2021 End of Year Special

1Huddle’s CEO and Founder, Sam Caucci, sat down with our own Jaime Lara to wrap up 2021 and ring in the new year.

Jaime and Sam discussed developing your workers, the importance of year-round training, and making training accessible anytime, anywhere. 

Here are our top takeaways from their convo…

Top 7 Highlights

• Only 9% of companies in the U.S. have a 52-week a year training in development program.
• If you want to build a better workforce, you build better people.
• Companies have a responsibility to invest in their people.
• I’m the Founder and CEO of a company and I didn’t do this all on my own.
• 80% of workforce training in America is invested into safety and compliance related training. 
• Discrimination against any worker is discrimination against every worker.
• Only 1% of corporate workforce training today is mobile first. 

For more on their convo, see the full transcript below. 

Full Transcription

Jaime: Alright, we’re rolling. We’re live. 

Sam: Live, in action. Unless you’re listening to a recording. 

Jaime: Yeah. Which you very well could be depending on when this podcast comes out.

Sam: It’s true. 

Jaime: That’s true. We made it through 2021. I wouldn’t even say we made it. We kicked ass. We kicked a lot of ass during 2021. 

Sam: Yeah. There was definitely some ass-kicking.

Jaime: Always good. Ready for a quick five questions?

Sam: Because I said ‘ass’ does that mean that it’s explicit now? 

Jaime: I will have to put a little marker, but you know what? I feel like that’s our brand a little bit.

Sam: Badass. I like it. 

Jaime: Yeah, it’s only once a year that we do these live in-person podcasts, for now. 

Sam: Once a year. It’s just enough. 

Jaime: It is just enough. I agree. So this year was a banner year to steal your phrase for a little bit, in many ways, but one of them was, we really walked our talk and we really committed to a 52-year training program. You were the one spearheading and putting that together. What were some of your biggest takeaways in executing and planning a 52 a week training? 

Sam: Yeah, we ran a research study in 2019 and it funneled over into 2020. And one of the things we found was, and it was, I’d like to say it was surprising, but it wasn’t so surprising that only 9% of companies in the U.S. have a 52-week-a-year training in development program. At the end of the day 1Huddle is a workforce training platform that allows companies to make training 52 weeks a year. So if we’re going to demand that of others, we have to demand that of ourselves. 

So in 2021, I launched our 52-weeks a year training program. We called it Win Every Day, which was our player development program for all of our team members here at 1Huddle, we had over 30,000 games played in the year, and it was the equivalent of an extra full month of work time for our team, in training and development on 1Huddle. The average employee saw a 12 point increase in their performance across all game topics that mattered most. And so I gave you a lot more than your question there, Jaime, but I was very proud of what we did with our player development program. You know, if you work in 1Huddle, the game never ends and continuous development is a core tenet of our beliefs and it’s something that most companies don’t do. 

Jaime: I remember one of the things that you were talking about early in the year was kind of a three P’s, you know, your personal development, your professional development, and I’m blanking on the third one.

Sam: Positional.

Jaime: Positional. Right. Thank you. And you know, it was really interesting for me being a part of the 52-week training program, seeing how those three P’s kind of how I developed in all of those from our training table program and everything. Especially with, and we’ll get into this later, but with 2020 and 2021, a lot of personal work and home life kind of blurring together because of hybridization, because of work from home, because of really just strenuous circumstances that a lot of people aren’t used to. How big of a deal do you think developing your employees or coworkers from those three PS is? And do you think a lot of companies are doing a good job of keeping those three P’s or the equivalent in mind when they upscale their workers?

Sam: I mean, it’s fundamentally fucked up as a society that we call human resources and it’s even more fucked up that we have a department called human resources. At the end of the day, if you want to build a better workforce, you build better people. And as an organization, it’s just not legit for you to say that you are about your workers and are about strong culture, about employee engagement if you don’t have plans in place with coaching and mentorship for frontline managers, because they’re the ones touching your employees every day. To not just think about the positional development of a worker, which is where most companies start and stop, but also think about the personal development, which is what happens before they clock in and after they clock out, and their professional development because you might have employees that work for you today, who aren’t going to be a good fit for you tomorrow.

