Working with the C-Level from an HR perspective with Maria Kamischke

Thomas Kohler:
Today’s guest, Maria Kamischke. Do you also have certain frameworks in place? What you can use in terms of maybe there is a business case for a certain, I don’t know, you want to roll out compensation plans and then a bonus structure for commercial, for a commercial unit. Is there already something that you regularly build out or is there something what you would individually build for companies?

Maria Kamischke:
I would always build it individually for companies. But the way how you build it can be basically recycled for a use case or for instance, getting budget for benefits. For instance, oftentimes question that the business asks is, okay, how can we measure return on invest? Because it costs a lot of money, but how can we make sure that the people will be actually using it? Does it actually meet a need? And I mean, when you ask for a certain budget for a certain benefit, I would assume you have been already doing some research in terms of what is actually needed for the business. How does your employee group look like? Are they all in the same location? Are they office space, remote? Are they, at what age are they, what’s like, what are the characteristics of the Personas in your company? And Personas is, for instance, a methodology from marketing which you can use to group individuals into certain stereotypes of employees. And through that, you make it somewhat comprehensive to give a narrative and a storyline to the business on why you would need certain benefits and hence certain budget to make sure that you meet the needs of these employees. You can also, and this is often used, do an employee survey and ask employees for benefits. And you will always get answers. But you will also get people who will be dissatisfied with the outcome, because what you basically do is ask adults for a wish list for center, more or less.

And then you find yourself not being center, but being somebody who needs to ask for budget. And you will have maybe like, let’s say a top five of benefits, but you can’t tackle them all at once. But you need, like, for instance, this year you focus on one or two of them, and the year after, you can assess one and two, you can say, okay, both have been successful, or one of them haven’t been successful or both haven’t been successful. And then you change for the next year. But you always will find yourself in like, understanding a demand through a certain methodology, giving a storyline that translates the demand to what the business needs to know in terms of what does it cost us, what will it bring us, what is the outcome and how we will measure the outcome as well. And then you also find yourself in an iteration of actually measuring this outcome, making sure that you also engage with the business again on hey, you have been giving me, let’s say 20,000 euro for a mental health benefit. How is actually the activation rate?

Thomas Kohler:
Marie and I talked about how to get approval from c level, how to get benefits approved, what benefits worked for her and whatnot, and how she pitched them, and also how to build a business case to transfer the things you want to get approved into the language the stakeholders want to hear or see it. And also then making sure that everything is organized in a way that you can also measure the region and invest and also get approvals in the future. If you need them, then you can.

Today’s guest Maria and we will talk about how to get more approved from sea level from an HR people perspective. I’m looking forward to that and maybe we start with a short introduction about yourself.

Maria Kamischke:
Yeah, sure. Hi, I’m Maria, I live in Berlin. I am actually also a real Berliner and I am 31 years old. I am a crazy cat lady even though I don’t have a cat because I am also a passionate traveler. So I decided for travels against a cat and I have been called an HR veteran because I am already for now twelve years in the HR space have been in making my way through HR business partnering had a privilege to always work in very strategic HR functions and companies where HR has been also had this standing as a strategic function. And 2021, I took a step back from the corporate roles and went into the very exciting HR roles in the startup series and had my first leadership role in a hypergrowth scale up as like every startup was naming itself in 2021 most likely. And yeah, ever since I’ve been in leadership roles and now I work as vp people in culture at Lingoda, an online language learning school that is also supporting german healthcare facilities with migrating skilled workers to Germany.

Thomas Kohler:
Cool. And you are also an ambassador in Berlin for the human resource collective. What’s that about?

