Breakdown: Andy Jassy

Brian (00:15.325)
How we doing listener? Welcome to another episode of talent chasing, a podcast that dares to ask the question, what do sports in the office world have in common? The answer as it turns out is quite a lot more than you think. Join us as we aim to bring real stories from the world of sports and athletics to the confounds of offices of corporate talent. My name is Brian Johnson. I'm a former major league baseball player and scout.

Jasper (00:41.366)
My name is Jasper Spanjaart. I'm a journalist and filmmaker.

Chad (00:44.859)
And I'm Chad Sowash, recruitment industry veteran, tech startup advisor and investor. And then this episode, well, it's part of our breakdown series where we literally break down news and topics of our favorite athletes and business icons. This week, we're breaking down Amazon CEO Andy Jassy's aversion to remote or hybrid work. Just for all those kids out there, if you don't know who Andy Jassy is, he again, the CEO of Amazon.com.

Taking over for, as you would probably know, super yacht man, Jeff Bezos in July of 2021. He previously built and led Amazon Web Services, humongous company, making it a global leader in cloud computing. Born in 1968 in New York, Jassy earned his MBA from Harvard and joined Amazon in 1997.

Not a guy who hasn't seen success, not a guy who's not well educated. Jasper, what you got?

Jasper (01:49.368)
Well, I think it's a very interesting discussion and I think it's propelled it to a whole new level because COVID happened and we all needed to work from home. And I was quite surprised by the people struggling with that concept because when COVID happened, I was already working from home for about three or four years and it was fantastic. So it's a bit of a, it's a bit of an eye-scratcher, a head-scratcher at the minute, because you go to a level where this has obviously become the discussion. Do companies need to return people?

Chad (02:00.892)
Mm-hmm.

Jasper (02:17.932)
back to offices, do they need to adopt some type of hybrid model? There's plenty of options out there, but I think some of these leaders are being very cruel on their employees in the sense that you go, everyone's working at the office and that's it from us. And you go, okay, why? Firstly, why? Because there's no, you'll get in some statistics later, but the statistics show that working from home can be very beneficial.

Chad (02:29.821)
Mm-hmm.

Jasper (02:46.272)
It can be, you can be very productive. I know I am very productive from home. and I know I'm very productive, not very unproductive when I'm in an office. So, it's, it's just like, feels a bit harsh. feels a bit unnecessary, but to get into that, what's, what's both your views on the concept, just purely the concept working from home.

Chad (02:47.997)
Mm-hmm.

Brian (03:08.047)
I would say for me, you know, working as a consultant, so therefore I get to work in several different environments, every industry you can imagine in their workspace, talking to their people about how they view things, how they see things, and as a business consultant, trying to help them improve and whatever that may be. So having seen that and through all this time, right, through the transition back out of COVID and back into normalcy, it seems like...

kind of to, to, to kind of play the other side, we want to be balanced, right? It sounds like from the business standpoint, some organizations need to have people there every day, right? Depending on what they do, like in sports can't do hybrid and sports, you got to be there every day. And there's some organizations be at the, you know, operations or whatever it be. Some, some parts of companies need to have people there to interact with each other. But to your point, Jasper is a lot of parts of companies where they don't. So I can see, and.

The bigger issue is that, and I think where Mr. Jassy is coming from and other companies is that what we're seeing in a lot of big cities in the United States, at least, is that post COVID, there's a whole lot of office space that is vacant. That Chicago is having the same problem now. San Francisco has been highly publicized. All the challenges they're having is that there's a whole lot of office space that's empty and the owners of these businesses still have to pay rent. They still have to do something with that space. So they are putting the pressure on.

employees to come back to work. So, you know, for me, I like the flexibility of working from home. Also, I'm not raising kids anymore, but when we were raising kids, it'd been a whole lot easier to be able to not spend that money on child care because child care is hugely expensive no matter what part of the world you're in. And for me not to have to commute, pay for gas, pay for maintaining my car, paying for bridge toll if I'm going across the bridge.

