The Strategic HR Imperative: Beyond Admin to True Business Partnership

Welcome 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. I'm excited to welcome Madison to the Built By People Podcast. Madison, thank you so much for joining us. And as a starting question, I always love to ask if you could share a little bit more about your career journey.

Of course, my career journey, I don't think it's unique to those of us that end up in HR because I didn't dream of becoming an HR professional, but I was initially very interested in psychology because I wanted to understand more about why people do the things that they do, what motivates them, why they make decisions. And that's of course been invaluable throughout my HR career, but initially thought that I would use that to become a marriage and family therapist. And during my senior year, I did an internship and quickly realized that something was missing. I did, again, with that line of work that I could help individuals solve personal problems, but I had also grown up with a dad who was in software sales most of my life and was always fascinated with hearing about the different businesses that he worked with and even my organizational psychology classes, understanding more of, again, how people help move forward business objectives and thought that I should look into HR before truly going into graduate school and committing to becoming a therapist. And during my internship realized that HR isn't just about policies and administrative work like you might see on TV or in the movies, but you, it was about that aspect of solving business problems through people. So a lot of what I liked with the original origins of looking into psychology, but more of, again, that business aspect was involved as well. That's really what got me started in HR initially. And then as I've grown throughout my career, I feel like a big aspect of utilizing that psychology background has been as I've built trust and credibility with the leaders that I've worked with and throughout the organization is, again, truly trying to understand them as people. What motivates them in their decision-making as leaders, what motivates the business to be successful, and then also the individuals that are doing the work as well.

Madison, you've shared the concept of the 3 Ps in HR, police, pushovers, and partners. Can you elaborate on how HR professionals can find that sweet spot of being strategic partners while maintaining necessary boundaries?

Yeah, I feel like early in my career, I saw individuals in HR, and I feel like I've seen that throughout my career. I've seen individuals in HR that have leaned too far in one direction, either enforcing rules without understanding the business needs or trying too hard to please everyone without making hard decisions because of maybe the need to feel accepted. And I don't think that either works long-term. I think really that sweet spot, again, of that partnership does require where there's going to be times for us to push back, but I think the most important thing, and I mentioned it a little bit, And my last answer is just that trust and credibility that you're building with your leaders. So first, again, understanding the business so that you truly can speak the language of the business, the language of the leaders that you're working with. You know what's important and even knowing what's important when you're choosing when to push back, because of course there are times when we are required to push back, but I think understanding again, when it's going to provide the most value to the business and helping in how we're pushing back. So, one of the things that I really love to do is ask questions, stay curious, to hopefully help leaders maybe come to decisions themselves that I maybe would've recommended. Again, going back to helping solve problems, like how are we being more consultative in our approach where it doesn't feel like As soon as you come to HR, you're going to get a no. So more of that administrative side of things, it's like, how can we truly show up and provide value by first having that credibility, that trust, which takes time to first prove over certain situations that you may have worked on together. And I think another piece of that is also providing data behind your decisions. When you're asking questions, you're staying curious, or you're pushing back, do you have data to back that up? Do you have that credibility piece? Do you have language that resonates with the leader that you're working with? So that you truly can help them make a decision that's best for everybody involved.

Madison, having been with Domo through its growth from startup to public company, uh, with nearly 1,000 employees, what were some of the most critical HR transformations you had to implement?

Yeah, I think a big one that I was a part of initially was really helping to scale HR processes. Early on, and I think a lot of companies struggle with this in the beginning, especially because HR doesn't always have the biggest budget, but a lot of our processes are more informal. We do things via email. It takes a lot of time. It's a lot of, again, that administrative work. So streamlining and scaling those processes, especially even utilizing our own Domo product to allow us to streamline those processes. Even we have a really awesome functionality in the process called approvals. Rather than having to chase on certain decisions or email follow-ups, we can just submit it in our approval process within the system and it follows a specific workflow and can be implemented that way, which is, I think has been big with some of the administrative nature of our job. I, one in particular, since I've taken on this position, so I've been in this role almost 2 years now, 2 years in May, and one of the things that I initially did when I took on this role, I had been at the company for quite some time. We were in one building. We've now expanded. We expanded at one point to 5 different buildings. We're in 7 different countries. We're now in HQ in American Fork, back to one building altogether, but we still have employees dispersed across the country and across the globe. And I wanted to just better understand, not just from my own opinion and experience, but from the data I could gather, whether that be through exit survey data, you know, looking at the last 2 years of that data, why were people leaving the company, looking at our employee engagement data, not just the results, but also reading all of the commentary. And then I also had the opportunity to meet with over 100 leaders and employees across the business to truly just try to triangulate and understand where we should be focusing our time as an HR team. And I found that a common theme was communication. And I think part of that does come from, again, growing quickly and expanding where you're not just in one building, where even on a daily basis, employees that maybe wouldn't work with an executive team or your CEO are actually getting, having the opportunity to interact with them pretty frequently and are hearing updates on a regular basis just by walking the floors. We of course had to rethink how do we scale our communication, ensure everybody's up to speed on and marching in the same direction on what's going to be important to the business. How frequently are we communicating in company meetings? What are we communicating in company meetings? And one of the things that we've tried to really instill is always starting with our strategic initiatives as a business and then taking those and communicating about them in other formats. How do we connect that back to the strategic initiatives so people understand how it ultimately rolls up to the overall business impact we're trying to make. Again, from an HR standpoint, from every leader across the company, again, really just focused on how are we communicating consistently and ensuring that everybody's hearing the same message.

