We started the evening with connection, then moved into new research Maureen Mo Berkner Boyt has been leading around change, the skills needed to navigate it, and the benchmarks we’re seeing among leaders today.

One of the biggest things that stood out to me was the neuroscience behind change: why it can feel so heavy, why it asks so much of us, and how we can actually build the capacity to move through it with more clarity, resilience, and trust.

Then we had the chance to hear from Jeremy Edmonds, SPHR (he/his/him), EVP of People & Culture at Snooze, who shared more about his own journey as a People leader and the intense amount of change Snooze has navigated over the last six years.

Hearing what the restaurant and food industry went through during COVID and beyond, and how Jeremy and the team continued to lead through it, was such a powerful reminder that change is not just a business concept. It is deeply human.

What hit me most throughout the night was how many of us are carrying multiple pressures of change at once. Organizational change. Personal change. Team change. Market change. The kind of change that can feel messy, exhausting, exciting, and uncertain all at the same time.

It reminded me that we are all doing the best we can, and we can also keep building the skills to thrive through change. Not perfectly. Not overnight. But together, with intention.

Last night made me even more excited for what this community can become.

We’ve all been there. When your company is sitting at 15 or 20 employees, a PEO (Professional Employer Organization) feels like a warm blanket. They handle payroll, compliance, and give you access to decent master-policy benefits. It just works.

But then you hit 50, 75, or 100+ employees, and suddenly that warm blanket starts feeling a bit like a straitjacket.

The Hidden Cost of Staying Too Long

As HR leaders, we have to look past the convenience and look at the actual employee experience (and the bottom line). When you stay on a PEO too long, two things usually happen:

1. The Tech Silo: You are trapped using the PEO’s legacy, clunky tech instead of building a modern HR tech stack (like HiBob) that actually drives company culture.

2. The Benefits Black Box: You lose the ability to customize your benefits strategy. You’re paying a premium per-employee fee, but your team doesn't get the specialized advocacy or mental health support they actually need.

The Reality: Leaving a PEO doesn't mean you have to drown in administrative headaches. It means you finally get to combine great modern HR tech with a benefits consultant who actually acts as an extension of your team. You can get better, customized benefits and save money to reinvest in your people.

I get this question pretty regularly. And I understand why.

When the cost of living is up, people's salary doesn't go as far as it used to, and that's what they talk about around the dinner table.

So it feels like the natural thing to build your pay bands around.

But here's what I've learned after doing this with a lot of companies:

- Your bands don't exist to track the cost of living.

- They exist to track the cost of talent.

Those are two completely different markets.

Cost of living tracks your bread, your milk, your petrol.

It moves on the supply and demand of stuff.

Your bands should move on the supply and demand of people who do that job.

When I see a company anchor their bands to cost of living, one of two things always happens:

- The market for a role runs hot (think AI skills right now, 10-15% in some places).

- While cost of living is sitting at 2.1%.

So the company nudges their bands up 2.1% and then wonders why they can't hire and why their best people are taking calls from recruiters.

Or the opposite.

Cost of living jumps, the market for that role is flat, and the company pushes bands up 5% to "keep up." 

Now they're burning cash they never needed to spend, which for a startup with finite runway is a genuine problem.

Either way, the band is now disconnected from the actual market.

It's telling you a story about groceries when you needed a story about hiring.

So when a client asks me how their bands reflect cost of living, here's what I say:

"Your bands should reflect the market for the role. Cost of living is real, and your people are feeling it, so address it deliberately, but address it somewhere else."

(btw I'm a fan of one-off allowances over a blanket % on pay. Cost of living pressure doesn't scale with what someone earns, so why should the relief?)

So don't ignore cost of living. Just stop asking your bands to do a job the aren't built for.

I never told them what wasn't working. So their performance just kept declining until the only conversation left to have was the last one.

So when I finally had it, it landed like an ambush.

I left the parking lot with a promise to myself: I was never going to let someone get all the way to the end of their time with me without knowing exactly where they stood along the way.

I've learned in the years since that the kindest thing you can do for someone is tell them the truth early, while it's still small.

Withholding hard feedback can feel like the caring move in the moment. But it robs people of the one thing they deserve most: a chance to do something about it.

Caring about someone and being honest with them are two sides of the same coin.

The leaders I admire most care enough to tell them the truth, so no one ends up surprised, sitting on a cement parking block, wondering how it got this far.

What helps you give the tough feedback early?

Bouquet Building: Growing Great Cultures 🌸

Join us for an intimate evening on a beautiful Chicago rooftop designed to bring HR leaders together for meaningful conversation, genuine connection, and a little creativity along the way.

