HR Voices

(with guest Anne Buchanan, Chief People Officer, Guitar Center)

An employee’s bereavement leave after his spouse’s death ends after five days, per policy, but he’s clearly not okay. His manager quietly covers for him instead of escalating. Three weeks in, his work has stalled and his teammates are absorbing it without complaint, for now. Everyone is running on compassion and nobody is following a process, and the goodwill won’t last. Anne explains why a manager handling things alone is usually the real risk, and what HR can offer once it’s finally brought in.

What you’ll hear in this episode:

• Why managers keep things from HR, and what it says about your culture when they think escalating will hurt the employee
• Why people tolerate unequal treatment when they trust it’s being handled professionally, and resent it when it’s handled quietly
• Who to bring in first when a situation like this surfaces late, from the leave and accommodations team to the senior executive who shouldn’t be caught off guard
• How to ask a grieving employee what they need in plain language and let HR translate it into PTO, FMLA, intermittent leave, or a phased return
• What to tell the team when you don’t have the employee’s consent to share details, and how to shift their focus to covering the work
• Why documentation protects everyone involved, including the employee, when a preferential-treatment complaint shows up months later

About Anne Buchanan:
Anne is Chief People Officer at Guitar Center, where she leads the people function for a retail workforce. She’s known for treating policy as a set of guardrails rather than a script, and for working toward a goal she states plainly: ten years from now, employees should look back on their hardest moments at work and feel they were supported.

HR Voices is brought to you by AllVoices. When issues escalate, AllVoices gives HR one place to manage leave and accommodation requests, coordinate with managers, and record every step. That way, if a complaint about the situation comes in later, the full history is already there. See how it works at allvoices.co.

(with guest Mhyrynde Noah, Director of Compliance & Benefits, Sojitz Corporation of America)

A salary spreadsheet meant only for the comp committee goes out to the entire company. It’s live for four hours. Pay gaps by gender and tenure are suddenly the subject of every Slack DM, and HR has to decide whether to address it head-on or let it settle. Silence will look exactly like what everyone already suspects. Mirinda works through the scenario with Rebecca and makes the case that the leak created the crisis, but it didn’t create the inequity.

What you’ll hear in this episode:

• Why the leak and the pay gaps are two separate problems, and why treating this purely as a confidentiality breach backfires
• Who needs to know within the first 30 minutes, and why it’s worth asking whether the “accident” really was one
• What the first message to employees should say, and why “please delete this immediately” only adds fuel when employees have a legal right to discuss pay
• How to investigate a pay gap beyond current salaries: starting pay, promotion timing, bias in performance reviews, career interruptions, and geography
• How tenure-based pay compression, return-to-office commute costs, and company culture shape what employees see as unfair, even when the numbers hold up
• How to pace updates so people trust the process without getting daily emails, plus Mhyrynde’s advice for the first ten minutes after the bad news lands

About Mhyrynde Noah:
Mhyrynde is Director of Compliance & Benefits at Sojitz Corporation of America. She works where compensation, benefits, and compliance meet, including the challenge of updating a tenure-focused corporate pay philosophy for US markets like New York and San Francisco.

HR Voices is brought to you by AllVoices. When a pay concern turns into a formal complaint, AllVoices gives HR and ER teams one place to take in concerns, run investigations, and document every step, so nothing lives in a Slack thread or someone’s inbox. See how it works at allvoices.co.

(with guest Heather Krueger, Chief People Officer at Engine)

Two finalists. One spent three years at a household-name company, but joined after the IPO, once the hard part was over. The other spent three years living through a layoff, a near-collapse, and growth with no playbook, and has the less impressive resume to show for it. Leadership wants the logo. The hiring manager wants the person who has already proven they can function when everything’s on fire, and now has to win that argument with people who’ve only read the resumes.

