Welcome And Why Human Success

Speaker 1 0:05

Welcome to Work in Progress, a podcast featuring thought leaders with interesting perspectives on HR and people and culture. My name is Pernille Hippe Brun, and in these talks we explore the latest trends shaping the future of work. In this episode, I'm speaking with Nina Carøe, who is a human success and scale-up evangelist, and also the chief human success officer at the company Sensei. Nina, we are sitting at um the Sensei Copenhagen office. Yes. Home of human success? Home of human success. Yes, that's what we call it. And that's why we're here today. We are going to talk about why do you call it human success and not human resources or people and culture as many others do. But first of all, Nina, who are you?

Speaker 0:57

Uh yeah, so I'm Nina. And I'm the mother of two children, five and seven. So that's I guess what defines me the most these days. But I'm also someone who's worked in the people space for a long time. And uh throughout some uh very interesting years, I would say. Because when I think back uh when I started in AR, we we worked in a very different manner. But not only did we work in a different manner, the world also was very different. It moved more slowly.

Speaker 1 1:35

What when what then what are we talking about? How many years ago are we talking about?

Speaker 1:39

So that's what 12 years ago after finishing uh after finishing school. So 2010 or something like that? 28, 2010. Yes, yes. Okay, exactly. Different world, differ very different world. And so I started working in HR, and my luck was that when I came out, it was just after the financial crisis, and there was just no jobs for newly educated uh HR people. No, so I ended up actually starting in retail where I I uh I became responsible for uh uh three shops and everything related to that. So I learned really early on uh what it looks like to manage people uh and to just be responsible for uh all the things coming in and all the things going out of a business and all of that. So I got that kind of experience really early and then got to move into an HSR role there.

Speaker 1 2:35

And and by that, do you mean you got that experience of what it takes to drive a business?

Speaker 2:40

What customer relations with everything it takes. Yeah, exactly. So um, so so that was just such a good experience. At the time I saw it a little bit as a failure that I I wasn't able to land an HR job right after, but I did get to move into an HR job in where in that uh company because I showed good results. So it also taught me that showing good business outcomes is just really good for HR people to be able to do because then you're seen as someone who can add value to the business and not just something that's a nice to have.

Speaker 1 3:16

So so the deeper understanding of business life and having that business acumen. Yes, exactly. Interesting.

Business Outcomes As HR Credibility

Leaving HR To Build Culture Software

Speaker 3:23

And then I moved into HR, worked in HSR for several years, and that was great. I mean, also early on, like getting to know all the inner workings of HR, all the things you do, and but I think at one point I felt that I was stuck. Uh I felt that I was, even though the world had changed so much, I felt that uh the way we worked didn't change. The way we were taken into consideration, the the way the people perspective was taken into consideration by leaders weren't changing. And I could just see uh how much that ultimately affected uh the performance of the business. And I couldn't figure out how to bridge that gap. So I was sitting in HR. How did I how could I bridge the gap to the leadership team? Uh so they could just improve the business because they became better at uh at uh working with the people and making sure that that the people in their company was doing their best work. Um so so so that was a big frustration for me, and I ended up leaving HR entirely and starting my own little company together with uh with a colleague from my former company, and that was just a great experience, and we wanted to build software that um helped leaders uh use uh data about values, company values, and company culture to improve the business. And then we were talking about how do we make uh the human success uh the human part of the business more visual to the leadership teams and the boards so that they will take that into consideration more than they plan. And uh and uh and then we I'm Erasmus from Sensei. At that time, it was called Learn365, and they had just bought Weekly 10, and they were building this new platform that uh caters for human success. And that was just uh a super nice timing. Um, and Sensei ended up buying Value Bead, and I joined as a chief human success officer to drive the internal uh HSS team, uh to drive the own best use case efforts that we have, and obviously also to talk about human success and and build on that even more with the product team and with the commercial team. So it's a super lovely role that I'm encouraged now. Great.

Speaker 1 5:46

So you started out in a company with a different name. Um learn Learn365, and one of the things that has changed while you've been here, how many years now? So two years. Two years this month. To date? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. Yeah, so many things you've done in two years, it sounds like because you changed name not only as a company, but also within your department or whatever we call HR, it changed its name as well. So I'm so curious to hear why did you change the company name and why did you change the name of your department?

