Spot the burnout before its turnover: Empathetic HR leadership w/ Stacie Baird

How Community Medical Services Combats Burnout Before It Becomes Turnover

In this live-recorded episode of Pulse by HRBench, we sat down with Stacie Baird, Chief People Officer at Community Medical Services (CMS), to explore one of the most urgent challenges facing HR leaders today: burnout.

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With over 30 years of HR leadership experience—much of it in fast-paced, private-equity-backed environments—Stacie has seen burnout from every angle. She’s also a certified trauma-informed coach and the host of the HX Podcast, where she champions the elevation of the human experience at work.

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During our conversation, she shared the strategies her team used to reduce turnover by 27%, how they’ve built burnout detection into their survey design, and what it really looks like to lead with empathy in high-pressure environments.

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Burnout in HR: Vicarious Trauma and Early Warning Signs

Stacie didn’t hold back: burnout is real, and it often hits HR first.

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HR teams are often the first to get the call when someone experiences a tragedy, or when a difficult termination has to be executed. This repeated emotional labor creates what Stacie calls vicarious trauma—absorbing others’ pain secondhand, often without time to process before jumping into the next meeting.

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“It’s like you terminate someone, then dial into the next meeting like nothing happened. That takes a toll,” Stacie said.

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To help her team catch the signs of burnout early, she trains leaders to watch for disengagement, absenteeism, and subtle behavioral shifts—people showing up to meetings without energy, not taking PTO, or simply losing their spark.

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She encourages one-on-one check-ins with a “two-word emotional pulse” (e.g., “Overwhelmed. Tired.”) to keep a real-time read on team morale.

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Slowing Down to Speed Up

How do you make room for empathy in a high-growth, high-pressure culture?

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Stacie’s approach: “Recover to sprint.”

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Even in PE-backed environments, she insists on building in time to rest and re-regulate—personally and organizationally. That means encouraging her team to block time after emotionally intense meetings, promoting use of tools like the Calm app, and helping each person identify their self-regulation tools.

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“You’re responsible for the energy you bring into every room,” she said. “And you can’t pour from an empty cup.”

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Using Surveys to Catch Burnout Before It Becomes Attrition

At CMS, Stacie’s team redesigned their engagement strategy to detect burnout signals early—well before they show up in turnover metrics.

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They use short pulse surveys with burnout-framed questions like:

• “When you woke up this morning, did you feel energized or exhausted?”
  
• “How supported do you feel by your manager this week?”
  

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This data, Stacie explains, becomes a leading indicator—while turnover is a lagging one.

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They also track participation and engagement in wellness and recognition programs. A sudden drop in those metrics can signal that teams are silently burning out.

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The Good Job Score: Centering Values in Engagement

Another unique tool CMS uses is the Good Job Score, a survey created in partnership with one of their investors focused on impact and ESG principles.

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As a certified B Corp, CMS strives for a balanced scorecard across employees, patients, and shareholders. The Good Job Score helps them evaluate:

• Alignment with mission, vision, and values
  
• Perception of leadership support
  
• Compensation and benefits sentiment
  
• Clarity on goals and accountability
  

The survey runs annually—but the magic isn’t in the data. It’s in the response.

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“Don’t ask if you’re not going to answer,” Stacie said. “We use the results to build a clear action plan for the following year.”

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Last year, for example, feedback revealed gaps in clarity and accountability. In response, CMS launched their “Core Four” priorities and began conducting quarterly performance reviews to close the loop between feedback and action.

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Diagnosing the Root Causes of Turnover

One of the biggest wins at CMS came from a focused pilot around their client services role—a high-turnover, entry-level position with a 70–80% annual attrition rate.

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Instead of launching broad HR initiatives, Stacie’s team sliced the data by:

• Role
  
• Seniority level (client services vs. senior client services)
  
• Site location
  
• Tenure (especially under 60 days)
  

What they found was telling: the highest turnover happened within the first 60 days, pointing to onboarding and expectation-setting gaps—not long-term dissatisfaction.

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They addressed this by improving their realistic job preview during hiring, revamping onboarding, and creating 30/60/90-day pulse surveys to stay ahead of disengagement.

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Result: a 27% improvement in turnover.

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Bringing Data into the Boardroom—in Real Time

What stood out most in the episode was how hands-on Stacie is with data.

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She doesn’t wait for static reports. With HRBench, she builds dashboards on the fly—sometimes in the middle of executive team meetings—to answer questions in real time.

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“Someone asks about nursing turnover in Wisconsin, and I’m pulling up that dashboard on the spot,” she said.

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This ability to slice by role, site, and time frame allows her to triangulate insights and show clear, business-relevant outcomes from HR initiatives.

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Communicating Data with Empathy

Being data-driven is important—but so is how you communicate it.

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Stacie shared that she leans heavily on AI tools like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot to help refine her messaging. She’ll upload dashboards and ask:

• “How can I communicate this to leadership with empathy?”
• “What’s the business impact of this trend?”
  

Framing HR data in human terms (e.g., “If we keep turnover at this pace, we’ll lose X nurses next year”) is what earns her buy-in from leadership.

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“That’s the story that makes people sit up and listen,” she said.

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Predictive Analytics and Future Focus

CMS is now piloting predictive analytics to forecast turnover risk 3–6 months ahead. While adoption is still growing internally, they’ve started giving business leaders direct access to their own dashboards, empowering managers to own their data.

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That transparency, combined with trust, is what will make the predictive models most impactful over time.

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Final Takeaways

Before we wrapped, Stacie offered a reminder to HR leaders:

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Take care of yourself, too.

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Burnout doesn’t just show up in your team—it shows up in you. And if you want to model empathetic leadership, it has to start inside.

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This episode was full of tactical tips, from survey design to real-time data storytelling. But what really stood out was Stacie’s human-first philosophy:

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“Lead with empathy. Act on feedback. And never ask a question you’re not willing to answer.”