Bridge the Generational Divide in Your Workplace

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This content is brought to you by Travelers. Logo, Constitution State Services. A red umbrella logo, Travelers. Text, Could Generational Workplace Tension Undermine Worker's Compensation Stability? Cora Hall.

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CORA HALL: Hello, everyone. I'm Cora Hall, head of marketing strategy for our national and commercial accounts group here at Travelers and Constitution State Services. Welcome and thank you for spending some time with us today as we talk about some of the important workers compensation issues impacting regulations and legislation.

Travelers leaders are actively engaged in dozens of workers compensation regulatory boards, committees, and associations at the regional and national level. Our experts do not foresee a slowdown in legislative activity, and we want to learn more about what's influencing it, which led us to our first panelist, who is an expert in generational tension in the workplace.

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Soon, you'll meet Michael North. He is an Assistant Professor of Management and Organizations at the Stern School of Business at New York University. Professor North is one of the country's foremost experts and researchers on generational tension. So he can help us understand its impact and offer recommended solutions.

Also joining us is Eric Belk. He's the Assistant Vice President, Business Insurance of Workers Compensation product here at Travelers. Eric leads the company's workers compensation product development efforts. In addition to creating a vibrant and compliant workers compensation product across all segments, he and his team serve on boards of directors and various committees for most of the independent workers compensation rating bureaus and on the numerous industry committees that help shape the workers compensation legal and regulatory environment.

Eric will share insights on the legislative landscape and trends likely to impact the future of workers compensation. Over the next hour, you will gain a better understanding of generational tension, its impact on mental health, and what it might mean to employee recoveries in a view of how the regulatory environment is being shaped by all of these trends. We hope to have some time for Q&A at the end, but let's jump into our program and get started.

Professor North, welcome to the show. Please share some of your background. We're really interested in your research on generational tension. It's a unique area of research that many of us may not have heard of, but is clearly relevant to our audience. Let's start with, how did you get interested in generational tension?

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Text, What do we mean by generational tension? An overhead photo shows people walking in different directions. Michael North.

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MICHAEL NORTH: Yeah. Thank you, Cora. And thank you to travelers for having me on here. I get asked that question a lot. I'm not sure exactly the reason for why. Maybe they look at me-- I used to get this question even more when I was a little bit younger, less salt and pepper in my hair, I guess, being like, why do you care about this?

And the anecdote I usually tell, it's a professional one. I had just graduated college and I landed my first summer job as a research assistant, coordinating a study where we were recruiting local folks in and around the Ann Arbor, Michigan and Ypsilanti, Michigan area. And I had a job of interviewing them one-on-one, one at a time for two hours in a basement with no windows. That was my summer job, effectively.

And I was really, really dreading interviewing the older folks. If I'm being honest, I thought they would be boring and I thought it would just be awkward in general. And as it turned out, I ended up really enjoying interviewing them even more than I enjoyed interviewing folks who were not so-called older in their chronological age.

And it kind of got me thinking a couple of things. Number one, I felt very guilty about these misconceptions that I had had. But number two, I also thought this was probably not unique to me. I'm probably not the only 22-year-old knucklehead who had these kinds of impressions. And I guess in some sense, I'm like a reformed ageist who really decided to dedicate his life to trying to rectify these generational misconceptions because I think not only are they unnecessary, but when you think about it, age is the only universal social category.

It should be the glue that binds everybody in the sense that if we all live long enough, we all join every age subgroup, and yet we tend to push aside this reality in my field. In particular, when people were doing research, they were focusing on other demographic categories, usually more so than age. And as you're pointing out, Cora, it's still an area that folks don't often think about as much when it comes to, how do you manage a workforce that might feature folks of different demographic categories? So given the universality of age and given my own personal experience, that's why you find me here today.

CORA HALL: Thank you. So let's go deeper. How are you seeing generational tensions show up in the workplace?

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Text, Generations in the workplace and their biggest differences. A photo of a young woman and older man sitting side by side in an office.

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MICHAEL NORTH: Yeah, great question. So in my role as a professor teaching at a business school who does research on this, teaches primarily the so-called younger generation of up and coming professionals and also someone who is passionate about uniting generations. I end up talking with a lot of organizations. And I hear similar kinds of laments from workplaces, big and small, that you get generally some form of older workers or the old guard sort of lamenting a lack of loyalty from today's younger generation.

Lack of loyalty, which manifests both in a broader trend of younger employees job-hopping and not seeing their first or maybe even their second employer as one that they're seeing themselves as likely to stay with for the long haul, but also seemingly, increasingly boldly questioning norms, talking back to folks higher up in the hierarchy.

And what I often hear is maybe senior employees being like, there's no way I would ever question someone above me in the hierarchy in that kind of way. And I hear that. And I certainly I feel like-- I hear that lamentation and I certainly understand it.

I think it's important when those sorts of things happen to think about what's happening in the broader space in this regard, in the broader workplace and the broader macro environment, I guess at some level, which is that today's younger generation increasingly does not trust their employer to take care of them maybe in a way that in the past might have been more feasible.

Now, whether that perception is fair or not, we can certainly debate that. But I would say it's a pattern and a theme I keep hearing from my students, from the so-called younger workers that I interact with that they just don't see a world and a career that is full of the same kind of stability that they were led to believe maybe when they were going through school or when they were just entering the workforce.

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Text, Shifting expectations. An illustration of a young woman standing atop a stack of colored balls and looking down.

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When you combine a really tough job market, a perceived, at least, lack of opportunities for employment, as well as just more macro level challenges that afflict this particular generation, specifically the rising rates of student loans, of the lack of affordability of housing, the increased lack of the ability to settle down, you get a recipe for more stress and more uncertainty.

