328: Why Job Loyalty is Dead & How AI is Reshaping Work with Bryan Power, Nextdoor’s Head of People
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But the two massively disruptive forces right now are hybrid work. Like the way people work has just been completely upended by the major shift out of going to the office every day for most people and the rise of AI, which I think is also another seismic shift. But these two things, hybrid and AI, are now changing everything. And so it's elevated the conversation that the people leader is a part of in the C-suite. ♪

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, depending on where you're listening. Welcome to a special episode of AI and the Future of Work. I'm your host, Dan Turchin, CEO of PeopleRain, the AI platform for IT and HR employee service for...

Oh, I believe only the fifth time ever in more than 300 episodes. We're recording this one live, coming at you from Transform, one of the, I'd say, two biggest HR tech events of the year. We're here at the Wynn in a conference room. So excited to have you meet today's guest. As you know, we recently published a newsletter and

We share AI fun facts and tips that don't always make the regular show in that newsletter. We'll publish a link to subscribe to it in the show notes. And since this is a special episode,

We're going no AI fun fact. We're going no listener mailbag. Just me and my guests coming at you live. A bit about today's special guest, Brian Powers, the head of people at Nextdoor, the hyperlocal social network you probably have heard of.

It launched in 2011, went public in 2021, and now has nearly 90 million members, myself among one of them. Prior to Nextdoor, Brian was the CHRO at Yahoo and HR leader at Square and Google. He's a vocal leader in the HR community on all topics related to people ops. Brian received his BA in English literature from Vanderbilt, Go Commodores, and without further ado,

Brian, it's my pleasure to welcome you to AI and the Future of Work. Let's get started by having you share a bit more about your background and how you got into the space. Dan, thanks for having me. I've been working in tech in some capacity in the people space now since the late 90s. I came to the Bay Area as part of the dot-com boom in 1999. It's now over a quarter century ago.

I got started in recruiting and I joined Google right after it went public in 2005. And I remember when Google was only a couple thousand employees before it became the monster that it is today. It's really a giant influential organization. I was there for about eight years, primarily in recruiting roles. And then at the beginning of the 2010s, I joined Square when it was a startup.

which was a really incredible company to be a part of. It was about 150 people when I started. I left just a few months before it went public to become the C-H-Dro at Yahoo. As you mentioned, I was part of the Marissa Meyer executive team there, which was great. And then...

My most recent role next door, I've been there just over six and a half years now. I started in 2018. It's been a really fascinating ride. It's an incredible company with an incredible purpose. And it's funny, I almost don't even remember working anywhere else because so much has changed in the last six and a half years. I've navigated COVID and the whole hybrid disruption in the workplace. I became a dad. We took the company public. It's really been a great ride. So you've been a people leader at some of...

the most iconic at companies with some of the most iconic cultures ever. What have you learned from those experiences in terms of being part of and helping to find those cultures? I mean, I've learned a lot through mistakes. That's for sure. But I found like I've been lucky enough to work for these companies that are really mission driven. And I think when you can find...

a way to tie what people are doing in their day-to-day to a bigger impact in the world. When they can really feel, no matter how small or incremental their job might feel, that they see how they're part of doing something bigger. It just unlocks this energy inside of the company that I find intoxicating personally. Something I say frequently is that your customer experience will never be better than your employee experience. Yeah.

Take us back to maybe the early days, whether it was Google or Yahoo or for that matter, Square, Nextdoor. What are some of the things that those companies did differently to invest in their employees? It's interesting. I learned a lot comparing Square and Google's culture because I thought they were really different. Google was very engineering-centric. Square was really design-centric. Google had a really strong culture.

regardless of the part of the company or city that you worked in. It really felt the same. Square had a really shared company moment when we would do all hands. But other than that, Jack Dorsey had this beautiful idea. He wanted the different functions to feel like different neighborhoods with their own culture.

a lower level of shared identity it really did depend on if you were in finance or in sales that that org would have its own so the things and then like i said we would come together as a company and it was called uh town square because it was like when all the neighbors together

So I learned a lot about how the leaders of those companies wanted to have an intention about what they wanted the company to be. And I think that's been the biggest lesson that I've brought back recently at Nextdoor.

you've got to be really intentional about what you want the company to be because people will bring their last job to their new job and just operate the way they did the last company. So really defining your own culture and putting a lot of energy and life into it sometimes over time. One of the reasons I wanted to have this chance to talk to you is because Nextdoor is a smaller company, but it's a brand that's

ubiquitous. Everyone I talk to and prep for this is a member of Nextdoor, 90 million community members. And so Nextdoor, the product is itself a culture, a community. And you're tasked with building culture and community for Nextdoor, the team that's building that product. What's it like to be part of an organization whose product is community and culture?

