Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
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 - Nicholas Lassalle
===
Kelsey Willcok Jones HOST: [00:00:00] Welcome, Nicholas Lassalle, Director of Total Rewards at QinetiQ. We're super excited to have you this Tuesday. Before I start peppering you with questions, I'd love for you to share with our audience a little bit about your career and background, your current role today, and where you're calling in from.
Nicholas Lassalle GUEST: Yep. So my name is Nicholas Lassalle total rewards director at QinetiQ. That's my current role. For most of my career has been like the HR generalist or more HR different type of functions across the board. Like that's been most of my experience, and basically it's been centered around government contracting specifically for almost the majority of my HR career.
And a lot of my focus, I think o- over time, has been centered around compliance, like benefits, compensation, HRIS. So that's where my experience has been honed in for the last couple years, and that's why I've been in total rewards specifically.
Kelsey Willcok Jones HOST: Awesome. And where are you joining us from?
Nicholas Lassalle GUEST: I'm in Lorton, Virginia
Kelsey Willcok Jones HOST: [00:01:00] Fabulous. Can you tell me a little bit about your workforce at QinetiQ? Is it a international workforce, mainly domestic? How many folks do you have? And tell me a little bit about the population.
Nicholas Lassalle GUEST: Yeah primarily domestic. We have employees that are at different customer sites, and then we have two main office locations in Massachusetts and in Lorton, Virginia. And we also have some spattering of Massachusetts sites as well, but we have basically two main sites in Massachusetts and in Lorton.
Kelsey Willcok Jones HOST: Awesome. So I have lots of questions to follow up on, especially around your current role today and the landscape, which, certainly is ever-changing, even from a compliance perspective. There, there's so many new things that are happening in the world of HR, but before we get there, I'd love to learn a little bit more about you personally. So tell me a little bit about your first job and if you recall, what you spent your first paycheck on.
Nicholas Lassalle GUEST: Yeah, so my first job was actually at a pet kennel. I was living in Columbia, Maryland at the [00:02:00] time, and I wanted to get a job during the summer in high school. So I was just applying to random positions, and I was like, "Oh, let me try this pet kennel that's semi-close to my home." And yeah, basically that's the main majority of the job is cleaning out the cages and walking the dogs out.
So that was the majority of the job. It's a very dirty job, right? As you can imagine. Yeah. And, getting paid minimum wage. At that point, I think it was like 5.50 an hour. And yeah, I was there for, I think, two summers. And, eventually graduated from high school after that.
But first paycheck, I would say that I probably spent it on getting, going out to eat and then getting gas for my car. That's the only thing I could think of initially, looking back at that period of time, but that was, like, such a long time ago. What, close to 30 years, so very long time,
Kelsey Willcok Jones HOST: and how do you think your money story and [00:03:00] even your first job has influenced how you think about paying and supporting the people you lead?
Nicholas Lassalle GUEST: Yeah, I think it's definitely like eye-opening, right? Like when you get your first paycheck and you look at, look backwards and be like, "Wow, I'm actually earning income and this is like how I could support, myself at that point in time." And then looking on how it impacts our employees across the board.
It's a huge impact, right? Based on our employees within the organization and, the constructs that fall within the total awards realm, right? Based on compensation, based on our benefits, and even based on compliance as well, just to make sure that the company is safe
Kelsey Willcok Jones HOST: Companies are doing a lot more today, I would say, to support the whole person, whether it's with mental, physical, financial, you name it. Can you share a little bit about what you're specifically doing today at QinetiQ to support the whole person and where you see companies are falling short?
Nicholas Lassalle GUEST: Yeah. I think it's looking beyond, compensation and benefits and [00:04:00] supplying a complete employee experience across the board, just like we're going through salary planning cycle right now. One of the things initiated from our side is launching the SAP compensation module to support two bonuses in our annual salary review process.
In- insurance across the board from a timeline perspective, because I think from years past, it wasn't communicated properly or managed appropriately, like where there's like kind of a standard cadence, like timelines that we can actually adhere to and make an automation, right? Like before it was through spreadsheets but maybe a lost communication based on it and not being, communicated throughout the whole entire process.
And I think that's something that we've really changed the landscape on, and creating the automation across the board, it just makes it easier for our side from the administration piece, right? Like, where we don't have to do all these efforts to do mail merges or merging spreadsheets. And I think we've [00:05:00] heard a lot of great feedback from managers and the ELT based on this process specifically that, we've basically implemented in a short amount of time.
