Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Today I’m having a long-awaited conversation with Paolo Pisano, Chief Human Resources Officer at Booking Holdings, the powerhouse behind brands like booking.com, Priceline, and my personal favorite, Kayak. Paolo brings a wealth of experience from his global career where he navigated complex cultural landscapes and has driven transformative HR initiatives. We discuss how Booking Holdings balances the autonomy of its brands while fostering a unified corporate culture. And he also has some thoughts on the evolving role of HR as a strategic enabler, debunking the myth that people and profit are at odds. We talk on critical topics like DEI, the power of analytics in HR, and how mental health and resilience have become central to their company culture, especially in the wake of the pandemic. And Paolo gets personal. He talks about the intrinsic connection between personal growth and experiencing the world. I’ve been wanting to have this conversation with Paolo for a while, and I am excited that it finally happened. It’s more than just a deep dive into HR practices. It’s a look at how a global leader thinks about culture, leadership, and the future of work. Let’s get started with Paolo Pisano of Booking Holdings.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Paolo, thank you so much for joining us. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation for a long time. So please tell us what is your why?

Paolo Pisano: Well, thanks for having me. The why, I mean, the why for Booking is to make it easier for everyone to experience the world. And I think my why is maybe not far from that. In a way, I’m a product of a multicultural environment in the first generation, Brazilian in my family, and I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to travel, to work, to live across a number of different countries around the world. And for me, I think the opportunity allowed me to focus on my growth and my development as part of that journey. So I think my why connects somehow with that, with helping people experience the world, experience themselves, grow and develop. I think that’s somewhere around that space.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Love this idea of helping people experience the world because in the work we do at Culture Partners, it’s all about experiences that shape beliefs that we have, which will lead to action and ultimately get companies a result. So this, you may not have an answer to this question, but let’s give it a shot. What beliefs do you hold or not? Do you hold? Do you hope people will develop by experiencing the world? Is there something that, some way in which you feel like you’re influencing humanity in particular?

Paolo Pisano: Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, I think we tend to, as we grow up, we look at the world from a perspective that everything is according to what we’ve experienced as we were growing up as our environment. And I think when you’re put outside of your immediate group, or particularly outside of your culture, you realize there are other ways of looking at the world that are different and sometimes very different from your own, right? There are different value systems, different beliefs, different histories, and perspectives. And being exposed to that and sometimes particularly being exposed to that in the right way can make a huge difference in how you broaden your perspective and you become more open to other ideas, other ways of being, and to changing some of your own behaviors or beliefs. I was part of an organization, an NGO, I don’t know if you’ve come across it, called AIESEC, which is I think they’re still the largest run student run NGO.

I always remember, I joined them early in my career actually was a foundation, maybe a career, and they started after the Second World War in Europe because they had a belief that if they could get students to move across countries and spend a chunk of time working or studying in other countries, they would be able to put themselves in each other’s shoes and look at what was happening in Europe from a very different perspective. And this is several decades ago, they’re still going strong. And I think my belief is very aligned to that. But even if you travel for holidays, you don’t have to spend a year or six months working. You can go on holiday and you can see things from a different perspective. I think that’s, that’s already a big contribution in my opinion.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel: It’s a big part of my family’s story. When I graduated college, my father, who was the CEO of a well-respected company in New York City, he had a loft in downtown Manhattan. He was married, he had three daughters. He sold everything that he owned and he got a motorcycle with a sidecar and he went on a 12-year trip around the world. Wow. He called it the Timeless Ride. That was exactly why he did it because he wanted to see the world differently. He wanted, I think he was on a search for meaning man’s search for meaning, typical kind of, I need to find out what else is out there. And sometimes we can find that at work. My dad couldn’t find that at work. He had to just completely leave the workplace entirely and go find it on the road meeting people. I mean, he went to almost every country. It was incredible. But let’s hope that not everyone has to go on a trip around the world on a motorcycle for 12 years to find meaning and that some of us can find fulfillment at work. Do you find that fulfillment in the work that you do? I mean, it’s a complicated business, right? Because it’s got Priceline, it’s got Kayak, it’s got all of these different organizations and you are, help us understand the CHRO of the holding company, but also the head of HR for one of those companies. Is that right?

