3Sixty Insights #HRTechChat with Dr. Chris Mullen, Executive Director of The Workforce Institute at UKG

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Our most recent guest on the 3Sixty Insights #HRTechChat was Dr. Chris Mullen, executive director of The Workforce Institute at UKG. Chris brings an extensive background relevant to the #HRTechChat conversation. Prior to joining what is now UKG, he carried out a leadership role in HR at the University of Chicago and helped to lead employee and faculty recruiting at Colorado State University.

For this episode, we delved into why employees’ feelings matter. By feelings, we mean employee sentiment. What is the role of human capital management and the technology for it in bringing about and supporting positive employee sentiment? Chris notes that there’s plenty of research showing that positive employee sentiment matters to organizational success. And he’s right about this.

The obstacle many HR professionals run into as they argue for investments in related solutions is that improvements in employee sentiment, the very results that bolster an organization’s ability to succeed, do not translate to financially quantifiable line items in a spreadsheet. Leaders on the financial side of the equation struggle to see the value, efforts stagnate, and inertia sets in.

My own key takeaway from this conversation with Chris, partially covered in the podcast itself, is the following. One way to get around these seemingly intractable differences in perspectives is to understand that the nuts and bolts of HCM deeply influence employee sentiment too — and show how these effects are not discrete, but part of the whole of the rationale, both tactical and strategic (i.e., concrete and abstract), for investing in modern clocking-in technology or efficient, accurate payroll processing software. Doing so creates a toehold that HR can build upon to expand organizational leadership’s concept of what constitutes worthwhile investments in the workforce.

This is only a small snapshot of our chat. We covered much ground, and Chris is a wellspring of knowledge and wisdom on these topics. Be sure to watch the video.

Our #HRTechChat Series is also available as a podcast on the following platforms:

See a service missing that you use? Let our team know by emailing research@3SixtyInsights.com.

Transcript

Brent Skinner 00:00
Well welcome, everyone to the latest episode of HR tech chat. And with us today we have Dr. Chris Mullen, who is executive director of the workforce Institute at Ukg. Welcome, Chris. Hey, Brent. Thanks for having me. Yeah, yeah. Thanks for agreeing to do this. Honestly, I’m super interested. And speaking with you today, we, we had a conversation. I think it was last week, around some of the things that you folks are looking into their the workforce Institute. And it was kind of interesting, that was a sort of an inadvertent sort of alignment with some of the things we’re looking at it 360 insights. And so we figured, hey, let’s, let’s continue this conversation, for the public domain for everyone else to to hear. We were talking about a few things. So I just want to make sure that I characterize this correctly. One of these things is that employee feeling so ah, HCM, human capital management, the practice of it, the technology for it, we all know, you know, there’s sort of the nuts and bolts of HCM making sure payroll is processed on time getting schedules, just, you know, making sure that getting a system that can create a schedule, you know, with as little human, you know, manual labor is possible, you know, these sorts of things. But then there’s, there’s employee, there are employee feelings, and how they play into that and how they play into other sort of higher level things. And how that is a major focus, or should be of HCM? And how the two don’t have to be at odds with each other. Maybe that’s a good way to good place to start. What are your thoughts around that?

Chris Mullen 01:59
Yeah, kind of, you’re right, I kind of equate the HCM nuts and bolts in this employee feeling slash sentiment, to the age to the age old discussion from an HR perspective of, you know, is HR should HR be tactical, or should it be strategic, it’s like this versus that shouldn’t be there. It’s both it’s and like HR should be tactical HR should be strategic. It’s a both and both have an interplay. I do believe that, you know, when we talk about HR practitioners, or HR leaders, that there are many of us, some of us can, can go between the two. And there are also some people that should be in one or the other bucket, they’re really good at the tactical. And then there are other people that are really good at the strategic. And so I think the similar thing comes about when you start to talk about HCM as the nuts and bolts, or the employee sentiment, like where does it fit, we definitely need the nuts and bolts, we need people to track time to get paid. Great. Without that you don’t think you can do the rest. So it’s almost like the foundation, if you have your HCM nuts and bolts, correct, and humming along, then you can really start to work on your employees feelings, the sentiment, and that’s like, to me, it’s like the icing on the cake. As you might say, this idea, or the thoughts that you can start to listen to your employees. I think a lot of times we survey employees, and this is I think what you and I were talking about last week, you can survey them. And then if you don’t do anything about it, then your employees are like I’m not filling that out again, like he didn’t hear anything about it. I didn’t they didn’t do anything, until it really leaves them with a bad taste in their mouth.

