From Unemployment Lines to the C-Suite: Julie Bell on Building Pay Equity, Doubling Wellness Enrollment, and Why Merit Beats COLA

Episode notes

Summary What does it take to transform a billable-rate-driven pay culture into a fair, transparent, and data-backed system? Julie Bell, Global CHRO at Roush, shares how she built a rigorous compensation architecture from the ground up - partnering with Willis Towers Watson, standardizing hundreds of roles, and running annual adverse impact analyses that have cut pay inequities by 50% year over year. With a nontraditional HR path through org effectiveness and M&A integration, Julie brings a transformation-first lens to HR - centralizing offer decisions in Compensation, using regression analysis to win over engineering leaders, and challenging the tendency to overpay unproven new hires while overlooking internal performers. She also breaks down why benefits often go unused, how spouse-inclusive, targeted wellness communications nearly doubled enrollment, and how this strategy helps contain healthcare costs without shifting burden to employees. Julie closes with where AI is heading next in HR - personalized benefits navigation and mental health support - plus her dignity-first approach to difficult workforce actions.

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