Creating culture champions out of middle management

Welcome to the Built by People podcast, where we share the stories and insights of the world's top executive leaders. Join us as we dive deep into the minds of executives, uncovering their strategies, challenges, and triumphs in shaping today's workforce. That's previe. Now let's jump in and get started with our next guest.

Welcome to the Built by People podcast. Today I'm joined by Whitney Bedor. Whitney, thanks for joining me today.

Great to be here. I'm excited for this.

Awesome. To start off, I'd love to hear about your career journey, right. The unexpected turns, what ultimately led you to where you are today?

Yeah, it's a great question. And like many who work in hr, I didn't start on a traditional path towards this career. Actually, following college, I completed a management internship at my family's hog production business. And while I was shadowing each of the divisions and learning about the different management styles, the herd, our pig herd contracted a disease. It's known as prrs. It impacts the pig's reproductive and respiratory systems. And during that health crisis, I learned firsthand the toll that it took on employees. And I got to witness the leadership that was necessary to really bring a team together and overcome hardship simultaneously. Kind of like the healthcare industry, biosecurity is of utmost importance with animal care. And so I got the experience to learn how to write and to train both protocols and policies, biosecurity, and then to build accountability to get folks to follow these really important policies. And so through that experience, I found my passion for this intersection of employee wellbeing, governance, and workforce strategy. And thus began my career in human resources. Since then, I've been working in healthcare organizations. Had the opportunity to work in a lot of different areas of hr, from talent acquisition, talent management, some rapid growth through mergers and acquisitions, and then, most recently, in my more senior roles, a bigger focus on workforce strategy. But leading through periods of change and transformation has really been the thread throughout my entire career in hr.

I love that. That's great. You know, Whitney, as you join an organization, talk to me a little bit about what are your top priorities as you join an organization? You know, you hit the ground running. What are the things that you're focusing on.

Yeah, I think really having great conversations with and important conversations with senior leadership is the first thing to do. Where's the organization at? What are the organization's priorities? And making sure that HR walks in lockstep with operations on that. Some of the priorities that I'm seeing with a lot of organizations right now are developing systems and governance frameworks to implement AI and automation. That's all the rage right now. Workforce planning is kind of layered on top of that. So thinking about not our org charts of the past, but what is work going to look like in the future? It's going to be our org chart is going to become a combination of agents and employees. And so trying to figure out who's going to do what work. And then we've got to get the people and the systems developed and get the right skills there so they can do that work and we can bring that to life. I see that employee experience is still a top priority. I hope it always is. But we have five generations in the workforce now. Everybody has different needs. There's a lot going on in the economy. And so making sure that we're supporting employees the best way possible, you know, continues to be a priority. I hope it always is.

Yeah, no, I do too. That's great. What's one initiative, as you look out over the course of your career, what's one initiative you've rolled out that you're really proud of?

Yeah. So in my last organization, our employees were dispersed across the United States. We had a large portion following the pandemic that were working in varying hybrid schedules, continued to have a large portion of the population that were remote and had some folks in person. So over the last couple of years, trying to figure out how to engage these employees and how to communicate with them, keep them up to date, became ever more challenging. And so my team and I developed a communication strategy. The project included creating a portal. It was very strategically designed for the employee experience because we've got employees that are busy doing their jobs and when they need to come to human resources, right. They've got minutes to come in, get what they need, and figure out what next steps are. And so it was really about building this hub related to everything, human resources, everything that employee may need to support them and have it easy to access from that portal. Then we also sent out monthly news digests, and they were really catered to featuring what's the most relevant information that employee needs at their fingertips right now. Celebrating employees. We've got employees dispersed across the US and they want to hear, like, what are the successes of their colleagues, what's going on in other departments? And it was also a great way to plug in, like learning development opportunities, skill development. And throughout that process, we really focused on our energy on creating communications that gave employees the relevant information they need. Again, going back to that, they've got one, two minutes. We've got to get in front of them what they need at that moment. We have to make sure it's skimmable. Another big part of that project that really excited me was we created feedback channels and we didn't use that information on a yearly basis. We were looking at it very routinely and tweaking our strategy to make sure that we're meeting our employees needs, that we're getting that information out to them in the way that best suited them.

