Building Culture Through Gamification & Efficiency With Sarah Russell

Una: Before we get into the story of the belts and your previous roles, tell us more about 512Financial and what you do there.

Sarah: 512 is the Austin area code, so if you're an Austin local, you know what we're talking about. We're a professional services business that does fractional finance, hence our name, and accounting. My side of the consulting services is all things HR — recruiting, executive retained search, payroll, benefits, system migrations.

We're four years old as a company, and I've been here almost four years, mostly in the internal people and operations seat. This past year I moved over to lead the practice for the HR and recruiting side of the business. We were around 10 people when I joined and we're north of 50 now, and most of the company is consultants.

Una: How did you end up moving from internal people operations to leading a practice?

Sarah: I'm a professional generalist. My background is actually operations — it's not even in the HR world. I just love learning how businesses work. As 512 matured and we did two small acquisitions in 2025 expanding our HR space, there was some shifting in leadership, and since I did a lot with those two acquisitions, it made sense for me to step over and lead that team.

It was a fun new challenge. What does it look like to focus on people and then operations, instead of operations for people? Now managing the team is the majority of my time, and then I look at how I can do operations to optimize for them. I'm exactly a year into that transition.

Una: Do you miss anything from leading people operations internally?

Sarah: Before, I knew everyone I was supporting. Now I touch a lot of clients and don't know everything about every account, so I work with my consultants more, which I love. But sometimes you don't get to own the culture — you can only influence it. That can be challenging when a company chooses to do something that's compliant but maybe not the most people-forward. Learning to navigate that with our consultants and clients isn't always fun, but it's a good challenge.

Una: How did you end up going from social work as a career to running a practice at a consulting firm?

Sarah: Who knows? My path is so not traditional. The through line I've been able to identify is my wiring: I can't not see problems, and I love helping solve them. In social work, that was one set of skills. In operations, which is a big chunk of my career, it's very obvious. And with people, it's sitting with them and asking, is it as urgent as you think? Is it as heavy as you think? Helping them pace themselves in a way that's sustainable.

My very first career was social work and case management, so I get to put that hat on a lot more now. I have one-on-ones with more people working through their work challenges, and the personal stuff comes up. I really enjoy that, even though it can be emotionally taxing at times.

Una: Sounds like if you're in a job where there are no problems and things are running smoothly, you're out. Though if there's ever a company without problems, let me know who they are.

Sarah: Right. I actually learned a phrase at the prior company we'll talk about: what is good enough to the next inflection point? So we don't over-solve, and we know there will always be something to solve or improve on again in the future.

Una: That's a great segue into your former role and our topic for today. Tell me more about the company, what you did there, and the story of the belt.

Sarah: I've got the belt here — I'll pull it out so it makes sense in a minute. The prior company was a stereotypical tech startup in the health space, with an app as well as a physical product. This was early COVID, so we were remote-first across all the US time zones plus some folks in South America. There's a lot of room for communication to break down when everything is virtual and asynchronous and not everyone has their camera on.

When I joined we were probably around 60 people, and our COO and head of talent were really focused on how we do culture well. They found it was easy for us to miscommunicate, intentionally or not, which meant losing efficiency, missing sprints, and delaying feature launches. So they created something called efficiency deep dives.

Our director of talent built the framework and then looked around the company for people who liked to train, could talk well cross-functionally, and were looking for an upskilling opportunity. I was one of those folks. At the time I was in a customer success role, not a manager — bottom of the totem pole — but I loved working cross-functionally.

Una: What did an efficiency deep dive actually look like?

Sarah: On the surface, it made sure everyone in the company, all the way up to the CEO, was using our systems well. We had Asana for project management and Google Workspace. How are you using your calendar? How are you keeping up with your inbox in both Asana and Google? Each person would screen share and walk us through how they handle their email, calendar, and Asana, and we'd coach them on how to optimize.

Through that we created a baseline of how everyone used the systems. That's operations, but what it was actually doing was culture: we were getting shared language. For example, if I get a meeting invite, I should respond within a day with yes or no, not maybe. If I don't know if I can make it, I should say no, so if I'm critical to the meeting, the scheduler can adjust instead of me just not showing up and them not being able to have the conversation they needed.

