Beyond the Paycheck

Summary Stacie Phylicia, Chief People Leader at Strategic People and Business Solutions, LLC, joins host Kelsey Willock Jones on Beyond the Paycheck to trace twenty one and a half years in the military into a people strategy built on one habit: every leader sat down with every soldier and walked through the pay stub, line by line. She argues that supporting the whole employee is not the size of yo...

Summary Tarangita Gupta, global HR leader at Tenarai Inc, joins host Kelsey Willock Jones on Beyond the Paycheck to trace a line from her first paycheck, 6,000 rupees earned as the first working woman in her family, to the way she leads HR for a 6,000 person AI consulting firm today. She makes the case that not every people program needs a KPI, explains why 70 plus percent of employees never fully...

Summary In this episode of Beyond the Paycheck, host Kelsey Willock Jones sits down with Donovan Mattole, CHRO at Langan Engineering & Environmental Services, a global firm of engineers, scientists, and archaeologists working in over 100 countries. Donovan explains why Langan pays straight-time overtime to every individual contributor, lets employees bank a week of it as comp time, and kept it...

Summary What do you do for employees when you can't out-pay inflation? In this episode of Beyond the Paycheck, host Kelsey Willock Jones sits down with Gin Kirkland Kinney, Executive VP and Chief People Officer at NRG, to talk about building total rewards around the whole person at a 17,000-employee energy company. Gin shares why employees turn down roles that pay 5% more, how NRG reduces financia...

Summary What does it take to protect a benefit when every other line item is getting cut? In this episode of Beyond the Paycheck, host Kelsey Willock Jones sits down with Morgan Pattison, Senior Director of HR Operational Excellence and interim CHRO at Kraton Corporation, to talk about the decisions that never show up cleanly on a spreadsheet. Morgan shares how she makes the case for benefits wher...

Summary What keeps employees at a company when a competitive paycheck is just the starting point? In this episode of Beyond the Paycheck, host Kelsey Willock Jones sits down with Corinna Carbone-Stephens, Chief People Officer at VLS Environmental Solutions, to unpack how a labor-intensive company with 52+ locations and a 73% hourly workforce supports the whole person. Corinna shares her journey fr...

Summary What happens when a people leader cuts the benefits that exist for show and hands the money to employees instead? In this episode of Beyond the Paycheck, host Kelsey Willock Jones talks with Dennis Richter, Chief Business and People Officer at Fullscript, about the wellness fund that replaced Fullscript's vanity perks, why a benefit at 2% adoption is shelf wear rather than support, and how...

Summary What happens when benefits renewal costs rise 15% to 50% while wages rise 3%? In this episode of Beyond the Paycheck, host Kelsey Willock Jones sits down with Chuck Heaton, Vice President of Human Resources and Chief Compliance Officer at Perma-Pipe, to talk about the "Armageddon year" brokers are warning about and whether it marks the beginning of the end of company-provided benefits. Dra...

Summary How do you make a case for people programs when the spreadsheet won't back you up? In this episode of Beyond the Paycheck, host Kelsey Willock Jones talks with Kyle Taylor, Head of HR at Revature, about the one word definition of strategy he brings to every compensation conversation, the pendulum effect that quietly teaches employees to stop reading their own bonus plan, and what DHL funde...

Summary Jeremy Stick, CHRO at DaBella, joins host Kelsey Willock Jones on Beyond the Paycheck to trace a line from his first paycheck, $2.35 an hour washing dishes in a junior high cafeteria, to the way he builds benefits education and development strategy for twenty six hundred employees across twenty eight states. The conversation covers why he trains people so they can leave and then treats the...

Summary What if the most valuable benefit in your package is the one without a line item? In this episode of Beyond the Paycheck, host Kelsey Willock Jones sits down with Robert Lazenby, Senior Director of Total Rewards at Hays, to explore why flexibility beats richer perks, why financial stress is a business issue disguised as a personal issue, and why the next decade of benefits belongs to healt...

Summary What do you do when the best benefits can't be justified by a spreadsheet? In this episode of Beyond the Paycheck, host Kelsey Willock Jones talks with Ann Meyers Piccirillo, CHRO of JDA TSG, about growing a company from 100 to 13,000 employees and building benefits for a workforce most benefits systems forget. Ann shares her case for strategic ROI alongside quantitative ROI, told through...

