Today’s Chief HR Officers are better positioned to take on the CEO role than ever before. Check out some highlights from host Brandon Laws’ interview with Amy Spurling, Founder and CEO of Compt, and learn how HR leaders can maximize their “seat at the table” in an ever-changing business climate.
GUEST AT A GLANCE
Amy Spurling is the Founder and CEO of Compt, an employee benefits and perks software company. Amy draws on over twenty years of experience in leadership roles where she’s been responsible for strategic planning, expansion, employee development, finance and accounting, and human resources, just to name a few.
A QUICK GLIMPSE INTO OUR PODCAST
🔊 Podcast: Transform Your Workplace, sponsored by Xenium HR
🎙️ Host: Brandon Laws
📋 In his own words: “The Transform Your Workplace podcast is your go-to source for the latest workplace trends, big ideas, and time-tested methods straight from the mouths of industry experts and respected thought-leaders.”
A NEW PATH
“When I started my career, there was no such thing as a Chief HR Officer, or CHRO,” guest Amy Spurling explained. Initially, HR’s job was to manage payroll, benefits, or even performance. However, now, the game has changed.
Among many other executive functions, today’s CHRO looks at how the business will stay competitive for compensation, how to approach employee engagement, and what to make of metrics. This new strategic role better positions CHROs to take on the CEO role instead of filling out compliance paperwork behind-the-scenes.
PODCAST EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
Staying Steps Ahead
“You need to think about the product, of course. You need to think about sales strategy and all the things. But with the CHRO, it’s really tackling like, ‘If we’re spending all this money on human beings, how do we actually do that in the best way possible to make sure that we can continue to grow, stay ahead of the curve, not spend too much, not spend too little?’ It’s a much more metrics-driven role at this point in time.”
Keeping the Seat
“CHROs, and HR in general, got a big seat at the table through Covid. That crisis was not a financial crisis, it was a humanity crisis. So HR took the lead like, ‘Okay, how do we get people home and get everybody functional and tools and all of that?’ When we move into a recession, CFOs start taking those reigns back because it becomes more financial. And so we’re seeing that CHROs right now are losing some of the power that they had over the past two and a half years. And so I think it’s the pendulum shifting. But I think that the fact that we still have a very tight labor market kind of ensures and continues with a notion that HR absolutely has to be at the table.”
A Humane Approach
“People understand that there may be a point in time where something like a big set of RIFs has to happen. We saw that with Stripe, for instance, but the way they handled it was the most humane way they possibly could. They explained what happened. They took accountability for it. They did a bunch of leave, and they did severance, and they did all the right things for the people on that team. And then we’ve seen obviously other examples where that hasn’t been the case. This stuff does have a ripple effect. You know, it impacts who you’re gonna be able to hire next and how people think about their job security.”
Building it Right
“The days of not hiring an HR person until you’re hundreds of people deep — like you can’t do that anymore. That’s not an option if you wanna build a functional, viable company. In the same way, not having email is not a functional option in an organization either. […] You need to have somebody with that level of expertise or you end up filing all the paperwork that you need to file, not setting up in states the way you need to, not doing some of that functional piece, and certainly not doing the strategic piece either. So if you need to grow rapidly and add a bunch of folks to the team, you can’t do it without HR at the table.”
Working Together and Moving Forward
“Now you have the CHRO, the complimentary person to the CFO. They’re really the only two roles in an organization that sit across every department. Every other department leader is over their department. They’re not sitting across the entire organization. You need to collaborate in order to figure out, ‘Alright, how do we handle this from a financial and compliance perspective? And then a people and compliance perspective?’ So, in my mind, in the most well-run organizations, those two folks are best buds.”
The Same Goal
“Anytime you’re approaching somebody in finance, you’ve gotta be pretty metrics-driven. Feelings and wants and needs may fall on deaf ears with the finance team. Because they’re gonna get to ‘What’s our bottom line? What’s our top line? How’s this going to work?’ But that’s where I think the collaboration can work really well too because ultimately both have the same goal, right? They both want the organization to grow. They both want it to thrive and do all the things that it needs to do, but they’re looking at two sides of the coin.”
Finding What Works
“So you can’t ask your employees, ‘Oh, what do you want?’ It’s impossible. On average, every person wants three different things, so you have to move away from just surveying people and finding out what they want. You’re never gonna find out the truth and what’s gonna move the needle, and that’s just an exhausting exercise that’s not gonna get the job done. So instead you say, ‘We support wellness or family’ or just, ‘Here’s a bundle of things that you could have. You go find it. You go do what you wanna do.’ And so HR doesn’t have to be playing that role, and employees are just a lot happier as well.”
LEARN MORE
Find out how you can revolutionize your employee benefits and perks with Compt.