Taking HR From Paper-first to People-first with Tracie Sponenberg
Angela R Howard (00:01.522)
Hey Tracy, welcome to the podcast, how are you today?
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (00:04.418)
Thanks, Angela, I'm great, how are you? It's nice to be able to say great, I feel like I said that for a long time and didn't mean it, but I mean it today.
Angela R Howard (00:07.009)
I
Angela R Howard (00:13.098)
Yeah, me too, me too. I just got back from a vacation, a long weekend away. So I am recharged. I'm in the same place as you are. I'm doing great. Feels like a Monday, but it's a Tuesday since I'm coming back.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (00:26.646)
I know. I hope you had a good weekend. I went away Saturday night and got home Sunday and all day Sunday. I thought it was Saturday, which was disappointing.
Angela R Howard (00:31.282)
Thank you.
Angela R Howard (00:38.25)
Well, you know, when you do the work you love every day can be a weekend, right? I think we have these arbitrary rules around Saturdays and Sundays. But anywho, it's great to be with you today. Thank you so much for taking the time this morning and sharing your thoughts on this podcast. I would love for you to just tell us a little bit more about your story, Tracy, who you are, and the impact you're looking to make on the world.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (00:45.522)
Right. Right.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (01:02.502)
Yeah. Great. Well, thank you so much for having me, Angela. And I'm grateful to our mutual friend, our mutual buddy, Josh Dreen for hooking us up because I've learned a lot from you and I am super honored to be here. So, um, I, it's funny, we talked about this before I, uh, listened to your episode with Joey Price and I adore Joey and he said, well, nobody's
you know, went into HR and middle school or wanted to go into HR and middle school or high school. And I did, which is really sort of strange, I think. But I had an aunt who was in the fields and I thought that kind of personnel, which it was at the time, mashed my love for business and people and psychology, which is what I ended up studying. I was like in college, really kind of blended them all. So I went in intentionally.
Angela R Howard (01:35.561)
Hmm.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (01:57.07)
And stayed all the way through without ever a thought. And what I've done and how I approach work and all of that has changed. And I grew up in a very, uh, traditional way of learning HR, which was the compliance driven, everything was for the company. Um, people were, I don't want to say numbers because I don't think I ever treated people like numbers, but more like that more corporate, even though I worked in a lot of smaller places. And then about.
Angela R Howard (02:19.23)
Mm.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (02:26.414)
10 years ago, I had a shift in my approach to everything and work and life and just looked around and liked what I saw and changed a lot of things and started to acknowledge the impact that I could have in the world, which was nothing at that point. I wasn't doing anything, wasn't doing any networking, wasn't really... And that was part of what was driving my unhappiness. I realized that I could do more. So I started getting involved in more. And I started...
Angela R Howard (02:52.03)
Hmm.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (02:56.354)
sharing my voice more, which I hadn't done at all, and realized that I kind of loved that. And so I am very passionate about a lot of things. One of them is changing the way we look at HR, both by we, I mean us in the world of HR, and how our companies view HR. There are still a lot of companies that think good HR is the legacy HR, which is compliance-driven. Compliance is a place.
but people should always be first. I'm passionate about that. And I'm passionate about the people's experience. We have a people experience team within our team and our company is a wholesale distributor of plumbing, heating, water, cooling, propane supplies, and energy supplies. And we have a lot of people who are truck drivers, a lot of people working in the warehouse, a lot of people moving things from one place to another. And there's no reason that they can't have
Angela R Howard (03:34.015)
Hmm.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (03:54.73)
an amazing people experience as anybody else. I work for the Granite Group and I'm the Chief People Officer for the Granite Group we're based in New Hampshire.
Angela R Howard (04:05.098)
Wonderful, yeah, well we were talking earlier. No, no, it was beautiful. It made a ton of sense and I can relate to it because as a fellow, well in my case, ex-cheap people officer and also industrial organizational psychologist, I understand kind of the intersection that you're talking about, which is, you know, taking a systems approach to the organization.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (04:06.614)
That was all over the place, but that was...
