This episode features an interview with Laura Wall Klieves, Head of People at Malwarebytes. Laura’s career began in automotive advertising before she pivoted to Learning & Development. At Malwarebytes, Laura leads L&D and drives internal communications initiatives by weaving together her knowledge of visual storytelling and learning to elevate the organization's leadership and management teams. In this episode, Simpplr’s Chief People Officer, Miriam Connaughton and Laura discuss HR trends for 2025. They explore strategies for improving employee engagement post-pandemic, the balance between remote work and return-to-office mandates, and the responsible integration of AI in HR processes.
This episode features an interview with Laura Wall Klieves, Head of People at Malwarebytes. Laura’s career began in automotive advertising before she pivoted to Learning & Development. At Malwarebytes, Laura leads L&D and drives internal communications initiatives by weaving together her knowledge of visual storytelling and learning to elevate the organization's leadership and management teams.
In this episode, Simpplr’s Chief People Officer, Miriam Connaughton and Laura discuss HR trends for 2025. They explore strategies for improving employee engagement post-pandemic, the balance between remote work and return-to-office mandates, and the responsible integration of AI in HR processes.
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“ There is something intangible about being next to another human being, whether they're on your team or on a cross-functional team. There's something about being able to say to, as I call a 3D person, live and in-person, ‘Hey, how are you?’ Those spontaneous connections. We're not dictating five days a week, but we do want to encourage, at least, our managers and our senior leaders to get back into the office a little bit more. The other thing that I think we see, but also I would imagine a lot of companies are seeing, is especially for new employees, that learning about the company, making those initial connections when you first are hired doesn't happen when we're all sitting at home.” – Laura Wall Klieves
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Episode Timestamps:
*(04:19): Getting to know Laura
*(04:27): Laura’s priorities for 2025
*(07:06): How Laura is approaching return-to-office mandates
*(12:46): Strategies for enhancing employee engagement
*(24:16): The role of AI in HR
*(33:57): Future HR trends and predictions
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Links:
Connect with Laura on LinkedIn
Connect with Miriam on LinkedIn
Miriam Connaughton: Hi, everyone. And welcome back to the Cohesion podcast. I am Miriam Connaughton, the Chief People Officer at Simpplr and welcoming today.
Miriam Connaughton: So lovely to see you again, Laura. Laura Klieves, who is kind of my counterpart, I guess, at Malwarebytes. Thank you for taking the time with us today. Well, thank you so much for inviting me. I'm excited to be here. And now Malwarebytes, I think in today's world is a quite a familiar company name, but do you want to just say a little bit about what your role encompasses there and a little bit about what your company does?
Laura Wall Klieves: Sure. Malwarebytes is a cybersecurity company. We take care of both our direct customers, as well as corporate customers to keep them safe from all the bad guys out there trying to hack through systems, et cetera. And I'm head of people. I've been with the company for five years and been in the role for a little over two months.
Miriam Connaughton: And I think like me, you and I have kind of atypical roots to the chief people officer. I just, I'm fascinated by the career paths we all take. They're so diverse. Just, you know, maybe share a little bit of that audience about some of the stepping stones you've taken, which is all built towards where you are today.
Laura Wall Klieves: So, I backed into head of people on the people team through learning and development, and I come to learning and development midway through my career, I have a whole nother career in marketing and advertising, and I worked for a company helping them to build out their training and their business academy focused on presentation skills and communication.
Laura Wall Klieves: So that's how I got to be where I am today.
Miriam Connaughton: So before we dive into some dialogue today about kind of what's on our mind, what are we thinking of for the year ahead, I'd like to help our listeners get to know you better. So let's kind of go in with a little bit of either or. So these are some simple either or questions to ease us in.
Miriam Connaughton: So are you a tea or a coffee person?
Laura Wall Klieves: Coffee.
Miriam Connaughton: Coffee. I'm a tea. Surprise. I'm British. There you go. Cats or dogs?
Laura Wall Klieves: Dogs. Although I like cats. I love cats. I'm not going to alienate our cat friends out there. You're not a cat hater. I'm not a cat hater either, but definitely a dog. My husband's allergic to cats, so that's why we don't have any cats.
