MODERATOR: Alright. Hello, and welcome to today's O.C. Tanner webinar, resiliency in times of change, people centered change management in practice. We're so glad that you could join us and that you're taking this time to to be with us today.
We will send out a link to the on demand recording of this webinar later today, so watch for that in your inboxes.
If you'd like to earn SHRM or HRCI credits for this webinar, we'll share those codes at the very end. And if you have a question for our panelists, please drop it in the chat or in the Q&A. We should have time for Q&A at the end of today's presentation.
We're delighted to host this conversation today with Dana Bradley, vice president of human resources at Silver Cross Hospital.
With over thirty years of experience, Dana has been instrumental in driving change and transforming HR into contemporary high performing organisations across various industries.
She is passionate about delivering excellence and strengthening HR's credibility.
Starting her career in operational roles, Dana's approach, design, and consultation are deeply informed by this background, ensuring that the needs of clients are effectively served.
Dana holds an MBA from Case Western Reserve University, as well as a master of arts in speech communication and a bachelor of science degree from Miami University.
And joining today joining Dana today is Denis Beausejour.
Denis joined O.C. Tanner in twenty sixteen, and in his current role, he consults with Fortune one thousand companies on how to create peak employee experiences throughout the career cycle that lead to a high performing work culture.
Denis has worked with clients such as John Deere and Grant Thornton.
Formerly, Denis spent ten years at FedEx helping health care clients ship life saving equipment to and from Latin America. He is a graduate of the College of William and Mary and has earned his MBA from Kellogg School of Management. With that, I'm gonna turn the time over to Dana and Denis.
DENIS: Thanks, Raven. Dana, it's so exciting to have you here for this conversation.
Thank you. You have a wealth of knowledge, and you know how to get things done. So to start out, would you mind just telling me a little bit about yourself?
DANA: Sure. Sure. Raven really, captured the foundation of my career, early career, when she talked about my experience in org development. I will tell you, I do have over thirty years of experience.
I started in corporate America in a high risk, high reward college fast track program. And the whole premise of that program was you come in, you deliver, you perform at a very high level, and you could get promoted. And then the other side of it is if you don't deliver, then we would part ways with you. So I will tell you when I first, at twenty three, went into corporate America, my very first day on the job, I had thirteen bargain for union employees, and I had one exempt employee.
We supported, we were a clerical pool that supported personnel. And so I did that assignment. I was met with quite a few challenges both on the people side, the performance management side, attendance side, and things of that sort. So I was really learning how to lead and manage and get work done through others.
And then they said, well, where do you wanna go next? And I said, well, they say the call centre is hard and call centers are hard. And I said, well, let me go to the call centre. Let me see what that's about.
And so I went to the call centre, and I really wanted to be on the order side. I was on the collection billing side, but nonetheless, I was in call centers. And I will tell you there was one assignment in that role that every one of my colleagues absolutely dreaded, and it was called the "in charge" position. Imagine a hundred and twenty five people, service reps, union, didn't really want to come to perform at a very high level, and we had utility commission requirements where we had to answer eighty percent of the calls in twenty seconds.
That was the worst day of the week when we were running the office. And so my boss came to me, and she said, hey, look, we need to meet these public utility commissions. Now keep in mind, I am the junior member on the team. And she said, I want you to be in the "in charge" position every day.
I said, you have got to be kidding me. But the only comfort that I had is she said, "and I'm gonna put Eva on the on the team with you" because she was really good at it as well. So I worked that in charge position, and it was really challenging, but I was able to deliver the results. I think all of us were unhappy.
I was unhappy, even all the one hundred and twenty five service reps because they knew they had to deliver. So I worked at work stoppage there, and then they said well, Dana, where do you wanna go next? And that was the beauty of this college hire program. And for me, it was about building business literacy.
And I said, well, since I have the upfront part, more on the billing side, I said, let me go to installation and maintenance. And that was something that I did not know about. I chose to go there because my whole orientation was, if I'm going to work for a telecommunication organisation, I wanted to learn the business. And so I did that. And along the way, I went to many more other operational assignments. Denis, if I think about the first part of my career, the first seven or eight years, I was in operations.
And I would not have changed that for anything in the world. And at one point, I transitioned to a business unit. And interestingly enough, I had accountability for negotiating service level agreements both between our consumer business unit and installation and maintenance. And that was really the earlier part of my career, and then I transitioned to human resources.
DENIS: Yeah. So it sounds like you were jumping into a lot of different things, and you had a lot of roles where you were not quite sure what the next step was. What kind of drew you to HR, and what made you take the big jump.
