Stop cutting heads, start expanding what's possible

I began my HR career at Toys R Us. That job helped put me through college, and I'm still grateful for it because it introduced me to HR and to people from every walk of life.

From there, I moved to US Synthetic, a manufacturing company that was the complete opposite of retail. What drew me in was its culture and philosophy.

Next came Goldman Sachs, a world-class builder of professionals, where I developed much of my foundational knowledge and my ways of operating.

Now I'm at TaxBit, and I think I'm addicted to startup life. I love the impact I can have here and the chance to learn from colleagues who are experts in their fields at a much smaller company than Goldman.

That mix of experiences has shaped how I think about culture, generations, and, more recently, AI.

This article is based on Lydia's fantastic podcast episode, which you can watch in full here:

Everyone wants to do a good job

Even though TaxBit is a startup, we have a real breadth of generations.

We rely heavily on people with institutional knowledge in complex tax and accounting areas, so I've had a good view of different generations working together in something like an isolated think tank.

My most important observation is simple: regardless of age, people want to show up to work and do a good job. I don't think 99.99% of people arrive thinking they'll mess up everything that day on purpose. Holding onto that baseline belief matters.

Where I've seen friction is in how different generations interpret what "good" looks like. Someone from an older generation may approach things more narrowly because a particular way of working has served them well for 15 or 20 years.

They prefer specific ways of operating and specific modes of communication because those are tried and tested. Younger employees may pick up tasks quickly and do them efficiently, but they sometimes miss the bigger picture.

They complete task A without seeing how it affects department Z, simply because they haven't been in the role long enough.

Most of the clashes I've seen don't come from a lack of respect across generations. They come from unmet expectations around how people want to operate, how they define good work, and the impact they're having.

Striking the balance on hours

I've been part of conversations where a younger employee pushes back and says, "I need to go home. I end at five. That's the end of my day."

I've also seen the other end of the spectrum, where people who've been in the field longer understand that sometimes you have to put in longer hours.

The goal is balance. We don't want anyone burned out, but urgent priorities do come up.

The question is how to bridge that gap so we aren't encroaching on personal time, which is important, while still getting done what needs to happen.

Transparency is earned on both sides

In my experience, younger generations expect more communication and transparency. "Demand" might be a strong word, but it's close.

At Goldman Sachs, which also had an open culture, if a managing director told you to do something, you sometimes did it first and asked why later.

At TaxBit, we're a smaller company and everyone is invested in our future, so there's a greater expectation that we'll explain why a decision is being made.

That expectation helps bring people along. There's a big difference between saying, "You need to work overtime, end of story," and saying, "We need to land this big client, so you'll need to work a couple of extra hours this week to make it happen."

Allowing and expecting that conversation is one of the good things that has come from mixing generations.

It works in the other direction too. If three out of four times I say yes to overtime because you've been transparent about why, then the fourth time I can say, "I really can't this time because of childcare needs or a family event."

You earn transparency on both sides.

Sometimes transparency is also a lesson learned the hard way. When a company messes up and it ends up all over social media because someone was recording, the rest of us learn through their pain and can do better.

What culture actually means

When I think about shaping culture, I take it back to operating fundamentals. How do we want to operate as a company across departments and roles?

How do we want to communicate with each other, and what modes of communication are acceptable? How do we want to grow, and how do managers and HR support that growth? And how do we want to have fun together?

We can look to peers to see what other companies have done successfully, but we also run internal conversations to find where people need more support or feel there's a gap.

Culture shows up in tangible ways. If there's a culture of communicating respectfully, you'll be called out when you don't.

At TaxBit, it also shows up in our five cultural values. One of them is "win together," which brings an element of fun into the workplace. We work hard, but we also want to unwind together.

That keeps things human. If you're in a different city and I never see your face, it's easy not to care. But if we've interacted in some fun way, I care about you as a person, and that carries into the work we do together.

Setting the tone from day one

HR's biggest role in sustaining culture, the way we do it, starts at onboarding. We were intentional about explaining how TaxBit communicates, and in some ways about giving new hires permission.

Our onboarding training includes a whole section on communication methods: email, calendar, Slack, and how to be mindful of different time zones.

We also remind people not to write anything down or say anything over the Wi-Fi that they wouldn't want to read in front of their mother. Then we cover how to use Slack, and we explicitly give people permission to use emojis and GIFs.

That starts them off on the right foot. Nobody has to wonder whether this is a place where they can show some personality or send a humorous GIF in response to a situation.

(That said, my professional pet peeve is the overuse of memes and emojis. If a conversation is serious and someone responds with a GIF, it's a little cringe. Use them at the appropriate time and place.)

Culture also plays into hiring. Someone can be an incredible interviewee, but we also like to bring candidates to lunch with the team. It's a great experience for them because they get a free lunch and meet great people.

It also lets us see how they interact on a personal level, without the structure and preparation an interview allows. You passed the interview; now let's see how you fit in with the team.

AI and the generational myth

People often assume older generations struggle with technology. I have seen some friction around AI, but not in the way you might expect.

It often comes from leadership saying, "We need to implement this immediately." They're looking for ways to work better and faster, but they may not fully understand the impact of the technology they're asking younger employees to use.

I have a lot of grace for older generations here. An older boomer has gone from primarily paper-based work all the way to AI.

They've seen the full spectrum, and in my experience that makes them more adaptable and willing to try new technology because they've lived through so many iterations of it.

