How HR Can Lead the AI Shift in 2026
In this episode of the HR Leaders Podcast, we speak with Bryan Power, Head of People at Nextdoor, about leading through transformation, building a “founder’s mentality” culture, and why HR must take the lead on AI adoption.
Bryan shares lessons from scaling Google, Square, and Yahoo before joining Nextdoor, where he helped navigate an IPO, COVID, and now AI disruption. He introduces Project NAI-BOR (Nextdoor Artificial Intelligence Building Operational Readiness), explains how to unleash safe experimentation, and why HR can’t afford to be a passenger in the AI shift.
The conversation also covers mental health, hybrid work, and the next frontier of employee experience.
🎓 In this episode, Bryan discusses:
Mental health as today’s workplace injury
How to manage the uncomfortable truths of hybrid work
How Project NAI-BOR helps HR lead AI adoption at scale
Why a founder’s mentality creates urgency and frontline focus
Balancing experimentation with structure in AI policy and rollout
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Bryan Power 0:00
I think what you're seeing today in a lot of the media about AI is this frustration between CEOs who are boldly proclaiming, oh, we're just going to cut half the company and use AI to do it, and then people on the front line are like, it doesn't do it yet, you know, like it's helping and it's doing things, but it's a big leap to just say, yeah, just sack everybody and and put AI in because it's not, it doesn't have content. Yeah, and it's creating, I think, in many parts of the world, fear, yeah, and the people doing the work that they're supposed to figure out how to eliminate themselves. And I just see it as a totally different opportunity to just create much more satisfying types of work for people at all levels the organization, and really being able to transform the way things, uh, things, get done.
Chris Rainey 0:59
Brian, welcome to the show. How are you, my friend?
Bryan Power 1:01
I'm doing great. Thanks for having me, Chris,
Chris Rainey 1:04
come in with a professional microphone, professional headphones. I love it. I love it.
Bryan Power 1:09
Hey, this is a professional podcast, so I feel like I needed to elevate my game. Yeah.
Chris Rainey 1:14
Anyway, firstly, How you been, how things I'm doing, I'm doing
Bryan Power 1:17
good. You know, summertime, like we're just saying it's foggy and rainy in San Francisco, yeah, but we're all
Chris Rainey 1:21
good. Love it before we jump in. Like you've had such a interesting career journey. Tell everyone a little bit about your background, and then the journey to where we are today at next door.
Bryan Power 1:34
Yeah, absolutely. So I've been working in the tech industry most of my career. I originally grew up in New England, outside of Boston, Massachusetts, and I found myself after college in recruiting with a really large organization called Aerotek that actually transferred me to San Francisco in the late 90s. I mean, I'm dating myself here, but it was the.com boom in San Francisco, and the company I was working for was having a tough time keeping recruiters because of all the dot coms. Of course, I left a few months later to go to work for my first startup. And that was really kind of the beginning of my journey in Silicon Valley in the 2000s kind of that decade of my career. The first part of it was working for a woman, Valerie Fredrickson, leading her executive search practice, HR consulting. So I really got grounded in how to build leadership teams and recruitment of that nature. And then, like many people in that world, I wanted to go inside of an organization that was growing and kind of stick with one, one group. So in 2005 just a few months after their IPO, I joined Google, which is a much different company today. The Google I joined was about 3500 employees, like I said. It had just gone public, and it was really growing to become kind of the tech titan that it is today. I was there for almost eight years. My last two were in New York City, their their great office in Chelsea Market in New York City. And that was, you know, the early 2000 10s, which was a really fertile landscape for startups, many of which are now some of the biggest companies in tech today. So at this time, companies like Uber were about 100 people. Airbnb was about 100 people. The company I joined, Square was just getting started, which is now called block. And you know, for one reason I was, I was dating my now partner, my wife, we were dating New York to LA, and so I kind of wanted to come back to California, yeah, and also, because I just, I wanted to come back to San Francisco and be a part of this next wave of technology and disruption was happening. So I was at Square for a couple years. It's where I met Sarah fryer, who becomes important later, later in my career story, again, she was the CFO of square at the time. I was leading the people team, and just before Square decided to go public, I joined Yahoo as their CHRO. This was the time where Marissa Meyer was the CEO, and kind of big story about trying to turn around Yahoo. I'd worked with Marissa at Google, and that was kind of my first jump for two things. One, it was, it was a large public company, you know, 15,000 employees and 30 countries globally as a public company. And so that was my first CHRO job that was kind of like of a of a big thing, and also as a turnaround. So Google and square were really growth opportunities where you were just chasing the potential of really significant product market fit. And so I was excited about a different set of challenges in a turnaround. So I was at Yahoo just just about two years because we ended up and the company ended up breaking up and being sold to Verizon, or the core business anyway. So I took some time off. I never really taken any time off, and started thinking about what my next thing was going to be, and that that kind of leads us to the end of 2018 when I joined. Next Door. And it was interesting. I met the founder near patolia in the interview process, and when we were interviewing, he told me he was actually moving up to the board and stepping aside as CEO. And in my mind, I was like, Well, I'm not sure I'm going to not trying to take a job without knowing who the CEO is going to be. But it turned out, Sarah fryer, who was the CFO of square, was coming on to lead next door as CEO. So I joined with her, yeah, you know, small world in tech for sure. And so I joined with her at the end of 2018, and at the time, next door had been around for about seven years, and that period was Rocky. It had a shorter runway financially. It had had some turnover, and was just kind of the board, you know, it was ready for new leadership, so I joined with her, and in the next five years, we went through a lot of stuff, like we raised money, we ultimately took the company public. We went through covid. You know, we were about 150 people, and I joined and we hired a few 100 people during covid. So we kind of went from 150 to six or 700 just during that 2020, 2021, 22 period of of the global lockdown, or the global pandemic,
Chris Rainey 6:08
probably explain Ryan what what next door does, just for the people that are listening?
