June 3, 2025 • 19 mins
In this episode of the HR Mixtape podcast, host Shari Simpson welcomes Tracy Sponenberg, founder and chief people officer at Tracy Sponenberg LLC. They dive into the often-overlooked topic of deskless or frontline workers, discussing the unique challenges and opportunities in enhancing employee experience for this critical group. This conversation is timely as organizations increasingly recognize the importance of inclusive leadership and effective communication strategies, especially in a post-pandemic world where employee engagement is paramount.
Listener Takeaways:
-
Learn how to implement a listening tour to build trust with frontline employees.
-
Discover why flexibility in roles and schedules is essential for enhancing employee experience.
-
Explore strategies for leveraging technology, like AI and mobile solutions, to support deskless workers.
Hit “Play” to gain valuable insights on transforming your HR approach for frontline teams!
Guest(s): Tracy Sponenberg, Chief People Officer, Tracy Sponenberg LLC
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:02):
You're listening to the HR Mixtape Your podcast with
the perfect mix of practical advice, thought-provoking interviews, and
stories that just hit different so that work doesn't have to feel,
well, like work. Now, your host,
Joining me today is Tracy Sponenberg, founder and chief people officer
at Tracy Sponenberg LLC. Tracy is formerly the
(00:25):
chief people officer at the Granite Group, where she led transformative initiatives,
including technology advancements and the evolution of the HR department
Tracy, thank you so much for jumping on the podcast with me today. Thanks
for having me, Shari. I'm thrilled to be here. So I want to talk about
(00:46):
the desk list or frontline worker. And I
think so often they are overlooked in
our HR conversations. Why do you think that is right now?
Well, it's not in my conversations because this is
where I dedicate my time. I just left the corporate world about a
year ago and I spent probably about 90%, 95% of my
(01:07):
30-year career in companies with deskless workers. I think we tend to design
our processes, design our procedures, design our communications
around somebody who's sitting at a desk all day. Now, some certainly
companies have cracked that code, but at least in companies I've
(01:30):
worked in, you know, we tend to send out an email and
call it a day, right? And that doesn't necessarily work for somebody who
is on their feet all day and who either isn't attached
to their phone or who can't be attached to their phone and who certainly isn't
How do we make that transition to think frontline worker
first? And I think it's probably some of the same transition that
(01:54):
we've had to make in other places where we've had to
think of remote first. I think it's the same
transition with our minds, we just have to think about it differently. And I'll
add a caveat to that. Because when I have worked
with frontline workers in the past, and we as HR have been sitting
around having those conversations about things like engagement, I
(02:14):
feel like it always ends up going down this road of just very
silly, very like fake enjoyment,
those kinds of activities that we look at rather than thinking
more strategically about how you actually support a
I don't actually think about engagement so much as I think about the overall employee
(02:35):
experience, right? And one of the things we did at my last job and
certainly that I do with my clients is we wrap everything around the
employee experience. So from before you think about
becoming a candidate, all the way to way past the
time you leave. What are those moments that matter along that
life cycle? And those look different, potentially, depending
(02:56):
on how you work. So we take a lot of cues from marketing and
look at personas and look at how we communicate. And
we take an omni-channel approach and communicate broadly
and widely and make sure that we're hitting all
segments of the workforce. Traditionally, in companies I've worked in, truck
drivers were the hardest. because they're on the road all day. And
(03:18):
they were the hardest to reach, the hardest to get a message across, the hardest
to get time with to listen to. So we
developed, my former CEO developed something called the truck driver
test, which was, that's how we knew when it was communicated, when
you could talk to a truck driver, and they knew what was going on. And
that was a whole mix of you know, the
(03:39):
executives, those of us in the executive team doing our job, the
people team doing their job, and more particularly, most importantly, the
You know, honestly, some of the most creative were some
of the most old school. So when it came time to
(04:02):
make it really important things, particularly the people team had to do, we'd
send mailings home. We'd target spouses when
we knew there were spouses because the historically the
population that I work with last time was 80 plus percent
male. And historically, a lot of their spouses were handling things
like benefits. So we would, you know, invite them into
(04:23):
the conversation. I also spent an awful lot of time out
on the road visiting the locations. That was the highest and best use
of my time and listening and learning to everybody who's
out in different locations across the place because we had one
company culture, but we also had 60 individual
location cultures and we had to make sure that they were tying
(04:47):
How have you helped leadership, understand
that the experience that the frontline employees might be
having can be wildly different than those that are
inside the office, you know, working behind a desk,
