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Satish Kumar on Why Performance, Learning, and Pay Must Finally Work Together
8 Plays1 month ago
Performance management only works when it’s connected to how people grow and how they’re rewarded.
In this episode of MustardHub Voices: Behind the Build, Curtis Forbes sits down with Satish Kumar, Head of PerformSpark at Trainery, to explore why traditional performance reviews are broken and what modern organizations need instead. Coming from a finance and private equity background, Satish brings a first-principles perspective to HR tech — questioning long-standing assumptions and rethinking how systems should actually work together.
The conversation dives into why once-a-year reviews no longer make sense, how AI can surface patterns managers miss, and why learning, performance, and compensation should never live in silos. Satish also shares insights on distributed and frontline workforces, manager enablement, and why intellectual curiosity and AI fluency are quickly becoming non-negotiable skills.
This episode is a must-watch for HR leaders, founders, and operators looking to move beyond fragmented tools and build talent systems designed for the future of work.
About Satish:
Satish helps lead PerformSpark (fka ReviewCloud), Trainery’s performance management module. His philosophy is simple: learning, performance, and pay only make sense when they’re connected.
PerformSpark is the “performance” piece of that triangle — the part that makes goals, feedback, and growth feel real instead of something that just happens once a year. His job is to make the tool useful, simple, and tied to how people actually work.
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Transcript
Introduction & Guest Overview
00:00:06
Speaker
Welcome back, everyone. This is another installment of Mustard Hub Voices Behind the Build. In these episodes, I sit down with the people building, backing, and running better workplaces. I'm your host, Curtis Forbes, and my guest today is Satish
Philosophy of PerformSpark
00:00:19
Speaker
Kumar.
00:00:19
Speaker
Satish helps lead PerformSpark, formerly known as ReviewCloud, Trainery's performance management module. His philosophy simple. Learning, performance, and pay only makes sense when they're connected.
00:00:33
Speaker
PerformSpark is the performance piece of that triangle, the part that makes goals, feedback, and growth feel real instead of something that just happens once a year. His job is to make the tool feel useful, simple, and tied to how people actually work.
Satish Kumar's Career Journey
00:00:48
Speaker
Welcome to Behind the Build. Thanks so much for joining me today, Satish. Thank you for having me, Curtis. Happy New Year. Yeah, Happy New Year to you too. Looking forward to ah to kind of diving in. And, you know, I'm I'll kick things off here. um I'd love to start with really just you, right? You you come from a ah finance background, which I would say is not always the most direct path into into people in HR or training.
Challenging HR Norms
00:01:18
Speaker
So what walk me through your career journey. What ultimately you know pulled you into the space?
00:01:23
Speaker
Sure. So I am a Georgia Tech i industrial engineering graduate. My career began at Truist Securities in the healthcare investment banking group.
00:01:33
Speaker
I did that for two years. And like many investment bankers, they want to move to the investing side. And I did that um at ah Opportunities Fund here in New York City, where I currently live.
00:01:45
Speaker
um Similar to a lot of PE special situation investors, they want to go operate a business. Luckily enough, it came at the same intersection where my father's ah HR consulting company was sort of developing a lot of these software solutions because they were noticing gaps in a lot of their clients' organizations.
00:02:07
Speaker
And, you know, the intersection came where I was
Integrating Performance & Compensation
00:02:11
Speaker
able to help. but My goal is to help, you know, professionalize the business and, you know, really iron out or go to market strategy and, you know, develop the product. And I guess one of the benefits, as you mentioned, it is a very unique sort of career trajectory yeah is, um I guess,
00:02:27
Speaker
with a lot of things going on in the world right now, I get to zero base budget and zero proof how I look at everything. So all the ah HR processes that you know a 30 year professional may know as best practice or a technologist, um I don't have any of that. So I can kind of come in and look at it in a first principles basis. And I think sometimes it's pretty important, um especially with how the world is moving now, For example, one of the questions I asked the organization was, why is a job description important?
00:02:56
Speaker
right And you know when you've been doing this for so many years, you don't even think about that question. um But then you know I asked that question and I could see, you know for example, my father's stumbling for a bit. He was like, what how could you how could you have an enterprise without it? I was like, no, answer me.
00:03:12
Speaker
like Why is a job description important? And why is a job grade important? And when you really break down these questions and solve for like you know what this what this solution does, then you can really understand what problem you're solving and what to do next about it.
00:03:27
Speaker
um So that's a little bit of background of you know ah where I came from and kind of my view on all of these things. And it kind of connects to my my overall strategy is you know I look at it and say, you know you have a top performer, um you have a performance management solution.
AI and Talent Intelligence
00:03:43
Speaker
um you know, that's called Perform Spark. And you're like, all right, this guy's a top performer. What is next, right? What's next? A promotion? Sure. And, you know, a bonus.
00:03:55
Speaker
Great. And then it's like, what makes you do the next step? And a lot of these solutions, a lot of organizations have this disjointed, you know, I've had conversations with several or ah HR leaders and these are disjointed processes or they live in different systems. Some are manual, some are not.
