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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 - Kyle Taylor
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INTRO: [00:00:00] Hi everyone, and welcome to Beyond the Paycheck, where we bring you candid conversations with CHROs and people leaders who are rethinking how compensation and benefits impact far 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.
This podcast is presented by Aura Finance, a psychology-based financial wellness employee benefit that combines coaching and financial management. Now, let's get started and jump in with our next guest
Kelsey Willock Jones: Welcome, Kyle Taylor, head of HR at Revature. Thanks so much for joining us this afternoon. We're so excited to have you. To kick us off, I'd love for you to share a little bit about your current role, your career and background, as well as where you're calling in from today.
Kyle Taylor: Sure. Yeah. Currently, I'm head of HR at Revature, as you mentioned. [00:01:00] Revature is a hire, train, deploy company which means we serve big companies looking to hire people in the technology industry. And we do that by hiring them up, training them ourselves, and then placing them with these clients.
So head of HR here is HR for our, what we call corporate folks like me and our trainers but also head of HR for our associates that go through our training and work with our clients. Career background really started as a business generalist and then did some management consulting for DHL as part of their internal management consultancy.
And through there, did a lot of different strategy projects, but was always drawn to the people projects and the HR projects that we do for our clients. And decided to move into HR and did that at DHL Express at their headquarters in Germany for a few years. Was global head of employee engagement there.
Learned a lot. They do a really great job there. And then moved back to the US about seven years ago, and that's when I joined Revature. Started looking after the employee experience for our associates, and that's slowly evolved into [00:02:00] the role today.
Kelsey Willock Jones: And I see a surfboard behind you. Do you get much into surfing in Texas?
Kyle Taylor: Yeah. So I'm here in Tampa, Florida right now.
That's where Revature the Revature office was, so I joined for that. Not a lot of waves here on the Gulf Coast side, but there's some every once in a while. But grew up in Hawaii, and so that's where my surfing background comes from.
Kelsey Willock Jones: Fantastic. Really excited to have you and excited to learn more about your current role as well as, prior experience. But before we get there, would love to learn a little bit more about your first job. So tell me a little bit about your first job and if you recall, what you spent your first paycheck on.
Kyle Taylor: Yes. I would say the first job-- two-part answer. The first job I think I was 10 years old and was delivering papers, delivering newspapers. And after about two weeks when I did not get a paycheck I asked my boss and then learned that she had basically subcontracted the work to me, a 10-year-old, and didn't really have any plans on how to pay me.
So that was the end of it. So truly beyond the paycheck [00:03:00] in that I did not get paid for my first job. Learned some life lessons though, about, making sure those arrangements are clear upfront. So first paycheck would've been I was a busboy at a diner when I was in high school.
And at that, I don't really know where I spent... Probably at that time would've been video game or clothes. But that was the first real paycheck.
Kelsey Willock Jones: And certainly an important lesson learned of always needing to advocate for yourself and have things in writing before committing to them is ~a,~ a lifelong lesson to be
Kyle Taylor: Yeah, absolutely
Kelsey Willock Jones: How do you think your money story has influenced how you think about showing up for your people and making decisions in terms of pay and benefits?
Kyle Taylor: I think that, I learned through that, through my own experience through managing people that, everybody has a different expectation when it comes to money and compensation and what it takes to be feel truly, valued or rewarded. At the same time from an HR perspective, leadership perspective, it's tricky because, everyone you [00:04:00] work with and have to align with, whether it's CEO or head of finance or thing, all feels ~they, ~they know how they get paid, they know how it works, so they all have different, opinions and insights, and they bring that to the discussion.
I don't consider myself a comp and bend, analyst or deep expert, but I would say more of a architect or comp and bend strategist. And what I've found is whether it's business strategy or comp and bend strategy, the most practical definition I like for strategy is just tradeoffs.
It's always a tradeoff. And a lot of times, whether it's you're dealing with individuals and their pay issues or trying to align with other leaders on, a comp and bend policy, it's that every decision comes with a tradeoff. And a lot of times we're making decisions without realizing what those tradeoffs are.