Brent Skinner 03:48
That’s such a great point right there. You know, if you’re going to if you’re going to do an employee engagement survey or employee, employee sentiment, survey, pulse survey, whatever, maybe pulse surveys, and maybe there’s a little bit more, you know, think rigor to that because you’re doing there’s already sort of an intrinsic, we’re gonna keep doing these kind of thing there. But with the other two, yeah, if you just leave if you send it out there and just leave it hanging, you know, just don’t do it at all. Right? It’s actually better. Yeah, yeah. A couple things that you said there that were super intriguing to me. One is this idea that you know that HCM can be both and I just to give listeners, bring them up to speed where there’s some real interesting alignment here. You talked about strategic and tactical HCM. We call it 3Sixty Insights is abstract and concrete HCM. You know, concrete is no this is the stuff that’s and I think it equates to the tactical at least a lot of it this idea that this is the stuff that that that the accountants readily understand is super easy to translate it to a line item in the general ledger, you know, It’s a financially quantifiable thing that and so, and, and, you know, a lot of businesses, you know, when they don’t know what to do as a business as an organization, they fall back on the numbers, you know, the, the, you know, the balance sheet, you know, that can be that fixation there, but, but also the abstract being all these things having to do an employment with employee sentiment, the things that contribute to employer culture being good one or bad one, all these kinds of things and how that that really needs to be a focus as well of HCM. What are your thoughts on? So I have some thoughts around this the following, but what are your thoughts around why HCM has been so tactical or concrete or more so that then, then the other thing that’s just it’s there, it’s kind of the reason why people went into HR in the first place. Why is that been? That focus kind of struggled to gain traction, just across organizations? And yeah, I

Chris Mullen 05:59
think just because of the necessity of it, of the concrete, the tactical and necessity, we have whole functions built around it. payroll being a really good example of that, although I do think payroll needs to be more strategic or 10. Big if not already. And it goes to maybe your example before of when you’re doing surveys, like employee engagement. That’s what we hear a lot about. It’s a term that you use so much right now. And I’ve been giving whole talks on how employee engagement is the result of a good employee experience, people forget about the employee experience, I have a whole talk just on that alone to get people off the engagement piece. Because you do the survey, you look at the engagements out, it didn’t change again, or change slightly, but you don’t know why maybe not. But if you provide people with a great employee experience along the employee journey, and I and I challenge participants to map out their journey, I give them a good roadmap. But it’s something as simple as clocking in and out, that’s an experience. If I’m on the manufacturing floor, and I’m coming to clock in and I have to wait in line for 20 or 30 minutes, right? Probably not that long. I’m exaggerating, but you get my drift, even five minutes. Yeah, that’s time I’m not getting paid for. And now with the pandemic, that’s the time that I’m interacting with people. And so safety could be an issue. But after experience, we need to increase and make it more positive. Because there’s always there’s always an experience, the question is, is it positive or negative to the employee, and more positive once we have the better?

Brent Skinner 07:39
I think that’s super interesting, what you sit around and play experience it, it’s how there’s always an employee experience. And that’s that to me, you know, within sort of the lexicon that we’ve that we’re kind of developing in real time, right now, in this conversation, it’s almost as if it’s plug and play experiences is a real sort of connective tissue between the abstract and the concrete or the tactical and strategic in HCM. And, and this goes to something that, you know, occurred to me as I was looking at concrete versus abstract HCM earlier this year, and we finally published a wrap up report around that. And that, that it’s not it’s not, it shouldn’t be concrete versus abstract HCM. It’s, it’s and there, it’s both right. And they’re there in, in Furthermore, they’re happening at the same time, all the time, within the same thing. So even, you know, even the act of being of being paid on time, right? If you’re paid on time correctly, then, you know, that’s, it’s, this is an interesting one, because it’s, it’s you just expect that as default, right? You don’t you don’t you don’t say you don’t send an email to your, to your manager, or the payroll department say, Hey, thanks for paying me on time, incorrectly, right? It’s just like the power company and say, Hey, the electricity was on all day, that’s great. But when it goes out, right, when the intensity goes out, or if you’re paid, you know, incorrectly or not paid on time, God forbid, which happens sometimes, especially small companies, right? That’s, that says is immediately and an acute, very acute and intense, bad employee experience. Right. And that can have a very deleterious effect on on your employer culture and, and your engagement. So that’s it. So even, you know, in payroll, be you know, if you think about it just at first blush, or just sort of superficially or maybe just in passing, if you think about payroll just in passing Oh, that’s a very tactical that’s, that’s a concrete thing, but it but it’s so much more.