I think we've basically launched the system in eight weeks, which is a lot, right? Like I'm new to the organization. I started in January, but basically launching this whole effort in eight weeks, to me it's tremendous, right? Like from a capability standpoint and timing perspective and to launch, trainings based on the whole process and communications tailored around it.
I think it just makes it better from an employee experience standpoint, like making automation and other people that are involved, like finance and payroll, simplifying the process across the board. So again, that we can meet all these timelines and make sure people get paid on the timelines that we constructed.
So I think that's something we just did recently, again, to make sure that the complete employee experience is there, right? To make [00:06:00] sure that employees are well taken care of including answering all their questions. Like we even did s- sessions where it was like an open-ended session where people could ask questions and answers and then even ask, "Hey, you can work with us directly," like from the ELT perspective.
Like we had calls with each ELT member directly to make sure that they were well taken care of as well
Kelsey Willcok Jones HOST: Yeah, it's-- communications is so huge. We think that in today's day and age, just sending out one notice to someone isn't gonna land. We know it takes so many more touch points, but also, multiple touch points takes a lot of effort, time and I imagine, human capital. So finding ways in which to make sure that we've closed the loop and through automation, I think is a great way to make sure, yeah communications aren't falling beneath the cracks.
Nicholas Lassalle GUEST: Yeah.
And it's hard, right? In my opinion, you have to over-communicate, right? You have to over-communicate what you're doing to people just to make sure they get the point across, right? And trying to do different [00:07:00] levels of communication I think is important as well, so
Kelsey Willcok Jones HOST: Absolutely. And different people, communicate differently and need different modes of it. I might be someone that's super heard a new benefit that's launching at the company, but another person needs a couple more touch points that, might ring a bell in their head saying, "This is applicable to me at this time."
Makes a lot of sense. Can you tell me about a benefit specifically, or a policy that you specifically put into place that you saw removed a barrier that was getting in the way of people doing their best work?
Nicholas Lassalle GUEST: I guess two benefits, like we just for May, right? We had the mental health wellness initiative through the company and, basically my team tailored information specifically around mental health. So we collected all the mental health information to employees so that they had a kind of a one snapshot.
So I feel like that was extremely helpful to employees to get access to those specific resources. Another [00:08:00] resource that I've been communicating to people when they have Medicare-type questions, we have a specific benefit that they can address all those questions to those employees specifically around Medicare.
Because Medicare is not a employer-sponsored plan particularly, right? Like I can't really go into details, but we have this service that's been really helpful to help guide them through the whole entire process, right? Like I can give general information regarding it, but I feel like this resource that we have available to employees has been a really good adder that some people might not even know about.
And same thing with the mental health aspect, because I feel like mental health is extremely important nowadays. Like giving people that access to those benefits has been, in my mind, really helpful, based on the feedback we've received, so
Kelsey Willcok Jones HOST: I love the Medicare example because it's non-obvious, but especially for certain populations, other, aging populations, for example, it's going to apply to all of them. And so it's [00:09:00] cool to see a company say, "Although that we're not the provider of this specific, insurance plan, we know it affects you, therefore we care about helping you navigate it." It's a perfect example of, removing a barrier for someone that they can show up more effectively and work How do you think about the connection between supporting people and the quality of their output? Is that something you measure? Or how do you think about why it's important to invest in these types of programs, whether it is mental health, it is, Medicare support where people can get the answers they need? Basically what I'm getting at is why does it matter to you and the organization?
Nicholas Lassalle GUEST: Yeah, to me it matters just because I think the wellbeing of people is extremely im-important. And, one thing that we've really taken hold of is making sure that we can respond to people in appropriate timeframe. We communicate, basically through the email. We have an email inbox specific for our team, and basically we communicate 24 to 48 hours on [00:10:00] return as our policy to, to return back to people as fast as we can.
And even if people, want answers from me directly or our team, we respond basically immediately because we wanna make sure that people are taken care of based on their questions and concerns. And some people, they have limited time. If they're in a like a cleared space, they might only have a little short window of time to talk because, because of those constraints.
And then same thing with managers. If they're in continuous meetings and then they ping me, I, I try to respond right away because I know that there's a possibility that they have something coming up, right? So to me, that was an important piece of coming to the organization because, looking at the inbox coming in, it was-- there were so many unresponded emails, right?
