Engagement for Success: FreshDirect’s CPO on Redefining Performance, Purpose, and Growth

Show Notes

Summary

In a farm-to-door, 24/7 operation, how do you keep 2,500 people aligned, motivated, and truly high-performing?

Claire Ko, Chief People Officer at FreshDirect—the pioneer of online grocery delivery—shares how her lean people team supports a complex, tech-enabled business spanning production, logistics, merchandising, and corporate functions.

Claire offers a view inside FreshDirect’s direct relationships with farms and fisheries, food-waste reduction efforts, and a new fair-trade initiative sending $1 per bunch of organic bananas back to farmers—purpose that fuels pride and performance.

She breaks down “Engagement for Success,” a company-wide framework that centers monthly, employee-led conversations defining personal success and linking work to business impact, complete with ongoing documentation to strengthen reviews and growth plans.

Claire also tackles calibration pitfalls, perspective-shifting tools like her “magic-wand” team exercise, and why clarity, recognition, and manager accountability matter most. She closes on HR’s human advantage in an AI era: connection, motivation, and the courage to remove obstacles so people can do their best work.

Timestamps

[00:45] – Guest intro and FreshDirect’s direct-from-farm model

[01:56] – Sustainability in action: reducing food waste and fair-trade bananas

[02:52] – HR in a complex, tech-enabled operation: competing expectations across teams

[04:35] – Leadership basics: clarity, recognition, and time with the team

[06:42] – “Engagement for Success”: purpose, design, and expected outcomes

[10:43] – Monthly employee-led success conversations and yearlong documentation

[14:25] – Rethinking performance reviews: beyond KPIs and the calibration trap

[15:35] – The “magic-wand” exercise: revealing potential and redefining what’s possible

[19:14] – The human advantage in an AI era: engagement, motivation, and trust

Takeaways

- Implement monthly, employee-led success check-ins that define outcomes, surface obstacles, and tie work to business impact.

- Document progress and engagement continuously to inform fair, future-focused performance reviews.

- Equip managers to remove blockers and recognize wins; make clarity and follow-through nonnegotiable.

- Use perspective-shifting prompts (e.g., the “magic-wand” team exercise) to reveal potential and set bolder goals.

- Connect roles to company purpose—such as sustainability partnerships—to boost pride, retention, and high performance.

Sponsor

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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.

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Rebecca Taylor (00:17)
Hello, welcome to HR Voices. I'm your host Rebecca Taylor and I'm here with Claire Ko, who's the Chief People Officer at FreshDirect. Welcome Claire, thank you for being here.

Claire Ko (00:26)
Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here.

Rebecca Taylor (00:28)
I'm excited too, because as we were chatting about very briefly before this, I'm a huge fan of FreshDirect. In my HR days, FreshDirect was the food provider for our office when I was stocking everything. So huge fan of what you all do. But for those who might not be familiar with the brand, can you tell us a little bit about FreshDirect and about your role there?

Claire Ko (00:45)
Yeah, I always like to say that FreshTrack is the pioneer of the online supermarket food delivery company. We have been operating in this area in New York City and states around us for over 20 years. We have been building strong relationship with vendors and what's making us very unique. And I always like to say that everyone feels so proud to be part of the company where we're doing something that no one else is actually able to do. Over 90 % of our produce come directly from the farm and fishermen.

So ⁓ the quality of the freshness and also the type of products that we can actually carry is really unmatchable compared to other other grocers or traditional brick and mortar stores that you can visit. sometimes the fish that you're ordering may still be in the ocean and a lot of the produce that we bring to our customers are coming directly from the farm and then it's coming to our warehouse and then directly back out to the customers to their doors. So we're very

Rebecca Taylor (01:32)
Yeah.

Claire Ko (01:44)
proud that we're doing something that's very unique. Also very excited to share with you guys that for the first time, we're going to be the first East Coast online retailer to offer organic fair trade bananas with just $1 from every bunch going directly back to the farmer. not just reinforcing obviously the quality of the that we bring, but also the commitment to the integrity and the communities that we actually serve.

