Scaling in 90 Days: The HR Playbook for Efficiency, AI, and Leadership

The operating partner just swapped the annual plan for rolling 90-day revenue targets, and the people team now has to show how it supports the quarter without slowing hiring. For many HR leaders, that is the first time they have to describe their work in P&L terms rather than headcount terms. Kelly Oliver, an ACC certified executive coach who spent 30 years at Microsoft, Oracle, HP, and Salesforce before running HR at a PE-backed cybersecurity company, makes the case that revenue literacy is what earns HR its seat.

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How should HR scale a PE-backed company without slowing hiring?

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Turn the scrutiny inward. Oliver strips away the programs that do not move the company toward its quarterly goal and treats change management as a standing discipline, because the pace only accelerates from here. She frames it through her sport: training for a marathon means cutting whatever does not serve the race. The hard part is timing. Quarterly forecasts are compressing into month-by-month targets, and talent does not develop on a 90-day clock. "In high growth companies, it's about revenue goals," she says. The engagement survey still matters, but it bends to the quarter.

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How does HR learn to speak in P&L terms?

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Start with a coffee chat. Oliver tells every HR person to sit down with someone in finance and ask one question: how does the work HR does show up on the P&L and the cash flow conversation? Too many tap out because they decide math is not for them, and she treats that fluency as a core competency. The next move is an HR QBR that mirrors the business QBR, reporting what is going well, what is not, and why, tied to data the team can defend. As she puts it, "all good things come from selling, right? All good things come from selling."

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Why are managers so unprepared right now?

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They get the title without the training. Companies promote strong individual contributors and expect them to grow at the pace of the business. "We make people managers and they scale from two to 20 direct reports without any manager one-on-one training," she says. Her fix is a required manager 101 tied to company values, even for people who have managed for years. The harder part is behavioral. Managers lean out of hard conversations because it is easier to route them to HR, and Oliver argues that owning the discomfort is the job. Managing what an employee does can be automated. Managing how they do it cannot.

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Where should AI go first in an HR organization?

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The back of the house, not the front. Oliver would automate the clunky internal processes first, so benefits and payroll stop eating a sales rep's afternoon, before pointing AI at employee-facing touchpoints. "I'm a big believer in putting AI in the back of the house first," she says, drawing the parallel to inboxes already flooded with automated outreach: do not do that to your own people. She is direct about who belongs in the room. The processes that slow a workforce are the ones HR owns, so "leaving HR kind of off to the side and outside of the AI strategy is a huge disservice," with the chief people officer sitting alongside the CIO and the COO.

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None of this removes the human part of the work. Empathy and eye contact are the skills AI does not replace, and Oliver leaves the audience with a challenge: be better than a bot.

Logan (00:00): Want to talk about HR and operating in PE environments, and from an executive lens, how HR can do that better. I'm here with Kelly Oliver. And Kelly, what should the audience know about you?

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Kelly Oliver (00:16): Wow, that's a big question. Well, I would say this.

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Logan (00:16): We always like the intro with big questions.

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Kelly Oliver (00:18): Yeah, I like it. Well, thanks for having me. First of all, it's really a pleasure to talk to someone, especially like you, Logan, who is just an open thinker and I ask great questions. So appreciate the opportunity. What should people know about me? I have come up through my career starting really in a engineering type mindset and information systems background, and worked my way through large enterprise software companies like Microsoft, Oracle, HP, Salesforce, and then most recently spent some time being the head of HR at a PE-backed cybersecurity company. So that's kind of my career history, 30 years in a nutshell.

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But other things to know about me is I like to have fun. So I think you'll see a little humor in this conversation. And then also I'm a runner, and I love the idea of long distance running and do a lot of it.

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Logan (01:15): Okay, what kind of distances?

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Kelly Oliver (01:19): Mostly marathoning, and the goal is to get into the ultra running space soon as time allows. And, you know, I've been a runner since I was, I don't know, 14 years old, and I won't comment how long that's been, but, you know, just taking the time to do it all is probably what's next on my list.

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Logan (01:20): Okay. That's awesome. I'm a swimmer by trade and I was always distance swimmer. And obviously anything distance, there's always some similarities in athletics. And so I always have an interest in how people are training for that.