Angela R Howard (04:32.63)
and a very personalized approach, which gets me to dig into this concept of the desk-less worker, which we talked about earlier. And I know when we hear about typical best practices or modernizing HR, typically we think about maybe the sexy celebrity CEO or CHRO that is doing the work in tech or a startup. And
What we forget is that we have this whole sector of employees who are doing these extremely important, necessary, critical, we saw during the pandemic, right? These are the roles that make our economy move forward. So I guess, tell us a little bit more about what modernizing and transforming HR looks like in that space and maybe how it might differ from
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (05:12.138)
Yeah, right.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (05:19.158)
Right.
Angela R Howard (05:30.112)
we're seeing in other sectors.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (05:32.11)
Sure. So, we were in a central business. So we were one of those companies that didn't stop for a moment. So that's a whole other discussion and something we talked a lot about that, you know, it was a lot. It was a lot on our people. It was a lot on the HR team. It was a lot on everything. But so let me start with, you know, we're in a company that...
Angela R Howard (05:42.894)
Mm-hmm.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (06:00.854)
provides a vital service, right? And so we have products that this is the best way I can describe it. Very simple way, but a plumber goes to your house, um, and looks at your toilet and says, you know, you need a new whack brain. I don't have one in the truck, but I have one at the shop. I'll be right back. So they're coming to us or they're coming to one of our competitors. That's a very, they probably have those. That's a very simple product, but.
Angela R Howard (06:25.173)
Mmm.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (06:26.534)
Um, so the coming to us are one of our competitors and maybe coming in multiple times a day, and we're serving as an extension of their business. And aside from that, we do things like spec out giant projects and everything that's behind the walls, underneath the floors, essentially sometimes outside. That's what we do to, really, really vital service. Um, and when I first started at the company, it was a very traditional
Angela R Howard (06:47.462)
Mm.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (06:53.858)
HR department. It was the person who had started it was wonderful. She was a mentor of mine who I followed into a job previously 20, like 20 years prior, 15 years prior, something like that, and started the function. There was no HR function until she got there. She was there for 12 or 13 years left to teach college and it was her and one other person. And there were a couple hundred people maybe at the time. And so kind of about what you'd see.
And just so she had to do everything. She had to do a little bit of everything. And so knew what needed to be done from a technology perspective, knew what needed to be done, but, but couldn't do all those things because you're just getting, I don't know if I can swear, so getting stuff done. Um, so you're getting, we're getting shit done. Okay. So you just like, you gotta get shit done, right? So you just gotta get shit done. And sometimes I was a department of one for.
Angela R Howard (07:25.161)
Hmm.
Angela R Howard (07:40.931)
We could say all the curse words on this, I guess. Yes. Uh-huh.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (07:51.006)
over a decade. So I know you just, prioritize getting the fit done. And so when I started, one of the things that I always had done in companies was like, take a broad look at everything, right? You don't go in, you know, and you don't go in and make massive change, but you observe and you take a look at everything and then see what needs to be done immediately. And so when I started, one, if just an example, there was a new hire path.
Angela R Howard (07:54.555)
Hmm
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (08:19.498)
in a paper and we were highly distributed at the time. We had 25 locations maybe, we've got about 60 now, and we had no talent team. So the managers were doing everything talent. And so they were faxing in packets of paper for onboarding, like 50-plus pages. And we were relying on the managers to do all of the training, developing, educating, everything with the new hires. So that was not an easy fix. It took a while, but...
You know, I came into a team that didn't know anything, like any of us, you don't know what you don't know. They didn't know that there was a tech solution to automate things that, you know, this could be done online, not, you know, on pieces of paper that, that. So we set about changing that. And, because the department function is just getting shit done, that's really how it was seen and, very much the party planners and all of that. So.
Angela R Howard (08:54.887)
Mm.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (09:18.23)
I wanted to change that, but I had to educate everybody, including my team, including myself to a degree, including my CEO on what HR was and what HR could do and what, um, by doing some of these things that we needed to do by automating the day to day, the things that didn't matter as much, you know, instead of spending time keying things in, we could focus on our people. So.
