How UiPath Drives Business Value Through Automation and Agile HR
As organizations aim to optimize operations in an increasingly complex business landscape, automation has become a strategic priority. As Brigette McInnis-Day, Chief People Officer at UiPath explained on a recent HR Leaders podcast, “Our mission is about building AI powered automation platforms that understand, automate and operate end to end processes.”
Brigette discussed findings from their recent Automation Generations report surveying over 6,400 global employees. Key insights indicate that automation platforms not only drive productivity gains, but also boost employee empowerment.
Already, 31% of respondents actively use automation in their day-to-day roles. For millennials and Gen Z in particular, automation is enabling greater job satisfaction and engagement. As Brigette emphasised, UiPath’s automation “allows you to constantly improve the work you’re doing.”
Internally, UiPath’s people team serves as a role model for HR automation. From onboarding to internal mobility and more, Brigette shared how they are training staff as “community developers” to build and apply automations. She also discussed the company’s shift towards integrated “talent experiences” rather than functional silos.
This agile organisational model brings unified candidate and employee journeys that can scale. Rather than waiting on vendor roadmaps, UiPath is doubling down on building its own automation capabilities. As Brigette advised, “prioritise automation as a company, because it’s not just about the people function, it’s the lift for the rest of the organization.”
Episode Highlights
How UiPath is championing an automation culture to unlock productivity
How the automation generation is reshaping workplace expectations
How UiPath is leading the way towards scalable, integrated talent experiences
Recommended Resources
Follow Brigette on LinkedIn
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🎙️ Automatically generated Podcast Transcript
Brigette 0:00
We redesigned our team, instead of having it be, you know, more siloed to focus on talent experiences. So bring all the talent elements together, including our full services, org building from an end to end perspective, the approach versus process by process. So we're really trying to shift that to think how all that connects so that you reduce redundancy, people working on multiple things.
Chris Rainey 0:29
But you're welcome to the show. How are you? I'm good. Thank you. Nice to see you again, before we jump in and tell everyone a little bit more about you personally, and your journey to where we are today. And then a little bit about your organisation. For people that may not be aware.
Brigette 0:43
Sure, I'll start with the orc because it probably goes a little faster. So for those of you don't know. UiPath is the business automation software leader, our mission, I think it's nice. As always start with what do we aspire to do. Our mission is about building AI powered automation platforms that understand automate and operate end to end processes. So you think about it as not needing to have all the solutions. But the platform sits on top and really helps lift from automation across all of your tech, which is pretty impressive. I think. I think one thing too, just to put that into more plain talk is about, we want to optimise work, we want to enable employee Empower engagement, empowerment. And we want to take people above and beyond the mundane tasks, they have to do the work to be more inspired, more engaged, less burnout, I think that at the end of the day is pretty important, especially in the market we've got right now. Amazing
Chris Rainey 1:36
Yeah, we can make we definitely need that now more than ever, so we can do to help use all the help we can get in
Brigette 1:42
terms of how they get here. So, you know, I had worked on this for a while once people said, Yeah, how did you get there, and you had to really reflect about it as well. And one thing I would say, just as a theme for career, I always reflect probably every week at least, what do you do better? How do I do this? But think about what do I need to change? And how do I grow? So reflect change and grow is one of the things I think that stays with me in terms of always evolving. But as Chief People Officer, I've been here a little over a year, pretty excited to have the opportunity to work with a team of growing post IPO company. My whole theme, if you look back at my career is all about high growth, high growth, lots of change. And how do you take companies to really scale Excel and scale from a people perspective. And prior to be coming here, I came from here from Google Cloud. I'll go backwards from the top as opposed to the bottom. So I'll go backwards. I let HR for Google Cloud to really, really lift them up in the enterprise space, huge build great experience. Prior to that I was at SCP for about 17 years, which if you you think about it, when I went in, there was be no way I would have thought to stay there that long, but had nine jobs, different jobs around over that time lived in Germany, for about four years took my babies there, literally a five month old and a three and a half year old, did not speak the language. But it was probably one of the big pivotal moments in my career. And prior to that I worked at a b2b startup and they were one of my clients when I was at Mercer HR consulting. That's where I started right out of grad school, focusing on all areas of photo rewards, m&a, performance management and working with companies of all sizes, all boards right out of grad school, which gave me a it was the best best training ground have to say about how do you really understand being in front of customers learning, you know how to companies drive as well.