Jasper (04:44.334)
Mm-hmm.

Chad (04:52.391)
Mm-hmm.

Jasper (04:56.002)
That's true.

Brian (05:05.341)
paying for parking, right? So if these owners of these businesses are wanting people to come back to work so bad, they need to pay them more to be able to compensate folks and fill the void of some of those things that people are needing like childcare and transportation issues. So that's my view.

Chad (05:22.753)
Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, if you're working a manufacturing line, healthcare workers, retail workers, I mean, but, you know, from this standpoint, yes, the people that are in the warehouse, they've got to come in, they've to work until the robots take over, right? But this from Entrepreneurial Magazine, when Andy Jassy mandated that workers return to the office full time in January, he said working in the office five days a week would strengthen the company's culture.

We'll talk about that and better connect teams. But early this year, Bamboo HR actually surveyed employers and found out that, 82 % of Fortune 500 companies offer a flexible working environment. 82 % of Fortune 500 companies with only 18 % requiring full time and office work, end quote. So why is Jassy being such an assy?

Brian (06:17.21)
Hahaha

Jasper (06:17.55)
I think that's the question, isn't it? I'd love to get an answer directly from him, but we'll have to do with the three of us. Yeah.

Chad (06:25.021)
Right. mean, 82 % though, right? 82%. I mean, he's not the only one. Don't get me wrong. know, there's still, there's 18 % who they are forcing the mandate. But why? Culture was one of those things. Tell me what you think about the whole culture issue that he's citing.

Jasper (06:30.816)
No, it's not. It's really not.

Jasper (06:45.684)
putting us on the spot there. No, but I think if you can't trust your people to be productive from home, there is no culture. Then you've done a shitty job of building a culture. It's as simple as that. If you really, if you really think you need to watch over people's backs to go, okay, what you're doing now, what you're doing now, you need to monitor their every hour work. It's ridiculous. Cause if, if that's what you need, then you have a very bad culture.

Chad (06:53.085)
Mm-hmm.

Chad (06:59.377)
done a shitty job of hiring though, right?

Chad (07:10.141)
Mm-hmm.

Thank

Brian (07:15.571)
Yeah, it's a great point. And I think you're right. mean, you look at the social relationships you have at work anyway. You're texting each other. If you really have a relationship there, you're spending time outside of work as well as inside the work. I mean, you look at the relationships that you have that are really business oriented. That's not where your culture is. Your culture is not coming from that someone I'm forced to work with because they're in another department because we're already working on email anyway, right? We're doing email or...

chat within my organization I work for, everything's on GChat, right? So all of our real communications are coming from there. You don't have to be in person. And it's funny for a tech company, for the CEO to be looking at us from such a dinosaur's perspective of the only way we can communicate, the only way we can build our culture and improve the culture here is to be physically in front of everybody. That's just not the case.

Jasper (07:48.046)
Hmm.

Chad (07:48.509)
Mm-hmm.

Chad (07:59.185)
Yeah.

Chad (08:08.029)
Yeah, I think it's just funny because this to me is propaganda more than what it is anything else. And I'll read a couple of these stats to you. 26 % of employees say a greater divide has developed between remote and non-remote workers in return to office and 44 % of hybrid

Jasper (08:08.286)
No, I'm not. Yeah, go on.

Chad (08:29.167)
in office employees say they don't have a strong relationship with the remote colleagues compared to the ones that they see in the office. First and foremost, I don't need you to be my friend. We're getting work done. Okay, we're getting work done. Okay. At the end of the day, this is not about building those in office friendships. I have the friends, right? And we can still build that just like we are here.

Jasper (08:40.526)
Jeez Chad, be nice.

Chad (08:58.779)
But at the end of the day, this to me is more of a framing that CEOs who want to frame culture as well, they just, don't have the deep connections and culture that we had before. Why are we not talking about outcomes? Because all of the statistics and surveys that we've seen demonstrate that at least hybrid, and there've been a lot that have been done in hybrid, hybrid is as effective.

