A hard job market for new college grads, the cost of declining employee wellbeing, a bold child care policy

In this episode, we explore Cake’s Body’s bold $36K childcare stipend, why the job market is suddenly so brutal for college grads, and what the WEF’s new report reveals about the steep decline in employee well-being. We break down what these headlines signal about where workplaces are headed—and what HR needs to be thinking about next.

Connect:

With Anessa:

• On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anessafike/
• On her website: https://www.fikeandco.com/
• Her book: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-revolution-of-work-fuck-the-patriarchy-and-the-workplace-it-built-anessa-fike/21206822?ean=9781961347540&next=t

With Stacey on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/staceynordwall/

Articles:

• Cakes Body’s $36K Child Care Credit Leads the Way in Affordable Child Care Planning for Employees
• Something Alarming Is Happening to the Job Market 
• World Economic Forum Warns Employee Well-Being Is Declining—and Costing Businesses Trillions

Transcript

Stacey Nordwall (00:00):

Welcome to Toot or Boot, where each week we talk about news related to HR and the world of work. We toot the news we like and we boot the news we don't like. I'm your host, Stacey Nordwall, a serial joiner of early stage tech companies as their first in or only HR person. And joining us today, we have Annessa Fike, welcome to the show. I am so glad you are here.

Anessa Fike (00:25):

I'm super excited. Stacey and I have been working on this for a while, and we finally got our calendars to connect, so I am so excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Stacey Nordwall (00:35):

Awesome. And Anessa, for folks who don't know you, can you tell them a little bit about yourself?

Anessa Fike (00:40):

Yeah. Okay. So I'm going to try to go through it quickly. I have been doing fractional HR people, talent leadership for almost 12 years. So one of the very early people to do fractional HR in the us And over that time I have worked with over 125 organizations in nearly every industry, but oil and gas in 30 plus countries around the world. And so when it comes to all things hr, I'm not sure there's anything out there that I haven't seen or that would surprise me at this point. So we've seen a lot and a lot of that, to your point, Stacey, like being in tech and startups, a lot of that is in tech and startups. So there's just a lot of wild stuff that happens.

Stacey Nordwall (01:26):

Yeah, absolutely. And we're going to get into some of that as we talk over the next two episodes together.

Anessa Fike (01:34):

Amazing.

Stacey Nordwall (01:36):

We're going to start off with an article,Cakes Body’s $36K Child Care Credit Leads the Way in Affordable Child Care Planning for Employees This article is from success.com. The recap here is that Cake's Body, a women's undergarment company, has introduced a stipend offering employees up to $36,000 annually for childcare expenses. This initiative aims to support working parents, particularly mothers in balancing career and family responsibilities, and the company hopes that this will inspire other organizations to adopt similar measures. What were your thoughts?

Anessa Fike (02:15):

This is a tough one. So I think I'm mostly a toot except for, I don't know, there's something in there that's a little bit boot for me of are we just making sure that only the parents feel taken care of, only the parents. And so I always want to be cognizant of if someone decides that they don't want to have kids, they don't want to adopt, they don't want to do these things, that's completely fine, right? They're great, we love having them amazing. And so I really don't want to just put all of our eggs, all of our financial eggs in one basket if we're just taking care of parents. So for me, it's like I kind of want to understand a little bit more of for Cakes, what else are you doing for everyone else too?

(03:03):

But on the toot side, hey, anything that makes it easier to be a parent in America as a parent myself, I'm here for, because you know what? It's interesting that we are now relying on these companies to do the thing that the government should have been doing for so long, and we know these things. We're still one of the, if not the only first world country that doesn't have this stuff in place. And so it's really wild at this point that it's 2025 and we still haven't gotten there. And so I do understand that companies are now kind of like, well, if the government's not going to do it, I guess we're going to try to make up for some of this. And in that way, I am a two because I think at least it's going in the right direction. And I'll be honest, daycare, child expenses, it's expensive. It's expensive to have kids. So I am mostly a toot on that one.

