Episode 8. Overlooked Workers Series Introduction

Episode Description

Every workplace runs on a set of assumptions about who workers are, what they need, and how they operate. Most of those assumptions were built with a particular worker in mind. And for a significant portion of the workforce, that worker isn't them.

This solo episode opens a new series on overlooked workers – groups that have been underserved by research, by organizational practice, and by the broader conversations we tend to have about work and workplaces. The series grows out of a panel Hannah organized at the 2026 SIOP Annual Conference: Expanding the Lens: I-O Practice Centering Overlooked Worker Groups – a session designed to raise visibility, share practical approaches, and build community among researchers and practitioners working on these issues.

The original panel focused on three focal groups – skilled trades workers, non-traditional caregivers, and veterans. This podcast series aims to be a recap and continuation of that conversation, and a way of opening the door to people who weren't in the room. Hannah also expands the lens beyond the original panel with an episode on the unwritten rules of professional life: the hidden curriculum of workplace norms and the way those rules land as barriers for people navigating stigmatized social identities, including social class and neurodivergence.

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Music: “Feel Good (Instrumental Version)” by PØW via Epidemic Sound

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References

Yung-Boxdell, H., Frerichs, V., Kiproff-Downer, L., Reiley, P. J., & Turner, S. M. (2026, April 30 - May 2). Expanding the Lens: I-O Practice Centering Overlooked Worker Groups [Alternative]. Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology Annual Conference, New Orleans, LA, United States.

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Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2025b, July 29). Unemployment rate for veterans was 3.0 percent in 2024. The Economics Daily. https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2025/unemployment-rate-for-veterans-was-3-0-percent-in-2024.htm

Carmichael-Tanaka, N., & Kang, B. Y. (2023). Applying an intersectional lens to consider disparities in historically marginalized women’s access to caregiving resources. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 16(2), 257–262. https://doi.org/10.1017/iop.2023.18

Desilver, D. & Lin, L. (2025, March 31). Blue-collar workers are less satisfied at work, less attached to their jobs than other U.S. workers. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/31/blue-collar-workers-are-less-satisfied-at-work-less-attached-to-their-jobs-than-other-us-workers/

Greenberg, E., Schaefer, E., & Weddle, B. (2024, April 9). Tradespeople wanted: The need for critical trade skills in the US. McKinsey & Company. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/tradespeople-wanted-the-need-for-critical-trade-skills-in-the-us

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McCauley, R., Ullah, H., Ditursi, A., Frerichs, V., Kiproff-Downer, L., Latham, G. P., Merlini, K. P., & Ahmad, A. S. (2025). Breaking barriers: Support strategies for non-traditional caregivers [Panel]. Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology Annual Conference, Denver, CO, United States.

Gabriel, A. S., Allen, T. D., Devers, C. E., Eby, L. T., Gilson, L. L., Hebl, M., Kehoe, R. R., King, E. B., Ladge, J. J., Little, L. M., Ou, A. Y., Schleicher, D. J., Shockley, K. M., Klotz, A. C., & Rosen, C. C. (2023). A call to action: Taking the untenable out of women professors’ pregnancy, postpartum, and caregiving demands. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 16(2), 187–210. https://doi.org/10.1017/iop.2022.111

Offermann, L., Gray, C. E., Bragger, J., & Laguerre, R. A. (2023). It takes a [helpful] village: Recognizing and minimizing unhelpful help to better support female caregivers in academia. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 16(2), 233–236. https://doi.org/10.1017/iop.2023.14

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Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP). (2023, November 28). Veteran inclusion strategies in the workplace: Insights from I-O psychology. https://www.siop.org/post/veteran-inclusion-strategies-in-the-workplace-insights-from-i-o-psychology

Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP). (2024, November 6). Leveraging industrial-organizational psychology to support veterans in the workplace. https://www.siop.org/post/leveraging-industrial-organizational-psychology-to-support-veterans-in-the-workplace

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Spector, P. E. (2024, April 7). It is time we started studying skilled trades workers. Paul Spector. https://paulspector.com/it-is-time-we-started-studying-skilled-trades-workers/

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Episode Transcript

[Intro]

Hey, y'all. Welcome to Office Hours at the Alignment Lab, where we explore what it really takes to align values, strategy, and behavior at work. I'm Hannah Yung-Boxdell, an organizational psychology practitioner, strategist, and systems architect. In Office Hours, we take an honest look at the human side of work and offer practical takeaways for evaluating what matters, what doesn't, and how to focus our attentions accordingly. Whether you're mid-career or in the executive suite,

The things you'll hear about in Office Hours can build careers and organizations that are effective, resilient, and aligned with what matters most to you.