Jasper (09:13.004)
Exactly.

Chad (09:26.711)
as an office and the attrition rate is much, much lower, which means you're spending less money trying to fill those seats of people leaving because they don't want to be in the damn office.

Jasper (09:39.454)
No. And I think, you know, for me, because, he'll, the big Amazon bosses will look at one stat more than most other stats. They'll look at productivity, right? They'll just base it off productivity. But the weird thing is to me, it feels counterproductive because if you were asking people to work from home, you're, you're, you're automatically saying we expect you to be more productive here. Well, look at the average numbers. think I'm just pulling up some research pieces here.

Chad (10:06.875)
Mm.

Jasper (10:07.052)
You know, the research is the reports vary, but most say an average person is productive at work in an office space for about three and a half hours, right? Three and a half hours out of eight hours. Now that's not a lot people. What are we doing with the other four and a half hours? Exactly. Drinking coffee, relaxing, just, need to, I need to smoke break. Yeah, go on, but do your work.

Chad (10:15.762)
Yeah.

Chad (10:24.881)
You're in my damn office.

Chad (10:30.087)
Yeah.

Chad (10:33.574)
You

Jasper (10:34.976)
So it's to me, the concept of eight hours a day is crazy to begin with. think you should just look at tasks. You should just look at what is the job that needs to be done and go from there. but it's, it feels like, like Brian said, it feels dinosaur risk. It feels very much out of this time and it feels like it's a, it's a very weird statement to make when you, a new generation is coming to the job market that is wanting to do anything but come to the office.

every day. They want to work.

Chad (11:05.629)
Well, to Brian real quick, Brian, you actually said something with regard to obviously childcare. Less females are now in the workforce because they have to stay home with the kids, right? So we now have less people in the workforce, not to mention individuals with disabilities. Individuals with disabilities had the highest workforce rate.

Brian (11:24.712)
Mm-hmm.

Jasper (11:24.884)
Mm-hmm, exactly.

Chad (11:30.243)
in history since we've actually started looking at these numbers, the highest because they could do work from home. So from your standpoint on the diversity and being able to include everybody, Brian, what are your thoughts around this? mean, this is the antithesis of what you think business would want.

Brian (11:49.235)
Yeah, I agree. think what comes down to, I like the hybrid model. Some companies are saying three days a week, some are pushing for more. I saw in the Jassy article that Jassy was pushing for five and it's a negotiation, right? Pushing for five in hopes to get three. And I guess on average it's 3.1 for those organizations that are doing a hybrid. So 3.1 days a week coming in.

Chad (11:55.634)
Mm-hmm.

Jasper (11:55.694)
Mm-hmm.

Chad (12:05.596)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Jasper (12:08.398)
Hmm.

Chad (12:13.115)
Mm.

Brian (12:17.533)
But yeah, especially when you're thinking of including, because right, the workforce, you got to have talent. And to your point earlier, Jasper, if I, if you had to look over my shoulder in order for me to be productive, I'm not being productive, nor is the company being productive because that's, that that's not possible to do. So when you're hiring the best talent, you want to get them for wherever they come from. Doesn't matter if they're able to get here or not. mean, again, with the disability piece, the physical challenges that you mentioned, Chad.

Jasper (12:35.992)
Exactly.

Brian (12:46.065)
I love that you bring that group up because it took in the United States, at least it took 50 years of hardcore working the government, working bills, working the influencers to finally get a law that said cities had to make little ramps for wheelchairs to come up on them. Little things we take for granted now, right? The little bumps on them so don't slide off it with ice. 50 years just for people with physical challenges to be able to get across the street.

Chad (12:57.746)
Mm-hmm.

Brian (13:16.049)
So to overlook groups that are not necessarily of the norm, numbers wise, has been very much par for the course for a lot of companies and a lot of industries around the world, United States being a leader of that. And this I feel is no different. The desire to work remotely, be more efficient, being more efficient with their own personal finances, I think is very much a great thing for the workplace. If we can draw one

Chad (13:39.229)
Mm-hmm.

