What if HR and IT weren’t separate functions, but one team? (Manuela Paoletta, SVP of People and Culture at AlayaCare, and Kahina Ouerdane, CPO at Workleap)

Manuela - 00:00

I think a lot of companies right now still work in silos. HR is not just about people anymore. It is no longer just

about systems. People and systems need to interact. The future of work really is how do we integrate all of that?

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Kahina - 00:20

Welcome back to Leading Building the Future of Work. I'm Kahina Ouerdane, Chief People Officer at Workleap. I've always truly believed in the power of collective intelligence. How people coming together can create. Create something greater than the sum of its parts. And that's actually what this podcast is about. We're having real conversations about what it takes to lead in today's workplace. Today I'm joined by Manuela Paoletta, Senior Vice President of People and Culture at AlayaCare. In her role, Mani leads the people strategy for a global team of 600 employees across Canada, the US and Australia. She's been instrumental in building high performing teams and cultivating a strong values driven culture at AlayaCare. Hi Manuela.

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Manuela - 01:00

Hi Kahina.

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Kahina - 01:01

I'm so happy to have you with us.

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Manuela - 01:02

Thank you for having me. I'm excited and I mean super honored actually to be here with you.

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Kahina - 01:07

Manuela, you and I have similar roles and not only do we have similar roles, but we also are both in charge of HR and it. So I'm really interested in hearing your experience around like, how did this happen? How does that play out and your experience overall around this topic.

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Manuela - 01:22

Yeah. And you know, I think you are the only other HR leader that is supporting it and I think that's great because I think we're going to be seeing more and more of this as we're thinking of the future the way it started. When I started Adelaide Care, it is a team that I inherited. I did think it was odd because I didn't really know much about it. So I asked myself, how can I actually lead this function? But I took it as a learning opportunity and I told myself I'm going to take it on and I'm going to build on it and I'm going to do the best that I can because to be honest, I'm not very, you know, tech savvy.

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Manuela - 02:00

I was that person that would go to it and ask them if they can come and like fix my printer back in the day pre Covid. So for me it was quite a challenge and obviously we love to take on those challenges. So I embraced it and I took it on. And fast forward today. It's four years that I'm at alike here. We have, you know, one of the strongest partnerships and Collaborations and having IT on my team has been nothing but, I guess an inspiration for me and I continue to learn from them. The thing is, I think that HR is not just about people anymore, just people. It is no longer just about systems. The reality of IT is that people and systems need to interact. So having people and IT together is really critical.

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Manuela - 02:52

And that is really just going to help, you know, automate. It's really seamless and having that interaction is going to help with, you know, the intelligence of the function and the adaptability. So I think a lot of companies right now still work in silos where HR builds talent and culture, it builds systems and infrastructure. But the future of work really is how do we integrate all of that. So it has been really helpful. We partner so close together. The head of IT is part of my leadership team. We do have our weekly meetings and we talk a lot about HR stuff. And I tell him, I said, when there's stuff that you don't want to listen to, that's okay, I get it the day to day.

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Manuela - 03:40

But when we do talk a lot about the IT things, when it's about automating, streamlining our processes, innovation, AI, he'll jump on it and right away, you know, things happen a lot quicker that way, that they are part of our team. And definitely it starts with the employee experience.

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Kahina - 03:58

Yeah, and I very much agree with you. We say that IT is the backbone of employee experience nowadays. And I really believe that. Another thing that we've been saying a lot here at Workleap has been that software is the new workplace in the sense that because we are remote or hybrid or whatnot, the tools and processes and systems become the office that we go to every day. So there's something like that has been enhanced, I think, with the new reality. I also think, and I mean, I'm sure you agree that's pretty much what you were saying, that it has such a big impact on employee experience as well.

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Manuela - 04:28

Right.

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Kahina - 04:29

I mean, the way that the computer gets shipped to someone, the access to things, like when people talk about their onboarding, they talk about that a lot. You know, how quickly was I set up to be able to start working? Like, how overwhelming is it for me to get a hold of the different systems and processes and all those kinds of things are handled by it. So yeah, I'm very much aligned with you on this. Have you noticed any, like, unexpected benefits?

