[ANNOUNCER]: Breaking down everyday workplace issues and diagnosing the hidden sickness, not just the obvious symptom. Our hosts, James and Coby.

[COBY]: Did we lose a patient?

[JAMES]: No, that’s just my lunch.

[COBY]: Hey, thanks for joining us. I’m Coby, he’s James. And let’s get started with a question. How can we find the budget to invest in our employee experience?

[JAMES]: Yeah, so this question kind of came up or, kind of came as a result of our last Q and A episode. So I want to be clear. I’m not, m. Our recommendations are not going to be looking at, hey, take this line item from your budget and move it here. Like we. Obviously these are going to be somewhat general principles that you can, use if you want to open up your books to me for some unknown reason. Sure, I’ll take a look. But really what we want to get at is here are some practical strategies and ways that you need to shift the way that you think about investing in these types of solutions.

[COBY]: Absolutely. And that’s just it, that the best we can do in a single podcast episode is just help arm you listening with some fresh perspectives or maybe some potential business case arguments or something that can allow you to actually take the. Put a bit of tangibility behind how you want to approach either reinvesting, or kind of like divesting some of some of your current spending into actually in the employee experience we talked about in our last episode, which are Q and A about things like how vital trust is, how vital, employee retention is towards your customer attention. All these fundamental pieces that are really summarized in the employee experience are critical towards your business sustainability. Because let’s be serious, the world is pretty complicated and stressful right now. But the one thing that is, is, a firm truth is your employee experience is one of the most vital components towards long term sustainability. So if you’re not too sure where to invest, you will. You’re going to get an amazing ROI always by investing in your employee experience. So we want to give you some again ways to rethink how can we get the budget for that investment. Hopefully you’ll find this conversation helpful. so I think we’re gonna talk about three things. we’re gonna bring up one of our favorite topics, which is labor value loss, helping you kind of like figure out where some of the holes of that, you know, that you can patch to kind of in order to kind of recoup some of your spending. we’re going to introduce to you or maybe reintroduce you, you’ve already heard of it. But the dead horse theory, something that we find.

[JAMES]: This is a fun one.

[COBY]: Yeah. And then we’re to kinda get into kind of some of the nitty gritty and we’re going to talk about the realities of bootstrapping. So let’s just jump into labor value loss. So this is something that we use all the time, we love as a concept and I think something that just helpful for people to kind of reframe. How big of a deal is some of these common issues that are just draining your bank account.

[JAMES]: Yeah. So ultimately what we’re talking about with labor value loss, we liken some of these, very common business problems. The same to the idea of insulation, in your home, when you have cracks in your walls, when your windows are not sealed properly, when your doors don’t close properly, when your insulation isn’t doing its job, money is just leaking out of your business, out of your home. When you have these common problems like high turnover rates or employees who are not performing the way that they need to, or you know, a bad employer brand or all of these common problems, they often don’t show up as line items on your balance sheets, but you’re bleeding money by not addressing them.

[COBY]: Yeah. And it’s just like the idea of like insulating your home. We refer to addressing labor value loss as insulating your productivity.

[JAMES]: Yeah.

[COBY]: Because again, so we’re going to reh share with you some stats that we talked about in a previous episode. We’re just going to bring them up again. But we did an episode on what’s the cost of doing nothing on your workplace culture from season two. So this is of interesting checkout that episode too. Cause we go into in more depth. But the ones we kind of wanted to reframe again are things like employee eternal. So, employee turnover. The typical cost of employee turnover is 20% of an employee’s salary. So that’s 20% of employee that leaves their salary is lost as an additional expense in things like productivity slowdowns and in kind of replacement costs and all the other kinds of like dip in morale that affects, you know, performance and impacts absenteeism and everything else like that too. So it’s the idea of whenever employee leaves, there’s a major cost associated with it that compounds other areas and makes other things more expensive. And the idea of this productivity insulation is that if this is something that’s happening that you’re not addressing is kind of like worried about Your heating bills while you’re leaving the windows open. Midwinter. Right. It’s just that this is a major area of financial liability that most people don’t really think about. Again, 20% of an employee’s salary may not seem like a lot to you listening, but think about every employee that’s.