What you’ll hear in this episode:

• Why “are we hiring the logo or the person?” is really two different decisions, and why the biggest red flag in this scenario is how leadership is reasoning, not which candidate wins
• The “how” questions that cut through polished, AI-assisted interview answers: how did you handle it when the roadmap changed three times in a quarter, or when everything was an emergency?
• How Heather uses interview transcripts and AI to map a new hire’s gaps against the job description, then builds the onboarding plan around those gaps, because the hiring manager owns the person’s success, not just the decision
• What a 30-to-60-day “incubation period” of modeled behavior looks like, and how an operating rhythm helps leaders be shock absorbers instead of shock amplifiers
• Why Heather reads LinkedIn more than resumes, hires non-HR people onto her HR team, and considers a realistic job preview the biggest gift you can give a candidate
• Why an interview panel where everyone agrees might mean your assessment has a blind spot

About Heather Krueger:
Heather Krueger is Chief People Officer at Engine. She has led people teams through more than one high-growth company, so she knows how brutal the first six months of a scaling role can be. She’s skeptical of resumes, a fan of hiring HR people who didn’t start in HR, and runs her people function like a product org: if employees don’t feel the value, it’s just a tax.

HR Voices is a podcast by AllVoices, the AI-powered employee relations platform for HR teams who handle the hard stuff. Learn more at allvoices.co.

(with Adam Goldman, CHRO at Cacique Foods)

Your step-count challenge got a standing ovation from the exec team. It also passed legal review as ADA compliant. And it’s quietly telling employees with disabilities to choose between disclosing private health information, begging for an exemption, or paying more than their coworkers. Unwinding it without torching a program leadership loves is harder than it looks, especially when you’re the one who launched it.

What you’ll hear in this episode:

• Why “not technically a penalty” doesn’t hold up when some employees can’t reach the discount at all
• How most wellness programs end up rewarding the people who were already healthy, and what “meeting people where they are” looks like instead
• How to tell leadership you missed something without calling it a failure, by framing the fix as phase two rather than a do-over
• Why an annual physical will likely do more for your healthcare costs than 10,000 steps ever will
• How to design one program for a workforce split across an HQ, production floors, and sales reps who spend half the day in the car
• Why the most mediocre HR teams protect the process instead of the result, and how to keep pride of authorship from getting in your way

About Adam Goldman:
Adam is CHRO at Cacique Foods, where he leads HR across a headquarters office, two manufacturing facilities, and a remote sales team spread over more than a dozen states. After spending most of his career in California, he now works from Texas and brings a strong bias for results over process. He’s also the HR leader who will tell you to get out of your office and walk the grocery aisles with a sales rep.

HR Voices is brought to you by AllVoices, the employee relations platform for HR teams who’d rather catch issues before they become backfires.

(with guest Jaime Akers, VP of Team Member Relations at Hilton Grand Vacations)

For two years, an employee's performance reviews were drafted by AI and lightly edited by her manager, and she only found out because the tool credited her with a project she never touched. The AI isn't really what stings. It's the question underneath it: has anyone actually been paying attention to her work? Now HR has to decide whether this is a performance management failure, a documentation integrity problem, or both, and what it means for every review that manager has ever delivered.

What you'll hear in this episode:

• Why the first move is to pause and notice your own thinking before bias quietly becomes your conclusion
• Why your AI acceptable-use policy, not your personal judgment, has to anchor the investigation, because consistency breeds credibility
• How a "hallucinated" project might actually be a botched redaction, and why that still doesn't let the manager off the hook
• Where a policy violation ends and a coaching moment begins, and why the cover-up is usually what turns one into the other
• Why a performance review is a moment of connection, not a writing exercise, and what repair looks like when that connection breaks
• The case for one-page policies, since legal and compliance are usually the only ones reading page two

About Jaime Akers:
Jaime Akers is vice president of Team Member Relations at Hilton Grand Vacations, where she leads the Team Member Relations Center of Excellence in the Human Resources department and initiatives focused on employee relations and leadership partnership. With over two decades of experience spanning hospitality, gaming, technology, financial services and human resources, Jaime is passionate about building people-centered workplaces that balance human connection with business performance and the evolving future of work. She is a global HR executive, doctoral researcher and advocate for modern leadership practices that foster trust, accountability, and engagement.

Outside of work, Jaime is a member of a running club in Las Vegas and recently completed the Ragnar Trail Soldier Hollow relay in Utah with her team. She adores her husband and two children and brings energy, curiosity and a commitment to growth into everything she does. Those same qualities shape her leadership approach and reflect her belief in continuous learning, both professionally and personally.