Brian (13:45.533)
decent thing that happened out of the COVID experience that we went through worldwide. Maybe we're gonna work smarter and not harder.

Chad (13:53.085)
And what you're talking about is what they call universal design, which means everybody can use it. Right. I mean, and that's the beautiful thing. And that is workforce efficiency for all, hence universal design. Right. So it much like remote work, that's a universal design. Jasper was talking about generational and there's some data that actually shows that Gen Z 47 41 percent of Gen Z were likely.

Brian (13:58.887)
Yeah

Chad (14:21.435)
to want to work from home. But the other side, obviously, that was the biggest chunk who said, yeah, we'd rather be in the office, right? I think to me, this is a flexibility situation. And what we need to do as again, as as leaders is we have to set standards in place and we have to take a look at flexibility. One company that actually did a did a six months.

Jasper (14:32.792)
Exactly.

Chad (14:50.125)
of an experiment. Took half, they had two control groups. Nobody got to choose what control group they were in, which would have sucked if you had to go to work. Anyway, they had a control group in the work, they had a control group who were at home. And again, the control group that was at home did just as well, but they had lower attrition, right? Now, the thing that worked, and that was actually a hybrid model, so it wasn't total remote.

Jasper (15:00.022)
You

Chad (15:19.577)
sorry, there was a hybrid. They had a Monday, Wednesday, Friday in the office and then two days at home. OK, so you still got a chance to quote unquote build the culture. But then also but then also there was a standard put in place so everybody knew what the expectation was. And as humans, we have to be able to set those expectations. So from a generational standpoint.

Jasper (15:27.48)
Okay.

Chad (15:44.805)
Exes don't, I mean, we don't want to be in the office, but not as much as millennials. Millennials sure the hell do not want to be in the office compared to the survey. To me, this seems like a leadership problem, not an employee problem. What do you think?

Jasper (15:58.85)
Hmm. Yeah, directly. It is a leadership problem. The leadership will always ultimately decide what the employees are going to do. But the only, the sort of pitfall that I can see in approaching a, or using a sort of remote first method strategy is that some of these young people are struggling to stay productive. That's the only sort of pitfall you can see in some of the research, right?

Chad (16:24.773)
Need mentorship. Yeah.

Jasper (16:25.964)
They need mentorship. They need to be trained on how to be productive at home. Put your phone in a different room. You know, think about what you're looking at in terms of the screens you're allowing yourself to see, you know, you need a bit of, because people ultimately sometimes ask me like, how do you do it? Like, how do you go and sit behind your own desk in your own house for hours on end and just be productive? For me, it's never been an issue not to be productive from home. It's just the fact that you need to concentrate and you need to help yourself.

put away distractions, put away your phone. If you've got a laptop or if you've got an iPad for entertainment purposes, that has obviously got nowhere, that shouldn't be nowhere near your desk. It's really as simple as that, but you need to train people on how to do that. And I think that's the one thing, common denominator in all of this is that we've forgotten to do that. It's like we've forgotten to train people how to be productive at home. What are the things you can't do and what are the things you shouldn't do?

People have just sort of been, remember quite vividly during COVID, people were struggling to be productive. I don't have a great internet connection. How am I going to do this? I don't have access to the drives that my company uses. How can I, you know, we needed to come up with a U-Haul. We needed to come up with a completely different approach to it. And now we're in a sort of phase in time where this is a thing. People will want to work from home at least two days a week.

You need to think of a strategy to teach these people how to do that best. And yeah, I can, I can see the benefit of coming together once or twice a month and building, building the culture that you speak of and do that and see each other and interact with each other. That is definitely valuable, but also trust people to be able to do the work from home.

Chad (17:58.001)
Yeah, yeah.

