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Beyond the Paycheck brings you candid conversations with CHROs and top people leaders who are rethinking how compensation and benefits impact more than just employee bank accounts. From the first paycheck to financial wellness programs, we explore how money shapes identity, equity, purpose, and power at work, and how forward-thinking companies are using pay and perks to transform lives, not just attract talent.
This podcast is sponsored by Aura Finance, the financial wellness platform designed to help employees feel confident, secure, and in control of their money.
See more at aurafinance.io
Beyond the Paycheck - Jay Hart
Kelsey Willock: Welcome Jay Hart, Global Head of Talent Management at Varex Imaging. We're so excited to have you today. To kick us off, I'd love for you to share a little bit about yourself, your current role and background, and where you're calling in from.
Jay Hart: You bet, I'm really happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me. I am the global head of talent management for Varex Imaging. We are a company that you've used, but you may not know it. We produce the components that go inside X-ray machines and CT scanners, and we are one of the largest in the world at what we do. So chances are if you've ever had an X-ray, the guts of the machine came from us. And my team is responsible for talent management across the globe.
Jay Hart: I've been at Varex for about three years, but I came primarily from the banking world, where I'd spent almost 20 years working in various HR leadership positions, kind of rotating around the HR globe. Before that, I spent a decade as an organizational development consultant. So I have a lot of the HR world in my background, and I'm excited to talk a little bit about how I see the total rewards experience fitting into what we do.
Kelsey Willock: Awesome. Well, really excited to dig deeper. Tell me a little bit more about the workforce itself, the kind of roles, how many people work at the company, where they're based.
Jay Hart: Yeah, we've got about 2,500 employees around the globe. We've got large operations in China, in India, in the Philippines, throughout Europe, throughout North America. And I would say that maybe sixty percent of our workforce are production operators, so factory workers who are producing the parts that go into the machines. We have a lot of engineers and physicists, and then of course the support roles like HR and finance that help make it all possible.
Kelsey Willock: And really interesting background. How did you find yourself going from more of the financial services world into the world of, you know, being the bones of the machines that help build healthcare systems?
Jay Hart: Yeah, one of the things I like to say is that human resources should be industry agnostic, right? Because people are people, regardless of where they sit and what they do. And I think it's important that we find ways to help our employees have the best possible experiences. So I came to a point where, as much as I loved banking, I knew that there were other things that I could learn. And when an opportunity presented itself to experience manufacturing, which I had never done, to experience medical devices, which I had never done.
Jay Hart: It was kind of an exciting way to say, okay, I should learn something new and test my hypothesis and see if we really do get to move HR processes and programs around in different industries. And what I have found is that that is the case. People are people. Systems that help people are the same regardless of where they are. They may look a little bit different, but at the end of the day, the issues and challenges that our employees are facing are not that different wherever we are around the globe and whatever industry we're in.
Kelsey Willock: So let's talk a little bit about people. Right now we're seeing a major trend where companies are investing significantly in supporting the whole person, whether it has to do with their physical health, their mental health, their financial health, and beyond. Can you tell me about some of the programs that you're particularly excited about or proud of that you've introduced at the company or even past employers, and maybe elaborate what brought those programs into the company and what got you so excited about them?
Jay Hart: Yeah, look, I think we have this challenge where we frequently look at pieces of the HR world in a very fragmented way, right? We say, okay, talent acquisition owns acquiring and attracting and selecting talent. And learning and development is responsible to train our talent. And the HR business partners own the relationship with managers. And total rewards has benefits that worries about wellness, and compensation that worries about pay.
Jay Hart: That's all true, right? But if you think about it, the employees don't experience it that way. Our employees experience one company employment, one employment deal. And so we've fallen short, I think a lot of times, when we divide ourselves within the HR world and the way we present ourselves to our employees. And what that creates is a lot of fragmented programs. We're going to run out an initiative that's going to focus on pay transparency because it's really important and because laws are telling us we have to do that. We're going to run out another initiative that's going to improve the way we do web-based training so that employees have more flexibility to develop on their own pace. Those are all really important. What we really need to be better at is saying, how do we deliver all of that together? What is the employee experience supposed to be like? I like to say that every employee should be able to say, because I work at this company, I can count on blank. And however we fill in the blank, we all need to be able to deliver that together as a unified front.