00:04:10
Speaker
um So my overall thematic understanding in this, you know, couple months that have been doing this now, little over half a year of a crash course is this should live together yeah as a solution. And we should be aiming to solve these problems with the way the world is changing with AI.
00:04:26
Speaker
um So that's a little bit of a long line answer of who I am. I love that though. You mentioned that the there were some structural gaps that he was trying to
Distributed Workforces & Compensation Tools
00:04:37
Speaker
solve. Yeah.
00:04:40
Speaker
ah to walk me through what some of those things look like and where, where you kind of came in to help fill those. Sure. So, you know, one of the, one of the interesting ones in as the now head of like perform spark, which we're, you know, now is ah like becoming a live product and we're going to be, you know, aiming to sell and grow our customer base this year in is that one of the untapped markets are these distributed workforces, right? And a lot of our ah HR consulting clients, where nonprofits or manufacturing organizations that need compensation help um or you know you don't have guys healthcare care facilities that need assistance for their compensation planning and all of that.
00:05:22
Speaker
um And one of the things is, well, how how do you derive your compensation? right and and And one of the aspects is based on performance.
AI in HR Processes
00:05:30
Speaker
So, you know, the performance management solution comes, there's no shortage of those in the market. And then you come up with compensation, no shortage of those point solutions in the market.
00:05:39
Speaker
And my thesis is like, well, these should be, you should be connected. And, you know, we were just aggregately building these tools in silos and you'd subscribe and um you could describe the different tools. And again, they just live in different silos or you just have a core employee profile and um you know, your employee date of birth and gender and all of that stuff lives across these modules, but they don't really work together, right? um you're You're not paying for for for for performance performance in an intuitive way. um Learning paths aren't created based on the gaps that are surface in performance management. And so we see he noticed these problems and started building in silos. and
00:06:19
Speaker
And my thesis coming in with that fresh look is let's use AI to and and all this onslaught of agentic and all of these word jargons that are coming out in the in the last couple months and and going to be in the future is to really make an a talent intelligence platform and a talent enhancement platform because it's not enough to matt manage talent. And that's why I'm keen on using words talent enhancement because can't just manage talent anymore. You have to enhance it. You have the tools to enhance it when it comes to coaching managers or whether it's coming to you
Trainery Platforms: Traitori Learn & CompBuilder
00:06:53
Speaker
know surfacing insights a about your organization based on surveys.
00:06:56
Speaker
um So that's kind of where I was able to come in and just give a kind of a fresh look from the legacy companies and mindsets and frameworks that have been there that are great that I'm learning to how they work, but also that fresh view of what should we do next for this new workforce age that's you know coming.
00:07:16
Speaker
Love that. I'm going to want to come back to some of that um when we talk about how it works together, how the compensation and the performance and all these different elements um work together. But before we do that, I think, so you're you're you're leading one of Trainery trainer One's products.
00:07:37
Speaker
And for anyone who isn't familiar, tell us a little bit about Trainery. Yeah. Yeah, so Traitori is a HCM solution, and we have three core ah platforms, one which is Traitori Learn. And this is not just an LMS, but it has coaching management,
00:07:55
Speaker
and ah a marketplace that we're also rolling out where folks can buy content for their organization. um Again, we work with a lot of distributed organizations. So think you know um industrial manufacturing and those kinds of things where they need to buy safety content and training content, forklift safety, all that good stuff.
00:08:13
Speaker
And they can get that content, upload that to an LMS, which we already have. But I think one key component that is, kind of lost within corporate organizations is that majority of the learning doesn't actually happen in the LMS.
Integrating Learning Systems
00:08:26
Speaker
I believe the statistic is 30%. So a lot of it actually lives in, you know, other form of learning or instructor led training.
00:08:34
Speaker
So our unique offering that we think we have is this integrated learning solution where you can capture all of your learning, whether it's virtual instructor led or instructor led. and obviously online learning content as well, all in one place to have that fully unified. Again, that theme of everything being integrated as one.
00:08:54
Speaker
um And then we also have a compensation platform called CompBuilder, where we have the job description management and job architecture work, which is kind of the spine of how an HR organization has to think about um you know their their payment, their their job grading, job evaluation, all that stuff that it is frankly administrative and you know on the back end, but very important for how hr has to think as their organization grows. And then ah the part I'm more close to, which is a performance management, right? So evaluating your employees as well as you know making sure we have all the features in place for continuous feedback and and development.
00:09:33
Speaker
And one of the key connections we have is you know IDPs or learning paths, right? so when you have ah you know a gap that surfaced in your performance review that you know this manager needs to have better better ways to get feedback. Then you can get a course um from the Exchange or the Marketplace and then upload that to your LMS, which we'll call a trainer relearn for if you have our LMS and really have this tight feedback loop of developing your employees and enhancing your your your ah employee base.
00:10:04
Speaker
Awesome. I like that. So, trainer, or excuse me, perform Spark, right?
Continuous Feedback & Employee Engagement
00:10:11
Speaker
this is This is the part that you, I guess, directly directly manage. Give me the the problems that it's specifically designed to solve. I think I understand what it does.