Miriam Connaughton: And what's your dog breeds that you have?
Laura Wall Klieves: Mutts. We get them from the pound.
Miriam Connaughton: Oh, lovely. I have an English lab. The English name continues. Yes. And so Perfect vacation, snowy mountaintops or tropical beaches?
Laura Wall Klieves: 100 percent tropical beaches.
Miriam Connaughton: There you go. I think we can all deal with that a little bit at this time.
Miriam Connaughton: Excellent, excellent. Well, thank you again for joining us. And so we're kind of at the early part of the year. Our minds are very much in priorities, planning ahead, maybe just kick us off a little bit. You know, what's on your mind? What's on your priority list as you look at the year ahead?
Laura Wall Klieves: Yeah, you know, I think the biggest priorities for us are about engagement.
Laura Wall Klieves: That is a continuing theme. All of us have gone through the years of the pandemic and can you believe it? We're coming up on the five year anniversary where we all went to ground as I like to call it. So we've got offices scattered around the globe and some of our offices, some of our folks are much more interested in coming back in not five days a week and that's okay and we're not requiring that but those offices here in the U.
Laura Wall Klieves: S. are just a little harder, a little bit more hesitant to come back in. Many of us like our bunny slippers and our stretchy pants and, you know, it's okay. We don't have to commute that hour plus to get to the office. So, and Being in office does not necessarily mean that our people are engaged, but what we're finding is that having a little bit more time with folks that we don't normally see all the time actually can help.
Laura Wall Klieves: That engagement. We get to know people that we don't normally connect with on zoom. So that's top of mind. The next big thing for me is going to be a I. How do we bring a I into the people team? and use it responsibly. I don't want to be just screaming out applicants using A. I. That's not what I'm talking about.
Laura Wall Klieves: How can we up level the work that we're doing by bringing in this kind of technology? And so those are the two big things on my mind this year.
Miriam Connaughton: Yeah, I think those resonate with me. I'm sure they will resonate with a lot of our listeners out there as well. So I'd love to start with that first topic you mentioned because it's attention grabbing in the headlines, isn't it?
Miriam Connaughton: One big company after the other is saying return to office mandates of various flavors. And the debate is still raging, isn't it, about what's better and what do we prefer as employees versus the employer? I mean, as, as, as I read about it and think about it, I think one of the things the CEO of Microsoft coined this phrase, I think a year or so ago, he talked about the productivity paradox and kind of the research showing that, you know, we as employees think we're in general much more productive when we're working flexibly, at least if not fully remotely, whereas,
Miriam Connaughton: the opposite or the reverse is true in general from employees. As you think about shifting your return to office Mondays, how are you viewing that kind of aspect of the debate about the preferences and choices that we have as employees?
Laura Wall Klieves: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we have conducted a lot of surveys over the years asking our employees, what do they need?
Laura Wall Klieves: How do they feel? And this started just after the pandemic, probably about six months into the pandemic as we started to explore what reopening our offices would look like. And so we do listen to our employees. And as I've just said, we're not In a position nor I think want to mandate five days a week. I mean, let's face it us executives like working from home to where I think we as leaders are coming to is that there is something intangible about I don't know.
Laura Wall Klieves: Being next to another human being, whether they're on your team or on a cross functional team, there's something about being able to say to, as I call a 3D person, live and in person, Hey, how are you? And those spontaneous connections. dictating five days a week, but we do want to encourage at least our managers and our senior leaders to get back into the office a little bit more.
Laura Wall Klieves: The other thing that I think we see, but also I would imagine a lot of companies are seeing is, especially for new employees, that learning about the company, that making those initial connections when you first are hired doesn't happen when we're all sitting at home. Did we all hire people during the pandemic?
Laura Wall Klieves: Many tech companies did and many are continuing, but we've lost out and I hired people during the pandemic and they themselves have said, I kind of miss those early days. I like working from home, but I miss those early connections and building it on zoom is much, much harder to do.
