Hit it.

On this episode of the Left of Boom Show, I interview Deb Mueller from HR

Acuity. She’s the CEO and founder of HR Acuity. If you’re not familiar, it’s an

investigations and employee relations technology platform that she and her teams built. Her company is high-flying. It’s 150

employees. She’s been recognized uh by Inc. and by Forbes as a top female founder. Uh they’re doing some really

exciting things in the employee relations space. Uh today we talk about their platform and the impact of having

a good process for investigations and how what it plays on your culture. We talk about things like AI and how that’s

impacting the employee relations function and then also benchmarking and KPIs. How do you measure the employee

relations function in your organization? Uh, and finally, she reveals a very

interesting sounding uh, s’mores recipe. I think you’ll really enjoy today’s conversation with Doug Mueller, CEO and

founder of HR Acuity. Well, Deb, welcome to the Left a Boom

Show. It’s great to see you. It’s great to be here, Phil. Thanks for inviting me. Yeah, I’m excited to have our interview.

Let’s just start off at the top with your background. Tell us a little bit about who is Deb Mueller. Um, so I’m Deb Mueller. I’ve been the

founder and CEO of HR cut now for almost 20 years. It’ll be 20 years in March. I can’t believe that. But really my who I

am, I am an HR employer relations professional by trade. That’s what I did. Never really set out to be a tech

founder. Started my career sort of in a traditional way, working HR roles in big

companies and you know along the way had this crazy idea that we could be doing investigations and employee relations a

little differently. thought about you know who could do that and since I had absolutely no tech background for some

reason I decided I was the one go down that route and here we are. So great. What like uh background prior to

prior to starting and you know HR Yeah. So was an HR you know really all

through my career started off in City Bank. I worked for Honeywell for many years done in Brad Street and did a lot

of you know generalist roles leader roles in the space. At that point employer relations was not a separate

function. It was something that we just write it and I I don’t know why but I

was the one who sort of opened the draw the drawer which became like Pandora’s box or question something and sort of

you know pulled the string that led me down this sort of complicated investigation. People probably wished I

hadn’t opened the box. Um and I found myself learning how to do investigations sort of by reading books by being really

able to watch other people who are good at it and learn from them. And then when you keep doing them, you get the more

complex ones, the kind of crazier ones, and you’re sort of all of a sudden you’re the go-to person for investigations. So that was my career.

And then I actually started HRE in 2006 to be a firm that did workplace

investigations. That was the primary thing I felt that I saw as outsourcing investigations to law firms. And I

thought, well, god, those lawyers, they’ve been in a law firm their whole life. They don’t know what happens at a plant. They don’t know what, you know,

how do they know what questions to ask? It’s sort of a chilling effect. You know, a good HR investigator can really

get so much more information and really understand the situation in a much more comprehensive way. We need more of those

as options. And so that was really that was really it. Start this firm. You know, I thought maybe it would grow

around the country. We’d have investigators everywhere. And um when I started going out to my clients, I

talked about my process for doing investigations. And they would say, “Well, we need a better process.” And I thought, “Well, yeah, but I’m not I’m

not here to give you my process. says, “I’m here to do your investigation.” And I was going out to some large companies. That’s where my network was. And they

finally, I always say like the 2×4 was hitting me over the head. It hurt. And I was listening to everything like,

“You’re supposed to listen to your customers.” And I listened and I thought, “Huh, they’re right. There is

no comprehensive way to do investigations. There’s no consistency in the process. Forget about employee

relations.” And there’s so much data that we learn about these situations

that we’re in that we just sort of push away and we you know in a drawer and we don’t learn from them and there’s really

an opportunity here and you know I decided let’s go for it. All right couple of quick pivots off of that. So the first one about 10 years

earlier I also so I I was the lawyer that did not really you know know much

besides the law that I took a job as a year as a HR director for a client of

mine and I tried to talk him out of it. He was he was a friend of mine too and I was like that you have no idea like how dumb an idea this is but I don’t even

know what I don’t know about HR. And that was an incredibly important experience for me because of what you

just said. You know there’s a whole practical component. You can know the law, but like if you don’t have that

sort of practical experience being inside of a company, you’re going to give like correct answers if it was a

law exam, but you’re not going to give practical example, you know, practical

advice. It’s going to be very useful. Some of my best relationships of my colleagues were when I had a really

strong and I was fortunate to have a really strong legal partner with me. I was working with what was happening in

the business, what did we have to accomplish? they were sort of working well here are the risks and together we figured out what to do. We’re not

against each other. It’s like how do we sort of weigh the risk and the experience of the employee and what’s

the right thing to do versus what’s in the policy and then make decisions from there and then you have to look at both

of them together. So I think that’s like you need both right you need like you have to assemble

the Avengers to really get you know best possible result. So that I think I think that’s great great advice. All right.

