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The Future of Compliant Workplaces with Jocelyn King
4 Plays28 days ago
In this episode of MustardHub Voices: Behind the Build, Curtis Forbes talks with Jocelyn King, founder and CEO of Virgil HR, a SaaS platform helping HR professionals make compliant decisions in real time. Jocelyn shares her path from philosophy major to HR executive to tech founder… and how her frustration with the complexity of labor laws sparked the idea for Virgil HR.
Curtis and Jocelyn explore where companies most often go wrong—from wage errors to employee misclassification—and why compliance mistakes can be devastating for small businesses.
Jocelyn also looks ahead to how AI and predictive risk tools will reshape HR, and why leaders must invest in upskilling, tech literacy, and organizational change readiness. Her practical take on building adaptable, forward-thinking teams makes this a must-listen for anyone shaping the next era of HR.
About Jocelyn:
Jocelyn King is the CEO and Founder of VirgilHR, a SaaS platform that helps HR professionals make compliant employment decisions in real time through an intelligent chatbot that delivers instant employment and labor law guidance. With a career dedicated to human resources, she has supported both high-growth startups and public companies, building deep expertise across all areas of HR, including serving as the Vice President of North America, Human Resources for Ocado Group and Vice President of Human Resources for Cybrary. Jocelyn is recognized for her ability to develop HR strategy, manage multi-state and global employee relations, and foster diverse, high-performing cultures. Her long-standing experience in the technology sector has strengthened her understanding of how tech and HR intersect, enabling her to lead VirgilHR into the future of HR innovation.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:00:07
Speaker
Hello again, everyone. Welcome to Mustard Hub Voices Behind the Build. In these fireside chats, I sit down with the people building, backing, and running better workplaces. I'm your host, Curtis Forbes.
00:00:18
Speaker
My guest today is Jocelyn King.
Role and Experience of Jocelyn King
00:00:21
Speaker
Jocelyn is the CEO and founder of Virgil HR, a SaaS platform that helps ah HR professionals make compliant employment decisions in real time through an intelligent chatbot that delivers instant employment and labor law guidance.
00:00:37
Speaker
With a career dedicated to human resources, she has supported both high-growth startups and public companies. building deep expertise across all areas of HR, including serving as the Vice President of North America Human Resources for Ocado Group and Vice President of Human Resources for Cybrary.
Tech and HR Blend at Virgil HR
00:00:57
Speaker
Jocelyn is recognized for her ability to develop ah HR strategy, manage multi-state and global employee relations, and foster diverse, high-performing cultures.
00:01:08
Speaker
Her longstanding experience in technology sector has strengthened her understanding of how tech and HR intersect, enabling her to lead Virgil HR into the future of HR innovation.
00:01:23
Speaker
Happy to have you here on Behind the Bill, Jocelyn. Welcome. Thank you so much for having me, Curtis. Yeah, so it sounds like you've done everything. Yeah.
00:01:34
Speaker
You're an hr thought leader. You are a tech founder. You're basically an expert in ah HR compliance and change management and tech readiness and so much more.
00:01:48
Speaker
How on earth did you
Challenges in HR Compliance
00:01:51
Speaker
get here? What did that career journey look like? Where did it even start? Well, let's see.
00:01:59
Speaker
Straight out of college, I was recruited by Target. I had no clue what I wanted to do. I was a philosophy major, so I didn't have a clue. And I didn't know very much about human resources, but I thought it was general enough in the business space, so I took the job, which I'm really grateful for because I learned a ton in my time there. They have really incredible management training program, and and I learned a lot and just really fell in love with HR. So after a Target, I decided to shift into technology
00:02:32
Speaker
And since then I've worked for technology companies but the rest of my career and just moved my way up, always kind of in that generalist role. And I loved the generalist role because I was able to be a jack of all trades, master of none type thing.
00:02:47
Speaker
I could touch on every aspect of human resources, which is such a dynamic profession and eventually moved into these leadership roles. And as i as I did that and throughou throughout my journey,
00:03:00
Speaker
I was working with multi-state employers and always felt this pain point of having comply with employment and labor laws, which I wanted to do. But there were so many and they were very complicated in a lot of cases and there were a lot of nuances. And so Google became my best friend and my worst enemy.
