"Soft Skills" is a Terrible Name for the Most Important Skills You Have

Speaker A: Researchers analyzed 70 million job transitions across a thousand plus occupations from 2005 to 2019. And they found that workers with strong foundational skills, which included collaboration, problem solving, uh, communication, and basic math, outperformed specialists long term. They earned more, they climbed higher, they learned faster, and they were more resilient to industry disruption. Well, hello there, business casual friends. Ever sat in a meeting at work and thought, wtf is happening right now? You're not alone. I'm Jenny Lavy.

Speaker B: And I'm Sarah Burstyn.

Speaker A: As HR consultants, we've seen the best, the worst, and absolute train wrecks of office life. And now we're here to share HR stories that have been kept in the vault.

Speaker B: You can think of us as your mostly unfiltered guides to navigating the chaos. There will be plenty of long rants, laughs, and hopefully a little bit of wisdom along the way.

Speaker A: Just remember, we're your consultants, not your lawyers. All right, let's dive into this week's topic. Well, hello there.

Speaker B: Hi. How are we today?

Speaker C: Good.

Speaker A: Yeah. I know you've had a crazy couple of days, so. Yeah. Kids are home and how's stuff going sideways and all kinds of stuff. So I know you're just, like, coming in hot.

Speaker B: Yeah. You know what I've been thinking about is the thing around when people ask you how you're doing. I've been trying to do a better job of not just saying, like, yeah, I'm fine. I'm great. Things are wonderful when things like really aren't fine or great or wonderful. And at the same time, it was some other podcast, they heard someone say the, uh, whole world threw their problems into a bowl.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: And you had to go pick out. Just, you didn't get a choice. You just had to, like, draw it random. Would you take someone's world problems or would you keep the problems that you have? And I have, to be honest, I would absolutely keep the problems that I have. My problems are like, do they suck sometimes? And I'm very frustrated this week with some things. Yes. And I would keep them hands down than drawing from a bowl of what I could get. So there's that for everybody.

Speaker A: I know it's your glass half full situation.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: But I. I also think we should say. And, um, I mean, I don't want everybody to go around complaining, but I do think we should be honest when things are like, a little bit rough because it makes us human. And you know, in an organization, when you've got a manager who isn't like always, it's great. Everything's great. Then you feel like you've got a little bit more, I don't know, authenticity. And you feel like you can actually share if something's not going your way, you know?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. It's sort of like you have to almost like put a governor on yourself or something to be like, well, how often am I getting on the call and being like the world is falling and I hate, you know, all the things are so hard.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: Like, how much are you doing that versus how much are you not showing up with, like, truly how you feel versus, like sometimes you do just gotta put on the happy face. And there's also nothing wrong with that occasionally. Like, it's taking all the spectrums.

Speaker A: Yep. Which actually, I think is a very good segue into what we're talking about today. Because we are talking about. It's actually a term we really, really hate because people call it soft skills. And we don't believe that that's a good term because they are what we think is the most critical skills that you need. Right. So we like to call them human skills. And I actually, I did hear another term and I texted her and asked her to remind me and I don't think she. Oh, yeah, okay. I heard another term and she said it's the skills that make us uniquely human. And I thought that was a good way to look at it. So we read an article from Harvard Business Review, and it said that researchers analyzed 70 million job transitions across a thousand plus occupations from 2005 to 2019. And they found that workers with strong foundational skills, which included collaboration, problem solving, communication, and basic math, outperformed specialists long term. They earned more, they climbed higher, they learned faster, and they were more resilient to industry disruption. So this article is basically saying this means that soft skills or human skills or whatever you want to call them, are actually like the ceiling razor. Not just the floor. It's like, not just, you know, hey, these are table stakes, you have to have them, but they're actually the things that can catapult you up through the organization. So I don't know, we just thought it was interesting and thought it would be a good conversation.

Speaker B: Yeah, it speaks a lot to, I think, the time and space that we're in right now. When you think about AI, when you go into organizations and they're talking about wanting to do performance reviews or whatever it might be, or when they're talking about promoting somebody, there's always this heavy emphasis on technical, technical, technical. And what this article is pointing out is we have it really backwards or uh, we're missing a huge component of the technical is great and it can be important, but it's actually not the only thing. And it's probably not even the most important thing.