So, so HR cutie, so you found this firm, your your clients want to know the process. So, just kind of walk us

through what’s kind of what did that look like and and and then 20 years you’ve you’ve been on a journey. So,

maybe give me some of the highlights on that trip. Really journey. When we first started, it was all about the investigation. How do you drive a consistent process for

investigations? You know, we’ve been doing, maybe we’ll talk about it later, our benchmarking study for many, many years, and I was doing a survey then,

and one of the data points that really has remained, it’s grown a little bit, but we’ve started asking, do you have a consistent

process when dealing with investigations in your organization, a required process? And you know, I think when I

started it was very low, then it went up to maybe 40% of organizations. Now, it’s in the 50s, so we’re getting there. But

you think about that when something goes wrong in the organization. When it happens to people, we’re just sort of letting everybody investigate however

they investigate. Maybe it’s they learned it in one organization or they don’t know how to do it or they read one book that tells them how to do it. And

so there was really a need for that consistency to build trust to get answers for what’s going on. I

often I often use the the comparison to if you go on a plane and there’s something wrong with the plane and they

say we’re going to investigate the problem but but don’t worry you know 40% of the time or 50% of the time we use a

required process otherwise we just sort of figure out as we go along doesn’t really build trust that they’re going to get to the bottom

of and actually solve the problem. I watched this guy fly a plane one time and he did it this way and it was

successful. I just kept doing it like that. That’s right. I don’t know. it just it just doesn’t build a lot of trust and

we’re dealing with our most important our most expensive resources. So, it started with investigations, but then as

I started to think of my own background and listening to my customers, I realized what I knew was the

investigation is just a part of employee relations. And it’s a part when everything’s gone wrong or you haven’t

sort of put the pieces together. there’s been predictive indicators that you’ve either chosen to ignore or you could not

see across your organization that get you that someone doesn’t come into the organization one day and just start I’m

going to start harassing today because it’s Tuesday right there’s cultural things that have allowed that they’ve

gotten away with things so it’s so much more than just the investigation which is really how HR acuity has matured

really all the way we say from issue notification all the way through afterare like when do we start hearing

about these things whether they’re big issues or little issues which I think is where the data really can, you know,

take us in the right direction. You know, what are we seeing? You know, what’s happening that if we put the put those pieces together, we connect those

dots, we can maybe avoid issues later on. And so, you know, that’s what we set out to do. And again, from a technology

standpoint, I drew it out on PowerPoint. That was my and I think the other thing

that drove me was I had been the user of really bad HR software. And

so when I think about the guiding principles of doing this, I was like, I’m not going to rebuild something bad. And when I think about what was wrong

with those software systems, and still we see this in other systems, is they were clearly built by someone who didn’t

understand the role. Hey engineers, create an investigation system for us, an ER system for us. Don’t don’t ask the

user. Don’t understand the use case or what they need. And so that was sort of the the promise I made. If I’m going to

go down this path, it’s going to be something that my colleagues would say, “Yep, that’s what we need. you understand me and we continue to do that

with sort of engaging our community and our customers. I have a friend of mine who was sort of like where you were at

in-house ran investigations was looking for something like HR acuity and I

remember like the best thing you could find was was basically software bug reporting you know like that like but

but that that’s what engineers built and so like you had that and then it was like could you cobble something on top

of that like we have a bug in our employee relations system someone’s harassing somebody like how do we

document you know whether we A lot of companies particularly because it wants less systems and procurements

involved. They see what they have and when they hear case management they’re like oh we have case management. So they sort of a traditional ticketing

system and I always say if you want to build trust with your employees it doesn’t really help when you say well

we’re going to use the same process and systems to deal with your harassment issue as we deal with when your mouse is

broken. Right? I mean it’s just not helpful. also it owns it and you know not that it ever

does anything wrong at work but you know perhaps people you want to own that solution and then one other thing about

consistent process going back to the whole legal component like this this is where this is where legal components

important right if you do have the same pro versus if you have the same process and this is how we investigate everything then you you no longer are

open to the complaint which is which is a very valid one like why did I get the

deep dive investigation and everybody else gets like the gloss over investigation like why was my process

different than everyone else’s that’s a huge problem if you’re if you’re in litigation and also I would think expanding beyond

that to sort of er so I think of when we think of sort of our processes we think of ER cases in I talk about this

paradigm of a traffic light right as an organization green light is what we want right those are the policies the

guidelines the job descriptions the goals that we set for people that’s how we want them to behave that’s how we want them to act everything is green

light and if everybody did exactly as what we put on paper. You know, you and I both would not have

Matthew McConna. But the yellow light, right? So the yellow light are the things that happen. They’re sort of like when things just

sort of veer off course maybe slightly or so that you need to manage. You need

to document them. You need to handle them consistently. You need to deal with them in the moment. You can use that

data to see if maybe there’s a more systemic issue in the organization or a regional issue. And then we have our red

light issues, right? or things really if they’re not handled properly can cause more harm. So we knew that when we

started it was all about the investigations, but we knew that the employee relations experience and those

yellow light incidents were actually in many respects much more important for risk mitigation. So if you get a claim

to the EOC or something like that, hey, I I didn’t get promoted because of my race, gender, whatever it is, it’s not

the investigation. you have to do the investigation, but it’s really no, I can show as an as an employer that we’ve had

other people in similar situations that we’ve treated the same way. Um, and there were no investigations, just, you

know, this person was promoted or terminated or what whatever employment action we took. We can look across to see how we’ve treated people.

