This week, Jessica is joined by Raúl Valentin, the Chief Human Resources Officer at ABM Industries. Raúl explains how his belief in fairness drives his leadership–everything from recruiting policies to acquisition strategy to the way ABM integrates AI into HR operations. He opens up about his early life as the son of a single mother, why he almost went to law school, and how that background fuels his commitment to give every employee a fair shot — even if that doesn’t always mean treating everyone the same.
Raúl and Jessica also discuss what it really takes to scale culture across a workforce of more than 100,000 hourly team members across the world, why humility and collaboration are at the heart of ABM’s identity, and how Raúl is navigating the evolving conversation around DEI without getting lost in political labels.
Plus, the tactics of leadership — like what makes an acquisition succeed, how physical workspaces shape behavior, and why AI can’t replace the human side of HR, even if it’s helping us do our jobs better and faster.
About Raúl Valentin
Raúl joined ABM in 2019 and serves as the people leader and advocate for more than 100,000 dedicated team members across the US and the UK. Raúl is dedicated to cultivating a stronger community by growing and developing our people and fostering an inclusive culture where everyone is seen, heard, and valued.
Raúl has held key HR leadership roles at Coty, Comcast, and Frito-Lay, with more than 30 years of human resources and management experience. He serves on the board of Quanta Services, Inc., a leading provider of comprehensive infrastructure solutions for the electric and gas utility, renewable energy, communications, pipeline and energy industries in the United States.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rauljvalentin
https://investor.abm.com/management/raul-valentin
Jessica Kriegel:
Website: https://www.jessicakriegel.com/
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessicakriegel
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jess_kriegel/
Culture Partners:
Website: https://culturepartners.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/culturepartners/
TRANSCRIPT
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: This week on culture Leaders, I’m talking to Raul Valentin, the Chief Human Resources Officer at A BM Industries, where he’s helping lead one of the most massive and diverse workforces in the country. Over 100,000 hourly team members across the US and beyond. Raul is all about fairness. And in this conversation you’ll hear how that personal purpose has shaped everything from recruiting policies to acquisition strategy to the way A BM integrates AI into HR operations. He opens up about his early life as the son of a single mother and why he almost went to law school and how that background fuels his commitment to giving every employee a fair shot, even if that doesn’t always mean treating everyone the same. We dig into what it really takes to scale culture across a workforce this size, and why humility and collaboration are at the heart of ABMS identity and how Raul is navigating the evolving conversation around DEI without getting lost in political labels. We will also get into the tactical side of leadership, like what makes an acquisition succeed? How physical workspace shapes our behavior and why AI can’t replace the human side of hr, even if it’s helping us do our jobs better and faster. This is one of those rare episodes that blends strategy, empathy, and real world experience. Here is my conversation with Raul Valenti. Well, thank you so much for joining us. I’m so excited to have you on. So my first question is, what is your why?
Raul Valentin: Alright, that’s a great question. My why, as I’ve thought through this, throughout my career, I’ve ended up realizing it’s fairness. It’s about providing environments where fairness leads to a better environment for those folks in the environment. I’ll often think the thing with fairness is it doesn’t mean always equal. So it doesn’t mean that everyone’s equal or it doesn’t mean that all the things are equal, but that we make sure we put things in place that provide a fair opportunity for folks. And for me, when I thought back, it really started with my mother. I grew up only child of a latchkey kid, single parent who worked hourly jobs in kind of a crazy world at the airport. And I think as I grew up, I always felt was the environment fair? Was she treated fairly? As a kid, you always want the best for your parents. And later in life, I realized at one point I thought about going to law school, which I didn’t. Then I ended up in hr. Like many people, it wasn’t what I thought I’d end up and when I reflected back, it was about trying to create an environment where I thought my mother could work and be treated fairly. And that’s kind of my why, and that’s how I think of things.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: So have you been passionate about the hourly workforce in particular throughout your career?
Raul Valentin: I have, and I’d say certainly the hourly workforce, which is really important here at A BM when we’ve got over a hundred thousand hourly team members. But at every level and every population and in global environments, it’s making sure the folks in Brussels feel like they’re being treated fairly compared to the folks in the UK or the folks in Singapore. So it’s broader and it cuts across very different things.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: I have a theory that a lot of people’s why comes from seeing a gap or something being missing. So where would you, and maybe this is not your experience, but where would you see or have you identified a lack of fairness?