Miriam Connaughton: For sure. For sure.Yeah. You know, yeah,
Miriam Connaughton: there was a, I was reading a piece of research at Gallup issued fairly recently, and I forget the absolute statistics. Somebody, you can go Google it if you're interested, but it was basically showing that those employees who are fully remote were reporting that they get less. regular weekly feedback than either those that are hybrid or those in the office.
Miriam Connaughton: And it's kind of intuitively rings true, doesn't it? Cause it's kind of just felt it's those random collisions. I see you in the corridor. I'm like, Oh, Hey Laura, can I just have a chat with you about it? It just kind of comes a little bit easier naturally. And, but you know, and there's lots of other dimensions to that kind of different experience.
Miriam Connaughton: Whatever your working model, I mean, what are your things you're thinking about or have maybe concerns about when we think about creating that equitable experience so we don't create this have and have not your hybrid or your remote, but you're in the office more. Therefore, we want to make sure we don't slip into some bad behaviors when we have this diversity of work models continuing.
Laura Wall Klieves: That’s a great point. I remember a conversation I had probably a couple of years ago now when we were looking at officially reopening all of our offices. Some of our offices, as I said, in Europe, they were open much sooner.
Laura Wall Klieves: Since we're based here in California, we had a much longer lead to really get back into the office. But the conversation was, let's not put any Zoom links in our meetings. And I said, Wait a minute and pointed out that because of our hiring patterns during the pandemic, we chose to hire anywhere.
Laura Wall Klieves: Essentially, we couldn't just now cut off zoom access. So we have to be mindful of that. I'm a huge proponent of one on ones. I have skipped level one on ones. In fact, I see my job as a manager to be able to have those one on ones and give feedback. If I'm too busy to do that, then I'm frankly too busy to be a manager.
Laura Wall Klieves: But we continue to encourage all of that. We are thoughtful. My team is responsible for a lot of the cultural events. We're thoughtful about how we can be inclusive if we're doing in office versus remote, how we can do that. We'll have Zoom screens up and running so people can chime in and be participatory.
Laura Wall Klieves: That way we're mindful. We have in person and Zoom all hands meetings. in the conversation about, you know, encouraging people to come back in. If you're close to an office a couple of days a week, I've also reminded that we do not want to be punitive and say that if you're not coming in, you can't be promoted because of the expanse of remote employees who are in our company.
Laura Wall Klieves: So I'm the voice of reason, and I'm not saying that our leaders and our managers are not thoughtful about that. We just need to remind each other. to be inclusive of the folks that were intentionally hired as remote employees.
Miriam Connaughton: Yeah, for sure. And of course, you know, in many other sectors, I know in tech here, we generally, you know, we have a lot of knowledge workers who can sit at screens and get their work done.
Miriam Connaughton: But if you've got a lot of deskless workers, frontline workers, that's always been the case that you've had people working remotely. And it's definitely something we've got to stay attuned to. I want to come back to something you said at the beginning about one of your priorities is around engagement.
Miriam Connaughton: And of course, that's a, a well known human need and thing that we've been working on as businesses and within people teams, especially one of the things I've been thinking about more as we think about the diversity of work models is for me, engagement in part is about people feeling connected, connected to purpose and mission, connected to their teams, connected to their colleagues and coworkers.
Miriam Connaughton: Cause we know a lot of goodness comes out of that feeling of being connected and it's about emotional closeness or connectivity. It's not about physical proximity. I can be very connected and engaged, but work very remotely from you. I mean, as you think about continuing to work on that, what are some of the maybe ideas or things that you're trying to kind of solve for in the year ahead, or maybe do more of or do differently to enhance that engagement?
Laura Wall Klieves: Yeah, yeah. Excellent question. We conduct an employee survey every year, and we have other surveys throughout the year, manager feedback, et cetera. And one of the points that came out of last year's engagement survey was getting to know our executives and senior leaders more. We all show up at meetings and we all present and we all talk about the business.
Laura Wall Klieves: But our employees want to know us. at a deeper level. And because we're not all in the office together all the time, and because many of us are remote, one of the things that we have launched, we launched it late last year, I kicked it off is what we call our bites chat. That is where we have an executive or a senior leader come and talk a little bit about business, but also share about ourselves.