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Kelly Oliver (01:42): Wow. Yeah, swimming is no joke. Like, that's no joke. You know how to suffer then.

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Logan (02:03): I don't know about that, but yeah, I mean, I don't know if you do. Do you do two a days running and like all of that? There's not that many sports that are two a days like that. And it's usually always the distance stuff.

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Kelly Oliver (02:09): Yeah. You gotta... running on tired legs is the key.

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Logan (02:23): Yeah. And I'm going to apologize to the audience. I cough, or a cough makes it into the recording. I have this lingering cough. I don't know why, but at any rate. So taking that, your most recent stop was in HR. So I kind of wanted to kick off the conversation, because so much of the high stakes environments, you know, PE-backed right now, is how do you scale an organization efficiently? I mean, it's probably the many, many million dollar question that everybody's trying to answer, especially as we get flooded with AI, which we will talk about. But how would you start to think about how HR leaders should scale organizations efficiently, kind of given the newest parameters of the world, if you will?

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Kelly Oliver (02:56): Yeah, it's a great question. I think one of the things that, you know, I have seen in my career is that you really have to pivot more inward versus outward, and scrutiny on internal processes to become more efficient and strip away kind of, well, I'll just use a running analogy, right? When you're training for a marathon, you start to strip away all of those things that are not going to serve you to reach your goal.

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Right? So if you want to train for a marathon, you start to get really inward focused on your nutrition, your scheduling, your rest and recovery. And it's very similar into a company that needs to scale efficiently. Right now, it's let's get inward. Let's focus on how we can really streamline our most critical processes. And then, you know, the things that are nice to have, we will start to implement those as we achieve our goals.

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And so the other thing I see is just there needs to be a critical focus on change management, because the pace at which change is going to occur is going to accelerate, because you have to be lean to be able to pivot quickly. And that's where a change management framework is really important.

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Logan (04:26): Like how fast are you thinking that change is starting to happen in, you're doing that? Like what are timeframes that you're thinking fast?

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Kelly Oliver (04:36): Yeah, it's interesting, quarterly sales forecasts are certainly becoming month by month forecasts. So the tolerance for outcomes in a quarter is getting narrower and narrower, right? The expectation within 90 days that a company or a team or organization can pivot quickly to deliver outcomes within that quarter has changed. We've stopped setting goals for first half and second half, right? It's moved to within that 90 day time frame. And then it's managed month to month and progress week by week. So it's really, again, that's that inward focus and inward scrutiny that I'm talking about.

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I think one of the challenges there is that we don't always see talent develop at the same rate, right? Like it's really hard to develop a skillset and demonstrate it and master it within 90 days, because you don't always get the opportunity to reuse it within 90 days. So the rate of talent development and the need for company growth, there's a little bit of friction there. So that's one of the challenges I see in the space right now.

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Logan (05:45): Yeah, I mean, I'm going to go with your running analogy. Like if everything is sitting in that 90 days, like if you're training for running or a marathon, like you can't do it in 90 days. It takes you, I mean, if you, like you probably can because you have been running forever. So there's muscle memory there, but somebody who's not, you know, maybe goes from a 5k isn't in 90 days going to do a marathon and feel really good about it. And so there's like a huge dichotomy there, right? Like that.

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Logan (06:13): Not everything can be forced into 90 days.

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Kelly Oliver (06:16): That's right. That comes to the importance of setting very realistic goals. And I think we're seeing, you know, vision and ambition around really aggressive quarterly goals, and the thought process to like, hey, if you're trying to go from a couch to a marathon in 90 days, again, that is a talent development type thing. Like you're just not going to get there in 90 days. And so setting a realistic goal within 90 days is a 5k, 10k, you know, maybe a half marathon or something.

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The other thing I just want to mention is muscle memory becomes so important during this condensed timeframe. So you need those leaders that have done this before. They know how to communicate. They know how to conduct change management, and they know how to be transparent and authentic during times of high acceleration for goals.

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Logan (07:08): Yeah, that's a really good call out for just kind of knowing how to do it before. And I think that that's just, it's hard to learn that fast if you've never done something before, but that's a little bit of a digression. So in this 90 day window where we're looking, those goals are gonna come top down and they're gonna be revenue focused. How does HR start to get involved in that process and understanding and laddering up kind of the people side of stuff into these 90 day change management or changes for efficiency and revenue impact?

