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HR Voices is a scenario-based podcast for People Leaders who’ve actually had to make the call.
Each episode brings experienced HR and People leaders into realistic, anonymized workplace scenarios—the kind you recognize immediately. Performance issues. Messy conflicts. Investigations that don’t fit neatly into a policy box. Instead of talking about their own companies, guests react to outside cases and walk through how they’d think it through in real time.
There are no right answers here. What you’ll hear is judgment: how seasoned leaders balance risk, fairness, legal reality, and humanity when the stakes are high and the path isn’t obvious.
HR Voices is for HR, People Ops, legal, and leaders who want to hear how other smart humans actually handle employee relations—without confidentiality breaches, hypotheticals that feel fake, or a lecture on “best practices.”
Rebecca Taylor (00:17)
Hello and welcome to HR Voices. I'm your host, Rebecca Taylor, and I'm here with my guest, Lynnette Heath, the CHRO at nVent. Lynnette, thank you so much for being here.
Lynnette Heath (00:27)
Thank you, Rebecca. I'm happy to be here today.
Rebecca Taylor (00:30)
I'm excited to have you. had a lot of fun in our prep call and I know that this scenario was one that you were able to accidentally chat with some other folks at Invent about, which I'm excited to get into. So for those who are new here, ⁓ HR Voices explores real and fabricated anonymized employee relations scenarios through the lens of experienced HR and people leaders like Lynnette. So we're gonna evaluate a realistic workplace situation and we're gonna demonstrate how someone like Lynnette would assess risk, apply judgment and design practical responses.
So our goal is to reveal how strong HR leaders think when they're facing ambiguity. We're not necessarily looking to find one single correct answer because as we know in HR that very rarely exists and much of it is kind of in that sort of gray area. So, I'm so excited that you're game to do this with me.
Lynnette Heath (01:16)
Yes, I'm looking, I'm excited. I'm looking forward to it as well. It's going to be fun.
Rebecca Taylor (01:20)
Yeah. Okay, you ready for the scenario? Alrighty, so this one we're calling the Remote Work Spy. A company installs productivity monitoring software on remote employees' laptops, tracking keystrokes, application usage, and taking periodic screenshots. One employee discovers the monitoring software, does not remove it, but begins staging his screen. So he starts working on a decoy window while handling personal matters.
Lynnette Heath (01:23)
Sure.
Rebecca Taylor (01:45)
When HR confronts him with footage showing low productivity, he argues the monitoring was never disclosed in his employment agreement, violates state electronic surveillance law, and constitutes an unlawful search. The company argues the equipment is company property and a policy update was emailed company-wide. The employee never clicked the acknowledgement checkbox. So in the age of AI and surveillance, I feel like this is very topical. So before we start to dive too much into
like the specifics and solutions, Lynnette, what stands out to you as the most risky or unclear in this particular situation?
Lynnette Heath (02:20)
First off, I just want to say what spoke to me, if you will, about this is something you alluded to, not only in this age of AI, but I think the transformation that we saw happen post COVID is a lot more people working remotely, right? This, I think, situation perhaps is occurring more than we maybe even realize. So it's certainly so timely. But as I look at this, there are a number of things I would want to understand. For example, if this floated up to me through complaints,
whether it be compliance or HR or the employee themselves coming out to me directly, I would want to understand a little bit more about the situation. So I would be asking questions, both of our IT team, of maybe the manager, the HR and the employee themselves. I would want to know, okay, you're saying that there's footage showing low productivity. Tell me more about that. How do we measure that? How do we know what's going on there in terms of the
he, the employee, or she, guess, is stating that this violates state electronic surveillance law. Does it? I can tell you I've oftentimes had employees quote me laws that they deem to be stating something and it's not. So I don't know if that's necessarily the case. I would also want to look into, are you sure we never communicated this before that you didn't agree to it previously? I've also seen a lot of employees think they never agreed to something and they did. And just investigate how
Rebecca Taylor (03:35)
Yeah?
Lynnette Heath (03:49)
Are we communicating this policy? Is it a one and done? Do we do it, you know, frequently like at my company every day? When you log in, you can't log in without clicking on the acceptable use policy and I don't oftentimes we all know that small print are people actually reading it. Well, whether you are or not, you're agreeing to it. So it's important to understand what you're agreeing to. So initially I would start by learning a little bit more on those four different work streams, if you will.
