Workplace Champions

Brett & Jack discuss how the hiring function is expected to become the sweet spot for Chat GPT and other AI offerings as the technology emerges as a powerful tool for finding and qualifying talent for organizations. This episode features the workforce insights and commentary of CFO Jonathan Carr of Armis, CFO Céline Dufétel of Checkout.com, and CFO Dan Fletcher of Planful.

Brett & Jack discuss the workforce rantings of Elon Musk and the new Twitter owner's November 16th deadline for employees to decide whether to leave or stay. Is Musk's leadership style solely responsible for the turmoil at Twitter or are there other contributing factors? This episode's featured Workplace Champions expose how leaders seek to optimize work environments to empower people to do their best work. While Jack views the talent mind set of each of the three featured finance leaders as the upshot of extensive leadership experience, Brett points out there may be a method behind the Musk "madness." This episode features the workforce insights and commentary of CFO Anat Ashkenazi of Eli Lilly, CFO Ambereen Toubassy of Airtable, and CFO Evan Goldstein of Seismic.

This episode features the workforce insights and commentary of CFO Adam Swiecicki of Brex, CFO Manish Sarin of Sprinklr, CFO Jason Keen of Mills Nebraska, and CFO Komal Misra of Starry

Brett & Jack discuss how growing numbers of businesses are facing an employee retention crisis as they battle escalating workforce attrition and struggle to fill job vacancies. As the crisis grows in certain industries, more finance leaders are sounding the alarm on escalating business risk and dedicating more time to solving the current talent equation. Featuring the commentary and insights of workplace champions CFO Efrain Rivera of Paychex, CFO Anisha Sood of First Choice Health, CFO Will Johnson of Iterable, and CFO Adriana Carpenter of Emburse.

Brett and Jack discuss how the leadership narrative benefits hiring, and why department hiring budgets may someday soon be replaced. Featuring the commentary and insights of workplace champions CFO Cassandra Hudson of EngageSmart, CFO Nitesh Sharan of Soundhound and CFO Michael High of Shell's Deep Water Gulf of Mexico.

Brett and Jack weigh-in on Zoom firing squads, the move to hybrid workplaces and hiring's enormous impact on your company's funnel. Featuring the commentary and insights of workplace champions CFO Jim Morgan of CallRail, CFO Amol Chaubal of Waters Corporation and CFO Justin Judd of BanbooHR.

Brett and Jack discuss the move by Amazon and other companies to pay employees daily will trigger new approaches in salary administration. Plus, more developments in the age of the "great resignation."  Featuring the commentary and insights of workplace champions CEO Craig O'Neill of Versapay, CFO Michael Rosen of Digital Power Marketing, CFO Kurt Shintaffer of Apptio.

Brett and Jack discuss the highs and lows of executive compensation, and  why corporate culture may trump all.  Featuring the commentary and insights of workplace champions CFO Gregg Clevenger of LiveVox, CFO Charles Freund of  FLEETCOR and CFO Jill Klindt of Workiva.     Read More

Brett and Jack talk the power of the mission, the CEO return-to-work agenda and covid's delta variant backlash.  Featuring the commentary and insights of workplace champions CFO Beth Clymer of Jobcase, CFO Todd McElhatton of Zuora and CFO Scott Dussault of Workhuman.

Featuring the Workplace Champions CFO Harmit Singh of Levi Strauss &Co. CFO Mark Shifke, of Billtrust CFO Bill Kelley of Treehouse Foods     Read More

Featuring the Workplace Champions CFO Arleen Paladino of Crum & Forster CFO Guy Blanchard of Aerofarms CFO Mike Rasic of Synapse CFO Ross Tennenbaum of Avalara

Featuring the CFOs: Tom Berquist, CFO, TIBCO, Terry Coelho,CFO BioDelivery Sciences , Kevin Ingram,CFO, FM Global, Robert Linder, CFO, Lazy Dog Restaurant & Bar

This Episode Features Human Capital Insights & Commentary from: Dynshaw Italia, CFO, Soldo Brad Kinnish, CFO, Aryaka Will Bondurant, CFO, Castlight Health The Workplace Champions Podcast explores the innovative workforce practices of talent-minded business leaders tasked with opening a new chapter of growth for their midsize organizations. More keenly aware of the competitive price of employee burnout and workforce attrition — many midsize companies are today busy rethinking how they attract, hire and inspire employees.

