Summary

What happens when a compliance-minded HR veteran who has seen the inside of more than 50 companies takes on workforce planning for an almost entirely frontline, cross-border workforce right as AI rewrites the rules? In this episode of The Human Element, host Barb Bidan sits down with Dawn Stastny, Chief Human Resources Officer at BelPak, the packaging company formed when Coregistics, Proven Partners Group, and Belvika combined into one organization with more than two dozen facilities across the US and Canada. Dawn shares why she refuses to call them soft skills, how AI screening unlocked a pool of candidates her recruiters could never reach, the governance guardrails she applies to every AI decision, and why she has a calendar reminder set for the middle management crisis she predicts in 2031. This conversation is for HR and people leaders navigating AI adoption with frontline and deskless teams.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction

02:30 From consultant to operator at BelPak

05:45 There's nothing soft about humanity skills

07:30 Merging three legacy companies into One BelPak

11:15 AI recruiting and the third shift problem

15:30 AI governance and compliance guardrails

18:30 Give the time back to your people

24:00 The 2031 middle management crisis

28:30 Developing talent through community partnerships

32:00 Lightning round and final advice

Takeaways

-Humanity skills like empathy, judgment, and discernment become more valuable as AI advances, not less.

-AI screening lets recruiting reach candidates the traditional process never could, like third shift mechanics, while removing unintentional bias from the first pass.

-AI gives you information; humans are still responsible for verifying it and making the final decision.

-Entry level jobs cut by AI in 2026 and 2027 could create a middle management shortage by 2031, so leaders need to protect their pipeline now.

-Instead of consuming talent, develop it: community college partnerships can build the skilled workforce you cannot hire off the market.

Connect with the Guest

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dawn-stastny-sphr-shrm-scp-/

Website: https://belpak.com

Sponsor
Wisq is the AI platform for HR. We built Harper, the world's first AI HR teammate — designed to handle the judgment-heavy work that has historically consumed HR teams: job changes, performance concerns, leaves of absence, onboarding, and employee relations issues. Where HCM bolt-ons and chatbots deflect the easiest questions, Harper resolves full cases, end-to-end. The result is an HR function with the capacity and strategic bandwidth to focus on the work that moves the business.

Companies get Harper live in weeks, not quarters, with implementation support built on deep HR domain expertise. Wisq serves HR leaders at leading companies across industries, helping them raise the bar on employee experience and expand what their teams are capable of.

For more information, visit https://www.wisq.com

Summary

Jens Hovgaard Jensen, Vice President of People and Culture at ECCO Americas, joins host Barb Bidan on The Human Element for a candid conversation about HR's future in the age of AI. Drawing on a career built from turnarounds and carve-outs at Maersk, Girteka Logistics, and ECCO, plus ten years as an officer in the Royal Danish Life Guards, Jens makes a provocative case: HR should actively eliminate its own transactional work with AI before someone else does it, treat restructuring as a chance to lead with humanity, and stop over-planning the workforce in favor of higher-value analytics. It is a practical, occasionally uncomfortable listen for HR and people leaders who want to move from administrative function to true business partner.

Chapters

00:00 Welcome and Jens's path from the Royal Danish Life Guards

02:35 The military through line: plan, then pivot

06:35 Closing 75 stores across three countries

07:45 Why ECCO gave people notice in November

10:45 HR sawing the branch it sits on

16:15 From transactional HR to true business peer

19:55 Where AI is already quietly removing HR work

23:00 Plan less, elevate the workforce analytics

29:25 The broken benefits model and vendor AI roadmaps

32:35 Lightning round and the final word

Takeaways

• Treating people with dignity during a restructuring is also good business. ECCO told staff in November about January store closures and saw low turnover, not a wave of early exits.
• "Working yourself out of a job" is a career accelerator, not a risk. Eliminating your own repetitive work tends to get you promoted into bigger problems, not pushed out.
• HR should drive its own AI adoption before someone else does. The transactional, administrative identity is exactly the work AI should absorb.
• Never spend more than 20 to 30 percent of your time planning. You need the other 70 percent for execution, and over-granular workforce plans rarely survive contact with reality.
• The real AI prize in HR is the analytics humans could never do well before, from predicting attrition to running M&A due diligence to challenging your own assumptions.