Raul Valentin: Yeah, I think it’s leaders and people’s perceptions around who’s entitled to or where would you go to promote people or select people or who has the ability to perform or deliver at a certain level versus in my idealistic world, everyone does. If given the opportunity, they may get to different levels, but they all should be given the opportunity. All things being equal if you will. Sometimes there are gaps. Sometimes there’s just taking the lens of what would someone else say on the other side, walking someone else’s shoes. You come up with a policy around vacation time and someone says, well, we’re going to grandfather it for the executive team, but everyone else who gets hired, they’re going to have to reform to the new standard. And it’s like, well, why is that? That doesn’t seem fair. Why? Because they’re at a senior level, they get treated differently.
Is that really fair? Is that really appropriate? Does that reflect our values? And then that leads me to things like, no, then everyone will either be grandfathered or no one will be grandfathered. And that’s being consistent on things that I think we can make a difference on in creating that environment. So that would be an example of where I see sometimes gaps on the recruiting process. When you think of it often people in companies that waiting periods, you can’t raise your hand for another job until you’ve been in your role for a year. Well, why? When a competitor calls to recruit you, they don’t really care if you’ve been in the role for a year. They care if you’re qualified. When management feels that they want to promote someone, they have a great opportunity for them and they’ve only been in the role seven months because they promote them. So is it really about the time period or is it really about are they prepared to do it? And is that really being, again, in my mind, fair and consistent in our application of workplace rules and policies and procedures that create an environment that I think provides people the opportunity to excel?
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Well, it’s interesting because fairness is also subjective in some ways. I was just working with a client who’s moving to a new healthcare benefits system and in the move they discovered that people who were older and single were going to have more increases in their premiums versus other maybe younger family employees. And so then the company, the head of HR was asked, well, why don’t we just pay supplemental expenses so that it’s fair so that everyone is affected equally? And the pushback was, well, no, that’s not fair to supplement for some people and not for others. And so in that case, what is fair? How do you determine fair when there’s differing views on what fair is?
Raul Valentin: Yeah, and I think when I started, I said, fairness doesn’t always mean equal. So that’s a good example of it. And that’s hard. It’d be easier to say fairness means equal all the time, but it’s not. And in a case like that, and this is what makes HR so much fun is right, there’s not always the answer, right? For the organization and something like that, I would look to say, well, was this a change that was new to the organization? Could we help transition them? So maybe what’s fair is not that we’re going to supplement it, but for year one or two, we subsidize part of that cost in a transition, which we’ve done from time to time sometimes with acquisitions, but eventually they go onto the same platform and the same cost benefit if you will, ratio as the rest of the organization to be fairer. But that transition sometimes was out of their hands. So do we look at that versus assume a cookie cutter approach.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Yeah. You have history of working with organizations that have an acquisition strategy. You’ve been a part of many acquisition, HR transitions. Can we dig into that a little bit about Sure, of course. How that goes where you’ve seen it be more successful versus less successful, particularly as it pertains to culture and getting people to think and act in the same way.
Raul Valentin: Yeah, of course. Yeah. I think when you think about acquisitions, there’s a lot of variation there, a lot of nuances from size from are they in the same kind of sweet spot that you are? Are you trying to acquire something that supplements and therefore it’s different skill sets? Different skill sets also then mean different profiles of the folks and maybe how they react to things and what they expect or differently. Then I mentioned global before, certainly part of acquisitions in parts of Asia, Latin America, Europe, and again, each country has their own unique sense of how do you engage with those folks. I think the common elements are trying to listen to understand why are they wanting to be acquired, what are they looking for, meeting them where they are. What I found to be successful is trying to understand where are we heading and how do we help them get there? They normally sign up, they want to be part of something bigger or they want to cash infusion or the owners do or the PE firm does, right?