Bryan Power 6:12
Yeah, yeah. So, so the best way to think about next door is, it's an app that provides technology and tools for your neighborhood or your local community. We just had a major relaunch of the product experience just last week. There's tons of press right now about the end of July, the relaunch of the product and the utility. It's a combination of the utility of the product and the local community you're in. And for us, the product really centers on three major aspects of utility, which is on kind of local news. So as you imagine, the local newspaper that we all kind of grew up with is really kind of faded away. It's much harder to find kind of journalism that's unique to your your part of the world, small part of the world, timely a work, timely alerts, the things like safety, weather events like snow storms and hurricanes, is really good use case for next door, and then also the local recommendations. So the recommendations of your neighbors. You know, it's really hard to learn what someone down the street from you is using to either clean their house or take care of their yard or fix the sink, whatever that might be. So anyway, bringing it into the future, Sarah fryer, she's now the CFO of open AI. She stepped aside as CEO about a year and a half ago, and the founder near EAP tolier, came back to CEO. And so the last year and a half has really been this cultural transformation of the founder returning and bringing next door into this, like third era of the company.
Chris Rainey 7:38
Wow, what we're gonna we're gonna have a movie
Bryan Power 7:43
some point. You haven't really made it in tech until they make a movie about your company.
Chris Rainey 7:47
Yeah, yeah. What was it you mentioned a little bit, but what's really top of mind for you, and what really attracted you for the organization? You know, where did you really feel that you could add value to the well, back
Bryan Power 7:58
when I joined in 2018 what I liked about it was, it was, it was 150 people. So it was a startup. It had, it had a good product, like, I think the idea of a neighbor is a very, very big one. So, so in tech, finding a very high ceiling can be difficult, but everyone in the world, every culture, understands the idea of a neighbor. So that that kind of opportunity, I appreciate it. But it also had the element of a CEO change and a trans, you know, turnaround, cultural transformation. And I think it's really difficult to find both a startup opportunity and a turnaround transformation at the same time. And it really married a lot of my prior experience with an incoming CEO that I knew really well. So that was a long time ago. Now, that was seven years ago, so a lot has really changed, but still, you know, today I really appreciate the team that I work with. You know, the people team at next door is, is just an outstanding group of people. We've all worked together for many years now. And I also have found, you know, company that has a mission, particularly our mission is very much centered on community. Helps you really, kind of feel like the impact you're making is making the world better
Chris Rainey 9:00
place. Yeah. Could you share details about your neighbor program? I think we discussed.
Bryan Power 9:05
Oh, yeah, so I think it's really interesting we did. So this is very present mind, right? So this is about the transformation in the workplace due to the rise of artificial intelligence. And so for us, I'm the, I'm kind of the lead for what we call project neighbor. And that's neighbor spelled incorrectly, N, AI, B, O, R, and it's an acronym which is next door artificial intelligence building operational readiness. And so we've kind of, yeah, we've kind of brought together a task force across the people team, the IT and is teams, you know, information technology and information technology and information systems, primarily, we pull in other groups, but I'm kind of spearheading that effort to really lead the opportunity we're all facing in the workplace that this disruption really offers. You know, having seen them old enough to have seen multiple ways of disruption, including I started. Career before the internet, really. So this is big. People haven't kind of clued in to the fact that this is really going to change the nature of what we do in the workplace. It definitely,
Chris Rainey 10:10
well, yeah, well, one of the things I was excited when you shared that is that you've really stepped up to for HR, to take the lead, yeah, on this and not being a passenger or another order taker. Yeah. So going backwards. Why is that? Why was that so important to you?
Bryan Power 10:29
Well, I think the first thing is, again, the pace is just so fast. But as I came into the end of last year, in the beginning of this year, I really felt the urgency of like, because, you know, we're we were like, I said, we just launched a product last week that was kind of a 12 month effort. So we were trying to just block out all the distractions and focus the entire company on getting this new release out the door. But I remember a conversation we had the leadership team is like, Yeah, I know we agreed. We can't, kind of think about anything else, but we can't wait six months to get started on this, like I'm really feeling companies starting to separate on kind of change the entire direction of how work gets done, or kind of not really dealing with it. And the more I see the people and I know and companies I know not dealing with it, the more scared I am about ending up in that group, right? And so we really focused at the beginning of this year on just igniting the energy just around like experimenting and trying this. And as anyone who leads organizations knows, communication is about repetition and focus, and people really try to admit they kind of want to sense. Are you going to still be talking about this a month from now, or is this actually a real thing or not? So we really had to bang the drum to get that energy and experimentation up. So we did a couple things. One was about really trying to unleash experimentation. We quickly got a policy up that we've now iterated three times. So it's like an organic policy, which is very unlike most policies,
Chris Rainey 11:55
yeah, it needs to be moving so fast. Ai, you can't move so fast.
