The State of Work Videocast with Marcus Mossberger (Southeast)

00:00:09 - Anthony: Thanks for joining us today. Tell me a little bit about yourself. What do you do? Who do I have on the line?

00:00:15 - Marcus: Wonderful. So first of all, thanks for having me, Anthony. My name is Marcus Mossberger. I am the Chief Market Strategy Officer of an organization called Lytiqs, and we do what it sounds like—analytics. We're actually a workforce intelligence platform with a focus on strategic workforce planning.

00:00:36 - Marcus: TriNet conducted the State of Work report for 2025, and we found in South Central some of the data shows that there was a huge report of people being really engaged—around 85% of employees were really engaged, they were optimistic. Yet those same employees are actively planning to leave in the next year—about 55% of them. So it's a little bit of a conundrum. You say you have all these employees who are hyper-engaged, but at the same time, they're shopping; they have wandering eyes. So what actually happens in the gap between a leader like yourself who thinks they have high engagement, but employees are actually out there applying for jobs, especially in a remote culture, but also specifically in the South Central region?

00:01:19 - Marcus: Well, to put it simply, Anthony, they're lying. I mean, are they engaged to some degree? But any kind of self-reported survey like that, you've got to take with a grain of salt. What you really need to do is look at the data. What does the data tell you about the engagement of your workforce? So how do you measure discretionary effort? Are they picking up hard-to-fill shifts in your organization? Are they taking discretionary classes in your learning management system? Are they referring people to the organization? Are they going above and beyond in what they're doing? That's how you know they're engaged. I don't care if you ask them; they'll tell you what you want to hear because they want to keep their job. So some of that data—I think you need to combine the qualitative with the quantitative, and then you get a more accurate picture of how engaged the workforce really is.

00:02:12 - Marcus: I could not agree more. I think oftentimes we have this fallacy with Net Promoter Score. Definitely understand subjective responses versus explicit outcomes are two different ways of viewing this same theme, you know, statistic.

00:02:26 - Marcus: Yeah, and I think the other thing to keep in mind, too, is just because they're open to looking outside of the organization doesn't necessarily make them disengaged. It just means they're pragmatic. They're like, "Hey, if there's something better over here, I'm not stupid, I'm going to take it." So it's not a matter of they're actively trying to get out of the organization; most of the time it's just that they're like, "Hey, if something better comes along, I'm going to consider it." The idea of loyalty on both sides of the equation—employer and employee—is long gone.

00:02:59 - Marcus: Marcus, you write about a 4-day work week, portfolio of careers, agentic AI, digital nomads. As an HR professional, these are some scary words; these are inflammatory, a little bit inciting. Some, you know, triggering words—whatever the HR PC terminology is here. But the idea that always seems to be true is, you know, five years away is like this mainstream adoption of some of the things that you may already be on the forefront of. So which of these do you think is actually arriving faster, and what do most organizations need to realize now, today?

00:03:34 - Marcus: Yeah, I would say let me preface all of this, Anthony, with a statement that may sound a little bit counterintuitive. I believe that the more that we embrace technology in the workplace, the more human work will actually become. And so I really feel like technology is the impetus for all of the downstream impacts that will enable the 4-day work week to actually come to fruition, that will enable people to start looking for opportunities to pursue side hustles inside and outside of their organization.

00:04:12 - Marcus: So, you know, in terms of what's the big thing, Anthony, that's coming? And it may be the recency effect of me just spending the last week in Vegas at an event—I'm going to Vegas again next week for another HR event—but I really do think that agentic AI is the next really big thing. And there are individuals out there that have embraced it and are starting to make it part of their daily workflow. There are others that find it confusing or question the value of it.

00:04:46 - Marcus: What's phenomenal to think about, though, is it has incredible potential to truly transform the way human beings work. But you know what's going to be the prohibiting factor, Anthony? We are humans, because we hate change, and we're so bad at adapting to new things and adopting them in a timely way. So it's change management that's going to slow it all down. I hate that term, by the way—we shouldn't be trying to manage change; we should be enabling change. But that's a whole other topic.

00:05:20 - Marcus: There are some counterintuitive data about work-life balance and satisfaction. And you know, in your region, they're pretty balanced—like 88% of people respectively feel like they have some sense of balance. But you know, when employers want flexible work hours and employers recognize that it's something valuable, like how do you have work balance and a remote culture? How does that differ from an in-office culture? And when does balance and company requirements get to supersede one another?

00:05:50 - Marcus: Yeah, well, maybe we can start, Anthony, if you don't mind, by giving me a sense for how you would define work-life balance. Because I feel like even generationally, that gets defined differently. But in the context of this conversation, how would you attempt to put some definition around that term?

