NYCA Spring Panel - Tackling the New Complexities of Compensation Planning

[00:00:02] Here's an experiment for you. Take passionate experts in human resource technology. Invite cross-industry experts from inside and outside HR. Mix in what's happening in people analytics today. Give them the technology to connect, hit record, pour their discussions into a beaker.

[00:00:21] Mix thoroughly and voila! You get the HR Data Labs podcast where we explore the impact of data and analytics to your business. We may get passionate, and even irreverent, that count on each episode

[00:00:35] challenging and enhancing your understanding of the way people data can be used to solve real world problems. Now here's your host, David Turetsky. Well we're going to be talking about as a lot of the complexities that may come up that have something to do with the regulations

[00:00:51] that all of you who have been swimming in for the last few years, especially the last two. And so we're going to talk about the complexities of compensation planning, but you can't talk about compensation planning without talking about the world of pay and transparency and inflation,

[00:01:05] other things that not only have we been dealing with, but we're struggling with. If you have any questions, you can interrupt us. So it's okay, we can flex like that. We do have some time

[00:01:15] at the end for other questions if you want to hold your questions. It's solely cool. But why don't we start with introducing the people on the panel? So my name is David Turetsky. I am the CHRO and vice president of consulting at salary.com. If anybody ever asked

[00:01:29] me if I ever wanted to be a CHRO, I told them they're crazy. I would never want that. I'm a compensation person and have been for more than 35 years. In the latest couple of jobs,

[00:01:40] I was with ADP and I built the ADP data cloud. So I did a lot of people analytics and I've been talking a lot about people analytics. And you know, that goes a long way until

[00:01:50] you lose your job and then you start consulting around people analytics. And I'm sure a lot of you can relate. But then I got my company Turetsky Consulting got acquired by salary.com and I've

[00:02:00] been there for a year and actually two and a half years. But the next person, Sean, why don't you give an introduction? So I'm the general manager of Total Rewards at Visier. So known for people analytics and we've expanded into the total reward space.

[00:02:13] Been in Comp and Ben more on the software development side for not quite 35 years. Since last millennium, basically from product dev, basically the nerd side of the house to building tools, etc. I've never been a practitioner. Frankly, that job just looks

[00:02:30] like it sucks. You guys have to deal with all the people and everything around those pieces. So I build tools based on what you guys need. So and we're excited to be here. So as we expand out getting feedback from you all around our space.

[00:02:44] And thank you for sponsoring. You're welcome. Jackie, you're next. Hi, everyone. Jackie Rubin. I'm a consultant with the Willis Towers Watson, which is a large global human resources consulting firm. I focus on compensation. So helping companies and organizations design job frameworks, salary structures,

[00:03:01] incentive plan designs, basically all those frameworks and governance and administration tools that you all use to help manage compensation in your organizations. And I'm really excited to be here today. Thank you, Jackie. KC, how about you? I'm the practitioner. So I work at a company called eHealth,

[00:03:21] head of total rewards. We have about 2000 employees. They're nationally remote based. So they're all over the country, which obviously includes a whole lot of complexities. I have a nice little tenure at Morgan Stanley. And then my favorite place to

[00:03:36] work was at Ralph Lauren with Jeff over there. And that's pretty much my history. I do want to pause for a moment and not talk calm, but bring it right back. Wish David and everybody else a happy Purim. Purim was this last weekend.

[00:03:51] Why do you care that it's Purim? Well, I find Purim to be a funny Jewish holiday that aligns to performance management. All right. So the story goes, there's this king. Let's call him Mr. CEO. And the king had an advisor. Let's call him Mr. CFO.

[00:04:12] An advisor was given some bad information, had a real bias against his one department. And we know we don't like biases. So he basically said, I want to get rid of this department. I'm going to tell the CEO some stuff. He'll buy into it.

[00:04:29] Along comes Miss Queen HR and her uncle, Mr. Legal. And they come and they talk to the CEO, explain what a calibration session is, get some alternative opinions. And ultimately, the CEO says, man, I just got the worst advice

[00:04:49] from the CFO. He was going to make me fire this whole group of people. And instead, I'm just going to fire him and create the culture I wanted in my Oregon king. That is a brilliant representation. By the way, the story is a lot darker than that.

[00:05:08] But every year we celebrate the fact that that group, that department didn't get fired, quote unquote. Good one, Casey. I had actually never heard it put that way, but that's actually now I'll use that. That's really good. I'll of course quote you on that.

[00:05:21] I mean, the whole point of this obviously is fair and equitable practice, right? Eliminating bias from the equation. So enjoy the cute story. That's awesome. That's awesome. But it actually sets us up well for talking about context because

[00:05:35] a lot of those things do happen. And I'll start with then performance management, be talking about some of the more interesting things that are going on in the world of performance management. Because performance obviously feeds into compensation planning,

[00:05:48] to a great extent, because a lot of us believe in pay for performance, or a lot of the companies we work for do, or at least they say they do. Because performance management as we know is everybody's favorite activity. It's employees' favorite activity, it's managers' favorite activity.

[00:06:02] And so if you've ever been a part of it, the best thing you've ever gotten is that invitation from your boss that says, hey, do you have time next Monday? I want to talk or worse on Friday,

[00:06:12] afternoon, and we're going to sit down and talk about your performance for last year. Oh, this is the first time we've talked about that in 12 months. That's great. Let's sit down. What happens at that conversation? Are expectations normally aligned?

[00:06:29] No, they're never aligned because that conversation should be happening often. And so a lot of the context that I'll set when it comes to performance management, especially when it comes to compensation planning is, when you go in to make your

[00:06:39] merit decisions, a lot of those decisions are seen as subjective because they're not based on the facts of how you actually perform throughout the year. Usually there's that thing called recency effect. Does anybody know what that is?

[00:06:52] Yeah, a lot of us do because it's whatever you did lately or at least within the last quarter. Or if you're doing this in January or February, could even be after the new year.

[00:07:02] Maybe you had too much to drink on December 31st and you got came in late on January 2nd. And that was what your boss, when you're doing merit or you're doing bonuses, that's probably what will affect it. And so let's move on from performance management,

[00:07:19] which by the way hasn't really seen a major change in many, many years. Some companies are actually going to check-ins on a weekly basis and they're saying that there's enormous amounts of conversation that happened and it creates that air of non-recency effect.