Bryan Power 11:59
That's right. And we, you know, we fast tracked tools assessment and financial approval. So so people are starting to get these signals that, like, Okay, this is actually like, a different lane of things that we're dealing with at work. Our CEO, you know, he tasked every executive with coming up with their own functional goal, you know, the first six months of the year. And a lot of this is like, hey, the bar for what you do in the early going is kind of low, but what you can't do is nothing. It's like, just show me you're doing something, and then we'll make it really great, right? But just get going, you know? And so we've, we've, like many companies, we've kind of iterated on how we recruit, you know, to make sure we're not just skipping past this. We're, we're kind of coming up on a performance feedback cycle, so we're figuring out how to really internalize that. So we're really trying to work at, like, the systemic level, to build it in. But also, you know, the nature of how you use it at work. It's just changing so fast. You know, stuff that didn't do much three months ago is now really powerful today. And so, yeah, it's been exciting project to work on.
Chris Rainey 12:59
I know you're still on the journey, but based on what you've seen so far, for other companies that maybe want to consider building their own neighbor program, who are the essential stakeholders that need to be involved to make this successful?
Bryan Power 13:12
If I had to pick three, it would be the CEO, because without the CEO kind of talking about this, they're talking about something else. So you have to signal from the very top of the organization that this is essential. And then I believe the chief people officer, you know, really dictates who gets hired. Helps, helps decide what is good work. You know, what to recognize. And then the leader of the AI Information Systems in particular, because, well, while changing a tools infrastructure is on a longer timeline, like these are usually multi year contracts. You can't just rip them up and start over. You have to really start to work on that as quickly as possible, given given the rate of rate of change on
Chris Rainey 13:49
this, yeah, one of the things that we spoke about on our last call, which stuck with me, was around leading with a Founder's Mentality amid transformation. And and when you when you talk about the neighbor program, that's what comes to mind. Are you not thinking from the role of HR? You're thinking on the role of a entrepreneur?
Bryan Power 14:13
So, yeah. So this is, um, this is this kind of different angle of end up in the same place. You know, when Neerav came back in between his times as CEO at next door was about five years and he had been largely an investor, so he, I mean, just imagine, kind of not being an operator during the early 2020s when covid happened. Right the way he worked in 2019 versus 2024 it's like so dramatically different. It's a he, he's really had to learn a lot. It kind of coming back to a full time CEO role. But one of the things he did early on was he asked himself, listen, someone must have looked at founders coming back to their company, you know, famously, and tech Steve Jobs came back to Apple. That's kind of like the iconic thing, but it's not unusual. It's actually really kind of made into this symbolic hero thing. I'm on venture capitalist, and this is actually a few. Months before founder mode kind of detonated on Twitter in tech, right. And so he reached out to this author. His name's James Allen, who wrote a book with Chris Sook, their their president, their sorry, their consultants at Bain, decades of experience. They wrote a book called The Founders mentality. And he was like, hey, Richard buck is pretty cool. And he just literally cold. Called them on LinkedIn, right, which, I mean, does that work a lot. I didn't think it worked out. Does AI? It does. It does come through more than you think. Is what I took away from this. And they made this, have made this relationship now. And so we've used this book, which is excellent, as a framework to really in re instill the founders mentality. And it's got three core principles, which include really having a bold and insurgent mission. So something gives people urgency and energy around the collective work they're doing, having an owner's mindset, which in tech is not that uncommon. Like most, almost every startup has, act like an owner as a company value, including next door. We have that as well. And the third, which I think was probably the most transformative for us, was called the front line obsession, which just means you have to be obsessed with the people on the front line. And what they mean by that are the people who are hands on keyboard, talking to or working with or figuring out your customers, your users. Because as you get bigger, the gravity moves away from them and moves up the chain to the senior people. And so in many ways, that frontline obsession has driven our thinking around project neighbor, which is not AI, in like what senior executives are talking about, but in the people who are kind of trying to get stuff done day to day, where is that disruption happened? Because I think what you're seeing today in a lot of the media about AI is this frustration between CEOs who are boldly proclaiming, oh, we're just going to cut half the company and use AI to do it. And then people on the front line are like, it doesn't do it yet, you know, like, it's helping and it's doing things, but it's a big leap to just say, yeah, just sack everybody and put AI in it, because it's not, it doesn't have to hair, yeah. And it and it's creating, I think, in many parts of the world, fear in the people doing the work that they're supposed to figure out how to eliminate themselves. And I just see it as a totally different opportunity to just create much more satisfying types of work for people at all levels the organization, and really being able to transform the way things things get done.
Chris Rainey 17:19
How have you taking those principles and brought into life for the different programs, and what do you do with your team? Because that's yeah. So one challenge,
Bryan Power 17:27
one Yeah, one thing we thought was important was to help train people. And again, I don't It's not like you can go hire someone with 10 years of practical AI in the workplace experience, and you could probably find someone who's been researching it for 10 years. It for 10 years, but chatgpt is only, like, two plus years old, you know. So there's, there's not a lot of people who can kind of give you best practices. And so we, you know, a co worker of mine, and I were just like, hey, we've actually probably been experimenting and using this stuff for a few more months than everybody else. Let's just kind of start talking about what we've learned and make a training around it. And we used, you know, chat GPT to help us make the training. And I think it it, I can't say it's like pretty or or we'll meet all the best practices with the way an L and D practitioner would put a training together, but it's really helped people make a few steps going from, hey, I'm actually never really been able to ask anybody about how to use AI to being able to ship their own agents by the end of the training, we thought that was like a good beginning and end point that would grab attention. And I think just publicly saying, Hey, we're gonna try to help everybody learn together, yeah, moved us to having people who are on the front line working through kind of their day to day problems in a learning group where they can kind of learn what other people are doing and share ideas. Was a better way to think about how to change what we're doing than trying to do it from, you know, the C suite, so to speak, and just us trying to all sort through the workflows at the highest level.