00:06:08 - Marcus: To me, it's about expectations of response. And to me, I need to have certain modalities in which I have times in which I'm not expected to respond to anything. And that is an effective work-life balance. So I don't mind that there's work to do, as long as I feel that I have the agency and autonomy to compartmentalize that to my own schedule. That's balance. I'm an adult, you've hired me for a salary, and you've given me a bunch of things to do, and I have the agency and the autonomy to do things on my own. Balance: if I want to stay up until 3:00 am and work on stuff and not work from 10:00 to noon because I have kid duties, I'm an adult, and as long as I do my things every Friday—like there should be a short time interval where I'm given this agency, not months or quarters, but we're talking a 100-hour block—I should have a high degree of agency and then kind of less over larger time scales.

00:07:07 - Marcus: Yep, well said. I'm glad that I asked that question because I think a lot of people think of a more old-school definition of work-life balance, and they're thinking work-life separation. I think I need a distinction between my work life and my personal life. And I think we all saw the pandemic really disrupted that because we found ourselves working from home so much, and then we also started to get a glimpse of people a little bit differently—like we're on camera and a cat walks by, and you're like, "No way, I had no idea you were a cat person!" And it kind of started blending that line between personal and professional.

00:07:42 - Marcus: And so we started redefining it. I think "work-life balance" is not a good term; I think "work-life integration" is what the next generation wants. And it comes back to one word that you used over and over again—it's one of my favorite words: agency. I want to feel like I have some control over when I work, how I work, where I work, right? Even to some degree why I work. So I'm a huge proponent of hope. I don't know if we talked about that, Anthony—I have a "Hope at Work" podcast, a "Hope at Work" newsletter, I created a Workplace Hope Assessment. And a big part of hope is agency—feeling like I have something to look forward to and that I have some degree of control over it.

00:08:24 - Marcus: So I love that you called that out. I would love us to get to the point where we're not evaluating people based on the number of hours they're working for us, but what's the deliverable that we asked them to do? And it doesn't matter if it took you two hours or 20; it doesn't matter if you did it from Spain or San Francisco. If you did what I asked you to do, I shouldn't care about how you got there or how long it took.

00:08:49 - Marcus: A lot of people appreciate that AI can help, but there are some extreme concerns about AI accuracy, follow-through, lack of empathy, lack of humanity. And so while people can appreciate this can be useful, their concerns about how it could be harmful are disincentivizing them to adapt or leverage it. And so that long-winded question back to you is: how can employees and employers relate to AI differently? What should they be informed about?

00:09:20 - Marcus: Yeah, it's interesting. What you're starting to see, Anthony, is what I've heard referred to as the bifurcation problem. So essentially, we've got this K-shape where we've got some people that are embracing AI and adapting it into their daily work, and then there's others that are fearful of it and trying to hold it at bay. And what you're going to see is a dramatic shift in those two groups of people in terms of their ability to be successful in the future. Because I do genuinely believe that AI is not a novelty; it has the potential to fundamentally reshape the way that humans work, as much as the printing press and the internet and some of the other significant inventions of the past.

00:10:05 - Marcus: So I think we have to get past the fear factor. And again, the media loves to portray it as a job killer. We're also unfortunately seeing a lot of employers do a lot of layoffs and they're blaming it on AI, and it has nothing to do with AI; it's the fact that they overhired during the pandemic and they're still shedding some of that excess talent. And they're like, "How do I get out of this without it being about me? Oh, it's AI's fault because we're expecting this jump in productivity from automating or augmenting our workforce."

00:10:36 - Marcus: The other interesting thing, though—you mentioned the term empathy. I actually think there's an opportunity for AI to do way more than we expected. So I actually heard a session recently on AI in healthcare. And they were comparing patients' interaction with general physicians/doctors, and then those same patients interacted with an AI chatbot. And Anthony, they rated the chatbot as higher in empathy than the human beings. And I actually, on my podcast, I had somebody who's an empathy expert and I asked her, "Can AI demonstrate empathy?" And she said, "Absolutely it can." Now, it doesn't have this lived experience that you and I do, but think about it: you can train AI to have an understanding of way more experiences than one human being could ever have, and so it can use that to respond and react to individuals.

00:11:43 - Marcus: So we are just scratching the surface of what AI is capable of. And the last point I'll make about that kind of bifurcation is that these folks going up are using the brand new tools—like the latest and greatest. I don't know what it is now for ChatGPT—5.2 or whatever. These people may be using the free ones that were, you know, three versions ago, and the distinction between those tools is dramatic. The quality in the ability to respond is unfathomable, Anthony. So that's another distinction—that if you're not going to embrace the latest and greatest and you're not going to embed it into the way that you work, you're going to fall behind. It's inevitable.

