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Welcome to Voices in Local Government, an ICMA podcast. My name is Joe Superville,
and we are excited to start the new year on Trends to Watch For in 2025. With Dr. Zhikun Liu
, Vice President and Head of Mission Squared Research Institute, and
Gerald Young, Senior Researcher, Mission Squared Institute. Thanks for joining. - Thank
you. - Glad to be here. - So today, what local governments will or should be
prioritizing in 2025? You all have some good research on it. And this is about how
local governments can best position themselves for recruiting, retaining, and sustaining
an effective workforce. Listeners can find the research and more resources at research
.missionsq .org. So thanks again for being here. Five or six topics depending on how
you look at it, but today we're going to cover workforce motivations succession
planning concerns over emerging technologies Employee debt stress mental health kind of
as one group and then at the end we're going to hit retirement and investment
Motivations to work it can be different public private sector We know salaries are
not insignificant for either, but there are different specific motivations motivation.
Gerald, can you get us started with what the research says on the difference between
the local government employees compared to perhaps the private sector? Certainly, yes.
Thank you, Joe. We've done a number of surveys over the years looking at not only
what organizations are currently doing, but what employees are seeking in employment
opportunities. And, within the private sector, salary is really the top motivator.
But within government, while salary is one of the motivating factors, you also see
issues like serving the community or finding personal satisfaction or really being
able to see the results of one's own efforts, the ability to make a difference in
the community as something that motivates them to consider a job working in state or
local government. - And yeah, we've heard that phrase called the service, which could
be a cliche, but I think it's true, so. - Right, and it's something that, while
it's important for the individual, it's also important for the government recruiting
those people to really emphasize that opportunity when they are advertising those
positions. So that, you know, let's say, you know, going back to the US Army's old
slogan of, it's not just a job, it's an adventure, you know, to take that call to
service and make it front and center of what you are advertising, it's not that you
have a bureaucratic job description that you're offering people, it's that you are
offering them an opportunity to be of service and to see the effect of what they're
doing in their local community, particularly if they already happen to live in your
area. So that also gets to how you are targeting the advertising for these
opportunities so that maybe you're reaching out to, you know, students in K -12 to
make them aware of public service opportunities in their future, working with
colleges, not just having a job fair, but getting into some kind of a partnership
with them, offering internships, all sorts of opportunities for them to really get a
sense of the opportunities before they're reaching graduation, and also advertising
within the
looking beyond the idea that, you know, everybody has to have a college degree, but
looking at, you know, what alternate pathways people might have acquired job related
skills in, and that you can reach out to them in a very plain language way and
say, hey, this is what we're looking for. This is what you might be able to
accomplish on this job. And also then communicate that in a way that meets their
preferred communication strategies. So if that's video campaigns or social media or
whatever it is, align that with whatever the audience is. - So to echo on Gerald's
talking about state and local government recruitment and retention, I just wanna add
one more point, Joe, if I may. - Sure. - Yeah, we find that through our different
surveys, we kind of started to create a picture that at different age period or
different stage of life the the public sector's Workers have different priorities in
terms of needs for their for the recruitment or retention Kind of attractive factor
like for example when they are in their 20s and 30s They think the job fulfillment
the personal satisfaction of the job is more important. When they transition into 40s
and 50s, they start to think job security and sometimes health insurance becomes more
and more important. And then after they kind of glide to that retirement phase,
we start to see some interesting trends that people start thinking retirement is a
big topic in their factor. So that's just something I want to add it's different
stages like you said so you got to recruit for those whether there's a college
degree involved or not those early 20s coming into the workforce but there's also
potential transitioning from other areas probably there's private sector or maybe even
something like the public education field those there's a lot of people switching
into local government so there is opportunity out there but it also kind of sounds
sounds like you're saying those old copy paste HR job descriptions aren't really
cutting in anymore, right? You can't just put your stuff up there and expect
application. So is there-- I don't want to say tricks, but were there any-- did the
research show anything that was working in local government that was proving
successful to get better results? Not? And I guess it's quantity of applications,
but also the quality, which is hard to measure, but who's been successful and what
did they do? Well, I think it's really been kind of an all of the above approach.
