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Episode 2: Riptide of Change - Heather E. McGowan, Best-selling Author of 'The Empathy Advantage: Leading the Empowered Workforce’
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In the latest episode of From the Horse’s Mouth, Phil Fersht sits down with Heather E. McGowan to discuss the powerful currents reshaping the world of work. They explore how the "riptide of change"—a convergence of rapid technological advances, shifting demographics, and evolving societal norms—is impacting human connections in the workplace. Heather offers insights on how leaders can navigate these forces by fostering empathy, purpose, and genuine relationships within their teams. They also examine the role of generative AI, considering how to integrate new technologies without losing the human element essential for innovation and resilience.
Listeners will come away with practical strategies for embracing change instead of resisting it. Heather highlights that by nurturing empathy and authentic connections, leaders can steer their organizations through uncertain waters. The episode wraps up with actionable advice on harmonizing technological advancements with the human touch, empowering teams to become more adaptable, united, and ready to face the future.
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Transcript
00:00:12
Speaker
You're listening to From the Horse's Mouth, intrepid conversations with Phil First, ready to meet the disruptors who are guiding us to the new great utopia by reshaping our world and pushing past corporate spin for honest conversations about the future impact of current and emerging technologies. Tune in now.
00:00:35
Speaker
Hi, everybody. My name is Shill Searched. I'm an author and leader of the Baron Hosses now podcast. So welcome to today's discussion. And today I'm absolutely thrilled to have Ebert E. McGowan, who is a well-known author and a well-known thought leader, teacher, idea generator in the areas of the future of work.
00:00:59
Speaker
And um where we're going in this current, probably most confusing environment to the workplace that we've ever experienced. So I'd love to hear a bit more from you, Heather, about you and your client back.
00:01:12
Speaker
Hey there, thanks so much for having me. Well, I started looking at the future work before there was even those words were at least colloquial for it. And that it came out of working for corporate clients in white space exploration, proposing product services and systems that didn't yet exist, and also working in academia trying to help them prepare the future workforce for jobs that may not yet exist.
00:01:35
Speaker
And along the way, I spent most of my time explaining to people not so much the future 10 years out or 20 years out, but next year, even the year they were in, because I found so many people didn't understand the change that was happening in some cases had been happening around them. So it sort of spun off and unexpectedly became its own thing and spawned a couple of books so far. Let's talk about what inspired you in the past to write a couple of great novels on this top edge.
00:02:01
Speaker
are you objecting on a third, or is there something that's driving you to write about a further change that's happening in your workplace? trilogies are a thing. are they So now life Chris Shipley and I wrote the adaptation advantage in 2020. It came out smack in the middle of the pandemic and it became sort of an accidental guide. And our contention at that point is the future work is going to be learning in adaptation and that your mark for success in the future is going to be your ability to adapt to rapid and sometimes unclear changes. And that certainly was the pandemic, but it's also what's happening right now with regenerative AI becoming more and more presence at work.
00:02:37
Speaker
changes globally. We have a lot of societal, technical, demographic, and economic changes that people are adapting to. And then our second book came out in 2023, which is called The Empathy Advantage, Leading the Empowered Workforce. And that was really about the fact that I think for the foreseeable future, even with an economic downturn, we're going to have a pretty tight labor market. We've got new generations coming into the market. And the workforce is empowered, and that's something we should celebrate, not try to suppress.
00:03:06
Speaker
And the best way to activate your empowered workforce is to help them become intrinsically motivated, which means you have to understand your people and help them get in touch with their own source of purpose and curiosity so that they learn and adapt on their own because we will never get our people to learn and adapt at the speed, scale, and scope that we need. Yeah. I mean, you're talking to my heart. I run a company of around 75 people and all of them work remotely. And my goal in life is to have a happy, motivated workforce. And sometimes it feels like it's getting harder and harder to achieve that. Sometimes I blame the work environment. People getting isolated are higher when they're never alone, staring at a video screen.
00:03:49
Speaker
too long. Sometimes I think, hey, you guys, go walk the dark, get out, go to the gym, do something. If there's something I can do as a manager to motivate my people, where's the line between how much I have to do versus how much employees need to do themselves to be happy and motivated at work?
