Summary
What does it take to go from working at a Mississippi gas station to leading global HR strategy at a private equity-backed company?
In this episode, Kelsey Willock sits down with Nabeel Ahmed, Chief Human Resources Officer at Wellbore Integrity Solutions (WIS), to unpack his remarkable career journey and how it shaped his approach to compensation, performance, and employee well-being.
Nabeel shares the early money memories that defined his perspective on equitable pay and the life-changing potential of total rewards beyond base salary. With experience spanning 30 countries and top-tier companies like Halliburton and Baker Hughes, he offers a rare lens into how HR can be both a business driver and a vehicle for personal transformation.
From pay equity and generational shifts to flexible work and private equity wealth-building, this episode is packed with insights for HR leaders, founders, and anyone rethinking how we value work.
Timestamps
[00:58] – Nabeel’s career journey: From IT to HR across 30 countries
[04:01] – Arriving in the U.S. with $500 and learning the value of hard work
[06:21] – How early experiences shaped his views on pay equity and performance
[08:03] – The most common breakdown in understanding total rewards
[11:08] – A real-world example of compensation transforming lives
[13:16] – Why measuring engagement needs to be topic-specific
[15:43] – The future of compensation: shorter vesting, faster value
[18:32] – Tools and approaches to build pay equity from the ground up
[19:31] – A powerful 30-day mindset shift for financial wellness
Takeaways
Invest in education around total rewards — employees often undervalue what they don’t fully understand.
Design for diversity — different generations are motivated by different types of compensation and flexibility.
Create equitable (not just equal) pay structures — performance should drive differentiation.
Shorten incentive timelines — newer generations want value sooner, not just later.
Focus engagement efforts on specific topics to get more actionable insights.
True financial contentment comes from creating opportunities for others — not from possessions.
Sponsor
Aura Finance helps you simplify compensation and benefits planning by bringing everything into one streamlined platform. No more juggling spreadsheets, disconnected tools, or manual calculations
Aura gives you a single place to design, compare, and communicate total rewards packages with confidence.
With AI-powered insights, it takes the guesswork and busywork out of comp decisions, helps you spot pay equity gaps early, and makes it easy to model scenarios that keep your teams engaged and your budgets on track.
See a demo at https://www.aurafinance.com/