CEOs Like Their Chief Marketing Officers, But Want Them to Move Faster
BY Stephen Koepp March 26, 2025While CEOs tend to like and trust their chief marketing officers, they have declining confidence in the ability of the CMOs to drive business growth, according to a new report from Boathouse, a marketing-performance consultancy. The report asks: “Are CMOs too busy being popular and not enough of a profit driver?”The report, based on a survey of 150 CEOs from top U.S. companies, shows patterns from four years of data collection about the role and performance of CMOs. On one hand, 66% of CEOs view marketing as more relevant than three years ago, the report said. But the execution of their departments is often falling short. “While 79% of CMOs are now involved in financial goal setting, many remain on the periphery of growth strategy, limited by a focus on metrics that don’t directly tie to the metrics that CEOs prioritize. To elevate their strategic role, CMOs must deepen their financial fluency and align marketing metrics with business outcomes,” the report said.“Increasingly, we are seeing the CMO is in no-man’s-land,” said John Connors, CEO of Boathouse, as reported in Ad Age, noting the divergence between the CMOs’ grades and the understanding of what the department accomplished. “CMOs are getting smarter about how to build a better relationship with CEOs but marketing overall is losing credibility.”The report’s statistics make the point in showing rising relevance for marketing, but lack of confidence in results. “As CMOs align more closely with CEOs and Boards (e.g., 76% show commitment to the C-Suite, up from 44% four years ago), you’d expect this proximity to better channel CEO strategy to marketing teams. Instead, the gap between CMOs’ performance (45%) and marketing’s overall capability (37%) suggests a breakdown in execution,” the report said.In its analysis of how CMOs can do better, the report suggests that they can help bridge the gap between the CEO focus on financial results and the need to foster a corporate culture that can produce growth. “Data shows 87% of CEOs acknowledge their transformation strategies have not fully succeeded, with top private concerns including employee morale, culture, and reputational risk—areas which are often sidelined in favor of financial metrics,” the report said. “Marketing leaders have a unique opportunity to bridge this gap by aligning brand messaging with internal culture, fostering employee engagement, and brand integrity as pillars of sustainable growth.”In other findings, the survey found that marketing departments are missing the boat when it comes to AI because of an ambivalence about embracing it. “CEOs are enthusiastically adopting AI across their organizations, but marketing lags behind functions like customer service and operations,” the report said. “Marketing must leverage AI for efficiency, insights, and innovation—or risk losing ground to more agile functions. In a technology-led economy, CMOs who don’t lead with AI will watch others claim the spotlight.” Boathouse CEO Connors noted that many marketers are talking about pilot programs, but none are making “bold bets on AI,” he told Ad Age, which is leading CEOs to think their CMOs play it too safe.Stephen Koepp is From Day One’s editor in chief.(Featured illustration by Creatival Images/iStock by Getty)
The Connection Solution: Bringing Workers Together for Development and Insight
BY Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza March 24, 2025“For a long time, employers have thought that loneliness wasn’t their problem to solve,” said Adrienne Prentice, founder and CEO of coaching platform Keep Company. “I would challenge everyone to say, ‘maybe we’re not paying enough attention,’ because loneliness is not only impacting the health of our individual team members, it’s impacting organizational health as well.”In 2023, then-U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warned of the public health crisis spurred by loneliness and cited a study that estimates that stress-related absenteeism attributed to loneliness costs employers $154 billion every year.Prentice was part of an expert panel during From Day One’s Washington, D.C. conference, on a new era of investing in humans. She and her fellow panelists believe employers can help alleviate the pain of loneliness. “A major ill of our society right now is our lack of community and connection,” Prentice said. “Church membership is down, we don’t know our neighbors. We’re not connected to each other. I think work has the opportunity to be the last frontier.” If connections are built in the workplace, employers can begin to close the gap.Forming Connections by Learning Together “The first time you learn something, it’s likely by observing the behavior of someone else. Your friend, your parents, your brother, your sister–whoever it might have been–demonstrate some behavior that you wanted to adopt in your own life,” said Victor Arguelles, the VP of global learning and development for Marriott International.This can be replicated in the workplace. When we observe how others work, think, reason, and problem-solve, we’re able to learn at a faster rate. Learning new skills and competencies both unites workers and levels the playing field, Arguelles said. “We know that people learn better when they learn from each other, when they find community, and where they can fail or succeed together.”Think beyond individuals or single teams and cast a wider net across the organization, said Matt Waesche, the chief learning officer at defence contractor BAE Systems. “Curate a group of people from all different parts of the company–people that wouldn’t normally find themselves in the same room. You can have legal sitting with engineers sitting with general managers that run a craft trade with someone that might run a very technical type of work.” The diversity of expertise, experience, and thought can yield novel results for both skill-building and community.“You have your people system and you have your work system, and if you want to improve your results, you really have to optimize both,” said Shannon Arvizu, sociologist and founder of Epic Teams, an organizational competency consultancy. She recommends peer coaching for this. Rather than hiring a third-party coach that produces a 20-page report on what a team lacks, “bring the team together to ask questions and co-create an action plan–teach everyone to be a coach.”Uniting Workers In PersonCompanies are calling workers back to the office, but poor planning has made for very public fumbles, like employees arriving to find insufficient parking and no desk to set their computer. Others have been ordered back to the office only to dial into Zoom calls for hours at a time or sit in an empty office, without managers or senior leaders.Journalist and From Day One contributing editor, Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, moderated the panel about "The Connection Solution: Bringing Workers Together for Development and Insight"If you’re going to require workers to be in the office, panelists agreed, then make that time count. Ensure there are enough people in the workplace to make it a social occasion, and pull unique groups together to learn and grow together. This is especially important for young workers, many of whom graduated from college amid Covid lockdowns. They’re lacking workplace experience and hungry for interpersonal interaction.At mortgage lender Fannie Mae, VP and head of learning Michael Trusty gathers interns and campus hires for dedicated, in-person learning programs. It’s expensive, he said, but entirely worth it. If the company wants to retain those employees, then they have to create social networks. “One of my favorite metrics–and I bring this into conversations with our senior leaders–is when I go through the cafeteria, how many of our early career professionals are sitting together? It’s great to see it. People from data science with people from finance with people from business–they’re creating their communities.”Trusty also facilitates employee connections around the organization’s mission of housing affordability, connecting people outside the office. He takes finance professionals into middle and high schools to teach financial literacy. This kind of volunteerism–which the company encourages with paid time off–is a means of building camaraderie among workers.Learning opportunities can be interpersonal, not just professional. Arvizu described a relationship building exercise called the “journey line.”It goes like this: Give everyone a piece of paper and have them draw a line down the middle. Then ask, ‘what experiences have shaped who you are?’ If they’re positive and affirming, put them above the line. If they’re challenging, put them below the line. “No matter who you are, how old you are, or what background you come from, everybody will have a zigzag line,” she said. “Give folks the opportunity to share their stories and acknowledge them for their stories.”Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism.(Photos by Justin Feltman for From Day One)
Corporate Empathy: Where It Went and Why It Matters
BY Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza March 19, 2025It certainly seems like a bleak moment to be a worker in America. Scroll the news or social media and a picture forms of an uncaring, turbulent, and miserly workplace.Why is this so striking? Empathy, or the ability to understand and be sensitive to others’ feelings and experiences, became a fashionable trait in business just a few years ago. For a while, employers were getting really good at responding to the needs of the workforce. Some companies even traded on it. Empathy, as well as its more active cousin, compassion, took many forms. As more attention focused on how some demographic groups were often left on the sidelines, employers said OK, let’s find ways to level the playing field, and they set hiring goals and stood up mentorship programs. When Covid lockdown closed schools and day-care centers and quarantined babysitters, companies told workers to take care of their families and welcomed Zoom cameos from kids. When employees needed a reprieve from expensive cities and long commutes, companies converted to remote work and hybrid work. When burnout and loneliness pressed on our minds, employers started footing the bill for therapy.The year 2025 feels really different. Much of change in the weather has to do with what the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency are doing to the federal workforce, gutting it haphazardly and villainizing the civil service—and how companies in the private sector are playing follow-the-leader. Meta appeared to ingratiate itself to the incoming administration by axing its DEI programs. And when President Trump ended federal DEI programs, Google and Amazon ended some of theirs. When Elon Musk fired “low performers” from the federal government, so did Meta and Microsoft. Public sector followed private sector in ending remote and hybrid work. First Amazon, AT&T, and Boeing called workers back to the office in late 2024, and the president did the same on inauguration day. Underscoring the dramatic shift: All of this is happening as we arrive at the fifth anniversary of Covid lockdowns in the U.S. In some ways, all those revolutionary changes to the way we work seem to be dissolving. To be sure, many employers insist that employee well-being is still a priority, but surveys show that most workers aren’t feeling it. According to Gallup, the percentage of employees who believe their organization cares about their well-being plunged to 21% in early 2024. At its peak in May 2020, that figure was 49%.These stories and statistics certainly make it seem like employers are pulling the plug on empathy. But while the big tech and banking companies that have toughened up their workplace policies employ a lot of people, as does the federal government, they don’t employ everyone. Do these stories really reflect what it’s like to be a worker in 2025? Is corporate empathy dead? I started asking around.When the Reality Doesn't Match the MessageAs I was working on this story, Lauren Branston, CEO of the UK-based nonprofit Institute of Business Ethics, sent me an email. “I have been hearing people I trust saying they are seeing more and more ‘campaigns’ saying empathy is bad, etc. Which I find worrying,” she wrote. “People are campaigning against a core human value. We aren’t ready for this as an institution or in society because we have assumed these topics to be settled.”For decades, she later told me in an interview, people have operated with the belief that undergirds much of Western political democracy: that those with power can largely be trusted to use that power for good, and if they don’t use it for good, then accountability, in the form of ethics or regulations, will come for them. Now, it’s not clear whether either of those things is enough to stop the rolling tide.“It’s fundamentally challenging, she said. “It’s a moment where your values and beliefs are shaken, and it’s a moment where you have to sit and recalibrate what’s going on. What you see when people’s values are challenged is engagement and collaboration and connection. People organize and get organized. And I think that might happen.”As a reporter, I talk to senior HR leaders and executives every day, and some of them I know well. It’s clear to me that a lot of these people who work in HR are, as individuals, genuinely concerned about the well-being of their colleagues. And some are really pushing for change.In February, I moderated a From Day One panel of senior talent-acquisition leaders, and all of them were insistent on providing a good candidate experience even as they introduce AI into their hiring process and navigate an unwelcoming labor marketplace. In fact, they were most concerned with finding ways to provide feedback to individual applicants, even those who don’t get the job. Comcast, which might get a thousand applications for a given role, learned that what applicants want most is feedback, so its TA team is finding ways to provide that.But when what the company says is not what the company does, a lot of HR leaders are really troubled by this. Lori Osborne is one of them. She has spent her 20-year career in HR, mostly working for corporations and startups, plus a brief stint with a non-profit organization, before leaving in 2024 to be a fractional CHRO for startups. Hypocrisy is why she left corporate HR, after finding that values and behavior just didn’t add up. Publicly, leadership would say, “‘We want you to go on a run at lunch. We want you to go to your kids’ school play. We want you to do this thing that you have a personal passion for, even though it’s during work hours,’” Osborne told me. But behind closed doors, the same leaders debated whether to promote employees who went on lunchtime runs or left early to make the school play. Taking them at their word was a trap. But this didn’t happen in the new, colder environment, it happened years ago, when it was in vogue to be a support-everyone kind of company. Which tends to confirm the worker suspicion that many companies never believed in empathy at all.What It Feels Like When the Vibe ShiftsEven so, I found employees who wanted me to know that they don’t believe corporate empathy is dead. One of them works in product development at a large, U.S.