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Kelly Oliver (07:43): Yeah, great question. So one of the things I encourage all individuals in HR, regardless of where you sit, is you typically have a colleague within the finance organization, and having a quick coffee chat around how does the work we do sit on the P&L? Where in cash flow do we matter? And matter is a strong word, but the reality is, do you understand how the work that you're doing shows up on the profit loss income statement and or the cash flow conversation?

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So a lot of people tap out of that conversation because they just don't think, you know, like math isn't for me. That's very much a core competency that has to be in the HR organization. So one, I would say, you know, get focused on understanding the work that you do, because quarterly goals are about revenue. That's it. Like we may all think it's about getting the employee engagement survey out and done. We may think it's about getting all performance reviews out and done. That's actually not it. In high growth companies, it's about revenue goals.

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And so making sure you really understand that, if the company needs to turn the lever really hard on sales in Q3, we might need to adjust the timing of some of the programs that are going to roll out for the HR and for the employee experience. Again, it's that inward scrutiny and kind of stripping away the things that don't get us to the exact goal, because all good things come from selling, right? All good things come from selling.

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Logan (09:21): Yeah. You're the second leader I've spoken to that has mentioned HR getting close to revenue. And I worked with a sales leader a few years back and his comment was like, the closer you are to revenue, the better things happen for you, kind of a thing. And so like this learning how to get close to revenue. And if you're in high growth, the people strategy has to matter, because if, let's say you have turnover in those 90 days and you still need to hit revenue, the recruiting team has to know how to go get sales reps or anybody who's going to be able to make quick impacts. And so then industry knowledge becomes important. Rolodexes become important for if you're hiring and doing all of that. Like just understanding that context, I think is super, super critical if you do need 90 days, like 90 days goes really quickly.

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Kelly Oliver (10:19): It's aggressive. It's aggressive for sure. The thing I'll mention where I think HR can be really impactful on this is having a pulse on individual performances within the go-to-market space. Right? Because if you know, and generally I like to say there should be a heat map for performance. In a global company, if we're starting to see a degradation of performance of our sales reps in Southern Europe, to know that, to start to give that leading indicator that we may have uncovered quota in Southern Europe because we're seeing low rep performance, that has direct implication on our revenue goal for Q3.

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So being kind of more in touch with the employee performances is really, really important, right? I think that's something that HR can do, right? And then helping leadership understand where there's individual performances that will roll up to impact the quarterly goals.

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Logan (11:20): So should, I don't want to make it a leading question, but like should HR be in touch with managers like that all the time, or like how would you give advice for managers or HR folks to get involved in that and be early on that identification?

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Kelly Oliver (11:22): Yeah, I mean, getting in touch with the managers, ultimately it's the manager's role to manage performance, right? So I think HR having a very clear understanding of what are the managers setting as goals for individual performance, whether it's pipeline coverage ratio, net new logos, renewals, whatever it is, having finger on the pulse of how individual reps are meeting those goals through the manager, and getting feedback from the manager on what is being achieved and how they're getting it done, is the number one way in my opinion for HR individuals.

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And then, you know, we tend to think like, that's for HR leadership and potentially HR VP roles. It's actually something that can be shared. I encourage every HR organization to host their own QBR or a monthly update of how is the business performing against its goals. And what is the HR lens we can put over that? So what was the revenue produced globally in October? And who were the top performing reps? And why? Something as easy as that, that is connecting the HR knowledge to the business knowledge and what's actually happening in the field.

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Logan (12:31): Yeah. What would an HR QBR look like for you?

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Kelly Oliver (12:54): Great question. Great question. I tend to think of it as, you know, four quadrants of what's going well and what's not going well and why. Right? So in my opinion, like I want to know what the top business issues are and go to market, right? In the COEs, you know, finance. So really it's a report out of what's going well and not going well and why.

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And we can get super prescriptive, and I would encourage all HR organizations to start thinking about this. Also, it really helps bring people along in their data literacy, because what we want to do is encourage people in HR to be thinking about tying what their findings are to data that supports it, right? Because we can pontificate why there's problems, but does the data support it? And that's where, you know, HR business skills kind of come together with data intelligence.