Chris Rainey 18:59
Yeah, I feel like you're doing the right thing, because you can overthink it, but you just gotta get started, right, that's right, and create a safe sandbox for people to play in. I think the next step of that is then just trying to link that sandbox back to some of the key strategic business priorities, definitely, and then, and then make that that tie that together, basically, you know, because right, people can really understand, okay, this is the why behind, behind this, and this is what this means for me, and this is what it means for the organization. And if you can bring that together, and like we said earlier, the tools are going to change so quick that you use too early to make any real bets. So it's a really round around experimentation right now, and pilots, right? And that's right, creating that culture of curiosity.
Bryan Power 19:51
It is true. And you know one thing, this time you had a you had a guest on the podcast who's a, you know, friend of mine, Amy Wright. Connector from Databricks. And one of the things she said was the way employees kind of expect companies to care about them. And this, this is some I agree with her fully. And this is something that really stepped up during covid, when employers really needed to kind of support people are going through this pandemic crisis. I see a kind of a related theme with AI, is like you have to kind of help people who feel threatened by AI or don't know how to do you have to really put more time and energy into helping them along this continuum than just saying, hey, kind of up to you. You should be figuring this out nights and weekends, you know, you're on your own, and at the same time saying your jobs at risk. I just don't agree with that approach. And so we've benefited from really pulling people together and saying, hey, no one really knows this stuff, you know, but, but things are happening very fast, and people are learning very fast. So this is not something we can just come back to at the end of next year and pick it up then. And so we're really trying to balance the urgency of we need to be moving on this with doing it together, and saying, Hey, at all levels, we've got to find, got to find wins.
Chris Rainey 20:59
I completely agree. And I think also, on the flip side, I think some companies are still naive to the fact that your employees are using these tools anyway, 100% if you think they're not using these tools, and unfortunately, probably with your data, and probably not in a secure way,
Bryan Power 21:16
it's always, it's always been like that, yeah, same with internet, Right? Like some of the internet, it's also the same with mobile like, I remember people, many IT leaders were adamant that people could not use their own phones to work. Yes, and it's like, as soon as they had an iPhone, they're like, why can't I just put this my email on my phone? Like, I don't want to carry my laptop around. Respond to email the time, it was a hard line. You cannot use your personal phone for work like today. That just sounds ridiculous.
Chris Rainey 21:42
That's why, when BlackBerry went out of business, right? Like the moment, the moment that Apple had the security for the corporate, the corporate it was, it was over, is over that day. It's like, Blackberry CEO, like, Nah, it's fine. We're never gonna interrupt Exactly, yeah, that one. I do still.
Bryan Power 21:59
I do still miss the scroll wheel, though? The wheel on the side BlackBerry email was unbelievable. Yeah, I was really good.
Chris Rainey 22:05
It's something about the tactileness of it, yeah? Like the new generations would never understand. Yeah, my daughter actually came in a room the other day, which you'll find funny with she's seven with a CD that fell out of a book. And she's like, Daddy, what's this? It's funny. And I was like, What do you mean? She's like, What does this do? And I was like, Oh my God, my seven year old has no idea what a CD does. And she's like, what? So this, there's, there's like, music on this, how he's asking me. And then she was like, how does the music get on here? And I was like, oh my god, try and explain. To your child how music gets onto a CD. That's hysterical as well. But so it's just her brain was blown by the idea that what's in Spotify, which is where she listens to her fun kids songs in her playlist, was on their physical Yeah. Do you think? I do
Bryan Power 23:02
think the pace of right now, the pace of talk to text, you know, I think my I have a five year old son, and I think he's gonna wonder what we were doing with our thumbs all the time. Yeah, all
Chris Rainey 23:13
day. Yeah, she day. And so
Bryan Power 23:16
I would like to not use my thumbs like this with my iPhone all day, but I do think that's going to be looked at the same way your daughter was asking about See, I
Chris Rainey 23:24
completely agree. I made that bet about five years ago when we launched this podcast on Alexa. So people, the team for I was insane. They're like, why would people want to listen to the podcast? Yeah. And I was like, well, because they'll have, in the future, people will have these devices around their house, and they'll probably just want to talk to it and then play That's right, the podcast, right? But this is like, five years ago. My team was like, no one's gonna do that. And now, yeah, pretty much every single person I know has a smart device,
Bryan Power 23:55
yeah? And I think they're gonna get, like, you know, your phone now it's got, like, the laundry machine and the dishwasher notifications, like, you should just be able to talk to the dishwasher and talk to the Lonnie machine. I don't think that that's
Chris Rainey 24:04
far away. Yeah, I'm pretty extreme with that now, like my Alexis even connected to my bed, where I work, right? Yeah, I like, cook. I call basically I can tell it to cool down the bed ahead of me going to sleep. So I go in and it's lovely. 17 degrees, nice and cool. My whole house is automated. But I feel like, that. Robin's growing up in that environment, so she doesn't know any different. She expects to walk in the room and turn on the light with a voice and say, Alexa, turn bed, my bedroom red.
Bryan Power 24:34
She expects they it's interesting. I wonder if they're gonna want the opposite. You know, they're gonna want all analyze, oh, they're
Chris Rainey 24:41
gonna go, like, what a standard of it's in fashion. One thing that,
Bryan Power 24:44
one thing that's always in fashion is young people don't want what the older people want, no matter what it is, just as a rule, they want the opposite.