-based tech company. He wanted me to use a pseudonym—we’ll call him Terry—so he could speak candidly.Terry likes his work, which he says is creative and challenging. He also likes that expectations are clear and good work is rewarded. There have been two rounds of layoffs and a reorganization since he arrived, but Terry believes the matters were handled as well as they could have been.Primarily, he told me, empathy is evident in the fact that executives are so accessible. For two years, and especially lately, employees have asked executives during town hall meetings whether they’ll stick with DEI. The answer has always been yes. They ask whether workers will be called back to the office. The answer is no, remote and hybrid work will stay in place. As far as ratcheting up productivity expectations, the company now attaches bonuses to performance, but Terry doesn’t believe that’s meant to hector workers. It’s just what happens when revenue flattens out.But something weird happened. Recently, Terry’s new boss told him to provide weekly status updates, a requirement that sounds suspiciously close to Elon Musk’s ominous email to federal employees, ordering them to list five accomplishments for the week. I asked Terry, does that give you pause? It does, so he’s going to ask his manager why. Is he not trusted? Many workers may be harboring the same concerns, but aren’t confident enough to speak up. “Senior leadership can’t make people ask questions,” Terry told me, “but they can create an atmosphere where you can ask questions in front of everyone, or silently Slack the leadership.” So that’s what he’s going to do.What Does Empathy Have to Do With Business?It may be worth asking ourselves where we expect empathy in the workplace to come from: the executives in the C-suite who represent the business, or the colleagues we interact with on a daily basis?One employee who was recently let go from the Department of Education wrote on LinkedIn about how her colleagues went out of their way to help when she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. One tech worker told me how much their manager was a mentor. Federal workers at the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Commerce have told me how they’re banding together to share resources and support. Go looking for empathy, and you’ll find it.What some employees are getting from their employers cannot be dismissed: bullying and badgering, threats and ultimatums. Really big sticks and no carrots to speak of. People are really angry about layoffs. Most people would agree this is really bad humanity. Some would argue really bad business too.Business Insider’s Aki Ito reported on how Meta’s harsh performance reviews may backfire and damage productivity rather than improve performance. “CEOs may think they’re creating a meritocracy,” Ito writes. “but in reality they’re marching their companies straight into a trap of sunken morale, high turnover, depressed profits, and reduced innovation.”There’s evidence that corporate empathy really does affect dollars and cents. Among my favorite examples is a study by a group of researchers in Switzerland and the UK. They examined 510 CEO conference calls by 448 U.S.-based companies on the Russell 3000 stock index that took place in the earliest stages of the pandemic. They found that the more CEOs made statements, even vague ones, that signaled their human concern for employees, customers, or clients, the better those companies’ stock prices fared when overall share prices plunged in March 2020. The researchers call them “human care statements.”We’ve seen the opposite happen in 2025. Tesla’s stock price has been dropping precipitously, for nine straight weeks. Much of that may be politically inspired, but Musk’s gleeful lack of empathy for workers hit by DOGE cutbacks, with references to wood chippers and chain saws, gained viral infamy.The opposite kind of behavior appears to be demonstrably beneficial and stabilizing. “Follow-up explorations unveiled a negative association between CEO human care statements and stock volatility, meaning that market participants discounted these companies’ future earnings less,” the study reads. “Our explorations suggest that it pays off for CEOs to go beyond mere financial information and show some humanity.”Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism.(Featured photo by Miniseries/iStock by Getty Images)
A New Use Case for AI: Succession Planning in an Era of ‘Squiggly Careers’
BY Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza March 19, 2025Careers are more non-linear than they’ve ever been. This trend puts workers who can flex with the times, moving fluidly across roles and departments, in high demand. This is true not only among early-career workers finding their way, but at every level of the organization.At the top, companies are expanding the responsibilities of executives and adding new seats to the C-suite. Traditional paths to the top are being overwritten by “squiggly” careers. Take, for instance, the role of chief financial officer. Fewer CFOs are coming from purely finance backgrounds, with operational resumes becoming a popular pedigree. Some executives are pulling double duty. Salesforce appointed its first dual CFO-COO in 2025, as did PayPal and outdoor-apparel company Cotopaxi. Chief financial officer is now officially a route to the CEO’s job.As careers become more circuitous than straight, succession planning gets harder. Old paradigms are less relevant. It’s now the skills that matter—and the assessment of them.Workforce demographics further complicate succession planning. During the span of 2024-27, more than 11,200 Americans will turn 65 every day. Retiring Baby Boomers are vacating a record number of senior positions. Identifying and preparing the next generation of leaders is a key exercise for HR.Artificial intelligence may be the answer. Overloaded HR teams are already employing generative AI agents to write the first draft of job descriptions and benefits newsletters, but the tasks AI can complete for HR are getting increasingly complex, like identifying attrition risks. Why not succession planning?Succession Planning for a Skills-Based WorkforceArtificial intelligence is a promising solution because it helps identify employees who have the skills necessary for the role, not only the right career history. HR is already using artificial intelligence to identify skills within an organization, typically to match current employees to open roles or new projects, but “you could easily extend that to succession planning,” says Chris Pinc, the director of product management at consulting firm WTW.Firms like WTW and other industry experts are spinning up their own AI-backed agents. For instance, the Josh Bersin Company launched its new AI platform for HR, called Galileo, in 2024. It looks a lot like ChatGPT; users type a query into a search bar and the tool returns an answer. Galileo can suggest prompts or help you find specific content related to HR expertise.Chris Pinc, the director of product management at consulting firm WTW (company photo)WTW released its own AI assistant, Expert, last month, while HR tech firm Visier has Vee, an AI agent specifically for people analytics. Google is working on its own AI-powered instance for its HR team. Like Bersin’s Galileo, the interfaces of Expert and Vee will be familiar to anyone who has used a generative AI tool. Why use tools like Galileo or Expert instead of ChatGPT? First, these platforms are closed environments, which means that the information employers enter about their workforce stays only within their ecosystem; it doesn’t feed the larger corpus underlying the tool. And second, these platforms are trained on data, research, and thought leadership from respected HR firms. Galileo pulls from the Bersin company’s own collection plus others, like research from Heidrick & Struggles. WTW’s Expert is similarly constructed, with the entirety of the WTW library backing the tool. Users can load in their own proprietary resources, like survey results, skills assessments, projects, plans, frameworks, processes, and original research. Amy Farner, Bersin’s SVP of product and member experience, said, “We’re not letting it go out there and troll the web.” These companies tell the AI what content to trust.Where AI Can Supercharge Succession PlanningLet’s say it’s time to start looking for a successor to your chief marketing officer, who’s likely to retire in the next three years. Let’s use generative AI to find a good fit. You might ask your tool: I need to find employees who have taken on several major, client-facing projects in the last year. Ideally, with the marketing team. They need to score high on our leadership assessment for innovation and creativity. They also need eight to 10 years of people-management experience.The tool returns a list of leaders matching the criteria. You’re surprised to see Kelly Kapoor, a senior manager from business development, on the list. You learn that last year she worked on a successful product launch and still attends regular meetings with the tech and marketing teams. Not only that, Kelly’s name appears on several proposals for new product features and she has created detailed presentations on original competitive research. Plus, her performance reviews are excellent.Amy Farner, SVP of product and member experience for the Josh Bersin Company (Company photo)It looks like she might be a promising candidate, but under the company’s traditional framework, she never would have crossed your radar. So you load the CMO job description into the AI tool and tell it to map a three-year development plan to prep Kelly for the seat. You learn that she hasn’t yet completed a few key leadership-training courses, and she has very little experience working with creative teams. Plus, she’s had only two or three direct reports at a time. Looks like Kelly has a ways to go before she’s ready, but now you have a new candidate and a plan.What Other Talent Have We Been Overlooking?This is a fictional example, but there’s real-world precedent. Pinc has seen it happen. Recently, one of his colleagues in IT was promoted to a senior finance role. “She took on a special project to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of our overall software-development function,” he said. “She learned a lot about finance, then became a logical person to be the finance director for the IT function. She understood the finance work from that project and she understood the IT from her previous role.” Use AI to fill a role like this, and it can be scaled for an entire organization. The success of so many nonlinear careers raises the question: What other great talent have employers been overlooking?AI can lower the cost of succession planning too, said Pinc, who worked closely on the creation of Expert. Companies have long used leadership assessments for succession planning to find people who are capable of climbing the ladder, but it’s expensive to interpret the results, present them to leadership, then work with HR to write development plans. “That’s human time that I think will be able to be taken over by AI,” he said.AI is still relatively new to HR professionals. This is due, in part, to privacy concerns. Companies can’t just throw employee data into a gen-AI chatbot, even if it is a closed system. And HR is not historically a tech-forward department, but that’s changing. For now, HR is primarily using AI for time-saving, says Farner, but that will expand over time. Organizations are beginning to move past tapping AI as an assistant completing admin tasks to tapping AI as a consultant that operates like a colleague.Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism.(Featured illustration by Photoman/iStock by Getty Images)
Prioritizing Benefits That Drive Impact for Your Employees: A Successful Case Study
BY Christopher O'Keeffe March 19, 2025As companies compete for talent with increasingly generous benefits packages, many are discovering a frustrating truth: robust offerings alone don’t guarantee employee satisfaction or utilization.“You can have millions of programs available to your employee population, but if they’re not educated, if they’re not aware, we’re not going to see any value,” said Preeti Nadendla, senior global benefits partner at Marqeta. Nadendla spoke during a From Day One webinar about “Prioritizing Benefits That Drive Impact for Your Employees: A Successful Case Study,” in conversation with Britt Barney, manager of customer success at Northstar.Nadendla’s perspective comes from navigating the complex landscape of global benefits at Marqeta, an Oakland, CA., based financial technology company that provides backend systems for payment card programs. With approximately 850 employees across the U.S., UK, Canada, and Poland, Marqeta exemplifies the challenges faced by growing international companies.When Nadendla joined Marqeta two years ago, she found herself in a scenario familiar to many benefits professionals: excellent offerings that went underutilized because employees simply didn’t understand them. "The sheer volume of benefits information was overwhelming," she recalled. “Employees weren’t utilizing them effectively and didn’t understand the value of what was being offered, which created a lot of frustration,” she said. As the sole benefits professional at the time, Nadendla methodically rebuilt the company’s approach from the ground up. She transformed vendor relationships from transactional to collaborative partnerships, establishing regular meetings and leveraging vendors to help educate employees. Britt Barney of Northstar spoke with Preeti Nadendla of Marqeta during the webinar (photo by From Day One)With open enrollment looming just months after her arrival, Nadendla orchestrated multiple virtual education sessions with partner vendors, created accessible FAQs, and ensured recorded sessions were available across global time zones. The results were immediate–employees began actively engaging with previously underutilized benefits, reducing confusion and frustration while increasing the return on the company's benefits investment.From Theory to Practice: Benefits Strategy in Real MarketsNadendla’s approach to measuring success goes beyond typical utilization metrics to focus on meaningful understanding within employee healthcare networks.