Speaker 1: Welcome to Leaders Legacy, I'm your host, Varsha Sarkar, and today's episode, our title is Aligning HR with Commercial Goals for Business Success. Our guest for today is Kirsten Brunfett, who is the VP of People at Krisp. Welcome to our show, Kirsten. Thank you. Thank you, Varsha, for inviting me along. So Kirsten, how can HR professionals bridge the gap between their traditional HR roles and the commercial goals of the business?

Speaker 2: Yeah, great question, Varsha. I think it starts with being more commercial in your outlook. I think if you think about things as a business leader does, so what does this mean to our bottom line? What's the impact on our revenue, cost base, reputation with customers or the market for current or future employees, for example. If you think about successful businesses, they're really outcome focused. So think about what's the outcome that the business or the leader wants and ask them to work on assumptions. So I've always worked with my team to think holistically about across all of the business objectives, not just the measures for our team, but actually how we can influence other parts of the business. How can we positively impact the wider business objectives? So for example, if it's increased sales or if it's reducing customer churn, for example, how can you impact this? So hiring faster, having a better onboarding programme so you can make sure that people can come on board quickly and that they can assimilate information at the right pace from the right people and become more productive. I think things like that will provide greater insights into how you can help and support at the right time for driving those business outcomes. And also think about what not to do. Some organisations I've worked in, we've introduced initiatives at a really poor time. So for example, when we're looking at closing out a quarter or at year end, it's not a good time to introduce a new process or a new initiative. So just think about the things like that and that will drive better commercial relationships.

Speaker 1: How important do you think employee engagement is in aligning HR with business goals? And if you think it's important, what strategies should any HR professional implement to increase the employee engagement?

Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it's a known really that happier employees are more productive. Richard Branson coined it really nicely when he said, your clients don't come first, your employees do. If you take care of employees, then they'll take care of your clients. And ultimately, you should treat your employees as you want them to treat your clients. So I think that what you need to do is traditionally, you look at what organisations do and they go to employees once, maybe twice a year through an employee survey and ask them what they think of the organisation. And then if they're lucky, they might get a feedback through a town hall or an update meeting where they're told what's been heard and then what's going to be done. I think what you need to do is check the pulse of the team more regularly and through less formal interactions. And so, you know, ideally, kind of through managers, interventions and not just things like after benefit renewals or pay review cycles, but with the things that affect people on that more day to day level. So if a key member of the team leaves, if you're onboarding a new customer, they're going to have to support or if a customer leaves, for example, I think the feedback is always there for the taking. It's just making sure that you listen to it and then you take it on board. And as a leader, I regularly ask my team, what can I do better or what do I need to stop, start or continue? And I think in terms of your question about this, about engagement, and I was thinking about this in terms of it seems really easy what I'm going to say, but actually, it's a huge amount of work. So, you know, give them a voice and then hear what they have to say. Test your assumptions. Don't believe that, you know, you're not operating in an echo chamber. You know, don't operate on what you think you know about them. Ask them and then manage your team as you like to be managed, manage your employees as you like to be managed. So show them an appreciation for them in a way that's meaningful to them and ultimately make sure that this fairness in equity in play by being really transparent. Play your best employment engagement strategies, fairness, equity, having a voice and managing people as you like to be managed.

Speaker 1: So we know, especially post COVID, almost globally, every company is struggling with skill shortage and talent gap. So how can HR professionals anticipate the talent gap and in a way manage it in order to support the long term commercial success?

Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I think ultimately you need to partner really closely across the functions, getting involved in organizational design for their teams, understanding what the current roles are and what the future might look like for them and just keeping abreast of what's happening there. New technologies that have been introduced, new systems that maybe are being deployed, etc. Think about job redesign. So do you need to bring somebody in externally or can you upskill or reskill somebody to do that job? Implement that as part of a competence framework. So look at the transferable skills and knowledge. So I think this is powerful for a number of reasons because you're supporting the business with what the business needs by doing this and you're also developing individuals. Bringing somebody into the business to fill a gap, it's an additional cost and the learning curve, the hockey stick so much steeper. So if you can harness that internal talent, it means they already have got that organizational knowledge so they can transition into the role much quicker. But I think ultimately it comes down to that partnership relationship that you will have with parts of the business and understanding what their needs are going to evolve to be by keeping abreast of what's going on for them and their client base.

Speaker 1: Right. Kirsten, being an HR leader, what strategies have you implemented to collaborate, you know, stronger relationship with the other verticals like marketing, sales, finance, finances, so that all of you come together and you know, increase the commercial goal of the, make it stronger, the commercial goal of the company.

