HRchat Podcast
Listen to the HRchat Podcast by HR Gazette to get insights and tips from HR leaders, influencers and tech experts. Topics covered include HR Tech, HR, AI, Leadership, Talent, Recruitment, Employee Engagement, Recognition, Wellness, DEI, and Company Culture.
Hosted by Bill Banham, Bob Goodwin, Pauline James, and other HR enthusiasts, the HRchat show publishes interviews with influencers, leaders, analysts, and those in the HR trenches 2-4 times each week.
The show is approaching 1000 episodes and past guests are from organizations including ADP, SAP, Ceridian, IBM, UPS, Deloitte Consulting LLP, Simon Sinek Inc, NASA, Gartner, SHRM, Government of Canada, Hacking HR, McLean & Company, UPS, Microsoft, Shopify, DisruptHR, McKinsey and Co, Virgin Pulse, Salesforce, Make-A-Wish Foundation, and Coca-Cola Beverages Company.
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Podcast Music Credit"Funky One"Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
HRchat Podcast
Heart-Driven HR: When Mission Meets Talent Management with Amy Kruglak
What happens when HR strategy genuinely aligns with company mission? Amy Kruglak, the first VP of People at medical AI company Elucid, reveals the powerful impact of intentional employee experiences in this thought-provoking conversation.
After taking a post-COVID break to recharge from the exhaustion many HR leaders experienced, Amy found herself drawn to Elucid's mission of cardiovascular disease prevention—a cause deeply personal to her after losing her father to sudden cardiac disease. This alignment between personal values and organizational purpose forms the foundation of her approach to people leadership.
Working at the intersection of regulated medical technology and cutting-edge AI presents unique HR challenges. Amy details how she's navigated these complexities by immersing herself in the business fundamentals, developing specialized onboarding programs that help technical talent quickly understand Elucid's innovative products, and creating benefits that reflect the company's mission—like providing cardiac CT scans to all employees.
Throughout the conversation, Amy emphasizes that effective HR leadership requires both data mastery and human connection. "I'm kind of a data junkie," she admits, highlighting how metrics around hiring, compensation, and performance give her the credibility needed to partner strategically with business leaders. Yet she balances this analytical approach with a commitment to honest feedback and personalized employee experiences that simply aren't possible in larger organizations.
As Elucid celebrates reaching 100 employees, Amy offers advice for HR professionals stepping into executive roles: "Learn the business." Understanding how people drive organizational success transforms HR from a support function into a strategic powerhouse that directly impacts the bottom line.
Whether you're leading people operations in a regulated industry, navigating growth at a mission-driven company, or seeking to create more intentional employee experiences, Amy's insights provide a roadmap for elevating HR's impact. Subscribe to the HRchat Show for more conversations with innovative people leaders who are reshaping the future of work.
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The HRchat show has had 100,000s of downloads and is frequently listed as one of the most popular global podcasts for HR pros, Talent execs and leaders. It is ranked in the top ten in the world based on traffic, social media followers, domain authority & freshness. The podcast is also ranked as the Best Canadian HR Podcast by FeedSpot and one of the top 10% most popular shows by Listen Score.
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Welcome to the HR Chat Show, one of the world's most downloaded and shared podcasts designed for HR pros, talent execs, tech enthusiasts and business leaders. For hundreds more episodes and what's new in the world of work, subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit hrgazettecom and visit.
Speaker 2:HRGazettecom. Welcome to another episode of the HR Chat Show. Hello listeners, this is your host today, bill Bannam, and in this episode I welcome back after way too long. We were just chatting before we hit record. I can't believe how long it's been. The awesome, wonderful Amy Kruglak, as the first VP of people over at Elucid. Amy is responsible for developing and executing an HR strategy in support of the overall business plan and the strategic direction of the company and she's a huge believer that every organization can be more intentional about the employee experience and I'm sure we'll get into that as part of today's chat. Amy, it's been way too long. How you doing? Welcome back to the show.
Speaker 3:Hey Bill, thanks for having me back. It has been a long time I think two plus maybe three plus years. So it's great to be back, and I'm in a new situation here at Elucid and can't wait to share a little bit of what we're doing here.
Speaker 2:Well, let's, let's start then. Let's talk about that straight off the bat. Tell us about your role at Lucid. What drew you to become their first VP of people and what excites you most about shaping the people strategy at a fast growing tech company?
Speaker 3:So it's an exciting story. Post-covid, I took a little bit of a break to kind of just to recharge break, to kind of just to recharge. It was such an exhausting time for HR, people, leaders and I had started to pursue some consulting activities when I was contacted about this opportunity here at Ellucid and it was really something very exciting. It was going to get me out of the house back in the office and it's an incredible technology focused on cardiovascular care and prevention and, as somebody who has been with mission-based companies for many, many years many of my past jobs I think that that's really important and resonates with me. I have cardiovascular disease on both sides of my family, had lost my father to sudden cardiac disease, and so this was a way for me to kind of I feel like it was. It's giving back somewhere to society and supporting, I think, something that's bigger than just myself in terms of how we can approach cardiovascular care worldwide.