Chris Rainey 3:42
And one of the things I did take in that you've you've you've worked in this space from, from different lenses you've worked for early on for an academic lens, then you have also seen it for a consulting lens. At your time, when you've seen it for as a vendor lens or SAP, you have very unique perspectives from the outside, in inside out. Do you think there's something that's really helped you in your career having worked inside and outside the function?
Brigette 4:08
Absolutely. I think one of the things I even being a concert consultant at Mercer I wanted to say like how I want to know if the designs we build or recommend actually work. So I have to go in and test my tests myself are these actual, legit and valid and do the things work? It was not enough to be a consultant, right? Which was a huge, huge lift in experience. But then even being inside a company at Consulting at Mercer was that during the.com Boom, so it was high tech really fast, really. And that's what I got attracted to high tech. I started taking clients in all different industries but loved the pace that changed the innovation around the incentive plan designs. For me, that was pretty, pretty big and then even some of those to your point those different opportunities. I stepped out of HR at SAP to be the CEO at SuccessFactors. and drive strategy because we had an external facing focus as an HR team, because we were moving to the cloud pretty quickly. And all of our salespeople were pretty, pretty great at pulling in people to be out in front of customers. So we help customers and prospects understand their HR strategy and how to digitally transform and how that actually just gave a huge lift to take on changing the demographic for Africa workforce, you move away from succession plans to talent pools, there's no gaps, and leadership. I mean, it's really a way to really accelerate how you deliver. So for me, the technology piece, to your point with the academic piece, and the other angles, probably how I cultivated the different areas and probably makes sense why UiPath one of my responsibilities is to work on lifting the HR space, internally, from an automation and AI perspective, and then also out in front of customers to help them as well,
Chris Rainey 5:58
I want to dive into some of the content because I think one of the things that I was really excited about is to learn more about your recent automation generation report. So be great. What's the what is that? For everyone listening, and then we can jump into some of the details and insights, one of the ways we
Brigette 6:12
look at how do we actually drive, you know, more automation, but less mundane work. And we look at a couple of things on our automation generations, global surveys important for us, we go in and look at about 6400 workers that we pulled around the world to understand what the current generation is facing as a result of whatever's happening in the market, post COVID, shrinking teams and resources, but also the different pressures they're seeing economically right, every everywhere I think you as you turn, but for us it's really understand how do we prepare for those next topics? And how do you get in front of it. And automation has been seen as a solution to enhance job satisfaction. I think people think automation odours that mean, it's really about thinking about it differently. It's about already we've got about 58% of respondents say they they that technology has allowed them to address the burnout and increase their overall productivity and fulfilment. And that's a big difference. Because right now, I think most companies are challenged and how to get people motivated, and engage. I think the other other piece that was a key finding was around are millennials and Gen Z workers are more likely to use business automation solutions, and believe that those technology tools are what's going to help truck drive their jobs for the better. So giving them that empowerment and having them be trained on how to automate, which is our overall community developer approach is freeing them up from the work they're doing and who better than them, right. They're the ones doing the work each day versus my opinion versus the person doing it on the grounds, we find that these surveys help us identify how do we provide those use cases for organisations? How do we make sure we get in front of it and understand what the audience and the users are going to be like for the future? For us? It didn't get around that as you know, how do we think about how to attract talent? Would you want to work with a company that allows you to automate the things that you don't particularly care for, and allows you to do the things that you really love to do or, or the new things you can't get to because of it, and allows you to actually constantly improve the work you're doing? So I think this is where not only this general automation generation, but I think, honestly, every generation, I think can adapt to it, too. I don't think it's just one or two generations.