Angela R Howard (09:42.346)
Hmm.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (09:47.326)
I did that. I did a listening tour. I went out and visited all of our locations. I try to do that as much as possible now and just learned what needed to be done. And what I learned were, was our people were awesome. Awesome. And, you know, I developed a strong desire to keep that feeling. They love working for the company. Um, and then develop the, the programs and, and then, put the things in place, the systems in place.
Angela R Howard (10:08.undefined)
Mm.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (10:17.066)
that would foster their growth and development and keep their engagement high. So we've done a lot of different things. And, you know, these folks should have an incredible people experience just because they don't work at a name company or if you're working in the warehouse and you're not coding, who cares? It's still an incredibly important job and these folks still want
Angela R Howard (10:39.923)
Hmm.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (10:46.474)
development, whether that's up sideways, backward, or whatever, and they still want to work on a great team for a great company. And so that's, we try to make that happen.
Angela R Howard (10:59.202)
Yeah, I think all people typically want some of the same baseline things when it comes to that social contract that we talk about between employees and employers. And I think over the years, over the decades, over the centuries, a lot hasn't changed when it comes to this idea of, especially with diskless job workers, you can be seen as
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (11:06.208)
Mm-hmm.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (11:11.071)
Right.
Angela R Howard (11:27.142)
You know repetitive tasks tasks monotonous, maybe a little unsexy right compared to coding or the big-name brand working for a big-name brand company, but The people are the same you know the the core motivations of working in an enriched environment Where I feel like I'm learning something being able to work within a team where I feel safe to speak up and Express my ideas
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (11:32.962)
Mm-hmm.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (11:40.766)
Mm-hmm.
Angela R Howard (11:55.406)
I think some myths come with this idea of a diskless worker. And I call, I said blue-collar workers earlier, to you, offline. And I just want to make that connection. I don't love terms like blue and white collar. It just really is generalized. But I want, the audience, I want them to make the connection between the sectors that I'm talking about here. But like you said, it doesn't matter.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (12:11.383)
Yeah.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (12:15.31)
Sure.
Angela R Howard (12:23.686)
what industry you're in, we're talking about people and their livelihoods. So what are some of the myths that you think, as you were working to modernize HR and transform HR, what are some of the myths that you found maybe from leaders or people around you that would say, oh, well, they don't want that? They don't want any of that HR talent stuff.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (12:46.146)
Yeah, right. And I think, first of all, the bit in this one pisses me off. So I get asked a lot and why would you work there? Like what you could work. It's biased on a lot of different levels. It's just really, right? And so I've been asked that a lot. And even, you know, we just hired a new CFO and even my CEO was like...
Angela R Howard (12:50.956)
Mm.
Angela R Howard (13:02.768)
discouraging.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (13:14.83)
wow, I'm surprised we got her. And I'm like, why wouldn't we? So I think when you approach like, like our company's awesome. Why wouldn't we get an incredibly talented person who wants to work for us? And so I think we play into those biases. So I think one of them is that a company or its people are less than because you work in a certain industry, which is ridiculous. I mean,
We have a lot of people who could be doing a lot of different things but don't want to sit in one place all day. So they come to work where they're engaging with people, they're performing a vital service, and they're getting to move around and have a real deep impact on their customers' lives and their team members' lives. I think that you mentioned unsexy.
Yeah, I guess it depends on your definition. I did a few years ago, I did a disruptive talk on bringing sexy back to toilets because we have a sexy $7,000 toilet, but that's, that's pretty much it. But I think we put too much emphasis on that. And I think we put too much emphasis on, you know, the names, the name companies. And I think it's, you know, why do you, why does anybody want to work where they do? And I think that answer is a little bit different.
Angela R Howard (14:22.327)
Ooh.
Angela R Howard (14:26.034)
Hmm.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (14:40.578)
They want to feel valued. You know, they, they want to know that their work matters. They want to know that the company that they work for, supports their community, supports their development. And that isn't, you know, that's, that runs across all industries. That runs across all industries.
Angela R Howard (14:52.81)
Mm.