Which I think in the workplace is manifesting itself as increased rates of job hopping, where, yes, younger employees have always tended to job hop more than older employees. But it does seem like this is a rising trend today, which is fostering this, again, perceived lack of loyalty targeting today's younger workers.

CORA HALL: And as we were rehearsing for this webinar, we had an example around communication that could be one real practical example. So, Eric, I want to bring you in and your example that you shared.

ERIC BELK:

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Eric Belk.

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ERIC BELK: So obviously, I'm not a Generation Z or even a millennial. But we have the opportunity to bridge that gap age-wise and to help to mentor and bring others along as well. So I had a discussion with a younger associate who wrote a business communication internal that used six exclamation points.

And I counseled that as exciting as it might be, we really don't need six exclamation points in an internal communication, except if we're making a really big announcement. We want to announce it, but maybe one in that case. So we negotiated and ended up with two.

MICHAEL NORTH: Yeah.

CORA HALL: And Professor North, yeah, jump right in.

MICHAEL NORTH: I was just going to say, I've seen the same thing with my students. I'm very conscious to sprinkle exclamation points in my messages because I have learned the hard way if I only use periods, then my students might get the wrong impression that I'm angry at them.

This has happened to me several times on occasion. And I think it just underscores, again, there is a generational divide of sorts that maybe afflicts different levels within the workplace from things as seemingly benign as communication styles to things as big as how much do I trust my employer to take care of me.

ERIC BELK: Indeed.

CORA HALL: So we're going to dive deeper into that research. But Eric, I want to bring you in and get your thoughts on why agents and brokers and business customers are caring about this topic of increased patterns of generational tension. And from your role, what are you seeing happening in the regulatory environment?

ERIC BELK:

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ERIK BELK: Good question. First and foremost, because we care very deeply about maintaining a healthy workers comp system for everybody. When workers compensation benefits are adequate, they're awarded fairly and injured workers get treatment quickly, system's healthy. It's healthy for everyone, younger and older.

And there's definitely a connection to the regulatory environment that we'll come back to, I think, later in the webinar. And I think our audience might be surprised to learn that there were more than 900 state and federal legislative bills last year that could impact workers compensation. And that runs the gamut of everything.

And then while many of the laws are relatively benign, such as, say, a change in the average weekly wage, for example, there are always attempts to impact the workers compensation system in a negative way, ones that could either expand workers compensation to address issues that never should be in workers comp or to allow employees to sue outside of the system for something that ought to be covered under workers comp. So we see those types of changes occurring quite frequently in the regulatory environment.

CORA HALL: And so, one of the things that has come up as a pressing topic is the issue of independent contractors as part of that legislation. So, Professor North, I want to throw the question to you. Gig workers are traditionally independent contractors. So share with us, why do you think that there is this desire to be able to have gig work? And how does it contribute to the issues of generational tensions?

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Text, The rise of independent contractors. A photo of a woman taking a picture of a hat.

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MICHAEL NORTH: Yeah. Great question, Cora. Again, it goes back to a point that I already briefly mentioned about today's younger generation sees a world that is increasingly unstable and where institutions are not going to take care of them at least as much as maybe they used to be believed to do so, and/or not as much as today's younger workers were led to believe.

It makes sense. If you're entering the workforce and you see a lot of your friends either losing their jobs or having trouble getting a job, you are saddled with student debt, saddled with, again, the unaffordability of housing, with coming of age through multiple recessions and so on and so forth, not only is that going to yield greater amount of anxiety due to a lack of stability, but it's also going to lead you to consider what your options are.

And if your options-- it makes sense that you wouldn't just limit your option only to your employer, your one employer if there is this perception that your employment isn't necessarily going to be guaranteed for a long time. And so in that sense, you would want to crave more independence. It might be empowering to have autonomy and not be dependent on only one source of income if you're trying to survive in an environment like that.

So again, you have this general lack of stability fueling some of this anxiety. You have maybe a craving to try to take matters into your own hands. And in addition to that, I would also argue there's a backdrop of a younger generation that has come of age with things increasingly being more on-demand in general. I don't know if we call it the Netflix effect, but something along those lines where they're coming of age during a time when you can literally pick and choose any movie, any show that you want.

You can have what you want when you want it basically, at least more than prior generations were able to have. It makes sense with this sort of on-demand kind of mindset combined with the lack of stability that you're going to have a recipe for younger generation who's going to try to take matters into their own hands, ergo, pursuing things like gig work or what today's younger generation might call a side hustle.

CORA HALL: And Eric, how does the Department of Labor see this?

ERIC BELK: So that's a great question because just this week on March 11, US Department of Labor published a rule change that will impact the ability of a person to work as an independent contractor. And really, it impacts those who truly want to be independent such as a gig worker. And the Department of Labor's rule is certainly well-intentioned change.

They want to avoid misclassification of employees. They don't want a situation where somebody really ought to be an employee, but the employer carves them out as an independent contractor. And then therefore, they're denied access to benefits, denied access to workers compensation, for example.

But as well-intentioned as the rule is, there are many people who prefer the freedom that gig work provides. They make that choice willingly. And this rule may well impact their ability to work. I travel a lot with business, and I talk to-- I have to use Uber and Lyft and other transportation network companies.

And I talk to the drivers and I ask them, why are you doing this? And they tell me either they're picking up a little cash on the side or they need-- emphasis on the word need-- they need the flexibility that that job gives them. If you're an employer and you expect the employee to work 40 hours a week, well, they have to be there for them 8:00 to 5:00 or 9:00 to 5:00 or whatever your rules are.

