EP118 | DEI is Disappearing and Gen Z is Struggling. What Comes Next?

[00:00:15] Hey everybody, it's Tim Sackett. I'm back. Another edition of HR Famous. We're calling it season two. I don't know if it's really season two. It's more of a restart. Anyways, I'm here with, I think, probably my longest friend in terms of like tenure. Professor Marcus Maharg Stewart. That's how much I know you is I know your middle name. And I'm not going to call you Dr. Stewart because I just know you as Marcus, like, you know, the idiot that I went to school with.

[00:00:45] But Marcus is one of my closest friends ever. I always tell people this, like, you might be the smartest person I know, which you always are very humble about. But like the reality is, is you challenged me constantly to think about things differently. So wanted to bring you on. Ironically, since we started playing seventh grade basketball together, you went on to become a professor in the business school at Bentley University in Boston, but also you have like kind of an HR kind of specialty or behavior.

[00:01:12] And then I got into HR because like, that's what dumb guys do. You got it because you were smart. But like, somehow we ended up kind of in a little bit of parallel, like universes, so to speak, in terms of knowledge. Yes. Yours being at the university level, mine being in actually having to hump it out and like, yeah. Yeah. So Marcus, welcome to the pod. Did I miss anything? Like, oh, also, are you like the, you're not the dean, but you're the chair?

[00:01:42] I'm chair of the management department at Bentley University. Yeah. And one other thing I'll mention in terms of our parallel, that when we came out of undergrad, our first jobs were both like front end sales on the phone. Yeah. So you went undergrad, master's at Bentley, PhD from North Carolina. Yes, sir. Chapel Hill. Yeah. Chapel Hill. Impressive.

[00:02:12] Well, privileged. Yes. Yeah. Do we want to, we should probably for the audience grade each other's basketball game in the eighth grade. Oh. Like you, like you give me like what I, I'll start, I'll give yours because it's easier for me to do you because you were a way better player.

[00:02:32] Marcus, basketball player, comp, really good ball handler, really high basketball IQ, thought he could shoot better than he could, could finish in traffic, was in all out effort. You were not the most athletic of the brothers. You have two brothers that were super, you know, well, I mean, Mike was probably more athletic. Matt's just giant. Like, yeah. Anyways. He's a beast. But eighth grade, I hadn't even hit puberty. I was two years away from puberty. Yeah. You were still almost the same height. Exactly.

[00:03:01] And we can't see this on the pod, but you're a foot taller than I am, you know, so it's, but yeah, you, you were a worker. All right. Now I want to hear your, your comp. Not seventh grade, Tim. Eighth grade, Tim Sackett. I would say like a comp for someone of our generation, I would say you were like the, the, the Godwin Heights equivalent, like a Corliss Williamson, Bonzi Wells, played bigger, played bigger than you.

[00:03:32] I actually thought I did play bigger. I always thought like I could like post people up for some reason. No question. You were starting a tiny guard. I just felt comfortable with a ball, my back to you. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Back down. Right. That's what I'm thinking. Corliss right off the bat. Yeah. And undersized too. Yeah. I had one dribble move that I thought it's the only one I ever had was like, I could go, like I would start right handed cross over between my legs to my left.

[00:03:59] But then I immediately had to go up for a shot. So I could get, like I had one step to get around you. And if that didn't work, I had nothing left. That's all I had. I remember you showing off your, your, your, your handles at around half court or something. And my dad saying, don't ever do that again. Like we, like literally we could talk for hours of that because Marcus's dad was our eighth grade coach. We had, is it Mr. Postman? Postman? Postman.

[00:04:25] Was our seventh grade coach, which was like the nicest man in the world. Like he could have been like, you know, running like a daycare center or whatever. Like, I mean, just, but we lost every game. I mean, we got killed every single one. And so your dad was our eighth grade coach and he was not going to allow that to happen. And when we finally won a game in eighth grade, you thought it was the national title.

