Here’s this week’s edition of our Coworking series in which we chat 1:1 with an HR Brew reader. Want to be featured in an upcoming edition? Click here to introduce yourself.
Charlie Kautz moved to HR after experiencing an aha moment while working in marketing. He wanted to apply the time and energy he spent making customers happy toward improving the working experience of his colleagues, so the marketing pro became an HR pro. Kautz believes companies need more people who care about making work meaningful and fulfilling for employees, who will then be ready and willing to take care of the customers.
At Live Oak Bank, Kautz has been leading the team of learning and organizational development since December 2021. Kautz said he worries the shift to digital development tools omits a valuable interpersonal component of learning that comes from the shared experience in a classroom setting. In-person trainings are “still really worthy of your time, energy, space to get together as a group to commit to learning and have a shared experience,” he told HR Brew.
What’s the best change you’ve made at a place you’ve worked?
Live Oak has been on a radical growth trajectory…Because of this, we were finding (and hearing) that it was getting harder to stay connected with colleagues at the bank, let alone know what our newer folks were doing, who they are, and what brought them here.
Last year, two months after I started, we introduced a peer networking program called “Branching Out.” Every two weeks, people who’ve opted into the program are randomly paired with another colleague for a get-to-know-you, informal 30-minute networking meeting. In less than a year, we’ve had almost 400 people sign up and participate in the program.
What’s the biggest misconception people might have about your job?
I think there’s a misconception that learning has truly shifted to digital-first. We find that people here are hungry for shared learning experiences that thrive on human connection. Digital tools are great, but we see independent learning as a complement to in-person, facilitated learning.
What’s the most fulfilling aspect of your job?
I believe my team’s work contributes to creating a more fulfilling work (and work–life) experience for 1,000 other people. What more could you ask for?
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What trend in HR are you most optimistic about? Why?
Broadly speaking, I’m most optimistic about “new ways of working” and perhaps more specifically, new ways of organizing people to collaborate and accomplish work…Organizational design should be visualized as a network, not a ladder, and we have to make work more personal, more humanistic, and continue to evolve away from command-and-control organizational systems. I think teams with experimental mindsets and progressive leadership have only scratched the surface on what is possible in the realm of new management systems and self-organization.
What trend in HR are you least optimistic about? Why?
This is going to sound very counterintuitive, given the surge in narrative around artificial intelligence, but I would probably say AI. People (human beings) are the most complex behavioral species on Earth. Intervening with them, reasoning with them, creating experiences for them is a byproduct of intimate human curation and understanding. I’m worried that automation and AI are potentially already a bit overstated and misunderstood in terms of the potential of how they might influence the HR function specifically.
Tell us one new or old HR tech product or platform that’s made your life easier, and why.
It’s not necessarily an HR tech product, specifically, but one tool we’ve loved experimenting with at Live Oak is called Murmur. Murmur is a software startup focused on what they call “working agreements”—facilitating localized conversations to enable teams to set norms for the "how" of work—how we communicate, how we collaborate, how we do lots and lots of different things. So many teams spent a lot of time chartering on what they do, and why they do it, but very little time on the operating rhythms of the "how" of work—especially not on how work gets done. Murmur helps eliminate assumptions about teamwork and lets individuals have a voice in the how of work. I think it’s an awesome product that’s very low on a long bell curve of adoption and impact.