People + Strategy Podcast Perspectives: Fall 2025

Build Psychological Safety Around 3 Core Questions 

“Psychological safety can be defined in a lot of complex ways, but I like to define it simply as the condition of feeling secure. Not job security, but a certain level of comfort. And there are three big questions that account for employees’ psychological safety. 

No. 1: Do you care about me? I know I need to be here to have a fully staffed team, but do you really care about me? 

No. 2: Are you committed to me as much as you ask me to be committed to you? And No. 3: Would you tell me if things changed for me? In other words, can I trust you?”

— Dennis A. Davis, National Director of Client Training at Ogletree Deakins

Move Employee Experience from Soft to Strategic

“Sometimes it feels like employee experience is this thing companies do just because they want all their employees to be happy. And we certainly want employees to be happy. But employee experience drives productivity and productivity drives business results, so employees that are engaged result in happy customers.   

“We have a lot of data at Cisco and we do a lot of sensing and surveying. And we know that employees who are getting regular attention from their leaders are three times more likely to be engaged and have significantly higher performance ratings. So there’s a  straight line that we see from employee engagement to happy customers.” 

— Kelly Jones, Chief People Officer at Cisco 

Step Outside Work to Understand Your Workforce 

“I seek out volunteer opportunities so that I’m not just getting fed through work, but I’m also getting fed through my personal life. ... And I think we don’t really understand what a lived experience can look like [for our employees] if we’re not exposed to what’s going on for people on a daily basis.   

“When CHROs are volunteering and taking that learning back to their teams and their organizations, it not only can inspire volunteerism within the organization, but it shows that it matters to us, as leaders, what’s happening in our community and what our employees are experiencing every day. That way, we can hopefully better address the needs they have and how that’s impacting their work experience.”

— Jinah Chernivec , CHRO at Goodwill-Easter Seals Minnesota

Give Feedback That Is Personal and ‘Camera-Lens’ True 

“Whatever I might have accomplished had more to do with leaders that I worked for who sometimes saw more in me than I saw in myself. They had the courage and the good nature to give me feedback. Some of it was really hard to hear, but all of it made me better. And I worry today that the feedback culture in most companies is more watered down and much more safe.  

“The best feedback has to be personal. It can’t be generic. Back at Pepsi, we used to have a term called ‘camera-lens feedback,’ which meant that if you’re going to give somebody feedback, it needed to be something that you have seen, like a camera would witness someone, as opposed to third-party feedback, which makes people defensive and paranoid. ”

— Kevin Cox, Former CHRO at GE and Pepsi Bottling Group

Remove the Noise of HR to Restore the Humanity

“Our workforce is going to change dramatically. ... And we need to start to think about how we can add the human back into the process. It’s not all about, ‘Machines are going to do everything and we’re not thinking anymore.’ It’s about where we can have higher and better use of our humanity and create those connections with people that we’re not able to do right now because we have such an administrative burden.   

“[Generative AI tools] can take some of the noise out of the work that we have and allow us to get back to the people part of HR, which is really why we all want to be here in the first place.” 

— Kathleen Pearson, CHRO at McDermott Will & Schulte 

To Sustain Your Strength, Honor Your Boundaries 

“The HR profession, like education and health care, requires you to create space for others at times, and it requires higher levels of compassion and empathy. Those are wonderful gifts. But oftentimes I’m finding that people within those fields are more prone to compassion fatigue and burnout, because people with higher levels of empathy and compassion tend to be pretty awful sometimes at setting boundaries.   

“That’s because the voice inside of us — our ‘inner pleaser’ — is very much in tune with what other people think about us and how we’re serving them. These pleaser parts in us are very driven to create these spaces where we’re available often. And that can surpass the needs and resets that people need for themselves to keep those wonderful gifts afloat.”

— Leah Marone, Psychotherapist at Yale University