Rebecca Taylor (02:11)
That's so cool. And thank you for sharing that too. Because especially when it comes to produce and fishing and farming, you want to see sustainability, especially because it's so easy to kind of lean into over consumption in so many ways. So love hearing that you're giving back and that it's all good for environment farmers and for everything that you want it to be. That's awesome.

Claire Ko (02:23)
Yeah.

Yeah, talking

about the food waste, actually were also able to work with our farmers who we have a very, very long and trusted relationship with. So if there is an overproduction, we actually provide a lot of support, sort of marketing those products so that we can buy more products from them so that they can minimize the loss. Yes. Yes, into value.

Rebecca Taylor (02:47)
Nice, get them off the shelves and into bellies, right, where they belong. Yeah, I love that.

So it sounds like there's some really cool stuff kind of going on, you know, for FreshDirect and everything that you're doing. So from an HR perspective, you know, what are some of the challenges that you're working on that might coincide with some of this change or might be completely different?

Claire Ko (03:07)
Well, the business itself, it's a complex business, right? So we are under a lot of operational pressure because we have the food production facility, we have the logistics and delivery network, and then the merchandising engine so that we can get the best and freshest quality of the products that we can deliver to our customers. And then on top of that, we're a sort of tech-enabled organization. So our corporate office have to be shift and of course change whenever needed based on the business needs. So all of this operation

under high customer expectations. So people have different interests and expectations and challenges that they face. So managing all of that underneath and making sure that people feel supported, I think is the biggest challenge I face as a people leader, as people are managing different expectations and also different demographic and different workforce. So that's definitely a challenge.

Rebecca Taylor (03:59)
Yeah. And there's

so many moving parts, right? Literally and figuratively, because you have the deliveries, you've got the trucks, there are physical moving parts. And then there's also just sort of from the business of, you know, making sure that you're working with the farmers in the way that, you know, that best supports them. That is also, you know, in line with the strategy that the organization needs. It is a lot to juggle. Yeah.

Claire Ko (04:08)
Mm-hmm.

It is a lot to juggle for sure, yes. And we

also kind of have to think about how do we deliver excellence and speed and making sure that we're profitable while sort of continuing to feel motivated and wanting to do this continuously, right? So that's definitely something that we are ⁓ managing on top of everything.

Rebecca Taylor (04:35)
Yeah.

Yeah.

So what are some of your secrets? What are some of the things that you know, either programs you've implemented or just tricks and tips that anyone could listen to?

Claire Ko (04:48)
⁓ I think, you know, I really want to make sure that I'm supporting my team with clear communication, transparent discussions, and making sure that everybody really understands what winning actually looks like and feeling recognized of what they've done well and making sure that we can talk about the impact and the positive impact that those work actually makes for the business. I always like to say my biggest challenge personally is to make sure that I can find more time to be able to spend with our team.

interaction, the engagement and supporting them without the delay so that the frustrations can be minimized is definitely something that I kind of remind myself every day that I want to do.

Rebecca Taylor (05:28)
Yeah, I

feel like in HR, there's always just, you always wish that you had 30 hours in a day only because we're always looking for more time, right? More time to do more things, especially when you're juggling, you know, large teams, right? Because how many folks do you have, how many folks are in HR and how many employees does FreshDirect have total, roughly?

Claire Ko (05:35)
Yes. Yes.

well.

In Fresh Drug, we have over 2,500 employees, and about 300 corporate employees working with us. And within the people team, we have roughly about 20 people. So I always think that people team have a lot to do, and then we have a lean team, and we can always find more things to do. But we are obviously expected to drive high performance of everyone and making sure that we can also, at the same

be the emotional safety net for people. So we have to focus on reducing the costs, ⁓ of course, increasing the productivity, protect the culture that we have, or drive the culture together with the management team, and handle compliance, manage risk, and coaching people, and absorb emotions so that we can be the listeners and making sure that we can provide solutions to people. So a lot that we're managing, and I can tell you about a lot of the exciting programs that we're actually rolling out, ⁓

Rebecca Taylor (06:43)
Yeah.

