Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: All right, everybody, welcome to the podcast. We're going to do a little bit of a different approach for the next couple of weeks. I'm starting a co host podcast with Josh Seacrest. It's Josh and Josh today.
Josh is the vice president of marketing at Paradox, which is now part of Workday.
He and I have known each other for a number of years. He's one of the most knowledgeable experts in Frontline work, not only because he worked at Paradox, but he was the head of global talent strategy at McDonald's, where he was supporting hiring of millions of people per year. He led culture and talent at Abercrombie and Fitch, and he was just elected to the boards of the National Restaurant association and the National Retail Federation to help with long term Frontline work strategies in the restaurant industry and the retail industry.
Josh, thank you for agreeing to do this with me.
[00:01:01] Speaker B: Josh, thanks for having me and doing it with me. We've had some amazing dinners over the last several years, and the conversations are always robust, but they always kind of turn to Frontline. And I think both of our brains are just so excited about what's going on within the space.
[00:01:16] Speaker A: Well, Frontline is a big deal. Most young people working Frontline at some point in their career. I mean, you worked in Frontline, I'm sure in your career.
[00:01:24] Speaker B: I did.
[00:01:24] Speaker A: I worked at McDonald's and I was a paper boy, et cetera. What about you?
[00:01:28] Speaker B: How were you at McDonald's? Were you pretty good there? Model employee.
[00:01:31] Speaker A: I was really good at cleaning the bathrooms.
Really good at washing the windows.
[00:01:36] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:01:37] Speaker A: And pretty good at making hamburgers. Not very good with the customers. That was the part I didn't like.
[00:01:42] Speaker B: How long were you there?
[00:01:43] Speaker A: Actually? Four years, on and off.
[00:01:45] Speaker B: Four years.
[00:01:46] Speaker A: I did it for a long time.
[00:01:47] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I mean, that's. That's amazing. I mean, you're actually learning all the bits.
[00:01:50] Speaker A: I was there.
I made A$65 an hour. I was there for the launch of the egg McMuffin. That's the year that I was there. Whatever.
[00:01:59] Speaker B: That was my go to order Egg McMuffin and a little bit of espresso at the right one. Yeah. Mine was technically Panera, which I loved because I got free Asiago bagels at the end of the night. And then cheese baked goods is, I think, the through line for me. My next job was Red Lobster, and I was a server there, and it was incredible. You got cash at the end of the night. You learned service, you learned hospitality. The kitchens were hot. One of my favorite foods is their Cheddar Bay Biscuit. One of the things I was always taken by, and we'll probably dive into it a lot within these episodes, is just like the power of a frontline manager. I'm not sure if you can still remember your manager at McDonald's. And when I got to go and work at McDonald's, I was really taken by the role of a frontline manager and just, you know, had impact on my life outside of work. Coaching me up, training me, giving me sometimes very direct feedback. Really formative. And I'm excited to learn more from kind of all these experts on the National Restaurant association board and the National Retail Federation foundation boards. Because this attention towards frontline managers and giving them support and making sure you've got the right teams in place is just so critical to our businesses. So, yeah, neat that we've kind of gotten to see it and obviously everybody kind of starts their career and usually some sort of frontline role. And that's sort of this common theme of the things that we get to learn and bring into maybe corporate lives if we go that direction.
[00:03:21] Speaker A: Definitely. I won't tell you my whole management story, but one of the guys I worked for was this kind of jiving frontline guy. He used to call me J A Joshua.
[00:03:31] Speaker B: Joshua.
This is even pre Friends days, so Joshua hadn't really come in.
[00:03:37] Speaker A: I know we're going to talk a little bit about the imperatives. Before we do, let's talk about what the frontline space means.
Why is it so important?
What do you think about when you think about the impact of Frontline from a company in an industry and an economy and workforce perspective? Josh?
