Welcome to the How People Work podcast

There is a fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ence in how the gen­er­a­tions of the work­force see and expe­ri­ence the world because of the role tech­nol­o­gy has played in their lives. These gen­er­a­tions can be split into two groups: native analogs and native digitals.

Native analogs: Silent, Boomers, Gen X, and even some old­er Mil­len­ni­als remem­ber a time before the Inter­net. They view tech­nol­o­gy one of two ways: a help­ful, occa­sion­al resource or as a dis­trac­tion from every­day life. Native dig­i­tals: Mil­len­ni­als and Gen Z, on the oth­er hand, grew up sur­round­ed by new tech­no­log­i­cal advances at a rapid rate. They inte­grat­ed tech­nol­o­gy into every­day life.

This fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ence of per­spec­tive is why we often see exec­u­tives and employ­ees talk­ing past each other.

Lis­ten on Spo­ti­fy | Apple | YouTube

Key ideas and highlights

Trans­for­ma­tion of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion with Work­place Generations:

• When some­one tells us we have to do some­thing (i.e. going back into the office), it’s human nature to not want to do that thing. To employ­ees, it’s not about their per­son­al pref­er­ence, they just want the flex­i­bil­i­ty to choose.
• The sus­tained hap­pi­ness from expe­ri­enc­ing some­thing is far more than the instant hit of dopamine we get from some­thing tan­gi­ble. Things get lost; expe­ri­ences cre­ate mem­o­ries that will last a lifetime.
• Mon­ey can’t buy love…or hap­pi­ness. Receiv­ing some­thing mean­ing­ful, even if it’s small, is bet­ter than receiv­ing some­thing imper­son­al, like cash (or gift cards).
• How many of us are actu­al­ly putting our under­grad degrees to use? It used to be that you had to go to a uni­ver­si­ty to even have a chance at get­ting a ​“real” job. Native dig­i­tals under­stand the val­ue of on-site train­ing or internships/​apprenticeships in the field they love instead of spend­ing thou­sands in tuition.

“Think­ing about try­ing to lead a com­pa­ny our­selves, I think we just need to be flex­i­ble. We need to be real­ly open-mind­ed. We just need to not think about things like pedi­gree in the same way. We need to not think about where peo­ple work and how they work in the same way. And we need to under­stand that peo­ple need dif­fer­ent things. And the only way to pro­vide such a diverse group of peo­ple and oppor­tu­ni­ty to be suc­cess­ful in the way that they need to be suc­cess­ful is to be incred­i­bly flexible.”

Word of the day

Cacoph­o­ny

Timestamps

• 0:00 Intro
• 4:20 Native analogs vs native dig­i­tals, explained
• 5:20 Fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ence in how gen­er­a­tions see the world
• 6:50 Could the online world be ​“real life”?
• 10:20 What was the world like for native analogs?
• 13:50 Maybe film­ing the moment IS the new liv­ing in the moment
• 15:30 How much of the world has changed for native digitals?
• 17:50 62% of employ­ees already report to a Mil­len­ni­al boss
• 22:02 How has com­mu­ni­ca­tion changed for these two groups?
• 25:24 Expe­ri­ences are greater than things
• 28:20 Expe­ri­ences pro­vide more sus­tained hap­pi­ness than things
• 28:59 Sein­feld and cash gifts
• 31:05 Some ben­e­fits pro­grams do more harm than good
• 38:22 How to think about ben­e­fits equi­ty for a remote team
• 39:25 Why flex­i­bil­i­ty mat­ters now more than ever

Transcript

Jor­dan Peace (00:00):

All right. Wel­come back to How Peo­ple Work. This is one of your hosts, Jor­dan Peace. Jason Mur­ray is join­ing me as usu­al. And Jason, tell us what we’re talk­ing about today. Excit­ed to record this episode with you.

Jason Mur­ray (00:12):

So we’re on the third episode now, and the first one, we talked a lit­tle bit about our ori­gin sto­ry, and we’ll come back to pieces of that and future episodes, I’m sure. But in the sec­ond episode, we got a lit­tle bit into some of the gen­er­a­tional dif­fer­ences going on in the work­force. We did a lit­tle bit of a high lev­el overview of some of those things, but today I want to dig in a lit­tle bit more into that top­ic. Cause I think there’s some things that are real­ly inter­est­ing and some ideas that are maybe a lit­tle bit more unique that peo­ple haven’t heard about nec­es­sar­i­ly, and ways to think about fram­ing this prob­lem, if you will, a lit­tle bit dif­fer­ent­ly in the work­place here. So I mean, think it’s safe to say that work has changed pret­ty dra­mat­i­cal­ly over the last hun­dred years for sure. But in the last 20 to 30 years, espe­cial­ly. And so today, I want us to talk about some of those shifts that have tak­en place, give some fram­ing and back­ground on that shift, dis­cuss some of the ways that com­pa­nies and lead­ers can be think­ing about how they can adapt to these changes as well. So hope­ful­ly some prac­ti­cal take­aways for the folks listening.

Jor­dan Peace (01:17): Absolutely.

Jason Mur­ray (01:18):

So you all may remem­ber that we talked about the five gen­er­a­tions that are in the work­force today. And one of the things that’s real­ly tak­en place is as we’ve shift­ed to this mar­ket­place econ­o­my that we have today as opposed to an agrar­i­an and then indus­tri­al economies that we’ve lived through over the last kind of thou­sand, and then last a hun­dred years we all kind of got pushed togeth­er work­ing in the same places ver­sus work­ing on farms or work­ing on skilled trades or work­ing in fac­to­ries and so forth when indus­tri­al­iza­tion was tak­ing place. And so then we pro­gressed through the ser­vice econ­o­my in the mid­dle of the last cen­tu­ry. And that’s a lot of what our kind of indus­try is based on today. And now we’re liv­ing through this tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tion of real­ly the last 20 years. And I think it’s unlike any­thing that we’ve real­ly seen before. And so one of the con­cepts that I want to put for­ward today we can’t claim full cred­it for this because it’s an idea that Christo­pher Lock­head and the folks at Cat­e­go­ry Pirates first start­ed talk­ing about this idea, but I think it real­ly res­onates and has a lot of prac­ti­cal impli­ca­tions for today. So I’m going to set this up a lit­tle bit and then we can jump in. Cause I think there’ll be some fun things for us to kick around here.

Jor­dan Peace (02:46):

We can claim cred­it for it if no one’s heard it yet. I think that’s okay. I think that’s a pod­cast norm we can have.

Jason Mur­ray (02:52): Fair enough.

Jason Mur­ray (02:55):

So what I want us to do momen­tar­i­ly as maybe sus­pend our think­ing about tra­di­tion­al gen­er­a­tional dif­fer­ences, and let’s just divide humans up into real­ly just two groups. So dan­ger­ous, yes. But we like things sim­ple. Let’s do it. We like things sim­ple at range. So one is peo­ple who grew up in a world where tech­nol­o­gy was at best a sup­ple­ment and at worst, a dis­trac­tion to their in real life expe­ri­ences, as we might call them. And we’re going to call these peo­ple native analogs. So these are your typ­i­cal­ly Boomers, Gen Xers and your old soul mil­len­ni­als, which you can put us into that category.

Jor­dan Peace (03:41):

I think we firm­ly fit in there.

Jason Mur­ray (03:43):

And the oth­er group is made up of those who grew up in a world where tech­nol­o­gy was real­ly the cen­tral part of their life expe­ri­ence. They don’t remem­ber a world where devices and kind of the dig­i­tal world was­n’t a core part of it. And so these immer­sive dig­i­tal expe­ri­ences are real­ly sup­ple­ment­ed by their in real life expe­ri­ence, if you want to call it that. And so in some ways, you might say real life is the dis­trac­tion for those indi­vid­u­als. And we’re going to call these peo­ple Native dig­i­tals. Native dig­i­tals. And so these are gen­er­al­ly most of your mil­len­ni­als except for the old soul mil­len­ni­als and your Gen Zers espe­cial­ly. And so these two groups of humans real­ly have fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent ways of see­ing and expe­ri­enc­ing the world. So that divid­ing line is about age 35. And if you’re old­er than that, you’re real­ly the last of a dying breed of humans that is soon to be replaced by this new kind of human. And that’s just what it’s going to be. It just is what it is. That is what it is.

Jor­dan Peace (04:44):

That’s not a com­fort­ing thought. Well, I agree with it.

Jason Mur­ray (04:47):

I was actu­al­ly excit­ed to tee this up for you because I think there’s a movie ref­er­ence here that is applic­a­ble and bring­ing some of this into per­spec­tive. And so you’re the one that actu­al­ly told me about this movie first, so maybe you could tell us a lit­tle bit more about it. But Ready Play­er One is actu­al­ly, I think, a use­ful metaphor to some of these top­ics. So if you want to give the audi­ence maybe a quick overview of that.

Jor­dan Peace (05:12):

Well, I remem­ber watch­ing that movie on a plane, actu­al­ly, which is where I watch most of my movies these days because it’s five kids at home. There’s not a lot of time to do that. But when you’re trav­el­ing, you get to watch movies as opposed to doing emails like a respon­si­ble per­son. But this movie set place in the not so dis­tant future, I recall, and ini­tial­ly the movie starts out where every­thing’s very ani­mat­ed, kind of car­toon­ish. And so you’re like, oh, it’s an ani­mat­ed film. And it turns out that after the first 20 min­utes, you real­ize that what you’ve been watch­ing or peo­ple play­ing a video game, it’s vr and there’s just real­ly kind of engrossed in this game. And over the course of time you real­ize that it’s not just a small group of peo­ple play­ing this game, but it’s every per­son on earth plays one sin­gle game and they play it all day long. And that is their life. Their life is the game. They work in the game, they play in the game, they fight in the game, they earn cred­its, and they go dis­cov­er treasures…

Jason Mur­ray (06:13):

To school.

Jor­dan Peace (06:14):

And they go to school and they do all of these things. And then they log off to feed their phys­i­cal bod­ies and sleep and they get back and they play the game. And as a gamer, well used to be, again, before life got so busy and so forth, I, I’ve always loved video games and the con­cept was real­ly intrigu­ing to me. But what was so stark was this idea, you kind of ref­er­enced it ear­li­er that what I would call real life was the kind of sideshow, it was the dis­trac­tion from the game. Well, let me eat real quick. And they, you’d see some char­ac­ters occa­sion­al­ly just shov­el­ing down food to log back in because they’re miss­ing some oppor­tu­ni­ty of some kind tak­ing this break. And it end­ed up being real­ly kind of a fas­ci­nat­ing movie. I don’t want to spoil the whole thing for any­body who had­n’t seen it, but in the end, you sort of see that there’s a lit­tle bit more bal­ance returned to this sce­nario where peo­ple real­ize actu­al­ly maybe play­ing this game all of the time is maybe we’re miss­ing out on some things in life. Maybe we’re miss­ing out on some oth­er kinds of human inter­ac­tion that might be healthy and the world kind of changes and shifts towards the end of the movie. But it’s real­ly good.

Jason Mur­ray (07:27):

Yeah. Yeah. And I think it’s just a help­ful metaphor to you, just this par­a­digm of a dig­i­tal world being sort of the pri­ma­ry world that these indi­vid­u­als oper­ate in. And it’s prob­a­bly not over­stat­ing it to say that for dig­i­tal natives and Gen Zs in par­tic­u­lar, that they grew up in a world where those expe­ri­ences were so kind of part and par­cel of their every­day life. And so, I mean, think it would be fun­ny to talk about some exam­ples, maybe some things that we remem­ber from our own life that are par­tic­u­lar to what native analogs might expe­ri­ence. And so I’m curi­ous for you, what are some moments or things that, for you feel very par­tic­u­lar­ly ana­log in your experience?

Jor­dan Peace (08:11):

One of the things that’s real­ly inter­est­ing about rais­ing chil­dren at this peri­od of time is I remem­ber talk­ing to my par­ents or even my grand­par­ents about their expe­ri­ence of life and think­ing, oh wow, that’s pret­ty dif­fer­ent than my expe­ri­ence. But now when I com­pare to my child­hood expe­ri­ence and my kids’ child­hood expe­ri­ence, it’s as if we are 10 gen­er­a­tions apart. They look at me, I’ve got three heads, and they’re just like, so when you want­ed to know some­thing, you had to find it in a book. Just brains all over the bed­room. I mean that is unbe­liev­ably for­eign, for one that you’d have to find it in a book for two that you would­n’t know the answer to some­thing is mind blow­ing when­ev­er I’m like, oh, I can’t remem­ber the name of that movie, or that actor or that what­ev­er. They’re just like, look it up. Yeah. I’m like, oh, act. And some­times I’ll actu­al­ly resist. I’m like, actu­al­ly, no, I want to see if I can remem­ber. I don’t want the answer imme­di­ate­ly because I’m the dig­i­tal ana­log or the what­ev­er it’s called, native ana­log. Sor­ry. And I resist it. It’s too easy. But some of the things we talk about with them, like, not hav­ing cell phones. Well, if you’re in a car on a long dri­ve, how would mama would you call you? Or how would grand­ma call? Yeah. Or how what­ev­er. We would­n’t talk.

Jason Mur­ray (09:38):

Just call when you get there.

Jor­dan Peace (09:39):

Yeah. If we had to, we’d stop some­where. And inside of build­ings, there would be phones, like a gas sta­tion. I mean, if you were des­per­ate, you’d knock on some­one’s door and you’d ask them to use their phone and you’d go into a stranger’s home to use a Yeah, actu­al­ly peo­ple would.

Jason Mur­ray (09:55):

And the phone was attached to the wall.

Jor­dan Peace (09:57):

It was attached to the wall, and it had a cord and all this stuff. And then they’re just mind blown, mind blown by this stuff. Yeah. I did­n’t feel near­ly as, it was­n’t so out­ra­geous when my par­ents described their child­hood to me, there was some dif­fer­ences, cer­tain­ly, but now it’s just insane. In one generation.

Jason Mur­ray (10:18):

There’s fun­ny ways it’s changed even the way rela­tion­ships take place. I remem­ber in high school, for exam­ple, weren’t, cell phones weren’t com­mon­place. And so if you had to crush on some­body, you real­ly had to work to track ​‘em down. You could­n’t text ​‘em or call ​‘em.

Jor­dan Peace (10:35):

Had to stalk ​‘em in the hall­way, had to fig­ure out their class sched­ule to know which hall they I going to walked out and bump into him accidentally.

Jason Mur­ray (10:45):

Mor­gan, who’s my wife, the audi­ence would­n’t know that our first date she ini­ti­at­ed but she had to work real­ly hard to find me because it was over a win­ter break. And there’d been a big snow storm, and I was out shov­el­ing dri­ve­ways. I was out hus­tling, mak­ing that mon­ey, mak­ing that money

Jor­dan Peace (11:02): Start­ed early.

Jason Mur­ray (11:03):

Of course, she’s calls the house to see if I’m there and my mom tells her, I’m out play­ing in the snow.

Right. Play­ing. Thanks mom. Thanks mom. Appre­ci­ate that. Appre­ci­ate it. Yeah.

Jor­dan Peace (11:12): Yeah. Well said. Yeah

Jason Mur­ray (11:15):

No, yeah. Well, and I think what you bring up about the expe­ri­ence with your kids, and I res­onate with that a lot too, hav­ing kids as well, is that these phones, screens, tech­nol­o­gy, they’ve real­ly become the pri­ma­ry mode of inter­act­ing with the world from the very begin­ning. I mean, for our young, they know how to work the screens, like, oh yeah, intuitively.