Laura Wall Klieves: And so when I kicked it off, because I'm so passionate about development and growth, I shared My career journey and starting with marketing advertising, how I got into L and D and how I am now head of people here at Malwarebytes and then talked about what we do here. We have seen a decline in the parties.
Laura Wall Klieves: It used to be in the early pandemic days, we'd have 100, 150 people show up for whatever game or silliness that we had to keep us all connected. The last one we did, we were down literally to 12 people. Sad but true. Our bytes chat were over 100 and we've run three of these now and we're consistently over 100 employees and we're a small company.
Laura Wall Klieves: We're 700 employees. So that's a huge percentage of people and it's not Late in the day. It's eight o'clock pacific time. So people in our talent office are signing on in the evening and people are taking business hours to participate. So that is one thing. You know, we're using our engagement survey.
Laura Wall Klieves: We're using the data we're collecting to try to solve for this engagement. And I'm here to say it's so far so good. And we're definitely going to continue throughout this year. And we'll continue the fun parties too because everybody likes us. At least 12 people do.
Miriam Connaughton: And, but I think, and that's a great example and I'm going to steal that.
Miriam Connaughton: And by, by the way, of course it's bytes, B Y T E S playing on your name. Exactly. We all got that. Not the B I. It's that meaningful connection though, isn't it? Like that example you gave, to have so many people show up. I mean, that to me, really just shows we were craving that kind of more meaningful connection.
Miriam Connaughton: And as much as, like you said, you know, how many of us did corporate bingo, team wine tasting, you know, I mean, and then we all kind of got a little sick of it, but it was over the time, wasn't it? Because we were literally locked down and craving. Does any kind of interaction that wasn't with our dog or our spouse that we'd got sick of the site or whatever it was, but it's very contextual.
Miriam Connaughton: So what does connectivity mean now for where we are now and what we need to solve for? And I think what you gave is a great example, because what I think one of the things is enduring, isn't it, that follows high engagement is trust and confidence in leadership. And you can only get that through building some of those trusted relationships and getting to know people as people as opposed to some faceless head and shoulders on a screen.
Miriam Connaughton: And that's all you hear about.
Laura Wall Klieves: Exactly. Exactly.
Miriam Connaughton: That's such a great example. And I know you and I have chatted before on this topic, but one of the things that I know we've got a greater emphasis on here is, Simpplr, which we feel is important. We're very much a remote first company. We do have hybrid, you know, I'm hybrid because I'm sitting here in the Bay Area and go into our office a couple of days a week, but majority of our team are remote.
Miriam Connaughton: So we have remote hybrid, largely work models. It's just the value of people feeling appreciated because going back to my earlier comments, you know, those occasional, Hey, great job. You've got to be more intentional about it. when you're not literally running into people or seeing them. So how does that factor into your plans and just actions you already take to really boost that sense of I feel seen, I feel valued, I feel appreciated?
Laura Wall Klieves: Yeah, well we've had and continue with a peer to peer reward system. So we can acknowledge people for big projects, little projects. Thanks for helping me in a crunch. Happy anniversary. Happy birthday. And our folks really do appreciate it. I mean, honestly, of all of our programs, and I have evaluated all of them, this one sees the most engagement on a monthly basis and anything else, you know?
Laura Wall Klieves: So when you're looking at budget cuts and things like that out there, folks don't just assume that, oh, I'll just cut that peer to peer because dollar for dollar. Our program is, yes, we could save money, but our program gets used and actually is the best way for us to really encourage that acknowledgement and reward system.
Laura Wall Klieves: We also use it for team events. We just ran a hackathon for both our corporate business and our consumer business with our engineering and product teams, and gave out huge amount of points. And so, As well as some cash prizes, I might say. We use it for sales spiffs and all of that. So it's really an important component of how we stay connected and engaged.
Laura Wall Klieves: We encourage our senior leaders. I remind them every month. Please give your points away. Don't just give it to your team members. Give it to other people. So we want to keep that going and we want our leaders to also be visible in providing those points.
Miriam Connaughton: For sure. We're just here at Simpplr. We're just fresh off the month of December.