It has not been that, you know, as you say, that governments are sticking with the
job description as it was written 50 years ago and saying, this is what we have to
recruit for every time. The language and the format of that job description might
change. And one of the things that a large share of governments are working through
right now is reviewing the job requirements, looking at yes,
degree requirements as one of those criteria, but also looking at how the job has
changed as technology has Or, you know, how maybe the job description might,
again, focus on not just what is required today, but,
you know, a more general skill set that you're looking for for somebody who can be
flexible as circumstances change, and you just want them to be,
you know, sufficiently ready for the workforce and ready to learn as new skills may
be called upon.
- So let's move on to the next topic. And that is debt, stress, and mental health.
So that all kind of fits into that employee benefits, employee services, and what
the employer can do to help.
So take it away. Where does the research show on that? What are the employees
looking for beyond just kind of the generic or standard things that just about every
employer offers. Yeah, and it's not necessarily just what the employees are looking
for. It's also what they are experiencing. And so many employees have indicated that
they are seeing student debt as a major problem for them. Or regardless of whether
they have student debt, the debt itself is an issue. and particularly on our
research of employees 35 and under, there are about 60 % who are considering leaving
their jobs and anything that employers can do to help alleviate stress that those
employees are experiencing can help to maintain that effective workforce without having
to re -recruit every time. One of the other things that we're seeing is in terms of
student debt,
the payback period on it seems to be getting longer when we asked people who had
prior student debt versus those who have it now, more and more are saying that it
might take many, many years to pay that off. And there is kind of a silence around
debt that both employers can do better about discussing not just what they are
providing but for instance what the public sector loan forgiveness program provides
and address the fact that for many employees they feel that student debt is too
personal a topic and therefore they don't discuss it around their employer. To really
normalize those discussions, to make it part of what
You know, let's say open enrollment periods to talk about the types of stresses that
employees might be feeling and ways that employers can help. Thanks, Gerald. I to
echo your question, Joe, I think financial stress is definitely one of the stress
that public workforce is facing and student loan debt is certainly not helping it at
all. And one of the interesting we find in our survey is when people are asked
about their employer benefits in terms of helping you alleviate student loan debt,
both sectors are thinking the other sector is doing a better job. So that's very
interesting. Grasses greener. Which maybe means no one's doing a good job, but-- Yes.
So to transition on that, I would like to talk about another stress. We talked
about financial stress, that's one type of stress. Another stress is mental stress,
which public sector workforce, particular phase, especially in some hard to fill
positions. And when we talk about mental labor and emotional labor,
most of us are not familiar with the terms. We focus on the physical labor and the
benefit programs and the compensation are designed to compensate those physical labor.
But our research finds that mental labor is another important factor, which we're
going to publish some of the studies next year. So just to give you a quick
definition, mental labor is commonly defined as the cognitive tasks associated with
the physical labor of work. Well, emotional labor refers to the negative emotions
when you work, like for example, anxiety or depression or fear or stress.
Those are particular prevalence in some of the positions,
like first responders, firefighters, police officers. So not so many research has
tackled on that aspect. So our goal is to take this trend and put it on our
shoulder and do some research and see if we can help to advocate those mental and
emotional labor for those particular professions and see if we can help the local
and state governments to develop some benefit programs or at least education or
training programs to help with those stress. Yeah and it's all tied together because
we talked earlier about that call to service and what the motivation is to get in
or stay in or not local government and money is the money but that is tied into
some of the other stressors and then there's that other topic about whether you're
the city county manager or mid -level staff or entry -level staff there's the public
public service, the perception is that it's underappreciated, undervalued, and then it
leads to the, why are we even doing this? Is it helping? And then that can lead
to the emotional stress that you're talking about. So it would be great to see more
research and more numbers on that coming up. And then another type of stressor is
the emerging technologies. AI obviously is at the top of the list, but there's other
versions of it, other technologies. And it's kind of that ongoing pendulum or debate,
is this going to make us more efficient, more effective? Is it going to help us do
our jobs better? Is it going to replace jobs, whether it's physical labor or
eventually just white -collar jobs in local government or otherwise? So what does the
research show on what employees think about that versus just what the leadership or
the technology companies themselves say about it, because it might not be the same.