Angela R Howard (14:59.038)
Right. Yeah, it has nothing to do with the type of industry. And the one thing that I do think about, we talk about deskless jobs, and we talk about the shift to hybrid work and remote work. And a lot of organizations, I work with a company that half of their workforce was, I guess, corporate staff, support functions. Well, a third. A third were support functions. A third was manufacturing.
type jobs and then a third were chemists. So two-thirds of the company had diskless jobs, for the most part, had to be on their feet, had to be working with their hands. But then you have a third that technically could probably work from home and do some of their work from home. So how is tech digital and remote work shaping your thinking around this?
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (15:35.982)
Right. Right.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (15:50.05)
So, you know, if you're listening, you can't see, but I'm at my home office. I would love it if my work office looks like, look like this. This is like love to bring. I should bring Pikachu and, uh, Greg, but, uh, everything, baby Yoda, everything back there. So, and I did bring pieces to my work office of, of me, but I think one of the mistakes in I've seen companies make is that. Okay.
Angela R Howard (15:58.25)
Hehehe
I love it, we got baby Yoda, and we got everything back there. I love it.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (16:18.822)
Two-thirds of your company cannot work from home, so nobody can work from home. I think making that decision without consulting your people, and maybe all your people want to work in the office, is a mistake. I think knowing what's best for people or thinking we know what's best for people is also a mistake. Last year, I was on a panel in New Hampshire with a bunch of CEOs and talking about a lot
Angela R Howard (16:23.443)
Hmm.
Angela R Howard (16:41.982)
Mm.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (16:48.142)
this and the CEO next to me said something along the lines of, you know, well, we have everybody in the office five days a week and this was a professional services company because we think that's what's best for them. And then, and I, when it came to me, I said, well, we don't do that because we don't pretend to know what's best for our people in the most respectful way because I possibly could. And so it was hard, really hard for us.
Angela R Howard (17:13.092)
Mm-hmm
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (17:17.574)
Most of our people have to come in every day, had to come in every day in the middle of a pandemic, face to face with customers. So we did everything we could to keep people safe for two, two and a half years. Our entire team was deployed every single second to do pandemic response, every available second. And so that was tough. And so we made the decision and we had, in the beginning, our pandemic response team met every day and sometimes for hours and hours and hours.
And that was a real kind of fight. And what do we do? So we never closed our office because our office is co-located with one of what we call our branches, which is face to face. And we had somebody from IT, somebody in accounting who had to come in at least a couple of days a week. So we all but forced people home. We didn't, but we said, you know, go home. Then we strictly delimited it for a while. And then we opened back up. And what we didn't ever do is say, you have to be in.
two days a week, three days a week, four days a week, five days a week. If your job can be done remotely, you have, and this is the keyword, the flexibility to do what you want and what you need to do. And what that did was help build trust. It was a little sticky with some people in our branches who were like, well, I have to come in every day and this person in purchasing doesn't, and that's not fair.
Angela R Howard (18:18.794)
Mm-hmm.
Angela R Howard (18:26.91)
Hmm.
Angela R Howard (18:36.305)
Mm-hmm.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (18:39.934)
And so we have these conversations. Well, what's fair? Is this a job you want to do? Well, no, I never want to do that. I want to be doing exactly what I'm doing. Okay. Well, you know, are, is there something else that you need in order? So we had a lot of those kinds of conversations, but it's flexibility. So most of our people are hybrid. My team has eight people in three offices. So we, including mine, um, I decided to share that and I'm close to the office.
Angela R Howard (18:49.775)
Mm-hmm.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (19:09.794)
few days a week and sometimes it's all day, sometimes it's not, it depends on my schedule, so, and meetings and so forth. But I like that mix. We have people who prefer to work fully remotely and we have people who prefer to be in the office all the time.
Angela R Howard (19:16.02)
Hmm.
Angela R Howard (19:24.806)
Yeah, it is a tough balance, isn't it? Because of your point, the idea of fairness always comes to mind when we talk about these peanut butter blanket solutions. What we know is we should be talking about equity and understanding what people need to be successful. And this is where I think, exactly. And that is always the, you know,
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (19:27.543)
Yeah.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (19:34.988)
Yeah.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (19:42.974)
Exactly. Exactly. And fair doesn't mean equal.
