Episode #180: The Evolution of the Labor Movement With Dr. Chris Mullen

My guest today is Dr. Chris Mullen. He’s the executive director at The Workforce Institute at UKG. I am excited to have Chris on the show, because he’s an experienced leader with a demonstrated history of working in the technology and HR industries. He’s highly skilled at the employee experience and leveraging technology, and his PhD research was focused on work-life balance and the use of mobile technology. In our conversation, Chris and I talk about all the good stuff — COVID workforce issues, burnout — but most importantly, we talk about making work better. I know you’ll want to hear this conversation so you can make work better, too.

Punk Rock HR is proudly sponsored by UKG. They are an award-winning all-in-one HR platform. If you’re curious and want to fix work and do HR better, check out our sponsors at UKG.com.

Download my whitepaper “The Way Forward: A Look at Post-Crisis Work Life,” created in partnership with UKG.

If You Can’t Take Care of Yourself, You Can’t Take Care of Others

Dr. Chris Mullen has a strong fundamental belief about labor: work-life negotiation. You might be thinking, “How is that different from work-life balance?” Dr. Mullen believes that deciding what to prioritize in your life is always a negotiation between priorities, obligations and desires. And that negotiation process is constantly evolving as we grow through different life stages.

Even after studying work-life negotiations for his PhD, Dr. Mullen is still evolving his negotiations. And it’s OK if you are, too. “We’re constantly negotiating when we’re working, when we’re stopping, what takes precedence over another,” says Dr. Mullen, but that balance must be renegotiated depending on what season of life you’re in. For example, Dr. Mullen has four kids, and sometimes he has to negotiate his priorities between work and his family. “Sometimes I have to give [my kids] more time than work. And then there’s other times where there’s huge projects, and that’s going to take my time. And so we’re constantly negotiating, not just on the season of life we’re in, but then the roles that we play in our lives.”

I love this idea of a negotiation, because it sparks the idea that we can all be better negotiators — whether we’re front-line workers or HR leaders. One thing Dr. Mullen and I strongly agree on is the importance of negotiating so you have time to care for yourself. As Dr. Mullen says, “If you can’t take care of yourself first, you cannot take care of others. The same holds true for HR.”

Find Something Every Day to Do for Yourself

So many of us operate out of a hermeneutic of fear. We think people are going to say “no” to us all the time. And we’re sure that if we ask for more, if we put ourselves first, we’ll get fired. So how do we teach bravery, courage, all that good stuff, so that people can negotiate better? According to Dr. Mullen, a lot of it comes down to asking yourself, “How satisfied are you with your work in life?”

Dr. Mullen has a process for answering this question. “I walk [people] through the Wheel of Life activity, where you take every domain or every category, and you give it a grade. And then we start to coach people through: What kind of goals do you want to set? What would increase your work-life satisfaction by two or three notches?” For some of the people Dr. Mullen works with, the solution is something simple like self-care and doing one thing per day for themselves. Other times, the solution is to follow the rule of “what gets scheduled gets done.”

“You need to find something every day to do for yourself,” Dr. Mullen says, “If you can do that, you are winning.”

What Does Employee Feedback Look Like in 2021?

In 2021, we’re more compassionate, we’re more empathetic, we’re more vulnerable. And yet we still have these systems that are baked into an HR calendar that tend to rule our world. We believe in the employee experience, but in certain months of the year, it feels like we need to put employee experience to the side and just get stuff done. And one of them is the annual review.

There’s a whole process around how we give feedback during the review, but that process is undergoing significant change. Dr. Mullen has also studied feedback, and so I wanted to ask him, what does feedback look like in 2021? Dr. Mullen has a lot to say about improving feedback, but here are some of his main ideas.

  1. “If you are going to do a survey, be open and honest with your employees, as you’re giving it, talk to them about it. Don’t forget to communicate back what the results were in a timely manner. And then also put together a plan on what can be done because of the results.”
  2. Ditch the stuffy traditional ways of getting feedback. “I would have lunch with … folks who were in my department, because I wanted to just hear, ‘Hey, how’s it going? What’s going on?’”
  3. Walk around your place of employment (try strolling through campus or doing a lap on your office floor). “If they know who you are, they’re going to tell you what’s up.”

