Russ Simpson

▶0:00HostWelcome 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 Russ to the Built by People podcast. Russ, 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. Sure.

▶0:49GuestThanks for having me here today. Looking forward to our conversation. So I started as a public high school teacher. Teaching government and U.S. history and thoroughly enjoyed that and learned a lot about people, about motivation, a lot of things that ultimately I didn't see till later on really helped me in my career. I started doing that, but at the same time, I had lots of time in the summer on my hands. So I went back and got a technology degree because that was another interest of mine. And I decided I would leave public education, moved into the private sector through an IT department. And really learned a bit about business and business systems through that. As I was doing that, there was a formation of an organization development department and the background of my education and technology came together, system thinking, improvement. And so I was fortunate enough to join an OD department that then turned into kind of me joining the HR department and doing a career through many— literally was able to walk through each of the departments. And got a good, well-rounded view of what HR and strategic HR was. And then ultimately found my way into a company, Steebo Systems, that combines my technology and my HR together. And it's been a fun journey and ultimately have been able to find putting people and technology together, and I've really enjoyed it.

▶2:16HostRuss, as an HR leader, what specific challenges were you facing with employee engagement before implementing the Peakon survey? Could you talk to us about what that Peakon survey is and why would improving engagement scores such a critical priority for your organization at the time? Sure.

▶2:32GuestSo like many companies, let me start with the challenges were all around the growth that we were going through. We had a global company, lots of growth, really trying to get a sense of where the employees are from an employee engagement standpoint. So we had lots of inconsistent data. It was very difficult to get people, leaders focused on what needed to be done. Inconsistent data and unable to deep dive into it. I truly believe that engagement is key, helps drive so much. If engagement's good, then we're driving turnover down, driving extra effort up, satisfaction for customers, and hopefully business results. So we went out to market and we found this company called Peakon. Stibo Systems is a Danish headquartered company, and at the time Peakon was in Copenhagen. This was prior to the acquisition. PCON was its own standalone employee engagement tool. It was purchased by Workday. Workday has incorporated it in. They call it now PCON Employee Voice. What we were looking to do is increase the frequency of feedback, the administrative burden ease, and really finding the drivers that will drive employee engagement. And this tool gave us that. It gave us both support for HR. It gave us support for the people leaders. And so we started executing on that survey and we could do it more consistently. So it was great for us because it create— and when Workday and Peakon came together, it just created a tighter link to the integration between those two things. And so Peakon, I don't get anything, but I highly recommend. I think it's a great tool for what the employee engagement, particularly what it does.

▶4:11HostRuss, could you walk us through the tangible steps and initiatives you implemented to drive higher engagement scores over the course of several years? What was your methodology for identifying which areas needed the most attention?

▶4:24GuestYeah, I love this because I think once again, I'm going to go back to the tool. Peakon itself is just, it anchors so much. It does a great job of identifying the drivers that you should be focusing on. It doesn't just hone in on the low So these are the lowest scores. It actually looks behind the scenes and says, okay, what impact do these particular drivers have on your organization? So looking at those two dimensions, it really brings together, it shows you here's where you need to focus. But then it takes it one step further. It says, hey, I'm going to help you action plan and I'm going to help your people leaders learn about the specific topics that they're doing. That was the foundational piece. For us, where we really focused was it gave us an organizational view to go in and say, what 3 items organizationally are we impacted by? Talked a bit about functional and teams and what they can do to locally address things. It helped HRBPs hone in on the data they need. And I will say that earlier on, PCON was one of those early tools that adopted a bit of AI. And even today, there's a lot of AI that's sitting behind the scenes there to really help you identify those things. Tangible things we did was around really honing in on the comments that employees are making. We were getting 1,500, 2,400, 2,700 comments. And the great thing about PCON compared to other tools is managers can go in and actually respond to those. It's all anonymous, but they can respond and it's super impactful to employees when they get that feedback or you engage in a bit of a conversation. The other thing we really could do is we wanted people leaders to take ownership of the results they had at their local levels. And through the tool, we can see that 37% of managers actually have an action plan and 25% of those have actually completed steps on their action plan. So it gave us a much wider view as to what was going on, not just executing a survey, but actually the follow-up, which is really the more important piece when it comes to employee engagement.

▶6:38HostRuss, last we talked, you mentioned navigating through a reduction in force while still increasing employee engagement. What specific strategies did you employ to maintain trust and morale during that challenging period?