Speaker A: Yeah, well, and you and I see it all the time. We see frankly assholes who are very strong technically, but completely destroy the culture of an organization. Right. One of the things, and I don't think I've shared this with you, so you'll get to hear it for the first time too. Usually Sarah's hearing something for like the second or third time. But we've talked about on the podcast before that we are doing some stuff in preparing people entering the workforce into like helping them be successful in the workforce from day one. Because there's a gap. We're hearing from our leaders that there's a gap. When they come in, they just don't know how to corporate. Right. So we've been doing a lot of research around that. So I met with a woman last week and she does similar work. So we were kind of sharing stories and trading ideas and stuff. I have a 20 year old daughter and she was telling me, I have advice for your 20 year old daughter. And said, okay, what is it? She goes, make sure she gets an internship. And then I was with one of my friends and my friend was talking about her daughter starting her internship and about like how much she's learning already. And I started to have this moment of panic because neither one of my girls had an internship. Well, Chelsea still has time, right? She's 20, she's in moving into her junior year, so she still has time. My older one, Alyssa, she never had an internship. And so I started having this feeling of panic. So I shared that with my friend. I was like, oh my God. As soon as you said that, I just felt this like visceral reaction, like, oh shit, my kids aren't doing that. And what she said I thought was super profound. She said, okay, think about it this way. So my older one is, um, she's in Alaska. She is in basically service industries, right? So she deals with humans all day long, every day. This summer she's doing guided kayak tours and guided hiking in Alaska. So she is communicating and having to navigate schedules and having to problem solve and all that kind of stuff all day long. And then my younger one, she is a summer camp counselor. And so she's dealing with parents, she's dealing with kids, she's dealing with conflict, she's having to resolve things, you know, all the homesickness all those kinds of things. And so she said, your kids are learning something so, so incredibly important and so very different than what you learn in an, uh, internship. And I will say I have noticed in both of them since they've taken on this kind of work, you know, I mean, I don't think they were unique in the way that a lot of teenagers don't make eye contact. They don't know how to have a conversation. And the last several years, like, my kids know how to have a conversation with anybody now. So when she said that, I took, like, a big sigh of relief, and I was like, oh, my God, you're right, because you can teach the technical stuff, right? But the stuff that they're learning is so important. So it just made me feel better about them not having an internship.

Speaker B: Well, can I tell you what my gut reaction was to the thing that you said?

Speaker A: Yeah, please.

Speaker B: I'm sorry. This is so probably not a wonderful thought process. But my gut reaction was organizations, most of them don't even know how to structure internships. They are breaking the laws, breaking the rules. They have them filing mail. They don't have them actually learning anything valuable now, I guess. Are they at least getting to see, like, office culture maybe, you know, up close and personal, or, like, people culture up close and personal and getting to, like, take it in? I think that's great. But I'm also like, uh, most companies don't even know how to run an internship program. So first and foremost, like, don't even start telling me that that's important when most of them don't even put together a good program. I don't know. Give me a break. I actually don't believe that.

Speaker A: I think you're spot on. Most companies don't do a good job at, uh, doing internships. They literally put somebody in a corner, and they do data entry or whatever, and they're not really learning what they should be learning. But the schools push it really hard. Parents push it really hard. Like, there's a lot of pressure to get an internship. And so it was just funny. I've said before, I'm like, I don't care if my kids do an internship. But apparently I do, because when those two people said those things, I was like, oh, my God, my kids are behind. You know, you worry about your kids. My friend Molly, she's always just, like, super insightful. She's also one of the greatest leaders I've ever seen. So I think about her a lot when I think about good leadership. So when she said this, I was like, I can take a sigh of relief now. I feel so much better.

Speaker B: So is it also being pushed because so many of younger generation and maybe this isn't true, I don't know. Is it also true that some of them just haven't had any work experience? And so an internship is like the first true opportunity to be in some place of work. Whereas for you and I, when we were growing up, I worked as a hostess during the summer, I was a babysitter, I worked in a clinical research office for a period. Like I did a lot in between summers or and even during college, like that was in high school. And then during college I worked mostly full time. So like do you need an internship because you've actually had never had any other type of proper work experience?

Speaker A: Good question. I don't know. I don't know the answer. Both my girls did work. They didn't start as early as well. Actually they did. I mean they both worked the whole time. So I don't know. I think it's a good question. I think sports are different and so if you're in any kind of sport it's hard to have a job. So that could be impacting things. I don't know. I think it's a great question.

Speaker B: Yeah, sports become your job essentially when you're a college, uh, athlete for sure.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: I don't know. That's interesting. I will say along the lines of like the technical component and being able to teach it or having the skills to be able to translate because the, the same the article said that in the 1980 the half life of technical skills was about 10 years. So meaning if you learned it, you were probably pretty solid for 10 years. I was like great, you could go sit in a job and do that thing and be pretty good. But today it's down to four years and it's projected to drop below two years. So you learning that, you know, AI tool or that piece of technology is almost not that valuable anymore. But what is valuable is that you can translate. I learn fast. I can problem solve through this new system that I don't know how to use. And I can be a self starter and I can learn the information and I can uh, go talk to somebody. What's more important is that you're able to understand how you translate. Getting the skill versus just necessarily using the skill. And so that's where it said, you know, the direct quote was in an age where technical expertise can become irrelevant in just a few years, foundational skills matter more than Ever before. And that's what they're talking about is like learning the technical piece isn't going to go away, but all the other stuff, like how you actually do those things, that's what's going to be the difference maker for you moving forward.