[bctt tweet=”“I always tell people, if you can’t take care of yourself first, you cannot take care of others. The same holds true for HR.” ~ @chrismmullen. Hear more about work-life negotiation on @punkrockhr!” via=”no”]

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Full Transcript

Laurie Ruettimann:

Punk Rock HR is proudly sponsored by UKG they’re an award-winning all-in-one HR platform. If you’re curious and want to fix work and do HR a little bit better, and I know you do because you’re a fan of Punk Rock HR, check out our sponsors at UKG.com.

Hey everybody. I’m Laurie Ruettimann, welcome to Punk Rock HR. My guest today is Dr. Chris Mullen. He’s the Executive Director at The Workforce Institute at UKG. UKG is the sponsor of Punk Rock HR this month and we are so glad to have Dr. Chris Mullen, because he’s an experienced leader with a demonstrated history of working in the technology and HR industries. He’s really skilled at the employee experience, leveraging technology and his PhD research was focused on work-life balance and the use of mobile technology. Dr. Chris Mullen and I talk about all the good stuff, COVID, workforce issues, burnout, but most importantly, we talk about making work better. I know you want to hear this conversation, so sit back and enjoy this discussion with Dr. Chris Mullen.

Hey Chris, welcome to the podcast.

Chris Mullen:

Well, thank you so much for having me. I’m really grateful to be here.

Laurie Ruettimann:

Well, Chris, I’m super stoked to have you here. This is going to first air over Labor Day weekend 2021. And I’m excited about that because you and I share a passion for labor and workers. So why don’t you tell everybody who you are and what you’re all about?

Chris Mullen:

I’m Chris Mullen and I am the Executive Director of The Workforce Institute at UKG. Basically we are a think tank where we talk about, we write about, we study the workforce. We have a global board, so we’ve got a lot of diverse opinions and thoughts out there. Then, like you said, we love to hone in on the frontline worker and what’s impacting them really in the day to day.

Laurie Ruettimann:

Well, let’s get right to it. I want to know what’s happening in the world of work in late 20 21? Where are we? Where are we going? What’s going on?

Chris Mullen:

Well, I mean, some folks say we’re coming out of the pandemic. To me, it depends on your industry if you’re coming out of the pandemic. Others are talking about now the Great Recession or the turnover tsunami. So these are some of the big topics that are really happening right now. The things that haven’t changed, talking about mental health, talking about diversity, inclusion, equity, and belonging. There’s just so many topics for our HR folks out there. I don’t know how they’re not overwhelmed.

Laurie Ruettimann:

Well, I think they are overwhelmed and we’ll start to get into all the good stuff that I want to talk about. I want to talk about feedback and wellbeing and all of that, but let’s start with HR professionals today because I fundamentally believe that you can’t fix work unless you fix it for yourself first. So you have a bunch of HR leaders who are trying to implement these enterprise wide programs and they haven’t had day off since February, 2020. So talk to me about what’s going on with some of your partners in HR.

Chris Mullen:

Well, I think this is why you and I align so well. That is a fundamental belief of mine as well. My PhD research is on work-life balance, what I call work-life negotiation, and I always tell people, if you can’t take care of yourself first, you cannot take care of others. The same holds true for HR. And from an HR perspective, I was telling this the other day, in our job descriptions for corporate, we have that 5% at the bottom that says other duties as assigned. HR is the other duties as assigned for your corporate job description. Anything that happens in the corporation, no one knows where to go, let’s just punt this one to HR. Unfortunately they’re not easy topics, it is mental health, it is diversity, equity and inclusion. Although now we’re starting to see more departments and areas that solely focus on that. But from an HR perspective, they have to be overwhelmed with what’s going on.

Chris Mullen:

And like you said, we have to be able to take care of them first. We need to have that day off, we make ourselves take that day off to take care of the others. In fact, myself, as a leader, I am constantly looking at how many days did my employees take off, and I’m not looking at it just to go, “Oh, you had five and you shouldn’t have.” I’m looking at it to go, “How many more can we get you?” Or, “You only took five days off. How do we get it to seven in one span?” Try and push the limits, not just of a company, but of the individual. A lot of times we’re our own barrier to our own wellness.

Laurie Ruettimann:

That resonates with me. I love the phrase, work-life negotiation, I think that’s really interesting. Can you tell us a little bit about what that means and is it a negotiation? Is that accurate?

