Name: Redefining HR’s Role at the Leadership Table
Uploaded: 2025-06-26T12:01:10.936Z
Duration: 37 min 34 s
Description: Redefining HR’s Role at the Leadership Table

Transcript for "Redefining HR’s Role at the Leadership Table": introduction of myself. My name is Shay Stecker. I lead our UK and Ireland teams here at Rippling, and I will be the moderator today. The objective today is to to openly talk about the transformation that HR has had over the last five years and why HR needs a seat at the decision making table, how to earn it, and ultimately, how to keep it. I'm thrilled to be here with our exceptional panel of HR leaders. I will start with Becca Thompson, head of people at Flawless AI, brings a wealth of experience working with a number of different executive teams, which we'll get in today. Hello, Becca. Hi. I'm excited to be here. And next, Selena Purdy, head of people at SurrealDB, who has a really interesting approach by seeing employees as subscribers, to company culture, which we'll get into for sure today. Selena, welcome. Hi. I can kick off, I think, the the theme will be why HR is getting a seat at the table. And I'll start with you, Selena, if that's alright. Why do you think HR is finally being seen as a more strategic function? You know, what do you think has shifted? Yeah. I wish more executives actually see HR as a strategic, function. But I do think we are being brought into a lot more of those conversations more recently with, you know, the economical instability, COVID, you know, wars. So much going on that we are kind of having that conversation a bit earlier. But, I also think it's our responsibility to proactively seek that strategic involvement. If you think about any business and what they spend their money on, a huge amount of that will be their people. Not just salaries, but when we're thinking about, the attracting them, the benefits, taxes, and so on. So if we are responsible for one of the largest amounts of spend of the business, We should also be responsible for guiding how that money is spent. And so, really, we need to be thinking about how can we align all of the initiatives we have in people directly to the business initiatives. Because there's so many things that we can do that can directly influence costs and overall impact, to the business. So I think we're starting to have that conversation. I think we're gonna talk about it later a little bit about how we change the mindset in HR from being sort of just a reactive function to more proactive. But also, yeah, we should be having a seat on the table because of everything that's going on on the changes. We need to start thinking differently and adapting. Yeah. Makes total sense. The largest line item being the employees of the company. Makes sense to invest into the resources there. Becca, I'd love to hear from you on what are the things that you do differently compared to, say, five years ago, when it comes to influencing, the executives of the business? Yeah. A hell of a lot. I think part of it is trial and error and learning through things I've done well and things I have not done well. But part of it is I think I'm much more thoughtful about how I work with executive leaders now versus, versus a few years ago. So something I do each time I'm working with a new leader is think deeply about how they consume information, and I have that conversation with them upfront. So, this has actually been really interesting for me recently because we've gone through a CEO transition. So, what I did with our previous CEO, he was really open about the fact that he likes to consume information audibly. So for him, the best way to get across the most important things, that he should consume or I really wanted to hit home, he was like, just talk to me. Talk to me. So we did everything, like all the big things. We were doing our one to ones. I wouldn't send emails about it. I wouldn't create really long decks. I tried that at first and and I realized that was not the right way to, get that across with him. And it was great because he was really self aware of that. So it was quite easy to learn how to communicate with him. Thinking about our new CEO, for him, he's in a different location to me, eight hour difference, in time. So with him, he's really clear that he has to, like, async. He likes to have his time blocked so he can really get heads down and and think about different topics. So I do Loom videos, quick, kinda max ten, fifteen minutes, where I send over an update of what works on the people team, or our people metrics. I do a people metrics Loom video. And that means that, actually, the things that I really want to make sure, he understands and he's aware of, they go they get through. And it's the same with how I target information. And, again, this is something I do quite differently is I used to make these really long decks, really long engagement survey decks with, like, loads of scores. Really hard for CEOs who are understandably focusing on so many different things to consume that level of information. So I give a lot less information now and target it to what I think they're gonna care about the most. So naturally CEOs are going to care about speed and productivity and particularly the stage that we're at a flawless early stage, startup. We've just got our product market fit. So for us, it's sorry, I lost my train of thought. It's coming back to me. It's coming back to me. So that I apply that lens, with everything I send over to him. And so, for example, rather than sending over these big decks that I used to send, I'll send two pages. My people metrics update is, two pages. And I'll always include the feedback score because I know that constructive feedback is gonna lead to high quality work. So that's one of the most critical ones to send. EMPS, it's actually