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Logan (13:57): Yeah, that's a good call out in helping, in letting it be a teaching moment for data literacy. I think it was a Malcolm Gladwell book. I want to say it was Outliers, but I'm not entirely sure. I don't remember, but it's always stuck with me where people say I'm bad at math. And he went in and it was the quote, it's like, nobody's actually bad at math. It's just whoever sticks with the problem the longest.

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Kelly Oliver (14:03): It's a great point. It's a great point.

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Logan (14:25): Yeah, the bad at math is just people dropped off too early before they figured it out. And so helping people along to get that is super good, especially in functions that don't necessarily sit with data, because the executive level and everywhere else in the business, or in certain areas of the business that drive business decisions, it's all data and revenue numbers.

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Kelly Oliver (14:30): That's right. Yeah. I'd like to kind of just create some clarity on a QBR. I think actually mirroring what happens in the business, right? Because we don't necessarily have a structured HR QBR with all the recruiting metrics and employee engagement metrics. Those don't change as frequently as we'd like them to. But I think there's things like time to fill, cost per hire. There are a number of data elements that are worth reviewing.

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But also I think it's really important, if you're in HR and you haven't had a chance to sit through one of your business QBRs with your business leaders, you want to bring that, sort of mirror that into the HR organization. So that way there's a lot of synergy between what you're working on and how the business actually reports out quarterly or even monthly. Be it monthly business reviews happen, but usually not at the same rigor of quarterly business reviews.

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Logan (15:42): That's also another important call out. I mean, it doesn't matter if your organization uses OKRs or not, but like one of the OKR philosophies is everything laddering up to the top so that it's all unified. And you really don't want something being different, because then it's really hard for you to speak the same language.

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Kelly Oliver (15:49): Well, and it's also disconnected data, right? So how many times have you sat in a meeting and you're like, well, you know, we're not including this deal, it was an anomaly. So you have like multiple sets of data. It just creates confusion, right? And it slows down the process and it creates more work for us. So my suggestion again is, you know, top down, whoever, you know, work with your leaders on sitting through one of their QBRs, and then start to mirror that into your organization with HR relevant KPIs, but also relevant business KPIs.

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Logan (16:39): Yeah, I want to go back to when you were talking about managers and kind of in the sales organization in helping manage performers and HR getting involved, and kind of segue into the second thing that I want to talk about, was just managers during all of this. And you had mentioned something in prep that your opinion is that managers are relatively unprepared today in navigating this current environment. And what do you think, why are managers so unprepared now?

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Kelly Oliver (17:17): Well, I think it's twofold, honestly, Logan, and I have had the luxury of going through a lot of manager enablement personally, professionally. I'm an ACC certified coach, so I just like. One of the things is, we are expecting managers to get to be on that same growth trajectory as the business. And that, again, that's just unrealistic, right? So we're not able to train and enable our managers at the same rate we're expecting them to deliver on it. We make people managers and they scale from two to 20 direct reports without any manager one-on-one training, right? Like that's just very unrealistic.

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I'm a huge sports fan. I, you know, like we just watched the World Series end of October. So you think about how many swings at the plate these people are taking, right, throughout their season? It's just like managers need that same opportunity, but they don't have the training. And again, that's something, you know, to me it is a non-negotiable. When you make someone a people manager there has to be a manager 101, even if you've been managing, like some of myself, I've been managing for over 25 years. The training needs to be about how we manage people here at this company in alignment with our values and our hyper growth goals. So I'm pretty passionate about this one.

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Logan (18:41): So what would be some elements of that kind of manager training that you would look at? Obviously, you mentioned managing to this particular organization. So aside from the nuance of individual organizations' manager training, what are some things that you advise people on doing for some of this manager training?

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Kelly Oliver (18:53): Yeah, so one, think it's important to teach managers how to lead through the company values and demonstrate those in the work they do, right? The other thing, and of course, like, let's not confuse manager 101 with onboarding, right? So onboarding is welcoming an employee in to initiate their experience. Manager 101 is when they want to lead people and they have that desire, or we've anointed them. Like, great, you know what? You're really good as a developer. Now we're going to make you a manager of developers. And some people are like, I just didn't want this, but let's train them up so we can help them and support them through the process.