DANA: So when I mentioned that I was in consumer services, I, and I was negotiating the supplier level service level agreements, and here's what I knew for sure. I had come from installation. I knew what the capacity was. And I knew what my business unit was asking them to deliver through me was unreasonable.
Right? So I really had to make sure the stakeholders there and then I had to answer to my business unit leaders. And I could say this now, as luck would have it, I just happened to be pregnant, and I had a high risk pregnancy. I went out unexpectedly at thirty weeks.
So I went out at twenty nine weeks, delivered at thirty weeks, and I was at home on maternity leave. And they called me and they said, Dana, do you want to become a director, HR business partner to installation and maintenance?
And that's when I transitioned to an HR partner role after I left maternity. But I will tell you, I accepted the job while I was on leave. And then after I hung up the phone, I panicked because I said, what did you do? You don't know a thing about HR. I had only had a college recruiting assignment for just a few months, you know, early career. And so here's what I did while I was on leave.
I started doing some research, buying books, but interestingly enough, I did not buy one employee relations book. I didn't buy an employment law book, something, and I don't know why I was compelled to. I started buying org development books, Warner Burke, process consultation by Edgar Schein. There was something in my thinking is I can learn employment law.
You know, I can learn other parts, the technical parts of HR. But in my role as HR business partner, what I needed to know, in my opinion at the time, was org development. And so while I was on leave, I started immersing myself in the learning of org development and what that meant and what that did for organisations. And that's how I prepped before I returned to work to support, customer provisioning, installation, maintenance at the HR director role.
DENIS: Yeah. That sounds like a huge job transition from operations into HR, but it seems like, the first step was sort of to educate yourself and really try to come up with a basis or a philosophy around it.
Why do you think you were prepared for the change?
DANA: So when I think about early career and all those different assignments and, you know, I had almost as many assignments as I did in those years because I changed yearly. And so if you think about it from a change, resilience perspective, you know, I had it in spades because of the college hire program I was facing.
But there's two reasons why I felt prepared. One, I knew that content area.
I knew installation and maintenance. I knew I could sit at the table and talk from a technical aspect, but then, I also thought I could do it given that I proved that I could be successful in operations and before I returned to work I immersed myself in learning more about facilitation, all the, and org development. I did know baseline of all the organisational structures and things of that sort. And I think we as HR folks just need to say I got that and I had to convince myself that I could learn it.
And then also when I returned to work, I had five other colleagues, and there's absolutely nothing better than to tap into the expert. And they were career HR pros, and I was able to leverage their knowledge. And we stole, stole shamelessly because we just had so much work to do. So I leveraged my resources. Plus, I had a content area in OD that proved useful in those assignments.
DENIS: Yeah, that's great. So you sort of had mentors or coaches on the team that were really helping you dive in. And it sounds like you sort of had sort of a subject area that you could kind of help add some value as well. Right. That's awesome.
So when we start thinking about change, right, I think, Gartner recently said that, an average employee experienced about ten planned enterprise changes last year, which is up from two in twenty sixteen. So we are just getting faster and faster and faster at managing change. I'm just curious.
When you think about change, how did you apply that change and that OD work within the function? What were you thinking?
DANA: Yeah. So, you know, I'm gonna give you an example. I work for an amazing university, and I was the deputy. I was not the CHRO at the time, but I had a huge portfolio at the time. I had accountability for talent acquisition, compensation, our HR business partners, which I implemented at this university, and also this notion of payroll.
The one thing that I learned and what I knew at this university, you know how you, when I think about HR operations data and data analytics, I think about the life cycle of the employee in the HCM system. And so I would be called upon as the lead HR business partner at this university to to implement changes for the executives that I supported, the leadership that I supported. And I would say, where is HR operations? Where is it?
And they were like, well, you're talking about payroll. I'm like, no. I'm not talking about payroll. I'm talking about HR operations.
And so they would send me to payroll. And I will tell you, when I walked into that payroll office, it was a, really it was one floor. It was a lot of folks in on that floor, probably about thirty folks. It was chaos.
I'm like, oh my god. What is going on? And it was under my accountability. I was relatively new.
And here's what I learned. I learned from a change perspective, we had frontline employees doing a widget. If they supported a school, they supported either staff, faculty, or student. They didn't support the entire school.
We had payroll being the face to the client. We had a lot of different functions.
And so, you know what myself, what I did along with the director, we took the entire frontline team offline.
It was about twenty five or thirty people, and we did a facilitated conversation about, you know, why do we exist and what do we do and things of that sort.
And we co-created our future organisation using the voice of the frontline employees.
DENIS: I love that.