“For me, it’s not just utilization but the actual engagement and frequency,” she said. "Working with a mental health benefits partner, we want to track the frequency of interactions. Are they doing only one coaching session, or is there an uptick in therapy sessions? Is it only a certain subset of employees using it and not the entire organization?”This nuanced approach to measurement extends to the company’s cross-border benefits strategy as well. While many companies struggle to provide equitable benefits across different regulatory environments, Nadendla has developed a philosophy where benefits should be “globally competitive but locally relevant.”Northstar, the financial wellness platform, provides personalized guidance to employees through dedicated advisors, helping them navigate their benefits options and broader financial decisions. As Barney of Northstar says, the platform focuses on building relationships. “In my 13 years of working in financial services, there isn’t a single question that doesn’t tie back to money. So from a benefits perspective, we'll talk about budgeting and saving for emergencies, paying down debt and having a family retirement, all of those types of things. But we’ll also talk about which health plan you should choose,” she said. Marqeta and Northstar put Nadendla’s principles to the test when addressing issues within the UK’s pension program. Rather than relying solely on consulting partners, Nadendla sought direct input from Northstar's UK-based financial advisor to understand the employee experience. “I wanted to connect with the advisor and understand, ‘This is what we’re thinking, these are the options available—as an employee, how does this impact me?’” she said.After implementing these changes, she organized an educational session with the advisor which drove significant engagement. The success of this approach informed the company’s recent expansion of financial wellness benefits to Canada, demonstrating how education-driven implementation can succeed across borders.Removing Barriers to Benefits UtilizationTo truly understand what employees need from their benefits packages, Nadendla implemented a more focused approach to gathering feedback.“I personally don’t like the fact that the benefit survey questions are part of a larger survey, and just have a few benefits questions,” she said. “I personally would do an entire benefits survey which is dedicated to benefits.”A more targeted feedback strategy extends to working directly with employee resource groups to understand specific challenges different populations face. The approach has revealed a critical insight: employees often hesitate to use financial wellness programs, such as Northstar, due to privacy concerns.Nadendla addresses this by emphasizing confidentiality in all financial communications. “This is our employees, one on one, conversations with their financial advisors. And we don’t have visibility into it. It’s confidential, and it’s 100% up to them on how much they want to share,” she said. This transparency has significantly increased utilization of financial wellness benefits, particularly among employees who were previously concerned about sharing personal financial information with their employer.Nadendla’s education-first approach proved particularly valuable when adding after-tax contributions to the company’s 401(k) plan offerings. Rather than simply announcing the new feature, they partnered with Northstar to host educational sessions that explained both the mechanics and the long-term financial implications. “We wanted employees to understand how the enhancement could help them, the pros and cons, why someone would do it and why someone wouldn’t,” she said. As Marqeta continues to evolve its benefits strategy, Nadendla remains committed to a holistic approach that addresses physical, mental, emotional, financial, and social well-being. Her focus on staged implementation allows for testing new benefits in specific locations before rolling them out more broadly. “We take a step back and tell our employee population, ‘This is something new we’re rolling out in one location. We’re going to test it and see how it works,’” she said.Nadendla’s education-first approach offers a valuable framework for ensuring these investments actually enrich employees' livelihoods. “Education is the key to a successful benefits program. That's just our philosophy,” she said. Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Northstar, for sponsoring this webinar. Chris O’Keeffe is a freelance writer with experience across industries. As the founder and creative director of OK Creative: The Language Agency, he has led strategy and storytelling for organizations like MIT, Amazon, and Cirque du Soleil, bringing their stories to life through established and emerging media.(Photo by Prostock-Studio/iStock)
The Secrets to Finding and Retaining Top Talent at a Time of Digital Revolution
BY Jessica Swenson March 18, 2025How can technology organizations attract and keep talent in an industry where employees have countless mobility options?Dan Domenech, interim chief people officer and chief talent officer for Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), spoke about some of HPE’s best practices for recruitment and retention at From Day One’s Houston conference. Sean McCrory, editor-in-chief of Houston Business Journal, moderated the conversation.Even with its enviable attrition rate of 3–5%, HPE’s innovation and growth mean that it is constantly hiring technical, sales, and customer experience roles across 40 countries. Open roles often receive hundreds of applications, even in niche business areas. There is typically a 50/50 ratio between internal and external hires, says Domenech.By embracing technology, the company has boosted its hiring capability and improved the candidate experience. In conjunction with a world-class talent acquisition team and external recruiting partners, HPE pairs the Phenom platform with a robust customer relationship management platform, an application status call center, and chat bots to provide a hyper-personalized digital experience for all stakeholders, says Domenech. Leaders also regularly review candidate feedback data to ensure an exceptional talent acquisition experience.One of CEO Antonio Neri’s top priorities in 2025 is internal mobility. Ten years ago, companies eliminated formal performance ratings to favor more frequent, informal performance management conversations. Unfortunately, this strategy did not give employees what they needed. HPE introduced quarterly success plan conversations to provide regular feedback, assess progress, and learn more about team member aspirations and development plans. The company leverages technology to support this process as well. Employees enter their existing and aspirational skill sets into HPE’s Workday-based career marketplace and use AI tools to be matched with mentors, learning opportunities, and new roles, says Domenech.Sean McCrory, editor-in-chief of Houston Business Journal, interviewed DomenechAnother priority for HPE is leadership development. They ensure that leaders know what is expected of them through a clear framework they call the Four E’s—engage, empower, evolve, and execute. Domenech also revealed a personal passion for promoting psychological safety in the workplace, which was identified in a recent Google study as “the number one characteristic of high-performing teams.” As HPE evolves its leadership model, the company ensures that leaders listen to the employees’ voices, are inclusive, and consider the team members’ best interests in their decision-making processes. Despite the recent trend of companies reversing course on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, Domenech does not anticipate any changes to HPE’s practices. Recently recognized by JUST Capital as America’s Most JUST Company (for the second consecutive year), HPE is a values-based organization that will continue to be unconditionally inclusive of its employees’ diverse backgrounds, ways of thinking, and contributions. “We know that we’re better together,” Domenech said. “We need those differences to thrive and provide that innovation and service to our customers.”A key consideration of HPE’s potential merger with Juniper Networks—beyond the typical risks of any merger—is the integration of Juniper’s 10,000 employees. HPE leadership is already planning how to onboard leaders and assimilate cultures, including an exhaustive culture study. The data shows that the individual cultures are more alike than different, enabling them to integrate the additional talent into existing HPE operations, capitalize on each company’s strengths, and maintain their values-based approach.The advent of AI technology in the organization prompted HPE to establish a governance council that ensures ethical, responsible AI use. Additionally, Neri wants all HPE employees to have what he calls a “minor in AI,” and Domenech’s team has been a key part of this initiative, he says. They collaborated with internal partners to facilitate AI education throughout the enterprise. They are now building a comprehensive training suite to provide more specialized knowledge to technology-focused leaders and teams.With a strong commitment to flexible working arrangements, HPE led by example during the pandemic by shifting to a remote model for anyone whose work didn’t require them to be on-site. The health and safety of on-site teams was paramount, and remote teams were provided the tools they needed to be successful outside the office. HPE has maintained its commitment to flexibility despite Neri’s belief that in-office innovation and collaboration are unmatched. He recognizes that the balance and autonomy afforded by flexible work is crucial to employee satisfaction and retention.When asked for one piece of advice for business leaders who want to retain and engage their existing workers, Domenech replied “It all starts with culture.” He encourages sustained focus on a mission-based culture that makes people enjoy coming to work, feel confident that they will have growth and development opportunities, and know they are a part of something great.Jessica Swenson is a freelance writer based in the Midwest. Learn more about her at jmswensonllc.com.(Photos by Annie Mulligan for From Day One)
Encouraging Employees to Be Proactive About Their Mental Health and Well-Being: a Strategic Approach for Companies
BY Ade Akin March 18, 2025Covid might be old news now, but its impact on mental health lingers in many workplaces. “80% of employees have experienced some sort of stress at work in the last week, but the way we address it is changing,” Jon Shimp, the head of sales at Calm said during a thought leadership spotlight at From Day One’s Salt Lake City conference. Shimp, who has over 20 years of experience in the digital health space, says it’s time for mental health support from employers to evolve from the reactive crisis management approach of the pandemic era to preventative care and personalized solutions.The Mental Health Crisis at WorkThe numbers are staggering: an estimated 20-25% of adults report dealing with mental health conditions annually, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). While stressors like political shifts and return-to-office policies can exacerbate workplace anxiety, the real problem is how companies respond. Many employers adopted an “everything-at-once” approach during the early days of the pandemic, scrambling to provide mental health resources for employees, says Shimp. “It wasn’t necessarily a strategy; it was a volume play,” he said. Companies now have the opportunity to refine their approach to addressing the mental well-being of their employees by assessing what works, eliminating ineffective policies, and streamlining access to care.From Vendor Fatigue to Smarter CollaborationThe exponential increase in the popularity of digital health solutions has created unintended consequences like vendor fatigue. HR leaders often report feeling overwhelmed by the many options available. “There are over 200 vendors competing for mindshare in the benefits space,” Shimp said.From Day One CEO and co-founder, Nick Baily, interviewed Shimp of CalmOne major shift that’s ongoing is encouraging vendors to collaborate. “A lot of these services are interrelated,” he said. “If they can pass referrals to each other and share data, it leads to better care outcomes.”Companies can better serve employees with a holistic approach instead of segmenting the treatment of physical or mental health disorders. By managing health holistically rather than segmenting conditions like diabetes, hypertension, and mental health, companies can provide employees with a seamless experience.The Mind-Body Connection: A Holistic ApproachOne popular misconception about mental health disorders is that they occur in isolation. Research shows that many mental disorders are linked to chronic health problems. “If you have a chronic condition like diabetes, COPD, or heart failure, you have a 50% likelihood of experiencing depression,” Shimp said. “For those with multiple chronic conditions, that risk jumps to 75%.”Companies are starting to recognize the importance of addressing employee mental and physical health issues together. For example, Calm Health leverages its well-established meditation and sleep tools with clinically validated assessments like the General Anxiety Disorder (GAD) and Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ) tests, helping to identify employee needs early on and paving the way for targeted interventions. Traditional benefits packages often miss the mark because of a lack of personalization. “Middle-aged men, for example, are historically terrible at engaging with their healthcare benefits,” Shimp said. “They’re not waking up thinking, ‘I should check my benefits page for a therapist.’ But if they start with a sleep story or a focus tool, that’s an entry point into deeper engagement.” Calm Health personalizes recommendations based on every employee’s needs, from managing chronic conditions to helping with stress management. The Importance of Preventative CareCompanies have traditionally focused their efforts on the mental health of employees in crises, often neglecting those who are generally doing well but experience anxiety occasionally, Shimp says. “Preventative care is essential to stop employees from sliding into high-acuity situations,” he said. “Maybe someone is dealing with a bad breakup or grief. Providing them with resources early on can prevent more severe issues down the road.”Employers are now prioritizing investing in tools that help employees deal with everyday stress, protecting their mental health instead of waiting until they’re in a crisis. Leaders will play a vital role in reshaping workplace culture as attitudes toward employee mental health become more proactive and less reactive.“Leaders showing vulnerability is a huge piece of the puzzle,” Shimp said. “Employees need to see that their managers are human too.” Leaders sharing their struggles with team members normalizes conversations about mental health and encourages employees who need help to seek it. One message remains clear as companies refine their approach to employee mental health: personalized, preventative, and holistic solutions are the future of workplace wellness. Employers who embrace this shift aren’t only supporting the well-being of their employees; they’re fostering a healthier, more productive workforce. Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Calm, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight.Ade Akin covers workplace wellness, HR trends, and digital health solutions.(Photos by Sean Ryan for From Day One)
Attracting and Retaining Employees: Essential Tips for Leaders
