Transcript

Voiceover:

Chamberlain Group is proud to announce that we've been voted as one of WayUp's Top 100 internship programs of 2022, alongside other companies such as Boeing, Adobe, and Twitter.

At Chamberlain Group, we create opportunities for interns to fully experience our culture and work on projects that are meaningful to our business.

We have intern positions in fields like sales, marketing, engineering, IT, and many more.

We take pride in the real-life work experience that is offered to every intern that comes through our door.

If you are someone you know is interested in applying for an internship, we are taking applications for the summer of 2023.

Head to chamberlain group.com/internship.

Colin Uthe:

Welcome to Connected, a podcast about the operations and the people of Chamberlain Group. I'm Colin Uthe, and this month, we're exploring a component that is crucial to nearly every business on the planet. I'm talking, of course, about human resources, responsible for not only the entire employee life cycle but also benefits, training, culture, even conflict resolution. Leaders everywhere seek HR guidance through the good, the bad, and the ugly of their organization. Today, we're just going to talk about the good.

Earlier this month, I sat down with Juli Prizant and Edwin Giboyeaux to highlight some of the incredible functions that the Chamberlain Group HR team has established, along with some brand-new and upcoming functions that are getting attention from our leaders. Julie was acquired by Chamberlain Group earlier this year, and she's got a career's worth of HR experience under her belt. She started off working for other organizations, helping them staff upper management positions. A short while after that, she began running her own consulting business and eventually found herself back in the corporate environment specializing in talent functions, and she hasn't looked back.

Juli Prizant:

My current title is Vice President of Talent Management and Organizational Effectiveness. Basically, I am responsible for anything that is around talent and the people. How we bring them in, talent acquisition, how we develop them, talent management, learning and training opportunities, learning and development, diversity, equity and inclusion, and university relations, and engagement.

Colin Uthe:

I would think that when you mentioned talent, I think it starts and ends with talent acquisition, but it's obviously a lot more in detail than that.

Juli Prizant:

Right. It's the entire employee lifecycle.

Colin Uthe:

Edwin has been with Chamberlain Group for over 10 years. Before joining us here, he worked as an industrial engineer and secured the title of General Manager. Because of his well-rounded experience and familiarity with the industrial environment, Edwin was offered the role of HR director at that company, which he happily accepted. He eventually left that role, took a job with Chamberlain Group, and the rest is history. Edwin sounds a bit different than myself or Julie because he did this interview from his office at the Nogales plant, while Julie and I recorded from Oak Brook.

Edwin Giboyeaux:

I'm the Director of Human Resources for Manufacturing. Our manufacturing facility's located in Nogales, Mexico.

Colin Uthe:

So you oversee just about everything HR related in Nogales?

Edwin Giboyeaux:

Yes. Matter of fact, I'm in my department, I have about 150 plus employees. We go from cafeteria, responsible for cafeteria, responsible for HR, employee relations, communications, environmental health, and safety. We have a daycare, we have a clinic, and also, I have our perimeter security staff reports into our HR department.

Colin Uthe:

Edwin, what do you do outside of work? What do you do for fun?

Edwin Giboyeaux:

One of the things that I do, I play in a Latin jazz salsa band.

Colin Uthe:

Nice.

Edwin Giboyeaux:

I play percussion. And I also play tennis, which I enjoy also. And I started learning golf, which I am a little frustrated right now with the golf.

Colin Uthe:

How long you been golfing for?

Edwin Giboyeaux:

I would say, I've gone to play golf maybe four times in my life. So, yeah, there's a lot of opportunity for improvement there. Continuous improvement, for sure.

Colin Uthe:

All right, Julie, I'm going to come back to you. What do you do outside of work?

Juli Prizant:

I'm actually a jewelry designer.

Colin Uthe:

Really?

Juli Prizant:

I'm a metalsmith on the side.

Colin Uthe:

No kidding.

Juli Prizant:

And, yeah. So I work with a lot of raw gemstones, precious metals, and create differently... It's my outlet, it's my catharsis.

Colin Uthe:

Do you have a portfolio at all I can see your jewelry?

