Every organization issues credentials. Very few of them think about what those credentials actually mean to the people wearing them.
Identity in Action is a podcast about physical identity: the badges, cards, and credentials that tell the world who you are, where you belong, and why you're here.
Hosted by Lindsay Martin-Nez, VP of Industry Engagement at HID, each episode brings together security practitioners, HR leaders, technologists, educators, and organizational thinkers to explore the intersection of identity, belonging, and the programs built to support them.
We talk about what it takes to run a credential program at scale. We talk about physical badges and mobile credentials, and why the best answer is almost never "one or the other." And we talk about the human side of identity - the part the industry doesn't discuss nearly enough.
If you issue credentials, carry one, or care about the people who do, this show is for you.
Joe Gutiérrez has spent more than 25 years in corporate security, and right now he’s in the middle of something most big organizations put off for as long as they can: replacing every badge in the company. Joe sits down with Lindsay to talk about standardizing one badge design across 200+ offices at a Fortune 200 company, and why that badge doesn’t carry a logo. The story behind that decision will stay with you.
They also talk honestly about why his team is sticking with physical credentials for now, even after a close look at mobile.
Then Joe shares his rebadge playbook: moving off prox after a decade of accepting the risk, the photo problems nobody saw coming, executives who kept changing the design, and how he got local sites to volunteer for badge exchange.
If you’re planning a rebadge, or quietly avoiding one, you'll want to give this one a listen.
29 Sept 2026
The Hidden Complexity of Enterprise Credential Rollouts
Everybody talks about a badge design like it's the hard part. It's not. Leon Deane has spent 35 years in the identity and access world, and for the last several years he's built K&A Industries into one of the go-to names for large enterprise credential deployments.
In this episode, we get into what actually makes these rollouts hard: reader compatibility across a whole building or campus, managing card formats and facility codes without duplicating numbers in the access system, and the orchestration it takes to reissue credentials for tens of thousands of people without grinding operations to a halt.
Leon also walks through why K&A made the deliberate choice to stay out of access control installs and focus entirely on credentials, what changed when the patent expired on proximity technology, and why being an early adopter of HID Fargo Connectshaped how he thinks about automated badge issuance today. This one hit close to home for me too, since I'm knee deep in HID's own global rebadge project right now.
We close things out talking about where credential technology is headed, including how mobile, physical badges, and biometrics aren't competing with each other so much as they're learning to work side by side.
15 Sept 2026
The Badge is a Gift: Belonging by Design
What if the ID badge on your lanyard could start a conversation instead of just opening a door?
In this episode of Identity in Action, Lindsay Martin-Nez sits down with Naomi Clare, founder and CEO of StoryCraft Lab, to talk about the research behind human belonging and what it means for how we design workplace culture. Naomi's team built the Belonging Playbook in partnership with Google's Experience Institute, studying hundreds of stories to understand what actually makes people feel like they belong somewhere.
The conversation covers the pathway from invitation to being welcomed to being considered, the surprising power of small moments (including a story about a stairwell encounter that changed one man's career), and why Naomi calls the badge a gift: a blank canvas most organizations never think to use with any intention. Lindsay shares her own experience adding interest icons to employee badges at her former company, and Naomi explains why that kind of detail does more for connection than most people realize.
If you've ever wondered why some workplaces feel like a community and others feel like a building full of strangers, this one's for you.
31 Aug 2026
Can an ID Badge Improve School Security and Make Students Proud to Wear it?
We're extremely excited to have Jim Culbert, Chief Operating Officer from Duval County Public Schools join us for our first episode of Identity in Action!
Duval County Public Schools is one of the largest school districts in the U.S. Their size is impressive, but not nearly as impressive as the technology and innovation behind their badging program.
Listen in to learn more about how students utilize badges at their campuses every day, what Jim thinks of the future of the badge in their district looks like, and what he hopes students feel every time they put their ID on in the morning.
If you issue credentials, carry one, or care about the people who do, this is an episode you won't want to miss!
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Apple Podcasts (US)
5.0 / 5
4 ratings
Spotify
5.0 / 5
3 ratings
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