Phil Wilson (00:00)
Well, Deb, welcome to the Left of Boom show. It’s great to see you.

Deb Muller (00:03)
It’s great to be here, Phil. Thanks for inviting me.

Phil Wilson (00:05)
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 Muller.

Deb Muller (00:12)
So I’m Deb Muller. I’ve been the founder and CEO of HRQD 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 employee 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 and 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 to go down the road. Here we are.

Phil Wilson (00:51)
Great. like background prior to to starting and know,

Deb Muller (00:58)
So yeah, so I was in HR, know, really all through my career, started off in Citibank. I worked for Honeywell for many years, done at Bradstreet and did a lot of generalist roles, leader roles in the space. At that point, employee relations was not a separate function. It was something that we just, right. And I don’t know why, but I was the one who sort of opened the drawer, which became like Pandora’s box or questioned 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. 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 sudden, you’re the go-to person for investigations. So.

That was my career. And then I actually started HR acuity 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. I thought, well, God, those lawyers, they’ve been in a law firm their whole life. They don’t know what happens in a plant. They don’t know what under, you know, how do they know what questions to ask? It’s sort of a chilling effect. 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 it. Let’s start this firm. I thought maybe it would grow around the country. We’d have investigators everywhere. And 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 here to give you my process. I’m here to do your investigations.

And I was going out to some large companies, that’s where my network was. And they finally, I always say like the two by four was hitting me over the head and it hurt. And I was listening to everything. was 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 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.

Phil Wilson (03:18)
All right, a couple of quick pivots off of that. So the first one about 10 years earlier, I also, so I was the lawyer that did not really 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 a friend of mine too. And I was like, 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 could know the law, but if you don’t have that sort of practical experience being inside of a company, you’re going to give correct answers if it was a law exam, but you’re not going to give practical advice. It’s going to be very useful.

Deb Muller (04:02)
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.

Phil Wilson (04:29)
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 I think that’s great great advice. All right. So so H.R.I. Q.D. So you found this firm your clients want to know the process.

So just kind of walk us through what’s kind of, did that look like? And then 20 years, you’ve been on a journey. So maybe give me some of the highlights on that trip.

Deb Muller (04:54)
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 it, maybe we’ll talk about it 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, 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 one organization or they don’t know how to do it. And I 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. often, I often use 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 don’t worry, 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. It doesn’t really build trust that they’re going to get to bottom of it and actually solve the

Phil Wilson (06:03)
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.

Deb Muller (06:10)
That’s right. I don’t know. just, it 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 you did. 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 aftercare. Like when did we start hearing about these things?

whether they’re big issues or little issues, which I think is where the data really can take us in the right direction. What are we seeing? What’s happening that if we put those pieces together, we connect those dots, we can maybe avoid issues later on. And so that’s what we set out to do. again, from a technology standpoint, I drew it out on PowerPoint. That was my technology.

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

Phil Wilson (08:03)
I have a friend of mine who was sort of like where you were in in-house, ran investigations, was looking for something like HR acuity. And I remember like the best thing you could find was basically software bug reporting, you know, like that, but 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 fix the bug or not.

Deb Muller (08:34)
A lot of companies, particularly because IT wants less systems and parents are involved, they see what they have and when they hear case management, they’re like, we have case management. So they use 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. I mean, it’s just not helpful. Also, IT owns it.

You know, not that IT ever does anything wrong at work, you know, perhaps, you want that solution.

Phil Wilson (09:05)
And then one other thing about consistent process, going back to the whole legal component, like this is where the legal component’s important, right? If you do have the same process, and this is how we investigate everything, then you no longer are open to the complaint, 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 in litigation.

Deb Muller (09:35)
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’s green light. And if everybody did exactly as what we put on paper, you and I both would not have.

Phil Wilson (10:03)
Matthew McConaughey,

Deb Muller (10:04)
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. And 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? Where 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 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 employer that we’ve had other people in similar situations that we’ve treated the same way. And there were no investigations, just this person was promoted or terminated or whatever employment action we took, we can look across to see how we’ve treated people.

Phil Wilson (11:05)
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 things that happen ahead of time and paying attention to the yellow light stuff also tells you like, hmm, 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.

Deb Muller (11:29)
going on there. Or they don’t have any complaints, right? there, you know, one of our tools also, which we, we sort of expand sort of the universe is the manager giving them a 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 has been telling people I’ve been either been saying this or doing it, you know, Hey Phil, make sure you document that conversation.