not something that's super important, because it only really focuses on one question. I want to understand the bigger picture and all the different focus areas. And then I think about this in terms of the other project I've faced that I share. So it's onboarding as an example. Rather than sharing some of the things that we care about in our team, so things like, how good people are building their relationship with their manager? Are they building relationships with their peers? What's the onboarding program success been? These are all things that really matter. And, of course, they matter to CEOs as well. But the one thing that I share with him is time to, value. How quickly are people getting up to speed and getting productive, because that's a great measure of how successful our onboarding program is. And then the other thing that I do really differently, and I know Selena is 100% on the same page as me here is working as a product team. So the way I lead our team rather than leading it in a more traditional project way is running it like a product team in terms of sprints, building MVPs, retro is the way we work. So I know we're gonna get into that in loads more detail, and Selena, has a great approach. So, yeah, we will dive into that in more, but that's the biggest change I would say. No. No. Eager to to dive in. I will just say, it's such a good call out to upfront have the conversation with your manager or your leader or the executive around how best do you consume information. I know there are some executives that much prefer a long text, you know, amount of text and read on their own terms, Or is there maybe another option of send a Loom video or keep it very concise in a few bullet points? It's such a great call out, Becca. I'd I'd love to transition now into the we covered the why. I'd love to get into, really the how. Like, how to get your seat at the, the executive table. And so back to you, Selena. What helped you build credibility with your board or with your, senior leadership team? Yeah. I think just piggybacking of exactly what Becca said, not just asking, you know, how you like to receive information, but what matters to you in the business. And so as, people leaders, we touch all areas of the business. We're actually quite lucky in that regard that we have the ability to interact with all areas and be that conduit to the business. And so, what I do a lot of the time, I spend a lot of time with the different leaders to kind of understand what matters to them, how can we help, and then also you can really learn from them. So during my time at Founders Factory, there's a really amazing product team. I spent a lot of time with the product team there, and I learned how they worked with the early stage businesses in terms of helping them solidify their, proposition to growth. And they helped me really understand. If you think about the end to end people experience as our people product, we are the product managers for that end to end experience, and everything that we're doing is to try to improve that for the employee. I actually, yesterday, was speaking to someone who almost took a bit of offense at the idea of, like, we're thinking of them as a user instead of an employee. But my thinking is, like, back in the day, like, HR is, like, human capital. You thought of this capital as an output. Right? That's really not very useful, whereas in with this way of thinking, what we're looking at is each employee, you're really valuable to us as a people, leader because you're the user of our people product. You're the one who's gonna be subscribing to us, and we need to keep you subscribing to our culture and not churn and go elsewhere. And so you become more valuable as a user, although it's not a nice term user, as, rather than just, you know, human capital that is, you know, an arbitrary number. And so the way that we kind of shift that mindset is that you think about all of the touch points you have as an employee. So that comes from, like, from the very beginning, you're looking at a job description all the way through to, you know, your promotion. You're gonna be interacting with the people team whether you know it or not over loads of different touch points. And then what we're gonna do, is try to optimize this to make your people experience amazing and keep you subscribing to us, the whole time. So what I've started to do is do a lot of employee interviews. How can we get some of feedback for what you'd like to see and improve? Build that into our product roadmap. I also think it's really important that you make a product like a a road map for the people too. And all the initiatives you're working on, make that public because there's always gonna be, an inherent interest of employees to kind of work on something that they're feeling a pain on right now. What they don't realize is there's loads of other things that are happening in that branch. So by making it public, it gives you a lot of time to be able to focus on things, and also gives a lot of transparency to other people so they can see that actually, you know, although you might not be focusing on compensation right now, it's on the road map. It's down here, and they know that, you know, you've heard the levels that have been heard. And then what we try to do is think about every new initiative. I think there's a product feature. So let's say we are looking at revamping how we deliver feedback. So what is the minimal viable product that we could release to see if what we're doing is working rather than rehauling everything that we're doing in terms of feedback and reviews. And then, you know, doing a big initiative and then it lands and it's bit flat. So what we do is mini test. So we'll get a small group of people. We'll test out maybe a new tool on how would you think about