Oh, that's great. And that kind of goes along the lines of my next question. You kind of answered it. But maybe to dive a little deeper, one thing that we've found as we started doing these podcast episodes is employee communication. Right. It's kind of the make or break of an organization. Right. It's becoming harder and harder across every organization globally. What's one area where you're trying to improve that engagement through better communication? Or how are you approaching making sure employees actually see, understand, and act on the information that's sent out?

Yeah, absolutely right. We can have the best communication strategy in the world and may not always get to everyone we need. So it takes more than just a portal or emails. One of the strategies that we've been thinking about is creating culture champions out of middle management, which we found is really key to improving communication strategy. Really taking time to think about how is that communication getting from the top to the front line? And how are we teaching employees to discern what needs to go to their team? Thinking about who needs this information, when does it need to get communicated, and how is it communicated? Sometimes that's a quick slack message or a note in an email, or even a quick note in a team meeting. Hey, don't, you know, don't forget there's this really important message. Make sure you go back and read it. But sometimes it requires an individual meeting with certain team members that maybe are more impacted by the change. So helping leaders really build up the skills to discern how they're communicating this information. And it's often skills that I'm finding aren't taught when someone moves into a management role. So thinking about training that, but also what tools managers may need, you Know, do they need talking points as if it's a significant change or even an action plan on how to get that information out. I think another big part of this, you know, you mentioned, like, how are we measuring what information gets out? One thing that I found that's really important is taking the time to really set clear expectations. What are we, what actions are we expecting? And then how are we communicating that we're all inundated with information today. We've got thousands of emails, We've got seconds that somebody is skimming an email. And so getting that action really clearly communicated up front is important. And then figuring out how are we going to measure that action. And then kind of back to my first note about the communication strategy. I think it's important that we look at this data and what it's telling us routinely and we update our strategy, not waiting weeks after we've sent a message to then go back and look at the open rates to see, well, actually, you know, only 10% of our organization opened this. We've got to be adjusting those strategies more timely.

I love that. And that makes a lot of sense too, because kind of have to act while the fire's hot, right, as they say.

Yeah, definitely.

What tools or platforms are most essential for your operations?

Yeah, I think that's really hard to choose in today's environment with all kinds of technology available. A couple things that I think are really important in any technology in today's world, it's finding something that has data availability, accuracy and security, and governance that allows you to manage that software the way that your organization needs to. Automation capability is becoming ever more important in our work and the employee experience and not just thinking about the employees that are coming into your, whatever technology that is to use it, but also how is the HR team interacting with that and. And what's their experience? I do think, you know, a robust HCM software is really the foundation that enables workforce strategy. It enables you to lay an organization to layer on to create the tech stack that they need for their organization. But really having going back to those foundational pieces is important.

If you could leave one piece of advice for our community, maybe something you wish you had known earlier in your career or as you're kind of climbing the ranks of leadership and management, what would it be?

One piece of advice. I think if I could share one piece of advice, it would be protect your energy. Today we have more caregivers in our workforce than we ever have before. One in four employees is caring for children, a parent, a family member, and most of us, most of us are balancing professional responsibilities with caring for others. And I think a common message that we all hear is keep pushing caring for others is the most important work. But really that approach isn't sustainable. I think your ability to care for others at work and at home is directly tied to your own well being. So prioritizing health, whether that's setting boundaries, whether that's maybe making a career move that better supports life, supports your life, investing in physical health, these things aren't selfish. They're essential for you to really be successful. And success is, you know, being your best self so that you can take care of others.

I love that. That's great. Whitney, thank you so much for all that you're doing. It's been awesome to hear a little bit about how your mind works, your career journey. Thank you so much for being a guest today on the Built by People podcast.

Thank you. It's great to be here.