00:10:24
Speaker
um How would you describe really what what the problem is? Sure. I think the problem, I could go on for an hour about what the problems are, um but, you know, I think I think every performance management vendor and and yourselves can understand that the age of the once a year cycle is over.
00:10:43
Speaker
yeah That's not the way to. And I think we saw that with the age of quiet quitting where it was an employee driven labor market and they were leaving ah to get for better opportunities for more compensation or whatever. So a lot of organizations have to think internally and say, like, how do we retain?
00:11:01
Speaker
um So we saw that huge jump of people acquiring service ah software to whether it is survey software or any of these kind of other vendors to actually get a you know a handle on how employees are feeling.
Unified Platform for Distributed Workforces
00:11:14
Speaker
And i think one of the key things that I'm seeing, and you can see it with our pricing model and how we we are going to be selling our product is a lot of things are still sort of gated from other vendors. right They make you pay more for surveys or check-ins or one-on-ones and OOKRs, that's another one, that's another pay add-on module. And then when you put it together in aggregate, um it's going to be hard for ah HR to go to their board or their C-suite and you know justify $15 per employee per month for something that may not be used in aggregate for all the employees. Yeah, i' agree. Our goal is here to say, look, we want to give you the best employee experience, like the the best experience possible. And you have different ways you're going to be using this software across our organization. Again, we're really trying to target distributed workforces, which we think are a pretty untapped market um from a lot of the software vendors, because which makes sense that, you know, they get funding and, you know, you want to go after the software companies or, you know, Fortune five hundreds and and all of that. But this untapped market where, you know, your corporate office has a different way of evaluating your, you know, your corporate executives, your white collar, for lack of a better word, than your blue collar workers.
00:12:27
Speaker
um So really connecting that in one platform is our goal here. and Additionally, um one of the things that we notice is you know a lot of the insights and AI is going to be huge in this is a lot of the insights are siloed in you know review summarization or goal alignment and all these different things.
00:12:45
Speaker
So one of the use cases that I like to bring up that we think is unique of our in ours is you know since we don't gate any of our features, meaning if you sign on with our platform, you get everything. The full kimono is open, We're not going to we're not going to try to get upsold into buying surveys or other things. You will get up, try to get upsold to buying into purchasing or compensation or learning software.
00:13:05
Speaker
But the goal is you'll start to see how obvious it it is to add these modules on versus it being forced on you as, you know, it may just increase your spend with us. And one of the examples I to give is, you know, there are some managers who are a little bit, you know, they don't think much about the reviews. Right. And they just say, everyone's great. You know, let's move on. Everyone's great. Five out of five. You know, we've seen this all over. Yeah. um And, you know, you have your survey, you do an annual survey in our platform and you see that like the manager, the subordinates or employees in this person's group come off disengaged.
AI in Identifying Disengaged Employees
00:13:40
Speaker
Right.
00:13:40
Speaker
So you're like, okay, well, I have someone who's getting five out of five. this person's getting five out of five. So every one of their subordinates and the employees find the man you're disengaged. That is where our platforms AI will be able to like flag to the HR BP or the business partner.
00:13:56
Speaker
um that there is a risk here. There is some sort of mismatch that is occurring. So what do we do? Right. AI will help suggest solutions. But again, it's up to the organization how they want to you know rectify this. But, you know, we'll suggest HRBP having a conversation with that manager saying, like, what's going on? You know, you have 30 employees that are saying they're disengaged, um but you're giving everyone five out of five. Something isn't right. Either you're not trying to earn your performance reviews,
00:14:23
Speaker
or your employees are disengaged. So that's part of an example of what I'm seeing in the market and what we're aiming to solve. I think that that's a, you know, you you point out a really good um nuance here, and that is um ai ai doesn't solve the problem.
00:14:40
Speaker
um It also doesn't necessarily tell you exactly what is the problem, but what AI is really good at is recognizing patterns. yeah And you know there's no crystal ball. There's no predicting the future.
00:14:55
Speaker
we are still human beings, right? But what it can do is it can recognize patterns better and and arguably earlier than our human eyes would be able to do. and So that's ah where I think it becomes really powerful, right? and and And really effective. And then we can go in and we can you know, sort of layer our our human element on top of that, right? We're all still people. We all still have feelings, right? We all still um are our human beings and we before perform in human ways. um So,
00:15:28
Speaker
from From your vantage, what kind of tell me about the organizations that are most drawn to perform Spark. you know Who inside the organization is usually raising their hand and saying, hey, we need this, we want this. Who comes to you? Who do you work with within an organization? We don't have any name any names here, but I'm really curious about what your landscape looks like.
00:15:48
Speaker
Yeah. So given that we are in the rebrand and you know we like to call it as we're a new company now and we're going out to market, you know we have a lot of meetings set up and I think there is some validation in my thesis that the distributed workforces are a pretty untapped market.
00:16:03
Speaker
um And I think a part of it is an is an example of sort of how companies have viewed their blue collar workers as maybe more replaceable talent um and, oh, they're gonna leave anyway, so why invest in them?
