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Today, I have a dynamic discussion with Q Hamirani, an influential figure in the HR, AI and remote work sphere.

Q is known for his groundbreaking work at Airbnb and his current role as Chief People Officer at an ed-tech company, Paper and most recently founded the world's largest community for HR and AI enthusiasts called PeopleGPT, a community I have been an early member of and really enjoy.

Discover the implications of generative AI for HR, how embracing technology can redefine organizational structures and career paths, and why we should never choose the status quo. 

Here are a four takeaways to apply as a leader: 

1. Embrace and Drive Change

Q underscores the importance of challenging the status quo and actively seeking ways to improve and innovate.

As employee engagement is still at record low levels, encourage your teams to question existing processes and to explore new ideas that could lead to the development of pioneering programs like Airbnb’s "Work Anywhere" initiative.

2. Strategic Integration of Technology in HR

‍As Q says, in HR, it's always a combination of technology with humans in the loop.

Use technology to free you up to do more interesting and complex work.

This goes beyond automating routine tasks to leveraging advanced technologies like generative AI for more strategic purposes, like enhancing decision-making, improving employee engagement, and personalizing the employee experience.

As leaders, fostering a culture that embraces technology will be key to staying competitive and efficient.

3. Choosing the Right Technology

Whether it’s HR Software or IT technology like collaboration tools, you have to be tied to the hip as HR leaders, because these platforms deeply influence the employee experience.

As Q said, it's important for HR or people leaders to be very opinionated and influence what collaboration tools are being given across the organization by IT typically.

Q is also a big advocate of centralizing onto one platform, especially for communication and knowledge management, and especially in remote companies where this becomes the employee experience 

4. Navigating Generative AI

If you feel a bit behind on AI at work, you’re not alone. This conversation reminded me that we're still all figuring it out.

‍One thing is for sure, there is a lot to figure out, for example workforce planning as AI can do the job of one or multiple people. We may also need less managers. So everyone, including HR, needs to jump in and get familiar.

Plus, there may be some teams in your org who are using it actively, so why not spotlight this to the rest of the company so you can all learn together? 

As people leaders, your stewardship in these areas will shape the future of work within your organization.

Q’s insights remind us that the path to innovation and success is paved with curiosity, courage, and a commitment to putting people at the heart of everything we do – especially as it relates to new technology like Gen AI.

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Transcript:

Daan van Rossum: Could you just do a quick elevator pitch on your career so far, and especially your very interesting role at Airbnb focusing on, remote work. 

Q Hamirani: Thanks for having me. I know it's long overdue, and I'm so excited to connect.

My story—I'll try to keep it brief. I studied electrical engineering, and that'll make sense in a minute why I brought it that far back. I really realized towards the end of my college program that I did not want to sit in a lab by myself.

I love being around people, be it to cause commotion, have fun, or build things. Being around people was what energized me. So I started off my career at GE as an operations leader on the manufacturing floor, got the training and operations.

I then went on to have the first five years of my career post-graduation at a Big Four firm called Deloitte, where, ironically, I was in the finance transformation space. So I was an engineer who had done operations and was then doing finance at that point. I did that for five years and realized I really loved being at the intersection of various functions. At that point, it was finance, operations, people, and technology.

Once I realized I wanted to do something more strategy and ops, I went over to Aon for two years at Global Strategy and Ops, and at that point, I had this kind of “aha moment” in my career, which was that you can have the best product and the best process, but if you don't have the right people in the right roles, you will not succeed.

I saw this through various global implementations at Deloitte through my work at Aon, which was all over Europe and Latin America. I was physically in those countries. So, as I said in typical fashion, I know nothing about HR, but I love to understand perspectives and people. Let me take the right turn and work in the field of HR.

For me, at that point, I knew operations. I knew technology, and I knew analytics. So I said, That is how I'm going to pave my way into the field of HR. My operational mindset convinced me up until today that the most impactful way to drive productivity and success in an organization is by working in HR because you're impacting the whole organization versus one function.

Long story short, I applied for a lot of roles in HR and got flat out rejected because it was an engineer who knew finance, knew some business in 2008-2009, and didn't know employee relations. How was I going to get a job?

So I quit my job at Aon and started my own HR consulting company, specifically focusing on technology, which was a lot of new HRISs at the time, like workdays were coming down.