[00:04:47] I was shaking. I remember just shaking, you know, I also remember in seventh grade, they had no cut policy. It seemed like we had 45 people on the basketball team. Like there was two rows on the bench. Yeah. Some of those kids never saw time, you know? Ah, it's so funny. All right. We're, we'll get, we're going to talk some shop. We're going to start with the federal worker buyout program that Trump administration came out with.

[00:05:13] And so everybody immediately kind of loses their mind because it's like, Hey, one kind of generous, like eight months of pay. It was kind of unclear whether you had to work or you didn't have to work. It was kind of like most of you don't have to work. Some of you might have to work a little, but you could basically get eight months of pay. Don't come into work. Go, go find another job, whatever.

[00:05:36] And then of course it's kind of like temporarily been stopped in the courts because of some union interaction stuff, whatever. Eventually I think it'll all get kind of lifted because there's some precedent of this. In 1993, Bill Clinton's administration with Al Gore also offered a buyout program. The Trump one, again, given context, Clinton's was like just 25 grand. Get the hell out of here.

[00:06:00] In today's dollars, it's about 55 grand. So Trump's is a little more robust in today's dollars. I mean, you know, comparable. I mean, just slightly, but similar. The difference, the big difference being Marcus is that Clinton actually went through Congress to get Congress to kind of, you know, kind of dig into this, talk about it.

[00:06:19] But the whole concept was over a three year period, every agency that had a group of a hundred people had to reduce by 4%. And it was, again, government's getting too big. We need to reduce, blah, blah, blah. And it was, for all intents and purposes is pretty successful. I think it was like 277,000 workers took part in that from that standpoint.

[00:06:40] Want to get your opinion on if we really want to pare down our workforce, whether it's government, private industry, whatever, is this how you would do it? So Tim, and thanks for the background and the perspective from the Clinton episode. So I don't think this is the way you necessarily go about it now, but there are two things. So the question is, what are you trying to achieve? Yeah.

[00:07:08] So for some outcomes, like if your mind's on some things, then yes, that's what you do. Now, if I'm thinking from a corporate, from a Donald Trump deal maker, from an Elon Musk, I'm in charge my way of the highway. Sure. I mean, it's consistent with an approach. And the other thing, Tim, is again, from an executive perspective, often the executives are, as you know, are heavily incentivized by ratios. Yeah, yeah.

[00:07:37] You incentivize by making your numbers quarterly or at the end of the year, or here's the time we're going to check. Yeah. You bring up a good point because big, major enterprise level corporations, like they have to answer to the market, constantly look at headcount. Yeah. And we see this in big enterprises as well, where they go, hey, we're just going to offer a buyout. We see this in the automotive industry. It seems like every six months they're offering a buyout. It's usually targeted, right, to like older workers, whatever. So this is a common kind of place in big organizations.

[00:08:08] So, and Tim, in some ways, you're incentivized to do this by the way things are set up. Generally accepted accounting practices, right? GAP. Yeah, yeah. Has human resources, basically compensation, training expenses, anything associated with people is on the liability, on the expense side of the balance sheet. So I'm an executive and I need to make some decisions to get my ratios in order for my evaluation. Where's the, cut expenses? Yeah. It's the easy thing to cut. Like, there they go, right?

[00:08:36] So tomorrow I can have my numbers in line for this, you know, assessment. So from that perspective, like the Trump, you know, this federal worker layoff, if you're trying to correct about, get your numbers in order, yes. But if it's about efficiency and doing things better, I think it's a losing proposition. That's my thing. Like, if it's one thing, if you said, hey, in this scenario, if you said, hey, we think from the best employee to the worst employee, they're all about the same.

[00:09:06] It doesn't matter. We just need to get rid of 4%, 5%, 10%. It doesn't matter. Like, let's just go out, offer a bow to everybody. It doesn't matter. If you really want better government, you would go through a process to say, who are our best workers? And then regardless of seniority and all this stuff, then how do we do that? Now, again, the problem you have is you have a combination of, I mean, like some unionized workforce, non-unionized workforce, blah, blah, blah.