Speaker A: Well, and if you think about what they've been saying about AI, right, it can do a lot of the technical things. Like, if you had a business analytics degree, you might be scared right now. So people are definitely scared because it is taking over a lot of those technical pieces. So I don't think the human is going to go away, but your job might. They might need less people to do analytics. They might need people to do, you know, different kind of work. So that the degree in analytics might be benign at this point. Right. Like the computer can do it for you, but you still have to be able to translate it to your audience. You still have to be able to tell them how they can incorporate that data in the business, all those kinds of things. And again, those are the things that we're talking about. Those are the skills that we're talking about.

Speaker B: Yeah. And people still in the organizations we run across seem to value the technical component over the human complexity of it. And we see a lot of people, I think, talking about what you talked about around AI, saying, oh, well, but AI will solve this technical component for us and all is going to be well. And maybe we don't need a person or we need fewer people. You were on another podcast a couple weeks ago. I think you should share what you talked about from that.

Speaker A: We just talked about the fact that if we could be successful by just reading the information, we would all be wealthy, as fit as you can imagine, like experts in everything. Right. But let's say you have an issue and you type it into AI, and AI gives you a script, and let's say you deliver that script like you have a difficult situation with an employee. So you sit down, you get your script, you sit down with that employee. And we've actually had this happen. So we did have a client where this happened, and it created a whole issue. We had to go in and, like, mitigate a conflict and all kinds of stuff. But so you sit down with your employee and you are going from a script and you're telling them like, these are the things that are unacceptable and this is how you have to do better. But if you can't deliver that in a way that you can read their body language, you have empathy, you understand how to connect the dots, like telling them why it's important they do X, Y, Z. Right. Like if you can't do those things, it's not going to matter. You're going to diminish trust. They're not going to have any faith in you as a leader. And that's exactly what happened in this situation. And so yes, you can outsource the script or you can outsource the. Here are the points you need to cover. Right? You can't outsource the human aspect of it. And I mean, maybe I'm just being optimistic. I don't think that's going to change. I really don't.

Speaker B: If you can get a direct order and operate, great, that makes you a manager. But if you can take the directive and then figure out how to formulate a whole, you know, talk track behind it, make people feel good about it, get buy in around it, problem solve where you see that there's an issue and then manage up. Uh, none of that, I'm sorry, is coming from AI and none of that is from being technically skilled at what you do. Again, I don't disagree that you have to have it. I mean, we talk about all the time from an HR perspective. I better know the law. I better know how to operate within the law. If I don't, I'm a really bad HR partner. Right. Technically I have to know the process, procedure to go through to get through the thing. And I have to know what the law means and how to operate in the context of the law. But how that gets translated to the employee can either make them feel really good or it can make them feel really bad about who they are and what their place is within the organization. And I think that's the thing that this article is talking about is that's what's going to be the clear differentiator here.

Speaker A: Absolutely. Okay, so this is going to sound weird, but it made me think of our handbooks. So bear with me a second. And you'll probably be able to translate this better than I am. So I'll lay it out and then I think we can have a conversation about this. But we have in the Collective, which we talked about on the last show, but the Collective is a product that we have for small businesses. We do have a template for a handbook and it's very simple. It's like if you maybe have a couple employees and you just have to make sure that you're following the law. Right. But there's no like culture woven in know how to do this. It's just like literally here is the law. Here's what you need to do that kind of thing. And then we also redo HR consulting. And we will build you a handbook from scratch that is aligned with your organizational values, your mission, your culture. We tell you the how to communicate, all that kind of stuff. So to me, it's that difference between that technical handbook that is like, here's what to do, and then the handbook that is built out. Here's what to do, here's why you do it, here's how you do it, here's the impact of it. Right. I don't know if that lands, but it just made me think of that.

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Speaker B: Yeah. And then I think this takes us into another part of this discussion, which is, so what are organizations? What are we as humans? What are we doing about this? Because what we continue to find is, again, you're hiring for technical skills, you are promoting for technical skills, you are giving raises based off of technical skills. And we train on technical skills even. Right. Like, when you go, you have to, to a lot of times get, um, continuing education credits to remain technically sound in the field that you are in. Which, again, great, super important. So we're putting all of our mentoring into that. We're putting all of our budget dollars into that, whatever it might be. But what about this whole other component? And it was another thing that the article said, which is that training these human skills is a lot harder to do later on in life than if you are still early in your career. Your brain and your, you know, worldview around some of these things is still in development. I think all of us should try to keep the attitude of, like, we should always be developing and getting better.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: But the reality is, as we get older, we get more stuck in our ways of how we communicate things, how we problem solve, how we critically think. So the question is, what are organizations doing about this? If this is critically important? To how we're going to move through life. Are we doing anything about it on the inside?