Jor­dan Peace (11:40):

And my sev­en year old, he has a mes­sen­ger kids account, and he texts me, I mean, I don’t know, con­sid­ered a text, but a direct mes­sage or what­ev­er. And he texts grand­ma and my dad and dif­fer­ent peo­ple, his uncle, and they’re like, oh yeah, I was tex­ting with Uncle Jason, the oth­er dif­fer­ent Jason the oth­er day. And I’m just like, you what? <laugh> Right. It’s wild. But they know so much at such a young age that they teach me things about my phone. And I’m not old. Like I, I’ve been using a smart­phone since smart­phone start­ed to exist.

Jason Mur­ray (12:18):

They just sit around and play with them and fig­ure that stuff out.

Jor­dan Peace (12:21):

They got it down. Yeah, it’s wild.

Jason Mur­ray (12:22):

So Christo­pher Lock­head, when he talks about this con­cept, tells a sto­ry about going to a beach with some friends, and they took their kids with them and they went to this beach to watch the sun­set. And it was real­ly this per­fect micro­cosm of how dif­fer­ent that ana­log and dig­i­tal expe­ri­ence was because he sat on the beach with his friends and they just talked and they watched the sun­set and they remarked on how beau­ti­ful it was. And they just enjoyed the expe­ri­ence being togeth­er phys­i­cal­ly. And when he looked over at their kids, his kids were sit­ting on the beach with their phones up record­ing the sun­set and Insta­gram­ming it and Tik­Tok it to their friends. And the first reac­tion usu­al­ly for native analogs is Put the phone down.

Jor­dan Peace (13:08): What’s wrong with you?

Jason Mur­ray (13:09):

Stop. Stop. Enjoy the expe­ri­ence. But what it miss­es is

Jor­dan Peace (13:13):

Be here, be present. That’s the mes­sage that we just, it wells up in us.

Jason Mur­ray (13:17):

Our, and to them, they actu­al­ly don’t under­stand that, right? Because to them, they’re actually

con­nect­ing with a real expe­ri­ence, shar­ing with friends.

Jor­dan Peace (13:25): With their friends

Jason Mur­ray (13:26):

Dig­i­tal­ly. Right. And actu­al­ly, I think it was real­ly fun­ny, a recent exam­ple is when LeBron James broke the scor­ing record, there’ve been some pic­tures where peo­ple com­ment on the back­drop of all the fans in the crowd with their phones up record­ing it, hun­dreds of phones. And 20 years ago, a sim­i­lar shot of Michael Jor­dan where peo­ple were just watch­ing the game. And I think it’s such a fas­ci­nat­ing dichoto­my of what’s tak­en place there. And it’s not that those fans aren’t engaged in the expe­ri­ence happening.

Jor­dan Peace (13:54): It’s super engaging.

Jason Mur­ray (13:54):

It’s just a dif­fer­ent way in which they’re expe­ri­enc­ing what’s tak­ing place in the real world. So real­ly fun­ny sto­ry to you that I saw recent­ly when I was scrolling through Insta­gram, try­ing to go to sleep one night there was a mom who was run­ning late, get­ting home from work, and she was try­ing to get ahold of her teenage daugh­ter. And she was try­ing to text her. She was try­ing to call her, could­n’t get a hold of her. And she real­ized, I know what she’s doing. She’s play­ing Roblox. So mom logs into Roblox, which for those who don’t know, it’s the whole kind of dig­i­tal world that you can go into. And it’s sort of open-end­ed and what­not. And she finds her daugh­ter imme­di­ate­ly in the game. And you can mes­sage peo­ple in the game and tells her daugh­ter, Hey, I need you to actu­al­ly get din­ner out of the freez­er so when I get home, it can be pre­pared and be ready quick­ly. And so I just thought this was a fun­ny way in which even com­mu­ni­ca­tions take place dif­fer­ent­ly for this new generation.

Jor­dan Peace (14:52):

Yeah, absolute­ly. I feel like in this we kind of in the mid­dle with mil­len­ni­als or our old soul mil­len­ni­als like us, it actu­al­ly goes down to the mode of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. So mm-hmm. Our friend and Chris is even a lit­tle bit old­er of a old soul mil­len­ni­al. That’s true. Even though he’s five days old­er than me, and I can’t get him on text, I can’t get him call­ing. I’ve got to email him. I, I’ll text him 12 times, ​“Hey, what are you doing tonight?” And I don’t get him. So I email him, what are you doing tonight? And I get some­thing in 30 sec­onds. He’s just a lit­tle bit more of that old soul.

Jason Mur­ray (15:28):

Does he have a land­line still?

Jor­dan Peace (15:30):

He prob­a­bly should. And a news­pa­per sub­scrip­tion. But it’s inter­est­ing, the pro­gres­sion, and it’s

hap­pened so fast. Well, incred­i­bly fast.

Jason Mur­ray (15:41):

Incred­i­bly fast. So over the last 20 years, and this was shock­ing to me, the first iPhone came out in, I think it was 2007

Jor­dan Peace (15:51): Sounds right?

Jason Mur­ray (15:52):

So I mean, lit­er­al­ly the iPhone has only exist­ed for what, 16, 16 years now? Bare­ly. Gosh. And so can you believe how much this lit­tle device has trans­formed the way in which we go about our dai­ly lives? Right. It’s incredible.

Jor­dan Peace (16:08):

We’re still call­ing it a phone, iron­i­cal­ly, even though it’s a com­put­er in our pock­et. That’s true. With a phone app on it. That’s good point. It real­ly makes no sense. But the dig­i­tal ana­log, the native analogs are still win­ning the ver­nac­u­lar there. That’s true. I

Jason Mur­ray (16:21):

Thinks it’s an oppor­tu­ni­ty, new cat­e­go­ry. So need­less to say, this trans­for­ma­tion is well under­way. It’s hap­pen­ing rapid­ly. I mean, some of the sta­tis­tics showed that in the next five to sev­en years, gen Z and mil­len­ni­als are going to be two thirds of the workforce.

Jor­dan Peace (16:41):

A third, five to sev­en, five to seven

Jason Mur­ray (16:43): Years. It’s about a third.

Jor­dan Peace (16:44): Now that is soon.

Jason Mur­ray (16:45):

So in the next five to sev­en years, I mean, it’s going to be a real­ly dra­mat­ic trans­for­ma­tion that takes place. And inter­est­ing stat, you already have a 62% chance today of report­ing to mil­len­ni­al boss. So already some of these dynam­ics are at play. But what I want us to do now is take a few top­ics that I think are rel­e­vant to our audi­ence, rel­e­vant to any­one who’s in HR or any­one who just leads peo­ple for that mat­ter to real­ly help think about how this fram­ing can maybe give us a dif­fer­ent lens on these issues. So the first one I want to take is the notion of return to work or maybe flex­i­bil­i­ty and work. And so I guess maybe you could give the audi­ence a lit­tle bit of a quick overview. Just like, Hey, what’s the con­ver­sa­tion around that kind of stuff out there

Jor­dan Peace (17:36):

In the world right now? Sure. I mean before we start­ed how peo­ple work, I was inter­view­ing a whole lot of peo­ple on the pre­vi­ous pod­cast and a lot of CEOs and also a lot of peo­ple lead­ers and just folks that were either mak­ing the deci­sion as to are we going to return to an office? Are we going to be vir­tu­al? Are we going to be hybrid? Are we going to be option­al, what­ev­er? And I mean, it’s pret­ty clear, I could pret­ty much assume based on the age of the per­son that I began to inter­view, what the answer was going to be or the age of their ceo, right? With some excep­tions. But on the whole, it was pret­ty clear that those that were the native ana­log guys were putting it, which I think is, I real­ly like that the native ana­log, native dig­i­tal, because it simplifies.

(18:28):

We’re talk­ing five gen­er­a­tions and you’re like head spin­ning, try­ing to keep up with the nuance of all five of these gen­er­a­tions. But I think it prob­a­bly is close enough to just say, Hey, let’s talk about two groups. Right? So I think that’s use­ful fram­ing. So I found a smat­ter­ing of every­thing real­ly. It was a cacoph­o­ny of answers, if you will, from we’re going to go back to work, and if you don’t like it, deal with it. We’re vir­tu­al for­ev­er. Then there was the tech com­pa­ny said, we’re vir­tu­al for­ev­er. Oh, six months lat­er, nev­er­mind. We’re going back to work <laugh>, right? Because some­body pan­icked and we’re pay­ing too

much for this dag one office. You’re going to use it.

Jason Mur­ray (19:11): Going to make use of it.

Jor­dan Peace (19:12):

You’re going to make use of it, what­ev­er. But the con­ver­sa­tion’s been all over

Jason Mur­ray (19:15):

This. That’s such an ana­log thing to say too, which is fun­ny. Cause I can pic­ture my par­ents even in my

head that are like, I paid for this. You bet­ter make good use of it. Yes,

Jor­dan Peace (19:24):

I can remem­ber that con­ver­sa­tion on many top­ics and now I’m the one say­ing stuff like that,

Jason Mur­ray (19:29): Right? Analog.

Jor­dan Peace (19:30):

But the con­ver­sa­tion’s been all over the place, but it’s so clear where it’s going to fin­ish. And what you just said about the five to sev­en years before mil­len­ni­als and Gen Zs are two thirds of the work­force. Do peo­ple real­ly think peo­ple are going to come into an office in five to sev­en years? I mean, even now you’re los­ing peo­ple by just say­ing, Hey, we’re return­ing to work. If I can find a sim­i­lar job, sim­i­lar pay even, maybe a lit­tle bit less pay, and you’re not demand­ing that of me. Yeah. Bye. Yeah. It’s just not going to work.

Jason Mur­ray (20:03):

So let me ask you some­thing. Yeah. Cause this will tie in. If I were to tell you that I had a face-to-face

meet­ing with some­body, how would you assume that meet­ing took place

Jor­dan Peace (20:13):

At a cof­fee shop or in an office of some kind?

Jason Mur­ray (20:17): Typ­i­cal native analog?

Jor­dan Peace (20:19):

Is that the wrong answer?

Jason Mur­ray (20:21):

No, no, no, no. So it’s actu­al­ly a real­ly inter­est­ing thing that even puts focus on the fact that when we say the same words,

Jor­dan Peace (20:32):

The same phrase

Jason Mur­ray (20:33):

We don’t actu­al­ly mean the same thing. So true in lis­ten­ing to some pod­casts and talk­ing to some Gen Zers, when they talk about hav­ing a face-to-face meet­ing, they just assume mean, I had a zoom meet­ing where I saw, or I had a Face­Time with the per­son where we were face-to-face in saw their face in no way implied that it was an in-per­son phys­i­cal meet­ing. And so even that in and of itself kind of shines a light on this whole return to work paradigm.

Jor­dan Peace (21:04):

I remem­ber there’s this nuance I picked up on right after I should­n’t say after covid, but after the scari­est of the time through­out and so forth, and before any­body was com­ing back togeth­er in per­son at all, I remem­ber when I would final­ly meet peo­ple and I would think of it as meet­ing them, and I would say, it’s nice to final­ly meet you. And I remem­ber get­ting a weird look enough times that I was like, oh, I need to adjust this phrase, great to meet you in per­son. Right? And I start­ed adding that on so that, because I just felt old. Say­ing, say­ing, oh, nice to final­ly meet you. And they’re been on 12 meet­ings, dude. Yes. But yeah, I’ve felt my age or my cat­e­go­ry in that nuanced way.

Jason Mur­ray (21:54):

Yeah. Well, so just to kind of bring it back to the top­ic here, this whole notion of return to work in an office and flex­i­bil­i­ty it, it’s so much less about pref­er­ence because I think that’s the assump­tion that peo­ple lead­ing com­pa­nies make is it’s just a mat­ter of pref­er­ence. And peo­ple can get over pref­er­ences just

Jor­dan Peace (22:14): Suck it up.

Jason Mur­ray (22:14):

It’s real­ly not. It’s actu­al­ly just a mat­ter of they have a fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent way of see­ing and expe­ri­enc­ing the world such that they can’t com­pre­hend why work has to be done in an office when a face-to-face meet­ing just as eas­i­ly takes place over Zoom or Face­Time as it does in the phys­i­cal pres­ence of oth­er peo­ple in a build­ing and so forth.

Jor­dan Peace (22:40):

We’ve talked before about this whole idea of the work­place needs to catch up to the mar­ket­place. In oth­er words, work needs to catch up to life, right? And so sim­i­lar­ly, if you’re a native dig­i­tal, your life looks like hav­ing Zoom calls FaceTimes

Jason Mur­ray (22:58): With fam­i­ly, friends!

Jor­dan Peace (22:59):

Send­ing friends Tik­Toks back and forth, and you’re like, what­ev­er the case may be, what­ev­er app you’re using, but you’re actu­al­ly going to see your peo­ple more on a screen than you are in per­son any­way. Even if they’re not spread all out of the coun­try, even if they’re three hous­es away, that’s how you’re going to inter­act more. Yeah. Any­way, so this idea that, but at work, I can’t do that. I have to go to some arbi­trary place in order to be phys­i­cal­ly togeth­er for sense, for some pur­pos­es. I don’t under­stand how is my work enhanced? How’s my rela­tion­ship enhanced? How are we a bet­ter com­pa­ny for that? I don’t, yeah. No, I mean, I’m not speak­ing for myself. I actu­al­ly do val­ue it to a degree. That’s hard to describe, but I total­ly can empathize with this idea that just I don’t get it.

Jason Mur­ray (23:53):

Well, and the fun­ny thing is, native dig­i­tals do val­ue it. (23:57):

And so they do appre­ci­ate the phys­i­cal pres­ence and prox­im­i­ty of oth­er peo­ple and hav­ing that kind of com­mu­ni­ty. But when it’s put into this con­text of you must be phys­i­cal­ly some­where, it’s forced to do work. It just does­n’t com­pute, it does­n’t make sense. Right? So anoth­er top­ic I think is an inter­est­ing one that this, I feel like prob­a­bly maybe goes beyond just native dig­i­tals, but it’s cer­tain­ly become more appar­ent as a result of this trans­for­ma­tion tak­ing place. And the expe­ri­ences are more impor­tant than stuff. And so I know you have some thoughts on this top­ic, thank in par­tic­u­lar. So would love to hear even just how you think about that concept.

Jor­dan Peace (24:40):

Yeah. I mean, gosh, that’s a big top­ic. How it relates to work and how it relates to life. I mean, I, I’d say if I had to sum­ma­rize it as quick­ly as I pos­si­bly could, I’d say that our gen­er­a­tion and I’d say Gen Zs prob­a­bly as well, typ­i­cal­ly being raised by Gen Xers, who I call baby Baby Boomers, they expe­ri­ence par­ents who, if they were able to accu­mu­late wealth, typ­i­cal­ly this big stereo­type here. But that’s what we’re doing. Typ­i­cal­ly, they use that wealth to accu­mu­late things, whether that was the big­ger house or the big­ger car,

Jason Mur­ray (25:22): They’re pro­vid­ing a bet­ter life.

Jor­dan Peace (25:23): And

Jason Mur­ray (25:23):

That’s which equat­ed to…

Jor­dan Peace (25:24):

They’re pro­vid­ing a bet­ter life. That is the way in which they felt like that pro­vi­sion was tak­ing place, or they were win­ning. They were, were get­ting ahead in life. And I think that our gen­er­a­tion and gen­er­a­tion behind us saw that as kind of emp­ty of just like, yeah, you got a great big house, but you did­n’t see the world. Yeah, you got this great sports car, but you don’t take it any­where or what­ev­er. And again, stereo­typ­ing, but there tends to be a very strong theme amongst mil­len­ni­als and Gen Zs. They’re just like, yeah, I mean, stuff’s cool. I’m not against stuff, but more so I want to make mem­o­ries and I want to record those mem­o­ries and I want to watch ​‘em back lat­er. I want to share ​‘em with my friends, and I want to see as many coun­tries as I can. And it’s just a total­ly dif­fer­ent men­tal­i­ty around the pur­pose of mon­ey and also kind of the pur­pose of time. I think our gen­er­a­tion, we were defined by this idea of the fear of miss­ing out. I think the gen­er­a­tion behind us is more so fear of miss­ing a bet­ter oppor­tu­ni­ty. So there’s always this watch­ful­ness for what is some­thing great that I could be a part of or go do or expe­ri­ence. And I don’t see that watch­ful­ness at all in the gen­er­a­tions that came before.