[00:07:34] But I'll tell you that managers and employees tend to get sick of talking to each other that much. And then it goes to every two weeks and every three weeks, every month that

[00:07:43] becomes every quarter. Now I'll tell you, every quarter is not bad. It's better than once a year. But still you lose that recency effect and it's okay. Some other contexts, what was inflation

[00:07:54] doing last year? It was high but actually it was coming down, right? It wasn't as high as earlier in the year. When did we set our merit budgets? Mid-year, right? So mid-year was the inflation

[00:08:10] higher or lower? It was still a little higher. And so expectations that people had coming into the new year were higher. But we were setting higher budgets and then came the end of the year, the Fed started easing things started calming down. So context being set, the people's

[00:08:28] expectations may be misaligned. I'm going to talk a little bit about that. And so the last thing I want to talk about is regulations and laws. I'm not a lawyer, although there is a lawyer

[00:08:39] at ADP whose name is literally David Torecki. And I got some of the most fun emails you can possibly get. Of course I would delete, I would send it to him and then delete both copies.

[00:08:51] But the chuckle you get from actually opening up one of those emails never goes away. And now that I'm a CHRO, I actually get those emails. So that context was wonderful. But you've lived or been swimming in a world of regulation that has completely upset the whole market

[00:09:08] as you know it in the world, especially in New York City, but in the world of New York, as well as Connecticut and other places, where now we have to be more open and honest about what

[00:09:18] we pay for a starting role. And so we'll talk about how that affects the world of compensation planning as well because that's not going away ever it's codified. And so this is backdrop.

[00:09:31] We're going to talk about what's been going on last year, this year, and where we see things going in the future around compensation planning. Okay. And so now let's talk to our

[00:09:49] experts on the panel and it's not just about me. And the first thing we're going to talk about is the three things that surprised us in the world of pay. And specifically we're talking about pay and how

[00:09:59] it impacts compensation planning. And I'm going to start with Jackie because you've seen a lot of things from a lot of your clients, what things surprised you in the world of compensation planning and pay in 2023? One or two? Yeah. So I think here in New York,

[00:10:17] the pay transparency law was the first one after Colorado. I think a lot of us were nervous at first, but for some of us it ended up being, I would say reactions varied. So some of you might be,

[00:10:28] oh, the pay transparency law, we got this, we got this, maybe we make some tweaks to the ranges we're posting, but we have a good handle on this. Some of the rest of you might be

[00:10:38] still sort of figuring this out. But I would say a big impact on the comp planning process this year for all of us was how each of us dealt with that in terms of the comp planning process.

[00:10:49] So our employees asking more questions about where their salary fits in, when their sings range is posted. Some of you may have been getting a lot of questions, but I've also heard from some clients

[00:10:58] that say, oh, there's been no change. So I think that was a little bit of a surprise, the number of organizations that are saying, oh, they're not necessarily seeing a lot of what more questions from their employees on comp planning and why their salary might be different

[00:11:15] or in the lower end of the range of what's posted. Also on comp planning, I would say something that I've been seeing evolving, I think this also might be feeding into the future is how

[00:11:24] all of our roles as compensation professionals is changing. So our job sort of used to be, we have to develop a great comp program, we need to develop a salary structures, incentive plans, and we need to make this a really great plan. But now we also have to

[00:11:38] communicate it and not all of us are natural communicators, right? So we need to develop a plan that's good for communication. We have to communicate it. And we also have to train our managers and our leaders on how to talk about this plan to the population in our

[00:11:53] organization. So I think that's something that organizations are still figuring out and how that relates to the annual comp planning cycle. I have an interesting question to ask the group, how many of you communicate to managers about

[00:12:08] how to use the ranges and how do you use what we're communicating publicly? Okay, great. That's quarter of the room. The rest of you, there are consultants here to help you amongst the room as well as on the panel just to let you know.

[00:12:24] So Sean, I'll throw it over to you. What are the top three things that you had as surprises for 2023? I'll probably go with two because see, I'm not that bright, but I'll spend time on there. Two, one, it's okay. We got plenty.

[00:12:35] One, so the first one actually we're 15 minutes in and I'm going to talk about AI, which is a really long time. Wow, anybody have AI on your finger card within 15 minutes? Yeah, no. You had to have the under. But actually the reason I like to talk about AI

[00:12:50] is everyone has an AI strategy and they've started there, but very few companies have a data strategy. So the under arching data that sits underneath it, the most remedial example I would

[00:13:00] give you is if you're using AI on your current data, what's one plus one? Come on, help our brother out. It depends. There's probably a good answer. Are there any salespeople in here? Thanks, Dan.

[00:13:13] So one plus one is two. If you use AI over a bunch of sales decks, what do salespeople say all the time? One and one is three because that's just the way they roll, right?

[00:13:22] So actually if you run it a large language model over that, the answer is two points, something, something, something, right? And so having a data structure becomes really, really important. So I know David talked about pay for performance. It's a great example, right?

[00:13:34] So if you look at comp planning, bringing it all back, everyone wants to create a great merit matrix. You spend oodles of time figuring out how to create a merit matrix where how we're

[00:13:42] going to pay zeros, how we're going to communicate to a zero, how much a five is going to get, all that. And then the pay for performance comes in and everyone has a five because there's no data rigor or are you saying people use peanut butter?

[00:13:56] Well, they almost always get there by default, right? So we can talk to that by default, right? And how much manager discretion you get and are you going back and figuring out how much manager discretion you're giving and how they're using it. All that's part of the data

[00:14:09] strategy along with the ancillary data around survey data, etc. But all the new cool tools that everyone's talking about in the space, that is all not relevant, albeit super cool as a nerd, the stuff that it can do without a really good data structure. And actually,

[00:14:23] the second piece just real quick is the pay transparency piece. I kind of felt at least it slowed a little bit last year as a whole. Well, from a legislative perspective. From a legislative and then of course without the legislation, legislative news,

[00:14:37] I guess, it slowed a little bit. But then Colorado wanting it to speed up again, then put career frameworks in as a requirement. Everybody know that, right? So if you have Colorado employees, now you need to provide them with a career framework.

[00:14:51] Your frameworks are awesome for employees. They've been screaming for their entire lives, tell me where I could go, tell me what I have to do to be successful here. It's not a bad thing. It's just when it's required, it kind of sucks because you have to

[00:15:03] do it now. Well, so a little bit of my surprise for 2023 was that there weren't more states than enacted pay transparency legislation. In fact, my Massachusetts, well, my adopted Massachusetts, I'm still in New Yorker, but Massachusetts has had their house had passed

[00:15:19] the bill a while ago and it's still sitting in the Senate for ratification. And obviously, people think Massachusetts will sure they have pay transparent. No, we don't. But we have the rule that says you can't ask for pay history, which is at least to set

[00:15:34] forward. And we've had that for many years. They were one of the first yes that actually said you can't ask for pay history, which is wonderful. But it's still there's still managers and hiring managers and crews get around that by saying what's your pay expectation?

