About Our Speaker 

Jeremy D Stick is the Director of Human Resources for TML Health, an intergovernmental health benefits pool for municipalities and political subdivisions in Texas.  

For more than 20 years, he has provided Human Resources Leadership for non-profit and for-profit organizations as well as led Human Capital initiatives for various governmental agencies. Some notable engagements include rebuilding and rebranding TML’s Human Resources department, as well as working with the CIA, US Coast Guard, US Bureau of Engraving and Printing, and being a contributing member to Forbes Human Resources Council. 

Jeremy earned a Ph.D. in Human Resources with an emphasis in Leadership Development and a Master’s in Education Psychology from the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. In his free time, Jeremy enjoys outdoor activities with his wife Keren and two-year old son Jacob. 

Podcast

A Glimpse into the Podcast 

02:08 – 06:35 – What are your tips to create and increase collaborative mindset in the employees? 

06:56 – 13:49 – How do you figure out whether an employee is able to perform at his highest potential in this new normal? 

16:27 – 19:52 – How do you alleviate the fears of employees and get them to engage by letting them know their contribution in solving the problem or the challenges of the business? 

19:54 – 24:44 – How do the expectations are going to change as businesses are starting to open up? 

Insightful Chat on Performance Management and Employee Engagement 

We feel that people lose connection with their teams. They had got people in the office to interact with. When we’re in the office, we talk to them, we were meeting with them in person but that’s something a very strong bond that we took for granted and we didn’t realize that something like this [pandemic] could weaken it, say the least, but not broken. There are ways to strengthen that bond even in this current model of working together. What do you think and what are your ideas that you’ve seen work in creating and increasing that collaborative mindset in this remote working scenario that we’re in?  

Absolutely, we struggled with it when we went remote. We actually made the decision in a week. We have been testing the capability to go remote. We started on Monday, send people home, here and there Monday to Friday and then actually on a Sunday, we flipped the switch and everybody came into the office and got their computers, went home, and 100% remote like you said. We thought that this was going to be a few weeks and so it was fine at first. It was no big deal and then we externded to months and now we’re going on seven months being remote and the ability to interact with people as you said, we did lose that. The informal stop by someone’s desk or pop into their office, it’s gone or even that idle chitchat that you have, going to the meeting, or when you get to the meeting, sitting down for a few minutes. So, we’ve been struggling kind of on what we wanted to do and how we get that normalcy back and we did realize that it was meeting to meeting to meeting was what our days were like.  

So, we started actually putting this stipulation that meetings couldn’t run more than 45 minutes. So, it would start on the quarter hour, run to the hour, and then there was a 15-minute break. That 15-minute break, you could use to chat with somebody, talk to them before the meeting, or do an impromptu or you use your technology, we use teams, to call somebody and just talk to them, can be work-related or how are you doing. One of our directors actually makes it a point to call everybody in her team. So, she’s gotta a checklist and she just works through the checklist and she talks to a couple of people each week and just randomly calls them and she said that it’s really funny because the minute they pick up they say, “What’s wrong?” And you know, when you hear from a director, something’s gotta be wrong and I have taken that idea because from human resources, nobody wants to hear from people and they just want me to stay away and with all of a sudden, I pop up there, “What did I do?” and it’s me just saying, “Hey, how are you doing?” “What’s going well?” “What can we improve upon?” and we’ve really just started to kind of push each other into that direction of talking more. And we have lunches that we’ve done like virtual lunches. We have some virtual happy hours that teams have done but we noticed that when you just do teams, they become silent. So, the IT Department over here doing their happy hour and then communications are doing theirs. So, it started to kind of host inter-departmental happy hours.  

It’s not between two people to pop in and obviously a happy hour or 2 begins little bit crazy ’cause we have 30 people trying to talk, it creates a kind of an overview but people just have an opportunity to actually get human interaction and we’re somewhat fortunate that the building that we own has a very large conference room and so, when we have an incredibly important meeting or an initiative that we’re working on, we will ask for people to come in to work on site for a day. We’ve got everything set up for social distancing, don’t touch door handles, or anything like that. You just use your badge but we do recognize that there are times you have to be in person to be a little more collaborative.  

The new water cooler conversations, which brings in the family and then someone pops into the background and you say, this is what my daughter is up to, she’s doing her homework, or she is upset, or whatever that may be. I have noticed that has become a new kind of normal, which is very nice. But is it ‘disengaging’? Because at work, we have little distractions when it comes to what we focused on. We were almost blinded, work blinded. When we’re at home, other things get in the way, not intentionally though. So, we ask ourselves and also some of our customers too, how do you able to figure out whether an employee is able to perform at his highest potential in the new normal? How do you avoid the circumstances that limit the high potential employees? 