[00:03:55] Speaker B: Yeah. First of all, thank you to the Josh person coming in for you to focus on this area. You know, I know your research that I'm going to pepper you with a bunch of questions on the research and what you're already finding. But one of the pieces from your research, and it backs up the McKinsey study that came out a few years back was just that this represents 70% of the workforce in the US and so that's a huge population.
And I think we're in the middle of a bit of a generation skip with the frontline space because of all this technology and automation that's coming through. And so what I mean by that is we've always known it's important. I think if you talk to any HR professional who is in retail or manufacturing or healthcare, you'd say, oh, our frontline team and our team out in the field is critical. The problem is you only have so many resources that you can usually apply to that workforce. Right. Because there's such scale, you can't necessarily just keep scaling your HR organization to be able to support them. I think we're now in a point where there's automation, robotics, AI, where we're actually able to generations skip and be able to support this workforce and frontline managers in a way that we just weren't able to before. We wanted to. We just weren't able to. And so I think that's really exciting and I think we're going to dive into some of the leaders and case studies that are out there where people are changing their processes and how they're approaching frontline work and the frontline experience.
And certainly they're saving costs and their time, but they're also driving revenue in their improving the frontline experience, which is yielding better retention and better training and some really warm, good stuff for this workforce that's 70% of the population. Well, what about you? I mean, you have always been in my life as sort of the expert within HR and corporate, but it's been so fun to see your brain go into frontline. What are the things that are sticking out to you as you're going into this research and.
[00:05:50] Speaker A: Well, you know, there's two things that have occurred to me that are really important and I definitely want your perspective. First of all, the U.S. economy right now is constrained by frontline. The white collar workforce, there's a surplus. The frontline workforce, there's a huge supply problem, drivers, nurses, restaurant workers, transportation workers, entertainment workers, flight attendants, et cetera. So economically, this is the part of the workforce, at least here in the US that is holding the country back from growth.
But maybe at a microeconomic level. Here's what I observe and I really want to get your perspective being on these boards.
I think there's a mentality in some executives that because frontline people make less money, which is they make significantly less money than senior people in the company, they're paid hourly, they tend to be less highly skilled, that we should invest less in them because they're going to leave anyway.
So let's just treat them like replaceable parts and we'll buy Paradox and hire people faster.
Right, and give them a little bit of training. But let's not think of them as talent, let's think of them as workers.
Now I understand why that is because some of the jobs are maybe not particularly long term career oriented work, but a lot of them are not that way.
Because to me, the reality of the situation is every company that has Frontline workers, which basically is every company, those are the people that are directly talking to customers, directly delivering the product, the service, the medical benefits, the medical care, and giving you potentially massively important feedback on what the market wants and what the customers want. So why would you treat them like replaceable parts? I'm not saying every company does that, but I think there's a bunch of companies that do and then a bunch of companies that don't. And when I did the math on the 70 or 75% of people that are on Front line, I did a bunch of analysis. That's a six and a half trillion dollar payroll market.
The payroll on Frontline is six and a half trillion dollars. So there's a lot of money being spent on this. So why wouldn't you treat it as a very, very, very strategic part of your company?
[00:08:12] Speaker B: In the rooms I'm in, that is not the sentiment meaning, right? There is a high value in team members. There's a high value in the restaurant and retail managers. There is an articulation of the value a great retail manager or restaurant manager or floor manager at a manufacturing plant can deliver.
There is a lot of respect for the people that come in and do the work. I do think sometimes data in Total obfuscates some of these storylines. To your point, these are all things that we're gonna have to break down within this, right? But when we say, hey, as we look at frontline work and there's a lot of turnover, well, you and I have dug into the data and it says, actually there's a lot of turnover when it's part time work. And especially if you're including seasonality. Well, you've got a lot of high school students that are going to college. You've got a lot of people where life comes at them and there's a little bit less consistency in life. And so that is a part of this. But I don't think there are many employers that I'm hearing from where they're saying, hey, our intent is something that is super replaceable. It's more we care. We want to give a great experience because these people are our customers. We care because some of these people can really become our managers. But up until five years ago, we were operating in such volume that our hands were tied. We couldn't support the workforce or the managers in the way that we would have ideally wanted to because it wasn't financially possible to be able to scale HR or support functions or the technology.