Claire Ko (06:43)
that I think that could be interesting for many people to learn about. Yeah.

Rebecca Taylor (06:47)
I'd love to hear about those. Please

tell me.

Claire Ko (06:50)
So I am launching a program called Engagement for Success. It's a program that I've designed to make sure that we can enhance the level of connection to what success looks like for you, and also to make sure that we can start building the path towards it. So it's not just a program, it's really to make sure that we can make everyone feel like they are personally connected to our company's purpose.

and have clear expectations and making sure that they are feeling really motivated and encouraged to grow. So I want to call that where we are basically letting everyone to define what success looks like for you. So it's not just about what you do, responsibilities, what's written in the job description, how you complete your task. It's more about how am I going to be or what success do I want to achieve? And at the end of that road, what is the positive impact I'm making as an individual for this?

business.

So it is it is really a motivational tool and I'm calling it for engagements for successful reason because this requires continuous engagement with your manager, aside from what you do every day to think about, well, if I do everything every day, right, what is that end goal looking like for me? But also before I even define what what those tasks look like, you know, I want to talk about what success looks like for me and how that's

Rebecca Taylor (07:51)
Mmm.

Yeah.

Mm.

Claire Ko (08:20)
to be positive impact the department and of course the company. And I think it's beneficial for both the team and for the company because we can encourage people to think about the potential gaining of the benefits that we may not be able to actually realize today.

Rebecca Taylor (08:35)
Yeah.

Claire Ko (08:36)
And

people are going to be able to sort of consistently think about, if I do this, it will help me to get to where I want to be. And that definition of the success is not just a success for myself, but it's a success of all.

Rebecca Taylor (08:49)
Yeah.

And I think that that's such a smart way to think about it too, especially when you think about how you've named it Engage for Success, because there's no secret, anyone listening to this, anyone in HR knows that engagement is at an all time low everywhere, right? So connecting that to almost kind of, it almost sounds like going back to basics, and I mean that in a good way, where it's like, hey, what if we just help people realize and understand what they can achieve in their career or what they might want to do and let them kind of...

put out what they're looking for and then see how the organization can kind of back into that based on different success metrics that they work on with their manager. think I'd be hearing a lot more of that in these types of conversations too, that those types of performance plans or career paths are becoming a lot more collaborative now, which I think is smart because the way that we do our jobs today is so different from the way that we did them five years ago. So imagine a year or two from now and it's like, you have to kind of keep it collaborative so that you're putting people.

Claire Ko (09:34)
Yes? Right.

Rebecca Taylor (09:47)
on the path that they want to be on and that the path that's sustainable for them.

Claire Ko (09:51)
Yeah, and you know, can tell you a little bit more about how I came up with this whole concept of engagement for success. I think based on my conversations with my managers and also individuals who want to be successful, one thing that we could have offered better throughout my career was, you know, actually create an opportunity to talk about it. Oftentimes, the performance review process is focused on what you've done well, what you need to improve, and what are we going

Rebecca Taylor (09:56)
Yeah.

Claire Ko (10:20)
to to make sure that you can be better. Instead, we never really talk about the individual goals and how they're actually defining the success. Perhaps someone may not be looking for just a senior title. Someone may be looking for an opportunity to explore other areas of their department where they can learn more so that they can not just to be transferred to another opportunity, but rather to have a better understanding of how the business is actually operating. So what this is actually going to be offering to our team here is

Rebecca Taylor (10:27)
Mm-hmm.

Claire Ko (10:50)
You're going to be driving this conversation every month just 20 to 30 minutes with your manager You're gonna have to come prepared to talk about what success looks like for you for your first meeting and then every month you're going to talk about one what type of path you're creating for yourself and also to making sure that you're making progress and if they're feeling any obstacles or challenges that they are not able to overcome themselves and Making sure that they're getting the guidance and support from their manager

Rebecca Taylor (11:08)
Mm-hmm.

