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The WorkOps Podcast is your weekly conversation with HR leaders and People Ops practitioners doing the real work.
In every episode we dig into one story. A process that went sideways, a system that just didn't work, and what someone actually did about it. Packed with practical lessons you'll want to bring back to your team. Whether you're supporting 500 employees or 5,000, this is how the best People leaders are building for what comes next.
The WorkOps Podcast - Heather Oxley
Jeet Mukherjee: All right. Hey everybody. Today I am joined by Heather Oxley, who's the CHRO at Perficient. Heather, thank you so much for joining us today.
Heather Oxley: My pleasure. Thank you.
Jeet Mukherjee: Yeah, before we jump into things, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how did you choose HR?
Heather Oxley: Sure. So I started my career doing IT and tech consulting. did a lot of process design, large systems ERPs.
Heather Oxley: And that naturally led me to the human side of technology. I worked a lot early in my career around journey management, change management, communications, training, but always tied to an IT solution product, something we were doing for clients. as I progressed in my career, I realized that's the part of the work that I really enjoyed. and so
Heather Oxley: About 10 years into my career, I made my first launch into a true HR role. I worked internally then for the consulting company that I had worked for. and then eventually, after another decade of doing core HR work, I went back to client facing. And I was able to, find that bounce between working in HR and then working for clients, helping them solve their toughest problems. That's always been the cornerstone I think what
Heather Oxley: gets me up every day and makes me love my job is at the end of the day, if I can solve problems related to making someone else's experience better, we spend a lot of time at work. it's deserving of getting right. and so that's what I have the joy and pleasure doing as the CHRO of Perficient.
Jeet Mukherjee: Love it. can you tell us a little bit about Perficient itself?
Heather Oxley: Sure. Perficient is an IT services company. We're about 7,000 worldwide. We operate in about 40 different locations. and we cover the broad scale of software development lifecycle, data work, we operate for sales and marketing stack. But ultimately, what we're doing is taking work that clients have difficult problems to solve, largely around agent-led services and really taking that from
Heather Oxley: AI thinking to AI enterprise level solutions.
Jeet Mukherjee: Yeah, so I guess you've got to dog food your solutions too and and yeah.
Heather Oxley: You got it.
Jeet Mukherjee: And y you mentioned that the work is about improving people's lives because we spend so much of our time at work. It does feel though that the work of HR just keeps expanding. And you've been doing this for twenty-five years. Is that a hyperbole or is that a a truth that you're seeing that the work is just growing?
Heather Oxley: It is, it is. And I think particularly in this disruptive era, you know, we're starting to see some CHROs even take on the title of chief transformation officer, right? And if we think about how at an individual level, the way we get work done is evolving. I don't know about you, Jeet, but how I kind of approach my day and solve a problem and create deliverables and drive outcomes is now very AI assisted.
Heather Oxley: Right. And it somewhat happened naturally, I think, over the last year. It went from experimentation with tools at an individual level to now at a team level and really thinking about how to broaden that out to more of an enterprise level type of impact. But so if we think about that and it we think about the behaviors are changing, the skills underlying that are changing, it falls withon us working in the HR domain to make that happen. So there's the skills and capabilities.
Heather Oxley: Building, but ultimately this is a behavior change. We have to think about how work gets done, how organizations are structured. I think for the first time in modern times, we're beginning to see how the traditional silos of work, think finance, IT, HR, legal, those were really put there by processes designed a very long time ago. If we think about redesigning work,
Jeet Mukherjee: Yeah.
Heather Oxley: We can start to break down some of those silos, and that's where I think this next few years is gonna get really interesting.
Jeet Mukherjee: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I love that you said around the topic that it's it AI is really about change management and and we see this kind of time and time again, that it's not just a tool. And then what gets really interesting is like who is accountable, who is going to maintain it, who's gonna maintain the governance piece around it too? And you mentioned something really interesting around those silos are starting
Heather Oxley: Yeah.
Jeet Mukherjee: to break down.
Jeet Mukherjee: what are your thoughts around HR and IT fusing into one or like what does that relationship look like to provide that best experience for the workforce so they can get their work done in in your opinion?