Jason Mur­ray (26:53):

Well, and I think that’s some­thing that this native dig­i­tals have right here. So I mean, the sta­tis­tics say 74% of Amer­i­cans val­ue expe­ri­ences over phys­i­cal prod­ucts. So that’s as of today, high num­ber broad­ly. But I think it’s also inter­est­ing because psy­chol­o­gists, through research and stud­ies that they’ve done, have actu­al­ly demon­strat­ed sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly that when human beings make pur­chas­ing deci­sions, that pur­chas­ing deci­sions of expe­ri­ences lit­er­al­ly pro­vide more sus­tained hap­pi­ness for peo­ple than things. And so just, I think it’s a very pos­i­tive shift gen­er­a­tional­ly, that is some­thing that is desired in that way. And I, I think that has impli­ca­tions as it comes to com­pa­nies and lead­ers of com­pa­nies. Because one of the phras­es, if I hear it one more time, I think I’m going to fall out of my seat, is how is this bet­ter than cash?

Jor­dan Peace (27:55): Oh,

Jason Mur­ray (27:56): <laugh>, right?

Jor­dan Peace (27:57): Yeah.

Jason Mur­ray (27:57): Yeah. A great. Or

Jor­dan Peace (27:59):

Maybe get out of your seat. Pick up your chair and break it over your legs. That’s

Jason Mur­ray (28:02):

Right. Yeah, I prob­a­bly would. Or break it over some­body else’s back maybe go WWE style. There’s a fun­ny Sein­feld clip, which maybe we’ll post that along with the pod­cast notes that high­lights it, I think real­ly beau­ti­ful­ly. But I mean even more than just expe­ri­ences over stuff. Did you know that vir­tu­al Guc­ci bags were a thing?

Jor­dan Peace (28:27): Virtual?

Jason Mur­ray (28:28): Yes.

Jor­dan Peace (28:29): Purs­es. Yeah, vir­tu­al purses.

Jason Mur­ray (28:31):

More of those are sold than actu­al Guc­ci bags kicked out.

Jor­dan Peace (28:35): For

Jason Mur­ray (28:35): What? That’s crazy.

Jor­dan Peace (28:37): What do you do with it?

Jason Mur­ray (28:37):

It’s just part, it’s kind of like your avatar, right? So that’s why I asked you about Ready Play­er One.

How much should they, cause I have no idea. I, we’d have to look at it

Jor­dan Peace (28:47):

If we con­tin­ue this dis­cus­sion. I must sound ancient because that did­n’t com­pute at

Jason Mur­ray (28:52):

All. Right? But as we’re say­ing, all of this has impli­ca­tions in very direct­ly, I think for the employ­ee expe­ri­ence. Oh, because

Jor­dan Peace (29:00): Goodness.

Jason Mur­ray (29:02):

What does pay look like? I mean, suf­fi­cient pay cer­tain­ly mat­ters, but we’ve heard for years now that employ­ees, espe­cial­ly younger employ­ees, val­ue cer­tain things more than addi­tion­al pay. And so that brings us to what kinds of things mat­ter most to peo­ple? What ben­e­fits mat­ter most to peo­ple? How do you think about rewards and recog­ni­tion? I not just crum­my gift cards to buy stuff, but mean­ing­ful expe­ri­ences I think is much more going to lend itself to what this gen­er­a­tion desires. It’s upcoming.

Jor­dan Peace (29:35):

Yeah. I mean, I’ll nev­er for­get, our friend at Cap­i­tal One is a pret­ty high lev­el employ­ee in her, I don’t know, it was 20, 25 year anniver­sary or some­thing. And her choice was like, you can have this kitchen appli­ance or just knock­off Rolex. And she was so offend­ed by this. I mean, it had such a neg­a­tive impact. It would’ve been ver­ba­tim. I remem­ber her say­ing it would’ve been far bet­ter to give me noth­ing than to give me options of just stuff that isn’t that mean­ing­ful. It is. It’s not per­son­al­ized to me at all. It’s just some­thing why even both­er? So I love that stat around 74% of it pre­fer­ring expe­ri­ences, because that’s not point­ing to nec­es­sar­i­ly one gen­er­a­tion or two gen­er­a­tions. I mean that, that’s pret­ty wide­spread. So I think it has a huge impact. And I think that we mis­take the idea of, well, I have a pro­gram. I rolled some­thing out. And that in and of itself is always good. I think there’s so many times we do more harm than good by just rolling out some­thing to check a box. That is a big mis­take. And I think with five gen­er­a­tions, or even with two sort of native groups, if you want to look at it that way, you got to have a lot of inten­tion to help me put a lot of thought into how you approach com­pen­sa­tion ben­e­fits, where peo­ple work, when they work, what their sched­ules look like, et cetera. You can’t just sort of throw things at the wall and see what sticks.

Jason Mur­ray (31:12):

So the last top­ic I want to hit on, and then we can maybe wrap up with a few ideas around what can com­pa­nies be doing with this fram­ing here is around work expe­ri­ence. And so this is the notion of how native dig­i­tals think about the neces­si­ty of cer­tain kinds of train­ing in rela­tion to their work expe­ri­ence. So for exam­ple, col­lege degrees. So we were talk­ing about this just before the pod­cast here, but that 51% of Gen Z does­n’t care about get­ting a col­lege degree, that they’re more inter­est­ed in skills based edu­ca­tion train­ing on the job. Think a good anal­o­gy is they see work more climb­ing on a jun­gle gym than climb­ing a rope or a lad­der, for exam­ple. So I mean, it’d be inter­est­ing just to com­ment on that for a moment because it’s such a dif­fer­ent change even from what we expe­ri­enced not that long ago.

Jor­dan Peace (32:07):

Yeah. I, geez. I think by the time I was even in mid­dle school, there was con­ver­sa­tions begin­ning about not, are you going to go to col­lege? Where do you want to go to? What are you going to study in col­lege? There was an assump­tion that unless we were in a sit­u­a­tion where we sim­ply could not afford col­lege, which real­ly, there’s tons of pro­grams out there to help with that. But even still, that was the only way. It was­n’t going to hap­pen if our fam­i­ly was in dire need and you need to go out and work now, or we just did­n’t have the resources or some­thing. That was the only pos­si­ble way that I was not going to go to col­lege. And that was­n’t my fam­i­ly, that was every­body I knew. It was just like, that’s what you did next. Because if you did not do that, the assump­tion was your oppor­tu­ni­ties are severe­ly lim­it­ed. Right. Which did­n’t actu­al­ly turn out to be true press. I appre­ci­ate my col­lege edu­ca­tion. I appre­ci­ate even more of the time I spent there, but I could have done lit­er­al­ly every­thing I’ve done from the age of 22 to now with­out that degree. Same. It did noth­ing to help me get here. Not what I learned in class. Maybe what I learned about doing my own laun­dry. You know, what I learned about clean­ing my house or the life skills. I could have learned that on a job liv­ing in an

Jason Mur­ray (33:34):

Apart­ment. Well, native dig­i­tals are wise up to it because they’re say­ing, well, why is pay a hun­dred grand or more for this in order to get a degree that, as you said, has served you none in the things that you’ve done over the past decade or more.

Jor­dan Peace (33:51):

Yeah. I mean, I even think about, and not to always take things back to kids, but I got five of ​‘em. I think about it all the time. I’m not even sav­ing towards col­lege for them. I’m just sav­ing in accounts for each one. Just sort of gener­ic advi­so­ry accounts that are tax­able that could be used for any­thing. Cause I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m going to seed their busi­ness, start busi­ness, I’m going to, they’re going to go to trade school, or they’re going to come work for me or

Jason Mur­ray (34:17):

Be able to buy a house. Even

Jor­dan Peace (34:18): A

Jason Mur­ray (34:19):

House native dig­i­tals can’t do these days.

Jor­dan Peace (34:21):

Right? Yeah. I have no idea. And I just stopped assum­ing a lit­tle while ago that col­lege was the route and has, it’s no com­ment on them as indi­vid­u­als and their capa­bil­i­ties or even their personalities.

Jason Mur­ray (34:33):

Well, I think it’s a com­ment on the neces­si­ty of it to actu­al­ly move for­ward in the world. So I mean that’s,

Jor­dan Peace (34:39):

Well, col­lege col­leges kind of priced them­selves out too. I mean, that’s anoth­er piece puz­zle there.

Jason Mur­ray (34:43):

But I think com­pa­nies aren’t adapt­ing quick­ly to that real­i­ty. So yeah, I mean, the fact of the mat­ter is you’re going to have more and more young employ­ees com­ing in with no pedi­gree, let’s say, as it relates to col­lege education

Jor­dan Peace (34:57): In that way.

Jason Mur­ray (34:58):

But I think still high­ly valu­able employ­ees who are going to be look­ing to com­pa­nies say­ing, Hey, how are you going to train me? How are you going to devel­op me? Are there appren­tice­ship? Are there ways that you can teach me on the job, the real­ly prac­ti­cal skills that I need to actu­al­ly be suc­cess­ful in the world ver­sus the,

Jor­dan Peace (35:14):

Because iron­i­cal­ly kind of old school,

Jason Mur­ray (35:16): Yeah, it is

Jor­dan Peace (35:18):

Going back in time, but in a kind of fresh

Jason Mur­ray (35:20):

But new way. Cause desire,

Jor­dan Peace (35:21):

The oppor­tu­ni­ties are dif­fer­ent, right?

Jason Mur­ray (35:23): Yeah, very much. Yeah.

Jor­dan Peace (35:25):

Well think about too, I mean, think about when we did finan­cial plan­ning. I remem­ber we had clients that were 18 years old that were, had such Insta­gram fol­low­ings that they were mak­ing far more mon­ey than you and I prob­a­bly ever will at 18. It was just like, what? That was not a thing, right?

Jason Mur­ray (35:43):

That was not a thing. Good gen­er­a­tion. Well, even on the oppo­site end of that, there’s a guy that who also start­ed work­ing when he was 18, right out of school at the nuclear plant. So like a skilled trade. But by his mid twen­ties he was mak­ing $150,000. Right? I mean, so it there’s oppor­tu­ni­ty out there that does­n’t require that same kind of path that I think was instilled in us in that way. Yeah, absolute­ly. Well, let’s wrap up just talk­ing a lit­tle bit about what can com­pa­nies do, how do we take this fram­ing, maybe apply it to some of the ways that we go about build­ing com­pa­nies, lead­ing peo­ple, and so forth. And so I would love to hear from you some things that come to mind. I mean,

Jor­dan Peace (36:20):

What I hear, just lis­ten­ing to our­selves in this con­ver­sa­tion and think­ing about try­ing to lead a com­pa­ny our­selves. I think we just need to be flex­i­ble. We need to be real­ly open-mind­ed. We just need to not think about things like pedi­gree in the same way. We need to not think about where peo­ple work and how they work in the same way. And we need to under­stand that peo­ple need dif­fer­ent things. And the only way to pro­vide such a diverse group of peo­ple and oppor­tu­ni­ty to be suc­cess­ful in the way that they need to be suc­cess­ful is to be incred­i­bly flex­i­ble. You can’t say, well, we are all going to return to this office all the time. We can’t. And I would argue you can’t also say we’re all going to be remote only. And there’s nev­er an oppor­tu­ni­ty. There’s nev­er an oppor­tu­ni­ty for you guys to get togeth­er and get around a whiteboard.

Jason Mur­ray (37:13):

That’s what’s designed and solve

Jor­dan Peace (37:14):

Some prob­lems. Exact­ly. Nobody, I would argue prob­a­bly nobody or most peo­ple don’t want zero oppor­tu­ni­ty for that, right? They just want the flex­i­bil­i­ty. And that’s chal­leng­ing. And to some degree, it could be expen­sive even. But I think about how we run our com­pa­ny. We think about, okay, well we don’t pro­vide an office space for every sin­gle per­son, but we almost account for it as if we do. Right? What would it cost to pro­vide a desk for every sin­gle per­son? And then how could we use those funds dif­fer­ent­ly because we don’t pro­vide a desk for every sin­gle per­son to serve peo­ple to serve the need of get­ting togeth­er occa­sion­al­ly for that team build­ing and that fig­ur­ing prob­lem solv­ing and doing some of those things togeth­er and break­ing bread and what­ev­er. And I think that’s the type of think­ing that’s need­ed. It’s just like, okay, it’s what­ev­er we’ve done in the past.

(38:10):

Let’s take the lessons that can apply and let’s use those and let’s let the oth­er ones kind of fall by the way­side that just don’t apply any­more. And that kind of stub­born atti­tude of just like, I’ve been here, I’ve done that. I know how things work. Sor­ry, the world’s chang­ing too fast. To think that what we learned 10 years ago is still rel­e­vant. Yeah, no. So I, I’d say above all, and in the inter­est of time, I’d just say be flex­i­ble. Be open-mind­ed and under­stand that your employ­ees are very, very dif­fer­ent than one anoth­er. And poten­tial­ly the group as a whole is very dif­fer­ent than who­ev­er you were lead­ing 10 years ago or 20 years ago if you’ve been doing it that long. Yeah.

Jason Mur­ray (38:51):

Yeah. I mean there’s say, you might even call it an arro­gance of every pre­ced­ing gen­er­a­tion that total­ly assumes that, hey, just the way things are is the best way. Right? And there’s a resis­tance. And so what I’m hear­ing you say is being will­ing to move through this trans­for­ma­tion that’s tak­ing place, being flex­i­ble, being adapt­able, and not just fight­ing it is

Jor­dan Peace (39:17):

A huge part of it. Yeah. I think you got to know what your absolutes are, and you got to know what kind of your rel­a­tive truths are, right? There are some things that have car­ried through all gen­er­a­tions and will car­ry through all gen­er­a­tions things. Just like being hum­ble and kind to your peo­ple and lis­ten­ing to them, right? Whether you’re lis­ten­ing over zoom or in per­son over cof­fee, kind of a uni­ver­sal absolute, right? But then there’s a whole lot of things that I think we as lead­ers, espe­cial­ly the old­er we are, we want to hold onto them and be like, no, no, no. This is how busi­ness is. And it’s no, that actu­al­ly belongs in the cat­e­go­ry of things that you need to be open-mind­ed and open-hand­ed about. Yeah. And I think that’s the dif­fer­ence between great lead­er­ship and kind of aver­age lead­er­ship going into the next 10, 15 years.

Jason Mur­ray (40:02):

Well, I think that’s a great place to wrap up this con­ver­sa­tion. And I hate to break it to you, but you failed to use the word of the day. I did not. From the last conversation.

Jor­dan Peace (40:12):

Cacoph­o­ny. I said, you missed it

Jason Mur­ray (40:15): I total­ly missed it.

Jor­dan Peace (40:17): That was smooth. I’m a smooth oper­a­tor today.

Jason Mur­ray (40:19): Yes you are. Yeah. I was

Jor­dan Peace (40:21): Talk­ing about inter­view­ing CEOs and get­ting a cacoph­o­ny of answers.

Jason Mur­ray (40:24): I was get­ting excit­ed, which is kind of

Jor­dan Peace (40:25):

Not using it cor­rect­ly, but it was close.

