Workplace wild west: AI, return-to-office, and DEI shifts with Jaime Klein

Jamie is the founder and CEO of Inspire hr, which is the HR leader's go-to partner for interim senior experts on strategy and execution. And in this quick hit conversation, we talk about some of the workplace trends that Jamie's seeing these days. We cover ai, return to office, and what's happening with DEI and more. So enjoy this conversation with Jamie Klein. So Jamie Klein, founder and CEO of Inspire hr. Welcome to the Modern Mentor Podcast. Thank you for being with me today.

But the point being you are just inside of so many different companies and you're seeing things and you're hearing things and the workplace feels like the absolute wild west these days. And so I wanted to pick your brain just about what you're seeing and what you're hearing and and what's really capturing your and your expert's attention these days. Sure. And again, thank you for having me and I'm flattered by what you said.

I've been a Rachel's super fan for a long time, so, so happy to be here. And I love your firm as well. So what we're seeing is it's so interesting, it's pretty consistent, no matter size of organization, zip code industry, you bring a bunch of people together and the same stuff goes down.

I think folks are pretty AI obsessed at this moment and it feels akin to when the internet first started And you know, you would see some companies say, oh you know, we're gonna have our customers continue to go to our really thick phone book size catalog rather than going on and kind of looking at our inventory online. And some people were earlier adopters. It feels a little bit like that.

I've heard countless people say AI is not going to take our jobs, but the people who really are agile with AI will take our jobs. So I am seeing a trend across HR where everyone is curious. I think that there is a spectrum of kind of early adopters to folks that have fully implemented it. So for example, Pfizer, I think that they have co-CEOs and we run these monthly HR salons and we are recently talking about companies that are quite extraordinary and someone relayed the advisor.

It's kind of embedded the use of AI is kind of embedded in goals at a company level and therefore of course it trickles down to the point of where they've had prompt aons really helping employees understand how to come up with the best prompts. Because what I've heard from countless authors thought leaders is that less important that you have the answer is more important that you ask the right question because we'll all be able to get the answers.

It's how you prompt and so how you ask the question. So a lot of organizations are doing things to look at the entire employee experience and really challenge their HR team to think how do we automate, create efficiencies, get rid of joyless work. And a hack that I heard um, recently is when you are talking to chat GPT, Gemini, Claude, whoever it is to ask what other questions should I be asking you to get the most thorough answer? I thought that was really smart.

And we've seen organizations do everything from utilize AI in the applicant analysis system. I think most candidates these days, they really look at the job description and then they attach their resume and say, please update my resume to most beautifully meet the moment of what this job is looking for. So I think recruiters assume that people have kind of had their resume a little bit judged up.

But what people are really using AI effectively for is to screen those resumes and really understand who has had, you know, the basic, you know, like successive promotions is always coming into um, more senior roles shows innovation. So teaching AI to do that. Recently we were told that one of our clients had it stopped that for the first round of interview you get on with and the candidate knows in advance it's just a screen and AI asks a number of questions and the candidate answers.

So you don't have to get all, you know, gussy up and put on, you know, a fancy outfit because you know that you will just be talking to a machine. But companies are using it, I would say most heavily in the TA space because it's such a high touch heavy volume. You need an army of people to find the right candidate and schedule interviews. So there's lots of hacks there. So we're seeing the most use in ta.

We're also seeing it used um, in other parts of the employee life cycle such as succession planning. So kind of what used to take data analysts, you know, weeks now in minutes, AI can take all this disparate information and really aggregate it, whether it's in the form of PowerPoint or PDF or performance reviews and look at it to look through top candidates.

I could go on but by another example is kind of um, all the verbatims through employee surveys and all the things that people write, that sentiment kind of AI aggregating all of those themes. And of course this has all be password protected to protect the company's ip, but clearly everyone is exploring where they can automate and have high impact across the employee experience. Yeah, that's

But then it also sounds like they want their employees to be upskilling themselves in terms of prompting and questioning and so it's kind of touching at every level.

What are some creative ideas? Just I'm planning a vacation to go to the beach this summer. What are some great spots in the Jersey shore? I wanna go to Sonoma. What are the great vineyards? Whatever it is, because then it's self-motivated and folks see the user friendliness of it. And so that is kind of a quick way to get folks excited and interested and more comfortable.

But a lot of organizations we know they are telling their employees paste most draft emails into AI and just hit Polish and it will come up with more succinct appropriate language. Then you can say, do you want it more business-Like, do you want it to be more casual? And it can ju it either way, but yeah, it's here to stay. Yeah,

You need to just make sure that your tech team is very much staying up to date on all the things that can be done to make the organization more confident in using ai. And you know, you think of any other type of massive change in work or on the home front where we've had this type of transformation, there are always gonna be those organizations that want to wait and see others kind of make the mistakes, lessons learned so that they can kind of dive in.