Phil Wilson (11:32)
I don’t have any complaints, yes.

Deb Muller (11:56)
Make sure you do this. And you know, managers kind of look at you like a deer in headlights. If they do it, they do it in a notebook somewhere that you can’t look for trends or they don’t do it 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 by the way, some of ways we’re using AI to make sure they can gain confidence in how they do these things, but just documenting those things. Those little things can really show you either.

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.

Phil Wilson (12:30)
And those were 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?

Deb Muller (12:52)
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 I 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, just do listening tours in that particular place because something’s telling you it’s not right.

issues will happen. 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, know, found 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 safe and trusted environment. Yeah.

Phil Wilson (13:47)
And we’re going to switch to the hero assumption in a second. And maybe no one has had the guts to raise this with this person. if it had been, they would be just aghast and would fix it and lose the opportunity.

Deb Muller (13:59)
Absolutely.

They don’t always want to do things. 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, you know, it helps you as a leader say, well, how does that compare to other parts of the organization or other organizations out there? So it gives you some, some measure.

Phil Wilson (14:23)
All right, so speaking of the hero assumption, who has made, like who was 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 that leader in your life?

Deb Muller (14:41)
I think it’s a lot of people. As I think about that, my aunt just passed away. She was 93. She was one that told me about Cornell. She’d gone to Cornell, which led me to the Industrial and 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. Then I had Interestingly, I had some leaders during my career when I was doing employee relations. I always think about this 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? And they’re like, no, no, no, we hate this. We all like doing it. And I thought, huh, that’s interesting. Like you realize like it’s something and it’s different than everybody else. You sort of need someone to show you that. Otherwise you just think everybody’s sort of the same way.

Phil Wilson (15:17)
Yeah.

Deb Muller (15:32)
So I credit them. And then I do have an advisor early on in the business. 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 advisors, he’s still a personal advisor to me today, Steve Schlesinger. Shout out to him. But I remember as the business was growing, again, I didn’t set out to build a technology company. When I think about the fact that I 150 employees now, I’m like, what?

Not It wasn’t on the little trifold that I created. But I remember him saying, no, no, he’d always be like 10 steps ahead of me. No, no, it’s going to be this big. Or here’s the opportunity. And as soon as we got close to that, he’d 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 to see, huh, this really could be something. And by the way, I also credit the world for maybe not so great, for basically turning on its head and rolling over since we started in the recession in 2009. really, it’s sort of given us some new opportunities to raise them.

Phil Wilson (16:37)
Yeah, feel the same way. Yeah, it’s like the universe is conspiring to like create a bunch of problems to solve and so

Deb Muller (16:44)
I’d rather we didn’t have them, but you know, we can have

Phil Wilson (16:47)
Exactly. Yeah. So I’m going to combine a couple of the questions that we talked about ahead of time. the 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 hopefully, you know, I don’t want to make this.

This is definitely going to mark this as a point in time, but we just recently underwent this Coldplay concert where the CEO and CHRO not married to each other, got caught on the kiss cam. so talk a little bit about best practices in investigation, then how would you, if you were asked to investigate that type of a situation, what are some of the tips that you would give to folks about that?

Deb Muller (17:33)
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 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. 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 and just sort of giving people the voice to hear. We do some research every year. 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 gonna get my numbers wrong. I don’t have them in front of me, but I’m gonna be around. Right. So when you ask in general, you know, all employees and we asked a couple of 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 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 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 percent interest, it’s a 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’re actually 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’m in a rush, I have a funeral, I need something hemmed, help me out, they’re gonna get it, they’re gonna put their arm around me and they’re gonna get it done.

And so loyalty is built when something bad happens. Does your employer have your back? And so people underestimate that they, my God, investigations, we just sort of wanted to go away. Let’s not spend time on it. But 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 can help you. And so there’s consistency, fairness, transparency about what’s happening. It’s not done behind the curtain. And trying to resolve it the best you can. I don’t think people want, they don’t expect perfection. They just want you.

Phil Wilson (20:17)
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, tool locks because if because of that it’s transparent and it’s like, you disagree, go have a group of your peers, listen to the situation and tell you what they think. And, uh, 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 how 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, yeah, 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 got a fair shake. 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 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 where things go, go south. Yeah. How do we, how do we act culturally when that happens?