Jason Mur­ray (40:28):

Yeah. My active lis­ten­ing was just, sore­ly lack­ing there

Jor­dan Peace (40:33):

You’re for­giv­en. What’s my word? Next week? Well, I

Jason Mur­ray (40:35):

Got excit­ed because I thought we could keep score and I get a point if you for­get to use it and then you get a point when you do use it, you’re

Jor­dan Peace (40:40):

Going to get crushed If we did that. I am crushed. Don’t think

Jason Mur­ray (40:43):

<laugh> prob­a­bly true. Well, the word of the day for the next episode will be anachronism.

Jor­dan Peace (40:50):

Good. Gosh, these are not get­ting used here. <laugh>, I’ll be googling that in about five minutes.

Jason Mur­ray (40:57):

So Well, thank you every­one for join­ing us on this episode, and we’ll see you next time.

Jor­dan Peace (41:02): Yep. Bye-Bye.

‍

Employ­ers and peo­ple lead­ers across indus­tries are fac­ing the same chal­lenge at work.

How do you lead a diverse work­force well?

For the first time in his­to­ry, there are five dif­fer­ent gen­er­a­tions in the work­place — Silent, Boomer, Gen X, Mil­len­ni­al, and Gen Z. And each gen­er­a­tion has a fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence of the world, lead­ing to com­pet­ing expec­ta­tions of the employer.

How can lead­ers demon­strate care and respect for all of their employ­ees when they expe­ri­ence the same work envi­ron­ment dif­fer­ent­ly?

In this episode of How Peo­ple Work, Jor­dan and Jason dis­cuss how lead­ers can meet the com­pet­ing needs of today’s employ­ees with­out neglect­ing any one group. They’ll answer ques­tions like:

• How do our employ­ees want to be recognized?
• What incen­tives will moti­vate each generation?
• How do employ­ees define well­be­ing and why does that matter?

Now avail­able on: YouTube | Apple Pod­casts | Spo­ti­fy

Key ideas and highlights

• Cur­rent­ly, Mil­len­ni­als and Gen Z make up 35% and 7% of the workforce
• By 2030, Mil­len­ni­als and Gen Z will make up over two-thirds of the workforce
• Rewards and recog­ni­tion pro­grams need to be tai­lored to the dif­fer­ent expec­ta­tions of each generation
• Show­ing appre­ci­a­tion to a Mil­len­ni­al in the same you would you show appre­ci­a­tion to a Boomer is like­ly to offend rather than inspire that employee
• The expe­ri­ence of the world is fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent for each generation.
• Employ­ers who aren’t aware of these dif­fer­ences will strug­gle to acquire and retain top talent.

“Com­pa­nies are gross­ly unpre­pared to han­dle the gen­er­a­tional shifts about to take place over the next 5 years. The expe­ri­ence of the world is fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent for each generation.”

— Jason Murray

Word of the day

• Ame­lio­rate — said @ 33:43 ✅

Timestamps

• 0:00 Intro
• 1:18 What are the five gen­er­a­tions in the workforce?
• 3:06 What the work­force will look like by 2030
• 3:56 The rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent expec­ta­tions each gen­er­a­tion has for their employer
• 5:10 Why many recog­ni­tion pro­grams do more harm than good
• 7:16 What each gen­er­a­tion has in com­mon at work
• 17:18 How to lead all 5 gen­er­a­tions well
• 22:50 What hap­pens when you view work as the enemy
• 24:18 Why ​“work-life bal­ance” is a ridicu­lous false dichotomy
• 26:30 What we stand to gain if we think of work as play
• 27:30 What work, camp­ing, and sports have in common
• 29:05 What lan­guage trips up lead­ers and silences employees?
• 33:28 How lead­ing out of fear vs. trust will inform your tal­ent strategy

Transcript

Jason Mur­ray 0:00

Well, wel­come back to the how peo­ple work Pod­cast. I’m Jason Mur­ray, I’m here with my co host and co founder of fringe Jor­dan Peace. Hey there. And on this pod­cast, we talk about the inter­sec­tion of how humans work as indi­vid­u­als and how they apply them­selves to work. And hope­ful­ly that helps us to be more insight­ful, com­pas­sion­ate, com­pelling lead­ers of peo­ple and com­pa­ny builders.

And so today, we’re con­tin­u­ing some of the themes that came out of our first episode, where we talked a lit­tle bit about our gen­e­sis sto­ry, around what is Fringe, how we got start­ed, a lit­tle bit of our back­sto­ry, and even why we’re pas­sion­ate about some of these top­ics. And so I think the the sort of over­ar­ch­ing premise, if you will, that might be help­ful for peo­ple to under­stand, that I think will be com­mon, but we want to dig into this in a lit­tle bit more detail is just how are the var­i­ous gen­er­a­tions out there in the work­force, impact­ing the way that work is get­ting done impact­ing the way that gen­er­a­tions are inter­act­ing with their employ­ers? And what does that rela­tion­ship look like? And I use that word rela­tion­ship very inten­tion­al­ly here —so pop quiz, sur­prise, to start us off.

Jor­dan Peace 1:20

Thank you for that. Appre­ci­ate it.

Jason Mur­ray 1:22

Can you name the gen­er­a­tions that are in the work­force today?

Jor­dan Peace 1:26

I think so. We got the Baby Boomers. The Gen Xers. Which I refer to as the baby boomer car­bon copies. Which is prob­a­bly not fair. Then Gen Y or mil­len­ni­al? Yeah, two names for our gen­er­a­tion. And then the Gen z’s. Okay, I miss some­body. That’s four of them.

Jason Mur­ray 1:52

You got some strag­glers in the Silent Gen­er­a­tion. Bless their hearts if they’re still working.

Jor­dan Peace 2:01

Yeah, I did­n’t. I nev­er thought about that.

Jason Mur­ray 2:05

But there are some that are still out there in the workforce.

Jor­dan Peace 2:10

I just saw a sto­ry today about a great grand­moth­er got her mas­ter’s degree at 87 years old. I’m like, Yeah, that’s awesome.

Jason Mur­ray 2:18

Appar­ent­ly, they’re so silent. You for­got about appar­ent­ly. So we got the gen­er­a­tions here. That’s prob­a­bly com­mon knowl­edge to most of us, who­ev­er that last one may be. It’s not com­mon to me. One of the things I think would be real­ly inter­est­ing, though, is to talk about, you know, espe­cial­ly in the work­place, is: How are we start­ing to expe­ri­ence some of the dif­fer­ent expec­ta­tions of these gen­er­a­tions who are com­ing into the work­force? And in par­tic­u­lar, what are the expec­ta­tions of mil­len­ni­als and Gen Z?

Mil­len­ni­als already make up 35% of the work­force, and Gen Z cur­rent­ly stands at about 7% to 10%. What I think is actu­al­ly stag­ger­ing is by 2025, over 30% of the work­force is esti­mat­ed to be Gen Z. And so we’re about to see a mas­sive change in the num­ber of employ­ees rep­re­sent­ed in the work­force by Gen Z. And so what that means then is s of the work­force by 2030 is going to be mil­len­ni­als and Gen Z. And so I think it’s of espe­cial impor­tance to talk about what’s going on with those gen­er­a­tions. So just as you’ve been in the busi­ness, and I’ve been work­ing in this space, what are some of the things that you’ve noticed along the way around expec­ta­tions of these dif­fer­ent generations?

Jor­dan Peace 4:03

Yeah, I think one of the things that stood out to me the more we we not only observe but also research and even write about this and pod­cast about this an inter­view oth­er folks about this, I remem­ber I inter­viewed a cul­tur­al anthro­pol­o­gist, one time, it was a fas­ci­nat­ing inter­view and learned a lot from that con­ver­sa­tion. But what you find is that human beings across gen­er­a­tions, much of what they want, at their core, is the same. The way they want that com­mu­ni­cat­ed or deliv­ered or who they want that mes­sage from changes dra­mat­i­cal­ly across gen­er­a­tions, right.

And then some­times there’s things that just com­plete­ly pop up for a new gen­er­a­tion. They have new needs, new desires that just most­ly because of tech­nol­o­gy advances in the world that either that oppor­tu­ni­ty or that thing just was­n’t vail­able in the past, but is as an exam­ple of some­thing that is com­mon­place, right? Every­body wants to feel seen and heard, every­body wants to feel appre­ci­at­ed at work, right? That appre­ci­a­tion in, let’s say the work­place 30 years ago, prob­a­bly would have come to the form of some­thing trans­ac­tion­al, when it comes to the form of a phys­i­cal award, prob­a­bly a plaque, some­thing that was actu­al­ly in and of itself expen­sive and heavy, right? A thing that said, This per­son is valu­able, they achieved some­thing, they bet­tered their peers, they’re the best of, of what­ev­er they are. And then of course, through income, right through a through a bonus or pro­mo­tion, which is still com­mon­place to this day.

If you were to give a plaque to a mil­len­ni­al, right, they would imme­di­ate­ly drop it in the trash can, right on their way out the door, like how they would actu­al­ly be offend­ed. Like, how dare you think that all this work I put in to sep­a­rate myself and to do some­thing great, and to con­tribute to the com­pa­ny. And you thought I want­ed a piece of met­al with some­thing engraved on it? I mean, the thought the thought­ful­ness is still there, the idea of just try­ing to say, hey, we see you, you’ve done a great job. But the per­spec­tive has come in, that’s just a, it’s just the lan­guage that you’re speak­ing, the heart of the mat­ter is, I want to feel appre­ci­at­ed, right? In both gen­er­a­tions. So it’s just real­ly inter­est­ing that like, some­times the, you know, at the very core, it’s noth­ing’s real­ly changed all that much. But if I say it in the wrong lan­guage, you actu­al­ly offend more than you do good. Show what you want to show. Yeah, so just just as a high­light, but I think that’s a lot of what I’ve learned is, when you get into con­ver­sa­tions with peo­ple in our par­ents’ gen­er­a­tions, you ask them about their expe­ri­ence at work, their expe­ri­ence is very dif­fer­ent. But if you dig into what they want­ed to expe­ri­ence, what the words are that they want­ed to hear from their boss, what they wish it would have been like, or the things that were great about their work with. A lot of that stuff turned out to be like, oh, yeah, I feel the same way. Yeah, yeah. No, like, I total­ly see that.

Jason Mur­ray 7:14

Right, well, I think that’s a real­ly impor­tant dis­tinc­tion there because I think it speaks to things that I think we believe to be true, which is that humans are, have intrin­sic val­ue to them. Humans have intrin­sic needs that are, you know, true about just who we are as peo­ple, regard­less of gen­er­a­tion. And so there are things gen­er­a­tional­ly in our expe­ri­ence of just world events, and things of that nature that have shaped who we are and how we go about and kind of oper­ate in the world. But at the same time, yeah, like that desire for appre­ci­a­tion and, you know, respect and what­ev­er the case may be. But I think it’s, it’s inter­est­ing. And it might be help­ful, even if we just share some of our own expe­ri­ences of our par­ents maybe and what were there maybe are some real­ly notable dif­fer­ences is what their expec­ta­tion of their employ­er was, because I would say, with my par­ents, in par­tic­u­lar, while they may have desired to have those things, they nev­er expect­ed it from their employ­er. And so although they might have appre­ci­at­ed hav­ing, you know, more recog­ni­tion in that fash­ion from man­agers and super­vi­sors, I think, you know, for my par­ents, it was real­ly like, I go to work to pro­vide for my fam­i­ly. It’s very trans­ac­tion­al, because they give me a pay­check. And I give them labor. And that’s all I’m ask­ing for. Or that’s all I expect from them. And any­thing more than that is like, that’s great. It’s kind of icing on the cake. And I think what’s changed, at least in my own expe­ri­ence that I found was like, Well, I don’t want that. You know, and I think that’s what a lot of folks in our gen­er­a­tion, you know, as mil­len­ni­als have seen, and part of what’s kind of cre­at­ing that, you know, reac­tion that maybe we’re see­ing in the work­force now,

Jor­dan Peace 9:08

I think it comes down to how peo­ple are raised. If you’re raised by folks that are com­ing out of, you know, the Depres­sion era, the expeca­tion is to just store away every­thing you have, be grate­ful for what lit­tle you do have if you have a job, hold on to that thing with all your mind, do what­ev­er you’re ask­ing. And then they raise the baby boomers, they raised this gen­er­a­tion of peo­ple, and they tell them about how hard things where they tell them about how for­tu­nate they are to have the oppo rtu­ni­ties that they have. And I think it just cre­ates a sit­u­a­tion where the mes­sage is: Go to work. Keep your head down, keep your mouth shut, do what you’re told, right? And don’t have a lot of needs, right? I mean, that was the oth­er thing. It’s like, just the emo­tion­al avail­abil­i­ty of par­ents then ver­sus, like, what we expe­ri­enced prob­a­bly being raised and what our chil­dren are expe­ri­enced being raised. Like, and again, speak­ing in gen­er­al­i­ties, but that’s what we’re doing in this point in this episode, right? We are just going to be much more emo­tion­al­ly avail­able. And so what is the mes­sage that my par­ents were very emo­tion­al­ly avail­able to me grow­ing up, and so the mes­sage that taught me was, I’m allowed to have needs, I’m allowed to want things I’m allowed to be upset, I’m allowed to not feel like the rela­tion­ship’s okay, and want to kind of restore that, what­ev­er. But if you’re not grow­ing up in a sit­u­a­tion where that’s being pro­mot­ed, you’re not gonna go to work and expect some per­son that’s not even your fam­i­ly, to sit down with you and go, ​“You seem to real­ly hav­ing a real­ly hard day, what can we do to help you?” You expect to hear, ​“Shut up and do your job”. Right. So it’s, it’s, it’s not so much only the work­place, the work­place is kind of an out­pour­ing of I think, what hap­pens in the home. And that, and that’s what’s been passed down to the, through the gen­er­a­tions is that there’s just more emo­tion­al avail­abil­i­ty, more of a rela­tion­al aspect, between par­ent and child that is more around feel­ings, right? And so there­fore, when you go to work, and you have this rela­tion­ships, it’s not meant to be parental, but you do hear peo­ple bor­row that lan­guage, when they talk about the work­place, and they talk about, then they should­n’t, but they talk about employ­ees as kids, right, you hear that all the time. And and I think the rea­son why that lan­guage is being bor­rowed is because peo­ple drag that in to the work­place and it affects their expec­ta­tions of who their employ­er is and who they’re going to be.

Jason Mur­ray 12:02

Well, I think it’s real­ly impor­tant that we not just gloss over the fact that there are these gen­er­a­tions, and there are these dif­fer­ences, too, because I think the the time in his­to­ry that we’re liv­ing in right now is one of the most unique that we’ve ever seen. So there’s nev­er been a time in human his­to­ry where there’s been lit­er­al­ly five gen­er­a­tions of human beings that may be work­ing togeth­er in the same place. That’s nev­er hap­pened before. And then lay­er on top of that, the fact that we’re liv­ing lit­er­al­ly in the fastest tech­no­log­i­cal trans­for­ma­tion that’s ever hap­pened in human his­to­ry over the last 20 years. So we’ve got both of these things going on at the same time. It’s real­ly hard to over­state how impact­ful that is to what peo­ple expect from work, how they think work should hap­pen, what com­pa­nies are try­ing to do. And so, you know, this isn’t like, you know, hey, let’s just kind of like make this gen­er­a­tion hap­py and move on. I think it’s actu­al­ly we real­ly have to fun­da­men­tal­ly look at how are com­pa­nies designed to enable peo­ple to work in a good way. And that’s some­thing we talked about in the last episode is this notion that work is good. Like, we think it’s a good thing for peo­ple to have that. And so it means that we real­ly have to rethink how com­pa­nies are designed to enable peo­ple to work effectively.

