TL;DR

Alison Jeske describes leading an HRIS overhaul, a full redesign of Propelled Brands’ benefits program, and a rebuild of how managers are trained. Most HR leaders would treat these as three separate projects with three separate playbooks. Jeske treats them as the same problem, and that’s where this gets interesting.

Ask HR professionals at a happy hour what they think of their HRIS, and you get the same answer every time. They love parts of it, hate the rest, and somewhere in the middle sits a system nobody quite trusts but everybody has to use anyway.

Swap “HRIS” for “benefits package” or “manager training,” and the shrug barely changes. Different system, same complaint. Alison Jeske, Director of HR Operations at Propelled Brands, has a different explanation: “The problem was never really the software, or the benefit, or the manager. It was who was in the room when the thing was designed.”

Since joining the company, Alison has consolidated its HR technology stack, redesigned its benefits program inside a tight budget, and rebuilt how the company trains its people managers. Three efforts, three different stakes. Ask her about any one of them, and the same explanation comes up.

The Tool You’re Handed Versus the Tool You Build

Most HR leaders inherit an HRIS the way they inherit an office chair: something that arrived before they did, works well enough, and gets adjusted as far as possible. Alison starts from a different premise. A purchased system is a license, not a finished product, and what happens between signing that license and going live is where the real work sits.

Propelled Brands is a holding company, running FASTSIGNS, My Salon Suite, and Camp Bow Wow under one roof, with plans to keep acquiring more. When Camp Bow Wow joined the portfolio, the company took on 200-plus employees at once, and the existing HR infrastructure wasn't built to onboard people at that scale, let alone repeat the process with the next acquisition. That's the problem Alison inherited: a set of systems that couldn't keep up with how fast the business intended to grow.

Before she chose an HRIS vendor to consolidate that fragmented technology stack, she wrote down everything that wasn’t working optimally. Every HR department accumulates the same clutter over time: an HRIS, a performance system, a recognition tool, a benefits platform, a background check vendor, each holding its own slice of the same employee's data.

"What we find ourselves doing a lot in HR is that we are entering employee data into multiple systems. What does that cause? Error," Alison says.

So before she evaluated a single platform, she mapped the entire infrastructure as it stood, then decided what she needed the new system to become, one that could onboard the next 200 employees as smoothly as it handled the current headcount. That decision came before any vendor demo, which is what let her walk into those conversations already knowing her requirements instead of discovering them mid-negotiation.

Part of the requirements list came from a problem no vendor demo would have surfaced on its own. This particular build carried seven years of historical data from a separate HRIS, and an accounting setup, cost centers, and GL structure, that was more complex than anything she'd worked with in previous roles. Understanding that setup well enough to avoid breaking something on the payroll side wasn't something accounting could hand her a spec for. She had to work through it herself.

The same logic carries into the timeline. Most organizations treat go-live as the finish line: the software is in, the project is done, move on. Alison's clock runs differently.

"The go-live is one point in time of an HRIS implementation. It takes a full year to implement that software because you have to get through an entire cycle of HR. You have to get through your first open enrollment in the tool. You have to get through your first performance management in the tool, your first everything in the tool so that you can build and tweak along the way. And then year two, you're finally in a place where you've got this thing figured out and it's working the way that you want it to."

Treating go-live as the finish line means the tool gets judged and even abandoned before it has run through a single real cycle. Treating it as the starting point means the first year becomes deliberate configuration instead of disappointment. That difference in framing changes how much time, patience, and internal expectation a leader budgets for a project like this, especially one that has to hold up under repeated acquisitions rather than a single, static headcount.

It also explains why Alison insists on being inside that configuration work herself, rather than letting the vendor deliver a finished system for HR to adapt to.

"My firm belief is if you build the tool, you will love the tool. And so it is critical that HR is fully involved in that implementation process and knows how to build the tool," she says.

Why Ease of Use Was a Requirement, Not an Afterthought

That belief extended into what she actually screened for when evaluating a vendor. "The tool that I am implementing is very user friendly, so that the amount of training I have to provide is minimal," Alison said of the HRIS rollout at Propelled Brands. "That has to be a part of that evaluation and consideration." She weighed ease of use alongside the technical requirements from the start, and the rollout to her test group produced no onboarding questions at all.

She'd seen this work once before, at a manufacturing company earlier in her career, in a setting where the stakes were higher and the skepticism was louder. That company was moving employees off paper time-off forms and onto a phone-based system. Leadership pushed back hard.