00:04:08
Speaker
Yeah, I think the first thing we need to do is recognize what we're going through. And I don't think enough people have done that. And we are seeing shifts in our demographics in the workplace. We're seeing, in some parts of the world, aging societies, other parts of the world, youth films. So those have two different economic impacts. We're seeing so rapid technological change, which has been happening for the last 10 to 15 years, really in a way that's distracting in some ways to folks.
00:04:32
Speaker
We also have a long-term 50-year march towards this loneliness epidemic, which some folks blamed on the pandemic or social media. Both of those were accelerants, but they weren't what started it. We've seen a decline in how often we interact with each other. And I don't mean just going to the office. That's a very small piece of it. I mean, talking to your neighbors, going to a religious or spiritual place you might, you know, church or whatever that you might belong to.
00:04:58
Speaker
clubs we used to do, backyard barbecues, all that sort all that's been on the decline. So much so, in the US, I was reading an article that real estate agents are saying there just isn't even a dining room anymore and maybe not even a dining room table because we're eating alone, we're living alone longer. So you take loneliness and that's been going on for 50 years, that's been increasing. And then you add a you know this kind of riptide of societal, cultural, technological, and demographic change.
00:05:23
Speaker
And when you're lonely, your amygdala goes into overdrive and your parasympathetic nervous system goes into fight or flight mode. So you take a riptide of change, you take loneliness and you take social media, which can weaponize these things and people are polarized. And it's a discussion we're not having at work that we need to have at work, not about politics. And it's happening everywhere this year. Four billion people vote. That's half the globe. But we need to figure out how do we get back to what binds us together, which is relationships and social connections.
00:05:53
Speaker
And when it comes to work, this isn't normally a role work hand, but we have to have work step up more and more to help people find their purpose because you're not getting it anywhere else. And it helps your work performance as well as if you can connect to a set of purpose. What is it we're doing here? Why does this organization exist?
00:06:11
Speaker
How does the world look differently because it exists? What part of your self-expression comes into work? Now, we're going to cheer for different sport teams. We're going to vote for different candidates. We've got lots of differences, opinions, but there's so much more in common that we have in common than we have in difference. And it's to remind folks of that. And I think that becomes a bit of a flywheel that generates more energy. When we feel more connected,
00:06:32
Speaker
When we feel more of a sense of purpose, when we feel more of a sense of optimism, when we feel more of the impact we're having in the world, in the work that we do, we get energized as opposed to depleted. so impacts in the what we do and that means a lot i been and involved in a very divisive conversation about return to purpose. I had a thousand people in my academic training and it became like they're either in one side or the other. There was none of this stuff. And what's the thing that should be against ever going back to the office? And one person even said to me, I don't want my company to dictate to my social life. and I don't want my company to take things that should be my friends. If my company wants me to, if my colleague, that should be my choice.
00:07:14
Speaker
I'm going to the point where you see that in an interview, I'm giving you a job something. There is this sort of like, people see working from home now as a human right, and I'm like, okay, I get that, but we need this common sense of purpose, we need this common sense of drive.
00:07:31
Speaker
And then when your employees are held like contractors, I'm not saying, well, mine do. um then so It draws the line between what is a job versus what is just having a contract to perform some tasks. And I do show we're getting to that point with some organizations where are you actually employed this organization?
00:07:49
Speaker
I do just fulfill certain tasks that I also need to do and you don't feel, you feel it's like an imposition of your rights and freedoms that actually have to collaborate with your colleagues, care about your business, care about the mission of your your company.
00:08:02
Speaker
Yeah, I think what we have to step back and realize is that social contract with work broke several decades ago. We used to trade our loyalty for security. Most people don't have that security anymore. So when the pandemic came in and people started working at home, they felt more control over their lives and it began to feel like a right.
00:08:19
Speaker
I have no dog in the remote work versus office work fight because I think actually we'll figure that out over time in those studies we're doing now in terms of where work should take place. There's lots of arguments for more flexibility around working parents or people with disabilities who have struggled to get in the office.
