0:00:05.3 Wayne Brown: Hello, I am your host, Wayne Brown, and welcome to the ET Project. We’re delighted to be delivering this podcast for executive talent all over the world, and we’re affectionately referred to as Team ET. Today we’re heading to Utah in the United States and a little south of Salt Lake City. In fact, we’re heading to the city of Saratoga Springs on the Northwestern shores of Utah Lake, visiting Mr. Tom Applegarth. Tom has over 30 years of HR experience, including serving in high profile companies such as Goodyear tyres, Payless Shoes, AMACO, Belden, Potter Electric and Young Living, and you’ve probably identified that this spans multiple industries, manufacturing, retail, as well as several Fortune 500 companies.

0:00:39.8 WB: Tom has worked across the United States as well as in Europe, Asia and Latin America, and his considerable experience has brought significant measurable improvements in employee engagement, attrition reduction, recruitment of the best and the brightest employees, and establishment of high impact HR processes and improvements. Tom currently works for Preferred CFO, Preferred CFO provides finance, accounting, HR and payroll support for small companies. This conversation with Tom was a lot of fun, and I got to play devil’s advocate and challenge the HR industry about how well they’re handling the workforce shift from traditional offices to work from home, where who knows what employee shenanigans are going on behind the privacy of the household walls during work time, and of course, the question of how prepared are we as leaders for when the first work-from-home accident case finds its way into the courts, a lot of hypotheticals and what ifs.

0:01:55.1 WB: But all in all a great conversation. So Team ET, I’m excited to bring this conversation to you and welcome our guest, Mr. Tom Applegarth, to explore all manner of topics, leveraging his extensive experience against the backdrop of uncharted waters that we currently find ourselves in.

0:02:14.0 Speaker 2: Welcome to the ET Project, a podcast for those executive talents determined to release their true potential and create an impact. Join our veteran coach and mentor, Wayne Brown, as we unpack an exciting future together.

0:02:31.1 WB: Well, welcome again, Team ET, we’re back for another week, so today we’ve got a really interesting guest, Tom Applegarth, so welcome to the ET Project. Great to have you on board.

0:02:42.3 Tom Applegarth: Thank you Wayne, proud to be here.

0:02:46.5 WB: I wanna try and push Tom and challenge Tom to get into some nitty-gritties about HR and how we’re coping with the whole gamut of work from home and remote work, etcetera. But before that time, I like to ask our guest, is there anything that our listeners would be interested in knowing about you, a fun fact perhaps.

0:03:08.5 TA: Well, I grew up in Utah and graduated from Brigham Young University, but then spent the last 30 years kind of in the Midwest in Chicago, Kansas, Dallas, Cleveland, and St. Louis, but last year moved back here to Utah, and I’m glad to be near the mountains once again.

0:03:32.4 WB: So you’re not too far away from the actual lake itself, I guess, the Salt Lake.

0:03:36.0 TA: Yeah, I’m about 35 miles south of the Great Salt Lake, and I’m actually right on Utah lake, which is the second biggest lake in Utah. So that’s where I’m at.

0:03:45.0 WB: So that 30-year period traveling around different states within the US, 30 years within the HR field, I guess.

0:03:56.6 TA: Yes, yes. All in HR, all of my jobs have been in the HR field.

0:04:04.8 WB: Welcome reservations for that.

[laughter]

0:04:07.9 TA: No, I’ve enjoyed it. It’s been a lot of fun.

0:04:09.6 WB: Anything out there got you excited at the moment, like anything in the world that’s really pushing your buttons or you think it is worth talking about?

0:04:20.3 TA: You know, I’ve been playing around with ChatGPT and I am just fascinated with the artificial intelligence and what that might mean for the workplace going forward, so it’s pretty exciting. And it is pretty amazing what tools are available.

0:04:40.6 WB: I’m guessing you’re either a baby boomer or a gen X.

0:04:44.1 TA: Yep, I’ m a gen X. Yes.

0:04:46.4 WB: Gen X. Okay. So I’m 45 years in my career now, so you can see by my, the color of my hair as a, towards the end of the baby boom cycle. AI is something that’s still a little bit foreign for me. Yes, I dabble with ChatGPT and all of the sister or brother products around that. And it is quite extraordinary. Right? It’s really reshaping business as we know it. I guess we will talk a little bit about that in terms of HR and the impact it’ll have with HR going forward as we get into the conversation. What got you into HR, like how did it all start 30 years ago?