I knew PeopleSoft from my Deloitte days. So that translated. I knew I was very strong on analytics. So people analytics was a buzzword at that point. People didn't really know what it was. I was like, Let me build it. And my operation skill set actually translated to building employee experience processes for scalability and making sure the experience was right in the hyper-growth environment.

So back then, employee experience was not even a word. That became a word maybe a decade ago. That's how I started my career in HR. In the last 12–13 years, I've done every role in HR, done my rounds, and I still love it. Most recently, I was at Airbnb for five years, where I got the opportunity and privilege to lead a lot of our programs, some pretty unconventional.

That brought together all my crazy right turns in my career, if you will. And it brought it all together. And, for example, the “Live and Work Anywhere” program that we created really just started off with Let's Incubate an Idea. Let's support our employees traveling around the world in a nomadic way while being compliant and making sure the employees understand their own liability. And 15–16 months later, that turned into our “Live and Work Anywhere” program.

So it's really fun to see how you just take the right turn. If you just try something out, you get the right support. Sometimes it becomes bigger than you ever would have even anticipated, like the Live and Work Anywhere program.

Most recently, over the last year, I've been at an EdTech company called Paper, which is in the education sector, really trying to push for equality and learning opportunities in the public school system in the US.

I have a 3-year-old son who's about to enter the public school system in a few years. I didn't grow up in the U.S., so I was very personal, strong, and relatable. Then, I'm also an executive coach. I've been certified to do that for about five years. So I do a lot of executive coaching for founders and CEOs, do some investing, and try to keep my hands dirty in the startup space as well, because I'm not doing a startup because I've done three in my past life, and it's a very different form of stress, but I want to stay close to it. So I do try to do that.  That was a long elevator ride.

Daan van Rossum: Thank you for sharing. I think this is so inspiring for a lot of people to see that sort of like very unconventional path towards where you are now from that experience at Airbnb, when you switched to Paper, the Ed Tech company you just mentioned.

What are some of the things that you took with you in terms of like things that you've learned, in Airbnb that you now wanted to apply at Paper as well? What's their work policy? 

Q Hamirani: I would say there were a couple of things that I took from Airbnb that just got engraved in my DNA, if you will, after five years of being there, which, in startup land, five years is pretty. Even though Airbnb is not a typical startup, we did operate like one in terms of creativity.

I think for me, there were two things. The current status quo is just a recommendation and a starting point for what you want to build. So don't take that as what you want to do. In fact, challenging the status quo is what I typically try to do, and that's what we did at Airbnb and everything we did from the “Live and Work Anywhere” program. Every company was like, You can do 30 days or 60 days and then turn a blind eye.

We had the option to do that, but we picked the option that was harder. A year later, it just so happened that we found the magical connection that we did not anticipate, which tied it to our business model. And that's where the flywheel started. So essentially, not taking the status quo as the status quo, really challenging it, and trying to build something that's personal and unique to that. That's one.

The other piece that still stays with me is how communications, internal and external communications, and PR, to some extent, in terms of your external brand, are all so tied together. What you tell your employees and how you storytell the right, honest, transparent conversation about where a company is.

To be honest, it's the tough times that define you in these moments, not the good times. And we had to unfortunately go through that at Airbnb in 2020, where the pandemic literally halted our entire business. We had to do a big layoff, unfortunately. So really, the power of staying very true to honest and transparent communication is in being very intentional about your communication strategy.

At PayPal, as that's translated to my learning from Airbnb, I quickly, in the first few weeks, picked up internal communications as part of the people team. That was something that was unique to my experience at Airbnb, where internal communication sat in HR. It can sit on a variety of teams, depending on where you are.

That was one learning, which actually had an unintended consequence down the line to my earlier point, which was, as of last summer, I also own public relations and external communications, partly because we are still smaller and we didn't have a dedicated focus from a leadership standpoint on it. And partly because of my prior experience understanding how critical it is.

We live in a world today where you cannot tell your employees one thing and expect the streets not to hear it or tell the streets another thing. You have to be unified, and that's a good thing. I think that's good pressure to have.

Challenging the status quo and the power of internal and external communications on the employee experience are my two learnings that I've taken with me. Again, I took it with me as a starting point and then evolved it and personalized it to what paper needed, what the right structure was, and where the right support was, because it's all about crafting your own playbook at the end of the day, is what I've learned.