Absolutely. So, we’ve kind of looked at that problem and it was intact on two different levels so with the engagement side, keeping the employees engaged in TML because we talked about when you go remote, there’s no sense of that you belong to TML. The culture starts to kind of shift because now you’re home, you don’t have that interaction. So, we actually created an employee engagement committee and one of the things that we were really focused on, was ensuring that we’ve got a representative from each Department and we have a pretty diverse tenure at TML. We have people who have been there for 25 years and then we have people who’ve been there for a year or two, and it was important for us to get a representation for each Department because they represent those different demographics, and so, what is it that would engage somebody who’s been here for a year and maybe 22 is very different than somebody who’s been here for 25 years and is approaching their 60s. So, how do you engage an entire workforce?  

Engagement: And so, we’ve got this engagement committee and we have some of the historical knowledge about things that people used to love at TML. Halloween is coming up and that is a very big holiday for TML. There was a pumpkin carving contest, there were costumes but how do you do all that remotely? The engagement committee said, “We’re doing it remotely.” So now on, Halloween, which is on Saturday, so the Friday before, we’re having a costume contest, and with your best costume, you can take your picture, you can do a video, best child costume because most kids are home right now and we’ve even thrown a best pet costume. They’re doing a social hour for the pumpkin carving and then at the end of the day,w there’s gonna be happy hour with trivia where they announced prizes, so that’s one thing that our engagement committee is doing is figuring out ways to keep our staff engaged in TML so that it doesn’t just become the monotony at work and like I’m doing my job and I’m having fun because now I’m engaged in what I’m doing.  

Disengagement: Some other things with the disengagement as you said, when we were in the office the bar was here. Well, our bars haven’t changed, we’re actually in the middle of three major strategic initiatives. So, we’re expecting so much more from our staff. We have so much more going on and it’s one of those that we know we just can’t ask our staff to give more. We have to get creative and what do we do. So, one thing when we made that first switch to go to remote in April because we are an insurance company, we didn’t get to stop because we are essential business, so everything had to keep going. We could not delay. So, we rolled out something called a hero in pay and what it was is, if people didn’t take off a day of work in April, we gave them a one-time merit, and we gave them one free PTO day to use over the next year. We knew that April was going to be a really critical month for us to get claims process, to get things going again, and we knew that there was a lot of uncertainty. So, we were rewarding people for doing that extra effort.  

Tips to Engage Your Employees. We were all remote, so we were asking to just help us out, give us the commitment in return we’re going to be able to give you X and Y. We’ve also got pretty creative with the fact that we’re not traveling now, so we have money that was typically allocated for budget in travel, we can use it to do other things.  

1. So, little merits here, so departments who have metric goals, we have the metrics set, and when the Departments achieve those overall metrics, we do like a $10 gift card for another virtual lunch, just a way to say thank you. It’s just simple little things that we can come up with here and there. We have a virtual bingo that we’ve been doing throughout the week and we’ve twisted it up and now it’s a virtual trivia bingo. So, you have to know the answer to the Trivia question to get your score and what we constantly do as well as we reach out to staff to see what do you need from us.  
2. There’s constant communication especially from the HR Department, where we randomly will ping people and say, “How are you doing?” “What’s going well?” “Where are you struggling?” “What something that we can do to help?” We’re listening to the feedback because the staff can tell us what they need to help keep them engaged or what they may not have to help with them.  
3. And then other thing is just totally embracing technology. With the disengagement, it’s a possibility but our IT Department, anything people need, they’re going to help them get it and then leave and go to their house help set them up. That way, we don’t have any obstacles that are in the way. We’re trying to mitigate anything that we can to help keep our staff engaged and again it goes all back to that communication and letting staff know that even though you’re home, you are still the heart of TML. Now, it’s just it’s a different environment so we want you to help us work together to create this new culture that we’re having to embrace. 

We keep talking about collaboration while working from home, but another element that we try to talk about is trying to do a temperature check on employees who genuinely have concern, maybe your business is not performing well because of the pandemic and all the external environment. So, what’s going through their mind? How do you alleviate those fears and for employees? How do you get them to engage that they’re actually helping to solve the problem or the challenges of the business? Metrics is a good way but metrics itself do not solve a problem. Have you come across those kinds of challenges? 