[JAMES]: Left over each employee salary. Yeah. And if you’re in an industry that has historically high turnover rates like retail, you’re talking 60, 70% turnover rates. 20% for each one is a massive loss. And it’s not just retail that suffers from high turnover rates. So many so many businesses are focused on what they can do to attract people that they neglect. What can we do to hang on to people, to treat them well so that they want to stay and where they don’t want to leave.

[COBY]: Absolutely. So again, I think turnover is one that everyone kind of gets. Okay. Yeah, you, there’s slowdowns, there’s overtime costs, all these little things that kind of make costs go up. Another one that I know you really like, that is a really interesting one is the cost of workplace incivility.

[JAMES]: Yeah.

[COBY]: So on civil workplaces, things where like microaggressions are super common or rude and passive aggressive behavior are kind of the norm. This kind of environment can reduce employee performance to about 26% of every employee that experiences it of their annual salary.

[JAMES]: Yeah.

[COBY]: So what we mean is if you’re in a workplace where you would classify your 20 person team, let’s say that you work with on a regular basis, that there’s a sense of incivility, microaggressions, rude behavior, snide comments, people don’t feel. Yeah. Then every employee is losing the equivalent of 26% of their annual salary is being lost in performance because of just the nature of this environment, the stress, the lack of psychological safety, the worrying and having to check and recheck and the poor cooperation efforts, all this stuff. 26% of each employee’s salary is lost because of this incivility.

[JAMES]: And if you’ve ever worked in a hostel or in, in uncivil in civil workplace, this would make a lot of sense to you because the amount of energy that it takes to put up with that garbage day in and day out, it’s energy that’s diverted from what people should be doing, which is their jobs. it creates clicks which creates further incivility. It creates ah, it erodes trust which creates further problems. It just, it is a poison pill that doesn’t get talked about. so you’re right. I love this stat. It’s not that I love workplace incivility, although if you’ve worked with me, maybe you have a different opinion on that. I. On the fence, yeah. But it is a really. What? It’s something that I’ve experienced and seen firsthand. and something that doesn’t get the attention that it should because it is a very destructive, unfortunately, common, problem.

[COBY]: Yeah, absolutely. So the next one I want to bring up, just be kind of clear for you listening. If you’re wondering where these stats are coming from, I’m going to cite all these stats in our show notes. So if you’re wondering if we didn’t just make them up, this is where they come from. Anyway, the next one is poor workplace communication. So this is around when poor communication is a persistent problems. It burdens businesses and employees to the point that every employee that is affected by poor workplace communication can lose about 21% of their annual salary in inefficiencies, in mistakes, in performance breakdowns, in delays. And that is considerable when you think about like incivility for example, going back to the last one. Can live in a small team, but not in a whole organization. But poor workplace communication is usually systemic. it’s usually everywhere. So if you have 10 employees, then that’s 21% of the average employee salary being lost of 10. If you have 1,000 employees, then that’s the 21% of every employee’s that annual salary being lost. That is unfathomable amount of loss.

[JAMES]: It’s a scalable problem, Right. We’re always looking for scalability in our businesses. Here’s one for you, here’s a really great example. Compound. Let’s just scale our communication problems.

[COBY]: Well actually speaking of compound, annually, every year that this problem goes is the loss of it, right?

[JAMES]: That’s just it. I mean turnover stat is one that is pretty common. People have heard the 20% and whether it connects with them or not, you’ve heard it a lot. It’s a one time expense. When somebody leaves, it requires that amount of money to bring somebody new in, get them up to speed and productivity and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all those other things. If you let incivility go without being addressed year over year over year that you’re. It’s not a one time cost. Same with the communication. It’s not a one time cost.

[COBY]: Right.

[JAMES]: So if this problem has persisted for five years.

[COBY]: Yep, there you go. Compounded annually.

[JAMES]: Yeah, scalability and compound Interest.

[COBY]: There you go.

[JAMES]: All the things in exactly the wrong way.

[COBY]: So let’s talk about the last one that I want to share, which is a bad employer brand. And this is one that I think most people hopefully are thinking this isn’t our problem. But you may want to verify this is not your problem. But this is that ah, when you have a bad employer brand, your reputation in the labor market is not overly great. What businesses typically have to do is they have to kind of create up their wages a little bit to make up for that poor reputation, to make the risk of working for this business that they hear bad things about to make it worth it. And that usually looks like 10%, higher salary requirements in order to, order to convince a candidate that to take a job with the company with his bad reputation.