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The other thing that I think has become super important in manager training is sitting in the discomfort of a problem. Because what I have seen is managers are leaning out of discomfort, because we have created so many conveniences around them like, well, just talk to HR about that. That's not HR's job. Managers have to own the discomfort issues within people leadership, right? That is growth. If you are uncomfortable doing something, you are growing. So just remember that.

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Logan (20:20): I mean, that's a really good point, because I've been in organizations where they only want HR to deal with anything sensitive. And I think from like, I've been a people manager in that situation and an individual contributor in that situation. And from the individual contributor's perspective, like, I don't think that really benefits anybody, because you're not with HR day to day, to say, HR is not bad, but you would want to be able to go to your manager for stuff because that's who you are comfortable with. And if you take that away from the managers, it's a little difficult, I would imagine.

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Kelly Oliver (20:59): Yeah, and I would say that managers, you know, my perspective from what I've seen recently is that managers think that their role is to manage what the employee is doing, but their job is also to manage how the employee is doing it. Right? So there's the what and the how. And managing the what and delivering on deadlines, like ultimately that could be automated through systems and processes, right? How people are getting things done in alignment with company values, observing your directs as they present or how they bring people along in a conversation, like those type of things, those truly could not be automated. And then being able to provide feedback and look someone directly in the eye and say, you know what, you did a great job. Here are some things I think you can work on in the future, right?

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So I just feel like, if you want to be a fully developed leader, don't tap out of the how part of managing your people, like how they're doing the work. And I've been through a lot of technology companies, and I'll just say the discomfort doesn't go away as you go up in your career. Discomfort and complexity of problems just gets bigger. So take the swings at the plate now, where you've got the support and you've got more opportunity, because you need to build that muscle memory for how you're going to do it in the future. And you want that part to be easy, right? Discomfort is always going to be there in your career. And as you grow, it's going to get even bigger.

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Logan (22:34): Yeah, that's a good call out. So in managing the what versus the how and getting managers to think more like leaders, how would you advise HR get involved in that? I mean, obviously you said the manager one-on-one, but there's an ongoing process of that as well. I want to call out an interesting example to this, and then I'll let you get to it, but years ago I was on HubSpot's customer advisory board. I'm sorry, Kelly. I was with HubSpot, but I went to their org, and you probably have...

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Kelly Oliver (23:06): All right. We respect the competition.

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Logan (23:27): But I went to their headquarters, and every single person there operated at an entirely different level than I had seen before, and I was just absolutely impressed by everything they did, the questions they asked. It came down to, and so clearly the organization had been an effort to train people in how to be, I mean obviously they hired really great people to start, but they also had enablement throughout that. So how would you advise like HR getting involved in that kind of stuff?

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Kelly Oliver (23:47): Yeah, that's a great question. So every time L&D designs something, there needs to be kind of this core or anchor. Again, I keep going back to company values. Some of that is, I did work at Salesforce where values were very, it was our lighthouse for everything. So trust and customer first. Those, if you were sort of lost in the ambiguity of which way are we going today, or the goals aren't clear to me, if you had customer centricity and you put the customer at the center of all your thinking, you weren't going to go the wrong direction and you were going to make the right decisions.

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And so I think that is what becomes really important, is helping HR can really help ask those questions. Like, how are we bringing this back to our number one value? Because that's what people are going to remember during times of discomfort, times of crisis, times of change. That's what's going to lead from within, is that how are we designing things and how are we implementing things within the company that feed the employee experience around simplistic values, right? And so sometimes a values exercise feels too squishy, and I'm the first person to raise my hand and say like, let's make sure it ties to revenue. But ultimately, again, if you're focused on the values and your values tie to revenue, you're always going to be making the right decision.

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Logan (25:13): And that really goes back to kind of the whole scaling an organization, focusing on revenue, like focusing on the customer is also a focus on revenue. There's very few companies that do really great performance, and there are companies where they just don't focus on the customer. And the product could be anything. But normally in private equity backed, you're not that big yet, that you still have a very hard, big focus on the customer.

