Do I need to? First, this webinar is being recorded and will be available in the AOE Learning Center. So, as soon as that is available, we will be notifying you via email. And throughout this presentation, our attendees are on mute, and so you can feel free to drop in questions for our presenter today in the Q&A or in the chat, and we'll be answering those throughout the presentation. Additionally, we aren't going to be using that raise hand function, so please do utilize those. And when you're in the chat, make sure that you are chatting to everyone so we can all see what questions are coming in. And finally, AOE does not allow AI bots as a part of our webinars. They are just for AOE members and paying webinar registrants. And so, if we do see any of those in the attendees, we'll go ahead and remove them. So, without further ado, I'm going to go ahead and welcome today's presenter. We are joined today by Katie Dykstra with Marshall McKinnon Agency, and she's going to be presenting to us about how our businesses can thrive in 2025. Welcome, Katie. Thank you. I'm glad to be here, Jessica. I appreciate it. All right. Let me share my screen, and we'll get this party started. All right. Good morning, good afternoon, depending on where you are calling in for this webinar. My name is Katie Dykstra, and I'm gonna go over what we're seeing take place from the workforce. So when you think of your people at your organization that help support your business, we're gonna talk about what's the trends that we're seeing out there, how is that gonna impact your business and what's going on with the workforce and what you can do to actually enhance the employee experience. So we're gonna go over challenges, just ways to be resilient and flip your people strategy, maybe enhance it. Be more effective with your benefits, so meeting people where they're at, and then having the right mindset and understanding the technology advancements that are coming into play. So a little bit about me, my name is Katie Dykstra, like I told you. I have been in HR for over 20 years. I fell into HR, and if you ever talk to other HR people, they will always tell you that. In my case, I went to school for law enforcement and needed an internship. And guess what? Walgreens Corporation needed someone that could handle employee relation issues and asset protection. And that's kind of how I fell into HR. Eventually I ran the employee relations department, left Walgreens and did a wide variety of working with other entrepreneurs and really helping them build out their HR strategy. So I'm excited to be here today. I'm excited to help guide, answer any questions that you have, but that's a little bit about me. Right now, I am the client engagement director at Marsh McLennan Agency. We're an international company that's an insurance broker, providing benefits to our clients. In my role, I'm an HR consultant and helping with our clients and providing resources from projects or day to day. So let's talk about the challenges employers are facing in 2025. Well, we started to see this about a decade ago where we're having a hard time tracking and retaining talent, but we really saw that come alive in 2020. When COVID hit, we did see a lot of trends take place. And we saw a lot of people that were saying, I'm not gonna work anywhere at this organization. I am gonna go jump to a competitor. We also saw that with less people, more stuff needed to get done. And that trend is still continuing today. And that's why we're gonna talk about technology in a little bit and how AI can help your organization and how can you utilize it. So when it comes to things that keep you up at night and that you're worried about, we wanted to do a poll to see out of those three that I just shared with you, what keeps you up at night? I'll give you guys a minute or two to answer that, and then we'll talk about it. So far, it looks like everybody's worried about everything, all the options you threw up there, Katie. Yeah, and again, it all can have a little bit of a different effect depending on your organization and the people that you have. So what we're going to do is it looks like everybody said that they are really struggling with all of these. So let's talk about this in a little bit more detail. All right, so how can you be resilient with your people strategy? Let's first talk about what people strategy really means. So when we talk about people strategy, we're talking about the organization and the people within it. When it comes from a people strategy, usually what we hear is we want to keep our people. We want our people to be happy. We want to retain them for a long time. We want to help them develop. We want to see them get to other places. And with that, normally when you talk to people that are in HR, our thought process is the same thing. Our goal is to enhance your employee experience. So thinking about from the moment that someone sees that you have a job opening at your organization to jumping on board and being onboarded to your organization and then everything in between until they leave your organization, we want to make sure it's a really good experience for them because if they do leave our organization, they're talking about our organization in a really great way. It's just that they either outgrew it, they had a better opportunity, but they enjoyed the chapter that they had with you. So when we talk about resilience and the HR infrastructure or just the people strategy, this is what I'm referring to. What I have found is in HR, being in it for over 20 years, it is a lot different from when I first got into HR to where we are today. And what I mean by that is that it's more complex. And when I say more complex, that means that it's not so general. And I'll give you the example of that. What we're finding is there's more progressive states putting laws into place when it comes to leave. I'm in Illinois, and I always say, Illinois is a wannabe California when it comes to state laws. And so some of the laws that have happened in Illinois this year is offering leave to part-time and full-time employees within Illinois. Meaning that no matter how big your organization is, it's required that you give at least 40 hours of paid time off for an employee. Well, that's complex. And then we also have to think about federal law. So when you think about your organization and the states that you might be located in, there's a complexity that's gone into place over the last few years that HR professionals or