Chris Rainey 8:28
No, I feel like it's more natural to the new generations coming through. But everyone can benefit. Like one of the things that Shane and I did when we first started our business is automate everything. I remember we measured it, it freed up an entire day. Super important. And I think one of the challenges I mentioned to you, we had a wellbeing event yesterday where we had, you know, CH rose about 1200 theatres talking about their well being. And one of the things that we was talking about when it comes to burnout is the systems and processes that companies have now were designed for a different, you know, for three years ago, when we're all in an office, right and haven't evolved, that their teams have gotten remote. They've gotten to a hybrid model, but their systems and processes are still the same. And that's causing a lot of burnout. One of the things that we took out of it is before you start adding things as well there was looking at like, what should we stop doing? Like loads of companies are quick to throw in loads of new technology. Now I've got like seven channels right now, at one point, we had like a zoom chat, a Slack chat, a whatsapp chat or a Facebook workplace, what post by Facebook. They were all laughing about it. But it is ironic because they all know that those things exists. And it's like, oh, yeah, but that team uses this, but we can't take it away because we our team uses that and it just causes this mess of chaos. They exist.
Brigette 9:48
And Chris think about let's say 15 years ago, CHR OS didn't have to even worry about that stuff, their presence in social media, what they're showing how they're attracting that. I mean, I'm I'm glad it's here but it's a totally different ways to think about how do you actually approach the work, but also what that person your image persona does to help bring in talent, culture, etc?
Chris Rainey 10:09
Yeah. How are you seeing AI powered automation enhance things like productivity, because productivity is a big thing everyone's focusing on right now, I
Brigette 10:17
will tell you internally at UiPath for money, we call our people organisation, our human resources, and call other places. But what we're doing is how do you actually provide more productivity. So we look at the time and effort it takes, but also we also looking at the outcome of it, what we're looking at is we have taken even data and saying, let's look at all the issues in the data. And if there's issues, we can actually find it so that you don't have human beings or people working through bad data, and system. So we have that set up and generate it. And that's increasing people's time, but also reducing major issues in our data and how we act that feeds in all of our decision making. Another place on productivity, I would say is that we've actually, if you, let's take a recruiting process and end, whether it's you know, sourcing for candidates all the way through the first 90 days, the onboarding, think about what a manager needs to do for all that. Think about the recruiting team, think about the HR business partner, think about the hiring leaders write all of that we can even show how you just boil that right down. Automation works throughout the whole park part. You could have assistant automation, we have a human that comes in and out based on what they want to see what they need. And we have the ability to onboard people all we call it our rocketeer. I had brand new employees, week one, here's here's a chart, a tool, a template around how do you sit down with your brand new employee? How do they like to be led week one comes in the next month, they have all their training, their onboarding all of it through the rocketeer. And then you're engaging with your people, and you get the prompts. It's really nice work behind the scenes that links to all of our learning and development and the culture. And then people are excited and engaged and and you're engaging from a human perspective. But all of it's powered by our automation. So I think that productivity how how quickly you ramp up employees, how quickly do they feel like they belong, makes or breaks their overall success in the in the first first year for certain. So those are just some of the productivity we have a lot more. But we had a hackathon This week in our our people team. And we're giving awards for people with the best automations. And we have about a third of our organisation trained on automate automation that we do ourselves. And then we are driving these hackathons to make sure we're continuing to evolve around our own automation and how we drive more productivity for the team. And the thing about HR is we can improve our team. But I think you've that benefit goes not only just for the team, but you end up lifting the entire organisation, think about the enablement that then lifts the employees, the leaders, they're empowered, they're engaged, and then how does that trickle to your customers, that's the bigger piece that I think people have to think about not just thinking about a little bot, all the way to what the platform can a platform does to enable and lift an entire organisation. It's