Paolo Pisano: Yeah, that’s right. We have a number of brands that are part of our group. booking.com is the largest one. So I started actually my career with booking through booking.com for the first couple of years. And then back then we did not have a chief HR role for the group, so we ended up creating the role for holdings. And now I hold dual at just like my boss, the CEO, who also hosts a dual hat for holdings and booking.com. But I do have a very well-connected group of leaders, very experienced HR leaders across the brands in the group. And we meet on a regular basis to make sure that we are finding the right balance between autonomy and agility and independence for the companies of the group, but also joining the pieces and making sure that we are leveraging our resources or knowledge in what we have. And to the first part of your question, I mean, yes, I find fulfillment every day at work. It’s an amazing company going through I think an amazing period of growth, but also transition like everything we see around us, but also a great group of people. It’s a high integrity, low ego, high execution type of environment, which is an amazing springboard for learning basically.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Are the cultures of the brands different? Are they the same? Does it matter?

Paolo Pisano: They are different, but they have a lot of commonality. So the way we grew and developed the company like many companies in our space through acquisitions over the years, one of the things, one of the decisions a Booking Holdings made over these years was to provide as much autonomy and independence to the brands as possible. We often brought brands in with their founders and teams. They’re very entrepreneurial in nature. And we wanted to make sure we kept that space for people to pursue the best possible way to create value for customers. And what we’ve noticed is, yes, they’ve developed cultures on their own, but given the nature of the sector we’re in, the companies we have in the group, they’re not so different in terms of what they offer out there. You do have a lot of commonality in some of the ways of working and some of the beliefs that we have and the way that we approach how we do business with our partners, with our customers. And then over the years we realized that there was more value to be had if we started building a little bit connective T-shirt across the group, which is the journey we’re in now is to find that right balance between autonomy and independence, but also interdependence and leveraging of each other. And I think that balance is more art than science and it’s more dynamic than a place that we’re trying to get to.

But it does mean that we can have very different cultures but also be part increasingly of a larger culture that is the culture of Booking Holdings just like you be, I don’t know, in the US or New Yorker or Floridian, but also an American and you can hold both spaces easily.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel: That’s such a great analogy. I love that way of thinking about culture, that you can be both the same and different at the same time. There’s so much black and white thinking in corporate America today or even maybe global corporate generally. It’s like it’s got to be this way or that way. One of those places that I’m particularly interested in and would like to dig into with you is this tension, which seems to be growing in my opinion between people in profit, that these two things are opposite ends of a spectrum and you have to kind of pick one or the other. And during different economic cycles, we pick one and then we pick the other. And because if you invest in people, that’s going to affect your bottom line negatively. But if you focus on profit, it’s going to negatively affect your people. And I don’t believe those two things are at odds. And I think business-minded HR people get that. But there are a lot of HR minded HR people who maybe fail to see the larger context and business context in which they exist. You are a business-minded HR leader. So I would love to understand first of all your journey to CHRO and why you come at it from this perspective and also how you hold that tension. Because I would imagine there are people who see some decisions that you make don’t understand the value and you have to kind of communicate that value to them, right?

Paolo Pisano: That’s interesting because first I think it’s a false clash. I mean, you don’t have business without people. Businesses are made of people. And yes, you might have businesses that are more capital intensive, but even those businesses are still run and managed and they deliver what they do through people. And then in services businesses are the, so-called knowledge economy that’s even more or more obvious as they say, your outfits go back home every day and they have to come back to the office the next day. So there’s that level of volatility, so to speak. But I’ve been picking up less on that kind of conflict in recent years than perhaps throughout my whole career. So maybe there might be some bias of the people and companies in circles that are kind of around me. But I had say that it’s more of a rarity that I come across businesses on yet that you need to invest in people in order to get results than again 15 or 20 years ago.

When I came into hr, it’s interesting, I was in consulting management consulting and what pulled me into HR was a mix of intention but also an accident is I was very interested in what we were doing in the consulting space, not advising organizations into doing things differently. But I was getting increasingly intrigued on, because the company I was working is very small, and then I worked for a bigger one, but we were more on the design and delivery, but not the full implementation of what we were recommending. And my big question mark was how do you then get companies to implement to do what we’re recommending when that means significant changes on habits and beliefs and ways of working? And that’s when I came across HR and some folks that were thinking about HR from that standpoint, from a perspective of change management, organizational development, et cetera.