[00:09:34] And so it's really, really complicated. It's really involved. And I think they just go, look, we got 2 million federal workers. We have to reduce somehow, at least that's a start. But we also, what we see constantly at the corporate side is they offer the buyout. If they don't get the number of the buyout that they want, that's when they just, bam, we already, here's how we're going to cut.

[00:09:59] And it's usually then seniority or certain departments or certain teams or whatever, like, are just gone. And so my question really, or, you know, my thought is, is like, this is probably really the next step. Like, I think they said they got, they're getting like, you know, 40, 60,000 people that have, you know, kind of, you know, said, hey, okay, I'll take it. That's not anywhere close to where I think ultimately they're trying to like pare down to. Yeah, no, it doesn't move the needle. That's nothing. Yeah, it's a start.

[00:10:28] So I think to me, like, one thing that stands out is from exposure I've had to the org change literature over the years is that after major, major layoffs, major reconstructions come to mind. That's not the, that's not the word. Yeah, yeah, reorganization. Right. You're looking at generally a couple year turnaround before you're able to figure it out and gain. So you're trying to be more efficient. This is, it's a long term play.

[00:10:56] And I don't think that's what they have in, you know, that's what necessarily is in mind right now. Tim, that occurred to me too, as you were mentioning, you know, the, the, just laying off in mass. Yeah. Keep your best people. That does presuppose that, you know, who the best people are. And then we know that lots of organizations don't, they don't do a good job measuring performance. So it may not, from that perspective, if, if they've done the analysis and said, we can't tell who's good and who's not. Yeah. Then, Hey, well, you know what? You're trying to break inertia and start fresh.

[00:11:26] Well, maybe, maybe they're right on the mark. Hey, this is William Tinca. Work to find. Hey, listen, I'd like to talk to you a little bit about inside the C-suite, the podcast. It's a look into the journey of how one goes from high school, college, whatever, all the way to the C-suite, all the ups and downs, failures, successes, all that stuff. Give it a listen. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

[00:12:30] Yeah. And if you think, if you dig into obviously federal government, state government, local government, they tend to be really laggard behind in terms of processes, technology, everything else. So we can assume that their performance management practices are, you know, probably not up to par in terms of high performing cultures. Like it just, it is what it is.

[00:12:51] Plus we, you know, the other thing that came, came to me is like, because there's such constraints on compensation and pay versus if you think like if, you know, you're a high level student coming out of computer science or MBA or whatever, like you have private options that are going to pay you more. Probably better retirement, probably better options, probably better everything. So ultimately you're already taking off a huge swath of really talented people that would never go to work for government anyways.

[00:13:18] And so to me, it's just critical that you keep your best people. And this is just, it just screams of, yeah, we don't really care. We're just, we're just going to, we're just going to lop off a segment and then we'll deal with the, with the outflow. And there's maybe there's a little bit of this, um, night to, you know, be naive enough because Musk did this at Twitter when he said, Hey, I'm just going to cut 80%. And we, when we kept Twitter on, we didn't need these. And maybe he thinks the government will work the same way.

[00:13:48] And I'm like, Oh, that's a big like theory, right? That you're going to like, you can't just go and cut and not think something's going to shut down. Well, I think from a leadership perspective, you know, if you have, you know, I wonder, I don't know, you know, first I'm, I'm not anti-Trump. I'm not anti-Musk. Like I'm, what do I know? Yeah. Comes more data and insight and understanding of things that I do, um, information I'll never be. Yeah.

[00:14:14] So, but if you're not, I think you can become isolated or maybe insulated from, from difficulty when you're in a certain station in a certain position. So that even when, when there is fallout and things do get difficult, it doesn't really hit you in any important ways. So, okay, there'll be hard times. There'll be growing pains, but it's not going to be their growing pains for the most part.

