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Beyond the Paycheck brings you candid conversations with CHROs and top people leaders who are rethinking how compensation and benefits impact more than just employee bank accounts. From the first paycheck to financial wellness programs, we explore how money shapes identity, equity, purpose, and power at work, and how forward-thinking companies are using pay and perks to transform lives, not just attract talent.
This podcast is sponsored by Aura Finance, the financial wellness platform designed to help employees feel confident, secure, and in control of their money.
See more at aurafinance.io
Beyond the Paycheck - Julie Molloy
Kelsey Willock: Welcome Julie Molloy, EVP of Total Rewards at LPL Financial. We're so excited to have you this Thursday. To kick us off, I'd love for you to share a little bit more about your current role, your career and background, and where you're calling in from today.
Julie Molloy: Yeah, thank you, Kelsey. I'm so excited and honored to participate in this. I'm looking forward to the conversation. So I'll kind of start backwards. I'm calling in from just outside Charlotte, North Carolina, where I have lived with my family for the last 19 and a half years. And my current role at LPL, I get the opportunity to really lead the compensation, benefit and recognition strategies as the head of total rewards. I've been with the company only a couple of months, joined them back in May, and an office just on the other side of the North Carolina-South Carolina border, and have been really enjoying it. Sometimes when I add up the years that I've been working, I think that can't be right, but I have over 25 years and technically closer to 30, working in all different avenues of HR across a multitude of different industries, including financial services, is where I started. And then manufacturing, government, contracting, and technology, and then coming full circle back to financial services. And I've sort of run the gamut of leading all things in total rewards, including executive compensation, global mobility, and we could talk about that more if you need to know what that is. But also things like workforce transformation and performance management. So I've had a great career, never knew that I would get into the roles I've had, but have loved every moment of it.
Kelsey Willock: It's a pleasure to have you here and so excited to learn more about all the amazing work that you're doing at LPL. Tell me a little bit about the company. You know, how many people work at the company? What kind of roles exist? Sounds like it's a global presence as well.
Julie Molloy: It's actually not a global company, although we have a global capability center in India. But it is a leading wealth management company. So we support financial advisors, institutions, and wealth managers, really providing them all the tools and the resources and the support that they need to help financial advisors deliver a great service to their clients, right? So one of our biggest missions is we want to take care of financial advisors. And we want those financial advisors to spend their time and attention on their clients and helping their clients become financially sound, build their wealth portfolio, live out their dreams, and really live the American dream, if you can say that. So we have lots of different groups and I'm still getting to know all of them. We actually do have our own financial advisors that are actually LPL employees. But we have a huge product and technology group always sort of innovating for what's next, what's gonna make things better, faster. You know, the term AI is a daily conversation as you can imagine. And we have folks focused on what are the best products and tools that are out there, and products being financial products as well. So we've got about 9,500 employees kind of roughly and scattered throughout the United States.
Kelsey Willock: Well, you better believe I'm gonna be asking you about all the new innovations that you're working on as well as AI. But before we get there, I want to take a step back into the past. Can you tell me a little bit about your first job ever and if you recall what you spent your first paycheck on?
Julie Molloy: Yeah. So that's a fun question because of course I feel like I took odd jobs, right, working summer camps or things like that. I guess a first high school job would have been working at Burger King, which is still there in my little hometown in Pennsylvania. And you know, started out making the burgers and then got to be, work the front register, which was always my best. It was a good day when you got to work the front register. I'm sure the money was used for just regular fun teenage spending money. I don't have any real memory. What I would call my first grown-up job was actually a paid internship at one of the big accounting firms, KPMG. I was in college. We got to sort of take time off to focus on paid internships. And that was our course load for the semester. And I know I made more money than I'd ever made in my life and worked harder than I'd ever worked during tax season. And so I went shopping and bought clothes and more clothes and more clothes. And then the obsession sort of continued. So those are some fond memories that I have of many, many years ago.
Kelsey Willock: And I love how you also bring up the high school job. I am always so fascinated with how people answer this question and even prefer when they give me the dual answer, the first W2.