HR Voices is a podcast by AllVoices, the employee relations case management and whistleblower hotline platform built for situations exactly like this one. Learn more at allvoices.co.

(with guest Jeremy Edmonds, EVP of People & Culture at Snooze)

An employee under a performance investigation has been secretly recording every one-on-one with his manager for eight months, in a two-party consent state where that's illegal without disclosure. Now, he wants HR to treat the recordings as proof that his manager set him up to fail. The evidence may be both illegally obtained and true, and choosing to use it or ignore it each carries risk. Jeremy, who has spent 25 years in HR, explains why the urge to act fast is the real trap.

What you'll hear in this episode:

• Why Jeremy splits this into two "swim lanes," the employee's complaint and the recording itself, and why you can't sweep either one under the rug
• How to get what's in the recordings without listening to them, by asking the employee to walk you through the moments they think prove their case
• Why the risk of using the recordings depends on the likely outcome: coaching a manager is a very different decision from terminating one
• The two intake questions that reframe the whole case: "What changed eight months ago?" and "Have you raised this with anyone before now?"
• Why, in 25 years, Jeremy has never seen a manager deliberately set someone up to fail, and what's usually going on instead
• How consistent investigation practices have won him court cases, and why "if it's not documented, it didn't happen"

About Jeremy Edmonds:
Jeremy Edmonds is EVP of People & Culture at Snooze, an A.M. Eatery. In 25 years in HR, he's built his approach to employee relations around separating the issues, bringing in legal early, and documenting everything as if it will end up in court.

HR Voices is a podcast by AllVoices. If you're juggling investigations like this one, see how AllVoices helps HR teams keep case documentation consistent and defensible at allvoices.co.

(with guest Chris Corneen, CHRO at MSI)

An employee reports financial irregularities in her department. The investigation confirms she was right, and also finds that she went along with some of the irregularities before she decided to speak up. Now HR has to protect her from retaliation and hold her accountable for her own part, at the same time. And everyone who's thinking about reporting something someday is watching to see how it plays out.

What you'll hear in this episode:

• Why Chris assumes the information has already spread before the complainant even walks in, and why a well-meaning manager running their own side investigation can do more damage than the person being accused
• Why a judge or the EEOC isn't asking whether you reached the right conclusion, only whether your conclusion was reasonable given a sound process (sixth-grade math rules apply: show your work)
• How letting scope, not the clock, drive the investigation keeps it moving, and why what looks like time pressure is often a different problem you can solve directly
• The "funnel" interview approach: start broad, play a little dumb, and hold off on confronting anyone until you've seen where their story starts to fall apart
• How to flip retaliation protection into something more useful, by putting in writing that the whistleblower did the right thing before you ever ask about their own role
• Why a delay in reporting is only one data point, why the reason behind it matters more, and why you'd better run the best investigation of your career if it ends with disciplining a whistleblower

About Chris Corneen:
Chris is the CHRO at MSI, where investigations are part of the job, whether that means coaching business partners through their own cases or reviewing work before it goes out the door. Chris has defended investigations in front of the EEOC and other federal agencies and has seen firsthand how they get picked apart. Chris's advice for anyone handling a case like this for the first time: go get help, and know whether your organization expects you to ask a peer or escalate to your manager.

HR Voices is brought to you by AllVoices. Chris's rule for every investigation is simple: the process will get more scrutiny than the outcome. AllVoices gives ER teams one place to document every intake, interview, and decision, so when someone asks how you got there, the answer is already written down. Learn more at allvoices.co.

(with guest Alissa Horn, Senior Director of Global Investigations and Employee Relations at Mattel)

An employee files an ethics complaint about their manager's expense reports. One week later, that same manager puts them on a PIP. The performance concerns are real, but nobody ever documented them or raised them with the employee. Now HR has to figure out whether this is a legitimate performance conversation with terrible timing or retaliation dressed up as process, knowing that from the outside the two can look exactly the same.