And my language for that is this like, you know, left of boom, right of boom, you know, so like boom is the is sort of

the red light what you’re talking about, but there’s all like the the things that happen ahead of time. And paying attention to the yellow light stuff also

tells you like Hm. There’s this department that seems to have similar

complaints that don’t ever kind of like get to red light just but but there’s a lot of smoke

going on there, right? Or they don’t have any complaints, right? Or they don’t have any complaints. Yes.

Not there. You know, one of our tools also which we sort of expand sort of the universe is the manager giving them

manager tools because HR is not on the shop floor. They’re not there. And so for my career and pretty pretty sure for

yours as well, you know, HR’s been telling people, I’ve been either been saying this or doing it, you know, hey

Phil, make sure you document that conversation. Make sure you do this. And you know, managers kind of look at you

like a deer in the headlights. If they do it, they do it in a notebook somewhere that you can’t you can’t look for trends or they don’t do it or they

don’t know how to do it. And just giving them those tools. You know, you’re tethering to them to HR. You’re not leaving them away. And and by the way,

that’s some of the ways we’re using AI to make sure they can gain confidence in how they do these things. But just

documenting those things, those those little things can really show you either, you know, you have a group where

nobody’s documenting anything, not good. So so much can be had from those I would call predictive indicators

that are out there. And those like some of the worst cases are where there is like no noise at all.

That’s because the boss is like if anyone says a word, you’re all fired. and like the like the very worst, you

know, I won’t even call them leaders, but the very worst bosses, you create that sort of an environment where if you

do have a tool and it’s like, wow, this is weird. Like everybody has something going on except for this one place.

What’s going on there? I always say either they have the most amazing leadership there and you should go and

figure out how to replicate that or you need to actually one of our community members I remember at talked about how

they sort of look at the data and then they go to where there is no data and then they’ll go do you know they’ll go

on tours and just do listening tours in that particular place because something’s telling it’s not right. Issues will happen. uh more

organizations are starting to be more transparent, starting to normalize coming forward, right? Looking at how

many complaints do we have based upon how many people and really saying we want you to come forward, not just when

you’re being harassed, like that’s too long. But when your boss tells a joke that made you uncomfortable, reach out

to us, you know, an investigation. Let us figure it out. Maybe, you know, five other people had an issue with that same

boss or in that same region or whatever. That’s where we can nip it in the bud and really make people make sure they

can work in a in a safe and trusted environment. Yeah. And we’re going to switch to the hero assumption in a second, but like

they, you know, and maybe no one has had the guts to raise this with this person and if they if it had been, they would

be just a ghast and would like fix it and absolutely lose the opportunity. They don’t always want to do things.

They have to be, you know, shown sort of the data. In our tool, you can do benchmarking. So you can kind of either benchmark internally or externally

against peer companies. You know, when people just give you data and say, “Well, we’ve had this many issues.” Yeah. You know, it helps you as a leader

say, “Well, how does that compare to other parts of the organization or other similar organizations out there?” So, it

gives you some some measure. All right. So, speaking of the hero assumption, we who has made like who is

important in your own career or in your life, it doesn’t have to be professional that you know made the hero assumption

about you that maybe believed in you or saw you in a place where maybe you didn’t even see yourself. Who’s who’s

that leader in your life? I think it’s a lot of people. As I think about that, my aunt just passed away.

She was 93. She was the one that told me about Cornell. She had gone to Cornell which led me to the industrial labor

relations school and I would have never thought that I could go to Cornell. I don’t know. I got in somehow. So that

led me down the HR path. So that was really someone who believed in me and saw something in me. Uh you know then I

had interestingly I had some leaders during my career when I was doing employee relations. I always think about

this at at different times they would say to me, “Wow, you really like doing this. You’re really good at it.” And so

my response would be, “Well, doesn’t everybody like this?” Yeah. And they like, “No, no, we hate this.

Don’t be doing it.” And I thought, “Huh, that’s interesting.” Like, you realize like something and it’s different than

everybody else. It you sort of need someone to to show you that otherwise you just think everybody’s sort of the

same way. So I I credit them. And then I do have an advisor um early on in the

business, you know, when you’re growing a business of something that you’ve never done before, I formed an advisory

board of people in my community and one of my adviserss, he’s still a a personal adviser to me today, Steve Schlesinger.