Juli Prizant:

Yeah, yeah, I do. I haven't updated it in a while because we just moved and I had to reset up my studio. Long story.

Colin Uthe:

This year, Chamberlain Group began to adopt a goal-setting methodology known as objectives and key results, or OKRs for short. OKRs are a powerful tool that help an organization build specific and measurable actions to achieve a larger goal.

Earlier in the summer, our CEO Jeff Meredith unveiled three OKRs for himself, and subsequently the rest of the business.

Juli Prizant:

There is a palpable sense of enthusiasm and excitement right now at Chamberlain. We're going through a lot of transformation, and we want to harness that, right? And we want to continue to harvest it, I guess. So we've introduced a framework that helps us create a stronger connection to purpose, right? Aligning people to the work that matters the most. And by doing this and by being very transparent about it, it actually connects everybody through the organization, right? Jeff has been very open about what his objectives are, and one of them happens to be around rapidly improving the employee experience.

Colin Uthe:

Human resources finds themselves center stage for the third and final objective: to create an employee experience and environment where our one team thrives professionally and personally. This objective has three smaller, more specific goals attached to it that will help us stay on track with the big picture.

We will fill open roles within the business. We will define our expectations of leadership, and then train all of our people managers to that degree. And last but not least, we'll reduce employee attrition by a measurable amount. It's up to Julie and Edwin, along with the rest of HR, to figure out the most effective way to meet these goals.

Juli Prizant:

So if we're trying to reduce attrition, right, and that is one of the key results that Jeff has, Gina is going to have an OKR around that. I have one around that. My team has something around that. So we're all connected, we're all aligning to the same vision, right? And there's a lot of different work that we're doing around that. It might be around recognition, right? One-team MVP. It might be around different ways of connecting with each other and communication channels. It might be around with the work that the BRGs are doing. It might be around development opportunities, right? It might be around training people, leaders.

Colin Uthe:

There's not too many barriers here. Julie and Edwin have to keep employees here by showing them that it's a great place to work. So, they do what they do best. They connect with people.

The cultures of our largest facilities are diverse from one another, so a good idea to support employees in one place may not work as well in another. Because of this, human resources makes a great effort to understand and fulfill the employee needs of each individual location.

Edwin Giboyeaux:

With everything, onboarding is critical, to make sure that the employee that's coming in and the employees that are here understand a whole spectrum of what the organization has to offer. And I think that we have success because there's a level of trust, that we listen to our employees, and that we try to do the best as we can to put some of those programs that are important to the employee as well as the organization. One of the programs that we have here, for example, Gemba Kaizen, our employees give us ideas from safety to quality to efficiency or how to do things better, and we get over 30,000 ideas from these employees.

Colin Uthe:

For a little background, Gemba Kaizen is a methodology for continuous improvement in the workplace, and Edwin's team periodically surveys the plant employees for advice on how the plant can be a better place to work. Taking in these ideas requires manpower. It's a lot of work for Edwin's team to process every idea and give it the attention it was promised.

Edwin Giboyeaux:

Some people look at the road and see something in the road and sees it as an obstacle. We don't see it as an obstacle. We need to look at it as an opportunity. And once you change that mindset and start looking at opportunities instead of problems, we become that much more efficient in making sure that we're developing our mindset to contribute to the organization.

Juli Prizant:

Yeah. So if we are all connected and aligned to a common purpose, we can have conversations with each other about what we're trying to do. It's transparent, right? So it's easy for me to be able to talk to my team about what we're trying to accomplish and what those potential obstacles are, or opportunities are, to remove those in advance. At the same time, the voice of the employee is critically important. Think about the work we just did around our values. It would've been really easy for us to be able to say, "Hey, guys, this group of people here is going to define what our values are. Go." We didn't do that. We said, "We want to hear from our employees. We want our employees to let us know and to hear their voice on what our value should be." And that's what we've done. It's a cool statement.

Colin Uthe:

There's confidence in employees and managers alike, that the programs we offer or are planning to offer will give real value to the people receiving it.