Madison, Domo has a strong track record of internal promotions with something like 50% of executives promoted from within. How have you built and maintained this culture of recognizing and rewarding high performance?

That's a great question, and I really think it starts with a mindset. I will say our CEO, Josh James, has definitely instilled a culture of recognizing and developing talent, but I still like also utilizing, and again, it goes back to the last question as well, how do we take just recognizing that performance maybe from feedback from our managers, but expanding upon that and gathering more data. So as we grow as a company, we truly understand who our top performers are and what programs we have in place to be developing that talent. One example I'll share that's again, been within the last 2 years and something I've been fairly passionate about. We haven't had formal performance reviews at DoneWell for the last 6 years, and I will say when you talk about performance reviews in HR, I still like, there's definitely going to be differing opinions across the board. And when I took on the role, I didn't want to move back to traditional performance reviews because that didn't work. And the reason we got rid of them to begin with was because we saw very low participation, which ultimately I think meant very low, low impact to the company. And We instead focused on really just asking managers to give real-time feedback in one-on-one conversations, but without having a more formalized process, we realized that those conversations weren't happening, again, from some of those data mechanisms I mentioned on the last question. And so, one of the things that we've worked on over the last year plus is how do we go from— we don't want to go all the way back to traditional performance, But agile performance or more modern performance isn't working. What's something that could work in the middle and feel like it adds value to the company? So, we've been really focused on that this last year, implementing various mechanisms by partnering with a company called Confirm. One of the things that they use that really, I feel like differentiated them from other, you know, performance management softwares out there is their organizational network analysis, which essentially during a performance review process allows anybody across the company to provide feedback on anyone. So, and there's of course are some specific metrics and measures I'm not going to get into right now that'll allow to make sure that there's no bias or other things that are happening through that process. But again, just getting as much more data than just that manager review, which can sometimes be biased. So, allowing that to happen, then of course, utilizing that data to truly come up with our key talent list. So, previously we were relying just on that manager feedback. And now we have additional feedback. There's a bunch of other things we're doing with Confirm, like development plans and other things as well, our leadership development program. But I think what really has set it apart is, again, we're a data-driven company. How do we get more data to ensure that we're making the right decisions and we truly feel like the list of key talent we put together represents the true population of our employees?

How do you think HR professionals can better position themselves as strategic business partners rather than just policy enforcers?

Yeah, I think HR really needs to understand the business. So whether that be metrics that are important to certain departments that you're working with, if you're a public company, tuning into your earnings calls, understanding what the metrics are and the financials that they're talking about on those calls and you, why those are important to the business and what those goals are, I think are really important to just ensure that you are speaking the same language as the leaders that you're working with. I feel like I've also seen, again, the power shifting with HR's influence with the power of data. So, providing more data, more accurate data to allow your leaders and those that you're working with to make data-driven insights. I think also allows HR to truly move more into that strategic partner arena. And then of course, coming forward with solutions, not just problems. A way that you can do that is by utilizing the data that you have access to, presenting it in a way that's not just like, we have a problem, look at the involuntary turnover that's happened across your team, but presenting the data and then having solutions and various insights that the leader maybe haven't thought of themselves.

What parting advice would you like to share with our audience?

I would just echo some of the things that I've already said. I think coming to the table with solutions, not problems, like I just mentioned on my last, you know, last answer. I think building relationships and truly understanding what motivates not only those that you're working with, what, but the business, so that you're well-informed as you're providing advice and feedback. And then I also think being adaptable is critical. So, I feel like one of the biggest things that has benefited me throughout my career, especially as we've gone from startup to where we're at today, is being willing to adapt. There might have been different HR solutions or things that we were working on that we quickly had to pivot and maybe no longer made sense to the business because the business was adapting and being okay with that. And again, I think having that understanding of the business helps you to truly understand the why behind the need to be adaptable and then why those decisions might be being made that do require you to shift speeds or focus.

Madison, thank you so much for joining us on the Built by People podcast.

Thanks so much, Dave.