Chris Rainey 13:15
also scalable, right? You can't do it, you know, you can't scale that without technology, or we used to in the past when it's a super heavy lift, super heavy lift. But also it not only was it a heavy lift, but it wasn't personalised either. So it was a heavy lift. And it wasn't even personalised to Chris. So for one you can scale it for right. And obviously the notches, everything you just mentioned stuff like that, but also create a more tailored employee experience. That means more to Chris and in my journey where I meet me where I am at when I need it, like we do with our customers. Right? Right. It's not doing that with our employees. And I think that's what excites me. And as you said, it frees you and the team up, we'll have more time and everyone to have more meaningful conversations and focus on the reader people side of it. And think
Brigette 14:01
about it, Chris, where we where we need to go. Think about all the data we have on people, all of it. How can we triangulate and pull those things together about their motivation and behaviour or timing role? Potential succession, literally learning development, think about how we can pull all that together and actually work with the employee work with the leader and see it all from a very different lens. That's, that's where I want to go. And we're going to try and build out what that looks like. But that's I think, where the power comes in, and we think more end to end and to your your point. What does that mean for the individual with all the information we have? We're not utilising it enough. Yeah,
Chris Rainey 14:37
I can imagine like all of that being its own sort of people p&l. Yeah. And linking that side by side with the finance easy. Yeah, you know, so when you're having I think we're pretty much close to having that conversation, right? But we maybe will maybe have some acronym for p&l. What p&l means we'll rename what p&l means, how the people p&l for that day and inside maxing out with the business strategy. And you
Brigette 15:03
and I should have a workshop on this. We'll start sketching it out. You just need people to take take the first poll move right
Chris Rainey 15:09
on it as well. What about from a generation perspective? I think it was kind of seeing, you know, when, when Gen Gen Z workers have favourable views on next generation technologies, such as AI, but other generations that kind of bit more disconnected, but for that new generation, they always demand this. It's like, it's not it's no longer a nice to have. They expect it. I had
Brigette 15:33
dinner last night with some friends. And they were saying that their son had an internship and the, the manager would give them work for the whole day, they'd haven't done in 15 minutes. Because,
Unknown Speaker 15:45
yeah, there used to be.
Brigette 15:48
They're using automation. They were using just even excel writing macros, and doing the work and then kept asking for more work. So it's, this is this is the reality. So I get it, maybe just an internship, but turning around and saying, how do you learn from the intern? Have the intern say, here's all the things we've got? What can you do with this? And how do you drive it? It's funny story. And I just thought about this, Chris, but I went to school in London for a semester abroad. And I was, had an internship out in Lee, and one of the psychology that will help well being centres, and one of the things I was supposed to do is put all the files and operationalize them into the computer system, right. So take the intern, give them your problems, and see how they, how they come back with it. I remember that was a while back, but I love that's how I learned how to love tea. And having the tea time was great. Every every good 2030 minutes. That's how I think we should think about it, bring the intern and have them tell us how we should be doing it differently. Not, not the other way around
Chris Rainey 16:51
teaching, as I've told you before, sorry, foreign focus, I got in trouble in my younger days for things like that. So in my first sales role, you know, the KPI was outbound sales, selling to HR executives, that's my first ever job. It's not an easy job as a 17 year, and I'll tell you right now, and there was like, you know, 150 calls a day, free hours on the phone, like 50 Outbound emails, right, etc. And after about two months of doing this, I was like, ah, there's got to be a better way. So what I did without telling my manager is I bought a marketing suite. And basically filtered in all my leads, uploaded my Excel spreadsheet into the marketing platform, wrote my marketing copy. And I didn't even have to call anyone, because I was getting meals by doing markets and people like, why is Chris got he's never on the phone. But he's doing quadruple the amount of deals is just, you know, innovation.