we'll give them a bit of training. What's the smallest thing we can do, and then we will think about, you know, doing a retro afterwards. So we can constantly iterate and improve before launching a really big hefty project that often takes months. You can do something in a matter of weeks, so it could be a lot quicker. And then also, again, as I mentioned about the retros, that part is super, super important in terms of helping us learn and adapt and keep going. So I think that's definitely a way that we can be more strategic, and it also means that we're speaking the same language as the leaders. So it gives you a little more credibility when you're in those exact meetings because we're talking about what matters to the business, but with the people lens. Yeah. It's a really cool, refreshing look at, just kinda holistically that what all goes into the employee experience and, like, whether you're engaging with the function or it's happening in the background, like, every step along the way. Really, really cool. Becca, I'll I'll turn it over to you. I I'd be curious. What advice would you give to an HR leader who knows they have strategic ideas, but maybe struggle to to get the airtime? Yeah. So I think I might talk a little bit about problem statements, and how they work, and that's kinda everything that Selena just talked about is a huge actually, huge part of getting that seat at the table. I think, I'll go into a bit of a deep dive into the first stage, which is problem statements because I think that can really help if you're somebody who, is struggling to get that seat. So, something that I do whenever starting a brand new project is think very deeply about the problem. I think the easiest way for me to talk about this is with an example. So I'll talk about manager development. If you think about how I approached manager development in the past, it was quite broad brush, whereas what we're doing now, we're currently working on manager development as one of our focus areas, is really diving deep into the specific things that we want to try and achieve. So before even thinking about what does our program look like, we built out a problem statement. So we thought about what do our managers struggle with? Well, the struggle with hard conversations, explaining the why behind company decisions, something they find difficult, giving that constructive feedback, having difficult conversations like compensation conversations. We know that that is a real core of what our managers are struggling with. Then we thought about why. Well, we have a huge population of freelance, former freelance people, who've come from because we're in the, in the film industry, a lot of people it's their first job as a manager in a in a more typical company, which is understandable that they don't know how to do this and that they're struggling with articulating it. We also have a lot of junior and new managers who have been kind of homegrown and are new to this, so that's another factor in it. And then we think about the impact of that. So people, because of their managers struggling with these conversations, don't always understand the why behind, you know, a real or maybe there's been some redundancies. It's difficult for them to really dig into, okay, why has this happened, or why is my compensation the way that it is? Or and they're not getting that constructive feedback so much. So that means that that's actually affecting the quality of the work that they're doing. What that means is that we can target what we're building at a very specific business problem, and that helps in terms of getting that airtime right because with the way that you're talking about it isn't I wanna develop our managers. It's really important. We all know that. It's here are the problems that we're seeing. Here's why, and here's what specifically what we're gonna target. And then going on to the next stage is involving them in the solution. So I always involve our leaders in creating the solution. And when as a for example, we'll give you another example, thinking about performance management. We recently built out our performance framework, and I spent time interviewing all our leaders. And the questions, rather than focusing about what do you want this to look like, it was very focused on what outcomes do we want, what are we trying to achieve, what have you seen in others that you hate because most most performance framework understandably, there's a little bit of resentment. Why do I have to spend my time doing this? So it's like, what are the problems that you see? What do we actually want to achieve with this? And then that means that we can also look at different responses across different leaders and see what are some of the differences and how can we what are we actually gonna go go after? What are we really going to try and achieve with our framework? So it means that we can be very specific and targeted in terms of the outcomes that we're looking for. So, again, I think involving them in the solution can be can be a biggie. Yeah. For sure. And especially, like, leading with the problem statement, I think, is is a key piece there. Wonderful. So we've covered the why. We've transitioned to the how. And now we're transitioning to sort of, arguably the most important piece, which is, like, how to keep your seat at the executive table. And so I'd love to to go back to Selena. What are some common traps HR leaders may fall into after they've gained access? So let's call it the executive board or the leadership table. Yeah. I mean, I think like, what Becky and I are talking about is a huge mindset shift from the traditional way of doing people. And so a common pitfall will be kind of reverting back to the tactical. They often, you know, we will be faced with, loads of ER issues as an example. And, things