00:08:36
Speaker
But we'll figure that out over time. I think what we need to figure out is how do we get people to feel more connected to the work that they do and more committed to the organization, wherever they work. And I think that that's got to come with ah a little more loyalty towards the employees. I mean, you got you got to hand it to them. If they feel like they're going to be laid off on a Zoom call on Friday, they're not going to fight traffic to get there on Thursday.
00:08:56
Speaker
We got to figure that out so we got a a rebalance of it. I think we've treated employees like they're disposable and so they're reacting in that way. Not every organization does it, certainly not. Lots of organizations are really fantastic. I would say the majority of them are. But we need to communicate that care to our employees so they feel we're never going to get back to the level of loyalty, security. We're never going to have one job for the rest of our lives. So how do we do that? I've seen some organizations that say,
00:09:23
Speaker
you know Things like, if this job isn't working for you, if you can't find your career here, I want you to go somewhere else and have experiences, but I want you to think back on this as the best experience you ever had. So that if you go somewhere else and you get better experiences and possibly more pay, depending on the organization, you're going to be so much more valuable that I want to leave the door up and then you'll always want to come back here.
00:09:45
Speaker
and organizations that talk about their alumni network. So instead of saying when somebody's left their persona non grata, no, you celebrate their successes at other places and you always leave the door open for the really good ones to come back. Because, you know, the war for talent, which is like a 20-year-old term,
00:10:00
Speaker
The talent won and it's going to continue to one in most markets where labor is going to continue to be tight even in an economic downturn, especially for the best talent. You want to create the best work experiences that you can so people want to feel part of you and if they have to leave for a reason or other, whether it's to get another degree or to go have another experience, they either look fondly at the experience they had with you or they want to get back to it, becoming more valuable when they do.
00:10:28
Speaker
I do think that's important, and I encourage employees to come back in the future. It's always a good look as well. Shade wasn't that bad outside. But there's one thing making people feel very belonged and mouthed and cared for a while back. I don't know anybody who realizes that they can lay them off at any minute. but yeah Getting that top of loyalty is really difficult. I mean, one of the big multi-billion dollar software companies, which had a tremendous culture, decided last year we're going to literally lay off 10% of the workforce, and we're just going to turn them off email. So I'm not going to get 10,000 people shut up for what the next day, couldn't get into their email. And then they got some note to say you'd be laid off. Now, how they ever recovered from that
00:11:15
Speaker
I don't know, because you meet people from that company now and we should talk about it. Like that scarred them forever. That she and I know we're always going to be here and there's always a sense of belonging. It really died to death.
00:11:26
Speaker
Yeah, and you know when you when that happens, it wasn't just the impact on the people that left. I think in some ways, it's more harmful for the company, the people that stay, because you just sit in your office, if your email's working, you go, well, am I next? If people can be that disposable. I think I'm always an optimist to look at the people who've done it well, and I think that's what we need to do if we're going to have fluctuations in labor demand or we're going to have to lay people off and hire people, because that's just a reality of rapidly changing business models. We've got to get better at laying people off.
00:11:56
Speaker
And I think the masterclass in this, and they are not perfect, but they were excellent at this, was what Airbnb did in the pandemic. Brian Chesky's letter to his employees that you can find it online, he said, I can't proceed the future right now. We are in an unprecedented once a century global pandemic that is rapidly hitting the travel market.
00:12:15
Speaker
And so as of today, you're all a shareholder. He rapidly increased did the vesting of the shares. He extended health insurance for a long period of time. And then, this was the most impressive part, created a very active network of people that helped place those individuals in other experiences and told them how proud he was of the work that they did, that they will always be a part of building Airbnb. That sends a totally different message than turning off your email.
00:12:41
Speaker
And so we have to make a decision as leaders, if we have to lay people off, what's the most humane and compassionate way that we can do it? So people would look back and say, I love that company, and I would go back and work there in a second. Partly that. So in terms of driving excitement around, obviously, Jenny and I is being very big for for my company, being a tech analyst firm.