0:05:31.1 TA: Yeah, so I got my undergrad at Brigham Young university in history, just because I like history. I like to read, I like to learn about what’s happened before, but when I graduated, I found that I wasn’t very excited by any prospective job opportunities with a history degree, so I went on and got my MBA at BYU, and the first semester they have you take finance and accounting, and operations and marketing, and then they had an organizational behavior class that they made everybody take. And when I was going to BYU, Stephen Covey had been a professor at BYU, but had just recently written his book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, so he was off making lots of money and promoting his book and doing consulting, and so he was no longer an active professor, but he would come back and give special lectures, and he was definitely a big presence still on the BYU campus. And so that exposure was what really got me interested in organizational behavior in HR and really got me excited about going into that field.

0:06:49.5 WB: You’re now working for a company called Preferred CFO.

0:06:58.2 TA: CFO.

0:06:58.9 WB: Yeah. Which is an outsourcing organization I guess you’ d call it?

0:07:06.1 TA: Yeah, yeah. We’re really a fractional CFO and HR firm, so we do finance, accounting, HR and payroll work for small companies that can’t afford the type of talent that they want on a full-time basis.

0:07:21.4 WB: So what does that mean in terms of organizations that engage your service from a HR perspective, what type of service do you offer?

0:07:28.1 TA: So we offer the full kind of HR breath where we’re helping them from a recruiting perspective, payroll perspective, helping to put together their employee benefits, their compensation structures, training and development, coaching for the leaders. And we’ll give them kind of the big company HR services, but tailored for a small company.

0:07:56.9 WB: I can imagine in today’s world, where there’s so many small organizations starting out that this type of business would really have a lot of interest.

0:08:07.3 TA: Absolutely, I think that small companies, one of the biggest mistakes I see them make is the owner or the founder tries to wear all the hats, and it’s just impossible for any one person to be an expert in every single area, and so I think the smart business owners really identify where am I an expert and where am I not an expert? And where I am not an expert, how do I bring in an expert in that functional area, and that’s where I think our firm really helps owners and CEOs that aren’t an expert in finance or HR, and we can bring in experts that all have 20, 30 years of experience and they’re very seasoned, and then we just look at the scope of service, we quote a monthly fee, and then we’re really part of the team on a [0:09:07.1] ____ basis.

0:09:08.6 WB: At what level do you typically come in, you come in at board level?

0:09:11.4 TA: Yeah, usually we’re coming in as a direct report to the CEO, and so really coming in as either their CFO or their head of HR, and then we have people that would then report to us that can do a lot of other work, so we can bring in the entire team, or some of our clients have an existing team, they just need the senior leader to manage that existing team, and we’ll do that as well.

0:09:44.0 WB: That’s a nice segue in a way to the area that I’d like to focus on, which is how are we coping at the moment in the world of our workforce, three plus years into this work shift transition, if you like, how do you feel that we’re coping as a whole, just as a generalization?

0:10:08.5 TA: Yeah, I think the one big lasting trend, I think, from the pandemic was the whole work from home, where prior to the pandemic, there were not a huge percentage of the workforce that were working from home, and then during the pandemic, there was a big percentage of the workforce working from home, and now we’re in the phase where a lot of companies are either mandating that people come back into the office or trying to entice them to come back in the office, and a lot of employees don’t want to come back in the office full time, most employees are fine coming back periodically, whether that be one day a week or two days a week or whatever it might be, but most employees don’t wanna come back in the office full-time, so there’s that tension that’s happening in a lot of companies now.

0:11:07.5 WB: Yeah, the cycle of hybrid work existence. Yeah. We have been through a cycle of almost everybody working from home through the hybrid, now we’re starting to see more requirements for almost full-time back in the office, so it’ll be interesting to see where it plays out, I guess, but I agree with you. I can imagine there’s a lot of tension with people having experienced the opportunity to do it from home now not wanting to go back, so… Do you think that is presently the biggest challenge that companies are facing with their workforce?

0:11:46.5 TA: I think that’s a big challenge. At least in the US, we’ve had really robust labor markets as well, and so unemployment is very low versus historical metrics, and so attracting and retaining the best and the brightest workforce is a challenge, and that’s one component of it, is that there’s a segment of the population that is looking for a lot more flexibility and the ability to work from home and trying to maintain that, and that’s certainly one of the factors that companies have to take into consideration as they’re looking at their recruiting and retention processes.