I think that's why it's kind of exciting right now is I think that the intent can actually catch up.
[00:09:46] Speaker A: You think tech is going to help, right, this slightly tilted ship a little bit.
[00:09:51] Speaker B: I'm a tech person.
[00:09:53] Speaker A: I guess you're a tech person, so what the hell.
[00:09:55] Speaker B: But, but I mean, I got to see it from the restaurant lens where it really helped us. Right. It was something where if you get time back from automation, you know, where is that?
[00:10:06] Speaker A: Typically there's more time for the other things.
[00:10:07] Speaker B: Yeah, more time for other things. But I do think it is as we just think of, hey, where will technology help us shift? I think this is one of those where it does make this more scalable to be able to provide support.
[00:10:19] Speaker A: So maybe technology will reduce the amount of hand care feeding that's needed for scheduling and management and training and coaching of people.
And therefore we can invest more money in the general benefits and wellbeing and careers of frontline people. Maybe.
[00:10:36] Speaker B: Yeah, maybe. Right. And I think when the private equity
[00:10:39] Speaker A: companies come in and buy up all the hospitals and buy up all the whatevers.
[00:10:42] Speaker B: But to your point, I mean, this is where it's interesting is one, there are good people at the top of companies who really care about their employees, right. And then there is this technology that's coming that's allowing for people to be able to maybe connect in ways that were different. But like one of the examples would just be as you adopt new technology, maybe it's technology that's a specific type of benefit for your frontline work team. Well, think of that process. What, three years ago, Josh, you had to buy the tech, you had to integrate the tech, you had to come up with a change management plan, you had to allocate corporate resources to roll it out, you had to teach your frontline population how to use that and enroll in the benefits. We're now going into a place where your team member can just get a text on the phone that this benefit could be a great perk for them. Would they like it or not? Yes. And everything's prompted to them. So I think even just things like that, where there are programs, McDonald's has a fantastic program called Archways which is essentially supporting college education. Sometimes employees just don't even know about it. So I think there's some stuff like that where we'll talk about hiring technology and we'll talk about communications. But I think even just things like that where if it's just getting easier, could be really warm for that population. What do you think on that?
[00:11:59] Speaker A: I buy it so let's talk about tech a little bit then. So given that everybody thinks tech is going to solve a lot of problems, which it is over time, should we go a little bit through the AI imperatives that we're talking about this week?
[00:12:13] Speaker B: Yeah, I'd love to hear it. It's something that I feel like I know you and your team have been working hard on, and as I read through them, such a good roadmap for teams. Obviously corporate, but I found a lot to dig deep into on the front line. Would you be able to kind of walk us through maybe the.
[00:12:29] Speaker A: Yeah, let me go through just a couple of quick things. So the big change that's happening for all of us in our tech world is in the older world, the traditional technology, as you mentioned, Josh, you were buying a multifaceted, multi process application that was developed as a monolithic system, and you were implementing it maybe out of the box, or trying to customize it, or trying to configure it in a way that usually managers in HR people would use it and employees would use it mostly to input data. In the agent world, in the AI world, the systems are built out of conversational agents that are trained from real data, and they get smarter almost the first time you start using them. So they have a completely different architecture. So the first thing that's different is the architecture in the frontline world where you worked at McDonald's. I'm sure when I worked there too, of course, I don't think there was that much automation when I was there. There was actually a video disc player in the basement where we did our training. You couldn't do these things so easily. So you kind of picked a solution, and if you picked one that was relatively easy to implement, you implemented it, and then you crossed your fingers that everybody would use it.
