Solving HR's Biggest Challenges: The Power of Data & Pragmatic Benefits

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

Yes, and thank you for having me. I'm happy to speak with you this morning. I've been listening to your podcast and what I think it's common theme on people and their career journeys is very often you hear that getting into HR was an accident, and that's my journey into human resources really wasn't planned. It was just a kind of a happy accident. My career began in retail banking. Most recently in retail banking, I had done mortgage originations in New Hampshire, and I chose to come to New York City, and the last thing I wanted to do again was mortgages. And so I found myself at a startup running a receivables and payable department. And by accident, there was an HR leader that was leaving and somebody approached me and said, would you fill in temporarily? We know that you don't know HR very well, but you're a good manager and we think you— I haven't— it's 25 years later and I'm still in HR. I think what typically makes me different in the HR space and what was my gateway in is I'm pretty analytical and I'm good with data visualization. And 100 years ago when I came into the workforce, that wasn't really— you didn't see that in HR very often. It wasn't really a data-driven function. And I think that was my natural evolution into the, into this space of human resources.

Patrick, in previous conversations, you mentioned putting a creative lens on employee benefits. What specific challenges or limitations were you facing with traditional benefit offerings where you are now that prompted you to seek more innovative solutions like Previ?

I feel like with some of the bigger benefit providers, it's it's what I would say, they have everything but the kitchen sink offerings. And so what I would find is a lot of times they would have, every one of my vendors had some kind of an employee discount program, but there was nothing unique to any of those discount programs. And there was essentially, people would ask me about pet insurance and I'd go out to the street to try to get a quote on that and be same as the discount they could get through. So I think the initial challenge that I had was understanding the complexities of all of our benefits, but also making it easy for our employees to consume.

Patrick, could you walk us through your decision-making process when evaluating a potential new benefit offering like Previ, and what aspects of the platform resonated with your goals for enhancing your benefits package?

My company's part of the private equity world, and we go to street very quick. And that is what I was looking for in benefit offerings that I could understand and get to street quickly. And that was one of the things with Previ that stood out was there wasn't a lot of, you know, typically we go with a new vendor of any kind, it's weeks and weeks of contract negotiations and red penning of contracts. And what I found with Previ is easy to understand, easy to socialize, and quick to street because there was very little that we needed to do to launch. The program.

Patrick, what was your implementation strategy for rolling out Previ to your employees, and were there any obstacles you encountered during that process?

We are in the middle of what I would say implementation right now. So we are running a promotion through the end of June. What I would say is we're really big on webinars. So we were— we've been promoting it a lot, and we've got an upcoming webinar in the next week or two getting the word out. Is the struggle with a virtual environment. We are predominantly remote in a lot of our locations. So it's finding that way that I can communicate to people in a virtual environment.

Looking at some of the initial results, how has introducing Previ and taking a more creative approach to benefits impacted your organization? And are there any metrics or feedback that serve as indicators of success?

We had great response initially when we launched the communications on the Previ platform. Platform, people were really excited to see that there was more of a curated discount program. We specifically had great response to the fact that we could help people reduce monthly costs with cell phone plans predominantly, or insurance plans. I think the feedback that was very positive because I think it's a very easy— was very easy to understand. You weren't diving in and searching in a directory of 5,000 promotion codes. You had very clear discount programs, and then your monthly spotlights. It was very easy to consume.

Patrick, what parting advice would you give to our listeners?

I think I said this once in a LinkedIn profile, is I spent a lot of my early career worried that I wasn't going to be able to figure something out or that I was going to fall short. And my advice to anybody is Eventually you figure it out. Like, there's never been a time where I've not eventually figured it out. So it's nice to let go of that angst of, what if I don't know the answer? What if I don't know how to do this? You eventually figure it out.

Thank you so much for joining us today on the Built by People podcast. It was a pleasure to have you involved.

Thank you for having me.