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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
Kelsey Willock (00:00)
Welcome Alex Bertin, Head of Total Rewards at BambooHR. We are so excited to have you this Monday afternoon. To kick us off, I'd love for you to share a little bit more about yourself, where you're calling in from, and your current role today.
Alex Bertin (00:14)
Yeah, Kelsey, so great to be with you today. ⁓ I'm calling in from Utah. It's nice, nice spring day here. Yeah, a little bit about my career. I maybe I used to think I was unique in my career path into rewards, but as I have brought in my network, it seems like a lot of us kind of serendipitously fall into rewards. But I started my career off in finance. ⁓ We were just talking beforehand that I started off
at Delta Airlines and loved the flight benefits, but ⁓ quickly pivoted into a tech world. I got a job at Qualtrics in doing FP&A and after a while was kind of not seeing that as my future. And they offered me a job to take a job in HR doing compensation and kind of, it was like the glass slipper with Cinderella. And ⁓ I've been in there kind of ever since and have slowly kind of.
increased scope and responsibilities to point where it's stay at BambooHR. I kind of own all the total rewards, people operations and facilities.
Kelsey Willock (01:22)
Fantastic. I have a lot of questions for you, but before I get ahead of myself, I want to back up a little bit more and get to know you personally a little bit better. And coming from both this finance and HR compensation background, I think it's a really interesting question. Can you tell me a little bit about your earliest memory of money?
Alex Bertin (01:42)
Yeah, I thought about this ⁓ for a minute and there were kind of two experiences that came to mind and I don't know which one came first. So they're not necessarily in order. But the first one is ⁓ when I was a kid, my grandparents every year with whatever present they gave us would give me a crisp $2 bill. And ⁓ there was such a novelty to it that it like stuck in my head and I...
had a collection of all the $2 bills that they gave me. And as a kid, knowing that it was like not a well-circulated dollar bill, like thought, this is gonna be worth so much money someday. ⁓ But doing a little research on the internet, it's they’re worth $2. And then the second memory I had was my sister taught swim lessons when we were growing up and my brother and I.
thought ourselves entrepreneurs and would buy candy at Costco and sell them to all of the kids coming in and out of swim lessons. So those were kind of my first real memories of money.
Kelsey Willock (02:48)
I remember the first time I got my first $2 bill and I remember putting it up on my wall and I still have a lot of $2 bill even though we all know that they are available at your banks. They're super cool and the novelty still stands today. What was your first real job? And you can say at selling the candy and do you recall what you did with your first paycheck?
Alex Bertin (03:11)
My first real job, we'll say, you know, not selling candy at the corner was I worked at Cold Stone Creamery. was a ice cream artist. I can't remember the exact names, some silly name that Cold Stone used, but I mixed ice cream. That was my first job. I made $5.25 an hour. So my first paycheck was...
about $150 for two weeks work. ⁓ And I couldn't tell you what I spent it on. It wasn't that memorable for me. But as a 16 year old, I probably spent it on gas and doing something fun with friends.
Kelsey Willock (03:58)
You know, I love that you first worked at Cold Stone as someone that does enjoy TikTok. I think a lot of the people now working at Cold Stone are becoming social media influencers and probably making a little more than $5 an hour. But how do you think your money story, whether it's getting those first $2 bills or working with your sibling?
Alex Bertin (04:10)
I missed it.
I missed my calling then and it was born in the wrong generation.
Kelsey Willock (04:26)
has influenced how you think about showing up on behalf of your people in terms of pay, benefits, and more.
Alex Bertin (04:33)
Yeah, that's a really great question. I think working in compensation and in benefits, I think you can really quickly and easily get kind of a jaded kind of feeling and perspective because as you talk to anyone out there, what does everyone want? They want more money and they want more benefits.
⁓ So I think you can kind of get to this point where it's kind of noise to you if you're not careful. ⁓ But I do try and kind of keep that mentality like knowing that I worked like those, I worked a lot of jobs through high school and through college where, you know, I was kind of that, call it front line type of worker. And each of those paychecks was super important to me to get. And,
I try and keep that, that empathy and realizing that that paycheck is deeply personal and deeply emotional to every single person who's getting paid. ⁓ that benefit that they're utilizing is having a tremendous impact on their life and trying to keep that mentality has, has helped me stay grounded. And cause ultimately my job is to be at kind of the intersection of, Hey, what can we do to
attract and retain talent while also balancing the needs of the business as far as from a financial perspective. So there's kind of a tug and push on both sides of me. And so, you know, I think having that mentality of empathy helps me kind of understand the employee perspective better as I represent what we should or shouldn't do.