But those are the employer's rules. There are people who don't want to work within those rules. And I think that to Professor North's point earlier, that this next generation coming up, that is the way their thought process around that. Many people simply don't want to be tied down to that 9:00 to 5:00 job. They want more choices.

CORA HALL: Thank you for that. So, Professor North, teach us, how are the tensions different by generation?

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Text, Exploring tensions. Colored strings are tied in a knot.

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MICHAEL NORTH: Yeah. And by the way, to Eric's point, I would say the number one source of generational tension currently is this tension over what should the work arrangement be, how much should you be in the office and so on and so forth. To me, I see that as emblematic of this larger, universal, and time-honored tradition of generational tensions whereby older generations have always lamented the changing norms that are associated with younger generations.

In other words, you can find quotations-- you can Google this yourself-- you can find quotations attributed to, as far back as, I believe, 800 BC, 400 BC attributed to the likes of Socrates basically lamenting, kids these days, how dare they disrupt things? How dare they change norms? When I was younger, I was taught to respect my elders. Today's younger generation doesn't have respect like I used to.

Now, on the one hand, it is a time honored tradition of older generations lamenting the shifting norms that come with younger generations. And it is true that typically-- though, we want to be very careful not to stereotype-- typically on average, older generations want to keep things mostly the same. Younger generations generally, typically-- although we don't want to stereotype-- want to change things and reshape things in their own image.

Again, we want to be careful not to assume that because, of course, some older folks like the idea of change. Some younger folks like the idea of tradition and stability. However, what I find interesting and maybe a little bit alarming about the types of tensions that seem to be playing out today is, I would argue, they're at the very least more complicated than they used to be.

And some would say they're more intense than they used to be, these generational tensions or divides. So one major reason for why generational tensions might be exacerbated today relative to even 20 or 30 years ago is a demographic reason. In other words, people are living longer than ever. Lifespan is pretty much going up year by year. COVID changed that slightly, but lifespan is going up pretty much year by year by year.

People are living longer than ever. They are often-- or increasingly, at least-- opting to work longer than ever. In fact, older segments of the labor force are the only ones projected to grow in coming decades. So on the one hand, you have an increased demand for folks to not just retire and sail off into the sunset. And who's to say that's not their right to work as long as they want to?

But on the other hand, you have this younger generation who is seeking stability, who feels increasingly disenfranchised, where you're seeing record high levels of anxiety and depression. And I hate to say it, but suicide as well. There's reasons for this. What you're getting is this sort of perfect generational storm of generations bumping into one another.

And I think these forces are oftentimes at the heart of dividing generations. That's one reason why I would say the tensions are more urgent now maybe than they used to be because the system as a whole, seems to be fostering this tension between generations.

Another major force that is also driving generational tensions is the sheer pace of technological change. I don't think you need me to tell you this. It seems like every week, I have the same existential crisis that maybe anyone else following this webinar has, at least I have it just with ChatGPT and all these other AI and whatnot automation, name your force.

The pace of technological change seems to be so, so great that it is also, you could argue, dividing generations because you have a younger generation who is growing up with increasingly newer technologies. It's fostering this perception that older generations who oftentimes can directly benefit younger generations in the workplace, by passing along their knowledge, by passing along their wisdom, you could argue the pace of technological change is dividing generations because it's a knowledge economy and those who are in the know is ever changing.

And so at least the traditional symbiosis between generations where you get older ones mentoring younger ones and possibly younger ones supporting older ones, you could argue that this classic dependence on knowledge sharing, there may be less of this need now because there are more ways to gather knowledge given the pace of technological change.

In other words, a point I'll make later on in this webinar, I would argue that one of the biggest sources of glue between generations, one of the best ways to get generations to see eye-to-eye in any workplace, whether your company is big or small, whether your workgroup is big or small, is this symbiosis between older generations passing along the knowledge that they've gleaned through their experience and through their wisdom and younger folks being very receptive to soaking that in. Given these forces of demographics and technological change, you could argue that glue is sort of weakening increasingly today.

CORA HALL: OK. So we have that baseline now that generational tension is real. So that's really important. Now, let's go into, help us understand the pressures with older generations versus younger generations.

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Text, Generational pressures. An older man and younger woman work back to back at office desks.

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MICHAEL NORTH: Yeah. So this is what a lot of my research focuses on. In other words, generational tension, it's complicated, right? It's multifaceted. You have the older side, for lack of a more specific term, the younger side, and then how do you get harmony with all those groups? One of my recent papers, which I don't know if my website is going to get broadcast. You certainly don't have to check out my research.

But if any of this grabs you, you can check out this paper, which we call Millennials Versus Boomers. And the idea with this is we have found that the so-called boomer generation of workers and the so-called millennial generation of workers, they actually see one another as one another's biggest threat more than other generations, which we find kind of interesting and also a little alarming, given that typically, that's like boomers generally on average have millennial age children and vice versa. So it's what that says about the family, I don't know.

But in general, there is this tension where millennials and boomers see one another as each other's biggest threat, but interestingly, for different reasons. So millennials see boomers as their generation's biggest threat based on what psychologists call realistic threat. In other words, they see a boomer generation who increasingly is obstructing their own opportunities for getting jobs, for making money, for holding positions of power.

They explicitly desire for boomers to get out of the way. Again, whether you see this as fair or not, I don't tend to arbitrate that. It is a real tension that is there. It's a real belief that is there that may be happening in your workplace or not, of younger workers seeing older workers as being in the way to their own pragmatic opportunities.