Stacey Nordwall (03:58):

I had some similar thoughts where on the toot side I'm like, great, it is a company that's a women's undergarment company. They are, to me, I am assuming this is a policy that then feels kind of in alignment with their values. This is an alignment with the people who are their customers, and it makes sense from that perspective, and that's a big investment in their employees. And I'm sure that that is a great retention measure. The boot for me, as you said, is like, are we having to have companies step up to do the things that the government is failing to do and how patchwork that is when we are just kind of relying on organizations to do that because the government won't. And the crazy thing about it too is they cite in the article that the Department of Labor data shows that a 10% plus increase in median childcare prices are associated with lower maternal employment rates. So they understand this, they know it. They would have to calculate that out. That four people in the workforce means that it is having an impact on our economy, and yet they still don't do it.

Anessa Fike (05:22):

They don't, it's like all this stuff that we know we're supposed to do. It's like the government just isn't brushing its teeth. We understand. You know what I mean? We know that our tooth care, our teeth are important for the rest of our body, but the government just won't brush its own teeth. It just doesn't make sense. Right.

Stacey Nordwall (05:42):

Yeah, I don't think I've ever heard that phrase. I love it so much. That is amazing. It's a great way to think about it, right?

Anessa Fike (05:52):

It's like, let's just, okay. Yeah. We're just not really going to take care of the really important thing. Okay, cool.

Stacey Nordwall (05:59):

Just do the basics, just the preventative care. Get your colonoscopies. It's important, right? Yeah. Okay, so we'll move on to the next article. This one is from the Atlantic. It is titled Something Alarming is Happening to the Job Market. So the recap for this is that the job market for recent college graduates has been especially hard unemployment rates for them at unusually high 5.8% and challenges, and they've been having challenges in securing positions in sectors like tech consulting and finance. In the article, they share three theories as to why this might be the case. The first is that the labor market was in a very long recovery from the great recession of oh 8, 0 9, and that recovery was then smashed by the pandemic, which was then followed by inflation. So the market really hasn't recovered and is just uncertain. The second is that college just does not give the same, A college degree does not give the same advantage that it used to. They said that in 2010, that marked a turning point where the lifetime earnings gap between college grads and high school graduates stopped winding. And then the third theory they gave was, this is the impact we're seeing from the beginning of AI transforming the economy and that AI is snatching up what would be those entry level roles or companies are investing in AI instead of hiring. So they said that, but they also note that that was yet to actually be seen in the data, though.

(07:34):

There's a lot. There's a lot. Yeah, there's a lot. Did one or more of those theories resonate with you? What are you thinking?

Anessa Fike (07:41):

Gosh. Well, I have to be honest. The first thing that I thought about when I saw this was, oh my gosh. As millennials, we totally understand what this feels like. When we came out into the workforce from college 2008, 2007, in that era, it was hard. And then it's been hard ever since. There's so many memes on social media around all of the things that we have to go through in our lives. And so one, we understand that feeling, right? We understand what that feels like. And also I think that there is this, there's this sort of peace around the economic place that we have in the US that we haven't recovered yet from Covid, and we were on our way there, and then we get some particular people in the White House who are kind of undoing some of that work. And so it's just like we were getting there, we were making strides, and now we were 12 steps ahead, and now we're 20 steps back. And it does feel like this very much. It is a precarious job market. I do also think that there's a lot of labor shifts happening, and they haven't really talked about, they talked a little bit about AI not seeing the data yet in that, and I think that, I'm just going to put this out there. I think we have similar views on ai, and I would say I think that people think AI can do a lot more than it actually can do. Well currently,

(09:14):

And a lot of people are saying, oh, AI will solve that. Oh, well, we'll just stop hiring people and we'll bring in AI. And we've just seen that Klarna, for instance, just rolled that back and said, actually, it didn't work.