00:13:05
Speaker
We use Gen AI as part of our jobs now as analysts. It helps get things done faster to monitor slicker. We even have workshops where we bring on our analysts on to present to the rest of the company how they're using Gen AI in their jobs themselves. And it's the best way to train people is get everybody to train each other and it's driving some collaboration. But at the same time, there's so some studies done which have shown that companies who driven the use of Gen AI into their to their star for a period of six months and then taking it away, we actually noticed a decrease in productivity and creativity and once they had those tools taken away. It was almost like they got a little lazy on the job. We used to Gen AI
00:13:52
Speaker
runner-in-queries for them, doing how they worked for them, and then suddenly they were back in their own old job again and they weren't as sharp as they were before. Is this something you think is going to become quite endemic and the workplace district would use these tools more and more and more and might lose someone's creative, heuristic skills?
00:14:11
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, you just drew a conclusion from the the results. I don't know that I would draw the same. Might be true. There's one way to look at it. Sort of like I used to be able to remember seven different phone numbers. Someone said their phone number. I could remember it. I could walk back to my office and I could call somebody. I can't remember three or four numbers. now because I'm so used to pushing a button on the phone. So skills we don't use do atrophy. That's that's for sure truth.
00:14:34
Speaker
But I would also wonder if, when you removed the generative AI, if you had layered back on some of the routine and predictable tasks that just sap your energy, and so they weren't as creative and sharp afterwards because they had to do more things that took the enthusiasm away from your job. When you got the generative AI,
00:14:52
Speaker
it's not that it's necessarily making you better i mean' a lot of the research i've seen as it will take a c player up to a b plus player it doesn't take a b plus player up to an a plus player but st when when allow people to use it their abilities increase because their energy increases because they've got the ability to focus on things they didn't get to focus on before Yeah.
00:15:13
Speaker
That would mean a mere hypothesis. That's what I'd like to see people figure out is not just, is it making us stupider when you remove it, or is it making us smarter and more creative when we remove that layer of sort of drudgery out of it? Interesting. I guess as we see these tools evolve, it'll be like, how did using calculators make us work at math, or did it make us faster at math and think?
00:15:39
Speaker
small and want to trade around that. If I ride an e-bike rather than a regular bike, hey, I'm using half the energy, but I'm enjoying the bike ride a lot more. Well, actually, it's interesting. The e-bikes, they've done studies and found people are actually doing more exercise because they're not intimidated by that hill. They're doing longer distances. They're burning more calories. So it's contrary, and that's a good analogy. I have an e-bike. I'm an e-bike enthusiast. I mean, on my regular bike, I would do five miles, maybe 10 miles. On my e-bike, I'd do 25 miles.
00:16:08
Speaker
It removes the friction of that hill that I would avoid, but I go so much further. And I've seen the studies ah on the e-bikes, so I think that that we need similar ones around what Gen. AI is going to do to us. It's definitely going to have us learn differently. It's also going to have us lead differently. And that's, I think, one the two of the things we need to be looking at now. We give me encouragement to have an e-bike showing up to tomorrow, I think. Yeah, enjoy it. It's a blast. That's fair, middle-aged, and lazy buying the Bangla. They are for sure. So now I longer,
00:16:38
Speaker
more enjoyable exercise and I'll actually burn my catfish, which is very jarring. Good. Tell me, what is going to happen next? There's interesting dynamics in the workplace. One of the things we are noticing is a lot of gen z's in my industry actually do want to go back from all this environment. There's a realization that I want to meet other people. It's healthier for me eventually. I don't want to be stuck at home all day.
00:17:03
Speaker
that there are mid-career folks on the whole. There's a lot of strong preponderance to this work. They hardly like it. They're willing to work on ways to get together more and have offsights and things like that. But why don't you see this all heading longer term as you look at these trends and you know you really look at a unique situation coming out of the pandemic.
