Carla Yudhishthu of Mineral: Five HR Strategies On How Companies Can Turn A Crisis Into An Opportunity or Advantage

An Interview With Finn Bartram, Editor Of People Managing People

As any HR leader can tell you, crises are an inevitable part of the job. Tough situations pop up, often at the least convenient times, and these situations need to be handled efficiently yet delicately. Whether it’s dealing with a new employee, wages, or internal conflict, there are ways to come out on top. How can companies learn to take a crisis and turn it into an advantage? In this interview series, we are talking to HR leaders who share their strategies about “How Companies Can Turn A Crisis Into An Opportunity or Advantage.” As part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Carla Yudhishthu.

Carla Yudhishthu is the Chief People Officer for Mineral, an HR and compliance solutions company trusted by over 500,000 SMBs. Over 20 years in human resources, Yudhishthu has developed a reputation as an empathetic and visionary leader, as well as a skilled HR practitioner. She excels at cultivating sustainable people-first cultures and human-centric leadership, driven by compassion and understanding.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to get to know you a bit. Can you tell us the “backstory” about what brought you to this specific career path?

My “entrée” to HR was in the recruiting world, and I quickly learned I loved matching people with work that was a fit for them, and contributing to the company success by finding those matches. The win-win was very rewarding. Recruiting eventually led me to an HR generalist career path, and I was fortunate enough to be in the right places at the right times and seize opportunities to develop into HR leadership and business partnership roles over the years. Over the course of my career, I spent time focusing in various HR functions at different times, including organizational development, organizational effectiveness, leadership development, executive coaching. My conclusion is I love partnering with the business and with leaders, anticipating what is next, what will happen in the business and how we prepare our people and organization to handle it, and coaching leaders to be ready.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

The theme of 2022 and 2023 would have to be pay transparency. Since we are a company who provides HR compliance and organization health support to other companies, we have to walk the talk. So we have been very focused on getting leaders and all employees up to speed on their compensation acumen, so they can digest their individual compensation situations with perspective.

The other thing on our minds is creating a culture of belonging. Like many companies, we have been on the DEI journey for the last 3 years, doing work to build ERG’s, bring in and support diverse talent, and evolve the understanding of our leaders in this area. Recently we have started shifting the focus (and the words) on creating a culture of belonging, because who doesn’t want that?

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

There are so many people who have helped me grow and develop over the years, leaders who have led me, peer leaders, and mentors I have had the fortune of learning from over the years. A common theme along the way when I look back is that many of these folks had more confidence in me than I had in myself. And they helped me see what I was capable of when I had a hard time seeing it.

I had one leader in particular back at Arthur Andersen named Shawn Harter. He was my first “boss” in the new (to me) world of recruiting. The industry and the work were both new to me. He took me under his wing, invested in me, and really helped to develop my recruiting skills, and to see that I could do more than I ever believed I could. In addition to being a caring leader, we became close friends. To this day, I do not hesitate to call him for career advice.

Fantastic. Thank you for that. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview about HR strategies for turning a crisis into an opportunity. Can you share your story of when an organization you’ve worked at entered into a crisis? What happened? What did you do?

The first thing that comes to mind is the first few weeks of the pandemic, when the prospect of our entire team working remotely collided head-on with our busiest time ever as a company. Like any other company, Mineral just wasn’t set up to have so much of our team working from home. We had 80% of our employees in office. At the same time, we couldn’t stop working because the small-to-medium sized businesses (SMBs) we serve as an HR and compliance solutions company needed our support more than ever. A pizza place that doesn’t have a remote working option needed our help in brand new ways — with employee health and safety support, navigating how to keep a business running in a pandemic era. We always say HR and compliance doesn’t take a day off, but it was painfully true during the early days of the pandemic. Our clients needed us more than ever and our teams were busier than ever trying to serve them. The challenge for us was, “how do we meet this growing demand for our business, while simultaneously rethinking the way our organization works and upskilling our leaders to engage and lead in a totally remote world?” Some of these are not challenges that were unique to us at Mineral, but looking back we were really in crisis management mode in many ways I did not recognize as such in the moment.

What was your mindset during such a challenging time? Where did you get the drive to keep going when things were so hard?

Our #1 priority at all times during the crisis was making sure our team members and their families were okay. We stated that early and often. Then we knew we had so many small companies who had to keep their doors open and this was a struggle for them, to know how to do that safely and compliantly. We all know how much SMBs were impacted by the pandemic and we were driven by the desire to do right by them. At the same time, we thought it was crucial that we get our team out of the tech startup mindset of working 60–70 hours a week and being proud of that. Even as we had a growing demand for our services, we needed to make sure our team was healthy and that they knew we were looking after their well-being first and foremost. The desire to put the happiness of our people and our clients first ultimately led us to the employee measurements that have become the fabric of our success and helped us create a more efficient business in a way that allows us to scale the support we provide to SMBs.