Speaker 2: Totally. And it's the partnership approach. Going along to team meetings, you know, not all of the time because people feel like sometimes they're being watched, but going along and being a member of team meetings and contributing to that. That's not always possible, especially as you get to more senior levels, but it's still a good thing to try and do. I think the key is to be an enabler and not a gatekeeper. Don't become that person that's just because HR said that I couldn't. Think creatively, think about solutions, not problems, but you've got to hold your ground. I think that in HR, you need to be able to assimilate data very quickly, and you need to think about the risks and alternatives and then the risks of those alternatives. Ultimately, within the people and culture functions, we're held accountable or we can be held accountable if it goes wrong. So you know, we need to be confident in the decisions that are reached by the business based on the advice that we give. I think, you know, think commercially and think about how that leader and their team work day to day and, you know, and the things that are going to keep them awake at night. An example of this that I've got from many years ago was I was supporting a sales manager on a performance improvement plan for a member of his team. And so it was difficult because we didn't understand what it was like to be a sales rep because we were in HR. So I got my team together and we went out at seven o'clock one morning with the sales rep and we were on his patch and it was back in the days when there were door knocking. So we went out to support them to generate leads. And it was a great learning curve for me and the team, because it really helped us to understand the role of that sales rep and the challenges and the reality of what they did day to day. And it meant we were more effective in how we could support them in the future.

Speaker 1: Can you share one success story in your career where you aligned the HR goals with the commercial goals of the company and that resulted in the company profiting or growing?

Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I think when you think commercially, these kind of successes start to come naturally because you are aligned to the business objectives and you're starting to think about them. So whether it's OKRs and thinking about how as a HR team we can help different OKRs, not just the people related ones through, for example, faster onboarding of people into the business, putting together more robust onboarding plans and processes and the materials behind it through knowledge management helps to bring people in quickly and make them productive more quickly. And that ultimately helped us to be able to onboard customers more quickly. I think the other things are, for example, looking at when you're part of a growth business, how you can hire people cost effectively, reducing agency spend and looking at how you can do direct hiring, whether that's headhunts, using tools like LinkedIn, being more proactive on the tools that you have and really just looking at how you can support the growth and scalability of the business without necessarily that cost increase as well for the cost per hire. OKRs, again, is a great way to target people and individuals and functions really across to help the commercial delivery of the business and improve the bottom line figures and increase revenue. And having, for example, a bonus scheme that is linked to OKRs can be a way to effectively do that. But I think ultimately having a commercial mindset as a people leader or in a people will always help to drive commercial success. And it will help to define a really robust HR strategy that supports scalability and keeps the cost base neutral across the business.

Speaker 1: Is hiring talent globally another way to maybe cut costs and to help the company commercially? Because like we discussed, skill shortage is an issue. Every company is facing that. So have you implemented any such strategy where maybe you saw, you know, commercially it has benefited the company when you hired from outside?

Speaker 2: Absolutely. I think the sort of offshore hiring is something which has been prevalent across technology businesses for a long time. And, you know, recently at CRISP, we did, we were looking at hiring some additional roles in to do a follow the sun model for customer support. And so part of what we did was I took a look with the business leader at various locations. So we considered a number of operational sites that were about eight hours ahead of the UK. So because we have a US base and then this was going to be a base across in the sort of Far East where we could have individuals on the ground that would be able to deliver that customer support. And so I think as part of that, you need to do your risk assessment of the different locations and, you know, thinking about cost. So looking at the hiring salaries. So if you're looking at Singapore, for example, Singapore salaries are higher than London because it's a really expensive place to live. And then you might look at Indonesia. You could look at Manila. You could look, you know, you could look at Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur, for example, and just doing an assessment of each of the different locations, you know, the employment law legislation that you might have there. How easy is it to set up a registered office? What are the tax implications for a business for things like sales tax? And just putting together a bit of a strategy and thinking about all of these factors that you'd need to consider to be able to sort of move ahead with an offshore model. I think, you know, that can massively help with sort of cost reduction. You know, we ended up opening an office in Manila and we could hire three people for the cost of one UK salary because of the cost of living being so different there. But the quality of individuals, you know, again, is very high.

Speaker 1: Thank you so much, Kirsten, for this really insightful conversation. Our viewers definitely will get, you know, a very in-depth knowledge of what exactly you do and how to align HR with commercial goals, because I don't think out in the market, you know, these people who are new in HR, they even think about it, you know, to align their function with the company's goals. That's something that I have witnessed. And I think this will be really helpful to them because they have to think long term. If you need to go in the, you know, grow in your career, you in any department, not only HR, but you have to align with the commercial goals, right?

Speaker 2: No, definitely. I really think that having a more commercial outlook can help you to define and develop your career. And I think you get much more recognition in your business if you can think in a way that supports bottom line as well as gives a good employee experience.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Thank you so much, Kirsten, for coming to our show. This concludes our episode. If you like it, please do like, subscribe and follow our channel Leaders Legacy. Until next time. Thank you. Thank you.