However, in the vice versa, boomers see millennials as a threat not because of these pragmatic sort of job-based tensions but as a more symbolic threat. In other words, whereas millennials see boomers as a threat, as obstructing their opportunities for jobs and power and things like that, boomers see millennials primarily as a threat due to ushering in, again, changing norms in society, in the workplace more than anything else.

And so if you are someone who's in a position where you're either managing different generations or maybe you yourself find yourself in the midst of a cross-generational work team, which is quite common, then I would just urge you to bear in mind that these tensions sometimes can be asymmetric, that the reasons for why generational divides are in existence can sometimes differ based on the age or the generation of the person in question.

CORA HALL: Thank you for that. And Eric, I want to bring you in because we know millennials and certainly Gen Z have a greater awareness of workers rights, especially relative to safety and a strong sense of social justice. So how do you see this playing in?

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Text, Expanded awareness. A young woman yells into a megaphone.

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MICHAEL NORTH: So it's certainly plausible that younger generations have a greater awareness and support of workers' rights and safety laws. No doubt about that. That's not to say that they're necessarily more safety-conscious, that maybe they're more rights-conscious than safety-conscious because our data has shown, as we've done in other webinars, that younger workers do tend to get hurt at a higher frequency than older workers.

That said, you know, growing up in the digital age, Gen Z very highly adept at assessing accessing information on workplace safety. Their greater awareness really empowers them to recognize workers rights, report unsafe conditions, those sorts of things. And even if they don't officially organize under a labor union, still their communication, the devices, most of which they hold right in their hands, permit them to talk.

It provides a means that they can talk amongst each other about these issues, share their grievances and support each other as a group effort. That said, workplaces are safer today than they've ever been. Frequency, the rate at which injuries occur, has continued to drop. It drops every year. Every time we think that curve is going to flatten out, it drops again. And that's continued even post COVID.

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There are a lot of factors that enter into that. But certainly, the insurers use of very high quality risk control measures and risk control people that we send out into the field has certainly been impactful. And you can't ignore the OSHA guidelines. There are inspections, investigations, and fines.

In fact, certainly augment that and have resulted in much safer workplaces as well. And this is kind of where the generational differences come in. Are the younger generations going to report these violations? Are they going to be more cooperative in helping the government ferret these things out? We'll see.

CORA HALL: So what is your reaction to that, Professor North? Do you see some of these tensions contributing generationally and particularly around Gen Z? What do you see?

MICHAEL NORTH: Yeah. I think to me, the key word that Eric just mentioned is sharing. This is a younger generation that has been raised with extremely strong norms of social justice, which is not to say prior generations have not had their form of that, right? I'm actually fond of pointing that out.

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Text, Social justice and Equity. A notification pops up on a mobile phone.

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It's not like boomers were the ones who ushered in the era of civil rights in this country. So it's not that necessarily is unique to Gen Z.

What I would say seems to be unique to Gen Z relative to prior younger generations is a deep concern with not only social justice issues, but also a responsibility to speak out against perceived injustices. So therefore, they're more likely to view unsafe working conditions as a form of injustice and importantly, a lack of equity. I would say equity is like particularly big among today's younger generation.

Again, I've taught this generation. I guess this is my ninth year at NYU. So I've taught folks who I guess would fall into the bracket of either the younger bracket of millennials or the older to middle bracket of Gen Z. And I have noticed a shift at some level. There's a growing awareness of this sharing mentality, seeing this idea of getting knowledge out there, getting information out there as the most equitable thing that can benefit everyone.

Which I find really fascinating because if you think about it, that sort of mentality of information sharing, you might argue actually goes directly counter to a world or an economy that feels increasingly competitive. It's kind of an interesting paradox in that way. So one of the anecdotes that I tell is when I was on the academic job market in my world of academia trying to get a job as a tenure track professor, which is extremely competitive.

Increasingly today, at most of the top departments, it's literally like one out of 100 odds to get a job like this just to give you an idea of how competitive it is. In spite of the increased competition for these scarce jobs, scarce resources, I find it really interesting and maybe in some sense heartening in a way that the job candidates who come from today's younger generation, they're arguably more supportive than my generation was when we were in the job market.

I shouldn't say more supportive because we genuinely were happy for one another when we'd get jobs. But we certainly didn't share information about whether or not we had interviews or what the proposed starting salary was or cheering on our rivals in this same rat race trying to get the same kinds of jobs.

And I think in many ways that really underlies this increased norms of sharing job search advice versus competitive job searching. And it's not surprising, if you think about it. This is a generation that has come of age in the age of social media. You could argue the number one way in which this generation relates to one another, certainly one of the top ways that they relate to one another is through sharing through social media.

At some level, it's a little like unionization in that sense. It's sort of power in numbers. Information is power. If we share the knowledge that we have, at least we can foster a more equitable society that all fosters this explicit sense of equity that Gen Z seems to feel a responsibility to speak out on behalf of.

CORA HALL: And that equity and the sharing actually came up at an industry conference I was at, the National Workers Comp Conference this past fall. And Eric, I want to circle back to what you had mentioned about safety, because at the conference they were sharing that 56% of OSHA inspections in 2022 were triggered by alleged hazards reported by employees. And some of the trends we're discussing here, namely the employee activism, the trends around social justice kind of tie-in. So I want to get your thoughts on what you're seeing at the state level.

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ERIC BELK: So states are always looking for ways to reduce exposure for employers and employees. They want to keep costs down in their state. It helps to build up their employment base in their states if they can keep employers costs cheaper. So we're seeing that play out in Pennsylvania right now. They had immense changes to their experience modification calculation. That hadn't been updated in 20 years.

And the reason it had to be updated now is workplaces are safer, so the algorithm they were using had to account for that. So the experience mod is one way that encourages safer behavior with employers. So companies with a better loss history generally pay less money for their workers compensation coverage, everything else being equal.