Deb Muller (21:16)
Absolutely.

Phil Wilson (21:39)
tells you everything that there is to know about culture.

Deb Muller (21:41)
Yeah, 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 fulsome investigation and it went away. Like we got people back to work and people feeling good and even little things like in our process, you have 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 moving the needle on it slower than I would like, but sharing with employees. And it can be a different amount that you share, you know, how many people have made complaints, you know, what the actions were, showing them that you’re counting, actually when people come forward, in many cases, you do find merit to the cases and you do think about it. Again, it’s not, then they feel like, I had an issue, I’m gonna come forward, it’s transparent. 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 and put something fake in, ask them to please let you know it’s fake, whatever.

But have them go through the experience when everything’s okay. Because when something happens, it’s stressful, but they can say, wait, I remember I went through those questions. Yeah, we love that. We love to look at how many scans by QR code happened right after the rollout. That’s a really good sign.

Phil Wilson (23:10)
That’s a great idea.

Yeah, I love that. I love that. Right. Because you’re right. I talk about this thing powered distance. But like 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, 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 is going to happen to me. And so having again, when you’re in peacetime, you know, using the system.

That gives you the confidence. Okay, well, I know how to use it. That’s not gonna be a barrier to you doing what you know needs to be done. That’s great.

Deb Muller (23:55)
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 is wrong with them, but they’re going to get to see a little bit of behind the curtain and you want them to say, know, again, they can again be advocates for people coming forward. Gee, I was a witness and they seem to have a process. They 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. mean, you 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 have a non retaliation policy. can’t be retaliated against, 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 put our arms around them and just put them in the best position to do their best work.

Phil Wilson (25:15)
And just checking in, right? Hey, how’s it going? Is everything going, know, like that, you know, caring enough to where it’s like, 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, creating the space where if there is anything happening, they feel safe and comfortable, like raising.

Deb Muller (25:35)
Yeah, we’ve started talking about the concept of aftercare, and actually one of the sort of the new words that we brought into our community is really through care. Like aftercare is important, but really through the entire process. How are we touching it with all the involved parties? know, the touch base, even 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. we didn’t resolve the problem though, it doesn’t matter that our investigation was.

Phil Wilson (26:09)
Great. So you’ve got this community that we’re very pleased to be a part of this empower community. Maybe talk a little bit about, where did that come from? And just tell me a little bit about that.

Deb Muller (26:22)
Yeah. So in about 2015, we started getting calls for employee relations conferences. Where’s their conference? Where can we go? And we thought, let’s do a conference. got into a room, hired some event planners. I said, I really hate conferences. I hate sort of getting up. And I know you feel the same way. LRI does some great work with your LaborVision program.

And I thought, let’s just get ER leaders around a table. There weren’t many back then. ER still is 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 come. So we got 50 ER leaders together and had like a three quarter of a day session where we just talked and it was great. And that just kept growing. Then we started doing phone events. People want to get together more often.

And in 2021, we decided, look, we were talking to the leaders, we needed a space for ER professionals. We kept hearing people say like, this is, finding my people. Like no one understands ER and labor relations like the people that do it. So we launched Empower, Empower-er.org, if anybody wants to join, it is free. And it has been growing ever since. have close to 7,000, we more than 6,000, maybe not quite 7,000 members now, but we are continuing to grow.

There’s a really wonderful, just live feed where people are asking questions, again, feedback from someone. And then we have partners like you, at 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 our sessions, live sessions. We had one today that was fantastic about tips versus packages.

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. mean, unions, mean, you know, they have this new, they’re new again. So they actually, I mean, they weren’t gone, but they’re back in a different way. And I think that’s non-traditionally ⁓ organized.

Phil Wilson (28:23)
Thanks

Deb Muller (28:30)
organizations are really thinking about how to stay that way or what to do.

Phil Wilson (28:34)
Yes, it is a it’s a hot area as hot as you and I have a lot of like gray hair to you know, I’ve been doing this a long time. And yeah, it is it is unlike any time in my career. And we’re you know, our firm’s 47 years old. But yeah, my dad started it. And this is unlike any time during his career. Yeah, it’s it’s pretty, pretty nuts. If I will just say if you if you haven’t visited the the empowered community, you really should. They have like

Phil Wilson (29:02)
industry groups. it’s not, 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 that. But they have groups for industry, they have groups for, you know, other related things. Obviously, if you’re an HR acuity user, 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 the other thing is it’s active. Like there are employee relations groups on LinkedIn.

