Your best retention data isn't turnover data: what to watch instead

Every HR leader knows the meeting where an operator points at the turnover number and asks for a retention plan, and the honest problem is that the aggregate number does not say where the loss is concentrated or which fix will move it. Stacie Baird, chief people officer at Community Medical Services, has spent 30 years in HR, much of it inside private equity backed growth, building a method that answers that. Recorded live during a CMS webinar on burnout and turnover, her core argument is that the most useful retention data is not turnover at all.

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Why is turnover the wrong number to watch?

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Turnover is a lagging indicator, and by the time it moves the person is already gone. The signals that give a leader time show up earlier: in engagement scores and absenteeism, and in the people who stop taking time off. Baird treats burnout as the leading edge of turnover and reads it first. "The lagging data here is turnover," she says, which is why she builds her early-warning system around the symptoms that come before the exit.

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How can HR spot burnout before people quit?

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Through structured one-on-ones and short, symptom-based pulse surveys, not the once-a-year engagement event. Baird has her leaders open a one-on-one with a two-word check-in, asking people to name how they feel with no qualifier, because words like tired or overwhelmed surface before a resignation does. She builds the same idea into the survey itself. "The best way for us to discern burnout in our own teams is having structured one-on-one conversations on a regular basis and knowing the signs and symptoms of burnout," she says. It holds inside HR too, where vicarious trauma wears teams down.

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How do you find what is actually driving turnover?

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Stop looking at the company-wide rate and slice the number by role, site, seniority, and tenure, then tag it to business events so cause and effect become visible. A single aggregate rate hides the story. "Slicing that data becomes really critical because the aggregate data is important, but it's not the only data that we look at to make business decisions and changes," Baird says. Tenure is the cut she leans on hardest, because when someone leaves tells you most of why.

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How did CMS cut turnover in its highest-churn role?

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By running a pilot on one role instead of guessing across the whole company. The client services coordinator runs the front desk, a demanding entry-level job where turnover ran 70 to 80 percent. "They are the air traffic control for our sites," Baird says. Slicing by tenure showed the loss was concentrated in the first 60 days, which points to selection, onboarding, or an unrealistic job preview rather than leadership or fatigue. The team layered 30-60-90 day pulse surveys to find where disengagement started, moved the number in that segment, and now runs the same method on nursing turnover.

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How do you get executives to act on people data?

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Lead with the human and business consequence, not the dashboard, and prove the fix on a pilot before asking for budget. Baird uses AI to turn an HRBench export into language operators act on, turning a trend into a sentence a clinical leader feels. "If our turnover stays at the same rate, given the growth that we have next year, we will lose X number of nurses," she says, the kind of line that makes an operator sit up. Because she ran the change as a pilot first, she arrives with proof, not a funding request.

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The shift underneath is one of posture. Retention stops being a number HR reports after the fact and becomes a signal the function reads early enough to change the outcome.

Stacie Baird (00:02): I always try to reinforce is the best way for us to discern burnout in our own teams is having structured one-on-one conversations on a regular basis. We use the symptoms of burnout and we ask them questions. You know, when you woke up this morning, how did you feel? The lagging data here is turnover. Slicing that data becomes really critical because the aggregate data is important, but it's not the only data that we look at to make business decisions and changes.

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Logan (00:28): Welcome to a special live episode of Pulse by HRBench. This episode was recorded during a live webinar with Stacie Baird, Chief People Officer at Community Medical Services. They're an 80 site, 1,100 employee organization on the front lines of mental health and substance use care. Stacie brings over 30 years of HR leadership experience, including in high growth and private equity backed companies. She's a certified trauma informed coach as well as hosts the HX podcast, where she explores how to elevate the human experience at work.

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In this conversation, we cover how HR leaders experience and manage vicarious trauma, the burnout symptoms CMS tracks with poll surveys and why burnout always precedes turnover, how CMS piloted a turnover reduction initiative that led to a 27% improvement in under 60 days, and real-time strategies for communicating HR insights to the C-suite with empathy and impact. Let's get into this episode.

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Logan (01:24): Stacie, what would you like the audience know about you today?