Summary What do employees actually need from their rewards package? In this episode of Beyond the Paycheck, host Kelsey Willock Jones talks with Eric Gutierrez, VP of Total Rewards at Point B, about why total rewards leaders should stop tinkering with programs and start managing the overall work experience, the $20 million healthcare premium investment whose most lasting return came from leaders r...

Summary What does it take to keep frontline employees past their first year? In this episode of Beyond the Paycheck, host Kelsey Willock Jones talks with Catherine Johnson, EVP and Chief People Officer at Travis Credit Union, about the financial wellness pilot that helped cut first-year frontline turnover from 50% to 14%, how she won leadership approval by framing HR investments the way the busine...

Summary What happens when AI runs more of HR than people do? In this episode of Beyond the Paycheck, host Kelsey Willock Jones sits down with Kelsey Browning, VP of People Operations at Invisible Technologies, who has spent 12 years practicing full stack HR at tech companies in moments of change. Kelsey explains why benefits are table stakes rather than a differentiator, why most employees don't u...

Summary What are you actually paying your employees for? In this episode of Beyond the Paycheck, host Kelsey Willock Jones talks with Joshua Lemon, Senior Director of Global Total Rewards at Resideo, about why total reward statements feel like showing your kids the grocery receipt, how his team uses personas to make benefits communication human across a 15,000 person global workforce, and why AI's...

Summary What happens when companies raid their benefits budgets to fund AI initiatives? On Beyond the Paycheck, Kelsey Willock Jones talks with Cristabel Lim, Senior Director of Total Rewards and Strategic Programs at Epicor, about why benefit stability creates the psychological safety that performance depends on. Cristabel shares Epicor's philosophy of never overreacting to market volatility, mak...

Summary What does a first paycheck spent on school supplies have to do with designing benefits for a 2,500-person global cybersecurity company? In this episode of Beyond the Paycheck, host Kelsey Willock Jones sits down with Zena Stephens Joy, Associate Director of Total Rewards at Fortra, to trace how her money story became a rewards philosophy: meet employees' basic needs first, then build from...

Summary What happens when a company treats employee financial health as mission critical instead of a perk? Christopher Forbeck, Director of Total Rewards at NorthWestern Energy, joins host Kelsey Willock Jones to share how a sales career, two master's degrees, and a moral compass check led him to HR, and why financial security now sits on his C-suite's agenda. He breaks down where most wellbeing...

Summary On this episode of Beyond the Paycheck, Kelsey Willock Jones sits down with Stephanie Elliott, Director of Benefits and Compensation at SGA Dental Partners, to unpack why so many benefits programs go unused. Stephanie traces her path from an insurance company mail room to leading benefits, and explains how the death of the 40-year career made benefits the real retention lever, why piecemea...

Summary What does fair pay actually mean when your employees span more than 20 countries? In this episode of Beyond the Paycheck, host Kelsey Willock Jones talks with Felipe Uliani, Director of Global Total Rewards at Rimini Street, about the money story that started with giving his entire first paycheck to his parents in Brazil, why a total rewards leader has to be a steward of the employees, and...

Summary What does an employee working a second job actually tell you about your workplace? Sarah Cornelio, Total Rewards Manager at Urban Engineers, joins host Kelsey Wheelock to make the case that financial stress is a burnout and safety indicator most HR leaders miss. She shares the "never let the first answer be no" vendor philosophy that surfaced a long-term care benefit her team never went lo...

Summary What does a 400-signup week reveal about your workforce? In this episode of Beyond the Paycheck, host Kelsey talks with Ernie Florkowski, Director of Benefits at Element Materials Technology, about the overwhelming employee response to a free financial coaching benefit, how his team designed an HR help desk AI that routes people to answers instead of generating them, and why he believes Am...

Summary In this episode of Beyond the Paycheck, host Kelsey Willock Jones sits down with Jonathan Taddeo, Director of Total Rewards at Syniverse, the company powering intercarrier text messaging across 24 countries. Jonathan explains why pay is a hygiene factor rather than a motivator, why recognition is the most underused lever in employee engagement, and why the EU Pay Transparency Directive is...

Summary What does it take to rebuild salary planning in eight weeks? In this episode of Beyond the Paycheck, host Kelsey Willcok Jones talks with Nicholas Lassalle, Director of Total Rewards at QinetiQ, about launching an SAP compensation module in two months, why the ROI of people investments shows up in the employee experience rather than the spreadsheet, and why so many employees leave free mon...