Heather Oxley: Yeah, don't know necessarily for the organization I've seen, both from an advisory perspective or from a functional perspective, I do think there's core responsibilities that differ between those two organizations and keeping those distinct and separate, because the jobs are very different. And so for example, if we think about enablement
Heather Oxley: very high level of collaboration between HR and IT around what that looks like. But HR is playing the role of ensuring that the access is there, at least for Perficient, the access is there, the enablement is there, the time is secured to get it from the individual, and that they have the time and space to do that. Once that enablement is done, making sure that we understand their skills, their capabilities, their interests, and how might that change an enablement maybe open up new career paths for them.
Heather Oxley: And that's a different job than making sure the infrastructure is there, the data is available to for the organization to work at an enterprise level, that access rights are there. And those two distinct jobs, I think today, do operate in those silos. It is possible for some organizations, those will fuse down the line, but for the most part in the short term, I see them as operating as independently.
Jeet Mukherjee: Nice.
Jeet Mukherjee: and you mentioned earlier on that the way that you do work and the way that you approach work has changed. and that's due to AI. And perhaps that's where kind of the lines are starting to blur even more. Do you have someone in your team who's put their hand up and said, I'm gonna lead the AI charge from the HR function? Or how do you kind of drive that progress and adoption? Is it still coming from IT, someone within your
Heather Oxley: Yeah.
Heather Oxley: It's really important the vision for where we want to go with AI comes from myself and my leadership team. You know, any of us can go out there and interact with Claude and say, I'm a CHRO, where should I put AI? What should I put an agent in front of, right? And we're gonna get a laundry list of things. Great ideas.
Jeet Mukherjee: Yes.
Heather Oxley: The hard part comes next, right? Because in order to do anything meaningful at the enterprise level, you've got to have the right data.
Heather Oxley: and access to that data for an agent to work against, right? That's where you have to partner with the IT organization because we don't own those data lakes. We don't own that data infrastructure. But once we have that partnership there, what I've found is everyone on my leadership has accountability for that.
Heather Oxley: So I have a chief learning officer, he has accountability. I have a a head of talent operations, he has accountability. My head of total rewards, she does. My head of HR business partners, they do. You have to take that responsibility and disseminate it down, or you'll move too slow. Now
Heather Oxley: Naturally, I think everybody's at different comfort levels. you know, I think you have very naturally curious learners who are gonna be the pilots and drive through that. and naturally you have others that are gonna need to learn from those, right? So I think doing that collectively as a broader leadership has really worked for us.
Heather Oxley: Naturally I think all of us feel like it's not going fast enough. We're feeling pressure
Jeet Mukherjee: Yeah.
Heather Oxley: from our leadership, our boards, you know, we're seeing the pace of the organization. There's a crunch we all feel, but
Jeet Mukherjee: Yeah.
Heather Oxley: it has to be broadly owned and decided.
Jeet Mukherjee: I like that. So rather than having necessarily like a specific AI transformation lead, you're infusing the use of AI within the existing functions and the existing responsibilities and roles. which makes me think there are some organizations that are specifically saying in job descriptions, and we're gonna kinda come to the skills piece in it in a little while, they're saying we're gonna test for AI, we're gonna make sure that people have AI fluency.
Jeet Mukherjee: I'm curious to hear where you sit on that, because what it sounded like what you were saying was as long as they are infusing it in their work, I don't need to necessarily see a separate skill set of of AI usage.
Heather Oxley: Yeah, it's a great question. You know, I think if I don't think it's reasonable at any organization that we would look at our current population and go, Well, I need everyone new, right? You know, we have to think
Jeet Mukherjee: Ha ha ha.
Heather Oxley: about retooling, reskilling, and reworking. we're all learning how to work again with a massively different way of thinking about how to get work done. And so,
Heather Oxley: I take time on my leadership team and we do little mini education sessions. Like, hey, what did you guys build this week?
Jeet Mukherjee: Nice.