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Stacie Baird (01:27): So, Stacie Baird. I'm a chief people officer at Community Medical Services. I am honored to serve over 1,100 employees, serve tens of thousands of patients at Community Medical Services, have 16 states and 80 locations. We treat opioid use disorder.

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So why did I want to talk about this? We're in mental health and in substance use and opioid use. So our burnout rates for our employee population is some of the highest in any industry, in any sub-industry. So like Logan said, I went and got a coaching certificate through the Trauma Institute when I started here. 50% of our employees are in recovery from OUD or SUD. And so I wanted to be prepared as a chief people officer to think about things like burnout, to be aware of what burnout looks like, to be able to coach teams and leaders and have those active conversations. I wanted to be very educated about what burnout looks like and how to address it. In addition, burnout leads to turnover. So that's one of the big things that we're talking about today.

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So my past and my history, guys, 30 years of being in HR, about 25 years of leading the practice with incredible teams in high growth companies. Right now, and for the last several parts of my career, I've been in private equity or VC backed companies. So as you can imagine, the stress and the pressure of that growth trajectory.

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That's a little bit about me, do have a podcast. So that's probably why I'm a little less flustered than I would be, because stuff happens all the time when we're live. And that's the HX podcast. We're syndicated across all channels for the last six years. And we talk about elevating the human experience. And this is part of that. So really passionate and really excited to be here with you today, Logan.

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Logan (03:17): Awesome. Well, thank you for that introduction, Stacie, and definitely go give her podcast a listen. Outside of that, I want to kick it off. So we wanted to talk about how you recognize and respond to burnout. Now, we will talk about how you deal with that across your nurses and employees, but I wanted to take a quick pit stop and say, like, I think probably some of the people on this audience in HR suffer from burnout often and don't always get recognized. So I want to kind of kick it off there, Stacie. How does burnout look like in HR for people in our audience?

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Stacie Baird (03:57): Yeah, so I talk about this a lot with other heads of HR because I think it's an incredibly important topic. I don't think it gets talked about enough. Our teams in HR experience what we call vicarious trauma. If you're on this call, you guys know, like we get the call when somebody has a tragedy in their family. We do the terminations with leaders. Like there's a lot of conversations that are very difficult to navigate.

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So something that I always try to reinforce is the best way for us to discern burnout in our own teams is having structured one-on-one conversations on a regular basis and knowing the signs and symptoms of burnout. Because what occurs is people get lost in the shuffle when they start to burn out, because the symptoms really are being disengaged, having low energy, feeling ineffective and feeling kind of like, what's the point of what I'm doing? So what happens is if we're not doing one-on-ones with our teams, we can't really effectively discern when people are edging towards burnout before they get there. But within the context of that one-on-one, that individual more intimate conversation, you can really get a sense for where somebody's at and how they're doing.

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And I always start with, we did this during COVID. I think it was a great practice and people have gotten away from it. Give me a one or two word check-in. And what I've started to add is don't give me a qualifier. Not good, not bad, but actually have them tap into what are two words on how they're actually feeling. So if you're hearing from your team or even in team meeting and you do a two word check in. Tired, exhausted, overwhelmed, and people will say that sometimes.

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So that's the first thing. The second thing is looking at absenteeism or people taking time off without a lot of notice. It happens from time to time, but if there's a pattern of behavior there, that's something to be mindful of. Another thing, and we'll talk about data in a minute, and we look at this across our entire population, is just disengagement in things that used to really get people excited and engaged. So like if you do a team meeting and people are just regularly not showing up to those team meetings or not showing up with any energy, you know, that can be something that can be very concerning as a leader that we can look out for. These things seem so obvious, but when we're also in stress, it becomes less obvious because it's harder to recognize other people in stress.

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So these are some of the things that we talk about. And one thing that comes up a lot that I'll call out is people that never take PTO. So it's really easy to celebrate people that work really hard. They're always on, right? They're always ready. And that takes its toll. So that's also something to watch out for. If you have people that are really bad actually at taking time away and disconnecting, that can start to be a symptom of burnout because they're kind of overextending themselves. So hopefully, Logan, that gives people a little bit of a construct of where to start thinking about and looking at burnout before we get to the turnover part.

