Laura Hammond

I am a proud Canadian living in New York City, and I've worked both in Canada and now in the U.S.. I am a dog mom to Holly, my rescue from Alabama, AND I'm learning how to cook through the New York Times cooking app. Professionally, I bring 20+ years of H.R. generalist experience, including ten years in the retail industry and more recently, health technology. I've supported both corporate and field teams. And when I say field teams, I mean retail and hourly workers across health care distribution centers, Customer service both in Canada and in the United States. In all of these roles, I've built teams that had have become great resources for the business line, but I've also won some amazing awards from places like the Retail Council of Canada and H.R. Advisor magazine. I bring a global perspective to my work, and so I've led teams within a large global matrixed organization at each NAM in Canada, the U.S. and in Asia and Japan. I became an H.R. leader in South Korea, and I've supported expansion across the United States and from Canadian businesses into the United States. So I have a really good sense of immigration programs, talent, mobility programs and H.R. compliance across Canada and the United States.More personally, my mission is to support organizations, to foster inclusive organizations where employees feel seen, heard and cared for because engaged employees can drive, bottom line, better business results. And I've come to understand through my own personal learning about diversity, equity and inclusion and belonging, that often human resources have been seen as a function that is not supportive of marginalized groups and can in fact be dangerous to them or are seen as untrustworthy. And I really want to change that narrative by creating workplaces that are truly inclusive and creating H.R. as a resource not only for executives, but for employees alike.