BY Christopher O'Keeffe March 18, 2025Gone are the days when competitive compensation alone could secure top talent. As external pressures mount, Robert Foster, AVP of TA at Amtrak, has observed that candidates are prioritizing long-term security over pure compensation. He emphasized the need for transparency in hiring while highlighting that employees can enhance their value through continuous skill development. “I encourage people to control what they can control, which is their own work ethic, skill set, ability to stretch and reach across the aisle,” he said during an executive panel discussion at From Day One’s February virtual conference. Felix Mitchell, co-CEO of talent solutions business Instant Impact, highlighted the organizational responsibility that accompanies this shift. “We need to think about what we’re doing with learning and development, with re-skilling, and with career pathing, to make sure that we’re preparing our teams for a world where maybe we’re seeing a lot of restructuring and a lot of change,” said Mitchell. Amid the anxiety that comes with uncertainty, maintaining humanity throughout the recruitment process has become essential. Kim Stevens, senior TA manager at Employ, says the importance of clarity and communication while balancing the use of AI is crucial. A compassionate approach isn’t just good ethics, it’s good business, she says. “Uncertainty is, unfortunately, the norm in our space,” Stevens said. “What comes with that is that high anxiety from candidates who are applying, who are going through rigorous interviews. For me, it starts with really making sure that clarity and communication are top of mind.”Technology can help in the communication process as well, says Mitchell. Technology should enhance rather than replace human interaction during the recruitment process. “I absolutely love that framing of bringing that humanity back into the candidate experience,” Mitchell said. “The technology and all this cool AI... they’re only impactful where they can improve that candidate experience, and where they have really human impacts at the end of the day.”Reimagining Employer-Employee RelationshipsAttracting and retaining talent has also evolved, says David Bach, senior director of TA at LabCorp. “Attraction and retention comes down to redefining the model that worked in previous generations,” Bach said. “I saw a LinkedIn post the other day. It made me giggle. It said, 'My salary is just my employer’s subscription fee to me every month,’” he said. “It’s really kind of almost become that.”Journalist Alexis Hauk moderated the panel discussionBach suggested a more structured approach to these modern employment relationships, including “defined employment contracts with notice periods, long-term incentives for all employees, fair and transparent severance policies, and comprehensive benefits that meet modern needs.” This shift recognizes that while the pension-based employment model isn’t returning, organizations can create frameworks that provide both flexibility and security.Evolving Expectations Across GenerationsThe panel explored how different generations approach employment, with Shantra Laye, VP of campus recruiting at South State Bank, offering insights on Gen Z candidates.“Gen Z’s are looking for culture. They’re looking for purpose-driven organizations,” Laye said. “They’re asking questions about sustainability, community impact, and less about traditional benefits. They’re looking for flexibility and work-life balance.”While acknowledging these patterns, Mitchell cautioned against overemphasizing generational differences. “I think the difference between Gen Z and the rest of the workforce is overplayed,” he said, suggesting that broader workforce trends affect all generations, though they may be felt more acutely by younger workers.The thorny question of remote work continues to divide corporate America, with some executives pushing for full returns to office while others embrace hybrid or fully remote arrangements. “Having been remote for seven years, it’s harder to get noticed. You have to make a really concerted effort,” said Bach. However, he added, “I think it improved upon my mental health and my relationship with my family.”Bach suggested that companies uncomfortable with remote work often have more fundamental issues to address: “If an organization is uncomfortable with people working in a remote environment, it’s because they don’t have the right systems and processes set up to monitor productivity and employee performance. And if that’s the reason that you’re not allowing remote or hybrid work, fix your process.”Sometimes the solution isn’t to revert to old ways, and instead looking to fix a process. In an uncertain job market, the most valuable offering employers can provide isn’t permanence–it’s authenticity. Successful recruitment and retention today is about creating environments people “want to stay and where they feel valued,” said Stevens. In a world where uncertainty has become the norm, perhaps the most valuable offering isn't a promise of forever, but a commitment to honesty, growth, and mutual respect.Chris O’Keeffe is a freelance writer with experience across industries. As the founder and creative director of OK Creative: The Language Agency, he has led strategy and storytelling for organizations like MIT, Amazon, and Cirque du Soleil, bringing their stories to life through established and emerging media.(Photo by BrianAJackson/iStock)
Developing Talent Across Generations and Rapidly Changing Technologies
BY Matthew Koehler March 17, 2025If the opening of 2025 could be defined with one word, it would be turbulence. From the street to the board room, the world is experiencing shake ups and changes, or turbulence, forcing everyone to adapt to rapidly changing realities.In these turbulent times, Daniela Proust, the SVP and head of people & organization at Siemens, focuses on keeping the company’s people top priority, and putting them first, especially “when there’s so much turbulence out there,” she said. “I think my role is to be the voice of our workforce, and to make sure that our people can thrive. We create a work environment where people want to be part of team Siemens, and that we help them navigate along the way.”At From Day One’s Washington, D.C. conference, Proust discussed Siemens’ people-first approach to workforce development and changes with Taylor Telford, corporate culture reporter at the Washington Post.Siemens, “a technology company in the B2B space” that’s been around since 1848, is huge and diverse. It has over 300,000 workers worldwide, with more than 45,000 in the U.S. alone. The range of jobs at the company cover everything from engineering, software development, and manufacturing. “We have a large manufacturing footprint. So we have to cover all of the different needs and the skill and capability building,” said Proust.The company’s success and competitive edge, says Proust, is based on its ability to “innovate” and reinvent itself over and over again,” she said. “I like to describe us as a living organism. [We] try to stay adaptive, agile, and focus on the things that we need to innovate and also how we need to foster and create our workflow strategies,” Proust said.Its advantage is being a large global company “in terms of workforce...that it’s almost like a playground,” said Proust. “You can try out so many different things. You can work in different industries, in different geographies, you can also move across different functions.”On this worldwide playground Proust says Siemens focuses on attracting the right talent while recognizing individual development needs. “Each and every one of us has a unique skill set, or almost like a backpack of skills and capabilities and experience,” Proust said. “What each and every one of us needs to continuously adapt is very different.”She highlighted the company’s My Learning World platform, launched about six years ago. The platform has become their “number one used platform or tool in the whole company,” offering more than 130,000 learning opportunities. “Our people just love to engage. They love to see what’s out there.”A Team by Team Approach to RTOAccording to Proust, flexibility extends beyond just remote work policies. “The conversation is much more dimensional than just that dimension, even though it matters.”Siemens implemented a global policy encouraging employees to be in the office two to three days per week, but defer to their teams in determining what works best for specific team needs. “Each team can design to what is most meaningful in their context,” Proust said. Preferences vary widely, though–particularly between office-based and manufacturing environments.Taylor Telford of the Washington Post interviewed Proust of Siemens during the fireside chat With approximately 150 locations in the United States alone, Proust emphasized that Siemens’ flexible approach has been successful. “We have very flexible teams, and this has worked for us. And when I hear other companies say, ‘Oh, people are not engaged or they are not coming back.’ I see the opposite.” She stressed the importance of team-level conversations to determine optimal working arrangements while meeting objectives.Within her own bailiwick as a people and organization (P&O) head, Proust “creates the forums in the space that these conversations take place.” She emphasizes the importance of first line managers alongside executive leadership. “Tone from the top is super important, and they play a critical role to develop the strategy of their area of responsibility, but where the true people experience sits is usually in your direct environment. It’s your direct manager, it’s the people you work with.” Being “conscious and strategic” about senior leadership appointments and how they support first line managers is also key.The role of P&O has shifted significantly over time. “It really shifted from being a service provider with shared services in the back end for the core processes of payroll, travel, whatever it was.” P&O evolved from service provider to business partner, helping with strategic workforce planning. More recently, she noted an even more fundamental change in organizational importance.“Over the last two to three years, we are the third leg of a stool. I’m in every conversation with the CEO and CFO, and the people conversation is always [at the] core of every business strategy conversation.” She stresses that people are “the highest value” in organizations, making talent and organizational capability essential components of business strategy discussions.But ultimately what matters most to their people, according to Proust, is work environment, flexibility, and benefits. “What I find interesting as a European, is this growing interest in the topic of child care and elderly care and support, when you have to provide for your parents and for your children.”Exploring Innovation Through AI ApplicationsProust says Siemens is uniquely positioned at the intersection of physical and digital domains. “We are building trains as an example. We are building factories so that vehicles get built, or beverages can be filled. We build digital factories as an example.” And of course, the company is combining industry expertise with AI capabilities.For Siemens, AI represents a significant business opportunity, from shop floor applications to supporting field technicians. As head P&O, Proust also considers AI's internal workforce applications, though she remains cautious about productivity claims.“What are the tasks that bring value where we as humans really bring the value to the table? How can we focus on those tasks? And how can we get rid of other tasks that can be done easily through the technologies that we utilize?”Matthew Koehler is a freelance journalist and licensed real-estate agent based in Washington, DC. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, Greater Greater Washington, The Southwester, and Walking Cinema, among others.(Photos by Justin Feltman for From Day One)
The Role of Leadership in Supporting Employee Mental Health and Wellness
BY Jennifer Yoshikoshi March 17, 2025When an employee faces a health emergency and is hit with a $1,000 bill, it’s not just a physical wellness concern—it quickly becomes a financial one. They may have to dip into their emergency savings, leaving them unable to cover their bills. At that point, it can also start to affect their mental health.Nate Nevas, head of benefits and health services at Pitney Bowes, says his company approached the benefits in terms of making all pillars of physical, financial and mental wellness equally strong for employees. During a panel discussion at From Day One’s Chicago benefits conference, Kim Quillen, business editor of the Chicago Tribune, led a discussion with company executives about how managers can provide employees with mental health and wellness support. Putting Mental Health at the ForefrontLeaders at Pitney Bowes started their commitment to mental wellness by holding conversations about mental health with efforts to destigmatize it within the company. By spreading the message of “it’s okay not to be okay,” it began hosting a series of internal webinars, workshops and providing resources on its website, said Nevas. Gillian Plummer, director of employee health and wellness at Quest Diagnostics says 35,000 employees at her company have taken advantage of health risk assessments. The top feedback they received was that employees are stressed about their jobs and finances. Quest Diagnostics applied this data to its vendor programs and adopted it into cultural changes within the company, says Plummer.Panelists spoke about "Employee Mental Health and Wellness: How Managers Can Be Empowered"Britt Barney, manager of client success at Northstar, says the company sought to create greater awareness of wellness for its employees by offering mental health sessions with vendors and holding health fairs onsite. These in person events allow employees to meet with people from vendors and understand their benefits.Empowering managers to provide information to their employees about available benefits and to introduce them to someone that can further assist can be an effective way to support wellness. “There’s not enough time in the day for benefits people to be answering these questions, but to empower managers as that kind of first person that gets the information, I think is really important,” said Barney.Employee Support ProgramsCompanies are approaching wellness as a team effort. Pitney Bowes has a program where employees serve as “wellness champions,” who stay updated on available resources to be able to assist others who have questions or need help, said Nevas.Quest Diagnostics has a similar initiative with its company ambassadors. These employees take part in putting up informative flyers around work, talking to their peers and “empowering each other to live their best lives,” said Plummer.The company also offers peer support groups, where staff across the country have been able to share their personal stories about wellness journeys like in weight loss. Plummer says Quest Diagnostics is focusing on taking a step back on being “corporate,” by pursuing a more humanistic feel in the work they do. For example, the company encourages walks during meetings to give space for people to back away from powerpoint presentations and clear their heads. Mérieux NutriSciences showcases the various benefits available in its monthly spotlight on benefits and programs, said Benefits Manager Talikia Kitchen. They inform employees about what benefits are free and how to access them. For the mental health spotlight, the company guides their employees through the Employee Assistance Program and helps them get in touch with wellness vendors. “With our spotlight program, we spotlight each benefit that we have and we let employees know it’s okay to use this. This is totally confidential. No one will find out. This is for you,” said Kitchen. “It’s to help to ease your mind and to let you know it’s okay to use your benefits.”Kitchen recognizes that mental health is just one segment to multiple pillars of overall wellness.A Manager’s Role in Promoting WellnessWhile companies can provide an exuberant benefits program, if the work environment or company culture is not at the same level, these benefits go to waste, says Matt Jackson, general manager and vice president of Americas at Unmind. “The organization is responsible for creating the talent brand that attracts the right people to your company. They’re not responsible for the culture. The culture sits within the individual teams, and the managers are the stewards of that culture,” Jackson said.Managers hold a lot of power and can impact employees’ mental health more than a significant other or therapist, Jackson says. This highlights the importance of training and equipping leaders to foster a supportive culture within the company. Taking a humanistic approach and understanding the struggles that people may be dealing with can be an effective way to approach wellness. Making the time to hold conversations and build rapport can open up more discussions about how employees are feeling, says Plummer. Even by noticing a change in behavior or reaction in employees and acknowledging it can foster a healthier environment where employees and managers can talk about things that may be negatively affecting them, says Kitchen. “We all sometimes have this crying moment because we’re alone and we’re by ourselves–but sometimes we need that person, even if it’s not asking or telling what’s going on, it’s just [having someone to listen],” she said. Jennifer Yoshikoshi is a local news and education reporter based in the San Francisco Bay Area.