What you'll hear in this episode:

• Why the timing isn't actually the biggest red flag here, and why a PIP with no prior coaching or documentation is the real problem
• Why filing a complaint doesn't put a "bubble of protection" around an employee who isn't meeting expectations
• What changes when investigations are handled by an independent ER function instead of the HR business partner who sits next to that leader in succession planning an hour later
• What to tell the subject's manager when an investigation opens, what to hold back on purpose, and why uncorroborated details can permanently change how a manager sees their employee
• The questions that reveal whether a PIP is weaponized: Is it an outlier? Is the manager following the documented process? Is HR?
• How to handle a leader who wants to proceed anyway, starting with whether the person you're talking to is senior enough to own that risk for the company

About Alissa Horn:
Alissa leads global investigations and employee relations at Mattel. She started her career as an HR business partner before moving into ER, and she's spent roughly 15 years running investigations, which gives her a rare view of both sides of the HRBP–investigator relationship that this scenario puts under pressure. Her parting advice for anyone facing this for the first time: you don't have to have the answer right away.

HR Voices is brought to you by AllVoices. If this episode made you wonder whether your complaints, investigations, and performance documentation live in separate places that never talk to each other, that's exactly the gap AllVoices helps ER and HR teams close. Learn more at allvoices.co.

(with guest Michelle Spencer Fourney, Global Director of Employee Relations at Zscaler)

A manager tells HR she's "pretty sure" an employee has undiagnosed ADHD — based on nothing but his disorganization — and asks whether she can require a psych evaluation before granting more deadline extensions. He's never disclosed a condition or asked for an accommodation. In this episode, host Rebecca Taylor and Michelle Spencer Fourney dig into what happens when good intentions turn into an amateur diagnosis, and why "pretty sure" is never a basis for anything. It's a scenario built on assumption stacked on assumption — and untangling it means going back to the one thing that's actually documented: performance.

What you'll hear in this episode:

• Why a manager's well-meaning guess about a disability can create more legal exposure than the performance issue it was meant to solve
• A framework for sequencing a hard HR conversation: start with what's easy (performance), save the harder disability conversation for last
• How to tell the difference between witnessed behavior and a diagnosis — and why HR should never let a manager blur the two
• What to actually ask a manager who suspects an employee is using an accommodation as an "excuse" for poor performance
• Why HR almost never talks to the employee directly in these situations — and what that says about the invisible work HR does
• How to turn a manager's success in a moment like this into a training story that builds a peer network of better managers

About Michelle Spencer Fourney:
Michelle is Global Director of Employee Relations at Zscaler, where she navigates the highest-stakes, most ambiguous conversations HR has with managers — the ones involving disability, performance, and everything tangled up in between. Her approach: start where it's easy, protect the employee's privacy, and never lose the manager in the process of coaching them through it.

(with guest Maggie Lansdale, Global VP of People at Cannondale)

An employee walks out the door and finally tells the truth: a director has been verbally abusive to junior staff for years. She never reported it while employed because she didn't trust the process, and now she won't put her name on it. HR has credible detail, a witness who won't go on record, and a director who's otherwise a top performer that leadership doesn't want to lose. Rebecca and Maggie dig into what happens next — and why the version of the story you're told first is rarely the whole story.

What you'll hear in this episode:

• Why people save their honest feedback for the exit interview — and what that says about whether your process is actually trusted
• How to weigh a "brilliant jerk's" revenue against the quiet cost of the talent walking out the door underneath them
• Why the order you talk to people in (junior staff, peers, leadership, then the director) changes what you're able to find out
• How to hear "verbal abuse" or "toxic workplace" without assuming you already know what happened — and why the words people reach for aren't always the legal definition
• What to actually document when nothing rises to a formal complaint yet, so a pattern doesn't take two or three years to become undeniable
• How cultural and communication differences change what abuse, feedback, or a manager's bluntness even looks like across a team

About Maggie Lansdale:
Maggie is Global VP of People at Cannondale, where she leads the people function across a global, multi-location team. With a career built inside HR teams of various sizes — from scrappy startups tracking everything in a Google Doc to global operations — she's spent years untangling exactly this kind of case: credible allegations, no formal complaint, and a leadership team reluctant to act. She's a go-to "HR buddy" for practitioners working through hard calls alone.