Rebecca Taylor (04:01)
Mmm.
Yeah, I think it's a really good start is just sort of getting an understanding of like, well, what exactly does the policy cover? Did the employee sign off on anything? Does that really make a difference? I think it's sort of a question too, right? Because there's the company policy side of things that's like, even if you, whether you click the acknowledgement box or not, you still, it's still a policy that by working here, you're kind of like obligated to uphold anyway, right?
Lynnette Heath (04:43)
Right, right. so I've seen this happen through different things that get brought forward. Maybe when there's an employee complaint and it might start going down one path, well, they're adhering to the policy and maybe it's a policy violation or whatever the case may be. But if you dig into this a little bit in my mind, one of our values is integrity. And
Rebecca Taylor (05:06)
Mmm.
Lynnette Heath (05:07)
for me, it's like regardless of the policy about the monitoring software, the fact that an employee consciously took really big steps to hide something from the company for me is an integrity violation. And I have had scenarios and situations where the actual policy maybe that they were violating that action in and of itself wasn't egregious enough, if you will, to terminate somebody. But the actions they took
Rebecca Taylor (05:18)
Yeah.
Lynnette Heath (05:36)
to step around it or go around it or hide what they're doing. We have a zero tolerance when it comes to integrity violations no matter how big or small. To me this is a huge integrity violation so that is something I would be looking at alongside digging into some of these things on the actual policy that's come to light. But if somebody is trying to be dishonest, not truthful, hiding what they're doing, I intentionally was trying to deceive
my manager of the company on how I was spending my work time, what I was getting paid to do, and instead I was doing personal things. That for me is as big of a red flag in this scenario as the actual policy that we're talking about in the monitoring software.
Rebecca Taylor (06:21)
Yeah, yeah. It's a good point. It's like you get asked about productivity, but you immediately show, you can immediately see that the person, even if they knew the policy, they're still acting around it. They're definitely acting to hide something, which is, you know, a separate issue, but that's connected, right? It's like all part of the same case, I guess.
Lynnette Heath (06:41)
Exactly. And again, what you may be alluded to at the beginning, because we're dealing with humans, things are always gray, right? It's not uncommon to have multiple policies impacted when we're dealing with an issue such as this. It's very rare that it's just this. You if you think about that after other things that occur, it's not just the one thing because it's about what else was broken, what else happened along the way. So for this, coming back to, OK, monitoring software, well, how do I feel about
Rebecca Taylor (06:48)
Yeah.
Lynnette Heath (07:11)
the monitoring software. Quite honestly, in my role as HR, it doesn't really matter what my personal views are. It's what have we decided as a company in terms of the risk profile, in terms of what we need to be able to manage our employee population? Perhaps we have a large percent of our employees that are remote and something led to whether it was productivity or something else, something led to us making a decision that we need this software on there to help keep the company viable, keep the company successful.
So we can employ and pay our people. regardless of how I would feel about it personally, I would say this is a policy that we need to uphold. Now, what is happening? Is it being used in the right way? Is our policy such that every day all the time we have this on there? Or does it get put on there when there's questions or something leads us to enacting, if you will, the ability to utilize this software? So there's a number of questions where I think I would be digging in to make sure I
Rebecca Taylor (07:52)
Mm-hmm.
Lynnette Heath (08:10)
really understand the broad scope of the scenario here. What I found is you never want to go in thinking you have all the information and then you're ready for a decision and oops.
Rebecca Taylor (08:19)
Yeah.
Lynnette Heath (08:23)
boy, somebody didn't tell you this or this, and maybe you would change your answer. What you really don't want to have happen is if it becomes litigious and now, ⁓ boy, I I would have known that because we would have taken a different course of action. So asking as many questions as possible is what I generally like to do to make sure I understand the situation. And that may be the team may come to me and say, here's everything we know. And then I'll say, OK, and what about this, this, and this? I'm not sure. Let me go back and find out.
Rebecca Taylor (08:50)
Yeah, yeah. And are there any assumptions that you're going to be careful to not make while you're kind of getting all this information together?