DANA: We did. Right? And, now we knew well, at least I knew when we came out of it and they just defined it, we would have a payroll function, we would have a tax function, and we would have HR operations. And that's exactly what we did. We used our frontline employees to co-create the future design of the HR payroll and data analytics function. And they, because they were close to the work, they knew it best.
DENIS: I love that. It's so interesting from our research. If you can give employees a voice in the change by seeking their feedback, you can positively improve the employee experience by twelve hundred percent, which is just, like, crazy off the charts. You're getting buy in from them.
DANA: Well, can I say something about that?
So during that same time that we took them offline, they co-created the organisation, and not only that, we had to train them on the full job because they were just doing a widget. We trained them on the full job, and then we started to allow our frontline employees to go to clients we serve schools and units.
That same time frame, we did an engagement survey across the university, finished at sixty four percent engagement.
My overall organisation was at seventy three percent engagement. And when I think about this payroll, HR operations, tax and data analytics organisation, they finished at eighty three percent engagement.
And we totally redefined their jobs. We rearranged the office. We did everything to drive a lot of change. And because they were part of it, I agree with what you just said because we saw it through our engagement survey results.
DENIS: That's fantastic.
Any other thoughts about how you apply change within the function? And then you can give me examples.
DANA: You know, if I think about my time at Silver Cross, because I've been here, a little shy of four years. I mean, then, you know, I will say this. There's nothing like joining an organisation where you succeed the former HR VP who happens to still be my colleague today.
He is in a different role. And then let me say this. He started as the VP of HR at Silver Cross over twenty years ago at age twenty seven. So when I do the math, I am thinking, oh, you probably only had one assignment before you got the VP of HR job. So I succeeded him. He is still here and, I work mightily to validate everything that was in place.
And while I'm validating everything that is in place, then I'm taking the organisation in a new direction.
Because I can honestly say from a change perspective within the function, to include compensation, benefits, talent acquisition, all of that has been radically redefined, because that's what Silver Cross Hospital needed. And so there's been a lot of design. Now your question is how did you do change within the function? I have to use the example of recruiting talent acquisition. You know, some of those folks turned over.
And, they turned over and the HR folks on, you know, on this podcast will say, oh my goodness, or webinar, because their job was to post the job and then you have all this process inside. They intersect it at the point of job offer. There was no prescreening.
There was no presentation of a slate. They posted the job, and they made the offer.
And, I had heard that we were a very hard hospital to get into, and I said, well, sure we are. Because we, from an HR perspective, aren't even talking to our candidates. And so I said, guys, we have to start prescreening. We have to start, you know, recruiting and presenting candidates. And a few of them said, I don't like the way recruitment is going. And I'm like, well, this is the hill that we gotta take. And so some of them, and this is probably, the best kind of turnover, opted to to do other things.
Yes. Well, select now. Yes. Yes. And in so doing, you know, we've been able to bring people on with the right motivation, the right competence, and things of that sort. So there's been a lot of change driven, within the function.
DENIS: No. That's great. You know, it's funny because it sounds like what you're really doing there is practicing modern leadership because, everyone, I think, has a place that they wanna be invested where they're engaged with their heart and their mind.
But that might not be your place. And so if you're creating a culture and, they're not willing to sort of engage in that culture, then how do we help them find another amazing job at an organisation where they can thrive?
So I love that. I agree.
DANA: Can I say one other thing? And when I think about talent because we're talking about talent, and I use this example at this university where we allow the frontline employees to co-create the the function.
That directorship was open and, because someone was retiring. And I said to her, hey, who is the best school administrator? Because in a university environment, every school has a lead school administrator that handles all the people related processes at the school level because I needed to replace, this person who was retiring, and she told me who that person was. And I called the person.
I didn't know him. I said, hey. Look. I hear you're the best school administrator on campus.
I'd love to talk to you about my HR director role. And the person said, sure. And she and I talked for two hours, and I said, well, hey. Are you interested in coming to HR?
And she said, absolutely. And I said, well, you know, tell me why. And then she said something, you know, sort of, well, I've always wanted to work in HR, and I never thought I would get the chance, you know, because I'm in the school. And, and I said, I'd love to put you on my boss's calendar.
I said, but please, before you meet with her, can you come up with a better reason why you wanna work for HR? But the reason I bring that up because sometimes we as HR practitioners, and I guess I could consider myself one even though my frontline leadership experience informed everything that I do, I know that there's certain functions when within HR that you can hire talent. You can hire somebody who drives excellence in service delivery and innovation and creativity. This person did not know HR at all, and I took a chance on her, and she proved to be an outstanding high performer.