Daan van Rossum: Absolutely. It's so interesting to think about that sort of internal and external. We've talked a lot about, CX is EX, but I haven't really heard that kind of idea of your internal communication and your external communication cannot really be that different because we live in a very transparent world.

It's very hard to tell this story internally and then externally have a very different story. But these are things that are typically not handled by an HR team. 

Did you have to convince people to see it your way? How did you bring in this like new perspective that those two things should actually go together?

Q Hamirani: Part of it is because I have experienced how well-curated communication strategies on the internal and external front can work really well because Airbnb is very proficient at this. And even though I was not the one orchestrating it, I was often on the receiving end of it. Any initiative we took, from the Live and Work Anywhere program to the layoffs that we took, was unfortunate.

It was all very intentionally curated so that the message externally was what was reality and not people looking up. The other part of it is that, in reality, in the startup world, you see issues in a particular area. You see, it's impacting the business, and someone's got to jump in to fix it.

When you have limited resources in a startup environment or even in not a startup, at Airbnb too, I would always put my hand up when no one knew where it should even sit. Should it even sit in HR or not?

Part of it is the right timing and opportunity because you can't time it, and a lot of it is that you have to feel the pain as an organization to dedicate the resources to it. Because once you see that it could have an impact that is unintended and not wanted, it's easy to make the case.

It's dependent on, I would say, what resources are already allocated within the organization; in this case, it was minimal, and two, we realize that it is very critical, and then just jumping in and trying it out.

This has been something for which I've been really thankful in my career, and I try to do the same, which is, when you jump into these scenarios and there's a gap that the organization needs fixed, you're jumping in to do it. I've always thankfully had the support of the leaders, including a head to say, Look, we don't even know how we're going to figure this out. But if you're willing to figure it out, we'll give you support.

My personal philosophy has always been iterating toward greatness. You don't get it right the first time you fall; you learn, you make mistakes, you come clean to employees, you work through it again, and you take feedback. So it's all part of having the right ecosystem to support you as well, because I could have all these ideas.

I could put my hand up, but if the organization says no, we're going to do things the way we've always done them, and that's not going to give me that opportunity. So it's two ways, is what I'm saying. It's me jumping in. The organization is feeling some pain in that area. Hence, the need is articulated pretty clearly, and then just having the right environment and support system to encourage that.

Daan van Rossum: I also want to dive into a little bit, the technology side. So you mentioned that from very early on, you had experience in technology, eventually going into areas that only later on became more mainstream. 

What was your approach to technology within the realm of HR when you started at paper? 

Q Hamirani: My approach to technology, or my philosophy toward technology, has always been that technology can help empower all of us to do more with less. But when I say do more with less, it's also to do more complicated, more intentional work that needs the complex human mind to process. In HR, specifically to your point, there is always a level of intuition, reading the room, and making sure that you are factoring in that different people will react differently. Different things may land on people differently because it's always a combination of what's going on in their personal lives and what's going on at work.

For me, I've always approached it with: I love technology. I'm a big fan of it because, I guess, I'm a tech geek at heart. But it's always two-fold. This translates to the new world of Gen AI as well, which means we can use it. And if we use it, it will just empower us to work on more complex situations, which is stimulating for someone like myself because you can get pretty bored if you're doing the same thing.

But in HR, it's always a combination of technology and humans in the loop. So obviously, like some processes, you can automate them, like creating a requisition and workday. Even I don't enjoy doing that. So yeah, let's let it get automated, but figuring out the right role that's needed in your organization based on, for example, the pains the organization is feeling or where the organization wants to go.

Technology is not going to do 100% of that for you. It's going to do 90%, maybe 70%, depending on the process that you're looking at. So my philosophy has always been to embrace it. If we can embrace it, it can, in some cases, make our lives more challenging and easier. So if it's automating a process, for example, we can do things that are more stimulating, but in some cases, it can also drive insights for us.

So it's being us, like when you look at people's analytics and you look at the different data sets that you have, when you start marrying up all multidimensional reporting, like it's empowering us to be smarter. It's empowering us to have better insights that we would not have had if we didn't use technology in the right way. So I think technology has always been, from the start, more like a friend or a copilot in today's terminology that's used a lot. You have to guide it, and it's more, I think, critical and important in the field of HR.