Maria Kamischke:
Yes, so the HR collective is a network for HR professionals without a limitation towards how many years you have been in HR or if you actually have been in HR. But if you’re passionate for HR, you’re already, you already qualify basically as a member. And the spirit basically is about connecting with each other, helping each other and making sure that we can all support each other when it comes to any functional or personal challenges that you may have in the space. And actually, Monday next week will be the first year anniversary of HR collective already, and we are now like 800 members, out of which 100 are in Berlin. So being the ambassador for Berlin is also quite an exciting role to be in. And the meetings we have are every time filled with very interesting conversations, filled with joy, having a comfort space, and also a space where you can really trust each other. Don’t need to hesitate to ask a stupid question or a question that you will be judged for. So, yeah, that’s that cool.

Thomas Kohler:
And the briefing meeting, what we had was really making me curious, because what I really see as a pattern in the people function, I think now it’s getting better, but especially from the past, is that a lot of decisions that are having implications on budget or maybe entire company wide decisions, implications, whatever, they are hard to get and hard to achieve. And people from the people department often don’t have the toolset or the confidence to get things signed off and implemented. Now maybe we can talk about your perspective on how you get things approved from the sea level.

Maria Kamischke:
Yeah, so I would say that’s also like to give a bit of context on why am I so engaged with HR collective and also other HR networks I’m part of is, as I said in the intro, I have been in a privileged position to always work in HR functions where strategic HR has been a thing. And HR hasn’t been seen only as a department which is responsible for contract creation and payroll and getting people on board, but having this like holistic view on actually people being the asset of the company. And just in the past, like one or two years, I actually understood how I lived in my own bubble of thinking. This is the whole reality and it’s not. And many, many companies still still have this old fashioned way of thinking about HR and engaging with HR, not necessarily because the people are not qualified to do more or the management wouldn’t be open to have more and broader scope assigned to HR. But I think it’s. And here it comes to basically answering your question.

The language is spoken are two different ones and my background is a business administration studies for bachelor’s as well as I did my MBA like two years ago. And if you have this business background, you can really leverage this to understand your stakeholder, which is always part of stakeholder management, right? Being empathetic with your stakeholder, understanding there perspective, understanding their language, understanding their challenges. And if you come to a common way of talking about the same things, you can give a different perspective. And I think this is like at the, as a very, very.

Thomas Kohler:
Let me take an example, for instance, for an engineering leader or what was the most experience you had with sales leaders, engineering leaders, or any specific field? Because I think that also really depends on how you need to, to talk to them or what assets you need to use, right?

Maria Kamischke:
Yeah, I think it doesn’t even also come from what function they’re in, but the function also comes with a different personality. So I can also recommend the book surrounded by idiots, which is about the different personality types. And you basically can put into the boxes the different type of leaders. Like for instance, I often found myself talking with technology leaders who are this blue type, like 100% blue type, like very analytical. Then you have sales and marketing leaders who are very red, red and yellow. So very creative, sometimes a bit bossy and too convinced even with themselves. So I would say the most interactions probably I had were with commercial leaders.

Thomas Kohler:
And how would you speak the language when we talk in stereotypes.

Maria Kamischke:
So with commercial leaders, obviously they have a commercial mindset. So they think in revenue cycles, whatever that means to the business, mostly you talk about yearly cycles. And if you engage with them, you got to understand, okay, what is the status of the current cycle? So where are you in? What are your challenges from a business perspective? What will be the peak times during the year? What will be certain points of no return or certain milestones or whatever it is that they have on their radar and basically try to translate that to your people agenda or business partner agenda whatsoever topic you have with them that maybe has a time horizon or that is having different steps along the way as part of a project, for instance. So really trying to like align your language with the language that the business speaks.

Thomas Kohler:
I would really appreciate it. And do you also have certain frameworks in place? What you can use in terms of maybe there is a business case for a certain, I don’t know, you want to roll out compensation plans and then a bonus structure for commercial, for a commercial unit. Is there already something that you regularly build out or is this something what you would individually build for companies?