Listening to Blue-Collar Employees
00:16:17
Speaker
you know And you know whether it is the tariff policy, overall manufacturing policy, whatever it is, manufacturing is is a goal of America, right? And one of these one of these key components is we see there's a huge shortage of manufacturing jobs. So it's really important to keep your manufacturing and industrial blue-collar employees happy. And one of the components is I think a lot of executives feel like, well, they're not they aren't going to care. They only care about money.
00:16:44
Speaker
So let's just keep doing wage increases. And then, um you know, like compensation is like the key factor. But what about their sentiment? Right. What if they can start, you know, get a pulse survey and they can write about like, Hey, even the break room, I would love some other snack in the break room, something as simple as that, or we need to shift the way we do our, our, um, you know, shift counting and, or how we do this process. Then executives can get feedback immediately from the field and help refine these processes that can go up.
00:17:15
Speaker
Um, so more bottoms up versus an organization, like a lot of the manufacturing organizations from, you know, so mega to small. that are very top down driven.
00:17:25
Speaker
So the when I talk to ah HR professionals and I say like, you know, one of the cool things we have is you can have any kind kind of configural cycle. So obviously you're your sales organization that sits in an office might be different than your you know your your guys that are getting down and dirty in the plants.
00:17:43
Speaker
And you need to make sure that you're addressing them in their unique way. So you know maybe a lot of the bundle suite solutions that you get out of your payroll or your Atreus provider are a little bit more, you know they're not as configurable. they're not you know they They haven't spent too much time on developing the software. And then the other ones are way two point solution and they make you pay all these add ons. So you got to think twice about what you want to pay for and what you're going to use and utilize. And then again, usually ah the distributed workforce aspect of the company gets the short end of the stick. So we're getting a lot of a lot of interest where I'm like, oh, we don't gate it and you put all your employees and at the price point you're getting it. I can you know really...
00:18:24
Speaker
I can really engage and get sentiment from my workforces that are actually out in the fields, my field reps, whatever the case is for your organization. And again, um i actually had a time where I did a senior design project with a large global multinational company. And they mentioned a lot about how they were losing a lot of employees to Amazon that was right down the street in a rural part of Georgia.
00:18:47
Speaker
And for them, they just thought it was compensation. And they mentioned actually like, oh, we actually just started listening to them more and giving them what they wanted in the ah in the office when it came to stuff like what's in the break room and and what ah what shifts work for them. And they instituted a new vendor for how they had shift management and all these things helped create retention for them.
00:19:07
Speaker
And again, I would like to you know flag that oh attrition for these kind of workers can cost $15,000 per employee. right So why not spend half that for a software solution that can keep you tapped in and of maybe you avoid that one person leaving?
00:19:22
Speaker
um So that's a pretty easy ah ROI logic that I'd like to you know maybe get out to some of the HR execs that are running these sort of organizations and make sure they relay that. And I think they know this, but relay that to their board or their C-suite who may be a little bit more reticent.
00:19:38
Speaker
Yeah. I think they do know that. i mean, at least from what I found, you know I think that the cost of turnover certainly isn't lost on them. I think that understanding the cost of retention is probably a fraction of it is generally what needs to be sort of reinforced, um right? Because there's definitely a value comparison there when it comes to what what you might be willing to spend to keep them rather than having to deal with um, the churn. So when organizations come to you, what are some of the most common people or performance related challenges they're, they're having? Like what, what's not working for them today?
00:20:23
Speaker
I think this one's a classic and is the, the charm has been beaten a lot on this one is, you know, managers, uh, Your performance review really just does hinge on the managers, right? And how well and how you know attentive they are to getting the performance reviews done.
00:20:40
Speaker
And I think there's a lot of data that shows that once you do employ a software and kind of grow out of Google reviews, whether it is out of the the size of the organization or the complexity of the review you want to run, um and you get any one of the vendors and Performance Spark being one of them, ah you start to see more adherence,
Manager Enablement & Coaching
00:20:58
Speaker
right? And this is not a one-stop shop. It takes years to start to see the impact.
00:21:03
Speaker
um And there's a lot of data from G2 and Gartner and a lot of the consulting firms, as well as the vendors on this that are um older and larger than and performance park right now that comes out that usually by year three, you'll start to see this impact, right? That when you do decrease attrition, you can start to see the cost savings that occur on the employee and employee level, right? um So, you know, when when it comes to the major problems is the software solutions do good on notifying the manager, right? Notifying the manager, it's time to get it done. But I think the next step is manager enablement and coaching, right? wow How can I be a better manager? yeah um And I think there's a lot of niche solutions if you go out to these conferences now that are coming out saying like, we're going to start coach, we're a manager coaching platform.
00:21:49
Speaker
and And that's the key point, right? is How can I get better feedback? And then how can I make my employees better? um The same way you you a lot of teachers get judged on the success of their students. course.
00:22:00
Speaker
Start judging our employee managers on the success of their employees. Are they hitting their goals? And then if not, what do I need to empower my manager with, right? youe is mentioned You mentioned it a couple of years.