[JAMES]: Yeah. So if a candidate is evaluating two different job offers and one has kind of a m. Meh. Neutral, not really spectacular reputation and the other one has a poor reputation, it’s going to cost that second company 10% more in wages in order to attract that person.

[COBY]: Right? Yeah.

[JAMES]: So again this is not a single instance. It’s not 10% once. That’s 10% more wages week out while they’re with you.

[COBY]: Exactly it. And again, and what I find funny about this step is one of the most common like partners, like connected, issues with a bad employer brand is high employee turnover.

[JAMES]: Yah.

[COBY]: Right. Which means your churn is so much higher, which means you’re hiring so many more, which means that you’re putting 10% into the workplace.

[JAMES]: Incivility leads to turnover, leads to employ poor communication. Like all of these things are connected. And that’s why labor value loss. I mean getting back to the actual question of, you know, how can we find the budget to invest in our employee experience? You’re spending money already. You are losing money on by. If you have these issues in place, if you have workplace incivility, if you have high turnover, if you have a bad employer brand, if you have inefficient, poor internal communication structures, you are already losing a lot of money by not addressing these issues. What you need to do is understand the cost of doing nothing is higher than the cost of doing something.

[COBY]: Right. Absolutely. And that is just it is that by choosing to not fix these issues is an active choice. It’s like choosing to leave all your windows open midwinter and concerned about the cost of heating. That money is getting spent. It is. You are losing, you’re losing it today. You lost it yesterday, you lost it the day before. It’s not like your, if you don’t do anything and you cover your ears and close your eyes, the problem pauses. It’s.

[JAMES]: That’s always how problems get fixed. Bury your head in the sand. That’s an effective strategy.

[COBY]: And it’s stupid that I got to say it out loud, but people have to hear it. And this is, and this is the reality. So if you’re listening to this podcast to find out how can you make a business case or present an idea for why your company needs to invest in your employee experience, labor value loss, and the fact that they are already bleeding money in a lot of these areas. Because again, a lot of these problems don’t exist in isolation. They usually kind of exist kind of together. You show how big of a expense they’re already spending, that if they were to go a little bit proactive and they were to invest even a fraction of what they’re probably losing, to shir up some of these holes before they kind of, you know, in the bucket, before they add more water, then it’s something that they will, you’ll see that’s where that budget can come from because it’s about mitigating risk rather than just spending on nice to have. And I think that is going to be the positioning that you might want to bring if labor value loss. You think that’s going to be your key to finding the budget to invest in employee experience?

[JAMES]: Yeah. so I’m, I want to move on to the next kind of point and this I’m gonna have to, I’m going to read, the actual definition. So what we’re talking about is called the dead horse theory. it is a satirical metaphor that illustrates how some individuals, institutions or nations handle, obvious unsolvable problems. Instead of accepting reality, they cling to justifying their actions. Thats a key element right there. The core idea is simple. If you realize you’re riding a dead horse, the most sensible thing to do is to dismount and move on. However, in practice, the opposite often happens. Instead of abandoning the dead horse, people take such actions as buying a new saddle for the horse, improving the horses diet despite it being dead, changing the rider instead of addressing the real problem, firing the horse’s caretaker and hiring someone new, hoping for a different outcome. How many times have we seen that happen? Holding meetings to discuss ways to increase the dead horse’s speed. Creating committees or task forces to analyze the dead horse problem from every angle. These groups work for months, compile reports and ultimately conclude the obvious. The horse is dead. Hello, government. justifying efforts by comparing the horse to other similarly dead horses, concluding that the issue was a lack of training, proposing training programs for the horse, which means increasing the budget or redefining the concept of dead to convince themselves that the horse still has potential. The lesson this theory highlights how many people and organizations prefer to deny reality, wasting time, resources and efforts on ineffective solutions instead of acknowledging the problem from the start and making smarter, more effective decisions.

[COBY]: Yeah, so that was from a social media post that we found when we were doing some research for this. So, we can’t take credit for.

[JAMES]: The dead horse theory, but I love it.

[COBY]: Yes. And that description from that post was a very, very good description. but it is something that I think should be a tool in the toolbox or the person listening to try to make again the business case and help identify where can we find the budget to invest in these things. The dead horse theory is something that there’s a Latin phrase called reducto ad absurdum where you take an argument and you reduce it to its most, most like ridiculous scenario in order to kind of like, you know.