people that are running your operations need to be aware of so that you're making sure that you're abiding by the law. The other piece that we're seeing is promoting people into management faster than they're ready to be in the position. And what that means is that we have to actually develop people that want to get into management or that are in management. And that could be focusing on skills such as emotional intelligence, how to give constructive feedback, how to have difficult conversations. What we're finding is we're just picking the person that's wonderful as an individual contributor, but when we're promoting them into a manager position because they were so great as an individual contributor. And what we're finding is we're not helping them develop in the role of being a manager or overseeing people. So what we want to do as an employer is really figure out what can we do to help our managers so they are better supported with the resources we're able to provide so they can be their best selves in that manager role. And so what we've seen a lot of trends with since COVID is we've seen executive coaching really pick up that individual piece where our entrepreneur is having someone to partner with and coach and talk about accountability. And again, what we see happen with our business owners is they get stuck in the weeds as they continue to grow as an organization that they don't have the time to really think strategically because they're in the weeds. And so having a coach or providing development for your leadership team can actually help with building a stronger workforce and having your employees be happier. The other piece that's really interesting, I talked about how state laws are changing and we're going to see a few more come to life in 2025. So if there's anybody that's in Michigan, leave that's taking place. If you are in Illinois, you have to now promote what the range is for a job opening on your job posting. So all these pieces have impact. But what we can do as leaders or owners of our organization is start to address better communication. And that can simply be by having a handbook that talks about policies. So if someone does have a question, they can go to your handbook and they can figure out those pieces or know what the policy is. It could be that you can put your PTO policy that you have at the organization so that employees can go to that and say, okay, I've been with the organization for three years. I get 15 days off because of my seniority and how long I've been with the organization. Having those simple pieces in place and having a one-stop shop where people can find it versus asking everybody, where do I find this is helpful and it starts to streamline communication. The other piece that you're going to want to think about is how you hire. What's really fascinating is when I talk to clients at our organization, I hear very often, well, we had a bad hire that was in 2020. So we're really hesitant now on who we hire because we've had bad hires. Well, how do you fix that? You fix that by having a really good recruitment process. And some of the simple ways that you can do this is I like to think about high-performing teams. So when you think about high-performing teams, I would look at the skill set of my team and what's missing. When I do my job posting, I'm going to add that extra skill that I think that's missing from my team that can make us a high-performing team. So it's okay to look and take in the skill sets that you have and figure out what's missing. And I'll give you the example of, I had a team and in my team, I noticed that we were very strategic, not very detail-oriented, really thought high level, but I didn't have someone that had that project manager background that could help me from the racy standpoint, can help me with Six Sigma, with processes and procedures and putting that in place. And so when I did my posting for my job of adding someone to my team, I looked for that skill set. And boy, did it make a difference because it enhanced the team. We were able to use each other's strengths to play off each other to get to that next level and grow. And so that's what I mean when having a really good solid recruiting process and really thinking about retaining people. Who are we missing on the team that we need to get on the team? So it is a better experience for our employees and they do have resources available from a leadership standpoint or on the team to help execute projects or help clients with whatever it may be. All right, so I talked about job descriptions and updating it and adding a skill set that you need if you were hiring on your team. But the other piece that you can do from a communication standpoint is update your job descriptions. Whenever I'm meeting with a client and they're telling me that they wanna do a salary benchmark, I'll ask them, when's the last time that job description has been updated that you want me to benchmark? And a lot of times they'll say, we haven't updated in like five years. Well, I can guarantee you if you haven't updated your job description from five years ago, it is gonna look a lot different of what you're doing today. And so what I always recommend is every year you should be looking at those job descriptions that you have and adding to it or editing it. There might be technology that comes in place that might change what that job description and what that person has is ownership within that role. If you have updated job descriptions, that means people know what to do. If it's not written down of what their job is, how do you expect them to know what they're supposed to be doing? And as you grow as an organization or you get technology or processes or people in place, that job description does change. So keep that in mind. As a good housekeeping, you're close to the end of 2024. If you looked at those job descriptions right now, how would they look? And then good relationships help for leaders. So good employee relations help for leaders. That means that if the employees are able to feel psychological safety and they feel comfortable with having trust with their manager or their leader, they're more likely to come to you about concerns that they have before it becomes a real issue. And so what we wanna do is make sure that our managers know how to have empathy. They know how to do psychological safety and build trust within the organization and with their team. All right, the other piece is if you want people to perform really well, you