Mark:
Welcome to PeopleTech, the podcast of the HCM Technology Report. I’m Mark Feffer. Today, I’m talking with Adam Gordon and Ulises Orozco, the co-founders of PTO Genius. Their platform allows companies to convert time off to help employees fund things like retirement, vacations, and emergency expenses. We’ll look at what employers are most concerned about right now, the consequences of employee burnout, and the dynamics of PTO all on this edition of PeopleTech. Hi Adam. Hi Ulises. This is your second visit here. So welcome. You talk with a lot of employers about benefits and time off. And I’m wondering, what are they concerned about right now?
Adam:
Good question Mark. So the top three things we’re hearing organizations come to us about right now is burnout, turnover, and engagement. Oh, about 54% of companies are asking us about burnout or talking about it. 45% are talking about turnover and 44% are talking about engagement. So those are the top issues we’re seeing from them.
Mark:
Of course, you have to ask a COVID-19 question, and I’m wondering if the pandemic has impacted how companies and workers, both sides are approaching time off and other benefits. Has COVID affected their approach to negotiating with each other, for example, or have the dynamics really changed?
Ulises:
So, what we have noticed is that in the beginning of the pandemic, there was a lot of, kind of let’s figure out what we can do since employees are working from home. And we certainly don’t want them to miss out on their PTO. So we saw a lot of companies initially talk about what are some quick, temporary changes that we can make. And then as they made those changes rolling over, letting employees cash out, more and more of them started to kind of say, well, maybe we should make some of these permanent. So from a standpoint of companies talking about how we can do something around COVID, they’re no longer really doing that. Really what they’re thinking more about is, Hey, this whole wellness from, excuse me, this whole financial wellness angle, this whole conversion, this whole burnout, that’s here to stay. So let’s do something about that. And that’s really where the conversation is really pivoted to.
Adam:
We’re also seeing challenges with engagement, right? It’s nothing new that we’re hearing that companies are trying to find unique ways to keep employees engaged in this remote or hybrid environment. But we see a lot of companies really struggling to figure out how to solve for that with their organization, because what works for company A may not work for company B. So really what we’re seeing now is more of them saying, Hey, you know what, instead of us assuming, let’s do a poll survey, let’s find out from our employees, what’s really going on, understand the challenges. And then from there, they’re trying to figure out, okay, how can we intelligently solve that? Because bringing in masseuse or hiring someone to go over to your house to give you a massage or doing a virtual yoga session, really isn’t solving the challenges. So I think companies are really digging in deeper to try to really discover what’s happening at the core that’s causing these issues with turnover or engagement to really understand how to properly solve for them.
Ulises:
Yeah. And some of that breaks down in a different way than it has in the past in that you’re no longer competing with the company down the block. You’re really competing globally, especially if you’re the kind of company that does hybrid work or has lots of employees that work from home because now those employees can work for anyone. Right. I mean, there’s many companies that are now expanding where they draw talent from. So competition has increased, expectations from the employee has increased, gen Z is coming into the fold. Their expectations are very different and they’re very vocal about what they expect in their jobs in a way that previous generations weren’t. So it’s almost like a perfect storm of many, many things that are kind of bubbling up to how do we do things different from a compensation perspective, from a benefits perspective, and really think outside of the box. And that’s what we’re trying to help companies do.
Mark:
What are some of these things? I was going to just ask, are people thinking differently in the post pandemic world, but you’ve just touched on some things and I’m wondering how, not how deep it is, but how widespread it is, how ingrained is a new attitude becoming?
Ulises:
So, what we’ve been hearing and what we’ve been seeing is that there is a sense of, I want to do something fulfilling. I want to do something that makes me feel like I’m contributing, that my contributions matter. And that really makes me excited to wake up every day. Now, at least that’s what we’re hearing from the HR folks that we talk to. And if I don’t get that, I’m going to be very vocal about my dissatisfaction, right? Whereas in the past for someone to become vocal, they would have to go through the different stages of getting to burnout, where eventually you become kind of disassociated and kind of disconnected socially with your job, your function and how happy you are. And that typically took a while.
Ulises:
Now it’s from the very get go it’s, I’m no longer wasting my time. I want to make sure that what I’m doing matters. And if it doesn’t, I’m going to go on and go to another place. Because right now there’s companies that are willing to give me a huge bonus just to join them. So, it has to go beyond that because if you’re just going to try to keep me with just financial incentives, I can go find those somewhere else. You got to keep me for a purpose, rather what keeps me as a purpose.
Mark:
Oh, Adam, were you going to say something?
Adam:
I was going to say, we’re not seeing any industries or company sizes that are impervious to this. This is ranging from SMBs up to the fortune 250s. They’re all having these challenges. Yeah.
Mark:
So how has all of this impacted PTO Genius? I mean, has it altered your development plans, your roadmap, your marketing, your outreach?
Adam:
It’s a good question. It certainly has. You can’t be tone deaf, right? You have to understand what’s happening in the world or in the market to understand what’s in the best interest of companies and how can we help them solve for those challenges? So for example, Uli mentioned during COVID a lot of organizations who had a traditional or bank PTO policy, their liability was really stacking up really high on their balance sheets. They were trying to find creative way to be able to reduce those liabilities. As we started to work through COVID, a lot of organizations, whether they have unlimited or traditional, or just again with burnout and how to solve for those things.