▶6:50GuestNever a good thing to go through, but a necessary step we needed to take in our journey of growth. Really working hard on the employee engagement piece. We really focused on a few things. We put together focus groups just after the survey. So we did the survey, but then we actually did tangible focus groups because we wanted to validate pieces of what we were hearing. We really engaged people, leader, through the entire process of the reduction, and that engagement I think paid off handsomely. We created a communication plan that focused on exiting employees, the employees that were staying, the people leaders, and then the executives. Each of those needed a little bit of their own work stream when it came to communication. And, and last, we refreshed our employee branding and value proposition, which really helped us focus in on the communication and, and anchor what we do. And ultimately, we called that all kinds of data mines. We're a data company, enterprise software, And so we came to this kind of conclusion that the most inclusive way we could identify who we were was that. And so to, to take a step forward, we really grounded ourselves in a few things from that information and from those things, we grounded ourselves in some very tangible actions. One was personal and career growth. That was key for what people were looking for coming out of this. So we created something called the Career Compass. Set out job expectation sheets. Second, wellbeing and support was really important. And so we focused in on that and we actually created these days that we have throughout our year called Mindful Days. And it's a time for people to step away and reflect on us as a business and their career. And then we went on to create learning days, which we called Mind Fuel Days. So we, we were playing on this employee theme. That we had created around Data Mines, and it has done quite well to show the importance of learning in the business. When we took a survey this last April and the main drivers— so growth, learning, support— we increased in all of those and really are in the top 25% of all technology companies. And if we look at our overall engagement score from December of '23 to April of '24, we increased 47%, and we achieved a, we used the eNPS score and achieved a 50 on that. We were quite pleased to see coming out of what was a very rough period, we were able to maintain the engagement and actually lift it quite a bit from when we started.

▶9:29HostRuss, shifting to AI in the workforce, I know you proposed the idea of hiring 100 digital workers. What specific problems or inefficiencies in your organization led you to consider that approach? And why do you believe treating AI agents similar to human employees is important?

▶9:46GuestYeah, so growth and scalability, that's a big piece of what we're trying to do as a company, and AI is going to provide some of that. I think the technology needs some focus and some strategy to it. And ultimately, if you look long-term, you can deploy— I see companies just deploying agents within their company. Ad hoc asking employees to do that. But I think that's going to be a longer-term pain point if they don't do it. So then I began to, I'm looking at what Salesforce is saying, I'm looking at what Microsoft is saying, and they're talking about these digital workforce or these digital agents. And I began to think, why wouldn't you treat a digital agent just like an employee? You would scope up what you want them to do. They need to be assigned to a manager. They then need to be monitored. Are they performing correctly? Are they learning and evolving? Because the business is going to evolve. It's going to need to evolve with it. What happens if an employee leaves and this agent's just working autonomously out there into the business? So as I begin to think about all those things, I was thinking, why not treat them exactly like you would an agent? Put them on a talent management plan, onboard them, performance, development, have a people leader associated with them. And ultimately, I think that helps people understand that they're not just coming after their job, they're actually part of the team.

▶11:10HostRuss, can you share some early results from implementing AI in customer support and other areas? What unexpected challenges did you encounter when introducing these digital workers, and how did you address employee concerns about job security?

▶11:24GuestYeah, so like many people, as we began to deploy these, The biggest thing was them interacting with customers autonomously and what's going on. It's that kind of that black box syndrome. And so for us, we worked very hard to make sure that we were comfortable with what the different agents were saying and how AI was being deployed. We also tried to keep it simple. I think sometimes people are trying to make it too complicated what they're wanting to do. So we kept it quite simple in what we do. Ultimately, to try to remove fear within the workforce, we talk about agents much more like digital colleagues than we do in a replacement scenario. We were very clear on the why that we were using this in terms of a business objective. We've had no layoffs and we don't intend to have any layoffs associated with this. And we set out very tangible results. I think when we think of AI, We think about what's the delivery, what's the quality, what's the delivery, and what's the cost. And I think balancing those things when you think of AI helps people understand the importance and what's going on.

▶12:32HostRuss, what parting advice would you like to share with our community?

▶12:36GuestYeah, I think as we wrap up today, it's clear that AI is not just a technological upgrade for HR or the organization. I think it's up for fundamental change. I think it's key that HR leaders in the coming years move strategically to navigate this evolution. So focusing on employee engagement with change and reskilling the organization is key to have real impact. The demands are going to change and collaboration is going to be key. Human connection as we go through this transformation is going to be key. And ultimately, being able to learn quickly. The technology is moving so fast. That you have to stay up with what's going. And so I guess I would just offer that HR embrace this technology and not as a replacement, that it's a powerful tool for augmenting the workforce and scaling the business, and that the strategic lens will be defined by that in HR as we go forward.

▶13:34HostRuss, thanks so much for joining us today on the Built by People podcast.

▶13:37GuestReally appreciate you