DENIS: I love that. You know, it's interesting, Dana. There's a trend, I'm not gonna remember the source right now, but where CHROs right now have just a good of chance from coming outside of the function as inside the function. And this is a little bit off script, but I'm just curious why you think that might be or if you have any comments around that.
DANA: Well, you know, if I think about, you know, my transition to HR, while I wasn't a CHRO at the time, I still needed to learn and possess the body of knowledge. I think people who come from outside the function, I think we, I'm gonna put myself in there because I was one of them, you know, early career.
Our lens is very different. And if I think about my orientation to HR to this very day, I design from the outside in.
I design from what does the leadership need, what's going to make sense for them.
I think, you know, and I love my colleagues when who were, you know, mentoring me on my first HR assignment. They were more practitioners, and it's what they knew. Sometimes when we are career HR professionals, we love to design inside and drive it outside.
But I think when HR is at its best, it is thinking about the clients we serve, what's gonna be easy for them to do and implement.
And so that's why I think the pivot of bringing people from outside the function, may make a lot of sense. You know, they have to have a thirst for learning and a curiosity and things of that sort, But the lens through which we see the function and solutions we deliver, I think, varies somewhat, and some people may think that's a little controversial.
But I lived it, and I can see why that might be a trend.
DENIS: So maybe just to try to synthesise that a little bit. So, maybe sometimes in HR, we're a little bit too process oriented, and we're trying to sort of drive efficiency in our function. Oh, whereas, it sounds like, really, you're thinking more about removing obstacles for those frontline managers or leaders in the organisation and trying to find a way to maybe be a little bit more people centric in your approach.
DANA: That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Everything I do, you know, I haven't been a frontline leader for many, many years. It's like I'm thinking about it from their perspective. You know, they're trying to deliver results, deliver patient care, and things of that sort. So what's gonna be easy? What's gonna be impactful and relevant?
So that's why I say I design from the outside in. But some of that, you know, is in my time in higher ed where where you have to stakeholder the stakeholders because in higher ed, people can opt in, opt out without consequence or and or reward.
So everything you do is through influence. But, yeah, I see it from the outside, and I deliver solutions that that make the most sense for the place.
DENIS: I love that. And just to take some, a bite out of our research, employees who perceive that their leaders have the tools to help them manage change are five times more likely to feel a sense of community, six times more likely to thrive at work, ten times more likely to feel a strong sense of trust, and seventy six percent less likely to experience burnout. So you are spot on, Dana, in terms of trying to really focus your energy there.
DANA: Thanks.
DENIS: Okay. So what about outside the function? How do you kinda think about change outside of HR within the organisation? Because that's sort of less in your direct control and more, you know, more of something that you need to influence.
DANA: So when I think outside the function and driving change outside the function, is that what I hear you saying?
DENIS: Yeah.
DANA: So I think that really lends itself to tapping into your change management models and your org development skills. And when I think about the most important role, in my opinion, that allows us to drive change outside the function is the HR business partner role.
You know, I put that in at a couple different places.
And my orientation when I am hiring HR business partners and I'll give you a story. I was interviewing someone at one of the universities, and I could tell she knew HR inside and out. And, and, but there was something that wasn't working for me, you know, and I told the recruiter, I have her between the yes pile and the no pile. And I said, put her back on my calendar because I have to talk to her again.
So she came back to my office and I said, listen, I was as straight as air. I'm like, look, I have you between the yes and the no pile. And I said, I'm trying to figure out which way this is gonna go. And I said, so I just need another conversation with you.
And so as we talked, I said to her, I get it, because she was gonna be the lead HR business partner. I said, I understand where there's a gap, and that's in the OD space.
I said, but if you're willing, I can get you there.
And, she said, absolutely. Well, she said, oh my god. You just get a no and you typically don't know, and you're telling me I'm between yes and no, and I just love that. And so I said, I can get you there on the OD side because I believe every good business partner needs to know OD.
And I will tell you, you know, we need to know employee relations too to be sure, but that employee relations matter is this presenting symptom. But if you pull peel the onion back, you get to what the real symptom is. And that's when you leverage your OD skills to drive change, whether it's structure, whether it's coaching to a leader, where there needs to be leadership alignment. And so I tap into the OD skills to drive change beyond the four walls of HR.
DENIS: I love that. You know, it's funny. A lot of times, I hear some complaints about wanting a seat at the table, when it comes to HR. And when I think of HR business partners, where they can be most effective is when they're a strategic partner to, right, their businesses. I'd just love it if you have any tips for how to help maybe someone who's more junior in their role just to sort of gain that trust. Because I think at the end of the day, this whole change thing, if you don't have that trust, it's really hard to even kind of start having impact.