[00:14:45] Yeah. So I think that that makes it easier maybe to kind of take that approach. Um, and it's unfortunate because a lot of folks will not, will really are going through, you know, difficult times. But for us as a country, and what does it mean for our country's leadership right now? You know, you don't know where innovation is going to come from. You don't know where a good idea is going to, or what we might be naive and say, man, this, this wasn't. It was a miracle. It totally, 10 years from now, it'll be like, thank goodness. So a great example of that.

[00:15:13] Like I read some stuff where Elon just kind of mentioned like, Hey, maybe we put the federal payments thing on blockchain and people are losing their minds. I'm like, well, wait a minute. If, if I pay my tax dollars in the government, don't I want to know where they actually go? And if it's on the blockchain, I know where every single dollar went through the entire thing. Like no one can go, Oh, Hey, by the way, I don't want to be paid. I just, you know, take me off the blockchain and pay me separately when it's like, no, it can't happen.

[00:15:39] Like, I think there's some of those things that we would look at it now and we kind of are like, well, it's so new and different. I don't know. And maybe 10 years, 20 years from now, we're like, why did we ever not do that? Like that's the dumbest thing ever. Right. Exactly. Like now you got, we have tax dollars getting funneled into things. We have no idea where they're going. So it's like, you know, Hey, we're going to switch to like kind of your expertise.

[00:16:01] And I kind of teed you up on this earlier when I said, Hey, I want to talk about the end or death of DE&I and DE&I programs. Um, we see it every single day, a company, big brands coming out going, Hey, we're no longer going to track this stuff. We're no longer going to have the website up. We're no longer going to have a chief diversity officer react to all of that. Okay. Is this the demise of DE&I?

[00:16:26] Now, on the one hand, the, the, the, the, the acronym DEI itself, it might be. Yeah. I don't know if we can refresh that branding at all. Right. Exactly. Or it might be a huge step toward, you know, really marginalizing that. It'd be like, it'd just give me like the Enron logo next to DE&I. Like we just can't bring that back. Right. Right.

[00:16:47] But anything that is really happening of substance in the area of diversity and, and workforce inclusion and so forth, it doesn't change any of that. I mean, you have, you're still faced with the same context that brought it all, that brought the stuff to the front. You have changing demographics in the country, changing demographics in the world. Yeah. So the talent that you're, that's available to you in the labor force looks different. Yeah.

[00:17:16] And so you need to be, you're going to have to hire folks, right? Unless you're going to be very insular, probably end up being a niche player. Yeah. You are going to have to scale. You're going to have to hire people of, you know, women. You're going to have to hire people of color from different religious backgrounds and so forth. And so since you have to do that, now you need, you got them in there, but now, so you have a diverse workforce by default. Now, how do we get the most out of them? How do we get functionality?

[00:17:45] How do we get innovation or, or efficiency or whatever the things we're looking for? Well, we got to figure out how to work together. We got to figure out how to best develop these people and so forth. So the same, the same needs and the same demands exist in the companies that are doing it. Well, are not going to stop doing that. They're not going to say, you don't want all those talented people, all the talented women, all the talented Latin Americans. You stay home. No, they want that. I think you're right on like the changing demographics, especially within the U S.

[00:18:13] I mean, we know that significantly more women are college graduates than men. So, I mean, you're just going to see a natural progression of more women in higher level positions. And that glass ceiling is just going to kind of disappear at a point because you're going to have, you're just going to have a majority of women that are in those professional positions. Mixed race. We don't really even talk about it, but there's going to be a, come to a point where every single person we hire is going to be a mixed race. Yeah. Like Brazil.

[00:18:41] Try to put our racial categories and take that to Brazil or South Africa. Like forget it. It doesn't make any sense, right? Again, now outside, I don't, cause I hate to, to overgeneralize and not recognize that there are some real difficulties, some real challenges that have befallen folks in some states. Being a professor, I know that folks at state universities in Texas, state universities in Florida, Georgia, and so forth that have lost, you know, losing jobs. Yeah. Change your curriculum.