Well, I think the idea of Nextdoor is really simple. And what I found working in Silicon Valley is sometimes the really big, simple ideas are the harder ones to find, where there's just very, very high ceiling. And the idea of a neighbor, which is a special type of relationship, it's not your family, it's not your friend, it's not your coworker. It's just this massive human idea. All cultures going back centuries understand what this is. And so Nextdoor really is trying to bring tools and technology to let those types of relationships flourish.

um that's like the neighborhood app on your phone is the current manifestation of that but your question like the the company's culture like we're a community-driven organization and so you kind of have to be into community and community building if you're gonna enjoy and really be able to bring your best work next door i used to say when we were you know before covered when we were in the office every day i would describe it to candidates as like

listen, you're going to get bothered around here. We're going to want you to come do this thing we're talking about. Come to a speaker, go help in the community, come to this meeting. It's hard to be just left alone and next door because the community gene is just really strong from the founding days to the company we have today. It goes back to what I was saying about we're really intentional about leaning into that more so. It's not unique, but more so than other companies.

I mentioned in the intro that you're here to give a talk tomorrow, I think on a panel, talking about the shifting relationship between employees and their employers. Maybe give us a preview of what you can talk about. What is that shifting relationship? Yeah, I'm really fascinated by it because I think the themes have been evolving for decades. I think about my parents, in the 70s and 80s, you would get a job and you would hope to stay there your whole career. That was like

what people wanted. And then I'm kind of simplifying things, but there was a lot of layoffs and corporate restructurings in the 80s and early 90s that kind of broke that idea of like, that's the ideal. And so when I started working in the 90s, my parents would still be like, hey, just find a great company and then just sell. And I was like, no way. I want to work in different places. But even my timeline was like, I was thinking like five to 10 years at a company is what you should aspire is more normal.

And then you come into today and the current market, I just see people move so much. People quit a new job after a year and take another one for a year and a half or two years. I mean, you just see this tremendous mobility in the marketplace. And I think on the flip side, the return, and I'm speaking specifically to tech, there's been a lot of layoffs in the 2020s. And so people are less trusting that they should really try to find a place and not leave because the companies are saying, hey, we might move on from you.

And so I think that this relationship

It's becoming much more honest. There's less of this pitch of, hey, come here and do your best for your career forever. It's like, this is what I've got for you to work on this year. This is how you're going to grow. This is what I'm going to pay you. And let's reevaluate year on both sides. And so I found just being upfront about that is just liberating for both sides. We had a great guest on this show who actually is at Transform, a guy named Josh Burson. Yeah.

well-known personality in the HR tech community. And one of the things we talked about is not just the shifting nature of the employee-employee relationship, but the shifting nature of what HR is. There was a time when what it meant to be in human resources meant there was more of a focus on the R than the H, being a resource for payroll and benefits. And today we actually think about culture and employee experience being a

foundational part of what transformational HR cultures see as part of their role. How do you think about how the role of HR has changed just during

during your career? Yeah, I mean, I'll give you like a longer timeline and a more present one is, and I've always had a hard time with HR, human resources as like the name of the function. If you just look at the history of the etymology of it, it's like looking at, I struggle when people say like people are our biggest asset

They're not assets. There's financial assets, there's real estate assets, but these people are not owned by the company. And I think discussing in that way comes back to the side of what the contract is. Your servers don't get pissed off in the morning and walk out the front door. And so just calling your employees resources, I think is a very financial lens into how it's shaped. It's why I really like the people team as a much more common name.

name now that I see a lot. I didn't see it. The first time I saw it, it was at Square, but now I see it all the time. Because the words people and team really are a better reflection of what the function does. And so I think a lot about that. Specific to the role, this role has gotten so...

much harder in the last couple of years. I think historically, it was really looked at a service organization that meant to have everything running seamlessly in the background to the point where there was people operations or recruiting or compensation. It's kind of like no news is good news. If you're not talking about it, it's because it's working well and we can get back to the nature of what the company is trying to do.

But the two massively disruptive forces right now are hybrid work. Like the way people work has just been completely upended by the major shift out of going to the office every day for most people and the rise of AI, which I think is also another seismic shift. And so these two things kind of squarely land on the chief people officer to come up with like what to do. And what's different is that the other enterprise leaders now like

They can't do what they need to do without understanding these things, which wasn't as true about the traditional people domains. I think that historically people always worry about recruiting. If they don't have their team, they're going to prioritize recruiting. But once they've got their team going, they kind of want to be left alone. But these two things, hybrid and AI, are now changing everything. And so it's elevated the conversation that the people leader is a part of in the C-suite.