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Manuela - 04:51

You know, we have such an amazing IT leader on our team. When we work together in terms of strategy, his involvement is very direct, very clear and we can execute on it really quickly. So it's going to help a lot. Like you were saying with the onboarding.

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Kahina - 05:07

I see a lot of benefits. And opposite to you, it was added on to my portfolio throughout the year. So I did not start with it. And this company, it came afterwards. And it was like a thoughtful process to say, well, for us, employee experience is large enough that it should also include. It should also include it. And so there's been a lot of benefits because I feel. I feel like the IT team, I don't know about you, but are more sensitive to the overall employee experience because they attend meetings where they hear about employee experience and overall engagement and the challenges that teams and leaders are facing. So they can be. They can navigate it differently. They have a different stance and angle when they accompany people throughout the business. So I think that's a big.

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Kahina - 05:47

It's a big plus, maybe a challenge that I've experienced a leader as the sharing of information and confidentiality to just to go back. So let's say when I do town hall meetings with, like, everyone on the function, in the function, it gets sometimes a bit more tricky because there are certain types of information that I would be sharing with people who are more HR specific because it's in the nature of their work to be able to handle confidential information. And then for IT support teams, sometimes they're not used to that or it's not necessarily part of their, you know, of their background or job description. So navigating that has been a topic for me a little bit.

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Manuela - 06:19

Yeah, it is challenging. I mean, I always try to find ways to make that team inclusive of ours. So every time I will schedule a town hall for the HR team. So we call People and Culture team, or I put on my slides, like People in Culture, and they'll write it, but it is part of People in Culture, so I'll remove it. And then I go back and forth thinking I want to make sure they feel like they are part of the People and culture function. And the other challenge I have is I feel like sometimes the IT team was kind of the black sheep where the company didn't know where it should sit. Right. So right now it's People in Culture. Oh, maybe it should go with procurement, maybe it should go with finance, maybe never knowing really where it fits.

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Manuela - 07:09

But at the end of the day, we, you know, we all decided and we really, truly think that it is part of the employee experience the full cycle, and that it's home should be with people and culture. And we just work so well together and employees don't see it anymore as just help desk support. That's not what it is.

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Kahina - 07:30

That's not what it is at all. And it's interesting. Everything. I think it's the future. I agree with you. And yet I think that we're still a minority of HR leaders. So it's funny, maybe there will be people watching as they're listening to us that will think, oh, maybe we could have that conversation in our companies.

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Manuela - 07:44

Right.

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Kahina - 07:44

I don't know if you have any ideas or tips of things that we could help them with so that they could have that conversation. Because I think maybe sometimes there might be resistance internally because we've never done things this way, you know.

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Manuela - 07:55

Yeah.

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Kahina - 07:55

So I don't know.

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Manuela - 07:56

Embrace it.

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Kahina - 07:57

Yeah.

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Manuela - 07:57

You know, and kind of talk more to the IT team. See exactly what they're doing. You know, how can their systems integrate with yours? How can you interact together? Look at your pain points. How can they help make those pain points more seamless? It's like automation now with AI coming. They are your perfect partner.

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Kahina - 08:21

And the closer we are to our partners, like the better things play out. I'm just thinking of something that happened and I think you've done also acquisitions from other companies and it did happen to us that we would buy a company and integrate it, but then they would still working on their own system and there would be delays before they would actually, let's say, join our Slack or join our SharePoint and whatnot. Because they were on a different platform and that had a huge cultural impact. Because if you delay 1, 2, 3 months, the integration in your system of people who were in different organizations before, well, you're delaying their cultural onboarding and their cultural integration.

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Kahina - 08:57

Regardless of the fact that you're doing all these things to integrate them, the fact that on a day to day they're still working in a different platform amongst themselves and are not part of the new adventure. I don't know. I lived it personally and then I think that was my aha moment when I said, oh my God, this is having such a huge impact on employee experience and culture that let's bring this closer. So I don't know if you experienced that as well.