Brian (18:07.313)
Yeah, I love the training part that you bring up too Jasper. It's because you have to train people who are in person, right? That are in there. got to when they first get there, you got to onboard everybody. You got to show everybody where the kitchen is, where the bathroom is, where you go for HR issues or whatever it may be, who what department does what and where they sit or whatever it may be. It's the same thing. So we should, right? As leaders, we should be training the same concept if you're to be hybrid or remote. But let me push back a little bit, right? We've made a pretty heavy argument against leadership.

Jasper (18:13.091)
Yep.

Brian (18:37.395)
Let's turn it around a little bit. If I'm a leader and I got office space that is not being used, so I'm inefficient there, I have a workforce where I can't kind of, you know, I got to trust people to do their work. I don't feel comfortable with that. I need to be able to see bodies. I need to be able to interact with folks and see how people are working, not just see it through an email, right? I need to make sure that my hybrid people or my remote people.

are feeling a part of the meeting instead of being forgotten about because they're online and everybody else is sitting in the the in the conference room. As a leader, Jasper and Chad, how do how am I supposed to handle that? What's the best solution for me as a leader looking to run my company? And I need my people to be able to run my company.

Chad (19:20.221)
I think the most beautiful part is that you actually have to start understanding who your people are. And most of these leaders do not. Most of these managers were not trained to lead. They were trained to manage numbers, right? And as we start to talk about what is really, what is productivity? Is being in the office productivity? No, it's not. What is productivity? Well, productivity is actually being able to hit those tasks, being able to hit those sales goals, being able to

get to those project phase lines, those types of things. The problem is, that leadership and managers don't know how to do their jobs, right? They don't know their people. And that's the biggest issue. Not to mention, if you don't know your people, how in the hell are you hiring new people? Because you say that you have a culture, well hell, don't even know who's in your walls or at home right now, right? So this challenges leaders.

Again, going back to my kind of like my military expertise, you know, your squad leader knew everybody in the squad, not just the people in the squad, but their families, right? Because it was incredibly important that everything was going well with their life. Because if you were in a foxhole, or if you were on the battlefield with somebody, if mama wasn't happy at home, that's going to get your brain out of whack, right?

And you don't need that. And me being next to that person, I don't need that. So this was, and again, I don't want to get into this whole family thing, but you just got to give a shit. For one, because it's good for business. For two, it's sure the hell good for hiring. You hear about all these companies who are saying, just, quality of hire, we can't get the right hire. Well, it's because you don't know who you should be hiring in the first place.

Jasper (21:07.328)
Yeah, and they usually don't even know what quality of hire means because...

Chad (21:10.125)
No, no. So, I mean, that's where I would start. You got to know your people and in an AI slash data society, this is the place to do it. I mean, the place to understand what productivity looks like, to be able to actually have human time because you can have that human to human conversation because the AI and the RPA is actually taking a lot of...

taking care of lot of that administrivia and bullshit work that you had to do before. So you have more time, go lead. And leadership means you know your people.

Jasper (21:46.53)
No, absolutely. think I've talked about this guy a bunch of this podcast, but Tony Dungey has a great quote about that. A healthy culture values its people. And it's really as simple as that. And when you talk about being valued, if we take that personally, you know, you want to be valued in the job that you do, but you also want to be valued in the type of person you are in the type of character you are in the type of development you're making in your life. You know, you need people who essentially like Chad's hat very bluntly gives a shit about you.

It's really that simple. And if you can't, you know, ramble off a few details about someone's personal life or about their aspirations in life, then what is the culture you're building? Because essentially a business is about its people and the people are the business. There's really nothing else. And if you don't put the time and money and effort into getting to know the people that are working for you, there is no culture that we can speak of.

Brian (22:43.838)
Yeah, great point. And is it interesting, right? We criticize our politicians, right, for being worried about power and control, right? Power and control. And is it interesting that the same thing occurs when a leadership of these companies, right? Of companies that we have, wherever it may be, doesn't matter what country you're in. It's about power and control, right? Power comes into play is that I want to make more money and I want to make more money for my investors. So therefore I need to get my workers to work harder.