00:22:11
Speaker
So I guess a question that I would have is if somebody signs up and wants to start using it, Is there a minimum amount of time that you would require for them to at least stay signed up so they get the the value, right, that there're that did they should from it? Three years?
00:22:31
Speaker
I would love three-year contract. We are annual contract. I would you know i would love to give a three-year contract and we'll give a nice little discount in the aggregate for that. um But this is more of just like this is what – everyone knows that is this is a compounding effect, right? Some things in business or whatever it is take longer to come out. And I think this is where HR sometimes struggles to relay that to the execs, not on their own, but it's sort of exec buy-in or board buy-in on getting these sort of solutions that may seem costly. And and again, we know how execs sometimes think of the ah HR function, but part of the longer term trend is that we're seeing here is
00:23:09
Speaker
ah HR is now not going to be an administrative function anymore. It's going to become a strategic function. So yeah actually out you actually empower these ah HR professionals who have all these decades, you know, at an organization, probably cumulatively hundreds of years of experience on like what makes a better employee for this organization? What tools does ah HR need to make sure that we are retaining talent, not just retaining and managing talent, but now enhancing it right We're in the new age of AI. Employees are scared. Execs are scared what AI is going to do to their job, their company, all that good stuff.
00:23:42
Speaker
um So yeahp that's ah that's a key thing. i use You sound like somebody who may speak to their customers or at least like really kind of try to get a good handle on you know what they're doing well, what they're not doing well, what they want to see, what they don't want to see, which I think is awesome. And I'm kind of curious. Yeah.
00:24:04
Speaker
Do you find that organizations typical typically correctly identify what these real problems happen to be? They sometimes come in thinking, hey, we have an X issue and it actually turns out to be Y once they go you know through this whole sequence of of using the software.
00:24:23
Speaker
I would love to get ah one the consultants from our sister company that this was born out of to answer this, but their bread and butter is pretty much saying Well, no, that's why you need us to come in. But actually, if if you did talk to the know the senior consultants there, is HR many times know what it is.
00:24:43
Speaker
I think in consultants in general, you bring someone else in to help validate what you're feeling as a third, like as a third party, you know, fresh eyes looking at it. And then they can really present something to the board or the execs that, you know, really outline a plan. Right. So a lot of it is why do we need to go do X, Y, and z Well, these consultants told us because they have a fresh look at our organization. Um, HR many times know what they need.
00:25:08
Speaker
They just need budget and the time and the time from ah the executive executive buy in. Right. Especially you start to. And very interesting enough, I think when we talk about like the graph this graph, right, this graph shows that you're a small company, let's say under 50 employees, you typically don't have as many ah HR problems. and then And then when you start to scale from 100 to 500 to 1,000, the problem skyrocket.
00:25:35
Speaker
And then once you hit enterprise level, you start to get economies of scale again. So it's like that variation, like, you know, that amplitude or where they have the two sides and where the middle is. The middle market is where there's that struggle, right? Because they, you know, hard to justify getting these expensive point solutions um and HRS,
00:25:55
Speaker
companies and the payroll companies are not just, they're they're not getting the full job done for your organization. So you can't justify spending all this kinds of money to solve every one of your problems with point solutions. And then small companies can still get it done through Google reviews and their culture stronger because there's 30 of them at the startup and they're all nine, nine, six together and eating pizza and getting drinks together after. But then once you become a ah hundred and you, you know, you can't do it on Google reviews and you Google sheets anymore. And you kind of see what I'm saying there. And then for the enterprises, they have are behemoths, right? So they are able to really have a lot of hierarchical processes and systems in place. And they're far more cost insensitive for like, you know, HR software selection and procurement. They're really looking for what solves their problem.
00:26:42
Speaker
um And you can just see what their are procurement cycles and how they go about asking their questions. Cost isn't the thing for them. um ah Execs have given them a mandate saying like, okay, we got to fix this problem. And they have a lot of trust in their CHRO or their CPO to get it done.
00:26:57
Speaker
So the CPO comes with recommendation after meeting with vendors upon vendors and demo after demo after demo. They're like, okay, this is what we need. So you do see this sort of graph where what we're really targeting is that middle market companies.
00:27:10
Speaker
um And that's where it's pretty interesting because below 100, they're great. And then after like 1,000, they're great. But it's like that one to 1,000, which a lot, that's a lot of America, right? Majority of America does work for those one to 1,000. They seem pretty untapped.
00:27:28
Speaker
With your finance background, right, you you've seen, I'm sure, how a lot of lot people decisions tie directly to these business outcomes. And so I'm curious how you help leaders kind of connect the performance development and training back to business impact.
Demonstrating ROI in HR Solutions
00:27:45
Speaker
How do you guys do that? Sure. um This is actually the tricky one. And i ah come you're right, I come from a ah quantitative background where you look at a lot of numbers. And I know you everyone knows we spend a lot of time in Excel and cranking out you know analysis after analysis.
00:28:02
Speaker
um So the ROI is harder. And I think this is why HR sometimes ah is reticent to buy software because they think about how do I go justify this to the back end, to the execs, or when cost cuts happen, they usually always happen in our department. So what's even the point?