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Manuela - 09:17

Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, we acquired a company in the US and we do have our technical analyst that is in the U.S. you know, and she is very proficient on the product and tools that we acquired right now. You know, she becomes a single point of failure in supporting that. But as you know, the time goes, she's obviously integrated within all of the organization and has learned all of the other systems and tools, but it took time.

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Kahina - 09:46

Yeah. So there's like the integration of the product that we're integrating, but there's also like, you know, the tools that people on the team are using in a day to day basis to go through, you know, on their journey as employees.

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Manuela - 09:56

Yes.

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Kahina - 09:56

And how do we shift from one system to another? The migration. Right.

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Manuela - 09:59

Yes.

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Kahina - 10:00

Of data. So I find that's really. Anyway, it's been a topic on our side.

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Manuela - 10:04

Culture.

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Kahina - 10:05

I mean, I guess what I'm hearing from what we're saying is culture is much more wide and nuanced and diverse than we would think. When we talk about culture at work, engagement, obviously is still part of it. And I think that we all care about that for all sorts of reasons. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this at the moment. How do you navigate. And again, you were telling me that you are a hybrid if I say organization. So you go to the office, I think once a week. Is that how you operate?

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Manuela - 10:33

Twice a week? We've mandated twice a week with a core day on Wednesdays. And then you can choose, you know, another day of the week. We try to do team days.

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Kahina - 10:43

Yeah.

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Manuela - 10:44

So the return to office, I would say, has been a challenge for us.

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Kahina - 10:48

People were kind of resisting that a bit. Yes.

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Manuela - 10:51

And there is still a lot of resistance, even though we've mandated it. So, you know, we try to find ways to make people understand the why we want people in the office.

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Kahina - 11:00

And it's interesting because I find that we are a remote company. So we gather twice a year. We gather all of our employees from everywhere in North America at the office two to three days every six months. Aside from that, people can work from wherever they want. And I think there's tons of advantages that come with that. And there's also challenges and talking about engagement, just to loop back to that, I feel like there's a challenge to be able to really capture the mojo, the morale, the mood of our people when we don't see them, you know, face to face. So I'm curious. You do get to see people regularly, I would imagine, because of your core days. How do you track data around how people are really doing and feeling? How do you capture that?

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Manuela - 11:44

Yeah. So we do quarterly engagement surveys. We're very big on engagement surveys. And quarterly feels like an eternity for me. I know. And I've used, you know, office vibe in the past. I've implemented it at my last organization. I was a huge ambassador of It. We've talked about that already. Love the product. And I actually missed seeing the pulse of that feedback. And I think it's so much more impactful when you can see it on a daily basis. And I'll go back to your question, but in my past, when I was working with Office Vibe, I would come to my desk every morning because we would come to the office, and the first thing I would do, I would open my computer and I would read Officevibe, and it was religiously done every single day.

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Manuela - 12:31

And I would just, you know, enjoy reading it and trying to understand. And then made it a point for managers to do the same thing. And obviously that's a muscle that they would need to flex because not every manager would.

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Kahina - 12:43

Would do that.

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Manuela - 12:44

But.

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Kahina - 12:45

Sorry, if I can just double down on that for a second, because I find it's interesting you were doing that even though you were at the office, and were at the office at that time. I know. And so there are still things that we capture from those surveys, even when we're at the office.

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Manuela - 12:57

Right.

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Kahina - 12:57

And I remember because when I first started using that, I was a bit doubtful because I was thinking, why would, you know, put in writing some things? I'll just tell it to our phrases. I was a bit naive. And then I discovered, no, there's like an array of topics or situations or contexts in which people would not necessarily speak up even if were at the office. And that was also tricky because you would be at the office, you were under the impression that you knew what was really going on, because you would go down the hallway and you would think that you were sensing things. But then Office Vibe would come up and whatever custom poll survey platform exists, and then you would be surprised by some results or by some comments anyway.

