play a supportive role in these things. So that's why I like to think about by 2030, I think we'll see a reconciliation of a lot of the challenges we're having in the workplace today in both of those areas, and they may combine towards something that's like let's get the human part right.
JB: Yeah, and is it safe to say let's get the human part right and move away from to take hold? That it's really been. The whole DEI thing was hijacked and became something very different than I think what people had intended and I think that's why it's such a hot button now. But I told her, I said the word that always, and you just said it the word that always resonated with me was inclusion and I always thought about it. You know, if we go back to traditional command and control, boss hole type of workplaces, it was the. It's like an aperture on a camera. It was very narrow.
I'm focusing on a few people and I pick my favorites and we've seen that statistically, when there is disengagement is because managers are focusing on favorites. They're just on specific players. But what I'd love to see is that aperture opening and realizing that you can have inclusion and merit at the same time, that there is a wide world of people that are very capable of doing this work. The idea of inclusion and merit do not have to be mutually exclusive. Does that make sense?
MP: It makes total sense. I think you had me on before and I was talking about the book that I had written where I cover fairness specifically and also bring in aspects of personality difference when it comes to behavioral differences. You know, if I'm a very domineering type person and I'm going to give the choice work assignments to other domineering type people, regardless of the nature of what that work assignment requires, that's not being inclusive right, that's not having a level playing field. And the same is true with neurodiversity. We're seeing more and more neurodiversity in the workplace and not acknowledging that people have different learning styles, for example, or communication preferences, and just communicating the way that I'm most comfortable with, again, that's not leadership and certainly not enlightened leadership in my view.
JB: Yeah, that's true, and, by the way, I'm going to make a plug for that book, "Expand the Circle. That link will also be in the show notes. Okay, number six.
MP: So we'll move on to something that I call corporate backlash.
There's this tendency that we're seeing, especially among younger generations and even post-pandemic workers, to move away from some of the I'll just call it big company kind of mentality. What we're seeing is that larger organizations tend to have two challenges that don't make younger workers and post-pandemic workers naturally want to work there. One it comes down to autonomy. Do I have, say-so over how I approach my work? Do I feel like I can do it unencumbered? Can I have the flexibility I need? And the other is impact. Can I see how the results of what I do every day are showing up in the things I care about in the world, in our products or services, and not just being part of a number or part of a cog in a machine, right, and so the other thing that shows up in this is this backlash against what I would call hustle culture. So where it's like work, work, workaholism all the time, and whether it's TikTok videos or you know the way that people are kind of advocating for themselves when it comes to work-life balance.
JB: Right.
MP: We're seeing that. That's kind of another backlash that we're seeing is people saying I want work to fit into my life. I don't want to just expense my life completely, you know, for the work. Yeah, you start to see that even executives I saw a statistic one time that it's like 70% of executives are seriously considering stepping down from their roles in favor of something that's better work-life balance. Now, they may not do that for a variety of reasons, but to even be thinking and contemplating like, is this really all there is? Is this how I want to spend my next X number of years, I think something has shifted, john.
JB: It has, and that's a healthy question to ask. And then you hear about the golden handcuffs. I mean, it's it's hard to break free from those, but if, um, if people want to find meaning and fulfillment. It may not be where you are right now at those executive levels, but that's really interesting. Okay, yeah, good, good, all right, what else?
MP: The very last one that I'll share with you is this shift that we've been seeing for a long time now towards stakeholder capitalism. When you think about the rise of stakeholder capitalism, some 90% of executives say that they've already got programs underway to move in this direction. Now, there's three particular what I call checks and balances. The first has been the law. The reality is, you can't manufacture products the way that you used to 20 years ago. There's more regulations, there's eco regulations, there's eco regulations. There's all kinds of things.
The second, however, was consumers, and consumers, for example, want to know your record when it comes to sustainability or organic or whatever it might be relevant to your industry. They want to know that you're a good actor. They don't want to spend money with bad actors. You know if you pollute the planet or you treat people poorly, that reputation is going to get out, and people will actually not shop with you or not do business with your firm. So that's a second check and balance. And the third, though, comes from the employees, and the fact is that talent has a choice too, and they're increasingly choosing organizations that are providing meaning. They're active in their communities.
They're also good actors, and so I had a situation where the Gen Z people in my family I've made three of them- they were at my kitchen table one time talking with a friend of theirs and they were giving him a hard time because he worked at Target. And I said oh no, is Target a bad actor? Like I hadn't heard of anything like that. They said, oh no, it's just corporate. So they were saying that even a chain was less favorable to that friend group than local businesses.
And I thought oh my gosh, if you're getting peer pressure, you're like that can be pretty impactful. So an entire generation who's saying like we want to do business with and work for companies that are seen as doing positive things in the world, I think that's going to really tilt the favor, you know, for a lot of companies to go on record.
JB: You know, Matt, I think that I think you make a really important distinction here, because over the last few years there has been a real pushback around the social corporate responsibility ESG. Is that the correct acronym?