Shout out to him. But I remember as the business was growing, like again, I didn’t set out to grow build a

technology company. You know, when I think about the fact that I have 150 employees now, I’m like, what that it

wasn’t on the little trifold that I created. Uh, but I remember him saying, “Oh, no, no.” He’d always be like 10

steps ahead of me. No, no, no. You’re going to it’s going to be this big or here’s the opportunity. And as soon as we got close to that, he’d be like, “No, no, no. It can be this.” And so just

having that vision, I think really helped in having someone to sort of be three steps ahead of me and really

giving me the confidence that, you know, to see, huh, this really could be something. And by the way, I also credit

the world for maybe not so great, but for basically turning on its head and rolling over since we started in in a

recession in 2009. really um you know it’s sort of given us some new opportunities to raise

relations. Yeah, I feel the same way. Yeah. It’s like the universe is conspiring to like create a bunch of problems to solve and so

rather we didn’t have them but you know we can help. Exactly. Yeah. So we’ve I’m going to I’m

going to combine a couple of the questions that that we talked about ahead of time that you know sort of best

practices and investigations and then I also want to touch a little bit on like those now we really are talking about

like red light investigations. We I hopefully you know I I don’t I don’t want to make this uh this is definitely

going to mark this as a point in time but we we just recently underwent this Coldplay concert where the CEO and CHRO

uh not married to each other got caught on the kiss cam. So so like talk a little bit about like best practices and

investigation but then how would you like if you were asked to investigate that type of a situation what are what

are some of like the tips that you would give to folks about that? Yeah. Well, they made it easy because they were, you know, they’re running

away from the camera. And I would say, you know, having a uh relationship with someone at work is not illegal. In this

case, just very stupid, you know, particularly when you’re in senior positions. And I, you know, I always wonder what’s going on with her. She has

sort of an opportunity, quite frankly, to say, you know, she was in this relationship for whatever reason. Um, I

I think there’s people underestimate the power of an investigation, the power of

consistency and standardization and making people feel like they’re trusted and they want to come forward. The power

in just sort of giving people the voice to hear. We do some research every year. I think this was last year we did it. We

did it before. And we always ask the question about people’s loyalty to their brand, like their NPS score, like how

loyal are they to the company? And I’m going to get my numbers wrong. I don’t have them in front of me, but I’m going to be around around. Right. So, when you

ask in general, you know, all employees, and we asked a couple thousand, you know, how likely are you to recommend

your employer as a place to work? In general, it’s around 41%. This is pretty much it’s it’s pretty the same across

the board when we asked that question, but then we asked it previous questions. We asked, did you have an issue come up?

Did you report it? Was it investigated? Was it resolved? We didn’t say either way. When we looked at that group of

people where the investigations were resolved, their NPS or their likelihood to recommend their employer as a place

to work went up to 57% and again I may be off one or two% but it’s big

difference. And so you think about why investigations are so important. So it’s

higher than someone that nothing happened to. Yeah. If nothing happened to you at all, you actually are not as loyal to that

employer. And I I like to say it’s very similar to what I would call the

Nordstrom effect for me. I’m a very loyal Nordstrom shopper. Why is that? Because I can get the same clothes

probably anywhere else. But if something goes wrong, if I want to return something, fine. You can return it. Year

later, doesn’t matter. Falls apart, we’ll give it back to you. No questions asked. If I in a rush, I have a funeral,

I need something hemmed to help me out, they’re going to get it. They’re going to put their arm around me and they’re going to get it done. And so loyalty is

built when something bad happens. Does your employer have your back? And so people underestimate that. Think, oh my

god, employ investigations, we just sort of want to go away. Let’s not spend time on it. But it’s it’s really critical.

And by the way, those are the same people that are going to stay in your organization and when they see somebody

having another issue, they’re going to say, “Hey, you should go to HR. They actually could help you.” And so there’s

consistency, fairness, transparency about what’s happening. it’s not done behind the

curtain. Um, and you know, trying to trying to resolve it the best you can. I don’t think people want they don’t

expect perfection. They just want you. It’s one of the reasons I’m a big fan of peer review like at least as one step in

your dispute resolution, you know, uh, toolbox because if because of that, it’s

transparent and it’s like if you disagree, go have a group of your peers listen to the situation and tell you

what they think. Uh, right. I mean, you know, like like having that kind of like a process and

it doesn’t have to necessarily be that transparent, but like ha having a process that you can go by. Look, I’m not going to tell you what happened in

this particular investigation, but I can tell you here’s how we investigate every single case like this. And that is the

same process everybody gets and that’s a fair process. And then if you don’t don’t agree with the end result of that

process, here’s the other avenues that we have that you can challenge that that you know like that you can’t really do

more than that. And to your point if once you have people who have gone through that process a few times and can

tell their peers like hey look I absolutely I got a fair shake. I I didn’t like what

the end result or I did like the end result or whatever, but it’s just like they took it really seriously. And

that’s really all that you you can you know that that’s what you hang your hat on. And from an employee relations

standpoint, again, like you just said, it’s the it’s the point when things go go south. You know, how do we how do we

act culturally when that happens? Tells you everything that there is to know about a culture. Yeah. It’s so true. I mean, I remember

my career when I was doing investigations, you know, small issues that were not handled properly that just

blew out of control because they just weren’t nipped in the bud and then typically they bring me in to fix it or big issues that

actually people actually were harmed or they were treated poorly but they were heard, the company took the right

action, they did a wholesome investigation and it went away like we got people back to work and people

feeling good. I mean even little things like in our process you know standard protocols so that when you sit down with

every person associated with an investigation you’re going through a very similar list and that says to them

there’s process there’s process we care about it being transparent and this is something we’re

we’re moving the needle on it slower than I would like but sharing with um employees and it can be a different

amount that you share you know how many people have made complaints you know what hap what the actions were showing

them that you’re accounting actually when people come forward in many cases you do find merit to the cases and you

do things about it again it’s not then they feel like gee I had an issue I’m going to come forward it transparency

even like our speak up hotline one of the things we tell people when or companies when they implement is really

encourage your employees to go on now scan that QR code have them go on now put something fake in you know ask them

to please let you know it’s fake you know whatever but have them go through the experience when everything’s okay

right because when something happens It’s stressful, but they can say, “Wait, I remember I went through those questions.”