Miriam Connaughton: We had what we call our season of gratitude. and we had an extra boost of points that people could give through our own recognition reward system, which we use, which as you might expect, we drink our own champagne off of the Simpplr platform and it got amazing participation. And to your point, who doesn't love a gift card?
Miriam Connaughton: Of course, you like getting the dot, you know, I've got my gift card from Amazon or whatever. I'll go get something nice for myself, but really the glow and the joy and the stories people shared in giving recognition. It's not about the money. It was about getting that nice glow, both as the giver of that recognition, as well as when you saw it pop up in your feed and you're like, Oh, that was nice.
Miriam Connaughton: You know, and it gave you that little boost as you read it. It's just such a joyful thing.
Laura Wall Klieves: Absolutely. And I'm going to steal that.
Laura Wall Klieves: Season of gratitude. I'm going to steal that idea. I think that's a brilliant idea. And I just hired two new team members and got points from both of them in the month of December, which I was thrilled to end the messages were thanks for, you know, being so welcoming.
Laura Wall Klieves: One of them said, thanks for the onboarding all the time. So you're absolutely right. And I make sure to give points to some of my senior leaders. I gave points one time to my boss and he said, thank you so much. I never get any points. And I thought that was kind of sad. So I kind of tucked that in my head and made sure that I've acknowledged even our senior leaders.
Laura Wall Klieves: Every now and then. Yeah. Yeah.
Miriam Connaughton: Yeah. Well, we're all human, aren't we?
Laura Wall Klieves: Exactly.
Miriam Connaughton: There's this lovely phrase I, I, uh, I read a lot, obviously from some of my examples I was reading about, and it was the notion of confelicity. Felicity meaning happiness, con, happiness, together. And We're just wired for that as humans, both the kind of the sad elements of that, which is, you know, empathy, the ability to empathize, but the confelicity I just thought was a lovely word.
Miriam Connaughton: I like learning new words. And it was also kind of just also pointing to a lot of the benefits we feel as humans, whether it's in work or in personal life is when you have shared happiness. Whether you're sharing good news with a friend or telling stories as a family around the dinner table, we know how that makes us feel.
Miriam Connaughton: And being able to kind of have those moments in the workplace, why wouldn't you want to? You know, it has such a boosting effect on so many levels. And it's not just doing it to be just because to socially engineer ourselves, it's how we exist as humans. And so it should be the same in work as we think about those positive experiences in life.
Laura Wall Klieves: Absolutely. And it goes back to what we were talking about that connectivity and that engagement. You know, when we have those shared experiences, yes, we can do it here. We can do it in the office. We can do it both ways. But building those shared experiences through the work that we deliver at the end of the day helps us to feel connected to this thing called the the company.
Laura Wall Klieves: We're all the company. The people that show up every day, whether it's remote or in person, we're the ones that are building the company. It isn't this monolith, the company, it's us. And so how do we keep us connected to each other. What's always on my mind and how can we do this better? And how can we improve that engagement and that connectivity and feeling a part of something bigger than ourselves?
Miriam Connaughton: I love the way you put that kind of notion of company because we often there's the negative connotations of the first corporate entity. But I've always believed, and I say this, you know, as we talk about our employee experience here at Simpl, is employee experience isn't some abstract thing that I own as head of HR or this.
Miriam Connaughton: We all influence it, we all own it. We all are our own, our own little mini employee experience creator. And so it's really about, I think, encouraging. A, just that awareness and ownership for each of us, but also the ripple effect of positivity that you can have if you are someone who shows up for your colleagues in a certain way or boosts others well being through recognition.
Miriam Connaughton: I love that idea because it really is about community. It's not about some faceless cooperation. Yeah, it is a hundred percent. I agree. So engagements top of mind for you. We've talked a little bit about that. I mean, the other thing you said, top of mind is who wasn't thinking about AI and AI in the context of our broader technology landscape since those frenetic days, as you said, gosh, five years ago, almost to, to March, 2020, you know, I think the pace of change
Miriam Connaughton: that we've seen in the tech we're using at work, not least platforms that, you know, we collaborate on all accelerated since 2020. But what are some of the things, as you think about bringing more AI into your delivery, into the employer experience, you mentioned responsibly using it. What are some of the things you're thinking of working on in that context for this year?