Maria Kamischke:
I would always build it individually for companies. But the way how you build it can be basically recycled for a use case of, for instance, getting budget for benefits, for instance. Oftentimes question that the business asks is okay, how can we measure return on invest because it costs a lot of money. But how can we make sure that the people will be actually using it. Does it actually meet a need? And I mean, when you ask for a certain budget, for a certain benefit, I would assume you have been already doing some research in terms of what is actually needed for the business. How does your employee group look like? Are they all in the same location? Are they office space, remote? Are they, at what age are they, what’s like, what are the characteristics of the Personas in your company? And Personas is, for instance, a methodology from marketing which like, which you can use to group individuals into certain stereotypes of employees.

And through that, you make it somewhat comprehensive to give a narrative and a storyline to the business on why you would need certain benefits and hence certain budget to make sure that you meet the needs of these employees. You can also, and this is often used, do an employee survey and ask employees for benefits. And you will always get answers. But you will also get people who will be dissatisfied with the outcome. Because what you basically do is ask adults for a wish list for center, more or less. And then you find yourself not being center, but being somebody who needs to ask for budget. And you will have maybe like, let’s say a top five of benefits, but you can’t tackle them all at once. But you need like, for instance, this year you focus on one or two of them, and the year after you can assess one and two, you can say, okay, both have been successful, or one of them haven’t been successful, or both haven’t been successful. And then you change for the next year. But you always will find yourself in like understanding a demand through a certain methodology, giving a storyline that translates the demand to what the business needs to know in terms of what does it cost us, what will it bring us, what is the outcome and how we will measure the outcome as well.

And then you also find yourself in an iteration of actually measuring this outcome, making sure that you also engage with the business. Again on hey, you have been giving me, let’s say, 20,000 euro for a mental health benefit. How is actually the activation rate? What does it tell us? How do the people use it? Are there any advantages that we can see either very directly measurable or even indirectly measurable? And through this storyline, you can convince the business to also engage with you further on those topics.

Thomas Kohler:
Totally. And do you have some benefits and some examples of benefits where you could definitely say and showcase in any company doesn’t have to be Linkoda yeah, this was successful and this wasn’t successful. Do you have examples what you can share? I think that’s super interesting for the listeners.

Maria Kamischke:
So I think so I have many examples of benefits. Like one is, for instance, at Lingoda, we have completely free language classes. So if you are a lingodi, you can have unlimited language classes for German, English, Spanish and French. And this is a benefit that is required a lot of other companies. So in the company I worked for, I worked before for Sellerx, which is an Amazon e commerce aggregator. Language benefits were one of the most desired benefits, especially from expats migrating to Germany because they wanted to learn German. And here we have it as completely free benefit. But it’s not even seen as a benefit.

It is also a kind of like, what do you make out of it? How do you position yourself as a company with those benefits and how you communicate around it? And we have some employees who are like our language ambassadors and some employees that never had any lesson and don’t even know how our product looks like. Right. And so this is also very interesting. At Linguda, we also have two mental health benefits. One is a healthcare subscription, and the other one not a healthcare subscription, a subscription for Headspace. Sorry. And the other one is a subscription for Nilohealth, which is mental health benefits platform. And Headspace, as like having the headspace membership reimbursed, has been introduced to Lingoda when COVID started, and in three years only has been used twelve times.

And we have 350 employees, so you can tell it hasn’t been very successful. And Nelo Health, which is kind of in the same area, but a different perspective and a different angle that it serves a purpose with, which is more of an in person interaction and more tailored to the individual needs of the employees, is actually used by almost half of our employees and has been a huge success when we introduced it. And we introduced it because of the Israeli Gaza conflict, where obviously people who are from Israel or people who have family or friends that are close to this conflict, like, for instance, in North Africa or in Middle east, or even in Gaza, but also people who were like, in cities like Berlin, where there was a huge movement, where people went in the streets and demonstrated, was a huge media echo as well. This affects the employees mental wellbeing. Right. So this is something where you are in a crisis situation, something that you’re not familiar with, and it may impact how you work. And so we decided for this benefit, and we didn’t make it a huge financial decision, but rather a decision for humanity. And, yeah, so we decided to have this benefit introduced and only think about the return on invest in the sense of an activation quota and not so much in a, let’s say, what is always being used as mental health benefits providers, talking about reducing your sick rate and increasing your happiness rate and whatnot. But taking this purely as a duty of us as employer and investing in the wellbeing of our employees.