Heather Oxley: So two of my leads got together and built a new dashboard to pull in data from, previously dependent systems and, work that was getting done on spreadsheets here pulled it all together so we could meet a business need.
Heather Oxley: Well, they built all that dashboard using AI tools, really slick, would have taken six months previously, turned it around in a week, and we then went back and taught each other how they did it, starting from scratch, That's not how I used to spend my leadership meetings. We'd spend it going through an agenda,
Jeet Mukherjee: Yeah.
Heather Oxley: right? So we have to acknowledge that this major shift also means we have to shift how we work with each other for now as we all learn.
Heather Oxley: so I think
Jeet Mukherjee: Mm.
Heather Oxley: that's kind of point one. we're going slow to go fast in other places, kind of is how I think about
Jeet Mukherjee: Yeah.
Heather Oxley: it. You know, we're operating at two speeds. the other piece, if we broaden it out to the broader organization, the AI skills can't sit next to what you do. They have to be proven and infused in what you do.
Heather Oxley: Because if not, you're not gonna see the benefits and the outcome. You know, they're all gonna remain at the individual level. We begin to see the impacts that we are really seeking as business leaders when we move this from individuals to teams to enterprises. And so in order to do that, you've got to have the AI skill plus the applied knowledge.
Heather Oxley: At Perficient, we have we have put through, we have created an academy, and that academy gets them to course completion, but we don't say they are ready until they complete a capstone.
Heather Oxley: And that capstone requires them to apply that knowledge and then go through an assessment of that application of knowledge. And that has to be on a real client situation, a real internal situation, and not just an idea. We're talking about an outcome. So it it cannot sit next to, it must be infused.
Jeet Mukherjee: Love that. Okay, so you've you've really formalized that process of upskilling everybody. And you mentioned that folks are at different levels of comfort, different levels of understanding. So this seems like a really good way of just a rising tide for all boats, which is great to hear. something you said there stood out to me, which was I'm hearing elsewhere too, there's a pressure and a tension of we gotta move fast, we feel behind, we have to do more with AI.
Jeet Mukherjee: But you mentioned that we also have to move slower now, slow down to speed up. And twenty twenty six so far was like the year of experimentation and that's quite quickly changing to the year of ROI.
Jeet Mukherjee: So how are you balancing the we've got to move fast, we have to show we talked about outcomes, we have to show the ROI from the AI with let's create space for testing, for sharing what we've built, for sharing our failures, for allowing people to to go through the academy. How do those things sit together?
Heather Oxley: this is the delicate balance of every day. I I think we have to be I'll go back to that list, right? Because I think when we think about how to get an ROI, there are some really obvious things that are a bit easier to attack.
Heather Oxley: from a build perspective and from an access perspective. I mean, the one that I think most CHRs have already gotten to or should get to fairly quickly is an inquiry agent, right? A chatbot, right? Which I think, you know,
Heather Oxley: But often policies are living on some sort of website. You have different country level ways of thinking about it. So it comes back to the data, right? Getting the data all organized and and putting that together. And when I first joined Perficient, we did a work study and we found 60% of our workload in HR was inquiry.
Jeet Mukherjee: Well.
Heather Oxley: So
Heather Oxley: just individuals asking questions. And that varies a little bit by geography, right? You know, we see in the US, people are more likely to self-find the answer. Across Latin America, they're more likely to want to speak to somebody. You know, so there's some regional variances that on average, though, 60% of our time was being spent just answering questions that were documented somewhere else. So looking at those ROIs
Jeet Mukherjee: Mm.
Heather Oxley: and saying, hey, this is, you know.
Heather Oxley: It's worth spending a little bit of time to get all of our policies, our data, our FAQs all packaged up, you know, simple bot here. Let's get this rolling. That's an area to go fast. I think you go slow.
Heather Oxley: And some of the more nuanced and thinking about workflow, thinking about those cross silos type of cases where you've got handoffs between teams and you have a significant opportunity to change the experience for the employee.
Heather Oxley: and potentially, drive some cost savings at the same time. Those are the spaces I think it's worth going slow. So going fast where it's obvious, where you think it's a fairly straightforward day to ask, going a bit slower when you have the chance to really be disruptive in how the experience flows.