(09:25):

I think that there's this expectation that it's going to fix all of our problems, and it's not going to fix our problems, if ever, but definitely for a long time. And with that same labor shift that I don't think that people are talking about enough is we are seeing as a fractional person, we're seeing so many people go fractional. And it's because the whole reason, whole way that work works nine to five Monday through Friday in an office or not in an office, it still doesn't work. All of this stuff. We're still trying to put a square peg in a round hole. And so for me, it's like, yeah, the economy isn't helping work, doesn't work. AI isn't fixing anything, and so we're just in this mess. We're in this chaos, this mess. So I guess I would say, is this a Toot or a boot?

(10:15):

I would say, is it a Toot or boot for the horrible job economy? The job market is horrible. So that's a boot. The economy is horrible. That's a boot. And I don't know, I don't see us getting out of it for the next three and a half years. And so I think we're just in chaos for a while, and that's going to be hard to find jobs in. It's also really hard from an employer standpoint, a company standpoint, to know how to plan when the economy is up and down, when the administration is up and down, how are we expecting companies to headcount plan and even plan their own strategy? Because there's so much happening. It's chaos all the time. We can put our best intentions in strategizing for the next year, and something else could come in and throw a complete wrench in it. And we have no control over those things. So for me, it's all a mess. It's all a mess. It's all chaotic because there's so much happening at one point in time, which is now, I also think we're seeing this labor shift into different ways of working where it's not one person, one job for 20 years. It's

(11:24):

One person with maybe a part-time job, maybe two part-time jobs, and maybe a gig job. Maybe they're fractional, maybe their advisor, maybe they're speakers. It's a whole mixture of things that we really more and more people are stepping into, and we've never experienced that in our lifetimes in a labor market. So that mix up is going to feel weird for a while. I honestly don't think it's going to get fixed though in the next three and a half, four years.

Stacey Nordwall (11:52):

Definitely not at all. Maybe the next chat. Yeah. Yeah. I agree with what you said. The additional thing for me that I want to tap into is what you said around companies planning, and it makes perfect sense in a volatile market where things are shifting frequently because of decisions some people are making that they wouldn't hire. Whenever something like that happens when the economy seems like it's contracting, companies get more conservative about their hiring. So no, that's a well-known thing. There's no hidden thing behind that. That's just clearly what's happening is that they're trying to be more conservative because the last thing, any good business wants to do a one with a real strategy is over hire and then have all of these people that you have to lay off. Companies don't want to do that.

Anessa Fike (12:51):

We've seen that for years in tech, right? We've experienced that so much. And it's interesting how we, I think especially from people, leaders see the cycles happening. And then it's always funny to me how we get told that we are really not good business people when we're the ones who see the cycles. But then you're like, but why don't you see the cycles? You're supposed to be good with people. So it's always a real weird situation, I feel like. Yeah.

Stacey Nordwall (13:17):

Yeah. And so, I mean, think for me, I guess I too it from the perspective of like, Hey, I like having the conversation. I like getting that emphasis out there, thinking about the theories. I like that they did kind of caveat the AI thing as you did and say like, Hey, everybody is saying this and worried about this, but that's not actually playing out in the data yet. And to your point, I think that's because AI is not able to do all of the things that people think that it can, or it still requires a real large degree of human interaction still to get the outcomes that you want. It might help people work faster in certain ways and certain things. It's definitely not replacing people yet. And I think that we are probably quite a few years away from that happening. I mean, transformation happens quickly sometimes, but I just am not getting the immediate sense that that's coming soon.

Anessa Fike (14:25):

Well, and it's interesting to me that all these companies want to move all of this to ai, and do they not realize that at some point, the AI is going to keep spitting out the same stuff and they're going to have no competitive advantage, and so what are they? They're racing to have no competitive advantage. It just doesn't make sense to me. Again, with trying to think down the line as a business person, where do you think this is going to end up? Because we're not going to get innovation. We're going to lose creativity. We're going to lose some of that authenticity that happens because people are going to forget how to flex that muscle and they can get it back, but they're going to forget it for a minute. And we're all just really on this really quick runway to what become robots. So it's just wild to me to think about what are you really racing towards?