Chris Mullen 09:46
Yeah. You know, because there are your or do your employees understand their pay their, you know, their pay stubs? Do they look at their accruals that they know that they have enough vacation relative to come to you I mean, I was in a position where I’ve director maker at one point, coming on to this new job, this job and every employee came up to the payroll office to find out their accruals. There wasn’t a mobile functionality, right that we couldn’t provide that self service at the time. And that’s something that I, we ended up changing, because it was it was that important to employees. And when you have 2500 employees that you’re supporting, you can’t have everyone showing up just asking what their accruals are. That takes a lot of time and energy. But both sides, the employee and the payroll team loved the interaction with one another. Great, they got to see each other and, and get to know one another. That’s what we want. But if we can get rid of the transactional and let the employee do it, we can spend more time with them doing something else doing more, more strategy, right, more of the abstract and working on that with them. And I think you’re right, in the sense that the employee experience is what ties A lot of it together. And so for those who are listening or watching, I would I would challenge them to develop. In my talk, we have a whole like I said, we have a whole roadmap that starts with recruitment, a hire, right, and it goes all the way to retire and all the different things in between and and on every point on the road of the employee journey, we mapped out Is it a daily interaction? Is it a weekly? Is it a yearly? Is it a one time we map it out that far. And then I can even drill down and pick that point on the journey. And it goes to an interactive, you might remember when we were kids that Choose Your Own Adventure books, I love those books. So that’s what this presentation is. So I can pick from the audience. Where do you want to go, I click on it brings me to a whole new slide that says here are the pain points from the employees perspective on this point in the journey, here’s actually the pain points from HR or payroll on the journey. And then here’s the solution that you might want to think about and implement, to help make it a more positive moment. And then to drill this home. There’s a book, the heath brothers, and I think it’s called moments that I think it’s called moments that matter. But what really drilled it in when I was reading the book, and this was a couple years ago to develop this talk was there is this hotel out in LA. And it was ranked I think, number one, it was more of a motel than a hotel. But it was ranked above the Ritz Carlton and like all the major hotels, and what really got to it was they talked about the furniture was all they talked about the place it wasn’t run down, but it wasn’t like gorgeous. But what they did was they created these moments for their for their visitors that just weld them enough, they created well moments so that the visitors would rate them so high. And it was it was a legitimate rating. Like if you went to the pool, there was a red phone, you could pick up the red phone, and you could order frozen otter pops or ICS, whatever you want to call them. And they would bring them out on a silver trout spray with white gloves for your kids. I mean, that’s a wow moment. At the time years ago, you could rent any DVD from them for free, they would bring it right to your room. And so like these were the experiences they were giving people. And that’s what matter people didn’t really care about the furniture as much as the experience they were getting. And that’s what I think we need to be doing to employees.

Brent Skinner 13:21
Email me the name of that motel, because if I’m at an area I want to stay there is some is a couple things that came up here. So three things I want to get out there. See if I can remember the third one has to go through the first two. So the first one is going back to something else you said around, you know, the technology and in getting things the technology getting that sort of a lot of that tedium out of the way, a lot of that time consuming stuff out of the way so people can focus their time on other things. How much? So how much of this getting more strategic with HCM? How much of it do you think depends on automation, whether it be sort of straightforward, you know, automation, which non AI related automation, because AI, you know, is complex automation complex automation of variable activities, which I think is the next frontier of automation. So that’s the first question. The second is more of an observation around, you know that motel, treating their employees see me their customers putting that extra thought into their customers. And now remember that the third one was more of a two to B. So there’s two activities. So the first one is this idea. Okay? employ so there’s this idea that your employer is going to your employees are an employer’s customers in a sense, right? That it’s not exactly the same, but giving them that extra experience that makes them feel special and appreciated goes a long way. What do you think the differences are there? And then then the third part of it is I thinking, I’m thinking back to a conversation I had previously on one of these podcasts, and I don’t remember who it was. But we, but we talked about how in play and player culture isn’t about, it’s not about, you know, making sure there’s foosball table in the, in the rec room, or, you know, making sure there’s pizza and beer, or Coca Cola or whatever, you know, on Friday afternoon. So, to what extent, so what can employers do? Let’s do this one. First, what can employers do to treat their employees more like customers, you know, to give them that memorable, positive experience that’s going to be sticky in it? But that’s not, you know, that is is more meaningful, you know, that isn’t just sort of, you know, sort of window dressing.