Juli Prizant:

I think that there are multiple channels that have been in place that maybe aren't as well recognized, and I think there are some new channels coming soon to a theater near you, right? I think that there are some that are going to be local, locally specific, but I think that there are some that are more enterprise-wide or global, right? If you think about some of the work that our BRGs, our business resource groups are doing, you don't have to be a woman to be part of the women's network or a person of color to be part of POKA, right? It's about connecting people with each other. It's employee-led, it's volunteer.

There's been some work done recently where we hosted a webinar with DePaul University about activating allyship in the workplace. We also had something recently here last month, in fact, June, actually, it's two months ago, June, where we did a music and mingle, right? It was an opportunity for people to come back to the office and celebrate with each other. And then last week, we had the carnival. Those are some local types of opportunities.

We also have ways of connecting with our leadership. I mean, Jeff hosts a Meet the CEO within 90 days of somebody's start with the organization, which is kind of a cool thing. I mean, how many people get to meet the CEO and have coffee with them 90 days after they start?

Colin Uthe:

That's what sets the metric, though, is that Jeff wants to make sure that he has one of those within 90 days of everybody starting.

Juli Prizant:

Yeah, and it's awesome. And other ELT members host coffee chats too, not just about learning about Chamberlain and stuff like that, but also getting to know people personally. There are some other employee-driven conversations that are happening as well. Things are happening all over this world that impact people in very different ways. So it's important that we're able to listen to each other and talk to each other and respect each other. And so, those things are being created as well, and that just builds engagement and improves the employee experience.

Colin Uthe:

The Nogales HR team offers some programs and services that are different from the Chicago land area but are equally, if not more important to their employees.

Edwin Giboyeaux:

One of the programs that we have that for some time now has been built around safety. Safety for us is really critical. We want our employees that come in here, that work in the manufacturing facility, we're about 650,000 square foot, and we have a lot of equipment that's in here. We want to make sure that that employee that comes to work for us, that they understand that they're safe and that they go back home with the same health or even better than when they left in the morning. That's not the only thing we do. We have a package of benefits that we give to our employees. We have a subsidized cafeteria. We have a dedicated clinic, a clinic that's here, not even a half a block away, that is specifically dedicated to the employee and their family. We actually saw over 18,000 appointments for our employees and their family members.

There's no other company here in Nogales that has that type of a benefit for the employees. We have a daycare, which we have about 150 of our employees' children that go to that daycare from, I think it's six weeks to four years. Just to give you an insight, we have employees here that met, got married, had a kid, had that child participate in our daycare system. They grew up, they came to work for Chamberlain, they're married and they have their children in the daycare system. So we've been in Nogales for over 50 years. I could give you some other examples. We have wellness program, we have scholarship program. We have a beautiful cafeteria that we service more than 1.7 million meals a year. That's a lot of cows.

Colin Uthe:

And the food is good too.

Edwin Giboyeaux:

That's a lot of fish. And the food is good. I've been here 10 years and I put on about 40 pounds, which is, it's not a good statement, but I'm looking forward to losing a little bit of weight.

Colin Uthe:

Something that's popular in all of our locations but wasn't mentioned during this interview is employee wellness. For US employees, Chamberlain Group offers an annual well-being incentive that can be achieved by completing a variety of activities, including physical fitness tracking, group 5Ks, attending a wellness seminar, even going to the doctor contributes to your incentive. HR put in a lot of effort to ensure that this incentive is achievable and accessible to anyone who wants to earn it. Along with the wellbeing program, Chamberlain Group organizes sports leagues, both in the US and Mexico for anyone that wants to join.

Edwin Giboyeaux:

So here we have internal sports, basketball, and volleyball, those are our number one and two we have internally, and we also do municipal. But we also have sports for our employees' children, for soccer. So we have various means. We have, not officially, but we have some mountain bike aficionados, and they go on bike runs In the mountains here of Nogales, which is always exciting. And so we do have opportunities for our employees to let loose and have a competitive sportsmanship.

One thing I would like to say, maybe I'll say this really quick. When I used to work in Costa Rica as a General Manager, I was selected for the basketball team, and I was the Michael Jordan in Costa Rica, I have to say. I mean, I was the one with the real deal. So when I came here to Mexico at our Nogales facility and they had a basketball team, I wanted to play with them and they selected me. I have to say, the folks here know how to play basketball. I actually played two minutes and that's it. I never played again because these folks here at Nogales, they are really good.