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Logan (07:13): Yeah, that is really good. I want to tap into something you had mentioned early on, and it was a new term for me when we started talking, but it was the, you mentioned HR dealing with terminations, you know, people coming to them, but the vicarious trauma piece, maybe that's common for this audience, but it wasn't for me. So maybe, can you talk about that just a little bit?

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Stacie Baird (07:35): Sure, yeah. And again, this is why I got certified by the Trauma Institute. I'm actually working with them on a course for HR, because I think this is such an important topic. And so again, in my career, I started 30 years ago. And for everybody on this call, I don't know how many of you have had this happen. I'm guessing many of you. It's like go and sit with the leader and have a difficult conversation with this employee, or even terminate their employment. And then the expectation is you just dial into the next meeting like nothing happened. Like you didn't just impact someone's life.

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And so we talk about big T-trauma and little T-trauma. You know, big T-trauma tends to be things that shift the neurology in someone's brain to the point where they struggle to reactivate. There have been times, I'd say vicarious trauma, so not direct trauma, but it's really someone else sharing their story, is what vicarious trauma is. So it's that trauma that we absorb through someone else's experience. So I talk about this a lot, even in, we have patient stories every Friday. Sometimes we can ignite vicarious trauma because they are reliving how they struggled with addiction. And that can be traumatizing for people to just hear, even though they're not experiencing it. So that's the difference between direct trauma experience and vicarious trauma.

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And I think we overlook vicarious trauma in HR, at least in good portion of my career. So now with my teams, I'm like, hey guys, if you're having hard conversations, schedule the 30 minutes after, block your calendar, go take a walk, self-regulate, call one of us to co-regulate, all of the things that we really need to do that we should be showing up for our people as good leaders.

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Logan (09:24): Yeah, that's really good. So how do you, because you mentioned you're in PE-backed and you've been in VC-backed and high pressure environments. How do you create the space for this in high pressure environments?

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Stacie Baird (09:36): Well, sometimes you gotta slow down to speed up is what I always tell my team. So, you know, we've got to recover to sprint. We've got to recover to finish the marathon. If you've ever trained for any athletic event, right? It's not like you keep going when you're feeling fatigued because you can actually end up, and how many of us have done that? Like we've kept going despite feeling exhausted. [Unclear audio in source; flagged for review.] ...are still relevant and I think more relevant, believe it or not, because now people are vacillating from in office to out of office. And so then you're like changing environments. This week, yesterday I was in the office. I was at a conference earlier this week. Now I'm at home. So you're in different places. So it's just developing a rhythm and a ritual that you can take with you wherever you are.

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What are the things that work for you to self-regulate? And again, we use the word self-care all the time and self-care is part of it, but this is really about self-regulation and re-regulation in the moment. Even if you only have five minutes, what are the things that work for you? And a great thing about AI, y'all, you can put it in AI of your choice. What are the top 30 self-regulation techniques that I can try over the next 30 days? And it will give you a full menu of options that you can share with your team or use yourself. There are apps out there. The Calm app is one of the most popular. There's lots of options now to really find what works for you in re-regulating your nervous system. So you can show up. You're responsible for the energy you bring every day in every meeting. And so to show up for that next meeting, for that next conversation. Otherwise, you're doing those people a disservice by not recharging.

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Logan (11:49): Yeah, that's really good. I want to move on to our next topic around getting good engagement data. And one of the interesting things here, and I want to try to create a good segue here, is you actually use engagement surveys to keep a pulse on some of these burnout symptoms. Can you talk a little bit about how you think about structuring surveys that way, and how you get good data?

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Stacie Baird (12:18): Yeah, so we have, like we all do these big engagement surveys. It's an event, right? But one of the reasons we, this is not necessarily a direct plug for HRBench, if you guys use whatever you use for survey mechanisms, but we use HRBench to create smaller, shorter surveys that are just a couple of questions. Again, think about it's like a two word check-in, but as a survey mechanism. And again, for some people that is a more relevant way to share their experience. Like, how are you doing? How are you feeling?

