Welcome back to Redefining HR! Today, I’m joined by Pavle Stojkovic, chief people officer at SWORD Health, the world’s fastest-growing virtual musculoskeletal care provider that’s on a mission to free 2 billion people from chronic and post-surgical pain. 

In this episode, Pavle and I talk about his career in hyper scale and growth, his experience at The Athletic, what it’s been like to search for a job in the competitive CHRO/HR market, what he is doing now and more.

Pavle has been in HR for his entire career. However, that’s not necessarily how he defines himself. “Fundamentally, I think of myself as a builder. I made a career by getting myself into chaos and turning chaos into order. I really enjoy building, working with people and scaling teams,” he shares.

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An Impactful Experience Every Time

The most crucial aspect of any business is the people who work there, and they can do their best work when they feel empowered by those in leadership. This journey has to start with what employees go through. “Any two employees, anywhere in the company, should have the same experience,” he says. 

“Whether it’s onboarding, performance or compensation,” it’s essential to create an environment that “empowers everybody else to carry the ball for us.”

This is why SWORD Health is building this type of infrastructure for their employees. “It’s just kind of having all those conversations as early as possible to understand— what’s the work that we need to do today to make that reality possible?” Pavle shares.

Data and Human Experience Need to Be Included

When it comes to designing your people strategy, several factors come into play. Many leaders will rely on data to help them track trends, engagement and people experience, but data alone isn’t enough. 

“Data’s only half the picture, right?” Pavle says. “Especially when you’re dealing with human beings. So you can’t get all the information from data alone.”

Data is essential to your strategy on a macro level to determine how people operate throughout your organization. Pavle shares that you must combine data with the “qualitative human experience to really understand not just, OK, what are we seeing happening at scale, but how do the people in the organization actually feel about the experiences that they're having?” 

“It’s really the combination of these two things that give you the complete picture,” Pavle says.

The Importance of Data Plus Human Experience

The relationship between these two concepts is essential to organization success, with one critical component of organizational value being employee perceptions. 

“As we go through engagement survey cycles and things like that, we need to make sure that we are also indexing for that qualitative feedback and not just looking at the numbers and the heat maps and so on and so forth,” Pavle states.

It’s more than just one or the other. These two facets need to work together. Pavle shares, “You always have to be looking at those two things. Because at the end of the day, it’s not necessarily about what objective fact is, it’s about perception.” 

Whether your employees stay or move on, you want them to be evangelists for your organization. How your current or former employees “feel about the company is a critical part of creating an ecosystem outside of the organization.”

While data and human experience (employee feelings) don’t always align, a failure to factor both elements into your people strategy will lead to mistakes made and information missed.

People in This Episode

• Pavle Stojkovic: LinkedIn