The Chief People Officer who merged HR, tech to drive transformation

In late 2025, Loopio, a Toronto-based software company with offices in Vancouver, the U.K., India, and the U.S., brought in Joanna Kmiec to do something the organization had never done before: place a senior people leader at the executive table and build the human resources (HR) function into a genuine driver of business performance. She’s less than a year into that work as the company’s first Chief People Officer (CPO), and the transformation underway is already one of the most ambitious in the company's history, according to Kmiec. 

The hire reflected a recognition that Loopio – which currently employs about 220 people, according to Kmiec – had outgrown the people leadership model that had served it through its earlier stages as a tech startup. 

"The organization felt that with its growth and how the market was shifting and evolving, it really needed to have a leader in place that was a strategic partner to this growth and transformation of the business," says Kmiec. "That's where I came in." 

What followed was a clear-eyed assessment of what existed and what was missing, she says: "You look at the tech stack, you look at the people, you look at the programs, and you identify what's missing,” says Kmiec. “Do you have the skills to truly partner with the business? Is the function looked at as more administrative than as a partner to the business?"  

The answer, she determined, required more than incremental improvement. It required repositioning the entire function – as quickly as possible, and in service of a company moving fast. 

From administrative function to strategic partner 

Kmiec's entry point at Loopio mirrors the broader shift she says she’s observed across more than 20 years of global people leadership. HR was once largely synonymous with payroll, benefits, and recruitment, but now it’s expected to sit alongside finance and operations as a measurable contributor to business outcomes. 

"It's now really evolved into a truly strategic partner to the business, a driver of performance if done correctly, and more of an architect of how the people initiatives and programs can help directly impact the performance of a company," she says. 

That evolution is well underway across Canadian organizations, but it’s uneven. HRD Canada's coverage of how HR leaders are redefining their strategic mandate in Canadian organizations shows that the gap between aspiration and execution remains significant for many people functions. At Loopio, Kmiec says she’s closing that gap through four concurrent initiatives: shifting the function toward data-driven decision-making; building a culture of structured feedback and transparency; strengthening middle management capability; and leading an organization-wide transformation that integrates new values with artificial intelligence (AI) fluency. 

Kmiec says she has introduced more hard data to bring to the executive conversations. Engagement has been added as a corporate-level metric and time-to-productivity has been introduced to measure how quickly new hires are contributing. "You want people making an impact as quickly as possible, so we're trying to elevate performance and productivity,” says Kmiec. 

The most underestimated risk in transformation 

Kmiec has navigated people strategy through mergers and acquisitions, rapid technological expansion, and significant workforce restructuring. When asked what leaders most consistently underestimate during high-stakes transitions and transformation, her answer is immediate: trust. 

"Trust in leadership, trust in HR, and maintaining that through a lot of change – once you lose that, it impacts more metrics than I believe leadership really gives it credit for," she says. "Your turnover rates start to increase and that has costs. If you're losing good people, the cost that it is to replace them, the time lost, the productivity lost when your turnover starts to skyrocket again, partially due to that lost trust, sometimes it's really hard to even quantify how large those numbers can get." 

This view is backed by research. A 2026 global study of C-suite executives by The Adecco Group, The human premium: Leadership beyond the algorithm, found that confidence in senior organizational leadership is the most influential driver of employee engagement and productivity during AI transformation. 

Kmiec believes that the key to controlling the narrative during transformation is to communicate, include, and invest in the foundation. “Make sure you bring everyone along for the transformational journey and invest in ensuring that your foundation remains strong,” she says. “You can't build and you can't grow if your foundation is shaky or has holes." 

The CPO-CEO relationship: the partnership that makes it work 

Central to Kmiec's ability to drive change at Loopio is the relationship she has built with the company's chief executive officer (CEO). She describes it as the most important partnership in the business – and the model for how the CPO role needs to function to deliver real impact. 

"In order to combine both the people side – the purpose of the people in the organization – and that innovation side, the CPO needs to be a true partner and right hand to the CEO," she says. "And the CEO needs to want to work that way, because the CPO can give insights that often get forgotten in times of big change." 

At Loopio, that relationship is characterized by mutual trust, psychological safety, and candour, according to Kmiec. "There's a very high level of psychological safety for both of us to be completely open and candid in every conversation we have about the business," she says, adding that in return, she ensures the CEO has full visibility into the downstream consequences of every major decision. 

"He doesn't just speak about people mattering as lip service – he lives that every day,” says Kmiec. 

Building AI fluency and merging people, technology functions 

The largest initiative Kmiec is leading at Loopio goes beyond any single program. The company is redesigning how work gets done at every level – combining new organizational values with a systematic push for AI fluency across all roles and functions, she says. 

"More than just tacking on HR processes and AI processes onto existing workflows, it's redesigning the way we work as a company," says Kmiec. "Truly changing how we work as an organization so that the repetitive work, what's considered the invisible work, can be done or automated in the background, allowing our people to truly drive the business and our customers forward." 

To drive this change at Loopio with the necessary coherence, Kmiec says she merged the people and technology functions, with the transformation team now reporting directly into her role. The result, she says, has been one of the most rewarding professional experiences of her career. "We’re accomplishing things at a fast pace that otherwise I don't think would have been possible." 

Kmiec believes that an essential skill for people leaders navigating this type of transformative environment is perhaps the most difficult to teach. "The ability to live and succeed in the tension between performance, engagement, and empathy – that tension of balancing the business side with the people side and making it work,” she says. “If you can't live in that tension and know when you need to lean more to one or the other, you'll definitely struggle to lead in this role successfully across an organization."