Gianna Driver

I’m a lover of life and thankful to have found my passion helping companies thoughtfully grow and scale their People function. Curious, driven, compassionate, and collaborative, I pride myself in creating strategies that foster high-performance cultures with global reach. Whether it’s helping to build executive teams or coaching through change management, I think boldly, deliver data-driven business results, and design human capital systems that empower teams to help the business grow.

THE PROFESSIONAL SPHERE

As the VP of HR at Actian, Inc., a global technology company, my responsibilities are broad, and you can read more about the specifics on my LinkedIn page.

When I think about what I do professionally—HR or “People Operations”—there are two general categories of professionals: those who view the function as a reactionary, compliance-driven, admin-centric part of the business, and those who view the function as a proactive, culture-building, strategic thought-partner at the decision-making table. While neither viewpoint is right or wrong, I identify with the latter category. I view the People function as a very strategic and influential part of an executive team; we steward the bridges of communication between executives and the larger organization, and we create systems that allow employees to feel heard, recognized, and have impact. Policy-creation, administering benefits, crafting total rewards programs, and other “traditional” parts of HR are very much valued and needed parts of the function, but I feel we’re in a new era of human capital management, an era where employers are looking at a hierarchy of employee needs and striving to create work environments with unique, differentiated cultures that foster self-actualized employees. That’s exciting!

IN SUMMARY

I love helping companies build ecosystems that use data and operational rigor to create highly-productive environments that cultivate happiness for employees, customers, and shareholders. When we craft environments where people thrive, the overall business moves up a step-function. Organizations become incubators for innovation, products become the vehicle to deliver desired outcomes, and culture is the invisible sticky stuff that holds it all together. The People leader has a very specific role helping executive teams strategize and then operationalize these goals.

I feel incredibly grateful to be part of this new generation of HR / People executives, and I absolutely LOVE what I do for a living!