[00:15:49] Without pay transparency, that's still a crap question to ask somebody who only knows context of their pay from their past unless they go on the web and look do a Google search or actually

[00:16:00] ask chat GPT and it gives them something from salary.com, which believe me, it's not coming from our really good paid sources. But the thing that also surprised me about it is there wasn't

[00:16:11] the pushback that we thought we might get from managers on pay transparency or employees. We heard a little bit from some circles that met that employees were quitting because they weren't paid what was in the ads, but this is a compression issue that's been happening

[00:16:26] anyways for many years. And so it's something that we have to get around. It's something we have to develop policies for. And frankly, it's probably well worth time to actually look at

[00:16:36] those groups and see if there are any other issues going on, especially with regards to pay equity. And so when it comes to the pay transparency, it may have forced us to do things like a pay

[00:16:47] equity audit or at least in audit of what pay is in those groups to try and alleviate the compression. None of those things are bad things, right? And even if you lost one or two employees from pay transparency perspective, you're going to have structural loss anyway. So,

[00:17:03] okay, what else? And by the way, if you ever look at your termination reasons table, there's nothing in there that says left for pay transparency. They may have had resignation or something like that. So you can't do any reporting on it.

[00:17:30] So the next question is, what are we anticipating when it comes to issues regarding managers making pay decisions in 2024? Yeah. So thinking ahead. So I agree with you, David. It is surprising when

[00:17:44] you look at the map of where pay transparency is. You don't see Massachusetts. You don't see New Jersey. But that being said, I do think it's only a matter of time for those states. They just

[00:17:53] need to get past those hurdles. And I think what we're seeing some employers do is they don't want to have to manage a hodgepodge of policies in each state, right? If that could get

[00:18:03] really complex, you might have the haves in New York State that have nots in Massachusetts. And how are you going to manage that as an HR team, as a compensation team and what's actually fair? So I think regardless of what happens nationally or on a state-by-state basis,

[00:18:18] I think some employers are moving towards a national moving or laying the road map to take a more national approach on pay transparency. And I think in order to do that, you'll have to

[00:18:30] be looking at your pay gaps. You'll have to be looking at your pay equity analyses. And I think having the results of those types of analyses to help feed into your annual comp cycles will

[00:18:41] only help employers close any gaps and help make it part of your annual processes going forward. What's fascinating is they're also going to need to renew a lot of their grade structures or geographic differentials around the US as well. Right. So I think some companies are sort of

[00:18:58] taking a look at their geographic differentials and thinking about what makes sense given this pay transparency. Do we want to be more granular nationally? And depending on your footprint, do you want 10 sets of geographic ranges or do you want to have three sets of geographic ranges

[00:19:12] and what makes sense financially? What makes sense from a communications perspective and what's easier to manage for you going forward? I think at the forefront it's going to be manager experience. So that's the soapbox I've been getting on. They do it once a year, right? So it's annual,

[00:19:28] maybe twice a year. And generally, the managers aren't hired for that. I don't know. I've never been interviewed and asked how do you handle the compensation management process as part of my job as a developer. And I think that's coming around because I think things have shifted

[00:19:43] from the standpoint of where tech used to be the limiting factor around what you could show an employee, what you could show a manager, what data you could bring in, how you could aggregate that.

[00:19:53] And now I think it's going to, like I said before, it's going to be sucked to be a compensation professional. You're going to have to come up with what's the strategy? What's all the data?

[00:20:01] How am I going to show that? And how am I going to make that make sense to somebody that once a year looks at this? I usually ask people, does anyone know what IRS Tax Form 6571

[00:20:12] is? I think the collective is no. Yeah, the collective is no. You do your taxes once a year. Well, do you do your taxes once a year? Again, most of us pay someone to do that. I did a poll

[00:20:24] beforehand. I'm sorry. I did a poll. Okay. So you do it once a year, but you don't know everything about it. And the expectation has always been that a manager pops into this process

[00:20:33] and works through it. And if you think about it, most comp professionals that I know, usually at the end of the compensation planning process, they're like, thank god that was over. That was awful. So if you can imagine the manager themselves getting that and then have to

[00:20:47] communicate that. And then the last thing on my soapbox usually on this is we come up with these really cool merit matrices. We push them down, and then they're literally as a human who has to

[00:20:56] sit across from another human that they work with and explain to them either you were kind of marginally getting $0 or you're getting barely enough to pay for your Netflix account, you know, how much that went up. Or you're getting less because you're already higher in the range of

[00:21:11] something again, they don't completely understand that. And that conversation is really, really hard. And so I know we were talking about the communication piece and that piece. Technology isn't the problem anymore. And as a nerd for years, we fought that we were always asked to do

[00:21:24] things we just couldn't make magically happen. Now we're kind of to the point where you give us stuff, we'll make it happen. But actually the human piece of human resources is now I think the overly complex piece. And I think that manager experience this next year,

[00:21:37] year and a half, albeit the forefront because in pay transparency, they can't hide behind. It's none of your business anymore. It's a thing. Yeah. But let me push back on that a little bit though, because managers have now been in a situation over the last decade where they've

[00:21:50] been allocating 3%. And 3%, everybody loves allocating a 3% merit budget, right? They say, oh yeah, I'm going to give my outstanding performers 5%. And I'm going to give my average performers are going to get 2%. And a lot of people are going to get zeros in that case.

[00:22:09] And they've had to develop that muscle, right? So yes, it's a once year thing. But I think that managers, managers who have been managers have had to do that in the past.

[00:22:20] But I think two things. One over a third of managers are doing it their first or second time. So yeah, you have to throw out a pile of them. They have no idea what the hell they're doing

[00:22:30] and their younger and inexperienced. The rest of them too, how much latitude were they given, right? And that's that piece where you go back and look at the data. So you send the merit matrix down and it says high gets 8, 0 and 2, whatever you want to do.