DANA: Right. I think it I think it's an extension of what I just mentioned earlier about the presenting problem as an employee relations matter.
But if you spend time with both the employees, if there's more than one involved, and with the manager, and you start to really diagnose what it is, then you can say, okay. I'm gonna fix this issue, and you're gonna fix it with excellence.
And it's gonna be a solution that sticks and stays. And then you start to negotiate your relationship with your client, and I think all of us should treat the people that we serve as clients. Everybody at Silver Cross is my client.
And, start to have one on one meetings if the extent to which that's possible with the client you serve, or the lead administrator.
And then you start to have a dialogue around, you know, what's going on in your organisation from a people perspective that I can help you either design, create, restructure, things of that sort. So it's that strength of the relationship with the lead client of a unit is where those very strong relationships need to be forged. But never let an employee matter be lost upon you to figure out how that can evolve into some kind of consultative solution.
And, of course, you're gonna deliver on that solution, and then you strengthen that relationship. You increase your credibility, and you also demonstrate a level of competence that the clients you serve value. And then there's a notion. You know, I worked at a firm, and I saw this up close and personal.
And I saw it with the, you know, people who work for the chairman. This whole notion of it's lonely at the top, I think rings true because I don't care what levels we are at leadership and especially at the very highest levels, people think we think we have a tendency to think we're supposed to know everything when in fact we don't. And so the extent to which you can be leveraged and used to be the trusted confidant, the person they can bounce ideas off of, or the person is gonna say, well, what about this structure? What about this design?
Or you ask really smart questions, because it's this notion of people tolerate your conclusion but act on their own. So how can you make sure you're asking really good questions so that that relationship is one that the client you serve finds invaluable, and then they start to bring you into the room, and you have a seat at the table. I don't think an employee relations matter is gonna get you a seat at the table, but it's what you do from that, that can.
DENIS: I love that. Can you say that one more time? People tolerate...
DANA: People tolerate your conclusion, but act on their own.
Now that's something I learned almost thirty years ago. Right? And so and it's true. If you ask really good questions, like, I give you the example of when we took all the frontline and people offline.
I knew which way we were going with it. Right? I could have said, well, I think we have tax. I think we have payroll, and I think which is a standardized business process replicated every time on time with zero defects, and we have HR reporting and analytics.
I knew that that's where I thought we were going. Right?
But I needed to ask them the right questions and design the experience to get them there so that they created it and they bought into it. So, yeah, when you can ask really smart questions and you're not being manipulative, you're not leading people, but you're being really smart in what you ask and by how you ask it, they will get to where you are. Mhmm. And that would be exactly where you would want them to be without you giving them answers because then they're gonna tolerate it. But if it's their answer, they're gonna live with it.
DENIS: I love that. I love that. And probably being willing to pivot along the way if there's something that really comes up that you weren't weren't expecting, but I love that.
Lots of organisations kinda have different models out there today. You know, we've got kind of, larger organisations at least have kind of groups around OD or OE that they're kinda focused around, you know, whether they're Prosci certified or or whatever. They're they're literally, change employees. That's their entire job function. And I think, the view is that if you can include them on a larger project, they're sort of like an insurance in a way to sort of make sure that the organisation is people centric.
The other kind of model is this, like, OD and HR business partner kind of combination where you're trying to sort of seed change into every aspect of the organisation. I'd just love your take on sort of, if someone's thinking about change in their environment, what do you think works best? And, you got any tips or tricks for people?
DANA: So I don't have a specific model because there's a lot of change models out there, and, there's so much research on it. I have a bias toward that HR business partner being the change consultant.
And, you know, you have organisations that have project management, PMO offices, and they deploy resources to drive projects into successful implementation, or they deploy research resources to do a change and change engagement, and then they go on to next. But the reason I lean more toward that HR partner, or professional, is because they have to live with the ideas they recommended with their client, and they have to own it. And there's an accountability there. And so that is my preferred way to deliver change and support the organisation.
They don't get a promotion in two years and then move on to something else, and then it's someone else's problem.
Right. You know? I love when we're accountable for living with the ideas and the concepts that we tee up.
DENIS: I love that. I love that. I think that's good. Any other examples you wanna bring forward?
DANA: So one of them, if I might, you know and one of them, involves you guys, you know, if if I could. Yeah. You know? And so I, you know, I, you know, I know there are a lot of people online, and I'm not gonna embarrass our hospital. But we do service anniversary recognition, and I will tell you, we give well, we gave cash.