[00:19:10] If you were, nevermind a staffer doing something around diversity and so forth, you're just out. So I don't want to diminish the, the, the, the, the pain and the, and the upheaval and disruption in the lives of those folks. If I was a CHRO in one of those organizations, or even like one of some of the big like brands, like private brands that we've talked about. And they, and, and I was a CHRO and my president came to me or CEO came to me or the board came to me and said, Hey, we want to eliminate D and I'd be like, cool. Because we want a high performing culture.

[00:19:38] And so I really want to create a center of high performance. And all those people would just move right into high performance. Right. Because that's ultimately, that's the entire intent of all this is saying, Hey, instead of just fishing from this little pond, we're going to fish from this big pond. I go back to like the Gallup research from like literally 40 years ago. That was like, Hey, if you have a best friend at work, you're less likely to be turned over. That was belonging. That's all that is. Exactly.

[00:20:03] I mean, we just, we, we just, we just did a really bad job in HR of managing the marketing of what we were trying to do, which is at the, at the end of the day should have always been about high performing cultures. Yes. You know, and we, nobody would ever would have said one thing about that. Yeah. HR folks in the diversity area have done a poor job of messaging throughout in terms of somehow, somehow letting the, letting go of the reins on merit, somehow letting go of the reins on high performance, like you mentioned.

[00:20:33] That, I mean, we should have been on top of that or had our claws in that like inextricably the entire time. For sure. So, so I think now when we see some of the data recently that, you know, produced by, put out by the wall street journal and their analysis of 13 million jobs, we saw that there hasn't been appreciable change since the social justice movement in 2020. No. The majority of jobs.

[00:20:55] So, so what really are we losing or what goes away if some of these programs that were not productive don't, you know, it's, to me, it's, you know, there's an emotional element to it and people feel like it's, you know, it's a political issue. So, and, and, and maybe so, but what does it change for people on the ground getting jobs done? The best folks are still going to get the jobs. And by the way, I think I shared with you those couple of weeks ago, the piece from wall street journal about, you know, something to the effect of now the DEI is gone. What are you going to blame your stalled career on? Exactly.

[00:21:26] Yes. Scapegoating of DEI that goes away. So all hiring managers that were, didn't want to take on the hard discussion. They're just saying, look, you weren't qualified enough. You didn't perform well in the interview. You're not as confident. You don't have the strengths of the person just to say, well, I really like to hire you. That's nice and easy to say, but we have this diversity initiative in place. So totally scapegoat that. Well, now that's gone. Yeah. So, you know, we'll see how it plays out again. You don't know where innovation and where steps forward might come from.

[00:21:56] 100%. Ultimately, you know, some companies are really going to be able to separate themselves. And no matter what you call it, you got to hire good people. You got to develop them, retain them and help build their commitment. And hold them accountable to high performance. Of course. Exactly. Like if I'm going to pay you, right? An above average salary and above average benefits and blah, blah, blah. There's an expectation. Correct. And if you're not going to hold my, you know, to it, then I don't care if you're who you are and what you are.

[00:22:25] Like you, you don't belong here. Go someplace else. Work for our competition and pull them down. But like that's, to me, gets back into this. And I, so I totally agree. I think when you take a look at, you know, Facebook and Google, we got really pressured to share their like diversity metrics for years. Yes. And every single year they had come out and it would be a big announcement and hit the media. And it never moved. It's exactly the same.

[00:22:49] And I'm thinking the billions of dollars they spent and were not able to move the needle, which brings up, does HR, does organizations, have we, have we proven the fact that we really can impact what we really want to impact? Which is if we want to have more females in STEM careers, let's say that's just one of the, one thing we, an outcome we want. We don't do that as adult learners.

