Ep. 123: Tracy Jackson - Training and Culture Gap

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


FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPTMitch:
(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 ...