"The senior leadership team thought I was absolutely insane. They told me, there is no way people are going to submit time-off requests on their phone, when they can do it on paper," she said.

Her answer pointed to a contradiction leadership had overlooked: "Don't you write them up every couple of weeks for being on their phone when they're supposed to be running equipment? People use their phones. People know technology."

The rollout reached full adoption. "We had 100% adoption. Everyone was using it," she said. Every employee who came to her with a question was already holding the phone they needed to solve it.

By the time she reached Propelled Brands, usability was a standing line item in every vendor evaluation.

If You Can’t Win on Pay, Win on Something Else

Retention pulls at HR from a different angle than adoption does. Nobody quits over an unintuitive HRIS. People quit over what a job pays, and what it offers around the paycheck. That's where Alison's ownership instinct meets a constraint she can't configure her way around: the budget.

"If you can't lead the market in pay, then you need to lead the market in culture and benefits," she said. Companies that can't win the compensation conversation still have a second lever, and most HR leaders underuse it because they assume it costs money they don't have.

"It doesn't have to be dollar signs. And I think that's the biggest fear for HR. They don't want to put in a policy on the benefit side that's going to cost more money. But that's not necessarily the case depending on what benefit you implement. You can implement benefits that actually save the company money."

One example sat inside the pharmacy plan itself. Rather than leave the generic drug tier at whatever the standard cost-sharing structure charged, Alison's team set it to zero.

"We took a cost increase to do this, but we made our generic drug tier as a $0 to try to drive behaviors to that, because then the overall savings that we would get out of it long term are there," she said. A short-term cost, absorbed on purpose, to redirect employees toward the cheaper drug category and lower the plan's overall spend over time.

"I'm not recommending this for large companies. This is tailored to under 500 employees," she said. The math on self-administering a benefit changes with population size, and what works when leave claims number in the single digits a year won't hold at a company running thousands of employees through the same plan.

"I have brought short-term disability in-house at two companies. You're saving a ton of money on the premium side because you're self-administering it through payroll," she said. The pitch to a CFO is a direct comparison: what the company was paying a third party in premiums, against what it would cost to run the same coverage through payroll infrastructure the company already has.

While seemingly unrelated, this mechanics work around benefits can impact retention. Employees kept telling Alison, in effect, that a benefit didn't need to apply to them personally to matter to them. "I don't necessarily need these benefits at this point in my life, but I would be proud to work for a company that has these benefits," was the kind of answer that came back repeatedly. A parental leave policy, for instance, only directly affects the subset of employees who use it. The rest of the workforce still counts it as a reason to be proud of where they work.

That's part of why Alison treats measurement as its own design problem. She built a baseline before changing anything: survey questions tracked over time, tied specifically back to the culture and benefits work, so that a shift in the numbers could be attributed to something concrete rather than assumed. The stated goal behind all of it, the one her team says out loud, is to become the employer people choose to work for.

The Training Most Companies Skip, and Why It’s Expensive to Skip

"Forty-something percent leave a job because of a supervisor or a manager," Alison said. Whatever a company spends on compensation or benefits, a large share of its turnover traces back to the relationship an employee has with the person they report to.

Many organizations respond to that number by running one training session and calling the problem solved. Alison built something to fill that gap instead.

"People manager training for me starts at the foundation, and that's just the basics. Then we go to more developmental training where we've got case studies or scenarios, or we role play things that are going to happen in their day to day."

The foundation covers what a manager is legally and procedurally responsible for: handbook policy, compliance basics, the blocking and tackling of the role. Skipping it means asking a manager to run development conversations and performance issues without ever having been told what they're accountable for in the first place. Most companies skip it anyway, because it feels obvious enough not to need designing.

The developmental layer is where the harder work sits. "We sometimes forget as HR professionals that we're managers too," Alison said. "We want a sounding board. So usually we go to someone in the organization that we think of as a thought partner." Managers need the same thing, and HR's role is to be that thought partner, not a compliance check on their performance.

Sitting inside enough of those conversations, patterns surface. "By being in all those conversations that are happening across the organization, we can usually pick up on themes," she said. A cluster of managers struggling with the same thing, such as feedback, time management, or difficult conversations, becomes the basis for the next training, built from what her own organization is actually short on, rather than a generic program bought off a training catalog.