So my first four is into HR are because of that. And then over the years I had the privilege of being surrounded by working alongside with or being mentored by some pretty amazing business leaders and professionals. And where it became clear and clearer that what we do in HR is fundamentally the enablement of the strategy of the organization. And that is done through people if you think as maybe people as almost like the hardware of the organization. But the other dimension is not the people, the talent itself, but is how people work together, is the ways of working and the culture of an organization. That’s the software. So I can get great talent inside an organization. If that talent is not capable of working in an incredibly effective way with one another, then I’m not really leveraging that talent because it’s all about teamwork. So I think both parts are critical. And again, I feed less of that conflict today even by looking at the sheer number of articles in big business publications. And you look at the last couple of decades how they’ve shifted more and more into leadership and people management and change management and culture. I think that says something. I think there’s a heightened awareness that you need to invest in people for the future. Perhaps there isn’t yet a heightened competency to the same level. So doing that work is hard. So the gaps are still significant in that space.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Well, maybe that’s it then, because I think when you just described the hardware and being the people and the software being the way that they work together, that’s how we define culture. It’s how people think and act, right? It’s the way we work together. But people without that level of competence, they see culture as ping pong tables and kombucha on Thursdays and nap rooms. I mean that was made popular by Google 20 years ago. And there’s still this very kind of soft, touchy feely, totally disconnected from the business objectives, HR mindset for many people. And they get marginalized. And that’s when CEOs see that. They’re like, well, that’s why we’re going to have our head of HR report into the CFO to keep them in check as opposed to, you are actually my greatest lever in driving results, which is what I do believe effective HR is. I didn’t just ask you a question, so there was a silence. Sorry about that.

Paolo Pisano: No, and I’m saying yes to what you said. I think it’s absolutely aligned with what I’ve seen and with a broad misunderstanding of culture.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel: So then let’s dig into a couple maybe the things where I’ve seen controversy in HR in the last few years. Things like DEI, right? SHRM just announced the Society for Human Resource Management just announced they’re moving from DEI to IND. And I think maybe because there’s an election cycle, this is a particularly hot topic right now. I know that you have been an advocate of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and that you get that does drive results. And do you see pushback more than ever in that or how has that shown up in the workplace?

Paolo Pisano: Yeah, I’ve seen a little bit more. People have been a bit more careful maybe in the US in particular because as you described, the political environment there, the polarization is very present. Also, I think that some organizations might have overextended how they talk about it or maybe over promise. So there was a little bit of perhaps too much of branding attached to that. And for example, for us booking, we have been in the other end of the spectrum from a talking about things standpoint, there’s a value of humbleness in the organization, which made us not be very much about saying how great we are putting too much stuff out there Historically, more recently, I think we’ve started becoming a bit more mature in that space and realizing that we do want or perspective talent candidates that might want to consider working with us to know who we are, what we are about, what’s important for us, how we work together, what kind of culture we have, and we think that’s important more broadly.

So we started doing it a little bit more in that space. But compared to other organizations, it, it’s still very, very, I’d say very shy in the DEI space. We’ve been doing things for many years, but we haven’t talked as much about it, so we haven’t felt much of the pressure because also we are pragmatists, right? Whatever we’re doing, we’re aligning it up with our values, with our strategy, with what we’re trying to do, what we’re trying to get better. And I think we’re also a very insights and very data-driven organization. And that means also that whenever we’re picking up something and investing time, energy, money in it, we’re trying to track and understand is this working right or do we need to change course and do something a little bit differently? So that keeps us pretty grounded in everything we do in HR and in that space in particular.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Let’s talk about analytics because that is also a space where I’ve seen some friction in the last few years. I mean, being data-driven HR organization I think is immensely valuable because especially with people, there’s so much emotion can confuse reality. Perception is not always reality. And so the analytics keeps us grounded in what is really going on. Also, there’s been pushback about privacy. Are you tracking when I come into the office and then people playing that game about coffee badging so that they’re like, I’m back in the office. But then not, have you had to navigate that tension at your organization?