[00:22:46] And then you let them squeeze it all back to the middle. And so we philosophically push down a merit matrix that says, oh, it's great pay for performance disarrangeation. When you look at the numbers and they come back, it's just a matter of whether it's smooth

[00:22:58] peanut butter or creamy peanut butter. And I'm going through a bonus cycle right now as CHRO. I've literally had senior executives say to me, I'm just going to give everybody the same because I don't have low performance on my team. I mean, that question of discretion is

[00:23:12] something that I find a lot of folks are talking about. So to your point, Sean, it's I think in the past, we had an assumption of we set the thing up and it's beautiful and

[00:23:25] perfect. And now go forth and do. And it should work out just fine. And we know it has not. And now it's all out in the open. So oh, God, now everybody sees that things aren't working

[00:23:37] the way they should. So what are the things I'm hearing about? And I'd be curious from the panel how much of this you've heard. I've heard a lot of professionals are questioning the level

[00:23:47] of discretion, how much discretion and whether it's and they're slicing it up in different ways. So it might be at certain levels, we're not going to allow a certain level of discretion, we're going to make it more formulaic or it might be maybe certain pay elements

[00:24:04] are going to be less discretionary like they saw than, you know, than others. But I mean, I'd be curious to hear what folks are saying. I've even heard people sort of break it apart where

[00:24:15] I will give you the discretion to do the rating. But then I the comp professional will determine what that rating equates to. I'm not going to forget the merit matrix. We don't need it.

[00:24:27] We're going to do it based like we'll do the rest of the calculating. But you manager, you definitely are the authority when it comes to performance. So that I will allow you.

[00:24:36] I mean, I'd just be curious what folks are. But I think Nancy, when I see that like, I don't want to say wrong way, but I think sometimes HR assumes they don't they don't understand what's going on. They work the system really fast.

[00:24:48] So if you don't force rank, right? And so if you're a believer in force ranking system, you know, not everybody loves the force ranking system. So how do you move that through the system? Right. And if you can't force rank them, then you can't create a merit

[00:25:01] matrix where they can't move money around. Like it gets highly complex. How much does 10 year play a role when you do promotion raises, do you move them up a certain percentage or do you move them

[00:25:10] to a place in the range? Like all that stuff gets put in there and it's really complicated. And again, then you have to somehow communicate that back to a human on the other end who's

[00:25:20] like, I really don't care other than I just got, you know, my Netflix paid for like that was cool, but that's not what I was hoping for. And at the end of the day, it's a zero sum game.

[00:25:30] Correct. So if someone gets more, someone has to get less. And these are these managers are adults and they signed up to be a leader and a leader who has to have discretion and then has to

[00:25:42] translate that back to employee pay and then has to translate that back into employee communications. So listen, we're talking about this in 2024. Somebody would have figured out the magic formula between when pay started and now it doesn't. But now we have regulations and other

[00:26:00] things and data and the internet that people are using as backdrop. So yeah, we have three questions. Yeah, I just wanted to raise something else is we're talking about about comp, we're talking about pay, but what about the trends on total rewards and

[00:26:22] other benefits that are to some people more important than pay or just as important like flexibility and all those things. And I don't know how I guess data analytics can capture some of that. Listen, compensation pay, that's foundational. Like if you're doing the

[00:26:41] work and you're not getting paid for that work, chances are you're leaving unless you have a good manager, you have a purposeful job, you have something that is above all be all. And that's not something that you can just input from a benefits program. I can't

[00:27:00] just reach over from the zero or another vendor and say, Hey, I want to buy this. You know, I was just talking to a friend in the crowd and she works for a nonprofit

[00:27:10] and her husband pushes her, Hey, you can do the same job, get X amount more money in a different place. But she loves her manager, she loves her purpose. And you know, comp can

[00:27:20] take a little bit of a backseat and that's admirable. But again, you can't buy that. To your question, Nancy, I thought foundationally, there are places where you want to differentiate more than others. And I'll give an example we use, we have a pretty big sales force.

[00:27:40] And I want zero differentiation in their fixed pay. I want all the differentiation in the variable pay, fixed pay. Here's your dollar an hour. I don't care if you've been here three, four years.

[00:27:53] Because if you've been here three, four years, and you haven't moved to something else, well, guess what? You're getting paid the same amount of the new hire for this role, unless you have additional credentials that move you to the next step. But base, same variable,

[00:28:08] kick some butt on what you can control or don't kick some butt and ask for help. Then you go up to the top tier, and I think dynamic differentiation is needed. Right? So

[00:28:20] you know, what's called the VPs of the world. If you're a VP not picking up the slack, and you got spread peanut butter, all other VPs are going to see that person still getting their promotion or treated well. And that's going to culture diminish

[00:28:35] everything. I just had one comment on the discretionary issue was working with the client engineering services, and they wanted to give their managers some discretion. The reviews came back 3.9256, four decimal places. So the caution is if you're going to give some discretion,

[00:28:53] you need to have some tighter guidelines to make sure. And the CHRO just said a 3.9526 is a 3. You can write whatever numbers you want after the three, but until it has a four point

[00:29:05] something that it becomes a four. So he let the engineers do their thing. And the only other thing a comment I want to make is something you said about managers. We have a lot of professional managers, but a lot of managers are knighted. They're not created and developed.

[00:29:19] So I think that's the other challenge too, where a lot of people are going on. My manager used to do like this, and he or she was average. And now I'm a manager,

[00:29:26] and I'm going to do it like this, and now I'm going to be average. So I think that's just a cultural challenge for a business to work on their employee development and create leaders and

[00:29:35] managers and not just knight them. So yeah, one of the things that was to me kind of an unexpected challenge when communicating to managers is the difference between price inflation, something like CPI versus wage inflation, which a lot of the survey providers collect from their clients.

[00:29:53] And up until COVID, it wasn't an issue because the Fed sets a target at 2% for price inflation. We have that 3% for wage inflation. So people always felt like they were coming out on top.

[00:30:05] And our managers, and this is true actually for a lot of clients that I spoke to as well, always communicated the year on year increase as a inflationary increase. And so these past couple of years when people weren't getting inflation, especially in other

[00:30:19] markets where inflation was just absolutely through the roof, and I think about like the UK for instance, they were pissed off because they were told that their entire career, that you're getting this increase because of inflation. And we as the comp professionals

[00:30:32] had to go in and say, well actually it's not price inflation we're talking about. We're talking about wage inflation and the inputs for those two numbers are quite different. They generally track in the same direction, but not always, especially now.