Speaker A: Well. And are we measuring it? I mean, again, if you go back to like performance reviews and things like that, are you just measuring the what are you measuring the how, like the how people are communicating, how people are conducting themselves in their roles? Yeah, I think that it's lacking. Right. But I also think about when you think as an HR professional over your career, when you get a call from a manager and there's a performance issue, most likely. What is that performance issue about?

Speaker B: Yeah, it's that they're treating somebody poorly or they weren't able to get the message across. Right. And they came across abrasive or mean or, you know, they feel like somebody bullied them or whatever might be.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's very, very rarely the technical skills.

Speaker B: Yeah, a hundred percent.

Speaker A: I thought this article was very enlightening. And it also, of course, maybe there's some confirmation bias too, because it's what we see every day. And so I felt validating, but yeah. And then you move into managerial level. Right. And a lot of times what happens is you're very good technically, but you've got some work to do on the social stuff. Right. And people think, oh, well, they're, they're fine, they're good technically. We'll manage around the other pieces. And the higher in the organization you get, the more damaging that behavior becomes and the more obvious it is that they're not equipped to do that role well.

Speaker B: And again though, what are we doing about it? Because I think we can all point it out when it's not good. Like when you find that leader who has clearly got promoted because they were great technically but have no idea how to actually talk to their team and to, you know, build trust and do all the things that you, you need them to do as a leader, but we don't do anything about it. I don't see us running classes on this in the workplace. I don't see us this being modeled. I don't see us mentoring somebody for this. And then even, golly, when we talk about Gen Z, right, when we say they grew up for the last 10 years behind a phone or behind a computer, they were times of COVID where they were just frankly, like not talking to anybody all day long. They were like little robot behind a computer. And then we're going to get them out into the workforce and our frustration is just to immediately be like, oh my gosh, you don't know how to human. You're out of here. It is not to say, okay, what training protocols do we need to put in place? What things do we need to be talking about on a daily basis? What things we need to be coaching on a daily basis. Instead, our response is, eh, uh, let's just kick you to the curb. And then it goes again, circular reference to the article of, if it's easier to learn these skills when you're younger, the time to be doing these, having these conversations and doing this training is now, not in 50 years from now, when they're already like, have no idea what the heck happened. Yeah.

Speaker A: And I will say, too, having been in HR for such a long period of time, when I first started in hr, there was a lot of time and emphasis poured into this, you know, into the human skills. Right. We had, I remember onboarding at a specific company where they did a lot of work around this, and another company where they did. They worked with the Gallup, and they worked with how do you communicate? Like, courses and resources and role playing and practice and all that kind of stuff. And as budgets get tighter and as time gets tighter, those are the first things to get cut. Like, uh, you can tell if somebody doesn't know what they're doing. Technically, you can tell in two seconds, but sometimes it is like the death by a thousand cuts with these kinds of behaviors. And so it's not gonna be instant. And so when you're building these skills, it's gonna take time. It's like building muscles. Right? Like, it's gonna take time. It's gonna take time to show that they're progressing, that they're, you know, doing better, whatever that this is, investing in these things is paying off. It's fascinating that the resources that go to that have just been completely cut.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's so minimal. I mean, I just feel like we don't see it anywhere. And it's cut in so many areas. Because I know I'm speaking a lot about training, and I do think training is important, but there's other things in the way that people hire. Like, we're also not asking the right questions when we hire somebody and get somebody in the door. You just talked about, we're not holding people accountable to it, or we are not, uh, giving raises based off of it. And it would be so fascinating if not only through training and saying, hey, this is really important to us as an organization. These are the skills we're looking for you to demonstrate every single day when it comes to critically thinking. And then if those were the conversations, those were the coaching conversations we were having, this is how we hired, this is how we promoted you to your point. It is just like building muscle. And if anybody's had to build muscle before, it takes years. This is not something that you get to go do in a gym. And in, in three months you're like, oh my gosh, I'm jacked. Look at these biceps. It takes like we're talking like three years for these things to happen sometimes. And our response here is, oh, well, if we just do this one class, it should be fine by tomorrow.

Speaker A: And you're like, no, we're not playing the long game.