We see this in a ton of environments, in restaurants, retail, and hospitality. Your bartender today may not be your next general manager, and that’s okay. But it’s my responsibility as their coach, their employer, as like a member of the community to invest in them personally, positionally, and professionally, because that bartender today maybe a bartender someplace else tomorrow in your community, or maybe a better general manager to a different brand in your community, or maybe a barber, like who knows what they’re going to do.

As a big village, which is what our communities are, companies have a responsibility to invest in their people. Now you might say, do they have to do that? No, they don’t. And guess what? They don’t! Like, they don’t have to. But then you don’t get to complain when you see things like one and two workers are going to quit in 2022. Great resignation. Then you don’t have a right to complain about employees who are, in your words, “late, lazy, and sitting on the couch.” You don’t have a right to do that either because if you’re going to treat them just like resources and they can treat you in kind to the way that you treat them, if you’re going to pay me a fair wage and I get it back up there, cause fair wages in different podcasts for a different day, but you know, labor is an exchange. It’s a deal. I’m giving you my time and you’re going to give me a wage. 

Now, the way I’ve always looked at it is if you give me a wage that’s less than the output of my labor, I’m eventually going to quit. If you give me a wage that is equal to my labor, I’ll stay. I might not stay forever. And you know what, if I give you a wage above and beyond your labor, that puts me in a position where maybe I want to be a part of that brand. And by the way, by wage, it may mean, not saying you overpay a worker, but maybe you’re investing in them more. Paid childcare. Paid family leaves. Better training and development programming. Maybe you’re doing stuff like that. Those brands are the ones that don’t have labor shortages. They don’t have turnover problems. 

Jaime: Well then, building off of that, we not only committed to our 52-week-a-year training process, but we also committed to a lot of our work in the social justice area. A lot of events from 2020 kind of carried over into 2021 in terms of kind of, it’s like geist and what everyone is talking about, what is a “hot button issue.” But, what were some of the biggest lessons from focusing on social justice issues from 2021 that as an, essentially, private sector company that we still are, you feel that are kind of good lessons for other companies to learn of and maybe looking forward to 2022, what other issues do you see, persevering or carrying over into 2022?

Sam: I’m the founder and CEO of a company and I didn’t do this all on my own. You know, I’m here because of a lot of other people that have afforded me the opportunity to be here. I’m also here because of a tremendous amount of luck. I was born in a certain family in a certain situation that has put me in a position to be here today. My understanding of that leads me in the path of knowing I have the responsibility to invest more and do more. And, when it comes to social justice and it comes to social impact, if I have extra seats on the ship, I have extra subscriptions available on our platform, they don’t go unused.

I want people to use it and we’re going to go to the people that need it most. I think we didn’t have to talk about social justice initiatives in our meetings and in our trainings, we made a decision to, and I made a decision to, because what’s going on in the news and what’s going on in our communities, what’s going on outside of our office impacts our people, and our people bring that into the office. So as a leader, I made the choice to talk about those things, and you know what? Some cultures and some organizations are afraid to, some try to ignore them, some try to sugarcoat stuff. 

One of the tenants of the culture here at 1Huddle is to do the hard shit. And when I think about doing the hard shit, I think about having the hard conversation and not fearing conflict, being open, being intellectually curious, and those are the reasons that we’ve engaged a constructive dialogue internally about things that are happening in our communities.

Jaime: And, thinking of our communities, we’re very much on the front lines of workforce development and are on the cutting edge of the kind of technology that goes alongside with that. What are some of the trends you predict or think about carrying over into 2022 when it comes to workforce development tools, or again, to use the word HR again, in terms of hiring people and in terms of upskilling people?

Sam: Yeah, I think that there’s a lot of trends that, in 2021 became all of a sudden popular, like having a conversation around remote work, having a conversation about hybrid, having a conversation around employee engagement. I’m not going to make any predictions, but I’ll speak to history.

80% of workforce training in America is invested into safety and compliance-related training. That’s basically like, “we spend a lot of money on cover-your-ass stuff. Thanks lawyers.” Like that’s what we do. We are not a skilled development nation anymore. And the data backs this up. Where our dollars go tells you what type of community you’re trying to build.