00:17:23
Speaker
been studying remote work long before the pandemic. And he found out the percentage is exactly right. If something like 20% of people want to be fully remote, 40% of people want to be hybrid and the ballots want to be in the office full-time or 50% want to be hybrid. And when ah when you break down those percentages, it's exactly as you said, but the reasons are interesting. So the mid-career folks who want to be fully remote already have a network.
00:17:47
Speaker
already have established themselves enough in their career, they've found their mentors, they have them. And they're more likely to have either children or aging parents and sometimes both. And so they want that flexibility. the older They're actually the 55 plus, 60 plus, if your kids have left the house, a lot of times they're bored and want to be back in the office. And then the young people haven't established their career networks and know that they can there's so much tasks that learning which has to be done in person, generally.
00:18:13
Speaker
that they want to go into the office and learn, it's both for their social lives, but also for their career pathways. What's interesting is, I really looked at this stuff when we first went into the pandemic, and it was those mid-career people and the senior people who didn't want to be in the office, and then suddenly they bought a summer house or moved further away from the office, and they were like, oh no, remote works great. And it was Gen Z that, who was coming out of learning in the pandemic who were fine working remote, they were most comfortable yet, so we saw a big flip-flop over time.
00:18:42
Speaker
Where do I see this all going? I see a couple different things happening. I think we just don't know yet on where all the work should take place. It's probably going to be some version of hybrid and maybe around flexibility that people lead in life stages, as we just discussed. But my concern is human connection right now. I think that the phrase in our society, it's acute in the US, it's popping up all over the world though, and the polarization, the lack of cohesion we have is something that we have to address.
00:19:10
Speaker
and it's getting bigger, it's going to get bigger going into the fall. Some half of the U.S. is going to be very unhappy. I don't know which half it's going to be. There's something happening in every part of the world where there's some form of election, and it's really not based on policy or values that much when you dig into it. We have so much more in common than we have in difference. It's just profitable and much more effective to divide us. So if we don't go into the office and we're not going to religious things and we're not talking to our neighbors, what is going to emerge as the place that connects us?
00:19:39
Speaker
what's going to be as Starbuck said this idea being the third place back when you know Schultz sort started seeing us bowling alone to use Robert Putnam's words, but we haven't sound that. and I think we're going to have to find our way back to social connections and cohesion. I do think work is one place where leaders could step forward and start being part of that solution by having some of these conversations and having hard conversations and talking to each other because most organizations don't have the luxury of serving only one person. you know, one political party. We're global. Most organizations are global. They're serving lots of different people. Probably should keep politics entirely out of work. But talk about how do we respectfully talk to each other? How do we talk about the things that that we value? How do we talk about the things we have in common? And then we use those differences to come up with better solutions. Because it's cognitive diversity that really drives innovation, but we're avoiding conversations because of this polarization. And it's something I really think we need to take on going forward.
00:20:38
Speaker
You are pretty sick of the quiet here. I come from the UK, originally, where we would open lane to self-politics. It was just something you'd get. And it was ever personal. It was always the best game into the issues. My conversation is now a community game into the issues. Let's not talk about the things you care about and acting like a mad show. That and so on. And that's a cultural thing. I think it's getting a little better in America, but then I think it's getting worse, but actually a tremendous point about expressing differences and viewpoints and finding common ground. And maybe this is a societal problem in general, not just a workplace problem. Yeah. And if you just look at it from a workplace perspective, if we're not having those hard conversations and we're not listening to those dissenting opinions, we're not creating better products and services. We're not creating better innovation that meets more people.
00:21:23
Speaker
It's the person who checks your blind spot that's going to figure out the better solution. But if you're unwilling to talk to somebody who doesn't disagree doesn't agree with you, you're missing that opportunity. It's a final question. and i'm goingnna pick on your hair, because we know what news we're experiencing. We are reopening an office in Boston at HFS London. I'm trying to get everybody jacked about it. Some people are, some people are pretending to be. But the best advice I've had from people is don't just have everyone show up and sit doing their tunes and zoom calls. It's just a waste of time. And then we'll get a drink after it's trying to create time in the office where we actually do stuff together. So that's my new challenge. But I'm having seen much of this going on. have you
00:22:05
Speaker
seeing any things that are working in and they're not working with companies trying to recreate some physical proximity to your game with the team. I personally don't think you know badging and tracking and surveillance is is the way to go. I mean, what you want in your organization is trust, and that's the way to ah a road twist. So the best organizations, I think, have curated experiences, because if you're fighting traffic and I'm a Boston native and there's some serious traffic there, to go into an office to zoom to somebody else's home that day or go in your office worse and zoom to somebody down the hall.