(Photos by Tim Hiatt for From Day One)
Building Connections, Shaping Culture: Elevating the Employee Experience
BY Stephanie Reed March 14, 2025“The equation seems to be: happy employees equals higher productivity, efficiency, low turnover, higher retention, and more profit,” said Mihae Ahn, VP of marketing at LineZero.Undoubtedly, the employee experience and the customer experience are interconnected. Organizations with engaged workers perform 147% more effectively than their competitors and see a higher ROI.What is the key to organizations creating happier and highly engaged employees? Communal support, Ahn says. “When we feel connected to others in our lives, we are happier. When we are connected to our colleagues at work, we are happier at work,” she said during a thought leadership spotlight at From Day One’s Washington, D.C. conference. Indeed, Forbes underscores how there is a “highly emotional component” to keeping employees happy and fully engaged. Employees desire to be recognized, heard, respected, supported, and valued. HR leaders recognize the importance of supporting the humane component of organizational success. Investing in the employee experience is now a top priority, as disengaged employees can threaten a company’s success. In today’s hybrid workplaces, leaders must foster inclusive cultures that support a multigenerational workforce with diverse skill sets.“How do we make sure that our people feel connected, and they feel like they are part of a community where two-way engagement dialogs happen?” Surprisingly, or, perhaps as expected with the rise of AI, technology is a powerful tool to bridge communication, cultural, and skill gaps in modern-day workplaces. Instead of further stripping away humanity in the workplace, newer technology can create more inclusivity and interconnectedness. Companies investing in the digital employee experience, in particular, are also driven to integrate the latest platforms, software, and tools to enhance their competitiveness, says Ahn. A Digital Employee Experience Hub Ahn emphasized that building genuine community support and connections in the workplace is key to enhancing the employee experience. LineZero is an employee experience and change management consulting company that partners with top digital platforms to help clients strengthen internal communication, assess data, and create engaging company cultures.LineZero consultants are adamant about ensuring that the digital employee experience tool they suggest to clients leads to the desired business outcomes and justifies the buy-in. “We have a deep understanding of whatever tool, whatever technology that you propose and present to your business. It has to have a very clear purpose. It should not be redundant. It has to be cost-efficient,” said Ahn.For example, such new technology helps objectively filter employee data, enhances communication, introduces new ways of gathering and providing reviews and feedback via online forums and channels, and helps managers and team leaders directly support employees in their unique professional journeys.Hence, digital employee experience tools are vital for internal communication among frontline, remote, and hybrid workers. Many organizations achieve considerable success using AI-powered digital tools and platforms.Ahn references Workvivo by Zoom as an effective digital employee experience hub. Workvivo integrates engagement by awards, surveys, and employee recognition programs; internal communications using online chat, podcasts, live streams, and smart activity feeds; and employee listening using advanced analytics and data-driven employee insights.The Necessity of Human Connection The necessity of human connection is ancient, Ahn says. Belonging to a group as hunter-gatherers strengthened the likelihood of human survival because of communal support.On the other hand, social isolation lowered a person’s chances of survival because of a fundamental lack of support. Therefore, the body still perceives isolation or ostracization as a threat. The sympathetic nervous system activates under those threats to help us cope with any immediate danger.Today, this weakens decision-making and critical thinking, increases anxiety and depression, and ultimately reduces employee engagement, efficiency, and motivation in the workplace.“Yes, a lack of sense of belonging can create all these negative consequences,” said Ahn. “But when we do a good job creating a sense of belonging, then the many benefits come out of it.”Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, LineZero, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight. Stephanie Reed is a freelance news, marketing, and content writer. Much of her work features small business owners throughout diverse industries. She is passionate about promoting small, ethical, and eco-conscious businesses.(Photo by Justin Feltman for From Day One)
Empathy Isn't Programmable: Building a Human-Centric Workplace
BY Christopher O'Keeffe March 12, 2025When Rob Thompson, executive director at Birkman called up a hotel recently, he had a simple request for the concierge named Andrew: directions to self-parking. After following Andrew's instructions only to find the garage closed, Thompson then posed an unexpected question to the concierge, “Andrew, can you love someone more than you love yourself?”“That’s a uniquely human experience,” replied Andrew, confirming Thompson’s suspicions. He was speaking with an artificial intelligence agent so convincing that most callers wouldn’t be able to distinguish it from a human employee.In the rush to adopt artificial intelligence, companies are increasingly blurring the line between AI capability and human understanding. While AI tools demonstrate impressive abilities to analyze data and mimic human interaction, they fundamentally lack the experiential awareness that defines human emotion and feeling. “This is really the introduction of one of your new peers, someone that you may be working with day in and day out,” said Thompson during a thought leadership spotlight at From Day One’s Houston conference. At Birkman, a company specializing in behavioral assessment tools used by Fortune 500 companies to improve team dynamics, Thompson has observed the rapid integration of AI across corporations. He spoke about how we got here, and what we can do to create a more human-centric environment.As AI use increases, Thompson says that leaders must counterbalance this technological revolution by doubling down on human-centered management approaches; a perspective gaining traction among workplace strategists navigating rapid AI transformation. “We have two choices. One is we have to embrace AI, that train has left the station. The other piece is improving the employee experience with AI,” he said. “As my mom used to tell me, ‘Robert, control what you can control.’”There are five key trends reshaping today's workplace: AI tools replacing human interactions; a surge in early retirements following the pandemic; significant workforce shrinkage amid declining birth rates; younger employees prioritizing purpose over paychecks; and companies recognizing that strong cultures drive financial results, says Thompson.This convergence of trends has companies racing to retain talent while balancing technological efficiency with human needs. His approach marks a sharp break from traditional management philosophies that treat employees as data points. “I cringe whenever a leader says to me, ‘We have 10,000 employees, we have to reduce our head count by 500 FTEs,’” he said, referring to full-time equivalents. “They are just a number on the page. That is how a lot of companies view employees,” he said. Birkman’s methodology, says Thompson, takes a holistic view, assessing workers across four dimensions—physical, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual. This "whole person" approach uncovers behavioral patterns, stress responses, and the conditions that enable employees to thrive. He pointed to his own team as an example of complementary behavioral styles working in harmony. One colleague shows care through attentive listening, another through casual banter, and a third by maintaining organizational alignment.Rob Thompson of Birkman International led the thought leadership spoltight titled, "Empowering Tomorrow: Building a Human-Centric Workplace"“World class organizations really slow down and focus on the investment before results. It takes time, money, and effort to really generate the results we’re looking for.” This investment begins with a sincere interest in employees as individuals. For busy executives, taking the time to understand their people might seem inefficient, but Mr. Thompson insists it's essential for building resilient organizations. He advises replacing perfunctory hallway greetings with more meaningful conversations.Thompson’s emphasis on meaningful workplace interactions echoes broader research on psychological safety in organizations. “The ability to speak up and speak your mind without fear of retribution is a huge driver in organizations,” he said. This environment, according to workplace experts, doesn’t just improve culture, it directly enhances organizational performance and financial outcomes.As AI capabilities expand, the most successful organizations may be those that strategically deploy technology while simultaneously deepening human connections. “As you’re building that culture, it’s getting to know the whole person at a different level that’s going to help your organization and your team succeed.” Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner, Birkman, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight. Chris O’Keeffe is a freelance writer with experience across industries. As the founder and creative director of OK Creative: The Language Agency, he has led strategy and storytelling for organizations like MIT, Amazon, and Cirque du Soleil, bringing their stories to life through established and emerging media. (Photos by Annie Mulligan for From Day One)
How to Become a Skills-Based Organization on a Large Scale
BY Katie Chambers March 12, 2025Covid put healthcare professionals’ skills to the ultimate test and redefined how entire health systems are organized. This was certainly true at Memorial Hermann Health System. Lori Knowles, SVP and CHRO at Memorial Hermann said it was a time of “rapid-fire decision-making and precision.” Knowles spoke during a fireside chat at From Day One’s Houston conference, interviewed by Jennifer Vardeman, Ph.D., Director and Associate Professor at the Jack J. Valenti School of Communication, University of Houston. “People were exhausted, but they came together for the community and for each other in ways that changed the fabric of the organization and what we believed we could do,” said Knowles. As the biggest healthcare system in Texas with more than 34,000 employees, Memorial Hermann is moving toward becoming a skills-based organization, in which jobs and careers are remapped to focus on skills. The goal is to improve employee recruiting, retention, and quality of care.HR as a Problem-solverAs a fully integrated health system, Memorial Hermann encompasses everything from hospitals to outpatient care, physicians, urgent care centers, and health plans—all driven by its mission of community support. “We are non-profit. The only health system in Houston that is community-owned, so there are no shareholders. We actually give back to our community to the tune of about a half a billion dollars a year in community care,” Knowles said. Given the organization’s wide reach, Knowles wears many hats in her role, overseeing not only the usual HR tasks of total rewards, benefits, professional development, and employee relations, but also chaplaincy and “a centralized float pool” of 1,200 floating caregivers that fill in for regular employees when they are on leave. But the fact that Knowles wears a lot of hats is not unusual to someone in HR. She shares that especially post-pandemic, organizations have been looking to HR for guidance on many major workplace issues, including mental health, wellness, resilience, burnout, and even rules on mask mandates. “That gives us an opportunity to prove that we are more than just the traditional functions of HR, but we are true contributors to the business who can think on our feet, and can problem solve in real time,” Knowles said.Skills-based Professional DevelopmentMany organizational obstacles can be solved through skill-building, either by hiring for certain aptitudes or developing them within existing employee rosters. After Covid, the healthcare industry was facing a crisis, including a nursing shortage and a lack of clarity for long-term career development as workers experienced burnout. At the same time, Memorial Hermann was having to overhaul its job listings to comply with nationally accepted pay transparency standards.Knowles and her team decided to incorporate all these issues into one solution, redefining job descriptions