00:12:26 - Marcus: Given that work has changed, income streams have changed, and you've written extensively about a portfolio of careers or what I would call an array of revenue streams—the hustle economy. The South Central data shows in the Try At Work report that 55% of employees roughly are either open or actively looking to switch for jobs. But it might not be for a traditional job—maybe it's for a supplementary job, maybe it's a creative outlet that lets them express themselves that they happen to get some income. So with that, is there risk in allowing your full-time employees to have side hustles? What does the workforce data show? Are these individuals more productive because they're able to manage another world and their finite amount of time means they do their job better because there's a sense of scarcity with their productivity? But how can we accept this novel innovation to encourage our employees to have this agency we've discussed and to allow them to achieve further than they would have been able to the generations before them?

00:13:31 - Marcus: Yeah, I think what you're asking about essentially, Anthony, is: is society ready to embrace some new social norms when it comes to work and employment? And you know, you talked about just the pace and scale of change and how different it is from previous generations, right? We've gotten to the point now, Anthony, where the half-life of skills that are relevant has gone from like 10 years down to less than two. So I think in many cases, employees aren't necessarily going, "Hey, I want to go over there"; they're saying, "How do I remain relevant?" And I know if I stay in my current job and I don't have an open mindset and learn new skills and new ways of working, I am going to be in trouble.

00:14:19 - Marcus: So I don't—again, it comes back to what you and I were talking about earlier: do you trust your people to get their work done in addition to maybe doing something outside of the organization once or twice a week? And here's the other thing: if you don't want them to do that, fine—give them an opportunity to do an internal side hustle. Give them Fridays and say you can go anywhere in the company and work on a project, try something you've never done before. And that way you're retaining their institutional knowledge and that intellectual capital inside your walls, but give them an opportunity for growth, for change, for exploration—or maybe, to your point, just a passion project.

00:14:56 - Marcus: The TriNet State of Work report and the South Central data shows that employees who cite that they're going to leave for better pay or flexible hours or benefits—you know, it's like 25 to 35%—that's like the top motivator for why they leave. Meanwhile, the employers are assuming that those people left for another reason. And so if you spend time studying what workers want versus what employers think they want, is there a mismatch in this literacy problem? Are some employers reporting their own stats and misleading themselves, kind of how we talked about Net Promoter Scores, and they're just selectively biased adding their favorite customers to play their numbers? You can always lie to yourself, right? I call it mathematical gymnastics, and I can make the numbers perform a 10 out of 10 if you want them to. But is it true? Is it accurate? Is it "plum," as we would say in carpentry?

00:15:51 - Marcus: I think it's a reflection of employers wanting to do what's easy versus hard. You know what's easy to do, Anthony? Throw money at people. You know what's hard to do? Match them with work that they are passionate about, that they find purpose and meaning in. So a few years ago, I was living in London and I went back to school—I found at the University of Sussex there was a postgraduate certificate program on the psychology of kindness and well-being at work. And it reminded me of Martin Seligman—he's a positive psychologist. He talks about "PERMA" at work—this is what people want at work:

• P is Positivity: I want to have a positive experience, I want to have good conversations with people like you.
• E is Engagement or Flow: when you're so into something you're like, "Oh my gosh, 3 hours passed and I forgot to eat."
• R is Relationships.
• M is Meaning.
• A is Achievement.

00:16:45 - Marcus: None of that mentioned compensation. And that's like the one thing that employers go to because it's the easiest thing to do. If you can give them those other elements of PERMA, you're going to be way ahead of the game. And it's different for everybody. For some people, you might have worked for a co-worker that the 'R' in that equation—Relationships—you could tell was their thing, whereas others, especially on the sales side, are like, "It's the 'A'—I want to achieve and be really successful and accomplish a lot and maybe make a lot of money; that could be part of it." But it's different for all of us. But getting back to those fundamental elements of what do human beings want from work? That's the important consideration.

00:17:28 - Marcus: I couldn't agree more. And I just want to circle back on accomplishment. Accomplishment can be pizza parties and gold stars and stickers, reward charts. It doesn't have to be money; that is just a single modality to demonstrate how someone is accomplished. And as humans, I think what it means is within our community we have meaning and there's purpose, and accomplishment is a way to explicitly show that to our fellow constituents within our community. But that's really what we're seeking. And unfortunately in today's materialistic, capitalistic society, one way to measure accomplishment is in monetary net worth—how much money have you reserved into your repositories. But is that really what they wanted, or do they just want to be thanked and acknowledged and appreciated that they had a value to the collective humanity that we all exist in?

