Thomas Lokar

▶0:00GuestWelcome to the Built by People podcast,

▶0:02Introwhere we share the stories and insights

▶0:03Guestof the world's top HR leaders.

▶0:05IntroJoin us as we dive deep into the minds of HR executives, uncovering their strategies, challenges, and triumphs in shaping today's workforce.

▶0:39HostI'm excited to welcome Thomas to the

▶0:40GuestBuilt by People podcast.

▶0:41HostThomas, 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.

▶0:49GuestThanks, Dave. Pleasure to be here. Pretty varied journey. I started out getting my PhD in IO psychology or behavior at Kansas State. And went into consulting with that, started with a small boutique firm. And probably the most powerful thing happened to me that I joined a guy that had some very unique offerings in leadership development, leadership assessment, coaching, because in a psychology program, especially I/O, you don't learn those skills. And I've leaned back on doing leadership assessment when I'm in between CHRO gigs, and I put up my own consulting flag. That's usually what I lean into. Very unique opportunity. Also allowed me to meet with C-team executives very early in my career. I then went on to the Hay Group and had a really great experience and career there. Made my way to senior consultant. And then as my wife and I were having children, we have 5 children in total. The first 2 started at to challenge my travel schedule as a consultant. So I moved on to internal in a director of leadership development role with Bristol-Myers, which led then to AOL, where I eventually became the head of talent, chief learning officer, led a massive leadership and culture transformation there at AOL as we shifted away from the dial-up business to more of a web business. And then first stepped into my first ever general HR role where I was an HR leader over a business unit, our web audience business. First real global management experience with employees in other countries. That led to me going on to HP where I ended up managing 200 HR people across 80 countries covering 55,000 employees. Another great run, 5 to 6 years at HP, and then the CHRO door started knocking and I got an opportunity to join a company called Mitel. We were an on-prem business communications company. Dave, these things are dinosaurs now. You wouldn't even think of having, starting a company and putting in desk phones and a PBX in a closet, but that's what Mitel did for many years very successfully. And they were privately held when I joined and we took them public through divestitures and acquisitions and then took them private again. Major HR transformation, major workforce and culture transformation as we moved premise-based systems to cloud-based systems. Great run at Mitel. And then from there, my own coaching consulting business and COVID and other things happening. And I got an interim role with a company called Oceans, which ran psych hospitals. I did that for a year through a PE sponsorship transition, and then that led to National Car Wash Solutions, the largest manufacturer of equipment in chemicals, supporting the retail car wash industry. I did that for 2+ years, great experience, and I just left there at the end of the year as we were finishing up a sponsorship transition as well, a PE sponsorship transition as well with them.

▶3:59HostTom, I want to go back to your experience at Mitel. What was your experience like transforming the company from private to public to private again? And do you have any key leadership or HR strategies that enabled such significant organizational change and success in those change initiatives?

▶4:19GuestYeah, I'll give you 3, 3 quick things. One is, as you're ping-ponging over a 6-year period from private to public to private, so you've got a private board, you've got a fully public board, you've got SEC filings, you have to be able to look around the corners as a CHRO. And see what is coming, and then go back into your HR model and say, what are we prepared to take on and what aren't we prepared to take on? And that leads to my other two points, which is leaning heavily on technology, not just putting in Workday, which was instrumental for us to be able to acquire many companies larger than us to grow globally and integrate those employees, integrate those businesses, capture the synergies, which are always a part of acquisition. But also to improve and normalize, harmonize all of our HR processes. Every company we acquired, including Mitel itself, did something a little different in a different country with its HR system, with its payroll system, in some cases with its ERP system. So the finance leader had an equally challenging task. And partnering with our CIO, I don't know if you saw, Dave, yesterday, Moderna is merged, their IT department with their HR department. I feel that because I really think our CIO and I, we were so lockstep over that period of time. So being able to see around corners, leaning on technology, and then you've got to get your core HR processes consistent across. And I guess finally, I would say, it's part about seeing around the corners is I noticed that our hierarchy our organizational structure spans the layers, as we used to say, was this fat diamond. In the middle, you had a lot of heavily tenured middle-aged people, engineers that weren't going anywhere. And if we were going to shift to a UCaaS or cloud model in the communications spectrum, we had to create headroom. And so a massive initiative moving out early retirement, different roles for those people, and layoffs to create room so we could open up development centers in India and Asia, redo our supply chain and our manufacturing center in Asia. All of that was part of an HR move that I led through workforce planning and having the right technology and knowing that we were going to need to be able to do that if we were going to continue to acquire and be successful with those acquisitions.

▶6:47HostSam, when was a specific time when you had to rebuild an HR function's operational excellence before tackling strategic initiatives? And how did that impact the organization's perception of HR as a value center?

