Jennifer DuPlessis

▶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'm excited to welcome Jennifer Duplessis to the Built By People podcast. Jennifer, thanks so much for joining us, and I'd love to start off by having you share with us a little bit about your career journey and what led you to where you are today.

▶0:59GuestGreat. Thank you. I'm excited to be here today. So I've had a bit of a different journey to my, my current position. I'm the chief of human resources at Collin College, which is a large community college system in Texas. And I started off my career in business development and operations and educational construction and operations from there. So had a lot of experience in that area and a little bit in finance. And then just kept getting kind of enamored with the concept of how we can, especially because I've always worked on the public education side, how we can maximize our effectiveness and realizing that that was really only going to happen if we were effective with our human resources because we always have limitations around finance and other capital assets and things like that. So I was basically looking at teaching a little bit on the side and really wanted to start doing more research in the human resources area and proceeded to get a PhD in human resource development. And that led to a great transition. I've always loved public education. The community college system I work in is absolutely amazing and really provides lots of opportunities for anybody in our community to advance their educational goals. So it was kind of a dream come true to be able to be here today.

▶2:33HostAnd Jennifer, can you tell us a little bit about your focus on your PhD?

▶2:37GuestYes, absolutely. So my PhD is in human resource development. I graduated from the University of Texas at Tyler, oh gosh, 4 or 5 years ago. And so my, my specialization was in organizational development and change. So as I kind of looked at some of the major concepts around that, I was really interested in some of the varying research around engagement. And I know that's a bit of a buzzword on the HR side, but really trying to peel back the detail of engagement and what's the difference between general engagement and job engagement and organization engagement. And so kind of peeling back the layers and how we can affect— specifically, I wanted to focus on job engagement for the research that I did. And so I felt like that was going to give us the biggest bang for our buck, so to speak, in maximizing our performance as individual contributors in an organization.

▶3:37HostAnd Jennifer, how do you define job engagement?

▶3:41GuestThat is a great question. There's lots of definitions for engagement, and I was really focused on job engagement, as I mentioned. And really building on the work of Alan Sachs, in 2006, he defined job engagement as the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral components, all three components, um, associated with our individual role performance. So I liked his, uh, construct because it was not only looking at kind of our mental model, um, but our also how we approach things emotionally and behaviorally.

▶4:13HostAnd why do you view that as essential for employee satisfaction and organizational success?

▶4:19GuestThat's a great question. So the reason why engagement is a buzzword in human resources is because it's tied to a host of positive outcomes, uh, for the organization as well as the individual. So interestingly, engaged employees are more productive. They have, uh, less intent to leave the organization. They're more likely to participate in organizational citizenship behaviors, or as us non-research, you know, on the non-research side, we would say those extras, right? All those other things that they would do to contribute. And then I too feel like it's a, it's a great focus because it also helps the individual, right? So individuals who are engaged in their work are also more satisfied, they're more motivated, they have less illness. Less stress-induced illness. They tend to have better safety records and things like that. So I think the focus there is just multifaceted in what it can do for the individual as well as the company or organization.

▶5:20HostManagerial coaching, that seems to be pretty crucial for driving engagement. I'm curious if you could share some examples of coaching practices that have helped skilled trades employees feel more empowered and connected to their work.

▶5:34GuestAbsolutely. So the research I did was specifically in the skilled trades, and I, I kind of targeted that area because it's an area where we have staffing shortages. So I wanted to dive right into an area where we're having, um, difficulty attracting and retaining talent. And so we kind of jumped into looking at the skilled trades and looking at what is the connection that could be made? What can we impact to reach engagement in that field? And specifically, in their jobs. So interestingly enough, some of the past research shows that managerial coaching can lead to job engagement, but then there are other research studies that say it doesn't. So I was kind of fascinated with what does and doesn't work, and I'll expand on that in a moment. But as far as managerial coaching, you know, we're really looking at being a facilitator of learning, right? So this was a concept my dissertation chair was Dr. Andrea Ellinger. Who's done a lot of work in managerial coaching and learning organizations. And really our role as managers is to facilitate the learning and growth of our employees. And what we see is there's a lot of opportunity to create complex systems in place when really the actions of managerial coaching are pretty simple and very easy to replicate if we know what they are and we kind of sponsor people to do those activities. So some of those actions are things like using analogies, scenarios, and examples to help our employees learn, giving them perspective, right? So recognizing that you might have a broader perspective as their supervisor, can you encourage them to see a bigger picture? Do you provide constructive feedback? Do you solicit feedback from the employee, uh, to make sure that the interactions that you have with them are most helpful to their growth? Do we help them think through issues with questions rather than quick solutions? Do we set expectations that communicate the importance of those expectations to the broader goals of the organization? And do we look at different perspectives and, and perhaps even role play with our employees, help them kind of prepare in a very actionable way with the things that we want them to move forward with.

▶7:50HostThat's great. I wanna switch gears now to this concept of job crafting.

▶7:56GuestYes.

▶7:56HostAnd I, I just did a LinkedIn post about kind of the importance of leveraging one's individual superpowers.

▶8:04GuestYes.

▶8:05HostAnd trying to create a career pathway that maximally leverages those superpowers. Talk to me a little bit about job crafting and some of the success you've seen materialize from putting that into practice.