Where it was sort of artificially mandated through other lending institutions and so forth, the whole debanking thing, which I don't support. But I think what you just said is the workforce will make that choice. If, for example, you want to attract the emerging workforce or the right kind of people, they have a desire, they have a need to meet that or that need needs to be fulfilled and met and organizations that are becoming good corporate citizens, are active in their community, are going beyond just the nuts and bolts of what we produce or the services we provide, is going to attract that workforce. Is that? I mean, that is what is resonating with me. Okay?
MP: Yeah, and sometimes it's the output of the, of the company itself, kind of lends. That it's natural. I'll give you an example like Bombas, which you know they they sell socks and they buy- for every pair purchase, they donate a pair to homelessness, to people who are who are currently, you know, unhoused, and that's, that's one thing. Another one, Tentree, is a manufacturer who has apparel that if you buy one of their products, like a hat or a vest or something, they plant 10 trees, and they have a goal of planting a billion trees by 2030. And so it's like, okay, those are great, but what if your business doesn't do something like so profound? Well, the reality is that any business can allow employees to contribute some of their time, some of their company time. So here at the Predictive Index, for example, we went about 10 miles down the road and did a cleanup project at Blue Hills at a reservation, just to help with some sustainability type work, use company time to do it. So that was just an example of the company's willingness to acknowledge that we have an impact on our community.
Absolutely and that there's something that we can do and employees love it.
JB: Yeah.
MP: It's fact is that we have an opportunity. It's there for us if we want to take it.
JB: That's awesome. That is awesome.
MP: So that's how we've gone from some of the more talent shortages, demographic issues, we moved through technology, we talked a little bit about generational differences, all the way up to stakeholder capitalism. You can see that there's a wide range of forces that are reshaping the world of work over the next five years, and that presents both some challenges we need to be aware of, but also opportunities for us, as executives and HR leaders, to be able to make sure that our organizations are ready for what's about to happen.
JB: So, Matt, for anybody that's listening to this right now, a business leader or a senior leader in an organization and thinking, oh my gosh, are we focused on this stuff? Where would you suggest they start? I mean, what is a- If you were to say this square is what you ought to focus on right now, what would you recommend?
MP: Yeah, I think, the people practices. It's very clear that the competitive differentiation over the next five years will come down to how well we really empower our people. We're past the point of trying to treat people like machines, because actual machines are taking over. We don't have to treat people like machines anymore and in fact, it's the human bits of organizations that is really where the difference is going to be made. So my best advice to executives is make sure we're doing all the things that talent optimization would tell us to do today.
Are we designing winning teams, like through the team dynamic? Are we hiring top talent and inspiring them to greatness? Are we diagnosing people problems that we have right and helping everyone perform at their best? If that's the case, we're already. We have the people practices. We have that strong foundation. Now think about how some of these different trends might affect the things that we care about most, like worker performance, their engagement, their well-being, their chance to grow in their careers and to make an impact. Like these are the optimal outcomes that we always want to have front and center, and figure out how we're seeing those things being put at risk a little bit by these changes and what activities we can, you know, deploy or pursue in order to preserve those things you know once we get to the level where we've got them pursue in order to preserve those things, you know, once we get to the level where we've got them.
JB: And I'm sure you've seen it, Gallup just recently released their updated state of the American workforce or workplace and, unfortunately, disengagement is at a 10-year high. It's been sort of fluctuating between 9, 10, and 11 years over the last few years. I would love and again, our clients know that our mission at Real Good Ventures is to help people find meaning and fulfillment in their work. We just happen to do it through people science, pi being a significant part of that. I would love nothing more than for you and I to have a conversation in 2030, where all of these trends, you've been able to provide guidance and people are really leaning into it. But we see that engagement truly authentically increase and disengagement drop, because it's fixable. You just have to know where to start, and that's why I asked that question, and I would also encourage people. You know the first component, the first driver of disengagement, is poor job fit, and so one of the first questions we ask clients is well, how would you characterize job fit and job fit optimization in your organization? Right now? You do. You know objectively that you have the right people in the right roles and a lot of them are saying, well, our clients are saying, yeah, because we're using your science, but a lot are saying I can't say that it's like, okay, that's a place to start and so, like you said, the the people focus, or really making sure that that's in place, that's so critical. Yeah, well.
MP: In my graduate HR program I teach over at Boston College.
I also include re-skilling and upskilling as one of our core modules, because the reality is that even the skills that we're developing today will be obsolete, in many cases, in three years or less, and so, when we think about it, we have to get good at learning and unlearning and helping our workforce do the same. And, to your point, it's what keeps engagement high. It's when I have a certain amount of autonomy, because I have some say-so over how I do my work, and I'm judged by results, not by dumb things. I'm judged by smart things.
