Interview: Pure Storage's Chief Administrative and Legal Officer on the intersection of compliance and HR

HR leaders' portfolio often expands to encompass functions related to corporate community and social responsibility, with ESG and particularly sustainability coming under their remit more and more frequently in recent years. Some HR leaders even move to the business side of the table, becoming business heads and even CEOs.

But the expansion of roles goes two ways. Other function leaders move into HR as well, and the person most likely to pick up people leadership is typically the legal and compliance leader - because their background ensures that they, more than any other C-suite counterpart, can get the compliance angle right.

How does such a move work? People Matters met with Niki Armstrong, Chief Administrative and Legal Officer of Pure Storage, to find out more about how the legal and people functions come together. Armstrong, an employment lawyer and litigator, added the leadership of Pure Storage's HR function to her portfolio in early 2024 when former CHRO Alessandra Yockelson departed for NetApp, and her take is simply: it's about getting the policies and processes right.

Legal soundness as a pillar of people-centricity

In her experience as a litigator, Armstrong saw a spectrum of ways in which companies could get into legal trouble over employment issues, and when she moved to corporate employment as in-house counsel, her focus was to prevent those issues.

"I've seen what can happen when when a process or a policy is not applied fairly, equitably, and consistently across the board," she said. "Helping companies to prevent that involves building the right processes and the right policies, having the right people and the right culture, to ensure that we have that foundation to help avoid or minimise those problems from happening in the first place."

Adding the people function to her role has actually broadened her ability to carry out that mission, she said; it takes away barriers between the employee relations, employment law, and HR functions, and that gives additional visibility into what is happening at all levels and influence over how to proactively tackle potential pain points.

"When you're able to bring both the legal and the people team together, it does create a lot of synergies in what you can see and what you can act on. It gives us the opportunity to ensure all of our practices and our processes are not only people centric and good from an experience standpoint, but also legally sound and aligned with our core values and our code of conduct."

Breaking it down into the various sub-functions of HR, it's beneficial across the board, she said. For example, it helps the hiring and retention process: "I think it lends to a broader, more positive employee experience as well, right from the candidate stage and all the way through end of employment life cycle."

And for a global company with headquarters in the US but operations all around the world, there are significant additional benefits in terms of communication.

"We not only want to make sure that messages from HQ are being cascaded transparently, so that people in different offices know what's coming, but also we want to hear what trends are happening here and what we should be thinking about," Armstrong explained.

"We have to recognise that just because something's happening in the US, it doesn't always mean that it's happening the same way in another country. We have to be very thoughtful of our global perspective and and recognise the nuances. And when the legal and the HR function are working side by side, it really makes a big difference to understanding the legal aspect of any policies or regulations that might be coming down the pipe, how those will impact our employees, and then hear the perspective of our employees in local offices."

The intricacies of bringing two different functions together

There is an astonishing amount of synergy between the HR and legal teams, Armstrong said. For example, her portfolio also includes ESG and DEI, both of which teams partner closely with the HR team. The corporate philanthropy team running the Pure Good Foundation, which is under the legal function, covers employee engagement along with workforce development and the environment.

"I have a head of legal ops and a head of HR ops, and the two of them work closely together, trying to understand and think through how what one of them might do might impact the other," she said. "They look into how to combine technology and tools so there aren't so many separate platforms. As HR thinks about processes or policies, legal becomes involved from a compliance aspect to make sure what's created is in alignment with our code of conduct. Workforce planning in a new region or country needs the support of legal."

The coordination of tools is of particular interest, Armstrong explained, because there's potential for queries to HR and legal queries to be routed through the same platform for greater efficiency. HR tools also need to be reviewed by the legal team to ensure that privacy and data protection requirements are met. And of course there is the potential for simple automation via AI.

There are even synergies to be found in learning and development, she added; the L&D team comes under HR, but the legal team has extensive mandatory training requirements, and now quite a bit of thought is going into how to coordinate and align the two.

What's the number one thing HR can do to drive business growth?

Help managers to do their best possible job, Armstrong said.

"What we want are managers who are really effective. And so how do we, as HR professionals, help our managers to be better coaches, better managers, better developers? How do we help managers have career conversations with people to ensure that they're leveraging and engaging high potential people, but also helping those who might need a little bit of help with performance?"

And this is not just a HR issue, she pointed out. It is an "everyone issue". It is a manager issue, because all these responsibilities are a manager's job; it is an employee issue, because they are the ones who will be directly affected by the quality of the manager's work; it is a senior leadership issue, because the impact on the employees trickles straight down to the bottom line and then back up to C-suite and board.

"Oftentimes you find HR professionals doing much more tactical work, putting out fires and dealing with immediate matters. We have to enable, empower and educate managers to handle these independently, so that our HR professionals can focus on higher-level strategic work, whether it's workforce planning, whether it's training and development, whether it's talent acquisition and attraction."

And the nature of that strategic work often involves future-proofing the workforce, Armstrong added: thinking about the perspective of customers, shareholders, and employees, thinking about the changing needs of the business and how to align people strategy with business strategy.

"We shouldn't just be thinking about what's good for tomorrow. We should be thinking in terms of the next three to five years. And for that, you need talent that's going to grow with you, not talent that you're just calling upon to backfill something that happened yesterday."