00:03:21
Speaker
I didn't know, know, is this article the most up to date or is it even accurate for that matter? and You know, maybe you're talking to lawyers, but there isn't a big budget to be doing that on a regular basis. And I thought, you know, there's got to be a better way for HR. And I figured automation and ai would be able to accomplish that. And so, yeah, I started Virgil about four years ago.
Birth of Virgil HR
00:03:45
Speaker
That's really cool. we you know I'm just curious, you had mentioned that you you sort of when you transitioned into the tech space, was that intentional? Were you recruited in that direction? Did you have an epiphany one day and decide that you wanted to do things sort of more on that technical side?
00:04:05
Speaker
Honestly, I i learned a lot about employee relations in my previous role. And they... There are just some industries that are more complicated than others and tech is not as complicated. So I felt like that was probably a better fit because ah sometimes those types of investigations can be really draining on you.
00:04:31
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, I bet. um So it all kind of brings us to to today, Virgil
Virgil HR's Automated Solutions
00:04:37
Speaker
HR. Yeah. um what were the circumstances behind sort of the the the genesis of that company? What what drove you to you know to to build that?
00:04:50
Speaker
Well, it was actually a while ago, I think 2015, where I'd first come up with the idea. i was is my first job supporting a multi-state employer. ah we hired our first employee in California, and the top of my head almost blew off at that point.
00:05:06
Speaker
you know California is so incredibly complicated. and even just having that one employee makes a really massive difference as an ah HR professional. So i at the time, had learned enough about technology to have a pretty good understanding of how we could deliver i' compliance information in an automated and real-time fashion.
00:05:31
Speaker
But I was also still relatively early on in my career, couldn't just quit my job and not pay myself for two years, had no clue how to even start a business. And so I just sat on the idea as a pipe dream for, i got a gosh, seven years.
00:05:48
Speaker
um and And eventually i I had an opportunity to go work for a Series C startup, and learn more about fundraising and what goes into building a company and scaling it and the metrics and who you'd want on your leadership team and all that.
00:06:06
Speaker
And I had told the founders my idea and they basically made me quit and became my first investors, which was really cool. Wow.
00:06:17
Speaker
That's, um wow. That's really, really cool. um So, okay. So it's it's important to ask then, this is sort of a good lead up. What is Virgil HR?
00:06:30
Speaker
Kind of give us the story. Tell us what it is. What problems does it solve? Yes. So I mentioned earlier that when you're complying with employment and labor laws, you're going on Google or you're talking to lawyers, it's very time consuming. There's a high risk for error.
00:06:46
Speaker
um So what we do is we have a variety of features within our product, and they're all there to automate the compliance process for you. So we eliminate the need for you to have to do any research.
00:06:58
Speaker
We do that in a number of ways, but one is through our chatbot. So you can ask the chatbot a question. I have an employee in Massachusetts who's requested parental leave. What do I do?
00:07:08
Speaker
That took me three hours of research one time. ah And it will start asking diagnostic questions and does a legal analysis to determine what laws apply to John Doe.
00:07:20
Speaker
ah And after it's figured out what laws are applicable, it then tells HR, OK, here are all the things that you need to do to be compliant. All the forms and we give you the forms, the notices, the third party state agencies have to reach out to. So what might have taken three hours of research and then you walking away, not exactly knowing if you got everything right.
00:07:39
Speaker
now turns into two or three minutes with the bot with all of the collateral that you need to move forward, knowing that attorneys actually programmed that bot and created all the content themselves.
Target Audience and Market Reach
00:07:51
Speaker
um So there's a lot of really credible data in there. ah And we then started building out other features, an employee handbook builder, ah multi-state comparison tool, legal updates, a compliance calendar. I hated getting those emails. Well, it was great that I was getting those emails from SHRM that would tell me when a new law had passed.
00:08:11
Speaker
But keeping up with all of that was crazy. I had an Excel sheet. i was trying to keep up with it by state. It just was not sustainable at all. So we manage all of that for you within our tool.
00:08:22
Speaker
And we even create tasks for you. So we have a task management feature. If ah minimum wage increases in Tennessee and you need to provide a minimum wage poster to your Tennessee employees, we will create a task, notify you and provide that poster so that you can then intern.
00:08:38
Speaker
ah send that off to your employees. So lots of really great stuff and a ton of features outside of what I just mentioned. But really, at the end of the day, it's to take away that headache that HR has and give them a sense of confidence in the decisions they're making.
