HR In The Boardroom: Candice Pokk of Segal On Why And How HR Should Help Drive Company Decisions

An Interview With Rachel Kline

Include your HR leader in the highest echelon of leadership where organizational decisions are made. Ensure your HR leader and team are clear on the mission of your organization and view themselves as enablers of organizational strategy. Represent and articulate employee perspectives and workforce solutions to the leadership team. Use data and analytics to provide insights and measure outcomes. Set clear processes and employment policies.

Most leaders don’t see how to employ HR as a strategic pillar of the business and this leaves a lot of professionals feeling somewhat frustrated. In this interview series, we talk to HR professionals, business leaders, and anyone who is an authority on HR who can share what companies can gain by having HR in the boardroom and why and how HR should help drive company decisions. This time we had the pleasure of interviewing Candice Pokk.

Candice Pokk is a Senior Consultant with the Organizational Effectiveness practice at Segal, a leading employee benefits and HR consulting firm. Candice specializes in facilitating and implementing strategies that transform organizations. Her expertise includes designing recruiting and retention strategies, building strategic workforce plans, conducting organizational assessments, facilitating culture transformation, designing organizational structures and re-engineering process improvement. Candice has worked with a variety of Fortune 500 corporations, higher education institutions, public sector, and non-profit organizations. She received her Bachelor of Science in Marketing Communications from California Lutheran University and a Master of Science in Organizational Psychology from Vanguard University.

Thank you so much for your time! I know that you are a very busy person. Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

Thank you for having me! My career started in an information technology consulting firm. My time there led me to work for DIRECTV, where I managed large, complex projects made up of global teams. I found myself naturally drawn to Human Resources and Organizational Effectiveness work during both experiences. I was often the unofficial people and change person and eventually, I decided to officially make a career switch. A mentor referred me to a role that utilized my past experiences, and I began working in Organizational Effectiveness. At the same time, I began my graduate degree in Organizational Psychology.

Now, I largely spend my time focused on assessing HR functions and designing best-practice HR organizations, as well as talent management and culture strategies. I have the pleasure of working with executive leaders and HR teams nearly every day. I feel fortunate to work with some of the best consultants and people I know, helping companies to become great places to work. When I’m not working or traveling, you can usually find me volunteering at church, walking my dog, out for dinner with friends or gabbing with my sister.

It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

Early on in my Organizational Effectiveness career I designed a solution without gaining consensus from significant stakeholders. My thinking was that my work would speak for itself, and everyone would immediately recognize the value. I was working at a Fortune 100 organization, and I devised and filmed a creative video for a change management initiative. My client sponsor thought it was effective and was very pleased with my work, but the project manager had not had an opportunity to give any input before I filmed it and was not too happy. The video was used, but it was not distributed very widely. I learned the importance of getting buy-in and input from major project contributors upfront and now I always involve key team members throughout all aspects of my work.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful for who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

So many people have shaped my life and career that it’s hard to pick just one person. There are two people who have had the biggest impact on where I am now. The first would be a long-time family friend, an HR executive, who recognized my natural talents and gave me my first job. She is still someone I seek advice from and exchange HR trends and information.

The second person would be my boss at DIRECTV. He taught me about being a successful project manager and the fundamentals of business. He also influenced me to start my career in Organizational Effectiveness consulting. I still rely on the lessons he taught me today.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“Never give up.” This quote plastered on my mirror from a young age. No matter what challenges I’ve faced in my life, and there have been many, I’ve found a way to pivot or persist until I reached my goal. Grit is an underrated personality trait that I think should be recognized and rewarded more.

Thinking back on your own career, what would you tell your younger self?

In order to have a glamorous career, you have to do the unglamorous things that others often don’t want to do. A successful career is built on a million tiny habits and decisions that are often imperceivable to others. Sometimes that means quitting a job that deep down you know isn’t the right fit, even though it’s comfortable and secure. In other times, it’s about buckling down in a discipled way day after day until it pays off.

Let’s now move to the central part of our interview about HR. Why do you think HR deserves a place in the boardroom and in high-level decision-making? Can you help articulate how a company will gain from that?