Speaker 6:24

Yes. So it wasn't just the change of the department, it was actually a mindset that had grown. And um when we had so even the executive, even before I joined, were talking about you know, what does the future of work look like? They're all people who has had quite a career, and they've seen firsthand that the people side of things can just make it or break it for a company and for themselves also in terms of wanting to work there. So both I've I don't know if you know Rasmussen and Robin, they're they're just people who they truly believe the leader, the CEO, yeah. The CEO and the and uh and the CEO, yeah. Um they just truly believe that if we can we can help companies build uh human success, then we will enable both the people, we will increase people's uh value in like life value, life uh what's it called, um yeah, life in general because you know we we use so much time at work, um, but also it will impact uh companies positively. And they were also very keen on understanding how do we connect the emotions around the people with the with the performance and the company, not because they want to take advantage of the people more, it's not a control exercise or you know, we want to know everything that's going on with the people, but it's more how can we make the signals, how can we make people signals more visible, visible early on, um, so that we as a leadership team can make sure that we continue to be successful. I would say also, of course, data isn't everything. And you know, data sometimes you can look at data the way you want and and see the res the kind of the answer you want. So of course, it's not only like we're just saying everything needs to be quantified, but but being more data-driven in terms of how we look at at uh human success and company success uh is is definitely something we think is valuable.

Speaker 1 8:23

And this is so interesting because it all happens while the world, like you said, is changing around us and also providing us more and more data. So, how do we select what to measure and yes, how to uh measure it in the in the first place?

Escaping HR Operations Into Impact

Learning Engagement Performance As One System

Speaker 8:39

And so I think to that point, I've so that's also what I I just really like about our our own plan for platform, and that's not to to to just talk about that, but uh back to where I started and and my frustration with ATR, I I found that we ended up um just being stuck in the ASAR operations. So, and in my in my world, what I'm supposed to do heading up the people side of the business is I need to, of course, there are some basic operations and some motions and some systems and stuff that needs to be in place. Um that's how it is for all departments, right? There's some of that that just needs to be in place. But what I found was that, and I think that's for that's the frustration with many HR leaders out there today when I speak with them anyways, um, that they never get to work with the people, um people um contribution piece, or like the people performance and engagement piece. So that's the operations, that's the people development that's connected with so that's engagement, it's performance, it's alignment, it's all of these things that are softer than the operations and in many people's minds more nice to have or ends up being because how do we do it? And so we do stuff like we have yearly conversations with the employees and we manage it in big spread sheets, but it doesn't really scale and become become very valuable. It's more an eight-star exercise, then it's something that adds value overall to the direction or or what we decide to do as a company. Um and then and I and I think like so I never really got to that, and I and that is that is that is what uh you know, you can in my opinion, you can totally build human success, a human success department in any company, also without our platform. But our platform is just it makes it easier. So now you can both road, you have the operations in your HRS, and then you have the the engagement performance piece. Uh so we're the HRS for that part of the HR scope, you can say. Yes. And when you have those tools in two in place, then you're actually much more empowered and ready to then look at the change management that we are that's such a big part of our role now. It hasn't been, I guess, to the same extent, right? Because now the world is changing so much, it's super complex. The market today is gonna be different tomorrow. So, as a company, we need to be able to learn all the time. We need to constant constantly enroll. And how do we do that? How do we make sure that our people, our workforce is able to actually learn, right? And we need, of course, engage people. We always knew that. I mean, if working HR know that, that's important. Not only because, you know, we're afraid of them leaving, but you just do your best work, you contribute better when you're motivated and in a good place. And then we need to tie that up to the performance piece. So, what is it we need to do as a company to perform? Like, where do we need to go? What are the targets we need to hit? And all of that is kind of tied together uh in our platform, and you're able to do that much better when you have these basic uh things in place, and then that's then also enables you to strategically be much more involved because now you have this like you have the baseline, you have the info, you have the um ability to adjust the people's motions. Um and because of that, you have indicators early on, you have data, um, and then you can kind of up-level your effort with the leadership team to just be more strategic. So, learning is just we it is just bit it, I guess like for some years it was more, yeah, yeah, or you know, we need to make sure our employees feel that they're learning and developing. And I was like, all of our employees need to now work with AI tomorrow, right? So, like learning has just become such a key thing for for for the company to actually be able to perform going forward and survive. Yeah, and survive, right? And engagement that's been there the whole time, and then but but then obviously I think that's the that's the last part, that's the performance part. Because you need to connect those two things to the performance part, and performance doesn't happen only on top of the company or uh individually, it needs to be connected, and we need that connection to be clear, also to make sure that our uh employees feel purpose, feel alignment with what we're doing. So it's on many levels very important. Yeah.

Speaker 1 13:19

So why did you learn back to the why did you why did you change the name of the company? Because it had learn in it. Yes.