Jeet Mukherjee: I see what you mean. It's almost like a two by two of like risk
Heather Oxley: Yeah.
Jeet Mukherjee: versus like impact versus Zeppelin type thing. And yeah. that makes a lot of sense. And what we've seen folks do is that yes, they'll build something really quickly because it might be lower risk and yes, we've got to clean up our policies, but actually the technology is available, it's commoditized, so let's just do it. there's no need to spend budget on getting it from elsewhere.
Jeet Mukherjee: And then for the new on stuff, I'd be kind of curious to hear your thoughts. And I appreciate it the answer is probably going be different and specific to Perficient
Heather Oxley: Yeah.
Jeet Mukherjee: given what you guys do. but at what point is it like, hey, we can't afford to move any slower? And so is that the trigger to be like, you know what, we're just gonna go and get a tool that allows us to do this? Or is the or is it just as a philosophy we are going to to build, considering the the speed at which you have to go at?
Heather Oxley: Yeah, it's a great question. And I guess the one that we've gone slower on. I wish it could have gone faster, but as we've talked about it, right, there's there's the technology, the data, the tools, the workflow, and then there's also the behavior change, right? and
Jeet Mukherjee: Yeah.
Heather Oxley: that part that part is interesting.
Heather Oxley: Right, because I think some w what I've seen is some tools. Like we built a field book for our sales teams to be able to harvest past case studies and and create pitch decks, the adoption of that was rapid, like overnight, right?
Heather Oxley: and you see other tools where there's more fundamental behavior underneath why they're using or operating how they are today. and those are really complex. And they they probably sit in that same two by two matrix in the very difficult but
Jeet Mukherjee: Yeah.
Heather Oxley: hard ROI domain, right? we found this with how we recruit and how we hire. fundamentally
Heather Oxley: Perficient operated fairly autonomously across roughly 40 different individual units. This comes from a history of how the company was built through acquisitions and largely operating in a local market, serving a local client, which worked very well for the company for, you know, 20.
Heather Oxley: five years. But as we think about the level of disruption and growth that's happening right now, the desire to move at speed and to really have access to the skills and capabilities across the whole organization, that was becoming a hindrance. So that's probably one of the harder ones that
Jeet Mukherjee: Yeah,
Heather Oxley: we've had to undergo over the last year.
Heather Oxley: But we're talking about how the work gets done, how people are incentivized, how people are structured in terms of organization hierarchy, how they were rewarded on an annual basis, how their goals were set. All of that came down to how they were hiring.
Jeet Mukherjee: Hmm. Gotcha. And that is something that you opted to not build a capability in house, but actually you brought in a partner to help you solve that. Is do I have that right?
Heather Oxley: We did, we did. Because if you think about the hire to retire cycle, and some of this is unique for a services company, but I think there are some really good learnings and messages regardless of the industry that you're working in. but we're solving a very simple problem. Every time we hire somebody, right? We have a demand to do a job that we don't have enough capacity for inside. And
Heather Oxley: It's basically what do you define inside? Do you define inside as the team you have in a single team here? the single team you have maybe across a state, a city, a region, a country, or across your whole company. And the broader you can make that funnel, the more likely you're gonna have to not go outside, right? so simply, you know, making a very complex problem very simple.
Heather Oxley: And what we were finding in Perficient is we were looking at the smallest level. And so as we think about skills changing for all of us, we talked to you a little bit about how we even changed our own work, right? If we take this into one of the most highly impacted positions and roles right now across the industry, software engineering, massively changing how they get their work done, thanks to the number of AI tools that are available.
Heather Oxley: And so if I wanna have access to the best engineers, I don't wanna look in my smallest pod. I wanna look in my largest pod. And so the first thing we realized first coming in is that it was slowing down our ability to bring the best talent to our clients.
Heather Oxley: On the human side of the equation, we were hiring people for one job and then maybe letting them go somewhere and hiring somebody else for the same job somewhere else. So
Jeet Mukherjee: Right.