Lynnette Heath (08:58)
careful not to, you know, where it says here productivity went down, right? Because I'll get reports, this person is a low performer, that well let me hear their side. Is something that we say and my boss says all the time and we say at Invent is there's three sides to every story. So there's going to be the manager side, the employee side, and actually the truth is somewhere in the middle. So making sure we understand all three sides to every story and that way getting to the best outcome.
Because everyone, you know, if I'm the employee in this situation, I have my own bias for whatever reason, and the manager has their own bias. Well, OK, you're saying their productivity is low. Are you comparing them in the exact same way? The expectations of what they should be delivering as you are everyone else and their peers and what they're doing? Are they given a different level of performance that you expect them to adhere to? So I really want to make sure I understand that when we say low productivity, what are we measuring against? How do we arrive at the bar?
that we're measuring against. There's just a lot of information that you should have because one thing for me, in my role as HR, I'm a business person. So I'm an advocate for the company and people say, you're an advocate for the people. Well, I'm employed by the company for the company. I am a business person. My function is HR, but I am a business person. Now, having said that, I will make sure that everyone is treated fairly and consistently.
I have very low tolerance when...
it appears someone is not being treated fairly. I have no tolerance for that. So that is something that's really important to me. And that's why I'll be asking all these different questions because I want to make sure we're consistent with our treatment of people and that we are treating people fairly, meaning in the way we would treat anyone else in the same circumstance. It doesn't mean that my perception of fair in a given situation is going to be the same as the employees, but something where I have to look myself in the mirror at the end of every day. And I want to be able to say, yes,
Rebecca Taylor (10:28)
Mm. Yeah.
Yeah.
Lynnette Heath (10:55)
I treated people fairly. I feel what we did was just, regardless of the course of action that we took. No one should ever be caught off guard. No one should ever be surprised on action that is taken. So that also then comes down to, did you really not know about this policy? Help me understand the different ways that we communicated, that we train on it. Maybe one time you didn't click on it, but what about these four times previously? You are held to that. So it's just important to really dig in and understand all the details.
Rebecca Taylor (11:19)
Yeah.
Yeah, I think it's really good is just, you want to come to something that's going to be fair and consistent because that's the biggest, because that's the thing that's going to cause either good things or bad things to happen down the road, right? Like, no matter what you can't approach, you can't really approach employee relations situations with a different approach every single time. You know, I mean, different cases might need different approaches, but those same types of cases need to be approached the same way every time.
Lynnette Heath (11:35)
Right.
Now.
Rebecca Taylor (11:51)
⁓ Because it's in that inconsistency that you could start to poke holes, you could start to find, you know, sort of biases or, you know, discrimination, just like reasons that one person was, you know, treated one way and someone else wasn't. So that fair and consistent is the very key part. And fair doesn't always mean I'm happy about this outcome for this person. Sometimes it just means that this is just what it is. Yeah.
Lynnette Heath (11:58)
Yes.
Exactly.
Mm-hmm, exactly.
Exactly. Because, you know, we may in HR as times say, well, that's not fair. Well, okay. Again, it's that definition of what is fair. It's really about being more of consistent versus fair, I guess, right?
Rebecca Taylor (12:33)
Yeah, yeah, I'm with you. It's like fairly concluded or like fairly investigated, consistently investigated. Yeah. And what's interesting about this and maybe it's just the way that this scenario is written, because this is a fabricated scenario. Sometimes we do real life ones. Sometimes we do fabricated scenarios. So this one, we kind of take some of it with a grain of salt. ⁓ But like, it sounds like this person was confronted with the footage showing low productivity and that the confrontation was about the productivity, but the employee flipped it and made it about
Lynnette Heath (12:36)
Yes, exactly, exactly.
Mm-hmm.
Rebecca Taylor (13:01)
the monitoring software, citing laws that may or may not actually exist, right? So how would you handle that if you're the HR leader, you're going in for one conversation? I know we can usually anticipate some reactions that people are gonna have without trying to think too far ahead, but how do you keep it to the conversation at hand? Or do you, I guess? What would you do? I'm just gonna stop.