00:28:20
Speaker
um And we've we've heard this, you know and I'm sure we've all heard this, that HR feels like they always get ah the short end of the stick when cost cuts happen. um That being said, in terms of ROI, you really just have to prove it. And a lot of data is now coming out with the older, larger vendors that are putting together some data and stated the industry reports that when you start instituting these solutions, and even if you know attrition takes down a you know couple hundred bips from 16% down to I'm not going to say the so software is not going to solve that for you. It's software is a nice system of record. It's but giving you the act, the ability to act on the information.
00:28:58
Speaker
That's where you can show ah ROI. It's like, Hey, we've been able to decrease attrition because now we have a system of record. It doesn't just live in all these different managers, notepads or word documents or their slack and their JIRAs and their Asanas. And now it lives in performance part, for example. And now when I'm doing my year end review,
00:29:16
Speaker
which is only a continuation of the three other quarterly review check-ins that I've had and all the things that I've had, and I can link it to a goal, then you really get a consummate view of what's what's happening.
00:29:29
Speaker
Then you can start to justify ah the ah ROI there, right? And also, um it's It's always based on, like oh are you decreasing costs and all of that? But what about improving productivity and and and happiness, right?
Long-term Benefits of Employee Retention
00:29:43
Speaker
um Happiness amongst your employee be base means that they stay for longer. And we know when employees have longer tenure, they add more value, they're more productive. They are your champions. When they go out to the bar and meet with their friends, they talk well about your company. These things add up in a way that you can't really quantify in an IB or private equity analysis, but HR knows this. And I think it's our it's our goal to try to, as vendors and and people, to put more dollars, put more quantitative metrics behind these things. And ah we will, in the in the and hopefully in the near medium and long term, to start putting the like lot this longitudinal data that folks want to see. um
00:30:22
Speaker
But yeah, I mean, that's kind of my answer it's like the roi is always there and nutrition and all of that but what about having champions for your company right everyone knows what what a great company looks like and who those names are that are really good in your industry and everyone knows the ones that are not um so how do you make yourselves one of the greats in your company a great in your industry for anor let's ah Let's talk about some training, upskilling.
00:30:49
Speaker
um Where do the organizations tend to get this stuff wrong? Is it in the content that they're using? Is it is it the delivery? Is it the follow through?
00:31:00
Speaker
you know What do you generally see? It is the last thing you said, follow through. I think that, again, when you talk about a performance review, is it your year end and it just it just stays there, acknowledge,
00:31:15
Speaker
over, let's give him a 7% raise. Great. Let's move on to next year. Okay. Um, and I get that for managers. It's not there day in, day out. It is actually just continuous follow through uh, for example, when when you have your performance review and they notice the gap and say, Hey, you need to improve your, you know, your writing skills, right. For, for something that you write as your, your bid writer.
00:31:41
Speaker
So you write a lot of this stuff for your ah RFPs. So you need to improve this. And then they give you content to give you coaching. Okay. Then what next? Just complete and and done? No, it's about like, all right, let's use that for the next use case. Let's assess how you are then, and then keep coming back. Right. So I think again, the major problem with HR tech and a lot of organizations, the way they are, they're using it is it's,
00:32:07
Speaker
It just ends in one place, and it's not continuous. It's not iterative. It's not dynamic. um So it's exactly what you said. It just ends in one place when you have training, and then there's follow-through component, right? So that's why we're big believers in that holistic system.
00:32:23
Speaker
Do you think there's specific skills that... um you know, have become sort of non-negotiable for today's workforce? Like, especially as roles continue to evolve, you know, what kind of competencies are critically important that that are going to be non-negotiable?
Skills for Today's Workforce
00:32:40
Speaker
So I do listen to a lot of tech podcasts and, you know, Lenny and all those, the the big guys and the and the plethora of highly accomplished people that come on. And I think When I hear the CFO of a publicly listed company saying that even they get on a chat bot and ask it questions or they try and and pilot new tools, I think it's and it's imperative that every employee from the CEO down to ah the newly hired analyst that was previously an intern is intellectually curious and is AI functional.
00:33:15
Speaker
So Functional, I like that. Functional. because I don't want to say AI functional because there's different uses. um if Not everyone's going to be you know a chat GPT researcher open AI researcher. You can't expect that. And also you can't expect you know someone who's been doing their job for 30 years to just you know change the way they do it on ah on a on ah on ah on a dime.
00:33:38
Speaker
You have to give them, again, this is where hr has to be huge in giving them the tools that they need. But you need that person to be malleable. You need them to be intellectually curious. They have to be able to go and, you know, ask chat GPT like, oh, I heard about this tool. If you're a salesperson and this is now well done out, but like a gong, but first came out, like, how do i use this tool? Like, why is this important?
00:34:01
Speaker
um Being able to pilot and try new things is the name of the game. That is the skill. And it's, i think it's a competency by itself to be able to use it. And if you, are trying to enter the workforce and you know nothing about AI, I think it's already shown that you're going to be very hard to get hired. If you're in a company right now that's selling software, ah HR software, and you go to try to, another your competitor and to try to sell a very similar solution, I think one of the first questions I'll ask you is, what AI tool do you use and why?
