This episode features an interview with Danielle Tabor, Chief People Officer at Emburse. Danielle has over 15 years of human resources experience in the biomedical, architecture, and financial industries. She also holds a Bachelor’s in Psychology and a minor in Education from Clark University. In this episode, Amanda sits down with Danielle to discuss work-from-home burnout, HR’s ability to adapt, and the importance of an equitable employee experience.
This episode features an interview with Danielle Tabor, Chief People Officer at Emburse. Danielle has over 15 years of human resources experience in the biomedical, architecture, and financial industries. She also holds a Bachelor’s in Psychology and a minor in Education from Clark University.
In this episode, Amanda sits down with Danielle to discuss work-from-home burnout, HR’s ability to adapt, and the importance of an equitable employee experience.
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“I really think the future of work is all about employee experience. Everything shifted with the pandemic. And as leaders, what we need to understand is what employees truly need and how we can realistically meet those needs. So, we need to consider the whole employee here. There are basic needs that must be met. At absolute minimum: stability. People don’t need to have anxiety about whether or not their job is stable. They need a healthy income, they need healthy benefits. But we also need to start thinking about family, community, social and environmental impact. It just expands. Previously, it used to be Human Resources that was focused on policy, procedure, compliance. Those things are obviously still incredibly important and they need to be focused on as well, but it goes so far beyond that. Where we really need to win over the hearts of our people if we want an engaged workforce. That’s going to be incredibly important as we go forward. And it's challenging, it’s not obvious all the time. And so, we need to be open-minded and we need to be able to adapt.” – Danielle Tabor
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Episode Timestamps:
*(01:42): Danielle’s background
*(02:48): Danielle’s role as Chief People Officer at Emburse
*(03:23): Segment: Story Time
*(03:39: How Emburse shifted during the pandemic
*(09:26): Danielle’s partnership with the internal comms team
*(10:43): Segment: Getting Tactical
*(12:46): Ensuring an equitable employee experience
*(17:46): How Emburse is combating employee burnout
*(20:47): How Danielle’s degree in Education influences her job
*(22:24): Segment: Asking For a Friend
*(26:15): How Danielle is getting better at her job through feedback
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Links:
Connect with Danielle on LinkedIn
Amanda Berry: Danielle. Thank you so much for joining me. How are you today?
Danielle Tabor: Thank
you
for having me. I'm doing very well. Thank you. How are
you?
Amanda Berry: I'm doing well. Thanks for asking. Thanks again for joining. I want to just start and let the audience know a little bit about you and your background. Tell me about your career path and what's led you to the role as chief people officer at Emburse.
Danielle Tabor: Yeah. So it was a little bit of a non-traditional career path. I actually started in software as an implementation [00:02:00] specialist and one of the things that was most notable to me when I started was the experience that I had onboarding and the recruitment team and that stuck with me. And I thought, this is what I really should be doing.
And so I had to take a step back and think about how I wanted to get there. Considering I didn't have a background in human resources and I was fresh out of college. I took the only approach. I knew how. And so I went to an agency and started as a technical recruiter. And so I took those skills and then I moved into my next company where I added on some HR skills.
And then it just kind of snowballed from there. Here I am. This was certainly not in my plan, but it's something that I was given an incredible opportunity to take on. And I've had this great growth opportunity within Emburse and just taken full advantage of it.
Amanda Berry: Great. What do you currently do when you're running?
Danielle Tabor: In my current role, I oversee and guide the strategic direction for talent acquisition, for HR, operations, learning and [00:03:00] development, total rewards, and really just the overall employee experience at Emburse.
Amanda Berry: All of those things are getting a lot of talk right now. We talking about great resignations companies trying to really beef up their offerings and make employees happy, make a better employee experience.
So you must be very busy right now.
Danielle Tabor: We are, we are you add a COVID into the mix and it just doesn't stop. It's a really fun time to be part of people. Operations
Amanda Berry: let's move into our first segment story time.