At this In Good Company meetup, we’ll be creating our own floral bouquets while exploring what it takes to build workplaces where people can truly thrive. Just like every bouquet is made stronger by different colors, textures, and blooms, great cultures are built through different perspectives, experiences, and ideas.

WHAT TO EXPECT
- Enjoy a relaxed evening of bouquet building, light bites, drinks, and thoughtful conversation with fellow people leaders in a stunning rooftop setting. You’ll have the opportunity to step away from the day-to-day, connect with others who understand the challenges and joys of HR, and exchange ideas around growing strong, people-first cultures.
- No presentations. No awkward networking. Just real conversations, fresh inspiration, a welcoming community, and a beautiful bouquet to take home.

WHY ATTEND
You’ll leave with:
- New connections with other HR professionals in your community
- Fresh perspectives and ideas to bring back to your workplace
- Meaningful conversations around culture, leadership, and employee experience
- Your own custom floral arrangement to take home

Come ready to create, connect, and grow — we can’t wait to be in good company with you. 🌷

Most AI hiring tools are trained to find candidates who look like the people you already hired. That is what the training data is. Past hires, past decisions, past definitions of a strong profile. The model gets very good at recognising the pattern it was shown.

For a hiring team that creates a quiet problem. The roles that are hardest to fill are usually the ones where your existing pattern is the weakest guide, because the candidates who can actually do the work do not resemble your previous hires closely enough to score well. So the tool is most confident exactly where you most need it to surprise you, and least useful for the searches that are genuinely difficult.

The teams handling this well seem to treat AI screening as a way to widen the top of the funnel rather than narrow it. They use it to surface people they would have missed, then keep human judgment on who advances, instead of letting the model's confidence stand in for a decision. It is a smaller shift in how the tool is positioned, but it changes what comes out the other end.

How are your teams thinking about this? Do you trust AI to rank candidates, or only to surface them, and where did you land on that line?

🍻 In Good Company Philadelphia Chapter Kickoff

Join us for the inaugural gathering of the In Good Company Philadelphia Chapter on July 1 at American Sardine Bar.

This casual networking event is an opportunity for HR and People leaders across the Philadelphia area to connect with peers, exchange ideas, and build meaningful relationships with others who are passionate about people-first work.

Whether you're navigating the challenges of leadership, exploring new approaches to employee experience, or simply looking to expand your local network, this event is designed to create space for thoughtful conversation and authentic connection.

There’s no agenda, presentation, or panel — just great people, good conversation, and the chance to help shape the future of the Philadelphia HR community together.

📍 American Sardine Bar
1800 Federal St, Philadelphia, PA 19146

🗓️ July 1, 2026
⏰ 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM

Space is limited, so we encourage you to RSVP early.

We look forward to welcoming you and kicking off the Philadelphia chapter together!

For all of those Canadian's out there. July 1st (Canada Day) falls on a Wednesday this year. Are you just giving that Wednesday off or are you planning a different day off for employees (with approval)?

thanks

Sometimes skills feel like buzzwords - this podcast ep is super practical and gets into how these skills show up day-to-day and what they look like in practice:

🎧 The 3 Skills That Make You Impossible To Replace At Work

Workday. Rippling. Gusto. Lattice. Deel. BambooHR.

Look at who founded the tools you use every day.

Engineers. Product people. Repeat software founders. Parker Conrad ran payroll companies, not people teams. Workday came out of enterprise software. The list goes on and the pattern is the same almost everywhere you look.

The software that runs your function was mostly built by people who have never done your job.

Here's the part nobody in HR wants to sit with.

You are the closest person in the building to the problem. You have run the layoffs. You have managed the comp crisis at 11pm. You have watched a bad manager quietly burn out a whole team and you saw it coming six months early. You know where every one of these tools breaks because you live inside the gap every day.

And then someone who has never sat in your chair builds the product, raises the round, and sells it back to you.

We tell ourselves a story about why. Founders are technical and we are not. Building software is for other people. Our job is to advise, theirs is to build.

That story is comfortable and it's costing us.

The person who has run twelve layoffs understands the layoff problem better than the person coding a layoff tool from a Notion doc. The CHRO who has rebuilt three comp structures knows more about what is broken than any PM doing customer discovery. Proximity to the problem is the single biggest unfair advantage in building anything. HR has more of it than almost any function in the company.

We just keep handing that advantage to...someone else?

Now I'm not saying every HR leader should go start a company. Most probably shouldn't. But the gap between how much HR knows and how little HR builds is the widest I have seen in any function. And I don't think it's a skills gap. We decided building was not for us, and the market believed us. But why?

Curious if you've ever considered building an HR product, and I'm not talking HR services (consulting). A product with an IP?