so that they really understand the dynamics of their organization and how employee
experience is going to look different for those, for those
(05:11):
One of the things we did at my last company with the executives, and this is something
I highly encourage anybody to do, is
we had them work in our central distribution facility, sometimes for
a day, sometimes for a few days. And I remember when I first
started at the company, it was something I wanted to do, not something
that I had to do. But I remember asking the head
(05:32):
of the location, what time should I be there? He's like, well, we start at
five, but you don't have to be there at five. I'm like, I'll be there at five. And
they had me doing things that were really easy. And
I was like, no, put me on what a new you do a new hire,
like what a new hire would do. Okay. And so I did, I
unloaded giant units,
(05:53):
air conditioning, heating units, right. And I learned to wrap them. And I
learned everything in a day. Eight years
later, seven or eight years later, And of course I had been to
the place in between and developed relationships, but we
were talking about a new person coming in, a new executive coming in
and doing that. And they're like, yeah, they
(06:13):
did the same thing that you did. Remember when you did that? That was years later.
So the impact of an executive, not just spending time,
but spending time learning and doing what their
frontline people do is really powerful, really
How have you thought about flexibility different for this group?
(06:35):
And I've had conversations before where we've talked about things like shift
swapping and, you know, variety in
their job. I think there's many more levers we can pull when
it comes to flexibility and thinking with a flexibility mindset
Yeah, I mean, I think we look at flexibility, it's not just the time flexibility, it's
(06:57):
the role flexibility, potentially location flexibility. So,
again, it goes back to the individual and, you know,
wrapping things around their experience and their individual experience. Flexibility
looks completely different to me than looks completely
different to you, and certainly looks completely different to people working
on the front lines. Some people might be happy working 10 hours
(07:20):
a day, five days a week, and might be super motivated
and productive. And some people might need something different or
a different location. So I think it comes down, you can't just say,
here's the flexibility we have. You have to have those individual locations.
For somebody, it might mean coaching a kid's game. For somebody
else, it might mean going home at noon to take their pets out. For somebody else,
(07:41):
it might mean working the overnight shift so they can take care of their kids. So
it means many different things. But the one thing that I do know that
is that we should be talking about flexibility more than we talk about
How has technology helped this population specifically?
Because I know in a lot of organizations, frontline employees, you
(08:03):
actually are depending
on their own tech, not necessarily providing them tech, which is a little
bit different. But we still need to leverage technology to
So, I looked at a number of different AI-focused solutions
before I left my last role, and I have clients looking at different AI
(08:24):
solutions as well, because AI enables us to do things that
we really just couldn't do before. But
the thing that tends to work with this population, I found, is
anything that can automate over text. So
while, you know, drivers and while folks in the warehouse may
not have a computer on them, they're probably going to have a
(08:45):
phone. So things like chatbots or helpdesks
where you can text a question like, hey, how much PTO do I have left? Rather
than picking up the phone or waiting for a break, anything to
make it quick and easy and seamless
and ideally in one platform or in a platform they're already using
regularly and ideally mobile based, that's
(09:12):
What do you say to the leader listening who's like,
yeah, that sounds great, but our employees for safety reasons can't have their
phones on them during the day at work, they're locked in their lockers. How
Yeah, I just actually had that conversation with somebody. And the
first question I ask is, okay, is that Really
(09:33):
true. Can they really not have a phone
or do you just not want them to have a phone? Because there are real
reasons why somebody's school or kids or parents might need
to get a hold of somebody. So that's number one. And in the limited
situations where people actually can't have a phone in a
location, I think then we're back to some of the same
(09:54):
challenges. However, on a break or
those, I encourage leaders to give people 10 minutes
out of the workday to deal with maybe their
personal business, sure, but certainly their work business that they
have to do. You don't want them having to do
a micro-learning course or check their
(10:21):
And that lends itself to being really strategic about
your production expectations and how you're staffing to
make sure you can build in some of that time because you're absolutely right. There's
work communications that revolve around technology now, no matter what
kind of role you're in. helped
people think about being more creative in this space. I
(10:44):
think of some of the things that we've talked about from the, you
know, remote work perspective around burnout, those
types of things. Burnout happens here, too. It's not just exclusive
to that population. How is it different in how we're approaching
it here? Or is it the same and we're using the same tools, just activating them
You know, I think that there's a I
(11:08):
don't know that there's a difference in burnout overall.