I just mentioned COVID the last two years have been really hard on, on most of us, if not all of us, what have you changed at the workplace because of the pandemic and how has that impacted the experience? The employee experience,
Danielle Tabor: As we know, COVID came up on us really unexpectedly and it felt like almost overnight, we had to change to a virtual first model.
So with that, we were really forced to examine how [00:04:00] we work and figure out how adaptable we could be. Within the current context of the workplace. Parents had no childcare. There were people at home with cats and dogs walking on their keyboards. And what have you, we've all heard the stories when COVID hit.
I had a two-year-old and I was very, very pregnant with my second child. And so my whole company. I ended up getting to know my two year old and then after my maternity leave, they were used to me bouncing on an exercise ball, trying to Sue the baby to sleep. We got very personal with people pretty quickly with that.
As an organization, we made a very conscious decision to allow for flexible work schedules and give each other as much grace as possible during this period of time, that was incredibly important to us. It's something where not every industry has the ability to do. And it was really eyeopening to me to be here during this time and think about how fortunate we were and think of it really as a luxury.
And I think what that [00:05:00] did was it really forced us to take advantage. We felt like we had a responsibility to make sure that our employees felt supported during this time because we had that luxury. Our mission at Emburse is to humanize work and that's our external mission. And it's also our internal mission and the.
Really helped us stay strong during the pandemic. Some of the things that we did other than being able to be flexible and supportive of people with our families and with everything that they had personally going on, we made some other small shifts as well. For example, how we communicated to the organization, the senior team, we went from quarterly, all hands to by weekly virtual coffee chats.
And that means, that seems like a lot, but it was needed. People needed over communication. At that time, we've started to wind that down a little bit, but during that period of time where there was heightened anxiety and people just didn't know what the future held, we wanted to make sure that we were easing their [00:06:00] minds as much as possible.
We also had some onboarding challenge. You have remote employees who used to come into the office, personal connections. And then all of a sudden there's a four hour HR onboarding on their first day, and then they're thrown to the wolves and, you know, some managers are fantastic with it when it comes to onboarding and some need a little bit of extra help.
And so. The HR team took it in their hands to create this new initiative called the new hire, meet and greet within a period of time, every new hire would meet in a social setting. Yes, it was via zoom, but in a social setting where they can really get to know people and that's where they created more connections.
They weren't being, you know, Forced fed all of this company information and trying to create relationships all at the same time, they were given this period of time to adjust and then come back and say, these are the people that are in my cohort. These are the people that I can count on. These are the people that are in a similar situation as me, and [00:07:00] got a lot of really good feedback from that.
In addition, zoom was like zoom, fatigue. And so. We had to adjust to that. And one of the small tweaks that we made there was avoiding recurring meetings on Fridays. We basically said, if you have to have a meeting on Friday, take a meeting on Friday, if it's super important, but let's give that as space for people to really get their work done and focus and wrap up the previous week and get ready for the next week, because we just found ourselves in back to back to back zoom meetings.
All of a sudden, those are some of the small tweaks that we made, but overall. The shift to being employee experience centric is really paid off for us. We've allowed people to tell us what they need and we've had to shift to what they need. We're not perfect. We have to pivot often, but it's helped with our employee loyalty in a way that I couldn't possibly imagine.
The great resignation has obviously [00:08:00] impacted us, but not in the way that I think we expected.
Amanda Berry: Let me ask you, how are you
hearing from employees? You said they're telling you what you need. How often are you hearing from them and how are you doing it?
Danielle Tabor: A few different ways. One is that we have an anonymous email.
It's a Google form as an ask leadership questionnaire, if you will. And they submit that it comes to myself and it comes to another member of the communications team. We take a look at it and we decide how we're going to. And to that, whether or not we need to get someone else involved, whether it's something that we can respond to on our own.
We also conduct quarterly engagement surveys through employee net promoter score surveys. I'm not sure if you're familiar with that. I am. Yeah. Okay, great. And we take the feedback very seriously from those surveys. We have initiatives that we launch on a quarterly basis. We report on those initiatives in our quarterly, all hands.