"If you've trained your managers well and you support them to write a really good performance improvement plan, the goal is to get that employee to improve and graduate off the plan and stay in the company," Alison said. Walking someone off a PIP and keeping them on the team costs far less than replacing them.

Whether better-trained managers actually keep employees longer is harder to measure than an HRIS rollout's adoption numbers or a benefit's cost savings. Alison is candid about why. Regarding what drives turnover on a given team, she points out that "there's lots of layers to it. So maybe it's the manager, maybe it's what skills they're recruiting for, maybe it's their training, maybe it's their onboarding." Manager-level retention is one signal, alongside newer tools that fold performance ratings and engagement scores into the same dashboard.

The Harder Standard

None of what Alison describes required a bigger budget than most HR leaders already have. It required being in the room earlier than most HR leaders are invited to be, and staying in it longer than a single decision.

The HRIS took a full year to become the infrastructure she wanted, mapped and configured under her own direction before she called it finished. The pharmacy tier and the in-house short-term disability administration came out of the same instinct: mechanics built to behave a certain way, priced against what the company was already losing. The manager training followed the same pattern, a structure assembled from what her own organization's managers were actually short on, sequenced so the basics came before anyone was asked to do the harder work.

The payoff isn't identical across the three, and it shouldn't be. A system built without the people who'd use it gets ignored or resisted, which is exactly what leadership expected from the paper time-off rollout, until someone designed for how the workforce actually operated instead of how leadership assumed it would. A benefit copied from a broker's standard menu gets treated as a line on a compensation sheet. One designed around what a specific workforce values, becomes a reason to stay. And a manager sent into the job with no foundation and no thought partner eventually loses people, including sometimes themselves.

Three different projects, each with a different outcome at stake, but the same question sitting underneath: who decided how this would actually work. Alison's answer, every time, was that she did, ahead of the vendor, the broker, and the training catalog, setting the terms before accepting whatever any of them would have handed her by default.

That's a harder standard to meet than buying good software, offering competitive benefits, or scheduling a training session. It doesn't show up on an invoice, and no one can benchmark it against what a competitor purchased. It shows up only in whether the system is used, whether the benefit is valued, and whether the manager knows what to do the day someone on their team is struggling. For an HR leader wondering where their own leverage actually sits, that's the harder, quieter place to look.

Practical Takeaways: The Ownership Standard Behind HR’s Three Levers

Ownership is a design discipline, not a budget question. For an HR leader, the test across an HRIS consolidation, a benefits program, or a manager training rebuild is the same: whether the system was built around how the organization actually works, or handed over to a vendor default, a market benchmark, or an assumption about what people will do on their own. That test matters most for HR leaders who carry responsibility for retention and adoption outcomes without full control over budget or headcount, since design ownership is the one lever that isn't rationed by either.

1. What does "design ownership" mean as a leverage point for HR, separate from budget size or vendor choice?

Design ownership, the way Alison Jeske (Director of HR Operations, Propelled Brands) uses the term, means deciding how a system, benefit, or training program actually works, rather than accepting a vendor default or a market benchmark. This shifts where the burden of proof sits. A leader who buys a strong HRIS, offers competitive benefits, or schedules manager training has not proven anything yet. The proof comes from how each was built and sequenced, which means the lever is available regardless of budget size.

2. How does HR being "fully involved" in an HRIS build actually turn a purchased system into infrastructure people use?

A purchased HRIS only becomes usable infrastructure once HR shapes how it works, which is the premise Alison Jeske (Director of HR Operations, Propelled Brands) built her rollout on. She insisted on being inside the configuration herself: mapping the existing technology stack, setting requirements before any vendor demo, and working through complex accounting and payroll structures firsthand. That ownership let her walk into vendor conversations already knowing her guardrails instead of discovering them mid negotiation. Handing that work to the vendor instead leaves employees with a tool nobody in HR fully understands, and adoption suffers.

3. What's an early signal that a new system or program will actually get adopted, rather than resisted?

One early signal Alison Jeske (Director of HR Operations, Propelled Brands) watched for was a test group running through onboarding with zero questions coming back, which is what happened with her HRIS rollout. It echoes an earlier rollout, at a manufacturing company, where leadership expected a workforce to resist mobile time-off requests and instead saw full adoption. In both cases, usability had already been screened for during vendor evaluation, ahead of any assumption about the workforce's technical comfort. A clean test group launch, before wide release, is the clearest early read on whether a system will stick.