[JAMES]: the ineffectiveness of it.

[COBY]: Yeah. and that’s what the dead horse theory is. But it is so apt and so relatable. The thing that I always, I always. The two points of that post that really resonated with me was replacing the jockey.

[JAMES]: Yep.

[COBY]: I mean how many times have we seen this department’s failing this, this, you know, or you know, or we’re not penetrating this market or you know, or this division needs, you know, it, it’s got to be a problem with the person not realizing that there’s a systemic rot in the organization or there’s this major issue or whatever it is, so they just don’t, you know, so that they just kind of swap out the jockey. Yeah, exactly. That’s just it. They scapegoat people. the other one too is the justifying the dead horse by comparing it to other dead horses. Yeah, that’s what we often refer to as the amazing race to the bottom. Right. The idea of, well, we’re not that bad. Our problem. This is just the nature of the industry. So, so we’re in line with our competitors. We can’t be that bad because I mean the idea of going back to one of our favorite talking points of our seven by three rule is that factors of the workplace have to be competitive, sufficient and equitable. But many businesses only hold themselves to the standard of competitive. So. Well, if we’re in a similar boat as our competitors, then we really can’t be that bad. But that is just justifying that the dead horse. The horse is just find dead horse by comparing it to other dead horses. Right. Because I mean, the idea of, well, if everyone sucks, then it’s okay for us to suck. Because sucking is just normal. Is just justifying the dead horse.

[JAMES]: Yeah, it’s and. It is a. When. When it’s actually articulated. because the problem is nobody thinks about the justification of competitive in that manner. Right. We think about competitiveness in terms of, well, competitiveness is a good thing. We want to be competitive with other people.

[COBY]: Right.

[JAMES]: But the problem is, who are you measuring yourself against? If you are measuring yourself against the worst actors?

[COBY]: Right.

[JAMES]: you can. I mean, I’m competitive with the worst actor, in the world. Doesn’t mean that I’m a good actor. But that’s how we structure things, in our businesses. That’s how we approach the. We don’t look at, Are our wages actually sufficient and equitable? Are they competitive with other people? Well, yeah, everybody in the industry pays garbage. So we’re going to pay garbage too, Right? Or whatever that mentality may be.

[COBY]: Yeah. Well, do you want. This reminds me of. Well, we had this conversation recently with one of our partners. we’re talking with Becky from Keto Creative. He was talking about, employee retention rates in retail. Right. And she was saying that, the overall turnover rate, sorry, the standard turnover rate for most retail is like 60 to 70%. And a lot of the business that she works with, when she talks to them, they’re like, well, that’s just what it is, you know, so we just hire or. So we invest a lot of our dollars into our recruiting processes and our onboard. And we’ve got a team of recruiters we’re really good at recruiting because we.

[JAMES]: Need to replace 60 to 70% of our staff every year.

[COBY]: Yeah. So that’s just the nature of the business. But then she was saying that. But then she counters that was saying. Do you realize, I realize that Costco’s retention rate for employees who stay for at least a year is 93%. And that at Costco’s overall turnover rate is 8%. Yeah, 8% compared to 60%. But this is the reality is that a lot of the retail, the major retailers, like across North America are saying, well, the standard retail, turnover rate is 60% to 70%. We’re within that. So we’re competitive.

[JAMES]: But They’ just a statistical anomaly.

[COBY]: But yeah, but that, just that they’re comparing themselves to the standard that everyone has agreed is acceptable or is normal instead. Instead of comparing themselves to the ones that are actually doing it. Well. So it’s like, like you said, they’re comparing themselves, they’re comparing their dead horse to the other dead horses saying well, we’re just as fast as they are not comparing themselves to a live horse who’s doing well. And that is the kind of a normal justification that exists across the business kind of continuum. is this idea of comparing our dead horse to other dead horses.

[JAMES]: Oh yeah. And not. This is not a retail specific problem. No, this is a. If you’re in business, it’s probably a problem that you’re experiencing. it is just pervasive because it’s how we teach businesses to think of business owners to think about their business from a m. Strictly competitive landscape. So as long as we’re in line with everybody else, we must be doing fine because everybody else must be doing fine. But everybody else is experiencing the same problems, right? Absolutely. The one really amazing thing about the race to the bottom. Is that it doesn’t take much effort to stand up above your competition when everybody else is seeking to do the bare minimum. It does not take an awful lot for you to stand up and do a little bit more and set yourself apart from the competition.