Julie Molloy: Yeah. The first W two, right, exactly.
Kelsey Willock: How do you think your earliest money memories or even relationship with money in general has influenced how you show up for your people, make decisions in terms of pay, benefits, and beyond?
Julie Molloy: Yeah. What an interesting question because you know, on an extremely personal note, I grew up raised by my grandparents who lived on welfare. And I was the first in my family to go to college. And so every day is a blessing far beyond I think what I ever would have anticipated as even a young teenager working at Burger King. And so I believe that hard work should be supported, hard work should be rewarded. And we sort of talk about pay for performance, right? It's what all of us total rewards professionals talk about. But I believe in it so much. I want to reward people, I want to pay them for fair work relative to the work that they do. So fair pay. I want to give them the opportunity to live their dreams, no matter what their background was. And then I think those that are hardworking and diligent and go above and beyond, there should be above and beyond rewards for those individuals. So I think it's such a great question because you don't think about it every day, but like in this moment you sort of reflect on that is why I sort of feel the way I feel and it's really kind of how life started and where it could have gone versus where it did for me.
Kelsey Willock: For me, I find this question so fascinating because I think a lot of people expect me, just tell me a little bit about your career experience and how that's influenced your current role. But I like to take a step even further back and connect the dots between your early life. So thank you so much, Julie, for sharing that with me. I think it's such a wonderful story. And I imagine your grandparents being very proud of where you're at currently today.
Julie Molloy: Thank you.
Kelsey Willock: So I want to get a little bit deeper into the world of total rewards and benefits and specifically talk about the whole person. So we're seeing a major trend of companies investing in the whole person, whether it has to do with their financial health, their physical health, their mental health, and beyond. So can you specifically share an example of whether it's actually at LPL or a previous employer? Something where you introduced a concept, a service, a benefit in particular that supported the whole person that you're particularly proud of.
Julie Molloy: Yeah. And I'm gonna share this one, but this is not mine. This is something that the current team that I'm very, very blessed to lead implemented just before I came earlier this year. But I shared a little bit about what the purpose of LPL is. And I think there was a moment recently where they said, you know, we need to be helping our own people set up their own future financial stability. And they're probably so busy doing the work that we want them to do and setting everyone else up, taking enough time to take care of themselves. And so we introduced a free service where our employees have access to an LPL financial advisor, and can have meetings and can talk about their own dreams, aspirations, goals, and really sort of set up a trajectory for their own financial planning. There's a lot of things we can do to help our employees, certainly mental well-being and physical well-being, but financial is the true trifecta of what well-being really is. And it's so curious. It's a brand new sort of program. It's just getting out there. But the statistics are showing those folks that even just had one meeting are increasing their 401k. They're sort of making different sort of financial decisions within the options that we have in our benefits portfolio. So it's really inspiring and we're gonna kind of continue to accelerate it. But what a wonderful idea to really be thoughtful and ask people to put their mask on first before they help others put their mask on.
Kelsey Willock: Sounds like financial health for employees is really important to the company. Can you say a little bit more about why? I'm super curious about, when people start participating in 401k programs, when people start feeling better about their money, what does that mean to the company?
Julie Molloy: Yeah. Well, I think it resonates so upfront at LPL because it's what we do, right? It's our purpose. We are enabling financial advisors to really help clients. And we mean clients at every stage of their financial health, right? From just starting out to truly high net worth individuals. So when that's what you do every day, it's sort of front and center in your thinking about it. But even separate from that, if I reflect on my prior companies, financial instability is such a concern and carries such stress on our workforce today, right? We know that the cost of milk and eggs and gas continues to go up. So it's every day people are, can I continue? How is this going to impact my plans for the future? Setting my children up to go to college, taking care of my aging parents, right? So it's all of those external environmental things that I think reflect and individuals carry. And so as employers, we have to be making sure that we're providing the education to help support folks to think about their retirement from the first day they walk in, right? Out of college, into a job, that's not something you wait for five years to start doing. You do it today. And so I just think it's why it's so important to LPL, but I think it's important at every level at every company because unfortunately, life only gets more expensive, and that concern continues to ratchet up.