Chris Mullen:

I think it is. So basically I spent nine years working on my PhD and this was the topic that I wanted to research, work-life balance and mobile technology use. What came out of that, that I found was, work-life balance to me was not a lie, you could say, a myth, it just didn’t represent what it should represent. Then some people say… because when you think about balance, I think of a scale. And for it to be balanced, it has to be perfect on both sides. I don’t know anyone who lives that way. So then I went to the extreme and did the research and people said, “Oh, work-life integration, Chris, that’s it.” Well, integration to me is, it’s so overlapping that you don’t know, are you at home? Are you at work? And that resonates now with us. So the term that I came up with was work-life negotiation and the reason for that, the definition of that is we’re consistently negotiating when we’re working, when we’re stopping, what takes precedence over another.

It also depends on your season of life. So for me, I’ve got four kids. Before school started, they were all at home. So sometimes I have to give them more time than work. Then there’s other times where there’s huge projects and that’s going to take my time. So we’re constantly negotiating, not just on the season of life we’re in, but then the roles that we play in our lives, and this is a constant negotiation. More people resonate with that, I think. You know what, it allows us to be off the hook of work-life balance, it doesn’t have to be perfect. It’s what works for you at the time you’re in.

Laurie Ruettimann:

That’s really good stuff. I love it because it is a negotiation and I think it then lends itself to a discussion on how do we teach people to be better negotiators, whether they’re frontline workers or they work in human resources. So many of us operate out of a hermeneutic of fear. We think people are going to say no to us all the time. In fact, those are just the stories we tell ourselves, but we’re sure that if we ask for more, if we put ourselves first, we’re going to get fired. So how do we teach bravery, courage, all that good stuff so that people can negotiate better? What are your thoughts on that?

Chris Mullen:

Yeah, vulnerability. All of these are things that we teach. So I walk my coaching clients, and when I do workshops, I walk folks through on how do you figure out where you currently are? So think about the roles we play in our lives. Think about your satisfaction level. A lot of it comes down to how satisfied are you with your work in life? I walk them through the wheel of life activity where you take every domain or every category and you give it a grade. Then we start to coach people through what kind of goals do you want to set? What would increase your work-life satisfaction by two or three notches? For some people, super simple things like self care. I talk to people about when you’re doing self-care, you need to find something every day to do for yourself. If you can do that, you’re winning, you are winning.

so for me, it’s working out, right? In this time in my life, it’s my non-negotiable. What’s your non-negotiable. Then also what I tell people is you schedule it because what’s scheduled gets done and make it moveable, not removable. So Laurie, if you called me and we worked together all the time and you were like, “Hey, this is the only time I have available,” and it was during my workout time, I’m going to be like, “Okay, I can move that to a different time of the day.” It’s movable, not removable. It always happens. So for me, that’s what we need to do. Folks really need to understand how do we take care of ourselves? These are just some quick, simple tips. How do we disconnect for an hour? I call them micro disconnections. You don’t have to throw your phone in the ocean for 10 days, can you disconnect for two hours at night, a day on the weekend and then start to work your way up to that vacation or holiday where it’s a little bit longer?

Laurie Ruettimann:

Well, that really resonates with me, especially the line, what gets scheduled gets done. I first heard that from someone I admire, Michael Hyatt, and I know he’s someone you admire as well. So there are all these people out there who are doing negotiation right, who are doing their work-life balance right and I always think, at least I used to always think, why them and why not me? It was just a matter of bravery and courage and practicing in the small moments so that I nail it in the big moments. How did you get brave asking for more, putting yourself first? What did you do?

Chris Mullen:

I started to be vulnerable with my manager and say, “Here are my needs. I need to disconnect one week a year for an annual holiday with my family.” There’s research out there now that’s starting to show, it takes three days for us really. If you and I disconnected today, we wouldn’t stop thinking about work until three days from now. I was reading in a book during my vacation this year and I was feeling it, I was on day three and then finally by day four and five, I just totally didn’t think about work. Then-

Laurie Ruettimann:

Yeah. But then, I don’t mean to interrupt, then how many of us have to turn around and come right back home on day five or six? That’s the hard part of disconnecting and that’s the hard part of all of this. So I think for me, I wanted more of that feeling throughout the year. I didn’t want work to feel tedious and then vacation to be the only break that I got. I wanted more of that feeling of joy, feeling of ownership of my schedule, feeling of autonomy, frankly, throughout the year. That took practice. There was not one answer for me. I don’t know about you?

Chris Mullen:

… It’s not easy. It goes against our grain, if you want to say it that way. So you have to practice it and be steady with it. So that’s why I tell people, take an hour, just try an hour a day, put your phone down, try maybe just on Saturday or Sunday, one day a week. That can be freeing, it can help build the habit or the routine, and anyone can do it, right? No matter what area or industry you’re in, whether you work from home or your presence is required at work, everyone can give it a go and you can definitely have positive benefits from it. But you HR folks out there, listen to me, I know you all are caregivers and you care for those you support, but care for yourself as well. There’s nothing wrong with taking that little bit of selfishness because you’re going to be a better person for it.

