Liz Ahmed

▶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 Liz to the Built By People podcast. Liz, thank you so much for joining us. And as a starting question, I always love to ask if you can share a little bit more about your career journey.

▶0:55GuestWell, thanks, Dave, for having me and always love to talk a little bit about what my journey has been. So I would say from the very first day of my career, one of the common threads that I would want to talk about really has been change and transformation. So one of the things that's a little bit different about me is I bucked the trend in HR, which I like to think that's what it is because I got so much advice through my career that you need to specialize, right? Go into a center of excellence, go run compensation. Go spend some time in total rewards or go run something very specialized, go run recruiting, for example, like that. And I never did that. So I am a generalist. And rather than doing that, what I did is I decided that I was going to hone in on kind of that intersection of what I would describe as talent transformation and business growth. And I've had really some great opportunities to have really critical opportunities where I was able to gravitate towards those strategic opportunities. And some of the ones I would pick out is at Unum, I was able to come and really help them with, I would say, a high-growth environment. I was at a very large M&A organization where we did probably 20, 30 acquisitions a year. So that really helped me build that kind of scalable organizational development and really helped that organization with some real transformation. I did some really deep M&A at some big organizations. So PNC Bank, Equity Trust, AmTrust, and then I did a lot of culture work at Marsh McLennan. So all of those, I think, have that common thread. And so my background really, Dave, has been about running towards and actively engaging in change. And I think that's just been my constant journey, including really my current role here at Unum Group.

▶2:53HostLiz, in the past couple of years, we have emerged from a global pandemic and are now looking at defining the new normal workplace and experience. What are the major issues that come immediately to mind for you?

▶3:07GuestMy goodness, so many things to come to mind, but let me go through a few quick thoughts on a couple of areas. I think really the first big one is how we've had to navigate employee engagement through the time of change, right? That ever-changing nature of employee engagement has just been something that threads through every aspect of an organization. If you think through that pandemic, engagement means something so much different to where we were then and to where we are now. And we shifted enterprises to remote working in just a couple of days, right? Employers were doing everything in their power to protect employees from the forces of the outside, things beyond their control, and really things that were beyond that normal employer-employee relationship. Now, I think what's gone on is we have to reset that relationship. We gotta bring the enterprise back to maybe a little bit more of what we saw pre-pandemic. And so that means we gotta have a renewed focus on value. We have to spend more attention to those physical spaces. We got to nourish that workplace culture. I think we're spending more time reorientating employees to company purpose. So I think it's about reestablishing culture, but culture that has to be based on core business goals. And I think the companies that are able to capture and focus their imagination of the teams and direct that energy on business strategy are really going to be the ones that are the big winners. And then I think the other thing that's really come through is employee wellbeing and that, that mental health. I think before the pandemic, we were looking at employee wellness, but now we're looking at it with a much, much more intentional further focus on mental health. I think if we look at it at Unum, we've seen a rise in our leave claims among our own employees that are associated with mental health. Of course, that gained a lot of steam through the pandemic because of that work home-life balance pressures. We had a lot of people with childcare demands, and let's be honest, a lot of that social isolation. If I look at the aggregated data from customers, that also revealed that same kind of trend line. You also saw that coming through in overall care costs. One of the things we had to do is get a cross-functional team of the top leaders across my organization. We got a lot of subject matter experts across Unum together. And we had to put a mental health strategy in place that was really focused on prevention, you know, risk reduction, a lot of early intervention, a lot of early leave claim management, and thinking about how do we help our employees get back to work. And that was really focused on a multi-pronged plan that really got us to a lot of different programs, including some onsite counseling, virtual care for our employees. We put in some mental health first aid programs and even were able to put in some behavioral health virtual platforms with Unum. And I think we were able to see the results on that through our employee wellbeing survey. And results of that are starting to be able to see that we were able to see increases in our survey. So I think that the focus on where we were pre-pandemic to where we are now is very different because of that focus and those threads have been significant because of the changes pre and post.

▶6:35HostBased on your experience in driving organizational change and transformation, what strategies have you found most effective in maintaining employee engagement and morale, especially during periods of significant change?

▶6:48GuestYeah, I, I think change and transformation gets a bad rap. I was actually just on a call before and we were talking about change and how it's really exhausting, particularly for HR organizations. And I certainly think that it introduces uncertainty and it can be unsettling, but my experience, there are quite a few good ways that you can alleviate the stress of uncertainty and leaders that are actively managing teams and organizations through that change can see engagement increase and their employee morale follows suit. And I think one of the most powerful tools and one we use quite a lot here at Unum is storytelling. So, I think sharing stories is about the collective journey, it's about successes, and often about challenges. And I think it really helps employees connect at a personal level with the organization's purpose and our values. I think it's about feeling much more relatable, fostering a much deeper sense of belonging. We have one of our core values is about show a caring spirit. And part of that for us is about showing and seeing the human in every interaction. And I think that resonates a great deal when we tell a story. Because it shows how we can talk about those interactions with our customers, the work we do in our communities, or even how we take care of each other at Unum. I think another way of doing it is about transparent, consistent communication. I think that's absolutely crucial with change and transformation. Say and do what you mean, right? Be honest, be open. Employees need to understand the why behind the change and how it affects them and what can be expected of those outcomes. Yes, it's difficult, but that's what they're often really craving. And so, We do updates on a predictable cadence. We do town halls, we do live Q&A sessions. We try to make sure that we address any concerns before they grow and before they spread. And then I think another one is being visible and accessible. That's really essential. And I think we've seen that even more since the pandemic, right? Our employees really want to engage with our leadership at every level. They want to have their feedback listened to. They want their concerns to be addressed, and that's often real time. That shows that the action that you're taking really values the— that is valued input and that you're committed to their wellbeing. We started what we call the Unum CEO Quick Connects, where my CEO and I, at the beginning of the pandemic, started 15-minute all-employee video. And we talk to our employees every week for 15 minutes and we're still doing it. And that's about visibility and it's about making sure that two-way communication is ongoing. And then I think thinking back to the workforce wellbeing, the example that I shared before, I think it's about making sure that those resources are in the hands of the people that need them. Training, counseling, development opportunities, helping employees adapt to the change. When employees have the support that they need, they are going to be able to succeed in unfamiliar environments, and they're going to stick with you, and they're going to remain engaged no matter what happens. So those are just a few thoughts that I would share.