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Kelly Oliver (25:51): And one of the big things, just going back to the kind of the what and the how, like we've all heard the story of, you know, the exceptional sales rep who, you know, closes all the deals, but the reality is they leave a trail of dead bodies behind them type thing, or they don't win together, or, right, or they cut out part of a, you know, a product off a deal, like that type of thing. So that's what I'm talking about.

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Like, it's not revenue at all costs, and that's where this how component becomes so important. And if you speak with compassion and authenticity and transparency about, this customer's not going to do this deal if we have this bolt on with it, we're going to have to cut it out, I just want to be clear, that's why we're doing it, because it impacts revenue and the customer just doesn't see the value in it yet, right? That's a very real conversation, versus just like closing the deal, taking it and run, be like, yeah, we just cut it out, right? Very different type of approach. And so you can see the differences there in the how, and that ties to values, right? Same outcome internally, right? But just done differently.

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Logan (27:08): Yeah, that's a really good call out. So I want to take a bit of a shift in this. And you had mentioned kind of in the prep that this is really one of your biggest passions is AI. And I love the AI conversation, because this is like the moving in 90 days piece that we've watched through this entire year. But let's start with AI and managers, like make that connection. Like how is AI... How do you think AI is kind of like shifting the manager role in organizations, or can, if you're ready to adopt it?

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Kelly Oliver (27:45): Yeah, and again, I think it goes back to managers are managing the work, not necessarily how people are doing it, right? And the reality is that can be automated through anything at this point, right? So that will quickly go away. And so developing that core competency around how to manage people getting work done is way more important, in my opinion, right?

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The other thing I'm seeing is, it can be a great way, an entree for people to get better enablement and to have, you know, conversations about like, I'm running into this problem, you know, can you help me understand what I could do differently, right? So I do think there's some sort of enablement component there that can help managers. The most important thing is, like any marathon training plan, right, like you can devise the plan, but you still have to go out and do the running for it, right? Like you can write the plan all day long. So sitting with AI and getting all the feedback and chatting about how to approach something, you still have to practically apply it with one of your direct reports. So I think that's really the important thing here.

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Logan (28:51): Yeah, what excites you most about AI entering the workforce?

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Kelly Oliver (28:57): My gosh, well, one, I'm a total like efficiency person. So I love the opportunity to kind of shed away some of the things that don't serve us as well. But more importantly, like I, you know, again, I just have that customer and growth mindset. One of the things I'm most excited about is the seamlessness for customers to experience product and services. So I'm a big believer in putting AI in the back of the house first to make sure that the customer ultimately gets that efficient process experience when they engage with you directly.

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I know there's a lot of BDR, SDR type stuff going on right now to automate, but to me, not having the face-to-face connection with your customer, in my opinion, is not where I would want to see more of it. I don't think losing the connection to the customer personally is a great move. Would love to see it more on the back end where you streamline all these clunky processes, so it's just seamless for the customer to do business with you.

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Logan (30:05): Yeah, that's a really good example, because everybody, well, I am going to say everybody because everybody's inboxes and phone calls are absolutely flooded with AI from BDR, SDR, sales ads, whatever. And we've really pushed that hard. So there's likely HR folks on this listening to this that have gotten that. And if you think about bringing HR in from, or AI into the HR function, it would make sense not to do that same thing to the employees.

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Logan (30:34): So to your point, bringing it back of house, like if it's all front-facing, right, to employees where they now have to, you know, it's all prompting versus, you know, simple if, things like that, rather than the harder AI, which is in the background, it's the same thing as bombarding the inbox with AI, I think.

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Kelly Oliver (30:35): That's your customer, right? Absolutely. And in an HR environment, the employee is your customer, right? So we don't want to lose contact with the employee, right? But, you know, if we look at, I'm a fan of looking at, you know, system processes and look at a heat map and where can things be automated, right? Is it, you know, like a weekly touch point? Is it a weekly pulse engagement survey type thing? Sure, that kind of stuff can be, but you're going to get better uptake on that if it is automated, right? Having someone design a big survey and launching it once or twice a year, those days need to evolve, so there is more customer employee centricity around HR type programs.