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Manuela - 13:36

Exactly. And then you would want to dig in and try and understand more. You know, how can I help? But, yeah, the same thing. You know, you're there in person, you feel like you know everything, but you don't. And there's some things, you know, you. You try to. To have psychological safety in an office, but at the end of the day, there are certain things that some people want to share on these anonymous platforms, and I thought it was great anyways. And then going back to what we do today, yes, it's quarterly. If there's a lot of survey fatigue.

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Kahina - 14:09

Yes.

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Manuela - 14:09

But if we start taking action, in which we have started taking action, there's less fatigue there. And so we have improved on that front. And you know what I think is really impressive At Allicare is that our participation rate is always really high. So that means we're doing something right. Okay. Because I've worked at companies where participation rate was 60%. Our lowest has been 88%. We've gone all the way up to like 92, 93. You know, we leave it open for two weeks, we give enough time for everyone to participate. We'll send reminders, we'll get our leaders involved and we really read the feedback. In some surveys we might receive a thousand comments, but we will read them. Our CEO will read them. If he doesn't have the time, he travels a lot.

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Manuela - 15:00

When he's on the plane, he's going to read all of these comments. And we just launched the feedback functionality about a year ago where if someone leaves a comment, we can respond back. It's a one way, which is unfortunate because you don't get enough data out of the feedback because some of the comments can be very vague and you need to understand a little bit more context that really helped the person. But we invite them to reach out to us. We want to learn more, we really want to try and solve this problem for you. So lots of comments, lots of data that we get so much.

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Kahina - 15:38

Both qualitative and quantitative.

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Manuela - 15:40

Both qualitative and quantitative, yes, exactly. And so we take that data, we slice and dice, we dig deep, we look at, you know, what's not going well. What more do we need? You know, what more data do we need to kind of to make improvements there? And we work very closely with all the functional leaders. So we do like one big survey once a year, it's about 50 questions and then quarterly is about five to seven questions. So the main focus areas of engagement, you know, like, and also ENPs. Would you recommend a friend or family to work here? Do you see yourself working here in two years? And a lot of questions on manager effectiveness because that's part of one of our company goals. So we're tracking that in terms of, you know, does your manager give you constructive and useful feedback?

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Manuela - 16:31

Do you feel like your manager is helping you grow? And we take that information and that's helping to support our company goals. But we support our leaders a lot in terms of getting the data. Obviously we use AI a lot and that saved us tons and tons of time. We can get the insights to them so much quicker than we used to.

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Kahina - 16:53

Going back to the power of data, one thing we are talking about leadership of influence and influencing change and being strategic. And that's one thing I have experienced personally with having data is that when you sit at the table at the executive level, it becomes tangible and it becomes real and it becomes a real topic that you can discuss. Having numbers, you know, and that changes the conversation completely. Because when you're at the executive level in general, we talk a lot about numbers.

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Manuela - 17:17

Right.

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Kahina - 17:18

And we talk a lot about whether it's billings or ARR or recurring revenue or whatnot. And we talk about these things because these things are observable and tangible. And so when we can do the same with engagement data, this is, that has been my experience. It shifts the conversation because it also becomes a real thing. And then you were talking about the velocity that AI brings to doing that kind of stuff. So let's jump on the AI ship for a second and talk about that. I'm super interested in hearing you around that topic. Everyone in hr, everyone is talking about AI all the time. And I think that there's like several different levels of comfort amongst HR professionals and HR leaders around that. Where are you at? What's your vision? What do you see? What role for AI in the HR world?

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Manuela - 18:07

Yeah, I think HR has a huge role to play in the world of AI. If you were asking me that question a year ago, I would be hesitant. I would think about what? About HR playing a big role in the AI transformation.

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Kahina - 18:23

Why?

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Manuela - 18:24

Because just in terms of transforming it across an organization, I felt it was more like, oh, well, it's a tech thing or isn't more it or why would HR be part of it? But you know, everything's working so quickly right now. And today I'm fully convinced that HR has a huge role to play in that and I am definitely involved in that for a, like here.

