Summary
Yessica Perez, Chief People Officer at Ojos Locos Sports Cantina, has spent more than 20 years in HR leading people work in fast-moving frontline businesses. Ojos Locos has nearly doubled its footprint since 2022, growing from 18 to 35 restaurants, so her work sits where growth, labor pressure, customer experience and frontline execution meet.

Yessica tells host Barb Bidan why HR's seat at the table now has to be earned again and again: by knowing the P&L, framing risk as a business decision instead of a "no", and staying ahead of AI rather than waiting to be told to learn it. She shares how a California opening was moved by a week without HR becoming the barrier, how 15 minutes and a Chick-fil-A taught her finance, the commercial she built with ElevenLabs, and the three-step method she used to pressure test a third party's sales analysis with AI. For CHROs, CPOs and HR business partners in frontline and multi-unit businesses.

Chapters
00:00 Meet Yessica Perez, Chief People Officer at Ojos Locos Sports Cantina
01:24 Getting the seat at the table vs. continuing to earn it
03:08 The credibility cost of leading with policy
05:02 The California opening: be the solution, not the barrier
07:50 Why AI raises the cost of not knowing the business
09:30 Building business fluency: 15 minutes with the experts
13:53 Making a commercial with ElevenLabs
16:33 How AI levels the playing field for mid-market companies
18:26 Pressure testing a third party's sales analysis with AI
21:53 Leaders own the outcome, not the AI
24:30 Teaching judgment through exposure
25:50 Lightning round: labor cost, retiring attendance metrics, the seat at the table
29:32 Takeaways and Yessica's final word

Takeaways
- Getting a seat at the table is not the finish line; HR keeps it by understanding the people, the numbers and the operations.
- Lead with the business outcome and the risk, then offer a path: a one-week delay beat a "we're not ready".
- Ask the experts for 10 to 15 minutes every period; HR business partners should know their regions, stores, P&L and turnover.
- Pressure test outside advice with AI in three steps: scrubbed data plus public benchmarks, a data-integrity check, then a fresh chat that acts as your adversary.
- AI saves time but never owns the outcome; leaders reskill people in judgment and measure training by application, not attendance.

Connect with the Guest
Yessica Perez LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yessicaperezsphr
Company Website: https://www.ojoslocos.com

Sponsor
Wisq is the AI platform for HR. We built Harper, the world's first AI HR teammate — designed to handle the judgment-heavy work that has historically consumed HR teams: job changes, performance concerns, leaves of absence, onboarding, and employee relations issues. Where HCM bolt-ons and chatbots deflect the easiest questions, Harper resolves full cases, end-to-end. The result is an HR function with the capacity and strategic bandwidth to focus on the work that moves the business.

Companies get Harper live in weeks, not quarters, with implementation support built on deep HR domain expertise. Wisq serves HR leaders at leading companies across industries, helping them raise the bar on employee experience and expand what their teams are capable of.

For more information, visit wisq.com.

Summary
Alan House, Chief People Officer at OTG Concessions Management, runs HR for a hospitality business with more than 350 restaurant and retail locations in North American airports and more than 5,000 crew members. Some of those airport operations are $100 million-plus businesses on their own, which is why his current work is about raising the capability bar for the leaders who run them.

Alan walks host Barb Bidan through what an airport director actually owns, the capability assessment OTG built to define great performance beyond the numbers, and how he measures an HR business partner: by the quality of the decisions they help leaders make. He closes with where his team's time goes once agentic AI takes the manual work, and the one business metric he wishes every HRBP understood. For CHROs, HRBPs and operating leaders in frontline businesses.