have to let them know what they're performing at. So are we doing performance reviews? How are we doing performance reviews? And is there any enhancements that need to take place? And how do we connect that to our compensation? Because when we think about it, the employee experience should all be connected in the pathway, meaning that I know what to expect with my performance. I know what to expect with my performance review and I know how that works with my merit increase because they're connected. And so I always ask organizations, do you have a compensation philosophy that matches to the culture of your organization? If you don't, there's an opportunity for you to think about that. How do we start streamlining all these pieces when we talk about a people strategy? And some of those pieces is just like having a compensation philosophy that's connected to our performance reviews, that's connected to our promotions. And then lastly, what we really see is that our clients, our leaders, struggle with having difficult conversations. And the reason is, is they go into that fight or flight mode. When you know you have to talk to your spouse, a friend, or a coworker and deliver a difficult message, some people get that yucky feeling in their stomach. They start to sweat. They start to get really nervous. That's that flight or flight that I'm talking about. People get nervous because they think worst case scenario. The way that we work from a neuroscience perspective is we are wired to think negatively. It's easy for us. If I asked you a question and I said, what's the worst case that could happen? I guarantee that you can give me that answer quickly. But if I asked you what's the best case scenario of what could happen? It might take you a minute to think about that and respond to it. So we want to make sure our organization can figure out how to be transparent and how to have those difficult conversations and support our managers with having those conversations. So when we talk about a resilient culture and thinking about that, it goes back to what I was just talking about. Your frontline supervisors. What support are we providing them? What feedback have they given us? So what I love to do is occasionally I will do stay interviews. Stay interviews is you going to people in the organization and asking what keeps them here. You can actually Google it right now and say, what are the best questions to ask for stay interviews? You'll see 12 of them come up. Those are 12 questions that you can ask people in your organization why they stay. What might make them leave? All those people, those pieces are data points for us and that helps us figure out how do we enhance the employee experience based on what we know? It also helps us figure out because our managers are going to tell us the support that they need that we might be lacking. So how do we get them that support? How do we get them the training or the resources so they feel better supported in areas that they might have a little bit of weakness? And then if you want to keep your people, you're going to want to make sure that you're paying them up to market or beyond. You can utilize resources to see where your pay is compared to the market and knowing if you're headed in the right or the wrong direction. I mentioned earlier about compensation philosophy. What I meant with that is that you have some philosophy behind it. I have some organizations that we partner with that are nonprofits. They pay below market when it comes to the cash salary. But what they really do is they provide some really great benefits as an alternative to make up for not being able to have a large salary or they end up helping from a workforce standpoint of being flexible with time and people being able to flex their time so that they can go to their children's soccer game. Whatever it may be, figure out what's important to your workforce and figure out are you competitive with what you're doing in your industry and what you're seeing happening in your area? So think about your competitors. And then hold your managers accountable. What's really interesting that we found in COVID is that we started to see data points to see why people leave the organization. What we found is that if we saw people that didn't take any of their PTO or very few PTO that they were very close to burnout. So we had our managers be able to say to the employees, hey, I noticed that you have three weeks of vacation and you've only taken one day this year and we're in fourth quarter. Do you plan on taking some of that day off days off or what prevents you from doing that? But holding the employee accountable to take that time off what we're finding is people are losing their PTO and never using it which means that's how that burnout happens. A lot of people feel like they can't take time off because what would happen if I'm not there? What if there's a fire while I'm out? And the thing is, we're able to cross-train people so that someone else can cover for you so you can take time off. But supervisors should be aware of who's taking advantage of their PTO, who's not using it, and they should be held accountable to enforcing these pieces. And if a manager continues, the same manager continues to have high turnover, there's an issue there. How do we figure out what that issue is? Is it the people manager? Is it the processes that we have in place? Is there training opportunities? Because again, when we think about problems and needing them to be solved at an organization, it usually falls into three categories, people, processes, or technology. So again, how do we start giving resources or having a better understanding where our supervisors are? So we want to make sure that we have the right people in the right seat. So we have one client that is family-owned and they are a meat packaging organization and they were having trouble with turnover. The first piece is you're freezing cold all day. You work an eight-hour shift in a freezer to work at this organization and it's a manufacturing organization for meat. And they were trying to figure out how can we make it a better working conditions for them and really meet people where they're at in order to keep people to stay. So their philosophy or their hypothesis was that if we can keep people for one year, we can keep them forever. That was their hypothesis. So they looked at the employee experience, they figured out where the opportunities were. That means they looked at their exit survey information. Why