are being escalated that we need to kind of get involved with. It's very reactive, and it's really hard to carve that time to take a moment to be strategic, to think about, you know, the problem statement, what matters to our business because you're so involved in the day to day. And so I think it takes a bit of effort. And, that is the yeah. One of the pitfalls is being seen as that reactive resource, that could be pulled upon. So, I think a good way to counteract that is to make sure again, like like I said, I'm just gonna echo everything you've already said. But it's, just ensuring, you know, what matters to each leader, business leader, and making sure that you are showing them information in the way that they like to get information and make sure that you're speaking their language. I also think one of the things that, is a a surefire way for you to lose your seat is being too nice. I don't mean that in, you have to be a horrible person. I just mean if you're scared to have some of those conversations, that can be quite controversial. So one example that we've had quite recently is talking really candidly about runway and whether or not we share that publicly, with the rest of the team. I say publicly. I mean, with the rest of the team or not. Because runway in an early stage business, that impacts everything. Like, people's moves, people's job security, this how we spend, how we behave. And if you don't share that with the rest of their employees, but their budgets are getting cut or expecting them to behave in a different way to extend one way, we're not really setting them up for success because we're not giving a lot of the transparency that we need. So, you sometimes have to have some really difficult conversations and challenge back with founders in, things that maybe they think is right, and you just have to stick to your guns. And most of the time, make sure that we're back to our data because that's always very important. And also inviting yourself into more conversations. Obviously, everything I'm saying, I understand everyone is time poor and, has a lot of workload in the people team. But you need to cut time to make sure you're in those conversations, that you insert yourself in strategic and exact conversations and have a point of view of things because often, you know, we actually have a lot more information than, other people may realize. You know, we have I have personally one on ones with every single, manager where we talk not to say about their team, but them and the business in general. So there's a lot of information that actually we hold that can influence our decision making. That could be anything from whether we want to expand our engineering team through to the new product offering, whether we think that's gonna be useful. Yeah. If I were to play that back, it's like, you know, increase the volume of conversations that you're having with the executives, lead with data, or make sure that you're armed with data, and sort of come with, you know, Kim Scott's, radical candor in terms of how you're delivering, delivering the news or the feedback or whatever it may be. I love it. Becca, what do you think the next evolution of strategic HR looks like in your view? Yeah. There's a couple of things. One thing I just wanted to pick up on on what Selena said actually in terms of making sure that you're, like, invited and inviting yourself to things. I actually think that's a massive thing that we can all do in our roles. Sometimes people don't include us automatically. Sometimes and it's easy for our heads to go, why aren't they included? Do they not value us? But actually, if I think about, like, my situation when I started at Flawless, one of our CEOs was a film director, and he'd not worked with the people team in the same way before. So part of my job is actually to say, here's how you use me, and here's how you can work with me in the best way, and let me demonstrate that. So I just invite myself to loads of stuff. So I think that is a really important point. In terms of the next evolution, I think the biggest thing is gonna be about working as a product team and using design thinking. So thinking about what's that problem statement, treating you employees and leaders, as users, creating user personas when you're building something out, when you're building out performance framework. For example, we have a persona of somebody who feels like this is pointless and a waste of my time because loads of people feel like that. And then it's important to actually acknowledge that and call that out and think about how can we how can we target those users. So that's a really important thing to do. And then tons of iteration to Selena's point earlier, getting an MVP out there, seeing how it goes. It's way lower stakes to get something out there that is, much more simple version, and you can see how it goes, see how it lands than spending tons of time on something, that you might put out there or not doesn't really land as you thought because sometimes we have these ideas that we think are great and then in practice, naturally, sometimes it doesn't land as we hope. So definitely getting something out there and iterating on it. I think it's actually sometimes in our roles, we don't think it's as safe as it actually is to chuck something out there, see how it lands, and then change it if it doesn't. And if you're really open about the fact that you're doing that with employees, then actually they I found they're really open to that change. So I think design thinking is is the biggest one. The other one, naturally, I think is automation. This is something that, it's so easy for us as Salinas said. We are so time poor in our roles. I don't think I've ever heard of people either saying, that they have spare time or they they have