Daan van Rossum: I'm just curious, do you think it typically should sit within HR that the kind of like the decision making around like what technology to use within a company and which kind of like systems to use? 

Does it sit within HR? Because I know from speaking to a lot of people that there are, many HRs who would basically say, Hey, let the HR IT figure that out or let someone else figure it out in the organization. 

What's the role between the people teams? 

Q Hamirani: I would say it's twofold, and I talk about technology in two dimensions. One is HR technology, and one is more what I would call IT technology in the realm of collaboration tools. What tools are you using?

So if we unpack the first one, which is HR technology, I've been in organizations like Paper and Airbnb, where they sat in HR. And that was fine.

At Airbnb, the HR technology team sat in IT. But my point here is that it doesn't matter. You have to be tight to the hip. You have to build that relationship. You're all on the same kind of journey. It's like payroll. Payroll sat on the HR at some of my past companies and a lot of companies, including the ones I work at and at Airbnb; it was in finance.

It doesn't matter where it sits. You've got to be on the same page. So it's partnership and collaboration. But I personally believe. It is dependent on the resources you have. So if you have the right sourcing, it should sit in HR. You just have one less layer of contextual translation that you need to do. It's a trade-off. If it sits in IT, you might get more IT, and you might get more resourcing. But you may need to explain the contextualization of what you're trying to achieve from a people program.

I personally think it's good to sit in HR because you control it, and then you have no one to blame as well. You are the master of your own destiny.

Really quick on the collaboration tools. I think that's a really interesting one to unpack, probably for a later day, but I'll give you my high-level thoughts on that. I think it's really important for HR or people leaders to be very opinionated and influence what collaboration tools are being given across the organization by IT, typically.

And what I mean by that is that I've been at organizations like Airbnb; for example, we had Google Chat. We had slack. We had an email. We had text messages blowing up. I can't even think of another medium, but it feels like there were like a lot, but that is a lot already. At Paper, basically, everything is just slack.

So I think by helping share your opinions on how ways of working can impact the culture of an organization, because to me, your operating system between your people is the interconnectivity tissue to build culture. So I think it's really important for people's leaders to weigh in when they see that there are no clear ways of working because technology is not enabling them and helping influence them.

So that's how I would look at HR technology. I would say sit with HR. You can't blame anyone. It's on you. You embrace it. You deal with the pain because sometimes, with a different group, you think everything's easy and you just tell the group to do it, but you really need to understand that.

People analytics is a subset of that. That's the technology, in my view, and for the broader collaboration, just be opinionated and help drive what you think will drive better ways of working. Because at the end of the day, that's what your people's leaders are here to do: increase productivity and make sure people are happy. But they're happy. The byproduct of that is that they're productive. They're not overwhelmed all the time with multiple channels of communication.

Daan van Rossum: And actually like that part of the technology, it does influence a lot about how people feel about work, because like you said, if you have all these different communication channels going on, especially if you work with somewhat older legacy platforms, it can really impact the employee experience. And you feel like I'm working for a very outdated company or you hear stories of people who are working with better platforms and you are like why not us? And so in that particular case, like you are really advocating at least within your company for centralizing and making sure that work happens in this case within Slack.

Is that something that you would advise most companies to really look at more of a centralization strategy? Or do you think that like individual vendors and individual platforms can still play a role even within something like online collaboration? 

Q Hamirani: So I would say, in terms of communication mediums, I would strongly suggest, having seen both now, that you use one form of communication as your primary form of communication.

I guess one is hard, maybe two, because email is never going to go away. So you have email and Slack, for example, in our case. I'm not advocating for just using Slack. It could be teams. It could be Gchat or whatever the company is comfortable using, but my point here is that it should be consolidated for communication mediums because then everything's in one place.

You don't have multiple conversations going on in different mediums. I think in terms of general service delivery, that is, I would also say this is a tough one to crack because of politics in organizations, which is just the reality of it. But let's say making sure things like ticketing tools are consolidated, because I've worked at companies where there's multiple knowledge bases.

One team uses Google sites, one team uses their own homegrown thing, and then, for GNA functions, ticketing for HR will be in one tool. Ticketing for finance will be another tool. And right away, we're fragmenting the employee experience because an employee doesn't know where to go. And if they go somewhere, they can't find it.