[00:23:15] We do that when you have young girls in kindergarten and you give them great opportunities and great schools where they can learn with each other. And like funnel the money there. Correct. Not into, hey, I'm going to teach, you know, a line worker at GM that's female how to code. Like, come on. Exactly. Yeah. I might put a giant pile of cash on the, on the ground and put it on fire and have the exact same effect. Yeah. Cause you, I mean, if that was the case, yeah, we'd have all these folks, you just go to finance or go to wherever, who's paying the most.

[00:23:45] That's where people will go. And that's not how it works. You go where you're intrinsically interested, where you have, you know, where you're gaining some satisfaction. You feel a sense of work. So no, you're right. It's preschool. It's, you know, if you're really talking about populations that are perpetually, okay. How about prenatal care? Yeah. How about some health care? Make sure children are born healthy. It's going right to the core. Right. Yeah. Start there. If you really are. If you're. Nutrition. Yeah. Exactly. Lead to them. If that is the issue.

[00:24:15] But yeah, this stuff where you start in high school, like, come on, that's going to be the teeniest bit of movement that you'll get. Yeah. Yeah. No doubt. We had kind of talked about, like, some of this stuff, too, is like, you can say you're going to do it with anything. But if it's good for the organization, it's good for the bottom line dollar. Organizations are going to continue to do it no matter what anybody says. They'll just wrap it in a different thing and keep doing it.

[00:24:37] And then many of us leaders who came up over the last, like, two decades, like, we don't, now we just don't even think differently about that. Like, I was telling you a story, like, I obviously came out of college, went to work for my mom, who was this baby boomer leader, who would sit right there and tell me to my face, you don't hire women, especially young women, because they're going to get pregnant. I wouldn't even fathom thinking that now. Like, I would be like, no, no. Like, in fact, some of the best workers I have are single moms.

[00:25:06] Because they have to, they, I know they have to come to work and show up and bust their ass. And they have a different work ethic, right? Which leads me to my last topic. I continue to hear and see stuff across media, across socials. Gen Z, goddammit, they're lazy. They don't want to work.

[00:25:25] There was a recent, and just this week, intelligent.com had a study they did, about 1,000 leaders, that basically they found 75% of companies report, some or all recent college grads they hired were actually, for the year, were unsatisfactory in their performance. 75%. Six out of 10 companies fired recent college graduates they hired this year. Nine out of 10 managers say recent college grads should undergo etiquette training. Okay.

[00:25:52] So, it opens up this thing of why do we believe or why are younger workers lazy, less conditioned to be a part of the system, blah, blah, blah. I'll let you, I have some takes on it, but I wanted to get your take on it as being one of these people who's actually educating this young workforce. Exactly. I mean, I'm perpetually in the environment of the workforce coming onto the market.

[00:26:20] Tim, just real quick, your kids are all Gen Z, right? Yeah, all Gen Z. Yeah. Keaton's the oldest. He's the geriatric Gen Z. He's 28. So, he's in the first year of Gen Z. Right, right. And then my kids are both Gen Z and the young teenagers. The other side. Yeah. So, I've never had the sense that your kids are lazy or won't work hard. And mine either. Now, they've grown up in a very different environment. The idea that etiquette training is needed.

[00:26:50] Oh, I could see that. I mean, we are talking about the kids that had the COVID, you know, at least a year, probably for most of them at home, isolated, learning online. Some of them, again, we talked about kind of bifurcation of the advantage that certain people have. But come on, some kids, Boston City Schools, you were at home for two years. Marcus, I have to share this. Last night, I'm at dinner with Keaton Cooper, my oldest, my youngest. He had come from lab.

[00:27:18] He's now teaching a chemistry lab at Michigan State University. Right. He had on gray sweats and a hoodie, and I wanted to kill myself. I'm like, you did not. Did you change before? Or, like, no, this is what I wore to lab. You educated students in that. And, like, he was just looking at me like, you're insane, Dad. Like, everyone wears this. Everyone wears this. I'm like, my kid doesn't. I'm taking you to Lululemon right now. We are changing that outfit. Right. Man, yeah.

