Serena Filson

▶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 Serena to the Built by People podcast. Serena, 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.

▶0:50GuestYeah, thanks. It's great to be here. My journey has been an interesting one. I started out a number of years ago at Johnson Johnson, so it was a really great entry to HR and had a great experience and really worked under a number of solid mentors who taught me what really good can look like. I grew up there primarily in compensation, but that was before COE concepts. So we had our hands in a lot of different HR areas, which always intrigued me. After I left J&J, I had a number of— I did independent consulting for a number of years when my daughter was young, which worked for the flexibility. I enjoyed the consulting opportunity because it really helped me build muscles in terms of coming in, learning how to assess things quickly, and being accountable at a high level in a very short period of time. Then I went back in-house a number of years ago, ultimately culminating in my current role here at Certara, where I head up total rewards. I also have the opportunity to oversee talent acquisition, HR technology, and then lead the M&A activity from an HR perspective as well. So, that's a little bit about it.

▶1:52HostSerena, you mentioned joining Certara as the head of total rewards, and then shortly after being told the company was going went public. Can you walk us through the specific challenges you faced in that transition and why it was such a significant shift for your HR function?

▶2:10GuestYeah, I think it's interesting. I joined— you see, so I joined Certara actually the first week of COVID shutdown. So on top of eventually learning we were going public, I was onboarding as a new leader and partner in a totally remote environment, which I like to say we did pretty well. It was definitely an interesting time in hindsight. Going public, I'm sure we'll talk a little bit more about some of the specifics as well. And that whole experience was super intense, but also just what a tremendous learning. It was really fascinating. It's kind of the best word I can use to describe it, watching how the organization, not only just the HR organization, but the organization itself needed to evolve and the pace at which it needed to evolve. From an HR standpoint, our team was certainly still lean. The complement of the HR structure was very different than it is today. Like, our team looks— there's some still common members, but we were extremely lean and structured, as you would expect a private equity HR company. So we had our CHRO, we had myself, we had one HR business partner and head of recruiting, and a traditional, maybe a few supporting roles. I think it became apparent the total rewards function was the one that was primarily impacted the most, let's say, immediately. You'll need an equity plan. You need job architecture. There are some compliance-related items and administrative-related items when you go public that become the immediate priority. So, I think it became apparent that the total rewards function, or my function, we would need to do a lot of process and structure work. I think it also became apparent to the HR team, the partnership, it was really a team effort. It's a partnership between IT, Finance, legal, that's like the trifecta. Going public, that accentuated the need to make sure that those partnerships and collaborations are really tight, that we stayed closely connected. And then I think overall it impacted the HR team more. At the time, I was also serving as the business partner to two of our presidents. At the time, I was also overseeing total rewards. It was challenging in a positive way. We were discussing how do you help start to change the leadership mindsets overnight? Meaning before you were private and you didn't have all these things to consider and you didn't have stock and you didn't have a common goal was making the company successful. But when you see your company stock traded on the NASDAQ, it accentuates a little bit more of a motivator. But how do you create the momentum in that shared motivation? And how do you have people become more responsible in the way that they're thinking about company resources when you're private versus when you're public? So I think that was— and that's still a journey, right? Some people's perceptions of how you would work in a private company are very different than sometimes how you would work in a public company. And I always say that, for me, working in a private company, to some extent, not in my role, some employees or whatnot, folks might say, perhaps that's like living in a rental, right? Meaning you want to take care of it, you live in it, you decorate it, you make it nice, But the infrastructure, the foundation, you don't own that, right? And when you go public, it's like you're now a homeowner and you need to worry about all those niceties and making it livable for you, but also making sure that you're responsible and solidly investing in the foundation to make sure your home is stable for the long term.

▶5:31HostSerena, you describe the need to go from infancy to maturity in several areas quickly. What specific plans and actions did you implement to prepare the company for compliance job architecture and stock plan administration?

▶5:48GuestYeah, it's a good question. In hindsight, I still sometimes am surprised pleasantly about how much work we were able to accomplish in such a short term. I recall making sure that having the leadership support and buy-in was absolutely imperative. Obviously, building trusting working relationships is part and parcel with what you do as an HR professional or any business professional anyway. But really level setting upfront to say, listen, we're going to have a lot of work to do in a very short period of time. I'm going to need your support along the way. So I had those conversations upfront, which I do think served us well. From a technical project perspective, I think a lot of the projects, you know, ran simultaneously. It was a team effort, but a very lean team. We had the notion of creating equity plan, which we had external support and some guidance and the best practices, how you would, you know, establish a pool, what type of vehicles we want to deliver from an equity perspective. The administration walking into something without an architecture and infrastructure was probably more daunting for me. We went back to basics, and I think I did about 500 job evaluations in a very short period of time. We basically had different business verticals, and each of them operated very differently. They had different ladders, different positions. So we were looking to try to figure out how do we get to a good enough model where we felt comfortable that there was parity for roles that had like scope and impact and responsibility to really determine what that equity eligibility cutoff was. So really, we did old school job mapping, aligned, mapped out the positions vertically, and then I facilitated a few different discussions with the leadership teams to say, let's look at this across the company and make sure that horizontal alignment made sense. We went through a few iterations, looked at some outliers, and at the end of the day, we lined that up to market practice for us and drew the line in the sand based on some of the global grades that we had established. I think that's certainly something I was proud of, given the team, we did that in very short order. And then I think the equity administration was also equally— sometimes I relied a lot on some of my mentors as well, meaning what questions do I not even know to ask? Those are the most important ones that I got upfront from other folks who have been through it. And we put that out like a traditional RFP. We did some benchmarking. I think it was really important for us. There are certain players in the space that we honed in on. The continuum of providers out there is very large, but we honed in on a few that we felt were in the space that we were playing in. We certainly looked at the technical requirements, all of that good stuff, but we knew that being small and being able to deliver an equity plan from a global perspective was going to be important. So we really wanted to select a vendor and team members that were going to function as extensions of our team. We did a lot of customer reference checking. We, we had calls with people who were customers of said vendors and really gained a lot of one-on-one, firsthand knowledge of how did they experience the team? How was the dedication? How did they establish the trust? And do you feel like the collaboration was really important for us in the service delivery? So at the end of the day, we really placed a lot of emphasis on the partnership and the collaboration between the vendor, as well as being able to deliver those technical requirements from an equity perspective across multiple countries.