Jor­dan Peace 13:27

Yeah, no, we real­ly do. I mean, your point about tech­nol­o­gy, it actu­al­ly just made me think about some­body sent me on YouTube was like the first TV com­mer­cial ever for Microsoft Excel. I don’t know if you’ve seen that. It’s hilar­i­ous that the TV com­mer­cial is show­ing this per­son that has built a spread­sheet, and they drag a group of cells over to the right, and the for­mu­la gets applied into the future. And they’re like in an ele­va­tor, and every­one is just like — brains out the back of their skull! Like, what just hap­pened? It just makes me think like, that was­n’t that long ago, right. And if you had to build a spread­sheet, you were going to be work­ing on that thing for weeks. Right, you know, like just on this one thing for this one meet­ing to give that one report if you weren’t doing it on paper if you weren’t doing it on paper, right. And before that it was done on paper. And now, the tech­nol­o­gy is at a place where I would expect some­one to do that same work that took that per­son weeks, 30 years ago, to be able to get it done in a cou­ple of hours, and then go do anoth­er 40 tasks today. Right? And the tech­nol­o­gy allows it right. But as our brain chem­istry caught up to the fact that we can achieve that much in one day. And so it’s just inter­est­ing is we’re fight­ing against, not against but we’re fight­ing along­side tech­nol­o­gy’s chang­ing gen­er­a­tional expec­ta­tions, what a work­day should look like what you can accom­plish and it worked. A Right, right. And I think if I would have start­ed my career, which I did­n’t, but if I would have start­ed my career 30 years ago, and I’m still in that career now, I would feel like what, like, I’m expect­ed to do so much in one day, and I’m will­ing, because I’m of the gen­er­a­tion, I’m gonna do what­ev­er you tell me to do. I’m gonna hus­tle, I’m going to work hard, right? And but I’m play­ing catch up all the time. Where­as I think some­times, you know, if I could raise a crit­i­cism of our own gen­er­a­tion, we’ve become so effi­cient at doing things that some­times we can put in two or three hours of work, and we sit back and go, ​“I’ve accom­plished kind of a lot today”. I’m prob­a­bly good, right? Like, and you kind of see that reflect­ed in this ten­sion between like, you know, those of an old­er gen­er­a­tion, just like, you guys don’t even work.

Now in the younger gen­er­a­tions, like, actu­al­ly, we’re achiev­ing a whole lot, right? We’re just doing it more effi­cient­ly. And it’s, it’s prob­a­bly blow­ing your mind a lit­tle bit, but like, how do we learn from each oth­er in the right, you know, like, how do we not just go well, they’re old and wrong. And we’re young and right. Or if you’re sit­ting on the oth­er, and we’re kind of sit­ting in the mid­dle? You know, the two of us? Yeah, or go, ​“All those young lazy peo­ple, they don’t know how to put in an hon­est day’s work.” Right? And why don’t they do it? Like, nei­ther one is cor­rect, real­ly. And I think, you know, what’s sad to me about the work­place is it seems like it’s got­ten, it’s got­ten to a place where there’s not a lot of knowl­edge shar­ing, and I would even use the word like wis­dom shar­ing between the gen­er­a­tions. You know, it just I think there’s not a lot of respect giv­en to the knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence of those that have gone before. And there’s also not a lot of patience and under­stand­ing giv­en to the younger gen­er­a­tions of maybe you’re not actu­al­ly just worth­less and lazier.

I think you can’t ignore that ten­sion in this con­ver­sa­tion, because I think it’s one of the good rea­sons to talk about it, is to help open the con­ver­sa­tion of every gen­er­a­tion has some­thing to offer. And the oth­er side of the coin, of course, we’re going to get to is, if you’re an employ­er, you’ve got to think about how do I employ well, all five of these gen­er­a­tions? And how do I treat them real­ly well? How do I have prop­er expec­ta­tions for them?

Jason Mur­ray 17:31

That is just such a huge chal­lenge. I think that under­stand­ing between gen­er­a­tions is so impor­tant, because as we talked about that shift that’s hap­pen­ing over the next five years, I think com­pa­nies are just gross­ly unpre­pared for what’s hap­pen­ing. And some of that I think, is, you know, let’s say the arro­gance of maybe old­er mil­len­ni­als, like us that are kind of on the cusp of like Gen X. And then those old­er gen­er­a­tions that are frankly, the ones that are run­ning com­pa­nies, for the most part, yeah, that call the shots.

Those are the ones that, you know, tend to — even when they’re try­ing to be empa­thet­ic — lack the full under­stand­ing of how dif­fer­ent the expe­ri­ence of the world is for that new gen­er­a­tion. And so, I was think­ing it’d be fun to even think about, like, some of the exam­ples because for one, for instance, like cell­phones, you know, we’re like, we remem­ber a time in our lives. I’m 38, then that was not com­mon­place. Like, I got a cell phone my first year in col­lege, it was a flip phone, which I thought was pret­ty damn. The green back­lit screen. You know, and you had to like press like 999 but­tons to like, send one text mes­sage and so you just did­n’t send text mes­sages. It was too dif­fi­cult. That was kind of the real­i­ty ver­sus you know, when I look at what Gen Z is today, yeah, like my daugh­ter is in Gen Z. So Gen Z is any­one who’s ages 10 to 25 right now. And so her famil­iar­i­ty with like, a cell phone tex­ting, like how you inter­act with that tech­nol­o­gy is just so dif­fer­ent from what I experienced.

Jor­dan Peace 19:37

Yeah, yeah, def­i­nite­ly. And I think, you know, if you’re employ­ing peo­ple of these dif­fer­ent gen­er­a­tions, that’s where the seri­ous chal­lenge comes in. Because you have to have the wis­dom to under­stand what are the com­mon threads that span across, all gen­er­a­tions, right? If you don’t find those, you dri­ve your­self crazy, try­ing to con­tex­tu­al­ize every sin­gle thing you’re doing based on how old peo­ple are, what their expe­ri­ence has been, and so forth, right? You have to per­son­al­ize to some extent. But if you spend 100% of your time try­ing to per­son­al­ize mes­sages, you’ll just go insane. Like, you’ve got to find ways to com­mu­ni­cate, and you’ve got to find the heart of the mat­ter. And so, you know, I think one of the things, you know, we talked about appre­ci­a­tion, you know, but I think anoth­er thing is just peo­ple want, peo­ple want to under­stand how what they do, it does­n’t mat­ter if they’re 55 years old, or they’re 22 years old, they want to under­stand what how does what I do con­tribute to the greater cause of the com­pa­ny, right? That is not a new idea.

The new idea is that the caus­es, social and oth­er­wise, that a com­pa­ny stands for, ought to be aligned with what I stand for, right? That is a very younger gen­er­a­tion thing. I don’t think the old­er gen­er­a­tions care about that what­so­ev­er, because their iden­ti­ty is not asso­ci­at­ed with the com­pa­ny near­ly as tight­ly and there all sorts of rea­sons for that. That’s anoth­er episode, I think, right around how we go about our soci­ety and nav­i­gate the world. But every­body wants to feel like their job mat­ters. And I think that one of the chal­lenges is that for the old­er gen­er­a­tions that are not in the lead­er­ship role, right? That are in you know, that VP lev­el, man­ag­er lev­el, what­ev­er it is, they can eas­i­ly feel like the world’s kind of pass­ing me by, I’m just sort of like hang­ing out wait­ing for retire­ment, I’m just try­ing to get to the fin­ish line, I’m not real­ly vital to this com­pa­ny any­more. And harken­ing back to this idea of wis­dom trans­fer, there’s just stuff that you can­not learn in a book, you can’t even learn through your first four or 5, 10 years in your career that we need to be hav­ing more men­tor­ship type of rela­tion­ships between the old­er and younger gen­er­a­tions, so that that stuff can get passed through so that we don’t grow busi­ness­es where you’re gen­er­al­iz­ing. Well, we don’t actu­al­ly learn how to do sat­is­fy­ing work, we don’t learn how to hus­tle to the point of, ​“Wow, I worked real­ly, real­ly hard this week.” And like, and I have this clear accom­plish­ment in front of me.

We were just talk­ing to some­body before we start­ed record­ing, who said he feels guilty when work­ing too hard. Like what Boomer would have ever said, ​“I feel guilty work­ing too hard”. Right? Like, that’s inter­est­ing. It and like, can you work too hard? Absolute­ly. Right. You absolute­ly can you can work your­self into the ground. But I think this belief has come to bear in our gen­er­a­tion, and per­haps the younger gen­er­a­tions that work is the ene­my and I just need to work as lit­tle as pos­si­ble so that I can go live. And it’s just miss­ing the fact that the liv­ing that you plan to do will actu­al­ly be far less sat­is­fy­ing. If you don’t strive and work real­ly hard to feel like you actu­al­ly earned the liv­ing and you actu­al­ly like need the rest and you need the restora­tion that comes with the time off because you gave it all you had when you were work­ing. That stuff just needs to get talked about between these generations.

Jason Mur­ray 24:51

Well, and and it’s real­ly fas­ci­nat­ing. So Mar­cus Buck­ing­ham talks about this in his book ​“Nine Lies About Work”. And, you know, we talked about this con­cept too, but basi­cal­ly the false dichoto­my of work life bal­ance, because I think it’s just ridicu­lous because like you said, work-life bal­ance sets up this, you know, you know, it puts work and life at odds with one anoth­er, like, yeah, work is neg­a­tive, right? And we want to do as lit­tle of it as pos­si­ble so that we can get around to our liv­ing, right, because life is where all the good stuff hap­pens. And it’s actu­al­ly not true about how humans are wired. Yeah, that some of the most ful­fill­ing things that we can do are inti­mate­ly inte­gral­ly tied into the work that we do. And so, you know, psy­chol­o­gists talk about this con­cept of ​“flow”. You know, when you get into those states of like, I’m doing work that I love, you lose track of time, and it does­n’t even feel like work. I mean, you might feel like, Hey, I worked hard, but it was­n’t drain­ing, or it was­n’t exhaust­ing, it was actu­al­ly high­ly ener­giz­ing. And so find­ing ways to cre­ate more of that is actu­al­ly going to be pos­i­tive for everyone.

Jor­dan Peace 26:01

Yeah, I mean, it’s real­ly fun­ny that we believe that false dichoto­my because if you think about how we play, they set up com­pet­i­tive games with rules that they can lose, right? And they have to exert them­selves. And they have to think real­ly hard. And even think about camp­ing! Peo­ple crit­i­cize camp­ing, and I get why they do, but peo­ple put them­selves out of the home that they have with run­ning water and elec­tric­i­ty, and inten­tion­al­ly make life a lot hard­er to go in the woods and set up a tent and sleep with wild ani­mals. That’s work. But it’s sat­is­fy­ing, because you wake up in the morn­ing, and you’re like, I just slept out in the wilder­ness. Like, I don’t need all this house and elec­tric­i­ty and stuff. Like I’m tough. There’s some­thing real­ly cool about that. And so, like, why do we believe that work is bad when all we end up doing when we’re not work­ing is set­ting up ways for us to work?

Jason Mur­ray 27:02

Yeah. Maybe that’s it? Maybe that’s an inter­est­ing dis­tinc­tion is, you know, pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions nev­er expect­ed work to feel like play, right? But sure, there’s maybe more of a desire that’s being expressed for that to be true. Because if you think about kids, like play is how you explore the world and play’s, how you engage with things that are new or fun, or it’s sort of how you learn. Yeah. And so like, why would­n’t we want work to feel more like play, and then it becomes this thing that’s ful­ly inte­grat­ed into your life. Because the prob­lem with that dichotomies, when you set it up is, you know, these two things that are at odds with one anoth­er. I mean, think about how much time you have to spend at work, like it’s unavoid­able, unless you’ve got some giant trust fund.

Jor­dan Peace 27:48

But like, I mean, we had clients that were trust fund kids and how hap­py were those peo­ple? Yeah, most­ly miserable?

Jason Mur­ray 27:59

Because it tells you some­thing. Yeah. about human nature. Yeah. Which is we need respon­si­bil­i­ty for some­thing because the respon­si­bil­i­ty gives us pur­pose. And that pur­pose is what actu­al­ly gives us sat­is­fac­tion. So if we don’t have a pur­pose to strive for, which is, I think, the appeal of games, right? We set up these com­pet­i­tive games, because what are we doing, we’re aim­ing for a goal, col­lec­tive­ly. And it’s a whole hell of a lot of fun when you’re aim­ing for a goal col­lec­tive­ly. And so that’s more or less what we should be in busi­ness. Right. And so, I mean, it’d be real­ly inter­est­ing to talk about, you know, we haven’t fig­ured all this stuff out. That’s why we’re talk­ing about it. But what are some of the things that we’ve been try­ing around here at Fringe that you feel like, you know, we’ve seen some suc­cess with?

Jor­dan Peace 28:46

Gosh, I mean, just in terms of kind of, like gam­i­fy­ing, the work experience?

Jason Mur­ray 28:52

In the last episode, you talked a lit­tle bit about, you know, the the dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence peo­ple have expressed when they’ve come to work here. And so it’s not to, you know, self con­grat­u­late our­selves on what we’ve built here. I’ve actu­al­ly found it quite sur­pris­ing. Yeah, you know, how much peo­ple have emot­ed about that expe­ri­ence? Because, again, you know, you and I did­n’t have a ton of, you know, cor­po­rate expe­ri­ence, or we did­n’t work at star­tups, before buy­ing com­pa­nies or small com­pa­nies, we kind of just did solo­pre­neur things and start­ed a small com­pa­ny that is the two of us. And so I don’t think we had expec­ta­tions. So for me, it’s actu­al­ly been more sur­pris­ing, but it feels like there’s some things that we’re doing that seemed to be working.

Jor­dan Peace 29:35

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think a lot of its cul­tur­al, right. I think a lot of it is is how you talk about peo­ple, right? I think it’s the words you use, right? So I think they’re one of the biggest prob­lems like is when we play, right when we go we get on the team and we play a game. It’s all very egal­i­tar­i­an. And I’m not say­ing that that’s how the work­place should be. You absolute­ly need author­i­ty and you actu­al­ly need lead­ers and so forth. How­ev­er, you, you don’t have to talk down to peo­ple, right? You don’t have to call your­self, the per­son­’s boss all the time, you could say we work togeth­er, you don’t have to say I’m this many lev­els up or down. Like it’s some of the lan­guage that I think is prob­lem­at­ic. I don’t care what gen­er­a­tion you’re in, that it’s just not the right way to approach some­body and say, Hey, we’re all human beings, we’re all here to work. We’re all here to achieve a goal. Like, let’s go get this done and imme­di­ate­ly sets up a sit­u­a­tion where, because I’m me, and you’re you, we’re going to do it my way, my opin­ion is just the one that just silences peo­ple, right? Because like that, you’re con­stant­ly remind­ing peo­ple that they’re not impor­tant as you are, which is, first of all, not true from a human lev­el. But sec­ond­ly, it just real­ly sti­fles the cre­ativ­i­ty in the room. And I think pre­vents peo­ple from hav­ing that courage. Say, I got an idea. Like, it’s my first week, and I’m 22 years old, and I’m fresh out of school, and I have an idea. And my idea might be ter­ri­ble, but it might be the thing that takes your com­pa­ny to the next lev­el. Right? And you will not hear it. Unless you show that humil­i­ty in that respect. Yeah. And so I think we’ve, I think we’ve just set up a place where, and again, I want to pat myself on the back or you or any­body else, but it’s there’s a humil­i­ty and lead­er­ship that I think brings every­body’s voice to bear. I think the oth­er thing that we’ve done is, I think we’ve allowed peo­ple to work in the way that they need to work based on their their sit­u­a­tion, right? Like if they’re, they’re so low at home. And that’s, you know, they get dis­tract­ed that you know, or they’re, they can’t focus, they need to come into the office, we have that avail­able, they can do that they can be engaged that way. If they’re, like you and me with a bunch of kids at home, it’s like, we need to escape we got to get here. But occa­sion­al­ly, it’s like, I got­ta just like lock myself in a room. And so I was like, All right, like hav­ing those options avail­able. And being able to pro­vide dif­fer­ent, you know, means for peo­ple I think has been big. I think, again, that’s a gen­er­al­ly gen­er­a­tional expe­ri­ence as well, because you need dif­fer­ent things when you’re 25, than you do when you’re 35 and 45. And 55. In your work­place, and then your envi­ron­ment and, and also the time, right? Like, I don’t mind any of our employ­ees hear­ing that, like every what is it? Wednes­day, I leave at three o’clock, I go home, I grab my daugh­ter, I take her to gym­nas­tics where they’re from 430 to six. A lot of times I’ll sit and watch or some­times I’ll do a lit­tle work in the car, some­times a mix of both, right? But then again, I’m here at 10 o’clock at night, right doing this because this is play, right? For me, this is fun, but it’s you know, it’s also accoun­tants work, right? And so does that flex­i­bil­i­ty, too. You know, work when you want to work and play when you want to play, like there’s a trust that you give over. And not every­body can han­dle that trust, right. And that’s why you got to be first, real­ly care­ful about who you hire. And also, like not try to hold on to peo­ple that you don’t think can actu­al­ly mature quick­ly han­dle the trust. What if you can trust peo­ple with that time and give them that free­dom? It’s just a beau­ti­ful thing, because they appre­ci­ate so they appre­ci­ate it so, so much, right? And it real­ly elic­its a whole lot of loy­al­ty and respect and good­will between the two par­ties. Yes. I mean, I could go on about a lot of things that we’ve done, I think ame­lio­rates the tra­di­tion­al, you know, cor­po­rate model.