That’s a great idea. Yeah, we we love that. We love to look at, you know, how many scans by QR code

happened right after the roll out. That’s a really good sign. Yeah, that’s a I I I love that. I love that. Right. Because you’re you’re

right. I I talk about this thing powered distance, but like it’s it’s like when when you are at the point where you’re

kind of like approaching, do I say something about this? like one of the things that’s going on it might even be

like fully conscious is just you know this fear that if I if I raise this or

if I say something like something bad’s going to happen to me and so having again like when you know in peace time

you know using the system that gives you the confidence okay well I know how to use it I’m you know that’s not going to

be a barrier to you doing what you know needs to be done that’s great yeah I mean it’s just making them feel

comfortable not scared of the process same thing like how do we treat our witnesses in investigation really important

because nothing’s wrong with them but they’re going to get to see a little bit of behind the curtain and you want them

to say you know again they can again be advocates for people coming forward g I was a witness and they seem to have a process you know it wasn’t scary nothing

happened to me you know we have a lot of companies now that are proactively monitoring retaliation which I love

another great way to build trust I mean you know you come in you have an issue and I tell you don’t worry Phil we and

this is good you have to do this we want people to do this we We have a non- retaliation policy. You can’t be retaliated against for reins. That’s

great. But that non- retaliation policy is basically saying something happened to you. It was really hard for you to

come forward. You took that step and you came forward. Now our retaliation policy is saying if something bad happens to

you again based upon come forward again. As opposed to we have some companies that are really proactively looking at

data. So through HR acuity pulling in some other data to monitor performance

measures, compensation decisions for certain people to say, hey, is a retaliation maybe unconsciously

happening in our organization? Can we actually take care of it so that our employees don’t have to experience something detrimental to them? Let’s

let’s put the our arms around them and just put them in the best position to do their best work.

And just checking in, right? Hey, how’s it going? Is everything going? you know, like that, you know, caring enough

to where where it’s like I’m I I’m not going to be like, hey, you know, necessarily like, hey, have you been

retaliated against, but it’s just like, you know, get creating the space where if there is anything happening, they

feel safe and comfortable like raising. Now we’ve started talking about this concept of afterare and actually one of

the sort of the new words that we’ve brought into our community is really it’s through care like afterare is

important but really through the entire process how are we touching in with all the involved parties you know the the

touch base even the the person accused I mean look it’s stressful for them and believe it or not sometimes they haven’t

done anything wrong or whatever people need to be treated properly so that idea

of through care throughout the process and then after you know we did a great investigation If we didn’t resolve the

problem though, it doesn’t matter who our investigation was. Great. So, you’ve got this uh community

that we’re very pleased to be a part of this empower community. Maybe talk a

little bit about so where did that come from and just talk Yeah. Tell me a little bit about that. Yeah. Um so in about 2015, we started

getting calls for employee relations conferences. Where’s there a conference? Where can we go? And we thought, oh,

let’s do a conference. got into a room, hired some event planners, and I said, “I really hate conferences. I hate sort

of getting up and I know you feel the same way. I does some great work with your vision program.” And I and I

thought, “Let’s just get er leaders around a table.” There weren’t many back then. ER still was very much in its infancy in 2015. We just started to see

groups separated out as a function, but it was sort of my field of dreams. If I build it, maybe they’ll maybe

they’ll come. So we got 50 ER leaders together and had like a threequarter of a day session where we just talked and

it was great and that just kept growing and we started doing um phone events. People wanted to get together more often

and in 2021 we decided look we were talking to the leaders. We needed a space for ER professionals. Uh we kept

hearing people say like this is I’m finding my people like no one understands ER except and labor relations like the people that do it. So

we launched empower uh empower.org or if anybody wants to join it is free

and it has been growing ever since. We have close to 7 thou we more than 6,000 maybe not quite 7,000 members now but

we’re continuing to grow. There’s a really wonderful just live feed where people are asking questions and getting

feedback from someone and then we have partners like you LRI Phil. So LRI now

has the labor group which you sponsor. We have other groups very active where people with

like-minded questions about what are going on can get together. We do empower hour sessions, live sessions. We had one

today that was fantastic about pips versus packages. Um, and it’s really just a wonderful community of people

collaborating and really helping each other and in these times when we have been navigating new scenarios in the

