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. 

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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.”

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People in This Episode

• Dr. Chris Mullen: Workforce Institute @ UKG, ChrisMullen.org, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook