Martin Hauck (01:25)
Welcome back folks to another episode of from a people perspective. I'm your host Martin Hawk. And today we've got Aaron Goody from oyster. Thanks so much for doing this, Aaron.
Erin Goodey (01:34)
Hey Martin, really excited to be here.
Martin Hauck (01:36)
Awesome. So ⁓ where do we begin? Well, first off, ⁓ let's let's dive into a couple icebreakers. And then we'll do introductions. And then we'll dive into the nitty gritty. So it's all you've got left. You're on an island and you've you've managed to figure out electricity and you've got a record player but you only have one record. What are you listening to?
Erin Goodey (02:06)
Ooh, do you remember like the millennial like big shiny tunes sort of era? I think I'd go for like a nice like 90s like compilation CD that would have like thrived in the mid to late 90s on much music.
Martin Hauck (02:15)
yeah.
This is a very smart answer. I've not, we.
Erin Goodey (02:29)
They're
a bit of a variety.
Martin Hauck (02:32)
Yeah, yeah, big shiny tunes. We talked about this before before we talked reluctantly a bit about my emo era. So I'm sure there's a couple emo songs on big shiny tunes that would be ⁓ nicely done. Well, well done.
Erin Goodey (02:46)
think it equals everything,
right? Like you get a little bit of sort of old nostalgia plus a little bit of like variety and genre.
Martin Hauck (02:49)
Yeah.
Yeah, you have something that's like because usually albums are sort of like a mood in itself. It doesn't shift too much. Whereas this gives you like, okay, I'm cooking dinner. So I'm going to listen to this or ⁓ it's a nice sunset. Yeah, yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Okay. ⁓ Midnight snacking. What are you What are you reaching for in the cupboard or the fridge? What's what are you going for?
Erin Goodey (03:08)
This is it.
Woo, I think it depends on mood. Before I moved to the UK, I wasn't a fan of chocolate. Since I've been in the UK, chocolate tends to be my go-to. Very different than North American chocolate. I don't know if I'll get hate for this, but British chocolate is just so much better. So if I want something sweet, I'm typically getting some chocolate, but I'm a salty, savory person, so.
Martin Hauck (03:27)
Mm-hmm.
Erin Goodey (03:45)
Yeah, anything that I can have like crunch and savory, I'll go to. I'm a Canadian expat living in the UK. So I've had some ⁓ North American time recently and got some ranch dressing. So my late time snack for the last two weeks every night has been baby carrots and ranch dressing.
Martin Hauck (04:03)
⁓
my goodness. amount of it's it's weird, right? Because you're like you have a normal bag of carrots and you're like, hmm, this will be in my fridge or in my. Yeah, this will stay. Yeah. Baby carrots and it's just like where I need more bags of baby carrots. Yeah.
Erin Goodey (04:13)
This will tie in here.
Yeah, so the recent North American journey has been able to fulfill sort of the late night snacking as well.
Martin Hauck (04:29)
No, no
good. Good answers. I agree with you. That's that's I have to revisit that that combo. I need to shake up my snack routine just in general. All right, couple of sort of quick takes. ⁓
Erin Goodey (04:36)
Thank
Martin Hauck (04:45)
Any, any email sign offs that sort of like make your eye twitch.
Erin Goodey (04:51)
I think there's like a cultural thing in some countries, you'll send off an email and you'll say thank you. ⁓ And in the UK, that's a really like harsh sign off. ⁓ One of the things in the UK that winds me up is best. So your signature line is just best. I don't know does that mean? What do want? But I think for me, when somebody is closing out an email and they've left something hanging, like what's the action? What did you email me for? What do want? What do need? ⁓
Martin Hauck (05:01)
really?
best.
Erin Goodey (05:18)
There's a lot of filler and fluff in emails and if there isn't a point anywhere, like it's got to be at that sign off. And I've been, my inbox is regularly overflowing and just drowning in like, what do want from me? Like, what's the ask here?
Martin Hauck (05:31)
Yeah.
Yeah. And saying, yeah, best is that's a tough one. I got it.
Erin Goodey (05:36)
Are you mad? Is
that what that means?
Martin Hauck (05:39)
I got a
lot of flack and this is years ago, 15, 15 years ago. And I first cracked into recruiting and I'm not from the UK. I have no relation to it. I used to work for a family from the UK. It was a very small family business. And I, I took cheers along with me. I loved it. And I signed everything off, with cheers. And there was one candidate who I had.
you know, had to let them know that they weren't moving forward in the process. They sent me and this was my early days. So I probably messed up in some capacity in terms of like the candidate experience. But they they'd sent this like, four pager email. And then like, they spent like three paragraphs, like, who even says cheers in an email, like this isn't a party. And after that, like I stopped for a year while I was working for that organization. But now just
just to spite them and also because I love it, use cheers. I don't know if that's the right thing or not.
Erin Goodey (06:37)
Totally normal
in the UK. think that's one of the things about like in my team, we've got folks just in like over 70 countries. So our interactions can be pretty informal, but we also have to consider like, what does that mean for somebody else? And when I first moved here, I had a not too dissimilar situation where I would sign all my emails, thank you. And then my name and my boss was like, that's quite rude. Like try.
like kind regards. like, okay, so that's been drilled into my head for the last like 11, 12 years that thank you is actually, I mean, it's the most polite Canadian thing. And they're like, no, no, no, don't use that. Don't say that.
Martin Hauck (07:16)
Kind regards in Canada and North America is kind of seen as a bit of slight like a sarcastic like, yeah, yeah, it's wild, wild. Why we could do a whole podcast episode on this, I'm sure, but we won't because we've got really interesting stuff to talk about. A couple more rapid fire questions here for you. ⁓ One word slash one sentence challenges. ⁓ Company culture is.
Erin Goodey (07:20)
The best.
not in a playbook, it is lived.
Martin Hauck (07:48)
Ooh. ⁓ that's a banger right there. That's good. That's good. ⁓ Team building exercises are
Erin Goodey (07:50)
Thank
depending on what they are, I hate forced fun. So yeah.
Martin Hauck (08:08)
Yeah. Return to office mandates are
Erin Goodey (08:13)
guised attempt at terminations without severance.
Martin Hauck (08:18)
Okay, interesting. Interesting. Yeah, that's a spicy one. We should double click on that one later. ⁓ The future of work looks like
Erin Goodey (08:30)
flexibility, empowerment, autonomy, treating adults like adults to get good stuff done.
Martin Hauck (08:37)
Okay, okay. So we've, we've figured out a bunch about you from from this. ⁓ And we've got a good foundation in which to build off of but I'd love to, to build off of a more stable foundation in terms of, you know, where you've been what you've what you've been up to how you got here and where you're going. So looking through your LinkedIn profile, ⁓ like super interesting, right? Starting off in
the world of mental health, then getting into the world of correctional facilities and court systems and then becoming an HR person like walk us give there's there's a lot going on. And we were talking about your North American tour before the podcast started. But walk help help me understand how you got to where you are today.
Erin Goodey (09:28)
Yeah, so did the whole typical 18 off to university and didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up. Started with journalism and political silence because I thought that would be fun. I had this vision in my head that I would be this amazing journalist in like war-torn regions doing like war reporting and that just is not me. I am scared of everything. I am that, you know.
It quickly sort of moved out of my system when I was in university and ended up doing criminology and human rights. And I really liked that side because I think most folks go into that thinking that they're going to go into ⁓ law or policing. And for me, I didn't know what that looked like, but it wasn't law or policing. ⁓ And I started a summer job at a nonprofit and it was working with criminalized and marginalized women. And it was...
you know, really, really eye opening that there was this whole other world that I could get involved in that was sort of support driven, human centric and could really feel like I was having any impact in making a difference, which when I was 20, 21, 22 in my world, I was like, oh, this is great. Like I can, I can do something really cool here. And then I was thrown into the reality of it where in my first couple of weeks, I was sitting in a prison with a woman who had done some really heinous things and it was like, oh, okay. So what do you want to be when you grow up? And
It was really framing that conversation with her and with other women around like, okay, you're not gonna be in here forever. What are we gonna do when you get out? How do we find you an apartment? Do we need to get your kids back? How do we find a job? How do we do all the things that you need to do when you need to function outside? And I did that for a little while and that human piece was always really important to me. And I took a job,
Martin Hauck (11:09)
Mm.
Erin Goodey (11:12)
student debt is not a small thing in Canada. ⁓ And I was never going to hit financial milestones in the nonprofit sector. And I moved into a port authority, which was complete opposite side of scope and sector. And I was the EA there for not long, but the president had started just a few months before I did. in our first meeting, he said, sort of, what do want to be when you grow up?
what organization do you want to work in? What does this look like for you? We're both new here, let's figure it out together. And it gave me lot of opportunity to sort of build and break and explore. And I was still really, really young in my career and very curious. So at one point he said, do you want to take on the HR side? Can't be that hard, go figure it out. And I did, and I really enjoyed it. But my role there was very much split between sort of the HR side and corporate social responsibility. So I was still being able to do stuff in the community.
And I really, really enjoyed that. Flash forward a few years, I was in HR in Canada and decided I wanted to move to the UK. I'd worked since I was 15 and sort of had a bit of a crisis when I was on the plane thinking like, oh, what am I gonna do? I don't have a job when I get here. And found a role in Bulgaria where I worked for a summer teaching international students, what do you wanna be when you grow up? So it was a bit around like, okay, here's the things that you think you like, here's the things that you think you're good at.
What does that mean to you in the long term as an adult from like a career perspective and really working with students around how to frame that into something that maybe is a tangible career opportunity. So doing things like mock interviews and working with them on their resumes and really just trying to get them to think more broadly about what they wanted to do. And then back in the UK took any HR role that would come my way. It was really, really difficult to break into it in the UK. And yeah, just started to build my experience here.
I've done a variety of roles. Most of them are sort of with a global remit. And then I joined Oyster about four years ago, initially as an international HR VP and then have sort of moved up through now leading that team that I joined back in 2022.
Martin Hauck (13:15)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, and this is the thing when when we first met at transform a couple months back, feels like years ago, but ⁓ we ⁓ that was kind of the thing that stood out in terms of like, okay, you've got this. First off, it's you've got this background in HR and people in culture. But you're also doing it in a way where you get a vantage point.
into so many different organizations. And so the thing for me was like, I want to talk to Aaron about what she's seeing, because oftentimes, like most of like, if not all of the guests that we have on the show, it's it's, they're kind of in not not for any bad reason, but they're in this tunnel of like their own organization, this bubble of their own organization. And so you get to you and your team get to see all these like
interesting circumstances. And yeah, I would love to just like, yeah, let's double click on just sort of like the journey how things evolved when you know, once you got to oyster why you why you joined and what it's been like and what what your day to day looks like now.
Erin Goodey (14:37)
Yeah. So when I joined it was, I mean, we were just about a year old. and everything, it was very much like we're on the plane and we're building it as we're flying it. So it was really exciting from a, like, I love to break and build. love to iterate on the stuff that we are doing. before I was here, I was actually in manufacturing for about four years and it was lean manufacturing. So it was all about trying to understand the why behind the way we do things, reducing waste automating. So I wanted to make that pivot into tech.
and I did that in 22. But it was really like I took a lot of learnings out of that into tech because we were building, we were trying to figure out operational processes, what we do, how we support our customers and our team members. there was a lot in the early days of trying to map out all the stuff that we're doing today. And now there's a lot of, how do we automate? Should we still be doing those things? Where I challenge my team a lot is if we stop doing this, would anybody notice? If they would notice,
That means we still need to do it. Can we cut some waste? Can we automate? Is there something more clever we could be doing here? But over the last four years, it's, Oyster has evolved a lot. My role has evolved a lot. So has the teams. Tech sort of went through this really weird period, of mid-ish 2022, very much in 2023 and 24, where we saw a lot of tech layoffs. We saw a lot of proprietary structuring. We also saw customers that were potentially
not necessarily reluctant to like full global employment, but we're really focused on LaTam or APAC. And we're then saying, okay, I need to step back and think about my global hiring strategy and what this looks like and where else should I be considering? Like where else is there talent? So a lot of my role, my team's role is working with our customers on sort of navigating the tricky, the complex, the risky, all the weird and wonderful that happens when you've got employees.
Martin Hauck (16:21)
Yeah.
Erin Goodey (16:34)
and somebody not behaving at an offsite, somebody doing something that they shouldn't do, restructures and everything in between. And then the other piece is like global hiring strategy. Okay, you you need to fill X number of roles, you know, you've got X budget, have you considered Estonia? You've been looking in the UK or Ireland and you're not finding talent or it's not finding, you know, matches with your budget. Let's...
Let's pivot, let's think more ⁓ strategically around maybe where that talent density is. A lot of my role really for the last two, three years has been around advising customers on, ⁓ I hear what you want to do, have you thought about this? ⁓ Or being that sounding board or that sparring partner around some of their people strategy stuff, their global hiring planning, even the remote work piece. We've seen some customers that...
operated in a hybrid model and then we're sort of curious about fully remote and wanting to figure out well how do we let people work from other countries so sort of educating and informing them around like how do you do it and here's it is really great but here's also the risks here's the things to consider and this is what it looks like in practice.
Martin Hauck (17:47)
Yeah, that's, I mean, that's an interesting question that's come up a bunch in the people people group. And I even just for my own curiosity, the the place that my brain is sort of settled in terms of like the answer to that question to a certain extent is like three months, right? Is it is it sort of like, you can do that, but for three months, anything above and beyond that?
typically should needs additional is am I going in the right direction is have I saved have you saved the right file
Erin Goodey (18:20)
Yeah,
no, I think that's the sort of like standard baseline most people operate from. It comes down to business risk. And in some countries you can hit permanent establishment on day one. Some countries you won't. There's things around like right to work. What happens if something happens when somebody is working from abroad? Like there's all these sort of bigger considerations that go into it. But most companies I've seen are sort of like, if they're really risk adverse, they're saying like,
a max 30 days, if they're not, then they're probably saying 60 to 90 days. It does come down to business risk, but I think also maturity within not just people teams, but management in companies and how much flex and autonomy and comfortability maybe managers have with letting folks work from abroad for X period of time.
Martin Hauck (19:13)
Right, there has to be a certain level of maturity within the organization and within leadership to be able to do that as well.
Erin Goodey (19:20)
When I think you see the flip side as well, even when there isn't a lot of maturity, you'll see some organizations say, yeah, work from anywhere. And then they find out six months down the line that somebody shouldn't have been in Bali for the last six months. And now they've got, you know, a presence that's been established and that team member that's been there maybe isn't working out. You need to terminate them. And they're now saying, Hey, Indonesian law applies, not my home law. So we see both ends of the spectrum when, in communities or in conversations I'm having where it's like.
Martin Hauck (19:29)
to
Ooh. Yeah.
Erin Goodey (19:50)
Maturity sometimes is the angle, sometimes it's for the better, sometimes it's for the worse.
Martin Hauck (19:56)
is the way you you have to structure your team at oyster the same as how companies should be thinking of structuring their people teams when they're growing and scaling and like there's there's not even just people teams but just teams in general right like do you see do you see having to set up your teams at oyster the same as how you recommend you know
clients and folks that are becoming more global in that same same way? Or is it is it to sort of like different use cases?
Erin Goodey (20:32)
I think Oyster very much sets a standard around certain things and we will advise based on our own experience as well. But we also want to factor in what's the reality for the customer and what do they actually want to achieve. And we see this across things like work from anywhere policy, but equally their approach to determinations or onboarding and what that sort of experience looks like throughout the life cycle.
The folks at my team and that I'm interacting with most regularly are typically people, people at the customer company. So what they want is that practical, like, okay, what are you doing? How are you doing it? And I think that it builds that credibility, but we can also say, actually, we've learned from this. Or when we first started, this is what we were thinking about when we did it it actually didn't work. Or ⁓ what you want to do actually is excellent and we're gonna steal that. So I think there's...
There's a bit of a mix and I think what people value most is that safety in space with a peer where you can say, this is what we're thinking about, or we've pulled the trigger on this thing, it's not really working, what's your experience with that? So I find that there's a lot of value in that, but yeah, I don't think we internally have everything 100 % right, but it's...
Martin Hauck (21:43)
Yeah.
Erin Goodey (21:54)
sort of that balance of let's put something in place, let's test it, let's get some feedback on it, and let's adjust if we need to. And I think we do see that a lot with our customers as well, where maybe they will take our advice on like work from anywhere or something and then adjust it, either scale it down or, you know, right size it for their own team members.
Martin Hauck (22:14)
I remember my last organization that I worked with before I went all in on people, people was there was a mandate to build out an entire engineering team in Latin and, ⁓ I'd never done it before from a acquisition perspective. The people ops team hadn't done it before from a people ops perspective. And we were acquiring the organization was acquiring a couple companies globally. So we had these new markets.
building up, but we weren't acquiring anyone in Latin America. And the, the, was, it was kind of a cool experience. And I'll land the plane on this question shortly. But it was kind of a cool experience because like it truly felt like starting from scratch. And at that time, this is like four or five years, like still like, you know, mid pandemic, ⁓ there's still like,
people are still figuring things out. And obviously, the pandemic kind of gave gave way to like working virtually, which leads to easier ⁓ comfort levels in terms of like, employing people globally from anywhere. ⁓ The I guess, yeah, it was the I mean, it was my first time doing it. But like they'd given me the mandate to like help us choose which country in
in Latin America was like, so I was pulling up all these like weird, felt like a high school project of like, okay, I've got to find you know, the English literature, literacy scores across all these places. And like, at the time, I, there wasn't anyone you could necessarily call, you could reach out to, to organizations that helped with it. But there was like, there was all this like, sort of like conflicting information. And I was just, I did my best.
right and I'm like I came up with a scoring system and here's all these like 15 different points of things that we should consider when choosing and here's the top three and this is why and we eventually went with Columbia and was great and there's 5060 engineers in Columbia as a result of that and which is fantastic like we have the intention was to like not have like a room filled with contractors it was the attention was like we want this to truly be an extension of the organization there's two there
very different approaches with that that hiring philosophy. I guess my feeling in that moment was like, okay, I'll do this to the best of my ability, but I don't know what I don't know. What what there's got to be like a best practice here. And there's probably way more resources now. So like, if I'm a person at a company that's been sort of like given this sort of mandate, hey, we've never done this before. But we
What are you advising to them? What resources can they access? What's your high level, like help them figure it out kind of approach?
Erin Goodey (25:18)
Yeah, I think there's so many more resources available now. I remember being in a very similar position not that long ago where it was like, oh, we want to hire someone in maybe Croatia. And I'm like, why? Like, know someone there? Like, why? You just don't know a map. And then it was like, yeah, we'll look at Mexico. Okay, why? And there was that element of like, let's scramble together and figure out what we don't know. And I think
Martin Hauck (25:31)
You
Erin Goodey (25:47)
If you're like, if you're not an oyster customer, you can use oysters resources. You can go on our website. You can see hiring guys across a number of countries and you can pull through the good to nose, the costs, the taxes, the, this is what it's like to terminate. This is what it's like around statutory leaves. If you are a customer and we do this a lot is heat maps. Okay. You've got this idea. You know, your hiring plan is X number of head count this year. Let's run through.
what your risk adversity is. Let's run through what considerations you have. Is it a support team? And are they primarily supporting folks in the US? Immediately, you shut down APAC because, well, the time difference is too big. But Philippines, actually, folks are much more accustomed to working US hours. So don't shut down the Philippines yet. We see, actually, a lot when we're talking to
Martin Hauck (26:38)
Mm. Yeah.
Erin Goodey (26:45)
North American based customers wanting to explore and they immediately will go south. So they'll go Mexico, Colombia, Argentina. Argentina typically people don't benefit from being an employee. They benefit from being a contractor from a tax perspective and a currency volatility perspective. So then there's also that conversation around like, okay, what risk do you want to take on for this? The more layers you pick, the more complex it gets. And what my team is, so the ethos of my team is make the complex simple. What's your why?
and let's work backwards from that. And I think, yeah, you want to look at things like, okay, what is the cost? What are the cultural nuances or quirks? What does that life cycle look like from an employee's perspective from a start to a finish? And what I mean is how quickly can you onboard? What does onboarding look like? How much is it going to cost? What types of leaves happen during that life cycle that you need to be prepared for? And what does offboarding look like? The biggest surprise is offboarding costs for everyone.
We always say like don't get excited for or don't think about the divorce when you're really excited for the engagement So when you're going through the onboarding, you're not thinking about the divorce a termination could happen and often people don't want to think about the bad thing when they're really excited about the engagement and You do need to think about how complex it could be in a country or how limited your roots could be to actually terminate and so
Martin Hauck (27:52)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Erin Goodey (28:10)
I always like to have all the information in front of me and I like to share that with customers. We're like, yeah, we're really excited about this right now. But what about when we're not excited and let's look at what that could cost as well or what that process could look like. There's this thing as well, where I think you naturally will look through your own lens. So if you are sitting in the U S your lens is likely to be U S centric. If you want to hire in a country like Germany, it might not even like spring to mind that things are going to take
Martin Hauck (28:19)
Yeah.
Erin Goodey (28:38)
longer period to do anything because you've got a wedding signature, you've got to post things to an office for somebody to sign and stamp them. Or the Netherlands, when you only have a two month probation period, you can't decide how somebody is settling in in two months. And then after the two months, you're likely going to have to do mutual termination, and it's likely going to be expensive. So it's these sorts of things. It's that context that I think is, is important. And it's sometimes really hard to get from just a quick Google. I think there's definitely
Martin Hauck (28:52)
Yeah.
Erin Goodey (29:06)
tons more information out there than probably where you and I were a few years ago trying to figure it out. But it's those pieces that I think are really important to consider when you are thinking about it. But I do think global hiring is a strategic lever and not this big scary thing. I think people need to move away from it is too scary to do it to trying it. But I think there's also that piece of like, don't throw a dart at a map.
Martin Hauck (29:21)
Mm-hmm.
Haha
Erin Goodey (29:33)
Don't just randomly pick Australia because you think it's a fun country or don't randomly pick Germany because one time you went there on holiday. Be strategic. Some of this stuff that we've been advising some customers on, we've been working with one in particular really closely, is they hire in sort of what they call pod countries now. So they've got three primary countries that they hire the majority of their folks in. It means their managers know what they're getting in terms of how to performance manage, what the cultural expectations are.
Their HR team is well equipped to support the life cycle. They know how to work with us. They know what to expect. And then we can dabble in another country once they're ready and they feel confident. So yeah, the world is your oyster. I love the pun, but gently ease in.
Martin Hauck (30:17)
Yeah,
it's a gift brings to mind, like, okay, if if you're hiring one person globally, that's, you know, that's like a very niche out edge case kind of situation. That's one thing. And then if you're like, hey, we're going to become an international global organization, we're going to start hiring globally, that's a whole different conversation. And in theory, you're going to have multiple countries or multiple geos.
are there like this sounds silly to say but like if say Germany is like a hard place to hire and because of the wedding, wet ink thing and a bunch of other things like that's like an advanced country to start with in terms of like hiring complexity and norms to get used to and etc etc. Are there
Are there good stepping stone companies to sort of like, Hey, we're thinking about this and we want to see we're not even sure about the strategy or when a company comes to you and kind of like, are there moments where like, cool, you're not even ready to do this. We don't even advise you to do this. You should here's some things to think about. So I'd curious to get your take on those two things.
Erin Goodey (31:31)
think it depends on the company and what role you're looking for. So I think if we're looking at Europe, for me, I think like the easiest countries are UK and Ireland. There's talent availability, there is ⁓ sort of easy life cycle stuff that happens, like nothing is too tricky or complex. So I think if you're trying to...
Martin Hauck (31:32)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Erin Goodey (31:57)
dabble on this side of the pond. Those are two easy countries to get into. I would caveat though, like depending on what talent you want, what budget you have, ⁓ I don't think any country is too scary. I think you just need to be prepared that it is going to be potentially more challenging than sort of the seat that you're sitting in. ⁓ We have a lot of customers that if they're, yeah, if they're thinking about Europe, ⁓ Poland, Romania seem to be.
Spain seemed to be the sort of top three. With that said, Germany is one of our biggest countries as well. If we are thinking about sort of our American customers, they'll tend to go one step above or one step below and they'll look at Canada or Mexico, which work well from like a time zone perspective, culturally, like it just makes sense. There are certain countries where I would say like, look, if you are considering about breaking into that region, be very,
sort of mindful of it. Like Japan has a concept of lifetime employment. It's really, really difficult to terminate somebody. So you need to make sure that your recruiting is solid, your onboarding is solid, that you actually need that role. So it's taking a more considered approach.
Martin Hauck (33:10)
Mmm.
Yeah, yeah. Interesting. ⁓ Are there? Yeah, so it is the classic people people group like we have a sticker that just says it depends and it's in our it's in our font. It really does truly depend on on on what you're doing. ⁓ You touched on this ⁓ earlier in terms of like making the complex
Erin Goodey (33:28)
It's the caveat for everything.
Martin Hauck (33:41)
simple. And that's, that's been sort of a thread throughout your entire career, it looks like even just the way you describe things. How would you say that? Is it is it truly like, okay, it feels complex to hire people in other countries? How do we make that simple? And how, how does that show up, I guess, in a day to day practice?
Erin Goodey (34:03)
Yeah, I think it's basic things like even giving advice. If we're working with a customer on a complex termination, don't do it in legal jargon. Like just have two humans having a chat about what's going to happen. I think often there's this desire to not over complicate on purpose, but to sort of make yourself feel or look smarter by using.
Martin Hauck (34:14)
you
Erin Goodey (34:28)
big words or like, we don't have to like just tell people this is how it is. And in my team, it's very low ego, no BS. It's this is what's happening. This is why it's happening. And we move on. ⁓ so I think things like that, like advice, especially when you're in a very complex situation, don't make it more difficult than it needs to be. When you think about things throughout the life cycle that can be automated, automate them. We are very much focused on having humans in the moments that matter and not having humans in the moments that don't. So.
If you need a, I don't know, a reference letter because you're applying for a mortgage, you don't need a human to do that. You should be able to click a button and a letter's generated with the details you need. If you're having a major moment in your life that is particularly challenging, we've got a disciplinary, we've got somebody who has suffered through some sort of challenging moment, that's when you want a human.
When we talk about making the complex simple, what we're also talking about is freeing up actual time and resource and the mental space to be able to really support when it does actually matter. And yeah, I think there's a lot of stuff across the life cycle that can be automated. You don't want to talk to somebody if you don't need to talk to somebody. I always describe this as a, you need information about what your balance is in your bank, you'll go online, you'll check it. If you look and see, yep.
It seems standard. I'm the one who spent all that cash. There hasn't been fraud. That was me. Fine. I can deal with that. But if you look and you say, okay, I thought I would have $10,000 here and I've got $8, that's when you want to speak to somebody. And that's how I describe how we work. Like if I need something that is like, I just want to know about maternity leave in Spain, I should be able to go and read the five sentences about it that are in plain English and move on with my day.
Martin Hauck (36:09)
Yeah.
Erin Goodey (36:23)
If I'm actually dealing with my own maternity leave situation in Spain and something has become complex with my pregnancy, or I'm supporting a team member who's maybe experienced a loss, I want to talk to somebody. I don't want to go and click through and do a chat bot thing. I want to talk to somebody. And this is how we try to divide our work is focus on the moments that matter so we can have a human deflect and automate where you don't need one.
Martin Hauck (36:34)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. I want to do a quick pivot and maybe we'll pivot back. That's just how my brain works. Well, we'll fix it in post. We'll fix it in post. But I think so you spent a good chunk of your career in HR and in the people people side on just being of service to those organizations. And now with oyster you
Erin Goodey (36:58)
you
Martin Hauck (37:16)
still doing that, but for you know, one to many ⁓ in a very and you've got a team of folks doing that. And the one thing that I'm noticing just in general with the the way things are going is fractional work is becoming more and more popular. And so HR folks are having to kind of do a similar thing that that you're doing, but they're sort of like baptized through fire in the sense that like, okay, I'm going to give for
know, whether it's out of necessity or out of desire of like, okay, I want to do this, or it's like, hey, I went through a layoff or restructure, whatever that's becoming more and more commonplace, as you said, obviously, 2022 and 2023. And just in general, the world and industry is changing. So a lot more people are becoming fractional. And then they're having to put on their sort of like, client success, customer service hats, which also like,
those two hats are very similar to employee experience and employee success as well. I guess, are there are there things that you've seen in this this transition as you've gotten comfortable with it as a leader? What are what are some things that you like, even just for the individuals and people taking on teams in that sense, that some some lessons you've learned along the way that you would just say, hey, they these are some
these are some things I would just skip the hard part and go straight to like the lesson.
Erin Goodey (38:46)
Yeah, I think it's difficult that everybody's trying to do a lot. And I think one of the things that I see sometimes of fractional folks is, especially if it's their first like dip into it, or they're doing it off the back of a restructure, is just taking on everything and anything and taking this broad generalist approach. And I think that does work for some folks. But I carving out a specialism.
is really, really helpful. I've never done the sort of fractional piece from an external perspective. I'm effectively internal fractional, which is an all seat to be in. And the same with my team. So I actually have two teams that report to me. One is our senior international HRVPs and one is our sort of operations folks. And both sides, I want them working like business partners. And think fractional people, you have to do that sort of on an accelerated basis.
Martin Hauck (39:25)
Yeah.
Erin Goodey (39:45)
The way I describe when I'm hiring an HRVP to that candidate about what we do is effectively you are fractional. You don't have the insight into what is happening day to day. You might not have like in-depth knowledge about their culture. So I think to like avoid the hard parts is to figure out those things that motivate some of their decision-making. So we've got a massive customer base. We don't spend time with all of them every single day.
But what we do is knowledge share within the team to be like, okay, I work with this customer. This is how they communicate. This is what they like. This is what they don't like. And we've got that safe space to be able to do that. Whereas a fractional standalone person, it's going to take a lot of time to build up that relationship and that trust and really understanding what is going on when they're not around. so think I would want to, if I was, if I was in a true fractional role, I would want to understand like, what's their culture, what's their pace, what are they like? Because that helps inform.
all the advice you're ever going to give them. It informs how you're gonna communicate, the manner in which you're gonna communicate with them, how risk adverse they might be, where they're willing to take some maybe constructive feedback to tailor their ways of working or change their ways of working. think, yeah, I'd really focus on understanding a customer's why to help me figure out.
how I need to work with them so I'm not reworking a lot.
Martin Hauck (41:17)
Are there any things that you've realized about the pro like about the people people profession having had so many different vantage points now like just some like universal truths that maybe might not be obvious.
Erin Goodey (41:32)
I mean, think a lot of them are obvious. think we're all under it. I think there's HR to this day, I think is one of the more under-resourced teams in an organization typically. I think there has been a lot of shift and change over the last few years around recognizing a people function as not a cost center. But I think there's still work to be done there. And I think in a lot of the conversations we have, there is this element of, I've got a lot on my plate. I just need this off my plate. How do I resolve this? What's the...
path of least resistance to get to the outcome that we need. I think the other thing that is, I think my favorite thing about people, functions and people people, is there is this strong sense of community and there is this like, you're just peers, just tell me how it is. And I wanna do this thing, how bad is that gonna land? Or I just wanna sound like this thing. And we all had different experiences, we are all looking at things through very different lenses and I think that
Martin Hauck (42:04)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Erin Goodey (42:30)
that sort of like safety in numbers is really helpful. And I think, I don't think, and maybe this is my own bias, I don't see that with a lot of other sort of functions in an organization. There are a lot of people, communities where you can just go to and be like, I've got this problem, help me. And within five minutes, you've got 20 people that are like, do this, don't do that. And I think that that is such a...
Martin Hauck (42:47)
Yeah.
Erin Goodey (42:55)
such a nice thing. And I think that goes back to like the ethos of like, people, people aren't all like, people, people, like, not everybody is a people person that's in a people role, but fundamentally, they care about, you know, doing the right thing, making sure that people are valued, making sure that people are trusted. But equally, they're asked to do a lot of stuff that goes against their own sort of comfortability or sensibility. And sometimes you just need a solid sounding board. And I do think people
Martin Hauck (43:18)
Yeah. Yeah.
Erin Goodey (43:24)
Functions often don't have that internally, they go external for that. And there's really great peers available to soundboard and just be like, I'm gonna throw something out there, I don't want any judgment, help me. And you never get the judgment, you get the good advice that you don't actually get internally.
Martin Hauck (43:36)
Yeah.
Yeah, and most because most people have been through that thing. Or a version of that thing and remembered kind of being isolated in that moment where like maybe they couldn't maybe there wasn't a community that they could ask or maybe they didn't have peers that they could just tap on the shoulder and say like, Hey, this is weird. I've never seen this before. What do I do kind of deal? There is it is very true. It's like there's I mean, I mean, I'm obviously biased as well.
Erin Goodey (44:03)
Yeah!
You
Martin Hauck (44:11)
But
it does feel like it's the it's, mean, when, when I started the community, it was because I was feeling that myself, like I was just like, went from an organization where there's three or four colleagues who were fantastic and I could just soundboard stuff off of them. And when, when I went to another organization, I was the only recruiter there and, and nobody wanted to talk shop with me, which was fine. And even if they did, it wasn't like they'd been in the weeds. And so I needed a place to.
to kind of ask questions and get answers and TPG was that for me, I was very lucky. it's like finding like, regardless of where or which community you find finding that, that's very important to your point, right? That's sort of like this, this universal truth. I guess. Yeah.
Erin Goodey (44:57)
I remember being standalone and being the
only HR person and being really early in my career and people asking me stuff like, I supposed to know this? Nobody's given me a playbook. What do you mean? And there was different sort of sister companies across the country. And I was like, I emailed all of them, like, can we all be friends? We're all dealing with a lot of the same stuff. Can we just, and there was no Slack, there was nothing. We were literally just emailing each other being like,
Martin Hauck (45:05)
You
Yeah.
Erin Goodey (45:26)
Hey, I've got this, has anybody else dealt with this? Or has anybody written a policy on this? Or I've just had a really, really rough week. I need a quick win, somebody help me. And as I've moved throughout my various roles and sort of like across my career, I've always looked for what that community is. Whether that is within your own org or sometimes it's even it's nicer to have outside of your org because you get that perspective that isn't.
Martin Hauck (45:37)
Hmm.
Erin Goodey (45:55)
biased by your own operations or biased by your own sort of perspective. And one of the things that we've done in my team is we have an unblock me channel, ⁓ which is very much like, it's our own little community where it's like, what does this mean? Or like, help me figure this out. It's super active. think our average response time is under two minutes and you get like just a pile on of like, yep, had that last week or no, I haven't had that, but I'm going to follow along so I can learn from this. And I think.
Martin Hauck (46:11)
love that.
Erin Goodey (46:24)
There's the two really important things is that community and that safety of being able to like ask questions and get responses, but equally to be able to follow along and learn. And I think there's so much benefit in that, like just learning piece.
Martin Hauck (46:37)
You're blowing my mind. I mean, as somebody that runs a Slack community, like a good, a good Slack channel and a good Slack channel name is like critical to like it just getting traction. And so that's the fact that, you know, the last five or six companies have been at, there's not like an unblock me channel. Like it should be general random and unblock me and like unblock me should be like a default, default channel that every org has. Like that's brilliant.
Erin Goodey (47:06)
huge advocate for this and now we have other teams that have their own unblock me channels now because it's like, it's just like, it is sometimes the silliest thing. Like I had one the other day where it's like, hi, nobody's ever asked me this before. And I posted and someone was like, yeah, you just do this. right. Okay. That's super easy. But it's, it's sometimes you just need to say something out loud to see how other people would interact with that or interpret that or.
Martin Hauck (47:27)
Yeah.
Erin Goodey (47:33)
Yeah, it's nice to have that space, just be like, look, there's no stupid questions. If there is, I've asked them, so please feel free.
Martin Hauck (47:42)
I love that.
⁓ Can I steal that? Yeah, I might just add that for people, people group. Yeah, no, that's brilliant. ⁓
Erin Goodey (47:45)
Yeah, I'll it.
create a little
there an emoji just so that I'm like represented in there.
Martin Hauck (47:53)
100
% will will do. Yeah, that's that's brilliant. Okay, so we've we've talked a ton about, you know, we've covered past we've we've covered present. The future is ⁓ exciting and terrifying all at the same time. We could talk about the thing that you and I both know what I'm about to say AI. I'd love to like split it up into sort of like two categories. What's occupying your mind in terms of the future?
professionally ⁓ when it comes to anything that's not AI related and then we'll double click on the AI side of things as well.
Erin Goodey (48:35)
Yeah, so I think there's two things right now that I'm like thinking a lot of. And one is around sort of what's going on globally. So there's complexity creeping in everywhere that we don't have control over. And I think for me, I'm always thinking about how we simplify our experience for employees, customers, internal teams.
while we still manage the realities of compliance and scale. Once you factor in like geopolitical situations and where folks are, because we are geographically distributed, our team members are geographically distributed as are our customers, how we effectively manage the BAU stuff that's happening every day when all these other things are happening peripheral to that. And I think for us, when complexity isn't...
It will slow things down. So we're focusing a lot on how do we like, what does good look like on a BAU basis so that we can weave in when we have those like added complexities. I think the other thing that I've been thinking a lot of, which goes back to AI a little bit is whether we're solving for today or actually building where the business is going. It's really easy to like optimize what exists, but the real challenge is
Martin Hauck (49:55)
Hmm
Erin Goodey (50:00)
sort of anticipating what we'll need in 12 to 24 months from now and making sure that we're not having to rebuild later. I think as well, like pivoting to AI a bit is...
I don't want, and I said this earlier, I don't want us to do things for the sake of doing them. I also don't want us to do things because we've always done them. So if we've got a process, is it working? Can it be automated? Can we stop doing something and would anybody notice? Is this actually serving anybody? And if it's not, can it? Let's just stop doing it. If we do need to do it, cut out the waste, automate, do whatever we need to do. The other thing that I think we should be thinking about is
Ignore the process we have now. If we had AI when we built that process, what would it look like? So don't look at what we do right now. Step back and like, let's use onboarding as an experience or as an example. What is that experience like end to end from let's start at the point of a contract going out to somebody's first day. What happens? Get AI to build that and then see how far off we are with our actual process. Like don't try to automate stuff that's already been built. Like, let's just think about realistically what that should look like.
Martin Hauck (50:52)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Erin Goodey (51:15)
And I think there's this piece here of like defining what good looks like. I always say with the team like aim for perfection but land on good and good is fine. Like let's just go from there and then it gives us room to like scale and build and iterate. But AI, it's really, really interesting because I think we're going to be having a very different conversation in 12 months. We would have had a different one 12 months ago.
Martin Hauck (51:37)
Yeah.
Erin Goodey (51:38)
The team is doing a fantastic job around experimentation and adoption. And we're thinking about like how we accelerate certain things that we're doing. Last week we had AI Week, so there's a big focus on that. We're having a team meeting tomorrow where it's all about AI, how the team is using it. Maybe the ones that are a little bit more cautious or maybe not fully like comfortable with using it every day. We're using this as a session to like get other people in the team to be like, this is what I'm doing.
Here's how I trialed it. Here's the benefits I've had. One of the things that was a really like nice whim, it was quite silly was last year I worked out, it took the team about 420 hours to do handovers for PTO. So handing a caseload to another HRBP for their, so they could go on holiday. It took an average in 20, 25, 420 hours for us to do that. We lost a whole quarter just writing handovers. Right? Like that's, it's insane number.
Martin Hauck (52:34)
Ooh.
Yeah.
Erin Goodey (52:38)
So we've built ⁓ an AI bot that summarizes our cases. Great, job done. There's your 420 hours back. It takes like five to 10 minutes now. And you just, get the summary, the HRPQ's covering can then go and read the summary and it's got like summary actions, next steps, who the key players are, any sentiment, anything you need to know.
Martin Hauck (52:51)
Ha ha ha.
Can you, can you shine a light on any of the tooling that you're using for that? Or is that something you can share or?
Erin Goodey (53:09)
Right.
So we use a ticketing system called Zendesk and our team has not our team, our BizOps team at Oyster has built what we're calling Pearl Diver. ⁓ they, but yeah, basically they've built out this function based on the need and the pain that we had. ⁓ We've got a couple other processes that we do ones around offboarding specifically with terminations where
Martin Hauck (53:26)
dear, I love it. Yeah.