in such a way that clarified pay and emphasized skillsets over years of experience, transforming the interpretation of the healthcare career track. “Let’s not just look at job duties and what experience you bring to the table, because the world is changing so fast. People don’t have 10 years of experience in AI, right?” she said. Lori Knowles, SVP and chief HR officer at Memorial Hermann Health System, left, was interviewed by Jennifer Vardeman of the University of HoustonThe leadership team created a new framework for the 2,200 different jobs at Memorial Hermann and tried to identify where there were gaps. “For example, what we found in our corporate offices is we had very few entry-level jobs–-everybody has to have at least two years of experience,” Knowles said.The organization used AI to scrape similar jobs across the country, identifying the 10 most prevalent skills attached to each job as well as the 10 most emerging skills, so that the company could understand both the current needs and the future framework for the role. This allows current and potential employees to visualize the pathway for growth and development, as well as helping HR better grasp succession planning and how to utilize the talent marketplace to create new teams. A focus on skills also takes the emphasis away from degrees, breaking down some barriers for talent that might otherwise feel excluded. Nurses, of course, need certain licenses. “But we are looking deeply at, do I really need a degree for everything? And if I do need a degree, do I need a master’s, especially if I have the skills that I can demonstrate [otherwise]?” Defining some roles, when able, by skills instead of certificates focuses on the true day-to-day demands of the business. “People are being hired in ways that are a little bit more attuned to the needs of the organization,” said Vardeman.Attracting the Next Generation of WorkersAs the population continues to age, so does the workforce at Memorial Hermann. Therefore, Knowles and her team must think ahead, providing employment models that are attractive to younger generations who may not want to spend their entire careers working difficult “bedside” roles, while also providing part-time flexible opportunities that might entice those of “retirement age” who still want to work, just not every day. The organization also provides a comprehensive benefits package that includes on-site personal counselors, elder care benefits, and retirement plans. To keep her employees of all different generations motivated, Knowles always goes back to the mission and value of the health system’s work. “What I try to do all the time is remind people that this is a noble profession. I’m famous for saying, ‘We’re not making peanut butter here, folks. We’re taking care of people’s lives for generations to come.’” Katie Chambers is a freelance writer and award-winning communications executive with a lifelong commitment to supporting artists and advocating for inclusion. Her work has been seen in HuffPost and several printed essay collections, among others, and she has appeared on Cheddar News, iWomanTV, On New Jersey, and CBS New York.(Photos by Annie Mulligan for From Day One)
How to Improve the Candidate Experience From the Very Beginning
BY Tabitha Cabrera March 11, 2025“Taking a moment to slow down and understand the candidate experience and finding time to focus on that is incredibly important,” said Kristen Baller, head of talent acquisition at DISH Network. “The candidate experience actually has a fundamental impact on our organization’s bottom line, meaning every candidate is a customer. And so, talent acquisition, while we may be looked at as a cost center, ultimately, has the ability to help drive revenue,” she said during a fireside chat at From Day One’s February virtual conference. Focus on the Candidate“What we’ve missed is where we actually carve out time to focus on creating a better candidate experience, focusing on the candidate—whether they’re going to be an employee, or whether we move forward with somebody else,” she said.One of the company’s core values is that opportunity is their number one benefit. Baller says that when looking at skills for both current and future positions within the organization, it’s important to assess whether someone has the energy to overcome adversity and the intelligence to think critically and outside the box.Megan Ulu-Lani Boyanton, reporter for the Denver Post, interviewed Baller of DISH (photo by From Day One)Internal mobility is also top of mind at DISH. Finding opportunities within the organization as Baller highlighted provides candidates confidence that “we go to the market and tell people to come build your future with us. There is someone and somewhere for everybody.” Leading With Empathy“When we think about our employer brand, one of the things that our team’s focused on is how we are taking the time to give back?” she said, highlighting their EchoStar Cares and Dish Cares volunteer work initiatives. “But how are we actually giving back to those that don’t join our organization? How do we create the space to just be more human and empathetic?” she asks. With this in mind, the company is focused on giving back and building their brand around that. Baller outlines that what she wishes industry leaders would do differently is to start carving out space for more empathy and human connection. Many of the metrics used by leaders and talent acquisition focus on efficiency and optimization, such as the number of positions filled in a quarter, time to fill, and time in process. Instead, leaders should shift some of that thinking to focus on metrics that measure candidate experience.Transparency can provide great value to the recruitment process, and overall candidate experience, says Baller. “How do we give them more transparency around what they can expect with the next steps of the interview process?” While Baller focuses on the candidate experience, the employee experience remains equally important to her. Baller highlights the importance of celebrating each other, “from a diversity, equity, and inclusion standpoint, it’s really important as an organization that we’re still investing and making our employees feel safe,” she said. Employers need to find ways to invest in and celebrate one another, recognizing that our differences and diversity of thought are what make businesses thrive and help move us forward as an organization.Tabitha Cabrera, Esq. is a writer and attorney, who has a series of inclusive children's books, called Spectacular Spectrum Books.(Photo by everydayplus/iStock)
Enhancing Workplace Culture by Prioritizing Growth and Engagement
BY Jennifer Yoshikoshi March 11, 2025Six years ago, BMC Software was hesitant to survey employees and gather their feedback, says Lynn Moffett, vice president of human resources at BMC Software. The company didn’t utilize surveys because it didn’t know what to do with the insights. However, with the arrival of a new CEO, the company embraced a shift in approach.The new executive team pushed for a workplace that embraced interactions with employees that boosted the company culture. Since then, surveys have been a critical part of evaluating employee needs and driving improvement.During a panel discussion at From Day One’s Houston conference, executives spoke on how their corporations are enhancing wellness and workplace culture for its employees.Listening to Employee FeedbackSurveys are serving as a great way for companies to gauge how employees feel about their workplace and pushes the needle to bring change and improvements for the whole corporation. BMC Software’s employee survey measured how employees felt about career growth and development and by partnering with a technology vendor, the company was able to analyze the data and develop a sustainable strategy for the company to deploy, says Moffett.The vendor also helped the company understand how BMC’s initiative compared to other organizations. It found that many others are also focusing on career growth for its employees. BMC aimed to use the surveys to empower managers by giving them access to their own feedback and scores, opening up avenues to hold conversations with their employees, Moffett says. Managers were also trained and supported in having these discussions.Adrienne Adeshina, global head of learning and development for Ericsson, emphasized that the important part of utilizing surveys is actually taking action.Richard Robinson, system vice president of employee and labor relations at CommonSpirit Health, added that companies should reflect on whether any changes occurred since the last survey. When creating a survey, it should recognize the current issues at hand.“I emphasize with the leaders to still check in with employees to see if we moved the needle. And if not, is there something else we should start looking at? Because maybe whatever was drawing the issue at that time may not be driving it anymore,” Robinson said.Carver Edison is using survey data and connecting it back to an evaluation of how employees are engaging with benefits and financial programs, says Aaron Shapiro, the company’s founder and CEO.“That actually helps create context around different survey responses so we can help our clients really understand how the two are connected, how employee survey data actually then connects and translates to the decisions people are making,” said Shapiro.Investing in Employee DevelopmentNational University has started a credential-rich pathway initiative which allows students to gain more experience and connections in addition to graduating with a degree.“No longer are we living this three phase life where you go to school, you have a career and you retire,” said Eric Roe, dean and regional vice president for Texas at National University. “You have this multiphase life where you’re moving in and out of education.”National University is one of the first education institutions to embed an industry certifications into its degree program, Roe says. The university has embedded the Google project management and data science certificate. It also partners with companies like Amazon and Southwest Airlines and takes its leadership training program and incorporates it into the university’s initiatives.Nick Baily, CEO and co-founder of From Day One, moderated the session Adeshina says Ericsson has created a four-level learning plan for global critical skills that the company has identified that are used in the organization. Employees are then given the opportunity to focus on growing these certain skills through short term projects in collaboration with their leaders. These projects open opportunities to network, work with new people and experience a day in the life of someone doing the job more related to that skill, says Adeshina.Holistic Wellness: From Finances to Workplace Flexibility While many employers want to provide more financial stability for employees through raises, budgets always cause a barrier, says Shapiro. Financial wellness is a growing topic among corporations as a report from the Federal Reserve shows that “72% of adults are doing at least okay financially,” which is six percent lower than recorded in 2021.People often look for jobs to make more money, therefore employee retention begins to increase when workers are feeling comfortable with their income and not seeking new employment, says Shapiro. In the remote working space, wellness and productivity can either decline or improve with the different initiatives taken by leaders to ensure the workplace culture is still prevalent for remote workers. The National University’s Center for the Advancement of Virtual Organizations recently published a book titled, Winning in the Virtual Workplace, a framework for leaders on how to successfully lead a remote team.“It really starts with a leader centered in the framework around emotional intelligence,” said Roe. “You have to really be able to understand that employee and connect with them, but then you surround that with a structure that supports that remote workforce.”The framework encourages communication through check ins, maintaining accountability and providing positive encouragement. A communication feedback loop has to be developed to keep remote employees engaged, says Roe.The panelists agreed that what they see drives engagement is stability, flexibility, growth opportunities, and connection.The Importance of DEIAs some corporations are rolling back on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, others are still holding onto its initiatives to make sure that the sense of belonging remains a part of the workplace culture. “Ericsson hasn’t rolled back or changed anything. It’s always been a culture of inclusion and belonging, and that continues,” Adeshina said.Social justice, equity, diversity and inclusion is important for building the next generation of the workforce, says Roe. Supporting DEI helps create a workplace culture where individuals feel valued, respected, and empowered to contribute—an environment that leaders are committed to maintaining.Jennifer Yoshikoshi is a local news and education reporter based in the San Francisco Bay Area.(Photos by Annie Mulligan for From Day One)
Optimizing Hiring: From Obstacles to Effective Solutions