Laurie Ruettimann:

Really well said. Well, I’d like to pivot into the world of work today in 2021, because it’s funny how some things have changed, we’re more compassionate, we’re more empathetic, we’re more vulnerable. And yet we still have these systems that are baked into an HR calendar that tend to rule our world. And we say, “Oh, we believe in the employee experience.” Except when it comes to certain months of the year, and then we just need to get stuff done. One of them is the annual review, right? Performance management. There’s this whole process that happens around feedback, which I know is something that you’re passionate about, something you’ve studied and I wonder, first of all, what does feedback look like in 2021? It’s got to be different than it’s been in years past. Right?

Chris Mullen:

Yeah. I wonder that though. The Workforce Institute, we just put out a survey and our research about a month ago over the summer about the heard and the heard not’s, who’s being heard, who’s not, what’s their feelings about it. A lot of it still is coming down to people are defaulting on surveys. It’s almost like you brought up employee experience, everyone defaults to employee engagement. My head wants to blow up when I hear those terms, because it’s more about the employee experience than it is the engagement. Just like with feedback, you cannot rest your laurels on, “Hey, let’s just throw out a survey and see what happens.” There’s so many things that are incorrect with that. Surveys can work if done correctly. But for the most part, a lot of companies they’ll give out a survey, they’ll get the results and maybe they do something, maybe they don’t. They come up with excuses why they can’t and then they never communicate. It’s that two way, they don’t communicate why they can or why they can’t do things.

So if you’re out there listening to this, if you are going to do a survey, be open and honest with your employees as you’re giving it, talk to them about it. As they give you the results, don’t forget to communicate back what the results were in a timely manner. Then also put together a plan on what can be done because of the results. Some of this is marketing. Then the other thing is, if you can’t do something because maybe you need more budget the following year, explain that to the employees, start with what’s low hanging fruit and then maybe what’s more longterm in these phases. Employees will get it if you can explain the why behind it. I think that’s important for people to know. There’s so many other ways to get feedback. I know myself as a leader, when I had huge organizations, when I worked at universities, I would have lunch with the folks who were in my department because I wanted to just hear, “Hey, how’s it going? What’s going on?” When you’re a director of HR at a university and people find out who you are, all you have to do is walk around the campus. The same thing holds true, I think, in a corporation. Walk around, if they know who you are, they’re going to tell you what’s up.

Laurie Ruettimann:

Well, I’d like to talk about surveys just for one more second, because I think there are times when it’s appropriate just not to do a survey. We think, “Okay, it’s 2021 and companies are trying to sell us on the survey technology and we got feedback out of our performance management system that things need to improve. And so let’s do a survey.” But sometimes I think companies aren’t ready for a survey. They haven’t done the work beforehand. So can you talk me through that? How do you know when it’s the right time to do a survey?

Chris Mullen:

Well, You have to be ready to do something about it after you get the results. I mean, when folks bring me in as a consultant and say, “Hey, can you run a survey?” I say, “If you’re not willing to do or listen, I’m not in, I don’t care how much you pay me. I’m not in.” Because I know what it feels like from an employee perspective. So the way you know is, have you done your due diligence prior? So it’s like a program, what are your learning outcomes going to be from the survey? Are they genuine? I honestly believe when people want to do a survey, no matter what, they are genuine, they really do want to hear. Now they may not know the techniques to go about it. But other items that they might want to think about is, will their employees actually fill it out?

Laurie Ruettimann:

Wait, wait, wait. I want to back up. Is that really a concern in these organizations? I know when you work at a fast food place, there’s low response rates, but is that true in the workforce?

Chris Mullen:

I think so. Folks are inundated, like you said, with work. So do they have time? Is the survey too long, too short? Sometimes we do an annual survey and we just try to cram everything in when maybe we should talk about, do we do this on a quarterly or a bi-annual basis? Really, if you have all that data, if you do an annual survey, what are you really going to use? So really be intentional about the survey. Really hone it in to maybe something that you can actually make an impact on. That is the snowball effect. If you can keep your survey a little bit short on a topic that you know, that you can most likely improve on and listen to your employees, that creates trust. It creates the relationship between the company and the employee so that next time you do a survey, they’re more apt to fill it out because they saw something being done about it. It just creates this great transaction between the employee and the employer of trust. Without trust, that’s the foundation, we need that. So if you don’t have that, don’t do a survey.