Angela R Howard (19:51.862)
I think the explanation we need to have over and over again is that we mix those two things up all the time. Because it's so much easier to say blanket solution, everything's fair, everything's even-handed, great. I'm doing a great job as a CEO or CHRO. When in reality, you can't get equity unless you are talking to your people. And also, I think humanizing the different experiences within your organization. Because I think what happens too is you get this us versus them.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (20:12.162)
Exactly.
Angela R Howard (20:21.142)
We need to be in the field while they're in their pajamas making lunch at home. And if you just really bridge the experiences of, working from home is great and all, but it doesn't have all its perks. We have blurred the lines between work life and home life. Some of us don't even have the space to be working from home. There are so many experiences that we could be bringing to light in both realms.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (20:21.228)
Right.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (20:47.671)
Sure, sure.
Yeah, I work much more now that I'm, you know, at least partially remote. And I don't share that a lot because I think, um, it's not helpful for, for our people and those conversations we still have when we need to, but I think the important thing is showing up, you know, answering the phone, getting out of teams, going in person. I was out yesterday all day and answered a call early this morning and just kind of being there for people and, um, having conversations, as you said, just don't.
Angela R Howard (20:53.075)
Yes.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (21:20.338)
It is easier to just say, here's our policy, but we try not to write a policy for the few and we write only policies for the many. And so, um, that's conversations are the way to go.
Angela R Howard (21:35.174)
Yeah, absolutely. So we talked about digital and the move to hybrid work and remote work and how that gets incorporated. What I'm hearing from you is I think equity and leadership and having human conversations with people about what they need to be successful, I think is important. What are you seeing when it comes to deskless jobs and things like...
AI and the shift of the skill set. What are some of the things that you're seeing in the market today and what should we be thinking about?
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (22:08.234)
It's funny, I had that conversation because I was an early adopter of chat. GBT. I love, um, we talked offline. I love technology. It's something that I'm not, um, not, um, naturally good at, but I'd love learning. I'd love to learn, which is the key. And technology can unlock a lot of things for us. So, I'm personally doing a deep dive and having my entire team do a deep dive and utilizing AI, and, and our big, we don't have enough AI in our tools. So our big, um,
Angela R Howard (22:14.81)
Yes.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (22:37.822)
Focus this year is a platform that sits over all of our different tech and our whole people stack and can automate some of the moments that matter to people. And then we're not that we're doing manually now. And so that's a big focus for us. But I just had this conversation with our president the other day. So I, I work for our CEO, but we also have a president and he runs, you know, he oversees all of our branch locations. And so we got on the topic of AI. And, and.
Angela R Howard (22:48.828)
Mm.
Angela R Howard (22:58.219)
Mm.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (23:08.514)
one of our competitors has a department where the jobs can be done largely with AI because there are processes that can be automated and there are tools that so that's something that I think in our industry you don't tend to think about but there are companies that are AI-based that sell AI platforms or tools that are specific to our industry.
And we are so focused on people and the customer experience and all of that, that that's a hard transition for us to make. Um, you know, we got a website maybe a dozen years ago and we get people using that and that's been a hard transition for our customers, but it's, I think going to be a transition that we are. Um, I don't want to say forced into.
Angela R Howard (23:50.126)
Hehehe
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (23:59.478)
but we will have to look into it. So if you take our purchasing department, we have people who've been there forever and they're doing this manually, and then they're going to retire. And they have all of this knowledge in their heads that they do their best to impart to somebody else, but that can't always happen. So I think it's less scary for companies like ours to look at things like AI as a performance enhancer rather than a replacement, right? And so...
Angela R Howard (24:14.637)
Mm.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (24:26.25)
You know, you can look at things like warehouse automation that is certainly out there and you can look at that. But we have to do it thoughtfully and what enhances our ability to serve our customers and what enhances our people's ability to do their jobs, not replace them. So that's a, it's a tricky line to walk, but one that we're having conversations about.
Angela R Howard (24:49.214)
Yeah, yeah, that's a really good way to describe it, I think, is, you know, there is some innovation and iteration that I believe can only really come from humans. You know, I mean, there's certainly some enabling technology, but this fine balance of how do we move this forward and ensure that we're keeping the same values and customer service to each other, but also the people we serve.
