I heart HR technology - Sarah Weiner

Guest Sarah Weiner, Benefits Manager at SunPower Corporation, discusses getting the most out of your HR Technology stack, fear of change and crafting employee experiences using data.

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Nate:               
So thanks for joining today, Sarah.

Sarah Weiner:       
Sure. I'm so excited to be here.

Nate:               
Great. So maybe you can start by just introducing yourself and a little bit about your current role at SunPower.

Sarah Weiner:       
Sure. So I've actually recently started at SunPower. We are a solar energy company and we do both the manufacturing of our panels as well as the sales and installation of our panels, both in the commercial space and the residential space. And I manage our benefits, both global and domestic here at SunPower.

Nate:               
So one of the topics that I really wanted to cover, and it might sound boring at first glance, is processes and documentation of processes. I'm sure you have had the same experience that I have where you started a new company and there are processes documented that are no longer accurate or even worse. There are zero processes documented. So talk to me a little bit about your experiences with processes, documentation, and why an HR team should invest time in that space versus all of the other competing priorities they have?

Sarah Weiner:       
Sure. This is a topic I'm super passionate about. Because very frequently in some of my past positions I've come in and there's been very little to no documentation of what decisions were made, how you do any of the things that you need to do every single day. I think it's just critical to document. It can be so long between when you have to do the same processes sometimes. So all of this reporting that we have to pull or when you're getting ready to pull the data for an audit or something like that, definitely take digital notes like in one note or wherever you want to do it. And actually write down the steps that you're using to pull those reports. Which reports are you using? What are the settings that you use? What timeframe are you using?

Sarah Weiner:       
Being able to record all of that makes it so much easier both for yourself and for anyone else who might have to step in to your shoes the next time you have to do it, and that has been invaluable to me. It has saved me so much time on my yearly audits, and things like that. And then when you leave, everyone else is able to pick up and carry on because again, your job isn't just to create a great experience for the employees while you're there. It's to also provide a smooth transition to your teammates or whoever comes after you so that they can continue to provide the same level of employee experience.

Nate:               
Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's something noble about leaving a role in a position, in a better place than when you found it. I just think that that's the right thing to do, and it enhances the entire company if everybody is thinking that way, how can I make this role better? It's a very noble thing I think. So implementing new technology, changing carriers and vendors, these sorts of topics really send HR people into sort of fright. I think there's a fair amount of inertia that occurs because we are so afraid to change things, and rightfully so it's so difficult to change things sometimes for a variety of reasons. I've always had a notion that this difficulty in fear is part of what stunts innovation in the HR space and keeps the whole people movement from moving forward. What advice do you have for people to get beyond this?

Sarah Weiner:       
I think one of my, I don't want to say it's like a great strategy but it's just, what I do is that I always ask vendors to walk me through any set up forms that they have. When you're setting up different programs, there's so many forms and checklists and things that you're filling out, and you have no idea if the meaning that you're attributing to a field is the same thing that the vendor is attributing and what that data will actually drive. If you click yes or you click no, what is that actually going to mean once I'm actually using the software? So I always ask my vendors to go through every form with me and explain what the fields mean so that I know that I'm thinking about it the same way they are.

Sarah Weiner:       
And half the time the person who is walking you through the form is like, I actually don't know what that means either, let me find out. And then to me, whenever we're having a problem I just get everybody on the phone, and that can be really difficult to do because everyone is very busy. And then you've got layers and layers of people within your vendors, right? Who have to be added to these calls and trying to coordinate everyone's schedule, but it is invaluable. You will not find a better way to solve a problem than having your benefits carrier, your file feed person, your HRIS, your benefits management portal getting all of those people together plus your broker on the phone and say, okay, how is it working now? How did it used to work? Why is it no longer working that way?

Sarah Weiner:       
How can we make it work that way again, or is there a better way to make it work? Because there's no guarantee that how we were doing it before was the best way to do it. I like to always ask my vendors every year for an annual review. It's so important because you always want to talk about the parts of the software or their services that you're using. What features may have come out over the year or that you're just not aware of that you're not using. You always want to look at what kind of information they can provide in terms of data for you. How many users are accessing this tool, how many unique users are accessing this service, right? So maybe you have one user who has to talk to the EAP three times about three different topics.