There's certainly a difference in the individual experience and what that
looks like if you're sitting in an office versus what it
looks like if you're in a warehouse
environment. I think it might be harder to spot in
a warehouse environment, and I've certainly seen a number of people
(11:29):
go through it and certainly a number of people deny it, including myself,
although I wasn't working in a warehouse environment. Education,
everything that, you know, I like to say everything starts
with education. You know, my own experience with
burnout, I had no idea what I was going through until I
(11:50):
read an article and I'm supposed to know the stuff and I've been
working in HR for decades, right? And if I didn't know,
what about my team? What about the company? What about
the frontline employees? And so I think
educating, talking about stories, I shared my story broadly
with the whole company, talked about that, and somebody
(12:13):
may recognize it. I think we start there. and then look for signs.
I think too often it shows up in a decrease in performance
and it certainly did for me and it certainly does. And I
think too often we tend to dismiss that as solely a
For sure. And you brought up a good point that made me think about
(12:33):
how you're communicating and supporting employees. And you
talked about sharing your own story. How does training
evolve for the managers of this group? Have you found that
there's specific things that are more important to lean into
When I first started my last company, it was very much a traditional
(12:55):
HR department where HR was doing everything. Everybody was sent to HR,
you know, very old school. But that's the
way it was. And that's the way that I grew up. And that's how I practiced for
years and years. And I evolved along with helping
the department and the company evolve a little bit to do that. And
along with that came, you know, helping train
(13:16):
some managers with how to handle these
day-to-day questions because people were going to them. People shouldn't
be sent to HR for a body odor issue, for example. And
so that training looks different depending on the company you're in.
So for us, a lot of what I did in my first couple
of years there actually was going around and working with managers and coaching them individually.
(13:37):
I spent a lot of time doing that because for that organization at that
time, that was scalable to
a point. It's not now, but that was scalable to a point. And
that was extremely, extremely helpful.
Well, and it's empowering your managers, right? They walk away hopefully
from that conversation feeling like, oh, I don't, I don't have to go to HR
(13:59):
for everything. Right. I have the skills I need and kind of the
quote unquote backing of official language that, you know, that I
can use in those conversations. As you think about
the clientele that you've worked with, what
comes to mind is like maybe the top, you know, three to
five things that you are consistently either surprised by or
(14:21):
really realize there's an opportunity for us to learn more about when it comes
I feel like nothing surprises me, but then something comes along pretty
often and surprises me. But I'd
say the biggest opportunities that we have are areas, number
one, leadership. So we still, in
frontline companies, and a lot of frontline companies, still promote
(14:44):
the best X or the best Y, right? So you're
great at working in the warehouse, so we're
going to make you warehouse manager, even though you have no experience, and we're not going to
give you any training. And so there's a huge opportunity because
leaders, frontline leaders, are everything to frontline folks
who might not be interacting with people from corporate or people from other
(15:05):
locations. So that's far and away the biggest opportunity. I
think there's a lot of opportunity with AI. I
think there's a lot of opportunity to lean into
well-being and to mental health specifically. We don't talk
about that enough. for the frontline workforce. And there's
sometimes a stigma still everywhere, but particularly in
(15:27):
that area. And I think opening up those conversations and
training managers on how to listen and how to observe,
I think that's another huge opportunity. And
How have you used resources like EAP
for this group? And I love to ask this question because I feel
(15:48):
like every HR leader I've talked to has a different perspective
and experience when it comes to EAP. Some of them had really great experiences,
some have had not great experiences, but I seem to think
about it as a great resource that doesn't actually get talked about enough. So
I think it was pre-COVID a great resource. I've always
(16:12):
had an EAP and if not, I've implemented them somewhere and
they're often embedded with our plans or with some type of
program that we buy. And so I think it's a great basic resource.