So it's a good experience. I think that our employees really do enjoy the extracurricular activities that we do here. We're going to find some more, and we're going to continue to listen to their inputs so that maybe we could do something a little bit different going forward.

Colin Uthe:

Like other engagement channels, HR is listening for what employees really want and aligning it with the business. In recent years, a niche working scenario has now come to the mainstream, something about a deadly virus keeping people in their houses. I don't remember the details. What I do know is that our employees asked for it, and we provided a formal work-from-home policy. Engaging our full-time work-from-home employees is a necessity.

Juli Prizant:

Yeah. I mean, I think that there's different avenues and different channels that we try to leverage to make sure that onboarding people virtually has been something that a lot of companies have had to struggle with and have had to deal with over the past few years. That's no surprise. I think that we've done a great job bridging that gap in terms of, we're very conscious and aware of the fact that maybe everybody in the room isn't in the room, like in this particular situation, Edwin is not in the room, right? But we're able to have a very engaging conversation and we are able to bring people along, in onboarding new employees, in meetings and things of that nature.

Colin Uthe:

There's a technology investment.

Juli Prizant:

There is a technology investment. Yes, absolutely. And there is actually, you have to be very aware of it, right, and very conscious of it. How am I going to bring on a new employee, have them assimilate and acclimate appropriately so that they're developing the relationship, so they're making the connections internally, so they are engaged? It's one thing to be satisfied, it's another thing to be engaged, and I think that's the thing that you got to keep at the forefront of your mind.

Going back to the Talent Hub, there's also tools and resources to help people understand how to do that. We've got the BRG groups. We have some new channels that are coming out very soon to help employees connect with each other on a more frequent nature, based upon the conversations that they want to have.

Colin Uthe:

And on top of that, we, you're right, we have made a serious effort to make people feel included when they're in the room and when they're not in the room. So we've made technical investments in both locations, lot more video conferencing stuff in the works. That's something that I was directly responsible for. Still a long ways to go though. Hybrid is hard.

Juli Prizant:

Hybrid is hard.

Colin Uthe:

People feel, yeah, it's much easier to have everybody completely virtual or completely in-person.

Juli Prizant:

It's interesting because, for example, our interns and our co-ops are about to do their end-of-season presentations. Most people will be in the room. There will be people who are also going to be there virtually. And what a great opportunity for everybody to be able to see the work that our interns and our co-ops are doing, right? But that wasn't, having that capability, that technology to allow them to be able to do that and to be able to present to a broader group, I think is really critical.

Colin Uthe:

So far, most of what we've talked about on this episode is geared toward a single key result from our CEO, which is to give our employees a reason to stick around and improve retention. While there are many other functions to reduce the open headcount and continue training our leaders, I wanted to highlight that Julie's team, specifically Claire Parkinson and Kenny Lentine, launched a portal on our employee website called the One Team Talent Hub, which effectively and gracefully hits all three of Jeff's key results, a silver bullet for improving the employee experience.

Juli Prizant:

One of the things that I noticed when I first got here was there were a lot of people saying, "Gosh, I don't know what's next for me." And we have a lot of material, we have a lot of programs, we have a lot of resources that are available for people to explore and own their own career. But the problem is, is that it was very difficult to navigate through that. And maybe once you found something, what do you do with it, right, and how do you do it? So we worked on curating a place where employees can go, where managers can go to sort of investigate and explore their own career options.

Edwin Giboyeaux:

It's a place where you get a lot of great information concerning leadership development, career learning, actually use some of the templates to make you think and jot down and write down some of the things that you want to do short-term and long-term. It's almost like going to a department store and right when you walk in, you could look at a monitor and see where you want to go and go straight there instead of walking through the whole store.

Colin Uthe:

How does the Talent Hub help employees specifically? So someone like me, I don't have anybody that reports to me.

Juli Prizant:

It's a place for you to go, as Edwin said, where there's a lot of different resources. So what is it that you're interested in? Where are you in your career? Perhaps, I mean, Colin, if I'm not mistaken, you moved from one area in the organization to another area in the organization.