Speaker B: Yeah, uh, the short game.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, we're constantly playing the short game. But it's interesting you said that because I actually just read something that said it takes longer to build muscle as you age too. So it's just so funny that they're very similar in the way it's like investing in building muscle, investing in changing your behaviors. The article too said that behavioral interview questions have little predictive, little predictive power and they're unstructured form. But companies still ignore soft skills because they're hard to quantify. The practical fix ask targeted questions about how someone learns, handles uncertainty and collaborates, not just what they've done, which we've been told like in behavioral interviewing, it's like tell me about a time where you blank right, so this is actually suggesting that you, you maybe give them some scenarios, see how they think about it. How do you handle collaboration? How would you handle the sit? So yeah, I thought that was interesting and that job descriptions could be weeding out so many good candidates because they are so focused on technical skills and keywords.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, I think that's so true when you think about what's out there these days. We've over indexed on finding technical skills in a job description and again we don't want something fluffy like nobody likes a, ah, job posting that's like, you know, come into this fast paced work and like be clear about what's happening. But be honest. Like if you're looking for somebody who has very clear problem solving skills or is great at ah, holding people accountable, then you need to interview for the thing that you're looking for and you have to talk about it in both of those places. It can't just be on the back end or on the front end.

Speaker A: So there's a scenario you wanted to bring up because it is a good example of why soft skills are so important. Do you wanna talk about the coffee shop?

Speaker B: Oh, I definitely Can. It's so funny. I just, uh. The one thing I wanna add, I think before we jump to that, is because you're on the lines of job descriptions. Just there's an internal thread there. Basically the internal thread line here is that there was. Oh, it's, uh. Since 2007, job postings emphasizing collaboration, coaching and influence have tripled while traditional supervision language has plummeted. So what that means to me is we're finally grasping, hey, in a leadership role. There are some technical things that you probably are going to have to get a handle on, but we're seeing a, you know, a significant uptick in looking for a leader who is great at collaboration, who is great at coaching, who is great at influence. And so that also tells us something. When we see that uptick happening there, it's like a real thing that people are starting to look for and you as a leader are going to have to have that and figure out how you're going to demonstrate it in front of other people.

Speaker A: I swear I saw 12 somewhere. So here's where that was. Social skills showed up as the number one predictor of top performance. Not just being nice, we're talking aligning goals across teams, sharing knowledge, reducing friction, coaching others. Jobs requiring high social interaction grew 12 points from, uh, 1980 to 2012. And wages followed. And this is data that is accessible, so it's not just like, you know, talk. Yeah, so it. I thought that was pretty interesting. Gallup will tell you that too. Yes, and Gallup's been saying that for years.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, and I mean, the reason we're talking about it today. Right. Is it's even something that we have to think about in our own consulting business when we're thinking about what training programs are we putting together, how are we talking to people about the accountability components of it?

Speaker A: Yep.

Speaker B: There's so many through lines to other areas and we, we're all figuring out how to make it better and different and, you know, easier for the next generation to get on board with some of these things. So I think it's important before we

Speaker A: jump to the next thing. You know, it reminds me, so when you and I first started this business, our first product besides just consulting was first line manager training. And it was for those individual contributors that move into a managerial role and have never had any training. And a lot of the content was about how to have a tough conversation, how to have empathy, how to show up well, how to communicate up, how to communicate to your employees while still maintaining the, you know, business like you have to be able to maintain the business line and the people and all the things. Right. So it was a lot of the soft skills, and quite honestly, not a lot of people wanted that they wanted. Well, how do I hold people accountable? Well, how do I do this technical thing? You know, like, they didn't want the soft stuff. And it's just so interesting. So even when you look at what people are purchasing, what people are spending money on, uh, what people are rewarding, they're not buying that stuff. Of course, you and I were devastated because we're like, but this is so important.

Speaker B: Nobody wanted to lean into that. Which is very unfortunate because I think it's so, so needed.

Speaker A: And I think that the impact you see when you invest at that level is so much bigger. But again, it's hard to sell that. It's hard to sell. But it's going to take a few years. Right? It's. That's tough. So, anyway.

Speaker B: Okay, well, my story, and I'm sorry, it's probably gonna have, like, 20 offshoots, but I'm just gonna tell my story because it is a negative story about a coffee shop that we went to recently. So I will not be saying the name. And I'm saying it because, in part, there is some human, um, skill translation here that this person fully, totally missed. And we've been there multiple times to have business meetings, to conduct work together. And I will now never go back there. That's how, like, irritating the experience was to me. But here's the gist of it. I walk into a coffee shop. You and I were set to meet, and then another consultant was going to be meeting us there as well. But I was like, oh, I'm going to get there a little bit early. I have some other work that I want to crank out. Like, I hadn't really talked to you, nothing about it. Like, we were just planning to be there at a specific time anyways. I walk in the door. Also, this coffee shop is known for being fairly busy. I think every time we go in there, sometimes you get lucky and get to walk right up to a table, but other times, you kind of have to, like, loiter around until somebody leaves.