Erin Goodey (53:44)
We ask customers for lot of information. And we started about a year and a half ago, ⁓ sort of we changed our process to make it a little bit more customer friendly. But we found in the last couple of weeks that there's some repetitive stuff that we think that we could get rid of. And we're now looking at that to see like, okay, if we chop those hours out, it's not just a time savings win for us, but also for our customers, which is better for the customer experience. It's those sorts of things where...
I think we're also thinking, okay, what is this massive big victory I could have when, look at your quick wins, because I think you can also have really, really nice victories in those as well. Gaining back a quarter is like fantastic.
Martin Hauck (54:22)
Yeah. Yeah.
It's funny because there's always this element of doom and gloom, you know, jobs are being taken away. And I finally came up with an analogy or a metaphor. I don't know the difference between the two. I'll have to use AI to help help me understand that. But this idea that like, if, if you work at a company that builds houses,
And your tool is a screwdriver and somebody gives you a power tool. ⁓ You can build your houses faster, but that doesn't change the fact that after you're done building the house, you have to build another house most likely. And it's sort of like it just means yes, jobs are changing. And yes, companies are downsizing as a result of it. But there is it's there's this also this optimistic element.
that it's just like, you just, you can do more now. And, ⁓ and the idea of like, it's a fun time in the sense that like, you get a chance to explore all these things. So your team is getting to contribute to the rest of the business in a way that maybe they never had the opportunity to do before because changing the process or influencing how a thing gets done.
was so far removed from their mandate that like, now the opposite is true where you might you're you're asking teams like, hey, if you think of a better way, or you have a like, share it with us, show us how you're doing it, though other people can learn. So it's a nice moment within organizations be like, there's this creative element to it that that ⁓ that is kind of heartwarming.
Erin Goodey (55:56)
Exactly that.
When I think as well, like there's a lot of people trying to solve the same problems, it's just a different flavor of the problem. And I think the more that we share internally to say like, hey, this is what I'm doing. This is what it's happened. Here's how I've iterated on that. Somebody can steal that and adapt that for something they're doing in their team. We also have this six week cohort that we run. We did the first one a few months ago. The second one's coming up where it's like an AI accelerator program.
Martin Hauck (56:14)
Yeah.
Erin Goodey (56:35)
and people put forward their ideas that will solve a problem. And we had an HR VP on my team who was on the first cohort and she was spending around 80 hours, I think it was 80 hours, quarter preparing some documentation for ⁓ terminations in France. Well, it's reduced it down to like an hour. Okay, that was termination documents. What other documents are we creating? Somebody else use this now and like adapt this for your purposes.
Martin Hauck (56:55)
while.
Erin Goodey (57:04)
But equally, now that we've had that sort of time back, how do we use that? And it goes back to my earlier point of like, I want HRVPs, I want my team really to be focused on the moments that matter. They should be involved when a human needs you. Everything else, let's do what we can. And to your point about like, AI is scary for some because we're thinking like, well, what does this mean from like a job loss perspective? And we're definitely seeing it, seeing the posts on LinkedIn all the time in the last...
couple of weeks and months, but there's also role creation. There's also development opportunity. There's scope for your role to change. Within our team, we've got an AI ambassador that was never gonna be part of her scope two, three years ago, but what does that mean for the rest of people around their development and their growth? And I think there's scope here for things to change.
But I don't think all the change is bad. I think we just need to figure out how we manage it and how we do it from a human-centric perspective as well.
Martin Hauck (58:08)
Since we're all kind of figuring out how to fly the plane while we assemble it. Love that expression. Used it earlier. Are there folks or companies or people that you're paying attention to that you're drawing sort of inspiration from the like, I should, we should take what so-and-so is doing over here. And like, I really like what company XYZ is doing. Like let's, let's do a version of that, but that one that makes sense for oyster. you, do you have a laundry list of those or?
Erin Goodey (58:37)
I mean, I'm super nosy generally, like I am poking my nose in anywhere. I think I had a lot of really great conversations out of Transform ⁓ and that has sort of like spurred my interest a little bit more to see what other companies are doing around AI. Zapier is one of them. Like I really love what they're doing. I love Zapier anyway, but the stuff that Brandon and his team are doing around AI is like really cool.
Martin Hauck (58:39)
No.
Yeah.
Erin Goodey (59:06)
And I think for us, there's also this piece around like scalability. Like I want the team to be doing cool stuff. I want them to be investing their time and their energy into this. Also leaning on them for like, who are you being nosy with? And who are they testing and trialing with? But yeah, for me, I'm very much in that like nosy exploratory stage with other companies to see what they're doing.
Again, my role and my team's role is not sort of that normal people function. So trying to figure out how we do things in a way that also makes sense for our customers and our team members without creating like extra friction points or things that don't make sense. So we're looking at it through sort of a variety of lenses in the team.
Martin Hauck (59:52)
Well, I mean, it's hilarious how often Zapier and Brandon gets mentioned. So kudos to him and the team. had a chance to do a podcast with them a couple months back. And for all the reasons that you mentioned, it's just they've really figured out how to like just share the knowledge in a nice way. And there's a ton of organizations doing that. There's definitely stands out. It's a great conversation, Aaron. Really.
Erin Goodey (59:57)
Yeah.
Martin Hauck (1:00:21)
Appreciate you making the time. Hopefully not the last time we chat in terms of podcasts. I feel like there's so many other to your point, right? In 12 months, everything's probably going to be different and everything you said today might be completely different. So no, thanks. Thanks again for spending some time with us on the pod.
Erin Goodey (1:00:30)
this week.
No, I appreciate it. Thank you. I've really, really enjoyed it and I will see you soon in real life. See ya.
Martin Hauck (1:00:45)
Yeah, yeah, see you soon. Awesome.
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