[00:27:46] So, again, home two years. Some without internet. You know, I mean, so that part doesn't necessarily surprise me. And, again, some of the stuff I think, you know, when we see these data and so forth. A little bit of it's clickbait. So, six out of ten companies fired people they hired this year. Yeah, but PWC, they all do that every year. They fire. They call. So, those are not new things. I don't. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Economic, cyclical. Like, give me a break.

[00:28:11] So, we talked about this pregame that really every generation thinks the generation under them is terrible. Pampered. Terrible. They're good. They're lazy. Yes. And so, my take on this is that that's because the younger generation is still hopeful.

[00:28:30] They haven't been beaten down to the fact for the next 40 plus years, you're going to be required to work almost every single day, 40, 50 hours a week, pay your bills, and then get up the next day and do it again and do it again and do it again. And they haven't come to that. They still have this hope that maybe they're going to become a celebrity. Maybe they're going to come up with this product and they're going to be a millionaire and make a million a month and they're going to do it. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:29:01] They're still – and like we all had in our generation. You and me, you were going to be an athlete. Maybe I was going to be a rapper. Who knows? Right? We all had some stupid – we had hope that, oh, my God, do not let me step on that treadmill that my parents are on. Because that looks like death. And then at some point, you step on the treadmill and you realize, okay, here's the game. And so I always just go – you look at them as they're lazy and weak and terrible because they still have hope and you don't.

[00:29:32] It's really something. But also because we won't allow them to have the experiences that we had. Exactly. Like we won't let our kids go hungry. We won't let our kids go to school with the same pair of pants every day. We won't let our – again, I'm saying most of us say middle class, upper middle class. Yeah, yeah. Especially those of us that came from less than that. You don't want your kids to go hungry. Like in the same way my father grew up with next to nothing. Yeah. I only had two pair of pants, but I always had a pair of game shoes and practice shoes. Yeah.

[00:30:00] So I was a leg up. And you had three meals a day. And you had like – Three meals, yes. And then for my kids, same thing. You know, the next thing. Nope. That's what the kids are wearing for pants. Because I had two pair. No, you got four. You got five. Like you not have to wear the same pair twice in a week. So we don't allow kids to struggle in the same ways. We don't allow – they can't get in fights. They can't win for themselves. They can't stand up for themselves. You know, they can advocate, but that means raising their hand and telling the adult in charge.

[00:30:30] You know, like – but then we criticize them for not being tough. Well, we also – like even if you go back to the work environment, when you and I first came up in that first job making those hundred calls, if we put the phone down or we spent too long in the bathroom, somebody was smacking us. I mean, somebody was in our face in calling us every name that they shouldn't be calling. Nobody in HR was batting an eye. And we were immediately put on the right course of action or they got rid of us. Like it was that – you know.

[00:30:58] But nowadays, you know, somebody comes in and, you know, their shirt's dirty and we're all just like, hey, you know, Tim, like I like that shirt. You know, I may – if it was a little cleaner, I would like it more. Like I mean we just – we're just pushing foot around like so much stuff and just going – like I remember showing up one day without a tie. I forgot. I forgot. Like, you know, I'd come – I drive to work without a tie and then put it on as you go in, right? Whatever.

[00:31:28] Forgot. So I just walk in. I got sent home to get a tie. Like no, you go get a tie. And like can you imagine sending somebody home today from work like going, hey, you know, like you got – come on, man. They got sweats with holes in them. Like we don't do that here. Go home. Right. No, we pay a fine. Yeah. We're going to have a tie and if you weren't clean shaven. But Tim, you know, think that when we were in high school, we got cussed out by coaches. Oh, my God. Down.