I think the problem came during COVID when there just were not
enough mental health professionals. So we had the experience where people
needed to access care and could not. And we're waiting days
(16:34):
or weeks to talk to someone when in many situations
that just wasn't enough. So one of the things that I've seen more of
that I actually love, and we did this at my last company, is
partnering with groups that have, say, peer resources. I
live in New Hampshire, and we have, you know, the front line
for people in the hospital who have a mental health issue
(16:56):
is a peer would come in and do the assessment, and
they're very well-trained, but not somebody who's clinical. And
for a lot of people, particularly on the frontline, that works really,
really well because it's less stigmatized. It's somebody who's
walked through what they walked through, whether it's divorce or
drug issues or general mental health. So
(17:18):
we partnered with a company that provided that support and that can work
really, really well. And then it's listening and
providing those resources. But EAPs are
great, but they may not be enough depending on your population.
I love the idea of peer resources because I think you're right. It
does create that stickiness
(17:40):
to somebody. Oh, you've been through this. You've been there. You're
kind of experiencing some of the same things I've been through. So there's
not that judgment or that fear that like, hey, I might be talking to
a therapist who has great clinical background but maybe doesn't
know necessarily what it's like to live in this world. As
we wrap up our conversation, I want you to think for a second about
(18:03):
the HR person who's stepping into a role
where they have a heavy frontline population that they've never handled before.
Let's say they've been, you know, more remote or hybrid. What's
your advice to them to be successful in that organization
and bring strategy from the frontline perspective to
First and foremost, do a listening tour, not going out
(18:26):
and saying, here's what I'm going to do, here's what I'm going to change, but
go out and listen and try to talk to everyone if
possible, but as many people as humanly possible. That's
the most impactful for sure. I mean, even more than
a team, if there is a team, that's the most impactful thing that
you can do is listen to your frontline folks because they really are
(18:47):
driving the business for the company, whatever kind of company it
is. And then I would say, you know, continue to do that
and build trust and trust takes time. So building
trust with your frontline population and everyone, but particularly
them, you're going to not only know what's going on, but
you're going to be able to make better data informed decisions based
(19:13):
I love it. So it's great advice. And Tracy, I'm so glad we were able to sit
and chat about this topic. I think it's really important for our
population as HR professionals to not lose sight of this really
(19:36):
Come back often and please subscribe, rate and review.
You're listening to the HR Mixtape Your podcast with
the perfect mix of practical advice, thought-provoking interviews, and
stories that just hit different so that work doesn't have to feel,
well, like work. Now, your host,
Joining me today is Tracy Sponenberg, founder and chief people officer
at Tracy Sponenberg LLC. Tracy is formerly the
(00:25):
chief people officer at the Granite Group, where she led transformative initiatives,
including technology advancements and the evolution of the HR department
Tracy, thank you so much for jumping on the podcast with me today. Thanks
for having me, Shari. I'm thrilled to be here. So I want to talk about
(00:46):
the desk list or frontline worker. And I
think so often they are overlooked in
our HR conversations. Why do you think that is right now?