Thomas Kohler:
Okay. And when the business is really demanding a business case, how would you then set up and structure a business case that you would also get something like Nelo Health approved, for instance?

Maria Kamischke:
Yeah. So first I would always recommend you looking into the data. So what is the data that you’re getting out of your systems already? What is additional data that you would be interested getting from the organization? And what is data that would be potentially supporting your case? So as I said, maybe you have a questionnaire that you sent around to the employees where you ask them which benefits they need the most. Maybe you look into your sick grades, maybe you look into your engagement rates. You also may consider if you’re internationally spreading, what are kind of like blind spots in certain other countries. Yeah. So for us as germans, it’s like super, like it’s a no brainer that you have a health insurance, but in other countries that may not be the case. So instead of giving a gym membership, maybe you should be investing the money in just like essentials, like a health insurance, like a pension plan or whatnot.

There are also benefits benchmarks that benchmarks provider can give you that can support your business case. Maybe not so much in customized data, but just as a benchmark towards what other companies are doing. You can leverage your own network for doing this benchmark as well. If you have a good network work, then you can just ask basically your competitors or make the research yourself. Oftentimes it’s in the job description to do the benchmark, but this is all supporting data points that will make your case stronger. And in the end, you always need to look into whether it’s really a return on investor can be measured in terms of money, or whether a certain return on invest would be maybe connected to lowering your turnover rate or higher, increasing your offer acceptance rate or whatnot. I mean, there are so many data points that you can look into that have a correlation or indirect connection to benefits, but you need to identify for your customized case. What are the data points where you want to move the needle?

Thomas Kohler:
Definitely. And I think understanding the cost correlation effect, I think that’s really key. And I think what also works very well. What I found is just listening a bit into the organization to understand what may be some main decision makers are hearing from their people, or what could be pain points that can be framed in a format that it makes sense to say the problems they are talking about can be categorized or framed or codified in a certain way. And then you put an entity into it, and usually it’s money or an indirect or direct way to costs. Right? And then even if you buy something that is also costing something, that the other opportunity costs or costs of delay or whatever it is, are then reduced or eliminated, and then it’s money traded versus money, and then it makes sense for them. And if it’s also logically making sense, plus the storyline emotionally makes sense for them, then I think it’s the perfect business case.

Maria Kamischke:
Yeah. So also, management is just, they’re just humans. Right. And I also need to still understand and learn about the effects of a good storyline, a good narrative, good visualization. So your slides do need to make sense. Your numbers have to be bulletproof. If your numbers doesn’t make sense, and it doesn’t matter if the numbers actually matter, but if the numbers don’t make sense, and the business will be immediately ruining your whole case, and it doesn’t matter if the numbers are actually correlated to the case or not. And also, what you just mentioned about opportunity costs, I think opportunity cost is one of the most underrated measures of a good storyline.

So if we think about this narrative of HR is just a cost center, then if we are just a cost center, why do actually so many companies have huge HR departments? Because of the opportunity costs. And you gotta identify the opportunity costs that matter to the business.

Thomas Kohler:
In case you have any feedback or anything you want to share with me, please send me an email on thomasseoplewise.com or hit me up on LinkedIn. And in case you really enjoy the show, please subscribe. I would really appreciate it. Do you also have an example where the opportunity costs got you something approved? I, for instance, have one. This is, for instance, when we had a critical hiring phase, that, for instance, ramping up the product development team for a product that should release, let’s say, 50 million in additional revenue. Right? That was the business case of them. And then they needed a team of 30 people immediately. But the recruiters, they were already working on roles because these were just net new roles that came on top of the existing headcount, which was already signed off, and this was just new.