Sarah Weiner:       
I don't want to see that there were three uses of the program. I want to see how many unique users there were. And then separately kind of what their usage of the program was so that you're really getting down to how is the service that you're providing that you're paying for, for these employees, how is it being used? And if you're not getting enough utilization, talk to that vendor about how do we promote this program? Because a lot of times they have a lot of promotional materials that are really good that are already created that you can start utilizing and passing along to your employees. And you always want to ask too what kind of satisfaction measures are built into these platforms. I don't want to just know that my employee talk to the EAP three times. I want to know that if they were satisfied with that interaction. And a lot of vendors now are offering like, a benefits call in line or something like that. I want to know what are the topics that people are asking, and when are those calls coming in? I mean obviously around open enrollment you're going to get a lot of benefits questions, but what are the questions the rest of the year?

Sarah Weiner:       
And it's also really useful to be able to ask the vendor if they can break down some of these statistics by demographics, so by age or by location so that you can know all right our San Jose location has a tremendous number of questions about babysitters. Maybe we need to look for some sort of program like a care.com or something like that that would be backup childcare. So it can really give you insight into where you may have gaps in your programs. So it's just looking at everything as you're going through kind of that implementation or even just reviewing your own programs and the more that we ask for that data from these vendors and from these carriers, the more likely they are to start recording it in the first place, and that can only help us.

Nate:               
Yup. Absolutely. And I think what you just described are what I wrote down here are three sort of broad steps to any successful HR program which would be understand your data, create the program and then run the program. And what I see many times is folks do a great job of creating programs, but they didn't necessarily do the work to understand the data of if that program is even valid. And then they put the program in place and they don't run the program. So they don't monitor it, they don't question it, they don't figure out how to make the program better. They think that it's just going to run themselves and that's a big mistake, you can't just put a bunch of benefits and features and things in place and check the boxes and hope that they're going to workout.

Nate:               
That's going to fail and people aren't gonna use it. They're not going to find value in it. So I would say creating the program is really the fun part and I get that. But understanding your data up front before you create a program. So that you're creating it in a smart way and then running the program after you've got it up and going and nurturing it are our two really important steps that are often missed.

Nate:               
That said, I'd like to touch on something that I know you and I have talked about a little bit in the past. I've always been extremely passionate about engaging the other half at home, whether that's a spouse or a significant other or whatever it is. Maybe it's a parent that they're living with who's going to help advise them. So just the importance. Maybe you can talk about having specifically in benefits, having information available outside of your firewall, sending letters to the home, those sorts of things so that you are really engaging with the entire unit of who's going to make this very important decision.

Sarah Weiner:       
To that point previously we've had some of our videos not at SunPower currently but at some of my employers we've had those videos available on youtube. So that you could just get to it and start to understand what those things are. Another thing you can do is ask your vendors to provide you with videos because a lot of times they already have that content ready and you just need to know, are we able to host it internally? Is this video available to the outside. Can we ask the carrier to create us a custom one where they take the same slides but maybe they just insert a couple others and maybe a little bit of extra audio that speaks specifically to our plans.

Sarah Weiner:       
We've also utilized monitors that are in the manufacturing area to remind people of open enrollment, remind them where they can find the benefits guide, how to Login, how to create an account for the first time, things like that. Printing materials and leaving them in the break room, or in everybody's mail slot or as stuffed in with the checks. So there are a lot of ways to do that. Personally I don't find mailing things super helpful. But that may be more me projecting my value on the mail, rather than maybe my employees who may appreciate that more.

Nate:               
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think there's also just the sort of good old fashioned getting out there in the factory, in the office, whatever, sitting down and helping people make decisions during annual enrollment. I think I have learned more by sitting, talking to employees and helping them through the process. Than I've ever learned talking to my broker or consultants or anybody else. You really get a feel for what's going on in their lives, in the real world. And I think all too often HR folks are really reluctant to make those connections and to be in person. And I kind of get it, but at the end of the day we're human resources, we're people ops? Whatever we are we need to get out and actually interact.

Sarah Weiner:       
Definitely. And you know, it's really interesting that you say that. My first week here at SunPower was in November, which if you're in benefits is kind of a terrible time to have to switch jobs. So my first day here was I drove into the office, I got my laptop, I went to the airport and I flew up to our brand new manufacturing facility in Oregon for their open enrollment. And I wasn't alone, thankfully, I had some really great help and our broker was there and our vendors were there to talk about our benefits since I obviously didn't really know enough about them to really answer employee questions yet. But then also all of those questions that the employees are asking you, like, especially when you're new to the position, write them all down every single question and then write down the answer once you find it.