00:08:53
Speaker
That's incredible and a a huge time saver. Yes. Huge time saver. And probably... money saver, right? I mean, I would imagine that there's so much of the compliance, you know, has to go through a lot of legal hoops. And if you have that sort of already done for you.
00:09:14
Speaker
So tell me about the kinds of customers that come to Virgil HR, and we don't have to name any names here, but I'm kind of curious to talk to me a little bit about what they look like. um What are they trying to accomplish when they come to you? What are some of the biggest things that you see them looking to, you know, resolve? What are the topics on their mind?
00:09:32
Speaker
Yeah, well, as you can imagine, they're experiencing the same pain points did. So they're looking for a solution that can address those pain points.
00:09:44
Speaker
ah We are typically selling to small and mid-sized companies, usually 5,000 under. We do have customers that are much larger than that.
00:09:55
Speaker
And it's interesting because some of the enterprise customers we have are using us because their internal legal team doesn't have the bandwidth to support them. So this is a way for them to get really quick information.
00:10:07
Speaker
In some cases, the legal team will use it as well internally. But I'd say for the most part, small and mid-market, we cover pretty much every industry. There are some more dominant industries than others, like professional services, and then the more regulated areas like manufacturing and construction, for example, healthcare as well.
00:10:27
Speaker
um And the user is that day-to-day HR professional. I am surprised actually by how many VPs and CHROs are actively using the product on a pretty regular basis.
00:10:39
Speaker
But we generally see admins, managers, and directors that are in there using it pretty regularly. And we have a lot of really great case studies from our customers on the amount of time that the product has saved them, the amount of money. We had one just share with us that they'd saved about $125,000 in the last year using our product.
00:11:00
Speaker
um And our product is a very affordable one to get. So that was really exciting. Right now we serve the customers in the U.S., but we will be expanding internationally next year.
00:11:15
Speaker
That's incredible. And 5,000 and smaller as ah as a general you know um as a general group is ah is still pretty big. I mean, do you you also serve the micro smalls, the five to 50, do you find that most people generally in excess of a few hundred are the ones that are adopting it?
00:11:35
Speaker
ah Yeah, I would actually say a majority of them are on the smaller side. so ah one of our partners, Bamboo HR, for example, provides Virgil to all of their customers for free.
00:11:47
Speaker
I don't know what their exact demographics look like, but small business. ah So we do have a lot of small business in there using it. I would say what we're typically seeing is 20, 25 employees, somebody who's kind of actively trying to handle this ah HR stuff. It might not be an HR professional. it might be a business owner or someone in operations, but ah That's generally when you tend to have a resource like that as you're growing.
00:12:15
Speaker
So, um yeah, I mean, under 100 is very, very common. And I'd say percentage wise, it makes up about a third of our customers.
Compliance Challenges and Pitfalls
00:12:27
Speaker
So, um you know, compliance, I think, is really beyond important, right, for for organizations when it comes to their people. Yeah.
00:12:40
Speaker
I'm curious, how many folks do you see? And I don't know what kind of analytics, you know, you're, you're measuring on the backside, but, um, I'm kind of curious what of the organizations that are using it, how many are really doing it right when it comes to compliance, how many are generally nailing it, you know, and how many do you find really slipping up along the way?
00:13:06
Speaker
Well, uh, you know this might come off as disingenuous, but it really is the truth. When they're using our product, they're less likely to be out of compliance. I mean, if they're using any product like ours, they'd be less likely to be out of compliance, right?
00:13:24
Speaker
um But I'd say that a majority of employers are probably out of compliance. It can be that they're not posting or providing the right labor law posters to their employees, which can be you know, of federal fines can be over $40,000 per incident. States can be several thousand dollars per incident as well. So that gets to be really expensive, especially for small businesses.
00:13:50
Speaker
But, you know, look, like when you look at the EEOC, the number one reason why employers are getting sued is for harassment and discrimination. So I do think that there's a lack of understanding especially by smaller business owners, but across the board as to what constitutes harassment and discrimination, which sounds really maybe surprising, but there are some nuances to it that can just get really tricky. And that's when you'd want to get some type of legal resource involved.