There’s other employee relations groups. The thing that I think has really been eye-opening to me is there are people there every day asking and answering questions for each other. So it’s a real active community as well.

Deb Muller (29:42)
Yeah, it really is. And you can post your jobs there or maybe look for your next job there. But yeah, we love having, you know, part of that, you can search the other members to see, want someone who in an organization with 5,000 people, you know, that handles this region, sort of, you know, 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.

Phil Wilson (30:10)
Yeah, it’s great. OK, speaking of looking for your next job, AI. you’ve embraced and are using AI as part of your platform. Talk to me a little bit about what do you see as the possibilities and the advantages of AI in the ER space, and then also what are some of the watch outs?

Deb Muller (30:26)
Yeah, well, I think the watch outs are the most obvious ones that we really took some time to think about 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 efficient? 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.

Bias Biased plus biased 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. can help. We’ve seen some ways that they can. We have to be careful because when we think about the many, many people that do this work and we think just about human nature, I’ve heard people say, well, we’ll do this for them and 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 click through that you also say you read and agreed to on any piece of software 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. We’re doing that thoughtfully. 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 cite trends and 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 can take that information and do something with it. Whether it’s 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.

Phil Wilson (32:40)
I’ll echo that. I think, yeah, ER professionals are not going anywhere. To me, there’s sort of two sides of this. To me, it’s like, if you’re lazy right now, you’re also doing a crappy job. there’s a lot of tasks that you just don’t do or said you did and hope nobody checks because it’s just hard and it’s mind numbing. And those are the kinds of tasks that AI is actually great at.

You know, 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 know, 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. like, so I can get a draft of something, you know, in 10 seconds that I can then make my own and I can work on. And 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, 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’s where there’s tons of value, at least available to be created. Now it’s up to us to create it.

Deb Muller (34:18)
And also if you are validating the data. Yes. I mean, I guess 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 mind boggling. know, 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. I don’t know why. But it. does help you just think clear. 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 voiced it in. And then I kind of threw it in, I’m like, could you put this, 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 go back and forth. 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 counsel to take theirs and we just throw it to AI and see what it says? No, no, no.

Phil Wilson (35:24)
Yeah. But there for sure are ways to use it to kind of force multiply and to… But you’ll never… I can’t remember who I read that it, but the job becomes really being the bullshit detector. You can have it do the grunt work that would take hours and hours to hours to do that otherwise wouldn’t be done. So that’s the good part of it. But you have to then really make sure, okay, does this check out? this?

Deb Muller (35:55)
Does this make sense? We’ve seen people talk about using transcriptions. You miss the nuance or the context of what’s going on or the detail. I’ve heard a lot of people, they’ll ask us and we’re not doing it, summarize the interview. It kills me. I’m like, wait, the devil’s in the detail. And so we’ll try different things. And I have a particular investigation that is sort of like my test investigation.

put things in little details to see that are very, very relevant. Maybe I didn’t know at the moment that I was taking those interview notes how relevant it was what that person ate or 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 glossing over it. And I’m like, no, no, that’s where you’re going to find your credibility.

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

Phil Wilson (36:53)
Yeah, no, it’s, I mean, it’s, 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 moment anyway.

Deb Muller (36:55)
It’s not going anywhere.

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 it just because you’ve been doing it forever? Or is it still the right way? And so it’s really good. 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.

Phil Wilson (37:27)
Yeah, and I mean, you’ve already mentioned this, but the old ways, we’re also biased, right? So 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?

Deb Muller (37:44)
Yeah, what are we trying to accomplish?

Phil Wilson (37:46)
I have two other quick topics and then we’ll go. So 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 these KPIs for the ER function. Just tell us a little bit about what’s going on there.

Deb Muller (38:00)
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 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 this 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. know, quantifying the risks 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? But to still somewhat of an immature function. How do I know how many ER people I need? And we know that many of people in our community, if you use 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 big business function. So we’re

We love our benchmarking data. Every year 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.

Phil Wilson (39:32)
Yeah, I mean, that’s great data. like you said, companies aren’t running around going like with a bucket of money going like, where’s the ER department? Like you have to fight for resources and you don’t want that to happen by like, we’ve just lost a multimillion dollar lawsuit, right? So you have to…

Deb Muller (39:51)
Yeah.