Speaker 4:Thanks for listening to this episode of the HR Chat Podcast. If you enjoy the audio content we produce, you'll love our articles on the HR Gazette. Learn more at HRGazettecom. And now back to the show.
Speaker 2:Okay, thank you very much, and thank you also for sharing some of your motivations for joining the company. Elucid operates at the cutting edge of medical technology, as you've just given us a little bit of an outline there. How do you tailor your HR strategy to support a team that's working on advanced and mission critical innovations?
Speaker 3:So I think you know, one of the one of the things that I always think is super important with HR is understanding the business, and this, this opportunity here to Lucid was something really unique and different for me, because it's the first time I'm working in a company that's a med tech, that is regulated and needs to be FDA approved. So I've learned a lot, and learning about how you bring a product like this to market is something that's really different. We have a lot of incredibly smart people. We're working cutting edge AI, so for me, connecting our people, operations, procedures, our processes, how we recruit, how we motivate is all based on understanding the business better and knowing what we need to do to get this product to market.
Speaker 3:So it's been a lot of learning in terms of what does it mean when you're using AI in cutting edge medical device and what kind of people are you hiring to support quality systems and all of the FDA regulated activities, and also in terms of being a software as a medical device company. There are unique differences that you have to have with your SAS product, so that you're making sure that that also aligns with making sure that you are complying with FDA regulations. So for me, it's really understanding deeply what the business needs so that we're hiring, training and delivering the best candidates and employees to the business to succeed. And also one of the things we've really focused on here more than anything in any other company that I've been at is the onboarding experience, and that's because there's a lot of complex detail that you need to understand to become fully ingrained in the product that we're building, and so we've kind of doubled down on the employee orientation and onboarding experience so people get to understand our product much more quickly and how we build the technology that we're delivering.
Speaker 2:Okay, thank you. So you believe that every organization can be more intentional about the employee experience? You focused just a moment ago on the candidate experience and the onboarding part of that. Can you expand upon that? How does a senior people leader ensure that that message of being more intentional about the overall employee experience across the employee life cycle actually happens and gets delivered on? What are you finding over at Lucid? What are your strategies?
Speaker 5:This episode of the HR Chat Podcast is supported by Nebula Academy, a technology industry-focused workforce accelerator that offers learning programs to prepare individuals for successful careers. Our approach is centered around cognitive neuroscience research, combining the latest research and modern learning methods to create informative and psychologically safe learning experiences. Our programs enable individuals to achieve career readiness and immediate impact in their chosen field. Moreover, we help businesses create positive learning experiences, increase productivity, enhance team performance and build upskilling resources to meet the needs of today's modern workplace. Learn more at nebulaacademycom. Thanks, and now back to the HR Chat Show.
Speaker 3:So I love being in this kind of smaller company space. It's easier to do this when you're 50 to 250 because you know your people really well, you know your managers, you know your employees, so that's a big piece of it. But I think also when you understand the nature of the work that you're doing and the business, you can really deliver what your employees need. So, for example, we are creating a product that does prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease. So one of the things that we just rolled out was a new benefit, so where we're going to provide all of our employees with the ability to get their cardiac CT.
Speaker 3:So by thinking very intentionally about the employees and what they're working on here at Elusive and then delivering a benefit or other activities in the organization, that kind of support our mission and support what they care about is really something to me that you know is unique and different about the approach we take here or any other company I've been at. We do other things in terms of kind of culture and giving back to society. We've done walks with the American Heart Association. We do things to support children's hospitals, cardiovascular ward and just things that really align with who we are as a company and the corporate mission, so that we kind of bring everything together full circle yeah, I actually saw both of those activities on your linkedin.
Speaker 2:You proudly reshared those, so it's good for you guys um linkedin's a great recruitment tool.
Speaker 3:People see how happy people are and what we're doing here and they come. They find us. We don't have to find them there we go.
Speaker 2:That makes sense to me. Um, you've, you've emphasized in the past the importance of minimizing bureaucracy. Uh, how do you strike a balance between necessary structures but also being agile, but maintaining a nimble, empowered workforce? And can I just add to that question what? What sort of numbers of employees does that then become quite quite a challenge? Way more difficult. Yeah, so you, you guys are in that you said, up to sort of 250 employee market at the moment. So I'm guessing, I'm guessing that might be a lot more straightforward to be agile, to be nimble, than a giant organization.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So we just hit a big milestone this week. We hit just went over 100 employees. We did a big celebration in the office with 100 grand candy bars and making sure employees realize that that's a significant milestone for a startup.