Jasper (22:52.034)
me.

Chad (23:02.823)
Yeah.

Brian (23:13.681)
And so the idea of being able to work smarter makes me as a leader have to work harder, right? If I have to get to know all my employees, man, you know, that cuts into my time. And in addition to that, it means that I have to really, you know, we talk about family, talk about culture, talk about whatever it is, but you got to actually do that because it doesn't just happen by osmosis. It doesn't just happen because you're making money or whatever industry that may be in. You got to actually

make that happen. And so that puts the pressure on the leaders and leaders don't like that. So it makes sense.

Chad (23:50.021)
Agreed, agreed. Yeah, it's it's really interesting. And watching I get a chance to work with a lot of companies and watching how they're tackling these different issues. Many of the startups that I work with, they've always been remote, right? Because it is much less overhead to be able to have all the real estate like you were talking about. Right. Right. Right. So you don't have that. Not to mention I can get better people.

Jasper (24:06.894)
Mm-hmm.

Jasper (24:12.43)
Of course.

Chad (24:18.801)
Right. I don't just have to get the people that are, you know, in close proximity to our headquarters. We can get better talent. So a lot of them are thriving right now. And I mean, they are they are thriving and they're growing. A lot of these small are these bigger companies that are kind of like brick and mortar ish companies who bought all of this, all of these buildings and all of this office space. They're going to have to find a way to sublet.

or do something because what's going to happen long term is they're going to lose some of the best talent because a lot of the Gen Z. Do you think Gen Z gives two shits whether they work for Google or one of the cool startups that's down the road? They don't care. They don't care. What they care about is that work life balance and being able to get up after my call, after my call and go put my

my wash in the dryer and then come back to my next call, that means more to me than having a cup of coffee with Jasper who's gonna waste an hour of my time for God's sakes.

Brian (25:30.483)
But I mean, but that's a great call when you talk, right? How long have we been talking about work-life balance, work-life balance? It's one thing to speak to it, it's another thing to allow it to take place. To your point, work-life balance is so much easier if I don't have to be in the brick and mortar every day. And on top of that, so I think what we have to buckle up for is that this is going to be a war, right? And it's already a war, but it's going to continue to be even more so because there's going to be

Chad (25:35.505)
Yeah. Yeah.

Chad (25:46.991)
yeah.

Jasper (25:47.896)
Mm-hmm.

Brian (26:00.371)
Two sides right it's gonna be pretty pretty cut and dry black and white You're either for being in the workplace and forcing people to go in there that don't want to be in there Or you're gonna be about your employees and the numbers at least right now show the employees are winning

Chad (26:03.549)
Mm-hmm.

Jasper (26:16.342)
No, and I think the last part, the last equation into this is the Amazon, as you mentioned, is a tech company, right? They are a tech company. I feel like the labor market for technical people isn't all that great. For the technical people it is, for the companies wanting to hire those technical people, not so much. So if we're asking those people to conform and go, you need to work in an office at least four days a week, preferably five.

Brian (26:23.995)
Right, great point.

Jasper (26:45.208)
They'll go, well, I know a guy with a startup. I'll work for him remotely and he's got a startup back in the U S and I'm based in the Netherlands, but I don't care. Time difference doesn't matter. Asynchronized workforce. We can just do our work and I can just stay at home, do my groceries when I'm done. You know, it's, it's, and to me it feels it's still, we've talked about the nine to five mentality before, but it's, it is so time to kill that beast. It is so time to put that thing in the coffin and never look back.

Chad (26:58.428)
Yeah.

Chad (27:10.437)
yeah.

Jasper (27:14.136)
Burn it, burn it to hell because we don't need it anymore. There is absolutely no one and nothing that can tell me that I need to be sitting behind my laptop at nine o'clock until five and those are going to be my productivity hours. No chance because I'm the type of guy, sometimes I wake up at six in the morning and sometimes I may wake up at 10 if I've had a long evening. I'll still do the work, it'll be on my terms.

