DJ Campbell

▶0:01HostWelcome 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. I'd like to welcome DJ Campbell to the Built By People podcast. DJ, thank you so much for joining us today. And I always love to start out by asking you to tell us a little bit about your career journey and some of the key lessons that you've learned along the way.

▶0:58GuestAbsolutely. Dave, thanks so much for having me today. What a great opportunity. So I have been in HR probably for about the last 10 to 15 years. I kind of started out in operations after I got out of school and was promoted to a leader at a very, very young age. And in full transparency, became more of a student of HR based on some failures I had out of the gate in terms of leading people.. And as I realized that I had some of those blind spots, I became a— like, I really wanted to understand what drives people and how to be the best leader that I could be. And so moved over into the HR side and have really enjoyed the work that I've gotten to do since then. I currently serve as the chief HR officer for Sanford Health in North Dakota. And so my span in North Dakota alone, I directly oversee one of the major markets around 3,800 employees and then I've got some extra duties on the workforce development side. I sit on the Workforce Development Council, was appointed by the governor and also the State Board of Higher Education. So get to do a lot of things. And so excited to be here.

▶2:01HostTJ, what are some of the key lessons that you've learned along that journey of 15 years in HR that you'd like to share with the audience?

▶2:09GuestYou bet. I would say the number one lesson is every day is going to be new and there's changes at every corner that you go. And so understanding and listening, I will be again fairly transparent that coming into the, to the HR world, I was probably a little bit more reactive than I probably should have been. And over the last 15 years, I've realized that understanding different perspectives and really being intentional about listening to people and understanding what their needs are has really benefited me. I think one of the big things over maybe even just the last 5 years has been really trying to instill in our leaders how to lead with empathy, but then still also being able to manage performance and accountability in those business results. We've seen a big shift, I think, in the HR world, probably post-COVID, a little bit before. And so a lot of business practices are changing. We're more adept to listen to our employees and understand and then utilize some of the technology that's come out lately to help us understand and make some meaningful changes.

▶3:08HostThis concept of listening is obviously related to the heart of our conversation today.

▶3:16GuestYeah.

▶3:16HostTalk to me a little bit about how you're using tools like employee engagement surveys to drive organizational change, improvement, and help employees elevate their overall satisfaction within the organization.

▶3:32GuestYou bet. Here at Sanford, we implemented Beginning, we've had variations of employee engagement surveys for years, but in the last, I would say, 3 years, we've been really, really intentional about implementing a process that really helped us understand what the needs of our employees were, both from an organizational standpoint and then also from that unit leader, department leader standpoint. And so we've invested in some technology to help us do that. And so we track those that scoring every time we do that survey. So we do it 2 to 3 times a year. We have a bigger one usually in the May timeframe, and then we implement more of a pulse survey to make sure that we are following up on the actions that we've identified in that initial annual survey.

▶4:18HostAnd what does the evaluation look like? You know, you're doing these surveys a couple of times a year. Curious to get your perspective on when you're getting those results. What does that process of analysis look like for you to drive decision-making across the organization?

▶4:35GuestI think technology is a beautiful thing. I think if you would have looked, you know, at the beginning of my HR career, this, this engagement survey was usually done by a third party, took almost a year to get the results. And so by the time you made any meaningful actions, the needs of the employee population has likely changed. The technology that we use is live, and so I can actually check the score in the middle of the survey to see what we're doing and looking at each of the, each of the questions also has a comment section so that we can get some comments of the specific feedback that they want us to look for and understand. And with that technology, we're able to really, you know, splice it and based on demographics, units, you know, job families, you name it, we can do that. And so it really provides us with a really robust data analysis of of what our employees are saying and how we can positively affect change. I think that another really big benefit of it is— and Sanford is a fairly large organization, we've got around 50,000 employees. And so when you look at our employee population, there's always going to be more of a system or enterprise type approach to it. So for instance, let's look at benefits. If we're hearing across the board that we need to do something for caregiver leave, we'll say that that's a good example of something we were able to do with the survey. You know, a lot of people are struggling with, you know, not only taking care of their small children, but now we're starting to take care of our parents too and help them as they get into, you know, their older years of life. And so enabling us to, you know, understand that and be able to put some meaningful change at a system level. But then also each, you know, leaders drive engagement. At the end of the day, you know, we can put together our best efforts at a system or an enterprise level. But those leaders are the people that, are really going to be the individuals that, that keep those people engaged on our front lines. And so they're able to pull their unit-specific engagement score and really look at that feedback to see what type of meaningful change they can put in place. We also require all of those leaders to put together an action plan and then also review that action plan with their team. And then we do that pulse survey, of course, to follow up on that action plan to ensure that we've put some things in place.