00:14:20
Speaker
um Accommodations is also an area that gets employers into quite a bit of trouble. And then things like wages, minimum wage, meal and rest break, final wages,
00:14:32
Speaker
ah leaves, for example, those can be extremely complicated and it's difficult to do, right? So unfortunately, it's a problem that everybody faces. And in some cases, and I'd say this is a lot of the time, they don't even know they're out of compliance in the first place. So when you have about 10% of employers getting sued every year, that kind of just reflects, right, how how incredibly difficult it is for these these organizations to stay compliant.
00:15:00
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, it kind of begs the question, where do you where is it that you feel that organizations are most likely to to drop the ball when it comes to compliance? Like, are there certain areas where they struggle the most ah that you but you find? I mean, you've brought up a couple of really interesting areas.
00:15:22
Speaker
Where are people mostly not figuring it out? I would say those are the big areas where they're they're really struggling. So, you know, there are easy things like, you know, let's say minimum wage, right? Everybody knows what the federal minimum wage is If you're in a certain state, you probably know what your state minimum wage is as well.
00:15:45
Speaker
But if you have an employee in Montgomery County, Maryland, do you know that the minimum wage is higher than the state's minimum wage and therefore supersedes the state law? you know So those little things can be missed.
00:15:57
Speaker
But yeah, accommodations, discrimination, harassment, ah things related to wages. i see a big area where employers get into a lot of trouble is misclassification.
00:16:08
Speaker
So for those who don't know what misclassification is, it's when you um essentially identify a role as exempt or non-exempt of overtime and minimum wage requirements.
00:16:20
Speaker
or in some cases, employee versus contractor. And the employee versus contractor is where you get into a lot of trouble um and many people get it wrong because it's very complicated to do an audit for something like that.
00:16:34
Speaker
And we have an audit tool, but I would still recommend that an attorney take a look at the results of of that audit tool. Or if you're not using a product like ours, just finding an attorney to do that for you because it's so sticky.
00:16:48
Speaker
of a situation to get into. um you know, when you're held accountable to wage theft, it's things like maybe you're not paying them the minimum wage amount you're supposed to, or it could be that you weren't paying them benefits or their social security and match, for example.
00:17:06
Speaker
So that can really add up over time. And i actually know of a small business. They had about six or seven employees. They were really small. They misclassified an employee as a contractor.
00:17:18
Speaker
She sued and they went out of business. So it can be a really big deal. And you want to make sure that you're on top of your classification audits for sure.
Feature Development through Feedback
00:17:29
Speaker
how do you How do you decide on your on the the platform? Obviously, you know on the backside of you, obviously you're ingesting data and information from a variety of sources to make sure you can provide the most you know accurate information.
00:17:45
Speaker
information to your customers, how do you decide what areas to lean into where to, you know, I'm, it's easy to say everything, right? Every, everybody should know everything about everything.
00:17:57
Speaker
Um, right. But, um, how do you decide where to do that? Do you, I mean, what, what, what's the feedback loop like with your customers? I'm curious. Well, we, we started off first with leave because that's probably one of the most complicated, um,
00:18:15
Speaker
experiences that HR or business owners have to go through with their employees. So our MVP, our minimum viable product, or like our beta, for example, um was leave in California, because if we could do leave in California, we could do anything.
00:18:30
Speaker
um So we started off with leave and um then took a look at the employee lifecycle. Everything from the moment you conceptualize a role and have to do a classification audit, for example,
00:18:42
Speaker
all the way to post-termination like unemployment. And we started building out the product over the last four years to cover those topic areas across the board. What we don't cover is payroll tax.
00:18:56
Speaker
Payroll tax is extremely complicated, and there are already vendors out there that are doing it
Navigating Multi-State Compliance
00:19:01
Speaker
really well. So it didn't make sense for us to get into payroll tax. But ah the other areas now over a period of time, we cover pretty extensively and I'd argue that we're probably one of the more comprehensive vendors out there when it comes to how deep we go into some of these topics.
00:19:19
Speaker
But I believe we cover 47 different topic areas in the U.S. and that can range from um workplace safety to leave to terminations to overtime and everything in between.
00:19:34
Speaker
Imagine that the compliance is a bigger challenge for, for some kind of businesses and others. I mean, thinking like manufacturing and construction, obviously there's a health and safety component um to it. Right. But then, you know, there's probably others where that's not so significant.
00:19:50
Speaker
um I mean, can you think of, or can, can you give me some examples of some where, um you know, you're, you find that there's, a huge you know um you know discrepancy in maybe significance, right, of the compliance challenge between some businesses and others?