Those things are things you can't put into chat GPT. You have to strategize around them.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (25:21.07)
Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And if you couple that with, okay, you've got an aging workforce, we've got 20% of our workforce that's going to retire in the next five to seven years. And so it's a good time to start talking and thinking about those things.
Angela R Howard (25:32.824)
Mm-hmm.
Angela R Howard (25:39.314)
Yeah, absolutely. And I think also from a modernizing HR perspective, I think we have to also upscale our people while they're with us. And I just, somebody posted on LinkedIn the other day about this mentality that, well, we're not gonna invest in people if we're gonna just lose them. I'm not gonna pour my money into somebody and train them up just for them to leave.
And it's such a toxic mentality that just spews out of like, CEO's mouths, like it's just the way things are. When in reality, we should be, you know, thinking about this more holistically on a global scale, right? How are we upscaling people so that they can be viable in a job market that's shifting? And not just with my company, but within another company.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (26:16.725)
Mm-hmm.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (26:21.282)
Right. Right. Right.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (26:33.134)
Yeah. Yeah. And it's funny, I wrote something this morning along those lines and I, I don't always share like, hey, this is my thought on things or hey, you should do this. And I need to do more of that. But I do share often things that were sparked by something I learned or read, or in this case, a conversation that I had yesterday about, you know, somebody's career development. And, you know, what's our
Angela R Howard (26:46.292)
Hmm.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (27:00.398)
you know, we have a stance, but we are getting mixed messaging, from other people, and how do we approach our internal development? And, so what I think a lot of leaders get wrong is they want to hoard their people. And so that's sort of what I wrote about is, is a leader. You should want to exactly what you said, right? You should want to, as a good leader, you should want to help develop your people, whether it's within your team, outside of your team, or even outside of the company. That.
Angela R Howard (27:14.419)
Yes.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (27:27.61)
is for very traditional leaders, just like I was a traditional HR leader, that is a tough shift to make, but I think one that's necessary to make, and that's something that I've had a lot of conversations about internally. It's not about, well, that's my person, and they're not a body. They're not a body. They're human beings, and it's in everyone's best interest to help develop them, even if it's outside the company. And they'll take their talents out and
Angela R Howard (27:53.778)
Yes.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (27:55.51)
for the greater good of the world. But I do recognize for a lot of leaders, that's not how they were taught. That's not, they were conditioned differently. So that's a tough shift.
Angela R Howard (28:03.282)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, gosh, I mean, we talked about, I think, some key shifts during this conversation, one around this idea of, I don't know, this kind of forgotten population of the deskless worker, which I think is a really important shift we have to make. I think if we're going to see work as a catalyst for creating change at a societal level,
we've got to look at every single person who is working. And so I think shifting some of the myths around that population, they don't want to be developed or they don't want to be enriched in their roles, you just want to come in and clock in and clock out, not true, 0% true. So I think that's a big shift we need to make. I think this shift around thinking about remote work and hybrid work.
differently from an equitable lens, even if you have a diskless population, and how we can get to know our people and understand what they need versus blanket solutions. And then the third thing around technology and what that could do to career development and how we're thinking about upskilling our people and that responsibility, I believe in my opinion that corporations have, organizations have to enrich their people.
whether they stay within the organization or leave. But we need to start upskilling people so that we can, that everyone is better equipped for this new wave of work, which is coming and I feel like every month there's something new that we have to be preparing.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (29:42.572)
Yeah.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (29:46.21)
Right? Right? No, I think it's true. And our approach has been, in the last many years anyway, co-designing. And that's something we didn't touch on, but not designing for, but designing with. And so we just built out, we have two incredible people on our team that have day jobs within our team, but because we don't have, we have a lean team, don't have a learning person, they built out learning paths for our entire branch system.
Angela R Howard (29:55.923)
Yes.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (30:15.01)
So it's both, you know, serves as, hey, you're coming in, you're in the warehouse, here's everything you need to know in an app, because that's how most of our people coming in are learning. And also aspirational. You wanna be a branch manager? Here's everything a branch manager does. We're not gatekeeping it from you. You can go in and learn it so that if this is what you wanna do, here's what you can do. And so there can be really exciting things that are done in this space.