Some of them, a lot of the team members, they may be very happy where they are, but understanding even to your benefits example, so what is the impact of them and how do we get them to our place based on our values, our strategic roadmap? And again, it’s not cookie cutter, it’s trying to understand. I remember working with a leader in a prior company. We acquired a company in Switzerland and I was trying to help him think about succession planning and he joked and said, why do I need succession planning? I’m the owner, I’m the founder. I’m going to be here until whatever, and I don’t need a succession plan, but it took me to go there and fly there and sit down with him and spend a day or two with him to get to a place. He understood the business criticality of it and I met him halfway and we got to a good place and a couple of years later we could laugh about it and talk about how we built a good robust kind of succession plan for that business as it joined a larger part of the corporation.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: What does meeting him halfway look like when you’re trying to get a succession plan in place? One person on the succession plan.
Raul Valentin: Sometimes it’s just their name on it and making sure they’re going to be here for a while, no quarter. The way I think part of it at is understanding, I’ve grown up in corporate America, I guess, so I understand why you do succession planning if you’re an entrepreneur, not assuming they understand that. So it’s taking the time for them to understand, here’s why we do this. In the event there’s a change and you won the lottery or you got hit by the bus or the organization wants to move you somewhere differently and we’re in a position to put someone behind you. And often what I find is if you take it from that approach of education, not ignorance or not being belligerent or not just saying, why is HR doing this? And I don’t have time for this, I need to run the business, but saying this is about helping run the business, then that understanding is kind of a big part of meeting them there because coming at it from different words, different languages, right? HR speak, which we’re notorious for. So how do we put it in the context of the business and then ideally one name or the promise to get to one name in the future as we add and go forward.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: So let’s go back a minute because you said earlier you have a hundred thousand hourly workers at A BM, and to scale that, let’s even just break down one element of HR attracting talent in the hourly workforce at the scale that you have to do. What are some of the emerging trends that you’re seeing in how this is becoming increasingly challenging right now?
Raul Valentin: Well, certainly some of the changes in what’s going on in terms of immigration policies makes it challenging and not challenging. I mean, we’re compliant, but clearly for those communities that creates fear and concern and therefore perhaps they second guess where they look for employment and what that means ultimately to the size of our employment size in the country, it’s bigger. It’s at a macro level, significantly bigger, bigger. So for us, I mean it’s about really staying on top of it, both from a data perspective. We’ve got dashboards that kind of help us in our key markets kind of stay on top of how many openings do we have, what’s the applicant flow look like so that we don’t get caught flatfooted in the event. There’s something that happens that creates a shortage in the workforce. Coming out of Covid, it was really tight, a very difficult employment market.
We made some significant changes in how we went to market, as I call it, our go-to-market plan on recruiting. We went to a regional model with national support from centers of excellence, and that’s really because we hire in, the work we do is done locally. We support thousands of clients across the country and in the UK and Ireland as well, and we do the work locally. We do it in their buildings and their locations. So we have to have a really nimble recruiting team and processes, but we’ve got to know the communities in which we’re recruiting. So now starting to leverage AI to help us with some of that stuff. When you think about how do we better screen candidates, how do we better start assessing them so that there’s a better fit? How do we provide a better job preview for all things that we’re looking to continue to enhance?
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Where else are you using AI in HR?
Raul Valentin: We’re trying to use it a little bit everywhere, I would say. I think it’s really important folks get comfortable with it, and the only way to get comfortable is through usage. So everything from, I encourage my team to use it personally if they’re planning a vacation, if they’re thinking about what restaurants they want to go to, go and use chat GBT, then from a work perspective, it’s really challenging ourselves to use it. On the communication side, we have seven or eight core languages we use, so we’re using it help with language translations very quickly on training. It’s helping us develop content much quicker than ever before to do this. So I can almost say every facet of HR on the compliance side of hr, we’re using it for us to stay on top of compliance regulations and how can we sort through stacks of information and find out what’s missing, what’s blank, and using AI technology to find trends and pieces there.