Paolo Pisano: So starting from the end on the tracking and the privacy, not as much. I mean, what we’ve done, for example, on the return to office, every company we’re trying to find what’s the right balance that we want to get over there. I think it’s still a learning journey. I don’t think anyone knows what the right spot is. And it might be different depending on the company you’re at, depending on the country you are operating at as well. It’s different culture, different approaches. But in that space where we’re learning, we’ve started using aggregate information to tell us a little bit about the trends and what’s happening around the organization. So the way we approached it in one of our companies in the group, for example, at booking.com, was to start providing information on attendance to managers the same way we would provide information on our engagement surveys, which means we’re not going to provide you names and surnames yet.

We’re going to provide you on a group report that tells you what are the patterns and what’s happening in your organization. So then on the basis of first and foremost, rather than pinpointing an individual or anything like that, you can talk to your teams, engage with the teams, have conversations, try to understand what is driving behavior. If you feel we need to change something, engage with the teams, have a conversation. So I think that was the way we found to navigate the space where people don’t feel we are kind of overstepping on that and still providing very useful insights to management and to leadership on how we’re doing and how we aligning more closely to where we want to get to or not more broadly on the analytics space. It’s interesting, I think it’s very welcome that the HR world or the HR craft woke up to the importance of having data, of looking for insights, et cetera. A number of years ago, I think it’s been a bit of a slow journey, but we’re making progress on that in the function around the world, not at booking, I mean, but more generally. But I think that sometimes HR functions still miss a trick on focusing on having the analytics tools and the surveys or whatnot, but almost like not knowing which questions to ask.

I think you can develop your best capabilities on analytics if you start from a demand standpoint, not the supply of analytics tools and frameworks, but what’s the demand? What is it that you’re trying to understand? What decisions are you trying to make and what do you need to know that will help you make a better decision for the business? Because at the end of the day, I think even behind or more foundational than thinking about the commercials of the organization is understanding that we are a network of decisions and commitments in the organization. And what you’re trying to improve is that most of our work, unless of course you are in a factory or something like that, we work with our brains making commitments with one another, meeting, sharing information and making decisions. So how do you make those better decisions? And HR can be very well plugged into that.

For us, we do a combination of things. It’s not one silver bullet. We can go from tools. You have engagement surveys, you have pulse surveys, you have focus groups, you have the intranet is an amazing place to give you insights. We have a lot of engagement around their intranets in the organization. We have communication spaces like town halls and Q&As and fireside chats, et cetera. What we hear from employees, what they’re thinking, what’s concerning them, what’s going on. We ask for feedback around that. We have HR teams that are on the ground with their ear close to the ground hearing and understanding what’s going on. We have a speak-up culture where we want people and if you see something, say something and a raise concern. So we try to create an environment where you have a lot of feedback and information flowing in a lot of directions, and then you have tools on top of that that help you seek and find and identify patterns and try to cross reference that information.

But you ultimately, or we try to be as simple on what decisions we’re trying to improve for the business. So if I know if I’m looking at a part of the business where we have some issues around the engagement or fishy is a bit higher, we try to understand what’s behind that and then we say, Hey, there are two or three factors that might be impacting that. So let’s act on those factors. That’s run an experiment and then let’s see if we see some positive results. We saw in one of our businesses, there was lower engagement that we attributed to lack of capability in management. We developed management training and development for those groups. And then when we were measuring the engagement of employees and some of the markers around good management, career development, trust, et cetera, we saw that the groups of employees that were under the managers that had undergone that development and that training that result improved faster than the result for employees that were not under managers at that undergone the program. So that gave us a hint that, okay, it looks like this intervention is working, so we scaled it.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel: That’s a great story and a great example. So it sounds like you’re doing hypothesis testing and then you’ve got a control group and the experiment group, and you’re actually seeing differences before making broad-scale decisions, testing, piloting.

