Episode 363 · January 15, 2026 · 18:24
Carlyne Ervin
VP Human Resources, Chrysalis
Intentional HR Leadership: Driving Engagement with Data and Streamlined Systems
Episode 363 · January 15, 2026 · 18:24
Intentional HR Leadership: Driving Engagement with Data and Streamlined Systems
Key moments
In Carlyne's words
“I fell in love with human resources about 2 decades ago. I started my craft 20 years ago... I love— I wake up. And just to think about things that I can solve in human resources. I really love what I do.”
“We have carved out this management curriculum into 3 tiers. First-time managers, right? Because first-time managers need to understand those basic manager things. How do you give feedback? You know, you're going from being a coworker to a manager, mid-level manager training, and then advanced-level leadership manager training.”
“Manual or fragmented systems internally within our organization. And what I mean by that is when data lives in too many places, it lives in too many places in our organization... we're trying to figure out how to consolidate and condense the data.”
Transcript
Read the transcript2,970 words
IntroWelcome to the Built by People Podcast, where we share the stories and insights of the world's top executive leaders. Join us as we dive deep into the minds of executives, uncovering their strategies, challenges, and triumphs in shaping today's workforce. That's Crebi. Now, let's jump in and get started with our next guest.
HostWell, Carlynne, I'm excited to welcome you to the Built By People Podcast, and thank you so much for joining us today.
GuestThank you, James, for having me. It's such a pleasure to be here.
HostWell, good. Well, hey, I love to ask the starting question, which is, tell us a little bit about you and your career journey.
GuestWell, I— fell in love with human resources about 2 decades ago. I started my craft 20 years ago, and my journey in HR started, started in a 1-person HR department, which I'm sure a lot of HR professionals, that is their, their story, where I did a lot of hands-on, a lot of just operational work, learning how to process payroll as a new HR generalist, and then I really started learning every single craft of HR. So I'm a generalist at heart. I've been a generalist, which now has led me to my HR leadership position at Chrysalis, where I do have a seat at the table. And now I'm more strategic as an HR leader, and I've carried all that I've learned in my career to my leadership position today. And I love— I wake up. And just to think about things that I can solve in human resources. I really love what I do.
HostI love that. I love it. Well, that, that, that's a perfect lead into the next question, right? Having the seat at the table, having the strategic initiatives. What are some of the biggest priorities that you're trying to accomplish, obviously, in this first quarter?
GuestGlad you brought that up because I just had a goals meeting for my team. I'm big on goals, right? I'm so big on goals because I always tell managers, how are you doing a performance review if you don't have goals, if you have nothing to measure the performance review. So my, the one thing that I'm really focusing on this first quarter is management training for all of our managers. We have over, oh wow, over 100 managers, people managers at our organization. And so I feel like it is critical for them to learn basic management skills. So we have carved out this management curriculum into 3 tiers. First-time managers, right? Because first-time managers need to understand those basic manager things. How do you give feedback? You know, you're going from being a coworker to a manager, mid-level manager training, and then advanced-level leadership manager training. I feel like it's important for our organization, it's important for just strategically for staff to stay engaged, as well as compliance.
HostOkay. Yeah, I love that because obviously managers can, well, they have a really big impact on who stays and who goes, right?
GuestOh yeah. Yeah, they do.
HostSo keeping that retention high is a big piece of it. I'm curious, right? Kind of diving into that. What would you say is the biggest challenge you think you'll face internally getting the managers to complete the trainings or level set them, right, to those, to those goals, right, that they're trying to push?
GuestYeah, really great question. It's going to be the bandwidth. It's going to be bandwidth with all that all of our managers have to do in their day-to-day job, right? How do we find the time? How do we carve out the time? And how do we strategically make sure that we're, we're building the pathway for our managers to get this training, to be able to absorb it and, and then be able to apply it after they've gone through the training.
HostYeah, totally. So, okay. Well, I think you kind of answered the question, which is my next question was gonna be, if I shadowed you for a week, where would I find you spending time on things that weren't as strategic? And I think you kind of answered that question. It's gonna be probably the follow-up of, hey, did you And time to do it. Did you complete this task?
GuestYes. Did you do X, Y, or Z?
HostYes.
GuestIf you shadowed me, you would see a lot of me responding to urgent employee issues, right? Me and my team, them pulling me in for a decision on an investigation. This person has filed a grievance. It's, it's a lot of those things that require my time. But still, it pulls me away from the strategy, from the strategic thinking.
HostOK, so that's actually a great lead. I'm curious, from an internal process perspective, is there any internal process that you feel creates friction or maybe slows down or slows you down from other things you're trying to accomplish? Like, is there a certain process that you're like, man, this consistently is causing friction that I, I'm, I'm going to try to solve that?