Well, it's not in my conversations because this is
where I dedicate my time. I just left the corporate world about a
year ago and I spent probably about 90%, 95% of my
(01:07):
30-year career in companies with deskless workers. I think we tend to design
our processes, design our procedures, design our communications
around somebody who's sitting at a desk all day. Now, some certainly
companies have cracked that code, but at least in companies I've
(01:30):
worked in, you know, we tend to send out an email and
call it a day, right? And that doesn't necessarily work for somebody who
is on their feet all day and who either isn't attached
to their phone or who can't be attached to their phone and who certainly isn't
How do we make that transition to think frontline worker
first? And I think it's probably some of the same transition that
(01:54):
we've had to make in other places where we've had to
think of remote first. I think it's the same
transition with our minds, we just have to think about it differently. And I'll
add a caveat to that. Because when I have worked
with frontline workers in the past, and we as HR have been sitting
around having those conversations about things like engagement, I
(02:14):
feel like it always ends up going down this road of just very
silly, very like fake enjoyment,
those kinds of activities that we look at rather than thinking
more strategically about how you actually support a
I don't actually think about engagement so much as I think about the overall employee
(02:35):
experience, right? And one of the things we did at my last job and
certainly that I do with my clients is we wrap everything around the
employee experience. So from before you think about
becoming a candidate, all the way to way past the
time you leave. What are those moments that matter along that
life cycle? And those look different, potentially, depending
(02:56):
on how you work. So we take a lot of cues from marketing and
look at personas and look at how we communicate. And
we take an omni-channel approach and communicate broadly
and widely and make sure that we're hitting all
segments of the workforce. Traditionally, in companies I've worked in, truck
drivers were the hardest. because they're on the road all day. And
(03:18):
they were the hardest to reach, the hardest to get a message across, the hardest
to get time with to listen to. So we
developed, my former CEO developed something called the truck driver
test, which was, that's how we knew when it was communicated, when
you could talk to a truck driver, and they knew what was going on. And
that was a whole mix of you know, the
(03:39):
executives, those of us in the executive team doing our job, the
people team doing their job, and more particularly, most importantly, the
You know, honestly, some of the most creative were some
of the most old school. So when it came time to
(04:02):
make it really important things, particularly the people team had to do, we'd
send mailings home. We'd target spouses when
we knew there were spouses because the historically the
population that I work with last time was 80 plus percent
male. And historically, a lot of their spouses were handling things
like benefits. So we would, you know, invite them into
(04:23):
the conversation. I also spent an awful lot of time out
on the road visiting the locations. That was the highest and best use
of my time and listening and learning to everybody who's
out in different locations across the place because we had one
company culture, but we also had 60 individual
location cultures and we had to make sure that they were tying
(04:47):
How have you helped leadership, understand
that the experience that the frontline employees might be
having can be wildly different than those that are
inside the office, you know, working behind a desk,
so that they really understand the dynamics of their organization and how employee
experience is going to look different for those, for those
(05:11):
One of the things we did at my last company with the executives, and this is something
I highly encourage anybody to do, is
we had them work in our central distribution facility, sometimes for
a day, sometimes for a few days. And I remember when I first
started at the company, it was something I wanted to do, not something
that I had to do. But I remember asking the head
(05:32):
of the location, what time should I be there? He's like, well, we start at
five, but you don't have to be there at five. I'm like, I'll be there at five. And
they had me doing things that were really easy. And
I was like, no, put me on what a new you do a new hire,
like what a new hire would do. Okay. And so I did, I
unloaded giant units,
(05:53):
air conditioning, heating units, right. And I learned to wrap them. And I
learned everything in a day. Eight years
later, seven or eight years later, And of course I had been to
the place in between and developed relationships, but we
were talking about a new person coming in, a new executive coming in
and doing that. And they're like, yeah, they
(06:13):
did the same thing that you did. Remember when you did that? That was years later.
So the impact of an executive, not just spending time,
but spending time learning and doing what their
frontline people do is really powerful, really
How have you thought about flexibility different for this group?
(06:35):
And I've had conversations before where we've talked about things like shift
swapping and, you know, variety in
their job. I think there's many more levers we can pull when
it comes to flexibility and thinking with a flexibility mindset
Yeah, I mean, I think we look at flexibility, it's not just the time flexibility, it's
(06:57):
the role flexibility, potentially location flexibility. So,
again, it goes back to the individual and, you know,
wrapping things around their experience and their individual experience. Flexibility
looks completely different to me than looks completely
different to you, and certainly looks completely different to people working
on the front lines. Some people might be happy working 10 hours
(07:20):
a day, five days a week, and might be super motivated
and productive. And some people might need something different or
a different location. So I think it comes down, you can't just say,
here's the flexibility we have. You have to have those individual locations.
For somebody, it might mean coaching a kid's game. For somebody
else, it might mean going home at noon to take their pets out. For somebody else,
(07:41):
it might mean working the overnight shift so they can take care of their kids. So
it means many different things. But the one thing that I do know that
is that we should be talking about flexibility more than we talk about
How has technology helped this population specifically?