Laurie Ruettimann:

Well, I work with some CEOs and they have looked me in the eye and said, “I don’t need to do a survey. Survey is not going to tell me anything new. Employees want to be paid more, they want time off, they want less work, they want more resources. Why do I need to do a survey? They want cheaper benefits. They want better managers. They want more opportunity to train.” I wonder, do you hear that as well? And is there an answer to that to compel them to say, no, no, no, no. You still need to poll your workforce.

Chris Mullen:

Yeah, I do hear that quite a bit. I still think there is a place for surveys. There’s also a place for focus groups. If I’m a CEO, I’m doing what I just talked about a couple of minutes ago, I’m going to pull a few people from the organization and say, “Let’s have some lunch, let’s just sit down and talk.” Do you know what it’s like for an employee to sit down with the CEO? One, it could be scary, but if you have that relationship with your employees, you can sit down and just ask them and you might know, but the question is, who cares if you know, what are you going to do about it? I understand that we can’t dump a ton of money into maybe all the benefits and things, but there are things that we can do. What if there’s a tool that’s missing that they need to do their job and you didn’t know that because it wasn’t a specific question on the survey, but just by doing these focus groups, you can find out a little bit more, these town halls, focus groups. There’s a lot of different ways, but it has to be two way. That’s what sometimes we miss with the surveys. A lot of times, it’s the one way.

Laurie Ruettimann:

Yeah, absolutely. Well, as we start to move the conversation forward, I’m thinking about all the really great work that UKG is doing and the Institute, I mean, you’re focused on a ton of different areas of research. So what’s exciting you? What’s interesting to you in the world of work?

Chris Mullen:

Yeah. The heard and the heard not’s has been really interesting to me to hear about who’s being heard and obviously who’s not. What we started to find is that really people leaders must ensure that really all of their employees are being heard equally and equitably. Because what we’re finding is, if I respond that I’m feeling heard, I still may feel that the rest of my colleagues are not. And that could be for a variety of reasons. You can take race, ethnicity, generation, and their age. So we want to make sure as a manager, as leaders, that we are hearing everyone equally. This really lends itself to the manager-employee relationship, which I still think is the linchpin of every corporation. Some managers get to where they are because they’re really good at their individual job. So we decided, “Hey, let’s give them some training to be a manager because that’s what it’ll do.”

Chris Mullen:

I’ve been in a lot of these trainings from an HR perspective and you cognitively get it. You’re like, “I get this. This is easy.” But then when you’re put in this situation to actually do it, it’s really difficult and we need coaching. So I think we’re missing that coaching from our leaders and how do we coach them to be really great managers? What are the small things we can do for our employees? Do you know their birth date? Do you know their annual… when they started at the company? Do you know what’s going on in their lives? That’s important, from my work-life research, there’s real spillover theory’s a real thing. What happens at life can spill over to work and vice versa, and it can dictate your productivity, how you come to work in a day, how you interact with people. So that’s one thing that’s really hitting home for me. The other, it’s a research that we did years ago on burnout. Burnout has not gone away. In fact, I think it’s increased, whether you’ve got the privilege of working from home and now you have no boundaries between work and life.

Laurie Ruettimann:

Right. As evidenced by the two of us recording a podcast from our home.

Chris Mullen:

I don’t know. I have my boundaries, and I get there’s a privilege here, I have an office in my house. But I’m a remote worker now. I did the commute, the hour and 15 minutes each way. I used to be a blue collar worker in construction. So I’ve definitely gone through it. During the pandemic, my kids would run in here in the middle of this. I mean, it’s just what it is. But I’ve set those boundaries of the door or I shut my laptop. I have a closed down routine at the end of the day where I shut my laptop, shut the door to my office and that’s my disconnect. If it’s a real bad day, I’ll walk around the block as my commute.

Laurie Ruettimann:

I like that. I like it a lot, but I’m really intrigued by the fact that we haven’t solved burnout. I entered the workforce in 1995, part-time while I was in college, and I don’t know, it seems like forever, it was forever ago. For all you kids out there, Bill Clinton was president back then. So totally weird. But people were talking about burnout in 1995 at the candy company where I worked in the HR department. So it’s just frustrating that all these years later here we are, we’re still talking about the same topic we talked about when I was 20 years old.