Paolo Pisano: Where we can, we do that. There are a number of instances where, as you know, you cannot do a perfect AB testing and then you’re going to just make an experiment and see if you can remove a little bit of the peer perception, flash intuition, and use a little bit of insights and data to you, your decisions. But equally in the other extreme, I’m a big believer that you need to balance data and insights within intuition too, right? There’s something that comes from experience from systemic thinking, from being able to almost like zoom out and defocus and you see the patterns and you sense what’s happening. That is also useful for certain things. What I try to do is to combine both by the zooming out almost gives me questions or helps me develop hypotheses, and then I try to get hard data to tell me if I’m going in the right direction or not.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel: So I’m wondering, another thing that I wanted to ask you about is mental health in the workplace. Have you seen any analytics around trendline analysis on whether that is becoming increasingly a problem, if that’s affecting absenteeism or engagement? Have you seen anything internally?

Paolo Pisano: Internally? I haven’t seen it as a rising issue. Now why is that? I could not tell you for sure. Meaning we have been investing quite a bit in the wellbeing space for a while, and we haven’t done it through only one single thing. We’ve done it through a combination of things that we believe are helping in that space. We have invested in the more traditional health and wellbeing support. We have apps for mindfulness, for meditation. We have external speakers who are experts in a number of areas that relate to wellbeing. And this is on various areas that might be physical, emotional, financial, et cetera. We do have, because we have a very active group of engagement, is in the intranets where we have them. We have a lot of our own employees that offer support to each other and offer classes or in our groups for discussing things or resources for people to reach out to.

We have ERGs, right? Employee resource groups. I think they can be also a great conduit and area of support from an inclusion and belonging standpoint to make sure that you creating an experience that is equally great and supportive for everyone. But the other bit we’ve been doing is, while it links to my prior example, is management development, because there’s an enormous correlation between stress and absentee and happiness and engagement in the workplace and how good a manager is and connecting with their team. So we’ve also invested in that. So I think a combination of that has meant for us at least that we haven’t seen a trend that has made us concerned. If I zoom out of booking specifically though, and I’ll look more broadly around the world. Yes, and I think there is a, we’re in a different space probably today than we were 20 or 30 years ago, but it’s I think complex to attribute that to one thing, right?

It’s possibly a combination of a lot of different things. There’s the way that we were raised by our parents, and that makes it for a generational shift on how people were brought up. There is a shift on how technology has impacted how we deal with things. And the impact of social media is pretty well documented as well, particularly on youngsters or teenagers. There is a difference on how some countries have developed in different ways, what happened economically and socially. So there’s a lot of stuff that I think is combining into making that possibly a bit more of an issue, but also there’s a positive side to it, which I think there’s more awareness as well.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel: I think we can talk more openly and more skillfully about mental health and wellbeing in general today than we could 20 years ago, and that might be also a contributor to us feeling that it’s a lot worse. And I’m not saying that it’s not worse, but I’m saying that there’s an element there, which is also around us being able to talk about it. And that is good that you can normalize it, not in a bad way, but I mean that it’s no longer as much UL to talk about it and to be a bit more vulnerable with each other and to seek help and to seek support.

Paolo Pisano: And that was probably accelerated by Covid because it was a mass experience of isolation that then I think in the workplace anyway, five years ago talking about mental health was taboo. We’re not just talking 20 years ago, we’re just talking five years ago. I’m curious, I know that you joined at the beginning of Covid, right? So how did covid affect the culture of the organization? Are you able to speak to that because of when you started?

Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Let me think. I started, yeah, I started on the 2nd of March of 2020. I remember that day. Oh my goodness. I spent two weeks in Amsterdam before onboarding, before I remember being with a steering group where we had to make a decision to close 200 offices around the world and send people to work from home and figure out how to make that work. So it was very, very early any year in the organization. Now how that changed the culture, I think we’re still figuring out what happened, how it changed, but there are maybe a couple of things that I’ve noticed that were positive. It’s interesting because for example, at booking.com, where I was closest to at that time, we noticed we still ran our pulse surveys for engagement, and we still run them once a quarter. Three of them are pretty short, really easy to complete.