Because I know in a lot of organizations, frontline employees, you
(08:03):
actually are depending
on their own tech, not necessarily providing them tech, which is a little
bit different. But we still need to leverage technology to
So, I looked at a number of different AI-focused solutions
before I left my last role, and I have clients looking at different AI
(08:24):
solutions as well, because AI enables us to do things that
we really just couldn't do before. But
the thing that tends to work with this population, I found, is
anything that can automate over text. So
while, you know, drivers and while folks in the warehouse may
not have a computer on them, they're probably going to have a
(08:45):
phone. So things like chatbots or helpdesks
where you can text a question like, hey, how much PTO do I have left? Rather
than picking up the phone or waiting for a break, anything to
make it quick and easy and seamless
and ideally in one platform or in a platform they're already using
regularly and ideally mobile based, that's
(09:12):
What do you say to the leader listening who's like,
yeah, that sounds great, but our employees for safety reasons can't have their
phones on them during the day at work, they're locked in their lockers. How
Yeah, I just actually had that conversation with somebody. And the
first question I ask is, okay, is that Really
(09:33):
true. Can they really not have a phone
or do you just not want them to have a phone? Because there are real
reasons why somebody's school or kids or parents might need
to get a hold of somebody. So that's number one. And in the limited
situations where people actually can't have a phone in a
location, I think then we're back to some of the same
(09:54):
challenges. However, on a break or
those, I encourage leaders to give people 10 minutes
out of the workday to deal with maybe their
personal business, sure, but certainly their work business that they
have to do. You don't want them having to do
a micro-learning course or check their
(10:21):
And that lends itself to being really strategic about
your production expectations and how you're staffing to
make sure you can build in some of that time because you're absolutely right. There's
work communications that revolve around technology now, no matter what
kind of role you're in. helped
people think about being more creative in this space. I
(10:44):
think of some of the things that we've talked about from the, you
know, remote work perspective around burnout, those
types of things. Burnout happens here, too. It's not just exclusive
to that population. How is it different in how we're approaching
it here? Or is it the same and we're using the same tools, just activating them
You know, I think that there's a I
(11:08):
don't know that there's a difference in burnout overall.
There's certainly a difference in the individual experience and what that
looks like if you're sitting in an office versus what it
looks like if you're in a warehouse
environment. I think it might be harder to spot in
a warehouse environment, and I've certainly seen a number of people
(11:29):
go through it and certainly a number of people deny it, including myself,
although I wasn't working in a warehouse environment. Education,
everything that, you know, I like to say everything starts
with education. You know, my own experience with
burnout, I had no idea what I was going through until I
(11:50):
read an article and I'm supposed to know the stuff and I've been
working in HR for decades, right? And if I didn't know,
what about my team? What about the company? What about
the frontline employees? And so I think
educating, talking about stories, I shared my story broadly
with the whole company, talked about that, and somebody
(12:13):
may recognize it. I think we start there. and then look for signs.
I think too often it shows up in a decrease in performance
and it certainly did for me and it certainly does. And I
think too often we tend to dismiss that as solely a
For sure. And you brought up a good point that made me think about
(12:33):
how you're communicating and supporting employees. And you
talked about sharing your own story. How does training
evolve for the managers of this group? Have you found that
there's specific things that are more important to lean into
When I first started my last company, it was very much a traditional
(12:55):
HR department where HR was doing everything. Everybody was sent to HR,
you know, very old school. But that's the
way it was. And that's the way that I grew up. And that's how I practiced for
years and years. And I evolved along with helping
the department and the company evolve a little bit to do that. And
along with that came, you know, helping train
(13:16):
some managers with how to handle these
day-to-day questions because people were going to them. People shouldn't
be sent to HR for a body odor issue, for example. And
so that training looks different depending on the company you're in.
So for us, a lot of what I did in my first couple
of years there actually was going around and working with managers and coaching them individually.
(13:37):
I spent a lot of time doing that because for that organization at that
time, that was scalable to
a point. It's not now, but that was scalable to a point. And
that was extremely, extremely helpful.