And that experience modification factor directly impacts the final premium. So the algorithm can look very complicated, but the outcome is simple. All things being equal, business owners with lower claims frequency, lower claim severity are going to pay less than their counterparts with higher frequency and higher severity.

There's another simple conclusion too. If you're not focused on safety, you're going to pay more for insurance. That's a fact when it comes to workers compensation. Safety really is a win-win-win situation. First of all, keeping workers safe is the right thing to do in every situation.

It also directly impacts a company's bottom line because safer companies pay less for insurance. They also save on costs associated with hiring to replace workers who are injured. And if you look at it from a purely mercenary standpoint, it helps their bottom line as well. And their employees are going to be happier and more productive if they aren't facing dangers at work.

CORA HALL: So I want to thank you for that. I want to bring back a comment you made at the beginning about a healthy workers compensation system, which I know is integral to your work here. So you share more what that means.

ERIC BELK:

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Text, A Healthy Worker Compensation System. Blue arrows point forward. A red arrow surpasses them.

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ERIC BELK: Sure. So Travelers and the rest of the insurance industry, for that matter, we don't exist in a vacuum. We operate with constantly changing regulatory and legal environments. And there are literally thousands of other stakeholders who are involved in that environment. So outside of Travelers, my team and I are focused on maintaining that healthy work comp environment, which is in everyone's best interest.

So we carry out that obligation really with the highest degree of integrity and ethics, respecting the rights and the obligations of all the stakeholders in the system. So we want to shape the environment because we want to keep it healthy. Healthy work comp environment is one where workers get benefits that are adequate under the state's laws.

They're administered fairly for all the users. They get them quickly. If they can get them quickly, they can get effective treatment quickly. And getting effective treatment quickly lends itself to a better result in the end. So they can return to work as soon as it is safe and medically appropriate to do so, of course.

And a healthy environment also fosters, I would call it, a healthy competition with respect to the needs of all the stakeholders. There are a lot of different stakeholders involved in here. Employers and employees being, of course, the two prominent ones. Insurers, lawyers, can't forget the attorneys, medical groups. It really is a big list.

And we also want to assure that what we will call the grand bargain remains in place. And I know folks on the phone who probably are on this webinar probably heard that term, the grand bargain. And unlike many other areas of casualty insurance, workers compensation is purely a creature of statute. We are created by statute. But workers comp--

You can say workers comp is about 5,000 years old. It goes back to the Code of Hammurabi. But modern workers comp goes back a little over 100 years. Now, the grand bargain simply describes the statutory agreement. So employers and-- or employees, rather, are guaranteed a known, stable level of benefits for a compensable injury that arises out of and in the workplace. Out of and in the course of the employment, rather.

And in return for which they give up the right to sue the employer for that injury. So the grand bargain assures that employees are getting prompt medical treatment, they're getting their indemnity benefits. They get what they need to recover from an injury, return to work, or to provide for their income and their medical treatment into the future.

Now, insurers can adequately plan and collect the appropriate level of premium in order to cover those losses and the expenses associated with that. And the employers have a known cost for what their costs will be. So this is also known as the exclusive remedy in workers comp because the workers exclusive remedy for a work-related injury is workers compensation.

So there have been-- and one of the things my team focuses on is trying to maintain this grand bargain because it is in everyone's beneficial interest to do so. And there have been a lot of attacks on the grand bargain in recent years. There are really two ways that you can erode that grand bargain. The first is to put things into work comp that don't belong there.

And next thing is to take things out of workers compensation that really belong in workers comp. And for example, there have been a number of laws recently that introduced presumptions into workers comp, essentially saying that the injury, whatever it is, the condition is presumed to have arisen out of the workplace.

And that strains the system because the employer essentially becomes the general insurer of its employees health, which is not the intent of workers compensation at all. And we'll dig into that a little bit deeper as we go on. But legislatures and courts have also been carving out exemptions to permit employees to sue the employer. So those are a couple of areas that really attack the grand bargain.

CORA HALL: So presumptions, PTSD, a lot of these issues have come out. You mentioned at the start of the webinar, almost 900 bills last year. So we'd love your thoughts on what do you see as the long term threats to the workers compensation system.

ERIC BELK:

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Text, The biggest threat to Workers Comp. A woman buries her face in her hands at her office desk.

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ERIK BELK: So post-traumatic stress disorder is a really interesting example of how the grand bargain can erode over time by changing the burden of proof in this case. So work comp is intended to handle injuries that arise out of and in the course of the employment, without regard to fault, of course.

But there's one thing. The worker has to prove that the injury occurred in the course of the employment. When you have a presumption, that presumption takes away that burden of proof from the employee. It essentially says, if you have this condition, we're going to presume that it arose out of and in the course of your employment. Then it becomes up to the employer to prove it did not.

And one of the issues that occurs with that is the reason that they create a presumption is because it might be difficult to prove something like take, for example, COVID, where there were presumptions in many states that COVID was work-related. And the employee didn't have to prove they got it from COVID.

But you think about it, COVID was ubiquitous. It was everywhere. You couldn't escape it if you tried. Even people who wore masks, people who were inoculated, everything, you still ended up getting COVID. So to presume that it occurred in a workplace environment is probably a step too far in that regard. So it's making a presumption that probably shouldn't be made.

And when it comes to post-traumatic stress disorder, which is a real injury, it really happens. It arises out of a compensable injury. It can even arise as a separate compensable injury in itself. The problem is not in post-traumatic stress disorder. The problem is with respect to the presumption that arose out of the workplace.