These new systems are so much more dynamic and they learn and they react and they're so easy to interact with because you chat with them or talk to them over the phone, especially for during recruiting, where you might even just be chatting on your mobile, that they're approachable for any company.
So number one is that is the architecture, the user experience, the intelligence built in is so different. That's the number one thing. The second thing is the agentic world we live in can be integrated together very easily so that you can have a single pane of glass, as workday calls it, and smile,
[00:14:21] Speaker B: we'll take it.
[00:14:22] Speaker A: So the chat or the interface that you might have with Paradox as a candidate could later become your tool for training and onboarding and later become your tool for promotion and later become your tool for scheduling, later become your tool for advanced planning of your pay and benefits all in the same place, which is vastly easier.
So that's part of this whole narrative.
[00:14:46] Speaker B: The third thing, can I jump in on that one real quick? I think especially as that ties into Frontline, I think that gets exciting. Maybe one of the through lines of this conversation has been that importance of our frontline manager. And you know, in both my jobs before Paradox, that was a big topic of conversation of just how do you make their lives easier and give them more time? Because they can make or break a store, because they give the customer experience as well as your employee experience, and they can really drive revenue. One of the pieces that I think you'd find interesting is as we talk about building our product, you know, this is paradox. But as I'm getting to meet all the leaders within workday, and really we're designing for the frontline manager, and one of the thoughts is, how do we keep the frontline manager out of our technology as much as possible? Right. Ultimately, in retail and restaurant, you don't want your manager going and logging into a system. You just want it either coming to them or having them quickly make decisions, because the two best places for them to be right are with their team and with their customers or looking at the business and figuring out ways to crank it up.
[00:15:46] Speaker A: And you know that. And that's great. I mean, that's fantastic. In addition, I think the manager can now get alerts and intelligent information about workload and schedules and overtime pay and operational issues that they maybe never even got from the other systems. The other systems were probably more transactional.
[00:16:03] Speaker B: Yeah, you do a great job in the imperatives on separating between something that just assists and something that's agentic. But I mean, if we could give a frontline manager sort of a 247 agent or assistant that's supplementing some of the decisions or workload, I mean, that could be pretty good.
[00:16:21] Speaker A: That is absolutely going to happen. I'm sure you guys are already doing it and other people do it too, because these agents like Paradox and Galileo learn from the data you give them. So say you're a store or a bunch of stores and you're a manager managing that entity. Data's coming in, the agent is always reading it and can always do something about it. You don't have to wait for somebody to run a report, find an exception, and then call you on the phone. I mean, the old way of doing analytics Almost seems ridiculous now. And we've only had AI for a couple of years.
The other thing that I wanted to quickly mention in the imperatives, there's a bunch of stuff in there is this idea of taking care of people.
And certainly in white collar work, and I think it's true in a lot of front collar work, people are really worried about their jobs. The outside of frontline, there's very little job mobility right now. The job market is frozen. And that's because employers are expecting AI to reduce the number of people needed. That's not true. You know, it's funny, I'm working on this big piece on the future of work a little bit, and I won't mention the details yet, but I just did an analysis of the last 50 years of economic trends. Josh. Believe it or not, I looked at all the different things that happened. You know, we first started talking about overload and work overload in the digital world in the mid-2000s, and then it went away for a while during the talent shortages, and then it came back during the pandemic, obviously, when everybody's worried about it. And now we're all worried about productivity. But actually employee care is just as important as ever. So when I go into a McDonald's or a Starbucks or whatever retail or food service organization I go into, I can tell if the people are stressed out. It affects me within a minute.
That element has not gone away at all.