Brigette 17:47
But two things I'll take away from that, though, I think it's really a lesson learned is one is they could have take those resources, upskill them and had them do more on the higher on the increase your revenue, the top line, boom, yeah. And think about just how much more they could have done. But the second piece, like you said, the measurements are wrong, right. So you found a different way to do it, the measurements were wrong, and how stuck people are on the same way. This is how we do things here. And that's the thing I think is if we do the reverse is let's give people the issue, the problem, the solution, but you come up with how you do it. Yes. Right. Don't give them the solution. That's how we're going to actually take the next step forward. And even if it was 10 years ago, I think people are still in that same mindset, what
Chris Rainey 18:32
some of the other findings in the report that really so Yeah, a couple
Brigette 18:35
of key highlights, I think that are really interesting is that we've been able to help help companies with their search time for talent by 95%. That's a huge productivity measure and think about, again, the people power that you need to do that versus how they could actually being mapping the market thinking about building relationships and finding the next new talent that you need out there. And then the other thing on the what they were calling the automation generation, it's they're proving the point that already 31% of the people in that 6400 survey, they're already using automation. And they're already saying that, you know, these workers, 87% of them are saying their automation solutions feel like that they have the resources they need, they're not asking for more headcount. Imagine that headcount gain could go away, and they have what they need, and they're supported to do their jobs. So I also spoke recently to a friend who's really interested in his face, and she said, but have you thought about even writing job descriptions for automation? And think about where does the automation work and where the word of our people work and very thinking very much thinking about it differently. So I think that automation generation should push all of us to think about it from a different perspective. What does
Chris Rainey 19:49
this mean for your own team? You see all these findings from the report? How are you then actually in some of that within your own HR team?
Brigette 19:57
So one of the things for our our people strategy is On role modelling HR automation for the company and for externally for our customers. So I always say we need a DTI lens on one and you know, our other lens is automation first. And so how do we how do we drive that? And we're even going to double down this year on everything we do drive via automation, we have a cog in the organisation working with them on how do we make sure we get the support around it, we need to automate all of this and really start to free up the work we need to do to help continue to grow this company, the opportunities we have are huge, we can't miss it, because we aren't fast enough to automate. So that's what we're focusing on a couple of things is, as I mentioned, our community developers training our own team to be able to run automations on their own and working through that. I want to be a trained as well, because I I think I'll be better at explaining it if I understand the backend, how it actually operates in a better at an A better way for your
Chris Rainey 20:55
training team on that. And so your, your team. Yeah, that's Wow. Okay, interesting. So that's a skill we never thought we'd need as a HR practitioner.
Brigette 21:03
I think we need it. I definitely think we need it for certain because we've been doing these things a long time. And who better again, to say how do we how do we move away from this space to actually do the areas that we're we're trained to do, as opposed to the operational side of the house. That's the big piece of it. And we like I said, we had the two half half hackathons. Recently. We do that across the employee base. I think that's an another way for us to really, again, learn from our, our, our people, as opposed to think we know the answers around how to take those next steps. And then different use cases,
Chris Rainey 21:38
what are some of the things that people come up with
Brigette 21:41
the compensation perspective, so pull all the data together. So you have one view of compensation for all elements and allow you to actually have that for a leader perspective, but also for the team, as opposed to pulling all these different reports, some new ideas around? I want to give them all away, right? So new ideas around how are we going to think about really changing our talent acquisition approach, and leveraging the information we have across so we redesigned our team, instead of having it be, you know, more siloed to focus on talent experiences. So bring all the talent elements together, including our Pool Services, org building from an end to end perspective, the approach versus process by process. So we're really trying to shift that to think how all that connects so that you reduce redundancy, people working on multiple things, we have clear clarity on what people are doing, but also to that talent experience should be felt by the candidate, the employee, the leader, from an end to end perspective, not from how we would design an HR organisation based on function. That's how I thought bringing it all together, having a leader that runs it that's been in an HRBP roles been in all the talent spaces, then you're all of a sudden all comes together as opposed to feeling like these things are falling out of sky, as a leader, and you're supposed to do all this stuff. And you don't know why. And you're not sure how it all fits together. So that's that's how we've reshaped the organisation about five months ago,
Chris Rainey 23:09
I love that you've done that, by the way, I'm seeing a lot of companies move to that, that that model, because as you said it, then you can create a really consistent experience across that. Whereas separately, you have those different functions that sit separately, yes, they talk to each other, but there's disconnect there. And also, it takes a lot more time to influence and you can't be as agile if when, when, when they're sitting separately. And you need to be able to move at speed and change and iterate. So I love the fact that you made that decision. Whenever I speak to heads of people experience in it, which is, you know, another new role that we didn't have, many years ago, they were the ones that I see that are really succeeding are where they have all of those functions sitting underneath the umbrella like you have the ones that are really struggling is that they've got this head of experience, people experience role, employee experience. And that's having to manage two or three different functions, and kind of bring everyone together. And it's becoming a bit of a nightmare, that they're limited in their influence, right.