Angela R Howard (30:26.122)
Hmm.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (30:43.102)
And they're very similar to the things that are done in every space. And your communication style may be different. So how you reach drivers may be different than how you reach people who are sitting at a desk all day, than people who are in the warehouse. Um, and we're at a big shift right now because for a long time that was in person. We, I'd go to every location every quarter. We have 60 plus now. It's not, it's not possible. So we're at a real inflection point and, and how do we reach everyone?
Angela R Howard (31:08.371)
Hmm.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (31:12.995)
in different ways that make sense to them.
Angela R Howard (31:15.974)
Yeah, and how do you use the leadership team, I think sometimes in HR, we think we have to be the holders of all the things. Ha ha.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (31:25.859)
No, no, we have in our branch system, we have two large regions and then some regions in, and we work extremely closely with our regional directors and they, we have always, they're an extension of us. So they're the, they're day to day. So they're dealing with the traditional HR issues that we may have been dealing with. And I cannot imagine our team functioning at all.
Angela R Howard (31:34.994)
Yes.
Absolutely.
Angela R Howard (31:44.844)
Mm-hmm.
Angela R Howard (31:48.378)
Yes, I think that that is what you just mentioned is a very important point, which is shifting from HR as compliance, as employee relations, and as the day-to-day. I have an issue, let me call HR, to leadership. We have to build the muscle around leadership to have conversations and feedback and mitigate things.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (32:05.822)
Right. Leadership. Yep.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (32:13.582)
Right.
Angela R Howard (32:16.654)
in the field and then there's some kind of escalation process at some point, or there's some coaching that happens within HR to continue to upskill those leaders.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (32:25.766)
And I think in the past, certainly in the beginning of my career, I would have had those difficult conversations with an employee. But now it's no, I can't do that for you. I'll coach you on how to have those conversations. But we moved so much of that, what we used to be in the domain of HR, to managers and leaders where it belongs. They're leading their teams. So we can coach, I describe us as coaches, consultants, and guides. We're not...
Angela R Howard (32:36.339)
Yes.
Angela R Howard (32:49.898)
Yes.
Angela R Howard (32:53.714)
Hmm.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (32:54.654)
you know, doing things for our managers. We're helping them to help themselves and help their people.
Angela R Howard (33:01.938)
Love that. Well, Tracy, I appreciate you and your insight around this general topic of modernizing HR and how you did it. I love the story behind how you've made the shift and some key paradigm shifts that we need to make in the process. If you are speaking to, and a lot of our listeners are, CHROs, some may be more traditional, some may be...
a bit more progressive in their stages of iterating and transforming. I guess what are your final words or some lasting advice to them?
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (33:42.858)
Yeah, I think wherever you are in your journey, it's okay. And if you are a traditional HR leader and you know, you may, there's a lot of reasons for that, that you may not have evolved yourself, you may not have the support of your CEO or your company. There's a lot of different reasons. Um, but if you want to change there, there's a way. And I think the, the, and I do think it's a right thing to do to shift, but I think the one thing that I would leave people with is.
Angela R Howard (33:59.539)
Yes.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (34:12.237)
connect with the community, develop a personal board of directors, or at least, you know, join one of these awesome communities that are out there. There are several that I love and I'm happy to connect people to. And, surround yourself with people who can support you, who lift you, who champion you, and who you can learn from.
Angela R Howard (34:32.178)
And where can people find you if they want to reach out?
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (34:35.266)
I'm pretty sure I'm the only Tracy Sponberg on LinkedIn. So that's a good place. And I'm at Tracy Spon on Twitter, Instagram, Peloton, you know, all those things.
Angela R Howard (34:46.63)
All the socials are wonderful. Tracy, thank you so much for your time. Appreciate you. And I would love to have you back on at some point as you continue to evolve HR and transform what we think about when we think about work. So thanks for your time.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (34:48.324)
All the socials. Yes.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (34:53.719)
Thank you, Angela.
Tracie Sponenberg (she/her) (35:03.286)
Thank you.
