Ep. 123: Tracy Jackson - Training and Culture Gap

Contact Tracy Jackson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tracydjackson/

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Mitch: (00:00)
 Welcome back to Count Me In, IMA's podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. This is your host Mitch Roshong and I'm here to bring you episode 123 of our series. Many businesses have had difficulty and/or needed to adapt to the way they onboard, train, and culturally integrate new hires following the lockdown and virtual shift to the business landscape. To explain how organizations can overcome these challenges and better help their employees become and remain part of the team, Tracey Jackson joined my co-host Adam for a conversation about the training and culture gap. Tracey is an engaging and energetic financial and accounting executive who serves as the CFO at CVR Energy. With over 25 years of experience across corporate finance, risk management, accounting, IT, and FP&A, she has developed extensive team building and change enablement skills. Keep listening for her insight as we head over to their conversation now.

Adam: (01:03)
Onboarding is something that can be very difficult with or without a lockdown. How has that impacted entry-level employees, especially?

Tracey: (01:18)
I think it's been another challenge on top of something that's already very challenging for organizations. Organizations, some do this very well, although not many, and some have continued to struggle with it even though there've been so many studies that show that getting someone hooked into the organization and integrated into the culture is part, the first step in successful retention. And I think the pandemic just gave us a curveball on something that was already very difficult to achieve. I can say that we've done some things very well and we've continued to fumble in a lot of different areas and the prep work that I did for the podcast actually gave me a lot of things to think about in terms of what we can do better. Specifically, a lot of our new hires come in on day one to the office even though quite a few of our employees are still at least on a split schedule, 50/50, and there was a lot of appreciation for that moment where they're in the office and they can see what the home office looks like, get their badge, hear about the company's goals and objectives in an onboarding session that HR hosts, meeting with their boss, if their boss is in the office beyond that, when people have received that initial landing, sending them back out over the last 12 months to work from home for an undetermined amount of time is where we really had to swiftly adjust. And I can say across the entire organization, we've done some of that well, and some of that not so well. The things that have been successful, I used to do a monthly luncheon with all of our new hires. It doesn't matter what level of the organization you are, I just felt like it was important to sit down with me and demystify the executive leadership team a little bit and talk about us as people and how we feel about the organization, what's going well, talk about our industry and I had to transition away from that obviously, and what I replaced it with was a webcast, that we do. And we haven't really been hiring as many people, so we haven't done it every single month, but every other month or so we get all the new hires are invited to a webcast with me and they can ask whatever questions they would like to ask of me about my personal life. I'm very, I'm an open book so, and I'm a divorcee and I have three cats so I might be a crazy cat lady, but, you know, really just making sure they know that we're all human and that we're real people because they don't even see us now. At least before I could go down to one of the floors that my folks were on and wander around and they could lay eyes on me, but now all they hear is my voice. If we talk on a conference call or on the phone for something, and then quarterly at our town hall meetings, which also had to change format, we used to do those in person and now we do a webcast for those. So lots and lots of challenges with just helping people feel like they've actually joined a new company and a new culture and understanding, why we do what we do and what our values are.

Adam: (04:52)
Yeah it's gone from having that personal touch of the face-to-face to a phone call or seeing somebody's face in that little box on the screen, you really lose that human connection. So you have trouble feeling like you're a part of the organization now.

Tracey: (05:05)
Now one of the comments that I got from someone was that they, now that they're back in the office, this individual has their own office so they can shut the door on and so they feel safe, so they're here quite a bit and then as the staff that are in cubes have been rotating in and out, they've been trying to introduce themselves to these people that they've maybe never seen before and they've been startled to find that these are actually individuals, some of them, that they've had extensive conversations on projects, but they had no idea what they looked like. So it's definitely changing the way that we interact with each other and form our persona of people because when you only have a voice paint your own picture, and when you see somebody in person, you have so many more cues as to what really makes up that individual.

Adam: (05:57)
You know, you've already mentioned some of the things that your organization has done. What are some of the things that you can do to help these employees? Because even when you're in person, we lose the facial cues because our faces are covered up by a mask.

Tracey: (06:12)
Right, and this gets to just a personal philosophy. I have found that our productivity shifting from a hundred percent in the office to nearly a hundred percent out of the office was not negatively affected. If anything, we may have been more productive and my personal opinion about why that is, there's less water cooler talk, which is not necessarily a good thing, but it sure does take away from wasted time. And you, we didn't have hardly any HR issues over the last year like we would have had in the past, because we didn't have cube mates bickering over things and we didn't have silly HR scuffles that we had to deal with. They were bigger picture issues about caring for a sick loved one and how did that impact their work schedule when they're at home. And so anyway, my personal opinion is that we have to make this adaptation on a permanent basis because efficiency and productivity and lease space and all of those things, companies are going to figure out, I can save a ton of money if I don't have to lease five floors in a building. And so, things that we can do to help bring them into the fold, I think really fall to the individual's manager and the individuals commitment to come into the fold. A lot of the past has been the expectation that companies feed new employees, copious amounts of opportunities to learn and integrate and interact and become a part of the culture and do networking events and volunteer events and that dynamic, that entire landscape is gone now. And so one, we have to train our managers better about the importance of bringing someone into the fold. And two, we have to express our expectation that the employee has an obligation also to buy into the new way and be willing to do, whether it's webcast events with their entire teams. And we all, I think at this point, everybody has a camera. Whether it's on your computer or not, you still have your phone and nearly everybody has a phone with a camera on it at this point. So participate on webcasts and help demystify what people look like. Don't get on a webcast and not show your face because we don't know what you ...