We have. As I said, we got a number of strategic initiatives that we’ve undergone in this last year and we’ve got plans so a lot of our stuff is 2021-2022 for the actual implementation of these new software programs, third party administrators. So, we have a lot going on and it is an opportunity, we knew what wasn’t working or the clear ways to do this more efficiently and so now we’re working with staff as we’re making these transitions and talking to them because they’re the ones who are embedded in these changes and it’s “What’s going well?” “Where do you see the concerns are?” “Where could be a potential hang up as we move from A to B?”  

The other thing is as we are starting to make these shifts, skill sets are going to change. And what we’re doing is we’re talking with staff and saying “Where are you now?” and “What are you going to need to be successful with these new systems?” So, we’ve got something that we’ve called an individual development plan, IDP for short, and it’s an opportunity for our staff to start honing their skills and learning new technologies or new expertise areas that are going to help them as we make these little transitions. So, it’ll be even more efficient with these new platforms that we’re doing.  

The really good part about this is that we did the training this year and we had over 80% of our staff actually take the training and that includes the supervisors and managers and they‘re really engaged in that. Then, they are identifying what they need to develop. It also makes us understand where our gaps are. So, we can figure out where do we need to start focusing some energies on and there is a leadership team member need to get involved or is this something that we’ve got a frontline staff or a manager or a supervisor, who kind of can step in to take over some of the parts of the project and develop them. And, it gives everybody kind of ownership. Now, these gaps it’s not so much that we, as a leadership team, have to identify and our staff are motivated to say, “Here is the gap.” And in order to fix the gap, you can do A, B, and C. However, I want to learn how to do this if I don’t have the skills now and I can help you when the implementation comes in and do a different job because my job is going to shift.  

So, with the current trend, in this current work from model and it is all predicated on how businesses open up and familiar normality comes into play, how do you think expectations could change? As things slowly start to open up, there might be a one more change in finding a new balance and reinventing in keeping the culture and energy going and also the goals that you have set for yourself and your team.  

Absolutely. So, we had actually, at one point, we were starting the transition back into the office and we talked about the hybrid model. So, no more than 25% of the staff will be on site in any point in day, so that that would be from Monday to Thursday. Everybody works from home on Friday, we got to test it out for a week. There was a spike in Texas with COVID cases, and so we abandoned. It was everybody stay at home but we do recognize that there is going to be a shift at some point. So, the Austin Texas area is a hub for tech and a lot of the companies like Indeed and Amazon are here and they were already on we are going to be 100% remote within, at least July. That kinda sets precedence for us. We’ve got to kind of look at what’s going on because in all of this we still hire people. So, that’s something that we have to contend with when we are hiring somebody, some companies are saying, “Hey, you can stay home.” We’re saying, “You might have to come in.” So, we’ve been evaluating what our model could be.  

We are starting to really figure out making a hybrid model. We believe that’s going to be the new norm. We’ve proven we can do our jobs from home. There is no doubt that everybody can do it. It’s what’s lost from not being in the office that you can’t make up for your home. There aren’t enough hours in the day to do informal meetings or the collaborative discussions. So, we are looking at how do we get to a point where we do transition people back and What’s gonna be the push back because as you said everybody is very comfortable being from home. So, now it is not a situation to just say that we are going to start having people come back and make it look like it is a punitive. We have got to brand it and sell it as to why we want people to come in. For that collaborative effort, we need to have all of these initiatives, we need you to be on site so that we can talk with you, we can do things face-to-face, and combine that and sell that the new normal, it is going to start shifting, we have currently made the determination that we are 100% remote until January.  

January is going to be a flu season so we’re going to have to contend with that but what we’re doing is rather than saying, “We don’t know we’re doing. We’re just going down the road,” we gave ourselves a deadline. In January, we’re going to make a revaluation, we are going to look at where we are as a company in terms of our strategic initiatives for our staff. We’re going to look at the number of COVID cases here in the Austin Texas area and then start to evaluate and we have to continue to focus on what’s best for TML and talk to our employees and listen to the concerns they may have about coming into the office again. As I said, we’ve taken a number of safety precautions to help ensure that our office is safe. we believe that if 25% of staff are on site at a time, it’s pretty minimal, not a lot of interaction. Then, we maybe redesigning some of the office spaces itself to open up and make broader areas, so the desks are not even that close together but again we’re taking it one day at a time. We know that there is going to be a change or just we’re just going to wait and see what’s going to work best for TML and get feedback from our staff so that we can revive the kind of comfort they are going to need to make those transitions.  

We hope that you enjoyed the podcast. Stay tuned for more insightful talks.