Chris Rainey 24:52
Isn't it crazy to think that what we're talking about right now is going to be seen by them as old fashioned we're talking about the future. Now the most advanced state that we've seen technology with a state of AI, but by the time kids are on, they're gonna be like, Oh my god, like, used to have to actually type words in, in in the LLM, you can just talk out loud, and every wearable that you're wearing automatically can detect that and give you what you need. It's going to be crazy. How do you think that AI is going to shape employee experience? Because we're already seeing significant leaps that we've worked for many years with our customers, who are creating a hyper personalized customer experience, and I think AI is now going to allow us to really start to do this in a way, more meaningful way, with our with our employees?
Bryan Power 25:45
Yeah. I mean, I think the biggest thing I've been thinking about it is not kind of here yet, but is on the horizon, is when it relates to the employee experience. You know any chief people offer an officer knows to as you scale, you have to kind of standardize a lot of what you're doing. So for example, when you build an onboarding program, the really good onboarding programs have elements of this shared experience, regardless of what level or job the person's doing that tries to make the first week or the first first month, both confirm that they're excited about their new job, but also get them up to speed at work as quickly as possible. But you've kind of got to do the same program, right? And so because what you can't do is have a different person on the people team customize the delivery of the onboarding to every single person who's starting. And think about bigger companies of 100 people starting a week, or 500 people starting a month, like that. You could just customize 500 versions of your onboarding. Is not really something you contemplate, but with more and more sophisticated agents you can and so what you can really start to do is tailor the kind of shared experience you want all employees to have with the unique kind of characteristics of each employee and what they might want. That's kind of just not something you could think about before you do that for everything you could do that for recruiting. You could do that for benefits offerings. You could do that for internal communications. And so I think being able to really create this bespoke employee experience at a really big scale is an opportunity that AI really, you know, really gives you. And then I think when you join, you know, you today, you get set up, open up your Slack account, open up your email account, you know, open up your payroll account. You have to do all this stuff. You're going to open up your kind of AI copilot, whatever that is, on day one. And it's going to know all this stuff you don't know, which is part of being a new hire. Like, I wish someone told me that a month ago. That's like the experience of everyone who ever starts a new job, right? This copilot is going to be able to kind of prevent those things from happening, and also you can start to educate it on what you know. And I just think very quickly, your version of your chat, GPT, custom GPT, you know, or your you know, your Gemini that's tied to your sort of Google Docs, whatever it might be, is going to be the standard thing you start your new job with it's
Chris Rainey 28:01
so interesting you say that, because at the end of this month, that's exactly what we're launching with Atlas Coco.
Bryan Power 28:07
Yeah, I think. And so, you know, I could really see, like the coordinators on the people team who today are sending out emails to new hires are actually programming a custom GPT based, or really an AI will code the GPT. But in today, they're kind of managing, like, set it up, yeah, then they'll be managing the agents, right? So we'll be able to really automate, like, how do you set up the right agent for the right employee? Yeah? And I just think that's going to really transform. Because right now, people have to ask the people team, they have to ask their business partner, basics, to ask the recruiter, basic stuff, but also kind of important cultural stuff, like, hey, people are kind of operating a little differently here. Can you kind of give me some advice and that, that, you know, you gotta have people who are here answering that. So yeah, it's, it's really exciting to see the opportunities that are brand new.
Chris Rainey 28:50
I'm glad you're saying that, because that was kind of a big request for us when we launched atlasses from our partners, saying, Hey, can you build us onboarding agents and then training it on and training it, yes, of course, on our our content, our policies and our materials, but also our culture and our values and understanding that. So when they're onboarding, sometimes you don't want to ask those questions to your manager, right? You want to be able to ask that and even even pre boarding, right? Yeah, but before you even get there, and we're already seeing we've rolled we've rolled this out already. The next iteration is way more powerful, because it allows us to now integrate that into Slack and teams and, yeah, in the flow of work, and generate learning pathways based on the questions. But that in itself, has been a game changer.
Bryan Power 29:35
It's just beginning, yeah, and it's just beginning, just the entry point on changing pretty dramatically how work is done there. One of the
Chris Rainey 29:42
things I was thinking about is, as well as hard skills get more become more accessible through AI, and we're already seeing now that people you can code and build apps, etc, soft skills. I don't like to say soft skills, but let's say power skills, human skills. Skills, I become more and more important. And I'm wondering what that means for the CV, because a lot of the CVS in the past are very focused on hard skills and not all, but there's a quite a big weight on that. And I'm wondering if degrees and CVS disappear, would your hiring process still survive? Yeah, it's
Bryan Power 30:28
an interesting question. I think the harder part of that question is like, Well, what do you need if the need for the hard skills changes, mix hiring different. But I think if you look at particularly for me, watching kind of this younger generation coming up, there's just so much more available that they've created than their CV. You know, like, when I was when I would be interviewing for a job 20 years ago, the resume is, like, the whole thing, yeah, everything, yeah. If I don't know anybody, that's like, the whole conversation, and you can't even really research me when I'm a 25 year old and come up with anything, you know, now, like a lot of, a lot of people have audiences that they've cultivated a lot, even if you just have 500 connections on LinkedIn, you know, you have people connected to you and kind of, and I think this younger group is better at curating their online identity than people who have navigated like, kind of, really growing up, with it for someone like me multiple decades. And so it's almost like a resume doesn't give me much of the picture. If I can really look at their Instagram or their personal brand or their posting like I get a much better feel for what they've provided, you know, the world, than just this kind of quick summary. And because so much my time will be freed up by AI, I can spend more than five minutes trying to make sense of a resume, and I can have aI surface a lot of this for me and synthesize a lot of this for me. So I do think the nature of what a candidate profile is is going to open up dramatically, because AI will allow you to synthesize more, and people are creating more. But I think the challenge you're you're actually getting at is like, what are the skills you're going to need if the skills in the workplace really change? And that, I don't think that's a new problem. That's just the latest disruption. That's always been, always been the case, you know, and I think people will. So I think people are so interested in learning, AI is they kind of are knowing, I've got to know what I'm talking about here, yeah, for the future. And I think that that's really true. It is. I do agree with this, like someone five years from now, who's just, yeah, I just don't know AI, I don't know how to use it. I saw people with that attitude related to the internet in the late 90s, early 2000s and it really hurts you. You know, a few years in when it really becomes adopted, it's too late to really try to catch up.