So my role has always been to, help make the tradeoffs known and make sure we're going into those, eyes open and aware of those tradeoffs we're making
Kelsey Willock Jones: I love that, and I think it's, it's hard to imagine how something like that can come at such a young [00:05:00] age, but it does. It happens early on in our lives, whether it's, ~m-~ making decisions about advocating for ourselves or beyond. But we're not always gonna check every single box, but what boxes are important to us is the most important thing. So my next question for you is a little bit about holistic wellbeing for employees. We're seeing a major trend where companies are focused on not just supporting people, from a financial perspective in terms of their paycheck, but really supporting the whole person, whether it's their physical health, their mental health, their ~m-~ financial health beyond their paycheck.
Can you tell me a little bit about whether it's an experience at your current company or a prior, of an initiative that you introduced that helped support the whole person and why you're proud of it?
Kyle Taylor: Yeah, I would say, there's a few I can think of. The company I'm at now is a bit smaller than, my times at DHL. So I also give one example there and then maybe I give ~the examp-~ the DHL example, maybe that's more applicable. But on the in our company [00:06:00] when it comes to supporting people, an initiative we did was our associates they train with us, they go to different clients, they have to relocate across the country.
And sometimes, the policies just don't work, or there's a loophole, or there's a crack that someone didn't intend ~to ~to put in there. And it's really tough because it's not a tradition-- They're not traditional employees where they have their manager here, at our company.
They're working for a client. We're barely in touch with them. Their client is their day-to-day manager. So when they get stuck, they don't really have anybody to advocate for them. So one thing I put into place was really a sort of employee, experience kind of escalation committee or emergency committee when something ~w-~ really went wrong, maybe a, a work location changed unexpectedly, and it really went against the policy, bringing people together, getting a small investment to really support that, that individual employee.
And so that's something that, really helped. And it's not always easy because we're always trying to battle, in HR setting precedents for people. But that was something that [00:07:00] really helped a ~f-~ few people over the years. It made a real big impact for them.
Kelsey Willock Jones: And where do you think companies are falling short right now in terms of supporting the whole person?
Kyle Taylor: So that's a great one. I think when I think of where companies are falling short, I think That leads me to the, my DHL experience and what they do well there, and a lot of companies don't do, is that when it comes to supporting the whole person, the part sometimes we work around or try to resolve around is ensuring that the person is, first of all, deeply understands what they're a part of, what the mission and more importantly, the strategy of the company is, why it's so important, and that they have their immediate manager, and whether that's a supervisor for frontline employees or, a senior vice president managing other VPs, really ensuring that they're engaged, they're motivated they're giving good feedback they're, truly being supportive managers.
And so what DHL did there, [00:08:00] which was really great, couple, two things. One they made sure that they they put their money where their mouth is. Every employee's, has a lot of employee satisfaction scores and surveys. At DHL, they made every supervisor or manager or leader that had people report to them, part of their in- their incentive plan was based on the scores they got from their employees.
So there employee surveys weren't just this something you do and then no one sees the results. They were taken very seriously. Leaders were very competitive about it and, that's the way to really get to the heart of taking care of your employees making them really feel valued and engaged.
The other part they did in terms of just, measuring it was really having a a culture program that broke down the customer experience for employees. That's something that is really, you know, a win-win but really specific to their business model. So in other words at DHL, their value [00:09:00] proposition to customers, one of them is that we're not gonna lose your package.
It's a premium, but we will not lose your package. Now, it's easy to promise but hard to do when you have 100,000 frontline employees, working in warehouses and driving trucks, and how are you gonna get these people to really treat every package like it's special and like it matters?
You could pay people 10% more, right? Which would cost millions of dollars, but is that really gonna move the needle? Maybe not. But they really invested in a culture program to get every employee to understand, the point of view, why that package is so important for them, how that could be, affecting things explaining that's really what we stand for and making that just part of the day-to-day process of really treating every package, like it's the most important thing to the customer.
And so that really, again, was a win-win. Drove better business results, but also people felt more engaged and like they were doing something important rather than just, sorting boxes.
Kelsey Willock Jones: What I love about that is, coming back to the beginning of what you were saying was, it's all about getting people [00:10:00] to understand the strategic vision of the company overall and what the company's goals are and where you align within them, and then finding different ways in which to support folks on that trajectory.
I think there's so many companies that, siloed roles and responsibilities where that individual might not understand how does that roll up into, the bottom line of the business, or how does that, impact the big, hairy, audacious goals that the company has. No matter what the job you have, whether it's the office job making high strategic decisions or the person, delivering the package, we all understand why each supporting function is important.