Una: Who set those principles? Who decided you should respond yes or no within 24 hours?

Sarah: Some of the core ones were set by leadership — the COO and director of talent — when we launched the deep dives. A lot of them came later, as conversations surfaced that a lack of clarity was impacting a part of the business or putting our quarterly goals off track, so we added them in.

That's where the Belt System comes in. I have a black belt — we're talking karate here. When we launched, everyone started as a white belt, and every new hire started as a white belt. Once you'd learned and demonstrated a set of things, you became a green belt, then a brown belt, all the way up to double black belt, and you got a belt with your name on it.

Leadership saw a need and came up with a fun, gamified way to meet it, and then they decentralized who actually ran it. It wasn't leadership telling you what to do — it was your peers coaching you on something they were skilled at. I got to learn a lot more about what the engineering team did and what our manufacturing team was doing in the lab. It built that cross-functional culture as well.

Una: How many people were on the coaching staff, and how did you divide the work?

Sarah: At the peak there were four or five of us. I had about 15 people I was coaching on everything. The coaches would check in every other month or so, or asynchronously, to share learnings, and we periodically switched people around so no one coach got all the new hires. We stuck to Google and Asana since they were our backbone, and we eventually rolled out Notion too.

Una: How did you measure whether someone was ready for the next belt?

Sarah: Usually at the next follow-up: show me. Are you color coding your calendar in whatever way makes sense for you — meeting versus task, urgent versus not? Are you implementing the things we talked about last time, and are they working for you? I don't want you to do what I encouraged if it doesn't work for you. And maybe what you've figured out is something we can take to others.

Una: Did you ever get pushback, like people feeling it was childish to be coached on how to use their calendar?

Sarah: Absolutely, especially from folks with fuller schedules. That's where leadership buy-in mattered — the COO could say, you're going to have this call, and it's going to be with Sarah because that's your group. Most of the pushback was in the first couple months. We started with the bottom of the company because those folks were more approachable and created buy-in. Then leadership was suddenly the group taking longer in Asana, and it was noticeable, so they were motivated to keep pace. There was some natural peer pressure.

Una: Did everyone eventually get to black belt?

Sarah: Sadly, no. When I left, most of us were brown and black, maybe not double black. We definitely saw the shift as a company, but unfortunately the company did have to shut down, so we never fully got there.

Una: Besides the belts, what else did you do to make it fun?

Sarah: The belt was the fun piece — I keep mine at my desk. There was also a customized mug where you picked your color and got your name on it. There wasn't a leaderboard, but there was visibility into where people were. You couldn't see a coach's notes, but you could see belt levels. So if a team was all brown belts and someone had been a white belt for two months, the team could help coach them — in an encouraging way, not a you're-slacking way.

Our product was in the health space, so we already had a culture of yoga classes and fitness and wanting to improve. This fit that: I also want to improve how I work. That doesn't fit every company's culture, but for us it felt natural.

Una: What impact did you see on the company and how people communicated?

Sarah: It's a bit like Maslow's hierarchy. Instead of our problems being down at the level where we disconnect, we leveled up. We were moving faster, but we were also no longer having conversations like, how did you do that in Asana? We all understood those pieces, so we could have conversations about the actual product or the actual root problem, instead of the software, or someone not showing up to the call.

Sarah: Another fun piece: at our weekly company all-hands, we'd spend the first five minutes in our Asana inbox or email inbox, respond to whatever we needed to, and then mark the rest complete or clear it. The thinking was, hopefully you're keeping up throughout the week, but if you didn't get to something by then and didn't get to it in those five minutes, it probably wasn't that urgent. And if it was, the person would reach out again and it would come back to the top. Not everything someone sends you is something you need to act on.

Una: That must have felt liberating. Do you still do that for yourself?

Sarah: I'm an Enneagram One — a perfectionist — so it's really hard for me not to look at everything that comes to me. I'm getting better, and AI helps clear out things I didn't need to see. I don't work in a project management tool now, but I kept a version of it. It's freeing to realize that not everything someone sends you, especially today, is something you actually have to do something with.