[COBY]: Well, I mean it doesn’t take much to dismount from your dead horse and get onto a little Shetland pony.

[JAMES]: If you get off the horse and start walking, you’re going to be better.

[COBY]: Exactly. And that is kind of the reality of it. Right. But I mean, but I want to tie the dead horse theory back to kind of the question how do I find the budget to investor employee experience. Well, the reason why we’re talking about this, even though it’s entertaining, is because what the dead horse theory kind exemplifies is the clarity to stop putting good money after bad. And that’s how you find the budget. Realize that to stop hosting meetings to try and talk about how do you improve the horse’s nutrition, stop trying to replace the jockeys. Right. Just realize that there is sometimes the sunk cost of something makes you want to put more money after bad. But I mean if you step away, if you dismount and say, you know what, we’re going to realize that, that we’re going to write that loss off and we’re going to try and put good money after around effective solutions. That’s going to be where it is. And one of the most common dead horses that we see in the employee experience realm is performative solutions.Right. This looks good on paper, but it has no measurable or clear benefit. But it looks good. So we’re going to keep investing in it. Is one of the dead horses that almost most of you listening to this are experiencing existing in your workplace right now. And it’s like, well, we’ve already invested in this so we’re going to keep investing in it. We’re going to keep it going. They’re trying to ride that dead horse and they’re putting good money after bad.

[JAMES]: Yeah, I think the key that I want to pick up on and what you just said is around sunk cost fallacy. because this, it really is the central to this whole idea that you know, we get to a point where we have invested a certain amount of time, energy or resources into something and it is hard to let go. I mean it happens in everything. It happens when I’m watching a movie, I’ll sit and watch. I’m half, half an hour into a movie. It’s like, this is a terrible movie. Well, I’ve already spent a half an hour, I might as well finish it. No, turn the stupid movie off. Right. But it’s the same with our businesses, right? Like we get into this, this self perpetuating situation, where I’ve invested so much time into this, I can’t, if I just drop it, that money has been wasted. So I need to put more money in to be wasted.

[COBY]: Well, here’s the thing, going back to your movie thing, I actually think that it’s more like you, you go to the theater and you sit down and you watch a movie that you paid to watch and the movie is awful. So your thought is well, maybe if I go buy more popcorn, I’ll enjoy the movie more.

[JAMES]: Right.

[COBY]: That’s kind of really more of, it’s like, right. I mean the idea of like, you know, like, like you know, put, we’re putting good money after bad. So I mean again, going back to the kind of, the central question here is that this is something that there is money that is being wasted that could be reinvested or diverted into your employee experience by stopping your habit, of investing in the dead horse.

[JAMES]: Stop doing what’s not working for you.

[COBY]: Right. Stop putting good money after bad. And that is where probably a very kind of like. I don’t Imagine if you have budgets that are allocated that money can be redirected today. Most likely with labor value loss. It’s going to require a bit more a longer term view where I think with the dead horse theory there’s stuff that you could probably find money to reinvest now looking for that dead horse.

[JAMES]: Because I guarantee you in your business it’s there somewhere.

[COBY]: Yeah. And if you’re wondering, okay, so if we find a little bit, what do we do with it? Well then that’s a different conversation. Once you actually find the money, where do you put it? We would always say put it into diagnostics, put it into figuring out where your problems are. What led you to the situation where you had to invest in this dead horse. That’s where I’d suggest as long. But again realizing that if you can divest from a dead horse, you know, into something that’s actually going to benefit you, that’s going to be where you find some budget. so let’s move on to the last one. So the last one again is a little bit more obvious, and a little bit less fun. And that’s the idea.

[JAMES]: Not as fun as riding a dead horse I guess.