And then, of course, there was no budget for hiring and they just did not plan for it. Right. And then I just came up with a case to say, okay, if you want to hire these 40 people, let’s say, really starting in one quarter, then you would need two recruiters for them starting immediately. And therefore, we might not even be ready to hire somebody permanently. And if we hire somebody permanently, then we would also maybe afterwards lay them off again or don’t need them again or look for work. So why not going for a freelancer or an embedded model? And then it’s even that we then came in to say, hey, these are the two resources for the next three to six months. You get. If you just fund the project by, instead of hiring 30 people, maybe just 28 or 27, but then you get 27 really approved and the other ones are hired later, then you at least don’t have the opportunity costs, that there is a big hiring delay or delay of product development.

And then it was big numbers, right? But we were talking there that it was just not a question to invest a few thousand euros a month for recruiting support because the potential hiring delay was so big. And then suddenly everybody said, yeah, let’s do it, let’s do it, let’s do it. But if it just would say, okay, this cost, let’s say, 18 to €22,000 a month, then everybody would say, that’s too expensive because they even cost more than internal people and so on. Right. So that’s a prime example. But I can give for opportunity costs. But maybe you have another one.

Maria Kamischke:
I think opportunity cost examples for everything related to hiring is very easy to put together. You just need to know your numbers and you know how to do narrative. I would say two examples of where you can leverage opportunity costs. One is when to engage an agency for a project. So, for instance, I have been starting two projects quite shortly after I started with Linguoda. One was to identify the company values of Lingoda, because the company values that we had were, like, outdated, where from, like, when Lingoda was still a different company, and the other one was for our employer value proposition. And I said, okay. So I did some research with the agencies on, like, what would be the scope of the project? What would be the potential.

The potential price of engaging with these agencies for doing those two projects? And we landed with, I think, something like 60k. Yeah. And so then I was like, okay, so how do you get the 60k approved? Like, you’re basically here for six weeks and you’re asking already for, like, big money. Yeah. And it was actually, in the end, quite easy because, a, we had no internal resources to do that. So very easy cases always to go for the option of hiring somebody and to hire somebody for the cost of 60k would mean that you would have a hire for quickly do the math, like 45k gross salary per year because you have to then add up the employer cost, not even talking about cost of hiring and whatnot. And then also the productivity loss of somebody just joining. They wouldn’t be 100% productive just when they come in, but like let’s say three to six months after. And the other one was looking into the probation period pass rates of the highest that we made in the last twelve months. And probation period pass rate wasn’t that bad.

But for if you also looked into the ratio of where we had to end the probation period versus when people actually end the probation period can give you an indication of have we hired the wrong people or have the people agreed to work for us under the wrong assumptions of how the company would actually be like. Because to be fair, an interview process gives you like let’s say three to 4 hours in total of having a conversation around what it is like working at this company. While you also need to invest time into how it is like working with me if I’m the candidate. And this employer value proposition and values that we all have as a common like North Star in terms of what is favorable behavior in this company and what is the guiding North Star in terms of how we make decisions, how we interact with each other, what is favorable in a sense of deciding whether you are a talent or not, besides obviously your business outputs. But if you have clarity about that, you will be getting better at hiring decisions, you will be getting quicker and better at onboarding because you have already a common understanding. And so if I looked into our probation period pass rate, our number of hires in the last twelve months, and also into the outlook of how many people we will still be hiring, it was quite easy to put a narrative together without even talking much about numbers, because anyways, those numbers are a bit made up.

But sometimes that supports your case and sometimes it ruins your case, and you always have to decide which route to go for. But just talking about the numbers it influences can already give a good cause of opportunity, can give already a good idea of potential opportunity costs. If you have benchmarks, for instance, for what is the cost of hire, what is the cost of a mishire, what is the cost of replacing someone? And oftentimes, as you also described in your example, the numbers very easily make.