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Logan (31:41): Yeah, and I will call out that if you're going to start automating processes with AI, if you think about this entire SaaS revolution of last 15 years or so, and just getting an organization to implement a normal workflow from ServiceNow or something like that, it's monumental effort. So AI is going to be just as hard to get implemented correctly, I think, and not any easier, because just to get it workflow automation is really hard.

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Kelly Oliver (32:12): Yeah, and what I would say to non-HR leaders or decision makers that could be listening to this, the reality is leaving HR kind of off to the side and outside of the AI strategy is a huge disservice, because things that will slow down your workforce are generally those processes that HR has to manage, right? Payroll, you know, just HR benefit, like all of those things. Those have to be on the roadmap. And this is where a great intersection between a chief people officer, your CIO, and ideally your COO. Like what are those employee critical processes that we have to have in place? And how did those stay on the technology roadmap in an AI first strategy?

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Because I do not want a sales rep that is spending a bunch of time trying to figure out their benefits for four hours and then having to call someone like, no, right? I want them figuring, I want them to able to do it seamlessly through a really cool automated AI first type of system, and they're outselling, right? So that's where we can really get some synergy across the C suite, that we're not just thinking about the end customer, but we're also thinking about employee productivity through HR systems and needs.

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Logan (33:35): Yeah, and that's a really good point, because I was speaking to a woman on here, her episode will probably come out before this one, but Kristen, and she was talking that HR really needs to be at the center of any of the AI discussions, because unlike other technologies, this one is going to impact the employee experience. And whatever decisions you're wanting to put into your organizations with AI, like it's going to impact people in most cases.

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Kelly Oliver (34:05): Right. And you really need, and you must have, an efficiently running HR organization, right? And all of that comes from, right, if your HR BCPs are getting bogged down and someone not understanding something and they're flooded with just personal contact, that's just, again, that's slow productivity. It lowers the employee experience, which ultimately we know leads to retention issues. There's a 30 % cost increase to bring someone from the outside into the company. It's extra money. So you can see like it all just starts to come together and impacts at revenue. The more expense we have, the more we have to sell to cover that.

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Logan (34:45): Yeah, exactly. Given kind of all of that from AI, what step do you think HR leaders can take now to make themselves more AI literate, if they don't feel like they understand it fully, in order to kind of leverage and be in the conversations around AI coming into the organization?

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Kelly Oliver (35:08): Yeah, I personally think the most important thing is just you've got to embrace it and not fear it, right? It's sort of like going back to your Malcolm Gladwell Outliers comment, like just saying, AI is like, it's in tech right now and we're just going to keep doing our thing over here, right? You've got to lean into it now, because there's a saying kind of out there right now, is that AI won't necessarily replace people, but it will definitely replace people that aren't using AI, right? And so when everyone's thinking about job security, you know, at the end of the day, AI is here and it's going to happen. So lean into it. Don't step back. Don't lean out because it's uncomfortable, right?

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And having been in an operations role myself personally, if a business ops, you know, good operators know how to operate themselves out of a job. That is the number one thing about being in strategy and operations, right? Let's figure out how to do this efficiently through automation. And then we move on to the next business problem. And I would encourage HR to think that way, right? Not necessarily modeling yourself out of a job, but modeling yourself to what is the next bigger business problem for our company through automation and systems.

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Logan (36:25): Yeah, that's automating to, you know, the next business problem. That's a really good one. And I think the AI conversation is super important for this audience, because all the PE folks that I've spoken with, the PE sponsors are wanting companies to really leverage AI. And so it's really coming down. So, you know, like you said, it's here, and this is a tidal wave that we're not going to really talk about really.

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Kelly Oliver (36:31): Absolutely. And the reality is, like, managers are using it. So to have a conversation with managers, like, you have to understand, like, they are using it. They're getting advice on how to deal with people issues through AI. So one thing I don't think AI can teach a lot is eye contact and empathy and like quality delivery of feedback. Like it can give you ideas, but role playing it with an HR VP or someone in HR, right? Like that's happening. So HR has got to lean into that, right? It's just like, you've got to know that the managers are using it too.