So really love that from the perspective of thinking actually about holistic health, because sometimes we forget motivation is also part of health. Do you feel good about showing up for your job? Are you excited to, and do you know why you're doing it?
Kyle Taylor: Absolutely. I think that's, a lot of times, in my view, what I've learned there is [00:11:00] really the core you have to start with. Employee engagement rates are falling, across the country, across organizations. And so often I think, it's the companies that haven't taken the time or haven't thought through themselves, how do we translate that mission down to employees at a level they can understand?
Then, you're just showing up to, to just do things rather than, being part of something bigger and I think that goes a long way
Kelsey Willock Jones: So I wanna dig a little bit deeper on the topic of engagement. When we think about success of programs, engagement might be one of those metrics that we track. That being said, it's not as simple as, engagement goes up, therefore there's a cost savings of $3. So how do you think about making the internal case for investment in a program, in an initiative when the spreadsheet might not obviously support it?
Kyle Taylor: Yeah, it's tough. It's in a perfect world, ~you'd, ~you'd run some A/B tests and you'd show, hey, this group of employees that have this engagement program, you know, had, had better, metrics or, produced [00:12:00] more per hour. Something very black and white, but it's really not that, that simple usually.
I think you have to try to draw numbers where feasible and connect the dots on your own with some assumptions and then hopefully make the case usually to give it a shot, without, black and white proof. So again, back to the, DHL example, the the story we would make would be service errors or, kind of quality or customer satisfaction scores.
And showing that, tying that to, I think, ~practical~ practical examples, again, fortunate DHL of looking across different maybe business units or countries 'cause DHL operates in so many countries on yeah, engagement scores and customer satisfaction or, and error rates or service issues.
Fortunately ~there,~ there's enough big enough sample size, you can draw some, correlations. And I think sometimes you have to rely on a little bit of just intuition which is, countries or departments or areas where, employee satisfaction scores are higher on specific questions.
And there I'm a big proponent in [00:13:00] the net promoter score. I think a question of how motivated are you, how engaged are you is really hard to answer. Are you happy at work? It could depend, if I came out of a tough meeting, maybe not so happy, so it can vary. But asking someone, if you'd recommend your place to work I think really cuts through it.
And I do think, you gotta rely on a little bit of intuitiveness that, hey, if people are happy to work there, if they're willing to recommend it as a place to work they're gonna take a little bit more pride in their work. And hopefully you can find some data to translate that to some KPIs.
Kelsey Willock Jones: So to recap what you're saying is, it's follow your intuition over a reasonable argument and eventually tie it back to the metrics that the organization's tracking, such as making sure deliveries are made on time, et cetera.
Kyle Taylor: Exactly. And if you might not be able to back prove it, but you can set up assumptions, and I think it's important to set out provable assumptions. So to not say we want a never-ending supply, budget to, to work on this, but hey, let's give this a shot. Yeah let's, plant a [00:14:00] flag and say, "Hey, if it doesn't improve this or if it doesn't improve retention or improve this rate, then we'll pivot.
But let's give it a chance and let's try." And I think always staking the claim first really buys a lot of support
Kelsey Willock Jones: Can you tell me about an experiment that you've run, whether it is sponsoring a new program or initiative, a benefit strategy, et cetera, that didn't go the way you expected and what you learned from it?
Kyle Taylor: Yeah, I would say there's a few, I'm gonna call them mini experiments. And then I can talk about where it's really just, I would say the we've adjusted some sort of incentive programs or, pay philosophy. And there I would say there's a couple and they're similar and it's really called the pendulum effect.
So annual incentive plan, especially for, more senior leaders. I've been in an organization where you start out very simple. Yeah, let's tie it to company, how the company's doing. And let's, have a little bit of, maybe 50% of the bonus should be tied to individual performance, and some, some KPIs whether [00:15:00] that's Sales targets or, operational KPIs and it starts out and then on, say, on the company metrics side, slowly you start simple, maybe with company revenue to incentivize, growth.
And slowly the business needs evolve or leadership changes and other, ideas come in and someone points out hold on. Revenue's great, but what's revenue without, profit? So maybe we should look at gross profit, as an incentive." And in the next year that shifts for the company incentive.