Jason Mur­ray 33:46

Every­one catch that? I was just won­der­ing if I was gonna have to tip you off there. Give you a lit­tle help on that one. Yeah, I think that the trust piece real­ly res­onates with me. Because, you know, in my mind, I like to think about, you know, is there is there a crit­i­cal lever that makes a lot of oth­er things work? Right. So there’s lots of tac­tics that you can imple­ment to make things work in your com­pa­ny, you know, flex­i­ble work sched­ules, yada, yada, yada, the ben­e­fits that you pro­vide all of these kinds of things that, you know, help com­mu­ni­cate some­thing, but it real­ly starts I think, with that trust, it’s like the reci­procity that comes from, you know, orga­ni­za­tion lead­ers say­ing to their peo­ple, Hey, I trust you to you under­stand the job. And just, you work when you need, like, you don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly have the hours lto get it done.

Well I mean, as some­one who’s an intro­vert, and I know you’re an extro­vert, even like the expe­ri­ence of flex­i­bil­i­ty of work­places. It’s like, there are some days where I’m just like, I’d pre­fer to work at home, even with the kids run­ning around down­stairs because like, I just need to focus I need that time like there. Do some­thing about that. And like, I don’t think twice about it, because there is that flex­i­bil­i­ty that actu­al­ly enables the work to hap­pen in the way that it needs to hap­pen. And so I think that’s a real­ly pow­er­ful thing, if we can design that expe­ri­ence for all employ­ees, and it has to be done with a lot of intention.

Jor­dan Peace 35:18

Well I think the qual­i­ty of your employ­ees is more impor­tant than ever. Because if you’re going to lead from a stand­point of trust, that’s a very dif­fer­ent thing from lead­ing out of fear. Because you can dri­ve peo­ple that are not actu­al­ly that great of an employ­ee through fear to just do the job, right. And you prob­a­bly could get fur­ther with less tal­ent­ed peo­ple, if you’re lead­ing out of fear, not real­ly an enjoy­able way to lead not an enjoy­able thing for the peo­ple work­ing for you. But from an effec­tive­ness stand­point, you prob­a­bly could get more out of less so to speak. But if you’re going to lead out of trust, you need not only tal­ent­ed peo­ple, but mature peo­ple and self moti­vat­ed peo­ple. And peo­ple that don’t need some­body cuz you can’t have some­body look­ing over their shoul­der all the time, lit­er­al­ly phys­i­cal­ly. So that it real­ly changes I think, how you need to look at the tal­ent pool.

Jason Mur­ray 36:13

I think that’s a great ques­tion. In some respects a good place to wrap up on this idea. Are you dri­ving peo­ple out of fear? Or are you lead­ing out of trust? And I think there’s a lot of things that you could answer about your com­pa­ny based on, you know, the way that you would respond to that question.

Well, we have a long stand­ing tra­di­tion on this show, now that we’re on the sec­ond episode here. Where I do pick a word, some­what at random.

Jor­dan Peace 36:40

The word today was ame­lio­rate if you did­n’t lis­ten to the first episode. That’s why Jason kind of freaked out when I said the word ame­lio­rate ear­li­er it was the secret word of the day.

Jason Mur­ray 36:51

And it was well placed and well used. And accu­rate. Yes, I can attest to that fact. So I did come up with the word of today myself and did­n’t use Google to find this one. So our word of today that will be woven into the con­ver­sa­tion in the next episode is cacophony.

Jor­dan Peace 37:11

Wow. You’re upping the ante imme­di­ate­ly from ame­lio­rate to cacophony.

Jason Mur­ray 37:18

I know how much you love words, and I do I do this and I’m a lit­tle bit but it’s gonna be fun. Yes,

Jor­dan Peace 37:22

let’s do it. Thanks, every­body, for lis­ten­ing episode two of how peo­ple work. We’re real­ly enjoy­ing this. I hope you’re real­ly enjoy­ing this, and we’ll see you on the next one. Bye bye bye.

‍

Many of the con­cepts we have about work assume that it is a nec­es­sary evil. Work is bad and life is good, and there­fore we should aim for min­i­mal time spent work­ing and max­i­mal time at leisure. This is the assump­tion embed­ded in the ​“work-life bal­ance” model.

In this first episode of How Peo­ple Work, Fringe co-founders Jor­dan Peace and Jason Mur­ray chal­lenge this way of thinking.

They explore the his­to­ry of how peo­ple have thought about work, what we stand to gain if we view it as inher­ent­ly good, and how this mind­set led them to start Fringe.

Key ideas and highlights

“Work should be a good thing. This notion of how we work as humans, but also how we apply our­selves to work, is some­thing that ought to be inves­ti­gat­ed and talked about. And it’s rel­e­vant to what we’re doing here with Fringe because we’re try­ing to very much build a com­pa­ny in which peo­ple can feel that they do good work and that the work is good for them and good for their lives and their fam­i­lies.” — Jason Murray

• Before, peo­ple viewed work as a trans­ac­tion­al rela­tion­ship between employ­er and employ­ee. In exchange for labor, employ­ees received wages.
• Now, employ­ees expect to find mean­ing, pur­pose, and belong­ing at work.
• This tran­si­tion was fueled by the expan­sion of ben­e­fits that extend beyond the quid pro quo arrange­ment of the past — health insur­ance added in the 1940s, 401(k)s in the ​‘70s, and more recent perks like remote work in the 2020s.
• The prob­lem with the cur­rent ben­e­fits land­scape is that almost all ben­e­fits are future-ori­ent­ed. You reap their reward lat­er on, espe­cial­ly when you’re sick, dead, or retired.
• The next devel­op­ment in the evo­lu­tion: ben­e­fits that meet the every­day needs of employ­ees, such as child care, men­tal health sup­port, stu­dent loan repay­ment, or even food delivery.
• Employ­ers that offer ben­e­fits that their employ­ees can use in their dai­ly life are best posi­tioned to dri­ve recruit­ing and reten­tion efforts.

Now avail­able on: Apple Pod­casts | Spo­ti­fy | YouTube

Learn more about how you can meet the every­day needs of your employ­ees with Fringe

Timestamps

• 0:00 Intro
• 4:53 Our rad­i­cal take that should be a good thing
• 5:54 Why rela­tion­ships can make it or break it
• 7:24 Ori­gin sto­ries of Fringe
• 10:41 If peo­ple like you and your vision, they’ll write you a check
• 14:41 Why employ­ees don’t feel care and appreciation
• 15:40 Ben­e­fit offer­ings are ridicu­lous­ly outdated
• 18:00 These ben­e­fits might be a waste of money
• 19:06 Where the name ​“Fringe” came from
• 24:27 The tides of employ­ee care are begin­ning to change.
• 26:07 Fish out of water — what are we doing here?!
• 34:55 Yes, there is a best way to care for employees
• 35:42 Explain­ing Fringe in 38 seconds
• 36:25 Expe­ri­ences lead to more hap­pi­ness, not things
• 37:18 Ame­lio­rate. Wait…what?

Transcript

Jor­dan Peace (00:05):

How many hours and years of our lives do we spend on work? For near­ly all of us, we spend 30 plus years and one third of our days in our voca­tion, more time per­haps than we spend at rest or at play. But this isn’t a prob­lem. Why? Because work is good. Work needs to be inte­grat­ed deeply into our lives and must be in line with our most impor­tant goals and val­ues. And if it is, we have a far more com­plete and ful­fill­ing life expe­ri­ence. Wel­come to How Peo­ple Work pod­cast, where we explore the inter­sec­tion of how humans think and act and how they apply them­selves to their work. When you under­stand both of these things, you’ll be equipped to be insight­ful, com­pas­sion­ate, and com­pelling lead­ers. This is how peo­ple work with your host, Jason Mur­ray. I’m Jor­dan Peace. I’ll call myself a co-host spe­cial guest, what­ev­er the sit­u­a­tion calls for.

Jason Mur­ray (01:01):

Every­day. Spe­cial guest.

Jor­dan Peace (01:02):

Yeah, every­day spe­cial guest. If you’ve lis­tened to Brag­wor­thy Cul­ture and you’re won­der­ing how the heck you got here and who this per­son is, once again, Jason Mur­ray, Brag­wor­thy Cul­ture has been con­tin­ued on and evolved into this new pod­cast, new for­mat, new locale. I’m no longer in my stu­dio, which is the bed­room clos­et in my home, but now in an actu­al beau­ti­ful space. Amaz­ing with pro­fes­sion­al equip­ment and it’s a lot of fun. But this is our first episode of How Peo­ple Work. And that expres­sion, how peo­ple work, is pur­pose­ful­ly obscure. It has two mean­ings. We are going to talk about how human beings work in terms of how human beings func­tion and think, go about life, how they work, and then also how they work, how go about their labor, how they do work, get to the office, not get to the office, have cowork­ers, have boss­es, do their career.

(02:00):

And so we’re going to talk about both things, kind of the psy­cho­log­i­cal, soci­o­log­i­cal aspect of human beings; and then also just the cul­ture around work and how that’s evolved over the course of time. How we see evolv­ing in the future. This should be a lot of fun. And we will have guests occa­sion­al­ly, not every week like we did in the old for­mat. But want­ed to share today a lit­tle bit about Jason’s and my com­pa­ny, Fringe. We also have three oth­er co-founders who, not to leave them out at all, but they’re not with us today on the pod­cast. So Jason’s going to guide us through the con­ver­sa­tion a lit­tle bit more. But we’re going to be talk­ing about Fringe, why we start­ed it, and also why we start­ed this pod­cast, which is very much related,

Jason Mur­ray (02:47):

Very, very much relat­ed. So yeah, we’re glad that you’re join­ing us and excit­ed to start some of these con­ver­sa­tions. And so since we are in this first episode in tran­si­tion­ing from what we were doing before, I would love to talk a lit­tle bit about what you hope peo­ple will get out of this. Who is this for? What are these con­ver­sa­tions going to do for peo­ple that might be listening?

Jor­dan Peace (03:10):

Yeah, I mean, hon­est­ly, I think for you and me, it’s all about authen­tic­i­ty. It’s all about hav­ing a place where we can say the real stuff about what it’s like to have a career in our case in tech, in this sort of ven­ture backed zoo that we live in. But also just in any kind of career, what it’s like to have cowork­ers and to have a boss and to go through a reces­sion and be fear­ful for your job, and not know how things are going at the top, and what your boss might be think­ing, and what his or her boss might be think­ing. And just have a real con­ver­sa­tion about some of that stuff. I hope that our lis­ten­er­ship turns out to be any­body from a CEO to some­body who’s aspir­ing to start their own com­pa­ny, or that just walked in the door to a new com­pa­ny in their first job out of college.

(03:59):

And it’s like, what is this sub­cul­ture of work? I don’t under­stand what’s hap­pen­ing here. This is not every­day life. I’m con­fused. And just have a real hon­est con­ver­sa­tion about what’s hap­pen­ing in the work­place, what’s com­ing down the track, or what we per­ceive to be com­ing down the track and why I think things are chang­ing, why gen­er­a­tions are shift­ing in the work­place, kind of the pow­er dynam­ic through gen­er­a­tions are shift­ing and there­fore the work­place is just utter­ly chang­ing which is kind of uncom­fort­able for sev­er­al gen­er­a­tions. Not ful­ly com­fort­able for any­one yet as we’re set­tling into the new nor­mal with remote work and oth­er things. So just excit­ed to get into that top­ic and just be able to share our per­spec­tive with the world.

Jason Mur­ray (04:53):

Yeah, well, and I add to that, I hope peo­ple who are not just HR folks and peo­ple lead­ers, but lead­ers of peo­ple or just real­ly any­one who’s in a posi­tion to influ­ence those around them can find val­ue in these things that we’re going to be talk­ing about. And I think too, there’s some­thing I’ve been think­ing about that, I don’t know if I shared it with you explic­it­ly, but just this idea that work should be a good thing. And so this whole notion of how we work as humans, but how we apply our­selves to work, I feel like is some­thing that ought to be inves­ti­gat­ed and talked about. And I think that’s rel­e­vant to us and our sto­ry and what we’re doing here with Fringe, because we’re try­ing to very much build a com­pa­ny in which peo­ple can feel that they do good work and that the work is good for them and good for their lives and their fam­i­ly. And I think that’s not true in the expe­ri­ence of many peo­ple we’ve inter­act­ed with over the years as well.

Jor­dan Peace (05:54):

Yeah, I think that’s in a sad way, real­ly aid­ed us in recruit­ing some real­ly fan­tas­tic peo­ple because they’ve had a real­ly poor expe­ri­ence in work. And it almost nev­er has to do with the work itself. It has to do with the rela­tion­ships at work or the lack of rela­tion­ships at work, or just not feel­ing seen, heard, or dig­ni­fied as human beings. So talk a lot about that top­ic cause we’re both very pas­sion­ate about putting peo­ple first and that peo­ple mat­ter. And that even though some­body might come into your com­pa­ny and it does­n’t work out per­fect­ly and they don’t fit the job, we thought that per­son, that human being should be giv­en respect and dig­ni­ty and hon­or whether they stay or go. So y’all are going to hear a lot about that as you lis­ten to this pod­cast. We’re very pas­sion­ate about that top­ic. But like we said, let’s not stray too far from the top­ic at hand today, which is Fringe which is actu­al­ly real­ly kind of dif­fer­ent for me.

(06:59):

I went through all of Brag­wor­thy Cul­ture, I don’t know how many dozens of episodes, and did­n’t even men­tion Fringe out­side of the intro and the out­ro of being spon­sored by Fringe because that pod­cast was about those that I was inter­view­ing and brag­ging on their cul­ture. And so I’m like, okay, I get to talk about my start­up now. That’s cool. I’m very excit­ed to do that. And so we want to tell the ori­gin sto­ry a lit­tle bit here. So Jason and I go back quite a long time. I think we met some­where in the range of 2013, I want to say might have been the year that we first met. Jason actu­al­ly inter­viewed me for a job. That’s how we got to know each oth­er ini­tial­ly and real­ized that we had quite a bit in com­mon, both from a stand­point of just where we were at from a fam­i­ly stand­point and where we were at from our pre­vi­ous career going into that posi­tion, which was in finan­cial planning.