[COBY]: So suppose bootstrapping to kind of, to receive financial and a mental ROI is kind of what we want to talk about. So again. So again the term bootstrapping may be familiar to most people, but just clarify. Bootstrapping is the idea of like kind of like tightening up your boots and kind of like, and like bracing yourself it yourself. Yeah, embracing yourself for tougher times. and willing to take kind of a small term loss for a longer term gain. This is the idea of you know like you know it may, it sometimes it may be cuts, sometimes it may be pay reductions of the people in charge, maybe holding back dividends. It may be borrowing money, it may be looking for alternative financial options. It’s the idea of like going leaner in your spending so you can free up more money to put into the things that are actually going to benefit you in the long term. Short term loss for long term gain is really kind of what a lot of this concept is. And it is not fun. No one likes it. It’s something that is the, that’s how you have tough years. But I mean it’s the idea of you need to take a bit of a loss, hold a bit of money back, reduce personal benefits or whatever it is in order to kind of ensure that you’re investing in the Sustainability of your business so that you’ve got longer term benefit. Right?

[JAMES]: Yeah. the challenge with this is often that like in the context of what we’re talking about, you know, going back to the original question of, you know, investing in our employee experience, it can be, it’s seen as an intangible. Right. The employee experience is not, it’s not a physical product, it’s not a piece of equipment. It’s. So it can be challenging for us to kind of work up the nerve or the, the will to invest in some of these things because at least if I went out and bought a piece of equipment, I have something tangible that I can show this thing has a certain amount of value because I paid a certain amount of money for it. It also means that it’s easier for me to get a loan to go out and buy a piece of equipment that I need for my business because it’s a tangible asset that if I don’t pay my loan back, the, the bank will take from me and they can recover some of their cost. There’s a lot of I mean it would not be, it would be wrong of us not to acknowledge the fact that it can be very difficult to secure, financing for operational expenses.

[COBY]: Right.

[JAMES]: And that, you know, financing for equipment is a much easier proposition because of the way that banks like to loan money and they can just take it from you if you don’t pay it back.

[COBY]: That’s a fair point. Yeah, that’s a good point.

[JAMES]: Yeah.

[COBY]: But I mean, but the thing too is that. So, but the way. But what you said also kind of does also allow for us to kind of make a bit of a path forward because capital expenses, I think you’re hundred percent right. But a lot of times what happens is when you have equipment that breaks, it’s not necessarily about replacing the equipment that most businesses do. Most of the businesses kind of, look at the maintenance costs, looks at repair costs. Those are more operational expenses in a large. A lot of it is a service rendered. Right. Bring in someone pieces to replace. And that’s something that businesses, businesses have an easier time getting capital investment. You’re right. Or capital expenses covered. But a lot of them still buy the money for repairs, maintenance, that sort of thing. That is kind of the same approach that we’re talking about. Right. When it talks about your employee experience, usually it might require help and service from someone else, from an expert, or whatever it might be. And then it’s a matter of how would you find the money for those Repairs and maintenance is likely the same ways that you could find money to invest in your employee experience. It’s probably the same method. It might be borrowing from alternative financing options that are not necessary to capital. It might be again like go and lean and trying to find the money internally and divesting from stuff or whatever it is. But the other thing too is that keeping in mind the bootstrapping idea is about receiving a good ROI. Not just a financial ROI, but almost like an ROI for your mental health. Because if you’re seeing your business decaying because of these employee experience issues and you’re like I don’t know how to find the budget for it, I’m stressing out because of it. You’re also investing in your mental health as well. As long as your long term sustainability financially it’s a good investment if you have the right partners. You have a tactical evidence based approach to do it. But I mean it requires you make sure that you can trust the process and so you’re willing to stick it out. Right. But it’s the idea of how would you pay for repairing vital piece of equipment is largely the same way that you would, you know, pay to kind of repair an employee experience.

[JAMES]: Yeah, I like that, I like that analogy more than just the direct capital cost because I think you’re right in that like there’s obviously that distinction between capital expenses and operational expenses. But the maintenance expense on equipment is like we will find that if you’re, I don’t know if you’re in a if you’re a manufacturer, if you produce a product and a piece of equipment that you have, you don’t need to buy a new one but it starts to not work as effectively as efficiently, you can see the problems coming. You’re going to find the money somewhere to fix that issue because it, fixing that issue means that your product continues to get out the door. It is the same mentality with some of these employee experience initiatives that if we, if you can fix these issues it means more products is out the door, it means higher revenue based on the like. There’s so many benefits that can come from just shifting your perspective in how we look at employees experience, employee relations and kind of any problems associated with our employees, they are in a to be completely reductionist, they are just another tool that we use to deliver value to our clients. It’s a terrible way to talk about a human being. But if we want to create the analogy between kind of employee experience and, ah, you know, machinery, it’s there. Are similarities in how we can structure that argument. Obviously, human beings deserve more attention, better value than better treatment than the way that you treat your machines.