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And what we do is we structure, we use the symptoms of burnout and we ask them questions. You know, when you woke up this morning, how did you feel? Like if people are exhausted, right? And we're getting a large percentage of people in our population that that's their exhausted versus energized. Like you can create polarity there and make people, like, pick a lane. And then you can really get a sense for what's going on in your population before, again, the lagging data here is turnover. And that's what this webinar, when we marketed the webinar, we talked about turnover. But that's lagging data. The lagginess of the lagging data is turnover. We want to start to get in front of people.

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The other thing we do is we do programs, like wellness programs and appreciation programs. And so you can also look at engagement data and trends in how people are engaging in programs. So and again, you can integrate that into your data set. So if you have an engagement platform and that engagement platform typically has this many engagements on a month and you see a drastic decrease in how people are engaging in that platform, that again could be a symptom of a workforce that's starting to disengage. So those are leading indicators, again, versus waiting for the once a year big survey or you're waiting for turnover data to trickle in. Let's get more proactive and human-centric about how we think about engagement.

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Logan (14:18): Yeah, that's a good tip. And I love that you using the smaller, more bite-sized surveys to grab a pulse there. So one of the things that we talked about in this collecting data, getting engagement data, was how you're getting those engagement scores and having role-specific data and integrating that into team structures and how you view that in order to start getting good data to make great decisions.

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Stacie Baird (14:48): Yes, so the most obvious example, we have five key roles in every clinic. So we do want to look at those individual role experiences because, again, let's just, I'll give you an example. The regulations were changed around dosing at the federal level earlier this year. And it changed the nurse role in our clinic, meaning like they were having to do things differently than they were before. So in that example, like being able to pull out in that engagement, in the pulse engagement data or the larger engagement data, that specific role and track and understand what engagement looks like over time as we make business changes.

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And again, I know in HRBench we can like record when things are happening in the business so we can correlate data to those big massive shifts and changes. And it allows us to look at role-based turnover and understand what a business change, like how we're doing dosing, or right now we're rolling out an EMR. I mean, that's a massive wholesale change to the business, right? We can start to look at how is that impacting different roles, sites, regions.

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You can slice it by leader. So again, like are certain leaders doing a better job at communicating change management, and other pockets or other regions, we're watching that engagement data trend down. So those are the things for me, Logan, like slicing that data becomes really critical because the aggregate data is important, but it's not the only data that we look at to make business decisions and changes.

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Logan (16:27): Yeah, and I like the call out of tagging your data to events to see does something affect or impact data down the line. And we'll get into that quite a bit with the turnover, because that's the lagging indicator. And that's probably where you end up seeing a whole bunch of that stuff. But one of the things that I know I think you're on the forefront of this is the good job score. And maybe this is going to sound like a little bit of a random question for everybody on here, but what is the good job score and how are you all using it at CMS?

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Stacie Baird (17:00): Yeah, so the good job score is something that Future of Work, they're an impact hedge fund, they're one of our investors, brought forth. We're a B Corp. And so, if you don't know what a B Corp means, like we really look for a balanced scorecard on how we're giving to our employees, to our clients and our shareholders, right? It is a very balanced approach. And part of that conversation is how our employees not just engage, but what is their feedback around that balanced scorecard? Are they feeling like there's a balance between how we're showing up for our patients and how we're showing up for employees?

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So it's a mechanism we use once a year. We send it out, actually right now as we speak in real time, it runs through Halloween for us. We're doing a trick or treat theme this year. And so we're asking people to give feedback. One of our values also is your voice matters. So we set this up really aligned to our value system that we want to hear your voice. We want you to be honest about where your pain points are. And there's multiple pillars in the Good Job score. You know, one of the pillars we really is mission, vision, values. Are we living our mission, vision, values? What about leadership? So like it's leadership communication. How is leadership showing up for you? And then there's, you know, the big question everybody always has is like there's questions about compensation and benefits packages. So like how is it? How does it feel? What's the value proposition to being at CMS?

