Episode Summary
In this episode, Mason Duchatschek explores the challenges HR professionals face in an era of tightening budgets, increased outsourcing, and rapid AI adoption. He urges HR leaders to be proactive in securing their roles by proving their strategic value. Mason introduces the Workforce Alchemy Challenge—a transformative initiative focused on improving employee selection, engagement, and retention—empowering HR professionals to future-proof their careers and thrive in an evolving workforce.
Key Takeaways
Be proactive about securing your role in HR.
AI is disrupting traditional HR responsibilities.
Demonstrating measurable value is key to long-term job stability.
The Workforce Alchemy Challenge equips HR for modern demands.
Engagement strategies can directly reduce costs.
Know the hidden costs of turnover—and how to prevent them.
Developing employees pays long-term dividends.
HR must evolve to stay relevant.
Certifications and networking are critical to professional growth.
The future of work demands preparation—start now.
Episode Chapters
00:00 – Preparing for Job Security in HR
03:01 – The Impact of AI on HR Roles
05:53 – The Workforce Alchemy Challenge
08:56 – Transforming Employee Value
11:48 – Increasing Engagement and Reducing Turnover
14:51 – Proactive Strategies for HR Professionals
* Follow and subscribe to the Mason Duchatschek Show (Podcast) here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-mason-duchatschek-show/id1266736989
** Apply to participate in the challenge, gain expert knowledge (for FREE) and earn up to $1000 worth of tools to help your business or department run better and faster without unnecessary drama or expense.
Apply for the Workforce Alchemy Challenge: https://workforcealchemy.com/
Follow us on social:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ReverseRiskConsulting
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/workforcealchemy/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@WorkforceAlchemist
Rumble: https://rumble.com/user/WorkforceAlchemy
Dailymotion: https://www.dailymotion.com/WorkforceAlchemy
Twitter / X: https://x.com/WorkAlchemist
#HR #humanresources #AI #StrategicHR #jobsecurity #automaton #WorkforceAlchemy #masonduchatschek
In this episode, Mason Duchatschek explores the challenges HR professionals face in an era of tightening budgets, increased outsourcing, and rapid AI adoption. He urges HR leaders to be proactive in securing their roles by proving their strategic value. Mason introduces the Workforce Alchemy Challenge—a transformative initiative focused on improving employee selection, engagement, and retention—empowering HR professionals to future-proof their careers and thrive in an evolving workforce.
Key Takeaways
Be proactive about securing your role in HR.
AI is disrupting traditional HR responsibilities.
Demonstrating measurable value is key to long-term job stability.
The Workforce Alchemy Challenge equips HR for modern demands.
Engagement strategies can directly reduce costs.
Know the hidden costs of turnover—and how to prevent them.
Developing employees pays long-term dividends.
HR must evolve to stay relevant.
Certifications and networking are critical to professional growth.
The future of work demands preparation—start now.
Episode Chapters
00:00 – Preparing for Job Security in HR
03:01 – The Impact of AI on HR Roles
05:53 – The Workforce Alchemy Challenge
08:56 – Transforming Employee Value
11:48 – Increasing Engagement and Reducing Turnover
14:51 – Proactive Strategies for HR Professionals
* Follow and subscribe to the Mason Duchatschek Show (Podcast) here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-mason-duchatschek-show/id1266736989
** Apply to participate in the challenge, gain expert knowledge (for FREE) and earn up to $1000 worth of tools to help your business or department run better and faster without unnecessary drama or expense.
Apply for the Workforce Alchemy Challenge: https://workforcealchemy.com/
Follow us on social:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ReverseRiskConsulting
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/workforcealchemy/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@WorkforceAlchemist
Rumble: https://rumble.com/user/WorkforceAlchemy
Dailymotion: https://www.dailymotion.com/WorkforceAlchemy
Twitter / X: https://x.com/WorkAlchemist
#HR #humanresources #AI #StrategicHR #jobsecurity #automaton #WorkforceAlchemy #masonduchatschek
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:00Are you an HR executive or manager worried about job security due to budget cuts,
00:05outsourcing, or AI? If not, perhaps you should be, and there are some very good reasons why.