Lynnette Heath (13:06)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
I do,
and that to your point, the deflecting.
can happen very, whether it's, you know, in this case deflecting on this or other times I'll have employees who are deflecting on my manager is so terrible and they mistreated me or so and so. Okay, but what we're here to talk about today is this. I'm interested in hearing more about that. Maybe we'll cover it at the end of conversation and that's something I can look into. But for now, I wanna talk about this. And I would be talking about their productivity and before, you know, I do the initial intake, so get the information, right? So I have an understanding and make sure all my questions are answered.
but
then really understanding that low productivity. What are we comparing to? What could I sit down and show the employee? Well, let's look at, because for your particular role, it's very transactional. We've been able to measure productivity for the past three years. Here's what we've seen. It's clearly dropped off since you started working remotely or whatever happened, you know, or the first year and a half you were remote, it was fantastic. What has changed? What's going on? Try to get an understanding of maybe what's driving some of this. it can be, my new manager is,
a jerk or who knows right or my co-workers I was tired of doing I've heard this before I'm carrying more weight than anyone else on the team and you oftentimes hear these different things okay well let me go check and because I want that person to know again I'm driving to make sure there's fairness and consistency so let me understand what others are being measured to I'm not going to tell you anything individually but I can take a look and say nope actually your metrics are the exact same that we're holding everyone else to
Rebecca Taylor (14:46)
Yeah.
Lynnette Heath (14:59)
Everyone else is meeting these metrics. So help me understand if there's a reason you're not able to, is there a roadblock that we can help break down for you or a barrier for your ability to be successful? And really try to keep the conversation going down that path while of course listening to what they say, if they try to deflect, are there other things I need to follow up on? Because of course more than one thing can be true. It can be, I've been frustrated because my manager is a jerk and maybe treating me X or Y the way they shouldn't be.
Rebecca Taylor (15:24)
Yeah.
Lynnette Heath (15:29)
but at the same time I'm not performing. So both things can be true so I try not to walk in and make an assumption only one story can be true here and that's all I should focus on.
Rebecca Taylor (15:34)
now.
Yeah, yeah, think it's that's brilliant. I love the way that you frame that, because if people will get defensive, especially especially the wording again, take it with a grain of salt, this is HR confronts, right, which can be I think it's an aggressive word probably for what would actually happen in this type of scenario. But, but, you know, it's like it's natural for someone to defend themselves, especially when they're afraid of consequence or they're afraid something's going to, you know, that there's going to be some sort of a fallout. But I hear something like this, too. And, you know, the this person came with
Lynnette Heath (15:49)
Right.
Great.
morning.
Rebecca Taylor (16:10)
you know, knowledge of whatever laws they claim are being violated. So they come with an argument which tells me that this is something that's been going on for a little while. And I have to wonder, you know, did the employee ever bring this up to their manager? And not that it would necessarily matter, right? But like, did they bring this up to their manager before it got to this point? Because that would have been an opportunity for the manager to say, hey, this might be an issue down the road. We need to keep an eye
Lynnette Heath (16:14)
Mm-hmm.
Mm hmm. Or and you bring up a good point. Even if the employee never brought up to the manager, what conversations has the manager had about this person's productivity with them? ⁓
Rebecca Taylor (16:49)
Yes.
Lynnette Heath (16:50)
It would not be the first time that a manager may come to me and maybe even say this person has to go. They're not performing. Okay, great. What conversations have you had? Wow, I just pulled up the review and how would they know that? Because it sounds like they're pretty fantastic. Again, coming back to something I said earlier, I don't think anyone should ever be surprised when you get, you know, development feedback or tough feedback on your performance. It should not be the first time you hear it. Should not be potentially the last time you hear it. So what has happened?
Rebecca Taylor (17:02)
Yeah.
Lynnette Heath (17:19)
along the way where this is part of an ongoing conversation versus the employee saying, I don't know what you're talking about. Now, again, if we can validate that's part of what we'd want to do through the investigation that they truly, maybe I did know because I set up this fake site and I'm over here on Candy Crush or whatever the heck's going on doing their personal things. I mean, that's important, but yes.
Rebecca Taylor (17:40)
doing my Black Friday shopping at work.
Yeah.
Lynnette Heath (17:47)
It's if you're consciously doing something that means to me this is where I would probe in the question. You should consciously understand that you're probably not as productive as you were hopefully at some point in time or are you a brand new employee and this seemed to work at your previous employer.
And maybe you thought it would work here. I don't know. But digging in, understanding the why behind some of these things, what conversations have already occurred? I would talk to the HR manager business partner. What are they aware of? What has already been given in terms of feedback? Or even maybe not individually to this person. What comes up in team meetings? Has this topic ever been addressed? Is this the first time you're actually ever hearing about it?