Speaker 13:25

The previous name is because it was only learned back then, and what we believe is that learning isn't enough. We need the engagement part and we need the performance part too. Those three things, that's our triangle, and we think if you have all of this, then you're able to really perform very well as a as a company.

Speaker 1 13:44

Okay, so you measure performance, engagement, and learning and learning as a triangle. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah.

Speaker 13:50

So you changed the name to sense I so we changed the name to sense because it wouldn't really be right to say we will only learn three, six, five, like more. Yeah. But that then also, of course, affected our company because when a company changes the name, uh, you know, we need to figure out how do we position ourselves, how do we sell the new platform, how do we go to market, how do we what like there's so many things that change us. So we've been through a of course a huge culture and mindset reset and change over the last couple of years, which has just been very interesting.

Speaker 1 14:24

Yes, and and at the same time, you also changed the name of the HR department.

Why Rename HR To Human Success

Speaker 14:29

Yes, we did that straightaway, yes, to be human success.

Speaker 1 14:34

Yeah, and and what what lies in that name? Why was that important for you that you didn't name yourself human resources, but rather human success?

Speaker 14:41

For me, it just it's because I want to be something else. I don't want to be so so uh when I speak to people and they ask what I do, if I answer I work in HR, they're like, oh so you do con you make contracts, you talk with the leaders, and then we don't really know what else you're doing. And then there's the there's people and culture, but I find that name to be too detached from business um kind of language or talk. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So so so we wanted to make sure that um we we wanted to kind of reset that by giving it a new name. And we just believe that human success will, you know, is equal to business success.

Speaker 1 15:30

So the name itself and the wording of it sparks different dialogues, it sounds like yes. It starts different associations and then therefore also different conversations. Yes, yeah. Interesting. That is that is uh that is that is what we ultimately want it to do. Yeah. Is that also what you've experienced then?

What Employees And Leaders Want Now

Speaker 15:50

How people react to it? I think when people when I speak to uh colleagues and like-minded HR people and culture people out there, I think they all relate to the same frustration about being stuck in operations, and they appreciate that resetup, you know, we need to uh think about it in a different way, but we also then need to work in a different way. And so back to a little bit, you know, when I started and what has changed. Like, so when I started working in ASAR, what we were focusing mostly on were we were hiring some people, we were letting some people go. We did barely, we barely had our employee data in one system yet. Right. Those system has has improved a lot over the last 15 years. So now we all have that in place, like the the basic employee data, which of course free up some time. But we were doing so much manual admin work. And if and when we were talking to the employees, they were asking about well what uh where's your office? Is it a nice office? Do I have lunch at the office? Will I get a work computer, a laptop, or will it be a stationary in the office? Is there a company phone? It was really things like that. That's not what employees ask about today. But what do they ask about today? Today they ask about, I mean, they take for granted that they can work from home whenever they want. They ask, uh, what will you pay for my home office setup? They ask, you know, how will I improve the world for the better by working here? It's become more and more important, at least for the Western world, because I think we've gone through some difficulties with COVID and everything else going on. So it's and the the climate change is really real for a lot of people. They're they're they're they're a little bit nervous about that. And so they want to be somewhere where you know we're we're doing something for the greater good. So it's much more a part of their identity and something that they don't they don't just go to work to get a paycheck. Um, and they also expect that before it was like it was the you work for the employer, now it's more what can you offer me as an employer? You know? Yeah, and and that is just a huge mindset change, and that requires ATR, people and culture, human success team, to work differently, because there's a different ask from our customers, right? So that's from the employee perspective, and then from the from the leadership perspective, there's another ask because the world is changing so quickly, it's more complex. So they are looking to the people leaders and asking, how do we manage this complexity and change? Because when things change so fast, companies need to be agile, they need to innovate all the time. And so so so, how do you do that? I don't think there's any machine who can do that or any three-year strategic plan who could do that. They so much depend on their employees to bring that innovation and agility. Ah so there's I would say there's a time right now where I'm I'm definitely feeling to much further extent than when I started working, that the other execs are looking much more at the at the people exec or the head of people or what we call this person. Because that's just the need, and they are realizing it and they are feeling the pain. Yes. Because before we changed about, we talked about this is a transformational year or change projects, but that's just every day now. There's no change project or transformation year. It's every day, it's like a muscle we have to train in the company. And who helps with that? It's the people leaders or people that the one that heads up that department. Um, so that's the other thing. And then the the third thing is that we have the technology changing so much. So obviously, everyone else is working different and using different technology, and the same goes for human success uh people. They also need to rethink how they work. It's not, they're not supposed to uh implement uh process to implement process. They're supposed to build great employee experiences, they're supposed to uh bring the the info that uh management needs to the to the management team about you know lack of skills if we want to achieve this goal. You know, we have a huge gap in skills in this team. Like, how do we add that skill in? Do we upskill? Do we bring someone ill? Do it do we change some? Like so so that's just such a that's a that's a just a very different ask from the business, and there's a demand, and it's driven by not only internally from which it was before, it's our people wanting to do more. Now there's actually a a real need for it. And I think so that's a moment and time for for for us uh to just um to just tap into this tab into now.