Chris Mullen:

I honestly think technology has helped move that forward, the burnout. That’s why it hasn’t gone away because now on our phones, our work is with us all the time. And that’s part of my work-life research. So I think that things have changed, but they haven’t, you’re right, corrected themselves. And I really think taking care of yourself from a work-life satisfaction perspective can be a difference. Even if you’re in a job you don’t like, I’ve been there, done that. I’m not the person who says quit right away. I’m saying go find another job then quit. It’s much more satisfying. So for me, it’s how do you work your way to the next step? What’s the next right thing to do? What I like to ask people, when you’re feeling anxious or you’re at a place where, “I can’t go into work today.” I felt those feelings. So, all right, what’s the next right thing? Well, first of all, I got to go get a paycheck so let me go do that. But I’m also going to work on this skill.

In fact, I paused my PhD in the middle of it to get my HR certifications because I thought, and it happened, it would open more doors for me quicker. I knew that a PhD was going to take quite a bit of time, but the SHRM certification and the HRCI certification opened up more doors to be a director of HR quicker than a PhD would have because that research quite a bit of time.

Laurie Ruettimann:

Well, I love that testament to real world work. And I think that comes back to your blue collar roots, as mine. T’s great to go off and get the PhD, but you definitely want to prove that you can work in the trenches. I wonder as we wrap up the conversation, what message do you have about the future of work for HR professionals, those working in the trenches? What should they be looking for on the horizon, maybe in 2022?

Chris Mullen:

What I’ve been talking about as of this week, as we record this, everyone is talking about the great resignation and recruitment. I am talking about how do we retain the good employees that we currently have? Because it doesn’t matter how many people you recruit through the front door, if you’re losing people out the back door, doesn’t matter. So how do we create these cultures where we can retain great employees, then that will help with your recruitment.

Laurie Ruettimann:

Give us the secret sauce here, man, because for all of us, we know this intellectually, but it’s so hard to do on the ground. So how do we retain people? I mean, it’s terrible enough before COVID, tell us how to retain great people now?

Chris Mullen:

I really think it comes down to the manager. Your leaders and your CEOs, your C-suite can say all the right things, but if the managers aren’t relaying the same message and walking the talk, it’s not going to happen. In this day and age, we can’t just rely on people are coming to work because they need a paycheck and then they’re going home. They’re going to look for another job. So if you can get great managers, good managers who build relationships with their team, it makes everything so much easier. With those on my team, I don’t have to beat around the bush. If there’s an issue, they know about it. So they know in a performance review time, if something surprises them, I didn’t do my job. They should know about it prior to that. I put a lot of onus on myself as a leader and a manager and I think everyone should take that responsibility seriously. Where HR can help is the coaching, the training. Then also, how do we create some margin in our managers’ workday so they can manage? A lot of our members are given individual responsibilities that are a full-time job on top of the manager. But if we allow people to spend the time managing, I think things will improve, your retention will improve, then your recruitment can improve.

Laurie Ruettimann:

I love it. I love the whole ecosystem. I’m dreaming about a world where we create a culture of retaining great people. So Chris, if people want to learn more about you, The Workforce Institute, all that good stuff, where should we send them?

Chris Mullen:

TheWorkforceInstitute.org, ChrisMullen.org. There’s the free, I talked about the wheel of life, you can get that, it’s free and it’s automated. So all the wonderful things. Sign up for all of our newsletters because we put out a lot of content that we want to be actionable for folks, especially our HR folks.

Laurie Ruettimann:

Well, that’s all very helpful. We’ll make sure we have links in the show notes. Thanks again for kicking off a month of UKG sponsorship. We’re so grateful for that. It’s a wonderful partnership, we love our friends at UKG. We love your good stuff. We love your content. We love The Workforce Institute. And most of all, Chris, we love having you as a guest. Will you come back?

Chris Mullen:

Oh, for sure, Laurie. You make it so easy.

Laurie Ruettimann:

Amazing, amazing. Thanks again for your time today.

Chris Mullen:

Thank you. My pleasure.

Laurie Ruettimann:

Hey everybody, I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Dr. Chris Mullen. For more information, you can head on over to the show notes at LaurieRuettimann.com/Podcast. And I’d like to thank UKG for their sponsorship this month, you can head on over to UKG.com or go to the show notes at LaurieRuettimann.com/Podcast and find a link to an awesome white paper that I wrote with UKG really focused on the future of work. Now that’s all for today and I hope you enjoyed it. We’ll see you next time on Punk Rock HR.