But also that I have some level of mastery, I'm able to kind of feel like I'm growing and learning and flourishing in that way, and then I experience purpose in the work that I do, I'm appreciated for the work I do and a lot of these things, john, that you're pointing out. They're fast and free, you can recognize others, you can help them develop career plans, like it doesn't take a lot of time, but we have to want to do it. And the thing that destroys the engagement you talked about is when we use outdated management practices and things that stopped working a long time ago. Considering that, think about our last 30 minutes. Everything is changing. Everything is changing. We have to change too, and if we're willing to do that and put people first, it's going to work out.
JB: If not, it's going to be painful. Amen, so true, okay. So, Matt, thank you for the trends, extraordinarily helpful, but let's think about the people that are in these roles, or the who, as you like to say. Walk us through a little bit of that.
MP: Yeah, I think it starts with the executives. We have to think that our job as executives is to look further out than the workforce they may be working. For example, like your directors might be thinking a quarter out, maybe a month out for some of your first-line managers, whatever it might be, and the fact is we have to think about what comes next so that we can navigate our organization.
So for executives to understand these trends, find out which ones are actually already starting to show up and which ones we have to navigate in order to have the long-term health of the company. That's something that I want to make sure that all executives are doing, and be frank with ourselves where we don't have the agility, the capacity to change the way we want, how do we get there? That's an important one.
For managers too. I think it's really developing those strong relationships. If the future is people-oriented, we've got to be people leaders, not task managers. That's just not going to cut it anymore. So I think that's important. And probably the biggest opportunity and what I get most excited about is the HR professionals, because you're the people experts. How do you use this recognition, this increasing understanding that the workforce isn't where it needs to be, to claim that seat at the table if you don't already have one? Make a strong business case for getting the people part right, using tools and frameworks like the ones that we give you and that Real Good Ventures gives you all the time to be able to really have an impact in a way that you've never had the opportunity before.
JB: That's where I think that I'm really excited about that mobilizing force that our HR professionals represent. We've talked about this for a long time HR, our human capital, our human resource professionals having a seat at the table. I love that imagery but at the same time I don't know if it's the velocity of change, but somehow I feel like there was a period of time and maybe it was pre-COVID where I felt that place at the table was more established and then things just sort of erupted and we kind of lost sight of that. I don't know what your thought of thought of is there. I mean, I'm totally on board with it. I want our HR professionals to become talent optimizers and understand they are such a critical catalyst in all of this. What have you seen about, you know, getting to the table or being sort of held off from the table lately?
MP: Yeah, the best in breed. Businesses preserve that critical role of HR as a strategic driver.
JB: Yeah.
MP: And they saw well enough to do that. Some of the lesser performing companies, however, felt those economic headwinds. They felt just the disruption of the change and started doing unnatural things like forcing people back to work or, you know, being more transactional in the business, more technical with their approaches, laying off thousands of people at a time to make a spreadsheet look a certain way, all those inhuman kind of things, sure.
And so there's a chance for them to rebound as well by restoring that place at the table. And, in fact, one of the most important mindset shifts that I would encourage all HR professionals to take is to stop thinking about ourselves as human resources and start thinking about ourselves as human potential. If you consider yourself to be a steward of human potential and not just resources, it starts to help you understand my opportunity to re-humanize the business that is increasingly being dehumanized by the forces that we talked about. The biggest companies that will the companies will have the biggest challenges are ones that try to approach business from an overly technical, sterile perspective, but the ones that figure out how to adopt all of these different technical aspects of an increasingly complex business, but not at the expense of the relationships and the human side those are going to be the winners. So I really love that mindset of the shift from human resources to human potential. That's the much better mindset to think about how I can be a leader in the future of work alongside traditional business executives and managers.
JB: That makes me think of Patrick Lencioni's distinction between smart and healthy organizations.
MP: There you go.
JB: Smart we've got the technology, we've got the operational details, we've got strategy. Healthy we've got strong people in the right roles. Morale we take a humanistic approach to it. When you combine those two, that's what you're talking about right there 100%.
MP: You have to master both and that's just how it is. So let's lean on our people professionals to help us get the people part right. Let's get these talent optimization outcomes flowing Okay.
JB: I’m ready. I hope everybody else, everybody out there, is ready in the talent in the Bosshole Transformation Nation. Matt, once again, thank you so much. Always a pleasure to have you on here. You're such an extraordinary person and we just love knowing you. But also your insights are really really helpful. So everybody check the show notes. You will find Matt's previous two episodes in there, a link to his book "Expand the Circle, as well as a link to the HR Field Guide to the Future. Just get in there and start to digest this, but find your starting point and realize that we can do some extraordinary things in the next five years. But, matt, thank you so much.
MP: Always a pleasure, John, thanks for all that you and the Real Good Ventures team does every day with your clients and beyond.
JB: Thanks, all right, everybody. We will see you next time on the Bosshole Chronicles. Thanks very much for checking out this episode of the Bosshole Chronicles. It was so good to have you here, and if you have your own Bosshole story that you want to share with the Bosshole Transformation Nation, just reach out. You can email us at mystory@thebossholechronicles.com. Again, mystory@thebossholechronicles.com, we'll see you next time.
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