AI Change Anxiety And New KPIs

Speaker 1 20:59

Yes, which is great. And and this is also where maybe AI comes into the picture, right? Because because how do we then also embrace the fact that things when things are uh changing so quickly, yeah, can we even rely on the data we receive? Are they not outdated the moment we get them? What are your thoughts on that?

Speaker 21:17

Yes, but I I think like so that's also like it I don't know if this is perhaps more specific to the company I've been working in. So I've been in software as a service for a long time. And so we sell software. Um and so AI is changing how we build what we sell our product, like uh because we're not selling software, we're selling AI enabled, like we're selling people enablement using AI, like we're good becoming an AI platform. Everyone is becoming an AI platform, should be, right? Because there's so much more opportunity um with that, which is great and so interesting, but also like it's it's of course changed. Everything, right? So how we build it, like the technical people, how they build is different. What the product should look like, how we sell it. So what is it marketing is gonna say about our product? What is the salespeople gonna say? All of that is changing. At the same time, we have a market where AI is, we're saying, is it just a bubble? How helpful is it really? All of that. You know, so it's just a time of like so much change. And then internally in the companies, we are also then able to just do things with AI that just helps us move quicker, obviously with pitfalls. Uh, because I think the biggest uh challenge right now for companies is that they are they're applying AI, but they're not building the infrastructure to apply it on. So there's a lot of issues with that in terms of then the data being the same uh everywhere and you know access to what and all of that. Um so so so so many things changing uh connected with that. And who is it in the organization who's gonna solve that? It's not me alone, it's not my team alone, because this is also a technical thing, it is also a uh financial thing very much, right? Because are we as a company before if we if we were seven if it were seven years ago, we would probably be growing to around 600 people with 200 people now, right? We're not gonna do that, we're gonna grow with AI instead. So we're not laying people off, but we expect that we can get more efficiency uh definitely by using AI. So we're looking at also other KPIs uh as a company, so the the uh AR per FTE is gonna look very different than seven years ago. And so right before we could look to other companies, what are they doing? But as we're doing everything first now with AI, I can't go out and say, you know, at this stage with what we earn, with where we are, blah, blah, we need to be so many people. This is how many people in this department, this department, because it's all changing. So it's a very like it's a it's a it's a time of like where everything is being tried for the first time. And I enjoy that very much, but I also know that it's a problem for a lot of employees. It creates fear and anxiety, you know, what is their role looking like? And I can totally also relate to that. Um like I I feel do my manager think that I'm good enough at AI, but I can only look at it as if I look just six months back or 12 months back, the the difference in how I work with AI is just huge. And I think if we look at that, every one of us, most of us, we can really see, okay, it's actually already impacting how we work. Um so I I think personally, I'm just thinking, I'm leaning a bit against that, just looking back and seeing, okay, I am moving forward. And in general, I think it's a good mindset to have that. Uh sometimes when you're in it and you're looking just one step ahead, it could feel overwhelming. But if you look at development over time, which I'm I really think you should as a company in terms of building teams that feel also that they're contributing well and developing well, like look at the little bit the longer perspective so that and then you'll see that you're actually achieving so many things, developing so many things and all of that.

Forecasting Roles With AI And Flatter Orgs

Speaker 1 25:34

So it almost becomes even more important that you can track the progress and that you can measure what what is actually happening and what's going on. 100%. I overheard once how you talked about the AI challenge as a challenge for your department as well. Yeah. Because, like you you mentioned already how you know the forecasting becomes really difficult because how do you even know? And and early on, maybe you could you could easily forecast because you knew exactly if this if if we are selling to this amount, we're gonna need this extra amount of people delivering. But but that's no longer the case. Exactly. How do you then now forecast or do you forecast?

