Stop Reacting: HR's Evolution to a Strategic People & Culture Force

Welcome 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'm excited to welcome Jeff to the Built by People podcast. Jeff, thank you so much for joining us today. And as a starting question, I always have to ask if you could share a little bit more about your career journey.

Hey, Dave, thanks for having me, first of all. And I've had a, a really interesting career. I started my career as a computer scientist, writing code in a lab for many years. But I found myself running parts of businesses as a general manager, being a chief marketing officer, and most recently, my first role in HR was the chief people officer, which started in 2020 here at Zebra Technologies.

Jeff, can you share a specific situation where the traditional HR model at Zebra Technologies was not meeting your needs and explain why it was crucial to transform HR into a more integrated business partner role?

Yeah, so I would say that Zebra, like most Fortune 500 companies, runs an ORIG model, right? So one where we have HR business partners embedded in the business, centers of excellence for functions like total rewards, talent acquisition, et cetera. And what I found coming to this kind of from the outside of the HR world in 2020 is I found that we were acting in a very reactive manner. We would get stimuli requests, we would respond to it, I want to open a rec. I want to change somebody's salary. A lot of transactional time was spent. And we did that very manually. And also found that we were inconsistent in the kind of results that we were creating for people because in many cases, if I was in Germany, I might answer a question one way as an HR business partner, maybe slightly differently in the US. So we, we didn't have consistency in the kind of services that we were providing. And so those are the, some of the key reasons that led us to that. I felt we weren't doing enough is were we really spending enough time being strategic? What are the skills that we need to develop and acquire 6 months from now, 12 months from now? Because we were so buried in those transactional elements.

Jeff, once the need for transformation was identified in that instance, what strategic steps did you take to initiate the shift in HR's role? Can you share any significant challenges or setbacks you encountered during this transition?

Yeah. So I would say that the first thing that we started with is, and it took a while to develop this, is a hypothesis. And it's similar to what I just said. My hypothesis was we were getting pretty good results, but we were just working too hard. It was too manual. And we weren't really getting to those strategic elements, particularly related to talent, where we had identifying, attracting, developing, and retaining the best talent that we needed to be successful as a business. HR isn't here for HR. HR is here to support the business needs. And so we started with that hypothesis. For us, what we did is we went outside and we got a consultant. We said, let's test these hypotheses. And what we found out when we did that, and what we did is we benchmarked our key KPIs. How are we performing? Our time to fill roles, et cetera. We found in fact that was true. We were getting good results, working too hard, working too manually, working too inconsistently. And through that consultant, we then created a vision for HR. And I think it's important While HR is here to support the business, it's also important for HR to have its own vision that it owns. And so we focused on that. And then the next thing we did is we focused on the people. Did— what was the operating model we wanted? If what we were getting out of the old rich model was something we didn't want, what was the operating model we wanted? And we selected from a number of them. We also had to make a decision that transformation of an HR organization of some size is hard. One of the things you have to decide is, where do I start? It's the hardest thing. Someone once told me, and he was talking about sales, said, the hardest thing in this job is getting out of bed. And I scratched my head. I'm like, I don't understand. That makes no sense to me. But I finally realized what he said after years, and he never explained it to me, is, you know, it's always hard to figure out where to start. I don't care if you're on, you're trying to quit smoking, you're trying to lose weight, or you're trying to transform an organization or start a project. Where to start is important. We spent some time on that. And then we looked at the things you would normally get. Okay, once we have those identified, how do we revamp those processes? Which is a step you need to take. Then what technology and tools can be leveraged to help you make the changes? And then how do you make sure you communicate really carefully with your employee base when you're gonna take on this kind of transition? So you can set their expectation. I would say the number one thing is, when you're making this kind of fundamental change, like when you change an operating model, it says we're changing everything the way we service the business. We're really changing the culture. And what you have is a real change management challenge. One of our tenets was fundamentally redefining what an HR business partner's role was. So that change management, I think, was probably the most challenging component of what we did.

