I followed the problems no one else wanted to own and ended up in HR operations

Welcome to the Built by People podcast where we share the stories and insights of the world's top executive leaders. Join us as we dive deep into the minds of executives, uncovering their strategies, challenges and triumphs in shaping today's workforce. That's previe. Now let's jump in and get started with our next guest.

Welcome to the Built by People podcast. Today I'm joined with Kelly Timpain. Kelly, thanks for joining me today.

Absolutely.

Hey, to start out, I'd love to hear about your career journey. Maybe the unexpected turns, what ultimately led you to where you are today.

Sure. So I actually didn't set out to be in hr. I feel like that's kind of a common theme. A lot of people sort of fall into it. I wanted to be a teacher kind of my whole life. And in hindsight that still makes a lot of sense because my work has always centered on helping people to function better inside the systems they're part of, whether that's in a school or now in business. And when I was studying for education, I worked at a part time daycare. When I left, I realized I really missed the kids, but not the job itself. So I started looking at what do I really enjoy, what classes, what types of, you know, parts of other jobs that I've done. And it really centered around math, statistics, business, law, a lot of problem solving. And I realized HR seemed to sit at that intersection of people, systems, processes. So a mentor I was talking with said, you know, take some classes, see if it fits. Start out as an HR assistant, do generalist work, get exposure to the whole function and then see what seems like it really catches your interest. So my first 15 years I really was working broadly in generalist roles, but I always gravit, gravitated toward the operational side. Technology, data, process improvement. It was just sort of what I always did when I went in. So eventually about 10 years ago, I started working for larger companies and specializing in HR operations. Sometimes that included total rewards, benefits and comp setting. Sometimes it was just the operational side without that. My most recent role has been a global people operations role where it was across all regions of the globe and enterprise wide, kind of that HR operations piece. I call it lovingly the techie nerdy side of hr. So I didn't really, I didn't fall into HR necessarily as a whole, but I followed the problems no one else wanted to own and ended up in HR operations.

That's great as you use your vast experience and you know the different roles that you've had current state, what are your top priorities Right now it's really

in almost every organization, it's sort of the same thing. Looking at how to reduce friction, improve decision clarity with analytics, ensure the organization can scale without burning people out. And that means focusing a lot of time and energy on operating model. What's the right model for HR for the organization? It's very different depending on the size of the company and how quickly you're scaling, reducing risk, cleaning data, there's a lot of that and making sure that your systems are really supporting good decision making, that they're connecting not just within hr, but that that data is speaking to and flowing to other enterprise systems. It's really, really important to have all of that connected and reduce the manual touch points as much as possible in terms of putting in the data.

No, that makes a lot of sense. What's one initiative you rolled out recently that you're really proud of?

At my last role, we were really growing rapidly. A lot of acquisition, a lot of organic growth into new global markets. And over about the past three years, I really pushed forward with standardizing the HR operating model, the systems, the processes, and had to sort of do it before everything felt ready. Which is a little bit doesn't feel safe. It felt safer to wait until, oh, we have more things in place. But sometimes you kind of have to do it ahead of the growth and be thoughtful about because you have a lot of compliance, there's a lot of decision risk and there's a lot of chaos if you have a whole lot of people and a whole lot of different business units and everybody's doing things different ways. So it really kind of was a few years of a phased approach of moving more things centralized into an HR operations actual center of expertise and out of the business unit, hr and kind of proving out to them and to their leaders that look, it actually works this way. It's more efficient, it frees up your business partners to time to really focus more on that strategic piece. And over time the chaos did quiet, the decisions got cleaner and hr I think was able to really shift from more of that reactive to strategic. So even though it felt safer to wait, it really would have Been far riskier. And I think it was a really, really good rollout overall. You know, just took some thought and some time.

I love that. That's awesome. You know, over the course of this podcast, I've been able to interview a lot of different people leaders. One thing that really stands out is employee communication. Employee communication is just becoming harder and harder across every organization. So what's one area you're trying to improve engagement through better communication? Or how do you approach making sure employees actually see, understand, and act on the information that's sent out?