Brigette 24:05
You can't have any separate and you don't own anything, they actually are then working through it. It just doesn't. It doesn't work. And so having the ownership even things like internal movement in the company. That's part of the entire experience. And so that's why we even call it instead of learning or client leadership experiences because it has to be more than just learning. Right? We got to evolve out of that. And for us, I always look at ways to accelerate and be really prioritised about what we work on. We can't do it all if we want to try to grow as an organisation to capture this market. And we need to utilise people and give them what they need when they need it. Not all the things we could possibly give them from an HR perspective. And I think that prioritisation is is really key for us to accelerate growth for the company.
Chris Rainey 24:53
That being said, now we're speaking about AI a lot. It has how does that influence where you are decides to invest your budget and resources.
Brigette 25:02
First thing is we have our things we we need to deliver on our benefits and things like that for the show the static pieces, but for us will be, our majority will be on our investment will be on automation, and then that's going to show us all of it, and then look at do it even before we even increase anything on our ATMs, I'm gonna go automation. First, it's much better to actually apply the platform than wait for an HCM for their automation to come. And it only serves that one solution, the platform will serve. All right, so if you want to link it to your six rows on trying to Salesforce or ServiceNow, all of that can be linked any technology you have versus it only services one piece, that's the thing about scale, you've got to think about it as Oh, you put it here, that how will it run through the rest. And so for me, that's, instead of spending a lot of money and waiting for these roadmaps to come out, we're going to leverage the things that not only we need, but like I said we can customers, there's
Chris Rainey 26:05
a big frustration I hear, right, you know, not to bash on workday, or Oracle, or SAP SuccessFactors. But many companies are frustrated, and waiting. Great. You know, they all had their recent announcements over the last couple of weeks. And many leaders I've spoken to were hoping for more in sounds of automation and the capability and how it's used yet, right? It was very lacklustre, from what I've seen so far. It's just my personal opinion, actually, and the opinions of many people that I've spoken to, as well. But to your point, you're like, we're not waiting. We're not waiting for them, we're gonna go and create it ourselves and make it happen. And that's what you kind of have no choice at the moment anyway. And
Brigette 26:44
we're appreciative of what the foundation has, but Oh, surely, yeah. And I understand being in you know, in those organisations, the lift it takes, right for the entire suite, or whatever it looks like, right. And for companies that change, we need to allow HR to accelerate faster, to go faster, and get the investments they deserve. That we deserve, that we know we can happen. And I think it's time to prioritise that prioritise that as a company, because it's not just about the people function, it's the lift for the rest of the organisation. But yeah, I'm not going to wait, I'm just going to keep going on.
Chris Rainey 27:19
I love it. There's so many people listening, right now they're like, they're on the same train as you they love it, can't wait around. And that also shows it sends a very clear message to your to everyone you know, from the top of the organisation to the bottom, and also your employees that, you know, we're doing this because we care, and it's only the right thing to do. It's good for business, good for people, you know, and it's part of I'm sure interweaved into the core values. And as you said at the beginning and the mission, the purpose of the organisation itself. So you kind of got to walk the walk, right? If you're, if you're an organisation like yourself, listen, before I let you go, I want to kind of jump into our quickfire round. I know, I kind of gonna surprise you earlier with these questions. But you said the challenges have only got 30 seconds per question. Are you ready? Yeah. Okay, what are your hobbies and passions outside of the office? You can't say automation, by the way, you're not allowed to say all my
Brigette 28:13
work. I do love to work. So that's one thing, but scratch that exercises a lot that travel and being near the ocean. If
Chris Rainey 28:22
you click your fingers and change one thing about HR, what would you change?