Chris Mullen 15:57
Yeah, yeah, I agree that employees really need customer centric technology. They’re looking for the same type of technological experience that you and I have one more customers like Think of your smartphone and how quickly it is to order. When you shop off your phone like that easy. That’s what they want from their work technology, anything that’s more arduous becomes an issue because then they can’t really do their job. And so that I think that’s a really good place for people to start. And it kind of goes to your first point of automation. Without AI, let’s automation is the foundation don’t AI is higher up the ladder of things I think people should be doing. But get the automation, right. So I had mentioned that I had been director of HR i was i was a practitioner for 15 years prior to come working in Ukg. So I understand I’ve been in people’s shoes who are out there in the HR space. what I ended up doing, the quick story is, is that payroll was tracking accruals and I came in as the director to tell me more, how are you doing as well dressed, man, we’ve got this on technology. I go great. Show me. They pull up an Excel spreadsheet. This is this is within the last? Yeah, I mean, it’s not that long ago. And so. And so I said, Oh, I said Really? Because there was no automation, like technology now with automation. But yeah, it gets a little worse. I said, Okay, so we’re trying to track 20 to 2500 employees, where are they all on this Excel spreadsheet? Because Oh, no, this is one Excel spreadsheet per employee. Only 100 tabs. They just had it they had a full document, one per employee. And so I said, Okay, we have a team of four to five payroll, folks, how long is this taking you all to do? And they said two weeks ago, okay, two weeks. And like they said, two weeks a month to track everybody. I was blown away. So the first thing we did with technology was how do we automate our systems and take care of this? Now people start to worry, because we were able to automate the whole thing? Well, that’s two weeks out of four people, that’s two FTS, are you going to get rid of us? No, no, we have other important work for you all to do, where you can now interact with the employees and provide them a better experience rather than sitting in front of a computer, trying to tally up accruals. And so that’s the automation piece that I think people still are trying to get out of the more and more I talk at HR conferences, I know where our technology is, like with AI machine learning. Most there are a lot of companies prior to the pandemic that weren’t even there. It was still paper based, they were still trying to work on the basic automation, which is okay. And that’s somewhere I think we need to be. But that also is a part of the experience, we want to give our employees that self service where they because if I’m, you know, brand new, and I’ve talked before this, I have four children, if I’m looking for a vacation, and I’m online, trying to find flights on a weekend, I want to know I can get my time off like that, like that it’s available and I can get it because if I have to wait a day or two, those flights may go up and that me would sit with four kids to adult, six people that can be $1,000 in a day. And I’m not a happy customer but if I can get that approval like that, because of automation because of eventually AI then I’m happy camper because I got that approval right away and save myself some money.

Brent Skinner 19:41
Yeah, yeah. It’s gonna be in the interest of the airlines to make sure that that those manual processes remain in place. You know, so, you mentioned I wonder how many companies would 2500 employees Still have such a sort of, you know, unwieldy, clunky, you know, technological scenario is, you know, an express and assuming an Excel spreadsheet for their for the payroll, I mean, I’d be interested to, I don’t know if anyone can boil the ocean this way, but it’d be interesting to find out what percentage of companies that size is still doing that, I know that they’re, you know, there are a lot of companies that any company gets to a certain point in its size, right? There’s, there’s an inflection point where, you know, we’ve been, you know, I’m speaking as the, you know, the archetypical, sort of, you know, small company person, you know, we’ve been doing this by hand or manually, you know, this, that, and the other will be doing it, we’re doing it with spreadsheets, and, but, you know, hey, it’s starting to take too much time, we need to find some sort of a solution. And we’re just, we need to get the tactical stuff down the concrete HCM down, automated as much as possible. They’re not even thinking strategically or abstractly about HCM necessarily, or maybe they are, but it seems, is something that’s really far away. And, you know, in my previous life, my previous life before my previous life, when I was in analyst Delta, where we looked at the ROI of, well, all sorts of areas of the enterprise, but my area was HCM Lou, the ROI of many HCM technology deployments. And it was a recurring theme, you know, a small company had a super bad situation where maybe they just found something off the shelf, or some sort of, you know, fly by night, sort of technology solution. And, and they were just dealing with this major manual, administrative sort of Frankenstein situation, and, and they bring in one suite to handle a lot of it or something to handle, you know, like, the core anyway. Right. And it was a huge ROI. You know, it’s just major ROI for them, you know, and, but, but that it, but if you think about from an accounting standpoint, right, it ends there. Okay. But productivity gains, right. But, but what are the productivity gains? Me, right, and you mentioned, you started to hit on it just now, you know, we’re not, you know, we had two full time to two FTS doing this stuff. What are you going to get rid of us? No, we’re going to, we’re going to let you do all these other things. Right. And so what I struggle with, just in general in Well, sumeet one put it just put this differently, what I’m striving to communicate figure out and to present to the world here is, okay, there’s that part of it the productivity game. And that’s the end of the financial unquantifiable conversation, right, or the stuff that we’re does this, this the upside like the, you know, the wild, the wild blue yonder, that that’s all of a sudden sort of opened up to you? How does that fit into the equation in terms of organizational success, and when we look at org, we look at companies and the ones that really, truly succeed, and, you know, prevail in the marketplace? Yeah, I