do people keep leaving us? Well, they left us because they felt like they didn't know what their job was. They left us because they felt that they couldn't take time off with the shifts that they had to work. And so what they did is they really focused on the feedback from their employees and their supervisors. They took that into place and then they started to figure out ways to enhance that employee experience. So here's the fabulous part. They were able to get their turnover down to four percent. And again, despite their working in frigid conditions, they were able to create a positive culture, given employees opportunities to grow. So they were able to build some career pathing. One of the pieces that we do here for manufacturers is that there's not a lot of places for us to grow. I don't necessarily want to be a supervisor. What other options do I have as an individual contributor? And they were able to build those pathways and they were able to make people feel connected to the organization and that their voice could be heard. When there were areas of opportunity and they did engagement surveys, they were transparent about what the results of those survey results were. So they owned it when they weren't doing something very well. Senior leadership came out and talked to the employees and said, these are the results that we had. Here's what we're hearing from you. Here's what we're willing to try based off that. And then if they weren't able to do something because an idea was thrown to the table and they couldn't fix that issue, the way that the employees suggested, they explained the why. So it's very interesting. As humans, we want to understand the why of our organization and we want to understand our role and how it fits with that. All right. So how do we be more effective with creative benefits strategy? This is really interesting because we are seeing many generations that are in the workforce. We're also seeing different landscapes taking place right now when it comes to benefits. And so we want to keep that in mind. What we're finding is one in three employees will forego a pay increase if you offer different benefits. And what's really fascinating is a lot of our employees don't even know the benefits that are offered at the organization. That's why it's really important when we think about initiating a project or executing a new policy. It's great that you did this whole piece and it's about to get thrown out to your workforce. But what we find is that we're not very good at change management. And really COVID taught us that we have to start to be change agents with change management. We have to be communication experts and gurus. And let's be honest, none of us here probably went to school to be in marketing or communication. But what we found is if you're better at explaining the why behind a policy or a project or some change at your organization, people are more likely to agree with it, understand it, have a better idea how to move forward with it. And so again, we want to do a really good job of explaining what our benefits are to the organization. What's interesting is we're seeing a lot of clients ask for total reward statements. So some of you on this webinar might be, Katie, what is a total reward statement? And so really what that happens is it's showing the employee all the benefits that they get at the organization plus the cash that they're paid as their salary, their hourly wage, and saying, hey, listen, although you only get paid 50,000, with all the benefits that you have, it's actually 100,000. And the question is, are you taking advantage of all the benefits that you have on there? And so your HRIS can do this. Your payroll system occasionally can do this. And it pops out a sheet that goes to your employees that explains all the benefits and the pay that they have and what the employer pays versus what the employee pays and everything that's out there that your organization offers. And so it's a real eye opener for people that really don't listen when open enrollment happens or you have insurance benefits people aren't taking advantage of. So what's really interesting is every generation cares about different things. And so when we think about our benefits, we want to look at our workforce. What age groups do you have as part of that group? The benefits that you currently have today, who's taking advantage of them? Are they actually beneficial for your organization? We saw some organizations offer college tuition reimbursement. And what was funny is not many people took advantage of it. So instead, as an employer spending your money in these certain areas that you're not seeing employees take advantage of, take that benefit and move it into another area where you want to invest money so that you can see that your employees are taking advantage of it. The last thing we want to do is pick something that doesn't work. And so when we talk about different segments, we want to understand the different chapters of people's lives. And I will tell you, I am considered an old millennial. My sister's about four and a half years younger than me, but we're both in the millennial group. And what I found is my sister does not have kids, and she probably won't, and that's okay. But what she does have is animals. And so she loves pet insurance. That is so important to her when she's looking at benefits and open enrollment, that she makes sure she always has that. Because her cat, Loki, has upper respiratory issues and has an inhaler that she has to do breathing treatments with. So again, that gets really expensive if you don't have the pet insurance. Where I am a mom of two kids that are 10 and 12, and what I have found is that I use very often the video chat option to talk to a doctor. Then going out into the cold in the Chicago windy city to go see a doctor at an appointment. So having that video conferencing with a doctor and being able to have a doctor assess and be able to send a prescription to the closest Walgreens by me is such a convenient perk that my organization offers. So it's really thinking about all those different generations and what our needs are based on the chapter that we're in life. All right. So when we talk about curbing our spending, we really do want to look, where is our money going when it comes to our benefits? And like I said earlier, are we really spending it in the right places? If we need to cut our expenses because we're spending money in areas or it's been a tough year for your