00:20:10
Speaker
ah Yes, absolutely. i I mentioned some of the more regulated industries earlier, like manufacturing, and construction, transportation is another really big one.
00:20:21
Speaker
Transportation gets into quite a bit of trouble for yeah wage issues that come up. does get complicated when truckers are constantly going pat going through different state lines um because meal and rest break laws are different depending on the county or the city that they're passing through. it gets to be very complicated.
00:20:41
Speaker
But they're also, in many cases, misclassifying truckers as contractors instead of employees. We saw a really big lawsuit several years ago with Swift Transportation. to pay $100 million
00:20:56
Speaker
um because they misclassified their truckers. Wow. So it can get very, very expensive. You have other areas too, like healthcare, that does get to be pretty complicated as well.
00:21:09
Speaker
And, you know, I'd say any employer that's a multi-state employer is going to have a lot of challenges no matter the industry they're in. Wow. that's um that's not That's definitely a non-zero um amount of money.
00:21:24
Speaker
i um you know I know for an organization that that that struggles with compliance, or there could be a lot of confusion and and lack of clarity around employment and labor law, which which seems to be pretty common.
00:21:38
Speaker
Tell me, how can leaders get more clarity around what they should be doing or where to even get started? Yes. Well, I would absolutely recommend if an HR leader hasn't done this yet and doesn't do it at least once a year, that they complete an audit of their compliance processes and policies to ensure that they're being yeah fully compliant across the board.
00:22:05
Speaker
So, for example, within Virgil, we have a compliance audit tool. It's 50 questions. It covers every aspect of the employee lifecycle. Everything from are you storing your I-9 forms correctly to are you paying out final wages appropriately by state or locality?
00:22:24
Speaker
And that gives our users a really great snapshot of where they are today and their gap areas. And then what we do in our report is we then provide recommended action items to mitigate those risks.
00:22:38
Speaker
So whether you were using us or you perhaps, ah I don't know, of anyone off the top of my head who does something as comprehensive as that, but maybe
Tech Readiness and Change Management
00:22:50
Speaker
engaging with an attorney in employment and labor law or a very senior HR consultant to do an audit for you is the best way to start to figure out what the health of your organization is. And then you can kind of build a plan from there.
00:23:05
Speaker
That's great advice. I bet there's a lot of tools out there that can really benefit, um you know, HR folks. um Do you feel like, and I feel like you're the perfect person answer this question, given your experience, both running and and leading ah HR teams and also building tools to support them.
00:23:24
Speaker
You feel like most teams are, are you know, tech ready, tech enabled, tech savvy. no not at all. no The shortest answer today. um Yeah, no, I mean, it it's just, it I feel like it's a it's um ah space that's moving so fast and it's kind of hard to keep track of. And when there's and a new shiny tool out there, you know, a month later, there's 10 more, um you know, that can do so many things. So how do you begin to change the culture for HR teams when it comes to to tech? How do they begin to make the the shift?
00:24:02
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's interesting because this is totally stereotyping because I know a lot of ah HR professionals who are very tech savvy. yeah But in general, HR typically is not tech ready.
00:24:18
Speaker
They're not tech literate. um And so I was lucky because I've worked for technology companies who I supported CTOs and CIOs who had technical teams and got to really understand what goes into the talent and what they do.
00:24:34
Speaker
ah But you know not everybody has that experience. And so I think it's really important to do a few things. The first is take a look at your organization and based on your strategic objectives, identify what type of tech you need within your company.
00:24:53
Speaker
You'll also want to identify not just whether you're tech ready, but whether your organization from a culture perspective is change ready. So that's another really important piece. If they're not change ready, don't even bother. That's what you should work on first.
00:25:09
Speaker
But then once you've identified the need, you can go to market and start looking at these different products. And I would always recommend no matter how proficient you are in technology, that you include your CTO in those discussions.
00:25:21
Speaker
And CIO as well, because we want to make sure from a data security perspective, we're fully covered with the vendors that we're working with. So um working with them is really critical.