Laura Wall Klieves: Yeah, Every person I've talked to in my role and other roles within the people team are faced with constraints on resources. And yet we are the people team. We call ourselves the people team intentionally because it is about people. And those are our constituents, everybody who works in the company. And yet, we get bogged down.
Laura Wall Klieves: We get bogged down in all the minutia of all the little details and the things that we have to change within the HRIS system and the updates and this and that. And so, I've observed over the last several years that many times the to do list takes over and we kind of forget about the people. So what I'm hoping for is to be able to leverage technology, AI or any new technology to help us get out of that minutiae a bit and up level the work that we're all doing.
Laura Wall Klieves: Admittedly, some of my team members are nervous like, Oh my God, technology is going to eliminate my job. And that is not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is having them do higher level work. So directing people to a policy on our internet bites net isn't a good use of time. Can we do it? Of course we can.
Laura Wall Klieves: Uh, should we do it? Yes, absolutely. But is that a good use of our time? So how can we leverage technology to teach our people to fish and to go look for that information that is readily available? But it's just easier to ping one of us to answer the question. So that's what I'm talking about. I mean, we've been leveraging technology and reviewing resumes and creating job descriptions for a number of years.
Laura Wall Klieves: We don't rely on just technology to Shift resumes into different piles. We actually have humans behind those sifting and sorting and making sure, but we leverage the technology to help us to make higher level decisions. So that's what I'm talking about being responsible with the technology, not eliminating the humans
Laura Wall Klieves: behind the scenes because we can discern, you know, the special cases or the anomalies and without a human brain, we're going to run into challenges, not just here, but across humanity. There was my editorial comment about responsible use of technology.
Miriam Connaughton: I 100 percent agree. It's called artificial intelligence for a reason.
Miriam Connaughton: And at least right now, It's not as reliable or creative or thoughtful or ethical as a good human can be. So coming at it, you know, responsibly is key. Very specifically, one of the things that I, for a while now, have added into my own decision making set around any tech that we're looking at is that notion of how responsibly is it
Miriam Connaughton: incorporating AI being developed. Many of our listeners out there may know this, but there's the Responsible AI Institute, which got created not too long ago, which we're part of, Simpplr, and many other tech firms are too. And it's just, it's right now, it's, you know, just a voluntary industry led body, but it's about signing up to standards of ethical development.
Miriam Connaughton: So, you know, some of those unintended biases and other things. aren't creeping in and creating some of those issues that we can all predict and know some of the earlier experiments in AI kind of highlighted the risks of. So I, I'm with you, that kind of notion of responsibility. And I think the other thing for me, I mean, you touched on, you know, there is some fear factor, isn't there associated with any new technology, whether it's AI or not.
Miriam Connaughton: And there was a BCG did some research, I think was they issued it last year that showed you are less afraid of AI. The more you've played with it. So there was a direct correlation between people saying, Yeah, you know, I've tried it out. I, you know, I use chat GPT for these things already and your propensity.
Miriam Connaughton: So, you know, I think some of it is just start using it in smaller ways, you know, helping you maybe accelerate some screening, but still having the human touching your talent acquisition responsibly using chat GPT. I don't know about you, but you know, I find it great for helping me outline when we're thinking about a new training curriculum that we want to maybe build.
Miriam Connaughton: Things like that. I mean, saves me time. I don't know about you.
Laura Wall Klieves: Yeah, yeah, no, definitely. Absolutely. And if you think about it, and my husband, bless his heart, is not really a technologist. He's a little nervous about all of this. And, you know, so when all of this came up a couple of years ago. He's like, Oh, I don't know about this.
Laura Wall Klieves: But the fact is we've all been using artificial intelligence for years. I mean, I would be at a loss if I didn't have spellcheck. I've completely adopted Alexa. Siri still gives me bad information sometimes, doesn't listen very well, but we're all using this. So this is just the next phase of how can we use this technology to help improve our lives as employees, as humans, you know, how can we work it into what we're already doing to improve and up level, like I said, our own work.