Stacey Nordwall (15:10):

I know, well, I think with Klarna, they had made AI basically their customer support anytime. I think that when people do something like that, it immediately just says to me, one, you did not think this through because have you gone through the experience of doing customer support with AI is fucking terrible? What mean everybody hates it? Everybody hate they scream representative.

Anessa Fike (15:43):

That's why everyone's doing.

Stacey Nordwall (15:44):

Yeah. It's the same thing when it's the ai, and ultimately it's a bad experience. And to me, that also makes me think that it is kind of the people at the top CEOs that don't understand the value that that work is actually bringing to the business. They're too distant from it to understand what those folks are really doing, what they're really dealing with to understand that value. And it's just like, okay, well, that can just be ai. And it does bring me a little bit of, what is it, the schadenfreude, to see somebody fall on their face doing things like that and then have to backtrack it,

Anessa Fike (16:24):

Right? Which at least good job, Klarna for saying the thing

(16:29):

A lot of us were thinking probably is happening at a lot of other companies,

(16:33):

They don't feel okay enough to say that it's not working for them. So at least I give klarna props for saying, Hey, this didn't work.

Stacey Nordwall (16:41):

That's true. Yeah, I just revealed how entirely petty I am, but that's okay.

Anessa Fike (16:48):

Okay. Well, for years and years as people leaders, we don't either get pulled in, quit early enough, or people act like we don't know what's going on when we're, we tend to be the only ones in the room who actually do know the entirety of what's going on. And so it's nice to just see the validation sometimes.

Stacey Nordwall (17:06):

Yes, a hundred percent. All right. We'll move on to our last article for this episode. This is World Economic Forum, warns employee wellbeing is declining and costing businesses trillions. This is from Inc. Is that A WEF report highlights a significant drop in employee wellbeing, attributing it to factors like layoffs, burnout, and AI induced workplace changes. The report warns that for many people, work is no longer a positive place, and that while employee wellbeing and mental health was a focus during covid, the pendulum is now swinging back. They note disconnect between employees and managers saying that while 80% of managers said they felt investing in people was good for overall business performance, only 19% have made that a strategic priority. So what do you think is that gap? What is causing them 80%? Yeah, this is important for business performance. Only 19% make it a priority.

Anessa Fike (18:16):

This is such a wild thing. And again, this doesn't surprise us. None of this is surprising. I'm pretty sure the entire time that we've been probably in a professional setting, active disengagement for employees has been higher than engagement for employees our entire careers. And it just keeps getting worse. And I think there's this piece that people think ai, we mentioned AI again here, let's just throw in AI and it'll make it all better. And it's like the more you try to make people more productive, the less engaged they are. And

(18:51):

Why this is a very glaring red, glaring button, but you still keep trying to push it and hoping it turns green somehow. And it's not going to work like that because we're asking people to forget of the trauma that they had during covid and just act like it didn't happen. And we're also not changing things. We're making it worse. We're trying to get people more productive. People aren't already working 60 hours a week during a 40 hour salary week,

(19:22):

And we're seeing huge levels of burnout and disengagement. Why do we think doing more of this is going to make it better? We should be reversing this and saying, Hey, you know what? I don't know the exact dynamics, but I read so many articles that said in the fifties their, eight hour day, we do their entire eight hour day in probably the first 10, 20 minutes we're awake the entire day. And somehow now, even though the productivity is off the charts from what it was during when our parents started out in their jobs, we are still talking about productivity. And then we're wondering why as humans, we are not doing well. And so it's like you add in the economic vectors, you add in the covid piece, you add in the world dynamics, you add in the societal dynamics, and then you have employers just saying, work harder. You'll feel better.

(20:19):

So for me, it's all of this stuff that we keep trying to put in place to make people more productive. And then we wonder why people feel burnt out. And we really need to unravel that and say, what does a salary job look like? What are the expectations? And I know that some of us have talked about this too, where it's like, what is the actual contract of the employer employee relationship now? And it has changed. It has changed dramatically in the last 30 years. It's changed dramatically, and employers are expecting far too much for far too little that they are paying.