Speaker 3:I think that having been trained in my earlier years at a big company taught me a lot of the kind of more strict ways to approach how you do things in larger companies, so that you're keeping kind of everything on course and following rules and guidelines and compliance. And one of the things I really like about being in a smaller company is you can understand that there's a lot more gray than black and white than you have to be in a bigger company, so everybody's situation is a little bit unique and different. You obviously need to follow all the laws and compliance and certainly there's a lot of that. We operate in 18 different states currently, so you need to understand all the different laws of the different states and you never want to put yourself at risk in those areas.
Speaker 3:But I think I've told you this before that my approach to employee relations and to employee situations is that you have to think about it, that anything can wind up on the cover of the Wall Street Journal. So you want to make sure that when you think through strategies on how to do things, you want to be mindful of that, but also be fair and treat people with respect and dignity. And I think that if you keep all of that in mind, when you're developing a strategy for how you treat somebody whether it's how you hire them or how you terminate them or deal with any situations in between you need to look at everybody's situation a little bit uniquely, and it's the privilege of being able to do that in a smaller company that you can't do in a larger company, which is why I love this size.
Speaker 2:And your passion, may I say your passion does come through, so I love this size. And your passion, may I say your passion, does come through, so I love that. Okay, let's, as we like to do on this show, offer some tangible takeaways for our HR audience today. Maybe you can offer some advice to HR leaders who are listening to this show today around ways to approach leadership, development and performance management. What are your top tips when it comes to developing those areas in a high-stakes, outcome-driven environment?
Speaker 3:like Lucid yeah, I think you need to know your team. I think it's really important to be honest and deliver very open feedback. I think that sometimes people fall into this pitfall where they want to just keep people happy and they don't, and they feel that if they give tough news, if they share kind of feedback that you know isn't aligned with who somebody is or kind of makes them uncomfortable, will mean that they're going to leave but they're not going to. You know they won't be happy at the company, but I think that it's really important to be honest and seize opportunities when they happen and give people feedback so they can learn from it. I think that in order to be agile and adapt to today's current workforce, you want to make sure that you're giving people the feedback that they need to succeed and grow, and sometimes that's difficult to deliver.
Speaker 3:As a people operations leader, part of my role is to make sure that managers can deliver that feedback to their direct reports and also that I'm honest with our team. Now, I'm also sometimes known to be tough, so I have to say that I have deferred a few times maybe more than a fair few to my good friend, chat GPT, and sometimes that's really helpful these days to get messaging down in a way that's kind of, you know, a little softer or may resonate differently with somebody who needs to hear things in a different way. So I think that the one thing that you should always think about when you're working with an employee population and you're trying to grow and scale is that feedback is a gift and that if you don't give that feedback, then you wind up having to sometimes struggle with an employee who doesn't know how to change or adapt or move along with the needs of the organization.
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Speaker 3:That helpful.
Speaker 2:That is helpful. Thank you very much. I was just processing that. Thank you very much. Data let's talk about data. How important it is. Yeah, our data, how important is is data. So we're talking about performance management metrics just a moment ago. For example, how important is that people data to to the decisions made by a chief people officer? Um, and is there more room for subjectivity, for personal relationships beyond the data, when you're in a smaller organization?
Speaker 3:I think data is important. Unfortunately, sometimes I think the leaders of the business don't always realize how much data that we have with employees. We have data about salary, we have data about the employee demographics and population and age and all that. We have data on how quickly you hire, length of service. So there is a lot of data and I'm kind of a data junkie and I always like to have it in my back pocket because I think that sometimes when you're in a meeting and somebody brings something up that if you have data to support a question that they're asking or a conversation that you're having, then you come across more credible A lot of times.
Speaker 3:I think there's also that trust and verify. You say to people oh, we're hiring really quickly, we're bringing people in quickly, this job is taking longer to hire, and a lot of it it becomes anecdotal until you can say, yeah, but I've got data to support it, and then you can say, well, this candidate's been sitting on your desk for two weeks and you haven't given us the feedback. So I think that there's a lot of great data that you can use if you set your systems up properly. I think sometimes it's a misnomer You're a small company. You don't have to maintain data or you don't have to have good HR technologies in place to keep things aligned. I think that you need to start when you're small so that you can scale, and we've got great systems in place right now here to track data.
