Sam Simmons

▶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 Sam to the Built By People podcast. Sam, 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.

▶0:54GuestAwesome. Thank you, Dave, for having me. Sure thing. So I originally went to college for broadcast journalism and decided to pivot after experiencing the culture of a newsroom. It wasn't necessarily that it was a bad culture, but that it moved at a pace that I didn't think was necessarily right for me. So ended up going into higher ed and athletics, rec sports, and then later undergraduate admissions, which propelled me into the nonprofit world where I was also doing recruiting and particularly for an organization focused on analysts and K-12-focused organizations nationally. That led me to executive search where I recruited leaders in organizations nationally as well, with a focus on nonprofit and social impact. And recruiting really opened the door to tech. My first couple of roles in recruiting in the tech sector were actually at Wayfair, where I had 3 roles total, the first 2 being in business recruiting across the company. And the last was in talent strategy, which was more of an emerging department where I functioned as a chief of staff and also a group head of people to 3 executives and then their businesses and teams across a few different countries. HubSpot came into the picture after that. I was placed in a newly created role, a role that honestly was created during my interview process, and it was focused on strategic projects, and that included everything from global expansion to company decision-making frameworks. Company policy changes on hybrid or pay transparency, reviews, and more. I was really happy in that job, and the Spurs was certainly not a planned shift. Spurs Sports and Entertainment, which includes 3 franchises, including the San Antonio Spurs. It happened on LinkedIn, and it was a really cool opportunity to do what I love around people in a sports environment, which was really the reason why I was interested in broadcasterism to begin with. I wanted to be one of those rare souls who could do NBA courtside reporting and keep their calm while talking to coaches who desperately want to get to the locker room or not talk to you. So it was an awesome experience. That's a really great team of people there in Southwest Texas between Austin and San Antonio. Did a lot of transformation, a lot of building, was there for 2 seasons. And then the LPGA came calling last summer, and it was a really unique role that kind of hearkened back to that last role I had at Wayfair. As a mix of being that head of people and also being a chief of staff and specifically working on the organizational operating system. So I've been here since mid-September 2024, so it's been about 6 months.

▶3:26HostSam, you have a lot of experience in change management in HR. What do you see as the biggest misconceptions about implementing organizational change?

▶3:35GuestI think one of the things we have a tendency to do is oversimplify the communication part of the process. Or the lack of awareness on your dependencies or failure to test your assumptions. So you come in overconfident and underestimating some of the diligence you need to do, even if you don't have an answer for everything. So a good change management process requires a communications campaign, plain and simple. It's gotta be steady, it's gotta be repetitive, but it, that's what you have to do in order to ensure it sinks in over time. There's no one and done. I say this all the time to leaders. It's like, you'll do a town hall and you'll do another town hall. You write an email and you'll write another email. You really have to think about accepting that role as a spokesperson and then really looking strategically across the organization, what other ways you can embed that change so that it takes within the business.

▶4:25HostSam, you'll be speaking at Transform about the evolving employer-employee dynamic. How has this power shift impacted the way organizations approach their people strategy?

▶4:37GuestIt's impacted it a lot. It's shifted a lot. Many organizations didn't have to think about the lifestyle element of their value proposition with candidates or new hires, but now they do. So it's not just about pay, it's about career development, the work-life integration the candidate is striving for. It's about the culture. You have to have really good quality, thoughtful answers to these questions and continue to step up your game year over year while ensuring that your leaders remember that culture is and always has been a team sport, and everyone has a part to play in it as a means of retaining the staff you currently have and attracting new people to the table.

▶5:17HostAnd what strategies, Sam, have you found to be effective in helping businesses adapt to the new reality where employees have more influence in their workplace?

▶5:26GuestGreat question. Using data, there's so much data available to us. So you use it as a way to tell a story, whether that's overall people analytics, survey data, what you have available to you when you're doing workforce planning. You have to show leaders how retention and engagement impact the organization's ability to achieve its goals. It's hard to get anything done without people, but we easily forget that even in the age of AI, which is a great opportunity for efficiencies and more gains, you still need people at the center of what you do. And oftentimes that can be your competitive advantage. So weaving together a credible and clear story about why they, being the leaders of the organization, should care and why engaged, diverse teams are higher performing teams as well.

▶6:11HostSam, how can HR professionals better partner with business leaders to create win-win scenarios that serve both organizational needs and employee expectations?

▶6:20GuestYou've gotta know the business. You have to learn what drives your company's flywheel deeply. So when you connect with business leaders, it's not just an opportunity to learn more about the people priorities and how people are doing. That's an opportunity to get business updates too, and to check in on those things so you understand what's going on, why it's affecting them, and what's top of mind for leaders in times of stress or when they're afraid or other areas in which emotions might veer a little bit more extreme, it's usually leading from that place of what's top of mind for them and what those business priorities are too, in addition to those people priorities. Your interest and your awareness on this really positions us well to be proactive in our roles, even though they're inherently really reactive too.

▶7:03HostSam, in your experience, what frameworks or approaches have been most successful in building sustainable workplace relationships?

▶7:11GuestThis is a great question. So for me, sustainable workplace relationships, I think of that as like we ride at dawn type of relationships. In the age of COVID we went online a lot, right? So we didn't spend a lot of time on that rapport building that sometimes innately happens when you're in person. So I would say don't skip that part, even if that's 2 to 3 minutes. If your coworker has been pregnant for the last 6 or 7 months and you didn't know that until they stood up, that means it was like, whoa, we gotta really get to know each other a little bit better. So understand what's going on, not just within your business and what we're working on, but you really as a person. You want the types of relationships that no matter what the crisis or the situation is, that it's really built tough so that you trust the person you're now solving for this situation with. That means make promises and keep them, that you're a person of your word more broadly, that you're clear about your constraints and that you're not out there to blame anyone, but you are there to explain the impact of what it means when collaboration falls apart or communication doesn't happen. So the best and most sustainable workplace relationships are built on trust, transparency, and follow-through always. A genuine interest in the person, in their teams, in their business. When it comes down to it, those soft skills everyone's talking about, like, that's really the make or break, right? And that also informs culture a lot too.

▶8:34HostSam, what parting advice would you like to share with our community?

▶8:38GuestI'd say, I'm so proud of you. Please continue to hang in there. As the world gets inevitably more and more chaotic, your people will search for stability and more clarity at work, which isn't something we can ever guarantee, but it is definitely a reality of the year that is happening before our eyes. So let's do what we do best and find ways to solve for the business and for our people at the same time, while always ensuring we take extra, extra care of ourselves.

▶9:07HostSam, thanks so much for joining us on this episode of the Built by People, uh, podcast in partnership with Transform. It was a pleasure to have you involved.

▶9:15GuestThank you so much for having me, Dave. Take care.