Rebecca Taylor (18:07)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
I think it's a good point is like, this a new employee that maybe just didn't think that anybody was looking? Which again, you know, there's still the integrity side of it that still matters, right? But it's always kind of funny the things that people think, oh, I didn't think you'd notice that. It's like, why do you think we pay all this money for the surveillance software? It's because we want to notice these things. Yeah.
Lynnette Heath (18:38)
Right, right.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Rebecca Taylor (18:54)
So I have to ask, know like, you know, accidentally spoke to some, when I say accidentally spoke to some of your security folks, it's not as if you revealed something you shouldn't, it's that you're having your own technology challenges right now. So did they have any takes on this that kind of shape it a little bit for you?
Lynnette Heath (19:01)
Yeah.
Right.
They did, yes, it was great having them in trying to fix my laptop at the time. So I said, hey, guess what? I'm jumping on this call. Look at this. And so they both read it. And they said, well, Lynnette, you know, remember, we have our annual training on this. Every day when you click to get in, this should not be a surprise. And when we hire somebody, they receive their laptop. It's made abundantly clear this is always company property. part of me thinks, in this day and age, perhaps I
think people should know it's company property. This is not something you're buying on your own. This is not a club you're a part of. You are being compensated to perform a task, a role, duties for an organization. However, I do think that understanding varies by individual and they really, but you can't really do that though, can you? mean, no, really? That can't possibly be legal. So the understanding varies by individual,
Rebecca Taylor (19:57)
Hmm.
Yeah.
Lynnette Heath (20:07)
The IT view was, ⁓ 100 % we could do this. Now again, at my company, it would be incredibly rare. And it would be something one or two people would see. even the manager and others wouldn't see it. We'd have to be really specific because that's just not something we're broadly going to do. But I do understand there's different businesses running in a different way who maybe have a much broader dispersed remote employee population.
Rebecca Taylor (20:20)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lynnette Heath (20:34)
and where they feel they need to do that because of issues with productivity. But IT was like, no, we communicate this really loud and clear and this is sort of a last resort versus automatically when somebody starts saying, hey, by the way, we have monitoring software. And I would also say if that's something that is given when somebody starts with an organization, it may or may not say something about the culture and that's something I think everyone has to be cognizant of as well. When you're joining an organization, is that the best fit for you?
the broad organization as a whole, what is the culture of that, but also that micro culture, if you will, of your direct manager, of your teammates, does that feel like the best fit for you? We all spend a lot of time working, so it's really important, I think, that that's a really good fit. And this may be, you might be like, ooh, that, you know, that just doesn't feel great, that doesn't fit too well for me, and maybe it's not the best place for me, not because I'm not gonna be an excellent employee, not because I'm not gonna be highly productive, I just don't wanna feel that, you know,
Rebecca Taylor (21:09)
Mm-hmm.
Yes.
Yeah.
Lynnette Heath (21:34)
quote, big brother over my shoulder, even though of course I'm working for a company they're going to, they should see the output and the value that I'm adding. But it's just a little nuance that I think people should take into consideration when they think about the overall culture.
Rebecca Taylor (21:48)
Yeah, I think it's a good point is just if it might not be for you. And I know I couldn't live like this for the record. used to, when I was ⁓ hunting sales roles, I used to be a sales recruiter of like back, back, back in the day. There was one company that I would recruit from all the time because I knew they had software like this. And these are people, they were still working in seat. They were still in an office and they had the camera on their laptop would focus on them all day, every day. It would take screenshots.
If they were using the bathroom, they had to like press a button to like, you know, indicate bathroom break and a countdown would start. And I used to use that as a way to be like, hey, it's not like that here. You could just get rid of this and people would come flocking. So, you know, if that's not for you culturally, I completely get it.
Lynnette Heath (22:24)
that.
Exactly. And it wouldn't be for me either. I mean, I take pride in what I do. I'm very performance driven. I want to do a great job. I want to perform. I don't think I would feel great if it's like, eh, we're going to monitor everything you do. But we trust you.
Rebecca Taylor (22:34)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lynnette Heath (22:44)
We believe you're going to do the right thing, but we're
Rebecca Taylor (22:44)
Yeah. Yeah.