Well, and it's empowering your managers, right? They walk away hopefully
from that conversation feeling like, oh, I don't, I don't have to go to HR
(13:59):
for everything. Right. I have the skills I need and kind of the
quote unquote backing of official language that, you know, that I
can use in those conversations. As you think about
the clientele that you've worked with, what
comes to mind is like maybe the top, you know, three to
five things that you are consistently either surprised by or
(14:21):
really realize there's an opportunity for us to learn more about when it comes
I feel like nothing surprises me, but then something comes along pretty
often and surprises me. But I'd
say the biggest opportunities that we have are areas, number
one, leadership. So we still, in
frontline companies, and a lot of frontline companies, still promote
(14:44):
the best X or the best Y, right? So you're
great at working in the warehouse, so we're
going to make you warehouse manager, even though you have no experience, and we're not going to
give you any training. And so there's a huge opportunity because
leaders, frontline leaders, are everything to frontline folks
who might not be interacting with people from corporate or people from other
(15:05):
locations. So that's far and away the biggest opportunity. I
think there's a lot of opportunity with AI. I
think there's a lot of opportunity to lean into
well-being and to mental health specifically. We don't talk
about that enough. for the frontline workforce. And there's
sometimes a stigma still everywhere, but particularly in
(15:27):
that area. And I think opening up those conversations and
training managers on how to listen and how to observe,
I think that's another huge opportunity. And
How have you used resources like EAP
for this group? And I love to ask this question because I feel
(15:48):
like every HR leader I've talked to has a different perspective
and experience when it comes to EAP. Some of them had really great experiences,
some have had not great experiences, but I seem to think
about it as a great resource that doesn't actually get talked about enough. So
I think it was pre-COVID a great resource. I've always
(16:12):
had an EAP and if not, I've implemented them somewhere and
they're often embedded with our plans or with some type of
program that we buy. And so I think it's a great basic resource.
I think the problem came during COVID when there just were not
enough mental health professionals. So we had the experience where people
needed to access care and could not. And we're waiting days
(16:34):
or weeks to talk to someone when in many situations
that just wasn't enough. So one of the things that I've seen more of
that I actually love, and we did this at my last company, is
partnering with groups that have, say, peer resources. I
live in New Hampshire, and we have, you know, the front line
for people in the hospital who have a mental health issue
(16:56):
is a peer would come in and do the assessment, and
they're very well-trained, but not somebody who's clinical. And
for a lot of people, particularly on the frontline, that works really,
really well because it's less stigmatized. It's somebody who's
walked through what they walked through, whether it's divorce or
drug issues or general mental health. So
(17:18):
we partnered with a company that provided that support and that can work
really, really well. And then it's listening and
providing those resources. But EAPs are
great, but they may not be enough depending on your population.
I love the idea of peer resources because I think you're right. It
does create that stickiness
(17:40):
to somebody. Oh, you've been through this. You've been there. You're
kind of experiencing some of the same things I've been through. So there's
not that judgment or that fear that like, hey, I might be talking to
a therapist who has great clinical background but maybe doesn't
know necessarily what it's like to live in this world. As
we wrap up our conversation, I want you to think for a second about
(18:03):
the HR person who's stepping into a role
where they have a heavy frontline population that they've never handled before.
Let's say they've been, you know, more remote or hybrid. What's
your advice to them to be successful in that organization
and bring strategy from the frontline perspective to
First and foremost, do a listening tour, not going out
(18:26):
and saying, here's what I'm going to do, here's what I'm going to change, but
go out and listen and try to talk to everyone if
possible, but as many people as humanly possible. That's
the most impactful for sure. I mean, even more than
a team, if there is a team, that's the most impactful thing that
you can do is listen to your frontline folks because they really are
(18:47):
driving the business for the company, whatever kind of company it
is. And then I would say, you know, continue to do that
and build trust and trust takes time. So building
trust with your frontline population and everyone, but particularly
them, you're going to not only know what's going on, but
you're going to be able to make better data informed decisions based
(19:13):
I love it. So it's great advice. And Tracy, I'm so glad we were able to sit
and chat about this topic. I think it's really important for our
population as HR professionals to not lose sight of this really
(19:36):
Come back often and please subscribe, rate and review.
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
Ridiculous History
History is beautiful, brutal and, often, ridiculous. Join Ben Bowlin and Noel Brown as they dive into some of the weirdest stories from across the span of human civilization in Ridiculous History, a podcast by iHeartRadio.