Colin Uthe:

I did.

Juli Prizant:

What an awesome story that is, and wouldn't it be nice if it was easy for our employees to be able to investigate what those options are? That's what it can do for employees. And it can also help us figure out how do we have the conversations with our managers that we want to. So I may want to apply for a different job. I may have to tell you as my manager that I want to apply for a different job. It's not you, it's my type of conversation. But how do I do that so it's comfortable for me to have that conversation with you, to talk to you about my career aspirations?

Colin Uthe:

How does the Talent Hub benefit managers specifically?

Juli Prizant:

I think from a manager's perspective, there's a couple of different things. There's the self, how do I continue to develop my leadership capabilities? And there's the conversations that you're having with your employees. How do I provide the right kind of feedback? How do I have the right kinds of conversations around career development? How do I continue to develop my leadership skills? And then also from a hiring perspective. I'm looking to hire somebody, what do I do now? What's my role and how important is my role in the hiring process? How do I put together the right interviewing team? What kind of questions should I ask to evaluate and assess candidates as they're coming through? So, there's all kinds of tools out there for that.

Colin Uthe:

And that's a good segue because my next question I was going to ask is, how does the Talent Hub benefit recruiters, specifically people looking for talent?

Juli Prizant:

Yeah, so that's a really good question, and when I think about that, I think about two things. Recruiters are employees, so they can look at the same things that anybody would look for. But I actually think it helps to, as they're talking to candidates externally, to be able to talk about what tools and resources we have for our employees once you join here, right? So most people don't come to an organization to just do what's in the job description. They're coming to join a culture, to be able to be part of a broader team, right? And what tools and resources do we provide them in their journey as an employee with that organization?

So I think it's part of a tool that could be used to help talk to candidates. I also think that, from an interviewing perspective, there's training in there and there's development around interviewing best practices and things of that nature.

Colin Uthe:

The One Team Talent Hub is available now for all Chamberlain Group employees through All Access Online.

It takes a special person to work in human resources. They need to be upfront and authentic to build trust with their peers. They need the cutting edge to get involved in a conflict and the tenderness to resolve it. They need the empathy to hear out an employee's struggle and the passion to do something about it. They need every value that embodies Chamberlain Group to engage our one team.

Before ending our interview, I asked Julie and Edwin both to describe their favorite part of the respective office's culture.

Edwin Giboyeaux:

I think there is a sense of being genuine, trying to do the best that we can because we're all in one team and we're all trying to achieve the same thing. And sometimes, we disagree and we may get into a hard conversation, which I think that's good. I think it's good for people to have difficult conversations, and I think that the organization here is equipped to rebound and get back on the horse per se, or get back to the objective, and then March towards the objective that we're trying to get to.

Colin Uthe:

You have such a strong community and family orientation down there, and that's not going away anytime soon. I love that. Okay. Julie, what's your favorite part about the Chicago land culture?

Juli Prizant:

So, there's a few things. First of all, like I said before, there is a palpable sense of energy and enthusiasm about what we're doing. You can't manufacture that, right? It is what it is. I think that the people here are very, there's a high level of collaboration and excitement for other people's successes. So it is kind of a one-team culture. I love the work that we're doing. I love the direction the company's going in, and I love the leadership. It's a very inclusive leadership and it's a very transparent leadership.

It's not all that common where the CEO will stand up and tell you exactly like it is straight from his heart and straight from his head, and that's not unique to him. That is something that transcends, I think, to our leadership in general, and to our people in general. So I think it's important. I love the organization and the direction.

Colin Uthe:

Thank you both so much for sitting down with me for longer than we were expecting, but we had a lot of good topics to discuss.

Juli Prizant:

Thank you very much for inviting us.

Edwin Giboyeaux:

Colin, man. Thank you. Thank you.

Colin Uthe:

Thank you for listening. Tune in next month to hear more stories that reveal how all of us at Chamberlain Group are connected.

This episode was written, recorded, and edited by me, Colin Uthe. Our producer is Thomas Missoula. Our music was supplied by pixabay.com. Special thanks to Gina Francis and the Chamberlain Group Corporate Communications Team.