[Chapter: Introduction to the Overlooked Workers Series]

Welcome to Office Hours at the Alignment Lab. If you're joining us for the first time, hello. I'm glad you're here. And if you've been along for the career development series or the introversion episode, welcome back. Today's is a solo episode opening our next series, which is about overlooked workers.

So a little background. I want to start where this came from. Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to organize and sit on an alternative panel session at the SIOP Annual Conference. SIOP being the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, a conference for both researchers and practitioners in the field.

so this alternative session was designed to be a bit more interactive and discussion-based than a traditional panel or symposium discussing research papers. The session was called Expanding the Lens, I-O Practice Centering Overlooked Worker Groups. And the purpose was threefold. First, to raise visibility of specific groups of workers who have been underserved by both research and practice in our field.

second, to discuss the unique characteristics and challenges of these focal groups and the ways that I-O psychology and people management more broadly have skimmed past them.

And third, to create space for researchers and practitioners with common focuses or issues that they're working on to find each other, to build a little community around topics and populations that don't get a proverbial seat at the table.

In addition to these three kind of primary focal groups, our panelists represented an array of practice areas: people analytics, talent management, organizational development, research across various industries and sectors, that included government, private, academia, in manufacturing, utilities, and consulting. Audience members

brought an even wider range of work contexts. So that last goal about building community, it really mattered a lot to the speakers in our panel. one of the things that I find most valuable about professional gatherings is when they create conditions for people who care about the same things to actually connect on a meaningful and practical level.

And the response to that session told me that there are a lot of people who likewise care about this and are hungry for this type of conversation and collaboration as well, this information sharing. That said, conferences have walls, right? And a lot of the people who care about this work or who are facing these unique challenges weren't necessarily in that room, whether because they couldn't attend or because they aren't plugged into that particular professional community.

Or because this work lives at the edges of multiple fields and frankly doesn't have a single obvious home. There's myriad reasons, right? So this series is a continuation of that session. It's a way, I hope, of opening the door a little wider.

[Chapter: Original Focal Groups: Skilled Trades, Non-Traditional Caregivers, and Veterans]

So the original session, I'll just share a little bit about that to kind of set the stage. The original session centered on three focal groups.

I want to introduce each of them briefly here because they're the anchor of this series and because I think that even a short introduction really makes clear why these conversations are worth having. So first, skilled trades workers. When I say skilled trades, we're talking about a pretty massive and diverse workforce, you know, includes construction and manufacturing, utilities industries, and more.

Around 15% of the workforce are considered skilled trades workers. That number swells to nearly 30% if you search by by terms like blue collar instead, which I'll say now, obviously, is not a straightforward synonym. In fact, language and terminology is not a small part of the conversations we have related to these workers.

But the point I was trying to make with these figures is that these workers are essential to the functioning of entire industries and to our broader economy. And yet, as the field of IO psychology has evolved, it has increasingly concentrated on office based work and management in its research questions, its methodologies, its tools, its assumptions. I know, look, I know that not all listeners here are IOs, right? But

This trend, I do think, is mirrored in the larger conversations we tend to have about work and workplaces in general. So the result is that a huge swath of the workforce has been largely left out of the frameworks and practices that shape how organizations hire, develop, retain, and support their people. How organizations think and what they think about. That gap has consequences, right? For workers, for organizations.

and for entire sectors that are already facing serious workforce challenges, and for society at large.

We also talked about non-traditional caregivers. When most people hear the word caregiver in a workplace context, they picture a parent with a young child, more often than not, a mom. And the field has made some progress on that particular population, right? Parental leave policies, child care benefits, some recognition of the tension between caregiver and career.

But non-traditional caregivers, people caring for elderly parents, disabled family members, chronically or seriously ill partners or siblings or other loved ones have largely been left out of that conversation. Workplace support systems for this group are rare, and the ones that do exist are often woefully inadequate. The challenges are often, I mean, frankly, invisible and encouraged to be. The demographic pressures that make this an urgent issue and

An aging population, more complex family structures, a fraying informal care infrastructure are only intensifying the pressure.

And finally, veterans. According to the VA, each year more than 200,000 service members transition into the civilian workforce in the US. Veterans represent a significant share of the working age population, I think over 17 million.

And yet they remain among the most undersupported groups in organizational life. Hiring initiatives, specifically targeting veterans, exist in only a small fraction of organizations, only about 13%, according to the Society of Human Resource Management, which is the largest HR professional society. That figure has likely actually declined since 2024 when it came out.