BY Stephanie Reed March 10, 2025To effectively enhance talent assessments, organizations must first identify any gaps that currently exist or could emerge in the future. Recognizing these gaps sets the stage for exploring external resources that can provide solutions.“We asked questions like, ‘What historical challenges have our stakeholders experienced that we haven’t been able to get exactly right,’” said Generi Wilson, talent acquisition program manager at Greenhouse.“‘What do we want to accomplish in X amount of years, and what's stopping us from achieving them?’” Wilson recalled how Greenhouse approached improving their hiring practices. These fundamental questions helped the organization determine the business need for an interview intelligence tool.At From Day One’s February virtual conference, Wilson led a thought leadership spotlight about “Optimizing Your Hiring Process: From Challenges to Solutions.” Greenhouse is a hiring platform that helps businesses improve their hiring processes. Wilson draws on both client experiences and the organization’s own journey to develop a more structured approach to hiring.Demo Interview Intelligence ToolsAfter pinpointing any gaps or focal points, it’s important to explore external resources created specifically to address those challenges to achieving your business goals, says Wilson.Generi Wilson of Greenhouse led the thought leadership spotlight (company photo)For example, Greenhouse determined it needed ways to cut the length of its interviewing sessions, and it wanted to help their hiring managers make more informed and unbiased decisions.The company noted the growing popularity of business tools using AI to optimize tasks and filter objective data. Leaders at Greenhouse proceeded to schedule demos with different vendors supplying interview intelligence tools. Then they used a rubric to determine which vendors were more aligned with their business goals.The pitch to stakeholders determines a new tool's successful integration. The approval of stakeholders influences how the rest of the organization reap the benefits of those new tools.Discussing the benefits of interview intelligence tools and how to measure their success will be more successful when determining what information segments of your audience find most important. “So for example, what’s top of mind for a senior leadership team member might be different from what’s important for an individual contributor to know,” she said.Integrating New ToolsChange management will help fully integrate the new tools into an organization. Two-way transparency was essential to Greenhouse’s change management: providing support and data to address concerns or misconceptions, says Wilson.“The first step in that process was to identify all of our stakeholders beyond senior leadership, and mapped how they would be impacted,” Wilson said. “Once we understood what would be changing for them, we created robust enablement resources to help our audience perform the new tasks that we were asking them to do.” Available resources include tutorials, FAQs, and live demos.Then, they launched a pilot program to verify the success of the tool before fully integrating it into daily operations. Leaders kept track of the user experience with the chosen tool, BrightHire. Bugs, missing workflows, user sentiment, and usage helped measure its overall impact.After notable improvements, Greenhouse increased the pilot from 2 to 10 roles: the results were that 70% of departments were represented in the hiring teams and 60 interviewers used BrightHire to record their interviews. “By rolling out roles one by one, folks were able to experience BrightHire in a controlled environment, but also share success stories with other people on their teams who haven’t gotten the chance to use it just yet.”A Final Structured Hiring Process Wilson's description of how Greenhouse developed a structured hiring process is particularly insightful because the organization applies the same strategies they recommend to their clients. “This is a huge differentiator for us because it means we get to practice our own mission internally every day,” Wilson said.“Now, structured hiring is at the core of everything that Greenhouse does.”Greenhouse’s structured hiring process begins with defining the role requirements and the skills candidates should possess before a job is posted. It also focuses on building diverse and inclusive talent pipelines, ensuring that all candidates have an equal opportunity to showcase their skills.BrightHire has been instrumental in achieving these outcomes with benefits like generating AI notes for interviewers and providing transcripts of the interview in a question-and-answer format to help interviewers create more objective feedback.Greenhouse found success in improving its hiring processes: feedback from surveys reported that 75% of Greenhouse interviewers confirm BrightHire provides clarity, 90% say it saves time, and 100% recommend using BrightHire, says Wilson. Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Greenhouse, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight.Stephanie Reed is a freelance news, marketing, and content writer. Much of her work features small business owners throughout diverse industries. She is passionate about promoting small, ethical, and eco-conscious businesses(Photo by Jacob Wackerhausen/iStock)
Making Talent Acquisition More Efficient, Inclusive, and Personalized
BY Carrie Snider March 07, 2025Competition for talent is fierce. How can companies rethink their hiring strategies?At From Day One’s Houston conference, panelists shared insights for organizations to better attract and retain the right talent. Moderated by Jennifer Vardeman, director and associate professor at the Jack J. Valenti School of Communication at the University of Houston, the discussion highlighted the future of hiring and what organizations can do to build stronger, more engaged workforces.Harnessing AI for HiringArtificial intelligence is transforming talent acquisition by making the hiring process efficient, says Naga Krishna Kadiyala, associate vice president of HR innovation and analytics at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. “AI is really making hiring faster, smarter, and easier,” he said.One key area where AI has made an impact is structured interviews. Kadiyala’s team recently experimented with AI-powered interview guides. They removed sensitive information from resumes, fed the anonymized data into their enterprise AI tool, and let the system generate personalized interview questions. This approach streamlined the process for the hiring team, who often lack the time to create customized interview questions. Meanwhile, an AI-powered scheduling agent negotiates interview times between candidates and hiring managers, reducing the scheduling process from weeks to days. “Our design principle is to have a frictionless experience, and technology should play a major role in reducing the burden in that process,” he said. By leveraging AI to handle repetitive tasks, the institution has seen an increase in highly qualified candidates applying and more candidates being presented to hiring teams.Looking ahead, Kadiyala advocates for broader AI learning across the workforce. “I’ll say, go bold with AI learning for all,” he said. “At the baseline, there should be training on how to use AI. It helps with future-proofing skills, and also with retention. And I think retention helps in attracting talent.”Look at Your Internal TalentOrganizations often focus on external hiring, but panelist Amber Rabo, vice president of learning and talent development at ABM Industries, encourages companies to tap into their existing workforce. “Look at your current workforce as your talent pool,” she said. While not every organization has sophisticated internal job marketplaces, ABM found success with a simple yet effective approach—sending out a newsletter with newly posted job openings. “It was just putting new jobs being posted into a little newsletter and sending it out to all employees so that they can see what opportunities are available for themselves,” Rabo said. “You never know what’s going to come out of it.”Beyond internal mobility, AI has opened new possibilities for workforce development and candidate engagement at ABM. Rabo’s team of instructional designers embraced AI early on, leveraging innovative tools to enhance training and job readiness. One standout initiative involves using AI-driven realistic job previews to address the high turnover rates in frontline roles.“Our core business is very much around janitorial services and buildings, stadiums, airports—you name it,” she said. “And it’s an extremely high turnover rate oftentimes because there’s not a real understanding of what the job’s going to entail on day one.”To bridge that gap, ABM is developing AI-powered job previews that give candidates an immersive look at what a typical day on the job is like.“It’s amazing to be able to literally depict what it’s like—a day on the job, say, at an airport, doing janitorial work at an Amazon facility, cleaning it up,” Rabo said. Providing candidates with this level of transparency helps set expectations from the start, leading to better retention and a more prepared workforce.Authentically Tell Your StoryEmployer branding is as much about education as it is about attraction. Panelist Holly Strople, global head of talent acquisition at Noble Corporation, understands this challenge firsthand.“I think Noble is a perfect example. Offshore drilling, right? We run into a lot of perceptions about our industry—what we do, how we do it—dangerous, dirty, you know, all these different things,” she said.The executive panelists shared insights on the topic "Making Talent Acquisition More Efficient, Inclusive, and Personalized"One of Noble’s biggest hurdles is simply getting people to recognize the company. “We’ve been around for more than 100 years. We are the only player in the industry that has kept the same name for over 100 years. That’s a beautiful story from an employer branding perspective,” Strople said. “Yet, the fact that we’re headquartered here in Houston and less than half this room has ever heard of us—that’s a challenge we’re up against all the time.”They launched an internship program as an early careers talent program. Now, Strople and her team are revamping their careers page, but she keeps pushing for the human element.“We’re sitting in meetings, talking about our fleet status report and doing profiles on our rigs,” she said. “And I continue to say, ‘Where are the people’s stories? When are we going to fly out to the rigs and interview these people?’”She added: “The only way we’re going to allow you all to envision yourself in our organization is if we show people who look like you, who have the same experiences as you, who come from the same places you do—and then tell their stories.”That authenticity must also extend to the hiring process itself. Details as small as whether a hiring manager keeps their camera on during a virtual interview or whether they’re distracted by their phone can make or break a candidate’s experience. “All of that contributes to whether or not somebody is going to want to come and work for you.”Research Potential Employee PopulationsMany employers struggle with hiring because they rely on outdated recruitment strategies, says panelist Dave Harrison, executive director of workforce development and government relations at Fastport.“The biggest problem most hiring efforts have is bad research and analysis on populations,” Harrison said. “We don’t understand the people we’re going after, and we’re trying to steal the same talent from the same competitors over and over again.” Compounding the challenge, companies are no longer just competing within their own industries, something that changed before Covid. “Hiring was already tough because every industry was competing for the same talent,” Harrison said. “And now, the talent pool and their attitudes have changed.”To attract and retain employees, organizations need to do a better job articulating career paths. Harrison shared how they helped one company do just that. “We helped UPS rebuild their registered apprenticeship program a few years ago. They had amazing jobs, great benefits, but still struggled to find enough people,” he said. “The biggest shift we made? We got them to change how they articulated career paths.”Rather than just listing job openings, UPS started sharing real success stories—employees who started in one position and climbed to VP roles. “We helped them frame it as a lattice, not just a ladder,” Harrison said. “They weren’t guaranteeing outcomes, but they were showing employees that they weren’t stuck in one role forever.”This approach is vital, especially for companies trying to expand into new talent pools. He gave an example of a rail yard near an urban area where not a single high school student from the surrounding schools had ever considered working there. “They completely changed their marketing strategy. Now, students are engaging with them online, and the first thing they’re introduced to is career pathway opportunities—told by people they can relate to.”At Fastport’s annual Veteran Ready Summit in Washington, D.C., they coach employers on effective veteran recruitment and retention strategies. “One of the first things we do is review their online presence. And they’ll show stock photos of some model in a uniform that’s completely unrealistic,” Harrison said. “Anyone who has ever served, even in a different branch, can spot the inaccuracy immediately. And at that point, you’ve lost them.”Instead, Harrison advises companies to be upfront. “You don’t have to know every military occupation code or the phonetic alphabet. Just listen. Veterans will tell you their skill sets—leadership, management, overcoming obstacles, soft skills. The exact skills you need all the time.”Successful hiring is all about building meaningful connections, offering clear career paths, and creating workplaces where employees see a future. By taking a more strategic and inclusive approach to talent acquisition, organizations can position themselves for long-term success in an increasingly competitive market.Carrie Snider is a Phoenix-based journalist and marketing copywriter.(Photos by Annie Mulligan for From Day One)
Harnessing AI for Human Resources: The Promises and Risks
BY Matthew Koehler March 07, 2025To some people, generative AI can feel like magic, and perhaps it's meant to be that way. Even the experts who designed it don’t fully understand how neural networks are thinking on their own, which is quite magical. But if Dr. Balaji Padmanabhan could wave a magical wand over our awe of AI, he’d utter a revealing spell. “The beauty of magic is that even magic is not magic. And that’s a perfect metaphor for AI. Under the hood, there is a very specific way in which it works, and it’s extremely important for all of us to understand the capabilities of AI, rather than just walking around thinking it can do anything under the sun.”Padmanabhan, a professor of decision, operations and information technologies at the University of Maryland, led a thought leadership spotlight at From Day One’s Washington, D.C. conference last month. He spoke on the promises and risks of AI and the next frontier in the domain of HR and hiring.In a fundamental shift from earlier approaches, today’s AI represents a dramatic evolution in machine learning, says Padmanabhan. “AI, over the years, has picked problems that demonstrate intelligence.” And while use cases appear similar—chatbots existed 60 years ago and remain prevalent today—the underlying technology has evolved exponentially.Earlier AI relied on “pre-programmed logic,” while modern systems operate through “learning from continuous, massive data streams, as well as new learning paradigms.” The implications are significant. “Potentially, we are at a time when AI can be not just as good as humans, but potentially much better,” creating both “problems as well as concerns” for society.Zeroing in on how AI will outperform humans, Padmanabhan pointed to two broad issues. The first revolves around predictive models using AI and the “edge cases” it applies to.“Predictive models are very good when the future is like the past. So what happens when the future is not like the past? The data that we've trained [AI] on isn't going to be adequate to make those predictions.”You can think about predictability in terms of what physicians do during a majority of their workweek. While most of a doctor's routine work could be automated—perhaps 39 hours of a 40-hour workweek—their true value emerges in those critical moments of specialized judgment.“That 20 minutes or one hour in that 60-hour workweek where they make a decision that's different from what something would have automated is what that person is getting paid for.”This reality shapes how we should approach professional development, and Padmanabhan suggests we "focus on that aspect in our own professions,” specifically, the ability to excel “where the future is not like the past,” he said.Superpowered AI and Where Humans RemainPadmanabhan cast a revealing spell on broad assumptions about AI's superiority by highlighting the disconnect between publicized tests and real-world applications. “Where they show AI is better than humans most of the time doesn’t reflect on-the-ground use cases.” Dr. Balaji Padmanabhan of the University of Maryland led the session on AIHe bases this reality on his experience helping companies implement AI solutions. “When a company is actually using AI within an HR context, or when a hospital is actually using AI to help a doctor make decisions, those situations are not the same as taking an automated exam.”