Chapters
00:00 Meet Alan House, Chief People Officer at OTG
01:56 Why frontline hospitality businesses pull him in
04:33 What surprised him about airport operations
07:55 Capabilities and getting the right managers in place
10:03 The airport director as a $140 million business leader
15:08 Capability assessments that create clarity
20:30 Great HR partnership starts with trust
25:05 What AI gives back and the people-first culture
27:14 Lightning round: adaptability, AI in 3 years, the metric HRBPs miss
30:59 Takeaways and Alan's final word

Takeaways
- HR credibility is built when operational leaders see you understand their metrics: labor cost, productivity, turnover, guest experience, safety and profitability.
- An airport director runs a standalone business of up to $140 million and 70 locations, so influencing and aligning people matters as much as financial expertise.
- Capability assessments name the exact behaviors that define top performers and turn "be a better leader" into an action plan on the two biggest gaps.
- OTG is folding 8 leadership capabilities into 2027 performance objectives with quarterly check-ins, so assessment and review stay joined at the hip.
- An HRBP's value is the quality of the decisions they help leaders make, and the metric most still miss is how the business makes money.

Connect with the Guest
Alan House LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alan-house-hr
Company Website: https://www.otgexp.com

Sponsor
Wisq is the AI platform for HR. We built Harper, the world's first AI HR teammate — designed to handle the judgment-heavy work that has historically consumed HR teams: job changes, performance concerns, leaves of absence, onboarding, and employee relations issues. Where HCM bolt-ons and chatbots deflect the easiest questions, Harper resolves full cases, end-to-end. The result is an HR function with the capacity and strategic bandwidth to focus on the work that moves the business.

Companies get Harper live in weeks, not quarters, with implementation support built on deep HR domain expertise. Wisq serves HR leaders at leading companies across industries, helping them raise the bar on employee experience and expand what their teams are capable of.

For more information, visit wisq.com.

Summary
Dessalen Wood has led people teams across retail, entertainment, and HR tech, from Disney Stores, Hudson's Bay, Reitmans, and Cineplex to CPO of ThoughtExchange, and now serves as Global Chief People Officer at Syntax, where she leads people strategy for 3,000 employees across 15 countries. On The Human Element, she and host Barb Bidan dig into how CHROs can separate real change from imagined emergencies when the function is constantly told it is about to be reinvented.

Dessalen explains why the fundamentals of autonomy, feeling valued, and development matter more than any perk, why remote work alone never fixed retention, and how she buys time when a leader insists HR is behind. She also walks through the four stage AI maturity map Syntax used on its way to training 90% of employees and building more than 1,000 functional agents, and closes with lightning round views on assertiveness, career paths, and the question every CHRO should be asking.

Chapters
00:47 Meet Dessalen Wood
01:59 Why she went back into the CHRO seat
06:27 What the vendor side revealed about HR
08:43 Autonomy, value and development as the fundamentals
11:50 Remote work and the perks that stopped working
13:42 Picking a few things and never rolling them back
18:58 Handling imagined emergencies
22:06 The lifeguard chair view of the CHRO role
25:53 A four stage AI maturity map at Syntax
32:00 Lightning round and the final word

Takeaways
- Design every people program around autonomy, feeling valued, and development, and test anything new, including AI enablement, against those three needs.
- Flexibility or perks that mainly make leaving harder are not a culture; differentiate on a few things and keep them consistent in good years and bad.
- When an imagined emergency lands, neither defend nor panic and agree; buy time so your executive function comes back online before you respond.
- Keep your antenna out on the industry and the whole organization so big changes rarely arrive as a surprise.
- Move through AI maturity in order: tooling and guardrails, enablement with clear expectations, measurable P&L impact, then reimagined roles and products.

Connect with the Guest
Dessalen Wood LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dessalen-wood-b1192513/
Company Website: https://www.syntax.com

Sponsor
Wisq is the AI platform for HR. We built Harper, the world's first AI HR teammate — designed to handle the judgment-heavy work that has historically consumed HR teams: job changes, performance concerns, leaves of absence, onboarding, and employee relations issues. Where HCM bolt-ons and chatbots deflect the easiest questions, Harper resolves full cases, end-to-end. The result is an HR function with the capacity and strategic bandwidth to focus on the work that moves the business.

Companies get Harper live in weeks, not quarters, with implementation support built on deep HR domain expertise. Wisq serves HR leaders at leading companies across industries, helping them raise the bar on employee experience and expand what their teams are capable of.

For more information, visit https://www.wisq.com