00:25:33
Speaker
I would highly suggest that if this isn't happening yet, that you speak to your CTO or CIO and and just get a more in-depth experience, or kind of knowledge, I guess, of what they do, what their teams do, what skill sets are required. You could even go out and take, you know, MOOCs have tons of free courses online ah to just educate yourself a little bit more. But the area that you'll really want to educate yourself on, of course, is ai And ai is just kind of this like shiny ah you do little thing out there that people are really excited about, but don't always understand
00:26:10
Speaker
The implications are the functionality behind it. And so that's why it's so important to bring someone from the data security side into it. Absolutely. Because we're so we're starting to see more and more companies getting into a little bit of trouble for things like algorithmic bias.
00:26:26
Speaker
um So getting a better understanding of AI and a good way to do that is to go to conferences. There's some really great conferences for HR professionals, Transform, SHRM, Unleash, all really great.
00:26:42
Speaker
series that are covered throughout the webinar that touch on everything from giving yourself a little more technical knowledge of AI to how do you implement AI and everything in between.
00:26:53
Speaker
I could talk forever about this topic because i'm super passionate about it. So I'll kind of stop there and see if you have any questions to that. I really, I... I like that. I love that. um Yeah, I mean, in addition to those, you know there's there's Disrupt HR, there's HR tech. they all They're all great. It's a great place to start.
00:27:16
Speaker
um You made a really interesting comment that sort of stuck with me about if if your team, if your team is if their culture is not change ready,
00:27:34
Speaker
then you can't even start. If the culture isn't ready, like if literally, if that culture is not built to adapt to new changes, then everything else can't be done.
00:27:49
Speaker
yeah And that real, I mean, I agree with it, um but it really stuck with me and it kind of begs the question
00:28:01
Speaker
if you're lead if if if there's an HR leader or a team leader or CEO or whatever it is, you know, or even if it's a consultant who who's come in to help an organization and has sort of identified all these gaps, you know, or or, you know, things that need to happen and somebody's brought in as like, let's say a change agent, where do they start to change that culture so that it is adaptable to change?
00:28:31
Speaker
How do you create that environment where they're ready to do all these things? Yeah, it's a great question that I'm sure people get paid a lot of money to, you know, answer and do But I'll just say based on my own personal experience, one of the best ways to start off is through these engagement initiatives that you have with your employees. So if you were to do, for example,
00:28:59
Speaker
pull surveys or periodic engagement surveys with your employees and then built out action plans and executed against them and showed them, hey, based on your feedback, I'm executing against what you've shared to make your life better here.
00:29:15
Speaker
um When they start to see that, when they start to see that feedback that they've provided has resulted in really great change for them in the organization,
00:29:26
Speaker
that's where you start seeing an attitude shift and a cultural shift where they in turn become more change ready. um And so i think that that's huge.
00:29:40
Speaker
ah And it's also really important for leadership across the organization to be promoting change consistently. And when you do have initiatives that require some form of change management,
00:29:52
Speaker
that you're fully executing on the change management, you know, structure when it comes to a transformation project. If you're, if you're implementing a new software, let's say, and you have a terrible change management um process, then people are going to be less likely to accept change in the future. so you have to be really careful with that.
00:30:14
Speaker
You know, and it, and it, For it sort of for for me sort of basically begs this next question. i see and I fully understand this this idea about change.
00:30:28
Speaker
What if I'm starting a company? What if I'm just now scaling my team and I know that these are future challenges that every organization has to deal with?
00:30:41
Speaker
What kind of things can I be doing as a leader to build this kind of culture that I know will be able to embrace that in the future? Yeah, that's a great question. And i I think that there are different types of change that you need to be prepared for.
00:30:59
Speaker
So let's use AI as an example. Everybody's really worried that AI is going to take their job. And in many cases, it will. um But there are a lot of new jobs that will surface as a result of AI. And there's some really cool stuff that I've kind of seen that that's particularly interesting. So on the HR side, for example, um ah human AI kind of teaming manager where they're designing workflows, where humans and AI systems cooperate efficiently,
00:31:33
Speaker
or you have this AI kind of interaction designer, which is another HR role that kind of um evaluates how users interact with AI assistants. So there will be a lot of really great change, but you have to prepare your workforce for that change. So I'm not seeing this, but I am hearing it more, which is good.
00:31:53
Speaker
And that's the importance of upskilling your workforce. So it's really important to take a look at your workforce today. and identify the roles that you think are going to be replaced by AI.
00:32:04
Speaker
and then take a look at the roles that could exist based on what what your company might need in the future with the adoption of this AI technology to upskill your workforce and get them prepared for that change.