▶7:03GuestYeah, Dave, I'd say every time, but most recently with National Car Wash Solutions, when I got there, we were not able to meet customer demand on equipment or chemical. We just couldn't hire enough people in our plants or in our service functions or in our install functions. Serving the retail car wash industry across North America, you have employees in every zip code in the United States, including Hawaii. So you have to be able to hire. And we didn't have a staffing function. We didn't have consistent onboarding. We couldn't do background checks efficiently. Our I-9 verification was very manual and slow. And I would've loved to spend my time on the top team and building up top team, which I did get to in, in small pieces with offsites. But if we didn't get that shored up, we were never going to be able to meet the retail demand. And then the second part of that is once you're able to staff, how do you retain? You can't live with 30 to 40% turnover year over year in your plants or in your field service and create a consistent business operation as well as a consistent customer experience. So shoring up retention, and that was a matter of, one, putting some HR people closer to the problems. We didn't have any plant HR people where we had plants with significant scale or size. So it was a bit of a free-for-all for the plant manager. They now had a right-hand person. And the second thing to do there was giving tools. I launched 15-5 within NCS to give tools to managers and employees to one, first recognize each other and give each other, you know, a little recognition for job well done, but also to pivot very hard to a weekly conversation about what's working, what's not working, how can I help you, what roadblocks can I remove. And so shoring up that retention side, shoring up that staffing side, really gave me the opportunity to then move up the scale with the CEO, the board on higher order things like turned over the entire exec team over that next phase of the company. New CEO, new CFO, new COO, new chief revenue officer, new CIO, and, and then building their teams from there was the next strategic wave for the company. And I think our brand was seen very much as transactional. You're just here to go and chase down every ground ball. And with me at the helm and making those moves, I ended up my last quarters leading the strategic planning process. I wasn't doing an HR job technically. I was leading our strat planning process, leading our operating model redesign with the help from our PE sponsor. So that's what that allows you to do when you can get those headaches off the plate of the C-team.

▶9:45HostTom, can you tell us about a time when you successfully leveraged AI in HR to improve efficiency and consistency, and what practical advice you'd offer to HR leaders looking to integrate AI into their operations?

▶9:58GuestYeah, I'll give you— there's a two-part to this, Dave, and you can decide whether you want to keep the second part. And the first part is we very early on realized without a staffing function, and we eventually added some staffing people, some recruiters to NCS through contract and then made them full-time. Got rid of a lot of contingent search. A lot of money is using AI in our recruiting function to build better job descriptions. Again, we're hiring in every corner of the United States. So trying to get the compensation or trying to get the posting correct on Indeed and Zip for that location and finding people who are in places we wouldn't normally look Using AI to do that, scuttling into vocational school postings, into community college postings, looking for service industry people that you wouldn't typically look for, having AI find those people, bring them, aggregate their resumes into the recruiting process, put those in front of managers, ended up being super helpful. The other part is my, my second job is I'm serving as a strategic advisor to an AI engagement platform. And what I'm seeing and what we're leveraging with clients is the use of AI as a dashboarding and coaching tool to not only impact engagement, but then measure the return on that, continuously measuring the upside of retention and the upside of productivity. So that product, which is very new in its development, I think is going to take off in some measure across— you're probably going to see Workday, SuccessFactors, all of them at some point have agent AI working across these various kinds of traditional HR remits: staffing, retention, even leadership development, succession planning. You're going to see agent AI working across them, and certainly workforce analytics, data analytics. I think that's where the biggest opportunity is in HR for AI.

▶12:04HostTom, I want to switch gears and talk about your approach defining and implementing the HR business partner role in the mid-2000s. What lessons can today's HR leaders learn from that transformation?

▶12:19GuestYeah, this is a good one. I've written a little bit about this and I've thought about it a lot because I was with a leadership team in HR that was really going from transactional HR, HR associates, generalists out in the field, as I like to say, drying tears and tucking people in at night and not doing value-added advisory services to their client base to help them pick better leaders, to improve reward systems, to define the right comp model for their area, to define the right sales incentives for their area. Too busy chasing things down. And so we made that pivot and put things in centers, an HR operations center. I would— it was called an IT center, but most companies now call it an HR solutions center where you have technology, HR technology solutions, and then the centers of excellence around staffing and leadership development and learning. And then your HR business partners who were client-facing, and their job was to operate as many CHROs to their client, bringing in the tools, and the programs that were being developed in the centers to bear on their client. And I think the lesson learned there is it's like nature abhors a vacuum. It always wants to pull you back to what it's used to. Business always wants to pull HR back to what they're used to, which is transactions, getting things done. And I think I would have hired— we hired one. I would have hired probably all of our HR business partners in the 2000s, and I look to do this now from different functions. Either from consulting like McKinsey or Bain or PwC or Deloitte, or from the marketing or finance function or legal function. People with different perspectives who wouldn't be easily drawn into, this is how HR always operates. I think that was the gotcha back then in how, as I've seen HR business partners over the years define themselves by title, I still see them as HR generals. They're still chasing down every ground ball at the second.

▶14:17HostTom, what parting advice would you like to share with our community?

▶14:20GuestIt is, to me, still a passion play kind of role, HR. And that's not to say, woe is us, and we're so beat up on, but it— you really have to love and believe in HR as a value center. And if you think of yourself every day when you wake up as a value creator versus a cost center, I think it changes your mindset and your confidence going into an HR role or going into a meeting. I think finance always has the leverage in that sense, right? Because they manage the books, they manage the numbers, they close things out. And we need to think of ourselves as important and be as confident with our perspectives. That means we have to have really good data. This is no longer a function where you can talk theory. You have to bring dashboards and analysis, and AI is gonna help this greatly. So you can say, hey, we did these 6 things, got these 10 outcomes, and without these 6 things, we would now not be able to do this in revenue, in cost savings, in growth outside of our core products as a company. That's where I would coach my HR people to, to go is think of yourself as a value creator. And it'll change your mindset every day you walk in the door or in front of your video camera.

▶15:39HostTom, thanks so much for joining us today on the Built by People podcast. It was a pleasure to have you involved.

▶15:44GuestThanks for having me, Dave. Really enjoyed it.