▶8:21GuestI love that you did that post. So as I was researching different aspects of the work experience, you know, basically there was a researcher, Amy Wrzesniewski, who just, just kind of threw the thought process that traditionally was had on its head as far as job design. So Job design is a— we're not in the kind of manufacturing Henry Ford days where we're on an assembly line and we're trying to figure out how, how short a timeframe we can increase our output. Work is— we're in a knowledge economy, we're doing more complex work, and employees do wanna have an opportunity to craft their work. So kind of further research discussed this as self-initiated change behaviors. Them employees engage in with the aim to align their jobs with their own preferences, motives, and passions. So exactly what you said, and that, that definition was from Timms, Baker, and Dirksen. But, but basically, are we able as employees to kind of focus on the things we want to focus on, we're passionate about, and we're motivated to do? We're going to be much more successful. And as employers, we need to be a little more open to that idea because it will— what we found in this research that has since been published that I did during my dissertation was that it was the missing link. Job crafting was absolutely a missing link between managerial coaching and job engagement. So if we wanted to increase job engagement by doing managerial coaching, we also needed the way, the way in which that happened was through job crafting. So it makes sense, right? We don't have, you know, very independent and dependent variables in social sciences. It's more complex than that. So this really kind of helped explain when coaches or managers are acting as coaches and doing kind of the behaviors we talked about, and then subsequently employees are able to have conversations about the things that they're interested in and what they can do for the organization and how they can advance organizational goals. That's really the power that leads to, uh, job engagement.

▶10:30HostWhat do you see as some of the hurdles to implementing job crafting within organizations? Because it sounds like some— this is something that should be ubiquitous in practice, and yet, uh, it doesn't seem to be the case. What are some of the challenges and how do you envision, uh, folks overcoming those?

▶10:51GuestThat's a great question. So job crafting sounds very nice and very idealistic to most managers, right? So we think, oh, of course that's what we want to do. But then we go to work and then we have objectives we have to meet and things we have to focus on. And sometimes it feels difficult, right? So I want to craft my own job. Does that mean I'm going to rewrite my job description every other Monday? No, but can I lend my focus to this area or this committee or something like that. We have to be able to be more flexible to allow for job crafting, and we also have to encourage employees to understand that job crafting doesn't mean you're going to change your job every other week. We still have things that we have to accomplish. However, what it does mean is I want to hear from you. One of the questions I ask a lot is, what do you really like doing and what do you really not like doing? Very simplistically, I can make small adjustments in my, you know, team of 20-ish people in HR. We don't all have to do the exact same thing, or we don't have to all, you know, kind of just stick with a very myopic view of what our jobs are. We're here to serve the institution. We're here to serve students. So whatever we're going to do that's going to advance that. But I think it's just, it kind of turns that whole job design idea on its head. So it's challenging for managers.

▶12:12HostAnd how do you measure the success of your engagement efforts, and what insights or lessons have you learned about fostering engagement in the workforce?

▶12:22GuestI think it's, you know, many organizations do kind of longitudinal surveys looking at levels of engagement. There's a lot of noise, right, in the independent organizations around those surveys though. Like, right, we're in time— if we're in a time of massive change, we might have more discontent, things like that. So I like to look at it on an individual basis. Over time amongst team members. I can find it to be most effective, like I said, getting down into the nitty-gritty of one-on-one dyadic relationships in the workplace and how they're going. Um, I think it's probably one of the most effective ways. Having that data and research definitely gives us ideas of where we need to go and what we can do, but I think we also see some of those barriers in managerial coaching. Right? So coaches or managers know that they, that coaching is expected. They want to coach. But we did another little bit of research on barriers to managerial coaching, and that, that really is about time and confidence, trust, expectations, just kind of building the self-efficacy that supervisors have to engage in coaching. So I think it, it would be great if we could all isolate everything to one data point to the next, but a lot of times that you, you experience it within the organization as culture, right? So if I see over time, um, that I'm able to make these adjustments, I see over time that I'm able to be coached by my manager, you're going to see the outcomes in the organization as a whole, right? If the whole purpose of what we're talking about is to increase our job engagement, to increase our personal and professional performance, we should see those outcomes. It's, it's hard to isolate, but over time, we see that they kind of layer and start to kind of build that flywheel effect over time.

▶14:20HostJennifer, any parting advice that you'd like to share with the HR community?

▶14:25GuestI think my parting thought would just be, you know, two questions we often ask is, did you have a conversation? And you would be shocked by how many conversations aren't had because we're focusing on our tasks, which is great. But as human resource leaders, our job is to encourage people to think beyond a single task and what we can do to support, not without a fancy shiny program necessarily, but how do we sponsor supervisors having the conversation, not at the annual appraisal time, not, uh, as an event, but as an ongoing feedback loop. And I think one of the things we can do to do that is walk the walk, right? So as an HR department, are we engaging in those conversations with our own employees and can we share examples? And then as that kind of catches on, giving kind of some space or opportunity for others to share success stories, right, where they've talked about how they've used this, could definitely help shine a light on the benefit.

▶15:28HostJennifer, thank you so much for joining us. It was a pleasure to have you on for an episode.

▶15:32GuestThank you.