I would say unifying communication mediums and service delivery is in the best interest of people's leaders to push for and fight for because, at the end of the day, that is how the culture is going to get built with how people feel, how people can get information, and how they can interact with each other. And I think obviously we live in a world today where remote work is significantly higher than it was pre-pandemic, even if not everyone has adopted it, and that makes it that much more important to focus.

Daan van Rossum: Yes, exactly. Because the more remote that we work, the more that really those digital tools are the interface to the company. And maybe to a degree, they feel like they are the company. 

I think there's a really good point and that links to our topic about AI in terms of something as simple as knowledge basis. If everyone is on different platforms, it's going to be really hard to get a holistic view of what does this organization know. What's the knowledge that we have together. 

Let's actually jump into that topic, because I know that you also founded a new community called the PeopleGPT. So maybe you can share a little bit, your view on AI, Generative AI, and how this is going to impact organizations. 

Q Hamirani: I think, Gen AI, we're still all figuring it out. So that's the first point to note, which is really unique for HR being in this profession, because normally HR is looked on as the go-to  for upskilling and making sure employees get all the right skills. In this case, we're all figuring it out together. So with that caveat of laying that stage, I do think Gen AI, the deeper I've gotten into it in the last six months, field under the hood, I think the impact on the organization is so vast. And what I mean by that is that it's across the board.

We can decouple this into two pieces. One is that the impact on HR internally is huge. The simplest, easiest example is that you can write a job description within a few minutes with Gen AI, and it comes out pretty, beautifully. So that's just one example, or in addition to several use cases in recruiting and automation, all that fun stuff. I think the real aha moment I had with Gen AI was how it can impact HR business partnering with the entire organization because every function, some more than others, is going to go through a transformation in how people do their work and, in turn, how organizations are designed within that team based on how much Gen AI can be used. So, for example, sales, content, and marketing seem to be the ones that will have a lot of impact, but that doesn't mean engineering is not going to have an impact.

A very simple use case that I've talked about or worked through is. This is an example; it's not true, but say an organization has four engineers to code in four different languages or platforms. Tomorrow, we may need one engineer because Gen AI can translate the Python code into whatever language you need it in.

So to me, if you have fewer entry-level engineers, the tool can help you duplicate or replicate it. That means you need fewer middle managers. So right away, it's okay. You'll have fewer junior engineers in this example, fewer middle layers, but I do think you'll need to have more senior folks because they will need to figure out the architecture.

I've not programmed in a long time, but I tried playing with it, and I created Python code for something I was playing with. And I had no idea if it was right or wrong. You need an engineer who knows. So it's not going to replace humans completely, is my point, but that's just an example of the future of organizational design for that engineering team.

Is it going to be flat now because we don't have so many people and we don't have some middle managers, and then the million-dollar question is: how do you retain them? How do you promote growth? How do you provide that career ladder when the organization is relatively flatter? So all our people programs need to be reassessed. How do you manage performance when you don't have middle layers and you're now doing it at different layers?

So I think the impact is so broad, and as you can tell from our conversation, it's not all figured out, which is the exciting part of where we are in our journey, but also, some would say, the scary part. It's an opportunity.

To answer your question, I think Gen AI, especially for HR, is going to be a really fun but challenging time because, A, we're figuring stuff out with the rest of the organization and the world in terms of the real impacts, and B, we're going to need to support every single organization with every single function within our organization in some form or another to adapt it, be it organizational design, be it safety, or be it policy. That's why I started the community, PeopleGPT. Because of our initial elevator pitch, I entered the field of HR because I had that technology mindset. So I jumped into the technology piece, and that worked out to my benefit because, in the last decade, technology has really advanced. I don't think that's the natural comfort zone for a lot of people, especially leaders, who are not up in a technology-centric or geeky way like I am.

So the whole point of the community is: let's bring each other along. I know you're part of it. You share some amazing research as well as all the stuff you're doing. Because collectively, we can learn from each other. It's less about, I know, I don't know most of it stuff, but I know people are working on cool stuff.

I'm hoping that can be a small part that we can play in helping the function really understand the impacts in a simplified way. So that we can all be better HR professionals through our careers.