Speaker A: Stare at people until they leave.

Speaker B: Yes, exactly. So I walked in, I did, like, you know, the quick head check to see what it was like, and I was like, oh, it's busy, so I'm just gonna order my coffee. There was nobody in line. I get up there and there is a, you know, barista getting ready to take my order. But then a Person standing behind the barista, they're kind of like having a conversation. And I'm stand there listening to this entire conversation go down. So the person behind the barista, which again, I can hear everything that is occurring, she comes up and she goes, hey, I need you to go over there and talk to that lady that's over there. She is sitting there and she's not going to order any food or any drinks. And you need to tell her that she's either going to have to leave or order something, basically. Right. And I'm like, okay, it seems like a really great conversation to be. And they're attempting to be like, jokey and funny about it. Like, it should be no big deal for me to overhear this conversation. I'm not really paying attention to anything at this point in time. Again, uh, as far as I knew, you nor the consultant that we were there with was there yet again, the lady behind her is trying to be like, oh, we always have problems with this. We're so busy and people want to come in here and use the wifi and then they don't ever purchase anything and they take up space. But again, the lady walked up, sent the barista, who had literally greeted me and was getting ready to take my order, and comes up and disrupts her from talking to me, getting my order, doing whatever. And then I see her be like, yeah, it's that lady over there and points. And I'm like, oh, my gosh, that is Jenny sitting there. That's you. And I about died because she sends the lady out and then you get up to come talk to me and you're like, okay, I didn't know she

Speaker A: was on her way to talk to me.

Speaker B: Yeah, uh, you had no idea any of this happened. And you get up and walk over to me and you're like, oh, hey, can you order my coffee? Uh, when I walked in, this table was open, so I sat down because I didn't want to lose it again. I just told you all the place is busy all the time. If you see a seat, you got to sit down and take the seat. So she was just going to wait for me or the other lady, Jenny

Speaker A: was going to wait, which was like, maybe a few minutes, not like an hour.

Speaker B: Yeah, thank you, thank you. So then of course, the lady had to eat like crow because she was like, oh, my God, you know, it like, didn't realize that she had just bad mouthed another customer in front of another customer, not to mention. And then I find out she's the owner of the company because she goes, man, being a small business owner is really hard. And I'm like, oh, yeah, I get it. Like, I'm a small business owner as well. And it just like, the whole experience to me was like, bad from start to finish, where I'm like, Jenny had been here for literally two seconds. She sat down because it's really hard to freaking get a table at this place. So she sat down because she didn't want to lose it. Two, you're talking about a customer in front of another customer. And if you as the leader are demonstrating these skills, you are fully, like, transparently open about bashing another customer with your employee. How do you think your employees are then going to respond to a difficult customer in that situation? And frankly, it was a pretty hard conversation, I would imagine, to go over and be, you know, if you, the barista going to talk to a customer and you're like, hey, you've been here for a while and haven't ordered anything. Can I get you something? And the business owner wasn't willing to go do it. She walked up, sent her barista out of, uh, from her position to go have the difficult conversation instead of her having the difficult conversation, probably because she's terrible at it.

Speaker A: And the barista was actually doing something like working.

Speaker B: Yes. She was actually helping another customer. Yes.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So we haven't been back. And I did find it so fascinating, that whole situation. I honestly, and I think I told you this, I wanted them as a client prior to that. And now I'm like, no, I don't wanna work with you. We have a no asshole rule, and I think they would violate it, to be honest.

Speaker B: Yeah. She just didn't even, like, own up to it. She, like, tried to brush over it and she tried to justify all the reasons that she was doing it.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: She was like, man, people come in here all the time and they sit down and they take, you know. And I'm like, I don't wanna hear your justification. I would have felt much better had she been like, oh, my gosh, I'm so embarrassed that that just happened. I'm sorry, I'm having a little bit of a rough day. We've had what. Whatever she could have said would have been better than literally trying to double down, basically saying that she was okay with the way that she acted. Really. It bothered me so much that I wanted to leave before we even sat down. And I told you as soon as we left, I was like, I'm not coming back here again. Like, that's just not how you treat people.