Chad (27:15.847)
Yeah.

Chad (27:37.501)
Yeah, yeah. It's the evolution of work is what it is. know, Henry Ford came up with a 40 hour work week, you know, was late 1800s, early 1900s. You know, had, and that was all about manufacturing. You had to go to work, right? That was the thing. We don't have to do that anymore. But here's, here's the thing. And in the bamboo HR survey, 18 % of HR professionals, you're going to love this shit. 18 % of HR professionals and 25 % of

Jasper (27:40.318)
It is very much so.

Jasper (27:47.149)
Mm-hmm.

Jasper (27:52.812)
And it made sense.

Nope.

Chad (28:07.581)
executives hoped people would quit. So in those cases, it was a layoff in disguise or you call it a backdoor layoff because they didn't want to pay off the severance. Amazon is perhaps the most documented and nasty example of these RTO mandates. This from Yahoo Finance, around 30,000 Amazon employees signed a petition protesting the company's in-office mandate and more than 1,800 pledged

to walk out of their jobs, right? Nearly 40%, this is hilarious, nearly 40 % of managers in the survey said they believe their organization did layoffs because not enough workers quit in response to the RTO. So all of these people are like, we're gonna quit, we're gonna quit. And they're like, okay, go ahead, quit. Then we don't have to pay you severance. And they're like, wait a minute, I'm gonna go ahead and get another job first.

So they had to go through the layoffs and then pay severance. to me, and Jassy said this was not a backdoor layoff. I don't believe him. But in this case, 40 % of managers in the survey said that they were hoping to get more laid off or walked out so they wouldn't have to lay them off.

Jasper (29:23.832)
That's a great pilcher right there.

Brian (29:23.923)
Well, yeah. And yeah, in addition to that, even if they if they get them to lay off, right? What have we seen ever since the recession of 2006, 2007, when people leave, we just get the other people to cover for them. And then we never hire. We never rehire that position. So people are working two or three jobs as it is already. And and and COVID, we do the same thing all over again. Fine. Let people go. You do that job more. You do that job more. You fill in there.

Chad (29:33.137)
Mm-hmm.

Chad (29:42.013)
Too thin.

Yep.

Brian (29:50.235)
And then a year or two years later, you look around, no one has been rehired for that position. And that happens over and over and over in every industry.

Chad (29:59.133)
Well, and real quick, this is one of the reasons why, perfect reason why, Amazon has actually burnt through workforce in some of the areas where they have warehouses. They cannot hire people because they've already burnt through the people. There's nobody that they can hire. So same thing, right?

Jasper (30:11.342)
Mm.

Chad (30:21.009)
We're gonna go ahead, we're gonna spread you as thin as we possibly can. Here's what your quota is. wait a minute, you gotta get into the bathroom, sorry, piss in the trash can.

Jasper (30:28.556)
Sorry. yeah.

Brian (30:29.925)
All right. Here in Michigan, there's a brick and mortar for Amazon. It closed up less than six months after it opened.

Chad (30:38.681)
After all of those states were vying for the new Amazon and it's like, this is one of the, one of the, the, the worst sleight of hands that companies have done for years to be able to take tax revenues out of the actual communities in which they are actually trying to get people. and that's police departments, fire departments, education, health systems, roads, right?

So we're finally getting to the point, hopefully, knock on wood, that, you know, maybe, maybe we're not going to fall for the banana in the tailpipe.

Chad (31:19.734)
Beverly Hills cop reference by the way.

Jasper (31:21.21)
I got it fully got it. Yeah. No, no, no, no, no, no. One of the one of the one of the greatest films one of the three there. Absolutely. Axel Axel Foley is my one of my heroes in life. So yeah, Billy. Yeah, it's great. Great film. See, there's not a generation gap here, guys. Now, I think I think the final thing I would do want to say about is that all of these companies say the same thing when they talk about

Brian (31:22.087)
Yeah, Jasper is a little before your time, buddy. Sorry about that.