Thomas Kohler:
Sense, then yeah, definitely, definitely. And what are the top problems? You see that somebody is not getting something approved? Is it that it’s not the right numbers? Is it that people departments don’t build the right connection or maybe don’t focus on the wrong topics. Do you see a pattern there?

Maria Kamischke:
I would say the first problem is to not understand how to approach your stakeholder. So are you actually talking to the right person is the first question. And I mean, I was just at an event where somebody said I didn’t get approval from finance for my people development initiatives. And I was like, why are you actually talking to finance about getting approval? I mean, seriously, finance is controlling budget. They are not making budget decisions. Who is the decision maker? Right? I mean, like, if I would be financing, you would be asking me for money. I would also say no. So that’s my job, right.

So start to identify what’s the decision governance on your company? What’s the approval governance in your company? Who is making what decisions? If in the absence of a clear budget process, like budget planning, where you have a time in the year where you do budget planning, then you have a budget, and then you can work within a budget. But in the absence of it, who can, like, who will support you in getting this budget and who will make the decision if you get the budget or not? And those are two different stakeholders, because your supporter may be somebody from finance, because they said, well, you haven’t been get, or we haven’t been planning certain money, but we have saved, let’s say, 100k because of whatever reasons, because of delays and hirings or whatnot. And so finance can be your ally, but finance can also be your enemy. So it really depends on the case. And it’s always important to have a close connection to finance, but really understand who makes the decision and whoever is making the decision, understand where is their current headspace. So what is it that they’re currently being aware of? What is going on in the company? What are they currently working on in terms of overcoming challenges, whether it’s investor relations or it is business challenges, or it’s talent market challenges, or it’s a big m and a coming whatnot, and use the momentum of building this into your storyline. If, for instance, investor relations is on top of the CEO’s head, maybe it’s a very good time to talk about diversity topics and diversity initiatives because if you do some research about your own investors and look into what is it that investors are actually looking at when they do investor reporting, what are the top priorities of your investor when it comes to what they put into the media, this may be actually a case where you can really shine as a portfolio company, yeah.

But you need to do the research. You need to understand what is it that is currently the hot shit at the desk of the CEO. And from there, build your narrative. Whether it is, whether it is built on numbers, whether it is built on emotions, whether it is built on trends. For instance, if you look into what is currently happening in the media, in the media, this week there was this happiness survey, worldwide happiness survey being presented. And Germany has a big job in like, I don’t know, I think from 16 to 29 or something in the happiness score amongst 140 countries in the world. And I mean 140 countries in the world. And guess what?

How privileged are we in Germany, how wealthy are we in Germany, and why are we not happy? So this is actually also a big thing. If you think about a company that is headquartered in Germany, that has many employees in Germany. Obviously, parts of the people who answered the survey are also parts of the employees that you may have. And the other one is the Gallup engagement survey for Germany, where it was also very evident that people are increasingly dissatisfied with their employers. People are increasingly disengaged from their employers. There was this kind of COVID momentum where everybody was basically being anxious about their roles and their jobs, and they were happy when they actually had a job still at the end of 2020, or at the end of 2022, again, when there were all the layoffs happening. But this is going to shift again. And even though that the economic market doesn’t really stabilize people, and this is also one finding of the survey, people are now rather looking left and right to what does the talent market tell me? How often do I get approached from a headhunter? So do I actually have a chance in the talent market, despite the economic situation? And so these are things that you also need to consider when it comes to employee engagement, when it comes about, when it comes to how you think about your workforce, because this is a reflection of the general atmosphere.

Thomas Kohler:
Definitely. Thank you so much. I think that’s a very good summary of ending the podcast, because very insightful, very specific. Thank you so much, Maria. I really enjoyed it. And maybe we can do another one on the whole performance, management and compensation topic, because I think that could be another episode.

Maria Kamischke:
Yeah, happy to do that. Thanks so much.