Lynnette Heath (22:47)
going to install this anyway. It just, doesn't quite feel authentic to the whole trusting atmosphere. And who knows, maybe let's say in this type of organization, they're no, and it's, you're more of a number and we're driven to an output, but we're going to pay you extremely well. And because we pay you at the highest level of the range, these are some things you have to put up with and there's always trade-offs and people have to decide what is most important at that point in time.
Rebecca Taylor (22:49)
weird.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, our values are trust no one, not even our people. ⁓
Lynnette Heath (23:14)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I'm more of a
you have to lose my trust, not earn my trust. I tend to give trust and then you would have to do something to lose it versus some people's approaches. I don't know you so therefore you have to earn my trust. Okay, I like to give it freely and then hopefully you just keep it maintain it.
Rebecca Taylor (23:22)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm with you. mean, especially professionally,
right? It's like we're all grown adults just doing jobs, trying to just like make our way in life, right? So, you know, it's like, I want to be able to trust the people that I work with too. ⁓ you know, and I think this is sort of an example to me of buying a solution and implementing a policy for your worst behavior that...
Lynnette Heath (23:41)
Exactly.
Mm-hmm.
Yes.
Rebecca Taylor (23:56)
you know, it's like when you over policy for the worst case scenario. And it just so happens that this employee is the exact kind of employee that it was built for because they did the exact thing that the software is meant to catch and kind of get around. But it does kind of raise the question, you know, like, is this the culture that you want? Do you want to have to be policying for the worst behavior, the worst case scenario? If so, that's a choice. But it's expensive. It's a lot of this kind of software. It's a lot of
Lynnette Heath (24:05)
Right.
Rebecca Taylor (24:22)
employee relations software to track all the issues that people are going to have. But maybe that's more of an existential question.
Lynnette Heath (24:28)
Well, but I think it brings up a good point. Sometimes, perhaps, when you're thinking through these things, it seems easier.
to just policy for the worst case scenario to your point. Okay, because that way I can make sure I'm catching anyone doing this instead of putting the onus quite frankly on those frontline managers or those direct managers to say, I need you to be in tune with what your people are doing. I need you to understand how productive they should be. I need you to be checking in a lot more frequently. And sometimes managers say, I'm too busy. I can't be doing this. So how can we systematically make that happen for me? But then
It leads to something like this, but you also I would say lose some of that connection Which is so important when you think about engaging our people It's that individual connection with their direct manager and if that person is Bypassing that and handing it over to this technology or another type of technology I think we lose something along the way and that's you know as we started out the beginning talking about AI There's so many great things that AI can do and is going to be able to do I just think we have to
Rebecca Taylor (25:30)
Yeah.
Lynnette Heath (25:38)
to make sure we don't lose that personal touch, which is so important. That's how you build those trusting relationships, those deeper relationships, drive that engagement, in my opinion.
Rebecca Taylor (25:46)
Yeah.
Oh, I completely agree. And even, you know, a related question of that is, you know, how can HR leaders prepare managers for that kind of moment with, know, with more AI coming in, you know, more work being automated, quote unquote, whatever that might look like, right. But keeping that human touch, if you're a manager that's overseeing employees that are now managing agents or, you know, working in such a completely different type of realm, how can HR leaders prepare managers for a moment like.
Lynnette Heath (26:18)
I think this is something that we're dealing with real time right now. I'm not sure that I have all the answers, but it's thinking about, again, coming back and being really intentional. So at my company, at Invent, we always talk about our people matter and our culture is a differentiator. So we know we're going to be bringing in more and more in AI and it's really exciting and it's gonna make us more efficient. That doesn't take away from the foundation of our people matter.
Rebecca Taylor (26:25)
Yeah.
Lynnette Heath (26:48)
and our culture is a differentiator. And we talk about the fact that if we are not
actively fostering our great culture every day, it will quickly dissipate. So I still am going to have the expectation. We actually have a people leader goal and it talks about the different touch points and interactions and here's the expectation and you're being measured on this every year. So I expect you to be sitting down and having conversations. I expect you not only, you know, setting goals or doing the review or the mid-year review or right now we're at IDP planning or there's another point where you're going through the
career blueprint. AI is going to come in, but it's not going to take over any of those activities. I expect you to be having career conversations. So these are things in my mind, those personal touch points, AI should not take over. Now, AI can do other things for us, which should free up time for us to be having these important critical touch points. And that's something that we will help our leaders with. You know, some leaders need help with that, right? How do I sit down and have this conversation? I don't know that I have the answer, so I'm just going
Rebecca Taylor (27:39)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, which is okay.