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Kahina - 18:48

So tell me more about that role.

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Manuela - 18:49

Yeah, and also, I mean, I introduced a. I didn't introduce AI, no. But I welcomed it and I encouraged it and I spiked curiosity with it with my team over two years ago. So, you know, when ChatGPT came out in November of 2022, I thought to myself, okay, I work for a tech company. How am I going to make my function? You know, forward thinking and I need to do something with this. So I started being curious. I had my People and Culture summit. I told myself, I'm not an AI expert. Is there an AI expert out there? Can someone help, you know, come in and talk to my team about it and like what we can actually do with it? And this was over two years ago and you know, it's a small world. Through the networking found some incredible. This Incredible person.

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Manuela - 19:42

And so we did it through Zoom. It was a two hour session. She did like a one hour of like AI 101. This is what it is. And the second hour was use cases. This is what AI can do for your people and culture, function, employee engagement and job descriptions, onboarding, you know, your 90 day plan, so on and so forth. And everyone just got really excited about that. And I made sure that everyone felt comfortable about it and let them know, I want you to use AI. It's okay to use AI. Please have fun with it. You know, and sometimes they'd come to me and ask me a question and my instinct would be like, did you check ChatGPT? Like, I didn't think about it. I'm like, go check and come back. And they would.

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Manuela - 20:28

And then they would be amazed at what, you know, it did. And it made them work so much faster. So fast forward to like two years later. Team is using it all the time, every single day. They continue to be curious about it. You know, we're still learning about it. This is, we're all learning about it. And I think that in terms of HR playing that role, we are there to let people know that it's okay to use it. We need to make sure people feel safe using it and providing them with the tools. Right. HR is really a guide. So we're there to guide people through this AI transformation and being the connector or the conductor of all of this. And so right now we built out a AI center of Excellence, we can call it, just so we can centralize it.

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Manuella - 21:19

Because what's been happening all year is everyone was just working in silos throughout the business. Throughout the business. So, you know, were doing our own thing. It's been two years, but like, what's everyone else doing? You know, product and engineering are doing their own thing, and then customer success is doing their own thing. So how about we put all of our brains together and centralize this and let's make sure we're doing it safely.

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Kahina - 21:47

Collective intelligence.

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Manuela - 21:48

Collective intelligence, exactly. So we built out the centre of Excellence and we're still at the start of our journey. It's very fresh. We actually just kind of brought it up yesterday at our town hall and I'll be sending out a communication about it and with that I'll be sending out a survey, because we love surveys, but we need to get that data and kind of understand everyone's comfort level. You know, everyone's at a different level. They can beginner, intermediate, expert. But, you know, how do you feel. Do you really love using AI? Are you afraid of using it? Are you, do you want to use it? But like you're afraid to tell people you're using it or on the contrary.

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Kahina - 22:28

You're not comfortable and then you're ashamed of not feeling comfortable.

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Manuela - 22:30

Yeah. Like, you think AI, some people think AI is, is not good. You know, it's bad for the environment. So just kind of getting a pulse of what everyone's feeling and from there, taking that information and building out our strategy. And that would mean, okay, what type of use cases do we need? How do we need to get adoption? We want to get 100% adoption. But it's not only about adoption. It's really about, you know, teaching our people how to use AI and not, you know, how to use the tools that do AI for you. And that's really important. The prompt.

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Kahina - 23:05

Right.

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Manuela - 23:06

If you don't have the right prompt, you're not going to get, you know, the results that you're looking for. Yeah.

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Kahina - 23:12

And one thing I'm realizing as we're talking is that it's not only, I mean, when you look at the pace at which things are progressing, it's so fast. Because you're talking about a year ago we had someone talking to us about, well, at this point I'm sure you would need that anymore. And then it becomes something else. Because as you're talking, I'm thinking about a workshop we did Marcus team, and we didn't have the expert come in. It was just a month ago. It was everyone in the team sharing with everyone in the team everything that the AI with, because in a year it's already progressed so much and everyone's gone their way and now it's like, how do you bring it back and how do you share it with the group? And also how do you build the muscles?