And, now it's I think just a what? Three or something that have not been responded to that I've looked at today. And it's that's important to get back to employees. [00:11:00] And again I like having a conversation with employees as well. If I see that they're asking a specific question and I feel like there's more conversation to be had about it I, it's like I don't wanna just give people one-liner responses.
I'm open to reaching out to employees if it's through phone calls or Teams, which is our communication service that we utilize in the organization. That to me, that's more important because again, I wanna make sure that employee's getting the full answer of what they're asking, right?
I don't wanna just like half give them an answer based on what they're asking for. I wanna make sure they get a comprehensive response to what they're asking for and that they feel that, okay, like they understand what I'm talking about, right? Like I'm getting the complete answer and, it's like everything is basically handled the way it, that it should be
Kelsey Willcok Jones HOST: And it shows your people that you deeply care about them. Responsiveness probably leads to employee satisfaction [00:12:00] rather than, frustration that maybe that, that answer that sat unnoticed meant something really important to them. How do you think about making the internal case for investment or even, allocation of of capital time, people into things when a spreadsheet isn't obviously supporting it?
And what I mean by that is, I think sometimes folks think about investments in business in terms of, we're gonna spend $1, therefore we're gonna save three, or we're gonna make three. But I would argue that an investment in people is a lot more complex than that. So how do you think about, whether it's making the internal case for investment in a mental health service investment in making sure there's, people behind that inbox and making sure that responses are answered to again, when the spreadsheet isn't so three to one in terms of ROI?
Nicholas Lassalle GUEST: A lot of that, automation process that we've done in the last couple months has been, I think, extremely valuable because [00:13:00] we basically reconfigured a third-party benefit system. We reconfigured our 401(k) plan administration and file feeds. And to me, the ROI that was put into it, right? It's not necessarily in value terms like monetary terms, but it is from an employee experience standpoint, right?
Because now there's less issues based on, benefit deductions coming out of their paycheck. There's less issues based on pay. There's less issues based on, employees getting access to their benefits or 401(k) accounts.
Kelsey Willcok Jones HOST: Right
Nicholas Lassalle GUEST: And, like automation from let's say, their deferrals, their loans or their 409A deductions, right?
Like all those things are all automated now and configured correctly so that people are having less issues, getting money into their accounts. Same with we, set up a file feed with our HSA vendor and ADP, so now [00:14:00] it's all automated as well because before those were also manual components.
So basically automating a lot of different things because it makes the employee experience stronger, right? Because they're like, like I'm getting my HSA money, like basically one to two days after I get my paycheck instead of if it's an, if it's a manual component, right? Like you don't know when that's gonna happen.
It depends on the person behind the scenes. And it makes it easier for us, right? From a total rewards perspective, all the work that we did to do that is that now we don't have all that on our plate to do manually. It's like as it should be. And we did a lot of work behind the scenes to test, to configure correctly, have the right conversations so that everything is- in my mind, automation is key to our team, and we did a lot of automation
for the last five months that's been almost at a level that seems impossible. So
Kelsey Willcok Jones HOST: So it sounds like time i-i-is something that's, is super valuable to you and your team, and so communicating the savings of time [00:15:00] has been a really effective way to, prioritize certain initiatives.
Nicholas Lassalle GUEST: yeah, I think it's time and also it's the employee experience because if there's manual processes that were not being completed, then that ruins the employee experience, right? Because let's say, I don't know, like you're getting a 401(k) deduction, you're getting a benefit deduction taken out of your paycheck, and it doesn't post onto the account until a week or two later.
That impacts them because let's say an employee might need that money, like from a HSA standpoint because they have something coming up, right? That's gonna affect the employee directly. And same thing like let's say their 401(k), it gets posted later on their account, they're losing interest on that, right?
So these are things that impact the employee directly that at least I understand, and that's the whole point of doing automation is to ensure that we're compliant, right? That the employee experience is great and, making sure everyone's happy [00:16:00] across the board. 'Cause like, yeah, if the employees are happy based on automation, we're happy because there's less work on us from a manual standpoint, then it's a win-win for everyone.
Kelsey Willcok Jones HOST: So I wanna double click on that because I think HSA goes into the broader conversation of financial wellbeing in general. How important is financial wellbeing for employees to the company? I'm already hearing it, it's important in the sense of, HSAs, retirement. Can you speak about it a bit more broadly?