▶9:52HostLiz, you are Unum's CHRO and also a major customer of its services. What are the key factors that enable the firm to stay ahead of the market curve in providing employee benefit and workplace solutions? And how do you leverage your insights as a customer to drive these factors and ensure Unum remains a market leader?

▶10:13GuestIt is one of the things I just love most about my job. I have a really unique opportunity to have an interesting position here at Unum. I have a front row seat to those the challenges and the needs of 11,000 of our employees. And at the same time, I'm on the senior management group for one of the biggest employee benefits companies, and that provides Unum and Colonial Life, some of the two big market-facing brands, with a real-time test environment. We have— it's a real-life focus groups and lab, if you think about it that way. I have the opportunity to incubate ideas and product services. Units and our products teams are often in constant contact really talking about ideas, sharing the trends, talking about what our employees are experiencing, what clients are experiencing. And we're also using our own employee experiences to make sure that our technologies are where they need to be and that those end-to-end experiences are easy and intuitive. And I really have the privilege, and I do think it is a privilege to be able to spend a lot of time with clients. Those are other HR teams, those are people making choices to make benefit decisions. I'm talking to them about what they need, and I'm able to bring that back to our teams here at Unum. And when you bring it all together, that really ensures that what we put out into the market is the best that it can be. It really makes sure that we are the best market leader, but it is a privilege because I have access to being not only the people that use these products every day, but I get the ability to talk to our clients firsthand about what they need.

▶11:53HostLiz, what are some of the most valuable lessons you and your team have learned from testing new ideas in a real-time environment? And can you share an example of a product or service that was significantly improved based on that feedback?

▶12:06GuestYeah, sure. I mean, you know, testing, testing, testing, right? So we have a product that we call HR Connect. It's an automated kind of benefits administration. It exchanges data real-time between the human capital management systems that somebody might have, a Workday, an ADP, a UKG. And when we tested and piloted this, as we always do with our own Unum employees, there was something that we realized was missing, and that was the ability to account for intermittent FMLA. And if you ask any HR leader about a time-consuming process, inevitably Intermittent FMLA comes up. 35% of leaves are intermittent, and they often result in multiple absences, and companies are required to track leave absences down to the 15-minute increments. That is adding to huge complexity for organizations, and historically, it is a high risk of error. Employees are getting inaccurate pay. It leads to pretty tough compliance issues and often policies aren't adhered to. And when we put this in for Unum, we were experiencing that within our own organization. And we got a team together of subject matter experts in HR technology. We got our leave people together. We were able to get our payroll team, our IT operation, and we put a solution together, end-to-end, real-time automation. We got that intermittent process sorted out. Within about 6 months, we were able to reduce those kind of mismatched, inaccurate, across the platform data issues from 35% to 1%, Dave. It was amazing. We automated about 22,000 touches within Workday in our time off plans. We've saved hundreds and hundreds of hours for our employees and our managers. We've got hundreds of thousands of dollars annually that we can, we can measure. And so once we were able to do that for our own employees, that solution then became part of Unum HR Connect, and now it's something that our clients are able to use. And then another one I would throw out there is we have a product called Unum Total Leave, and that's an industry-leading digital-enabled leave and disability management platform that automates compliance and eligibility determinations.. And we again, beta tested that with our employees back in 2020. And when we rolled it out with our employees, we were able to make sure that we improved on the platform design. We were able to take the feedback from our own employees and using that leave experience and really made enhancements to the portal design to make sure that we were continuing to improve that. And we continue to be that design partner., and we're always happy to be that early adopter for the products that we have. And so it really is a unique opportunity for us to be able to use the products that we put in the hands of our clients, and I love being able to do that.

▶15:09HostLiz, what parting advice would you like

▶15:10Guestto share with our community? Sure. I think I'm going to summarize a few of the themes and maybe I'll try and tie it all together. I think for me, when I look back at everything we've talked about today, I think it's about making sure that HR strategies align with the overall business goals and plans. If you can understand and integrate with that broader corporate strategy, it unlocks the power really to drive meaningful change. I think it drives employee engagement, and I think that's where you get that sustainable growth. And if you can use the enterprise strategy as your compass, you can be proactive in your design of talent. You can be proactive in the management programs and processes and meet those current demands while really anticipating the future opportunities. And then I think I would say tie it all together with staying true to the purpose of your organization, because if you can do that, it means your employees will be able to see themselves in the center of everything that your organization does.

▶16:12HostLiz, thanks so much for joining us on the Built by People podcast. It was a pleasure to have you involved.

▶16:16GuestThanks.