Live from World at Work Total Rewards 2026 with Special Guest Sarah Severson

HR & Payroll 2.0 · 2026-06-16 · 35 min

0:00--:--

Episode notes

In this special episode, Pete and Julie are joined by Sarah Severson, Sr. Manager of Compensation at Medline, live from the annual World at Work Total Rewards event in San Antonio, TX, for a practical conversation on how compensation is evolving inside fast-growing, complex organizations. The conversation explores what happens when family-owned and high-growth companies scale faster than their compensation structures, why job architecture becomes a critical foundation for everything downstream, and how M&A, global expansion, and Workday implementations expose the need for common language, cleaner data, and stronger governance. Pete, Julie, and Sarah talk the practical side of AI in compensation, from using Copilot for Excel and manager communications to experimenting with AI-assisted job grading and market cleanup. Sarah offers a grounded practitioner view on where AI can accelerate work, where human judgment still matters, and why compensation teams must balance innovation with governance, transparency, and manager enablement.

More from HR & Payroll 2.0

All episodes →

Explore the best B2B HR podcasts →

All HR & Payroll 2.0 episodes →