We’re about to launch a coaching component for frontline managers. When you think of our workforce, a large part of it does cleaning of commercial real estate buildings throughout the country, and they’re in the buildings late at night when you and I have left the building potentially, and therefore access for that manager, if they’re having a problem with an employee, they’re having a problem themselves. I don’t have a team of HR folks that are on 24 7 per se. So providing this AI kind of coach, if you will, we think will really provide different access for tier one HR support. We still want them to have the human component that they’ll touch on with the HR business partners and regional HR folks. I think that’ll be a big unlock. And again, the cultural, and that’s cultural, but the language piece of it will be very big. Most of our frontline folks I always say are English as a second or third language. So their mother tongue is not English. They’re not always most comfortable in that. We try and have a lot of staff on my team that is multilingual, but we don’t cover all seven or eight languages. So to provide a chat box or a vehicle by which they can engage with and get some coaching and some tips or access to information in a way that’s most comfortable for them and at the time when they need it just in time, I think is really important as a service that we can provide to our operational folks.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Have you looked into these AI powered communication tools, not about translating or first line of support, but rather helping people strategize how they communicate? I’ve seen this in a lot of HR vendors now that are, let’s say we’re going to write an email to someone and it’ll go through some sort of AI tool that’ll suggest I shift the tone of my email or add a couple details in the email. Have you considered that?
Raul Valentin: We do. I’m not sure if we’re using a tool yet. I think we’re dabbling with that as a concept in the tools that we’re using already. I’ve even done it with make this a more serious tone or I’m preparing this for the board versus for town hall meeting, and therefore change the tone. I think it’s important we don’t lose the human element because I passionately and believe in authenticity and being your real self and bringing your whole self to work, as corny as that may sound. So I like that tool, but all tools, it’s just part of the kind of tool set. It shouldn’t be the only thing, and you’ve got to stay true to yourself versus get caught up in maybe sounding like someone that you think you should sound like versus who you really are.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: This has been around for a long time in performance management software where it’s helped me write this performance review and they give you some buttons to click and it populates some sentences based on the competencies being evaluated. But I’ve started to see it now in email and in preparation for meetings that they see on your Outlook calendar coming up. And I get nervous about that level because it does feel like we’re starting to lose little authenticity that if I’m sending you something that AI wrote and then you’re responding with something AI wrote, have we even really met is the question, right?
Raul Valentin: Yeah, we’ve kind of met, but not really. I don’t really know who you are. I know this persona that you’re projecting, which is not ideal. It’s again, human resources. Not everyone uses human resources, but there is the human part of that that you don’t want to get lost, right?
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Well, there is the question about whether we project personas anyway, right? I mean, do I talk like this to my daughter? No. I mean, I still haven’t quite figured out if I have a work persona or not, or if it’s just a more professional version of myself that is authentic. I think that’s one of the areas of work that we’ve all been confused about to some extent and how different cultures really accept you or not, for example, right?
Raul Valentin: Yeah, no, I think that’s really fair. And yeah, I’m sure every now and then my wife tells me, don’t talk to me with your HR voice. So that’s real, even though I don’t think it’s real. But in there, ideally, there’s still some authenticity of role that comes out when we talk to folks, and I think that’s what creates trust in an organization. I think the ability to talk, I mean given our population span up and down the organization is really important. And there are so many leaders that sometimes struggle with that, and I think it’s an important trait when we look for folks to lead. Many of our managers are promoted from within, and I think that says a lot. They know the work, but they know the culture and they know how to treat folks with respect. They appreciate the task at hand, so to speak. So finding that balance. But yeah, I think there are personas. You’re spot on, but trying to stay real as best as possible.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Yeah, it’s true. I mean, it is sometimes real, even if it’s a persona. I do the same thing with my boyfriend. He’s an attorney, and when we get into heated conversations sometimes I’ll say, don’t litigate my conversation with you. So I can see he’s just building a case with questions. I’m like, this is a setup. Objection, your honor. So how would you describe the culture at A BM?
Raul Valentin: Often I start with the word humility and humbleness. It’s in that what we do I think provides for an environment where we’re humble about how we interact with each other, the respect for folks up and down the organization and across the organization. Collaboration’s really high. It’s something that we have in our success behaviors, which are kind of our core competencies and in our values collaboration. And we toyed as an executive team when we were doing this, did we want collaboration to show up in two different places? But we did because we thought it is highly reflective of our culture. And the one caveat there is, I always say we’re collaborative when you fit in, if you fit in what I found and what people who are here, who I love being here is it’s a really supportive network. People are here to help you. When there’s a problem, people jump in and say, how do I help? How do I solve? What do you need? And that comes through everywhere. And even though we’re a company of a hundred plus years, that has grown through acquisitions predominantly that weren’t always integrated. So it’s only been the last five to seven years that we’ve in earnest really started focused on integration, whether that’s payroll, integration systems, integration policies, procedures, but as people come together, you always feel like they’re part of the family. So those are key elements of our culture that I think are really important.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: How do you think someone in one of the regional offices would describe the culture? Do you think that they would have the same experience?