Sarah Weiner:       
And then you can make that documentation available to your front line HR staff. Because as you mentioned, it can be really time consuming to sit with the employee and to go through all of these questions with them. But a lot of them have the same questions. So the more we can answer in scale and the more that we can empower our front line HR staff to answer these questions the better environment it is for everyone. I mean, no HR person wants an employee to come up and ask them a question and have them be like, you know, I really don't know the answer to that. I have no knowledge of how payroll works or how benefits work, you're going to need to go to Sarah for that. As an HR person, like that pains me, I'm absolutely fine with saying, you know what, I'm not sure, let me find out for you.

Sarah Weiner:       
But then every one of my front line HR staff shouldn't have to say that same thing when you can invite them to your vendor calls when you have those calls with your vendors, those intro calls, and if they have time have them join in. A lot of times they're super busy. They don't have time. That's okay. But invite them. You shouldn't be the only one who holds that information and it shouldn't just be written down. If they learn best by listening, maybe they want to sit in on some of your calls and that will help them tremendously to be kind of a one stop shop for those questions.

Nate:               
Yeah, absolutely. This is great. So the great HR debate all in one or best in class and maybe split it out between a company that is under a thousand people and a company that's over a thousand people.

Sarah Weiner:       
So that's a really interesting question. Personally I really like having all of my data in one place. There's almost no software out there that is really truly an all in one, because you always have data feeds to your carriers, or I mean, a lot of the all in ones have terrible recruiting modules. I mean, just awful. So you're almost always going to have a few solutions that end up being outside the all-in-one. But as much of the data as you can get in one place, the better because then you're not having to cobble together reports from different vendor or from different places that might have different measurement periods or these prices are in pay periods but these prices are in or premiums are listed monthly or things like that. And until you can get all of that data into one place, it's really hard to make actionable insights about it. Right?

Sarah Weiner:       
So if your demographic data is in a different system then your compensation data that's in a different system from your benefits data, it's really hard to get all of that into one place. And with the various data privacy laws that are going into effect, it's going to be harder and harder to kind of move that data around. So it may end up being better to have it all in one. And I think as a smaller company under a thousand people, it kind of depends on the staff and the complexity of your organization. If you're kind of a one person HR department, you really don't have time to be wrangling all of these vendors. And all of these carriers and all of, I mean there's so much complexity to it.

Sarah Weiner:       
A lot of us got into this business because we love people and we love helping people and we love interacting with people and making a difference in people's lives. And the further I've gone into HR and benefits and, I mean, I love technology, so I think part of this may have self selected myself, but I find myself sometimes more removed because I'm trying to get that automation and I'm trying to provide my same level of expertise but at scale to our whole organization.

Nate:               
Yeah. And that's what I see most commonly is recruiting usually a best in class recruiting solution, just because that is so important to companies nowadays. The sort of candidate experience. And then the other I would say second place that usually gets carved out from all in ones at some point are employee benefits. Because as you grow they get more complex. You want that experience also to be sort of up leveled. So those are the areas that I see most commonly being carved out of the all in one. The second thing is what you said about integrations is critical and a good software, all in one solution and a good a standalone solution if they have really solid integrations and relationships with each other, can function very well. You just have to know who does this recruiting software work well with and who do they have deals with, and sort of which ones are going to work well with each other.

Sarah Weiner:       
Right. And I love to ask my vendors who are their vendors, right? So like when I'm talking my recruiting firm or the software platform, I ask them, well, who are you using for your benefits management platform and who are you using for your HRES? And who are you using for your payroll? Because then you can start to see, I'm assuming that they are using their own platform for their own recruiting. Maybe that's a silly assumption to make. So being able to just find out, well, who are you using for dental and vision and oh, we've had a lot of problems with our vendors integrating with our current solution, but if you are using this other company, then maybe I should take a better look at that because the technology talks together better and that's going to save so much of my time and make so much better experience for my employees.

Sarah Weiner:       
So they're not showing up at the dentist and you get that panicked phone call of they're saying my insurances is no good. They're saying it's not valid. I have an appointment today. And nobody needs that kind of stress, the employee or the HR department.

Nate:               
Well, great. This has been awesome. Thank you so much for joining me.

Sarah Weiner:       
​Sure. I have really enjoyed talking to you. And you asked a lot of great questions.