Clark Jessop

▶0:00IntroWelcome to the Built by People podcast, where we share the stories and insights of the world's top HR leaders. Join us as we dive deep into the minds of HR executives, uncovering their strategies, challenges, and triumphs in shaping today's workforce.

▶0:37HostI'm excited to welcome Clark to the Built by People podcast. Clark, thank you so much for joining us today. And as a starting question, I always love to ask if you could share a little bit more about your career journey.

▶0:48GuestSure. Thank you, Dave, for having me on. I've listened to episodes of this podcast and this seems to be a theme, but I did not start out in HR. Or aspiring to go into HR. I was a broadcast journalism major and I spent my first couple of years out of college doing news radio in northern Wyoming. It was a great experience though, but it didn't feel like the long-term path I wanted to be on. So I had a mentor who was in the financial services space and he said if I got all of the licenses I needed, I could join him. I spent a couple of years in financial services before deciding to get an MBA, and when I went to pursue my MBA, the intent was to stay in something more finance or strategy related. I was accepted into Brigham Young University's MBA program. What I didn't know at the time is that within the MBA program, they also have a really good HR program. And as I heard from alumni and people coming back from internships, I thought, this sounds really interesting. And so I, I took what at that time felt like a leap of faith and took an HR internship with Bank of America. When I graduated, I joined HP's HR leadership development program. HP had a great HR function to help me better understand what good HR looks like. So I had a lot of opportunities there, but wanted to see how HR looks somewhere else. And so after spending several years at HP, I took an HR leader role with Cognizant, which is a big IT services company, very different company from HP, but it was a great experience in terms of my own development.. And then in early 2021, I was not looking, but I got a call from US Bank, which I didn't know a ton about, but there have been some people here that I've worked with previously and had a lot of respect for. And so I went through the process, just loved that it was a strong company with a loyal customer base, but also the role that I had the opportunity to play would be in the middle of a transformation where it was growing its digital capabilities and adjusting the business model to adapt to the new ways of doing banking. And so I support several of our corporate functions at including digital and marketing and strategy and a lot of those types of groups. Joining US Bank, it's been everything I hoped it would be in terms of the company, the HR function, the role, which has expanded and allowed me to do a lot of interesting work.

▶3:09HostClark, thanks for that great introduction. In our past conversation, you talked about employee engagement being more than just happy hours and potlucks. Can you share a story of how you implemented the Deloitte model and what tangible improvements you observed?

▶3:24GuestYeah, absolutely. It's amazing how often you hear from leaders, even within HR, that the solution to engagement problems is some kind of a social event. And of course, happy hours and potlucks, they have their place, but it can backfire if you just do those things, but don't get to the more foundational elements of engagement because those things in isolation can feel to employees like you're almost like you're spraying Febreze into a dirty room without actually cleaning the room itself. And you brought up the Deloitte model. There are several other employee engagement models. The Deloitte model, it's not an official model that's endorsed or has been broadly deployed by my current company, US Bank, or any of my previous companies, but one that has really resonated with me in having good conversations with managers, and it's Deloitte's Irresistible Organization Model. And it says that there are 5 components to engagement, the first being meaningful work, which really starts with selection and selecting the right person for each job, which sounds obvious, but it's easy to be distracted by things that don't really correlate with success in the role. So that's part of it, but also making sure you provide autonomy for employees and things like that. The second is positive work environment, which is probably closest to the potlucks and happy hours, but it's also about providing flexibility where possible, making sure you create a culture of recognition and creating an environment and team that's fair, inclusive, and diverse. Third, supportive management, which is having people managers who are able to coach their employees effectively, where employees have clear and transparent goals they are held accountable to. That can be a huge impediment to engagement when employees don't know what they're being held accountable for. Leaders play the main role in doing that. Next is growth opportunities. Is training available so people feel like they can develop in their roles and we provide some capacity for them to invest for their own development? And also talent mobility. One of the great things that we've done recently at US Bank is to create an internal talent marketplace where employees can input their profile, their skills, and recruiters have visibility to that. Finally, trust in leadership, starting at the company level, but also within teams and individuals in their roles. Is there a mission and purpose that they can really rally around and be inspired by? Is there transparency and honesty from leadership? Things like that. One interesting part of this model is that compensation is not one of those 5 components, but it's presented more as engagement hygiene, meaning that fair competitive pay, of course it's important, but you're not going to win on that alone. So that's obviously a fast summary, but I think where this has been impactful is helping managers see that a lot of these elements are within their control. For example, recognition, providing regular feedback, et cetera, because sometimes in big companies, managers feel like they are beholden to the company in whatever direction the company gives. So what we're trying to do is help managers feel much more empowered.

▶6:38HostClark, I'd love to hear about a specific example where your workforce analytics approach transformed data into actionable insights that made a real difference. For your team or organization.