Kelsey Willock (06:19)
This leads me to a really good question that I forgot to ask you in the beginning, which is, you tell me a little bit specifically about Bamboo's, BambooHR's workforce? What does that breakdown look like and what your company priorities are right now?
Alex Bertin (06:34)
Yeah, so Bamboo has roughly 1,600 employees. Right now, ⁓ we are all US-based. We are looking to expand internationally here shortly. But the majority of our employees live in Utah, but we do have a
probably a third of the company that's smattered across the rest of the United States, which does present some of its own unique challenges of having a very geo diverse workforce that we're working across time zones and locations. And as we think about priorities that we're working on, they're probably really similar to other people that there's macro economic pressures of inflation and ⁓
There's the macro environment of how the market values SaaS companies. There's the transformation that's going on with AI. And so we're working through all these and ensuring that we can continue to have sustainable, durable revenue growth and ⁓ have a really great product for all of our customers.
Kelsey Willock (07:50)
Where do you think compensation and benefits fit within those priorities? And secondly, where do you think they break down most often today?
Alex Bertin (08:00)
Yeah, I think it's right at the heart of things. ⁓ I kind of alluded to this earlier, but the total rewards is how you attract and retain talent, right? ⁓ No one's coming to work for free. There's a value exchange that's involved. And for the most part, everyone's...
high on their list is probably, and number one or two is how much are you paying me and what benefits are you giving me? ⁓ know, are people probably out there that care a lot about submission and alignment of values and those are important, but compensation and benefits are probably right there, number one or two. ⁓ So I think it plays a huge part. And another aspect of that is most companies, one or two, ⁓
highest cost center is their people, right? And so as you think about those pressures on cost, that's exactly what we're talking about. How do we design strategies that gets us the people in the door that we want and need to drive the business forward, but also balances what we have as a company from a resource perspective. So those are conversations that I have with our leadership team on a regular basis as we.
evaluate new benefits. It's almost always a trade-off decision of, what are we prioritizing, what are we not? ⁓ Kind of shifting to your second question of where do I see comp benefits break down the most? ⁓ I would say understanding ⁓ benefits and compensation is probably the biggest point of disconnect with employees. ⁓ You know, an employee...
doesn't know that a benefit exists or how to access it. Maybe an employee doesn't understand how the equity program works. And, you know, when they quit things that they have vested shares when they don't, or they don't know the compensation philosophy and thinks that they should be paid like they're an employee at Apple, right? Like there's this kind of disconnect is super important to try and close. ⁓ you know, I don't pay transparency is something that people, a lot of people talk about.
And, you know, it doesn't necessarily hit all the things that I just talked about, but I think process transparency and enablement are two really important things. Um, even an example of a project that we did last year, we, we did a compensation one-on-one training for all of our employees. We, you know, did, did a course and we had all employees have to take it in, order to pass their kind of annual training. Um,
And before we took the training, one in two employees said that they didn't understand how their compensation was determined. And after the training, ⁓ almost 90 % of our employees felt like they now understood how their compensation was determined. And that, that creates trust. It's, you know, makes compensation not feel like a black box that's like, is just spat out when they don't have confidence. And I think that trust is, a really important thing.
breeds higher engagement scores. We even saw our engagement scores year over year increase. So I think trying to drive that transparency in your processes and enable your employees to understand ⁓ is a really, really important thing to help that breakage of understanding.
Kelsey Willock (11:35)
Engagement is a huge one right now. Why does engagement matter to the company?
Alex Bertin (11:41)
Yeah, I think, ⁓ in a, in a one, one sentence summation, ⁓ engaged employees are productive employees. if you don't have high engagement, then you're not going to see that impact on your bottom line. trying to help employees have trust in your processes, feel like they're growing, see the value that they're getting in exchange for the value they're creating.
be in parity, all those things drive them to feel validated and do better work. And ultimately, you know, bamboo, bamboo HR's mission is to set people free to do great work. And I see that as like, from a compensation perspective, that's kind of how I frame all of our compensation and benefits related questions is. Are the things that we're doing setting our employees free to do great work? Are we making them not have to think about, you know,
How much money am I making? Is it the right amount of money? Or giving them really good benefits that they don't have to spend their time at work thinking about, am I gonna be able to pay my medical bills or whatever the case is so that they can be free to do their work while they're there and give their best selves. And ultimately that has downstream implications to the bottom line of the company.