Kelsey Willock: When we talk about benefits that invest in people and in particular their financial health, the spreadsheet doesn't always necessarily support the ROI of said programs. It's not like, okay, we're going to invest in a sales software that's gonna three times our output and our revenue. How do you think about building that case internally, getting internal leaders buy-in when the spreadsheet doesn't so obviously support these types of programs?
Julie Molloy: Yeah, I mean you're sort of speaking to everything that sits in an HR people team, right? It's not just benefits, it's not just something in total rewards. So often we know we need to sort of sell the fact that people are our business. And when people are secure, right, they know how they're financially secured, physically, mentally secured, they've got ideas of where their career and their aspirations are going to be supported, that they're going to show up, they're going to do better, and the business is going to grow. But it doesn't always translate easily in a CFO, CEO conversation as here's the direct ROI. So investment in tools to sort of accelerate how we think about skills and upskilling talent and career development, tools and how we say, listen, we really think this is our benefit strategy and this is where we need to invest. And we have to do it despite the fact that year over year it's double-digit inflationary benefit cost increases. And so we're storytellers in a way, right? You get as much data as you can, you leverage really good consultants that can give you insights into what everyone else is doing, which is the age-old question of, well, how is everyone else doing this? And then you try to put the plan together and you try to show results even if it's micro. So you try to show it in engagement scores, you try to show it in turnover, you try to show it in promoting some of your top talent, but it is the constant battle of being in the profession that I'm in, because so much of this investment will play out. But it's just not as easy as a normal financial model. And so you just become incredibly good at being persuasive and being a storyteller and then backing that with as much data as you possibly can.
Kelsey Willock: Yeah, no, I think that what I also find so fascinating about this conversation topic is it's still an evolution as well, and figuring out ways to better tell this story, figuring out ways to connect the dots better with data. But I think you said it so brilliantly, which is it's also just simply a part of the company culture or not. And at LPL it sounds like, you know, the people are the business, therefore the business understands investing in the people is a good thing. So I just love that answer. You also mentioned, you know, we're shifting toward really interesting innovations, technologies, you're working directly with your brokers to better understand where the market's at. How are you staying top of mind in terms of all of the speed of innovation? Are there specific conferences that you have found to be deeply valuable, newsletters, brokers that have been particularly helpful, even maybe startup networks? Anything that you would say is worth mentioning.
Julie Molloy: Yeah. Being so new to LPL, I'm gonna keep this focused on total rewards and sort of HR. I mean, there's just so many white papers, daily newsbursts. I love just trolling through LinkedIn because so often there's such good little articles or snippets, right? I love being busy. You know, I'm a mom of three. I work a lot of hours. I need things in small like micro bursts, right? I need to kind of hit different sort of things and think, I like that and sort of move on. So I just think I don't know that there's one that I would call out in this moment because I think I take it all in from every avenue, whatever's out there. I'm really excited this fall. There tends to be a lot of the big consulting firms in HR, right? They're doing a lot of small round table sessions in the Charlotte market, which makes it easy for me to take a couple of hours instead of a three day conference that you have to travel and put your out of office on. They're just little go meet, and you know, it's all, it's a relationship business, right? It's the people you know, the people you trust, the people you can call for a quick, hey, what are you guys thinking about this? And so it's that networking opportunity. And so there's a lot of those kind of coming up in the next couple of months that I'm planning to attend. And it's just you can't take enough in. And certainly it's a podcast like this one that you can listen to on your commute to the office or on your afternoon run and just get some insights from different perspectives.
Kelsey Willock: It's also certainly conference season. As everyone hits the ground running post Labor Day, it's that time of the year. But I agree with you. See the big major conferences in Vegas, but sometimes the ones at home and in our backyards are even more valuable.
Julie Molloy: Exactly.
Kelsey Willock: Can you tell me about an experiment that you ran in your benefit strategy or total reward strategy that didn't go the way you expected and what you learned from it?