0:12:33.0 WB: I can imagine it’s a daunting task for any HR professional, particularly having answered to the board and talk about how are you going to entice these people back to the office that don’t wanna come back, and how much talent does that mean you’re going to lose from the organization. So I can imagine a lot of sleepless nights probably for some of the senior leadership teams. How universal do you think this challenge is that we’re facing at the moment with this transition? Do you think it’s predominantly the western world or… Do you have a feeling for that?

0:13:09.1 TA: So during the pandemic… At the start of the pandemic, I was working as the head of HR for a small company called Potter Electric. They had about 700 employees, about 60 or so in the UK. We actually had like 20 in Ukraine, and then we had about 50 in China. And so it was kind of interesting to see how the different countries around the world dealt with the pandemic and the working from home, and so there were some differences there, but definitely one of the universal things was that most of the jobs that could work from home… Now, this was a manufacturing company, so there were a lot of jobs in the company that couldn’t work from home, and we needed to have people wear masks and be six feet apart and re-designed the manufacturing environment to do that, but the employees that could work from home, universally across the globe, and at least those locations, people that could work from home were working from home, and then the pace at which they came back to work changed, but none of those locations went to fully back in the office five days a week when I left about a year ago, and the companies I’m dealing with now are primarily in the US, and they’re definitely in different stages of wanting to bring people back in the office. Almost universally, the CEO wants everybody back in the office, but equally, almost universally, there’s a large percentage of the workforce that is pushing back on that.

0:15:03.7 WB: Yeah. And that’s my experience as well I have to say. I’m wondering, if you look at the generations of employees, is there a group that are more susceptible to wanting to come back versus those that don’t? Have there been any studies around that that you know?

0:15:27.4 TA: Yeah, I really haven’t seen that on a generational basis, but there’s definitely pockets of employees and a lot of it just depends on their home environment, their preference, maybe how long of a commute they have to go into work, which is a big factor, you have people that have a much longer commute are much less willing to come back in the office than somebody who has a shorter commute, but there’s definitely a population, even throughout the pandemic we had a population who preferred to come into the office for whatever reason. Now, it wasn’t huge, it was probably in the 15%, 20% range, but there was 15% or 20% of the people that just would prefer to be in the office almost every day, even if there’s not very many people in the office. And a lot of it, I think, was just their work environment, their home environment and what they preferred to do, but universally, in almost every survey and study I’ve looked at, there’s 70% to 80% of the employees that would prefer a lot of flexibility. Now, how many days they’re willing to come back to the office versus not, you know, there’s a broader range, but 70%-80% of the employees just universally don’t want to be in the office five days a week like they were prior to the pandemic.

0:17:04.5 WB: Yeah.

0:17:09.0 TA: And I do think that the younger employees are more apt to change jobs over it than the older employees, but the employee engagement, I think is pretty universal across all of the employees regardless of generation.

0:17:27.4 WB: What do you feel that the HR industry can take away from the pandemic in terms of people management?

0:17:36.3 TA: It’s definitely made work from home a possibility, other places where I worked prior to the pandemic, when somebody wanted to work from home, it was always a much bigger issue and happened much less frequently, and I think primarily because people were really worried about how productive somebody could be at home. Well, throughout the pandemic, there’s a lot of variants, but there’s a lot of studies that really show that productivity wasn’t negatively impacted in a lot of circumstances from people working at home, and so it’s made it a distinct possibility, and it depends on the business and what strategy they want to take, but there are some businesses that are taking the strategy of, we’re gonna lean into this work from home, and that’s gonna allow us to attract much better talent than we could otherwise, and we’re gonna use that as a competitive advantage in recruiting and retaining the best and the brightest. Now, there’s other companies that aren’t sure that’s going to work for them from a culture perspective, and so I think it is very situational and very much what are you trying to accomplish as a company, and what do you see as your strategic advantages versus the people you compete with in the marketplace and the people that you compete with for talent, and how are you going to navigate those waters?

0:19:19.7 WB: Yeah. I guess, you know, we’re only three years into this, so there’s still a lot of unproven outcomes to happen, so we’re still in the infancy of that. I’m gonna put my doomsday cap on for a moment, and just play devil’s advocate here a little bit and just see what you feel might be the situation, but I’m wondering, given that we’re still in reasonably early stages of this transition, work from home, how much is being covered up that’s not really being exposed yet? So just to give you a couple of ideas about that, like if we look at an office environment and we look at the requirements for the HR for the business to provide adequate lighting to make sure that you have the ergonomics of the desk and the chairs and the noise control, just all of these different factors, I’m wondering how much of that is now gone by the wayside, with people working from home who are happy to be at home, and therefore they don’t wanna raise any of those concerns and what the ramifications might be.