Claire Ko (11:19)
Now, this will automatically and naturally push the managers to have more caring and interest into what my employees actually want or what my team is looking for. And I will also feel obligated to need to remove those obstacles so they can excel in what they do. One thing that I've promised to many people at FreshTrack was I believe I have talent in finding what people can be very good at and helping people to be better at it. So I think this is definitely one of the programs

Rebecca Taylor (11:29)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Claire Ko (11:48)
that we're launching to make sure that we can support the team to gain the knowledge and experience and opportunities that they deserve to receive, but at the same time making sure that they are feeling motivated, interested, and passionate about the progress that they make to make better and positive and bigger influence to the business.

Rebecca Taylor (12:08)
Yeah.

And I love that it's also connecting to the business too, because from what I've been hearing from, you know, HR folks on this podcast, but also just on LinkedIn and just hearing conversations with different employees and people in different fields, they're worried about being misplaced or they're worried about their skills falling behind. And the key thing that every thought leader says is you have to learn the business, you have to connect what you do to the business. And like no one really

Claire Ko (12:32)
you

Rebecca Taylor (12:35)
can give me a very good explanation of how to do that that we're not doing already. And I think this is like, the way that you're positioning this is just sort of a really, really great way to kind of think about it is, you know, help them understand the impact that their work does have on the business in whatever fashion that might be, whether they're in, you know, the shipping facility, or if they're in the marketing side and the more corporate side of things, like every single person is hired at a company and paid a salary because that role, the work that they do is important, right? So it's kind of just.

I think it's really, really, I love that you're kind of tying it to the bigger picture because it also teaches them more about how to leverage their skills in other areas so that they do have less of a risk of becoming obsolete, right?

Claire Ko (13:14)
Yep, absolutely. I think high performance without that caring and the vision for long-term success and the impact will really not last long. I don't think that's actually a meaningful level of high performance that we should be driving. We want to make sure that people feel continuously engaged and the interaction to really making sure that people feel they're seeing the potentials and the impact that they haven't made, but they can see themselves

making, I think that is more sustainable and long-term growth that we should all be thriving for.

Rebecca Taylor (13:48)
Yeah,

I could not agree more. Especially you see all the talks of high performance culture and how it's become so much of a buzzword. I actually had a post on LinkedIn about this a couple of weeks ago, just like, can anyone tell me what this actually means? Because it's kind of just become sort of this buzzword. I'm like, don't we all want to perform well? Isn't that kind of always the goal? And I think that the balance between pushing towards achievement and pushing towards goal orientation is an important part of high performance.

but just as important as measuring the impact so that people see what it's all for. You need to kind of see that there's milestones hit. It's like, worked really hard on this thing and here's what it did. Here's how it matters for, here's why it matters for me, for my career. You can't have, I don't know, you can't have the forcing high performance without the balance part of that. I love that.

Claire Ko (14:29)
Mm-hmm.

Right. Right.

And what's actually really challenging for, I'm sure this is the case for many people leaders, is that when it comes down to the ⁓ period of the performance review, and I'm sure many companies are actually going through that currently, as the year has ended. And ⁓ we have to often face the situation of managers saying, well, my people are doing really well. Everybody in my team are great performers. And then we have to say, well, it's not possible that everyone is the best performer in your team, right? And then it's not just about the metrics and KPIs.

Rebecca Taylor (14:59)
Yep.

Claire Ko (15:07)
that we input, also have we done enough to really understand the level of engagement we expect to see from our people? And for that reason, I'm actually spending a lot of time with not just the senior leadership team, but also layers below that to make sure that I understand what are the potentials that we're actually not seeing at the moment? So some of the questions that I actually like asking is, I'm gonna give you a magic wand. I'm gonna be asking you to actually create the best team in the whole industry.

Rebecca Taylor (15:38)
Yeah.

Claire Ko (15:38)
Tell me what that structure is looking like and who's coming with you, right?

Rebecca Taylor (15:43)
Yeah, that's always a good

question. Who's coming with you? ⁓

Claire Ko (15:45)
And it

actually is a game changer that people are seeing things from a very different perspective. And this isn't about measuring people's performance and taking action. It's more about how do we think about the potentials that we're not seeing clearly today by switching or changing the perspective of how we should be seeing it. And I always ask, with this best team, what are we achieving? What are we doing? What's happening?