organization, you can get savvy with your benefits and figure out where there can be cuts. And that could just be looking at the utilization. The other piece we want to think about is empathy. Think about where our employees are in life. What I've seen become a really big trend since COVID is managers, the number one skill that employees are asking for is having that empathy. One of the resources that you can offer to your employees is EAP, an employee assistance program. You'll be able to see the utilization of how many people are calling into EAP to get a counselor or to have EAP plan a vacation for them or have EAP provide webinars for mental health. EAP is a one-stop shop. It's not very expensive to do and it can probably cost a dollar a person, sometimes less depending on how big your organization is and what you're looking for, but EAP is a great one-stop shop to help your employees figure out how they can get free counseling up to four or five sessions without doing a co-pay with their insurance. So there's a lot of resources that are out there that we can start taking advantage of. And so here's what we're finding. Pay is important to people. If they know that they can look at the market and see that you're underpaying them and they know they can go to one of your competitors and get a pay increase, even if it's just a dollar more per hour, we've seen the trend that they will do that. They will jump. We've seen that people want to know their worth and with the younger generations, millennials included, pay is important to them until they hit a certain dollar amount within their career. The other piece is people want purposeful work. So I do a lot of help with people that have been laid off where I will look over their resume. I'll help prep them for interviews just as a way to give back since I'm in HR and that is an area that I help support. And what I have found is when I hear people are not happy, I usually will ask them, do you feel like your work that you're doing is purposeful and are your values matching the values of the organization? If you tell me no to both of those, then I'm going to tell you it's probably time that you do need to leave your organization. It's very important to humans to know that they understand the why of the organization, how they fit into it. It's also important that they feel purposeful in the job that they're doing, that they're making a difference and that their values are being met. People have certain values that need to be met in order for them to feel whole. And if their organization is not doing that for them, they're going to be dissatisfied. All right, social and supportive culture. That means I can be my authentic self. And again, we saw that with COVID because people had to go remote instantly. And you might see my cat walk across the screen while I was on a call. Or you might hear the doorbell ring because I have a package being delivered. And before those were big no-nos of even mentioning that the doorbell is ringing or me even showing you that I have an animal at my household. But we've become more open in meeting people where they're at saying, oh, Katie has a family and she has pets. Okay, not a big deal. So really letting people be their authentic self is important that they can show up and be who they are. And that means you get to see the good, the bad and the ugly. All right, flexible workforce. I just told you I have a 10 and 12 year old. It's really important to me that I am able to go to my son's soccer games. It's important that I can get them to practice on time. So I will have days where I flex and I will say, hey, Amy, I'm going to let you know that I'm cutting out early. I will check my email when I get back, but I got to get done it to a game that's over an hour away. I just wanted to let you know. So it's on your radar. If anything comes through, can you cover me until I can jump back on? And Amy has never told me no. Again, if we can be who we are and actually meet the person on where they are in life. And if it's someone that just needs to cut out on Friday is a half an hour early because traffic is so bad coming from Chicago back to the burbs that you're okay if they flex and come in earlier so they can get out and beat that traffic and not be in traffic for two hours. Work with people. It doesn't cost anything to have them flex their hours. Again, there is ways that you can meet people where they're at and figure out what's important to them. I always say as leaders of an organization, you should know your team really well. You should know how people learn. You should know how they want to be appreciated and you should know what development they want to have within the year. If you can answer those questions, you're a pretty darn good leader because you're able to meet people where they're at. All right, so the other piece that's really been big is that we've seen the younger generations really want to know what the career path is. So you have to figure out if someone comes into this role, what might their next step be? Or what might be the skill set or other responsibilities they can get if they grow a skill set within your organization? And then wellness and benefits. Again, we keep talking about benefits a little bit, but wellness has come into place. And when I think of wellness, 8, 10 years ago, I only thought about it from a physical standpoint. Didn't think about it from mental, didn't think about it from financial, didn't think about it from all these other aspects. So when you think of your wellness program that you have at your organization, are we having an outsider come in to talk to people about how to budget, how to buy your first house, how to start tracking for your 401k so you can retire at a reasonable age? And so there are resources with your benefit packages that you can bring those pieces in from thinking of all aspects of wellness. And if you do these pieces, you're going to have a happier workforce. All right, so what generations do you fall into? Let's do a quick poll here. Okay, we're seeing mostly people that are in Gen X or Millennials. And again, there is a difference between those two generations in how we view things. We have some people from Boomers as well. Now, what's really interesting is like I told you earlier, there is multiple generations that are in the workforce. And what's really interesting is we have traditionals, which are people that are older than Boomers. And you might see these people as greeters at Walmart, where