(07:57):

And I did­n’t think at the time that either one of us would be here, and cer­tain­ly not both of us togeth­er run­ning a ven­ture-back start­up in tech of all things. Of all things. And I think that’s one of the parts of the sto­ry actu­al­ly, is just the sto­ry of not hav­ing the belief that we could do some­thing like this and you know, read arti­cles about peo­ple that start these com­pa­nies. And it seems like every oth­er one just was too bril­liant to stay at Stan­ford or Har­vard or whether they just, they’re so bored by their sec­ond semes­ter that they just had to leave and go make a bil­lion dol­lars overnight. And just that per­spec­tive I think just always held me back from not even try­ing this, but even start­ing a busi­ness at all and just putting myself out there at all. Cause I just thought, who am I? I’m just like some guy.

Jason Mur­ray (08:55):

Well it’s fun­ny think­ing about that because the first kind of iter­a­tion that we had was actu­al­ly some­thing before Fringe. It was Green­house Mon­ey. And you prob­a­bly remem­ber it more clear­ly cause I’m a lit­tle slow on the uptake some­times, but you had been push­ing for some time for us to leave a larg­er orga­ni­za­tion that we had been at dur­ing finance and

Jor­dan Peace (09:17):

About a year, but nobody’s count­ing <laugh>, right?

Jason Mur­ray (09:21):

Well, one day it final­ly hit me and we just thought, ​“Hey, why don’t we try and go do our own thing?” And so that was kind of the gen­e­sis of what ulti­mate­ly became Green­house Money.

Jor­dan Peace (09:33):

Yeah, I mean that if we had­n’t done that, we would nev­er would’ve done this because that took a mea­sure of courage to just leave this pret­ty estab­lished prac­tice or prac­tices that we both had. We had a long client list, we were on the track, we were doing the things we were doing fol­low­ing. If any­body lis­ten­ing and knows any­thing about North­west­ern Mutu­al, we’re fol­low­ing the Granum Sys­tem, we’re doing our dials and smil­ing and dial­ing and all that stuff and just be on the track. And to step off that track, and to give up every last client and every last com­mis­sion and every last, I don’t even remem­ber what they’re called any­more, but the funds that keep com­ing in, the renewals. Renewals.

(10:17):

That was a big step. And what was cool, there was a cou­ple things that were cool, not just tak­ing that step, but the next thing that was real­ly awe­some was when we went out and start­ed shar­ing that vision with some friends and fam­i­ly and said, ​“Hey, look, we don’t real­ly have any start­up cap­i­tal. We want to go do this thing.” We just were not finan­cial­ly sound either one of us at that point in time. And that was not that many years ago. And so going to folks and say­ing,” Hey, we got a vision. Do you want to put up some cap­i­tal in exchange for some equi­ty in this thing that, yeah, I mean, we’ve got some expe­ri­ence in the indus­try, but we nev­er start­ed a com­pa­ny before.” We did­n’t real­ly know what we were doing. And to have peo­ple take a chance on us and invest some of their hard-earned mon­ey and say like, ​“No, I like your vision.

(11:03):

I trust you, I believe in you. Let’s do this thing.” It was like, whoa. That was a light bulb per­son­al­ly. And I think prob­a­bly for both of us, that maybe what we were doing was going to be wild­ly suc­cess­ful or not, I don’t know. But it was a light bulb that I don’t have to nec­es­sar­i­ly be a per­son of great means to go into get start­ed in some­thing right now. It takes a good net­work. It takes know­ing peo­ple, it takes cast­ing a vision and so forth. And I think we’re priv­i­leged to know at least a hand­ful of peo­ple that could help us in that way. But that spark was the only rea­son why when the idea of Fringe came about, it was like, okay, what’s stop­ping us? Right? There’s peo­ple out there with mon­ey and they will write a check to invest in your idea if they like it and they like you and you can go do what­ev­er you want. And it’s just like, what is this world like? That was just so for­eign at the time, and now it all feels very nor­mal. And we’ve lived and been steeped in that for a num­ber of years now.

Jason Mur­ray (12:05):

So

Jor­dan Peace (12:05):

We got start­ed with Fringe. The idea came out of our work in finan­cial plan­ning, obvi­ous­ly work­ing with so many, I’d say Gen X and Gen Y most­ly is who we were work­ing with. Young indi­vid­u­als, young cou­ples, try­ing Green­house Mon­ey, by the way, finan­cial plan­ning firm. We should have explained that, that may be appar­ent from the con­text. But we were help­ing them try to save mon­ey, fig­ure out what they want­ed to do in life, fig­ure out how they want­ed to invest, how they bud­get, how they would be respon­si­ble, yada, yada, yada. What was inter­est­ing was that we often talked about their career. It’s just a nat­ur­al thing to talk about when you’re talk­ing about mon­ey is how much I make and do, should I switch careers? Should be gun­ning for this pro­mo­tion, I just got a raise. Oh, yay. Now we can save more over here and invest more over there.

(12:56):

So it was just a nat­ur­al thing to talk about. And com­ing to the real­iza­tion that I think a lot of peo­ple looked at their career as some­thing that was just not very sat­is­fy­ing and not from the stand­point of the work. I men­tioned this just a few min­utes ago, not because the work was­n’t good or suit­ed for them nec­es­sar­i­ly, but you just got this sense that there was this cyn­i­cism around, well, when they told you what they made, it was like, here’s what I make. I prob­a­bly should have made more, but nobody appre­ci­ates me. It was like the under­tone, right? And I don’t think that that means that we were just unlucky enough to find every per­son in Amer­i­ca that was under­paid. I think it’s that feel­ing is not real­ly so much com­ing from the mon­ey as com­ing from just not feel­ing appre­ci­at­ed or seen. Right? Yeah. And

Jason Mur­ray (13:46):

Well, it’s trans­ac­tion­al. It’s trans­ac­tion­al. I mean, we talk about that a lot around Fringe. That exchange of wages for time is just some­thing over all these years of human his­to­ry that has just been like, I’m going to give you some of my effort in exchange for that mon­ey. And it’s exact­ly that. It’s a trans­ac­tion. Yeah, it’s noth­ing more. But I think you and I believe in this is part of what we’re try­ing to bring to the sur­face and some of these con­ver­sa­tions is that we as humans are more than that. And so it’s no won­der that that’s a dis­sat­is­fy­ing expe­ri­ence for all of these peo­ple that we were talk­ing to in the finance busi­ness that we’re

Jor­dan Peace (14:25):

Doing. Yeah, I agree whole­heart­ed­ly. So I think real­iza­tion num­ber one is peo­ple are dis­sat­is­fied with their work for the rea­sons that we just named. I, we believe some­times maybe the work’s not suit­ed, but I think most­ly, I think we’re hit­ting the nail on the head there. The sec­ond real­iza­tion is that peo­ple did­n’t real­ly ful­ly grasp or under­stand the ways in which their employ­er was actu­al­ly try­ing to show some love or some appre­ci­a­tion <affir­ma­tive>. Because the way employ­ers have been try­ing to show love and appre­ci­a­tion, if you can give them cred­it for that over the last 80 years, is through pri­mar­i­ly just a 401k and health insur­ance. So that was the oth­er Bing. It was just like, wait. And we start­ed doing the research. We were like, wait, health insur­ance as a ben­e­fit has been around since the for­ties, and the 401(k)s since the late sev­en­ties. What’s changed since then real­ly in a big way, a big right cat­e­gor­i­cal change, pret­ty much noth­ing ad hoc this and that and sort of try­ing to plug holes and put band-aids and lip­stick on a pig, if you will.

(15:34):

That seems to be every­thing that’s been done since the eight­ies. And that was the per­haps even big­ger real­iza­tion for us is just like, oh wow, there’s a seri­ous lack of inno­va­tion in the ben­e­fits world. And we’ve, we’ve got­ten mul­ti­ple gen­er­a­tions since the eight­ies in terms of who’s kind of the pri­ma­ry force in the work­force. And then of course mil­len­ni­als now, and then we’re going to get chased out by the Gen Zs <laugh> at some point in the not so dis­tant future. But just the thought process of, wow, there needs to be a change. And so I think the obvi­ous strug­gle at that point, the obvi­ous rea­son why we could have walked away from it, is because when you look at who admin­is­ters ben­e­fits in, at least in Amer­i­ca, it’s giants, just tight­ens giant com­pa­nies that have been doing it for decades and decades. Super entrenched bro­ker rela­tion­ships all over the place. Every­thing’s just very locked, uptight, air­tight. And we’re just kind of com­pet­ing for a lit­tle bit of mar­ket share. And it’s like, yeah, we’re going to get in there and inno­vat­ed David and Goliath type of sto­ry. And that was scary. Yeah. But I want

Jason Mur­ray (16:57):

To you to take us though to, cause I think, at least for me, it was a real­ly dis­tinct moment when the idea for Fringe specif­i­cal­ly came about. And so we had some clients in the office, the

Jor­dan Peace (17:13):

Client’s in the office one day, there’s a client in the office because we start­ed a com­pa­ny and thank­ful­ly we were able to get some new clients, even though we walked away from all of our old clients. And her name was Lind­say, I remem­ber, was sit­ting in the office and she asked a ques­tion, which is not the first per­son to asked this ques­tion about how her, I think it was health insur­ance, ben­e­fits worked, a dis­abil­i­ty or some­thing that hor­ri­bly bor­ing, that even peo­ple in our own indus­try were just like, ​“do I real­ly have to explain this?” And so after explain­ing this thing for 20 min­utes and her eyes glazed over, I walked her to the door. I remem­ber I came back next to you. I don’t even know if I sat. Cause I was just frus­trat­ed. And I was just like, ​“Why? First, why do we have to con­tin­ue to explain this thing to people?

(17:59):

But sec­ond­ly, and most impor­tant­ly, why are com­pa­nies offer­ing exclu­sive­ly things that peo­ple don’t under­stand?” And because you don’t under­stand them, they also don’t appre­ci­ate them. And if they don’t appre­ci­ate them, then they might be a waste of mon­ey, or at least an inef­fi­cient use of mon­ey to just go, yeah, here’s some insur­ance that you don’t get. Here’s a con­tract that you’re nev­er going to read. Here’s a 401k that if you hap­pen to live to be 65 years old, it’s going to ben­e­fit you some­day. That’s great. Not that peo­ple should­n’t save, it’s not that peo­ple should­n’t insure them­selves, but if the point of the ben­e­fits is to engen­der loy­al­ty, and to show appre­ci­a­tion, and to try to have more than a trans­ac­tion with your peo­ple, which that’s what the salary is. You do work, I pay you mon­ey. That’s the trans­ac­tion. The ben­e­fits should be more than that.

(18:53):

And so it all just kind of mate­ri­al­ized in that moment. And I was just like, you know what, man, this needs to be inno­vat­ed and we should be the ones to do it. And I remem­ber even that day, sim­ply because we were kind of finance nerds and we know that indus­try, we even had the word ​‘Fringe’ because fringe ben­e­fits if you know, have our back­ground. It’s like, yeah, that’s cool. It’s what it is tech­ni­cal­ly. Yeah, it’s kind of a cool startup‑y word, but it’s also lit­er­al­ly what the idea was of tak­ing this idea of fringe ben­e­fits that his­tor­i­cal­ly have real­ly been more reserved for the exec­u­tive and the jet would be a fringe ben­e­fit, right? Some­thing like that. The com­pa­ny jet and tak­ing that and democ­ra­tiz­ing that and say, well, what if we took fringe ben­e­fits and applied it to every­one and just said, no, you don’t have to be some unique per­son in the organization.

(19:50):

You don’t have to be at this lev­el in the orga­ni­za­tion. You just have to be here on this team. And these are the ben­e­fits that team­mates on this team get. And I don’t want to say wel­come to the fam­i­ly because fam­i­ly and busi­ness is not always the best word, but that emo­tion of wel­come to the fam­i­ly here are these things, right? I think what we felt at that time would be real­ly impact­ful in the work­force. And that the next finan­cial advi­sor that’s sit­ting down with their client that works for X, Y, Z com­pa­ny that has these sorts of ben­e­fits in place, they would­n’t sit down with the same cyn­i­cal atti­tude. They would sit down and say, this is what I make and this is what our com­pa­ny does. And I love work­ing there and I have these cool ben­e­fits that real­ly enhance my life in var­i­ous ways, and it would be a dif­fer­ent con­ver­sa­tion. And that’s a lofty thing to go after to try to erad­i­cate cyn­i­cism in all of the work­force. But the cyn­i­cism is com­ing from a rela­tion­al break­down. And I think if you can find ways to heal that and find ways to com­mu­ni­cate well in this rela­tion­ship between employ­er and employ­ee, I think we actu­al­ly can change the work­force and in a real­ly sig­nif­i­cant way.

Jason Mur­ray (21:07):

So we go from this moment where this client leaves the office and we have this con­ver­sa­tion about what are fringe ben­e­fits, what could be done dif­fer­ent­ly? What does this inno­va­tion look like? And so for a while it was just a sticky note on the wall. I mean we had the idea, but we also had this new busi­ness that we had just start­ed. It was going real­ly well, it was. And so we weren’t try­ing to go start some­thing new, espe­cial­ly in an are­na that we real­ly had no expe­ri­ence in what­so­ev­er. But it was one of those ideas that was just real­ly sticky. It just kind of lodged in your mind. We start­ed hav­ing con­ver­sa­tions with some friends about it, and one thing led to anoth­er and shout out to Chris, one of our oth­er co-founders, but he was the one that real­ly put some effort behind this. Well,

Jor­dan Peace (21:55):

Poor Chris. I mean, Chris and I, Chris, you can look him up on LinkedIn. He won’t respond to you because he is not active enough. But Chris Luhrman, one of our co-founders, he has been a very, very good friend of mine since 2007. We were in, no, I’m sor­ry, 2004. We were in col­lege togeth­er. He has heard at least a cou­ple of hun­dred busi­ness ideas from me and pret­ty much told me that all of them were bad. And so that it real­ly was like to have peo­ple that know you so well and your BS and know, like, what you bring to the table, and then you see their eyes light up when you share an idea. It’s like, yeah, that’s far more proof than some very cor­dial, very polite stranger that’s just like, oh yeah, that’s a great idea. So that it real­ly was, I mean, cred­it to Chris real­ly, gen­uine­ly and lit­er­al­ly, because I don’t think with­out that approval and that sort of push and that, no man, this is the one, I don’t think we would’ve done it.

Jason Mur­ray (23:02):

Yeah,

Jor­dan Peace (23:02):

Def­i­nite­ly not for all the rea­sons that you just named and oth­ers. Yeah. Yeah.

Jason Mur­ray (23:06):

We were pret­ty busy. So I mean, he went off and did a ton of research. I mean, I remem­ber sit­ting in the lit­tle clos­et office that we had with lit­er­al­ly print­ed, because that’s what we did all the articles

Jor­dan Peace (23:18):

I’m still not sure why we print­ed, but we print­ed everything.

Jason Mur­ray (23:21):

We’d high­light.

Jor­dan Peace (23:22):

I prob­a­bly should­n’t admit it. Yeah, I don’t know. We did.

Jason Mur­ray (23:27):

And I mean, it was stuff from McK­in­sey and Deloitte and Gart­ner and all these places that do the research on employ­ee trends. Forester and Forester. Yeah, that was a big one.

Jor­dan Peace (23:40):

That study was a big one.

Jason Mur­ray (23:41):

And we just sat down and start­ed read­ing, high­light­ing the things that stood out and the trends that real­ly kind of caught our atten­tion then that seemed to,

Jor­dan Peace (23:51):

I wish we had a pic­ture of us, because I have a men­tal image of that lit­tle clos­et office, and we’re sit­ting in the mid­dle of the floor in that lit­tle shab­by car­pet every­where, and they’re just spread out in almost a com­plete cir­cle around us, and we’re just crawl­ing around high­light­ing things. Yeah,

Jor­dan Peace (24:07):

It was great. I kind of missed those days.