  "Talent has become really important, and you have to remain constantly focused on it—today, I spend around 20% of my time on it." - Ross Tennenbaum, CFO, Avalara CFOTL: What are your priorities for the coming year? Tennenbaum: One is building out our finance and accounting talent to take us to a billion dollars’ worth of revenue and beyond. We’re at close to half a billion of revenue, and we’re looking to go well beyond that. You really need the talent that has experienced a larger scale, knows how to achieve it, and can take you there. So, talent has become really important, and you have to remain constantly focused on it—today, I spend around 20% of my time on it. CFOTL: What does the phrase “workforce culture” mean to you? Tennenbaum: Beginning in my investment banking days, I’ve studied many companies and management teams. I’ve seen teams that were really high-functioning, really strong, great cultures. I’ve also seen management teams and executive teams that were not cohesive. There was a lot of distrust and backstabbing. Each of these scenarios could generate great numbers and be performing well, but I would only want to invest my money in the one that has that trust and has a cohesive team—and where this is really being driven forward in a cultural way. I don’t think that Wall Street really has a view of this. There is really no metric internally—and certainly not externally—that gives this view on culture. But I think that investors are increasingly trying to get this view into talent and culture. Drew Vollero, CFO, Allied Universal When Drew Vollero arrived in the CFO office of security and facilities company Allied Universal in 2018, he understood that the primary constraint to Allied’s future growth remained human capital. Like so many other meaty challenges, Vollero had helped to remedy during his finance career– Allied’s new CFO understood finance must play an active role when it came to optimizing the company’s “employee funnel”.  Then Covid 19 arrived - overnight elevating Allied’s hiring hurdle to Vollero’s top of mind status.    We recently asked Vollero to explain how the company’s hiring priorities may have been altered due to the pandemic. Vollero: I would say that we hire 3,000 people a week. We see a million resumes a year here at Allied Universal. There's 150 million or so people employed in this country. So, you're talking about a meaningful number of resumes that this company sees. Our ability to hire the right people is really important. How do you do this at scale is really our challenge. Our strategy team has adopted a couple of new tools that helped us do that through the field. We now have an artificial intelligence vehicle that we're testing that will help us identify what are the key metrics when it comes to hiring and what are the key personality traits or key answers that applicants can give us that (signal) they will fit well with our culture, as well as indicate that they might be successful employees. We're also using an automated workflow to really help us get through some of our staffing bottlenecks. Our challenge here today is we may get a resume, but we may not be able to call you for six to eight weeks. Managing that workflow better is very important to us and something that we spend a lot of time studying the employment funnel. How do we find 150,000 of the best employees? We hire based on customer needs. Customers continue to need services and some have used less during the pandemic like the retail channel, or some of the local office buildings, but a lot of customers have asked for more hours. State governments have wanted more hours. Hospitals have wanted more hours. As we manage through the pandemic we've really focused on three important pieces.  First, and foremost, we focus on our employees. We've instructed all of our employees to follow the CDC and WHO guidelines, social distancing, very important. … We've supplied over 650,000 cloth masks to employees during that time. We've also been very active with virtual events, hiring people, so lot of kind of drive-through hiring events to practice social distancing, and meet the demand for security services and we still have a significant number of open posts and we've been trying to fill those.  The customers, we've got 30,000 customers. And these 30,000 customers have 13,000 different ways that they've attacked this situation. Different customers have done it different ways and we’ve tried to be responsive to their every step.  From a financial perspective, obviously during the pandemic, we've been focused on really the liquidity of the company. On the financial side, there's a couple of things that we've been trying to do to make sure that the company can continue to do well and to frame the magnitude, our payroll here is a $100 million a week, and we have to make sure that we have the ability to continue to pay the people who are working hard through this.  