everything that they want to work on, they can work on. So as much as we can, automating things can help. And I think it's also important to think about automation as this can actually improve the user experience. So with our onboarding, we are very thoughtful. We've built built up a set of automations. We're thoughtful about at what point does what notification go to this person. So, you know, a week before somebody's probation meeting, we just send something out to managers reminding them of the guidance of how to hold the meeting in the right way. We schedule the meeting for them automatically. It all happens by default, and we give the guidance to employees as well. And it means that they're not getting overwhelmed with lots of information at once, and, actually, the quality of the conversation is better. So, automation saves time 100%. It also makes what you're doing higher quality and means that it's more impactful. So I think that's the other biggie. Yeah. I mean, so well said. I think there is, so much to be done or that HR leaders can lean in on to optimize the employee experience. And it feels like there's nothing more disruptive to that work than admin work. Right? Being bogged down with some type of administrative burden of just operating as a business. And so if we can automate away the admin work and have HR leaders focus on their people, it's just a night and day difference in terms of the experience of that company. Okay. Quick fire round. I know we've got only a few minutes left. In one sentence, what's your personal mantra or top tip for HR leaders who want to lead, not just support the business? And so maybe we can kick off with you, Selena. I repeat probably what we said before, but it's all, like, start with why. Like, figure out what is the problem that you're trying to solve. And, actually, I've got a second one now just because I've just picked up on what you said, Becca, which is about automation. It takes a lot of time to set things up at the beginning, but it is so worth it. And a lot of the time, people leaders feel like automations could be a bit icky in things like onboarding because it's such a human process of bringing someone through. But we found it to be incredibly useful, and it's thoughtful automations like you just said, Becca, where it's just before a review, here's the guidelines of how to give feedback. Or just before, you know, this, key, probation meeting, here's the details of the person and the thing their feedback that they filled out. So it's doing automations with care, and definitely, 10 x your efficiency for sure. For sure. I love it. And Becca? I'm gonna try to keep it to one sentence. My, I I think the biggest thing that we can do, actually, so for everything that we've talked about is we choice into what we're building. I think your what you're building and what you're doing is gonna be so much more impactful if you include an element of choice. So, for example, with a performance and review or reflection, we make we have two mandatory questions and then two, you have your pick from a list. It means that people can focus on things that they want to focus on. And with everything we do, we try to make sure there's an element of choice so that what we do is actually more impactful those individuals because we all consume things in a different way. We all like different music. Some like podcast. You know, some people like videos, and it's the same with what we're doing in our team. So we try and give an element of choice, and then it means what you're doing is much more impactful to that individual. Yeah. I feel like I've I've heard that theme today, and that's so true. Well, look, I wanna thank you both for your time and everybody who has attended. That is it for the webinar. I hope everybody has a great rest of their day. Thank you so much. See you, Selena. See you, Becca. Bye bye. Am I on? There, Selena. Hello. Hey, Selena. How are you? Not bad. Thank you. Amazing. Amazing. I do wanna, just thank everybody who attended the webinar today, and we can jump straight away into the q and a. I think there are some great questions that came from, the cohort. And so if it's alright, Selena, I'll ask a few your way. Yeah. Of course. Amazing. The first came from Adele. As a small start up company less than 10, what would you say the best way to help shift mindset? So our founder sees me as a leader in this role in my own right and not just, say, a conduit for the founder decisions. That's a really good question. And especially when you're in a small business, effectively, you know, our roles are to help support, but to be seen as a leader in your own right, especially if you disagree with some of the decisions or you want to make a point across. I think we go back to what Becca said previously. Now what matters to each of the leaders that you're working with? How do they like to receive information? What are the things that they care about? And then frame any of your thinking around that. So for example, I had a CEO who really wanted everyone to be back in the office, five days a week. This is about three years ago no. Two years ago now. And he and the main thing that I had to kind of speak to him about, was just to understand the why. So, like, why was he thinking about this? And his belief was that we had a lot of underperformance, and he believed that that performance was because of, lack of, you know, visibility of what's going on and people being in the office. So, we had to think about how can we work with them in a better way to, understand exactly, like, the underlying performance issues and then come up with ideas from that. And so really look at how they like to receive information, what data is important to them, and present that. So really have a data informed conversation. That's really important to get