The post-pandemic workforce has challenged organizations with high levels of turnover and a competitive labor market, making recruiting and retention a key concern for senior leaders. Older generations of workers are leaving the workforce and Millennials and Gen Z workers have much different expectations of their employers and their workplace. The pandemic also ushered in a new way of working, with many employers now offering remote and hybrid jobs. Employee mental health and well-being are now recognized as having implications for employers. These trends have put a much greater focus on the role of HR to address pressing challenges.

In highly successful companies, HR is a strategic business partner focused on enabling organizational strategies and outcomes. Those forward-thinking institutions have an HR leader who serves as a trusted partner to the senior leadership team and a change agent for the organization. They bring stakeholders along to achieve results and proactively provide solutions to leadership based on workforce needs. Companies that invite HR to drive business decisions and have a place in the boardroom often see higher revenue growth and better employee engagement, leading to lower turnover rates, higher productivity and lower costs.

From your experience, how can HR people and culture professionals ensure they’re involved in strategic planning processes?

First and foremost, ask. Communicating the desire and explaining the value HR can contribute to the strategic planning process is the first step. Unfortunately, too many HR professionals miss out by not advocating for themselves and asking to be a part of the conversation.

Next, be proactive in educating leaders on people and culture issues — and put forth ideas to address those challenges. Understand the needs and desires of employees and what motivates your workforce to achieve strategic goals. Use data and metrics to highlight the importance of focusing on people and HR. This will continuously demonstrate your value. Lastly, be prepared to recommend and design workforce and change management strategies that will move your organization forward.

A lot of folks believe that CHROs would make great CEOs, but often they’re overlooked. Why do you think that is?

Historically, HR functions and CHROs are seen as transactional, compliance functions rather than strategic problem solvers. To shift perceptions, CHROs should focus on becoming strategic business partners and change agents. The pandemic brought people challenges to the forefront of many organizations, elevating HR. Much of our consulting work is in HR transformation and helping HR and senior leaders move their organization from transactional to strategic functions that operate at the highest leadership levels.

What skills can HR folks work on to become more effective business partners?

1. Strategic thinking and problem solving

2. Change management skills

3. Coaching and advisory abilities

4. Effective use of technology (data analytics, AI, and HR systems)

5. Culture, engagement, and retention expertise

6. Intellectual curiosity about the business functions they serve

7. Striking a balance between being a strong business minded leader, and being an empathetic leader

Here is the primary question of our discussion. Based on your experience and success, what are the five most important ways that HR can help drive company decisions? Please share a story or an example for each.

1. Include your HR leader in the highest echelon of leadership where organizational decisions are made. I continue to see HR leaders being buried in the organization under the CFO, the COO or General Counsel. The HR leader should be a permanent member of the senior leadership team. This starts with hiring a leader that has a strategic mindset and has expertise in areas such as employee engagement and culture, workforce planning, talent management, succession planning, total rewards and employer branding. It is a person who brings the organization along and is a visionary for people and culture solutions.

2. Ensure your HR leader and team are clear on the mission of your organization and view themselves as enablers of organizational strategy. When I assess HR organizations, I frequently find that HR is disconnected from the strategy of the business. HR is commonly perceived as a roadblock to the rest of the organization and is seen as transactional. Driving company decisions starts with understanding business operations and having a perspective that is deeply aligned to achieving the mission of the organization.

I worked with an organization that had very dedicated HR professionals that often put in long hours to keep up with the workload and employee demands. Leaders and employees at the organization were hardworking and well-liked but were frustrated by HR and felt that their most pressing challenges were not addressed effectively. I recommended and facilitated an HR transformation to convert the HR function from a transactional, compliance-based function to a strategic, forward-thinking HR organization. I started by building new strategic, value-added HR services and capabilities jointly with HR and key leaders. After that was complete, HR processes were streamlined and automated to reduce bureaucracy and improve the user experience. Finally, I redesigned talent management and employee experience programs, redefined the HR culture and rebranded the HR function in order to create support for the true workforce needs and alignment to the organizational strategy.

