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.
Karina Bernacki has followed a winding career path to the HR function, with stops in Army intelligence, engineering, customer support, and people transformation consulting. When she arrived in the HR space, she thought, “This feels right.”
Since joining VSCO as its VP of people, Bernacki has worked to address the mismatch between what individuals expect from their managers and the company and what a company expects from its employees, telling HR Brew it can be “one of the biggest, most toxic challenges in a company.” In the HR department at VSCO, she started to incorporate the company values and those of its leaders into the job architecture and competencies for employees. She made them explicit so that expectations were aligned.
Bernacki credits her love of people to her childhood, as she moved a lot, and learnt early how to build new networks of friends and to “embrace the concept of the we.” Each day, she says she’s working on how to “minimize pain and suffering at work.”
What’s the best change you’ve made at work?
Redesigning our performance management system was quite a feat, but I’m most proud of our hybrid operating model. It’s not necessarily revolutionary, but for us it has created significant positive impacts. We have a system built upon learning loops that begins with our quarterly in-person event. I fly the entire company out to the same location for a week, where we conduct our big room planning, aligning all roadmaps across the entire company, including dependencies and risks. We set the goals and high-level themes and ensure that everyone knows how their work impacts the company’s success…We then spend a day with our functional teams, each team planning their own team-building activities and shared meals.
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The time between these events, we meet monthly to review how we are doing, how our plans are progressing, the impact of work delivered to date, and determine if we need to adjust. These are large group check-ins, really leaning into the awesomeness of being virtual and leveraging technology to ensure the experience is facilitated and highly inclusive of all communication styles…To truly make remote and hybrid models work, you cannot just focus on virtual happy hours and other social constructs. Instead, you need to design your entire system to ensure expectations are explicit. Transparency is intentional.
What’s the biggest misconception people might have about your job?
That it’s just about HR, i.e., payroll, ER, etc., and not about business strategy.
What’s the most fulfilling aspect of your job?
The humans. I just simply love them. I believe in the infinite potential of humans and want to spend my entire life seeking ways to help them unlock what might be possible.
What trend in HR are you most optimistic about? Why?
People operations and people analytics. Automating away all the lower value work that is necessary but not providing exponential impacts, i.e., all the administrative and compliance items, provides much more time and energy to expend on people development and engagement. Also, as someone who started in engineering and product, I love the growing field of people analytics and how we are evolving our ability to leverage data to better inform people strategies.
Tell us one new or old HR tech product or platform that’s made your life easier, and why.
Lattice is something that I’ve loved for a while, and it continues to evolve and improve. I’m a big fan of how it covers all areas of employee engagement, and the tool is great to help develop new managers with the 1:1 and update functionality.