0:20:46.4 TA: Yeah, I think you’re right. Some of the repetitive injuries that happen from not having a proper ergonomic environment, I think will take years to really uncover themselves, and I think that’s a very valid issue that might be one of the negative consequences from companies letting people work from home, I think you are right. It’s hard to tell how big of an issue that will be only being three years in, but certainly could be an issue.

0:21:26.9 WB: Could we be running the risk of almost reverting back to some sort of sweatshop mentality, but this time with it being our own doing where we’re wanting to work from home, but we’re prepared to work in whatever conditions we need to just for the sake of convenience to get the job done and we forget about the ramifications or longer term impact? Is there any guide rails that the organizations or HR are sharing with their employees that are working from home? Now, are there suggestions about how they should be caring for their health?

0:22:09.9 TA: Yeah, there definitely are. And there are a lot of information, and I’ve shared it with many companies on some guidelines that, you know, what is a proper environment to work in when you’re working at home, and how do you make a safe environment as well as a productive environment, and so there’s some guidelines but it’s obviously impossible to really control that the way that you can in an office place. And so I think your point is a good one, that there might be negative health ramifications that may take years to develop, we haven’t really seen any, or I haven’t seen any studies that show it at this point, but it may take many, many years before those kind of issues start to manifest themselves.

0:23:06.7 WB: Yeah, one of the areas I can imagine that’s going to be really hard to manage and control if it becomes an issue, is injury, so if somebody is working and they trip over the stairs and they put in a claim, where does that go? What do you do with that sort of scenario?

0:23:30.4 TA: Right, yeah. And at this point, the companies I’ve worked with have taken the position that if you injure yourself at home, it’s not a workplace injury, and it hasn’t really been litigated by the courts yet, so nobody really knows the answer of whether or not that is a legally valid stance if the person is working from home, but that’s certainly the stance that we’ve taken and it hasn’t…

0:24:01.9 WB: It hasn’t been tested.

0:24:02.9 TA: It’ll be interesting to see as laws evolve in different countries around the world, whether or not that stance will hold up.

0:24:12.2 WB: I can imagine there’ll be many cases in the future like we already have, if you are on your way to work that’s deemed to be under the employment, right? Therefore, if you’re working from home, I can imagine that from a legal perspective, that’s gonna be dismissed, so I can only imagine how that’s gonna play out at some stage in the future.

0:24:36.6 TA: It depends on what country you’re in. Every country views these things a little differently, but certainly, I think that’s probably an issue that will develop over the coming years.

0:24:48.7 WB: Is there any move by governments or by HR industry as a whole to start to look at policies for work from home? Is this an area that people are talking about?

0:25:08.5 TA: Well, yeah, and most organizations that I work with have a policy around work from home, but it may need to evolve over time, and especially with some of the issues we’re talking about that I don’t think are fully fleshed out in any of the work from-home policies. I haven’t seen the governments around the world yet kind of make a lot of changes from a legal perspective due to this shift, but it’s bound to happen at some point, and especially if there’s really some negative health issues or injury issues that really become more prevalent, then I think that’s when we’ll see governments get involved.

0:26:01.5 WB: Yeah. If we move on to the topic of AI, I’ve asked this to a few HR guests that we’ve had on the show, and nobody really has a sound understanding or knowledge, as you could imagine, what’s your feeling about AI, about robotics, about the role of the digital era within the HR fraternity going forward?

0:26:22.3 TA: Well, I think there’s definitely a role, and we’ve already seen it where on the recruiting side, where there’s a lot of automation in reviewing applicants to try and reduce that pool to a more manageable number for a human to then get involved. And I think that AI is pushing that process even further, and then there’s AI, and I’ve used ChatGPT to go in and help me put together a first draft of policies or training outlines or different things, and I’m sure it’ll just improve over time. There’s usually a lot of editing that has to go on, but it’s a great first start to anything that you’re putting together from scratch, I think it’s a great first start and is remarkably good in putting together a rough first draft, that then needs to be edited, and I do think they’re having some quality issues and that all of the data that it pools aren’t necessarily accurate, so you gotta double-check everything, you gotta have an expert read through it, but I can only imagine that that’s gonna get better over time, that seems like something that they can solve, and so I think that anybody who’s ignoring this does so at their peril.