Jay Hart: And so some of the most exciting things that I've been a part of are when we have pulled multiple things together to say, okay, we're gonna take a compensation piece and we're gonna take a learning piece and we're gonna take something around manager development, and we're gonna bring them all to one program or one process to help our employees have a better experience. I think that's really the key: when we get past the silos of HR and say, we're here to help the company succeed, which means we have to help the employees succeed. And we're gonna do that in a unified front.
Kelsey Willock: And you have a particular challenge, given it sounds like you have a large part of the workforce which is in the manufacturing world, as well as folks that might have these more corporate desk jobs. How do you find that continuity? Specifically given maybe some of the folks that you work with aren't sitting at a desk. They're not being communicated with in the traditional email way. I imagine there's different needs across different types of the workforce that you're serving.
Jay Hart: There absolutely are. I think the key is to listen, right? We have to be better at listening to our employees. There are certainly things like exit surveys, and there are things like, we may have a process, we built feedback loops and then we have annual surveys. And maybe we're doing quarterly or regular pulse surveys. Listening is important, but just hearing the feedback only gets us so far. We have to understand it and then do something with it. I like to say that to my team all the time. It's not enough to hear. We can't just say you spoke, we listened.
Jay Hart: We have to say you spoke, we listened, and we did something with that. When we do that, we earn trust from our employees. The more trust we earn, the more willing they're going to be to tell us more. The more they tell us, the more we're able to do the things that will help them succeed. Now, one of the things I like to say is that the head of HR of the company is the steward of the culture. The ownership, the CEO, the board of directors, they may determine what they want the culture to look like, but at the end of the day, whoever's accountable for your people's systems and processes are the stewards to ensure that that culture is what you experience. And you can't do that if you're not listening, if you're not paying attention and closely connected. So you've got to build feedback loops in, you've got to have processes and systems in place, and you've got to train your people to put their ear to the ground and hear it.
Jay Hart: So for us, that means training our managers to know the signs of distress in the workforce or the signs of frustration, but also training our managers to have the right conversations. It means training our HR team to know how to help the managers and help the employees. It means creating a culture where there's the right degree of psychological safety so that employees can have their voice heard. It means demonstrating that we're acting upon the feedback that we're getting. If we can do that, then we can find ways to address the individual employees' needs, instead of just saying, here's what we have for you and hope that it works.
Kelsey Willock: So really curious about some of those actions. Can you tell me about a benefit or a policy that you put into place that you saw remove a barrier that was maybe getting in the way of people doing their best work, or something that came out of one of these research and survey assessments that you conducted?
Jay Hart: Yeah. So a couple of years ago we ran into this issue. We had a location that was not at a headquarter site, and it was a call center, contact center location, and we had high turnover as most call centers do. And we were losing a lot of people that we had identified as high potential or top talent, and we were trying to figure out why. And so we went and did some analysis. And the initial response was, we need to pay more aggressively in the marketplace. And so we brought in the compensation team and they started looking at that.
Jay Hart: The more we listened, the more we discovered that our employees were not telling us that they were leaving for more pay. They were leaving for a different employment experience. As we started digging into that, one of the things that we learned is that we had a lot of employees who were very talented who didn't start their careers wanting to work at a call center. A lot of them worked at a call center because they wanted to stay in their hometown, and there were a lot of call centers in their hometown, so that was the available jobs. A lot of them had degrees in finance and accounting and marketing and HR, and they weren't using those degrees. They didn't see their careers progressing. They liked what they were doing. They liked the people they were with. They weren't leaving because we weren't paying them fair. They were leaving because they didn't see their careers moving forward. And that was a very different problem to solve.
Jay Hart: So what we did is we pulled together teams to say, how can we address this? And we created a program, a development program, where a small cohort was selected and put through a nine-month training program where they would receive mentorship from business leaders outside of their business unit. They would receive formal training and education on things that related to the business, but also connected to their career goals and aspirations and primarily the education that they had received. They received spot awards and bonuses for the extra effort that they were putting into that. We had to have managers that were willing to take them off the line for a period of time every week to do this.
Jay Hart: At the end, one of the things that we determined was a lot of these employees want to relocate. They're willing to relocate. So we pulled in our benefits team that owned relocation to say, okay, they finished this nine-month program, is there a way we can move them to a headquarter location where they can advance their careers? Some were not looking for that, but maybe we could enroll them in a management development program because they had better business acumen at this point. They were better prepared for that. We really kind of said, I don't care who in HR owns it, we have to provide a solution to what the employees are telling us.