[00:30:46] I do want to come back to something Dan said about are we seeing the total comp package around benefits be more important to comp or come into play. And this is not based on data,

[00:30:59] it's anecdotal, but I think about one of the fallouts from COVID and that experience, we talked a lot during that time about what's important for us? What do we want in our lives? Like what does work-life balance personal professional and what I'm seeing I coach

[00:31:14] a lot of former employees, people in my network. I'm seeing multiple people in my network take lower paying jobs that offer more flexibility, that offer better benefits that don't want that stress right in their life. They want to be successful, but they need to take care of

[00:31:30] themselves mentally, physically, emotionally. So I do think it's important for us to acknowledge that. I don't know if you're, I see head shaking and I don't know if you're having those conversations in your own personal circles, but I do think it really is part of

[00:31:45] the decision-making process and especially finding a job is hard right now for people that are looking. So comp can't be the only thing driving the decision. One of the things to mention on that is a lot of nurses left nursing,

[00:31:59] a skilled role where they got credentialed. They spent a lot of time getting educated and keeping their education and their credentials. And they actually got totally burnt out during COVID and said, I'm going to a lesser paying job so that I don't have to

[00:32:13] watch people die. I don't have to be totally stressed out and on call all the time. And I'm going to live a better life. And so a lot of times we use that work-life balance. Why?

[00:32:23] Why isn't it life work balance? I know it sounds weird to say, but when I'm doing a lot of leadership lately, I've been trying to change the narrative the other way. So people think

[00:32:34] about the fact that I want to live first. Forget work. I can lose my job and still live. So no criticism of you. We do it all the time, but it's an excellent point. Thank you.

[00:32:44] To piggyback on just what this lady said that I think one of the challenges to the companies have because of that is RTO return to office where regardless of what they say like,

[00:32:54] hey, three days a week or two days a week or four days a week, people just not complying. In my company, everybody comes in on Wednesday, 40% coming on Thursday, 60% on Tuesday, and you're lucky to see one or two people on Monday or Friday.

[00:33:09] I lived in the world at Morgan Stanley in 1992 where not only did I have to be at my desk a certain time at where I tie, and you had to greet people in a certain way, you had to act a

[00:33:20] certain way. We had those really secure Manila envelopes that we used to send into office with compensation information. Remember the red tie that we used to put on? God forbid it wasn't secure. Absolutely. Mailroom was wonderful with that, and God forbid when they

[00:33:38] received it and they go, hey, did you tie it in a knot? No, I never do that. Oh, we have a problem then. So we live in a different world now. In that, I actually use this a lot,

[00:33:51] in that world I used to sit down with people and say, if you talk about pay, you're fired. Obviously we can't do that anymore. But it's a totally different world, and that was only 20-something years ago. Yeah, okay, follow me there. It was only 20-something

[00:34:05] years ago. But that's really critical is we've gone through a lot of change and trying to take into consideration things like we just went through a global pandemic and people want to work differently. They want to live. They actually want some more days off.

[00:34:22] And in lieu of actually taking a pay increase, some people are asking or other things. I literally got a bonus one time and it was like a couple dollars because the way the calculation worked out from a parations perspective, I was like,

[00:34:34] can you save that? Can I actually have that in the form of an hour off? Like yeah, it's not an hour, bud. Sorry. But anyways, people are asking for that. They're

[00:34:42] asking for things in lieu of to actually live a little bit more. So it's a great point. Thank you, Carol. Yeah, just one comment on people are asking for other things. I think the thing

[00:34:53] we're seeing besides a reasonably competitive wage, a huge amount of interest in career paths. And so if you can't pay me a competitive wage, I understand if the budget's only 3 or 4%,

[00:35:07] but can you tell me where I can go in the future in this organization or what skills I need to get so that I can continue progressing? And I love the fact that Colorado put that in. Of course,

[00:35:20] people in Colorado hate it, but career frameworks are very expensive to implement, but they're phenomenal and people are loving it and they're dying for it. And you were talking about the lowest common denominator before. Jackie said, you said people are doing one thing

[00:35:33] across the US, build a career framework. Hey, are you listening to this and thinking to yourself, man, I wish I could talk to David about this? Well, you're in luck. We have a special offer

[00:35:44] for listeners of the HR Data Labs podcast, a free half hour call with me about any of the topics we cover on the podcast or whatever is on your mind. Go to salary.com forward slash HRDL consulting to schedule your free 30 minute call today.

[00:36:02] So let's talk about the third question, which is putting on your hat. Do anybody remember Karnak from the Carson to the Tonight Show? For those of you who don't, there was this old show

[00:36:13] before Jimmy Kimmel called the Carson show or the Tonight Show and he used to look into the future in a hermetically sealed envelope. Basically nothing more than just an envelope that someone spit on. But it would have really fun things about what's happening in the future.

[00:36:30] So now I'm going to ask you and Sean, I'm going to start with you this time to shake things up. What do you see happening in 2025 around competition planning? I think it's going to become a little more cyclical. You and I have talked about this.

[00:36:43] If you think about it, comp planning is typically once a year, maybe twice a year. I know we've talked about how hard it is. I think it's going to become more cyclical three,

[00:36:50] four times a year. You mentioned the interoffice mail. I've used the example back when comp planning was first starting, you had to gather all your data, you had to fax anyone remember the fax machine?

[00:37:00] You had to fax over to payroll company, the information to get it back. And so it was ridiculously hard. So we did it once a year. I think with everything changing, new hires, legislation, etc, comp planning is going to become more of all through the year piece.

[00:37:14] I think that will help actually with the employee manager, the employee experience and the manager experience because it's going to be something that's there all the time. Now when you do comp planning, you do it for a year. You hope that the manager said it right.

[00:37:25] You don't know because the employee just stues for a year or leaves. That's how you know. If we can do it on a faster basis, more cyclical pulling data who left? If we're over whatever percentage they don't leave, if they're under, all that stuff,

[00:37:40] I think is this technology can keep up now, which means we can deal with things on the fly. Because right now, you go through comp planning, you get everyone squared away, and then you hire five people. And your pay equity is just screwed because somebody didn't do something

[00:37:53] somewhere. And now you have to wait 11 months. And so I think that's going to be, to me, the biggest change because the tech is there. But all the policies and all the communication,

[00:38:01] again, not to make you guys do all the work, but basically that stuff has to get taken care of so that you can do it more frequently. But pay isn't just a once-year thing.

[00:38:10] Base pay changes might be. But there may also be, well, I mean, except for promotions and other changes that happen like market adjustments. But then there's commissions that get paid every month or

[00:38:20] on a more regular basis. Why can't we change base pays? You go through the year. So if you're getting make the math easy for me here, let's assume I did an okay job, which is a big assumption,

[00:38:29] that I'm getting 4%. Why don't you target me to do 1% a year and take advantage of my performance through the year? If I did a poor job, if the business changes, that change now can

[00:38:41] happen. And I think, and you're letting me get a year and a half out. So the care at now is 12 months away. So you give me 2% and say, if you do a really good job for the next 12 months,

[00:38:55] you can do it. Like how long does it take me to find a new job when I'm like, what's your point if you're a marginal manager? But if you're leaving because of a 2% or 1%

[00:39:04] differential, then we have to have a conversation. Like as Kara said, this is a total compensation. And a few of you mentioned this is a total compensation play. And so while I don't disagree that having compensation conversations more often is good, having spread 1%

[00:39:23] into four quarters or sorry, 1% per quarter is not going to change someone's perspective on their performance. No, but the care it moves all the time. So I mean, this is a fundamental

[00:39:36] for me. I think the opportunity to have it there and people change, do pay equity changes. If I do an increase, I mean, what's in everyone's 4%? I mean, that's always the interesting number two.