Chris Mullen 23:17
think it can be easily equated to the same thing as culture. It’s something that’s not as quantifiable as people would like. But it has a huge impact on the bottom line, productivity, taking care of your employees, has a huge impact. And I think we were we were getting there with I think your third question about, I can’t remember what it was, but I have my notes here about I know my answer was that it was about like, my answer would be is like, the easiest way to do that is that your culture and this not so quantifiable is managers are the linchpin for it all, whether it’s your culture, whether it’s how do we go from the concrete to the abstract, because they’re the communication tool, or the conduit, between leadership and employees and their workforces, too, we never want to forget our frontline

Chris Mullen 24:12
employees.

Chris Mullen 24:14
We spend quite a bit of time thinking about how does everything impact them? Like we spent a lot of time over the, during the pandemic, thinking about everyone else talking about remote work? Well, you know, a lot of frontline employees can work from home. So what does that mean for them? How do we give them more flexibility, safety, things like that, but this idea of managers came about, typically they get their job because they were really good at making widgets or whatever their role was as an individual contributor. And when they become a manager, we think as an organization, the easiest thing to do is let them manage maybe we give them some manager training, and that’ll work. It doesn’t always work that way when people go through retraining, and I’ve seen this because I used to do employee development and training as part of one of my roles, they cognitively get it. When they’re going through the training. They’re like, Oh, I get this this manager thing I creating relationships building. Yeah, I get I get that. But then to put it into practice is a totally different ballgame. It’s a totally different skill set. And we’re not providing our managers with coaching or follow up to how do you apply what you’ve learned? I think a lot of you know, a lot of colleges are having this issue, higher education is having this issue too, is, you know, businesses are like, give me the skills I need to do the work. And, you know, universities are giving people some of the skills but also a lot of, you know, courses in theory and, and people are struggling to apply it. And that’s the same thing with managers. So as a organization, we need to be able to help our managers deploy is a skill set, and how do we coach them to be a manager, trust is not something you can see. But Steve covey talks about if you can wait, if you increase trust, then you decrease cost. And you increase speed. Right. And so if it does have a factor on the organization, and managers are a key role in in, in that,

Brent Skinner 26:11
you know, what you’re bringing up, so one thing I want, I want to hit on, because I’m looking at the time, and I want to make sure we touch on this, before we run out of time is, is he mentioned the pandemic and its effect on just employee, I guess we call it employee experience. But going to what you said around managers and leaders, leadership in the organization, we, you know, we, when I say we, I mean the Royal we, you know, the industry, the profession we talk about, we talk about employer culture, and, and, you know, making sure that, that, you know that focusing on these higher level things, investing in your people and, and, you know, it’s not just about the numbers. And that’s all well and good. But, the conversation can stop there sometimes. When you really want to get into the weeds and really get into, you know, like the putting in the elbow grease or whatever. Right. That’s you. That’s managerial discussion, this discussion about, okay, how are we equipping our managers to be leaders? How are we identifying? Are we identifying the right people to be managers? You know, there are some people with intrinsic sort of innate traits that are better more, you know, make them better managers sort of innately than others, although a lot of it can be learned. So what are we doing in organizations? It’s so you know, I love that you brought that up, you know, that that’s so important. We can’t sort of forget about that. But, but let’s talk about the pandemic for just a minute, right? Because the employee experience, you know, I call it you know, 2020 was a was a wormhole, right? I’m not even I’m not even a Star Trek nerd. But I know what a wormhole is, it’s, you know, to late 2019, nobody in their right mind thought that we’d be this close this close to the future of work, or this much closer to the future of work by 2021. Right, as we are, you know, it’s like we went through a wormhole. So what do you think? Is that going to be the what are the going to be the lasting effects of the pandemic on sort of the appreciation for the play experience? Do you think we’re going to sort of revert back to our bad our old ways? Or do you think we’re, we’re, we’re sort of out of the woods for good or?