  
  

Connect with the Guest

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jensjensen42/
Website: https://us.ecco.com

Sponsor
Wisq is the AI platform for HR. We built Harper, the world's first AI HR teammate — designed to handle the judgment-heavy work that has historically consumed HR teams: job changes, performance concerns, leaves of absence, onboarding, and employee relations issues. Where HCM bolt-ons and chatbots deflect the easiest questions, Harper resolves full cases, end-to-end. The result is an HR function with the capacity and strategic bandwidth to focus on the work that moves the business.

Companies get Harper live in weeks, not quarters, with implementation support built on deep HR domain expertise. Wisq serves HR leaders at leading companies across industries, helping them raise the bar on employee experience and expand what their teams are capable of. For more information, visit wisq.com.

Summary

RJ Jadhav, Vice President of Human Resources at Lumen Technologies, joins host Barb Bidan to reframe how HR leaders should think about AI, transformation, and the role of their function. RJ has spent his career inside the most transformative companies in tech — fifteen years at Microsoft, the hypergrowth years at Google Cloud, and now at Lumen, where he's helping rewire a legacy network company into a digital services company built for the AI economy. In this conversation he unpacks why AI is 70% culture and 30% tools, why business impact has to be the goal long before AI, and why HR has earned the right to lead the AI charter inside the enterprise.

Takeaways

• Transformation needs three things at once — leadership behaviors, designed systems instead of interventions, and a real business anchor. Pull one lever in isolation and the other two drift.
• AI is not the destination. Business impact is. Start with where the business is going, then let AI accelerate moonshots you'd otherwise rule out as too slow or too expensive.
• AI is 70% culture and 30% tools. AI amplifies whatever culture already exists — good or bad. Treat it as a tool rollout and it will surface every cultural weakness you have.
• The most underestimated AI metric in the C-suite is protected leadership capacity — the space to think, reflect, and produce ideas muscle memory cannot.
• Stop using AI as a productivity hack. Start using it as a leadership system that coaches your judgment in real time.

Chapters

00:00 Cold open and welcome

00:55 Meet RJ Jadhav, VP of HR at Lumen Technologies

02:00 The through-line across Microsoft, Google Cloud, and Lumen

04:30 Microsoft's established engine vs Lumen's existential rewire

05:50 One year in — moments that prove the transformation is real

08:30 AI as accelerant, not destination

09:10 Lumen's three-year people strategy and the business-first sequence

11:00 The most underestimated AI unlock — protecting leadership capacity

13:00 From productivity hack to leadership system

15:30 AI as a 24/7 coach

16:30 AI fluency as the only new HR skill

18:00 Why HR should lead the AI charter

20:30 The Chief AI Enablement Officer role

21:30 Three focus areas — redesign, talent, culture

22:30 The work-design framework — automate, agentify, human

24:00 Skills for the next generation of HR leaders

26:00 AI is 70% culture and 30% tools

27:00 Goal Pro — 70,000 goals aligned to the North Star

31:00 Barb's recap of the conversation

32:00 Lightning round

34:00 Top takeaways

36:00 RJ's parting words — the judgment test

Connect with the Guest

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rj-jadhav/

Website: https://www.lumen.com/en-us/home.html

Sponsor
Wisq is the AI platform for HR. We built Harper, the world's first AI HR teammate — designed to handle the judgment-heavy work that has historically consumed HR teams: job changes, performance concerns, leaves of absence, onboarding, and employee relations issues. Where HCM bolt-ons and chatbots deflect the easiest questions, Harper resolves full cases, end-to-end. The result is an HR function with the capacity and strategic bandwidth to focus on the work that moves the business.

Companies get Harper live in weeks, not quarters, with implementation support built on deep HR domain expertise. Wisq serves HR leaders at leading companies across industries, helping them raise the bar on employee experience and expand what their teams are capable of.

For more information, visit https://www.wisq.com