▶6:46HostExcellent, DJ. I want to get a little bit into the weeds for a second here. I'm curious about your process for formulating questions for these surveys to help you uncover meaningful insights that can drive decision-making. What does that look like for you at Sanford?

▶7:05GuestYeah, that's, that's a great process and really good question because I think your survey is only going to be as good as the questions you're asking, right? And so you need to make sure that not only you're understanding what you need to ask, but also ensuring that you've got buy-in from all of the stakeholders that you're— that's going to— that are going to use that survey to get that meaningful feedback. That really starts out of the HR level. They'll work with the vendor that we have and they'll identify some just off-the-cuff type questions. And typically what they'll do is look at competencies or, you know, different, for lack of a better term, themes that they want to investigate or look at. So Maybe for in, in May, we want to talk about the health and well-being of our employees. So we want to have some questions that are tailored to that. That vendor will then make some suggestions. They bring it to our HR team. We'll go through and kind of make some tweaks to that. And then it goes to all of our operators. So our senior leadership team in all of the markets then vet those out to make sure that those are the right questions we should be asking, that we've got alignment across everybody. And so it is a multi-step process where we're engaging multiple stakeholders that ultimately drive those decisions.

▶8:10HostThat's great. So we talked about, you know, the process for formulating questions. I'm curious what actions you've taken as an organization that have resulted from the analysis of these surveys. Are there specific initiatives in mind that have come to fruition as a result of surveying the workforce? And if so, what are those?

▶8:31GuestYou bet. I can give you two really good examples. I think the first one is we will look at, you know, recognition and rewards is always an area, especially when you're going through a time of high inflation. Inflation. So how can we utilize that feedback to help drive some change? And I'll go back to the benefits example that I had before. We heard not only through comment— through a lot of the comments, the deductible that we had on our health plan was just too high for the average family right now. And so we were able to go use that feedback, go back to our broker, and really work through how we could lower that deductible and that max out-of-pocket cost for our teams. And so that was a great win for us. Another piece that we benchmarked or measured is professional development. So lots of people want to be leaders. And I think that, again, as a student in the HR world, you don't have to have a formal title to be a leader. Anybody can be a leader. And typically our best leaders probably don't have that formal leadership title. And so we were able to go back and understand that, you know, that was something that our team members wanted to see and do. And so we were able to build out our own our leadership development framework and coursework because of that feedback and really be able to provide coursework and development not just for those that have the title, but also those that are really affecting change on our front lines. And so I think we've been able to really do that, but do that in a very quick and meaningful way for our teams.

▶9:54HostAnd are there other measures you're taking outside of surveys to evaluate and amplify the level of employee satisfaction that you find within your organization. Curious to get your thoughts on that.

▶10:09GuestYeah, I think the traditional metrics that HR uses when we talk about engagement— so you're looking at turnover or, you know, retention rates, depending on which way you want to look at it. You can look at exit interviews, all of those different pieces we have in place and we utilize. Probably the most, you know, effective way in terms of, you know, when you're developing a listening strategy is 2 times a year, our CEO, Chief Operating Officer, myself, and a couple of our other C-suite executives go to all of the department meetings in the individual units. And so we're there to help answer questions, to understand. And so it's really a way for us to get in front of our teams to validate the information that we're doing, that we're hearing from those surveys, but then also be able to articulate the actions that we're taking I think sometimes we get very, very reliant on technology and how we use that technology. And there still has to be a human touch to everything that we do. And so implementing those 2 times a year and we've got a ton of departments, I mean, we're talking 60 different meetings across, you know, 6 months. And so it is a little bit of a, you know, it is some work for us, but we've been able to really validate and then also ask questions that maybe we wouldn't be able to ask just based on that survey data.