Yeah, that's a really good question. And it is. It's such a difficult area to balance between the amount of messages that employees receive and making sure that they do get the information they need. I think one of the things that's really changed over the past couple of years is making sure that you have that information going in different channels. Because especially with the different, you know, different generations in the workforce, different work styles and work habits, people are getting their. Their work information in all different ways. Now. They might have things that they're getting through Twitter, they might have things through LinkedIn, through internal messaging sites, through teams, through all different channels. And in my experience, hopefully it's not like this for everyone, but in my experience, if I saw even an email coming from hr, I might ignore it. I hate to say that, but if there's a lot of communication constantly coming out, it kind of just becomes background noise. So we really tried to make sure one, it was short and clear. You don't want the employee to have to read paragraphs and paragraphs, give them some highlights, some bullet points, add images if you can, because that draws the attention more and keeps the focus slightly longer. Try to provide things in fun, you know, video clips about what's coming up and put it on the intranet, put a message out by email, put something out live. Just really focusing on that clarity over the volume of messages and in delivering it in multiple channels and depending on how important it is, also making sure you get out there in front of them, whether that means live in person or doing some virtual sessions. It could be presentations. It could even be just having some open office hours where they can come in and ask questions.

What tools or platforms are most essential for your operations today?

Definitely strong core HR systems and ones that either will speak to each other. Well, if it's multiple systems, and that's fine. Some places decide to do that. There might be a specific timekeeping system that you have to do as a government contractor or a pharmaceutical company or Something with different regulations, but you can still use multiple systems and make sure that they're integrated and connected. And whether that's knowledge you have within HR or you go to the IT team, it's really important to make sure that the data you have in HR on your people is flowing through to all those other systems. Especially if you're trying to be able to match up metrics between them. It's really good to be able to show things like, okay, this is how many sales we're getting in through Salesforce or whatever other system you're using, and it's happening through these people. And by the way, this is what the turnover looks like in that department. And hopefully that means, you know, maybe it's the ones with fewer turnover have better results, who knows? But it's really essential to link that data together and be able to use it to make informed business decisions. And I think a big part of that also is the analytics, the workflow, and having good data governance. One of the best things that we had as a tool, not necessarily a hardware tool, but a tool at our disposal for how to make sure things really tied together was we had a governance team that was across all different functions, the people that really worked with the technology and we met regularly and it was a master, master data governance. So if we had something like an acquisition coming in, we would work really tightly together between it, finance, legal, hr, different functions, the business unit, and make sure that we had all the timing right. You know, if we're loading this data into our HR system, it's going to flow at this time to it, then it's going to show up in our emails. Well, have we announced that acquisition yet? We don't want people internally to start seeing things before they even know what happened. So it's really the tools, both in terms of the systems, but also what processes and governance and guardrails can you set up?

If we sat down again in 12 months from now, what would you have hoped has changed most in your organization?

I think not in the particular place, but kind of in general. Calmer organizations that have fewer workarounds, fewer band aids on the systems and the processes. You know, having things that are clear data and decisions so that leaders can spend less time putting out fires. I'm at a point in my career where I'm really trying to be thoughtful about where I bring this type of work next. And it's really, you know, the problems themselves are still what motivate me. I often had in pretty much every organization, if there was a problem that someone didn't know what function to give it to or who could solve it, it would end up on my desk, and they knew that I would figure it out somehow. That even happened with AI. My boss gave me a goal a couple years ago that was literally to, quote, figure out AI for hr. And at the time, I hadn't done much with AI. I said, well, what does that mean? She said, I don't know if anybody can figure out, it's you, so go figure it out. Now, a few AI certifications later and a lot of interest and passion for it, there's a lot you can do with AI, and that's something that I think really 12 months from now, we're going to see that a lot more in the workplace, in kind of the business field in general.

If you could leave one piece of advice for our community, Kelly, something maybe you wish you had known early in your career or for an aspiring leader, what would it be?

That's a great one, too. I think the biggest thing is you don't need permission to lead. You just need to have the courage. And you might not have the title of a leader, but if you step up and you do the work, people will follow you, you know, and if you see a problem already, it's already your responsibility to do something about it. I've seen, you know, too many times where people will see problems that are recurring and they'll say something about, oh, this problem is here, but they don't really stop to go, okay, well, is that a systemic problem? Is this the one off? Am I seeing this a lot? Should I try and figure out how to fix it? Or maybe bring someone in the loop that's a resource who could fix it? Not everybody is that same type of problem solver, you know, analytical data type person. But if you see it, bring it up. Try and pull in the right resources. Because looking at those problems that continue over time, time and time again, it's going to really improve things. And if you're the one to spot it and bring it to the table and bring a solution, a couple of proposed solutions, you're going to become that person that the leaders go to.

Kelly, this is great. Thank you for your time today. Thanks for being on the Build by People podcast and everything you're doing.

Absolutely happy to be here and can't wait to listen to more of your episodes.

Awesome.

Thank you, thank you.