The WorkOps Podcast

Summary On this episode of the WorkOps Podcast, host Jeet Mukergi talks with Kate Stewart, Staff People Operations, AI and Automations Lead at Horizon3.ai, about what really happens when you put an AI agent into a live people-operations workflow. Kate shares the story of the offer-validation agent she built in Slack to check every job offer against approved comp bands and job architecture, how a S...

Summary   In this episode of The WorkOps Podcast, host Jeet sits down with Colleen McCreary, Chief People Officer and Head of Internal Systems at Confluent, for a candid conversation about people, productivity, and what AI is really doing to the workforce. Colleen makes the contrarian case that early-career talent is a company's edge in the AI era, while the "murky middle" faces the hardest reinve...

Summary What happens when the push to automate HR collides with the humans inside the process? In this episode of The WorkOps Podcast, host Jeet Mukherjee sits down with Nancy Luschkowski, Director of HR Infrastructure & Operations at PagerDuty, to unpack a live onboarding redesign happening amid restructuring, attrition, and the AI wave. Nancy explains why a perfect automation can still ruin...

Summary In this episode of The WorkOps Podcast, Jeet sits down with Ann Watson, Chief People Officer at Cover Genius, to unpack why pay-for-performance creates a structural integrity problem that no amount of manager training can fix. Ann argues that the annual raise has always been a budget decision dressed in performance language, and that pay transparency didn't create the breakdown — it just m...

Summary On The WorkOps Podcast, Jean Parchewsky, VP of People Operations at Vendasta, makes a case most AI conversations miss: whether AI takes hold in your company is decided at the hiring table, not in the tooling budget. She traces it back to a training binder that optimized for terminations over hiring, the "hire slow, fire fast" principle she built in response, and the behavior-first "ideal e...

Summary On this episode of The WorkOps Podcast, Jeet sits down with William West, VP People at Wrapbook, to dig into what happens when HR leaders stop trying to do everything in one place. William shares how a 20-plus-hour calibration process became six hours by separating ratings conversations from development conversations entirely. He also makes the case that HR's distinct job in an AI transfor...

Summary A top performer walks out the door at Qualtrics holding an outside offer for double their salary. Michael MacArthur, then Head of People, has a choice: pretend the market is wrong, or admit the comp process was. His read, years later from the COO seat at Recharge: the 2x counter-offer isn't a market signal. It's an audit finding. This is one of the cleanest diagnostics we've heard for whet...

Summary In this episode of The WorkOps Podcast, Jeet sits down with Weston Fillman, Director of People Operations and Employee Relations at 1Password, to unpack what it actually takes to get an HR transformation funded, and what changes when AI enters the room. Wes describes the months of pre-work that won him more executive budget than he asked for at a 10,000-person enterprise tech company, the...

Summary What looks like a warm, boutique onboarding experience on the outside is often powered by something much less glamorous on the inside: a person copy-pasting LinkedIn headshots into slides at midnight.  In this episode of the WorkOps Podcast, host Jeet sits down with Amie Taylor, Senior Director of People Operations, Rewards and Technology, for a refreshingly honest conversation about the h...

Summary What if the most honest feedback about why people leave your company isn't in the exit survey at all—it's in the Slack threads, Zoom transcripts, and emails already happening every day?  In this episode of the WorkOps Podcast, host Jeet sits down with David Hanrahan, SVP of People Success at SolarWinds, for a candid conversation about one of the most broken processes in HR: the exit survey...

Summary A CEO signs off on a new compensation philosophy. Two months later, when HR starts rolling it out, that same CEO tells the executive team it was never approved—and blames the HR leader for pushing it.  Sound impossible? It happened.  In this episode of the WorkOps Podcast, host Jeet sits down with Kelsey Browning, VP of People Operations, for a candid and detailed story about what happens...

Summary When the sole operator of a global company’s immigration process left, a critical workflow supporting 10% of the workforce imploded. What remained was an undocumented, email-based system, causing widespread employee anxiety about work authorization and threatening the company’s ability to retain essential US-based talent. This created a strategic nightmare: a global healthcare data analyti...

Summary Most companies have an offer process that looks clean on a whiteboard and turns into chaos in practice. The recruiter fights for more money. The comp team says no. Finance says it's too expensive. The business leader just wants it done.  Everyone's working off different information, and by the time a decision is made, it's conflict resolution—not a hiring process. In this episode of the Wo...

Summary Vidyard's performance system was broken. Managers placed employees in nine-box grids with no clear expectations, no career framework, and no two-way conversation. Decisions on compensation and promotions happened in silos, riddled with bias. Employees felt the process was opaque and unfair — yet Sarika Lamont, Vidyard's Chief People Officer, had no technology, no team bandwidth, and a busi...