Great question, Joe. I think AI has been a hot topic for a year and a half.
And we want to study not just for AI, but all kind of advanced technology
automation techniques. And we see these type of advanced technology,
or we call it interoptic technology, or AI, has been attracting lots of public
attention recently, especially in the government sector. Some organizations on the
public sector too, some organizations has already embraced these technological
innovations and it benefits significantly from them. On the other hand, some
organizations, especially some workers, are taking a more cautious approach.
They're waiting for others to be the data path tester.
everybody can access to it. So we are trying to conduct a comprehensive survey,
which looked at both employer and employees' perspectives on their AI or advanced
technology adoption. So whether they can take advantage of it, whether they feel like
their job's gonna be replaced or We all put,
we all designed the questions to assess that. And also our goal is to see what do
they really want? Do they really want more training sessions or do they really want
more guidance or maybe even security requirement to utilize that?
And how can we help them to use these type of advanced technology to increase their
productivity and even boost employee morale. So that's kind of our goal and we're
excited about this research and we're conducting that survey right now and look
forward to see what the data tells us. Gerald anything to add on emerging emerging
technologies? Yeah you know I think AI is at a place right now where yes we've
seen lots of headlines about it and there are organizations as you can mention that
are using it within the local government sphere but from a workforce standpoint,
since it has been so difficult to recruit people in the last few years, I don't
think we've seen as much of the impact on the workforce yet. I think as maybe some
of the vacancies that we have right now start to be impacted by the fact that AI
is being implemented. We will start to get to that point.
When we've surveyed HR managers, they haven't yet seen impacts on, let's say,
reduced demand for positions. But there are a number of fields like customer service
in particular, where it's really ripe for automation, and we will start to see more
and more of those impacts and likewise more stresses on the employees that work in
those fields to either deal with the fact that there is change coming or to undergo
additional training that will enable them to work with that technology to improve
services. Yeah, and that can get tricky. I was on the phone with a customer service
rep, not from a local government, but their AI was so bad, it just made it more
frustrating. And I was joking with them that it's making their job harder right now
because the AI is there to help. But what it's really doing is just sending them
angrier customers from what they were even starting with. So that it's gonna be a
challenge for local government too, where the AI is supposed to help. And then it
kind of creates that circle or just doesn't give the option you want. And then the
next thing you know, they're yelling at your front line rep. And as we talked about
earlier, that's not good for stress or morale or workforce retention. So it's all
connected and tricky, tricky thing to solve. Yeah, well, the transition is always
difficult. But you know, that's one of the reasons you want to be very cautious and
very deliberate in how you roll out a program like that. Right. Okay,
another big topic, succession planning. Everyone has heard that buzzword and I think
there might be a misconception succession planning is just about choosing the next
leader, whether it's against city manager, county manager, or sea level positions,
where you kind of have someone there on the verge of retirement or maybe eventually
going to move on and they're almost grooming or hand selecting their replacement. But
I think it goes a lot deeper than that and you two are the experts. So why don't
you jump in and explain what is succession planning really? How do you get started?
How do you do it effectively? And is there is there an end point where you can
kind of say yes, we did it or is it just an never ending ongoing preparation for
the for the next cycle? So go ahead take the floor. You know, as you say, there
are situations where maybe you have a deputy or an assistant who would be a likely
person to step in if, you know, an existing staff member leaves, depending on the
level at which that person is in the organization, you might want to do, you know,
maybe just an interim and then recruit for that position. But really,
what organizations are looking at is with so many people considering leaving their
organizations, you might think that you have a succession plan in place and then the
person that you were thinking would be the successor themselves leaves, which is one
of the reasons that you don't want to be simply handpicking who the next person is,
but really bringing along an extensive cohort of people who are prepared to lead not
necessarily just in one particular role, but maybe through multiple roles throughout
the organization. And some organizations are prioritizing that really from the point
of onboarding their staff to emphasize professional development and cross -training and
opportunities to, you know, really experience different parts of the services that
they are providing to the community. One of the challenges that we're seeing with
succession planning is that it has not been prioritized sufficiently. We did a survey
in 2016 and 12 % of governments said that, yes, they have a succession plan in
place. 2024, that's only up to 13%.