Jay Hart: What we found was not only did those employees stay, we didn't lose any of those employees who were enrolled, but we had employees lining up saying, how can I be involved in the next cohort? I want to be a part of this too. We had an employee that said, I just turned down an offer to go literally across the street to another call center with another company, because they don't do anything like this. I think it's a matter of saying, how do we address their actual needs by pulling all of the levers that we can pull within the human resource function, so that our employees recognize that we mean what we say when we say we care about them.
Kelsey Willock: How do you think about making the case for programs and initiatives? And the one that you mentioned is, to me, pretty bottom line oriented. It keeps people, you retain people, that can be quite numeric. But how do you make the case for certain initiatives when the spreadsheet doesn't so obviously support them?
Jay Hart: I know this is tough. I don't think there's a single formula that I'm comfortable with, or that I know, that you could say for every dollar that we put into these employees, we will get X percent return. And that's part of the problem, because businesses are driven through spreadsheets. And if you can't demonstrate that clear ROI, it's really hard to get the support that you need. So you have to start looking for patterns. You have to say, okay, what are the other things that indicate that we're making progress?
Jay Hart: I worked for a company where the CEO used to say all the time, if we take care of our employees, our employees will take care of our products. And if they take care of our products, the products will take care of our customers. And then our customers will take care of the business. So we have to start with taking care of our employees. So what do you look for? You look for things like: are your engagement scores increasing? Is your regrettable turnover decreasing? Are you seeing internal mobility? Are you seeing higher levels of employee referrals for jobs? You start to see these sorts of things that you can measure, and you start to put a pattern together and say, okay, our employee experience is telling us that we are doing right, or our employee experience is telling us that there's some areas where we're falling short. Then we can address those.
Jay Hart: I think the second piece though, Kelsey, is you really do have to lean into your managers and say, okay, managers, how are your employees experiencing the company? What are they telling you? I believe that the manager is the longest lever in the HR toolbox. You get the most lift by helping your managers, because rarely does an employee come into the HR office and say, I've got a problem, or I'm stressed. If it gets to that point, sometimes you're well past the point of being able to help. So you do the best you can, but the managers can see those signs early.
Jay Hart: And so when you're building the case, I think you have to have a combination of what are the things we can measure, the quantitative things, and we look for a pattern. What are the qualitative things that we can't necessarily measure, but that our managers are helping us understand, that tell us what the employees are experiencing and what the employees need? Then we can design programs around that. My experience has been good leaders recognize that they can't do what they want to do without their people. And therefore, even if you can't put a dollar amount on it, you can measure the things that matter for your employees.
Kelsey Willock: Can you tell me a little bit about a benefits experiment, or even an initiative experiment, that you tried that didn't go the way you expected, and what you learned from it?
Jay Hart: Yeah. Here's the thing, we have to be willing to take risks. If we're going to transform the workforce, if we're going to change and drive for new results, we have to take risks. And risks mean sometimes we fail. Sometimes it doesn't work out the way we hope it would. We had a situation where we had a team of data scientists and they were very expensive. And they knew that they were very expensive, and they knew that they were highly in demand.
Jay Hart: And every couple of weeks they were coming to us. One or two were coming and asking for more money and more flexibility and more freedom. And they felt like they had all the leverage. And we kind of did some analysis, sat down with our compensation partners, and we put together a program where we were gonna do some pretty aggressive market adjustments. And with those market adjustments, we were gonna tie some pretty significant retention incentives to that. We'll give you a lot more money, but we're gonna need you here for three years. And here's what we're going to do to incentivize that for three years. And it cost a lot of money to do this. And we were ready to go.
Jay Hart: And what we found is that the employees that were going to leave left anyway. They left because the companies that wanted them were more than willing to pay out the retention amounts. They were more than willing to give them more money. And so we were constantly chasing this moving target. What we started to realize is, for a lot of those employees, it wasn't just the money that they were looking after. They wanted more opportunity. They wanted a structure where they could move to the next level of their careers. Some of them wanted support to go back and seek PhDs. Some of them wanted to have flexibility because they were in a very time-intensive role within the company.