CORA HALL: Thank you. Can you go deeper into some more of the groups that stress the healthy workers compensation system and really, what motivates the behavior?

MICHAEL NORTH:

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ERIK BELK: So there are and always have been stressors in the work comp environment. Fraud is a big one. On the medical side, for example, we have issues involving durable medical equipment or testing or doctors doing self referrals to other businesses that they own, unnecessary treatment, over-billing, over-utilization. You name it, we've seen it.

And just this week, two individuals in California were just sentenced to over five years in jail for stealing $21 million in-- there were some unnecessary knee braces and ankle braces and that sort of thing. Same day, a sleep clinic owner was jailed for 19 months for doing fake sleep studies. These things happen constantly. And we have entire teams devoted to nothing but looking at that.

We have to have medical review. And we're looking at treatment, causation, the efficacy of the treatment, all of that. The fact that you're doing the medical review adds to your costs. And people say, well, you can tame that pretty well with your medical review. Now that everything is good, why do you still need it?

It's the same thing as saying, well, there hasn't been a lot of crime, so let's take the police off the street. It doesn't quite work that way. The reason you don't have a lot of crime is because you have the police. The reason we're seeing less overutilization is because we're doing medical review.

Litigation is costly. We have to adjudicate disputes. We have to have a method of doing. It's not perfect, but it does work most of the time in most cases. There's always going to be a difference of opinion on certain things, and you have to have a method for doing it. But still, it adds to the costs and you have some that are taking advantage of it or are filing claims that shouldn't be filed or pursuing damages or claims that should not be pursued. All of those stress the system.

And another one that's recently come up is consolidation of physician groups. So you have physicians that are consolidating into much larger groups in order to have greater buying or greater selling power really with respect to their services. And we have to continue to make sure that we're keeping people within our networks, within our pharmacy networks, within our treatment networks.

Because number one, we know they get the best level of treatment there, the most efficacious treatment. And number two, it ensures that we're going to pay what we owe, which is what our obligation is under the workers compensation law.

CORA HALL: Thank you. Yes, I think the work that your team does always staying on top of these trends is just so critical to help us plan for the future. And, one of the-- I want to bring Dr. North back in because we spent a lot of time together talking about generational tension, really to develop our foresight on what's influencing the trends we're seeing.

And we're starting to see the research become more mainstream in our industry. So for example, PNC specialists did a great piece in February. Do a shout out to them on the five ways to overcome generational differences at work. We've seen new research coming out from technology firms and consulting firms around how generational challenges can impact the speed of digital transformation.

And adopting technology is a significant trend for our industry. And I want to talk a little bit about wearables, and especially the use in places like medical settings. Based on your study and your research, how do you think the generations will react to the privacy implications and monitoring that comes along with some of this technology?

MICHAEL NORTH:

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MICHAEL NORTH: Yeah, that's a great question. When it comes to at least the younger generation, as you can see on the slide, it's a complicated relationship with privacy that especially today's younger generation has. Privacy is sort of both something that younger generations don't assume, but also something that-- a luxury that they might like to have given [AUDIO OUT] mindset of mistrust of a world that isn't really offering a ton of civility or at least is seeming increasingly invasive.

So on the one hand, you have a younger generation that has come of age during the age of social media, readily willing to share way more private information than arguably any generation previously, at least in modern history, so ready to share private information.

On the other hand, you could also see today's generation seeing privacy violations as yet another indicator of the mentality of not trusting institutions, and then subsequently being motivated to report perceived privacy violations, again, in this name of equity and this name of calling out privacy invasion.

So I guess I would just say if wearable tech is an increasing reality in this industry, which it sounds like it is, you just want to be careful about how you roll it out. My guess is it would be because it's a-- if it's a newer technology that is seen as making the world more equitable and making health more equitable, which I believe would be the spirit of wearable tech, helping people be healthier, then it's probably going to have a net positive view in the eyes of today's younger generation.

Can be sure it's not seen as over-violating boundaries, or at the very least, that there's clarity on what are the agreed upon boundaries. In other words, you'd want to operate with an assumption that this is a generation that by default is not going to trust institutions rolling out something, especially something that might compromise privacy.

So just operate under an assumption of mistrust. Operate under an assumption that this is a generation that needs a little bit of extra assurance for that kind of stability, because that's just the reality. And you're probably more likely to have a more receptive audience to technology like this.

CORA HALL: Thank you. Eric, I want to get your thoughts a little bit more. With all these complex issues, as Professor North just illustrated, how do we engage in the legal and regulatory environment?

ERIC BELK:

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ERIK BELK: I want to touch on a couple of things that Professor North said regarding the wearable technology, for example, and the privacy implications. Another aspect, I guess the other side of the coin is perhaps the potential for overreliance on technology. You get to the point where people become so used to it.

For example, there are proximity detectors that will tell you how close you are to a forklift in the warehouse. And if that thing is overly sensitive and is going off all the time, then you're going to be less sensitive to the warning signal and you become used to it and you walk into the path of a forklift because you relied too much on the technology.

So that would almost be a luxury at this point because we still have to overcome the privacy implications because they don't want their employer to know when they go on break. They don't want their employer to know how long they stayed away at lunch. So there are different aspects of that. But I think it's a very exciting future at the same time. And there is room for partnership between employers and insurers in this regard.

And Travelers is certainly standing at the forefront of that. We have developed partnerships with several insurers where we have engaged them in wearable technology or in different types of proximity detectors, whether it might be how close are you to the edge of a roof, for example. Because falls from heights are a big part of the large loss claims that we handle.