▶9:10HostSerena, you also shared in our last conversation your experience with the LifeScan divestiture from Johnson Johnson. What unique challenges did you encounter when transitioning to a private equity environment, and how did you approach maintaining motivation during that period?

▶9:27GuestYeah, that was a— thank you for the question. Also a very cool experience. I've been very fortunate in my life to have been perhaps at the right place at the right time. I think there were a few different challenges with that in and of itself. I think one, there's the just simple cultural— I say simple, but there's the cultural shift, meaning overnight you go from a very large publicly recognized and well-established and has a great reputation to a private— a privately owned company where your brand might still be recognized, but how you operate within that family has changed dramatically. So I think the team— and this relied more with our HR business partners than myself in terms of total rewards at the time— it was a lot of showing care, wrapping their arms around the leadership teams as well as all employees, and getting to the countries where we were divesting, making sure that people felt we were being transparent. Here's what we know. When we know it, we're going to tell you. I think acknowledging that this was going to be hard was very important as well. We weren't trying to sugarcoat such a dramatic change, meaning like, hey, everything's going to be fine. But we gave people a safe space to say, listen, you're going to go through that change continuum, and here's what it's going to be, and that's going to be OK, and we're going to be with you every step of the way. So I think that was pretty intensive, but the right thing to do to keep people motivated. I think people respected that we were honest upfront and that we weren't trying to paint a picture of something that we didn't know. We just shared what we knew, said we're going to figure this out together. From a technical perspective, there were definitely some challenges. It certainly made it interesting when you're looking at things that the normal folks that might not usually see how things are happening behind the scenes, you wouldn't really think of it. But when you think about basic benefit plan in any one country, and that plan is extracted from a very large company, the whole structure needs to change. The cost structure is the same— the same drug that I take every month, is that going to be covered? And all of those things, it was a very intensive process to do it. We had to look at every single benefit plan in every single country and try to line up how you would basically extract that from a very large company and the offerings that J&J was providing. To what we wanted to provide from a LifeScan perspective. I don't know, I guess the judgment would be out, but I think we did certainly as good of a job as we could. We tried to make sure that people— I would say we still delivered what we perceived as competitive comp and benefits, but I think it was important that we looked at it more from an aggregate perspective because in such a time of change, you can't say everything's going to be the same because things are going to have to change. So some components had to shift, and then other components, I think we did our best to keep that reasonably stable.

▶12:18HostSerena, looking back at both experiences, taking a company public and managing a major divestiture, what were the most important results and key learnings that would benefit HR professionals who might face similar situations in the future?

▶12:32GuestI think it's a bit of a luxury in some ways when you're going through like an IPO or divestiture, one of the HR luxury is in some ways that becomes the priority. On our day-to-day lives, everything's urgent, everything's important, usually, right? We like to respond with high levels of urgency and the pace at which businesses change. Some advisement would be making sure that you, I say, ruthlessly prioritize that what you are working on within the constructs of those deals, that that, you know, the focused energies that you have are really on the levers that are either driving towards compliance or the most important for the business at the time. There's— it's easy. There's so much to be done that it seems like everything needs to be done. But even within those rankings of everything's urgent, there are still— you have to root through the noise and make sure that you get aligned with your leadership team on the top 3 or 4 major deliverables that we need to hit. If we hit anything more than that, it's a nice to have and then prioritize from a third perspective, meaning if we get to it, great, but it can be deprioritized until some point in the future. So I would say making sure that you rank that and put your energies accordingly.

▶13:51HostSerena, what parting advice would you like to share with our

▶13:56Guestcommunity? I would say this question's always a hard one. In light of those experiences, a general theme I like to operate with my team as well is that One, I have a few pieces of advice. I would say define what good enough is. Meaning, if you're going through transitions like that, whatever you're working on is going to have to be good enough at that time, but it's going to have to evolve. So I usually say don't waste time on perfect. Get to an 80/20 and know that it's going to evolve and be okay with that as long as it meets the briefs of the business. I also would say know when to say, I don't know. I'd said that a lot during the process. I don't know. We're going to have to be resourceful. We're going to get the best resources. I'm going to go find the information. So I think rely on, if you don't know, be open to finding out where you're going to get the answers, but don't try to fool yourself into, if you're in a space that you're not familiar, be open to kind of admitting that and doing the best that you can. And I would say that everything is fixable. There's always a lot of concern. Is this going to work? Is it not going to work? And it goes back to the whole things are going to have to evolve. But at the end of the day, even in relation to people's comp or whatever, most everything is fixable. So if something really doesn't work, then you just pivot and change it. And most of the time it's recoverable. So even within these really big, urgent, super impactful IPOs, divestitures, whatever the case is, most everything can be attended to. If something's not totally right, usually you can tweak it. Really, there's no loss, if you will.

▶15:29HostSerena, thank you so much for joining us today on the Built by People podcast. It was a pleasure to have you involved.

▶15:34GuestThank you for having me.