Raul Valentin: I do. I mean, I think they’d say when I spend a lot of time out in the field because really important to say connected and what I hear, and I don’t think they’re just making saying it because there, I don’t like to think that, but I’m sure sometimes that comes into play. I think that sense of humility shows up in that we spend a lot of time up and down the organization. If the CEO’s at and about, he will sit in the room with a bunch of frontline managers or leaders or team members and really kind of ask them generally, what’s going on? What’s working? What do you need help in? We do frontline leader training. I’ll jump into, if I’m traveling somewhere and I know there’s a session nearby, I’ll pop in and ask them, if you were head of HR for a day, what would you do?
What would you change? What would you keep the same? What do you love about it? So we try and be really engaging. So I think that comes through on the collaboration, on the connection points, I think they’d say, what I didn’t say is it’s hard. It’s hard work. There’s a strong work ethic, there’s a strong focus on clients. We’re very client focused, very client centric. We have a really diverse portfolio of clients, but I think up and down the organization, people are focused on our clients and are we solving the client’s problems? Are we delivering the service that we promise?
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: I would imagine the company has to adapt significantly post covid with a lot less people going into the offices. And has the business model reflected in adaptation in that way, or has things been just going back to normal over time?
Raul Valentin: Yeah, I mean, as more folks are going back into the office, it fills the building, which is good for us because a large portfolio, large part of our portfolio is commercial real estate. So that makes a big deal. We’ve diversified and continue diversifying our portfolio into kind of tech services. So resiliency grids, EV charging, we do more EV charging station installations than just about any single company in the country, for example. But you wouldn’t know that we do it on behalf of our clients, their locations, but it’s certainly changing when you think about how the world changed, how we work with our partners or the landlords or the owner tenants is different when they say, Hey, my space is only 60% full. Now what does that mean around how we take care of the space? At the same time, it’s more important taking care of the space As an employee, when you come into your office, you expect it to be clean and ready.
You expect it to be a safe environment that I can be productive and be ready to collaborate and build culture on. So we play a larger part of that so that, and many of our buildings are class A buildings, so we’ve seen a movement towards from class C, class B to class A, because again, if you’re shrinking your footprint from, we used to be on three floors, we want to go to one now because we don’t have many people coming in, you want a nicer one floor, so you’re going to go to a nicer building. So we play a large role in that, and that starts sometimes in the parking lot where we’ve got parking services back to the EV charging, are we doing all the right things that create the right environment for that employee of a company showing up and being there every day?
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Yeah, that’s interesting. I have spent a lot of time thinking about how the space that we are in, the physical space that we are in influences the culture, and this was really all the rage even before covid. We had that movement towards coworking spaces and what does it mean? Does it create more collaboration? And surprisingly, having coworking spaces as in not being assigned a particular desk did not actually have an impact on collaboration and had some negative psychological effects, but I would imagine a clean space. I just know that for myself, I’m in my office right now at home, I just cleaned my desk because I can’t make productive work in a messy place. So I could see how, is that something that you talk about with the employees or is that just a part of your go-to-market strategy, or is it just implied?
Raul Valentin: It’s D, all the above. I think especially coming out of Covid, right? For a while it was a psychological thing people wanted when they were going to go back to their offices, they were concerned. We know that it was in the media, at least on the coast, right? About, hey, people being concerned around their space, is it clean? Is it safe? Am I going to be exposed there? So I think then as they came back in, it’s the flexibility of that space. How do you maintain it? How do you make it more efficient for the work? And I think maybe to your point earlier on that shared space, communal space, a lot of agile space was the buzz open space. So I’m not sure the world has moved to the right answer yet post covid. I think we’re trying to find our place, especially as some companies are spending more time getting more people in.