Jason Mur­ray (24:09):

We were like children.

Jor­dan Peace (24:10):

We were, I mean, just dis­cov­er­ing some­thing new was a pure moment.

Jason Mur­ray (24:16):

But I remem­ber what was real­ly excit­ing about it was, I mean, we’ve had plen­ty of ideas, you and I togeth­er that all lived on that sticky note where Fringe was. But it was very val­i­dat­ing when we start­ed look­ing at that trend research because it was talk­ing about things like the per­son­al­iza­tion of ben­e­fits, the chang­ing employ­ee expe­ri­ence, the expec­ta­tions that employ­ees had, what the future of work was going to look like. And so all of a sud­den, I think for us, it went from, hey, maybe this is just an inter­est­ing idea to, oh wow, there’s actu­al­ly some­thing here that maybe we could do some­thing about.

Jor­dan Peace (24:53):

Yeah, yeah. Absolute­ly. And then also backed up by, of course, you start call­ing peo­ple, you start to find the arti­cles online of some cool com­pa­ny that did some cool thing. And then when you’re in busi­ness cre­ation mode, you don’t just read the arti­cle, you call the ceo, right? Hey, tell me about why you’re doing this and beg peo­ple to talk to you and give you infor­ma­tion. And that was real­ly cool. Cause we found com­pa­nies that were essen­tial­ly try­ing to cre­ate Fringe them­selves just for their own employ­ees and real­ly kind of low res­o­lu­tion ways. But the heart of it was there. I want each of my indi­vid­u­als, indi­vid­ual employ­ees to feel like indi­vid­u­als and to feel like they’re get­ting per­son­al­ized kind of ser­vice and atten­tion from the ben­e­fits that we’re offer­ing. And it was­n’t tra­di­tion­al stuff. It was the same type of things that we were think­ing about with ser­vices and expe­ri­ences and sub­scrip­tions and things that peo­ple in our gen­er­a­tion spend their mon­ey on. I mean, in real­ly sig­nif­i­cant amounts of mon­ey on. And so that was all of that kind of togeth­er, I think Novem­ber, Decem­ber of 2018, it was like, let’s

Jason Mur­ray (26:04):

Go. Yeah,

Jor­dan Peace (26:05):

Let’s do this thing.

Jason Mur­ray (26:06):

So how did you feel start­ing Fringe, not hav­ing any back­ground in HR?

Jor­dan Peace (26:13):

Oh my gosh much. I feel now, hon­est­ly I felt like a fish out of water. And I still often do. I mean, I think any­body that’s led a com­pa­ny or been a co-founder of a com­pa­ny, I hope if they have any humil­i­ty at all, should admit to you that they feel an insane amount of imposter syn­drome. And I think I felt and not to speak for you or say that you don’t feel this way, but I felt that even going to col­lege in my fam­i­ly, giv­en my his­to­ry and back­ground and so forth, even going to col­lege was like, who do you think you are? Type of thing. Yeah. No one said that to me, but that was a feel­ing, right? And then to work in an office and to be a finan­cial plan­ner at North­west­ern Mutu­al and put on three-piece, well, we nev­er real­ly wore three-piece, but put on suits, and it was just like, why aren’t you pea­cock­ing around? Those are the inter­nal voic­es in my mind. And then, okay, you think you can actu­al­ly go com­pete with the Prince­ton dropouts that are rais­ing from Sequoia? What? Real­ly? That’s all the inter­nal dia­logue that has fad­ed some because we have done some of the things that my inter­nal voice said I could­n’t do, right? So it’s like, well, screw you inter­nal voice. We actu­al­ly did that. Right? But there’s still just an insane amount of us,

(27:47):

Us. But I think that’s part of why I want to do this, right? I hope that there’s some­body lis­ten­ing that’s just like, oh yeah, they’re say­ing that. But they’re just hum­ble brag­ging and they prob­a­bly are just bril­liant. I’m actu­al­ly just not bril­liant. I’m, like, smart, I have some ideas. But we just hus­tled and we believed and we had courage, and we tried and failed and tried and failed, and we’re still try­ing and fail­ing all the time. But when you just don’t quit and you just don’t relent, and you just don’t let all the naysay­ers and all the cir­cum­stances tear you down, you can do it. Yeah, you actu­al­ly can. Yeah. Because 99.9% of peo­ple are too scared. So it just leaves all this wide open space for any­one who will have the courage to do pret­ty much any­thing they want in life because oth­ers just won’t.

Jor­dan Peace (28:43):

So any­way, that was kind of a speech, but yeah, I feel like an imposter, but also deter­mined at the same time.

Jason Mur­ray (28:51):

Yeah. Yeah. That’s a good way. Yeah. Cause I would say the same too. Yeah. I mean, it’s kind of ridicu­lous to think, Hey, we’re not soft­ware guys. We’re not engi­neers. Nope. But we thought it would be a good idea to start a soft­ware com­pa­ny when we had no expe­ri­ence what­so­ev­er in the HR peo­ple space, which again, very lit­tle expe­ri­ence. But I do think where you maybe under­sell a lit­tle bit was a lot of both of our expe­ri­ences pro­fes­sion­al­ly before had a lot to do with peo­ple. That’s true. And so I do think we did come into this expe­ri­ence, maybe not with any­thing tech­ni­cal around a soft­ware com­pa­ny or HR in par­tic­u­lar, but I think with a lot of at least vision and pas­sion for what a good work expe­ri­ence should look like. And I think some of what served us well is not hav­ing a lot of cor­po­rate expe­ri­ence. We have very lit­tle appre­ci­a­tion for the way things should be done, right. Because we just don’t know what they are. Yeah, exact­ly. And so a lot of what we’ve done is just been what seems to make sense with what we know and under­stand about peo­ple from our own expe­ri­ences. Yeah,

Jor­dan Peace (30:04):

Exact­ly. I wrote this tongue-in-cheek doc­u­ment a few years ago, you prob­a­bly remem­ber, called the Cor­po­rate Detox­i­fi­ca­tion Pro­gram. And we nev­er put that out there in the world yet because that is me to do 60% of some­thing and then stop. So that’s what kind of an entre­pre­neur is like, but it’s been so stark, the dif­fer­ence between peo­ple that are com­ing to Fringe as employ­ees that are either com­ing out of school or they’re com­ing out of just some­thing non-cor­po­rate, whether maybe they were a teacher or maybe they were in non­prof­it, what­ev­er. They come in and it’s like, this is amaz­ing. I’ll love this, but it’s not for­eign. This is great. Peo­ple that come from cor­po­rate Amer­i­ca are like, what is this place? I just go through some sort of inter­di­men­sion­al por­tal into anoth­er Land, what is hap­pen­ing? All that cor­po­rate BS pro­fes­sion­al­ism just is not what they found. They found peo­ple that just actu­al­ly care about them as human beings and are going to put expec­ta­tions on ​‘em and want ​‘em to per­form and suc­ceed, but not in this but­toned up cor­po­rate machine kind of way. And I’m real­ly proud of that. And you’re right. I mean, that is the expe­ri­ence we brought to the table. That is the, it’s the eq. There’s some IQ there. Sure, of course. We could­n’t do this with­out some IQ, but I think the EQ has been the rea­son for the suc­cess so far.

Jason Mur­ray (31:42):

Yeah. Yeah. I like to think too, we just did­n’t know any bet­ter. That’s true. A lot of times.

Jor­dan Peace (31:47):

Yeah, naivety is a pow­er­ful thing. It is.

Jason Mur­ray (31:50):

Yeah. I mean, I think I’d do it all again, but there’s stuff where it’s like, man, if you had known how hard it was, you prob­a­bly would’ve thought twice about some of the dif­fi­cul­ties of build­ing a com­pa­ny and two or three times.

Jason Mur­ray (32:03):

For sure. Well, the last thing I want to talk about now is just a lit­tle bit more explic­it­ly what Fringe does and the space that we’re in is HR, but we built a prod­uct and a plat­form that is very specif­i­cal­ly designed to help around this con­cept of lifestyle ben­e­fits. And so would love to actu­al­ly just hear you talk a lit­tle bit about what are lifestyle ben­e­fits? What is it that we’re try­ing to do here with Fringe?

Jor­dan Peace (32:32):

Yeah. I mean, I think we’ve cov­ered a lot of what we’re not. We talked about tra­di­tion­al ben­e­fits. Things haven’t changed since the for­ties or eight­ies or how­ev­er you’re count­ing that. And what we set out to do was a cou­ple of things. One, we want­ed to make ben­e­fits more per­son­al­ized because even I’m one of my 37, even in my child­hood grow­ing up by the time I was a teenag­er, there’s Star­bucks around, and it’s just the per­fect anal­o­gy because 20 years pri­or to that, you walk into a cof­fee shop if there was such a thing, and it’s like ​“you want small or large or what,” I mean, these are the choic­es. And then now it’s like I give some 17 word descrip­tion of the per­fect drink with exact­ly the kind of milk I want and the tem­per­a­ture and how frothy it is, and syrups and sauces, and I don’t even know what I’m saying.

(33:27):

I’m just, that type of per­son­al­iza­tion is just native to our expe­ri­ence and cer­tain­ly any­body younger than us. It’s just like, well, yeah, you don’t just get the same thing oth­er peo­ple do. Obvi­ous­ly that’s the expe­ri­ence of the mar­ket­place. And so when you go into the work­place and then you’re just going back in time and it’s just choco­late, vanil­la, or straw­ber­ry, it’s like, where is my per­son­al­iza­tion? So that was one thing we set out to do is make sure that every­body could select for them­selves the things that were most per­ti­nent to their life, to their lifestyle, to their per­son­al­i­ty, to their fam­i­ly, if they have one.

(34:07):

And then I think the sec­ond thing we want­ed to do is just to get away from tra­di­tion­al ben­e­fits where you have to be sick or dis­abled or dead or dis­mem­bered or 65 years old. That was a fun insur­ance to sell. It’s the best to ben­e­fit from your ben­e­fits. We just kind of asked the ques­tion, which seems obvi­ous now that we’ve been ask­ing it for four years. Where are the ben­e­fits that I can ben­e­fit from now in my every­day life and per­pe­tu­ity where I don’t have to be sick, noth­ing has to be wrong. I also don’t have to wait 30 to 40 years to actu­al­ly receive some of the ben­e­fits. And so those were the two dri­ving forces, per­son­al­iza­tion and then meet­ing needs now. And then that led us down this path to ser­vices, right? Because ser­vices not only are, I think, the way to show per­pet­u­al val­ue and per­pet­u­al appre­ci­a­tion to your peo­ple, but they’re also just how our gen­er­a­tion and gen­er­a­tions com­ing behind us spend their mon­ey, right? It’s not about how many cars you can get in the dri­ve­way or how many sto­ries your house is or what­ev­er. It’s about the trips and the cool sub­scrip­tions that you like and the ridicu­lous­ly fan­cy cof­fee that nobody needs, but we all love it. It’s about the feel­ing of those feel­ings and those moments that you can gen­er­ate through real­ly thought­ful and unique services.

(35:43):

So that’s what we do. We pro­vide that to the world. We issue this plat­form that has all of these options avail­able to employ­ees. Employ­ers sim­ply pur­chase that. They fund it on behalf of their peo­ple, typ­i­cal­ly month­ly, some­times in oth­er fash­ions, and then their peo­ple can log in and just Jews. It’s curat­ed and per­son­al­ized, and we try to guide peo­ple towards the right things for them and so forth based on where they live and some oth­er demo­graph­ic things. And that’s fringe in a nut­shell, at least as it exists

Jason Mur­ray (36:21):

Today. Yeah. Yeah. I think one of the real­ly cool things is the notion of ser­vices and why that’s so dif­fer­ent or expe­ri­ences more specif­i­cal­ly. And some of the research that psy­chol­o­gists have done around how humans expe­ri­ence hap­pi­ness when they make pur­chas­ing deci­sions, I think is real­ly fas­ci­nat­ing because the imme­di­ate sat­is­fac­tion of a pur­chase, like Ama­zon, for exam­ple, feels good in the moment more so than an expe­ri­ence even. But the research has shown that the dura­tion of the hap­pi­ness over time is far supe­ri­or. It’s defin­i­tive sur­round­ing expe­ri­ences. And so we’ve seen that with the younger gen­er­a­tion, of course, who have looked at their par­ents and said, Hey, I don’t want to spend my mon­ey on stuff. I want to have expe­ri­ences. And so they’re actu­al­ly right. I think it’s fair to say that instinct, because the research is show­ing that as humans, we are wired for that more than we are for the things or the stuff. And so I think that’s some­thing that’s real­ly impor­tant to them.

Jor­dan Peace (37:23):

I think even when you’re receiv­ing a gift, that’s true. Even if you don’t buy the thing your­self, I mean, we’re sit­ting here Jan­u­ary 5th. I mean, we just had Christ­mas at home with my fam­i­ly. We cel­e­brate Christ­mas, and if I ask my nine year old ​“what did you get for Christ­mas this year?” She could tell me. If I ask her what she got for Christ­mas last year, no idea. But she could tell me con­ver­sa­tions that we had on a fam­i­ly vaca­tion when she was five, because it was part of this expe­ri­ence that was mean­ing­ful to her that moved her right. In a way that just, it’s long last­ing. So I think very much the same. And whether you’re pur­chas­ing the thing or whether you’re just receiv­ing it as a gift, it’s those expe­ri­ences and those things that are more per­pet­u­al in nature are just powerful.

Jason Mur­ray (38:10):

Yeah. Well, that is a top­ic we’re going to spend a lot more time on in future episodes because I think we both have a lot to say about that. So we have a long stand­ing tra­di­tion on this show, long stand­ing, being that it’s our first episode

Jor­dan Peace (38:24):

Here, long stand­ing since about 36 min­utes here. That’s right.

Jason Mur­ray (38:28):

Where I pick a some­what ran­dom word that Jor­dan then has to work into the con­ver­sa­tion at some point in the next episode. And so our word for today, oh no, I will admit. It’s just the New York Times Word of the Day. Okay. I did­n’t actu­al­ly come up with this myself, but I thought it was good. You’d appre­ci­ate it is ​“ame­lio­rate.”

Jor­dan Peace (38:47):

Wow, ame­lio­rate.

Jason Mur­ray (38:49):

So, okay, everyone,

Jor­dan Peace (38:52):

First I’ll Google it and then I will work it into the next week’s con­ver­sa­tion. <laugh>.

Jason Mur­ray (38:58):

So look out for ame­lio­rate folks.

Jor­dan Peace (39:00):

Wow. That’s going to be a

Jason Mur­ray (39:01):

Lot of fun in the next episode.

Jor­dan Peace (39:02):

Awe­some. Well, this has been the very first episode. Thank you so much for join­ing us on How Peo­ple Work. Again, I’m Jor­dan Peace. This is Jason Mur­ray. If you can see the video of me point­ing towards him. If not, Jason is on the oth­er side of the mic here. We are so grate­ful for you lis­ten­ing. Please reach out to us. Let us know top­ics and things that you would like us to dis­cuss. If there’s any arti­cles that you’re read­ing that you think we should read, let us know, and we’d be hap­py to work that into the episode. Kind of like the word ame­lio­rate, we’ll be hav­ing guests in the near future as well. If you’ve been a lis­ten­er and you would like to sug­gest a guest to us, that has actu­al­ly gone real­ly well for me in the past. I have sug­gest­ed guests that just kind of fit and would enjoy this type of con­ver­sa­tion. So do that as well. But oth­er­wise, we’ll see you soon on How Peo­ple Work.

‍