Brent Skinner 28:31
Yeah,

Brent Skinner 28:32
let’s go ahead.

Chris Mullen 28:33
I really struggle with this one, because I am afraid that it’s a pendulum. And I’m afraid during the pandemic, we changed so quickly and swung one way where we were very worried about our employees keeping our businesses afloat. I am worried that now things are opening back up that we’re going to swing all the way back and it’s going to be, you know, butts in seats, then just reverting back. What I think folks should be learning from the pandemic and businesses is not that just change it inevitable. But how do we process change? Like, for instance, at the start of the pandemic, people like ramped up their technology because they add to your public sector, we’re hooked. We’re working at a desktop now they all need laptops, us to our knowledge workers and could work from home. We needed video conferencing. So everyone got video conferencing, chat, you know, Microsoft, whatever it is, everyone got it. But what we’ve what we fail to do is re evaluate where we are. I mean, now there’s studies coming out about how bad it is to look at yourself all day on a video chat. Like we’re telling people we we added more and more meetings more and more video. Right, as opposed to halfway through the pandemic or even now 32 reevaluate. Okay, we still are working from home for a few more months or whenever your cases but reevaluate, talk to your employees to say Do we really need to be on video for this meeting. First of all even need the meeting. Yeah, I have found that you know, that however much time you give something, that’s how long it takes. So if you plan an hour meeting, it’s going to take an hour no matter what. So I constantly ask myself, do we need this meeting? One, too? What can we do prior or on paper on paper, you know, via email, like, I’m not gonna just come on a meeting Brett and say, here’s my report. Here’s what we did. In fact, I could put that in an email and let you read it prior this prep work showing that I’m a good leader prepping, then you can come with any questions you have, we’ve saved ourselves 20 minutes. Yeah, these are the things people just aren’t I think companies aren’t evaluating where they are. They swung too far to the video. Now, everyone’s got to be a video where with my team, I’m constantly talking to them about you want to do a walk and talk like we do have to meet or video after chat. Let’s get on the phone. Let’s get outside. I can’t sit at my desk all day. Newer, should we? And so like how are we evaluating what we’re doing to people need time off up? There’s just a lot of things that I think the pandemic has shown us, I’m not sure that we’ve learned at all yet, like this constant evaluation of what we do between so far to a decision. And then it’s like, that’s the standard. And that’s what we’re keeping forever. Yeah,

Brent Skinner 31:16
I love what you’re saying there. And, and what’s interesting is technology, you know, is really good at facilitating communication, right? interaction, and also organizational agility, right. There’s this, there’s two things, right. And, but the employee experience, and there are ways that technology definitely can support and facilitate the employee experience, right. But there’s, there’s all sorts of things about the employee experience that had nothing to do with technology. And also, you know, you can’t look at it’s a multivariate thing you can’t look at, you can’t think of an employee experience. Well, that means work from home, right? Keeping, you know, sort of the frontline workers out of the picture, just for the moment, they’re super important, right? But thinking about that your typical desk worker, right, there’s, it’s not just work from home and you know, employee experience, okay, we got to give them all video to improve their employee experience. Wait a minute, maybe that’s not quite it. You know, I tried to get out for exercise. Most days, some days, I just, there’s no time. But I do try to get out there and do some sort of exercise you need that kind of time away from the screen and all this.

Chris Mullen 32:32
I people, my PhD my research is in work life balance and use of mobile technology. I didn’t see this coming during the pandemic. But when I when I do my talks, I tell people with your self care, find something you love to do, do it every day. But what I what I also say is make it movable, not removable on your schedule. So like I love to workout too. And I’m normally when you are You and I are talking at this moment, I’m usually done my workout, but this morning, I couldn’t. So I moved it from the morning to the afternoon. When I had when I made a time slot. It’s always scheduled, but it’s only movable. I never remove it.

Brent Skinner 33:10
I’m going to I’m going to take that as inspiration. I’m going to get out there later today and do my my run. This has been a great conversation. Thanks so much, Chris. Oh, I’ve really enjoyed I’m sure we could go on for hours, Brian. I love it. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Maybe we’ll do another one sometime. Have a great one. Thank you so much, my friend. Thanks.

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