Some companies are staying in some level of hybrid or some level of flexibility and finding that balance. I still think we’re working on it. I think some companies are doing better than others. We play a role regardless of how we do that. We have a part of a company that really focused on aviation for us, what we’ve seen happen in the aviation sector, the amount of leisure travel that’s really picked up post implications there about how consumers, how they want to experience an airport really differently than before, catered very differently to business travelers now to leisure people. So we’re providing concierge services with some of our clients and some of their terminals for some of the travelers, which is kind of, I don’t know, 10 years ago, I never would’ve thought of a concierge service at an airport per se, but it makes sense now when you think about how many people are first time travelers or new to traveling or that’s not what they do all the time.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: What’s a concierge service when traveling? You’re talking about the Porsches that pick you up when you’re going to miss a layover or what is that?
Raul Valentin: No, they may be standing somewhere and you can stop or they’ll walk up to you and say, can I help you? And you may say, I’m looking for a place seat and they’ll help you. Where do I go on the terminal for that? Or where do I go to this? They’re providing different levels of support versus often you can walk through an airport and you can find that there’s certain people standing around trying to figure out, where do I go? Whether it’s just finding the exit or the Uber pickup place, but also just navigating the airport. So those are examples of some of the things. Then we’ve done creative things in terms of helping getting people through TSA or other things in terms of being more efficient with that process.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Business travelers can spot non travelers in an instant. If you don’t have your laptop out and your shoes off before you get to the thing, business travelers lose their minds.
Raul Valentin: That’s right. Yeah. You do try and look at the line quickly and size it up, like, okay, family members, people that look like their business travels. I’m going on that line.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Yeah, that’s so true. Yeah, totally.
Raul Valentin: That’s right.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: So what’s next for the evolution of the business? What is the next frontier of innovation?
Raul Valentin: Yeah, I mean, I touched on it. It’s certainly continuing to grow in the technical spaces we talked about. When you think about energy needs, we do bundled energy solutions, the resiliency grids. When you think about the state of our grid in the country and the world, it has huge implications for where we can play. And in that leads to what’s next. As I said, we were not really integrated before. As we become integrated, it’s how do we become the single point of contact for a building so that when they’re looking about how do I best support a facility, they’re thinking a BM, because we can do everything from the stationary engineering to the parking garage to the cleaning of the offices and everything else in between. We believe that’s where, and we self perform most of that work, hence our size. And that will require different skill sets, but we think that’s a real change for us and for the space and where we do that. Well, the clients like it. They go to one person to help run their entire facility or facilities. So that’s kind of the pivot.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: I’m also curious where A BM is in its DEI journey right now. How has the conversation shifted? I mean, as it has for everyone?
Raul Valentin: Yeah, no, it’s certainly been unprecedented, which I guess is the word everyone’s using to say the least. To say the least. I guess we were early in our journey because of how we were structured before a bunch of, again, companies that weren’t integrated. So it doesn’t change the journey we’re on, I’d say. So we’re still the CEO and I and the executive team. We’re passionate about it. We’re sensitive to some of the labels. So we’re trying to be cautious that we don’t get lost in the labels, but rather what are we trying to drive? So if you think about fairness, when you think about inclusion, collaboration, those are all the right things. Instead of maybe thinking about it as systemic racism, it’s like systemic fairness is important. HR and organizations have a responsibility to do that. And by doing that, I think you lead to diverse teams, which we’ve always said is valuable and diverse, not just in ethnicity and color and religion, but in all the facets. So that still rings true to us. We have an incredibly diverse workforce. So I also think we have a responsibility to reflect the workforce that we lead. So those things continue to shape who we are and how we think about that. We don’t want to get caught on what the labels are. Those are fleeting. It used to be called personnel, and it was people operations, and it’s human resources. Who knows what the future is. It matters sometimes, but it’s not really the most important piece, and we shouldn’t lose sight of that.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Yeah, it’s interesting. We just got hired by a large organization that you would’ve heard of, but I won’t name who had a very robust DEI program, and they made a public announcement that they were abandoning their DEI program, which they had a lot of heat for. However, from the beginning, even before that announcement, they were super committed to the concepts of diversity, equity, and inclusion. And what they realized in the political landscape was that the labels, as you said, were no longer serving the mission of being diverse, inclusive, and equitable. So they announced the abandonment of DEI and those labels, and they hired us to help us make those concepts an integral part of the culture of how people think and act to get results. So it’s interesting because if you were to Google this company, you would think that they don’t care about DEI.