Kelsey Willock (13:04)
I appreciate you indulging me on that question because I think that given it is such a major topic, I think, you know, going beyond that it's important as to why it's important is really illuminating and you hit the nail on the head, it leads to the bottom line, which so many folks deeply care about. What is the impact of why we're doing what we're doing? ⁓
which I'm really curious about is, you know, have you ever introduced a specific new benefit or program at either bamboo or prior employers where you've seen go from, you know, just attracting talent to really transforming the lives of employees?
Alex Bertin (13:44)
Yeah, I won't take full credit for this because I can only take partial credit. But one of the most unique benefits that BambooHR provides is what we call our paid paid vacation bonus, which is ⁓ every year we give all of our employees a stipend for their
You know, travel their time off. So if you want to go to Disneyland, you know, you have a certain amount of money every year to pay for your trip to Disneyland. And we, see such strong engagement with this benefit and there's a lot of value. ultimately our two co-founders started bamboo HR for the purpose of making a great place for people to work where they can have great balance in their life. One of our values is to enjoy quality of life.
And this benefit is really synergistic with that value. And one of the things that I introduced was having kind of milestone bonuses that are higher for years that are like big, years. So at year five, 10 and 15 and 20, there's increased bonus amounts so that we're recognizing our employees who are staying and continuing to add value over longer periods of time.
And as I engage with employees who go on their vacations and get to do these big trips that they probably wouldn't have done otherwise, it just adds a lot of value to their lives. So that was the first thing that came to mind.
Kelsey Willock (15:19)
I love it because it's not the obvious, ⁓ we're reducing, you know, muscular skeletal health costs. Not that I don't think those are brilliant tools. I absolutely do, but it's how do you incentivize people to use the benefits that they have? know, so many people have vacation and don't take it or they stay home and they don't really, you know, get other value out of it, such as taking that trip that might've been their dream trip. So I think it's a brilliant example in something that's...
Alex Bertin (15:26)
Yeah. ⁓
Kelsey Willock (15:45)
It's not necessarily, you need to go partner with this other new vendor. You can enact it today by just saying, hey, we really want you to take that trip. And here's a small monetary stipend to make it happen.
Alex Bertin (15:56)
Exactly.
Kelsey Willock (15:59)
When you think about measurable impact that you're seeking to have, it sounds like retentions at the forefront. Is there anything else that deeply matters to you?
Alex Bertin (16:12)
Yeah, I think ⁓ I keep a really close pulse on our engagement. ⁓ I read every comment that our employees leave us and we use that to drive our decisions every year. But yeah, our retention, our ability to retain talents, our ability to attract talents, you know, we...
keep really close track of pay parity. We do a lot of work on our utilization of our benefits to drive that. So, you know, it's, don't necessarily have one thing that I hold above all, cause I think ⁓ in a lot of ways rewards is not something that is like, can directly tie everything is kind of an indirect impact because of what you're working on. So I think that's why I try and take a...
a broad picture to kind of everything kind of paints a little piece of the painting to tell me how our health of the business is from a compensation and rewards perspective.
Kelsey Willock (17:18)
So it sounds like it's an art rather than a science.
Alex Bertin (17:21)
Yeah, I might. I was on a
podcast earlier today where we talked about the art and science of, of compensation and rewards. And it definitely is. ⁓ I think you have to understand the context of, of what you're looking at and, kind of go beyond just the pure data, data point itself and, and look at, look at the whole picture.
Kelsey Willock (17:44)
compensation and benefits trends do you think are going to shape the employee experience most over the next year?
Alex Bertin (17:50)
Yeah, maybe unsurprisingly and very appropriately, ⁓ AI-driven products, I think, the near-term future. We've been looking at a couple of products that we're evaluating that I think will potentially, if we choose to go with them, will transform the employee experience for interaction and utilization of benefits, thinking agentic interactions. ⁓
the connectivity of all of our benefits in one place that they can interact with and understand and get insight into how they are or aren't utilizing based on what their need is. So this idea of having a central repository and kind of an AI overlay is going to be the way that employees are going to have kind of that interaction with our benefits offerings.
and drive better engagement as well as higher utilization and lowered costs. think overall, ⁓ having that AI layer on top is something that could be transformative.
Kelsey Willock (19:01)
I think I might know the answer to this, is the company more focused on build versus buy or vice versa?
Alex Bertin (19:09)
⁓ You mean bamboo, our strategy?