Brigette 28:27
The push ahead to really focus force, the change force the investment and kind of break out
Chris Rainey 28:34
of the old ways. We've been we've been saying that for a while, but I feel like we are actually now we're actually getting the pandemic pushed us to, but now it's like, can we sustain it? I think I would say, the momentum that we've built. How do you think your family and friends would describe what you do for a living?
Brigette 28:50
I thought first, you're gonna say how do they describe me that? You know, it's funny that one time my daughter was young, and she said something about you're the head of HR, and she says, mommy do you can put your head on top of everybody else. He's a really weird thing to say. Right? I think they think that they don't think they never helped ask for my help with homework. So they I'm not sure what they think I do. But they know that I actually represent people. And that's what they'll probably would say, Love
Chris Rainey 29:21
it. Love it. What legacy Do you want to leave behind?
Brigette 29:25
Yeah, I think for family but also the profession. I think that are we lifting HR and challenging us to really drive in different ways. And for my family, I just, you know, I've got a 19 year old and a 15 year old and you just you just want to have the happy, engaged and really good people and that we're gonna you know, in your in your life, and I think that's one point. That's part of your community service. I think even when you're on your own family and your own relationships,
Chris Rainey 29:55
which is the biggest investment that you've made in yourself. I really
Brigette 29:59
wanted to test We talk about transformation and change as HR professionals a lot, a lot of it's sometimes their buzzword buzzwords, I went on a full transformation on how I eat, how I live, and did that for about like three months, and went through the whole change journey and wrote about it and use that methodology on how to drive and live through transformational change. And so I said, I got I got to do it myself, and then really be convinced I can help companies, other people drive change. So and I've stuck to it in terms of just how, how I live. So that was I would say, that was a big challenge. Good for you. What
Chris Rainey 30:38
was the turning point? Oh, I was
Brigette 30:41
I was flying around the world, you know, globally, working a lot exercising, but you could tell I wasn't as healthy or I didn't have the energy I was, you know, had caffeine and all those types of things that I knew I had to have like a reset, figure out how to make it all work. And I wasn't getting any younger. So I thought I better start and pave the way for the future. So it worked. Last
Chris Rainey 31:05
question, what advice would you give to the HR leaders of tomorrow? The ones that are going to be sitting in your seat one day? Yeah,
Brigette 31:13
I think start now on your text being text set technology 70 digital transformation, what does that look like? Embrace it now. Understand how to own and manage and lead culture, measure it. It's not a buzzword, you really need to know how to how to really drive that but also be a transformational leader. And know how to bring up transformational leadership in an organisation. I think that is key as well. And pick, pick the CEOs you work with wisely. I think that makes or break your probably your success and your fulfilment as well.
Chris Rainey 31:51
Yeah, no, I love that one. Love that one. What is it? Thanks so much. Where can people connect with you? They want to reach out say hi, mostly
Brigette 31:57
on LinkedIn. I think that's the best place to go. For sure. Thanks
Chris Rainey 32:01
for coming on. I've really enjoyed the conversation. Super excited for for you in the journey that you're on. And you're looking forward to staying connected and kicked in again soon as Oh, well we should invest into next week. Thank
Brigette 32:14
you. I think your story's very inspirational. What you've done for the HR profession is pretty astronomical. And I think you should be really proud of what you're doing every day and what you're going to accomplish as well. So if you ever need some partners in crime on these topics, let me know.
Chris Rainey 32:31
Enjoy your day. I'll see you again soon. Thanks so much. You too. Thank you
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Steve Degnan, Advisor, Board Member, and former CHRO of Nestlé Purina.