[COBY]: Thank you for saying that. That will cut it on the hate mail.

[JAMES]: Yeah, like, obviously.

[COBY]: Yeah. but you’re right. If you need to be kind of like if you need to reduce everything down to an equal parallel so people kind of see the connection, that’s not a terrible way to at least address that from a financial budget line item piece. Right. I think that I’m hoping that we gave you listening some value in this question. I really want someone that listened to this episode to go, okay, I’m curious about this question and that we didn’t give you fluff, that we gave you something that might actually allow you to take some actionable steps forward. again, it’s hard for us in a single podcast episode to kind of solve your exact item. Say, say, hey you, Kelly, go to your line item and move this one over. There you go. Problem solved. We can’t do that. But I mean, hopefully we gave enough ammunition, enough justification, enough business case, enough strategy kind of, conceptually to allow you to kind of rethink how could you tackle this problem specific to your workplace. And hopefully you have a path forward. because that really has been, is our intention with this episode.

[JAMES]: Yeah, you know, I’ve been hesitant to. I think I’m just going toa mention it. if you are in a situation where you’re looking for, a solution, you’re looking for operational, funding to get some of these problems addressed, it can be really hard to go to, to get that from a traditional bank or a traditional lender. we do have, a partner, a good friend of ours who is in the financial services sector. his company has a whole bunch of partnerships with alternative lenders. I’m not going to name drop or do any of the promotion stuff here because it’s not appropriate. But if you are struggling, if you want to find an alternative, feel free to send us an email just to shoot us a message, info Roman3CA and I’d be happy to pass along the, information to you. Hopefully it helps. If it helps, wonderful. Otherwise, just ignore what I said.

[COBY]: Okay. All right, so I’m gonna do a little bit of a summary. So, the question was, how do we find the budget to invest in our employee experience? Well, the three things we talked about hopefully will be helpful to you as you kind of carve about a path forward to Address that in your own workplace. The first thing we talked about was labor value loss. The idea of there is a cost associated with not resolving common workplace issues like employee turnover, like in civil workplaces, like poor communication, like a bad employer brand. And all of these problems have a significant cost to them. And that cost is often an annual cost and that cost is usually per employee, that’s experiencing it. Racking up to significant losses in your organization that you are spending today by not addressing them. And the only way to stop the hemorrhaging of this kind of money going out the window is to actually to tactically address these issues with evidence based approaches. And you’ll start to see cost recovery from these problems no longer being as large or ideally resolved completely. The next thing we talked about is the dead horse theory. Kind of a satirical statement of the fact that businesses often know are on a horse that in a race that dies. And the idea that they instead of getting off the horse and moving on, they’re trying to reinvest in the horse, trying to justify the horse being dead. Anything to kind of stick with the sunk cost of this horse already. But what that really does is that just puts good money after bad and that is money that could be red divested into resolving these issues by accepting the reality and not being in denial about the horse being dead and being able to put these often the critical capital into will actually help you not just to just kind of keep the facade going.

[JAMES]: Yeah.

[COBY]: And the last thing we talked about was bootstrapping and kind of like tightening your belt in order to receive a financial and mental ROI. The idea that you know, the same way that you would find the money to fix vital pieces of equipment that help you generate revenue is a similar way that you can actually find the budget to invest in your employee experience. It may be about borrowing from alternative lenders, may be about reduction of cost and salary or whatever it might be, delaying dividends, whatever it might be. But it’s going to be about tough times in the short term to stabilize your long term success. And it’s something that we often will do it for more tangible things like maintenance costs or whatever like. Or whatever. But that same strategy is probably what we could, we could look at for how we can invest into our employee experience. So that way we’re not put as risk, same kind of risk with that as we are if our equipment stops running. Alright. So that about does it for us. We for a full archive of the podcast and access the video version hosted on our YouTube channel, visit Roman3.ca/podcast. Thanks for joining us.

[ANNOUNCER]: For more information on topics like these, don’t forget to Visit us at Roman3.ca. Side effects of this podcast may include improved retention, high productivity, increased market share, employees breaking out in spontaneous dance, dry mouth aversion of the sound of James’ voice, desire to find a better podcast…