Miriam Connaughton: Yeah. So no, for sure.
Miriam Connaughton: I mean, there's a few things I'm excited about is I, you know, I'm very much an optimist around technology and innovation always have been is. You know, I'm excited about the increasing possibilities of personalization with AI. We've got the level of personalization we have now, but just the ability is, you know, with some of the examples you mentioned earlier about trying to steer as people, team practitioners, our users to fish.
Miriam Connaughton: You've got to make it easy for them. And so those AI agents who can do more, I can answer a question. Yes, that's the simple chatbots we have today, but going beyond that and actually being able to do more for me, that's technology that we're going to see, I think, become much more mainstream this year.
Miriam Connaughton: Would you agree with that? What else are you excited about?
Laura Wall Klieves: Absolutely. I mean, look, we still have email boxes where if you've got an issue with our HRIS system, you send it to HRIS at Malwarebytes. com or benefits. So we're still using the old school technology. Right now, we're looking at for our people team putting in just Zendesk, just a ticketing system to get some of that out of email boxes so that multiple people can use it.
Laura Wall Klieves: But I want to see that next level this year, if at all humanly possible. And I will sometimes people teams a little on the slow side, I think to be able to have someone just engage with the chat bot and have that conversation. answer the questions and help steer people. We're all doing it anyway in everything else that we do.
Laura Wall Klieves: Anytime I have an issue with a product, you know, I'm online and talking to their automated agent. So why can't we do that for us within people within communications within other parts of our company? We're looking at building that in. We've got some betas already in our own products about common language rather than trying to figure out the exact right way to ask the phrase, but just being able, like so many of our search engines have done, let's just ask the question and have that information served up.
Laura Wall Klieves: I want to do that for the people team, and then we can take it to the next level. We can then engage a human to help solve those bigger issues.
Miriam Connaughton: And I think we're, well, hopefully I think up those tipping points because, you know, that we've been taught by this for a while in HR where we can get more of those kind of repetitive processes and things that are more easily automated and that our users, as you say, would welcome.
Miriam Connaughton: Because it's easier for them. It's better for them. And then there's those unmet needs that we all know. I know. I certainly feel this in my team where you've got this kind of long list of things that, you know, people want, like managers need more help to become better managers. And they're craving that.
Miriam Connaughton: Or you want to go spend more time developing key talent and supporting managers to do that. There's lots of things where, like you said earlier, we have that process policy program compliance piece that we sometimes you know, we just have to do when we get lost in, let's automate the heck out of that as much as we can.
Miriam Connaughton: I'm with you on that. I'm with you on that. And you make a good point. We're so used to this in our everyday lives. I think a lot of that fear factor is gone now. And there's some pent up almost demand for our employees in the workplace to say, I need my tech to be better. I mean, please. modernize it so I can do kind of what I can do on my smartphone.
Miriam Connaughton: So now one of the things as we get into the latter part here of our discussion, it's the kind of time of the year where I've been reading lots of articles, as you may have done, about predictions for the year ahead. We're certainly wrong more often than we're right. I'm not a great predictor of the future, but less about predictions maybe.
Miriam Connaughton: But just as you look ahead, what are some of the things that you think are trends that are just going to either keep on going or explode that we're just going to have to be ready for?
Laura Wall Klieves: Yeah, yeah. Well, I think we've touched on two of the big ones. I think, you know, again, five years post pandemic, we're still in a pent up.
Laura Wall Klieves: mode of people really wanting to feel more connected to our work experiences. And I'm talking beyond obviously beyond malware bites, but really just when making decisions to change jobs, to change companies looking for Those companies that really are doing something meaningful in the world. And that was something that I've kind of done throughout my career.
Laura Wall Klieves: But when I came here, because it's cybersecurity, because it's not just for corporations, it's also for individuals and keeping them safe. I've got a family history, family friend of being scammed and is meaningful work. So, you know, even though I'm talking about email boxes and policies, the work I do, I know is connected to that greater good.
Laura Wall Klieves: And I think that is absolutely going to continue. And I appreciate and applaud frankly, the younger generations for really bringing that front and center into because, you know, we all have to work. Most of us aren't billionaires. We all have to work. We all have to show up every single day. So what is that higher level mission that we're all delivering on?