GuestYes. Manual or fragmented systems internally within our organization. And what I mean by that is when data lives in too many places, it lives in too many places in our organization. And we've grown over the past 5 years and data living in all those different places we're trying to figure out how to consolidate and condense the data so the manager's training can— we can track that in one place. We can track performance management in that one place. We can track that the employee relations, the investigations. That's what I'm trying to do, streamline and bring everything into one place.
HostOkay. I love it. Yeah. So being able to actually pull everything into a central database.
GuestYes. Yes.
HostInstead of fragments. Okay. Hey, you're not alone. You're not alone.
GuestI'm sure. I'm so sure about that.
HostYou know, you've answered a lot of the questions I was going to ask, which one of them is, you know, what's one initiative you've rolled out? And actually, you know what? I do want to ask that question still. What's one initiative you have rolled out recently that you're like, man, that was it. I'm proud to put my name on that.
GuestOkay. So, I was going to say the manager training, but we've talked a lot about that, but I'm going to pivot a little bit. Because I'm proud of this, but I cannot take 100% credit for it. The first quarter of last year, me and my CEO and our amazing benefits broker, we went to a Pareto conference about benefits. I was in, and the keynote speaker was Mark Cuban. So I was there for it. Like, I was one of the first people in that room. And he said something very interesting. He said, if you have a lot of Gen Z employees, they're not reading the handbook. And I was like, oh my God, I'm about to finalize our new employee handbook. What can we do to be creative? And he said, you got to, you got to meet them where they are, right? So I came back, we released the traditional handbook, which we know nobody reads it. I don't care which generation you're in, nobody reads the handbook. Turn it into a podcast. And so I was like, it was, it's so cool. We've gotten tons of great feedback. We have the traditional handbook that employees review, they sign, it's available for them. But monthly, we, this year we're going to try to be more on the cadence monthly, we break down a policy or two in a podcast format. And sometimes I invite in colleagues because they, they, they're the ones that are like, oh, can you review our, I don't know, jury duty policy? And we'll have a fundamental conversation about.
HostThat's awesome, because like you said, like, like I hear a lot, people, no matter the age, no matter the demographic, they're not all reading the policy.
GuestThey're not reading— you know, you spend a lot of time, nobody's sitting up with a cup of coffee reading that.
HostYeah, exactly, exactly. So I love that, right? Meet them where they are.
GuestThat's right.
HostAnd give them different ways to understand it or learn about it.
GuestAbsolutely. Yeah.
HostSo, which actually leads really well to the, from a communication standpoint, trying to think of the best way to phrase this, but what we've heard, right, is communication is becoming harder across a lot of organizations, right? Just kind of what you mentioned, right? Meeting them where they are, right? I've got 3 different age demographics. Some prefer that email. Some might prefer that short text. Maybe they prefer a Slack or a Teams message, right? How do I meet them where they are? So what approach right now, you know, obviously you kind of mentioned the podcast. What other approaches are you taking from a communication standpoint so that the employees both understand it and actually engage with it or open it or read it, right? Just get them to do something with that information.
GuestYeah. You know, you got a lot of information coming at all organizations at all different ways, and it's the volume is just so much. So much. What we're trying to do to streamline communication at our org, because again, we are a large organization. We have some people that are in several different offices, some people that work externally, like outside in the elements. So we have crew leaders that are taking crews and they work alongside the freeway. So how do you really communicate in that type of environment? So we're being intentional. About our communication. We're hitting them in different angles. We'll send an email, but we'll have what we call— we do meetings called butterfly broadcast. So we'll do a broadcast, but we'll record it. And so we'll make it available on our intranet. We also are big, and this is why the manager's training is important, in being intentional about managers repeating and reinforcing the messages in their team meetings, right? Because what better way to communicate down an org message than through the manager, through the one-on-ones, through team meetings? So we're trying to be creative. We have an amazing development department and a social media manager. He gets messages out through social media to our staff. And, you know, sometimes we don't always get it right. But we're trying new things and we're being innovative with our communication.
HostThat's awesome. I'm out of curiosity, are there certain channels or maybe timing or formats that you've noticed that have a higher engagement for you guys specifically?
GuestYou know, it depends on the department. So departmentally, our programs department, maybe the afternoons, early afternoons are better for them because we kind of know that their clients when the client kind of, the client volume kind of drops off. And then for our Chrysalis Enterprises department, we kind of have to meet them where they are and go to their leadership managers' meetings and go to their team meetings to communicate down. And then our senior leadership team, we try to do a good job too of, we send a lot of emails, we do a lot of messaging to in Teams and a lot of video messaging as well.