world. It’s so important especially which is why we were so excited about LRI joining. I mean unions I mean you

know they have this new they’re new again. They’re back. I mean they weren’t gone

but they’re back in a different way. And I think that’s non-traditionally organized organizations are really

thinking about how to stay that way or what to do. Yes, it is a it’s a hot area as hot as

you and I have a lot of like gray hair to you. I’ve been doing this a long time and yeah, it is it is unlike any time in

my career. Uh and we’re, you know, our firm’s 47 years old, but you know, my my dad started it and it this is unlike any

time during his career as well. Yeah. It’s it’s pretty pretty nuts. It’s I

will just say if you if you haven’t visited the the empower community, you really should. They have like industry

groups. So it’s not you know so we’re a topical group and you can go in obviously and ask any kind of labor

related questions or employee relations stuff related to to that but they have groups for industry. They have groups

for uh you know other related things. Obviously if you’re an HRE user they they’ve you know there’s a lot of

community there to support that. So there’s just a it is a really really great and it the other thing is it’s

active like there are employee relations groups on LinkedIn there’s other employee relations group the thing that I think is really been eye openening to

me is there are people there every day asking and answering questions for each other so it’s it’s a real active

community as well. Yeah it really is. And you can post your jobs there or maybe look for your next job there. I don’t

but yeah we love having you know part of that the you can search the other members to see I want someone who in an

organization with 5,000 people and you know that handles this region sort of you know start start messaging people so

yeah it’s a great organization and really it’s because of the community it’s because of our expert leaders that

we have in there generating the conversation that’s so great yeah it’s great okay speaking of looking

for your next job AI you’ve embraced and are or using AI I as part of your

platform. Talk to me a little bit about what do you see as the possibilities and the advantages of of AI in the ER space

and then also what are some of the watchouts? Yeah. Well, I think the watch outs are the most obvious ones that we really

took some time to think about where where we saw other people sort of rushing in and like just trying to throw AI and everything. Our strategy is how

do we build the best product and are there ways that AI can help that either build some efficiencies and so I think

AI can help with getting us through some of the routine tasks making things go a little bit faster so we can start being

more strategic but if you think about investigations investigations are inherently biased AI biased bias plus

bias does not equal good things we have to be really careful about it but we are

finding some applications that are really exciting whether it’s summarization or suggested interview

questions, translations, workflow agents that we’re building into our cues. So,

there’s a lot of good things that can happen, but we cannot let it replace judgment, corroboration. It can help and

we’ve seen some ways that it can. I think we have to be careful because when we think about

the many many people that do this work um and we think just about human nature,

I’ve heard people say, “Well, we’ll we’ll we’ll do this for them.” Then they’ll have to click a box saying, you know, they checked it. I’m like, oh god,

please. How many times do you read the clickth through that you also say you read and agreed to on any piece of

software, you know, that you go to. I go to the UPS store, they’re like, read the agreement before I can send you package.

I’m not reading the agreement. So, human nature is we’re going to find ways to speed up. So, I think we have to put

safeguards in there and we’re doing that thoughtfully. Um, we’re really testing, but there’s definitely opportunity and

it’s pretty exciting, but I don’t think the ER role is going to go away. human versus to human. It’s so important in

building that trust. But there are ways we can use it to make things smarter. Our analytics, using it on analytics to

site trends and or look through themes that arise, that’s something a human can

do, but certainly AI can do it a lot faster. So the human thing and take that information and do something with it,

whether training or policy changes or figure out what’s going on in their culture. That’s where the fun comes in.

And I think it’s going to be a really welcome place for many employee relations professionals because that’s the one thing we hear. People are

overworked. They don’t have time for the strategic, you know, so lots of opportunity if it’s done carefully.

I’ll echo that. I think yeah, ER professionals are not going anywhere. The to me there’s there’s sort of two

sides to this. To me, it’s like look, if you’re lazy right now, you’re also doing a crappy job. So like there’s and

there’s a so there’s a lot of tasks that you just don’t do or said you do did and hope nobody checks because it’s just

hard and it’s mind-numbing and like you like so and and those are the kinds of

tasks the AI is actually great at. You know you can I see a lot of value

creation that occurs. I’ll just speak for myself. There’s things that I am asked to do on a pretty regular basis

like just like comment on an article or something or write an article about something where it’s like yeah in the

old days that I just the drafting of that just makes my head hurt and I already have 700 things to do and I’m

just not even going to try and so that’s just you not going to be created whereas now it’s like well I can get what we

call around here an SFD which stands for shitty first draft but like so like I can get a something you know in 10

seconds that I can then make my own and I can you know work on and I would I would do the thing that I otherwise

wouldn’t do the whole ream of Excel that you have right now that you could go through if you like spent hours but you

don’t have hours and you just won’t do it. Now the AI can do it and it tells you where to shine the flashlight just

like you said. I think that there’s and as long as that person then uses the time gained to go get in front of people

to go work on yellow light issues like that like that’s where there’s tons of value at least available to be created.

Now it’s up to us to create it. And also if you are validating the data.

