On this episode of People Solve Problems, host Jamie Flinchbaugh welcomes Renee Kaspar, Author and Workplace Strategist at Renee Kaspar Labs. A thirty-year veteran of human resources and the author of the forthcoming book HR Confidential, Renee has spent her career in the rooms where the most significant decisions about people get made. She joins Jamie to talk about what she calls The Great Transition, the period we are all living through, in which the foundations of work are shifting beneath our feet. Renee describes The Great Transition as a systems change rather than a single event. When one part of the system shifts because of AI, she explains, everything connected to it shifts too, which is why changing work also means rethinking education, hiring, pay, benefits, and how performance is measured. She likens the experience to raising a child, terrifying and constantly changing, with one crucial difference: a new parent has some kind of roadmap, and right now, no one does. To navigate a system in motion, she suggests finding an anchor and working outward from it, asking what has to move freely for that anchor to reach its next stage. Much of the conversation circles around agency, and Renee is candid about what its absence feels like. Lost agency, she says, shows up as anxiety, fear, burnout, and a loss of trust, the sense that control over one's own way of being has slipped away. She traces part of that to a vanished kind of stability, the era when a single employer could anchor an entire career. Drawing on a conversation she had just before the interview, Renee shares an idea that clearly moved her: agency is learned, not given. It comes from quieting the fear, looking inward to understand your own value, and knowing what you can carry with you from one place to the next. Renee and Jamie examine how this fear varies across generations, and she is careful to say that every group is anxious for its own reasons. She sees a younger generation entering an uncertain world without a playbook their parents can hand down, a middle generation exhausted and worried about whether the next rung on the ladder will still exist, and her own peers more willing to embrace change yet uneasy about ageism. Understanding those reasons, Jamie notes, is itself a step toward reclaiming agency. On how to practice agency, Renee points to self-advocacy, resilience, and curiosity, the kind of steady learning that builds confidence to face the next challenge. Jamie adds that writing things down, breaking problems into smaller pieces, and honestly weighing what might actually go wrong tends to shrink anxiety down to a workable size. Renee builds on that with a habit she picked up secondhand from Warren Buffett: for anything you face, name three positive things that could come from it. She is careful to distinguish this from forced optimism, and she offers a pointed warning that fear sells, that it is being aimed at us constantly, and that consuming it without care is one of the fastest ways to lose your footing. In the final stretch, Renee turns to her own profession and makes the case that human resources needs to reinvent how it shows up. Rather than remaining the function people fear, she argues, HR can become the steward and conscience of the organization. This part recognizes that people are burnt out and helps build something more stable and more human. For those who want to continue the conversation, watch for Renee's forthcoming book, HR Confidential. You can learn more about Renee Kaspar at https://reneekasparlabs.com/ and connect with her on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/reneekaspar/.