Jeff, as you implemented changes to enhance the employee experience, such as onboarding or retention strategies, What were some real-world examples of initiatives that worked well, and how did you overcome the obstacles along the way?

Yeah, one of the first things we decided to do was look at onboarding. I think onboarding is always very important. If you look at Gartner metrics, what you'll find is the attrition rate for people in the first couple years in a job tends to be very high. So there's a real significant cost to either selecting the wrong candidates or not onboarding them in a way that really works. This was one of the first things we wanted to start with. And I think from a North Star perspective throughout our entire journey, what we said is we just want to make the employee experience better. And that included candidates in onboarding. That's a place that we focused on. So again, for me, the start is what is the process today? What is the process that we want to have? And what's the results that we want to create? And what's the KPIs when you start on this? So we revamped the process. We got rid of lots of manual things. We had checklists and points where the service center would be emailing things, and we started automating those components. And I think that was really helpful to make things work. And as a result, I think that we've getting— it's early days still, but I think we're getting a much better adherence to a common process. We're getting better results, and I hope to see better retention rates through that beginning point. I might want to bring up another one that I think was important for us too is Because we were transitioning from HR business partners doing a lot of the kind of hardcore transactional work, we've redirected a lot of those transactional components to our service center and really beefed up the service center with the right people, the right technology, and the right processes. And if I had to say that an area of both challenge and success has been, how do we get employees, rather than calling the friendly HR business partner they're used to, how do they call the service center? Maybe look up a knowledge article, solve the problem themselves if it's an easy solve, or create a case that we can track to see where the bottlenecks are and where the problems are, and we can address them more. Getting that change has been hard. So again, change management tends to be the biggest thing. How do you change the employee behavior from calling the person they know? How do you change the behavior of the HR business partner to hand that person off in a pleasant way? Hey, I don't want to just tell you, go click on this link. I want to help you through the process the first couple of times, but I want you to get used to doing that. And I would say that we've seen a good uptick in our cases, and we're also solving our— we build SLAs, service level agreements. We know how quickly we want to respond, and we're meeting those well over 90% of the time, which is our KPI. So I think we've done a good job with that, and we haven't heard a lot of significant complaining. It's a fundamental shift from calling a person to creating a case, looking up a knowledge article, and then having it escalate where we have a lot more visibility. So I think we've matriculated that change pretty well, but change management, getting people to change, changing the way people operate, always very difficult.

Jeff, reflecting on the cultural reinvigoration process at Zebra Technologies, what were the results of defining your company's purpose and values, and what key learnings and takeaways can you share including actions you would recommend and pitfalls to avoid?