Daan van Rossum: I really want to speak to that point of the kind of the anxiety and the stress around technology because I do think that obviously we are in this world and we speak to a lot of other Chief People Officers and CHROs and there really is a lot of kind of unease around now yet another technology that they have to understand.

And I think you just made a great point Q around how you're talking to people in the business that are maybe also looking at you to understand the major implications on workforce planning, for example. 

One of the topics that came up in the community and then you look at something like you mentioned the example of engineering. You could say the same for a sales organization, where basically you need maybe less SDRs because a lot of that work can be automated. Therefore you need more people who then actually take the human conversation that totally changes how you do sales.

How can HRs, especially, those who are maybe a little bit less comfortable with technology, how can they understand at least the basics of this so they can have those conversations with the business?

Q Hamirani: I think the easiest way to do it is to just jump into it. There's a lot of good work, even from your organization, that's being put out. I think you guys recently put out the top 150 or top 100 Gen AI applications, which is a great way.

My point here is that there's no easy way to just wait for it. You have to jump into it. You have to want to understand it. I watched hours of YouTube videos. There's a lot of good content out there that simplifies things. I think every HR professional needs to jump into it and find their entry points. For some, it may be the community we've started and we're helping simplify things, and for others, it may be YouTube, whatever the medium is, but don't wait because, at the end of the day, I don't think AI is going to replace our jobs. I think what's going to replace our jobs as humans who understand how to use AI is going to replace other humans jobs.

So, let's don't sit on the sidelines; jump into it. I can't tell you that I've spoken to quite a few people who've not even used Chat GPT at all. And I think sometimes it's just a matter of sitting down with them. I sat with one friend for 10 minutes and opened up Chat GPT. And I said, Ask it to do a job description; ask it anything. And the rest, then he was down his own rabbit hole. So I think you need that entry point, jump into it, and find the right way that you can learn. Otherwise, it's not going to come just to you.

And I would say the other point on that, in the spirit of learning and jumping in, is to also see what function within your organization is already using Gen AI and try to lean on that. So I heard from an organization that their customer experience is using Gen AI for servicing their customers, which is a pretty common use case.

The HR team actually jumped on that to see how they could implement that into servicing employees. But to do that, they got a little crash course on what it really is. Almost every organization today, I would hope, or think pretty soon is, dabbling with Gen AI in some form or another, like Paper; it's an Ed Tech company, but we do tutoring and we're using humans in the loop, but Gen AI is with a lot of the tutoring efforts.

Pick on that function that's doing it if you don't know where to start and ask; maybe do a lunch and learn; or maybe have knowledge sharing. So tap into your own existing networks or find, or seek out, mediums that are comfortable for you to digest content, be it a podcast or a video. There's tons of content out there today.

Be proactive and be willing to jump into it. All I can say is that after playing with it for a while, this seems to me, in my 20-plus-year career, the easiest technology to understand only because it's so conversational. It's crazy. It's like me talking to you, and I literally feel like I'm cloning friends and talking to friends, and they're spitting out stuff like that. It's pretty crazy.

Obviously, proceed with caution, especially when you're doing things. I'm not sure if this is a disclaimer before I say this; it's also great for providing legal advice, but that doesn't mean I act on it completely. You had to do some sanity checks, but it's amazing. It's so conversational. It's so easy. Just try it out, and the rest will be history—almost a guarantee from my own experience, I would say.

Daan van Rossum: I think you're really hit it with that idea of this is probably the most human technology that has ever been invented. So if there was ever a technology that is easy to pick up, it's this one.

I think that idea, that's very practical kind of idea of just go to someone in your organization or a team in your organization that's already using it, learn from that, but then also use that spotlight them towards the rest of the organization to say, here's a great use case. How can we all be more like them?

What can we learn from them? How could you implement it in your team? Because sometimes it may feel just a little bit too far from our daily reality. So if we see in our companies that another team is already using it. That may just be what people need to think, wait, if they can use it for that, we can use it for that.

So I think that's a great.

Q Hamirani: It makes it more relatable and it's in your same realm. So you feel comfortable as well. 

Daan van Rossum: Absolutely. Okay. I think that was a super good call to action at the end of our talk today. 

Thanks so much for being on, and definitely, we'll have to do a part two, three, four, five, and until a thousand. Okay Q, thanks so much.