00:18:25 - Marcus: Yeah, even the way that you thank people is important. I remember years ago when I was in HR, we had a town hall for a technology company I was working for. And it was in person back then, right? And the senior executive was giving awards out for the quarter. And so he was calling all of these software engineers onto the stage. And a couple things: first of all, he was saying things like, "This person worked nights and weekends, they worked over this holiday and they made this happen." And they brought them up on stage and he shook their hand, and I'm like afterwards, I was like, "You did so much wrong there. Let's break it down." Number one, you told everybody in the audience you want people to spend time away from their family, working way too hard and burning themselves out. And he's like, "That's not what I said." I'm like, "That's exactly what you said—is that we are incentivizing that kind of behavior." Second, these are software engineers; they do not want to be coming up on stage and shaking your hand—that scares them to death. Salespeople, yes—they want a parade and they want you to sing songs about them, but not the engineers. So know your audience is the key.

00:19:30 - Marcus: And I like how you pointed out it doesn't have to be monetary. I had somebody that didn't even report to me, but she was kind of a dotted line years ago, and we were doing this huge project, Anthony. And she was a high school volleyball coach and they had an upcoming season. And we both knew that this huge project was going to take way more of her time—she was going to have to travel a lot. And so she told the school, "I can't coach this year." And I felt bad for her, so you know what I did? I bought her a subscription to a volleyball magazine so that she could, I don't know if it was every other week or every month, she got to stay abreast of what was happening in the sport. She felt still connected to it, and it was just like a little thank you, an acknowledgement that, you know, she sacrificed something. It wasn't generic, it wasn't movie tickets, Anthony, it wasn't a gift certificate to Chili's. It was something that said, "Hey, I appreciate the sacrifice you made, and I'm doing something that I know is meaningful to you."

00:20:31 - Marcus: To me, being present is so important. I don't need anything, I don't want anything. I'm just here in your network and you know what I do, and if you need the thing that I say I do, come talk to me about those things. And so as we move into our closing question, Marcus, I have for you: what is one piece of advice you would give to another small business owner-operator who's using workforce data to actually make better decisions—not to benchmark themselves against a national average, but to empower and encourage and to give this agency that we've talked about that is so important?

00:21:10 - Marcus: Well, I'll frame it this way—and I stole this shamelessly from somebody else, so don't think I'm clever because I'm not. You cannot connect the dots until you collect the dots. So most organizations have over a hundred HR technologies (large institutions at least), and then there's usually like 900 other technologies. So just getting the data, Anthony, is the hardest part. And then you've got to cleanse the data and aggregate the data before you can even start to predict what's going to happen and then to prescribe appropriate activity. So it's all about having technology to help you do that. And you know, obviously I'm biased—I work for a tech provider that actually does some of that—but you can't do that alone; there's just no way. It is a complex thing. Everybody says, "I can build my own analytical tools and my own dashboards," and yeah, it's going to take you six months to do it, and the world changed dramatically in a week. So you've got to be able to move fast.

00:22:16 - Marcus: The other thing I would suggest and an added kind of benefit of this is just being more willing to take some risks and to try new things and be innovative. I heard a great analogy this week and I've got to share it if you don't mind, Anthony. So we all know the Henry Ford story where he talks about, "If I would have given my customers what they wanted, I would have given them faster horses." And I love it. And so today what you see is there's a lot of car companies still trying to improve the experience of the driver—to make it easier, to make them more efficient, to make it safer, all of those things. And they're missing the point: self-driving cars is where things are headed.

00:23:10 - Marcus: I went to an event this week in Vegas and on the way there I rode in a Tesla. It was a 45-minute drive, Anthony—the Uber driver never touched the steering wheel that whole 45 minutes. So instead of focusing on making the world of the driver better, other organizations are focusing on creating self-driving cars. And there's a huge distinction there. And what was interesting, too, Anthony, is the Uber driver was like, "You know what, I literally have this on self-driving mode 90% of the time. And next year when Tesla releases the full autonomous mode, I'm going to buy three more of these. I'm going to sit on my couch at home and my four Teslas are going to drive around giving people rides, and that's how I'm going to make money."

00:23:56 - Marcus: So you've got to just think differently about how you approach things relative to your workforce. If you keep going toward the same traditional path and you don't start thinking about new norms like internal side hustles, the 4-day week, allowing people to work asynchronously, you're going to get left behind. I appreciate your time today and thank you so much. Be well.