Thanks to support from Meeting With HR
Meet Elly Colvin, host of Meeting With HR. Through candid discussions with practitioners and leaders, Elly explores how organisations run beneath the surface, from culture and trust to strategy, leadership, and AI. We spoke with her about the thinking behind the podcast and what she’s learned from her conversations with the people shaping HR today.
How would you describe Meeting With HR to someone who hasn’t heard it yet?
It's honest conversations with brilliant people who work in and around the world of HR and people leadership, but it doesn't feel like a HR podcast. There are no dry policy discussions or corporate buzzwords. It's real and warm, where I sit down with people who share how they are doing things differently in their organisations, shaping culture, navigating change, rethinking how we listen to employees…and we just talk. The kind of conversation you'd have over a coffee rather than on a conference panel.
Tell us a bit about your journey into a career in people leadership?
Early in my career at 23 years old I was promoted to Sales Manager and began leading sales teams within the fitness industry. I was a living example of someone being promoted for being competent at their job with zero experience leading people - so I had to learn on the fly, adapt and learn quickly. I love leadership and everything that comes with it, it can either make or break your experience in the workplace, and in the words of the great Jo Wright, there’s no space anymore for sh*t managers (checkout her book on coaching).
What inspired you to start Meeting With HR, and why did the podcast format feel like the right fit?
I began Meeting with HR to create a platform for some of the incredible people I’ve been meeting recently, giving them space to share their stories and insights into their company cultures. Everyday we are having golden conversations inside the business at eeda™, and we figured some of this wisdom should be shared.
Why is this a particularly important topic for you personally?
It’s important to me because HR can often get a bad wrap, they can still be seen as the ‘police’ in an organisation, but when you uncover the huge load that they are often dealing with, I want to create a space where we can shine a positive light on the incredible work that’s being done.
Are there any other podcasts that have inspired you, or that you’ve learned the most from?
HR Besties, Working Hard and The High Performance Podcast, I love the style and fascinating guests and conversations these podcasts have.
Who is the podcast for? What does someone who’d love Meeting With HR look like?
Honestly, anyone who leads people or cares about the experience of being at work. Yes of course that's typically HR Directors and People Leaders, but it's also founders, managers, CEOs, you don't need to work in HR to get value from it.
What do you want listeners to take away from each episode?
One thing. That's always the goal, that listeners leave with one idea, one perspective, or one thing they hadn't considered before that they carry into work the next day. I want someone to finish an episode and immediately want to tell a colleague about something they just heard. If that happens, then we've done our job.
What’s been your most memorable episode so far?
Genuinely hard to pick because they've all given me something different and have been brilliant. But the conversation with Nebel Crowhurst has stayed in my mind a lot and gained a lot of response.. Nebel has operated at serious scale, Virgin Atlantic Holidays, River Island, Roche during Covid, leading the people function at Reward Gateway through a $1.3bn acquisition. She's seen it all, but what really stuck with me was her take on employee voice, specifically the idea of collecting feedback through an annual survey. We discussed the trust gap between an organisation that asks and an organisation that properly (and consistently) listens. She articulated it in a way that talks right at the heart of why we built eeda™, because that trust deficit is what we're trying to fix.
Have any conversations on the podcast changed your perspective on HR?
All of them, honestly, but in different ways. What's shifted for me is how much I now see HR as a commercial function rather than a support function. Nebel Crowhurst talking about why HR needs to speak the language of the CFO to earn a proper seat at the table. Sam Valentine at Miro building in-house AI capability inside his people team and how Tyler Rose from Dishoom creates a family environment of psychological safety. These aren't people managing processes, but they're shaping the future of how organisations work from a human lens.
What do you think people still misunderstand about HR?
That it's soft, or that it's admin. That it's the department you go to when something goes wrong. The reality is that the best HR leaders are some of the most commercially sharp, strategically minded, emotionally intelligent people in any business. They're holding together culture, retention, performance, and wellbeing, and often with tiny teams and shrinking budgets - and they rarely get the credit for it. The connection between engaged employees and business performance is well documented. HR is the function that drives that, it just hasn't always been given the platform or the language to make that case loudly enough.
Are there any themes or topics that keep coming up across your conversations?
A few that keep threading through everything. The gap between what leadership thinks is happening and what employees are actually feeling, that comes up constantly. The generational shift in what employees expect from work, particularly younger employees who want ongoing dialogue, they want to feel safe and to have a voice (not a once-a-year survey). Also that the seat at the table for people teams is being earned due to the economic climate and the demand to navigate challenging environments.
Who can we expect to hear from on future episodes?
We're continuing the stellar line-ups and have got some brilliant guests coming up - people leading people functions in really unexpected industries and contexts, which I love and some leading CEO’s. I'm particularly excited about some conversations that sit at the intersection of AI and people leadership, that space is moving so fast and the best HR leaders are right in the middle of it. I want to keep bringing in guests that surprise people.