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Logan (37:29): Yeah, I mean, nobody wants it to be doing all of that stuff, because people are still going to want that human connection. But that really reminded me of... Did you ever see the movie Up in the Air? I think it was where he would... Yeah, George Clooney, that's right. And they transitioned everything to being virtual. It's like almost like that instead of in person. But not to make light of any of that kind of stuff.

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Kelly Oliver (37:33): Yes, George Clooney. Exactly. No, no, Walter Kirn, he wrote that movie, and one of the things, you know, it's, but the thing that strikes me is look at how unhappy George Clooney was in the movie. Like he was miserable as an employee, as a person. Like he was so unhappy because he lacked human interaction. And it just, you know, it makes me think of a book by, gosh, what's the gentleman? Anyway, it's called Lost Connections.

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Kelly Oliver (38:14): And it is a really interesting story and nonfiction book. Johann Hari wrote it. And it's about how the study of, it is a study about depression, but the most important thing that we learn is the human connection is what is the biggest preventer of that, right? And so as we're seeing burnout rise and as we're seeing like overwhelm come into the space of work, human connection can alleviate that. And as we lose connection with one another and we lose empathy and the ability to provide empathy for others, that has real impact on the employee experience. So there's got to be just enough of it within the company still as we advance. Hey, I'm a huge technology fan. I love it. But I'm also a people fan as well.

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Logan (39:03): Yeah. And remembering the human connection is a good one. Like even through, like, because I work remote, like HRBench is, and we started doing like a Friday night dinner with our neighbors every Friday. And it's like one of the best therapy sessions, not that we necessarily go gripe, but you're just with people and you get to hang out. And it's really, really nice to ensure that kind of stuff, if you don't always have, you know, a group like that, but.

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Kelly Oliver (39:11): Yeah, that's wonderful. That's wonderful. Yeah, I really encourage people to think about grabbing an article, you know, books are, trust me, books are hard for everyone to read these days, but grabbing an article about something of interest and just, you know, getting a group of people at work to read the article, whether it's about leadership or anything like that. Or, you know, if you do have an in office culture...

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Logan (39:33): I found the same thing.

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Kelly Oliver (39:57): Nobody is too busy to stop for five seconds and make eye contact with somebody that day. So if you haven't made eye contact with someone, go for it. Like even if you're just getting water or coffee. And then, you know, empathy as a skill is not going away. That's still always going to be in very high demand for leadership roles. And in fact, the CFO of OpenAI is in the Wall Street Journal today. There's a technology section, and she actually talks about how we cannot lose the human factor and the human connection of work. And so I thought that was fascinating, because here's a woman with significant pressures on her, and she is talking about how important human connection is as well. So I thought that was interesting.

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Logan (40:40): Yeah, well, maybe if all of this, if you're feeling a little tech burnt out, maybe all of this AI will automate in the background and we can go back to our Nokia flip phones and play Snake or something.

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Kelly Oliver (40:46): Wouldn't that be great? I'm going to get a Timex watch again. That's great.

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Logan (40:58): So, well, great, Kelly. Is there anything else you would like to leave the audience with?

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Kelly Oliver (41:05): Yeah, I would just say I'm super inspired by so many people that I see in the workplace today. And I've worked with some really fantastic leaders. And as we see kind of AI come up, I just want to challenge everyone to be better than a bot, right? Like the bot is out there. People are getting advice from it. But you as an individual and you as a human in the workplace, you are better than a bot. And I just want to throw that challenge out there to everyone, that every day you can be better than it. So I hope that inspires somebody out there to make some human connection while balancing it with keeping your values and customer centricity and understanding how your business makes money.

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Logan (41:46): Exactly. Well, that's a great way to close it, with be better than a bot. And awesome. Well, one last thing, Kelly, where would you like people to connect with you?

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Kelly Oliver (41:51): Sure, LinkedIn is great, and I also have a small private coaching company, Good Signs Consulting. If anyone's interested in connecting more just on this topic or needs some mentorship, I'm always happy to do a quick connection call.

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Logan (42:01): Okay. Perfect. And we will link both those into the show notes for everybody. And Kelly, I want to say thank you for joining and having the conversation. I really enjoyed it.

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Kelly Oliver (42:18): Yeah, this was great. Thanks, Logan. Great to see you again. Bye-bye.

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Logan (42:26): Great to see you.