Really have not changed But what has changed is that we are now at the point where
we are what's called peak 65. You know, the employees that are in the organizations
are at retirement age. And HR managers are saying that they expect the largest wave
of retirements to be coming in the next few years. So for those who haven't to put
a succession planning program in place, this is really the time to finish that work
and to be ready for the changes that are coming when those retirements are
actualized. Yeah, just to add a quick sentence, Joe, I think succession planning is
not just to handpick the next people or getting the position ready.
It's a comprehensive preparation for cross departmental and also for for mentoring
too. I think sometimes it might be easier for us to mentoring the next few
candidates as we think rather than when the previous leader retired and then we put
out advertisement or HR hunt. I think the formal makes more sense to start
mentoring, start thinking about cross -departmental teams and leadership opportunities,
as well as other type of maybe even job rotations and supports.
- Yeah, and is it fair that a succession plan is just that it's a plan, but it's
almost never gonna go exactly to plan. That's kind of the point, right? So you have
to have contingencies or Different options for different levels. It's not always about
writing out. This is exactly how we want it to go I'm expecting that that's gonna
happen. I Really looking at it is really being the bench strength so that you know
depending on the situation You know, it might be the you know utility infielder to
take a baseball metaphor They play multiple positions, but you know, you don't know
exactly what's going to happen And you just want to to have multiple options ready.
All right, Zhikun Liu, Gerald, thanks for the insights and trends in 2025. We'll be
back with part two focusing on public workforce retirement and investment trends. Look
forward to. Thank you, Joe.
Part Two
Welcome back to Voices in Local Government. My name is Joe Superville, joined by
Dr. Zhikun Liu vice president and head of Mission Squared Research Institute
and Gerald Young, senior researcher. You are both here to talk about trends in 2025.
Part one will be up on the feed wherever you're listening to for the audience to
it out. Part two, we're going to kind of move in a little bit to the financial
side on retirement and investments. And this, it still ties back into everything we
already covered, which was motivation, succession planning, emergent technologies, debt
stress, and mental health. It kind of all fits into that bucket of workforce
efficiency, effectiveness, morale, and recruiting, retention, and everything that goes
into running a well the organization. So retirement, expectation versus reality.
I think everyone might have a different goal, whether it's the age or the number,
the number in the bank account. So it's not like there's a one size fits all
answer to any of this, but I think what we see even on those cheesy commercials
for whatever bank is going to help you retire and investor funds and all that. And
then the couple goes off to the beach or sees the kids like that's not necessarily
real life, especially not necessarily in local government. So where do you want to
start with retirement? I mean, that's what mission square is here to help people
with. So what has the research shown and maybe dispel some myths and kind of break
that down on expectations versus reality? Yes, thanks, Joe. This is a very
interesting question or topic. I think I like the saying like retirement is like a
crystal ball. It's just as retirement planning is just as much art versus as much
science. So I tend to agree with that. And we want to be more scientific about it
because we want to help them. So we conducted the research, particularly want to
look at people's retirement expectations versus the reality and how much difference or
what's the gap in between them. We have some very interesting findings. First of
all, when we ask a 20 -year -old or versus a 30 -year -old versus a 50 -year -old,
when do you think you want to retire? You can guess the 20 -year -old will guess a
younger age and the 50 -year -old will say a later age. That's not just for peoples
of different demographics or groups of people. But also we had a data which tracked
about, I would say, 3 ,000 people from 1992 all the way to 2020.
And they asked the same question every other year. When do you think you're going
to retire? And we find the same trend. It's a natural upward trends when you ask
the same people in their 50s, sixties, seventies, until they retire.