[00:18:07] Speaker B: Restaurants are really interesting one, because no one's going to push back on take care of your employees. Right. But it's also nice where there's this connectivity with revenue. I mean, within a restaurant. And maybe easiest to picture this as like a quick service restaurant with a drive through. I know my drive through is going to be peak hours between 11:15 and 1:30 in the afternoon. And if I'm understaffed during that window of time, I know that my lines get longer and my ticket time's essentially slow. And if my ticket time's slow, then I know that my revenue comes in. Yeah. That my revenue starts to decline a little bit. And so that's easy for us as an HR team or an organization to then look at and say, wow, understaffing costs us revenue.
And I also know that a employee who's had three months or five months of experience are much more productive and faster than someone with one month. And so now you get into, we know we need to be staffed and we know we want to hold onto our people. And that's going to change. Right. If it's seasonal and retail. This is going to be different. I know I need to staff up quick to stock the shelves and get things out there for the holiday push. And then we've been able to have a really clean agreement with the people that are coming on that they're coming on for two months. So as we dive into segmentation, I think this is a key piece for us to come back to, which is I think the intent for organizations is to take care of all employees.
How different segments and different roles we define taking care of them. And what that's starting to look like is growing in sophistication. I think it'll be really neat for us.
[00:19:38] Speaker A: Well, one of the things I learned about doing Frontline research the last year, by the way, for those of you listening, we're going to be doing this for a couple of years here. This is not just a couple of podcasts.
One of the employee experience issues for Frontline is I'd like more hours, I need more cash, I need more money.
You don't hear that so much from the white collar workers every day. You might hear it once or twice a year.
[00:19:59] Speaker B: And I think that's a great one for the team. I mean, maybe this is an episode we do coming up, but when you kind of dig in and some of your research might even show this, there's so much about hourly pay. What is the hourly pay rate? The store across is paying $18 an hour and I'm paying 1650. And a lot of what you actually see when you dig in, it's more about net pay from the Frontline employee. Hey, I want to work 35 hours a week. I'm currently working somewhere that's only able to give me 20 hours per week. And they're not the days that I actually want to work. If I can shift somewhere else, maybe even if I take a 50 cent pay reduction, I will ultimately bring home more for myself, more for my family, and it meets my hours better. And you actually see a lot of turnover happen as a result of just
[00:20:46] Speaker A: shifts in those are interesting business rules for you guys to code into your agents too that are not typical HR things that might be in a general just scheduling system.
[00:20:55] Speaker B: Yeah. And even if you're flagging, maybe you're understaffed. Before you go out and hire somebody new, is there a super easy way for you to just pull your current staff to say, hey, would anybody be open to taking X amount more hours and kind of filling that way? And so some technology. This is easy to do that? Yep. I have A couple fun ones before we. We wrap up. Are you game for that? Because I feel like I always see you up on stage, I see you suited up.
[00:21:19] Speaker A: I'm usually pretty serious about this stuff, but give it a shot.
[00:21:23] Speaker B: Okay. So I was curious, do you eat fast food? And if so, what's your favorite?
Or the one that maybe I'm.
[00:21:31] Speaker A: I'm an Egg McMuffin guy like you, because it's pretty healthy and I like the protein. I get up at about 4:30 or 5 in the morning and I.
[00:21:38] Speaker B: Of course you do.
[00:21:39] Speaker A: And I either go to the gym or I go to Starbucks and I get a double or triple espresso. So I'm into that.
I'm not particularly into chain coffee, but the Starbucks experience is perfect for me. They're open, you can remotely order it and show up and then it's there.
So that works.
[00:21:55] Speaker B: So, Josh, I don't know.
[00:21:57] Speaker A: Pretty healthy.
[00:21:57] Speaker B: Espresso kick in. I feel like these are when I need to get you on these podcasts. That's.
[00:22:02] Speaker A: I'm at my Optimum from 4am until 3pm
[00:22:09] Speaker B: Great.
I'm currently Shake Shack. I've got one right around the corner, which is dangerous, but that's one of the treats. Chipotle is kind of within the regular circuit. And then you and I are on the road a lot. And so it's always nice because there's almost always a McDonald's. So that's something where I'll try and stop it now. Kind of a comfort food for me.