Una: I once heard a talk from an executive who, when he went on vacation, set an out-of-office saying: I'm back Monday, if this is urgent, email me then. He deleted every email that came in while he was gone, and only five people emailed him again on Monday. Otherwise he would have spent days sorting through thousands of emails.

Sarah: I love that. In consulting we need to respond to what our clients send us, but we can experiment. A friend of mine always says, let's experiment with an expectation. That gives you freedom — if it doesn't work, you didn't fail, that idea just didn't work, and you try something different. And tell people up front: send it to me on this date, I'll be back. Most email systems have schedule send now, too.

Una: What impact did being part of this program have on you and your career?

Sarah: Getting tapped to do it — being seen and called out — was really empowering. It helped me recognize and grow into skills I naturally had but that hadn't been called out yet in my career. It showed me how much I enjoy coaching people and working cross-functionally. Being stuck in one department isn't energizing for me.

I never moved into leadership at that company, but when I stepped into leadership at 512, I knew what that room would look and feel like. I'd gotten to coach leaders and see that they know a lot, but not everything — they're still human. That safe space of doing one piece cross-functionally gave me room to observe and build confidence that has launched me a lot further. Whatever seat you're in, you can probably help build efficiency, or whatever you're naturally gifted at.

Una: Have you implemented something like the Belt System at 512, or advised the companies you consult with to try it?

Sarah: We haven't implemented something this formal at 512. We're in the middle of AI adoption, like many companies, and we've talked about doing something like this after the initial rollout. But I pull a lot from how I learned to use my calendar and inbox, and I coach a lot of folks on it: color coding, labels, whatever your system has — it's a game changer.

Time boxing is another big one. If you're doing a task you've done before but there's a new element to it, block twice as much time as you think. If payroll normally takes you an hour but it's a new client, block two hours. That frees you to take the time to do it well, learn it, and not stress yourself out.

Una: What's the value of color coding for you?

Sarah: It's a quick glance. I know when I physically need to be somewhere and can plan my day for that. Or I'll see that a day has a lot of blue, which for me is meetings, so I make sure I block a lunch break or a screen break so I'm not overwhelmed. If a day is a lot of deep work, maybe I'll go to a coffee shop. It helps me think about where I'll be and protect my energy.

Una: What's a good email management tip you've found useful?

Sarah: It depends, because everyone's work is so different. My consultants are day-to-day with clients, so they probably have a folder system by client. I'm not, so I use labels — is this a prospect, or an active client issue? — and I look at those colors first because that's what's urgent for me. The biggest tip is to know what's possible in the system you have, and then experiment with what fits your work style best.

Una: I can see someone objecting that this takes too much time to set up. It's a bit like sharpening the saw. How would you handle that?

Sarah: We heard that in the efficiency deep dives: that all sounds great, but when am I going to do it? Right now. We'd use 20 minutes of a 30-minute call to set one thing up and see how it works. Want to try time blocking? What's one thing you do at least weekly? Time block just that. Like it? Great, add another. What's one label or folder that would help in your inbox? Set up one rule so emails go there. If you like it, great. If not, it was an experiment — do it differently.

Una: You said you're all for decentralizing culture and HR. Where does that belief come from, and how do you coach it?

Sarah: Empowered people enjoy their work more, so everything improves. And empowerment is sharing knowledge and information — not, here's the next step, but here's the whole process, how does that work for you? Then there's room to come back, experiment, and share feedback. Our team is sharing a ton of AI ideas right now. We give the guardrails, but beyond that: share what you're doing, don't work in a silo. Something like an efficiency deep dive is a great, safe place to start because it's business-focused and objective, but it's building culture.

Decentralizing also lets initiatives actually happen. If only HR owns something, they have so many other things on their plate that they may love the idea but can't run it. It's not fair to have one function alone administer something that's really part of how your whole company works. Come up with the 20% — it's this, not this — and then shoulder-tap people you see becoming managers in the next year and let them go do the 80%.