They're pushing their retirement age longer and longer when they get older. And we
want to find what factors are changing it. And surprisingly, COVID -19 is not one of
the significant factors. And we also did a very rigorous statistical test and find
out that the factors which are changing are health, wealth, age,
change of marital status, mortality expectations, education levels, disability,
and major illness. So those are the main factors changing people's retirement
expectations as well as their reality. And to summarize that up,
people's expectations change and their reality doesn't follow the expectations. We see
an interesting comparison between the expectation graph versus their actual retirement
age graph. The first graph has two humps. One is the first initial social security
claiming age about 65 -66 depending on your birth year or sorry the first one is
about 62 -63 And the second one is about 67. That's when you can claim social
security full benefit. And that's their expectation. But in reality, it's all over
the place. It's kind of like a bell shaped curve, kind of normal distribution,
but it's a little bit left skewed. That means most people retire earlier than
expected. And we see the average of gap is about three to three and a half years.
So they tell the HR managers or their plan sponsors, say, I'm going to retire at
age 67. But in reality, most people retire at age 64, 65.
And what's even worse is we find about 5 % of employees retire more than 10 years
away from their projection. That's a problematic approach because think about your
target fund and your glide path and your retirement income strategy. If the the
market is 10 years or plus missed, then all these plans will have to be
recalculated when you're trying to retire. So that's an important topic and we're
going to continue to dig deeper about it and see how we can make policy changes or
retirement tools to help them mitigate this problem. - Was that tenure -stat specific
to the public sector? - It's all over the workforce. It's not specific.
The survey participants include public sector and private sector, but we look at the
statistics and find a gap in both sectors. So we want to make sure we have some
research following up to get that gap. - Okay, that's interesting. And do you have
specifics on the differences in the participation?
Correct me if I get the wrong terms, but the default investment or kind of the
automatic match, maybe some people think of it, how does that fit in? And kind of
same question, is that different, not necessarily exclusive to local government,
but public sector versus private? Because again, that might tie back to the bigger
picture and how do you recruit and retain people to this workforce of the public
sector? So is there any differences there? Yes. Default is a very hot topic too,
or we call that auto escalation or auto enrollment, which means when you join a
retirement plan or when you're eligible for retirement plan, your plan sponsor or
employer don't ask you whether you want to join or not. They assume you're going to
join until you tell them I'm going to opt out. So that's called default. And our
research actually want to analyze the default. There are two default options or two
default aspects. The first one is whether you want to be defaulted and what
percentage percentage of your income, you won't be defaulted. Are you putting aside 3
% of your salary every month to put into a DC plan, define contribution plan, or
you want to put 5 % of your salary to put into a DC plan. The other option, the
other aspect is what kind of investment lineup do you want to put your default in?
Do you want to put into a targeted fund, or you want to manage your own fun,
right? And - That's what you're saying about the target date, if people are saying,
'cause it will project to you to that age, but if people are missing it by 10
years, then that math on maybe how aggressive or not those plans are skewed and
then you don't get to your number. - Yeah, it will be all mixed up because of the
glide pass the targeted fund are usually calculating based on your work years. So
our research shows that in the public sector in particular, people are more likely
to accept default, both the percentage as well as the default lineup.
So if their employer is allocating them into a default plan,
let's say default 3 % of the salary every month into a targeted fund, the private
sector are more likely to say, no, I'm not going to, I'm gonna choose my own fund
versus the public sector will be more likely to accept this and forget about it.
And also we tracked our own record -keeper data for about four years from 2020 to
2024. And we find that compared to public sector, compared to private sector,
the public sector workforce are more likely to stay in the default for the next few
So the out -to -out rate, which means after a year they find out that they're not
going to save more they out -to -out The rate is only one to two percent every year
after their initial default that compares the private sector That's a very low
percentage Which gives us some good news and responsibilities The good news is the
default does work. It helps them to save more for their retirement. And the
responsibility is we need to define or design their default investment lineup more
tailored towards their needs and better for them because they're going to use it and
not out. So it gives us more responsibility and more opportunity to help them. And
that probably going to bring to your next question. Yeah, so and you can keep going
or Gerald if you want to jump in, but do you have any more or what's the next
step for the employer to have a better designed default plan that both works but
then turns into one of those benefits that when you're hiring or retaining you can
point to and say this is helping our workforce so how do you actually what are the
steps or what are the needs to make those plans just better thought out, better
designed? - Yes, personalization is the key.
