A recap of our conversation with Sarika Lamont (Vidyard) and Claire Schmidt (AllVoices)

Most HR teams are listening. They're just listening for the wrong things.

An engagement score moves up two points and gets a celebration email. A high performer quits and nobody saw it coming. The promotion process is "documented" and everyone still thinks it's a black box. The data is there. The signal isn't.

That was the setup for session three of Rebuilding the Modern Workplace, our webinar series for HR leaders trying to figure out what to keep, what to throw out, and what to build next.

Rebecca Taylor sat down with Sarika Lamont, Chief People Officer at Vidyard, and Claire Schmidt, Founder of AllVoices, to get into what an internal intelligence system actually looks like when you build it for the people inside the company, not the slide deck going to the board.

It got real. Here's the full breakdown.

What's the most important thing you've learned about listening to employees that you wish you'd known five years ago?

Sarika opened with a lesson that gets glossed over in most engagement frameworks: the question shapes the answer. Generic prompts get generic responses. "How's it going" gets you "It's great." And in the wrong culture, it gets you "It's great" even when the building is on fire.

"I find that I don't really get much feedback if I just ask some generic question. Like, how's everything going? You have to get super specific. And the environment you've created has to allow for people to come with the full transparent truth."
— Sarika Lamont, Chief People Officer, Vidyard

She layers her listening across engagement surveys, pulse surveys, exit interviews, stay interviews, small focus groups, and one on ones. Different formats, different questions, different timing. The point isn't to collect more data. It's to triangulate enough perspectives that signal can be separated from noise.

Claire's lesson was downstream of that. Listening only matters if you close the loop.

"Even if the answer is, hey, we looked into it, this is not going to be financially possible for us this year, but we're keeping it on the list for next year, that is so much better than ghosting that person, basically."
— Claire Schmidt, Founder, AllVoices

The double feedback loop, in Claire's words: take the feedback, do something, then go back and ask if the change worked. That second loop is where most HR teams drop the ball, and it's also where trust actually compounds.

Sarika added the part nobody likes to admit. You have to repeat yourself until people roll their eyes.

"I get this a lot where, I don't feel like you guys are taking our feedback. And I'm like, everything that we build into our OKRs and our initiatives is literally based off of your feedback. You have to connect the dots for them over and over again because employees don't live this life like we do day in and day out."
— Sarika Lamont

When you decided to overhaul how your team operates, how much of what you threw out was stuff your team had been quietly hating?

This is where Sarika got into the Vidyard rebuild story, and it's the most useful part of the conversation if you're staring down your own performance management overhaul.

When she joined Vidyard three and a half years ago, she walked into what she described bluntly as "atrocious" performance management. One directional. Nine box ratings used as a coaching tool, which she points out is not what nine box was designed for. No career framework. No competencies. No real conversations between managers and employees about where they'd been placed or why. And those ratings were tied to comp decisions.

So her team built the thing every HR team is told to build: career framework, leveling, competencies, bidirectional reviews, automation. It worked. For about eighteen months.

"Then you fast forward, like, honestly, it was probably a year and a half, and all of that work became outdated."
— Sarika Lamont

The career framework became a static doc no one referenced. Managers stopped having the conversations the system was designed to enable. Enablement videos sat on Confluence pages no one opened. Layoffs and reorgs meant managers now had eight reports instead of four, and feedback was the first thing to get cut.

The breakthrough came from a conversation with one engineer.

"I had been saying for years, employees need to own their career. And someone, an engineer, said to me, but Sarika, I don't think people know how to do that. I don't think they know how to advocate for themselves, what questions to ask. They don't know how to have that conversation. It was like the biggest, holy shit, how did I not. I took it for granted."
— Sarika Lamont

Younger employees, many of whom had only ever worked remote, didn't have the mentorship loop to learn what self advocacy even looks like. They were being told to "own their career" without ever being shown what that meant in practice.

That single piece of feedback restructured the entire performance program. Vidyard is now rebuilding it piece by piece, end of year questions first, then competencies, then career levels, then an interactive tool to help employees actually have the conversation. AI and MCPs are letting them connect context from multiple systems into the performance flow without rebuilding the whole stack.

Claire's read on the moment widened the lens.

"Not every organization has a you. That's one of the reasons I started AllVoices. Maybe they don't have a you. Or maybe they do, but that person is not empowered enough or given the freedom and flexibility to do things this way."
— Claire Schmidt

How do you know you're solving the problems your people actually have, versus the problems easiest to see from the top?

Sarika's answer: you don't get there from one source. You triangulate.

Engagement survey data shows the pattern at the org level. Functional and team level slices show where the pattern is concentrated. Business partners pick up signals in meetings the data won't catch. Exit and stay interviews fill in the gaps that surveys miss. And small focus groups stress test ideas before they ship.

The shift Sarika named is that her team used to look at exit and stay interview data, then let it sit because the action plan from the engagement survey was already eating their capacity. The result was a feedback loop that ran on lagging indicators. They were investing in the right work in theory and missing whether it was working in practice.

