What if the career you were meant to build started with a task you never asked for?

In this episode of Elevate, host Joy Fajardo sits down with Laura McLand, VP of Human Resources at Sun Holdings, to explore what it really means to build HR and a genuine culture of care inside one of the largest franchise organizations in the United States.

Laura didn't start in HR. She was an executive assistant when her CEO handed her a payroll task and told her he believed she could handle it. That one yes set off a 25-year career she built intentionally, one certification and one hard conversation at a time.

Today, she leads a team of 20+ HR professionals overseeing employee experience for 30,000 workers across 13 brands, 1,250 locations, and 32 states.

She inherited a department of one and built it into a fully structured function, while the company was actively growing around her.Laura shares how she earns credibility at the executive level by shifting the conversation from ROI to VOI — value on investment.

She walks through the earned wage access program that put over $106 million directly into employees' hands when they needed it most, explains how she builds mobile-first experiences for a workforce that's never behind a laptop, and talks about what she's actually looking for when she decides someone is worth investing in.

If you lead a people function in a distributed, frontline, or fast-growing organization and you've ever had to fight for your seat at the table, this one is for you.