Younger, digitally native employees can be more set in how they already use technology.

So the conflict sometimes looks like the older generation saying, "This is new and shiny, let's implement it," and the younger generation saying, "But we're working just fine right now."

The job I'll retire from hasn't been invented yet

What comforts me when I think about AI entering the workforce is the computer revolution of the '80s and '90s. I wasn't alive in the '80s, but I imagine workers then watched computers arrive, replace jobs, and automate tasks, and wondered what they would do next.

Computers were incredibly scary, and they did revolutionize how we work. I think we're going through the same thing now; we just can't yet see how it will open up in the future.

In college, I was told that the job I'd retire from hadn't been invented yet. That was about ten years ago, and it didn't really stick at the time. Now it's coming true.

We're living through the period when those jobs are being invented, and if I can help shape what my job will look like, I want to dive in and be involved.

Survival versus thriving

Our CEO and leadership team have been supportive of experimenting with AI, and trying new things with the resources we've paid for is widely accepted.

But on the HR team, we're very aware of the announcements that seem to come out every other day about companies cutting 40% of their workforce because of AI. There's a real temptation for companies to use AI as the reason to cut headcount.

My friend Winston Blythe, who has a psychology background and now works in AI, framed this for me using Maslow's hierarchy of needs. At the bottom is survival.

Companies that cut people and have AI replace their work are just surviving.

Companies that let people experiment, keep their headcount, and ask how AI can make employees' lives better move toward the thriving stage, which is about expanding what's possible.

That reframing has been helpful as I think about our strategy and how we talk with leadership about where AI should fill gaps. If you cut people and replace them with AI, you're capping how far your company could go.

What an AI workshop looks like

Recently, our team dedicated an entire day to AI. We talked about how we were currently using it, what we wanted to use it for, and what tangible takeaways could make a real impact.

Many of us came in at the "we don't know what we don't know" stage. We'd heard AI is great, but we're not necessarily technical. I don't have a software engineering background, so my view of AI's future is limited.

Getting in a room together and sharing what we wanted to see happen, even pipe dreams that may never come to fruition, opened our minds to what's possible and where we want to experiment more.

It also connects to how HR supports change. If the directive is that people have to use AI, HR can come in and show them how.

That's transparency and demystification in action: giving people tangible ways to use AI tools so nobody sits quietly in a corner waiting for something to happen.

One question we discussed was hiring. If our recruiter sees only AI-generated resumes and then uses AI to screen them, where is the human part? The AI will put on the resume everything it thinks we want to see.

By the time we reach the human conversation, we may be wasting time because the candidate doesn't have the skills the AI claimed. I don't have an answer yet. We're in a trial-and-error period of figuring out when AI is too much and when we need to pull back and be more human-centered.

Keeping the question of how to preserve the human element at the forefront is a good guiding principle.

Using AI with healthy mistrust

Another idea I keep in mind is the Chinese room analogy, which dates from the '80s. Picture an English speaker in a room whose only input is a message in Chinese. Their only resources are Chinese-to-English phrase books.

They translate the message and send it back out. But if those phrase books are wrong, outdated, or based on the Chinese of the 1300s, the output won't be good.

I apply that to AI as input and output. It can deliver really good results, but if the input isn't strong or correct, you have to mistrust the output.

Some people treat AI as the be-all and end-all. It seems to hold a lot of wisdom, but it's really pattern matching. A little mistrust is part of thinking critically and using it well.

Personally, I rarely use the first iteration AI gives me. I cross-test it across platforms, drafting in Gemini, then putting it into ChatGPT and comparing the two. I'm also upfront with my boss.

I'll tell her I drafted something with AI and made my own notes, so she knows the level of thought I put in and that I'm not misrepresenting anything. And if there are any weird quirks, we can blame the AI.

Where AI will make a difference in HR

On the HR side, I think AI will replace a lot of manual work, such as onboarding people into systems or running certain processes.

But the human element will become even more important. Someone needs to audit things like AI-produced training to make sure it makes sense and isn't just AI slop.

Connecting with the business and understanding its needs will matter more than ever.

Some of the most exciting uses I've seen involve training. You can create an escape room game that teaches people about products or topics as they play, a novel way to make information stick. AI can also create something like a pilot simulation for any role.

Meeting notes are another big one. And if I get three or four pages of notes, I may not read them.

But I could put them into NotebookLM and turn them into a ten-minute podcast. That's a creative way to receive information in a format that works better for me.

People will always come first

The misconception that hurts my feelings when I see it on TikTok or Reddit is that HR doesn't care about you and only cares about the company.

Our HR team is incredible, does a lot of work for employees, and advocates for them. Not every HR person may think this way, but for me, people and employees will always come first, even as we move into an AI-centered world.

I understand why the reputation exists. HR is often present at the worst moments of someone's career.

I hold one-on-one check-ins with everyone at the company around their work anniversary, and I sometimes joke that we don't usually talk one-on-one, and that's a good thing.

When I do have to sit in on difficult conversations, I go back to transparency. I want to do everything I can to make sure the person understands why they're there, because it's a little easier when negative news isn't a complete surprise.

That's the advice I give the managers and leaders I support: be as transparent as possible and have the difficult conversation. It will make everything down the line easier for you and everyone else.

AI will keep changing how we work, but we can never forget the human element. Humans have to come first. Otherwise, we're in for a dark world.