00:34:31
Speaker
and And they're going to see how well do you pick up these concepts because they want to make sure that When they're doing the AI transformation, they're not going to have an employee that is reticent to change. um I think that's the key key component. I guess executives can have a little bit of reticence and reluctance to change if want to do things. you know They're way higher paid. They have a bigger resume and all that. But if you are mid-level to like junior level higher and or in your organization, you need to be able to use AI. And when the facts change, you have to change. So you have to be extremely on top of what's going on. so I think I went on a little bit of spiel, but I i cannot emphasize it even more, even internally here. like
00:35:09
Speaker
We are on pilots and demos, you know, every week I'm trying to see something else. I'm like, you know, i had to create a presentation. I'm like, let me try this PowerPoint creation tool. And it's not just using the number one guy in the market that's gotten the eye-watering amount of funding from ah Silicon Valley, but it's like, what are the companies that really solve your needs?
00:35:29
Speaker
I think that's the key, the key is being able to, understand ai and knowing how it helps everything in your in your day you know i mean i couldn't agree with that more you really just the open-mindedness the the open-mindedness i call it deep intellectual curiosity but exactly being curious, being open-minded, being open to learning and um being ready, ready for change. Change is coming whether they like it or not, right? You just have to be ready. You got to be ready for it. um
00:36:00
Speaker
You know, regardless of what that brings, what do you feel like one small change that organizations could make to their training approach that might have an outsized impact?
00:36:12
Speaker
I think that's a good question. um Training approach. I mean, I think it's so what it's one of those things that is so disjointed already that it hasn't been perfected and then AI is coming to change the way it was done.
Micro-learning & Training Effectiveness
00:36:27
Speaker
It's it's already disjointed and not done optimally. And then AI is just also added in.
00:36:32
Speaker
So, you know, one of the things that we're seeing in a lot of vendors, I would say is a lot of like lot more micro learning, right? Don't make everything so gargantuan as a topic and objective, right? Learn AI, like that's not going to help anybody, right? So really, you know, really using ah you know, small goals and small wins and giving your employees recognition when they have these wins is is the key for for that, right? So when it comes to training, um you know, break things down, keep it simple, stupid, right? Like don't, when you have this massive, you know, these large companies are all doing this entire change management and AI transformations and all of that.
00:37:10
Speaker
I think the key here is to give a lot of small wins and tell every employee what they're doing. So when it comes to I think you mentioned your question is about like what to do about training is make give it be very concrete and discreet about what you expect out of them. So they know what they need to accomplish. I think one of the major problems right now, if you know, like we read the employee sentiment and stuff is employees are afraid of AI because they think they're going to get AI and out of a job.
00:37:37
Speaker
You executives need and executives haven't done much, I guess, to assuage those concerns. But I also think they don't know. They don't know. so Be confused together. Don't act definitive in your in your keynote speech at the end of the year and tell you, like, I know what we're going to do. And then when you you know talk to investors, like oh, we're we're unsure.
00:37:57
Speaker
I've noticed that a couple times in a couple of eight K's or 10 K's that, you know, they don't know themselves what's going to happen. And then they tell that, oh, we will have job cuts. So I guess the answer keep it simple, um have a lot of small wins instead of these large gargantuan projects, except for ah especially especially for your your lower level employees. So they know exactly what to do and that gets them aligned. Right. Goal alignment, I think, is another key thing here, especially for organizations as they're changing.
00:38:24
Speaker
um And that means that when you know your small goal is, you're getting the right training to solve that goal. um And then you continually move forward as as as the year goes on. And again, this is all likely to change, too. I think what we had our understanding of AI now is going to be far different than our understanding of AI in months.
00:38:43
Speaker
We don't know what these guys are going to be up to and when it comes to, you know, the vendors and the LLMs. We don't have no idea. You know, yeah. want to kind of shift towards the future for a minute.
00:38:55
Speaker
When you think about the future of work, what what are the big shifts you know you're paying attention to? Give me some some predictions, skills, technology, expectations, how people experience it. Sure.
AI as a Performance Metric
00:39:07
Speaker
I think um it's it's going to become the way use AI is going to become a performance metric.
00:39:14
Speaker
right It's going to be a skill and a competency that's going to be written in your review. right How well is it? And it's going to be a key, ah a major one, I think, across different departments. But I think if we were going to do data on it, if some of the big vendors are going to look at it, they're going to notice this block that didn't exist two years prior.
00:39:31
Speaker
like How well does this person use AI? And a lot of the skills and competencies that come with someone's adoption of it. So as you mentioned, their curiosity, their open mindedness, those are going to become key, key components of how an evaluate employee is going to be evaluated.
00:39:46
Speaker
In terms of what I see with technology, I think there's linked to a pretty seminal piece of paper that was written by Jaya Gupta about context graphs. And she uses CRMs as an example. But speaking about for our industry, HR is if you have an employee record, which is a store of record.