So to answer your question now, Cora, we do engage with the legal and regulatory environment on a regular basis. We do have a government relations team here at Travelers. And we work very closely with them to help them to analyze and determine whether or not a particular law will have the impact that it's anticipated to have and what that impact should be and if it's overreaching. So we're providing that information to them on a constant basis.

I and members of my team, we serve on a number of different committees. I'm on the governing committee for the bureau in California, for the governing committee in Wisconsin. We serve on the California Work Comp Institute, for example, an educational nonprofit and WCRI and other places. So it's not just my team, but individuals throughout the company are doing that.

And we are engaging on every level to deal with regulatory issues, whether we're talking to the department of insurance in Florida about a new premium audit law that they are implementing, or we're talking to California about the ABC or ABC law that they call out there as a result of the Dynamics decision. So we're constantly engaging across the bureaus with that and across the industry as well.

CORA HALL: So thank you for sharing that with us. So, Professor North, I want to get your thoughts. You had shared with us, four ideas for minimizing generational tensions. Can you share those?

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Text, Minimizing generational tensions. Encourage more face-to face conversations, with everyone in the same room. Tailor your practices to utilize the motivations of different career stages. Consider more accommodations for older workers. Utilize reverse-mentorship. Good advice comes from anywhere.

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MICHAEL NORTH: Yeah, absolutely. And again, my goal with this is to offer broad frameworks for solutions to hopefully inspire folks to think about what your immediate work environment is like, what your unique cross-generational dynamic might be like, and see how you can apply these suggestions.

I would say the four broad solutions, just to list them out first and then I'll elaborate a bit on each of them, would be number one, just consider increased accommodations targeting the types of needs that your older workers might have. That can help reduce generational tensions.

Number two, don't overlook the surprisingly useful insights of your younger demographic. Number three, encourage more cross-generational conversations. And number four, doing what you can to tailor your practices to accommodate members of all career stages, not just one or be open to different norms of different career stages.

So what do I mean by that? So the first suggestion, again, is just to consider accommodations for older workers. And we want to be careful not to assume that all people of a certain age need special accommodations. That's not the point I want to make here. My point is more just, the more that you put any kind of employee in a position to succeed, the more likely it is you're going to make explicit what they have to bring to the table to help your organization.

Or put another way, what you really want to avoid is try to do-- you want to avoid this knee-jerk perception from younger workers from today's younger generation of seeing the old guard as burdensome or obstructive. If you really, truly want to foster a cross-generational workplace that's going to work well together, it makes sense to do what you can to listen to your old guard, listen to what they need, and try to meet them accordingly.

The second tip I would offer is sort of on the other side of the spectrum, trying not to overlook the surprising value that your younger demographic likely brings to the table. In other words, it's easy to view the younger generation as simply trying to change things for the sake of changing them.

Some of my work actually shows this, that there's this perception of today's younger generation as just disrupting, but just for the sake of disrupting, sort of like rebels without a cause, which I think at some level plays into this generational tension of seeing younger generations as a threat to symbolically changing norms and so on and so forth.

However, I would push back against some of that in the sense that not that you need to be open to every single idea for change that the younger generation suggests. But at the very least, their insights probably are more useful than you might think they are by default. And so I do have a published paper on this co-authored with my collaborator, Ting Zhang, who teaches at Harvard Business School.

And we were interested in whether high quality advice comes from folks of any age. In other words, when we think about advice, we typically think about good advice coming from someone older sort of mentoring someone younger or that would be sort of a traditional arrangement or what's known as a peer arrangement, where it's like you giving advice to someone the same age as you.

Where we tend to think advice is less, by default, useful [AUDIO OUT] mentoring someone older. But we actually put this to the empirical test. We collected pieces of advice in these various advice-giving relationships. And we found no statistical difference in terms of the perceived quality and usefulness of advice, whether or not it was generated from someone older than you, the same age as you, or younger than you.

And so I think what this underscores is not that you should automatically make your entry level 23-year-old the CEO of your organization. But I think it does mean that you shouldn't overlook the surprising advice that your junior workers have. Just try not to be so quick to discount what they have to say.

You might want to consider instituting what's known as a reverse mentoring program if you haven't already, where you at least empower your younger generation to share their knowledge, share their tips. And by the way, we found this was not just knowledge in terms of how to start a TikTok account, but it was actually life advice and career advice as well. So there's a surprising value of wisdom from your younger employees. Capitalizing on that can represent a second solution to minimizing these tensions.

A third tip that I was offering in my conversations with [AUDIO OUT] you do this already. But I've found that most workplaces don't, by default. Encourage intentional, cross-generational conversations. In other words, get different generations in the room face-to-face, to have honest, non-judgmental heart-to-hearts about what they feel about things that you're probably grappling with in your workplace, about what is a fair arrangement, what is a fair compromise in terms of how much you should be in the office.

Or if you don't want to talk about directly, what are the concerns of today's younger employees versus the older guard? Usually, when I have found the organizations that can capitalize on a workforce or workplaces that are increasingly age-diverse is to have these kinds of cross-generational heart-to-hearts. Because oftentimes what that ends up doing is you clarify a lot of misconceptions that don't need to be there.

Just because the younger generation is coming in and trying to change things-- or sorry-- just because the younger generation is coming into the workplace and it seems like they're trying to change things because they're not adhering to norms, they may be not adhering to norms because they simply don't know.

There might be just an ignorance there that this has not been explicitly spelled out. And if you have those cross-generational heart-to-hearts, oftentimes, you can actually mitigate a lot of these generational tensions. Maybe you do it once a month or whatever. But something where you explicitly do that, I think, can go a long way.