00:32:16
Speaker
So there are tons of ways that you can prepare your employees for change. That's just one of them. um But that also gives them a lot of confidence in the organization. You'll see better retention, better engagement and and performance. so all around it. it They're great initiatives.
00:32:33
Speaker
That's pretty, that's a really insightful and i um you know observation. i think that 100% am behind that. I think that oftentimes what can paralyze some folks, some team members, right, or make them resistant to change is a lack of confidence in their ability to ah to go with that flow, right? To be able to um, adapt and then adopt, or maybe it's the other way around, adopt and then adapt, um, to
Future of HR and Global Expansion
00:33:04
Speaker
those changes, right. To the, there's there's, there's a changing, um, there are changing needs, right. In this new world of work, right. We have to work with new tools and, you know, when we get so experienced with some and we lose the, um, the hunger, I think to learn more,
00:33:23
Speaker
I think that that could probably lead to, I think, some resistance to to change. So if you're upskilling folks and they're constantly learning new things, they're constantly gaining confidence with new technologies, new processes, and new systems, then when you introduce a new one, there isn't going to be fear that they can't you know adapt to it.
00:33:46
Speaker
Right. Give me some predictions for the future when it comes to the culture for for ah HR teams. What do you see creeping up? is it Are all these predictions AI or or do we have some others in there?
00:34:01
Speaker
Well, I think as a result of two things, the first is AI and the second is ah more expansive global workforce that we're starting to see with all these EORs popping up, for example, that an area that I predict will end up being pretty important and prevalent is cross-cultural emotional intelligence.
00:34:25
Speaker
Because as these teams become global, they're more diverse, they're remote. And so leaders won't just need cultural awareness training. They'll need to really feel and adapt in real time to different ways people express respect or disagreement or enthusiasm or concern. So, you know, as an example, knowing that silence in a meeting might signal disagreement in one culture, but respect in another is something that people are going to have to become really skilled at. So that's my prediction. I think we're going to see more of that cross-cultural emotional intelligence.
00:35:01
Speaker
I like that. Um, you know i think you're I think you're onto something there. With that in mind, give me some insights that maybe you know um tomorrow's leaders are going to have to develop in order to thrive in this sort of cross-cultural world that you've described.
00:35:23
Speaker
Yeah, I think communication is going to be one of the most important skill sets for a leader to have. And not just communicating like, I'm a really great orator, right? It's more, and I am i ah tailoring my message to my audience?
00:35:43
Speaker
So that is going to be really key. The other piece, yes, around emotional intelligence and having ah strong foundation in emotional intelligence will also be really critical.
00:35:54
Speaker
um And then there are some other aspects I think that it will be really important for it everybody to be more educated in technology. We can't have CHROs that are not tech savvy and tech ready with the change that's coming. So that will be really key too.
00:36:14
Speaker
Any big changes you think in compliance in the world of human resources coming up here? Yes, absolutely. So I'd mentioned earlier that we're starting to see a more global workforce change not just with big companies, but with really small companies too.
00:36:32
Speaker
And so compliance will become more complicated than ever because you can imagine how complicated it is just to deal with federal, state, county, city laws in the U.S., making the U.S. probably the most complicated country from an employment and labor law perspective.
00:36:48
Speaker
But now you're going to have adhere to France's laws, which you know makes California look like Texas. ah yeah i India, which is also very complicated as well, and the whole gamut. So um that will increasingly become more and more challenging for HR professionals and business owners.
00:37:11
Speaker
And then we're also going to see not just those cultural differences, but the language differences as well. And in some cases, language requirements from a compliance perspective. So, for example, in Quebec,
00:37:22
Speaker
you have to provide as an employer's notices to employees in English and in French. So what that might look like in other countries, I'm not sure. not an expert in all them, or really in most of them for that matter.
00:37:35
Speaker
ah But that's where I see things getting super complicated for people. So it will be really important to find the right resources to assist you, whether it's a global law firm that can help you out or whether it's a piece of technology that can do that for you.
00:37:50
Speaker
You mentioned that Virgil is, you know, at some point in the future, looking to go beyond the U.S. borders. um Are those things that you're working on now you so that you're you're prepared in the future um to sort of, you know, expand where those boundaries are?
00:38:08
Speaker
Yes. We're being very careful because, you know therere there are some companies out there that have built really amazing products, but They're essentially pointing to certain websites and then scraping off those sites and using that data to train their AI model.