3. Represent and articulate employee perspectives and workforce solutions to the leadership team. The best organizations to work for have elevated levels of trust. And trust starts with listening and understanding the needs and concerns of your employees. It is important not to stop there, but also take meaningful action when necessary. HR leaders should have awareness of employee views and proactively bring forth solutions to solve the greatest people challenges. This will create value for the organization and result in higher levels of engagement and stronger business outcomes.

For example, I’ve recently had an influx of clients who are faced with incredibly high levels of turnover and are struggling to recruit candidates to meet hiring needs. This often creates stress on their employees to take over the extra work. I’m seeing organizations increase pay and make other compensation and operational changes; however, these organizations are still seeing high levels of turnover. What I’m finding is that the drivers of the turnover are due to broader work culture and morale concerns.

At one nonprofit client, I met with stakeholders in the workforce to understand what was driving the attrition. As a direct result of hands-on interaction, I developed a recruiting and retention strategy that included programs to increase employee retention, instituted plans to streamline recruiting processes to be more efficient and enable quicker time-to-hire, and created an employee value proposition that attracts and retains employees to the organization.

4. Use data and analytics to provide insights and measure outcomes. When I work with organizations looking to transform their organizational cultures, one of the first steps I take is to conduct a survey to understand and measure the current climate. I then produce action plans to address the most pressing cultural challenges. After we’ve implemented our interventions, we continue to extend the same survey every one to two years to measure the impacts and outcomes of the action plans. Using data can be powerful in telling a story about what organizational needs are, as well as tracking the impact of intended results.

5. Set clear processes and employment policies. It can be incredibly challenging for leaders to make workforce decisions without clear guidance on practices. An environment that has transparent, streamlined HR processes and updated policies helps cultivate an equitable culture where all stakeholders can thrive. I see many organizations that do not document their HR processes or have outdated policies that are hard to access. This shifts the burden of interpreting policies to the line managers that are left to enact them or on the employee to constantly seek out information.

Can you share 3 or 4 of the most common mistakes you have seen businesses make when faced with hard decisions? What should one keep in mind to avoid that?

The first mistake I often see is not staying up to date with workforce trends and the company’s employee value proposition. Businesses must be nimble in order to adapt to a changing workforce and retain their greatest asset, their employees. I’m seeing remote and hybrid work as a driver of turnover. This employee expectation is not going away, and yet many organizations have a disconnect with what is important to their current and prospective workforce.

Under-communicating is another common mistake that can have big implications. I repeatedly hear from stakeholders throughout organizations about the lack of communication at the executive level or from their direct supervisor. As human beings we have a core motive to seek understanding, so in the absence of information we’ll make up stories or become very frustrated. I always encourage leaders to communicate more frequently than what feels natural, particularly during times of change.

Not acting swiftly enough is often another mistake I see. There can be a temptation to wait to act on a difficult problem or on implementing a new strategy. Taking a long time to enact a solution can be very hard on an organization that must maintain operations in the face of adversity for an extended period of time. With unemployment rates at a historic low, employees have more employment options than ever before. They will often leave an organization when faced with difficulty for too long. If these employees do stick around, organizational culture will suffer greatly. Once leaders have identified the solution to a challenge, they shouldn’t wait to correct it.

Preemptive layoffs are another issue. Laying off employees instead of looking for other cost-cutting measures is usually a mistake you can’t take back. Research overwhelmingly supports the fact that layoffs typically produce higher costs and lower productivity, while degrading organizational culture. Looking for creative solutions like furloughs, reallocating staff, salary reductions, voluntary separations, reducing operational overhead and soliciting input from your workforce to achieve financial goals during tough times, often yields improved short and long-term results.

We are very blessed to have some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world whom you would love to have a private lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this.

I’m a big fan of Adam Grant, the organizational psychologist. I really enjoy his podcast and the paradigm shifts he brings forth in his work. I would be delighted to have lunch with him.

How can our readers further follow your work?

Connect with me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/candicepokk or reach me through the Segal website: https://www.segalco.com/services/organizational-effectiveness

Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!