0:28:09.6 TA: Any knowledge workers in any area that is ignoring artificial intelligence is not doing themselves a service, you should really figure out how to use that as a tool and as a competitive advantage for your company and for you personally to develop that skill. But this is not unique in the history of mankind, the people that used to make horse saddles needed to make a transition, and some of them probably made that successfully to something else, and most didn’t, and so this is an ongoing scenario that has happened time and time again in the history of mankind, and this is just another one that we all need to pay attention to.

0:28:57.1 WB: Yeah, for sure. I used ChatGPT the other day for my job descriptions I was putting together. Like you said, you have to go through, you have to iterate it multiple times to get it to where you want to, but it is a great starting point. As we project a little bit further into the future then, if we look at all the robotics, the humanoids, if you like, simulators that are being constructed at the moment with faces that look almost real, as we start to see that progress, how do we deal with that, with humans working beside the humanoids, how do we write procedures for it? How do we create policies for dealing with this type of thing?

0:29:43.0 TA: Yeah, I think as technology has developed over time, we work much differently now than we did 30 years ago when I was starting my career, things like Zoom didn’t exist, so I think that they’re all tools, and I think the companies and the people that are gonna be successful, really figure out how to most effectively and efficiently use the tools and integrate the workforce with the tools and just dramatically increase productivity because of those tools. I think those are the people that will be successful. The people that fight and resist bringing new technology into their companies, I think ultimately are not going to be successful, so I think you just have to look at it, figure out how your employees are going to work with the new technology, design work processes and work policies that will make that effective. But I think it’s another tool that all companies need to look at, and really with the mindset of how do we use this to increase our productivity and our ability to satisfy our customer and our employees and our investors, I think making sure that whatever you do is good for all three of those groups is really important.

0:31:35.3 WB: Yeah, very true. What are you seeing, if you’ re seeing, in terms of education in today’s requirements with organizations, is there still the need from the organization for people to go and complete a three-year degree, or are people now looking for more short-term solutions for their continuous education?

0:31:58.7 TA: Yeah, I think there’s more and more of a trend to put less emphasis on a college degree. Now, it’s still a lot of organizations, especially when you’re going out to recruit entry level people, it’s easy to go to the university because they’ve done a lot of the screening for you. And so if you hire somebody that’s graduating from a good university in a degree that you know has a skill set that you need, and you’re looking at their grades and they performed well in college, well, then it’s hard to make a bad hiring decision, hiring somebody from that environment. However, if you’re looking for somebody not straight out of university, but you need somebody with certain skill sets, that’s where the companies I’m working with have really started to try and put their bias, because certainly the older generations all have a bias, if they had that bias growing up in their organization, they mostly haven’t changed that bias of, I want somebody with a college degree, but that’s where I push back on them often and say, well, let’s think about what we’re trying to hire here.

0:33:21.3 TA: We’re trying to hire somebody who has a certain skill set that has five or 10 years of experience in that skill set, and at that point, do you really care? I mean, help me understand the value that a college degree brings if somebody has proven that they have that skill set over 10 years, if that’s kind of the requirement is we want somebody who’s really an expert in this area, well, whether or not they have a degree is probably irrelevant, and there’s a lot of those as I and my team help people recruit the best and the brightest, part of that is really challenging some of those work requirements and is that really gonna bring us the best and the brightest who are gonna be the most successful in this particular role that you’re hiring for?

0:34:15.3 WB: If people wanna connect with you, I they wanna find out more about Preferred CFO, where would they go?

0:34:21.2 TA: They can go to preferredcfo.com, or you can Google me, Tom Applegarth at Preferred CFO, and I come up at the top of the list. And you can connect with me on LinkedIn or connect with me at preferredcfo.com.

0:34:34.3 WB: Tom, as a final parting comment, any words of wisdom you would leave with our listener base which are primarily leaders, any words of wisdom you’d like to share with them?

0:34:45.5 TA: I think the most important thing for leaders to do is to really understand, how am I and my team adding value, and that should really I think, as long as leaders have that as the guiding principle and are always trying to make sure they and their team are adding value, you have a much better chance of heading in the right direction.

0:35:13.3 WB: Tom Applegarth, thank you so much for being on the ET Project, great conversation. Great having you here all the way from Salt Lake City.

0:35:21.9 TA: Thank you very much, Wayne.

0:35:24.4 Speaker 2: Thank you for joining us on the ET Project, a show for executive talent development. Until next time, check out our site for free videos, e-books, webinars and blogs at coaching4companies.com.