they're checking your receipt or at Costco. We're seeing traditionalists come into the workforce and stay in the workforce because of that. And so what's really interesting is the traditionalists are back in the workforce because they didn't plan accordingly for retirement. So again, how do we set up the other generation so they are more comfortable? And so this is just looking at some of the pieces that we have to think about when it comes to benefits from different generations and meeting them where they're at. When I think about your benefits that you offer your workforce, I think of it almost like an a la carte, like a buffet. Depending on where I'm at in life, I'm gonna pick this, this, and this, and I might not touch everything that's in the buffet. But it's an a la carte because it's meeting me where I'm at in the chapter of life. So again, what we're really seeing take off, and I've started to fall into this this year, is I've started to notice that I'm now sort of a caregiver. I'm like the sandwich generation, or I'm taking care of my mother-in-law that has dementia, and I'm also taking care of young kids. And so with that, I want to figure out how do those benefits help me with where I'm at? Because that's a tough situation to be part of that sandwich approach where I'm taking care of young kids, but I'm also taking care of my old kids, my mother-in-law. So again, keep this in mind that there's opportunities to think about your different generations within your workforce and how to meet them. All right, how to have the right mindset when fostering innovation. So this is a rhetorical question to think about, but when's the last time that you actually thought about innovation at your organization? I worked for an entrepreneur a few years ago, and I always noticed that he would come into work late on Fridays. He would come in two, three hours after the start of the day. And so I asked him, I said, hey, I noticed on Fridays that you're coming in late to work. Do you have like a meeting schedule? Do you have like a meeting in the morning that's offsite? What's going on? And he said, hey, on Fridays, I go on a long bike ride in the morning. And that's where I get in my creative space. And I'm able to think about creative ideas that I want to bring to the organization and pilot it. And he goes, I need that downtime because when I'm not out of the office, I don't have the time to be innovative. I lose that. And he was not wrong. He actually empowered me to do the same thing. And my stress relief or creative space is actually working out. When I'm lifting weights, I have great ideas. Or if I'm out walking my dog, that's when I have some ideas that I want to test. And I'll go to my phone, I'll use my notepad or my notes, and I'll do a voice message of what ideas I have. And then I'll come back into the workforce. I'll talk to my team and I'll say, hey, can we try some of these ideas that I have? But we lose that innovative piece when we're in elementary school. Think back when you were in elementary, you got to do all these creative projects. You had an art class. But as we get further along in academia, we are talked at. We were told to memorize things. When we worked on our master's degree or a PhD or were in college, we were taught about philosophies and how you apply it. So it was really memorizing and then figuring out how it fits. We lost that creative space. So how do we bring that back to our organization? Are we offering that to our leaders? Are we offering it to ourselves to help spark ideas? Because those ideas is what you want to pilot at your organization. And if you heard me say this a couple of times, but how do we start having a hypothesis? I love talking to leaders and saying, hey, what if we have a hypothesis and start thinking like a scientist? Whatever comes back from that pilot, we can change our hypothesis on it. We learn lessons and we can apply it and how we want to work. Or when I've coached other leaders that are like, hey, my executive leadership will never let us do this. Oh, yeah? How about if you came back to them and said, what if we just do a tiny pilot of this? Only affects this many people and we see what those results are. Then we can go back to our executives and explain this is what the details were. And this is how it came out. All those pieces are things we want to keep in mind because it helps promote change and innovation to our organization. And I swear, because we are constantly in meetings or constantly with our clients or patients, we forget this piece. So how do we bring it back into our organization and spark some of that innovation? All right. So the other piece we want to think about is we are really great promoting our organization, our business externally. How do we take those same concepts and do it internally with the communication? So I told you earlier, we're like change management leaders or agents because COVID caused that. We had such rapid change happen in such a short period of time. We had to communicate all these changes quickly. We want to take those ideas and we want to use our marketing thought process that we have externally and bring that internally of how we communicate to our workforce about things that are going on, changes that are taking place. So think about that for a second. We want to create a magical place when people are onboarded. What we find is if someone has a poor experience onboarding at your organization, they're more likely to leave within the first year. But if they have that magical experience where it's planned out, they have structure, they know what their job is, they're meeting with their leader, they are more likely to stay with us. And that could just be you checking the 30, the 90 day and really asking about how the experience was. What else can we do to make it better? And then we want to engage with everybody. So we want your employee to know the benefits that helps their family, their organization. We want them to feel like they are part of the team and that they understand the benefits that are out there, not only for them, but for their family. And then engaging on a purpose. Again, your employees need to know the job that they're doing is purposeful and it goes big picture and it makes them make a difference in the world. And when we engage with our workforce, it's thoughtful. It's not a knee-jerk reaction. And so sometimes I feel like because we're go, go, go, we sometimes forget to think strategically of how we should communicate some of