00:11More importantly, there are a few specific actions you can take right now to prepare
00:15just in case, regardless of whether or not you think I'm right or wrong.
00:19Hi, I'm Mason Dukacek, and I'm host of the Mason Dukacek Show and author of the books
00:24Inclusive Leadership and People Matter Most. What I'm about to share might be exactly what you
00:29and the other executives and managers you share this message with needs to hear sleep better at
00:34night, protect your job security, and earn bigger raises faster. Old Ben Franklin used to say,
00:39wise is a man who fixes his roof. Well, if I'm right, the storms are coming, and if you don't
00:44plan ahead and take the necessary actions right away, the damage to your career and the upheaval
00:49in your personal life when they do hit can be devastating. If I'm wrong, there's no downside
00:53to being prepared, so I'm glad to share this message with you. If you're paying attention,
00:58you might already see the clouds gathering. I just read an article in Forbes that said
01:02Shopify CEO Tobias Lutke has implemented a new hiring policy that prioritizes artificial
01:09intelligence over human hires. In a memo to employees, he stated that teams must demonstrate
01:15why their needs cannot be filled using AI before they request additional resources. What does that
01:22mean to you if you're involved in roles like HR, customer support, or IT? It means that your work can
01:27largely be organized into rules and automated quickly. That means that you, in the role that
01:33you're in now, might be on the verge of becoming, dare I say it, expendable. Expendable is the opposite of
01:39job security, raises, and promotions. And here's a hard truth. Your circumstances may not be fair, and they
01:46may not be your fault, but you still have to deal with them. The question is how. If you plan, if your plan is to
01:51keep your head down, your mouth shut, and to do everything that the boss asks you to do as fast
01:56as possible without making mistakes in order to keep your job and hopefully get a raise, then good luck
02:01with that. You're going to need it. I was the past president of the Human Resource Management
02:05Association of St. Louis. That's the local SHRM chapter, and I served on the board for many years.
02:10I know lots of wonderful, smart, and amazing HR executives. A lot of them, I consider my friends.
02:16And that being said, good friends are sometimes kind of like cheerleaders who offer you their
02:21encouragement and kind words when you need them. However, great friends tell you what you need to
02:27hear and offer much more than kind words. They'll actually give you a hand and do what's necessary
02:32to help you. I strive to be the latter version of a friend whenever and wherever possible. One of my
02:38friends, a highly experienced, knowledgeable HR executive with all the important SHRM certifications,
02:44did nothing wrong, and still got fired. It was completely unexpected and totally devastating.
02:50After terminating hundreds of employees over the years, if anyone should have seen their own
02:55termination coming, it was this HR executive. Completely blindsided, humiliated, and embarrassed,
03:01the panic set in. How am I going to provide for my family? What am I going to tell my friends?
03:05I asked them to tell me what I did at work. The answers were exactly what you'd expect a typical
03:09HR executives say. Things like overseeing payroll, answering employee personnel questions,
03:14and that kind of stuff. I asked, did you make any mistakes? The answer, absolutely not. No mistakes
03:19were made, and I got payroll out on time, every time, along with everything else that I was asked to
03:24do. I immediately knew what happened. What happened is he did a good job, but a good job wasn't good
03:29enough. Simply put, he was viewed as an expense to the company in that role instead of an asset.
03:35The company leadership looked at his role and asked, what are the job functions of this person,
03:39and can we get these job functions accomplished for less money without sacrificing quality?
03:45Unfortunately, it wasn't as hard to do as the former HR executive thought it might be.