Speaker 3:Anything you ask me, I can go back and give you the metric on it to support the conversations we're having, and even just this morning, the call that I had before this one today was all about data and how we design our upcoming benefits renewal and working with our broker who's phenomenal and very data driven, it helps us to figure out how we're going to structure our upcoming benefits plan year. Do we stay with a fully insured benefits program? Do we look at going level funded and use some of the more current approaches to benefits design? Level funded and use some of the more current approaches to benefits design. And if you have that data, you understand your population and your risk factors then you can make appropriate decisions to support the business. Data definitely makes it so that you're more of a business partner and that you're not just kind of a nice to have department of the company so that they can outsource you. If you have real data and real facts about your unique organization, then you're much more of an asset to the rest of the leadership team excellent answer.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much. Uh, you mentioned chat gpt earlier. I can't do one of these shows these days without talking about impact on on hr, so let's, let's go there for a minute, let's go down that rabbit hole just just for a moment, if that's okay. Um, so I think elucid was founded. I think I read somewhere earlier today 2013, so it's been around a little while, certainly longer than um the onset of most ai within the workforce. How is ai changing? How and who you hire? So, for example, are there certain skills that you guys would have hired for a couple of years ago that actually, these days, you don't need to, because they've been replaced by AI? Right?
Speaker 3:So that has not happened here. Our product is an AI-driven product, so AI is helping to develop the models that we're using to develop the software that we're building. So for me, when I started two and a half years ago, ai was so new. But to many of the people that we have on the team, especially on our deep learning team, this is kind of something that they've been involved with it for a long time and it's just incredible to see how quickly it's shifting the workforce because you're using for everything. One thing I'm going to just give a caveat for for people who don't realize it is if you use kind of an open forum like ChatGPT, you got to be careful because what you type in there is going to be available for everybody to see someday down the line. It's kind of like talking to Alexa and you know. Next thing, you know everybody knows your business, but we have our own instance within Lucid, so that kind of keeps it within the Microsoft suite. It's protected and we encourage people to use it to help them be a little bit smarter and maybe even take a little kind of shortcut on some of the work that they're doing.
Speaker 3:For me. I think about it like it's having somebody who's creating a first draft of a document that I can go in and edit and revamp and look at. So it's a little bit of a shortcut because and I'm sure you've heard this, I say it all the time it's all about the prompts. You tell your kind of AI tool exactly what you're looking for and those prompts will produce something that's really helpful. And that is amazing because, as anybody in people operations knows, job descriptions are really important but also it's kind of a time suck to have to spend time building a job description for every job. If you put it into chat GPT with some good prompts, I bet you could get kind of 95 percent close to perfect of what you're looking for in a job description Offer letters, kind of just about anything. It gives you a great first draft. So I use it for my work all the time, but I know within the organization it's being used widely.
Speaker 2:Okay, so just on that note, imagine you guys are, you guys are very focused on the candidate experience. Imagine you guys are looking to hire someone in an HR type function and traditionally they'd need to be good at going through resumes or creating offer letters and so on and so forth. Actually, are those skills that today you don't prioritize because the AI can do that and then they just need someone, perhaps at a more senior level, to sub-edit, to go back through. Would that be a good example?
Speaker 3:I look for hiring somebody who's smart, and somebody who's smart is going to use AI in the right way, and so I don't think of it as an opportunity to replace talent. I think of it as an opportunity to augment talent. If I have a great team, ai is going to make them faster, is going to make them more efficient, is going to make them produce, I think, a little bit better, and then somebody can take on more work. So I think it's. I look at it as a helper, not a replacement.
Speaker 2:That is nice to hear, particularly when you read stats like 30% of all jobs that exist today will be gone by 2030. So it's good to hear that from a senior leader like yourself.
Speaker 3:Well, when you're in human resources or people operations no matter what you call it it's horrible to think about removing the human element, so I don't think you can ever fully do that.
Speaker 2:And just finally for today, amy, what advice? Let's leave our listeners with a bit more advice from a successful people pro. What advice would you give to other HR leaders or people leaders who are stepping into their first executive level people role?
Speaker 3:Learn the business. I think one of the things that I hear a lot is that people say, oh, I'm an expert at human resources. I've kind of come up. This is how I've learned my career. I think that if you don't understand the business that you're in and the role that you're, the function that you're doing, you can do anywhere at any company. But if you learn the business you're in, you're going to be a much better partner to the leadership team and you'll. You know you want to make sure that you're. It's not easy to replace yourself with AI, and so if you are really deeply embedded in the organization and understand what having the right people on the bus does to make to your productivity, to your ROI, to understanding how your people really help to drive the team, that's a lot more beneficial to the organization overall than just kind of somebody who's sitting in a seat and filling a function Awesome.
Speaker 2:Well, I think that just leaves me to say for today Amy, let's not leave it as long next time, but for today, thank you very much for being my guest.
Speaker 3:It's been a pleasure. Let's do it again.
Speaker 2:And listeners as always. Until next time, happy working.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening to the HR Chat Show. If you enjoyed this episode, why not subscribe and listen to some of the hundreds of episodes published by HR Gazette and remember for what's new in the world of work? Subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit HRGazettecom.