And a while goes by and I think that's good, that's not really factoring our fixed costs, so let's really focus on the contribution we get end of the day. And slowly that evolves and that sounds good, but now you're incentivizing department heads to look at the fixed costs of the company and look at, how many people the other department's hiring and do we need all those costs.
And that'll flip back to the pendulum to let's keep it simple and go back to, focusing on revenue and not having everybody too nosy about costs, right? On the flip side, for the 50% that an employee can control, starts out very simple. Let's have one or two KPIs, make them real [00:16:00] sizable.
The most important maybe like you said, ~the,~ the big audacious goals. And a year goes by and the next year it's like yeah, there's these other important projects, so let's have four goals, max. And then, over the years, eventually someone has seven goals and each one of them, is anywhere from 3% to 6% of their bonus.
And now it's really not moving the needle at all because, what's really the goal if there's all these goals? And so then you slowly then have to drift back and I think what I would like to or what I would try to help guide is, again, these trade-offs that we're making each time in the past look like sometimes we've gone in blindly and not realizing we're making a trade-off consciously or not.
And if we can go in there eyes open, know what's been tried before, without someone like me from HR coming and just simply saying, "We tried that before, it didn't work." But calling out the trade-offs can help make better decisions. And hopefully what I'm trying to do is slowly reduce that pendulum effect where employees are going, "All right, we don't know.
The bonus [00:17:00] plan's gonna change every year so we're just gonna, kind of tune out a bit."
Kelsey Willock Jones: Simplicity seems to always be king in the world of motivation, company goals, but we've all found ourselves in the world in which we create one too many OKRs. It comes from a good place of intention, but it never ends up getting used effectively
Kyle Taylor: Yeah. And back to, compensation being, personal~ beyond,~ beyond anything I've seen at work is that, people just take for granted I think when it's a policy or something, it's, yeah, it's someone else's money. It's they're thinking big picture. But, when an employee is seeing their bonus change year to year and the goals change and even if it's, evolving slowly, it still feels like ~their, ~their compensation is not being really maybe treated well or thought through or having enough foresight.
And that's where that pendulum can really, hurt morale.
Kelsey Willock Jones: On the topic of compensation, I wanna talk a little bit about financial health and wellbeing. How important is financial wellbeing for employees to the company?
Kyle Taylor: Yeah, it's extremely important. And I [00:18:00] think, there's a couple different filters though, because it's such a broad topic. I think there's on the one hand it's really, can be individual level or at a population level or company level or department level. I think that's really important to distinguish.
So for example, at our company on an individual level we do have for, one-off emergencies, pay advances. It's probably pretty standard, but, taking out a loan from a 401plan policies. As I said, we have this escalation committee whenever an employee is really in a tough spot where, we try to hold precedence, but we do make exceptions where needed.
And then there's overall the, at the population level. For us, because we're in the business of hiring people and placing them with clients our pay rates are always something that we scrutinize a lot to make sure we're, able to hire effectively wh- while also working with, very, thin margins on what we are, the revenue we're getting from our clients.
And so there we look a lot, we actually use those individual programs and offers as a [00:19:00] metric. So are certain employees tapping into pay advances more than others? How are, overall company-wide, are we seeing more of those requests go up? And so those are really important things for, financial wellbeing and it's a never-ending battle, but I think, separating individual versus company-wide or department-wide is usually a first step because, anecdotes can really all of a sudden color someone's whole perception of of how things are going.
Kelsey Willock Jones: You need to be really specific about those anecdotes so you can be focused on targeting, I imagine
Kyle Taylor: Yeah. And ~it's, ~it's natural, I think human bias, it's emotional. If there's a really emotional, painful story from an employee, it's hard to not feel like, "Oh my gosh, we have to rethink everything. We have to change everything," right? The flip side, sometimes, data comes in, anecdotes come in where some decision maker feels like, "Okay, maybe, we're, we've invested enough," or, "We're over-investing," or, "We need to, cut back."
And so yeah, especially the emotional anecdotes can be very powerful in driving narratives.
Kelsey Willock Jones: I think that makes a ton of sense. We're seeing a lot [00:20:00] of transitions happen in the world of HR, whether it's, this kind of massive influx of new technology new regulations massive changes happening in healthcare, including the cost of it. How are you staying current on what's working in the industry and new technologies?