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Kahina - 23:47

And maybe it's my last question on this topic, but how do we build future muscles for change that awaits us? Because it's not the end of change. Like, change will keep on happening and maybe the velocity of change will increase. So how do you, what's your vision on that? How do we, how do we build future muscles? How do we make sure people are adaptable and agile, both on our HR teams, but like in throughout organizations as well?

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Manuela - 24:09

Yeah, well, I think it's really giving those opportunities for the people to learn. Right. And giving them that platfor to learn and making them feel that it's okay, like making sure they're curious and experimenting and opening that door to experimentation. I think that's really important. And I mentioned that earlier, but it's sharing that knowledge and we're going to have AI champions. And so what are you doing? What are you doing? Slack channels sharing your use cases. And the question came up yesterday, what are we doing operationally with AI Again, because we're all in silos. So we're going to create that platform to share that knowledge so everyone can continue to learn and continue to be curious. And, And I don't think every organization allows that or empowers their people to be curious and experiment. And I think it's very valuable. It's true.

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Kahina - 25:09

And another thing that's also coming to my mind as we're talking is that in any change management curve, like the first piece of it is what's in it for me? Right. There's change coming my way. What's in it for me? And in order to be able to get past that, you need people to really speak honestly, their mind and their hearts around the topic at hand. And so that's, I mean, that's something that I'm thinking about because you were mentioning some people are reluctant, existing. Will machine take over humanity? What about our environment and those kinds of things? And how do we build the space for people on our teams, let's say, to express that, because if people don't express it, then they won't embark on the train, but we won't know why. And then it slows things down.

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Kahina - 25:46

And at the same time, I think that also AI in itself is bringing all sorts of complex questions into our lives, like ethical questions, moral questions that we also cannot overlook. So I think that we're super excited and focused on productivity and efficiency, which I'm also excited about, I have to be honest. And let's also think about the midterm long term of this. You know, roles will keep on changing. Some roles eventually might be replaced, other muscles will need to develop. Like, I remember a few years back I was talking to someone who was saying, oh, you know, the future of AI will make human beings relevant, indispensable because of their soft skills. Like, empathy is not something that AI can have. But like a few years later now we're like, well, sentiment analysis. And then maybe the machine can be empathetic. And so.

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Kahina - 26:28

So it's evolving constantly. And I think that I hope that we'll continue to have those conversations and ask the tough questions also as we use it, because we have, you know, because we have this opportunity to use it. Yeah, yeah. Another thing that comes to My mind, as we're talking about this is, for me, AI is a tool as a mean. It's a mean to an end, and then what end? And I feel like we're talking about AI as if it was an end in itself at times. But that's not the end. Right. That's the vehicle. That's the tool. That's the super powerful tool.

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Manuela - 26:56

It is a super powerful tool. Yeah. And I mean, the role in the HR function, people in culture right now is we all need to upskill. We don't have a choice, for sure. You know, like, we are here to. We have to augment our capabilities, you know, and AI is only going to elevate and not eliminate. And I think that's what people are afraid, that it's going to take away their jobs. But it's not going to take away your job. It's the people that will know how to use AI that will take away your job. So upskilling is super critical in every role right now.

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Kahina - 27:31

And keeping the conversation open and going, I think is also relevant because if we overlook those concerns or those risks, well, maybe we're not advancing enough or fast enough.

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Manuela - 27:41

Yeah.

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Kahina- 27:42

With the machine and, you know, we.

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Manuela - 27:44

Have superpowers, you know, I mean, we're complementing the machines, and the machines need us just as much as we need them.

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Kahina - 27:52

That's another topic, Alan itself. But we'll do another podcast on that.

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Kahina - 27:55

Thank you so much, Manuela, for your time. Thank you for having me, and have a good day. Pleasure. Thank you so much. Bye.