Join us when Mike Walters, CEO of USA Financial, explains how a loyal network of financial advisers and new technology adoption -- and some solid hiring -- is helping the Grand Rapids, Michigan, financial company to open a new chapter of grow

   “Sometimes we’ll be competing against very large agencies that are global in nature—so they’ve got offices in New York and in Hong Kong and in Munich. At other times, we’ll be playing against a specialty firm that operates out of maybe just one geography, like San Francisco or New York, and operates only in one sector, like tech. So it’s for us both interesting and hard because we sit in the middle. We have good ways to compare ourselves against the smaller firms and to position ourselves against the larger ones.” –Phil Carpenter

Indianapolis, Indiana—As companies grow and advance beyond their entrepreneurial roots, talent often becomes a major growth hurdle. To meet the demands of an expanding workforce, firms must steadily enhance their talent best practices. Join us when Justin Tysdal, Cofounder, Seven Corners, explains how talent became the primary path for opening a new chapter of growth for the international travel insurance firm. Guest: Justin Tysdal, Cofounder, Chief Strategy Officer Company: Seven Corners Headquartered: Indianapolis, Indiana Ownership: Privately Held Revenues: $40 Million Employees: 150 Contacts: www.sevencorners.com @sevencorners (Twitter)   From Brett’s Strategy Note BIG step to get outside help. Apollo – proactive, structure Need for new ideas , innovation Transparency KPIs THANK people

Having grown to 38 offices and more than 900 employees, Risk Strategies Company has entered the ranks of leading national insurance brokers with a strut that signals an appetite for M&A. Join us when the firm’s founder and CEO, Mike Christian, explains how acquiring companies in key markets, with key business practice areas, has made the firm a discriminating buyer inside an industry known for its frequent waves of consolidation.

Thrilled to introduce our first WORKPLACE  CHAmPIONS e-Book.  Featuring employee hiring and retention insights from a DOZEN talent minded CEOs  from midsized firms   LINK To Download e-Book: http://bit.ly/2nS0KJy

What if your company had unique lines of sight into the compensation best practices and approaches of your customers, and what if those lines of sight annually generated reams of data endowing your firm with a pool of strategic data that few firms—if any—can yet match? Join us when Xactly Corporation CEO Christopher Cabrera explains how customer insight became a primary driver of his firm’s future growth.

Featuring CFO Thought Leaders Few names are better known in the realm of multiplatform games than Unity Technologies. The software developer’s focus on “democratized game development” has primed the pump for independent game producers and led Unity to boast that its technology is already responsible for roughly 70 percent of virtual reality and augmented reality experiences. With few competitors in sight, Unity Technologies CFO Mike Foley says that the developer has begun to leverage a concept dubbed “radical transparency” that aspires to endow every employee with a generous look-see at the financials. As a one-time IT systems engineer, Phong Le has a finance career whose early roots run deep inside the technology realm, where today he serves as CFO of MicroStrategy—one of the data world’s pioneering innovators. Join us to hear Phong explain how burgeoning data insights are summoning finance leaders to become the organizational catalyst for quicker business decision-making.  

Eight years from now, when Lance Ruttenberg blows out the candles on a birthday cake celebrating his company’s 100th birthday, the CEO of American Textile Company will be savoring an industrial hallmark that no Fortune 500 CEO has ever known. Lance and his brother Blake are today the third generation of Ruttenbergs to own and lead the textile firm first established in 1925. While the company may not be in the same weight class as other successful firms with generational-family origins (Ford Motor Company, IBM Corp.), ATC’s longevity is a testament to an ownership/management model that has successfully served an industry, a family, and a devoted employee population for nearly 100 years.

MMTL: Along the way, you’ve made a lot of hires, so we’re going to ask you, “How do you make a great hire?” Matt: We follow this principle that we picked up in a book called Traction, by a guy named Gino Wickman. It’s an operating system for businesses called the EOS. We follow their people process, and it works quite well for us. It comes down to three things: Does the person get it, do they want it, and do they have the capacity to do it? If I could unpack that for you, what it means is that when we define a seat or role in the business and we start looking for people to fill that seat, the first thing we look for is, Do they understand the role? Do they get it? Do they understand what it entails, and if they do, then do they want it? Is this something that they think they would have a lot of fun doing? If they have fun, they’ll likely be good at it. Then, do they have the capacity to do it? It’s never a good idea to take somebody who’s never done a job or something even remotely close to that role and put them into it. This likely means that they don’t really have the capacity for it. We’re usually looking for people with a little bit of experience. Capacity is a lot of stuff rolled up in that, but it’s the anchor, right? They need to know and have the ability and the time and the wherewithal to do the job. The whole “get it, want it, have the capacity to do it” thing has been a game-changer for us in just simplifying how to find the right people.