Lamari Brayboy Lii

▶0:42IntroWelcome to the Built by People podcast, where we share the stories and insights of the world's top HR leaders. Join us as we dive deep into the minds of HR executives, uncovering their strategies, challenges, and triumphs in shaping today's workforce.

▶1:21HostI'm excited to welcome Lamari to the Built by People podcast. Lamari, thank you so much for joining us today. And as a starting question, I always like to ask if you could share a little bit more about your career journey.

▶1:31GuestYeah, absolutely. So by education, I'm a lawyer. I thought that I was very passionate about practicing law in the traditional sense and corporate law in particular. My mother was a corporate attorney for the AG's office back in Chicago, so I followed in her footsteps. But I quickly found out as I got into the workforce that having windowless courtrooms with tons of cases was not as exciting as I thought it was going to be. So it was recommended to me to get into consulting, and it was there that I really fell in love with training people, coaching them into their next career path, and really just fell in love with HR. So. From there, we started our own consulting firm that grew. I would call it a boutique consulting firm, but we grew from just a handful of people to about 120 to 150 people, where I held interim roles for a number of different companies, like the Boots Alliance or the Nike Foundation in Canada, which was very instrumental to my learning to see those global structures all the way down to smaller organizations like nonprofits and some PE backers. That's a little bit about my journey into how I stumbled into HR.

▶2:51HostLamari, can you share a specific example where you successfully demonstrated the ROI of an HR initiative to secure funding? And what approach did you use to articulate the business value?

▶3:03GuestYeah, I think that's great. That's something that we need to focus more on as an HR function. And in fact, in a previous organization, we were facing really high turnover among mid-level managers, which was impacting productivity and morale. And so we proposed a targeted leadership development program with a budget of about $250K is what we were asking for, which seemed quite significant to the leadership at the time. But we conducted the cost-benefit analysis comparing current cost of turnover including recruitment, onboarding, and primarily the loss of productivity because that firm was also a people service or consulting firm where we made our money off of billable hour utilization. So we projected the outcomes of what that program would be. And so, for example, we were able to reduce turnover by just 10% and save the business about $1 million annually.. And we also benchmarked that against similar industries for that external validation when we were presenting this. And so by presenting both those qualitative and quantitative measures, we received that full funding. And within a year, we saw a 15% reduction in management turnover and a 20% increase in internal promotions, which further reinforced the value of the investment because with those promotions, we were able to bill at a higher rate to our clients by saying that we had more or a higher competency when it came to certain roles

▶4:46Hostand professions. Omari, what strategies have you found most effective for HR professionals to become more business savvy and integrate financial metrics into their planning and decision-making process?

▶4:56GuestYeah, enabling HR professionals to be in cross-functional conversations and planning is key, right? Every single member of our talent team, we considered ourselves at one point in time a flat organization, which we know as HR people, there are pros and cons to that. But one of the biggest pros is that we are very fluid in how we enter in conversations. There's no slap on the wrist or scope creep or anything like that because we do contribute well to all of the meetings that we're in. So when we're talking about headcount planning or customer contracts or margin, it's good to understand those things as a function that's consulting the business on workforce management performance and et cetera. We also launched a finance to HR learning series where we partner with FP&A to train HR staff on P&L statements, cost modeling, in ROI calculations and just creating a different perspective of the conversations that we were sitting in and really understanding not just time to hire, but really looking at time to productivity for a specific institution like ours. We're making our revenue off of billable hour. So as an HR team, we're accustomed to saying, hey, let's track time to hire, which is important, but what's more important, we found by being in these cross-functional meetings as times to productivity and that direct correlation to revenue goals. So these are the kind of shifts that help HR individuals or talent individuals speak the same language as business leaders. And then it helps us build that credibility to enable a more informed decision-making process.

▶6:42HostHow have you transformed the perception of HR from a cost center to a strategic business partner? At companies like ThoughtWorks and— Yeah,

▶6:55Guestprimarily I would go back to that previous comment that I just made, right? Being in more conversations with cross-functional departments. With my healthcare background, I have a term that I love to use, which is interdisciplinary, right? So you have multidisciplinary, then you have interdisciplinary, and That multidisciplinary is where we're going to each function and we're playing the project manager, right? We're trying to figure out what we need from each function in order to get to the goal we're trying to achieve. Opposed to saying, hey, how can we make this a more interdisciplinary approach and invite everyone into the room and have conversation about what the problem or what the solution or what the targets we're trying to hit really are., right? And that eliminates a lot of the quote-unquote project management work or the single source of accountability when it comes to hitting these targets by having all the multidisciplinaries in the room together coming up with solutions. Repositioning those people ops initiatives as well, like performance, DEI, and workforce planning, right? So having all of those type of components in the room with you. And using that data to help forecast talent gaps really helped build that trust where we needed it. And so even with our sales department, a lot of times they were looking at what is the demand out in the field that's going to dictate how we hire internally? But the reality was that two things were true. What's also important is that we're selling to the resources that we have today and the resources that we know we're going to be obtaining over the course of the next quarter, right? Live by the— live by a quarter, die by a quarter mentality. And that really has helped us from a revenue perspective because, again, sales is just looking at, okay, what is the demand from the clients that we're going after, as opposed to saying, what type of clients should we be going after based upon the roles that we're hiring for and that we

▶9:04Hosthave currently? Omari, could you walk us through a case where you effectively leveraged internal marketing to strengthen HR branding across the organization? And what measurable impact that had?

▶9:15GuestYeah, I think that's the easiest question of them all because we can all relate to total rewards, for example, right? Which is, I feel like it's been a hot topic since I've entered the industry. What does total reward mean? How do we define it as an organization? And then how do we leverage that? Using our own communications, our own strategies within HR can feel lacking. It could feel like just another email that an employee does not want to open at the end of the day. But once we can partner, again, that interdisciplinary approach with our internal marketing team to say, hey, how do we make sure that there's appetite for this? Or how do we make sure that this looks appealing? What should our cadence be of communication? What TDLR, right? That was introduced by an internal marketing team at a big tech firm, right? And we started using that and it's been very successful.

▶10:14HostPossible.

▶10:14GuestLeveraging our internal marketing team has really helped increase utilization for a lot of the benefits that we have low utilization on. We've seen that we have more people that are engaged with our mental health benefit to justify us keeping it, to justify the ROI even in that. We found that in leveraging our internal marketing team, we're also able to come up with more modern solutions when we talk about communication philosophy. So it's not who our champions are anymore, it's who are the influencers in the business, right? Just like social media influencers, we have influencers in our business that we want to directly target to help us push these narratives. What packages of communication are we going to supply them with to help us champion the cause, if you will? And so I think leveraging that, resources you already have in-house, even just asking for 10% of their time to review material and give suggestions even is a resource that is very understated.

▶11:20HostOmari, what parting advice would you like to share with our community?

▶11:23GuestYeah, I would just say we've used the term to stay curious, right? I think a lot of people are using that term, be genuinely curious. But I would say the automobile to your curiosity should really be The motivation to have a more cross-functional, more diverse understanding of how your business performs. Ask to be invited into meetings that typically you wouldn't find make sense for your department, but see what you can take from that in order to influence your role, your department, and overall the business at the end of the day. Because professional development is hard to do in these roles because we're so into our roles and responsibilities. The investment in professional development can start directly inside of your business. It doesn't have to be a conference, a seminar, or a webinar. It could literally be you taking the initiative to go and sit in a meeting with finance or a meeting with your marketing team to discover their capabilities and how you might be able to partner

▶12:25Hostto improve. Omari, thanks so much for joining us today on the Built by People podcast.

▶12:29GuestThank you for having me.