Jamie Durling

▶0:01HostWelcome 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 Jamie to the Built By People podcast. Jamie, 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.

▶0:54GuestWell, like most people in HR, I didn't grow up thinking I want to be the person who delivers bad news and tells people they need more documentation for expenses. I'm here though. I started in HR by accident, and many of us do, don't we? I've worked across industries from luxury retail to media, and the common thread has always been organizations that evolve, ensuring that we don't let people behind in the process. This is number one, whether it's scaling teams, navigating M&A, which I know we'll talk about, or implementing policies that don't make people roll their eyes. I've been in the thick of it. And what keeps me engaged is that HR is never just about people. It's about how people drive business. It's a mix of strategy, psychology, finance, and sometimes even crisis management with a little bit of talk therapy thrown in. And no two days are the same, which is what makes it ultimately interesting.

▶1:55HostWell, Jamie, you've, you've developed expertise in connecting HR initiatives to financial outcomes. Can you share how you've developed this perspective and why you believe it's crucial for HR leaders?

▶2:06GuestYeah, for sure. So early in my career, I realized that HR only gets a seat at the table if it's connected to financials and if HR is able to substantiated with numbers. And we need to be able to talk in business terms at the end of the day and not just culture and engagement. So I made it a point to understand how people strategies impact revenue and the P&L, not just costs and PTO. So I saw firsthand how the right hiring strategies, performance management, leadership development have really impacted not just the overall engagement of the organization, but also the top and bottom lines of the company. And that's been pretty substantial in my development and in my growth.

▶2:59HostJamie, how do you recommend HR professionals build their financial acumen and develop stronger partnerships with their finance teams?

▶3:07GuestThis is a good question. I believe strongly that HR executives, chief HR officers need to make the CFO their BFS. The partnership with the CFO is absolutely critical, and being able to actually engage in conversations specifically around the impact of not really just HR-related costs, but HR engagements and activities that drive performance and really drive top-line and bottom-line revenue— top-line revenue and bottom-line profitability is the way to get the attention of not only of finance, but also of the CEO., and in order to gain a seat at the table, you really need to be proactive in discussing and understanding the impact of financials. And so this is really has been my secret. I have some of my closest colleagues in my past have been CFOs and heads of finance in the organization and controllers as well.

▶4:04HostJamie, you mentioned in the past the metaphor of having an angel and devil on your shoulders when making HR decisions. Can you elaborate how you balance financial performance with people-centric decisions?

▶4:16GuestFor sure. It's a tough balance without question. As an employee of an organization, we are employed by that organization and our ultimate goal is to, if it's a public company, to offer the shareholders the highest profit. That's, that's ultimately a business's job. In HR, we need to balance that with the engagement of the employees and the development of the employees. And so, Every time that I look at any activity from an HR perspective, I look at it from two lenses and I ask myself two questions. How is what we are doing and how is what I'm going to do driving the overall engagement and development of the employee population and prospering the employee? And then conversely, how is it actually impacting the bottom line? Because obviously the higher you drive performance, the better the impact on the bottom line if you maintain costs as it is or incrementally increase those costs. So those are the things that I ask myself, and in my experience, those are the two things that really impact the organization from an HR perspective and that really drive this, drive, drive the conversation with business leaders.

▶5:27HostJamie, in your experience working across luxury retail and media industries, what are some specific examples of how HR initiatives directly impacted the organization's profitability?

▶5:39GuestThis is a good question. HR typically is not linked with profitability and linked with, frankly, linked with finance. But I have a couple of examples, but I think the major example is in a retail organization that where I was the head of HR and implementing performance-based productivity-driven schedule management. Allowed us to not only save on personnel costs and costs of employees, which directly impacts the bottom line, but it also allowed us to identify those individuals who are driving the highest performance. So when I talk retail, I talk about conversion, I talk about average transaction value and those types of metrics that we built into the algorithm when we looked at employee productivity. And those are things that allowed us to schedule the right people at the right time to convert the right amount of clients and then ultimately generating the right revenue, which impacts the bottom line. And this is a true example, a real example of something that occurred recently a couple of years ago that we found to be extremely successful. And the commercial leaders of the organization appreciated the, almost the formula for which we could help them proactively and strategically drive the business that they had.

▶7:05HostJamie, how has your international experience, particularly in post-acquisition and merger integrations, shaped your approach to HR

▶7:14Guestleadership? Ultimately, at the end of the day, international experience for me has done a couple of things. Number one, it's really about understanding the differences of culture. When I have worked internationally in M&A activities and on integration matters, I'm not only dealing with differences in employment law from country to country, but I'm also dealing with the differences in the local culture itself. How we communicate, how we engage, the speed at which we communicate and what the change management is like. It's very different from country to country and culture to culture. And so one of the things that I, that I'm appreciative of is having been raised and having worked in the United States for as long as I have, I have a lot of experience across each of the states in which we operate in addition to the countries in which I operate and working in the United States, each state, as you know, and your listeners know, is almost like a different country. So when For instance, when I moved to Asia and I was living in Hong Kong and running a post-acquisition integration across 9 countries, it wasn't easy. I made many mistakes, but I approached it as if each individual, each president of each region was different. And those local innuendos and local cultures were also very different, even though it was the Asia Pacific region. And that has really fostered not only my ability to engage other individuals of different backgrounds, but also build a lot of trust relatively quickly within organizations.

▶8:50HostJamie, what parting advice would you like to share with our community?

▶8:54GuestAt the end of the day, it's really about HR positioning itself to be a true strategic facilitator of the business. This is a, at my core, this is what I believe. This is who I am. And I believe that HR actually does in partnership with the commercial business, but also with the operational functions such as finance, drive the overall top line and bottom line results. And so positioning yourself in human resources as a leader, or even as a business partner, as someone who is part of the business and understands the business. Is absolutely critical. The more time you spend with the business, sitting with the business as opposed to with HR and being in the field, if you are in a position where there are field-based employees, the more that you will not only develop credibility, but you will also develop a strong understanding of the overall operational aspect of the business, and it will make you a better HR leader and HR professional.

▶9:59HostJamie, thank you so much for joining us on the Built by People podcast. It was a pleasure to have you involved.

▶10:04GuestThanks so much.