"We felt overloaded by too much data. Let's just focus here and solve for this. What we were missing was the signals along the way on whether what we were doing and investing in was actually working."
— Sarika Lamont

AI is changing the speed of the cycle. Sarika described building what she calls a "second brain" for her team, pulling context from the meetings and conversations the team is already in so she doesn't have to be in every room to see the pattern. The point isn't replacement. The point is throughput. She can iterate on a new performance question, run it past a focus group, and adjust faster than she could before.

Claire framed this as the deeper shift in HR tech.

"HR tech was not built for the employee in mind back then. It was built for whatever HR needed. Tools like AllVoices and these new AI native tools are being designed more for the people they're serving."
— Claire Schmidt

What do you see across organizations when leadership designs solutions from the top down versus building them from the employee up?

Claire used engagement surveys themselves as the example. The questions are designed top down. The act of asking is top down. But Sarika's biggest insight, that the questions weren't getting at whether managers were actually having feedback conversations, came bottom up. The bottom up signal restructured the top down instrument, which produced better data, which produced better decisions.

That's the loop most HR teams skip.

Claire offered a useful mental model for evaluating where each listening channel sits in the trust economy. Imagine a two by two matrix where the axes are how much the employee cares about the org and how much they have to lose by being honest.

• Engagement surveys: employees still care, but they have a lot to lose if anonymity feels shaky.
• Exit interviews: nothing to lose, but they also care less, which changes the texture of what you get.
• Small focus groups and always on listening tools: the middle ground. Employees still care, the format feels safer, and the questions can go deeper.

"You need a diversity of data. People still care about the organization and its culture and its practices, and also don't feel like they have a lot to lose by sharing it. That's where the best signal is."
— Claire Schmidt

Sarika pointed to stay interviews, particularly with high performers, as one of the highest signal channels her team runs. She calls them coffee and culture conversations. A Starbucks gift card, a one on one, a structured set of questions, and a team member who isn't always Sarika herself, because the right interviewer depends on the comfort level of the employee.

What's the hardest piece of feedback you've received that made you rethink your entire approach?

For Sarika, the hardest hit was hearing that her team wasn't being transparent, after she'd built her professional identity on being direct and transparent.

"I pride myself on being super direct and transparent and bringing you along on this messy journey. So when someone tells me you're not being transparent, I'm like, what? But then you get into specifics. Oh, I don't think the promotion process is transparent. It's documented. Managers have been trained on it. People don't like to read anymore. They want information served to them. I think I missed when that change sort of happened."
— Sarika Lamont

The fix isn't more documentation. It's surfacing the information at the moment of the question, in the format the workforce now expects. The shape of transparency has changed, even if the underlying commitment hasn't.

Sarika was also clear about where she draws her line. Pay bands and job architecture? Public. Every individual's pay? Never.

"As a brown woman, and how hard it has been to get to this place in my career, the salary I've gotten to, the comp package, the title, absolutely not. You're taking my power away from me. That's the hill I will die on."
— Sarika Lamont

That distinction matters. Transparency is not the absence of confidentiality. It's clarity about what is shared, what isn't, and why.

For Claire, the hardest feedback was the kind that came through her own product. Anonymous reports in AllVoices that told her something about a team member, often months before she was ready to act on it.

"There's probably not a person I've had to let go for performance who didn't previously have an AllVoices report sent in about them. But sometimes it was a year later that the decision was made. The feedback I internalized over the first few years is you need to be a little quicker to take action when someone is not the right fit for the organization and the stage."
— Claire Schmidt

That's the cost of a feedback system that works. You get the signal earlier than you're ready for it. And then you have to decide whether you're going to listen.

How do you prevent information overload during major change?

Both Claire and Sarika pushed back on the framing of the question.

"I think we're all information overloaded in every aspect of our lives. There's too many places people can reach me. It's my job as the person running my life to be able to manage those streams. It's part of being a worker in 2026. You have to design your own information management system."
— Claire Schmidt

Sarika added the leadership piece. Part of an HR leader's job is filtering. Not as gatekeeping, but as protection.

"I think what I need to help employees understand is, you don't need to know all the information. I'm actually protecting you. Transparency doesn't mean you know everything all the time. We need to do a better job as leaders owning that, and not being scared to say that."
— Sarika Lamont

Rebecca closed the loop with the practical reality. Information always comes with context. Employees can't be expected to process every Slack channel and every all hands. The job of a communicator is to tag the update with the signal that tells the right people to pay attention.

The takeaway

If you walked away from this conversation with one move to make, Rebecca framed it well at the close.

"Ask the vulnerable questions and get the real information you need. You might find things you wish you didn't know, but now you're committed to figuring out how to deal with it. When you can really get to that true intelligence layer, then you can build what your organization actually needs."
— Rebecca Taylor, AllVoices

Look inward before you look outward. Other companies' playbooks are evidence, not instructions. The intelligence you need is already inside your organization. The question is whether you've built the system to surface it, the courage to act on it, and the discipline to close the loop when you do.

Build the intelligence system, don't just buy more tools

AllVoices is the AI native employee relations and intelligence platform built for the kind of listening Sarika and Claire described. Always on. Designed for the employee. Built to give HR the signal that surveys miss. Request a demo.

Catch the full session on demand and watch the rest of the Rebuilding the Modern Workplace series, including session four where we bring it all together on what it looks like to stop searching for the right playbook and start building the infrastructure to write your own.