“So take these predictions with a big grain of salt that AI can replace humans.”Another false reality to consider is AI’s reliability. “AI makes mistakes just as humans make mistakes.” And while many organizations have developed robust systems to understand and minimize human error, “most on-the-ground use cases [with AI], it's hard for them to even come up with a number which says what percentage of the time AI is making a mistake.”Despite some areas of concern, Padmanabhan remains optimistic about AI's potential as a personalized workplace tool, or what he refers to as the “superpower” we’ll all have in our pockets. “Regardless of what your job is, whether you're a wealth manager, whether you're an information analyst, whether you're an investment banker, everything that you're doing can be supported by AI in a very significant way, and that’s the superpower in our pockets that we have to try to go towards.”AI Agents and the Next FrontierDespite early missteps in automated hiring, Padmanabhan foresees AI continuing to be more useful and practical in HR. For example, HR vendors now use generative AI to automate specific tasks rather than entire workflows. These targeted applications include resume filtering and automatically preparing initial performance review reports—tasks that previously consumed significant time but can now be completed “in a matter of seconds.”One particularly promising application incorporates nudge theory—a behavioral science concept where subtle, positive interventions guide people toward better choices without removing freedom of choice. AI can deliver these “right pushes at the right time” to enhance employee performance.“Technology can very easily become our friend. That's what I meant when I was saying it’s a superpower in our pockets to help all of us do our jobs much better.”Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner, the University of Maryland, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight. Matthew Koehler is a freelance journalist and licensed real-estate agent based in Washington, DC. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, Greater Greater Washington, The Southwester, and Walking Cinema, among others.(Photos by Justin Feltman for From Day One)
Beyond Quotas: Increasing Employee Engagement With Your Favorite Function—Sales
BY Jessica Swenson March 06, 2025“What if I told you that your company already has a massive untapped sales force?” Alexandria Warren, VP of solutions consulting at Velocity Global, launched her thought leadership spotlight From Day One’s Houston conference with this question.Research shows that organizations with revenue-focused cultures experience significant increases in sales productivity, profit margins, employee engagement, and cross-department collaboration. By putting the customer’s experience and the company’s revenue goals at the center of everything, you enable all teams—not just sales—to reimagine the impact of their daily work, creating an environment of empathy, innovation, and retention.Sales teams used to rely on in-office camaraderie to celebrate their wins and commiserate over their losses. Today’s hybrid and remote environments remove that built-in connection. Combine that with a sustained pressure to perform, and you get a sense of isolation that reduces resilience and can lead to burnout. Additionally, companies have historically limited revenue awareness to sales and marketing teams. By expanding this focus across teams and functions, you create safe, collaborative environments where everyone shares both the responsibility and benefits of growth. This is key to building a sales-driven, audible-ready culture that can flexibly shift to meet customer and business needs.Warren shared seven unexpected ways to facilitate this transformation and drive a cross-functional sales focus in your organization, some of which have already been implemented at Velocity Global.First, empower your workforce with sales intelligence from day one. It’s important for people in all phases of the employee lifecycle to understand the customer’s pain points, the solutions that the company provides, and how their role impacts both. They also need visibility to how the company is performing and the influence their work can have on that performance. “Forrester found that when workplaces have a common vocabulary rooted in customer value, and they empower teams with that, they generate 2.4X higher revenue growth and 2X higher profitability growth than [companies] without that alignment,” said Warren.Velocity Global starts this integration as soon as their new hire onboarding program, giving new employees a very early indicator of how they fit into the organization. Team members are also trained to identify paint points and turn everyday conversations into an opportunity for business growth. Additionally, the company hosts quarterly brown-bag lunch events where employees learn about new product use cases, customer case studies, and the impact of their work.Next, teach employees to sell without selling by being good problem-solvers and storytellers. Training an entire workforce to center resolution of the customer’s pain can require a total, yet vital, mindset shift. Business opportunities increase when everyone is accountable for revenue growth and armed with the language, understanding, and ability to have an intelligent conversation about customer pain points and company offerings, says Warren. Alexandria Warren, VP of solutions consulting at Velocity Global, led the thought leadership spotlight “The best lead and the most authentic intro is from a non-salesperson who has the same pain that their friend, colleague, or industry partner has,” Warren said .“Everyone wants to help someone in their network, right?” Providing employees with the skills, knowledge, and language empowers them to elevate a simple conversation into a potential business partnership.Designing cross-functional KPIs and incentive programs is another key point, says Warren. Velocity Global recently implemented a program that requires its R&D and products teams to engage directly with sales partners to identify pain points and increase efficiency within the customer sales process. “When we have mutually aligned goals, we are all working towards the same vision,” she said. Finding ways to link goals and KPIs across teams allows the entire organization to share in the wins and losses of the sales team. Incentive programs like awards and recognition for customer-facing service leads, driving exceptional deal cycles, and making strategic connections help demonstrate the value of everyone’s contributions.Create mutual empathy through job shadowing experiences, says Warren. Customers and prospects give frontline sales teams feedback on products and solutions, an experience which can be challenging to truly understand without seeing it firsthand. Job shadowing programs allow non-sales teams to gain customer-facing sales experience, providing a more robust perspective on the daily work of their sales partners. A 2021 SHRM survey demonstrated that a majority of organizations (89%) with some type of job shadowing program also reported improvements in their employee experience. This expanded visibility provides a more robust perspective on the daily workflow of their partners and how their own role can impact that sales lifecycle, creating relationships based on mutual empathy and trust. It also positions the organization to be more flexible for out-of-scope requests or accelerated project timelines.Next, create a loss library that’s accessible to all teams. A shared resource tied to key performance indicators (KPIs) can encourage cross-team analysis and brainstorming, leading to fresh insights and sales breakthroughs. Bringing in different perspectives strengthens collaboration and innovation.Warren also encourages promoting friendly competition across departments. Fun, low-stakes internal contests can build camaraderie and expose sales teams to new ideas from experts in other business areas, sparking creative approaches to problem-solving. Finally, empower sales staff to turn away work from misaligned clients. Taking on the wrong clients can drain energy and create frustration, while allowing sales teams to focus on high-quality leads fosters engagement, respect, and stronger cross-functional trust.“Imagine the power of a company where everyone plays a role in revenue generation,” she said. “The result is faster growth, more deals, a competitive edge, with [the entire organization] consistently attuned to what the customer needs—and a wholly supported, passionate sales organization to carry the bag.”Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner, Velocity Global, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight. Jessica Swenson is a freelance writer based in the Midwest. Learn more about her at jmswensonllc.com.(Photos by Annie Mulligan for From Day One)
Modernizing Talent Acquisition: Enhancing Efficiency and the Applicant Experience
BY Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza March 06, 2025For any given job opening, an employer will receive hundreds of applications. Multiply that by the number of open recs at any given time, which could be dozens or even hundreds, and you have an impossible task. Use this number for reference: In 2024, the global power management company Eaton Corporation hired 9,000 new employees across the US and Canada alone.Recruiting teams are doing more with less, says Steve Bartel, founder and CEO of recruiting platform GEM. “Thousands of GEM customers and teams are a lot smaller than they were a few years ago. Recruiters are managing 56% more recs. Recruiting teams are getting about 3x the applicants compared to a few years ago. In fact, 20% of our customers see thousands of applicants for a single role,” he said.With too much to do and not enough people to do it, HR teams are looking to automation and artificial intelligence to help. “For a lot of administrative tasks, AI is going to be great,” said Rob Kumengi, who leads North American talent acquisition at Eaton. By automating routine parts of the job, both recruiters and candidates will have more time for human interaction. While Eaton has replaced the back-and-forth of scheduling a phone screening with a tool that lets candidates pick a time that works for them, it doesn’t replace the interview itself—that meeting is still with a human being.Recruiters are aware that job seekers are frustrated, and that many believe their applications are sent into a void, never to be considered. With that in mind, these companies are modernizing recruitment not only in terms of the technology they use, but also in the way they facilitate human interaction with candidates.This was the topic of discussion for a panel of senior TA leaders. During From Day One’s February virtual conference, panelists spoke about how they’re modernizing recruiting with efficiency and experience.The last handful of years have demonstrated the importance of empathy in the workplace, and some employers are resisting the pull to sever friendly contact with applicants in the name of efficiency. For these panelists, feedback for candidates is where they were finding ways to improve connection while preserving efficiency.Employers Asked and Applicants Answered: We Want FeedbackAt telecom company Comcast, where 84% of their applicants are also customers, the candidate experience is also a matter of customer experience, says Shelly Gross, VP of talent acquisition and experience.Comcast centralized its global talent acquisition function in the last two years, and Gross says it’s been a boon to efficiency: more agreement, less redundancy. “We’ve allowed the candidates to tell us where we could get the most experience lift for our buck,” she said, and candidates told them they want feedback.Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, journalist and From Day One contributing editor, moderated the session (photo by From Day One)“When we provided feedback after an interview, we were seeing overall [Net Promoter Score] swings of up to 50 points,” Gross said. “That’s just an amazing and unheard of opportunity to take advantage of.” The inverse was also true: “Where we weren’t delivering feedback, we were seeing swings into the negative 50 range.” Turns out they were providing candidate feedback just 40% of the time, so that’s where they put automation to work first, “implementing some feedback capture and delivery mechanisms for our leaders and recruiters in our ATS.”At professional services firm Avanade, Paul Phillips, who leads global HR and talent acquisition, was having a similar experience. Given the flood of applicants, Avanade wasn’t able to respond to each one. “At a minimum, you have to be able to reply to a candidate, and it was clear that many candidates were falling by the wayside,” he said. So, he ran an engagement survey of both successful and unsuccessful candidates. “My scores were horrible,” he said, and it was because they weren’t getting any feedback.OK, but easier said than done, right? When you have hundreds or thousands of applicants, recruiters can’t spend all their time giving notes.Scaling Candidate Feedback“Especially in our world,” said Kumengi. “Feedback is gold.”And employers are finding ways to offer it. Andy Nelesen, global solutions director at talent assessment firm SHL, is one of them. “If we were going to design a hiring program for the candidate that wasn’t hired, what would that look like?”By conducting so many psychometric evaluations, SHL learns a lot about job seekers, “and historically, we’ve only used that insight to help hiring managers and recruiters to make smarter, faster decisions on who to move forward,” Nelesen said. But SHL was forfeiting an opportunity to provide feedback to the ones who didn’t advance, “so we rolled out personalized video-based feedback for all candidates based on the results of the assessments.”Some start the feedback early. At Avanade, Phillips is working on “social talent training,” where candidates can improve their interview technique, whether they get the job or not. “How to answer and ask great questions, how to prepare for an interview, how do you get ready for day one?”Of course, all panelists emphasized the importance of modernizing for augmentation, not substitution. Even when AI is used to review and stack-rank applications, humans need to be heavily involved, Bartel said. “I think companies should be a little bit wary of anything that claims to replace recruiters. The technology is just not there, and I’m not sure if it’s ever going to be there, because that human touch is so, so important.”Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism.(Photo by dusanpetkovic/iStock)