Laura Wall Klieves: And I think that that ultimately is going to hold companies accountable for, you know, how they're running their businesses and delivering their products and services out to the world. So I think we're going to see that continue. I, being U. S. centric, I think there is probably going to be a bigger shift in movement this coming year.
Laura Wall Klieves: We are past a presidential election. We all here in the U. S. kind of seize up, you know, the six, eight months before the presidential election and hold on tight. And then we can see movement. So I'm anticipating that's going to happen this year and we'll start seeing more of that coming. And unfortunately, I think we are going to continue to see.
Laura Wall Klieves: Some of the larger companies just mandating return to office. Let's face it. A lot of those companies have a lot of commercial real estate that is sitting empty and either they're going to divest from that or they want to fill that up. So for us, we downsized, you know, we've taken a look. We have, as I said, we have remote folks, much
Laura Wall Klieves: more than we did five years ago. So we're downsizing our offices and providing good workplaces for those who can come into the office. But I think that some of the bigger companies, I won't name names. We all have heard them will unfortunately or fortunately, depending on your perspective, continue to push that agenda.
Miriam Connaughton: Yeah. Well, to that last point you made, I see that as opportunity because you know, we compete, especially you and I in the tech space, we're competing with a lot of big names who are doing that. So I'm like, flexibility is the new perk. Yeah. It's in the top three now of everybody's wishlist. for why I want to go somewhere is I want to keep or I want to get back that flexibility maybe that I've lost.
Miriam Connaughton: So I think we continue to make that a selling point where we have that ourselves. I think that can be a little smidge of a differentiator when we're trying to get some key talent away that perhaps people are losing that where they're currently. So If you're listening and you're out there and you're being forced back to the office you don't want to be, go and check out our job boards, us too, yeah there you go, get a little plug in there.
Miriam Connaughton: I think the other thing that I'm interested to see how we all navigate through that's again been in the headlines a lot recently is around kind of how our approaches and our thinking to DEI is evolving. And there's been a lot of headlines, hasn't there, about, you know, again, big companies that have taken roles out, or we're no longer calling it this, we're only talking about inclusion, a lot of big debate out there.
Miriam Connaughton: And I think things continue to evolve. I don't see it as a halt and certainly not going to be a halt here at our organization, but I think we've got to be very attuned, very aware of how that is changing and making sure that we are continuing to progress and not regress around that whole agenda, however we structure it or organize it or name it in our organizations.
Miriam Connaughton: But that's clearly something that's in the ether, isn't it? That seems to be shifting a little bit.
Laura Wall Klieves: Yes, absolutely. And, you know, we continue to advocate. We have one formal ERG and several other groups that come together. And yeah, it's a bit of conversation for us. And we're absolutely paying attention to all of that, at least for the folks at our company.
Laura Wall Klieves: That's really at the end of the day, all I can control. And yeah, it'll be interesting. It'll be absolutely interesting. My belief is once things have been opened up and exposed and discussed, it's difficult to put that genie back in the bottle. So I feel it's a season and we will continue to evolve and grow forward, as you said.
Miriam Connaughton: Well, I feel confident with great leaders like you and many of my peers that I. No one is, I'm sure you do across your network that kind of a part of that conversation and part of that leadership and stewarding that as well. Well, it's been so delightful, Laura. Thank you. It's always a joy talking to you.
Miriam Connaughton: Really appreciate you taking the time and lovely, engaging conversation with you as always, just as we're wrapping up here, any listeners out there who would love to connect with you, how and where can they do that?
Laura Wall Klieves: LinkedIn is the best place and I use my maiden name. So it's Laura Wall Klieves. So go check me out.
Laura Wall Klieves: I'm the gray haired lady with the blue tips and I'd be happy to engage with all of you.
Miriam Connaughton: Thank you so much. And same for me. Uh, LinkedIn is absolutely the best platform to connect with me to always love doing that. Well, thank you again, Laura, and have a great 2025.
Laura Wall Klieves: Likewise. Take care.
Miriam Connaughton: See you soon. Thank you.