[00:39:46] What's in your 4% annual increase? Is it pay equity catch up? Is it promotion catch up? What's in it? And if I ask in here, there's probably going to be three big buckets of what's in that 4%. And so it's not even 4%. Which is another reason why I would say

[00:40:02] why would we spread 1% per quarter? So I don't disagree with you. All I'm saying is there are other levers like quarterly bonuses or quarterly commission or monthly commission, there are other things that are better leveraged for moving performance than a base company.

[00:40:19] Yeah. And I guess I would just leave those don't necessarily leave per se. Hi, I'm Francesca with Ford Foundation. I'll come a little bit to your defense on this, not all the way there. I think that if you have a solid comp philosophy and you have a structure,

[00:40:37] then what really should be changing is if you see the market changing and you're hiring people at a higher rate, you have to go back and do market adjustments to the people who are

[00:40:49] in that similar position or have the similar competencies. So that's where I see people who have not done that more than once a year have to get on board with how do we do that more frequently?

[00:41:03] And so maybe pay transparency is helping us all to do it more frequently. But I think that that's the way that we should look at it more than are you rewarding people because you do

[00:41:17] have a budget, you have other things that go into that. But if you're doing that, then you know that you're keeping people equitable and you can have defensible conversations with your staff and you can help the managers know how to talk better.

[00:41:34] I agree. I think what I'm saying is that the ability to make changes more than once a year because when you're reticent to do that now. Yeah, I thought you were talking about the

[00:41:44] merit process. It can be merit. To me, it's all an option to have it in there and do it however you want. Basically, you can do it any way you want to do it now but that's a really good example.

[00:41:54] Coal changes, inflation changes right now, that's a once a year. You'll have to wait till the process happens thing and then comp gets stuck in the middle having to do that or run

[00:42:04] up the flagpole and say, it's a fire drill, we have a pay equity problem, go give me money. And they're always every time they go to the CFO, it's urgent as opposed to proactive and strategic. Would you say that the finance organization would be more apt to

[00:42:18] give more money to HR and compensation to do those things on a more regular basis or do you think they'd like to hold the cash flow to be more routine? But I think things fundamentally have to change because we know Gartner,

[00:42:32] I think has a statistic out where 45% of employees are referencing third party sources for their data. So employees are comp analysts now, we need to I think lead into that. I don't think it's just about managers, I think it's about everybody and I think having ongoing conversations

[00:42:52] around pay and rewards and career is the answer. I think it's being crisp about what each pay element means for your organization so to your point like how do we define base? When do we

[00:43:05] make changes to base? Should we even be rewarding performance in base? No. But I mean, you know, so those are the types of things but I do think too it's having the conversation partnering with finance to say rather than bring surprises to you because finance does not like

[00:43:22] surprises, right? Nobody, no. So rather than bring a surprise what we're going to do is we're going to have a partnership. We're going to continue to monitor the market, we're going to see what's going on every quarter, we're going to get together,

[00:43:32] we'll have a budget and we'll have a more dynamic budget maybe around that management and be proactive. Yeah, I think at the end of the day, like the tech can do any of that stuff

[00:43:46] and so what it's now saying is all of these things are on the table for companies to deal with but you have to answer the questions. I think it was interesting you said you can no longer say

[00:43:55] I'm going to give you this much money, that's what HR is doing and you can't talk about it to anybody else. You fundamentally have to have a plan for where you're going and that plan can

[00:44:04] be delivered on now with tech but you have to have all those answers figured out what you're going to do now and you use them not have to have them all missed. But we also need to arm managers

[00:44:12] with the answer. Managers can't say no and they can't say everything or they can't blame HR like no, no, I'm sorry, that's never happened, right? Well, that's still a solid answer if they can't move performance matrix. That's still a good answer. But pay transparency is now

[00:44:29] forcing managers to learn more and this becomes or makes it a really important thing. If an employee comes to you, it's like when your kid says, dad, I don't really want to go to school today,

[00:44:38] I don't feel well. You don't go okay, you're going to school anyways, you then investigate and you start looking into it. So if an employee goes, I don't know about my performance here, I don't know where my career is going, you don't just leave it at back,

[00:44:50] especially if they're a great performer, you diagnose, you look at what their pay is, you look at the market. So we have to arm them with the information necessary and the guidance.

[00:45:00] So I agree with you, I think it's something that we need to keep open. Okay, now I'm going to ask Jackie to look into your glass, your glass thing, you're seeing whatever it's called and look

[00:45:09] at 2025. Yeah, I like this discussion. I think it's about building shared ownership of compensation and pay equity. So it's not just on the manager, it's not just on comp, it's company-wide, it's society, it's like the right thing to do. So I think us as comp professionals, we've just

[00:45:27] started getting those messages out to our senior leadership, even the CEO, maybe there's a statement or eventually a statement that the company could put out on pay equity. So everyone knows that this

[00:45:37] is important to our company, this is who we are. So when the employee is potentially hearing a tough message, maybe they're not getting a large pay increase, but it's because others

[00:45:49] in their same role are paid less than them. I mean, what are they really going to say to that? If the importance of pay equity is really all over the company and all over our whole culture,

[00:46:01] it's part of our culture, etc., and things like that. So I think just getting shared ownership, getting leadership on board so there are no surprises for these types of conversations, I think that will be something that some companies or maybe the leading companies

[00:46:16] are able to get there in 2025. That's brilliant. It's definitely not going to happen overnight. There's a roadmap of plan, the whole thing. That's great. That's awesome. KC, what's in your crystal ball? I mean, I love the shared ownership. I was going to more of the

[00:46:30] like storytelling side of pay, but I come from a story, no Ralph Lauren on that. But I come from a storytelling company and there's power in the wide. There's power in the company's performance is X and telling that story year in, year out, quarter in,

[00:46:51] quarter out, month in, month out, and then aligning your pay decisions or your benefit decisions or just any practical decisions with the state of the company, the culture of the company. And that's probably where transparency starts, but could start in legislation where

[00:47:07] we're told to put a number on a piece of paper or it could start with the CEO and his leadership team and partnership with HR and partnership with employee communications and educating the managers to tell a compelling story of why we are paying, why we are spreading

[00:47:24] peanut butter or why we're differentiating, whether it's the right move or not. I love that. And what I'd like to say to that is that where I'd like to actually ask the crowd, compensation philosophy, do your employees understand your compensation philosophy?