Phil Wilson (39:53)
Because you’re going to be fired and then like the next ER person might get more budget but like that so like Yeah, what can you do proactively to sort of justify the function to and it’s not just justify it but also like prove the return on the investment of that 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

Deb Muller (40:07)
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 that’s called a T &R, trust and risk. But every organization, every ER professional should know how to measure this. It’ll be different. Are you organized? Are you not organized? Do you have retail located? Whatever.

but have this TNR that you can benchmark against the HR acuity 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 effects. So we’re pretty excited about that. We’re going to be working with the LR team, our round table community and hope in 2026 to have something that will start getting people to use. Yeah.

Phil Wilson (41:11)
That’s exciting. Yeah, the CFO, when they’re at the call with all the analysts, they’re like, well, how are we doing? I feel like we’re doing pretty good. It’s feeling good.

Deb Muller (41:19)
I can’t even imagine.

This is how we measure today. it actually part of that was sort of me becoming a CEO and looking at data at the PNL 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, know, take it, but move it into the ER realm and use very something similar to show, show trends. And we’re excited about it.

Phil Wilson (41:44)
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. So you are getting a lot of, I don’t know what you’re doing slumming around here, because you are a hot shot. So you’re one of Inc.’s top female founders. I think you just got named Forbes. What was the Forbes one?

Deb Muller (42:03)
50 over 50, I’d rather the 30 over 30.

Phil Wilson (42:06)
Well, you’re a late bloomer like me, but anyway. Yeah, exactly. Well, so like, that’s super exciting.

Deb Muller (42:13)
Yeah, it is. mean, look, I, you know, it’s sort of fun. I sort of, you know, sort of see it move on. you know, this isn’t sort of what I set out to do, it, it’s nice because for me, it means 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 what their demands are.

There’s so much we can do. So I’m just excited about getting the recognition for the function.

Phil Wilson (42:43)
I spent a lot of time in the entrepreneurial community as well. And it is super cool to see someone take an idea like yours that was like this nugget and turn it into how many employees? 150? Yeah. Like, I’m sure you do sit back and just go like, wow, like this is, you think about all the lives that you impact and then you think about

Deb Muller (42:57)
150 yeah I’m growing

Phil Wilson (43:10)
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 Deb, like you guys are touching millions of. It is super cool to see a business like yours succeed like it has.

Deb Muller (43:20)
Yeah.

Thank you. It is cool. I mean, I do take a lot of responsibility in those 150 team members that didn’t do this on their 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 Trotsky. She’s a great person to come and be my chief people officer. But from the beginning, we can do things our way. We can do the right thing. We need to model what’s right. 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 when we actually use all of HR Acuity tools and we love them, which is great. our own customers

Phil Wilson (44:02)
Drink your own champagne, as they say.

Deb Muller (44:04)
We do, but it’s been great. again, the community met some incredible people along the way. Just we couldn’t do without

Phil Wilson (44:12)
That’s great. Well, congratulations. All right. Last question. you’re a great follow on LinkedIn, by the way. So if you’re not following, 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 cookbook. But what’s your favorite thing that you have cooked in the last,month or so.

Deb Muller (44:35)
Well, yeah, so the cookbooks been a little fun, a little daunting and my team did just ask me, we had our town hall today and one of the questions was, am I gonna, cause I said I’d get through them all this year and there’s a lot of them. mean, I think, 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. It’s a lot. So I don’t know, I might try. They did say maybe I could share some with other people, but then we started.

Phil Wilson (44:46)
How many are there?

Deb Muller (45:00)
having fun with sort of these analogies of employee relations and investigations and cooking, like how are they similar? There’s a lot of them. What’s my favorite thing? This is totally not in the cookbook, but 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 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 crispy treat made with golden grams. It’s pretty incredible. Anybody wants the recipe link in with me, I will send it to you. have to, it’s sort of in my head, but, that’s my favorite thing to to this. Yeah.

Phil Wilson (45:36)
Well, Deb, thank you so much for your time. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for our partnership. been really fun this year. hopefully we’ll have you on the show sometime again soon.

Deb Muller (45:45)
Anytime. It’s been great. Thanks for having me, Phil. Appreciate it.