00:22:35
Speaker
or our tunes or whatever it may be, you're demotivating. But if you come to the office to have some shared experiences, an important meeting, a key lunch, ring in speakers, I have a speaker, shout out to all my speakers out there, crank those experiences, have a workshop. People don't want to go in because they're going to be missing something.
00:22:53
Speaker
If they're not missing something, they're not going to want to go in. And so there are going to be some people who just like being in an office. They have a small house, they have kids, they have loud neighbors, whatever it may be. There's also that there's something about the commute. If it's not too long, a commute is a nice break. It allows you to decompress from the day. So when you get there or you get home, you've switched gears.
00:23:13
Speaker
walking out of the bedroom down the hallway to the kitchen doesn't give you that time to switch gears. So I think more and more people might be interested in that. But really, it's creating the experience that they're going to otherwise miss if they run together. Yeah. And the that's fantastic. do you Do you think that if we take a maybe three to five year horizon, then a lot of businesses are going to have to go back to at least a hybrid model because it just becomes impossible to run a business with just remote stuff.
00:23:41
Speaker
Some organizations that didn't advance depends on the nature of what you do. I mean, think about sales organizations have largely never really been in the office. So it depends on the functions you're talking about. So every organization is going to be different. Again, on that human connection thing, some organizations may say, okay, we do have a central office.
00:23:57
Speaker
but we're going to have a smaller central office. We're going to have more satellite offices. We might have shared workspaces, but we have ways in which people can come together, connect, create collaborative opportunities, create community. I cleave it. Humans run on connection, so they're going to want that. That's intrinsic to our species.
00:24:15
Speaker
So how do you nurture that connection in a way that ultimately drives the performance of your organization? And I think that is creating intentional shared experiences, making it easy for folks, understanding the other factors they have in their lives, especially working parents, and I mean working moms, or people who have elderly parents they have to care for, or people with disabilities, having some flexibility around that.
00:24:35
Speaker
Because one of the silver linings of all the remote stuff in the pandemic is we saw a big rise in people who had been out of the workforce because they were in some way disabled and unable to either operate in the office or get to the office. So I wouldn't want us to erase those gains. We're at a pretty good labor force participation rate right now. would We'd like to keep that high.
00:24:53
Speaker
But I think we really want to focus on how do you optimize human performance? And I think that's through connections. I think that's through caring. I think that's through purpose. And I think that's through getting together when it makes sense to get together that you can't miss something, you know, by being remote. That's ah perfect, because I say we're all mammals, right? Yeah. oh even shall Yeah, we evolved out of five human species and they all existed in some form or fashion on the planet at once. But the sapiens emerged and leapt to the top of the food chain because of our ability to communicate and collaborate at scale and with people we didn't know. So it is the history of our species and and when AI comes in and presumes consumes more routine and predictable tests, it's going to be the key to our future collaborative exploration. And that's not something we can replace by any piece of technology. We run on connection.
00:25:42
Speaker
ye And AI, in a weird way, is driving like that, if it can be managed effectively with these tools. So this gives this cause some more confidence, I think, and hope, and less new chair then than dread. So this is wonderful. Heather McGowan, I really appreciate the time you've taken out of your day to share some of my alien tracks with us. Thanks so much for having me.
00:26:06
Speaker
Thanks for tuning in to From the Horse's Mouth. Intrepid conversations with Phil first. Remember to follow Phil on LinkedIn and subscribe and like on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite platform for no-nonsense takes on the intricate dance between technology, business and ideological systems. Got something to add to the discussion? Let's have it. Drop us a line at fromthehorsesmouthathfsresearch.com or connect with Phil on LinkedIn.