Lynnette Heath (27:51)
and avoid this career conversation because maybe I don't know where their next move is. And so we're trying to help them. It's okay to not know everything when you sit down and have the conversation. And we're still working on that journey to get everyone comfortable to have these important conversations. So we'll shore up and say, here, we have some great tools to support you. What we have ⁓ implemented recently, we have some coaching tools that prepare you for these important conversations. So you can get coaching from an AI agent, which is wonderful. So you're just
Rebecca Taylor (27:54)
Yeah.
Lynnette Heath (28:21)
more prepared to sit down and have that real live conversation with your employee. I think agents and AI can help make us better but should not replace that important human interaction.
Rebecca Taylor (28:25)
That's awesome.
Yeah, I mean, I completely, completely agree with you. And it's funny because this scenario is almost unintentionally what could happen if you let software manager employees for you. Because it's not AI specifically in this scenario, but it's the manager used this to track productivity. They noticed lack of productivity. It goes to HR. HR talks to the employee about it. It's like, there conversations before that? This is literally like, this is what could happen if you don't, you know, if you don't manage your people properly.
Lynnette Heath (28:43)
Yeah.
Yeah, to your point, let's say this is an organization that's all about AI and you know, we can go to the extreme and they could say now our span of control for managers is one to 100 because we put in all these AI tools and our HR capacity is the same. So it all funnels up to one person. You could see an extreme scenario where maybe it would be streamlined to that if you will, but I think you lose a lot along the way. So it's how do we not replace some of those important interactions and connection points?
but replace the things that can be replaced or enhanced or help coach or improve some of our skills and capabilities versus moving away from the things that make us great.
Rebecca Taylor (29:42)
Yeah, well said, well said. I have one last question for you, because believe it or not, we're actually at time. So one last question. What's one assumption about HR that you think needs to be challenged?
Lynnette Heath (29:49)
Okay.
Well, you know, it's interesting and so I'll probably take a long-winded way to answer this. It really depends on the organization. ⁓ But I think we still have some circumstances where HR is more of personnel and that, you know, HR is here to process all the things or in some cases for managers to maybe delegate their role as managing because you're here and you're the people person. Well, no, I'm not.
Rebecca Taylor (30:03)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Lynnette Heath (30:24)
That's an assumption or a stereotype that I'm not the people person. I'm a business person. I am running the function.
of HR, which is just as important as the legal function, as the finance function, as the marketing function. This is a critical function for the organization. I am a business leader. So let's think strategically about the fact that our people are making our products or delivering our service or whatever needs to happen to please the customer. And how are we making sure that we are best supporting this important function of people? But I'm not. I will tell you, we set our people strategy for the year.
during strategy planning and I look around the table to all the executive leaders and I say this I'm coming in but this is not the HR strategy this is the people strategy that we all own together so you all tell me what do you want to see in it this is an idea but I need to hear from you because you're the ones out there who are delivering on the people strategy every day with your teams I don't own the people don't look at me when you want to say ⁓ and about people and turn and look at me because I'm gonna look back at you and say well you tell me you're a people leader
Rebecca Taylor (31:34)
They're your people too. Like, I don't know, yeah, it's your job. Yeah, I love that. I love that. So well said. And thank you, Lynnette, so much for being here. This was so fun. I feel like I could talk about this scenario for a while too, especially just because it's very topical, maybe in a different way, but with AI and listening tools and all that. So thank you for sharing and for bringing your stories too. And thank you, everybody, for listening. Yeah.
Lynnette Heath (31:35)
Yep, exactly,
Yes.
Thank
Well, thank you. Yeah, Rebecca, I
really enjoyed it. It's really fun to just think of the hypotheticals. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Exactly.
Rebecca Taylor (32:00)
Yeah, me too. It's so much easier than real life sometimes too. It's just like, let's pretend for five minutes.
I thank everybody for listening and I hope you have a great rest of your day. Bye.
Lynnette Heath (32:11)
Bye.