▶6:50GuestAnd when we talked before, I shared that I think of this process like a bridge, and the first section of that bridge is the data. But I think the trap we often fall into is to stop there. And I've seen a lot of examples where there's lots of data being produced. It takes a lot of time to pull together, and the intended audience just isn't paying attention to it. So the second section of that bridge is providing insight. What is the trend within the business? How do we compare to both internal and external benchmarks? And what are some of the hypotheses about either that trend or the performance against the benchmark? And then finally is a process with leadership to say, here's the data, here are some insights that help us contextualize that data, and then have a discussion about what data would be most meaningful to the business's objectives if we could move it in a positive direction in 2 or 3 actions that we're gonna take. And there've been a lot of examples where I've partnered with leaders to look at things like employee survey data, attrition data, compensation data. At a previous company, one comes to mind where one of the businesses I supported, the leaders would come to me with lots of compensation requests, but I think Inadvertently, it became a situation where the squeaky wheel got the grease and only the people who were complaining were actually getting the increases. And so those requests absorbed our whole budget. I created with the data we had a kind of scoring system based on their performance rating, where they were in the pay band and the criticality of their role. And so if we had 5 employees who were complaining about their compensation, we'd consider those, but we'd also say, hey, Look at this other list of folks who've performed really well and are even lower in the pay band and are in our most critical roles. Should we consider them? And when the leaders saw that list and the data, oftentimes they were shocked because there were very highly valued employees who were on that list, and it helped them to be more proactive versus reactive in their decision-making.

▶8:58HostClark, you've talked about developing a skill-based role architecture at US Bank through identified the key skills, built that framework to help employees see their growth path?

▶9:10GuestYeah, it— of course. And this emphasis on skills, it's something that Elcio Barcelos, our CTO, has been emphasizing since he joined the bank a few years ago. And where that is most meaningful is at the role level. What are the skills I need to have success in my current role? If there's a role I aspire to move into, what are the skills I need to obtain to move into that role. And you may have some people who hear that and say, isn't that just a normal job description? But where we've taken it further is defining not just the skill, but the competency level of that skill. Because this is an HR audience, I'll use an example within our own space. You could have skills for HR professionals like building relationships, business acumen, change management, analytics, and the ability to work with data. And those are general skills applicable to a lot of different areas of HR, but the required level of skill for each of those will differ based on the role that you're in and the level that you're in the organization. So what good looks like for an early career compensation specialist versus an executive talent consultant role, which is what we call the HR business role at US Bank, that will look very different. And so We have done this for a number of our most critical roles, but what we did is talk to leaders in those businesses, practitioners who could speak to not only what the skill is, but how the application of that skill looks different and what good looks like for a role at all of the various levels. And that informs how we hire people, how we assess people, but probably most important is how we develop people. So when we took those skills and those competence levels and the managers would then assess their people so that individual employees could understand how do I stack up against the required skills for the role that I'm in. And what came out was really interesting. At the individual level, our people can now say, where do I need to personally develop to perform well in my role? And if there's another role that they're interested in, they can see what are the new skills that I need to develop. So that's at the individual level, but at the aggregate level, you can look at all of the results for employees in a given role and say, what are the skill gaps that we have as an organization? What are our strengths? And that informed the investments and the emphasis that we played on specific skills. So if, if you think of your career like a long road trip, this information is valuable because it gives you very specific feedback. And then also the kind of the roadmap of how you get to where you want to go.

▶11:45HostClark, what parting advice would you like to share with our community?

▶11:49GuestYeah, I'll share this because it's top of mind, something I was talking about recently with someone looking to start their career in HR, and it would be about work-life balance. There's this concept that's buzzy right now about work-life balance being more work-life integration. And personally, I think that's really a bunch of nonsense. I've got I have 5 kids and they don't want my work integrated into the time that I spend with them. And my work shouldn't be expected to accommodate every aspect of my personal life. But something I feel strongly about now, after spending a lot of years with several big companies, lots of different managers that all have their different styles, and that is that even though those variables about the company, its culture, your manager's expectations, all of those things factor in, but work-life balance is mostly personal decision, which isn't to say there will be times and seasons where demands are higher and you have to work on a Saturday late at night, early in the morning. But whatever boundaries you set, those times and seasons should be the exception and not the rule. And if you are deliberate with your time, you can set those boundaries. And in most cases, people will respect those boundaries. So that would be my final thing. Just be deliberate with your time, work hard and set boundaries. So you can achieve a balance that allows you to show up well, not just at work, but in the other aspects of your life.

▶13:10HostClark, thanks so much for joining us today on the Built by People podcast. It was a pleasure to have you involved.

▶13:15GuestThank you so much, Dave.