You said something there that's so critical that I want to spend a little bit more time on that your peers in the C-suite and everyone in the organization should be looking to you for advice or leadership about how to use technology in the organization. Because

Every employee today comes into the workplace and they've got a little bit of an added burden on their shoulders because they're wondering, how stable is my job? Did that degree I went to school for so many years have meaning? What does it mean to be a human when my colleague is a bot? And the thing that maybe outside of this event, Transform, might seem ironic, but it's not to all of us here today, is that that

complicated intersection of technology and people is something that really is owned by the leader of the people, the leader of people ops, the CHRO, etc. How do you think about that part of your responsibility, this kind of fusion or the synthesis or the education of the organization about the role that technology and specifically AI plays in their career progression?

Yeah, you know, it's interesting. It's weirdly tied to what we all went through with work from home and how we work for us. I think people tend to look at the people function as the one that's going to help people learn how to do things, right? Training, learning and development is a classic example.

people domain. The trick with AI is everyone is trying to figure it out at the same time. So there's not a ton of historical best practices you can draw on the same way you could training enterprise salespeople or probably new.

coding capabilities, right? So the reason I'm excited about a conference like Transform is everyone here, their number one thing is what is everyone doing about accelerating the use of AI in their company? Because when we went to work from home, there also wasn't really a good playbook. We really had to figure it out.

So I just find problems like this invigorating and exciting because you don't know what it's going to look like on the other side yet, but you are almost certainly sure it's going to be different. There's a credible argument to be made that jobs are at risk due to automation. But I'd argue because I host this podcast and I talk about it all the time and it's my passion in life that the counter argument is more credible. And that's that AI is not here to take your job.

It's here to augment what you, the human, do best. There are some things that we as humans don't do well, it turns out, and there are opportunities to partner with machines. And there are other things that are innate to the human experience, rational judgment and critical thinking and feeling empathy that we can never partner with machines to compliment us on.

When you think about kind of you taking the pulse of, let's just say, next door, what do you think is the prevailing attitude toward AI among your community?

It's interesting. So I was listening to a great panel yesterday and there was a panelist, Alex Shapiro. She's the chief people officer at Jasper AI. You should have her on here. She's excellent. And she kind of drew a great line through. This is just another new wave of technology disrupting. And she pointed out, you know, she really remembers when things went to mobile and companies were just losing their minds over how are we going to have people using their own phones online?

And this was a big problem. Today, the idea that you're just using your own phone to check your emails, it's not even discussed. But this was a big problem then. And then when things moved to the cloud, it was like, wait, how are we going to move our data to another company like Amazon? There's these huge hurdles. And now it's just so built into the way it was done.

And her point, which I agree with, was like, we're just at another one now with AI. There is a ton of fear and resistance because they see people are trying to now figure out like, I do it differently without AI. And I don't know what this change is going to mean yet. But I think I'm definitely a techno optimist. I think it's going to be

Great, it's the same thing. I'm so glad I can do stuff on my phone versus have to use a laptop. And I think we will all feel the same way about really incorporating AI into how we're gonna work. It's gonna give so much time back.

And then the question will be, which is another point Alex made, it's like, if it takes you 20 minutes now to do something that would have taken you a week before, what are you going to do with the week? And I think that's what's a really interesting question. Some people are like, well, I want the week back. I think I'll be with my friends and family now. But more likely, it's going to be like, hey, you now have much more time to add the value you were talking about, the nuance, the human connection that is pressed because there's so much time that's doing the work without AI today.

First off, Alex Shapiro, I know you're listening. Take Brian up on his offer. Come hang out on the podcast. You got an open offer there. Second and more important,

is we can't have this conversation about introducing AI into the workplace without thinking about what it means to do it responsibly. And it's really important that as part of this conversation, we say, if we're using AI to, let's say, facilitate or automate hiring decisions or screening or evaluate who gets a raise, we have to be careful because it cannot be said enough times, AI is perfectly designed to replicate human bias.

So we can't expect that introducing an automation tool will somehow automate out the human bias. It's already in our processes and we just potentially amplify it by using more AI. So as much as we're both AI techno-optimists, how do you think about questioning what could go wrong as you introduce AI? I'm using it all the time. I use it every day, multiple times a day. All the tools, you know, Cloud, Brock, ChatGPT,

Jim and I, I think they, I'm just learning. It's like I just got a new toolbox, right? So I just experiment with all of them. I think I'm not in a rush to have it do things for me. I'm having it really work as a thought partner to catch my own mistakes and biases. So I will say things like, hey, here's what I think I should do. Here's what I want to do. Check my thinking. And it's better than I am at me thinking about what I'm doing and

And so I agree with the risk. I think what's irresponsible is trying to just quickly have it do someone's job. I don't think we're in, I think it's kind of obvious we're in this co-pilot phase. I don't think we need to rush to get out of that. That itself is such massive leverage for everybody that I think it would be a jump for me to be like, well, I just don't need as many people now.