[00:47:41] I didn't get one hand up. Oh my God. I didn't even get, I got one mess on mess. And that's important, Casey, because when they don't understand your comp philosophy, then they kind of don't understand the basis for the decisions. Yeah. Well, actually having no

[00:47:58] comp philosophy means you do have a comp philosophy and you know what it is? Nothing. It's the Wild West. Anything goes. And so that's what managers are going to use is their North

[00:48:09] star, right? Well, if you're not telling me how to pay, I'm going to do it myself. And so while I'm not saying it's a good thing, you're right. A lot of companies don't have one or especially don't have one stated. Some companies actually put their comp philosophy

[00:48:22] in their SEC required proxy statements and other things. Some actually put it on your website so that when someone's going and looking at your career's page, they go, oh well, their comp philosophy is they pay low for base salary between the 25th and

[00:48:36] the medium, but they pay for results. And so they're at the 74% pile for total cash comp. That's awesome. And they have an ownership mentality, which means they may give us some kind of buy-in to stock or some kind of stock equivalency. So those kinds of things are

[00:48:51] really important because they actually drive not only the conversations that you're having from a patron's currency perspective, but also from the manager perspective when they're talking to their people about the decisions that have been made.

[00:49:04] Because by the way, if they don't have a philosophy and decisions are being made, you can bet your bottom dollar that definitely not going to be pay equity. There's not going to be pay equity taken into consideration. And so that's not a great thing.

[00:49:17] And there's two pay philosophies. There's the one that you're willing to share externally or internally on a pretty piece of paper. And there is still the one behind the scenes where there are mechanics that should remain okay.

[00:49:31] Okay. So we have a bonus question. If we didn't discuss it enough, what's the one thing that scares the crap out of you or the world of pay? I didn't take the word crap out of this.

[00:49:52] Yeah. A lot of organizations, even when I was in the consulting world, I saw this as well, are dropping what I always found to be like kind of arcane degree requirements for certain roles like having a four-year degree for an administrative role or something requiring,

[00:50:12] we prefer a candidate with a master's or something. And it was always so limiting. So I think beyond just DEI, beyond just protected classes, I think we'll see a greater diversity in profiles in terms of people's education. I do still think

[00:50:31] we'll probably have an over-representation of the top business schools and things like that and the Ivy League. But I think now the gap between the educational institutions has really closed. I think maybe people aren't aware of that if you've been in the workforce for a long time

[00:50:47] where a lot of the profiles that we see, they don't have the fancy credentials, but they're hungry and they want to come in and make a difference. And the vast majority, let's be real, like 85% unless you're in some kind of technical role, 80 to 90% of your role,

[00:51:02] you're going to learn on the job anyway. And what you learn in business school is going to be sort of on the periphery. So I think that is exciting, but it's also a little bit scary,

[00:51:12] I think, for HR professionals because you're used to putting people into these boxes. And if someone doesn't fit in a box, it's hard to decide where do we put them in the range? How do we compare them to their peers when this person has a lot more tenure,

[00:51:25] but it's clear that this lower-tenured person really is knocking it out of the park. And so I think maybe a more differentiated approach to pay is in the future, a more personalized approach.

[00:51:39] So I'm going to throw this to Sean first because I didn't, I'm sorry, I'll get to you a promise. I'm going to throw it to our panelists first, which scares the crap out of you that we haven't talked about yet. I still think it's the communication.

[00:51:49] I've never felt more excited to not be a comp precisioner. Over then over the next couple of years, the tech is there, but this whole having to build out a policy and then have these communication that's out there and it's out. You can't hide behind

[00:52:03] the it's none of your business thing. There are strategic decisions around pay transparency. I saw Airbnb posted all of their entire package out. So do you want to be defensive on it? Do you want to take the offensive with your

[00:52:16] pay transparency? How do you actually handle equity? How do you fund that? Because I haven't heard anybody tackle pay equity by reducing anyone's pay. It's only by increasing someone's pay. So I think the whole transparency equity thing is what scares me. The tech side, just because

[00:52:33] I'm a nerd data is portable. We can sling code really fast now we can build really cool stuff. What scares me is we can build anything you want and is that the right thing so that you

[00:52:44] can deliver it and how do you communicate it? The last thing is just the sheer volume of data. We can slurp in so much data now, billions of rows and serve it back up in less than a second.

[00:52:55] How cool is that? If you're a manager and you see billions of rows of data to try to fill out a performance matrix or figure something out of the comp planning process, that's that's scary. And so how do you guys really figure that out? And that's probably

[00:53:08] more of a challenge to you all to figure it out from the strategic and methodological and philosophical side, your paid strategy. Because the implementation piece now is not the hard part anymore. It's the what do I want to do and where do I want to position myself?

[00:53:24] Which is why you need to talk to the consultant. Zach, how about you? Yeah, I think some of the EU directive stuff. I know it's the EU and we're in the US here but some of us have global workforces we're dealing with and also some

[00:53:37] of the regulations that have been in the EU are like regulators on both sides of the pond are looking at what we're doing. So I wouldn't be surprised if something like that came here one

[00:53:46] day. I don't know when but just the EU directive is huge. It's a game changer and pay transparency. I think it's a good thing for pay equity, but it's also a little scary as a comp person.

[00:53:58] So one thing in that directive is that employees will be able to ask what is the average pay for men versus women in this job? Wow. So just think about that. That is huge.

[00:54:09] You have to have these job frameworks in place to be able to define jobs and also there's probably a gap in a lot of your jobs. So it's scary and how are we going to think about

[00:54:19] how are we going to correct that if there is a gap and how do we even explain that and communicate that either in the EU in a few years or if that ever comes here too?

[00:54:29] For me, I think the biggest issue is we have great data. We have a lot of regulations. We have other issues. It's going to be in a country where it needs massive tort reform

[00:54:39] is how many lawsuits are coming our way around pay transparency, pay equity, etc. It's only a matter of time before our corporations are going to be paying out massive settlements around this.

[00:54:50] So I think that's a giant fear factor that's real. So that's when I keep looking at this, I think of we have the data so you can't say we don't have the data and now it's

[00:55:01] becoming it's because our people are not doing their job correctly and how do we balance that? How many people know about the potential raise in exemption salary from 35,000 to about 60 something thousand 68,000? Anybody worried about it? I saw some hands. Anybody worried?