Rebecca Taylor (16:09)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, what's possible?

Claire Ko (16:15)
What are the possibilities? And I think those

Rebecca Taylor (16:17)
Yeah.

Claire Ko (16:18)
are the things that we should, and those are the engagement tools that I am using to make sure that people are able to see things a little bit differently.

Rebecca Taylor (16:26)
Yeah.

I love that. I love that. Especially, I mean, I know, you know, performance reviews this time of year is always a very, very stressful time, right? Because once you get everybody to actually submit their feedback, then you have to make sure people are having those performance conversations and that those are happening. And that's the hardest part because to your point, the perspective influences everything, right?

Claire Ko (16:33)
Yes.

Rebecca Taylor (16:47)
A manager isn't going to say that they have low performers on their team typically because then they see that as a reflection of them, right? So it's hard for them to be honest, even if it means that maybe this person's the lowest performer, but that doesn't mean that that's where the conversation ends, right? That that's where it begins in a lot of ways. And so the perspective.

Claire Ko (17:01)
Right. Right. Yeah.

One thing I can also,

yeah, it's also about the perspective. One thing I can tell you is this Engagement for Success program requires employees to the employees to record the conversation and those become a track records of the conversations that took place for the whole year. So it will be a critical tool to actually, to not only just measure the KPI and metrics that they've met, but also the level of engagement, what type of efforts were made and what the person has done to achieve that success that they've defined themselves.

Rebecca Taylor (17:35)
Yeah,

I think that's so critical is the documentation over time, right? As the job is happening, because that's where, you know, we see at AllVoices, we see, you know, some, have a significant number of cases that will, that are related to performance management or performance improvement, right? And it's because, you know, a manager maybe wants to terminate an employee, HR is always the last one to find out about it. So then they're like, well, now we have to do this whole thing to make sure that, know, to make sure that all the right processes have been formed, right?

Claire Ko (18:03)
What happened?

Rebecca Taylor (18:04)
Right, how did we get here? And

that's a problem that we solve a lot where we say, you know, hey, you can have the documentation of these conversations, whether they're performance improvement conversations or any type of, you know, just conversation that might involve friction or something that you just need to establish a track record because you can't make big long-term decisions off of anecdotal evidence here and there. It has to kind of be over consistent conversations over time so that you're looking at themes and patterns, not just recency bias.

And with technology now we can do that, which is I think is just, it's nice kind of what doors that opens up for honest conversations between managers and employees too.

Claire Ko (18:42)
Yeah, and I think I do strongly believe that this type of programs and actions that we take will be helping us to transform our business even further. I mean, we're already doing something very unique. Everyone feels very proud of being part of the company that offers unique offerings to our special products, actually, that are freshest to our customers. But I do believe that this will be ⁓ sort of supporting the transformation that we're about to face as an organization.

Rebecca Taylor (19:00)
Yeah.

Yeah,

ooh, I love that. I'm so excited to hear more, because especially as a longtime fan of FreshDirect, I'm excited to keep an eye on you all and what you're doing. ⁓ But I know we're, believe it or not, we're actually just about at time. So do you have any final thoughts you want to share before we close out?

Claire Ko (19:14)
Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean with AI sort of.

Threatening many of the positions, especially in the people team world, I do think that one of the strengths and great offerings that people leaders can offer to the business is the level of interaction, engagement, and motivations that we can offer to the table. And I'm loving that we're able to shift our focus to offer more of that for FreshDirect. And I think we're going to be able to offer even greater things in your future.

of how we can transform the business with creating a higher performing team.

Rebecca Taylor (20:00)
beautifully said. And thank you for that. And you know, I think there's a lot to kind of hold on to as everyone's kind of figuring out what AI is going to do to their role and how they can show up. And to your point, the human interaction side and just the support that you can give people is a huge, huge thing to kind of focus on right now, too. So I love that. Well, thank you, Claire. Thank you for being here. And thank everybody for listening. And I hope everyone has a great rest of your day. Bye.

Claire Ko (20:09)
Yep.

Thank you

so much, Rebecca.