[00:22:29] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:22:30] Speaker B: And then I wanted to do a segment that we can just maybe highlight somebody that's doing well and almost talk well behind their back. This is something we're stealing from Amy Poehler. Do you watch that? It's a good hang. They just won Podcast of the Year. And so one that I wanted to call out was 7 11. I got to see them speak at a national retail federation, the big show. And this is someone you and I both know well, but Rachel Allen's their head of talent acquisition, and they've just done such interesting things, I think, within this Frontline space. And I just want to keep highlighting places where there's new talent, tell people
[00:23:05] Speaker A: about what they do.
[00:23:06] Speaker B: Yeah. So for 7 11, one of the things that happened was they acquired speedway. Right. So you now have an acquisition that's coming in.
And for them, they had a centralized hiring team. So they actually had recruiters who were then finding folks for Frontline and then distributing them once they found them, two managers to actually go and interview and so 711 was actually able to effectively shift from a centralized model to a decentralized model. So essentially putting work back on the manager's plates. But they were able to automate a ton of the hiring experience to the point where they were actually returning 40,000 manager hours per week back, which is 2 million back into that system, which is just kind of wild. And then they started hiring in three days where they were 10, 14 days prior. And so that's obviously this hiring story. But what I like is when Rachel's talking about it, it's such a business transformation story that you're starting to see because now the managers have more staffed hours off their plate. And so I kind of really, really like that piece. And when you think of a 7 11, this is going to be different than maybe when we talk about a Lowe's or a Home Depot or a Nordstrom.
There are three people on the floor.
[00:24:18] Speaker A: I think that example is really a good example for HR people because that was a huge return on investment buy for them.
That wasn't. Let's do a little bit better job of interview scheduling or I don't know what the financial ROI was on that. You probably did it. You probably saved them.
[00:24:36] Speaker B: They were able, but they're not able to disclose the specific. But it would be able to see,
[00:24:41] Speaker A: see, that's another thing, Frontline. Because the volumes are so high, the ROI of the technology can be enormous in terms of revenue, time to market flexibility, meeting customer demand, whereas in a general HR technology, kind of hard to figure out what benefits are out there.
[00:25:00] Speaker B: Yeah, and that's been neat. You know, one of the pieces where I get to sit in marketing, but obviously as a practitioner and so it's been fun. I do the business cases. So before someone were to purchase this. And I think some of the big lessons are, hey, we're at this point where those business cases sort of write themselves because it can be purely from cost savings. You can fund new technology purely from cost savings that sit within your budget, which that wasn't always the case. Within Talent Acquisition, you're trying to rationalize a spend for better candidate experience or faster time to hire. Now we're at a place where, oh, job advertising spend can go down, technology and your infrastructure can go down. And so that's actually a nice part that's starting to fuel some of this adoption is, hey, it certainly works, but there's also just a super clear business case that's in it. So maybe with that. Josh, for this episode, any closing comments from you? I wanted to just hear. What do you want to make sure that we cover in this podcast? What's interesting to.
[00:25:57] Speaker A: Well, I mean, what we'll do your audience in the next podcast, we'll talk about the segmentation model and what Frontline means. Josh, I'm looking forward to just picking your brain on all these different use cases and industries and examples. We do a lot of case studies, but you're very close to this space.
You're as close as anybody I've ever met. I think a lot of people can learn a lot from you.
[00:26:19] Speaker B: Thank you. And I'm still learning and you're still learning. And my hope is that throughout this podcast we keep bringing on experts and folks who are close in specific industries and we can dive deep because I think there's just so many places for our brains to go, from the difference of part time numbers and full time numbers to us going deep in healthcare, us going deep in manufacturing.
And obviously we'll certainly be highlighting retail and restaurant quite a bit. Thank you for having me. Can't wait for the next episode.
[00:26:45] Speaker A: Great. Okay, thanks, Josh.