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So, you know, like many of these engagement score surveys, they have these various pillars, but those pillars really align to our value system, who we are as a B Corp and how we want to show up for our employees. And then we take that and distill that into an action plan. So I always, you know, I heard this a long time ago, this is not something I made up, but I'm sure you've all heard this. Don't ask if you're not going to answer. So don't ask the question, don't do a survey, if you're planning on doing nothing with the data but report the data. We then still out a 2026 action plan on how we're going to raise that score in 2026. It's a five point score. So, you know, we wanted to move from 3.6 to 3.8 or 4.2 or whatever it is. And then we narrowed down the scope, Logan, on what are the areas that we want to move the needle on. So a big one for us last year, for example, was clarity and goals and objectives, clarity on accountability. And so we've rolled out core four, we've rolled out quarterly performance reviews as an answer to that feedback from last year's scores.

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Logan (19:42): Yeah, it's a really good point. Don't ask the question if you don't plan on, I don't know, doing anything about it. Don't know that's exactly what you said, but that's how I'm interpreting it. And I...

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Stacie Baird (19:52): Don't ask if you're not going to answer. That's what I always think about. Yes.

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Logan (19:56): ...think that anybody who's been in an organization like that, you know, it starts to contribute to that burnout piece that we talked about earlier if you're not seeing the changes. But I want to move on to our last topic, which might be why people showed up, and CMS's impressive 20% improvements and kind of the playbook as to how you addressed turnover. But what caught me, and why I wanted to focus on this with you, was how you got to figuring out what was causing burnout or turnover and slicing that. And, go ahead, I don't need any more introduction.

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Stacie Baird (20:32): Well, we're big on pilots, right? Like we have 80 locations and 1,200 employees, which is not a huge organization, but distributed across 80 locations that can feel a little unwieldy to roll things out. So that 20% turnover was actually in a segment of our population that we focused on and did a pilot in. And to your point, Logan, we wanted to slice and dice that data. And if we made specific changes, would we see the needle move? Because again, I don't know about you guys, but if I went to my executive team and said, I want to spend all this money and do ABCDEFG, even though I'm a chief and I have some authority, the answer is probably going to be no, because I haven't proved the ROI of that decision.

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So what we did is, I'll give you the first example, is we looked at our client services position. Our client services position sits at the front desk. They are the air traffic control for our sites. They were dealing with patients and the providers and getting people to dose, like they are running, you know, their desk. And it's a very difficult job, but it's kind of an entry level job. So we were high on turnover, like 70 to 80%. Because let's be honest, somebody could have been making chicken nuggets at Chick-fil-A and then took this job. I mean, that is a big transition on thinking about how to deliver patient care, how to validate insurance. It's a stretch. So we're having this turnover issue in this role.

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And what we did was we started to dissect, as I said before, we looked at location data. We sliced it obviously into that role. We also had senior CSCs and CSCs. So we dissected that apart to see if there was any difference in that turnover. The other thing we did is we looked at tenure, right? So when are we losing employees? So, you guys know, I'm sure this is not rocket science, but like if it's early on, it may be a selection issue or an onboarding or an early training issue. If it's later in tenure, it might be leadership, communication, burnout, fatigue, et cetera. And what we found was it was early stage turnover, less than 60 days.

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And this has been something that's been a challenge for us as a business because we are moving so fast and we're so agile. We've not gotten as good as we should be at a couple of things. One, moving to proactive recruitment strategies that fill the pipeline with more people that understand our value proposition. Let me say that again. So what is our value proposition for this role? What is the meaning of this role in our clinic? What does it actually look like? What's the realistic job preview? What is somebody going to be doing in that seat? So are we doing a good job there? And then are we onboarding and training people to be successful in this role? And are there clear goals and objectives of what we expect?

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So ultimately, if you're seeing that early stage turnover, then starting to dissect it even more, we launched a pulse survey, we started launching 30, 60, 90 day pulse surveys, so we could then further dissect. At what point are people starting to feel disengaged? And so it's really utilizing the system and the data to get more and more granular about where the problem is really sitting. So first 30 days, that's probably a selection issue or not giving a realistic job preview. Like they don't have enough tenure to like really feel terrible about much else, I hope. Hopefully people are being kind and welcoming in their first 30 days. So we probably, they picked us and this isn't the right environment, or we picked them. So that's how I think about it, and we've done this across multiple roles at this point. We're really focused on nurses right now, for example, and focused on how do we get more and more creative about dissecting that data so that we can really get to the core issue around our nursing turnover as an example.