Nicholas Lassalle GUEST: HSAs and 401(k), let's just talk about HSAs. It's an important piece to an employee, right? Because there's multiple advantages of having it. It's tax-free, right? Like an employee doesn't have to pay taxes on those contributions, and then it'll save them... Number two, they'll save money on their tax returns because they're not being taxed on those amounts.
And then number three it's an investment vehicle, right? If you have s- X amount of money in those HSA accounts, you can also invest that money as well. So then you're actually [00:17:00] making even more money based on those investments. So that's why they always, I don't know, when people talk about it, it's like a triple kind of tax saving element based on having those particular accounts.
And it's large, like you can contribute a lot to an HSA account specifically, and it rolls over every year, right? Like you can... It just keeps going on continuously. Even if you leave an employer, you can still keep your account. So it's a really great resource that, in my opinion, more employees should utilize and contribute more towards
Kelsey Willcok Jones HOST: So would you say broadly financial wellbeing is important to the company for employees specifically?
Nicholas Lassalle GUEST: I believe so I really feel like financial wellbeing and understanding across the board is extremely helpful for employees. And, I definitely wanna be more of an advocate for people utilizing these type of benefits like HSA or 401(k) specifically, 'cause like I feel like a lot of people in general only have a very minute knowledge or [00:18:00] understanding of their benefits.
They might just talk to one of their coworkers and ask, "Hey, what would you select?" Or, " what are you looking at?" And then they'll just go based on an employee's feedback or maybe manager's feedback. But it's like that, is that decision the right decision for you, yourself or your family, right?
Like that, probably not. 'Cause if you're going based on what they're saying, right? Like you're not really looking in deep based on yourself and your family, right? Like you need to understand that first and foremost of what you actually need, right? And I think that's a lot of people don't think about that from that aspect.
And same thing from 401(k). It's like I think a lot of people don't... They leave money on the table because they, let's say, a plan contributes to 3% it, like as a 100% match, right? And people only contributing 1% to 2%. It's like you need to contribute 3% because it's like you're losing money on the table because you're not contributing to meet those thresholds, right?
Like to me, that's just a [00:19:00] loss of money, and especially over time as, your pool gets larger, then the interest continues to grow even larger as well. So I just feel like a lot of people don't necessarily understand that
Kelsey Willcok Jones HOST: Yeah, money can be really complicated for folks whether it's, emotionally or practically. And last question I have for you is we only have a few minutes left. What is a shift in compensation benefits or even total rewards broadly that you see coming that most HR leaders are not prepared for?
Nicholas Lassalle GUEST: I would say probably AI, like the use of AI properly. I know we're in conversations about using chatbots, particularly for the organization maybe as like a starting step and s-stepping stone to get in-into the world of AI and even ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot as part of the organization standpoint.
But I feel like a lot of people are not prepared or have the IT infrastructure to be able to launch those initiatives across the [00:20:00] board. I feel like that's something that companies need to take more hold of specifically. And I think automation as well, 'cause I still feel like a lot of organizations are not automating their processes and fully integrating systems across the board, and I feel like that should be another initiative that people should look out for.
If you have, I don't know, like a benefit system, an HRIS system, a ti-time and accounting system, like all this should be continuously integrated with each other, and I feel like a lot of companies don't do that, right? They just siloed in their own systems and continuing manual processes.
But I feel like in order to be a successful company, just like larger organizations, it, it is fully integrated, right? It's not... I feel like m-more like small to mid-sized companies should be on that initiative, right? To make sure that they have a true integration across the board. But I feel like a lot don't
Kelsey Willcok Jones HOST: Well, [00:21:00] Nick, thank you so much for your time and all of your wisdom. We deeply appreciate it. Where can our listeners connect with you beyond the conversation?
Nicholas Lassalle GUEST: Basically if you could find me on LinkedIn, if you just look at my name, you can just find me. I should be the only person listed with my name. I don't know anyone else that has my name, basically, so it should be easy to find
Kelsey Willcok Jones HOST: Awesome. Definitely please connect with Nick offline through LinkedIn, and thank you again for joining us.
Nicholas Lassalle GUEST: All right. Thank you. I appreciate it, Kelsey
In my opinion, you have to over-communicate, right? You have to over-communicate what you're doing to people just to make sure they get the point across