Yes. I mean I know just using you know generative AI where I will look at things and go back and I’m like no no no

that is exactly opposite. It’s like mindboggling and whether it’s personal things I’ve done. Don’t have generative

AI map things out for you because they will send you the wrong way. It’s happened to me twice. Yeah. I don’t know

why. Um but it does help you just think clearer. I mean I’ve written blogs. One

day I just had this idea for a blog and I was driving and so I just put my voice memo on and I like you know I voiced it

in and then I kind of threw it I’m like could you put this you know this is sort of my first draft it’s still in my voice

I still have to go back there’s things I know that it’s not good at it gets confused but I often and as long as

people are really working with it you you go back and forth um I often tell people when they think about how it can

do investigations I say look let’s pretend that you were accused of murdering someone. Do you want like the

district attorney to take all their evidence and your defense council to take theirs and we just throw it to AI and see what it says?

Yeah. Not but there’s there I mean there for sure are ways to use it to kind of force

multiply and to but you’ll never I I I can’t remember who who I read said it

but yeah like the job becomes really being the detector. like you

like you can have it do the grunt work that would take hours and hours to hours

to do that that otherwise wouldn’t be done. So So like that’s the good part of it, but you have to then really and make

sure okay does this check out does this make absolutely you know we’ve seen

people talk about using transcriptions you miss the nuance or the context of

what’s going or the detail. Um, I’ve heard a lot of people, they’ll ask us and we’re not doing, you know, summarize

the interview. It kills me. I’m like, wait, the devil’s in the detail. And so, we’ll try different things and and I

have a particular investigation that is sort of like my test investigation. Put things in it, little details to see that

are very very relevant. Right? Maybe I didn’t know at the moment that I was, you know, you know, taking those

interview notes how relevant it was, what that person ate or, you know, whatever they told me. But of course

those details I know are important and then putting those in and then watching the generative AI is just sort of you

know kind of glossing over it and I’m like no no that’s that that’s where you’re going to find

you know your credibility that’s where you’re going to make be able to make your determination. So it’s it is good though I have to say.

Yeah. No it’s I mean it’s it’s not going anywhere. It’s going to get better and better but you know it’s not going to I

mean at the point that it eliminates humans we don’t have to worry about it anymore but it’s going to be a Anyway,

I do think, look, it makes me think about the entire investigation process that I’ve been doing for years and I

always go back and say, do you think this is the way to do just because you’ve been doing it forever or is it

still the right way? And so, it’s it’s really good. All all things like that are good to revisit and make sure we’re

just not stuck in the old ways because that’s the way we’ve always done it. Yeah. Yeah. And you I mean, you’ve

already mentioned this, but the old ways were also biased, right? So like you like you you know it’s not like it’s not

like the way we used to do is perfect. It’s just can we make sure that we keep

what’s worked and improve on what maybe hasn’t. Yeah. What are we trying to accomplish?

All right. Two other quick topics and then we’ll go. So um ER benchmarking. I know this is something near and dear to

you. Just talk to me a little bit about your work on benchmarking and and these KPIs for the ER function. Just tell us a

little bit about what’s going on there. Yeah. So I think I mentioned before but we’ve been doing this benchmark study since we just released our ninth annual

study. So we started in 2015 years before that I was doing a much shorter survey and it really became again as ER

was evolving people needed to know like what good looked like from process or how others how their peers were managing

things. So do the study every year. You can download it on our website to see the information. And it’s really

exciting because it’s going to give ER professionals the way to influence to

give them data that’ll drive decisions and really have strategic conversations with their leadership to show impact.

You know, you know, quantifying the risk and the costs of what we do. The benchmarking data helps to do that to

show where you’re compared to each other to understand what’s going on. highlight

when you’re under resource, right? It’s a still somewhat of an immature function. How do I know how many ER

people I need? And we know that many of the people in our community, if you used our data to go get extra resources

because you can tell, you know, we’re just not resourced properly for here. So certainly that’s important. And also

look at business practices. You know, how are we trending versus other versus others in the industry? Our number of

cases, is that right? What’s the industry standard? So you can really help shift ER from being like a cleanup

crew to really a strategic business function. So we’re we love our benchmarking data. Every year we it gets

better and better with more organizations participating. Right now it has about over 200 participating

organizations, but they lean pretty large. It covered about 9 million employees. Yeah. I mean that’s great data. And like

you said, companies aren’t running around going like with a you know a bucket of money going like where’s the ER department? like you you have to

fight for resources and you know and and and you don’t want that to happen by

like oh we just lost a multi-million dollar lawsuit right so you know you have to because you’re

going to be fired and then like the next er person might get more budget but like that so like you what can you do

proactively to sort of justify the function to to and it’s not justify it

but also like prove the return on the investment of that function it has such a huge impact on on

organization and culture that people just don’t really pay attention to and it’s hard to measure. Yeah. So my sort of goal is to and we’ve

talked about this before is to create this er P&L. Right? If you’re in finance, you go to an organization, you

don’t say to them, hey, what do we report on? What do you guys use? Let’s come up with something to figure out how the organization is doing financially.