There’s like 15 pages in, if you go to the department of labor’s massive binder on federal labor policy, it’s like 15 pages on the requirements for the construction of a ladder. Like there’s zero pages on the construction of proper workforce training protocols, you know?

So again, we’re more concerned with protecting ourselves than developing others. And I don’t think that’s gonna change in 2022. But what I do think is going to change is the separation between the organizations that really don’t value people and the ones that do. I think the heroes win at the end, Jaime.

And I think that the organizations that have always had it in their culture to develop people, to coach them up, to challenge them, are the ones that are going to win. We talked to a lot of organizations at 1Huddle. We hear a lot of companies that would say a lot of really nice stuff about their mission, their values, and their people, and then I ask them, how much do you invest in workforce training per worker, and they don’t know the number. They don’t think about minutes of workforce development time for reskilling and upskilling. They know their closing figures, they know their bottom line metrics. but they’re not necessarily interested in the things that drive the development of their people. And I think that that is going to be a big separator between some brands and every other one that you’ve seen some really hard, hard impacts to restaurants and retail. A third of those workers are not going back to those sectors. Should we blame them because of the way they’ve been treated in certain organizations?

Jaime: Finally, 2022 for us is all about going forward, right? We’ve had 2020, we’ve had 2021, and now there’s a big movement going forward. What lessons from 2021 do you think companies should be kind of keeping top of mind in order to most effectively move forward? 

Sam: Companies need to invest in a workforce infrastructure that enables them to do a few things. One, continuously upskill and reskill every worker. That means that beyond just your initial onboarding, can workers continuously develop an upskill in their current role or reskill for the next role? That’s number one. 

Number two, the infrastructure should also make sure that every worker has access to it. Discrimination against any worker is discrimination against every worker. Today in America, 83 cents of every training dollar goes to the top of an organization, and just like trickle-down economics, it doesn’t quite get to every worker that needs it most. The overwhelming majority of legacy learning management systems have been designed in a discriminant fashion, to not allow every worker to access them. They’re desktop-based or tablet-based, you have to do four-hour training modules and take a monster energy drink before you sit through the crap. Like, is your workforce training available for every worker to access?

And third is that infrastructure built, to be anytime, anywhere. Only 1% of corporate workforce training today is mobile-first.  And even if you make the eight-hour videos and you load them up to YouTube, that doesn’t mean that a worker that’s at the vulnerable corner of our workforce is going to sit at home after a 12-hour shift at two different jobs and rushing home to take care of getting their son or daughter into childcare and then rushing to the community college to go through a career technical training for the next job is going to come home and be like, ‘oh yeah, I’m going to now sit through this like multiple hour training module, like on the bus.’

That is not thinking about the worker in mind. So when you think about workforce infrastructure, if you think about it from the point of view that your worker is like a consumer. If we pause for a second and treat our workforce like the marketing teams and our companies treat our potential customers, man, the shit we would do would be wild. The things we would invest in would be crazy. The service and the standards that we would deploy would be significantly different. But when you treat humans like resources, whatever that means, you use words that are dehumanizing or disguise the notion that a worker is a human by saying things like their capital or talent or the better one, which, in the background here watching Yahoo! Finance talks about the great resignation and people on there talking about things like, a worker is ‘high skill’ versus ‘low skill’. What the fuck does low skill mean? We’ve got to move past this crap, this language that’s been architected in a time like Henry Ford when we used to actually create stuff. We need to move into a model where work is not… even the word work doesn’t mean anything.

The work today is really a melting pot of activities. We have to do a better job in 2022 and forward identifying the tasks, the activities that makeup work, pick the ones that are going to be important in the next decade-plus, and invest in training, development, coaching, education, to develop those activities.

And I think if we do those things, the future of work will be a place where everybody can compete and everybody has a fair shot. 

Jaime: Sounds nice. Well, here’s to 2022.

Sam: Cheers.

Topics Discussed: Training, Employee Development, Training, Accessibility, Social Justice, Upskilling, Workforce Infrastructure