Chad (31:27.398)
Yeah.

Brian (31:28.667)
In Detroit, by the way, in Detroit.

Brian (31:34.524)
Yeah.

Chad (31:38.983)
There's not. You're an old soul.

Brian (31:39.059)
All right.

Jasper (31:46.676)
attaining talent. it's such a struggle. We can't find the right people. It's so hard to find people. Well, you've got a global economy now. You can actually hire from anywhere. You don't need to hire in your own village anymore. And that mentality directly coincides with the mentality of, we need those people to work in the office. No, you don't. The whole point of this is the most beautiful thing about technology is it allows us to work with anyone from anywhere.

Chad (31:50.301)
Mm-hmm.

Jasper (32:16.486)
Use that to your advantage versus going back to these old school ways of doing stuff. You're not Henry Ford anymore. This is not the early 20th century. Come on guys. can hire from anywhere. You can work with anyone and just make sure you build a real culture.

Chad (32:36.345)
Back to Brian's point real quick. It's interesting because there was a comment made by DJ Solomon from Goldman Sachs who was really, really kind of pissed off because he didn't think his people were working because one of the days he was at the country club and he saw one of he saw actually a couple a couple of his employees called up and said, Hey, David, how you doing?

Jasper (32:47.245)
Okay.

Chad (33:04.475)
He was pissed off because they were at the country club. Guess where he was at?

Jasper (33:06.656)
Yeah, that's not the point is it? then, then, I know.

Chad (33:10.575)
Again, it's the control factor. It's the control factor. I need you to be where I want you to be instead of again, this is the Henry Ford 40 hours a week instead of focusing on what actual productivity is. Did you get done what you needed to get done? For some people, it's going to take 20 hours a week. For other people, it might take 60. Okay, that's the thing. And that's what you have to understand as a leader. You want more of those people.

that actually take 20 hours a week because if you could give them maybe 30 hours a week work and they get 10 and they're incredibly happy, you got A players that are kicking ass, right? We have the wrong mentality in pretty much, I would say the US, but in many parts of the world, yeah.

Jasper (33:49.183)
Exactly.

Jasper (33:56.366)
anywhere. Don't punish people for being good and quick at their jobs. That's the thing. Like you go, okay, well, if you can do it in 10 hours, good for you. Right? If the equation is, okay, this is 40 hours worth of work generally, and you can do it in 10, 15 hours. Well, I've done a great job in hiring and finding you because you're going to be happy because you're not going to spend the entirety of your day on work. It's really that simple. And I think to also tie into that.

Chad (34:01.083)
No.

Chad (34:05.895)
Well, yes.

Brian (34:22.707)
Eh.

Jasper (34:25.226)
is the fact that when you've got these people who are working remotely, if you're a leader and you are adopting this hybrid model, or you're adopting some type of model where you allow people to work from home, don't be afraid to do it yourself as well, because people will always look to their leader to see, okay, but he's in the office five days a week, but that confuses me because he's telling me three days is okay, two days is okay. Don't be afraid to adopt and use your own model if that's what you believe is the best strategy.

Chad (34:39.485)
Mm-hmm.

Jasper (34:51.106)
But too often you see these leaders being burned out five days a week, sitting alone in their offices in this, in this solitude and this massive office and everyone's working from home on a Friday, but he's right there. You don't need to be just trust the process of the strategy you're putting out.

Chad (34:55.783)
Yeah.

Brian (35:09.553)
Great.

Chad (35:11.537)
Well, listener, I'm going to leave you with this from the Swedish company, Spotify. the chief HR officer, Katrina Berg stated, quote, you can't spend a lot of time hiring grownups and then treat them like children. Thanks so much for, for, for listening, to this episode of breakdown. We'll be back with interviews. We'll be back with some film room and more breakdown. Brian Jasper.

Thanks a lot guys. We'll see you soon.

Jasper (35:43.47)
See you soon, buddy.