Heather Oxley: that emotional churn that we were doing for both ourselves and the individuals was also not the right answer for us, right? We want to be, you know, known as a place where people can come and grow their careers. So in order to unlock those two things at the same time, we had
Heather Oxley: Rethink this whole process. So we moved and we created global practices where everyone who did the same type of job function now sits together across the globe. We then started to solve on both the supply and the demand side. On the supply side, in order to put all these people in one group and say, great, you're now all available, we have to know what they do. We have to know what they want to do.
Heather Oxley: And that's where it was a build versus buy question, right? If we build this, yes, it would be amazing. It would be best in class because that's what we do for clients as well. but how fast could we go?
Jeet Mukherjee: Hmm.
Heather Oxley: And so
Heather Oxley: that's where we were able to find a partner in the market who enabled us to really be able to harvest an initial view on everyone's skills, but then also think about in the way that work gets done, how do we continue to capture skills for those people? So every day we're learning new skills. How do we get that from someone? Because if your skills are stagnant or they're they're just captured once, right, they quickly become outdated, particularly now. So we're building an integration from our
Heather Oxley: learning platform, building in integrations from the work they do every day, and then of course building integrations for where they work in teams and other places to say, hey, what'd you work on this week? Any new skills? We worked in workflows to create validation to make sure the source of truth is right and good. And that fixes our supply side.
Jeet Mukherjee: Hmm. Interesting. the way that you're describing that, it doesn't feel like despite the advent of AI, in order to get the outcomes that you'd want from AI, the challenges sound exactly the same. Data integration,
Heather Oxley: It is.
Jeet Mukherjee: change management. what is so different about now? Why is it s being seen as such a different thing when it doesn't seem like
Jeet Mukherjee: Really is.
Heather Oxley: Yeah, it's a great question. well, even if you get all the data, you have to then make a decision with it. And I think that's where there's some real value in the matching side, right? The
Jeet Mukherjee: Yeah.
Heather Oxley: the demand side. So if you think about how our demand comes, same as any supply chain in any sort of manufacturing company as well, right? We sell something, we've got to get a match from our supply to be able to deliver it.
Heather Oxley: That's where it's, I think, we've really been able to unlock some new capabilities because this is just an information matching activity, right? I have
Jeet Mukherjee: Right.
Heather Oxley: a need for something, I have a supply for something else, do they match? How well do they match? And can I deliver that? And so
Heather Oxley: That is the part of the process where I think it's gotten significantly more sophisticated with the AI tools and algorithms that we're able to have access now that we didn't have access to in the past,
Jeet Mukherjee: Yeah.
Heather Oxley: that allows us to really unlock some possibilities. Having worked in this industry for 25 years, it was often who you knew, not what you could do.
Heather Oxley: And I think we're able to now find better matches based on skills and capabilities rather than just relationships.
Jeet Mukherjee: That's awesome. You're kind of democratizing people's ability to get the work that they want to get and that matches their skills and capabilities. and we started the conversation by saying that work itself is changing and therefore things need to be dynamic. How do you and we also talked about software engineering being one of the more dramatic ones? What about HR? how do you kind of see maybe three years is too too far in Chat GPT's
Jeet Mukherjee: four years old, so three to five years is too far, but maybe eighteen months, where'd you kind of see HRB at that point?
Heather Oxley: Yeah, I think
Heather Oxley: Every HR organization really has a different level of maturity, and we all play very different roles to the organizations we support. But at a broad stroke level, I think this function is still too administrative. We're still, pushing paper, we're still doing
Heather Oxley: more work across probably disparate systems, side of the desk spreadsheets than we would all like to do. so I think how the work is changing is I'd like to think in three years we're working much smarter.