03:49His sense of security was false because of it, and it caught up with him. The employer was also
03:54willing to bet that employees could find their own answers to their questions about company policies
03:59and benefits in their employee handbook. All the answers were there. Look, I just saw an ad for a
04:04payroll company that said payroll, benefits, HR, starting at $55. I've seen other ads for payroll
04:11services offering months of free service. To an employer, that looks a lot cheaper than the salary
04:17and benefits of an HR person. On top of that, AI is rapidly accelerating the transformation of such
04:23roles and responsibilities into delivery mechanisms that don't require as many, if any, people in these
04:28roles, at least as those roles have been defined in the past. Look, for as long as I can remember,
04:33I've watched the HR community battle for their seats at the executive conference table and their
04:39offices in the C-suite. They stress their value as strategic contributors, and unfortunately,
04:45in far too many organizations, that message has fallen flat and their roles continue to be viewed in
04:50terms of rules, regulations, and compliance responsibilities. With C-suites looking to offload
04:55rules, regulations, and compliance functions on outsourced services and AI, HR executives need to find a
05:02much better way to showcase value to their organizations that are greatly in excess of their
05:08salaries. Why? So they are no longer viewed as costs that need to be cut, but rather as assets that bring
05:14exponentially more value to their organizations than what they're paid. Assets get invested in
05:19and retained. In other words, they get job security raises and promotions. Costs get cut. If you're an HR
05:26executive or manager, what can you do right now to prepare for the storm ahead? What can you do now to
05:32deliver so much value that you can rest well at night knowing that your job is safe or that you have the
05:38ability to get a different or better job quickly if you wanted to? Here's my offer to help. Remember, good
05:44friends offer encouragement. Great friends tell you what you need to hear, not just what you want to hear, and they also
05:50go out of their way to actually help you. I want to be the latter. SHRM certifications are great. They show
05:55you that you have valuable knowledge, but there are lots of people with SHRM certifications, so it is
06:01still kind of hard to stand out. Granted, it's better to have them than not, but still lots of people have
06:06them, and lots of the people with those certifications are still seeing their roles largely outsourced or
06:12eliminated. So what can you do about it other than complain, hope for the best, or change careers? The answer
06:17takes time and effort, which all good things do, but cost is not an obstacle. I made sure of it. Jim
06:23Collins, in his best-selling book, Good to Great, said the most important thing any business can do
06:27is get the right people on their bus, the bus being their business, of course, into the right seats. I
06:33happen to agree with him. Unfortunately, he didn't explain how, and he didn't provide access to the
06:37necessary tools. This is where the Workforce Alchemy Challenge comes into play. If you apply for free,
06:43complete it, and earn the certification, also free, then you'll become infinitely more valuable to any
06:49and every company you do or could work for. So what is Workforce Alchemy? Why should you care or want to
06:56get certified? If you recall from back in the day in school, we learned about the concept of alchemy,
07:01which was the medieval art of trying to transform base metals like lead into gold. Of course, it was
07:07basic chemistry, and that didn't work, but when it comes to people, alchemy can work and does work as it
07:12relates to individuals, to departments, and to companies. So how do you turn lead into gold?
07:17Easy. Let me give you an example. Let's just say that you take a sales rep who produces a million
07:24dollars in sales revenue for your company a year. Then he's surrounded with people, tools, and technology
07:29and systems that he needs to perform at a higher level. You invest in him and in his transformation.
07:35Next thing you know, he's producing $10 million a year in sales. That's what turning lead into gold
07:40looks like, except with people. And once you know the secrets and have the tools to do it,
07:45you can do it in almost any position, any department, or any company. We have this thing
07:50called the Workforce Alchemy Challenge at workforcealchemy.com, where you can go and apply
07:55to take the Workforce Alchemy Challenge for free. And if accepted, you'll get 94 minutes of training
08:01on employee selection, engagement, and retention. If you complete the training and can pass the
08:06certification test with a score of 80% or better, then you're going to get a certificate that you
08:10can put on your wall and the distinction that you can also add to your resume and LinkedIn profile.
08:16And when you get into an interview with a potential employer or a performance appraisal with your
08:20current employer, this certification opens up an entirely different conversation, which gives you
08:26the opportunity to demonstrate your value as an asset instead of an expense to any company lucky
08:32enough to have you. Let me explain. If I were in an interview for a potential HR position and the
08:38interviewer starts telling me the roles of the job, I might ask a few specific questions. I might ask
08:43the interviewer a question like how many employees they have. For example, the interviewer might say
08:47they have 100 employees. My next questions would be about how many W-2s they produced last year.
08:52For example, if the interviewer might say they produced 200 W-2s last year, then I would know they lost
08:58100 employees and they have a turnover problem. For the sake of discussion, let's say half of the
09:03employees they lost were hourly and the other half were salaried. I could put a pencil in the paper,
09:08do a little bit of math and know that if they lost 50 employees and their average salary of their
09:12hourly employees was $30,000 a year, I know it costs about 16% of their annual salary to replace each of
09:18them. So that's $240,000 in turnover costs just to replace the 50 hourly employees that they lost.