And in fact, it’s very different, just like SH rm, right? This last year, Johnny C. Taylor at the SHM conference announced they’re moving from DEI to I and d. I interviewed him afterwards. He’s deeply committed to equity, but he understood that the labels had become problematic. And so there’s this political, it feels like a distraction from what we’re really trying to accomplish, which is a very complicated line to balance as a head of hr, because I think with HR generally, we’re always trying to prove our value to the business and not be viewed as a cost center that’s this necessary regulatory arm of the company. How has it been in your experience to balance that across that line?
Raul Valentin: I think you’ve got to stay focused on it. I mean, I’ll go back to Covid for a second. And often I’ll say again, we’re largest in the us so we have a ton of team members in blue states and red states, and we have tons of clients that are red and blue, and that’s okay. So I think it helps guide that we’re trying to find the right answer that’s fair and appropriate, and therefore getting caught on whether it’s mask regulations or not. Our principle was, and it’s always been, safety is one of our number one priorities. The work we do, maintaining a safe work environment is really important. So we always started with that during covid. It wasn’t about the political piece. We knew in the background there was a lot of politicalization of mass or vaccines, but it started with safety and what’s the right safety thing and how do we find the right accord?
Knowing that, again, from our client base and our team member base, everyone’s not going to feel the same way. So we’ve got to start with our value, our true north to a certain degree, and make sure that those are the conversations. And it starts with safety is important to us, and therefore us caring about how you work and where you work and how we do those things is really the job, not about the political side, not about whether you’re a red or blue state. And I think that plays true now as well. If we get caught up in the moment, we may lose what’s the most important part of the conversation and the progress that we’ve made.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Yeah, absolutely. So I have one last question for you, which is my favorite question, and it is, what is something that you don’t get asked about in these types of interviews that you wish you were asked more often?
Raul Valentin: That’s a really difficult question, by the way. I thought, I feel like people have asked me all kinds of questions, and my kids ask all kinds of questions, but for me, people don’t tend to ask. I get a lot of the, what keeps you up at night and what’s the most important part of what you do? I don’t often ask, well, what else would I do if I wasn’t doing this? And for me, it’s a hard one. I am one of those folks. I love what I do, so I love it. I feel I’m an integral part of the business connected to all aspects of the business. And so my answer would always, I think would be like I’d be running a business somewhere is what I do. Maybe whether it’s as an entrepreneur or in a corporate role, I’d be running a business, but I feel I’m already running a business. I think I run HR like a business, and I get to stay connected to our business. So maybe that’s why I’m doing what I’m doing versus moving on to do something differently.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Not law school.
Raul Valentin: Not law school.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Those law school dreams went away.
Raul Valentin: Yeah, no, no. They’re long gone.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: That’s right. Yeah. What was that from? Was it your parents that wanted you to be a lawyer?
Raul Valentin: Yeah. Well, most parents had three things, right? Be a lawyer, be a doctor, or I forget the third thing, but what’s the third one?
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: I think it’s just lawyer, doctor, professional. When I went to college, I had told my dad that I was going to be a nursing major because I thought, well, that’ll be a surefire job. And then I got to the orientation weekend and they showed me all the classes and I thought, oh, these look like science. I’m not interested in science. So I signed up for all the classes that I wanted, which were theater, voice opera, and the woman who was helping me said, well, I think you’re a theater major. I said, okay, great. That sounds fun. I leave orientation. I get in the car with my dad and I tell my dad all of my classes, and he says, that doesn’t sound like nursing classes. I said, oh, I switched to theater. And he had an absolute connection, but quietly, he didn’t say anything. He just said, oh, okay, that sounds great. But he was horrified that I wanted to be a theater major instead of a nursing major. And look at me now. It all worked out in the end. Didn’t adapt.
Raul Valentin: I was going to say, look, you’re hosting a podcast. You’re doing all this stuff. It’s got a little, it all plays together.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: I’m Using my theater skills.
Raul Valentin: Exactly. I using your theater skills. So there you go. We’re not.
Raul Valentin: Look at you. You’re basically running a business. So there we are. That’s better than being an attorney, and your hours aren’t billable, so it’s fabulous.
Raul Valentin: Yeah, that’s true.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Well, thank you so much for joining us today. It’s such a pleasure to hear your perspective and for you to share your insights with us. It’s been an absolute pleasure.
Raul Valentin: Thank you for having me on.