Chris Rainey 32:42
Yeah, yeah. But to your point earlier, though, we do have to understand that they're not, not everyone's going to be like me and you and very excited and jumping straight on it. And we have to help people along the way and help them like like we did with the Internet.
Bryan Power 32:58
The same thing, it's so funny to talk about the internet as a it really has a lot of similarities. I definitely see a lot of this counter trend right now that AI is not what it's hyped up to be. It's not gonna be as fast as you thought. You're almost getting this counter wave of, hey, it's not as big of a deal. And some of that is in the resistance of job loss. You know, people are kind of actually gonna not want to help it get on board, because they're afraid their jobs at risk. But it was a very similar thing in the 2000s you can find the famous quotes of people in the crash of the.com era saying, hey, look, internet's probably just best case scenarios, like a marketing tool for marketers. Think about calling the internet that today I'm seeing that. I'm saying, like anything. I'm seeing the counter trend start to emerge in the popular opinion, yeah, and I don't know, I believe,
Chris Rainey 33:43
when you're chatting to your network right now, what's the top top three? This is a thing, of course, AI. Let's put AI to one. AI is a big one, of course, outside of AI, what are the top errors that are coming people?
Bryan Power 34:00
The world feels unsettled. You know, more so than usual, just the global, uh, geopolitical environment feels, I guess, there's always conflict, but it just feels less less stable. And so I think what that translates to work is, is people turn to work as as something that's closer to home, and they put a lot of their energy into their employee experience as a way to channel their frustration with the bigger world. I definitely feel that quite a bit mental health is a really big topic. Some I've cared about a lot. I think we all kind of take that on in our in different ways, but I think that that's really become a very common topic at work relative to five or 10 years ago. Yeah.
Chris Rainey 34:41
Like, I think I said last time we spoke, we we introduced our well being summit three years ago, thinking mayor, maybe it'll be something interesting for our HR community. And we, we had 3000 attendees for that first event, and it was incredible. Yeah. And I personally, you know, hid, hid my anxiety and panic attacks for, you know, nearly 20 years from my friends and family, and was so scared to talk about it, and obviously realized that my closest friends and family and colleagues were all suffering in silence, too. That's right as well, so that that's that's been a game changer and something that we're really passionate about. Yeah, I mean, it's in you
Bryan Power 35:24
for me, particularly covid, I think normalized this topic for everybody, because it was a global mental health crisis, you know. And I've also really suffered with anxiety and depression in the past, and you know, not being able to talk about it, especially when it comes to an obstacle at work, can, really be a challenge, and particularly as employees are often responsible for a lot of it. And so I really think companies have started to embrace like, Hey, this is going to be better if we can push people to do their best work without it creating negative consequences. And I think as I've talked about the topic for a long time, I see an expanding of the conversation. So it's not just only about the kind of traumatic, traumatic aspects of mental health or mental illness, but also kind of saying, hey, these, there's practices here that can help you get ready to do your best work. And if you're I want people to want to do their best work. I want people to do hard things and trying to do hard thing. Because when you do really hard things you didn't think you could do. You make these big career leaps. You find success you didn't have, you didn't think you had in you. But that adversity creates stress, and stress can create anxiety, and depression can lead to sudden there's, there's all these risks, right? But I don't believe the answer is to try to minimize adversity as much as possible, because that just means you stop pushing to do things, right? And so I think the mental health conversation is broadening to like, think about professional athletes, right? Like they prime their mental health to be Olympic champions. It's not only about kind of the suffering, which is very true. Many people are suffering side. That's that's kind of not my point here. But you can include everybody in this topic, if you broaden it to also put to the positive end of the spectrum of it will really elevate your output, personally and professionally, if you pay attention to priming your mental health as much as preventing things from happening to your
Chris Rainey 37:14
mental health. Yeah, I love that concept. I think where I've got where I've got in trouble in the past is, I don't know my limit. Yeah, so I grew up playing hockey at AI level and many other ice hockey in many other sports, and we push ourselves to our limits, physically, mentally. You know, we win some games, lose some games, and it's similar in business, but for some, I think one of the things I've realized is like, as long as I know that I'm in a sprint, and I'm conscious of that, that I understand, Okay, I'm in a sprint right now, I need to dial in my sleep, dial in, yeah, dial in, dial in my uh, exercise, etc, because I know that if I don't do that, I'm probably going to break at some point. And then the past, I haven't recognized the signs of that, and I didn't even know I was in a sprint, and it's kind of ended in disaster through, you know, a panic attack or anxiety or just exhaustion.