Can you please tell us how you were able to overcome such adversity and how the company ultimately turned the crisis into an opportunity or advantage? What did the next chapter look like?

As I mentioned above, the challenge for Mineral during the early days of the pandemic was, “how do we meet this growing demand for our business, while simultaneously rethinking the way our organization works?” You could say it was a crisis inside of a crisis. In our minds, the only way to manage these simultaneous crises was to divide and conquer. Four weeks into the pandemic, our leadership team put together a working group with defined areas of focus. One of us focused on delivering on customer, one of us focused on uniting and galvanizing our team members, and one of us focused on getting our Covid content out to every team in the U.S. that we could. The purpose wasn’t to solve the problems right then and there. We wanted to establish measurements for gauging success in those three broad areas of our business. In other words, how are we doing on delivering in a time of high need to our customers, our internal team engagement, and sharing the wealth of content we had on COVID management for employers broadly across the U.S.? Ultimately, these measurements became pillars of our business and helped us successfully transition our team into finding success while learning to manage ourselves as a firmly remote-first company. Our workforce is now 65% remote and it’s helped us grow and scale. We blew our 2022 objectives out of the water, largely because we found new ways of working in a remote-first environment.

Here is the main question of our interview: Based on your experience, can you share five actionable pieces of advice for HR leaders about How Companies Can Turn A Crisis Into An Opportunity or Advantage? (Please share a story or example for each.)

1. Organize your team and know your roles

2. Understand what to and how to measure success during a crisis management — find your pillars

3. Engage your team so they know their opinions count during this time and that they are heard and are confident about how they are contributing to company success

4. Allow yourself and your team to vent about the problem before moving into problem-solving mode. You need to expel the emotions you’re feeling before you can rationally address the crisis. Then ask them to go into problem-solving mode with you. They often know best and can have some of the best suggestions.

5. Be flexible. You can anticipate, but adopting the 80/20 rule can be fundamentally freeing because it is hard to anticipate everything.

What are a few of the most common mistakes you see leaders make when their company hits a crisis? What should be done to avoid them?

The #1 mistake I see leaders make in a crisis is thinking they have to have all the answers. Despite my experience, I have to constantly remind myself that it doesn’t fall on me to solve every problem by myself. You think you’re supposed to have all the answers, and everyone expects you to, but how do you prepare for something that blindsides you? Crises, by their nature, are unexpected, which means they’re nearly impossible to fully prepare for. We all like to think we have the best action plans in place, but no one person is capable of preparing for every scenario. Find your people — peers and others you can lean on for brain storming and problem solving. Don’t be afraid to ask or say that you need partnership. Two heads are better than one. We know this.

How do you avoid this mistake?

Make everyone on your team part of the problem-solving process. You’ll find a workable solution faster because a collective will likely solve a problem better than an individual. Plus, you’ll be amazed at how much people appreciate being included. Working as a team to solve the problem will fill everyone’s cup and create a more unified team.

What advice would you give to HR leaders and organizations who have yet to hit their first real crisis?

I mentioned a moment ago how important it is to involve the rest of your team in the problem-solving process, but I think HR leaders encountering their first crisis should think critically about how they engage others. When you first engage your team in a crisis, you can’t start with finding the solution. First, you need to take a moment to address what’s wrong and what everyone is feeling. As your team is managing a crisis, they’re experiencing a range of emotions and it’s your job to help foster the release of those feelings before you solve the problem. Have a moment of catharsis together where you get out all the emotions you’re feeling about the crisis, then pivot to the problem solving. Only once you’ve gotten through the emotional phase can you collectively address the crisis calmly and rationally.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

Building a culture of belonging. A DEIB consultant I have been working with shared a staggering stat with me recently: $800M is spent every year on DEI work. Clearly the ROI is not what we would hope given the challenges we continue to see in the workplace in this regard. But take it back to belonging. As I mentioned earlier, who can argue with this? We all need to further create cultures of belonging in the workplace. We all want to belong. I am excited about this shift in thinking, and maybe if we can reframe this, we can make headway as a nation in this regard.

How can our readers continue to follow your work online?

You can follow me on LinkedIn. You can also find my work, and the work of my colleagues, on Mineral’s resource page.

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.