I'd rather maximize the people I do have by levering them up 10, 100x from what used to take them a lot longer. And honestly, sharper answers from what you're trying to get out of people.

I mean, we're only a little over two years into this global experiment. And already it's, I mean, we're in the cradle of Silicon Valley, both you and I, but it already is starting to feel ubiquitous in the workplace. Yeah, I remember when the internet started. Year two of the internet compared to today. Year two of the internet was exciting, you know? The first browser, or like the first Mac, you know? These things were incredible. But the first Mac compared to like this Mac, it's...

So I think AI will follow a similar trajectory. And as exciting and as ubiquitous as this feels, it's just very, very early as a consumer to be able to see. It's obviously, it didn't launch two years ago, but I think it broke out in a big way when ChatGPT launched two years ago. So here we're taping this early in 2025. Let's say Brian and Dan are back here in 2035. We're having a version of the same conversation about...

Maybe we don't call it AI in the workplace, but technology, how it aids employee productivity. How's the conversation different in a decade? One thing I think will change a lot is the tools we use. So, like, you know, my mother had a hobby in calligraphy. And what that meant is she had great handwriting and I had great handwriting.

But my handwriting is not as good as it used to be because I don't write as much by hand. And I'm a person that likes to journal and write and everything else. But I don't think my five-year-old son, I think his handwriting is going to get better because I don't think he's going to be typing.

Like right now, if you can't type quickly, you're basically at a huge disadvantage at work. I remember people who couldn't type when the internet happened. But now everybody can type really fast on their phones or on a laptop. I don't think that's going to matter. I think my son, when he's 15, 10 years from now, is going to be like, what were you guys doing with your thumbs all day? That's just going to completely change the way people interact with technology. And it's the same thing. 10 years before the iPhone, you couldn't imagine using a phone like you use the laptop.

You know what I mean? And now today it's like a primary device for so many people. So I think because of AI, I think we'll just be talking more, you know, and that means we'll be less of a need to write our thoughts with our fingers. And that's going to be incredible. You're just going to be able to talk out loud like in Iron Man to Jarvis and the things you want to happen will happen. And AI, I think, will be built on all types of stuff.

You know, like the smart home of today, like the wire dishwasher, the wire refrigerator. You're just going to talk to them or they're going to talk to you. I think that will be really, really exciting. I can't wait. I can't wait to be able to talk to the device in my house. Is that going to take 10 years? I think it will happen faster in some ways, but it'll get really good later. You know, it won't be 10 years to like launch, but 10 years...

I can't wait to listen to this 10 years to see how far off right or wrong we were. It will happen quickly, but it'll get really good faster once it happens. Brian, unbelievably, we're bad at a time. This feels like part one of a multi-part conversation. But you're not going anywhere without answering one last important question for me. So let's say you're talking to your five-year-old son or I have two kids. Mine are 15 and 17, my girls. And you're having a conversation with them about how to

invest in a career that's future-proof. What skills should they focus on? Maybe they're a little bit apprehensive about, maybe not your five-year-old son yet. I hope he's optimistic and not apprehensive yet. But as you get closer to picking a career, picking a learning journey,

that you want to transcend any one technology shift. What's your coaching to the next generation? I think what served me well and what I would pass on is prioritize learning. Make that your skill set is a curiosity and a love and a commitment to learning because that will be your skill to jump to changing industries, changing skills, changing needs is your ability to process and learn. To maximize that, you

You have to put yourself in positions where you don't know what to do. That's the only way to learn is to try things. It's just the definition of it. If you already know what to do, you're not learning. So my fear for the younger generation is they're trying to get to a place where they feel comfortable and they know what to do. And that's what actually atrophies your learning. Now, what comes with not knowing what to do is stress and anxiety. But that's the feedback that you're stretched.

And that I think when you can kind of embrace that pressure and make it an engine to get out of it so you can keep learning, it will serve you your entire career, no matter what you do. Brilliant advice. How can the audience learn more about you and get to know you and the work that you're doing? I don't have a big online presence. You can follow me on LinkedIn. That's probably the thing that I do the most. And that's why I recommend it.

Excellent. Well, gosh, that's all the time we have for this special live episode of AI and the Future of Work. Of course, thanks to Brian Power for hanging out with me one-on-one. And as always, I'm your host, Dan Turchin from PeopleRain. And of course, we're back next week with another amazing guest.