Bryan Power 38:16
Yeah, those are the those are, like, the injuries of mental health that happened, right? The same way you might tear AI, yeah, in a physical sport, like, if you go too hard mentally, you end up anxious or depressed or lack of sleep, whatever, yeah, whatever it might be. You know, the workplace injury, Injury of the modern workplace is not physical. You know, a lot of the healthcare infrastructure is around physical interest, injuries, getting sick, fall off a ladder and break your leg, like that's what the employer is supposed to cover. But that's not the adversity we experience when the workplace becomes challenging.
Chris Rainey 38:48
Today, it's interesting because, you know, tomorrow, I'm actually interviewing the chief HR officer of headspace, right? Yeah, I had the idea of an application like headspace 1015, years ago, would have been so foreign to people
Bryan Power 39:00
totally agree, especially as a corporate benefit.
Chris Rainey 39:03
Yeah, exactly right. You'd be like, that's nothing to do with us. We're a business. But the fact that headspace, and their corporate offering of headspace is kind of thriving, and I used it before it was even they even had a solution for the enterprise as well. The contrast between that and maybe around that time me, I remember going to my director at the time saying, I need some time off because my mental health. I was told to man up and go, get, go back, go, get back on the phone. That was, that was, that was a response. I never spoke to anyone ever again since, I mean, obviously now I have, but I mean, for years after that, I never, I know that was like, What you talking about, like, unless you were physically ill, it didn't count. You know,
Bryan Power 39:49
I agree. I think, yeah, I just see this tension, even today. I do think the generation entering the workforce is much more fluent in mental health. Topic, 100 embrace therapy really have better or better. I think one of their kind of obvious developments on personal setting personal boundaries. Some people get really frustrated that younger people are setting boundaries during the day or night. But, you know, we each have a natural my parents had a natural boundary where work stopped at six o'clock. You know, you couldn't get emails all night. You couldn't get slacks all night. And so you enter the workforce today, this stuff, kind of, no matter what, if your work is online, like it stuffs relentless, you know, there's, there's no break. You You have to create the break. And you know, just, just saying, work all the time, relentlessly in today's world is very different from before, where you kind of go home, sit down, have dinner, turn on the television and watch the news at 630 like that was that boundary was built in. And so I do think the evolution is people are kind of taking a better handle on how to maintain themselves again. My, my, my current thing is, like, I don't think just reducing ambition is the answer. It's really about, how do you level up successfully? You know, that's not just power through it. It is kind of focused on the things you're going to need to navigate a more challenging period,
Chris Rainey 41:09
yeah, as well. I feel like the athlete analogy is probably the best one. Like you said, right? You see the most the people at the top of their game, right? Yeah, and the best at what they do, they're still going to get a coach like for their mental health, right? Percent? And it's like, well, wait a minute, they're already at the peak of what they're doing, and that then they're still looking for that. Because I know in order to sustain that, they need to ensure that they're taking care of it,
Bryan Power 41:35
and to the same extension of the exam, your personal example is like athletes from 30 years ago would, like, finish the game, light up a cigarette, go to the bar, like, stay out all night. Like, like, they're not kind of behaving. They they were, like, if I did all this stuff, lift weights, like, train I would have, I would have played for 25 years. They all played for 10 years. You know, it's exceptionally rare to go longer than that because of these things. It's, I think, that once you know that your choice on how you're spending, you're going to time and energy. Yeah, wise up to it.
Chris Rainey 42:04
You're you currently work, hybrid right? Yes, hybrid work. I want to ask your thoughts. You know, a lot of people kind of afraid talk about this topic to get topic of our time, topic of our time, right? Like, you know, my most viral post last year was on this topic. He had 100 and 30 million views on LinkedIn. And I was wondering, like, what's sort of one uncomfortable truth about hybrid work, that you think we're not talking about enough that we really should be?
Bryan Power 42:34
Well, I think it's it shouldn't be such a polarized debate, like, one way is right and one way is wrong. And I, I've continued to see that pattern where certain, typically older exact, like, no one's doing any work. We've just got to get people back to the office. Is one side and the other side is like, I don't know why you care about where I am as long as I get my stuff done. You know, like that. Those are kind of like, I see the two ends of the spectrum on this debate, and I think where, and we've done everything, we've kind of gone fully remote. We kind of forced people back to the office. I'd say we're we're right now we we have a much more flexible, kind of functional approach to people want to go in, they can go in, and we try to be intentional about personal gatherings. So I think the on the first side, for the people who say, without everyone in the office, you can't do anything, I think that that is there are benefits when you are very small and you can all get into one room together all day, that do not translate to work from home. However, you lose the personal flexibility of working from home that is desirable. But the truth is, if you're all in a room, you can just go faster. Now, not a lot of companies are that small, so as you get bigger, once people are in multiple rooms, multiple floors or then multiple buildings or multiple locations, you have to figure out how to work virtually no matter what. And so the truth of like, I don't know why I got to the office just to get on video all day. Is also a very valid criticism. There's this is kind of it's just gonna happen serendipitously. It was true a long time ago, but also because people weren't on their phones all the time when they were together. So you see people in the office that don't know each other. They don't just start small talk, even looking they're checking. They're not even making it. Yeah, exactly. So what that means is the, and this is a common truth right now, is the intentionality of getting together in person is really important. You have to kind of say, why are we getting together in person, and what are we going to do together in person that really benefits everybody? And I find some people are skeptical of the value of that. I just, I don't think that's true. It's not true that everything is better virtually or from home, yeah, and so you have to start to be really consistent on what what on the in person front, I think people get like, you've got to be intentional about why you're doing it, and there's real benefits. And I