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Logan (24:23): That's a really great example of really digging in. Did you use HRBench at all during this process?

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Stacie Baird (24:31): That's all we use. And again, not a commercial break.

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Logan (24:33): It's all you.

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Stacie Baird (24:35): It's all we use. So we worked with the HRBench team to integrate all of our data points into HRBench. Because again, for me, I want to be able to triangulate that data, including sometimes what we started to also look at is, we're starting this this year, is, and I'm talking to HRBench about it, can we also look at correlative value of census data? So are we seeing early stage sites grow at the rate that we think they should? And are we hiring the right people so that they're delivering exceptional patient care? And what is the data saying about how potentially affecting our patient census or our patient retention.

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You lose a counselor over and over again and you're in recovery, there's going to be frustration about your journey as a patient, right? So that turnover directly impacts our patients, our nurse turnover. Nurses, you know, they're dosing patients, they see patients every day that they come in. Those patients have really a relationship with those nurses. They always want to go to the same window and see their same nurse and have the conversation and catch up about how they're doing. And that, although really not, you know, a clinical relationship from the standpoint, like somebody has clinical advocacy with their counselor, but it is a relationship that matters to our patients. So that nursing turnover does directly impact our patient experience.

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And so being able to use HRBench to really wrap and correlate that data. And there's, you know, there's a module in there where I can create my own dashboards and I do it all the time. When in real time, I'll be in an ELT, a question will come up about Wisconsin and I'll pull up Wisconsin nurses. I'll, you know, create my own little mini dashboard in the moment, which is why I love the tool, so that I can really drill into what I need to know for that conversation in real time with my executive team. And that's been incredibly valuable to, Logan, is just to be able to really be present and active in those conversations and not wait for somebody to deliver a report to me.

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Logan (26:39): Yeah, that's, I love the example of being in meeting and pulling up data because I can only imagine in a high pressure environment, you know, you want answers now, you know, you don't anticipate every question because you don't have a crystal ball. Although I think we all wish we did. You do. Okay, of course you do, Stacie.

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Stacie Baird (26:56): I do, I have one on my desk, it's right here. It doesn't work, but it's there. That's the joke in HR, right? Like somebody bought me that because people believe we have the crystal ball, y'all, and I do, so technically have one. It hasn't told me the future ever, so I'll keep it on my desk forever as a memento, but you're right. I can't predict what's going to come up in an executive meeting and what questions are going to be asked and what problems the business is going to face. So having that data at my fingertips and being able to in real time slice and dice that data how I need to has been incredibly valuable for me to be a strategic partner to the business.

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Logan (27:40): Great. And aside from just having the data, like there's a whole skill set in communicating that data. What advice would you have for everybody on today, to give them, of communicating those insights to leadership with data and empathy? So kind of combining both of that. You have any tips for everybody?

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Stacie Baird (27:59): That's a great question. Couple of things. One, I'm still getting better at this because I can get, and I think people that love data can real get nerdy and like overwhelm people with lots of information. So I don't know about you guys, pick your AI tool of choice and get real good at prompts. So that's what's been helping me, Logan, is to your point, writing an exceptional prompt and importing some dashboards from HRBench so you can download it as a PDF or a PowerPoint out of HRBench. And then I can upload that into take your pick, Claude, ChatGPT, or if you're using a closed source, if you're dealing with highly confidential data or data you don't want to put out there, you can use Microsoft Copilot or whatever your closed source AI is. And writing prompts, like how do I communicate the following data and highlight the challenges that we're having, again, to your great language, in an empathetic and direct way?

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AI does that better than, to me it does almost anything else. It'll give you really how to have language to have meaningful conversations with the business on the impact that it's having on the business, the impact that it's having on patients, which is what makes operators and clinical professionals sit up and take notice. And even calling out some statistics, I just did this the other day. It's like if our turnover stays at the same rate, given the growth that we have next year, we will lose X number of nurses. Like that powerful statement of how many human beings will come in and come out of our doors as an employer. You know, that's something that we don't always think about. So what's the high impact statement there to capture attention? So that's my advice. I mean, I think again, that's a really easy, fun, simple way to start to get really good at using some AI models and AI tools if you're just beginning down that road, because again, you can upload the HRBench data and get really rich feedback.