4. Beyond HR, which functions does an HR leader need in the room before choosing an HRIS vendor?

Accounting is the function Alison Jeske (Director of HR Operations, Propelled Brands) names directly as essential in the room before a vendor is chosen. Her HRIS build carried seven years of historical data from a separate system, alongside a cost center and general ledger structure more complex than anything she had worked with before. Understanding that setup well enough to avoid breaking payroll required her to work through it herself, since accounting could not hand her a finished spec. Any HR leader running a similar consolidation should expect accounting's structure to shape technical requirements before any vendor demo begins.

5. What goes wrong if a company treats HRIS go-live as the finish line instead of year one of a two-year cycle?

Go-live marks one point in a much longer implementation, according to Alison Jeske (Director of HR Operations, Propelled Brands): a full HRIS build takes a full year to move through a complete HR cycle, open enrollment, performance management, and every other recurring process running inside the tool for the first time. Treating go-live as completion means the system gets judged, and often abandoned or resisted, before it has run through a single real cycle. Budgeting patience and internal expectation for that full first year is what lets the second year become genuine enhancement instead of ongoing disappointment.

6. How should an HR leader frame a benefit redesign, like a zero-dollar generic drug tier or in-house short-term disability, to a CFO?

Alison Jeske (Director of HR Operations, Propelled Brands) leads with a direct cost comparison when pitching a benefit redesign. For example, for the pharmacy tier, her team accepted a short-term cost increase to set the generic drug tier at zero, framed around long-term savings from redirecting employee behavior toward cheaper drugs. For short-term disability, she showed the CFO what the company already paid a third party in premiums against what it would cost to self-administer the same coverage through payroll. Leading with the savings case is what turns a benefit expansion into a financial decision the CFO can approve quickly.

7. What operating shift turns manager training from a one-time session into an ongoing retention lever?

Roughly forty percent of employees who leave a job cite their manager as the reason, the statistic Alison Jeske (Director of HR Operations, Propelled Brands) uses to anchor manager training as a retention lever. She sequences training in two layers: a foundational layer covering handbook policy and compliance basics, followed by developmental training built from real case studies and role modeling, with HR as a thought partner throughout. Managers equipped to run development conversations well are the ones who keep struggling employees on the team instead of losing them.

8. If a company can't win on pay, what are its real options for retaining people?

If a company cannot lead the market on pay, Alison Jeske (Director of HR Operations, Propelled Brands) argues it can still lead on culture and benefits without new spending. Some benefits, like a zero-dollar generic drug tier or self-administered short-term disability, can be structured to save money while expanding coverage. She also points to benefits employees might not personally use, such as parental leave, that still build pride in the employer among the wider workforce. The option available is creative benefit design tied to what a workforce actually values, measured through a benefit-specific baseline survey.

9. What's the one decision an HR leader has to make before ever sitting down with an HRIS vendor?

Before evaluating a single platform, Alison Jeske (Director of HR Operations, Propelled Brands) mapped her entire existing HR technology infrastructure and decided what she wanted it to become: one consolidated system able to onboard the next 200 employees as smoothly as the current headcount. That decision came before any vendor demo, which meant she walked into evaluation conversations already knowing her guardrails and requirements instead of discovering them mid negotiation. Any HR leader skipping that mapping step risks selecting a vendor around whatever features look impressive in a demo, before the infrastructure question has been answered.

10. How should benefits and manager training investments actually be measured to prove they're paying off?

A baseline built before anything changes is how Alison Jeske (Director of HR Operations, Propelled Brands) measures whether benefits and manager training investments are paying off. For benefits, that means tracking a fixed set of engagement survey questions over time, tied to culture and benefits work, so a shift can be attributed to something concrete rather than assumed. For manager training, retention on individual teams is the main indicator, though she cautions turnover has several causes, including recruiting fit and onboarding, alongside training itself. The decision rule is to weigh survey movement and team retention together, not one number alone.

Closing Reflection

Design ownership raises the standard for HR leadership because it treats infrastructure, benefits, and manager capability as outcomes HR is accountable for building, not features it purchases or offers. A tool, a benefit, or a manager training only pays off when someone owned how it was sequenced and adopted, not when it was simply provided. Executives who understand that distinction gain a sharper lens for separating what looks like investment from what actually converts into usable infrastructure and retention.

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To hear Alison walk through the HRIS build, the benefits redesign, and the manager training, listen to the full podcast episode.

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