But Erica Swin, who's a future of work leader that I love, she put in a, a newsletter recently that the jobs that kind of summer interns are doing this summer most will be able to be done by AI by Christmas , right? Like this is the pace at which things are working. And so yeah, just really encourage folks to cautiously get on the bus within their comfort zone. Yeah.

I would never use AI in, you know, and I I feel like people are sort of struggling with this tension between yeah, you know, I need to learn it because it's a new technology, but I don't want people to think that I am not doing original working or thinking. And so how are you seeing people kind of navigate that tension? Yeah.

I think that the art of being able to take someone to take the ideas in our beautiful human minds and kind of put them on paper is really a precious skill. And what is my take, my take is that the human will always be able to bring to the writing true empathy, true lived experience that is shared true. Oh my god, remember that thing that happened to us when we both worked at American Express years ago?

I mean, AI will never know that, but I think that there's a magic middle that probably has to be found because three, if we were to do this, you know, catch up again in 20 28, 29, it'd be, it would be really interesting to see if I'm just taking a job. The employee communications teams at organizations are finding a way to integrate AI in some way that I can't even envision sitting here in 25. But as a quick example, you can now attach documents.

So let's say that a communications leader comes out of a, a brainstorming meeting of how to get a town hall ready and there's disparate pieces of data, right? There's a PDF, there's something written on a piece of paper. You can attach all of those things and AI can kind of take all the disparate information, come up with a draft to give you a running start rather than you, you know, literally sitting there going through slides and figuring it all out.

So I think of it more as what did our mutual friend Ian O'Keefe from Iona say? He said, it's not an Ivy League intern. It's like having a really eager intern. So someone who's like, I have, I'm full of energy. Let me try it this way, this way. Oh, you want it that way? You want it in bullets, I can do that. And they never get tired.

And I was in Midtown Manhattan two days ago for coffee and literally I walked into this coffee shop, it was adorable at 53rd and Lex Devo, I'm probably saying it wrong, it has some fancy pronunciation of the word devotion and literally they were like 14 people in line for coffee. I was like, where did everybody come from? But it was like, it was a long line, it was a long line. It was a, it was a moment where I realized people are back in the office.

They are, you know, we used to talk about how bring, we want to bring people back for moment that matter. The idea is, you know, if you're gonna kind of drag everybody in, you can't have 'em sitting there on their laptops on Zoom calls. But now it's less moments that matter. It's this is how work is done. We want to be able to quickly do that old thing where you can kind of grab someone and say, Hey, can we just kind of come in and debrief on that meeting?

I know we just finished the meeting in the conference room, but now we need to like really talk about what really happened in the room, the conference room and kind of grabbing people in the hallway. And I think what's happening is there was that moment in Zoom when we were all virtual, where you felt that everyone had a level playing field because we were all in the Hollywood Square boxes.

And then it kind of went to, alright, some folks are virtual, some folks are in the room, that call will end. The people who are virtual will feel like, wow, I dialed in. I set that meeting. But then the people that were there could kind of have that side hall wait conversation going back to their desk. And now what I'm seeing more is, it's like, like Hamilton, you wanna be in the room where it happens, like it's really happening in the room.

And if you are not there, there're you're at a little bit of a disadvantage. And this, if we had spoken Rachel like, I don't know, 12 months ago, I wouldn't have been talking about that as much. But I think that with this new administration that is in, it's also set the tone and it was always that ripple effect into the private sector. But I think that we, what we've seen definitely since January is more of a urge to be in the office.

So what that means is for many of our clients, they have employees that are in multiple states because people, you know, worked at the office in Pennsylvania, but then during the pandemic they decided to move to the Catskills in upstate New York. But now they have that treasured employee in Catskill, you know, in upstate New York and they have to kind of drag them back to Pennsylvania or say we're sorry.

But this job now sets in Pennsylvania and I think that organizations for a while were comfortable having, you know, new text laws and understandings of all the things and very per state. And now I'm seeing less and less of a interest in that. So that's another kind of big trend I'm seeing from kind of the, the quick coffee shop observations to the, um, the reality. Um, and some of our clients have gone.

So, you know, as far as to say for you to have a strong career path here, you are expected to be in. So there's a lot of change happening real time. That's kind of another big thing. And the last thing that is really on people's minds is the whole shift around DEI. So I know that you and I growing up at Amex, you know, the way that we operate and the way that we work is, you know, inclusion is always woven in to the work that we do.

It was in the company goals, it kind of cascaded down and it's kind of how I approach things. I know that you do too. And what we're seeing is that since the new administration has made various announcements and changes that even, you know, private sector companies are really impacted. So companies have done everything from closing down initiatives.

So picturing, you know, a big four consulting firm that had, you know, the female partner track initiative just closing that program down or the program that was for high potential women has been rebranded to now be open to anyone high potential and also rebranding of the way that things are discussed.