Speaker 26:15

Yeah, so we were looking at other other indicators. So before I had this, there was like a very good SAS benchmark for how the organization would grow compared to how much money it was making and where it was located and stuff. I can't use that anymore at all. Um, so what I so what we need to do is we need to understand. So what we've done is we've done an analysis where from what we know today, to what extent are different roles gonna be impacted. So, you know, uh what what roles are gonna be um still gonna be there, but they're gonna now work through AI. So a QA person is not gonna sit and do QA, they're gonna now orchestrate agents who can do QA at a much higher scale. So, what does that mean for how a QA department is developing? This is just an example. I don't know if that's actually the case, but that's just an example. Um same in my org, like we have Laura who's an amazing operations manager, and she, I mean, beforehand, I would say at one point she would probably have someone helping her. She's not gonna need that because she can work through AI emotions to just scale what she's already doing and improving it. So these things we actually used AI to and to you to what we know about AI today and how it's impacting the different kinds of roles. And we asked it, okay, so if we're gonna uh grow this much, we know that we're probably gonna, you know, specifically sell the XYZ more and this less, like put in some of those kind of expectations around the business outcomes and uh how the market is changed. And we just we used AI to then make an analysis on where what are the roles that we will need less of, what are the roles that we will need more of, what are the roles we don't have yet? How will teams develop in structure? So so that's what we've done. And I mean, AI only know as much as AI knows, so we don't know if that's actually the case, but we do know that we're probably gonna see. Um so before we had the triangle-shaped organization, we believe we'll have more of a and this is less role and more work. We should think more less roles and more work, because we are thinking that it's more of a diamond shape orc. Because AI is gonna make uh peop it's gonna enable people to work to simply have a bigger scope, but also to work um to to qualify their work. So what people what I'm able to do now, I can move quicker and I can do, I can make something better than what I was able to. Like if I was gonna do a training session, I can qualify that super easy with AI. I cannot do it's not I need to know something about it, but it just helps me so much. And that's for all roles. So it's not about this role will become 100% redundant. It's just gonna how you work and what you do will change slightly. And and so what we'll probably see, I think, is that we're gonna see um I think we're gonna see flatter organizations simply, and we're gonna see less need for admin roles. So the the lower part of the hierarchy of the admin roles, just people moving papers from one desk to the other, because that's less needed. And so and so that creates fear, like when I say that, uh, I'm sure. Uh and I I I just really have this, and and I just might be very like a little bit naive or a positive mindset, but I I just think that it'll just enable these people who were doing this before to now step up and do something better, right? Or ik bet not better, but like perhaps more um complicated, or they'll learn from it really, right? So so I don't see it as okay, so then we just cut something out someone out of the organization more, it's gonna transform so much, and we'll end up having flatter organizations because less people can do more at a more strategic level.

Speaker 1 30:35

Yeah, so actually more people can do more.

Speaker 30:38

Yeah, so it's just gonna expand.

Speaker 1 30:40

Yes, yeah, exactly. At the strategic level, yeah, right. With these uh tools and uh ways of working.

Speaker 30:46

And you can see it on our organization. Like again, if it was seven years ago, I was I would be saying to Lisa Jim, we're 200 now. If we want to do this, we need to be 600 people. Now I'm saying we can stay 200 people because we can actually do much more with what we already have. But we need to work in a different way. We need to work in a different way, but it's not it doesn't mean that we're gonna go out and and let people go, right? We're gonna upskill them to work in a new way where we can just do much more with the team we have now. Yes. Okay, got it.

Two Practical Moves For People Leaders

Speaker 1 31:15

So the advice you have for others on how to embrace that the future is already here and AI is already here, and yeah, and the world is changing, and we we can use it to our benefit, it sounds like. Um there's opportunity and change. Yes, even though it's scary. Yeah, yeah. So to sum it all up, is there something we can end with that will be a concrete maybe thing to do first step? They yeah.

Speaker 31:41

I would say if you're interviewing for H star roles or people in culture roles, make sure you set expectations. So the leadership team understands that what you can deliver in the terms they're providing, and understand with yourself do you want it? Like an interview is not you selling yourself, you need to really question is this leadership team gonna make me successful? Don't take it if you're in doubt. And the second thing is understand what's the people pain point that is mostly on mind for the leadership team and solve that. Because then you're gonna be a need to have and not a nice to have.

Speaker 1 32:20

Yeah. All right. That's a very concrete first step. Thank you so much, Nina. Thank you, Panel. It's been a pleasure with you. Thank you. You've been listening to the Work in Progress podcast on people and culture. If you enjoyed this episode, please feel free to share on social media. For more resources on people, culture, and working in a modern world, please visit get session.com and check out our articles, guides, webinars, and more. Thanks for listening.