these pieces. All right, so when we think about our organization and how we can make it better, it's being intentional. It's being compassionate, right? It's having that empathy. What I love is if you love your organization, you brag about it. It's just like when you use a product that you love, you talk about it all the time. So we want our people at our organization to brag on how amazing our organization is because it does spread with word of mouth. It is important. So if people aren't happy, they're not going to be talking very positive about your organization. So keep that in mind is where do we have opportunities for improvement? And one of the simple ways that we can do that is we can talk about our organization. And one of the simple ways that we can do this is actually thinking about technology. And I am talking about AI. So the piece that I find very interesting is people are very scared of AI. They think of Terminator. And I will be honest with you, like I've had thoughts of, could it be like Terminator and AI take over? But there's things that you can do at your organization that AI can actually help you. You can be more of a thought partner. So we're going to have our last poll. And I just want to know, are you currently using AI at your organization? And if so, what are some of the things that you're doing All right, so here's the interesting part. We had no one say yes. We had 33% of people say no. And then we had 67% say sometimes. So this is really interesting. So what I find very interesting about this is that we still see people that are very like nervous about what AI can do. And so let's talk about that a little bit further. We've been having AI and experiences with AI for probably a decade. When you say something to Alexa, like, hey, Alexa, tell me what the weather is outside. Alexa responds back, that's AI technology. Or when you're using a chatbot. So I'm not sure if you guys just heard that, but Alexa just talked behind me because I have Alexa here in my office. And so with that, we are using chatbots. We are talking to AI on a daily basis and we have been for a while. What's really changed is for the first time as a workforce, we have computers that can hold the amount of data that's needed for AI to get to the level that it is today. And so AI can help with a lot of things. It can help with answering questions about benefits for employers. It can help with answering a question about a vacation that you're going on that you booked Disney Cruise, and they have a chatbot that can answer those questions. So AI can help out with helping with task-oriented things. So a lot of HRIS systems, which is that HCM that I'm talking about with workflows, can be utilized. So when you talk about payroll systems that you use, when you talk about HRISs of how you hold your employee benefits or your employee data, they have AI technology in there that can help you so that you're not answering one-off questions about benefits, or you're not answering the question about how much PTO time they have, because there is AI technology that helps build out those workflows so that employee can find out that answer. And so when you think about your technology that you have at your organization, are you shocking to see that you have technology that's helping enhance the workforce? Do you have technology helping you or do you have technology hindering you? If you have eight different systems and they all don't communicate to each other, you're probably having technology hinder you. And so it's really important to think about your workforce and where we need to invest in technology so that AI can help. And sometimes what I tell people is that you're really nervous about AI and bringing it to your organization. Build a committee. Take people that are in different roles at your organization and make an AI committee. Start building out what you guys would be okay with as an organization and what you wouldn't be okay with. And then you can build an AI policy off that. And again, let's see if we can pilot some ideas of how AI can make our lives easier and make it worth the investment with AI. And you can simply use ChatGPT if you want to just to see how it answers on things. It starts to know how your profile works and you can use the free one or you can use Copilot. There's a lot of different AIs out there, but a lot of times if you're on an island and you don't have someone that you could be a thought partner with, you can go to ChatGPT and say, hey, listen, I would love to know the best practices when it comes to doing layoffs. Can you tell me what you have seen since 2020 when it comes to layoffs and things that the employer should consider if we had to lay off someone? And it will give you step-by-step what it sees out there. I'll also ask ChatGPT, let me know what resources that you were able to pull that from so I can verify that it's real accurate data. Garbage in, garbage out is what I tell you. So if you have bad data, it's gonna pull bad data out. But again, figure out how AI can help with it and see what gaps you have and what's holding you back from using the technology to the advantage. Because I feel like AI is here to stay. So if you are not feeling comfortable with it, start getting into the uncomfortable and seeing what you can do. And again, take baby steps. There's nothing where you have to rip off that bandaid and start doing everything AI, but you can do a phased approach for your organization. And if you're not ready to do your organization, then you as a person, start putting yourself out there with AI and figuring out that skill set. That's needed to utilize AI, because AI will replace jobs, but it will also create new jobs that are needed and we're gonna start asking people who is familiar with AI, how do you utilize it? How has that been used? Because that's gonna help with the operations and the employee experience and our client and patient experience. All right, so in this case, HR and AI, when we think about our strategies, you might have someone that's your office manager. You might have someone that is playing the HR role, but they're able to do mundane tasks. Mundane tasks, meaning that are very repetitive. They're able to do bend reconciliation and then have a report pull out. They're able to take away from the time consuming pieces, that your HR people or your office manager can actually focus on the things that need to be done. So again, figure out ways to be more efficient when looking at it. Right now, I'm