[00:31:58] I mean start freshman year, JV, Varsa, you got cussed out. Oh, yeah. You can't – I mean I can't – I don't – except in football. But it's rare now that I have a kid, you know, that has experienced that kind of thing coming up and I don't – Parents wouldn't allow it. You would immediately be canceled. No, no, no. They'll have you. You can't hurt my kid's self-esteem and, you know, their self-image and blah, blah, embarrass them and so forth.

[00:32:24] So sometimes I wonder like maybe this idea that kids are not so committed to a career or to work itself, like maybe that will lead to some good things. Maybe – It could. Yeah. If you don't have to work 60 hours a week and slog it out and be a single mom and whatever it is, it's good for you. Yeah.

[00:32:42] And unfortunately, as much as I said, you know, we don't let our kids struggle, well, you know, the two of us are going to be passing on to our kids means that – I mean, you know, they won't have to struggle like that necessarily. Not unless they blow it, if they gamble or whatever. Okay. But I don't know. It's a changing of society.

[00:33:01] It's a human issue as you – as socioeconomics – as the standard of living improves, I think we're just – we're running into things that we haven't as a, you know, people on the planet that we haven't necessarily experienced unless you're the royal family, you know? I always try to think of ways that potentially we can combat this, right?

[00:33:19] So if we know this, do we do – like I'm a big advocate of like a national term of service for high school graduates where you go, look, after you graduate high school, before you can start college or before you enter the workforce, automatically now you have this two-year commitment. You can go military or you can go to Habitat for Humanity. You have to go out and actually service the community. And does that change our mindset and work ethic?

[00:33:42] And also does it give them even some understanding, like you said, that maybe you're going, hey, I actually love building homes or I actually love helping the homeless or whatever. Like do we have a better society for that than if we just said, hey, you're going to go from high school to a $2,500 a month apartment with stainless steel appliances and granite countertops like in college? While paying $80,000, $90,000 a year, yeah, for tuition, right. You know, like are we really helping, you know, those kids out, you know, from that standpoint?

[00:34:12] So you're speaking to the corner, Nat. I agree. Yeah. Go sort trash and recycling for two years. Pedal a bike to generate energy. You know, like, yeah, you'll figure out what you like and you'll be able to, wow, now I understand this recycling issue. I understand the sustainable energy issue. Like, yeah, you were in it. Yeah. I also like, I always like, I want to challenge like CHROs to think and say, well, what if that new crop of college graduates came in that first year was just a scared straight program? Like, we're just, we're actually just going to teach you how to work.

[00:34:42] Like, you know, and like, I mean, because imagine like when you, when we first came up, like, it seemed like a lot of those kind of like MBA higher programs. So like that, like Keaton's a CPA, like you got to meet, they threw you into the grind to see if you would survive. They didn't really care about like the level or like the quality of work you did. It was like, are you willing to actually work? And if you were, then we're going to invest in you. We're going to show you, we're going to make you wealthy. Right. Because you had that work ethic. I don't know.

[00:35:10] It's, I, I had, like you said, like having kids who are Gen Z and I know I'm lucky to have kids that have great work ethic and so are you. But like, I hear it constantly from senior leaders that they're just like this generation coming up does not want to work. So, so I think Tim, one way I think about it is, yes, do they think differently? Is the value set and orientation toward work maybe different? Yes. I see that at Bentley all the time.

[00:35:38] But is it, is it worse or is it wrong? It's definitely different than, than the boomers and different than what you and I came under. But does that mean it's wrong or less than? That's what I'm not quite sure of yet. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No doubt. All right, Marcus, thank you so much. How can, how can people find you if they want to connect? Mstuart at Bentley.edu. I'm at Bentley University in Waltham, Waltham, Massachusetts, USA. You're on the LinkedIn's.

[00:36:07] Do you ever go to LinkedIn? LinkedIn. Yes. Marcus Stewart, Bentley University. You'll find me at LinkedIn, of course. So yeah, the usual places. Awesome. Thank you so much. And we will get you guys out of here with that and check you out in the next episode. So, so, hey, HR Famous, we are out.