Since many of the programs designed to support veterans have been caught in the crossfire of recent cuts to diversity and inclusion initiatives. Moreover, veteran-focused initiatives tend to focus on hiring. Inclusion once hired is inconsistent at best. Moreover, nearly a third of working-aged veterans have a service-connected disability. We didn't focus on disabled workers as a separate focal group.

In our original discussion, but it was a layer. And it's an aspect of identity and experience that cut through all three groups, such is the nature of intersectionality, no? What these three groups share and what makes them overlooked in a specific sense is not just that they've been neglected, it's that the very frameworks, tools, and assumptions we use to think about workers and workplaces were built with someone else in mind.

And when that's the case, the gaps aren't random, right? They're structural.

I'll call something out here briefly. All the panelists, our experience, the numerical figures I just mentioned so far are based on the US workforce and US regulations, which anyone who lives or works here knows is a patchwork in and of itself. Still, these organizational habits of overlooking

Which as I said earlier span both research and practice, these are not unique to the United States.

[Chapter: Expanding the Lens]

So the conference was a starting point, and this series aims at capturing that starting point and pushing a little further. You know, true to the spirit of of the original discussion, which was to expand our lens. As part of this series, I've also had the opportunity to record a conversation that takes the lens of overlooked workers in another direction that the original session didn't explicitly go.

But I think it is deeply connected to the same underlying questions. And that episode is about the unwritten rules of professional life, the hidden curriculum of workplace norms and assumptions, and the way those rules land differently or land as barriers for people navigating stigmatized social identities, specifically social class and neurodivergence. It's a conversation about who gets to feel like they belong in professional environments.

And why so much of what determines that is invisible to so many.

I find this addition to the series really fitting because in a lot of ways it gets at the root system underneath the challenges we'll be discussing in each episode and with each group. the skilled trade worker navigating performance management and advancement systems designed for office roles. The non-traditional caregiver trying to use a flexible work policy that exists on paper but not in practice.

The veteran whose skills and experience, whose expertise isn't valued, recognized, or easily translated into a familiar format. These aren't just logistical mismatches. They're the result of assumptions so baked in that the people making decisions may not even be aware of them, probably aren't.

The thread running through all of it is the question of who our workplaces were designed for and what it costs when the answer is not everyone.

[Chapter: Intentions and Limitations]

So a quick word on who this series is for, because I always want to be transparent about my intentions and possible limitations. The guests in this series include people who work in talent management, organizational development, people analytics, and research, right? The conversation is grounded in evidence and applied practice. So if you're an I-O practitioner, an HR professional, a people manager, or a researcher.

Working anywhere near these topics, the series was made for you in mind, right? Because it has been adapted from a conference session with you in mind. As you know, I always try to try and come back to practical takeaways for application. So there are always a lot of questions about how do you handle this? But I also want to say clearly, you don't need to be any of those things to find value here. If you're a worker who's felt like the system

That you're in wasn't built for you, or you're someone who just feels strongly about creating places that are more actively inclusive and intentional, this is for you too. Or just if you're curious, this is always for you. This place is always for any curious minds. I often find myself saying this, but one person can do a lot.

Whether you're in a position of formal authority or not.

And as always on this podcast, the conversation will be rooted in both evidence and lived experience. I said that at the very beginning of office hours, that scientific study is not the only basis of knowledge, and I do mean that. The guests in this series bring research, yes, but they also bring their own experience doing this work in real organizations with real people under real constraints, real life. That combination is, I think, where

the most useful insights tend to live. And it's always a balance between, you know, speaking in kind of more universal truths that are widely applicable and specific experiences that can effectively reach and resonate with our own unique perspectives.

Finally, and this feels important to say, the series is meant to be a contribution to a community, not just a content delivery mechanism. One of the explicit purposes of the original conference session was to create space for researchers and practitioners working on similar, but maybe not the same problems.

To be able to find each other and connect to share knowledge. I hope this podcast can help do some of that work too. And if you're out there working on issues related to overlooked workers in whatever capacity from whatever field, I would very much love to hear from you. Please send me an email, a message, whatever.

So that's the setup. In the episodes ahead, you'll hear conversations on skilled trades workers and what thoughtful talent practice looks like when you're actually centering that workforce on non-traditional caregivers and the gaps they can get caught in between what organizations offer and what they actually need as employees, and on the hidden curriculum of professional norms and the workers who pay the highest price for rules they were never taught, and more.

I'm really proud of this series and how it's shaping up and to the guests who made time for these conversations. I think you'll find them as thoughtful and practically grounded as I did. And as always, if something resonates or if it reminds you of someone who should hear it, please share it with them. If you have any thoughts, questions, or your own experiences with any of these topics.

Please reach out at officehours at alignmentlab.online.

Until next time, stay curious.