Julie Molloy: Gosh, that didn't go the way we expected. I guess I'll use one from a prior company and I won't give any details since I'm no longer at that company. But I think, and it's a couple of years old, but I think at the time we made the decision we wanted to increase family leave. We were not very competitive. You know, the market is accelerating. I think about when I had children, my husband barely got two weeks off, to now what's expected for both mothers and fathers. And so we wanted to expand this leave. We wanted to make it caregiver leave because we were also realizing, right, kind of the sandwich generation, right? That you're taking care of, it's elder care and it's child care, and you've got both. So we rolled out this amazing program. And it's not that it didn't go well. In fact, I think the issue was it went too well. So it resonated with just about everyone. And I think the financial implications and modeling, it blew all the models out of the water. So we were way overspent. And you know the CFO was like, what is going on? You know, like this is what you told, it's like double this. And so I think it went well, but it was one where it's, no good deed. So you sort of did it. And then the actual, there was no way, this whole conversation about ROI, we did our best to estimate certain things and none of the models captured what really happened. So it was a lesson of, you have to sort of maybe dip your toe into these things a little bit instead of going full in. You need more financial contingency, et cetera. I mean, we finally did kind of rein it in a little bit and get a lot better at sort of modeling and projections with our actuaries, but those first couple of, 18 months or so were pretty, pretty rough.
Kelsey Willock: There's something beautiful about a price ceiling to alleviate the concerns of a CFO. But you know, I think it's a great lesson to learn in the sense of, you know, success can be too many people signing up for something. And it's better than the opposite of it not resonating with anyone.
Julie Molloy: Yep, agree.
Kelsey Willock: What do you think is a trend in compensation and benefits that you see coming that most HR leaders are not ready for?
Julie Molloy: It's a great question. I think it's about, I maybe have two things. One is the expectations of transparency. And I don't know it's fair to say that HR's not ready. I think HR is trying to be ready. I don't think employees and companies are ready. And some have gone, I mean, you know, we read the articles on the companies that they know, not just what the CEO makes because of the public proxy, but they know what everyone else makes. And I give them a lot of credit and probably need to spend a lot of time with them. But I think full and open pay transparency is a potential snowball that's going to roll down that hill. And that is, there comes a level of maturity of understanding why two roles are maybe paid differently. And to just assume every employee at a company can sort of understand that is going to be a real sort of stretch. And I think the second one that I would give really quickly is just the expectations of the employee and how dynamic they are, right? I mean, we've got so many different generations still in the workforce, and we're trying to create programs that resound with everyone without offending anyone or sort of making any one group feel like we didn't focus on them. So you're trying to sort of balance. But I just think employees more and more are expecting more personalized benefits programs, comp structures, you know, they want very much to feel like this is unique for them, which is really at odds with trying to look at things sort of from a streamlined perspective, capabilities, those types of things. And so I think again, it's not that HR doesn't see it coming. I think that it's maybe it's going to be a harder bridge to set into reality and to sort of figure out where that tipping point is than we're currently really ready for.
Kelsey Willock: I would say personalization is one of the major topics that has come out of this question over the past few months. I'm fascinated by it because you know what my mind goes toward is we've kind of already reached personalization in the consumer marketplace, whether it's you know Instagram exactly knowing you, your TikTok algorithm knowing what you're interested in. It's completely safe to say that employees are going to expect the same level of personalization, but what does that mean? And it's obviously under different guardrails. Different guardrails, different regulations. As you'd mentioned, you have to make sure there's higher levels of sensitivity in terms of what you deliver. So fascinating to see what comes out of it next.
Julie Molloy: It sure will. It sure will.
Kelsey Willock: Well, Julie, it's been an absolute pleasure speaking with you. Thank you so much for joining us this afternoon. Where can our listeners connect with you beyond this conversation?
Julie Molloy: Well, they can find me on LinkedIn. Happy to continue to expand my network. I am attending a Conference Board session. I'm speaking on a topic relative to performance awards at a Conference Board session in New York.
Kelsey Willock: Exactly. Well, I'd love to have you back on the show. It's been such a joy. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your week and thanks so much again for joining us.