think most people generally agree with that on the work from home thing. I think that the challenge for many organizations is it's harder to make. Maintain the same urgency intensity when someone's sitting in their house versus sitting in their in an office with other people. And so people really enjoy the flexibility of blending their work and life and home. The challenge for managers and for leaders is, how do we make sure that the stuff we need to get done is at the right pace, you know, versus you've trying to just loosen the range, so to speak, maybe a bad metaphor. But how do you drive that intensity? Virtually is harder to do, and that's why I think a lot of leaders and managers want people to be face to face, so they can kind of drive intensity in a different, different way. And that I still think, you know, people are sorting out what that means. You know, I personally think the benefit to employees to work from home, you know, a real amount of time carries such benefits to work life balance, to making their life easier so they can do a better job is so real. It's hard for many jobs, it's hard to justify that you just shouldn't be able to do that. You know that that mean of control, I think, is really been disrupted permanently by by the experience
Chris Rainey 46:06
I love. I mean love, I love everything you just shared, but specifically the pace and the intensity piece, because a lot of times it's not the work's not getting done is that, is it getting done at the pace and intensity to deliver results faster, remain competitive, you know, really move the needle, right? And it's hard to create that urgency when someone's sitting at home in the kitchen. I don't also work saying everyone, but I could say even me, by the way, one of the reasons that I come into our office every day is that when I'm at home, I don't have the same intensity and pace, because I kind of just naturally I'm at home. It's where I relax typically, and where I decompress and connect, right? Whereas when I come into the studio, I kind of step into another gear, and I don't even consciously do that. I mean, so I subconsciously do that. I walk through the door and I just click into another gear and I'm moving. And that's not for everyone, but for me, I actually enjoy coming in to step into that new gear and that new pace.
Bryan Power 47:11
It's interesting, because I think that a lot of I keep referring to the younger generation, but I just I learned so much from people entering the workforce. The first thing is, you know, if you're 2728 years old, you don't know what return to the office is like, you weren't in the office in 2019 or talking about, so when you're like, come back to like, come back to what you know I was in college, or I was 19. So someone is 2720 years old, you're talking like five, six years of experience. Now they, they don't have that frame of reference and you so I think that's really significant, is like, I know what it was like, and so that's a learned behavior for me. But increasingly, the workforce of the future doesn't have that, doesn't have that reference, yeah, right. And so you have to kind of, I just think that's why it will be very hard to go back. It's, it's gonna, it's gonna take the best elements of the past and merge them with the opportunities of the of the future. I do think there's something about pace and expectations. Like working asynchronously at the same pace is really hard because people are kind of like, I'm going to do it when I'm going to turn back on and get with it, and so that that can space out if you're not being if you're not being intentional about the speed with which something needs to get done, it will just drag because people are dropping in and out of when, when work is good for them.
Chris Rainey 48:31
It makes things take 10 times longer. Like I had a call recently where we're setting up a new market marketing system and platform for for the launch of a couple of new products, and everyone was working remotely in different time zones, and it was just like, Okay, you go away and do X, Y and Z, and it just became a nightmare. And I just said, actually, you know what? We're going to schedule a time, and we're all going to sit on a call and we're going to stay on this call until all the work gets done. What was supposed to be a month's worth of work, we didn't like two days because we came on the call the same time. We asked about to swear, but we made X happen, and we just moved quickly, right? We if there's any bottle next week, we could we remove them immediately. If there's any approvals need, we approved them immediately. If anyone needed any feedback or any help, we removed it immediately. And stuff just happened, right?
Bryan Power 49:19
Yeah, so that's, what I mean. You have to manage it. It doesn't just happen. You know, that's and I think that's harder for people when it's distributed, when it's asynchronous, than if you're all just sitting around on the same floor in office, where the manager can just kind of see what's getting done, and people just ask quickly, yeah, so that's, that's the challenge that I think is being sorted through.
Chris Rainey 49:39
Yeah. Well, listen, I could talk to you forever, but before I let you go, what would be your kind of planning advice for those hate Charlies of tomorrow who are gonna be facing maybe a very different world that we're in right now?
Bryan Power 49:52
Yeah, I think it's we're in a period where you have to just be uncomfortable with things, not. Being figured out. You know, they're there, but, but I've been very impressed with the HR community, really, since covid has become much more open and learning, like sharing learning and helping each other. It's very different from my experience before the 2020s not that it wasn't like people weren't sharing, but there's a bias to share right now, and I think it started because no one knew what to do with the work from home kind of disruption. And so this AI disruption is just a new disruption. And so I would just say, like, be uncomfortable with that. It's not figure it out and lean into the community to try to both help and learn and share what's going on. Because for all people, leaders, you know, the way we do it, we're going to figure it out in the next few years, and this is both hybrid work and AI, and so we'll all get there faster if we if we've got a community mindset,
Chris Rainey 50:47
amazing. And Brian, Where's, where's best place for people to connect you? LinkedIn, the easiest things. LinkedIn, Yep, yeah, amazing. Well, listen, I appreciate you taking time to come on the show for everyone listening, the links will be below to connect with Brian on LinkedIn, and if you want to check out next door, there'd also be a link below as well. Check out your local area, your local neighborhood as well. Literally, had I mentioned right to Brian today, one of my employees like, I use that, I just moved houses, and I use next door. And I was like, we didn't even make that up. It wasn't even a sponsored plug. It was it was that really well. But I appreciate you and thanks for sharing your journey and looking forward to doing it again soon in the future.
Bryan Power 51:25
Thanks for having me, Chris. You.
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Bryan Power, Head of People at Nextdoor.