leverage with the leadership team, but understanding what matters to them. And so therefore, you can have discussions when they decide to make decisions. Yeah. Perfect. So well said. Yeah. Data first. Like, let, data drive behavior or inform the conversation. And I love I think it's really important to oh, sorry, Shay. Just to, interrupt there. The difference between, like, being data led as well and data informed. Because sometimes if you just rely on data, you can make bad decisions because the date might be messy. But just be data informed. So, like, give use that as part of your argument, but don't be totally swayed because you need to really understand exactly where you're getting that data from as well. For sure. Yeah. No. And I I was just gonna close out that it's such a good call out, to to talk with your leaders first and learn how they like to be communicated with, whether it be Slack or Loom videos or, live in person meetings, all that fun stuff. Okay. Great. Next question from Melanie. How do you make sure people topics get the same focus and priority as areas like finance, engineering, ops, and, SLT meetings? Yeah. I hear this all the time. And Becca and I, actually, I think we both agree. It's about just inviting yourself in, pushing your way in, and elbowing your way in because it is sometimes seen as an afterthought. I was actually speaking to a company today. It was a a director of ops at a different company. And, we were talking about doing lunch and learns and how it's really important that everyone could really understand what everyone's working on and a way to kind of build that because they're a remote first company. And she was saying how, they have a lot of the engineering teams, talking, the product teams, all the other teams, but ops and people weren't included. And the topic was around AI and automation. And, you know, we also are using leading ed top technology. We're also active there. So what she did is she just took some of that time, and she inserted herself in. And I think that's exactly what you have to do because it can be overlooked if you don't set the precedent at the beginning. And if you're trying to build your credibility, when attention is focused on maybe sales or maybe engineering or product, that's totally understandable. But, I think it's about inserting yourself and just making yourself present. And as Becky Becky said earlier, making people understand how they can work with us and how we can be utilized as a function because it's often misunderstood. We are seen as a reactive back office often. And, to be proactive and to have a voice, we need to just carve that time and just reeducate. So I would advise small steps. You're not it's not gonna happen overnight, but just showing how you can add value. So maybe, you know, speak when you're speaking with a finance leader as an example, and you've got some ideas on how we can spend the people spend, you being the voice to bring that up in the SLT meetings. And also understanding what matters to the business. You know, if the business is focused on international expansion right now and they're wanting to hire, like, open an office in New York as an example, but you think, actually, that could be better spent. We could find better talent if they were remote in the different states in The US. You should be bringing that up to the SLT meetings, and that should be a worthy conversation. People will then start to see you as more strategic. So, yeah, my advice would be invite yourself in. Yeah. Yeah. Nice. I I feel like, Selena, that was a bit of almost a theme in in, today's webinar in in in many ways, which is great. I think one more question, which is good. We, I like the framing of this, and maybe we can spend a little bit more time digging in, which is, what are executive leaders expecting from HR today that they didn't expect five years ago? Yes. A very good question. I think just related to what we're talking about before is there is an expectation that we become more holistic and have a more holistic understanding of the business needs. So we're not just focusing on people and our sphere, but we have a better, deeper understanding of how our business works so we can be more, create more advice and, more valuable. So create more value with our advice. But, also, I think what they're what they're expecting, and I think this is what everyone is expecting, is that we are adopting newer technologies and using them well. So AI automations, like, we should be using them right now in creative ways and bringing that up to the table for execs to see. That keeps coming up again and again. The amount of people that I speak to and, different leaders and different businesses, they're always asking. And and how are you being different? How are you building automations to make your life easier? How are you using AI in the people experience? How are you using AI in attracting talent, in evaluating talent in all of these different areas? And I think that one is an expectation. It's not even, you know, a question anymore. It's just you should be you are using it. How are you doing that? Yeah. Yeah. It's so interesting how, like, just as it as little as five years ago, that question wasn't being asked, let alone now it's assumed, and the question is how it's being used, I think speaks to how quickly both, you know, AI has moved. But just, you know, innovative companies have allowed for automations to unlock period specific to the HR space. Super, super interesting. I believe that's, that concludes our q and a session. I wanna thank you again, Selena, for your time. This was really, really awesome. And so thank you to everybody who's still here for the live q and a. I hope everyone has a wonderful rest of their Thursday and weekend. Thanks so much. Bye. See you, Selena. Bye bye.