HostOkay. That's, yeah, I think that's one of the biggest things I've, we've come across and learned, right? Is organizations that, you know, they have a higher retention rate or more consistency to communication, they're using multiple forms of communication, right? Kind of what you mentioned. They're trying to meet the employee where they're at. And unfortunately, not every employee is the same, right? They're all different. Read messages different and the timing's different and all those things. So I think the approach is awesome. Right now, right, this comes more down to the tech and tools. This is a big subject for a lot of people. What tools or platforms are most essential for your operations today?
GuestGosh. So organizationally, I'll start as the organization as a whole. The tools we use, we love to use Teams. We, we, we're a big Microsoft organization, so We love to communicate a lot out through Teams. We do have an org intranet where our messaging is centralized on our internal intranet, where if there's a new policy or something amazing that has happened, or we're celebrating an employee, we'll post those messages on our intranet so that our internal employees, it's always there. It gets refreshed. For HR, our HRIS system is everything to us. We recently transitioned over to ADP back in 2023, and we're maximizing it. We are utilizing every single module, the performance management module we're using. We're using now the goal setting module in ADP. We're using the performance management side of the write-up, like the corrective action, so that everything is centralized and it's centralized in one hub. The training, the training now can be tracked in ADP so that, you know, you got your training certificates, you have your performance management reviews. All of that has been centralized. And our goal this year for the organization is to now get 100% of our people managers to do their performance reviews in our ADP platform.
HostOK, so trying to guide them back to the spot that— That's right.
GuestGuide them back to the spot. Yeah, instead of doing it externally on our forms, go to the internet, download the form. No, let's centralize that so that all the employee's data is centralized in an HRIS system. And our HRIS system can communicate with our finance and accounting system so that everything isn't so fragmented, you know, and then we get our development and communications department to flow into that. So it's all very important and instrumental and key for our operations. Yeah.
HostWell, okay. So now the, the, the big question, if I sat down again with you 12 months from now, what would you hope, what would you hope has changed most within the organization from that, Sam?
GuestOkay. So I, I could wave a magic wand and we really hit our goals this year. I would hope that all the systems are speaking to each other. All the systems are up and running. We have SOPs across the organization, um, in that our communication channels, we can track messaging and see if it's landing correctly, if that makes sense.
HostYep, totally. Nope. I, I hear you, right? Having that, having data, right? That's the big one.
GuestData. Oh my God. Data is so, data is so critical. Sometimes when I talk data in HR, people kind of look at me with a weird face. And I'm like, no, data is everything in human resources because without the data, you don't, you can't, you don't have that story to tell to be able to fix or mitigate or be able to enhance or improve. So I'm a big fan of data. Data. I'm data-driven.
HostWell, hey, it goes back to the first thing you mentioned, which is being able to quantify and set goals. Because without a goal, there's nothing. There's no targets, right? It's very hard to create a target or What did we accomplish or didn't accomplish in this case, right?
GuestExactly. So, yeah.
HostSo I love it. Well, okay. So now my final question for you is any advice you'd share with other leaders trying to navigate the rapid change and rising employee expectations? What advice would you give to this community?
GuestMy advice would be slow down enough to be intentional. I'm going to repeat that. I love to repeat things so that it lands with people. Slow down enough to be intentional. And what I mean is you don't have to have all the answers, right? You don't have to have all the answers, but you do need clarity, consistency, and the courage to make the decisions. People are far more resilient when they trust leadership that's guiding them. And if you have the tools and the infrastructure in place, the intentionality will be easy for you. I love it.
HostI think that's the best advice we've got in a minute. So, um, and I think that's the hard part. I think what you just said is a very hard thing for especially HR leaders to do is slow down, right?
GuestYeah.
HostTo become intentional because the business, especially depending on where you're at, if you're in anything tech or rapid growth, it's like, no, it's, you don't have time to think. You gotta go fast.
GuestNo, you don't. You gotta go. Things are going, going, going.
HostExactly. So to take that second to step back and say, no, no, no. What are the goals? What is the intention? And then actually create a plan to do that. And again, track it, measure it, have the goal to it so that you can have the data to come back and say, did it work or did it not work?
GuestJames, that is the blueprint, right? You gotta track things because otherwise you are operating in the blind.
HostYep.
GuestTotally. Gotta slow down though. Gotta be intentional. I love it.
HostWell, Carlyn, thank you so much for joining us today on the Built By People Podcast. It's been a pleasure having you, and I believe The community's going to love what you're saying today.
GuestWell, thank you so much. It was a pleasure being your guest, and hopefully your community will love it. And you have an amazing day.
HostHey, you too. Thank you.
GuestThank you.
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