taking a certification that's through SHRM. SHRM is like our professional development on the HR side. And they have a class that's a certification on AI. I'm learning a ton in these classes and I'm so glad I did it because I thought I knew a lot, but I'm learning all kinds of different things that I would have never known if I didn't explore taking this certification. And now I can figure out how to bring that back to my organization. And I'm getting excited explaining it to my team of how we can utilize these pieces. And so again, AI will help you with automation and repetitive time consuming tasks. It also can help you from a creative space too. So let's say you're not a marketing guru. It can help you with thinking about social media posts or marketing campaign that you wanna put out. But again, there's good things for AI and bad things. AI is used to find complex patterns. It's able to summarize data. So if you have an article that you just don't have time to read and it's 30 pages long, you can throw it in chat GPT and say, summarize the key findings on this. Let me know how I can turn this into action. And then it can also be turned, things to like not utilize it for is it's not gonna be able to answer complex issues. It's not gonna be able to answer employee relation issues. Should I terminate an employer or not? Here's the situation. That's where you need humans. It's only able to do some basic stuff. And then again, you don't wanna put your organization at risk. We don't wanna put confidential information into AI unless we have our own AI software that we know is locked down and it's not going to the rest of the world of what we're putting in there. All right, so like I said, AI isn't going anywhere. So we gotta figure out how to embrace change. And again, I have an influencer that I follow that talks about the gig economy. And his quote is he always says, if you're not utilizing the gig economy, it's like you're not taking advantage in the 90s when the internet came out. Well, that's how I view AI. If you're not taking advantage of AI right now, you are behind. So figure out ways to start messing with it. And maybe that's your innovation space. Your innovation is actually playing with AI when we talked about figuring out times to be innovative and to start having that creative juice. It could be just testing AI and figuring out that skill set. All right, so I just wanna give us enough time so I can answer some questions. I can go over some pieces, but we talked about ways to attract and retain talent by enhancing that employee experience. It's really meeting your workforce and where they're at. How to get things done with less. So really thinking about how technology policies and procedures being better with communication can all help with getting more done with less time. And then using AI or other processes or procedures that can streamline your technology and the tasks that are going on at your organization. If there's anything that you're really interested in that I talked about today, these are some of the services that MMA does to support our clients. We're able to be your day-to-day HR, we're able to take on projects, and we're able to help you in multiple ways when you think about your workforce and what you need. What we're finding in right now is that a lot of clients are really looking at experts to come in and help be a thought partner, and we're able to do that for you. If you wanna stay in touch, I put my LinkedIn. I do a lot of posts about HR trends and things that are going on. And then I also wanted to put just a resource about the resources that we're able to provide from an HR consulting standpoint. I am gonna stop sharing my slides and stop sharing my screen so that I can answer some questions for all of you. Thank you so much, Katie. I haven't seen anything quite yet, but I did wanna bring up a point that one of our attendees, Sammy, said that she finds that she gets a lot more out of stay interviews than exit interviews. And so I just think that's another really good thing to reinforce is talking to your employees and hearing what they have to say and getting their feedback is awesome. And it's also great that you have an environment where you're getting that good feedback through that process as well, that people are feeling comfortable enough to be vulnerable and share some of that as well. Yeah, Jessica, I love that you brought that up. There was a study done by an organization, a consulting firm, that found that instead of doing an exit interview right when someone gives their notice, to actually send a survey two weeks later. And they said people feel psychologically safe to now answer those questions on their own. To now answer those questions honestly, because they're already gone. They're already at their new location. So now you can get those real nuggets of what went wrong and where we have opportunity to be a better employer based on the feedback that was provided. And I thought that was fascinating. Yeah, that's a great point. I've never even thought about that. All right, well, I'll see if there's anything else that comes in, but if there's not, as a reminder, we do have this recording and it will be available in the AOE Learning Center. So if you missed any parts of this or you have anyone else that you want to share this with on your team, then you'll be able to find it there. We do have two more webinars coming up before the year ends next week. So make sure to check that out. And we have several webinars already scheduled in the first quarter, starting the week of January 13th with the strategic planning webinar from an AOE member. So definitely start to look at that 2025 calendar and your calendar to see if there's an opportunity for you to come and see what else we have going on. I want to thank Katie so much for presenting today. This was great. And it's always good to kind of have another, like especially outside perspective on a grander scale of seeing those trends and what to see and to know and how it can apply to what AOE members are doing. So thank you so much for the time today and for the great presentation. The slides will be available in the AOE Learning Center as well. And if we don't see you next week on one of those webinars, we hope everyone has a nice holiday season. Thank you. Thank you so much.

AOE Learning Center

business strategies

workforce trends

employee experiences

recruitment processes

job satisfaction

psychological safety

AI technology

strategic planning