And then we do once a year a broader one. And it was very interesting to notice that, I think it was the first or the second round after we sent everyone to work from home, we’re still kind of in the beginning of the pandemic. Nobody knows how bad this thing is going to be long. It’s last. We had some of the highest engagement results then why? Because one of the things we did as an organization is we connected more effectively perhaps than ever before. The leadership of the organization was more visible. We were in touch with the whole organization more frequently. I think there was a level of openness of saying, we don’t know. We’ll come back to you when we do, and rest assured that we are here. So there was this no less of, we need to be certain about things and more on we are here to support you and to work together and we’ll figure it out.

So I think people felt really supported and there was a massive level of connection amongst our people to support each other. So I think was that a change? I’m not sure if it was a change in the organization as much as it was an amplification of something that was there. Sometimes latent, sometimes not as much. And that became very much front of mind for everyone and became a behavior. And I’d say that we’ve learned a lot from that period because a lot of the way in which we communicate, we engaged today, I’d say is possibly more similar to that than it was from what I hear from the times before the pandemic. So that was a change, a last thing change, and a good one.

Paolo Pisano: It’s interesting because I would imagine given the nature of your business, you were probably struggling financially, right? I mean, revenue probably plummeted massively, and the results are an experience in and of themselves seeing that uncertainty and that can create a lot of fear and anxiety. So maybe that spawned the need for more connection to comfort each other in the face of that uncertainty, maybe.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel: I think so, absolutely. And I think there’s a learning, a deeper learning in the organization around resilience, right? Booking was a very fast-growing organization, one of the classic scale ups that until the pandemic hadn’t really lived through any significant crisis. So there was a moment of growing up in a way as an organization where it is a very difficult time where you don’t know what the future looks like or if there’s a future. And yet as you come back from it with the scars, with the tough memories of it, but also the fond memories and the positive energy of how we kind of out together and work together. You take that into your next phase. And I think that’s one of the examples of learnings and change that I know it’s there. We know collectively it’s there, but how is that going to manifest itself and translate? I think time will tell, right? But it’s there. And that cohesiveness and that resilience that we’ve been through the worst crisis of the company’s history, and we’ve figured out a way to get out of it and to live through it and to do it in alignment with our values, by the way, which is also very important. It’s not like we had to change who we were to survive. We had to become more of who we were to survive and then to thrive after that.

Paolo Pisano: That’s a beautiful sentiment. We didn’t have to change who we were to survive. We had to become more of who we were to survive and thrive. Write that down, make that an Instagram post. That’s so inspiring. Okay, well, this is my last question and my favorite question, which is, what is something that you don’t get asked very often in these types of interviews that you wish you were asked more often?

Dr. Jessica Kriegel: What is something that I wish I were asked more often? Well, I’ll be very sincere when I engage in these conversations. I don’t wish I get asked anything. What I always hope for is a proper conversation, quite frankly, like the one we had. Meaning, look, you start the conversation, you see where the conversation goes, and you engage in the conversation with curiosity. So more than the question, I don’t get asked. What I think is great when it happens, and it doesn’t always happen, and sometimes for good reasons and sometimes not. It’s for it to be a real conversation. It’s not a list of questions, but it’s explore and be curious and see what comes out of it. There’s stuff that I know comes out from some of my conversations that I have not thought about, I have not articulated before until that conversation actually what I just said, now have to become more who you, I haven’t articulated that before. I said, yes, this is what happened, and now I can post it somewhere and make it look smart or whatever. But it comes out of a real conversation. So that’s, it’s not the question, it’s the quality of the conversation.

Paolo Pisano: Well, that is maybe my favorite response to that question that I’ve ever gotten in all of these interviews. And this has been so informative. I mean, I’ve learned a lot. I have many takeaways from this. I mean, the way that you talked about DEI and how people were really more into branding that than living with humility and actually living those values. I’ve articulated it saying it can’t be a project. It has to be part of your culture, but you just took it to another level. And the way that you talked about analytics, and it’s not about the supply, it’s about the demand. What is the question? How can we investigate? And also leaning on intuition. I mean, I have learned a lot about how to be an effective HR leader, but just generally business leader. So thank you so much for your candor, and I’m so glad we finally made this happen. It’s been on the books for so long, and I’ve been looking forward to it. And here we are. So thank you, Paolo.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Thank you for having me. Appreciate it. And again, I appreciate the real conversation. Thank you so much.