09:24Well, what about the 50 salary employees? Well, I can also do the basic math there and figure out
09:30that if they lost 50 salary employees and their average salary is $60,000 a year, and I know it
09:36takes 21% of their annual salaries to replace each one of them, then that's another $630,000 a year
09:42in turnover costs. So if I add $630,000 and $240,000, that's an $870,000 a year turnover problem.
09:51If I could walk into a company and say, hey, I know how to utilize employee selection,
09:56development, and engagement tools, and here's some of the best practices and strategies being
10:00used by America's top corporations, I think we can reduce that by 30%. And here's how. And I can
10:05show them how to save their company, I guess that would be about $261,000, which is a fairly
10:11significant savings they otherwise would have missed. Now that's just employee selection, but what about
10:16employee engagement? I hear a lot of companies talking about how much of a challenge it is to
10:21get good quality employees. Now labor costs are skyrocketing and out of control. Lots of employers
10:26mistakenly think that they need to add more people because they have so much more work than they're
10:31able to get accomplished with existing staff. To make matters worse, some of them are legitimately in
10:36areas where they don't really have that great of applicant pools and there's not a lot of high quality
10:41skilled applicants to choose from. In those cases, instead of getting more people, their challenge is
10:46getting more work accomplished with the people they already have in place. That's not always easy to do,
10:51but it can be done when you know a few secrets that other businesses in the same markets who are hiring
10:57from the same applicant pools don't. Perhaps you've seen the Gallup studies. Gallup says that about 16.5% of the
11:04working population is actively disengaged, hostile, and disruptive, and trying to cause problems. About
11:1152% of the working population is not engaged and they're doing just enough not to get fired. Sleepwalking
11:17into the day. That obviously leaves you with 31.5% of your workforce being actively engaged. As a matter of
11:23fact, I recently asked an employer that had a payroll of about 10 million what he thought was the
11:29discretionary effort of his average employee. He pondered that question for a moment, said probably
11:3560%. I think our average employee gives about 60% of an all-out effort on average every day. That meant
11:41he was paying $10 million a year in salaries, but was only getting $6 million worth of labor done for
11:47that. It was a $4 million a year profit leak. Then I asked him, if someone was embezzling $4 million a
11:53year, how long would you wait to fix it? Well, he said he'd handle it right away. Then I asked him what he's
11:57waiting for. His answer, he didn't know how and he didn't have the tools. A certified workforce
12:02alchemist would know how to go in and rescue a business owner like that. The conversation would
12:07be a simple one. If I can show you based on my knowledge, skills, and experience how to increase
12:12employee engagement by even 10% from 60 to 70%, that would save you a million dollars a year. As a
12:18workforce alchemist who knows how to save an employer a million dollars a year in employee
12:22engagement and another $261,000 per year in savings by reducing employee turnover, you'd be worth
12:28exponentially more than anything a business owner would pay you in salary. Why wouldn't any smart
12:34employer hire you on the spot or keep you, pay you more, or promote you? To them, you and the value
12:40you bring to the organization would make you better than free because you pay for yourself multiple times
12:46over. Of course, as a certified workforce alchemist, you'd also know ways to help a company reduce
12:52employee theft or fraudulent workers' comp costs, how to help them increase sales and improve customer
12:57retention too. So my encouragement to you is to be proactive and to look for ways to become exponentially
13:03more valuable to your employer than anything that they pay you because that translates into job
13:08security, faster promotions, and bigger raises. I shared with you what you needed to hear and access to
13:15the tools, strategies, and resources that you'll also need to prepare for the storms ahead. Sooner
13:20rather than later, the storm will arrive. The question you need to ask yourself is what are you
13:24going to do now to prepare for it? In closing, I want to invite and encourage you to visit
13:29workforcealchemy.com and to apply for and complete the Workforce Alchemy Challenge. I also want to invite
13:35you to check out and subscribe to my podcast, The Mason Dukajek Show, and our video channel
13:40at WorkforceAlchemy on YouTube.