Speaker A: No. And if you're hiring people that don't have social skills or don't have these skills, that's how your customers are going to feel. That is how they're going to feel. And we're also engineering humans out of stuff. You know, my most recent experience with. I'm going to say the fucking name. They're dead to me. But Airbnb, I will never go through them again. First of all, we had a horrible experience where things were falsified on the listing. So we got there, and it was quite different than what we expected. And they have this whole procedure that you go through. And so I complained within the allotted amount of time. I tried to resolve it between me and the host, because that's what I would want. I was kind. I didn't say anything mean. I didn't left out personal stuff, but, you know, all the things you're supposed to do, right?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And then I finally had to escalate to Airbnb, and the only way you can reach anybody is through an app. So you have to message back and forth in their app. And I said, this isn't. I'm like, I don't feel like anybody's reading this information because it's pretty bad. And they all just kept saying, this is as far as you can escalate this. And I'm like, I would like to talk to a human. Oh. So anyway, I'm going through the app. It's very obviously scripted. So again, going back to the script and not, like, the human component of, like, man, that is rough. Let's see how we can fix this. Let's see how we can help you. So can't get a human. What I do get a human from is them reaching out to me because the owner was angry that I complained and now has a counter complaint against me and my family. And that was a human that reached out to me, and I was like, great. A human. I'm like, this didn't happen. Here's all my documentation. Here's all the photos here. I'm like, great, right? And he says to me, that's not my department. You have to go back through customer support. I finally sent a message saying, I understand that's not your department. You also work for the organization. You are a representative of the organization and you know people in the proper department. So I trust that you can connect me with a human. I said, I am simply asking to be connected with a human that can help me with it. We are just like, so terrified of going outside of, like, we have to have this all documented. It can't go outside these lines. All that kind of stuff that if they would have said to me, oh, my God, that is awful. We can only do this amount of money for refund.

Speaker B: Here's why.

Speaker A: This is our policy. I will tell you, I probably would have been like, okay, I get it. Because sometimes you don't like the answer, but you understand the answer. You're like, I get it, it makes sense. You heard me, I said my piece, let's move on. But now I'm pissed, and I'm never using them again. You know, and it's just like, you can avoid all of that if you just have some basic communication skills.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah.

Speaker A: It, uh.

Speaker B: Literally, I think the thing you're going through to me as an AI system, like, again, it can tell you all the technical stuff, but it can give you no actual reasoning, and it can't connect any of the dots on all of the parts. And so it just leaves you feeling so frustrated. So, again, it is that roundabout way of, if you suck at this, your customer experience, your employee experience, anything and everything about it is going to be just totally diminished for everybody.

Speaker A: Absolutely. And will you and I talk too about. I've read and I. Again, admittedly, I have not checked into these articles, but I have seen some companies are starting to back off a little on AI, like chatbots and things like that because of exactly what we're talking about. I was meeting with somebody the other day. I talked to a lot of people who are also in small businesses, and they were talking about. They're meeting with a couple different vendors. And so we're different. We're like. They were. They were looking for an HR consultant, and they're looking at, uh, what's called a peo, which bundles a few things. And we don't do that. We just have one thing, and both are good just for different purposes. Right. And so he was asking me about our approach, and I said, well, there's two of us. So when you call, two and a half of us, because Caitlin's here too, but when you call, you're going to get one of us, like the three of us. It's not going to be an automated message, it's not going to be a chat bot, you know, so we are very cautious about how much we take on because we want to make sure that we can provide that service. And I was surprised by his response because he's like, oh, my gosh, that's so good to hear. He's like, most of them have had just a chatbot that will get back to you with like the policy. And I was kind of surprised because we're engineering the human out of human resources.

Speaker B: Caitlin told us on one of the clients who reached out, we have a form on our website, uh, for you to be able to set up a call with us. And it does not just direct you to our calendar link to just put any and all calendar advice that you want out there instead of ask you a little form. And then a real human person emails you from their real personal email address. And one of the clients was like, oh, I totally was not expecting, like, to actually talk to a person about this. And she's like, yeah. And so I do think that is going to be a differentiator of the type of service that you get is going to be, can I actually human with somebody or is it just you sending me a little bit of technical jargon? And again, I don't know, Gemini is pretty good right now. Like, I don't need to go pay a billion dollar software to do that. I could probably Gemini it myself. But you know what you can't get is the human components to any of that.

Speaker A: Yeah, well, I think I mentioned this to you too, but I was at a networking group like a couple weeks ago, and everybody was going around and talking about how their business, they're different, like how they differentiate themselves. And I would say 90% of them were like, because you get a human when you call us because it's personalized. I found that very fascinating just to hear all those people in one room saying the exact same thing and all different industries. It was like, like finance, a realtor, insurance, hr, like all across the board. They were like, oh, because I actually am a human that will call you back. And most of the time you don't get that anymore. Which is crazy.

Speaker B: Yeah. Because those big organizations have spent, as you just said, taking the human out of all of it. They have tried to automate, optimize, you know, the heck out of everything. And there's a lot of unintended consequences that come with that, that I think we're.

Speaker A: And they're incentivized for it.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: We know a company, and I won't say any names obviously, but we know a company that just did a pretty large layoff in their HR team because they outsourced all of it to like a service provider. And you know, that executive that Chro is incentivized for doing that because they Cut costs.