And, and I just think that cash is really impersonal.
And not only that, we gave a nominal amount of cash and, especially if you celebrated a ten year anniversary. And then worse yet, we don't gross it up. Taxes are taken out. And so I thought this could not be. This is just, you know, terrible. So my then CEO, I said, listen. Can we pivot to a new program?
And, she was like, no. People like their cash. I'm like, oh my goodness.
Okay. They don't, but okay. And, then I went back to her and I said, listen.
Can we move to a new program? And I'm thinking about O.C. Tanner because I, you know, I used you guys in another place. And she was like, no.
They, no. They want their cash. I'm like, for ten years anniversary, I don't even think they can feed a family of four with what they need. And I'm like, you've gotta be kidding me. And so she was, she said no.
DENIS: Strong feelings.
DANA: I'm sorry?
DENIS: She had strong feelings.
Yes. She had very strong feelings. And so then I thought, okay. This is not going the way I think, we owe it to our community to support them. And, and so then I, you know, I was talking to you guys, and you guys showed me this beautiful yearbook product. I had seen the yearbook, but you showed me the McDonald's Canada project. And I'm like, oh my gosh.
Please send that to me. And you did. And you said, we'll send it to you as long as you send it back. I'm like, I will return it. And so I will never forget it. It was the beginning of August, and we have a service anniversary recognition, you know, like, five or six weeks later. And I walked in her office, and I said to her, I want to show you what I've been trying to win you over on.
And she opened it, and she said, I love it.
Let's do it, like, right now. I'm like, you mean, like, right now and delivered in six weeks right now? Are you kidding me? And, Denis, you may recall when we were having our weekly calls, you know, virtual calls, you were playing poker.
DENIS: I was playing poker.
DANA: You guys didn't think you could deliver. I didn't think we could deliver because we really took a three month project time horizon and crunched it into three weeks. And, you know, in partnership with you guys, we absolutely delivered.
And that yearbook that we have here has had so much impact. And the one thing I wanna say, someone celebrated a ten year. He told me he has nothing in his office, and we were walking around campus looking for space. And he is a IT guy, and we walked toward his office, and he meant he had nothing in his office. The only thing he had in his office was his numeral.
That was it. They came out of the yearbook kit. And then I have someone who, you know, was working for me. And since we're in a hospital, sometimes we go get appointments, and, she needed to get a CAT scan.
She said, Dana, I walked over there, and what they wanted to know was, are you the person who put in this new recognition program? And she was like, no. I came to get a CAT scan. They said, well, look at our numerals.
They're all up here. And she said, I don't really think they cared about me too much. And then the last thing I will say, our, my boss, our new president, just celebrated his fifth year service anniversary here.
And, I launched the process for him because I wanted to really because this book has all these beautiful comments and pictures and things of that sort. He literally, two weeks ago, walked in my office, and he said, I absolutely love this yearbook from O.C. Tanner. He said, I just think it is amazing.
And I said, I'm so glad that you like it, and I want you to set the expectations that all leaders launch it exactly as you see your book, presentation.
And so, you know, you never miss an opportunity to strike while the iron's hot. And I'm like, oh, so does that mean we can migrate the retirement program to this O.C. Tanner solution? He said, do they have that? I said, yes.
He said, well, let's do it. And so I would be remiss if I didn't say, you know, in addition to me driving change and talent acquisition, you know, we've redefined relationships with almost every single benefit vendor that we have. And if it wasn't the firm, then we took people off of our project off of our account because they weren't servicing us. We've also been fortunate to be able to partner with you guys to redesign recognition, and I know our employees give us credit for that.
So I have to you know, you didn't pay me to bring that up, but I gotta tell you the partnership that we have with you guys and and what you've delivered to our community has been beyond a shadow of a doubt, one of the most impactful things that I think that I can say I'm proud of and that we've done.
DENIS: I appreciate that, Dana. I got I got a couple thoughts there.
One, we do a one and a three year anniversary, and I totally get what your CEO was was feeling. Because until you receive that experience, yourself, it is really hard to fathom exactly what that means to someone. It's really a special moment that matters. And, so I'm glad he had such a great experience and I'm glad that so many of your employees are having those experiences, every day.
The second thing I'll just say just to try to tie that in with, the change conversation we've been having is that we found that ninety two percent of employees at organisations with an integrated recognition program believe change in general to be positive. And I find that so striking that, including recognition consistently can really help change that culture, create that healthy culture where change is viewed as something to aspire to or something to embrace versus, you know, we've all been in those jobs where nobody wants to change anything because this is how we've always done it.
So thank you for that experience, and for sharing that experience with us.
DANA: Sure.
DENIS: In fact, I might go just a little bit further and say that employees at organisations with highly integrated recognition are significantly more likely to feel that they have adequate support to deal with change, believe leaders have the tools they need to help employees with change, increase trust in the organisation, believe that the organisation cares about employees, and think that change is managed well. So lots of really fun, positive things when you kind of combine those two pieces together.
DANA: And let me be clear.
I'm most proud of what this work, we still have work to do. We do quite a bit of recognition at Silver Cross. We do all year round. And we have to make sure it is truly integrated and that people see it for what it is, that it's a form of recognition. I think we have a better opportunity to market it and truly drive integration, because even in our engagement survey, they're like, we want more recognition, so we still have some work to do.
DENIS: No. That's that's a great call out, but I think you guys are on the journey, as we all are on our recognition journey, trying to figure out those low hanging fruits first and then slowly trying to adapt.
You know, I think culture is more like the bonsai tree than we want to admit, and you can't just, you know, try harder to make it make it positive. So, no. Excellent, Dana. And any other thoughts for you? Otherwise, I'd like to to turn it back over to Raven to, do some Q&A, but I wanna give you the last word, Dana.
DANA: No. I just, I love being able to have this opportunity.
And if, you know, if I think about the sweet spot of any business, I really think it's in HR.
And, because every day is a new adventure for sure, and I think the work we do is impactful.
And it just strengthens who we are and the professionals that we are. And so I wouldn't trade, I would never go back to HR. I mean, to to operations, because I just think that this is where it's at in terms of being able to drive change and and and doing it meaningfully.
MODERATOR: Awesome. Thank you so much, Dana and Denis. We have a lot of great questions. So let's see how many we can get through. First of all, the people demand that you repeat that wonderful saying, the people tolerate saying, could you say that one more time?
DANA: Yeah. Sure. People tolerate and I got it from Root Learning. Root, I think they might have been bought, but this is back in the nineties.
And I learned it from this person. His name was Randy Root. He founded Root Learning and learning maps were, there's a huge, beautiful learning maps and they were learning experiences and it was more self guided with employees. And the one thing he said when we were thinking about engaging him, you know, when I was in telecommunications, he said, and it stuck with me, people tolerate your conclusion, but they act on their own.
People tolerate your conclusion, but they act on their own. So the best opportunity is to ask really good questions to get them.
MODERATOR: That is so great. And I think applicable to lots of areas in in life, not even just in the workplace.
Oh, absolutely.
Kind of along those lines, someone asked how do you build the ability to ask smart questions within your team and even in yourself?
DANA: Oh, gosh. That's a really good question.
Well, so, you know, who I am, right, I sit in this HR job and, you know, I sometimes do things like this, but, you know, practically speaking, I am introverted by nature and so I'm always thinking and processing.
And, it's through observation, trying to synthesise what you're hearing even though it might be technical and then having the courage to just put a question out there. Let me let me say why I say having the courage. If I think about probably my first six to ten years of my career, I would formulate these questions. I would think about statements, but, you know, what I did, I limited myself and I held myself back. Right? And so if there's any of you out there, just put it out there and just ask a question because I really do believe that there's no dumb question.
And, even if there is a question that's a little odd, you can recover. But it's really about how are you processing real time, how are you synthesizing, and then sometimes you may just ask a rhetorical question to say, do I have this right? And then the more you do it, the better you get at it, because you're still in the process. When you think about asking questions, you're collecting data. And when you're collecting data, it allows you to ask more questions. But the one thing I will say is just start doing it, and there's no real lesson unless, Denis, you know some research that tells you how you develop that skill.
Come from a place of curiosity. And if you come from a place of curiosity, it's going to want you to ask more questions so that you can learn and be at your best.
DENIS: I love that, Dana. I love the be curious because I think if you're asking I think it's always scariest to ask your clients questions because it makes it look like you might not know what you're doing. Right. If you're basing that in business acumen or understanding their job, like you said, we don't have to know what like, everything in the whole entire world. Right?
So I love that. And the other thought I had was just going out to your outer circle. So if there are people that are maybe in a completely different organisation or they're doing something completely different and sort of asking them. I feel like that's a lower risk way to get some answers and some feedback without, you know, maybe having the pressure on with that one person that might not be totally on board with the initiative that you're trying to deliver.
DANA: I agree. And even if you, like I told you, the long serving HR VP is here. He sits next to me in our executive staff meeting.
Health care is really technical, and sometimes they ask they say all these acronyms and things of that sort.
Every week, I will lean over and said, what does that mean? He'll say, I don't know. You know? And so I might whisper it to him.
Right? Or sometimes I just ask the whole group. I don't even care. You know? Sometimes we hold ourselves back and then someone if I ask the whole group, someone else will say, I was wondering the same thing.
So just do it. And I do agree sometimes I'll go privately and say to someone, ask them a question, say, am I thinking about this the right way? Right? Because they can help me think better, but just do it.
And the more you do it, the better you get at it. And I meant what I said that I would come up with a solution, come up with an answer, have a question. I was too bashful to put it out there. And then thirty minutes later, someone would ask the same thing, and they would look brilliant.
I'm like, girl, knock it off. You know, use your voice.
Stop holding yourself back. And I gotta believe that there's some people who are on in this webinar or podcast that are holding themselves back, and let it be a lesson learned. Don't do to you what I did to me the earlier part of my career.
MODERATOR: That is a great, great lesson.
Here's a really interesting question. This person says that they've loved learning about your career journey through LinkedIn and the stories that you shared today.
And as a fellow higher education slash student affairs educator turned corporate trainer and leadership educator, Could you speak to how you intentionally centered yourself through self care or lifelong learning or practicing resilience while leading organisational change management?
DANA: Gosh. That's a lot. Read it one more time, and then I'll figure out.
MODERATOR: Yes. Yeah.
How do you intentionally centre yourself, whether that's through self care Yeah.
Or curiosity and lifelong learning, resilience while leading organisations through change moments?
DANA: Yeah. So, you know, you know, I'm gonna use the pandemic as an example because I thought about that. You know, that was, like, our worst nightmare. But when I think about it from an HR perspective, it was the best action learning experience we could have ever had.
Because every day, we were called upon to do something new and different. I would wake up today and say, when you go to work today, what are you gonna make up? Because there was no roadmap, right? And so in terms of getting through that, and that was really stressful, in terms of centering myself, you know, I would just take a pause and just be still.
Because in that moment where it was such the unknown, I just needed to quiet my mind to prepare for what was ahead of me. And I think it's where I draw my energy.
And so whether it was just to be still, sort of meditate, maybe read a book, and then sometimes I watch really bad TV just to really just suspend all of what I'm required to do daily.
And I think that's what really keeps me grounded. And then I have some hobbies and things of that sort.
And I think we need to disconnect, in order to come back better, you know, every single day of every single week that we're at work. That might not be the best answer, but it's my answer, and it's it's what I do, to keep me grounded.
MODERATOR: I love that. The whole idea of filling your own cup so that you can serve other people. Yeah. Absolutely.
I think we have one more question.
Two people asked kind of a variation of this. I think they're interested in kind of more of the nuts and bolts of how you approached that co-creation facilitative discussion with your frontline workers.
DANA: So so this is gonna be boring, but let me tell you what we did. We took them offline, and I had these post it notes. And then I intentionally said, okay. If this is a, I wanna list everything we do.
And if it's, like, deals with money, put it on this green post it note. Right? And then I'm like, if it deals with the life cycle of the employee from onboarding all the way through transition transaction, I said, put it on a blue post it note. And if it deals with tax, put it on a red post it note.
Right? So we had all these post it notes all over the room, and that's when we started to, from a facilitation perspective, say, oh my god. What are all these red things? Oh, what do you call these?
And we literally said, oh, that looks like taxes. Oh my god. That's right. This green, you know, this is all money.
I'm like, oh, might that be payroll? And then when it was these blue post it notes, it was like, oh, these are all these transactions. I'm like, well, in my former life, we call that HR operations. And we're like, yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. And so we had the employees doing all these post it notes. They were all around the room.
We had them cluster cluster them, and then we had them in sub teams trying to figure out how to theme it out. And that's what we did, and that's how we went in there and we walked out with a a new design and new nomenclature to call these functions what they were. So that's some of them. It was a facilitated conversation, and, and we were standing up the whole time all around the room.
So that was some of the nuts and bolts.
But never underestimate the power of a well used Post it note. Absolutely. Can do a lot of good work and a lot of co-creation.
MODERATOR: Absolutely.
I just wanna thank you both again for walking us through that conversation today and to everybody who attended and submitted such great questions. Here are your codes if you are interested in getting HRCI or SHRM credit.
And we hope to see you at our next webinar in August with speaker, best selling author, and workplace strategist, Erica Keswin. We also have a second June webinar that will be happening later this month, where we'll be talking all about the state of recognition. It's a new research report from our O.C. Tanner Institute folks. So we hope to see you there. Thanks for joining.
DANA: Thanks, you guys, for the invitation.
DENIS: Appreciate it.