The fourth thing I will say is-- or the fourth tip would be, the more that you can work into your practice the differing needs of different career stages, also the better you're going to be able to unite generations. And what I mean by this is when we're talking about age diversity or older versus younger versus middle-aged workers, let's say, what we're oftentimes talking about are differences in career stage.

And this is, again, from recent research of my own. But I've made this argument that younger or early career stage workers want different things usually from their organization than middle and late career workers want. Typically, to really broad brush, early career workers are really hungry for advancement opportunities. They want those opportunities so that they can foster some degree of stability, economic security, professional security for themselves and for their families that they have.

Mid-career workers usually tend to be very overwhelmed with a lot of different things. They're juggling the needs of different workers. They're usually have transitioned into supervisory positions. They're usually grappling with things at home if they have families where they're constantly being pulled in different directions. And so they actually, rather than seeking advancement, typically seek more balance. They trying to maintain their sanity.

Meanwhile, the late career demographic usually is trying to-- they're not necessarily ready to retire yet, but it's at least on their mind. And what all employees generally want, regardless of career stage, is to have some sort of positive legacy on their organizations. And so it's pretty typical of late career workers as they grapple with limited amount of time left in their working life, however limited that might be, which for some folks, it may not be anytime soon, but it's at least on your mind.

What late stage workers often want is just to solidify their legacy. They want to pass the baton on to future generations and know that when it is time to retire, that they've left their organization or their workgroup or their work team in a better place than when they first started. And so my point here is just to bear in mind that when we're talking about different ages, we're really talking about different stages often. And different stages have different needs.

The more that you can tailor your practices to foster symbiosis between these different brackets, the better you're going to be. For instance, know that your early career workers really want advancement opportunities, and you know that your mid-career workers are really overwhelmed.

Then there's a symbiosis there where mid-career workers can offload some of these tasks onto early career workers, frame them as advancement opportunities that might help the early careerists in their careers. And meanwhile, early careers are sort of paying the mid-career back by helping them be a little less overwhelmed and injecting some balance into their work lives.

So overall, I think what you want to do, again, is just given these dynamics, given the general forces that are at play in the broader societal and workplace sphere, what you want to do is you want to try to downplay these tensions by putting people, not only in the best position to succeed, but fostering cross-generational symbiosis that will help all parties.

ERIC BELK: And I can just jump in right now and riff off of what Professor North said. I'll bring the boomer perspective to this. So I have a very experienced team. And the majority of my people have 35 years plus experience on the team. So very experienced.

And

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Text, Importance of mentorship. An older and younger woman review a tablet screen together.

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And we decided we were going to put together some operating principles, how we're going to operate with each other and operate with people outside of our group as well. And I selected one of our younger, probably a Gen Xer-- I'm not really sure of where you draw the lines anymore-- to come up with-- they actually may have been a millennial. That's it-- to draw up our operating principles.

And it was wonderful. What a great opportunity for the older and younger generations to get together and talk about what's important to us and how we communicate with each other, how we work with each other, and how we get the job done at the end of the day. It was wonderful. So it was probably better than any single mentoring opportunity, although we have lots of those too, because again, I've got a lot of institutional knowledge within that group of employees with 35 plus years of experience that someday is going to walk out the door.

So we have to make sure that we have those opportunities, as Professor North stated, to have that sort of cross generational pollination to make sure that the company can continue and that the younger generation also feel a part of the team and they're given opportunities to grow in their jobs and to grow in their careers.

CORA HALL: Well said. And I want to just Thank you both so much. We do have two minutes left. There's a lot of questions about gig work.

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So Eric, I think we have time to at least address one of them. So I'm going to throw this one to you. If employees are going to work multiple different jobs and if they are the sole owners of some of the job tasks as a side business, how does this affect cumulative trauma injuries and who is the owner of the injury?

ERIC BELK: That is an excellent question. And I'm not going to dodge it. But I will say that it's all going to be dependent on what state you're in, because if you're in California, for example, cumulative trauma is extremely complicated and extremely big, something like 18% of the claims. 16% to 18% of all the claims in California are cumulative trauma claims. That's not true in the rest of the country.

For example, Maryland, where I practice law, cumulative trauma was the last employer on the risk when you're doing that type of job that would lead to that type of injury. California is different. They're going to share back for a year. And if you have multiple jobs, it's going to be shared with each employer in which the hazards of the disease exist. So it's a great question, but it's really going to differ by state.

I also want to hit the first question to Cora about independent contractors responsible for their own work comp, so why should we care? And I'll give just very brief anecdote. In Wisconsin, one of the other board members was saying it's an amazing magic trick we have here in Wisconsin. You have an employee who falls off a roof, and halfway down, he turns into-- an independent contractor falls off a roof. Halfway down, he turns into an employee.

And it's a kind of a snarky way of saying that people will come to you and say, sure, I'll be an independent contractor. Sure, I'll do this. But at the end of the day, that relationship starts to look a whole lot like an employment relationship. They're under your control. They're using your tools. You're telling them when to be there, what to do, and how to do it. They're starting to look a whole lot like your employees.

So my recommendation to you who ask the question is, yes, you should have a contract in place. But that contract is meaningless if the other things aren't there. So you have to make sure that you're not exerting control over the means and manner in which the work is done. Not legal advice to you. You have to look and see what the specific law is in your particular state. But it is a very interesting question is, what do you as an employer need to do in order to verify that somebody actually is an independent contractor versus an employee?

CORA HALL: Excellent. Well, thank you, everyone. Thank you to our panelists today for joining us. The replay of this webinar will be available on Travelers website as well as Constitution State Services. So thank you, and have a great rest of your day.

ERIC BELK: Thank you.

MICHAEL NORTH: Thanks.

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