In episode 27 of The HR Famous Podcast, long-time HR leaders (and friends) Tim Sackett, Kris Dunn and Jessica Lee discuss JLee’s knowledge on the best flowers, the crew gives theories on why meeting times have decreased during the pandemic (but the number of meetings is up), and workplace relationship issues that have reemerged surrounding former McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook (McLovin from episode 2 of HR Famous) are covered.
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Show Highlights:
1:00 – The resident ginger of HR Famous is back from vacation! Welcome back Tim!
4:40 – Tim got some flowers for his wife and tried to share the great deal with the HR Famous crew and Jlee had to kindly reject (she doesn’t like roses!) and KD had bought flowers for his wife 30 minutes prior to Tim’s text. Jlee also implores her vast knowledge of flowers onto the men of the group.
7:00 – First topic of the day — a new study was released from the National Bureau of Economic Research about changes in the workday. The study shows that the number of meetings and number of attendees per meeting have increased during the pandemic but there is a reduction in meeting length.
9:20 – Jlee thinks the reduction in meeting time can be attributed to less travel time from meeting to meeting and the convenience of meeting remotely. How far do you have to travel to get to meetings in your office? KD thinks the reduction is due to having more meetings. Tim thinks it can be attributed to the digital platforms.
12:30 – KD had to lead his first in person, socially distanced, masked up long meeting recently and he said it was horrible. He would prefer to do it through Zoom.
15:00 – One more stat from this study: the average work day has increased by 48.5 minutes from working remotely. Tim doesn’t believe people are actually working more but they are just working at different times of the day.
17:15 – How early do you schedule your meetings? Jlee is a fan of 7:30 am meetings.
19:30 – Second topic of the day — since most American children aren’t returning to in person schooling, some employees are giving benefits to their employees to help care for their children. CNBC published an article about the benefits some companies are and aren’t affording their employees surrounding child care.
22:40 – Jlee thinks the benefits in the article shouldn’t be considered benefits but rather resources given to employers with children. Tim thinks a true benefit would be to give a subsidy to those with children to help pay for child care.
26:30 – Final topic of the day — the former CEO of McDonald’s Steve Easterbrook was let go in 2019 with a $40 million severance package and now McDonald’s is suing Easterbrook because they have found explicit pictures he exchanged with several other former employees in addition to the single relationship he was previously removed for.
28:30 – Jlee is disappointed because she is a McDonald’s alum. She points out that at the time, the board of directors thought he was being forced out without cause and therefore, he got a big sum of money upon his dismissal.
29:45 – KD thinks McDonald’s will seek out all of the impacted parties and try to settle with all of them. Also, he thinks the company will have to conduct a big investigation and find everything that happened with Easterbrook and his misconduct.
33:00 – Tim thinks McDonald’s will want to negotiate all of the dealings behind closed doors. He also thinks the company didn’t do their due diligence when Easterbrook was leaving and tried to push him out too quickly.