Jay Hart: We thought we had the solution. A bunch of people said we're not getting paid enough, so let's figure out how to pay them more. And the market told us that we probably did need to increase our pay, but that's not why they were leaving ultimately. They were leaving because they weren't getting the development that they wanted. They weren't getting the flexibility that they felt they needed to do their jobs. They felt a tremendous amount of regulatory pressure and they didn't see air cover coming from leadership. Those were all things that we could have addressed. We could have saved a lot of money. We could have saved a lot of time, and we probably would have had different results.
Kelsey Willock: But you tried, and that's what matters most.
Jay Hart: We learned. We learned.
Kelsey Willock: So there's a whole lot of change happening in the world of HR right now, whether it's innovation related, regulatory related, you name it. How are you staying current on what's working? New innovations going on? Are there particular conferences that you've enjoyed, peer networks you've been a part of, or even startup ecosystems that you'd recommend?
Jay Hart: Yeah, so I think there's a lot that we can do. And I think a lot of people in HR need to be better at looking externally for information. Certainly conferences can help. Going to conferences, and they don't have to be big industry conferences that you pay a lot of money for. There are plenty in most major markets, there's plenty of opportunities to gather with people who do similar work and start to learn from them. And sometimes there isn't, and sometimes you have to create it. I have some colleagues at a former stop in my career who didn't see an industry gathering that worked for them, so they created one. And now they have a hundred or so people that meet every other month and have discussions about what's happening.
Jay Hart: I think being willing to look externally is a really, really critical skill for any HR leader, regardless of the industry. Certainly that matters. I do think the conferences do matter. If you go to a conference, though, for the last couple of years, it's all the same couple of topics. We're all talking about what's happening with AI and how far behind the game we are and how worried we are and what we're doing for it. And so you learn, and a lot of what you learn is that as much stress as I'm feeling, everyone else is feeling the same stress. And that's good. You can read books and you can listen to podcasts, but I think the key is to just say, I'm gonna dedicate time on a regular basis to learn so that I can be better at my craft.
Kelsey Willock: The pursuit of knowledge is so important. And even in my conversations, I learn so much each time I interview another person like yourself. So it's just great advice to always stay hungry. And a lot of that information comes outside the conversations at our own companies. It's being in the room of other people and other peers and industry leaders. So my last question for you, Jay, is, as we had been talking about, there's a lot of change coming. What is one of the big changes that you see coming that most HR leaders are not ready for?
Jay Hart: Yeah, I think the future of work is increasingly about personalization. I think the challenge with that is that most of our HR systems are built around standardization. For years, we have come out and said, what's the most scalable solution? And then we say to our employees, this is what we're doing. And I think our benefit packages are a perfect example of that. But our employees have different needs. And I think we need to be better prepared to adapt to the changing needs of our employees, to give them what they want.
Jay Hart: Employees are telling us that they want greater flexibility and greater choice. We know the needs of a 24-year-old who's early in their career are very different from an employee who may be wanting better parental leave options, which might be very different from someone who is concerned about the weight and burden of student debt from 15 years ago, which might be very different from someone who sees their retirement on the horizon and is not quite comfortable with where they are. Those needs are very different.
Jay Hart: And I think we need to be careful to not just say, here's the one or two or three sizes that are supposed to fit everyone. The challenge with that is, how do we present that flexibility? How do we present personalization in a way that does not create this massive administrative chaos and burden? I think technology can help us, and we need to lean into that. But I think we need to get more comfortable saying, this is our employment promise to you. These are the sorts of things that we believe in, and here's the options that you can choose. Because I think not just in terms of our benefits, but in terms of where we work, how we get our work done, what our deadlines look like, the way our teams are structured, I think our employees are telling us that they want a greater degree of choice and flexibility, and we need to find a way to provide that.
Kelsey Willock: I couldn't agree more, especially as we enter this world of advanced custom and personalization in the consumer markets. It's completely understandable that the same is being demanded of our employers. So thank you so much, Jay, for the conversation, for your candor. I've learned so much from you and I certainly would love to keep talking to you, but I will be mindful of your time as promised. Where would our listeners be able to connect with you beyond this conversation?
Jay Hart: Yeah, I mean, like most, I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. And so it's just jaydhart on LinkedIn. You can look for me. I'm happy to connect and continue the conversations going any way that I can help or be helped. I'm always open to it.
Kelsey Willock: Awesome. Well, thank you so much again, Jay. I hope you have a great rest of your afternoon, and thanks again for joining us.
Jay Hart: Thanks so much.