[00:55:20] Well, if you're not worried, I promise you should be crapping your pants right now because what this will do is it will say for most of those people who were exempt, they're going to be non-exempt potentially collecting overtime. My advice, make your

[00:55:36] entire exempt staff not exempt and collect our hours and then have managers actually force a 40 hour work week. I know that's not going to happen, but that's the law. That is the law. You will

[00:55:49] never get a DOL action if you make your employees not exempt. But that thing where you're talking to people off hours and you're forcing them to do things, that can't happen anymore or you pay them,

[00:56:02] but that's not going to happen because remember we were talking about with finance before? That's going to change our economics so much that we will not be able to afford a lot more people. But this is happening and there are some municipalities, states that actually already have

[00:56:19] this kind of level, but it's going to happen federally. We were talking about lowest common denominator before. You may have to change your entire non-exempt strategy and that is not a small feat. But David, just I know why you're handing that over. I think the legislative

[00:56:36] precedence that comes out in the first year or two, I think that's going to be the scary year or two because then I think it'll be easier to go to the CFO, whomever and say,

[00:56:45] here's what we have to do to be paid equitably or else. The or else is big enough to be scary or it's or else to be like, I'm not going to worry about it. David, you took a little bit away

[00:56:57] of what I was going to say in response to what Matt, but that's okay. I have anecdotal, not necessarily database evidence. I think more of the recent college graduates are going to come into non-exempt roles and for two reasons. First of all, exactly what you were saying,

[00:57:14] it protects the company, right? But also in my personal experience as a comp practitioner, there are times where we really would not have been able to defend an FLSA audit for somebody coming straight out of college who's being managed very closely, who has policies

[00:57:33] and procedures and why not just hire them as non-exempt? Pay them what you're going to pay them, but hire them as non-exempt and PS, exactly what you said. That over time some of them are going

[00:57:43] to work is going to open to my eyes a lot. What are your suggestions on addressing the whole perception of an employee who is a professional? I've gone to school, I've got my degree, I, this is my first job, but I'm non-exempt. Right.

[00:58:03] So how many of you think the word non-exempt is a bad thing? Why is it a bad thing? Why do we equate non-exempt with being a drag, with being a worker? We're all workers. We all do shit.

[00:58:17] Pardon me, sorry, sorry. But I get really passionate about this because we have put this label on non-exempt work that doesn't exist. Do we think that every non-exempt is a ubiquitous person, that you can just trade one person, one worker for another?

[00:58:33] No, I agree with you. I think the label needs to change. I think we need to stop talking about FLSA as being this really big flag and badge of honor that I'm exempt. So what? Who gives a crap? You're exempt from overtime. I promise you,

[00:58:49] you wish you got paid overtime for the hours you work. How many people wish they got paid for all the hours they freaking work? And I'm not just talking about work work, I'm talking about

[00:58:56] getting that damn call on Friday night or Saturday night and saying, I'm not supposed to be working right now. I'm supposed to be living. We were talking about this before, Kara. I'm supposed

[00:59:05] to be living. Why am I getting a call? Well, we never thought about this before the pandemic. We always did it. We said, yeah, it's going to take me two minutes to do that. Oh, shoot,

[00:59:12] it's not just that email. I have to do another email too. Oh my God, that presentation is due on Monday. I forgot about that. You're going to get paid for that if you're not exempt,

[00:59:20] or you should be paid for that if you're not exempt. But that isn't that... I mean, I think that's department-ish. So I think it can happen. I think go that way because in the

[00:59:29] Dev side, we have a ton of people come in as non-exempt out of school. It doesn't bother them in the least in the Dev world. Now, I don't know other places. And then over time, it's interesting because the discussions get very interesting because they're like,

[00:59:43] do I want to move to exempt in the next role because I want to be a manager? And you can see, they don't want to say it out loud, but you can see the wheels going in the smoke. Like,

[00:59:52] now I got to start doing this stuff. But exempt doesn't mean you're a manager. You could be a professional, an accountant or whatever. No, but I think culturally in the

[01:00:02] Dev world. So I think to your point, I think it can be made that way. I don't think people should be as scared of it if you communicate it and all the pluses and the whys because

[01:00:11] it's been done in segments already. Okay. Has there ever been a consultant here? Raise your hand. How many of you have had to log your hours anyways, even if you're we do this, we have to. And if you're in development, you have to do it for capitalization

[01:00:25] of your costs. Correct. So the fact that you're actually, if it's non-exempt exempt, I'm collecting my hours or not, that's okay. To your point before? The technology is there. Just put in your damn hours. But it's going to require intestinal fortitude of managers to have

[01:00:42] discipline about how many hours a person works. And they'll have to have that thought in the back of their head. If I make that call or if I send that email at five o'clock on a Friday afternoon,

[01:00:54] it's evening, whatever you call it, then you're going to be responsible for more money. Somebody mentioned the return to work. Okay. So when we talk about return to work, we're talking to what? Command and control. We're talking about, I'm going to work 40 hours in the

[01:01:10] office, get your butt in here. We actually had one of the largest, well, what not large anymore, one of the major companies said, the CEO said, get your ass back in the office.

[01:01:21] Literally said that. And of course, some people are like, I don't want to work for you anymore. Go to health. Right. And some said, Oh my God, I have to take a flight and I have to get

[01:01:30] back to work. So you're right. And the answer is, do we live or do we work? Which is it? Do we work to live or live to work? And so I agree with you, Casey. I really wish it was where we could live

[01:01:41] in a world that's flexible. Unfortunately, a lot of the winds of change are going the other way. Yeah. I wanted to add fuel to the fire here. Before we leave, two things that came to mind

[01:01:54] on this fears and things that scare you. Outside the US, if you have contingent workers, they have to be mapped into your job architecture framework. We're working with a large tech company

[01:02:08] that didn't do that and is going to be paying a huge amount of back pay because their jobs weren't mapped in and paid the same as full-time employees, which relates to the other FLSA rule

[01:02:21] which just passed and is already in place now, going back to a long test for the contractor versus employee. Listen, thank you so much. These have been awesome questions that you've given us. You've

[01:02:41] given us some great thoughts too. Thank you for participating. It's so much better when not only does the panel get to speak, but you guys get to as well. It becomes so much more of a conversation. You're awesome. We really appreciate it. We'll be here for a little

[01:02:53] while and I'm going to have my books over there if anybody wants to grab one. Thank you so much. Take care.