▶11:22HostYou know, a lot of the success, DJ, is contingent on high participation rates. Yeah. In activities like surveys. What are you doing as an HR leader to incent participation among your workforce in these critical activities?

▶11:39GuestYou bet. So, yeah, we do track participation rates in all of the surveys that we do and we have incentivized, you know, we'll do department awards for those that have the highest participation or And so those are helpful. I think at the end of the day, you know, when we took our first— when we took our first survey, I think there was a lot of concern, I think, from the employee population. Is it going to be anonymous? What are the results going to be? Are we going to do anything? And I think that as we have gone through, you know, 3 years of this, 6 different cycles and the actions that we've taken has helped really create that trust with our employees. And that psychological safety is so they're able to go in and they know that we're going to, you know, look at the results and we're going to take action on that. I think you can incentivize a lot of things and that's going to help you get there. But I think long term, it's, it's your actions, not necessarily your words, in terms of what you're going to do with the survey results and how you're going to administer it. So I think we've created a lot of trust along the way. I still think we have a ways to go because there's always going to be a group of people that we have to make sure that we're engaging in a different way. But it's been— our participation rates have been really good up to this point.

▶12:49HostDJ, any other insights you'd like to share related to employee engagement surveys, key learnings or challenges that you faced along the way that could be helpful to our audience?

▶12:59GuestYeah, I think probably one of the biggest challenges that we faced in the first survey that we did is, you know, we're asking everybody for comments and we live in a world of we can really type anything, especially when it's an anonymous survey. And so we really didn't do a very good job of gearing up our leaders for what some of those comments might say and what their reaction to those comments might be. And so I would encourage everybody, if you're going to implement employee listening, you not only have to be ready to take action, but you're going to have to have some thicker skin and realize that, you know, you're going to hear some things that are probably going to hurt a little bit. But that's all in the name of identifying what those trends are and being able to fix them long term. I remember going into a meeting right after our first survey, and a lot of leaders were just— I mean, some of them were in tears to some extent because they felt that they had, you know, a better relationship with their team. Getting a bad comment or, you know, a lower score, that doesn't mean you're a bad leader. That just means that there's a problem there that you need to dive into a little bit deeper to really understand. What's going on and how you can affect some change in that space. And so I would say leadership development on the front end of that is really, really needed. And I don't know that we would have done— we did a good enough job on the front end of that. The second thing I would say is your actions are going to speak louder than your words. So if you're going to do a survey and you're going to benchmark things, you got to do something with it. And when you don't, if you don't take action on the things you're being told and you don't address the issues that are underlying in that survey, you're going to have less participation and very little feedback to go on in the future. And so your actions are going to speak significantly more than, than your words are in that space.

▶14:44HostTJ, any parting advice that you'd like to share with our

▶14:49Guestaudience? I think that what I would like to share is, you know, we're going to go to a time of, of, you know, there's workforce struggles today. And I think as you look at in the way that companies are beginning to do business and the way that they're listening. Those that are implementing these strategies are winning right now. They have better retention rates, they have lower turnover, they have a more engaged workforce, which leads to more productivity. And so I think oftentimes it's these simple things that we think maybe won't yield really big results, but it's the simple things when we talk about listening and surveys and, you know, going to department meetings. Those are the things that are going to really make the difference with our teams as we continue to go through these workforce struggles.

▶15:35HostTJ, thanks so much for joining us on the Built by People podcast. It was a pleasure having you involved.

▶15:39GuestThank you so much for the opportunity. It was great.