Kelsey Willock (19:13)
In terms of what you're describing, is the company ⁓ building their own tools to provide AI-identic tools to help communicate the value of total rewards? Or are you seeking partnerships with services outside the company?
Alex Bertin (19:29)
Yeah, there's a little of both. We definitely have our own tools. mean, I'm in a little bit of a unique situation where I work for an HR tech company, right? ⁓ So there are products that we are developing ourselves that will have kind of this similar impact. ⁓ And we also look at partners as well and to fill in spots that we ourselves don't provide.
Kelsey Willock (19:57)
How important is financial well-being to the company?
Alex Bertin (20:01)
Yeah, that, you know, if I were to say one of the core pieces of what our co-founders were trying to achieve when they built the company, like financial wellness is one of them. From an early start, our two co-founders started reimbursing our employees to go take financial literacy classes. We've had financial...
coaching ⁓ available and planners available to our employees for a really long time. ⁓ And so I would say a lot of our key benefits, our 401k match is higher than industry standard. ⁓ These type of things kind of all signal to our employees the importance of that kind of long-term financial wellness that we want them to have.
Kelsey Willock (20:52)
Yeah, I'm noticing also this kind of growing importance. So it's really cool to see that the founders were at the forefront of the importance of financial well-being before it became a really cool space. And then it continues to be important at the company. Last question before we drop off. What's a 30-day experiment our listeners could try to boost financial well-being or engagement at their companies?
Alex Bertin (21:08)
Definitely.
Yeah, I think ⁓ the idea that I'd kind of thought of was just running a 30 day benefit, call it a ⁓ use it campaign. ⁓ Just picking a underutilized benefits that you have and you know, we're talking financial wellness. So pick one of your financial benefits, whether that's your 401k ⁓ participation or using your financial planners.
And running a campaign to drive engagement, sending targeted emails on a weekly basis, telling stories or exa showing examples of how this has an impact, could have an impact on your life, having clear calls to action and how tos to, to, ⁓ utilize. I think that's a really easy way you it's pretty binary to see like, Hey, where were we before we started? Where are we after? There's no added cost to you as.
I mean, other than like increased utilization. ⁓ An example that I had of kind of how this would work or could work is even just in interaction that I had with an employee a couple of months ago, we have a benefit that if you have, you know, ⁓ any debts from being a student will pay $100 per month towards your principal. ⁓ You just have to basically sign up on Fidelity.
⁓ And I was talking to an employee and they're like, I forgot that we have that and I was like, well, that's just a hundred dollars that you're a month that you're like free money that you're not taking advantage of. I followed up with them a month later. I was like, yeah, I forgot. And it was kind of crazy to me. Like, Hey, this, this was free money that you're just literally not taking advantage of.
And those are the types of employees that with a campaign like this, like bringing it back to the forefront of their minds, helping them realize, this is something that I'm not taking advantage of, is a way to get some easy wins.
Kelsey Willock (23:22)
Yeah, I was actually on a call earlier today with a marketing company and you know, it takes about seven touch points for a message to land with an individual. so the same is true for our employees when we think about marketing benefits to them. It's not just one email and it's done. It's, know, how do you remind people at when it matters to them, when it's top of mind to them. It, and it's the fifth, the sixth, the seventh email or, you know, a team's update, something like that.
And then it finally sinks in of, ⁓ I can actually do it. So I love that it's a really tangible thing that people can take away and essentially say, let's just run a quick campaign because open enrollment happened last fall and maybe people need a little bit of a nudge.
Alex Bertin (24:11)
Definitely. That sounds like I have, I'm sorry, I just going to say I have five more touch points with that employee to get them to.
Kelsey Willock (24:11)
Well, thank you so much.
Yeah, not to demotivate you, but you know, I think that when you think about marketing, I think about anything these days that I buy it, I'll get an Instagram ad, I'll get an email, maybe I'll get a text message. And then finally, I'm like, yeah, okay. I actually do want this thing. Thanks for reminding me five times. Well, thank you so much, Alex, for the time. really appreciate it. I know it's the, the afternoon. So I appreciate you spending some time with us. Where can our listeners connect with you beyond this conversation?
Alex Bertin (24:34)
I love it.
Yeah, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. I'd love to be connected and chat to chat further with anyone who wants to.
Kelsey Willock (24:54)
and we'll have a great rest of your afternoon, Alex.
Alex Bertin (24:56)
OK, thanks Kelsey. We'll see you.