Traditionally, the default is a targeted fund which just ask what's your current age,
which age are you going to retire and then put into a targeted fund because you
already tell them, I'm going to retire at this age. So, the glide path will change
the equity versus fixed income ratio to very low when you're retiring.
So, you are enjoying some stock growth in the beginning of the career and then to
be more stable. Yeah, aggressive early and then eventually tapering off is kind of
the standard again. I know nothing, but that's all I've retained on the finance
classes. Yeah, that's what we have been doing for years, and as you can see from
the previous research, A, the participant doesn't know when they're going to retire.
If they put a number when they join the plan and forget about it, that number
might be 10 years apart from their actual retirement age. And B, if we just use
two data points to tailor their retirement investment, that's not doing them a good
service. We could be more personalized, taking advantage of our research.
We want to look at their health status, their income, even self -perceived life
expectancy. Those are all good data points to put in there. And we can also borrow
the experience from the private sector. The private sector started to put different
data points to tailor each participants and look at their investment lineup and try
to help them to manage it. And also they want to build in annuity options or
guaranteed income options. So for example, when you retire, you're faced with a big
portfolio, let's say a million dollars when you retire And you have to calculate
yourself how I'm going to spend this million -dollar portfolio down for the next 10,
20 years for my retirement age. And also, I don't know when I'm going to die.
So what if I spent too much in the beginning and then two weight on the back? So
the private sector start to build in guaranteed income. So put some of the portfolio
into a stream of income. So they have something every month instead of have to
calculate, okay, based on the market, how much I have to spend. But the public
sector has a different story or different situation. Some of them or most of them
have DB plan, defined benefit plans, which can serve as a guaranteed income.
So that kind of personalization has to be more tailored towards public sector
employees. That's what we're doing actually. We're trying to take both of the DB and
DC or define benefit and define contributions, portfolio or savings, into consideration
to design a tailored and holistic approach for their retirement savings as well as
the retirement planning for their income, retirement income or withdrawal.
So those are the next trend because not only we want to help them save more but
we also want to tailor our advice to each individual based on their own situation
and help them to develop a withdrawal strategy too if we can.
Alright, Joe, anything else? Yeah, I think this is a really good place to kind of
show how all of these of these interact, because as we talk about the fact that
some people might be retiring earlier than expected, and the amounts that they've set
aside for their retirement might be impacted if they retire earlier than expected,
a lot of that goes back to, let's say, succession planning. If you,
as a government, are expecting people to retire later than they actually do,
then you're not ready when they do retire to have somebody new step into that role.
If they are stressed financially because they don't have enough saved or they are
still trying to pay off student debt, again, that might impact their decision to
stay if particularly as you can mention, they see that for them another employer or
the private sector
the full range of benefits that are being provided, and particularly around something
like retirement, you know, the 20 and 30 year olds may not be as attuned to the
value of those benefits when they first join the organization, but it's really a
matter of, you know, making sure that vesting and the long -term benefits are fully
explained and discussed throughout somebody's career as opposed to simply on day one,
here's a packet of papers and we expect that you understand it all. Yeah, agreed.
And none of these are really binary choices, right? There's a mix of, it's almost
more like a pie chart and people can assign what's important or not. And as we
talked about the very beginning, salary or financial incentive likely is less in the
public sector than private for obvious reasons, but that doesn't mean that's just a
hard no, I don't care about money forever. Student loans, retirement, kid's college
fund mortgage, like we can go down the list, it's never ending. And eventually that
equation might tip and then you lose the good employee. So one follow up question
on that, you both have mentioned a few times about better communication between the
employee and the employer. And maybe there's not one specific person, but is that
HR, is that the boss of each individual, is that the team lead, is that coming
from the C -suite, a little bit of everything? Where does that dialogue start?
