Director of HR cites importance of aligning HR with business goals, leading with culture during company’s rapid growth
When Janet Bray left the domain of the financial industry to lead HR for a small real estate and property management company, she discovered how energizing being a leader in an environment of rapid growth could be.
“I always say I ‘grew up’ working in large financial institutions or mutual fund companies, and I always felt I was contributing,” she says. “But when I came to Pier 4, a company that’s truly in a build and growing stage, there’s such great energy every day.”
Pier 4’s Director of Human Resources says she joined the company in May 2023 as its 14th employee. Less than three years later, the organization has 85 employees on the books, including a doubling of its headcount in less than a year, according to Bray.
Building business fluency before finding HR
Bray's path into HR wasn’t direct. She started her career as an internal auditor at a big bank before moving through product, marketing, lending and campaign roles. The turning point came when she was head of marketing at another company, running Pride at Work and women in leadership initiatives on the side. One day, according to Bray, she realized where the real energy was coming from: “I was thinking to myself that I was getting a lot more joy out of the side-of-my-desk responsibilities than my real job."
She decided to pitch a formal global DEI role to company leaders, who responded somewhat quizzically. “They very politely looked at me and said, ‘You have no HR experience whatsoever,’ but instead of shutting down the idea, they generously paid for me to go back to school and get an education in HR,” says Bray.
From there, she cycled through coaching, executive recruitment, and HR business partner roles, building the business fluency she now sees as essential to her HR function.
“That's really where I found that the real value of HR is bringing business intelligence with you, so that you can speak the language of the people you're working with,” says Bray. She believes that means aligning HR and business strategy so tightly that they’re indistinguishable rather than running in parallel tracks — which is particularly important during significant growth and change.
Alignment with business goals essential during growth
“It's not that the HR team is doing this and the business is doing that —the strategies must be aligned,” says Bray. “I use a phrase a lot around here, that we never want to be chasing our growth — that means a lot of things, but most importantly for us, we don't want to have to slow down this great pace of growth because we don't have the people or the infrastructure to support it, because when we stop looking after that, then the curve goes right down.”
“The conversations that we have [with other leaders], the ideas that we pull together, the strategies that we discuss become a reality quickly — it’s such an exciting time for me and for the organization,” adds Bray.
Moving from large organizations to a significantly smaller one also drove home the fact that the pool of business knowledge was much smaller and concentrated, says Bray. “As we continue to grow, I’m trying to mine that information so we're not having to relearn things,” she says. “That has to be a real element of the onboarding process, because in a big organization, lots of people know lots of things, but in a small organization, it can be one person.”
Leading with culture
It also means refusing to treat culture as a soft, downstream concern. “Culture can't be an afterthought, because when you're moving so fast, if you don't lead with culture, a lot of bad things can happen,” Bray says. In a high-growth “cowboy” environment, as she puts it, culture is the control system that keeps the organisation from veering off course.
Bray believes that a key part of HR is not to make generalizations about the workforce or even the C-suite. “No matter how many years or how much experience you have, especially in this particular job, you have to remember that every person is unique,” she says. “To be a truly effective HR leader and partner with the business, you have to be in the business as well as in the HR function. You have to know it, you have to get it.”
Pier 4's dual structure — a real estate investment trust operation alongside a property management arm — has forced Bray to rethink how she communicates within the organization. Early on, she pushed for identical messaging across the company. Now she takes a more nuanced line. “I want it to be a consistent message, but it has to be translated because the businesses are very different,” she says, adding that without that translation, frontline staff tell her bluntly, “I don't know if this applies to us.”
Finding the right communication frequencies
The same hard lesson hit when Bray proudly rolled out an employee savings plan with a company match in 2024 and watched it flop. “I wish I was exaggerating when I say it had zero pickup on it,” she says, adding that it took a manager spelling out the obvious — that many of Pier 4's young employees were more concerned with expenses like rent and student loans than contributing to a savings plan — for her to see the gap.
That misstep has reshaped how she approaches benefits strategy by “trying to think about the definition of benefits and what is that to them,” says Bray. Now she’s revisiting everything from the basic life insurance plan to the language used in presentations that focus on things more of interest to an older audience while underplaying the elements younger workers actually care about, she says.
Mental health support is one of those elements that’s on the rise with a newer generation of workers, according to Bray. “One of the elements that I'm currently investigating is mental health support, and it’s surprisingly inexpensive,” she says. As she rebalances the mix, she is prepared to strip back less relevant pieces, such as some life insurance coverage, to free up room for benefits that matter more to a 20- or 30-something workforce, she says.
Data a key tool in organizational transformation and growth
With juggling the culture and benefits needs of a rapidly-growing workforce that’s skewing younger, Bray believes that data is essential to HR’s decisions and contributions to organizational strategy. “Information is knowledge, and you can make better informed decisions,” she says. She uses demographic and usage data to refine the benefits mix, assess headcount growth, plan professional development, succession planning, and career paths, which she believes is essential to bring to the strategy table with other organizational leaders.
“Here at Pier 4, I'm at the table, and I think the world is opening up to say it is absolutely imperative that HR be at the table,” she says. “And to stay at the table and be a valuable part of strategy, HR has to get involved.”
In that regard, Bray calls back to her early career. “I don't think I would be as good or as engaged in my job if I didn't have that business background to support and provide me with that understanding of the importance of the HR programs that we're putting in place,” she says.
To support HR’s place at the strategy table, Bray believes that HR leaders and their teams need to stay visible and vocal. “You have to make sure that you're represented, because if HR isn’t in the room when the big calls are made, the job quickly becomes impossible,” she says.
For Bray, her role as an HR leader at Pier 4 during fast-paced growth and change emphasizes what HR leaders need to do to be that business partner in their organizations: “Make your organization aware of the value that we can bring to smooth out the transitional decisions and be involved in the strategy,” she says. “Be loud and let them know that it's important that we're at the table as we move forward.