00:38:24
Speaker
And unfortunately it leads to a lot of errors. And here's a perfect example. If we're going to England, right? And England is the next country that we're going to focus on.
00:38:38
Speaker
We will need to know where every law is so that we can actually pull off these government websites. Well, when you look at California, California's sick leave law, do you know where it sits?
00:38:51
Speaker
Where does it sit? It sits under their housing act. Oh, that's peculiar. How would you know to go look for something like that? right So the same can be said for moving into these other countries as well. We we have to be 100% accurate from a compliance perspective.
00:39:11
Speaker
And so we're being very careful and thoughtful about the way that we do that and what data we're using. i would imagine the just you know from a a cursory you know sort of thought that maybe the employee, you know you you originally talked when when you conceived this idea and you started with leave in California and you eventually then had to sort of break it out and think about the entire employee life cycle.
00:39:40
Speaker
I would imagine that there are points in the life cycle um that are different in some countries also. some Some things, I mean, obviously there's first touch and there's exit, right? But maybe along the way, you know, some countries do do things differently ah that we simply wouldn't have a need to conceive of here. Is that the case or am I way off?
00:40:04
Speaker
Yeah, there are some things like, I don't know this in great detail, but I know, for example, in France, you have to have like a physician available to your employees when they get hurt or something, something along those lines, but that physician is contracted by you. You're paying this person on a regular basis.
00:40:25
Speaker
um yeah okay A random fact that I have because I worked for an international company, but would we know to look for something like that? Yeah. That's the tricky part. That's why you're going to need in-country experts helping you as as you build something like this out.
00:40:43
Speaker
Yeah. And that's actually a great example. I had no idea that that was the case. And that's exactly what I was talking about. So with all these with all these changes, how do you see your own you're your own work evolving over time?
AI and the Future of HR
00:41:01
Speaker
You mean in terms of what Virgil is doing? Yeah. Yeah, in terms of what Virgil's doing or where your next challenge lies. Yeah, so I think that what we'll start seeing is more adoption of ai to automate tasks for our our users.
00:41:19
Speaker
We'll see more of that. I think predictive risk is going to end up becoming more and more popular. And so in the compliance space, you can imagine how incredibly valuable something like that would be.
00:41:31
Speaker
So ah so we'll we'll definitely see technology in many ways shaping how we work and how we build these products and how we engage with our users and get feedback from them and the like.
00:41:48
Speaker
So more to come Four years ago, I wouldn't have been able to conceptualize what AI can do today. So there's a lot to learn still. Yeah, for for us all.
00:42:00
Speaker
um You know, one thing I always like to wrap up and and and ask, I'm so curious, you know, if if an entrepreneur, if an HR leader, um you know, if another person, you know, who's who's getting involved in this HR tech space, you know, is asking you for, you know, a piece of advice, you know, some of the most important stuff that maybe you've learned, you know, about about managing people.
00:42:22
Speaker
about taking care of their workforce, maintaining compliance, you know, or around all of these things, you know, you only have a ah minute, you're on an elevator up to the top floor and before they walk right out the door, what what do you tell them?
00:42:36
Speaker
who Well, there are so many messages, whether I'm talking to an entrepreneur or an HR professional. I'd say if I was talking to an HR professional from a leadership perspective, one of the most important things that I would stress is to really orient yourself with change management.
00:42:54
Speaker
Change management, my master's in change management, so I have a lot of familiarity, but unless you've gotten that education ah or you have played a role at an organization that focuses or touches on change management, most HR professionals don't have that experience.
00:43:12
Speaker
And it's going to become more and more critical as we continue to see AI adoption and technology implementations within organizations big and small.
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:43:21
Speaker
So I would highly encourage HR professionals to seek out ways that they can learn more about change management and how to apply it at work.
00:43:29
Speaker
I love it. I love it. Thank you so much for joining me today, Jocelyn. I really appreciate you being here and all all those insights. Thank you so much for having me. This was another ah another installment of Mustard Hub Voices behind the build. Thank you for joining us. Please like, and share this episode, and subscribe while you're at it.
00:43:50
Speaker
ah Be sure to visit mustardhub.com to learn how we help companies become destinations for workplace happiness and turn culture into a competitive edge. And be sure to sign up to be one of the first to get started with Mustard Hub for free. Until next time, we'll you soon.