Una: The Pareto rule. Plus, people don't like to be preached at. I suspect the Belt System wouldn't have landed if the head of talent had just run a webinar on color coding your calendar for 60 people on Zoom.

Sarah: And they're not in the driver's seat on that call. If they can't find where the setting is, or they're using a different browser, they're lost at the first step and stop paying attention.

Una: Do you ever suggest ideas like this to your clients?

Sarah: A fun hurdle we're working on is shifting our clients' thinking about HR beyond just compliance, payroll, and employee relations — the necessary, reactive things — to being culture-forward. We're bringing that conversation in more, often by suggesting an idea for an internal operations or chief of staff type person to run with.

What I emphasize is that we built this over a year and a half. We didn't start with all of it. We started with how you clear your inbox and how you time block. There's probably a pain point in every company — start with that, figure out the root cause, even if it takes a quarter, and then roll out the initiative.

Una: Small steps. When customers start using HeyTaco, I always say, just start with one thing. If you spend six months developing a plan in a vacuum and it flops, you've spent six months building something people don't want. Ship fast, get feedback, iterate.

Sarah: Especially with something like this — yes, it's your team's time, but there's no extra line item. Experimenting isn't sitting and theorizing for a long time. It's, I'm going to try this and come back. If you sit for six months making a plan, you're probably getting a lot of groupthink and missing pieces because you're not letting in new voices.

Una: I hadn't thought about groupthink. Do clients object and say they want the whole plan first?

Sarah: Yes. We're consultants, so our time is directly their money, and there's a fear of not having the full plan. We often work in a 90-day roadmap — what happens at 30, 60, and 90 days. That gets to the inflection point idea: in 30 days we think we'll see this, and if not, we can pivot. It's a happy middle, because it's fair to have expectations. And if what we thought we'd measure doesn't come out, we want clarity on why, and on what might actually be helpful even if it's not what we expected to find.

Una: What problems are you excited to tackle in your role right now?

Sarah: We've had AI for a while, and now we're really doubling down on how we use Claude at the individual level, while departments figure out how it can optimize internal finance, customer success, and more. It's such a huge unlock to get the information in front of you so you can think more strategically. It takes away the gathering time. This week alone I've had conversations with consultants setting up agents, and it's a fun energy to be in.

Practically, I hope it gets people the information they need so they can do the parts of their job they enjoy more. That's a value add for our clients too. And it's very unique to this moment — we didn't have AI like this even six months ago.

Una: Do you have a pro tip to share about how you use Claude?

Sarah: On the theme of efficiency: we're on Microsoft and Slack and use Zoom for meetings, and I have Claude connected to all of those through my login, so it sees what I have access to. I have a daily briefing where it looks at all the meetings I've been in and my Slack conversations, pulls out everything it sees as a to-do or follow-up, and puts it in a Slack canvas as a checklist I can check off or add to throughout the day. The next day it moves what I checked off to the bottom and refills the list.

You just have a conversation with Claude and it tells you how to set it up — it gives you all the code. I'm not a coder, and it took me maybe 20 minutes, plus the system access and permissions. And it learns you over time. You can ask, what am I doing inefficiently now that I've used you for a while? That's where this came from — it said, you're constantly asking me about this, let's make it a daily flow. It recommended the idea, and I configured it so I'd be able to digest it.

Una: That's amazing. I don't look at help docs anymore either — I just ask Claude how to do something in a tool, and it finds the answer for me.

Una: Before we wrap up: in HeyTaco, you have five tacos to give every day to appreciate people and say thank you. Who would you like to give your tacos to today?

Sarah: I love this. I feel like you should get some tacos, because this has been a very fun conversation. But I'd love to give them to Derek on my team. He's our internal director of people and operations, and he holds all of our systems so well. You rarely get a front-row seat to watch someone step into a role you were in, and he has knocked the socks off of it — doing things I never would have been able to do or enjoyed doing, and doing them so well. It's been really fun to work with him this last year, and hopefully many more to come.

Una: That's a meaty bunch of tacos — nice work, Derek. Sarah, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast, and for bringing your black belt for everyone to see.

Sarah: Thank you. This was great.