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The other thing, and I know it's coming soon on HRBench, HRBench gives us insights too. So there are mechanisms on HRBench that literally benchmark some of what's out there in the market and give us insights and flag things. So again, I don't have to be hyper vigilant all the time at looking at my data constantly, which I totally love data and I could totally get sucked into doing. And again, it houses my recruitment data, it houses my HRMS data and it bridges all of that. So I can start to correlate again, candidate pipeline to turnover and other factors that typically would be teased apart into different systems. So that's the other thing is how do you start to have one story about what's happening, especially if you're doing board prep or strategic planning prep. How do you have one story and tell a powerful story with data that's simple enough for people to stay engaged? That's the hard part with executives, is getting their attention and keeping it.

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Logan (31:06): Yeah, that's a lot of great nuggets in there. We're recording this October 23rd. Everybody who hears live obviously knows this, but we are recording, we'll distribute later. And I was just on a meeting with our product team and the anomalies portion of insights is coming rapidly down the pipeline. And we do have predictive insights. So you do have predicting three to six months. Anyways, a little bit of a plug there for everybody, but at any rate.

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I did want to close it out because we are now, normally we do these like 30 minutes and we just keep going because there's so much great stuff here. So I want to close it out with a couple of key takeaways and then we'll open it up to some questions. So some of the stuff that we talked about today, spotting signs of burnout early, using your engagement surveys as leading indicators, because as Stacie mentioned, turnover is your lagging indicator. So getting ahead of things with your engagement surveys. Like we just talked about communicating to leadership with data and empathy. Use your AI tool of choice to help you out with that if you need some help. And understanding turnover root causes. Diving into the data and understanding what is happening even at a site level to be able to prove out pilots and prove to the business that you're going to make impacts. Stacie, is there anything else you wanted to leave the audience with in addition to that?

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Stacie Baird (32:21): No, the only thing I'll call out is that early stages of burnout, just be aware of it for yourself as well. If you're leading an HR function, it's inside out, it's start with you, it's you can't pour from an empty cup, pick your euphemism. But that's something that I'm passionate about, that people that are leading these teams are taking care of themselves as well.

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Logan (32:41): And thank you for adding that and giving everybody that permission. Not that anybody needs permission, but... All right, so a few questions. We did have some questions come in through the chat. So I'm gonna go ahead and roll with one. So do you have any tips for increasing participation rates in your engagement surveys?

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Stacie Baird (33:03): Great question. It's a marketing job, right? And so again, really marketing, choosing your time wisely. We really choose when we do these, when there are not a lot of other initial, like don't do it during open enrollment, for example. That's, you know, when there's less distraction, talk about it early and often. We talk about this all the time. I think there's also, as you go, if people see that you integrate the feedback, they will be more vocal and more engaged when the surveys come out. So if you're just doing a survey and again, you're not answering back or reporting out, we're talking about the planning that's happening, then people won't use their voice because they don't think it matters.

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So, yes, there's lots of trite things you can do with giveaways and raffles and all that good stuff, but we actually have incredibly solid engagement and it's grown year over year. And I have to believe the data is telling us that's because we take action on what we hear. So I think that's the biggest takeaway is do you take action? Do you communicate the action you take, how you're communicating that after the fact?

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Logan (34:12): Yeah, that's a really good point, is just the taking action. I think that that is a big driver of engagement. I know from myself having taken them, when I see that stuff, when I see things happen, then I'm more likely to take them. You talked a bit about the communicating generally, but one of the things that came in was how did you share your findings with people leaders throughout the company?

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Stacie Baird (34:35): Yeah, so we have a series of meetings that we have as an organization every week. We have our regional leader meeting, we have a manager meeting that's at the site level, and then we have a town hall. So this natural communication strategy lets us flow information through the organization every week so that we can make sure, you know, we're moving fast. A week is like a lifetime here. So we use that communication pipeline to our advantage to effectively communicate when something's happening, how it's going.