Are there specific conferences peer networks you've been a part of, interesting newsletters that you've been interested in reading that you'd be willing to share?
Kyle Taylor: Yeah. I'll talk about our company, then me personally. So for our company, the good news is we're plugged into the latest trends because our clients are hiring technology talent from us, and so we get an early glimpse of what they're looking for and where the market is.
And usually our clients are big Fortune 500 companies so they're not, a brand-new startup that's looking for the most cutting-edge technology. But by the time a Fortune 500 company is saying, "Hey, we want these specific AI skills in our people, this is what we expect," that's when we know it's starting to become very mainstream.
So [00:21:00] that really helps. And then what do we do then internally? I think, we're still-- I'm spending a lot of time on this, I'm really fascinated by it, is trying to figure out how to best get people to leverage technology, especially AI. Right now we've found that our latest approach is starting out, first of all, giving everybody our sort of I wouldn't call it an AI policy, AI stance, maybe AI manifesto on what it means for us, how to think about it and really letting people know what is allowed and not allowed, where to test things out, where to play around, where to be careful.
Next is that it's not a technology where everyone's gonna come up at the same level. So once everybody understands our policy on it, we're really trying to really encourage experimentation and using that to help people Use it, for example, building an app on their own to help solve a, automate part of their work or their department's work, and using them then as lighthouse examples to, share with others.
And as far as staying up to date, [00:22:00] I'm, again, personally just fascinated by it. I was I've been using it now a while. Built my own app for the first time ever this year to, to automate a workflow in my work. And there, it, it is quite overwhelming. I would say two really most valuable sources.
One are boutique AI consultancies. I think they really are great at Positioning and guiding for the mid-size businesses, and that's kind of the sweet spot between the AI native startups, which are probably light years ahead of everybody else, and the giant corporations that, takes years to roll out initiatives layer by layer through the organization.
And also there's a lot of great thought leaders out there on X. It's I think ~it's a,~ it's an under, appreciated platform where you can really tap into, some of the most advanced folks that talk about it, but talking at a very plain, no-nonsense, really almost sharing tips with each other sort of atmosphere.
LinkedIn, there's a lot on there as well, but I find so much of [00:23:00] it is promotion as opposed to sharing free tips, sharing, free ideas that So that's really what I find effective.
Kelsey Willock Jones: And last question for you. What is a shift in compensation, benefits, HR overall that you see coming that most HR leaders are not ready for?
Kyle Taylor: So yeah, there's a lot of shifts. Some are talked about a lot. So I think, some common ones I would not comment on are yeah, au- example, you mentioned automating things, automating HR processes with AI. Shifts not ready for, I think one is that just every day thinking about the communications you put out or the things you put out and just, always assuming the person's gonna take this, they're gonna post it in AI, and they're gonna get their answer.
So anything you put out, whether it's a job ad, you're making sure you are first testing things. That's a quick one. I think the bigger thing though is how to identify and retain folks that are able to leverage AI to [00:24:00] be twice as productive three times productive. It's not that everyone is instantly gonna, be able to do that, but I think now it's come where everyone knows of someone who has been able to do something pretty impressive at work or, add a lot of value.
At the same time, there's also a lot of people out there, employees that have done interesting things that might be exciting and flashy that haven't really added much value to the organization. So I think, for a lot of leaders and CEOs and department heads, it's, "Hey, how do we make sure we retain that person who's a whiz with AI and really using it really and have good ideas and can really help guide us without, overpaying or overly incentivizing the folks that are doing a lot of fun, interesting experiments but haven't actually been able to prove the ROI?"
Kelsey Willock Jones: So Kyle, you've been such a wealth of knowledge and so many tidbits of incredible advice knowledge. I'm really curious about your AI app, by the way. But thank you so much for joining us this [00:25:00] afternoon. I could certainly keep talking to you for much, much longer, but I wanna give you your time back.
So thank you again for joining us. Where can our listeners connect with you beyond this conversation?
Kyle Taylor: Yeah, I'm happy to connect on LinkedIn. So they can search for me, Kyle Taylor common name, but filter by Revature. I live in Tampa area, and so hopefully I'll be easy to find.
Kelsey Willock Jones: Amazing. I hope you enjoy the rest of your afternoon, and thank you so much again
Kyle Taylor: All right. Thank you