Executive director uses analytics, a strategic mindset and psychology as an HR leader in unionized public sector
Moneyball is a book and film about how a major league baseball franchise applied advanced analytics over conventional assessments to build a competitive team with limited financial resources.
For Matt Hopkins, Executive Director in the People and Culture Group at the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC), it’s an approach that can also be effective for public-sector organizations that can’t offer compensation or access cutting-edge technological innovation to match the private sector.
Rather than accepting financial restrictions as a limitation, he redefines talent strategy around organizational alignment.
“I need to find people who bring a skill set, or a certain orientation, passion, or mindset that's aligned to the organization,” says Hopkins. “Someone whose passion is about being at the cutting edge, that's not a good fit for organization — we need someone who wants to roll up their sleeves and grind it out.”
Hopkins adds that creative role design and strategic pairing of complementary skills allows organizations to achieve outcomes “even if it's not in the traditional way.”
Public sector brings HR challenges
As an organization funded by different levels of government and customer fares, the TTC's fiscal pressures concentrate challenges that HR leaders can face. Public-sector organizations such as the TTC face intense scrutiny over spending, must operate with constrained resources, and must balance multiple competing stakeholder interests.
These conditions require HR leaders to develop capabilities that many in the private sector can defer, according to Hopkins, who has also worked in the Ontario Public Service.
“It’s not just figuring out how to do more with less, it's also figuring out how to tell a story as HR practitioners that's not rooted in just ‘This is the policy’ or ‘This is the best practice’ — we have to be more data-focused so that we can make our case, tell our story, and support our recommendation or program,” he says.
Rather than relying on industry benchmarks to justify recommendations, Hopkins insists on building cases grounded in organizational-specific data that speaks directly to business objectives.
"As an HR practitioner, we have to challenge ourselves to learn new skills and to adapt and become more analytically focused," he says, noting that this demand for data-driven HR requires leaders to develop competencies in analytics and business intelligence that were not traditionally part of HR education.
Leveraging technology strategically
Hopkins sees technology such as AI as enabling HR to work more strategically by automating transactional work, freeing the function to focus on complex problem-solving and boosting data-driven analytics. It also can allow employees to find their own solutions using self-serve tools, further allowing HR to focus on strategic partnership where their expertise genuinely adds value, he says.
“How can we be a problem-solver for bigger issues and not just a problem-solver from a checklist of HR solutions, and how do we really help the organization solve its issues through the people?” says Hopkins. “We're an enabler through the people lens, just the way that the safety department is an enabler of safe working — all organizational functions, including HR, ultimately serve the organizational mission.”
Although he’s a strong proponent of analytics as a way to manage the TTC’s workforce of approximately 16,000 employees under financial and public pressure, he says he's still able to stay focused on people — due to his somewhat unconventional background.
Hopkins’ path began on the front line of labour relations, representing unionized workers at a grocery store where he worked through high school and university. That early experience, combined with a university education in psychology, created an unusual foundation that shapes his approach to people management.
"[Union representation] got me interested in how we can look at psychology in the workplace, and then I studied psychology," Hopkins says.
Research methodology and data-driven thinking
Initially, Hopkins thought studying psychology in university was a false start, as much of what he learned seemed disconnected from workplace realities. However, it ended up providing a foundation for his success in HR, as the research methodology and data-driven thinking he learned in academia became valuable tools for demonstrating HR's measurable impact on business outcomes. He followed up his study of psychology with a master’s degree in industrial relations.
The discipline of research and validation through data became natural tools when he became involved in designing HR initiatives, says Hopkins.
"What I've realized in hindsight is the discipline that you learn in terms of research and methodology — having a plan, and understanding and validating things with data — you learn all of that in psychology and academia," he says.
Understanding human behaviour at a fundamental level also informs how he approaches program design, recognizing that people initiatives underperform when disconnected from research about how people actually think and respond to change.
A collaborative approach to labour relations
Hopkins' approach also dips into his labour relations background, as he insists that labour relations remains central to his HR strategy, particularly in a unionized environment like the TTC — about 12,000 of its employees, or 75 per cent, are unionized. While some HR thinking treats labour relations as a specialized, siloed discipline, Hopkins believes that when labour relations is conducted with transparency and strategic partnership in tandem with HR, it becomes collaborative rather than adversarial.
"The union is a partner and a stakeholder, and we need them to help us enable success for the organization — if we treat them like an adversary or a barrier, then that's how they'll behave,” he says. “When I tell them 'No' or 'That's not going to work,' they respect and trust me a lot more because I'm straightforward and honest with them.”
Hopkins believes this approach allows negotiations with the union to focus on substantive issues rather than relationship management, creating space for more creative problem-solving when both parties understand that good faith governs the interaction.
Understanding the business key to effective HR leadership
Hopkins believes that effective HR leadership requires earning credibility through a demonstrated business understanding. “You have to be respected by the business and other leaders, and they have to feel like you understand their business and the organization's goals — to me, that's step one to being a good HR practitioner, someone who can bridge that gap between people solutions and accomplishing the goals of the organization,” he says.
Hopkins' pragmatic approach — leveraging an unconventional background, insisting on data-driven decisions, embracing technology as strategic tool, and committing to genuine partnership — offers Canadian HR leaders, particularly those in public-sector organizations providing a public service like the TTC, a route map for moving beyond reactive management and toward genuine strategic impact.
A central challenge Hopkins sees is transitioning HR from reactive, transactional work toward genuine strategic partnership, and he frames his own identity around this shift.
“I think if you want to be an effective people practitioner these days, you really need to have the mindset of a strategic enabler, someone that helps an organization achieve its goals,” he says. “To me, I'm not an HR leader, or a talent management leader, or an employee relations leader — I’m just another leader in the organization working towards our organizational objectives of getting people from point A to B, safely, on time, and reliably."