Speaker B: Yeah. Don't care about employee experience later on down the line, or don't care about how frustrated someone gets, or don't care about that. None of it's personalized or individualized to you and your culture, but you saved money, so. Woo hoo. Congratulations. Gold star for you.

Speaker A: Yep. Well, it makes me think about road rage driving because I also told you this one, but we were coming back from a road trip and I was like, I just need a drink. Like not an alcoholic beverage, but like a fast, uh, food beverage. And so there was a Wendy's and I was like, let's just pull through the Wendy's, drive through. It was an AI thing, taking your order. And I didn't like it. I didn't think it'd bother me. But the reason I didn't like it is pretty simple. They'd probably be able to fix it easily. It's like it didn't repeat my order. So I was like, do they, did they hear me? Did they know what it was? So I go up to the next window and a human was there and handed me my drink or whatever. But I could hear the guy behind me order and it was like he was talking to Siri because he's like, he orders and he's like, no, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, no blah blah blah. I'm like, somebody's gonna just kick the shit out of this thing. I give it a week.

Speaker B: It makes me wonder about my parents, like in particular my dad. I could just imagine my father because do you know them on speakerphone as it is? Anyways, like they don't hear something or something doesn't make sense and they just get louder and louder and I'm like, getting louder isn't actually solving any problem. You could lower the tone. I promise the person can still get the message because so could you just. I mean, I really, I can imagine my dad being like, no, I said a, uh, Coca Cola, you know, and it has nothing to do with that.

Speaker A: Uh, no, it was just so funny. I was like, oh my gosh. I don't know.

Speaker B: I.

Speaker A: So I think that there are going to be a lot of people with some serious rage. It sucks when you get something taken out on you. It really does suck. But I will tell you, usually that person does go away feeling a little bit better. Think about an airline, right? They let the gate agent have it and then they feel a little bit better. Gate agent feels like shit. So I'm just like, that rage is just going to be still stuck within them and has to go somewhere.

Speaker B: Yeah. You're like, again, what other unintended consequences are there going to be from this that we literally are not even thinking about? Oh, yes. So good. So, yeah.

Speaker A: So I don't know if there's anything else you want to cover, but, uh, yeah, I think that we have probably beat this to death. But you can tell that we're big proponents of building the. The social skills and the human piece. The human part of everybody in your organization. So.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: Thought this was a good one to talk about.

Speaker B: Yeah, Love it.

Speaker A: All right. Any parting words?

Speaker B: No, I don't think so. I mean, I guess I would say, if you know me, I always like to step away from. I think theoretical, philosophical questions are wonderful. But I always think, well, what's the tactical thing that you can do? Like, what's the right next step? And I would say, if you're a small business owner in particular, think about what's the one human skill, soft skill, social skill that's really, really, really important to your business. Write it down. Write a definition out for it, and figure out what behaviors in your organization for your people day to day actually demonstrate that they are meeting that really critical social skill for you. And so one, you can assess who has it, who doesn't. And then you can figure out, what training do I need to do and start. Provide mentoring, whatever it is I need to start doing to lean into the skill. Don't pick 10 of them. Don't pick 15.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Pick one. Ah. And it's gonna feel clunky, and it'll feel awkward at first. And it's probably. It's. It's not. Not probably even. It is not gonna be perfect at first. You're probably gonna have, like, this random list of things that you're like, I don't actually know how to write. Start putting something on paper, Start bringing it up, Start talking to people about it. And there'll be iterations where it gets better and better and better. And then at least you can say you've done something to try to upskill your workforce on the human component.

Speaker A: I love it. First of all, I think that's super helpful. The one thing I would add is once you write that down and you have the behaviors that you're expecting, make

Speaker B: sure you tell your employees and don't start us judging that. Like, don't do anything but gather the intel for yourself.

Speaker A: Tell your employees, I've mapped this out. This is what I expect. This is really important to our business. If we don't have the skills. I'm going to help you get there and then you work together to build those skills. But yeah, I think that's such a fabulous piece of advice. So thank you. Thank you for bringing it back to, like, what can we actually do today? Because that's the most valuable part.

Speaker B: So, yeah, love it. Love it. Until next time.

Speaker A: Until, um, next time. All right, have a good one bite. Thanks for listening to WTF is Business Casual. If you've got a weird, wild or straight up WTF moment from work, we'd love to hear about it. So slide into our DMs at wtfisbusiness casual on Instagram. If you love this podcast, we'd be so grateful if you could like and subscribe. Leave a review and share it with your friends. A huge thank you to the team at Rise HR for making the show happen. I'm one of your hosts, Jenny Lateby. And remember, if you can't fix it, at least laugh about it.