Heather Oxley: Candidates are getting immediately scheduled when they're matched. we're not spending time calendaring, we're not spending time taking notes during interviews, we're not spending time briefing managers where candidates are in the process, right? We're being agent-supported to be smart around finding individuals to join our organizations. And once they join, they have a very seamless journey between: did my background check get cleared? When do I start? Where is my laptop? All the things that are
Heather Oxley: Still largely loosely between the cracks and could be done better. When they start the first day, we're anticipating their needs based on all the needs that we know joiners have in that first week. Instead of sitting through long onboarding courses, we're giving them more point of need, smarter at their fingertips information. And as they go out throughout their career,
Heather Oxley: We have the ability to push information to them at the right time because we know what they are likely to need at the right time. That then frees up time for the traditional HR business partner role to think ahead. I think today our HR business partners spend too much time reacting today to solve questions or issues that we can anticipate are going to happen.
Heather Oxley: And if I think about this in layers of time, I think they get to get a little bit out in front. And I think that will be when we finally get to play this the more strategic role for our organizations. on the operations side, there's been a lot of work
Heather Oxley: Done over probably the last two decades around creating shared service or organizations. I think
Jeet Mukherjee: Mm-hmm.
Heather Oxley: a lot of that work can be very agent-driven in the future, which also frees up that capital, that capacity, that payroll to do more interesting work around, how we can retool and retrain and re think about internal mobility for our folks. So
Heather Oxley: Just like many other functions, I think we get to move away from the less value added task into the more value added task. I think the appetite for that will probably depend on the the industry that you're in, where your organization readiness is. and I think that's what makes it really exciting.
Jeet Mukherjee: Yeah. I I love hearing you kind of describe the employee experience from Higher to Retire and how it's enabled and we can be proactive about things. And some folks listening to this might think, yes, this this sounds amazing. Some folks may think that is my job today. And so so therefore, again we kind of come to a bit of tension, which is that whose responsibility is it to make sure that individuals are
Jeet Mukherjee: keeping on top of the technological shift that's happening. Because I've heard organizations who are saying, hey, we're going to create an AI fluency course. And if you don't pass that course, then as part of your performance review, you may not be the right fit for this organization. How do you think about that? Like is it HR's responsibility to level everybody up? Or like is it if you don't catch up, well we'll find someone else who who is more AI pilled?
Heather Oxley: Yeah. I do think it's a shared responsibility. Look, we all have to show up every day and want to be better. and the the highest performing organizations will create that tension and people will rise to the occasion and they will deliver that. And then you have a good organization match. So I do think it's a shared responsibility between individuals. The world is changing. We all have a choice to change with it or to ignore it.
Heather Oxley: You know, there will be pilots and there will be passengers. And so,
Jeet Mukherjee: Mm.
Heather Oxley: you know, I think the more that you surround yourself with pilots, the more you're gonna have strong teams who are willing to go through this change. I do think as leaders, HR leaders have a responsibility to drive the organization at large. However, it's not fully on our shoulders as alone. So we have to have that shared responsibility across our full executive teams.
Jeet Mukherjee: Yeah, yeah. and Heather, before we wrap up, and I'm gonna take that away, pilots and passengers. that's a good analogy. Before we wrap up, are there any final thoughts for other HR leaders who might be listening to this who's kinda going through that transformation, that transition, they're looking at optimizing process in this world of AI. any kind of first thoughts that you'd want them to take away?
Heather Oxley: Yeah, something I say to my team all the time is I know this feels hard and it's supposed to, right? So it's supposed to feel hard because we're stretching and growing. it's supposed to feel hard because how we've learned to do work is changing. the minute that we acknowledge that and we just lean into that hardness,
Heather Oxley: the minute is when we start to find some joy in that. So if you are struggling and if you are thinking, what do I do next? You know, I think there's lots of communities out there that are available. my inbox is always open, my LinkedIn is always open for a good chat around how we figure this out together. we can do hard things, we don't have to do them alone. and you know, I I think about this as a is a collective cross-enterprise challenge that we've been faced with.
Jeet Mukherjee: Okay, lead into the hard things. And since you offered, where can people find you, Heather? Is LinkedIn the best place to connect with you?
Heather Oxley: Sure, LinkedIn
Heather Oxley: is the best place. I'm I'm always active on LinkedIn and if not posting, at least through my inbox.
Jeet Mukherjee: Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Heather, for joining us on the WorkOps Podcast. And to everyone listening, we will catch you on the next one.
Heather Oxley: Thank you.