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Listen, y'all, if you can have this too, do it. I'm a huge advocate for this, having a PMO and a communications person on your HR team. You know, I have somebody who's incredibly gifted. I work with her every day. And we think about and strategize with the PMO at the central point of the company. Again, we look forward, what's happening in this month? What do we need to navigate around? How do we communicate that? Having a communication strategy built, because it's not one and done. We know that, right? Like, I mean, think of open enrollment. You have to like beat people with information until they say uncle. I tell the team, when people start complaining and tell us to shut up, that is when we've done a great job of communicating. When we rolled out new benefits about three years ago, it got to the point where everybody's like, okay, we got it. And I'm like, perfect. That means we've done our job.

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So I think it is over communicating and that gets said all the time. But what I mean by that is different vehicles, different channels, different mechanisms, different messages. So really being creative about how you're communicating and how you're building alignment inside of your organization through your leadership team by also co-creating those messages. What is going to resonate with their teams? They know their teams better than anyone else. And so when we go to do that, that's the other thing we do, Logan, is we socialize this with leadership so that we can co-create messaging and timing and rollout of anything we're doing, including miscarriage.

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Logan (36:43): Yeah, that's like everything throughout this, Stacie. That is another great piece of advice for everybody on the call today. We have a few more questions, but I want to be respectful of time. If you put your question in the chat, we will answer it later and email them out. But I'll do one final question. Have you started to use any of the predictive analytics yet?

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Stacie Baird (37:03): Yes, it's pretty early, right? But again, we're piloting and testing that. So again, not that I don't trust that just data and predictive, but to get buy-in, I mean, let's talk about buy-in from leadership. And by the way, all of my chiefs and all of my next line leaders have access to HRBench themselves and we build their dashboards so that they have direct access, which I think is really an autonomous way to think about data. They can access this when they want. So we do use those, started to plug into those predictive. I'm excited to get more traction there and more and more, but we wanted to build some trust in the organization that we can leverage those and they can go in and look at those and start to think about their own business and their own business drivers in that way. So still early stage, full disclosure, but we are starting to look at what is being recommended there on the predictive side.

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Logan (38:01): Yeah, the really good call out is the buy-in there, because for anybody to believe anything, especially when it comes to data, because you can make it say what you want, is to get the buy-in so that you're all in agreement and then you can move forward with strategic decisions. I really like that call out there. So, Stacie, I want to thank you for taking the time to sit down with us today and chat through everything that we've talked about. And with that, Stacie, is there anything else that you would like to leave the audience with today?

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Stacie Baird (38:31): I'm just going to sound, I was not paid to be here. So I'm just going to, this is unpaid, unsolicited. Of my vendors, y'all, HRBench is the top of my list. They are incredible partners. They have partnered with us every step of the way. We did an HRIS transition. I was able to hold onto my trailing data from my prior system and integrate that with new data from the new system completely seamlessly. And our team had to do zero lift there. So I cannot say enough good things about HRBench. I talk about it all the time. I sound like, again, they do not pay me to say any of this. This is not an endorsement due to HRBench giving me any reason to say any of this, but I just know how hard it is in HR to get great data and tell a story with data. And this has been a game changer for us moving off of UKG, moving on to a new platform with Paylocity. And having that continuation of that data has been such a gift, as well as maintaining our recruitment data in that same system. So thank you, Logan and team, for always sticking by our side and working with us on how to solve problems.

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Logan (39:37): Well, thank you for that, Stacie. That is much appreciated. And I just want to say thank you for joining us today, Stacie. Really big thank you. Thank you to the audience for taking the time to listen and think about burnout in your organization and everything else. It means a lot for your employee population, that's for sure. With that, I want to say enjoy the rest of your day. Thanks, everybody.

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Stacie Baird (39:59): Thank you.

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Logan (40:00): Thank you for joining us for today's episode of Pulse, the podcast that has real conversations with HR leaders linking people to performance. HRBench is the people analytics platform that turns HR data into business strategy. It connects to all your tools, HRIS, ATS, payroll, surveys, whatever you're using. In just a few clicks, you get over 45 metrics instantly visualized in boardroom ready dashboards, benchmarked by industry and company size. Book a demo at HRBench.com and we'll build you a custom benchmark report using your data.