(20:58):

A lot of the leaders, the CEOs, the COOs that we see and come into contact with a lot, the majority of them want there to be less pay and more work. But if you ever ask them to put maybe their family members or their friends in a similar situation, they never would. And so that to me is telling, right? And so it's kind of like, let's just stop the ridiculousness of going down this pathway that we have seen has not worked and actually has gotten worse, and let's back that up and talk about as humans, how do we actually do better? We do better when we're rested, when we are taking care of ourselves, we make better decisions. And that productivity piece, the loss of engagement and everyone feeling kind of down and out, it's not going to get better. It's going to cost us more. Do you know what doesn't cost more? And what saves money is rested, well taken care of people making better decisions. I think that's why we have jobs. That's why there's people leadership. And we are now starting to see that the smart companies are relying on their CPOs to then be their CEOs because they realize that we still remain to be the absolute only department that works across every single area of the business.

(22:18):

And we also understand how every single area of the business ties into each other. And so I think that there's just a lot of the stuff that we keep trying to put the square peg round hole again and wondering why it's not working, and we really need to rethink the entire game as it is.

Stacey Nordwall (22:35):

Yeah. Yeah, I think, so for me, I have this, it was kind of similar to my last one where the article itself or the information that they're talking about that wellbeing is declining. This is obviously a boot for me, but the two within that for me was at its core, what they're highlighting in here is that managers, other senior leaders within the business know they see it, right? They see it, they see it, and they just aren't doing it. And I think that time and again, as HR leaders, we talk about how we go in, we bring these things in where we think that it's very common sense, and even it is, they say in the report that investing in employee wellbeing could boost the global economy by 11.7 trillion. How many times do we have to say it? Right? Dollars, the information is right there, and that we run into this wall time and time again because they just ultimately don't want to make it a strategic priority. So I get that bit of validation where I was like, okay, so as much as we try, here it is this data that 80% of managers felt like it was good for business performance, but only 19% made it strategic priority. And there is something fundamentally there that we can try as hard as we can, but until that shifts, until there's a shift there, we are going to be limited in what we can do aside from just running headfirst into a wall over and over again.

Anessa Fike (24:17):

Right? It's literally like the 80 20 rule. We literally, it's like 80 20 almost, right?

(24:23):

The other thing that I think about too is that if you think about the leaders that we consistently, at least I consistently kind of headbutt with, it's the same people that think that when they're in their midlife, when they buy a red Porsche and makes them more attractive, I am just going to throw that out there. That makes no sense. So these are the types of humans we're trying to make actual sense logic work with. So it's just interesting. But I do think my one kind of toot in this too, is I think as more and more millennials actually get into leadership and more Gen Z gets into leadership, we are changing this because we're fed up. We've been trying to change it. Gen Z just isn't having it from the start. Good for them. But also Gen Z doesn't want to manage for the majority of what they don't want to people manage because they see how horrible it's so it's really going to rest on millennials coming into these leadership spots. Maybe those people kind of getting out of those leadership spots for it to actually change. Because to your point, we can keep pushing that boulder up the hill, but if the hill keeps extending, we're going to be the ones still there with the boulder five years from now, unless the hill gets shorter, right?

Stacey Nordwall (25:43):

Yeah. Yep. Absolutely. All right, well Anessa, that was so awesome. I enjoyed that conversation so much. Yay. Thank you so much too. Glad I bet you joined. Glad for folks who want to connect with you, learn more from you, how can they do that?

Anessa Fike (26:01):

So you can find me on LinkedIn. I say some rather unhinged things most of the time, which are very passionate, but you'll hopefully find some fun something in there that's a little bit of a glimmer. So find me on LinkedIn. You can also find me@fikeandco.com. It's F-I-K-E-A-N-D-C o.com.

Stacey Nordwall (26:20):

All right. Awesome. Thanks so much for joining.

Anessa Fike (26:23):

Thanks for having me.