Everybody knows a P&L. It’s a little bit different. So we’re starting to do something called a TNR, trust and risk.

But every organization, every you’re a professional should know how to measure this. It’ll be different. Are you organized? Are you not organized? Do you

have retail kit? Whatever. But have this TNR that you can benchmark against the HRQ benchmark data. You can benchmark

internally. You can look at quarter over quarter. You can have targets just like we do those KPIs just like we do to help

us, you know, look at leading and lagging indicators and also dollars in the organization to see the effect. So,

we’re pretty excited about that. We’re gonna be working with the LR team, our roundt community, and hope um in 2026 to

have something that we’ll start getting people to use. Yeah, that’s exciting. Yeah. The CFO when they’re at the like the you know

the the call with all the analysts and they’re like, “Well, how are we doing?” I I feel like we’re doing pretty good.

It’s feeling good. This is how we measure today. It actually, you know, part of that was sort of me becoming a CEO and looking at

data at the P&L and understanding what there’s certain metrics about what they meant in our organization and

translating them. How can we take this metric, right, and make it, you know, take it but but move it into the ER

realm and use very something similar to show show trends. And we’re excited about it. I think it’s great. All right, last

thing. We have a fun question at the very end, but before we get to that one, uh you are uh you are getting a lot of I

don’t know what you’re doing slumbing around here because you are a hot shot. So, you are uh you’re one of Inc.’s top

uh female founders. I think you just got named a Forbes. What was what was the Forbes one?

50 over 50. I’d rather the 30 over 30. Well, you’re a late bloomer like me, but anyway.

Exactly. Well, so like uh that’s super exciting. Yeah, it is. I mean, look, I, you know, it’s sort of fun. I sort of, you know,

sort of see it and move on. You know, this isn’t sort of what I set out to do, but it it’s nice because for me it means that

employee relations and what we’re doing is getting attention and so much more to do in this space.

You know, when I started it was all about the investigations and then it just became clear and I think with the the world sort of again falling on its

head and the workforce being so different and that what their demands are, there’s so much we can do. So, I’m just excited about getting the

recognition for the function. I spent a lot of time, you know, in the entrepreneurial community as well. It

is, it is super cool to see to see someone take an idea like yours

that was like this nugget and turn it into how many employees on 50. 150. Yeah. And growing.

Like I I’m sure you do sit back and just go like, “Wow.” like this is um like

like you think about all the lives that you impact and then you think about because this is what I talk to our

consultants about all the time. You start to think about all the lives that you touch but but Deb like you guys are

touching millions of people. Yeah. Um it’s is super cool to see a business

like yours succeed like it has. Thank you. It is cool. I mean I do take a lot of responsibility in those 150

members that Yeah. couldn’t do this on my own. There was a while I did do it on my own. Thank god I don’t anymore. Sort of have a lot of fun

with my chief people officer, Rebecca Trosky. You know, she’s she’s a brave person to come and be my chief people

officer, but I told her from the beginning, we can do things our way. We can do the right thing. We need to, you know, model what’s right and just

because, you know, we have a policy whatever, you know, we think about something with our employees, what’s the right thing to do? And I think we’ve

done a pretty good job with that. So that’s been we actually use all of HR’s tools and we love them, which is great.

So, our own c our own drink your own champagne as they say. We do. But, um, it’s it’s been great and

and I just and again the community met some incredible people along the way. Just we couldn’t do without them.

That’s great. Well, congratulations. All right, last question. You’re a great follow on LinkedIn, by the way. So, if

if you’re not following Deb, you should follow Deb on LinkedIn. But one of the things that you’ve been doing this year,

you’re like cooking your way through a cookbook that your team came up with. So my question, you can share whatever else

you want to share about this the the cookbook, but what’s your favorite thing that you have cooked in the last month

or so? Well, yeah. So the cookbook’s been a little fun, a little daunting, and my team did just ask me, we had our uh town

hall today, and one of the questions was, “Am I going to because I said I’d get through them all this year, and there’s a lot of them. I mean,

how many are there?” Um, here I actually have it here. Here’s the cookbook. I think there was like 50

or 60 or something. That’s like a rest of the week, and it’s a lot. So I don’t know. Oh, I might try. They did say

maybe I could share some with other people, but then we started having fun with sort of these analogies of employee

relations and investigations and they’re and cooking like how do how are they similar? There’s a lot of them.

What’s my favorite thing? This is totally not in the cookbook, but um we had some guests up this weekend. Two of

my nieces are always here and so for years as they’ve been growing up, we we cook together and our favorite recipe are s’mores brownies and they are

amazing. They’re brownies and they’re just think about a rice krispie treat made with golden grams. It’s pretty

incredible. Anybody wants the recipe, link in with me. I will send it to you. I have to It’s sort of in my head, but um that’s my favorite thing to do.

Yeah. Well, Deb, thank you so much for your time. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for our partnership. That’s been really fun

this year. Hopefully, we’ll have you on the show sometime again soon. Anytime. It’s been great. Thanks for having me, Phil.