Adam:
I think what we’ve seen is a shift in how do we reduce liabilities? How do we get people out of the office to now it’s okay, how do we create an actual environment where that work, life balance is consistent and not just reactive, because what happened with COVID. And to Uli’s point, how does that tie into our benefits offering and tying into our culture, tying into what we want to create here as an organization to truly make people feel like they want to wake up every day, open their laptop and be inspired to want to get to work, that organization be proud of it, and be able to be engaged and be able to maintain that level of engagement and excitement long term.
Mark:
Are people more inclined to take time off now? I mean, has the dynamics of time off changed at all?
Ulises:
So it’s gotten better than what it was in COVID. Right. Certainly we’re seeing a wave of people that are coming back to taking time off or feeling comfortable in taking time off, but it’s certainly not where it needs to be from a societal perspective, right? There’s still folks that have hesitation around taking time off because if the company downsized, there’s just too much work on their plate. These are people that are at risk, at danger of becoming disengaged, eventually burnt out and leaving the organization. There’s people that feel that they cannot take time off because they’re one of the fortunate ones that kept their job, right? So there’s still some psychological challenges to kind of get folks to a place where it just culturally, where we’re comfortable with taking the amount of time off to balance that work, life demand.
Adam:
To add on to that Mark, what we’re seeing is about 63% of the companies that we speak with are either concerned or very concerned that their employees are not taking enough time off. And then only about 12% of companies say that their employees use almost or all of their PTO. So it was interesting during COVID the United States was number one in terms of the longest work day increase in the world to about 11 hour work day on average.
Adam:
So to Uli’s point it’s how do we bring in more of that sort of maybe European mindset, where for some organizations, employees are off the entire month of August, or they’re getting large amounts of time off throughout the year. So I think to Uli’s point about talent being global, if I live in Europe and I work for a US company or I have the option to, what’s my work life balance, what’s my number of PTO days going to be relative to a company that maybe I could work for in Spain that mandates I take off at least 40 days a year. So I think that’s really helping organizations say, all right, well, let’s look at how we can maybe redesign our PTO package to be more competitive for this global talent out there.
Mark:
This is kind of a cynical question, but you often hear executives saying that they’re going to do something or change something and try to be responsive to their workforce. Are you seeing that that’s actually happening or is it still sort of almost like cherry picking where some companies are, some companies aren’t?
Ulises:
I mean, for the most part, the companies we’re talking to are trying to do some sort of change or trying to make some sort of change, whether that’s keeping the temporary things that they put in place during the pandemic, or just, I mean, gosh, we talked to, what was it, a 40,000 person company, a fortune 300 or fortune 50 I think it was, that completely redid their PTO policy after not touching it for over 20 some odd years. So, and they’re not what you would consider your more kind of progressive type of company, but they saw that folks are just expecting different things. Folks aren’t taking time off and they wanted to change that. So they got a little creative, they moved some things around and some people were a lot happier for it at the end. So we are seeing companies do something about it. Now the other side of the coin is what will employees kind of react, right? Will employees actually leverage it? Will they take advantage of it? Right. Will they take the time off that they need to take off? And that’s different.
Mark:
You both were last on the podcast nine months ago. And I’m wondering if things have changed very much in that period of time. Have you seen the business change, have you seen the landscape change or have things been getting back to something like a normal pace?
Adam:
So I guess we could only speak relative to what we see in our business. For us, we’ve seen a kind of overwhelming increase in terms of companies reaching out to us to talk. I think to Uli’s point, they’re realizing that they need to make modifications or updates to their policies. Burnout has become a huge topic within the last nine months, I guess, more so than since inception of the organization with companies saying that not only are employees burned out, but they’re also telling us Mark that we don’t have a mechanism in place or a way to be able to get people out of the office. And we just don’t know how to do it, that are good time for them in the company. A lot of organizations will have their C-suite or HR reach out to employees and tell them that, Hey, we really want you to take time off, but something we’ve learned a lot over the last kind of nine months to a year is ultimately that time off or responsibility of taking time off, sits with managers.
Adam:
And when’s the last time a manager looked at you and said, Hey Mark, I was looking at some reports. I noticed you haven’t taken time off in a long time. I really want you to go take some time off next week. They typically don’t do that. They’re not because they’re not bad folks as Uli says, it’s because they’re not thinking about these things. So I think a lot of organizations are saying, look, as we kind of roll out of the pandemic, we want to focus on core business functions and activities and get our revenues up. And in the meantime, what can we outsource or automate or what can we do to optimize our employees and what things can be done. I think we sit at the epicenter of that and that’s why we’ve seen a lot of, I think, increase in outreach for organizations wanting to talk to us.
Mark:
Adam and Uli. Thanks very much for coming back. It was great to talk with you again, and I hope you’ll make it a third sometime.
Ulises:
Thank you, so much Mark.
Adam:
Good thing’s come in three. So thanks Mark.
Mark:
My guest today have been Adam Gordon and Ulises Orozco, the co-founders of PTO Genius. And this has been PeopleTech, the podcast of the HCM Technology Report. We’re a publication of Recruiting Daily. We’re also a part of Evergreen Podcasts. To see all of their programs visit www.evergreenpodcast.com. And to keep up with HR technology, visit the HCM Technology Report every day. We’re the most trusted source of news in the HR tech industry. Find us at www.hcmtechnologyreport.com. I’m Mark Feffer.
Image: PTO Genius