Yeah, one thing I've learned in HR is the one thing that we're stewards of that is important is culture. And the way I define culture, which I borrowed from our friends at Gartner, is it's kind of how we get stuff done around here. It's every interaction from the moment you're a candidate to the time you leave. It's how we, you know, work with our own employees to address our customers and our partners. It's every interaction. And you can rally around a purpose. And something that a couple years ago as part of our culture reinvigoration, we set our first purpose up. And that purpose, I'll read it because I think it's helpful for us. It's together we create new ways of working that make everyday life better for organizations, their employees, and those they serve. And that embodied what Zebra does. We sit in the frontline employees' hands in retail environments, transportation, logistics, and others. Something people could rally around and build a culture around. We also changed our values. We had created values back in the 2015 era, and they were one-word virtues. Lots of companies have this. Teamwork and innovation and integrity. And they sound great, but there's not a lot of meaning if there's not the richness behind them. And so we revamped those to be much more inspirational. Succeed as one and things of that nature that we think our employees could get their head around and would be much more inspirational to them. And I think that was helpful. So it unifies the workforce around that rallying point, having a purpose and a value. Now, in terms of what we did from there, for us, it's great to have a set of values. It's great to have a purpose. You can put up all the banners you want. The question is, how do you make that active in the environment? Particularly in this timeframe. So we had a new CEO a couple years ago and he recognized the importance of culture. He said, we need to reinvigorate this culture. We're coming out of COVID We're coming out of the great resignation. We've seen a lot of turnover. We have more hybrid employees and remote employees than we've ever had before. So we don't have that central point of being in the office all the time that helps reinforce that culture. So HR took on, or the people team as we call it now, took on the challenge of how do we reinvigorate this culture? And we've been running workshops with all our employees. We're through over 50% of them now in the last 12 months to really focus on getting them excited about the purpose and the values and ways to make it real in everyday life and everyday experiences, whether those are with another employee, the candidate, whether with a partner or an employee. And I think those are really helpful. And in terms of recommendations or things to avoid, I would say that when you're creating your purpose and vision, if that's something you're taking on, you need to really have good input from your employees. You had a good cross-section of people because you need to get people to buy in and feel like this is something authentic, something you can own, something that's durable, and something that's real. And to do that, you have to have a lot of input. You also have to have your executive team on board because if they don't believe, nobody else is going to believe that this is really how we're building the culture around this. I would also say if you're going to do a workshop or engage people, don't just put things on the wall. Give— we have experiences and I don't want to ruin them. We talk about what is it called? Trading puzzle pieces where we've all had the same experience. We can all point back to, yeah, we need to work as a team because of that exercise. We could have never solved that unless we worked together. And people refer to these experiential things. It can't just be a monologue. You're sitting through training. It has to be something you experience with other people, and it makes it real, and it gives you real examples and a real common language. So we found that to be very helpful for us. So I would say get a lot of people involved, make sure you got your ELT really engaged on purpose and values and the fact that you're gonna roll out and need time to do these experiential workshops. And then when you do those workshops, make sure they're not monologues, make sure they're experiential. I think they become much more memorable and much easier for people to understand how to put them into action and have some follow-through. For us, we have a virtual platform. We have culture champions at all our sites and assigned to virtual people to keep the spirit alive. And that's what you need to do.

Jeff, what parting advice would you like to share with our community?

Yeah, I want to end where we started. I've had a really nonlinear career, and this is my favorite time of year. We have over 100 interns here, and I love talking to them and I like telling them all the things that nobody told me when I started working many decades ago. What I always tell them is your parents often tell you when you're picking your major and you're coming out of high school, this is going to be your life for the next 30 or 40 years. Be very careful. And I like to tell people as a person who's done all kinds of crazy things in my career that don't even make sense together, this isn't a life sentence. You're picking your major isn't your life sentence. Nor is any situation you find yourself in. So work hard to get out of that. And I always give them some advice. And the 3 pieces of advice I have for success and individual success, which I think is important. One is I've never seen anyone succeed without working hard. It's just a prerequisite. Number 2 is stay positive. I've been in a lot of rooms where, you know, somebody's moved along or been promoted and we've looked to backfill that position. We've never said, that guy who's really good, but is always negative. Let's pick that guy. We've never, that's never happened. Being positive is really important. So find a way to be positive. And the last thing is I always tell people, and this is what got me out of engineering, is the most important thing. I realize this now is being curious. I was curious about the, be curious about your business. Why is your business to do what it does? Why is it good? Why does it win? Who does it compete with? Understanding your, the business is important for every role in a business, whether you're in HR, you're a general manager, you're in marketing, you need to understand how your business makes money, why it differentiates itself. And if you go and learn that, and if you go and you're curious and go ask questions, go read, go learn, you'll find that opportunities will come find you. Because the people in HR who are the best, they understand the business and they're curious. People who are in product management are the best. They understand the business. So it sets you apart and it puts you in a position to succeed. So this is some advice I've learned over the years.

Jeff, thanks so much for joining us today on the Built By People podcast. It was a pleasure to have you involved.

Thanks for having me.