Because realistically, I don't think the average lower -to -mid employee is going to
want to bring that stuff up, traditionally not brought up. So how does that
conversation start? So, I think that's a very good question. I don't picture the
communication will be a one -time thing. Like, for example, when you first join an
organization, the HR give you a lot of education programs for the first week, and
then you, and hope you understand and remember everything for the next decades or
two. I don't think that approach is particularly effective. What we're advocating is
an ongoing approach, not just communicating through HR, like you said, we want to
communicate through HR and the supervisors. And also we want to communicate through
their plan sponsors too. Like for example, if some company is managing your
organization's retirement portfolios, they may want to send maybe a info email or
maybe even a training session, like whoever volunteered to join to understand their
retirement benefit better. And also that will help the plan designers to realign
their retirement expectations. Like what we'd find before, people's retirement
expectations change when their health or marital status or even self -perceived life
expectancy change. So when they have those communication strategies or sessions,
it goes both ways. If the advisor finds out that this particular employee is
changing his expectations for retirement, then we can go ahead and adjust the target
they found or whatever investment line up for him. So to sum it up,
I think the communication should be A, both ways, B periodically throughout the work
here and see on the personalized level. I think these are very important tips for
those education and training programs. Gerald? Yeah, one of the survey questions that
we asked a while ago was who employees are looking to for advice on things like
benefits. And the number one answer was friends and family. And Obviously,
those are trusted individuals to them, but it also points to a method for employers
to reach out in different ways. In the traditional way of dealing with benefits,
again, you provide in -person or on -paper resources to the employee themselves.
There are a lot of employees who've said that they are looking for more information
on financial topics. They feel that they don't have enough information on those
topics, but if there is education going to be provided, one of the ways to do that
is, let's say, in an on -demand format that they can watch it,
let's say, at home with their spouse or partner, and maybe it's in discussion with
that individual that they can then say, oh well this is what makes the most sense
for me. In terms of overall open communication with the employer you know it's not
to say that your boss is going to be asking you how much debt you have or you
know what the specifics are of your financial portfolio simply to say hey let's have
a discussion let me share with you the data that we have or the value of the
benefits that we are providing, maybe the milestones at which you will qualify for
additional benefits, and then allow the employees to ask questions, and not simply a
matter of asking those questions, you know, employee to boss, but also to encourage
those discussions with mentors or with peers, you know, Particularly when you have
very active unions, for instance, they can be very effective in sharing with new
recruits the ways in which these benefits are really important to consider when
making decisions about staying with the organization. Yeah, our end goal is to help
recruit and retention and boost employee morale, as well as increase their
productivity. Once they think their retirement and other benefits are taken care of,
they will have a better work morale and also the productivity.
Yeah, going back to that stress topic, it's never going to go away. Money stress is
never going to not be an issue, but if you can reduce it as the employer, that
will help. And And even workplace culture and all those cliches about morale and
culture, when that infrastructure actually handles it and proves that's action,
and I think employees see that and it makes a big difference compared to just
what's written down on a piece of paper or like a mission statement. It's the
actual follow -up that people are looking for, which getting back to the original
topic, local government can, I think if it's set up correctly, to have an advantage
over the private sector and some of those aspects and can help tie in all these
things we've discussed today to help recruit, retain and have an effective workforce.
So Zhikun Liu, Gerald Young, thanks for starting us off on Trends for 2025. The
website is research .missionsq .org for more on the research that's been referenced.
There's going to be some additional research coming out in 2025 and looking forward
to checking in on from ICMA to mission squared on some of those details later this
year So thanks again for joining. Thank you very much. Joe great discussion.
Guest Information
Zhikun Liu, Ph.D., CFP®, vice president, head of MissionSquare Research Institute
Gerald Young, senior researcher, MissionSquare Research Institute
Topics
Part One:
Workforce motivations
Succession Planning
Concerns over emerging technologies
Employee Debt, Stress, and Mental Health
Part Two:
Retirement
Employee investment programs