So what I'm hearing is that every organization, every HR leader wants to very much have the same initiatives, but they need to make sure that there are no metrics associated with what success looks like and they need to rethink the word. So I'm seeing departments now be called things like belonging or trust or transparency, and I don't know a lot of organizations who have done the following. I'm waiting if any, if you know of any, please let me know.

But I would love an organization to get up and just say, we are rebranding things because we want to stay sustainable as an organization and we want to be very agile and kind of in the moment of how things are discussed now, the work is the same . I think a lot of leaders that I've just kind of read about are kind of saying, you know, as you know, we've never focused on inclusion from traditionally marginalized in group, you know, groups as, as a metric.

We've always focused on merit and people in the town hall are like, that's something I've never heard you talking about merit as like the currency in which things are treated. It's assumed that it's merit, but we also knew that we had initiatives to make sure that folks who judicially didn't have a seat at the table had the path to get there. And we were really intentional about it.

And I think that employees are adults and they have long-term memories and everyone remembers all the work that's been done since the murder of George Floyd and the overdue racial reckoning in our country. And so many employees were made to go to mandatory training and all these things. And now those things have wound down and employers I think need to speak more honestly about why things are getting rebranded. And I think it's, we wanna stay sustainable and be relevant as an organization.

This is kind of what we need to do. And the work is still the same and the guts are still the same, but I think that more of that straight talk is helpful. And I also think that trust feels like a luxury item these days.

So to kind of build those moments of trust in small settings with employees and just speak really plainly, I think is really key because employees know that it used to be called DEI and like their water bottle that they had said that and now they're, they've decided to call it employee engagement. So I think we are all working, living and parenting and really unprecedented, interesting times.

And what I also see is that HR leaders who are at the helm and trying to think about the impact and all these changes to employees are also having a, a little bit of burnout. And I know you've done a lot of discussion about that in your multi-part series and I think that that's an important thing. You know, self-care for HR is always top of mind, um, for us. So yeah. Wow.

I am feeling like suddenly we're not allowed to talk about diversity and we're pretending it never happened. And also I have to be in the office four days and that's actually gotten really challenging in my life. Or I actually feel like I'm a lot more productive and I have a couple of days from home and all of this stuff is moving and also the economy is uncertain and so I'm not super engaged, but also I'm not ready to leave my job because, you know, I don't have that confidence right now of,

So like, so if I know I'm gonna have an intense day, I try to drink three, I tend to walk a mile or so every day. If I know a crazy intense day of meetings, I'll throw an extra mile. I eat a lot of kale really like, I try to get eight hours of sleep.

So kind of things that I've always thought were kind of nice to have, I always say or need to have because I think that our nervous system, as sophisticated as we are, we have these devices in our hand that we can, you know, do a thousand things with the human nervous system is built in a certain way where it's I think only capable of processing a certain amount of stress and change at a given time.

And the more fuel we kind of put in the tank, good nutritious fuel, I think the more we can ask our nervous system to kind of do more. Um, and fuel could include things like taking a break from difficult news.

There's this, um, a newsletter someone shared with me called Nice News where you can kind of have a quick update on what's going on in the world, but it is a little bit over indexing and on sharing good news or making sure that you take social media breaks or make sure that you surrender yourself with people that are optimistic, not unrealistic, but optimistic and find joy in small things like, I don't know, you and I both live in homes that have clean water.

Yeah. When we open our tap, you know, I don't know, we have, I know there are occasional moments where there is intense pollution, but when we had, you know, various fire fires in Canada, you and I live in the New York area and we had those fires in Canada summer of 23. And if you remember the, the sky was just really dark and there was such toxic air. Do you remember that? I do. We'd been so busy, right?

So I had, um, I had a call with an old friend and colleague that morning who, when that all was, was going down whose family's from India and we were talking, she said, you know what? She said, it smells like my grandmother's house. She, whenever I go back and I see our relatives in India, this is just kind of what the air smells like. And living in the New York area, we have not experienced that a lot.

But on days when I'm overwhelmed, I think, you know what, at the moment, you know, I can fill up three of these. I got the tap water from the fridge that's kind of working. I've got the clear, like, it sounds so basic, but just trying to get back to kind of some of those fundamentals because there is a lot we don't have control over right now.

So, um, and then I do a lot of reading and another thing, um, and I always say to our leaders, if you can take a, a break on the podcast all about leadership, just give your brain a break and just just read with, you know, fun for fun sake. So yeah, those are just some quick things. I mean it is nothing off the charts, but you know, things that we haven't all discussed or thought about, but I think it's about, um, oh and one quick thing.

I do leadership team meetings every Monday with my team and we always start with the one minute mindful meditation because I know I'm guaranteed to meditate at least on Mondays, you know what I mean? Like, oh wonder.