00:40:04
Speaker
Technology solutions are not about just storing that record. So storing that performance review, writing down your goals, writing down this check in and one-on-one, it's about that next step. Now we have to become a decision architecture, right? And we have to become a decision workflow, what comes next So we're all going to be scrambling as ah HR tech vendors to decide, you know, what do we do with this information that we have, right? Especially for the big, big players, Workday of the world or SAP is, all right, now we're sitting on trillions of data points. Now, what do we do with this data? How can we actually improve an organization? Because we do sit on this entire data set, like what can we do?
00:40:43
Speaker
um That's going to be the key. That's going to be the key for the HR tech vendors because they are sitting on a a gold mine, right? When it comes to CRMs, that that store record for your sales prospects is huge.
00:40:55
Speaker
But what about what we are sitting on? We're sitting on a gold mine here.
Leveraging Employee Data in HR Tech
00:40:59
Speaker
We're sitting on employee data. And that's going to be key for, you know, how organizations are going to grow in the future.
00:41:06
Speaker
So, and how an organization differentiates itself in its culture moving forward. In terms of, you know, Yeah, I guess that's that's enough on where I see technology. I'm not going to give my insights of where I think AI is going to go. There are smarter people who can ask than me.
00:41:22
Speaker
I mean, you know, so one only knows or can guess. yeah if yeah I always like to to wrap up with, i'm very curious, business leader kind of came to you and asked, you know, wanted wanted to get this right, wanted to, um you know, build some some training and upskilling systems and build strong performance.
Maintaining Cultural Practices in Scaling Companies
00:41:42
Speaker
ah within my organization, what's that one single most important piece of advice that you could give them if you only had a second before they walked out the door? Save the hard one for the end, huh? That's right. Yep.
00:41:57
Speaker
If you're like a business leader is what, and say you're a 50 employee company and you're like, I'm gunning to become a Fortune 500 I want to become one of the the big ones later in the day, later in my in my career, um i would say,
00:42:12
Speaker
what What do you have right now or what don't you have right now? So both, what do you have what you don't have right now that you would want or you want to have when you are a thousand or 5,000 employee company, right? if In the HR sense, right? What are the practices and the culture and everything you want to put in place right now and ah that you would want to have as 5,000 employee company?
00:42:35
Speaker
right And a lot of things in bureaucracy and all of that change. But I think we've seen a lot of tech startups, for example, that really maintain this level of culture, whether it's transparency, the rigor, everything, even as they scale from becoming you know a couple of guys in in a garage to you know a massive company that's publicly listed. So I think it's just like knowing exactly what you want to be and then like doing that on day one. right So if you know you want to have this um You know, you don't want to, for example, Stripe hates the PowerPoint culture and Patrick Collison was big on that.
00:43:06
Speaker
He instituted that from from day one and that stayed all the way through. And if you want to say that I want to have a completely open culture where a junior employee can critique the CEO, and that works for us when we're 25 people, because I'm not that different, than because I'm just the founder and there's someone here who i consider more of a peer, then make sure you institute that when you're a 5,000 employee company and allow juniors and ah you know entry level people to critique the CEO and his management style.
00:43:33
Speaker
So I would ask, that you know, I would ask them, it was think about the culture you want to have it when you are that large company and then institute those processes today or future proof it or make sure you have the right things in place to allow you to grow into that.
00:43:45
Speaker
that's what i That's what I would say. It will be more HR guided as an answer than ah than ah my finance or banking background. I think it's good advice. No, I appreciate that. I think that those are those are you know very wise words.
00:44:01
Speaker
So Satish, thank you so much for joining ah today. That was actually really great. I feel like I learned a pretty good bit today. Thank you for the time. Yeah, I mean, ah and you know call me. I'm just a guy that's six months out of ah finance and new to ah HR, but so it's been a crash course myself.
Valuing Fresh Perspectives
00:44:21
Speaker
but I think right now when the whole world is changing, I think sometimes having like that fresh view on how to look at these problems and asking those basic questions, like I mentioned, like, what is the job description? Why is that important for an organization? um Is sometimes a good way to like, you know, level set going into this coming decade where we don't know what's going to happen, whether it's you AI or employee like data and what's going to happen to labor itself. Right. No idea. You know, got to have an open mind, got to be ready to change. And yet this is a fantastic conversation. i I agree with that. I think it's super important to be able to come in with fresh eyes. And this is why, you know, a lot of founders who found so much success were not experts in that field when they were, you know, at the time that they, you know, came into Disrupted, Airbnb, right? They were not, you know, experts in hospitality, Uber. They were not experts in transportation, WhatsApp. They were not experts in communication, right?
00:45:20
Speaker
You know what I mean? And I think that that, you know, having those fresh eyes and be able to say, well, why is this Why do we do it this way? Why is it important? Can we do it a different way? I hope to I hope to have a similar story in the same vein. But yeah, there you go. we Well, thank you to all of us, or to all of you for joining us. This is Mustard Hub Voices Behind the Build. Subscribe so you don't miss the next episode.
00:45:46
Speaker
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