So people understand where we're going with. In addition to that, I just mentioned these virtual coffee chats and it was a way for us to [00:09:00] connect with employees. But the format there is that they're submitting questions to us and we're answering them live. So we send out a pre-meeting survey in case people have some burning questions that they want to get in.
And then we open it up during the session as well. So there are questions that are answered live, and then in. All hands. We also have a section for Q and a, and we're doing our best to respond. You
Amanda Berry: mentioned when you have employees built that Google farm, you meet with your internal comms folks. I have an internal comms background and always partner closely with my HR and HR buddy, you know, everywhere they went.
I went and vice versa. Can you talk about that relationship and how they might help you in your role?
Danielle Tabor: Oh my gosh.
Yes. We didn't have internal comms team until a few years ago and I don't know how I did my job without them. I. So closely with this team, not only do they help me really think [00:10:00] about how to frame the messaging, they're coming up with creative ways to even just get it out there.
Right. So it's not just, everything's an email or everything is mentioned in a meeting. Creative ways in which we can communicate to our employees. And there are ways in which we hit different audiences with different messages. There are communications plans. It's not just a one and done it's a complete rollout.
And they have just really upped our game when it comes to how we interact with the people that we work. I am just so grateful for that team.
Amanda Berry: Give me a
little shout out to the internal comms numbers.
Danielle Tabor: Yes. Yes, there's fantastic.
Amanda Berry: I want to move into the next segment called getting tactical,
Producer: um, trying to figure out tactics and it'd be prayerful honest, and I didn't have to worry about tactics too much.
Here I am in charge of driving to say, why didn't you sleep? Some tactics, tactics,
Amanda Berry: offices are [00:11:00] opening back up again. What are you doing about this? And what is your new normal kind of hate saying new normal? I know it's overused, but what is normal now look like for the employees at Emburse?
Danielle Tabor: We shifted to this, like I said, virtual first model, but then as things started to normalize in air quotes, we decided that we wanted to create a hybrid work environment.
And this is for a few different reasons, but mainly because we feel very strongly about the culture within Emburse and that. It's not in our DNA to be remote. Only personal connections for us are incredibly important. And we have a lot of people that want to go back into the office. So this is obviously challenging, right?
So hybrid is not really easy to pull off in all scenarios. We just had an all hands that was hybrid that we presented in Barcelona last week. And we had. [00:12:00] More technical issues than I would've liked, but we learned from that. And so it's constantly learning from that. And really what we want to make sure of is that people have space to collaborate with each other and places where they feel comfortable and supported.
That might be at home for some people that might be in the office for some people. Both for some people. And so we want to be able to give people what it is that they need to be the most productive and the happiest they can be in their work. And. And
Amanda Berry: I love that. That's fantastic. I would go in like a day, a week, maybe two hours here, six hours there.
I would love that opportunity. Of course, I work across the country from my office, but I love that. How are you ensuring that there's an equitable and good employee experience for both employees who are fully home employees who are fully in and employees who are both in and out.
Danielle Tabor: Technology has a lot to do with it, making sure that you [00:13:00] have the tools in place to create a seamless experience for people practicing what that might look like is important.
Reversals, as crazy as that might sound for an all hands or reversal is incredibly important. If you don't do a rehearsal, you don't see some of the issues that could come up. When you have a hybrid meeting in the. You have to make sure that you've got the right camera angles, that you've got the right audio input, that you don't have to, people that are in the room talking to each other.
And the person on the screen can only hear every third word. So it's investing in that technology to make sure that. People feel included. And I think that's incredibly important as we go forward. Not only that, but it's making sure that there are norms for people when it comes to meetings. It's not okay for those two people on the side to have a little side conversation, whether or not they can hear it, which they should, if [00:14:00] you have the right technology.
But whether or not they can hear it. They still feel a little bit left out. So how can we make sure that it is an inclusive environment and what are some of those meeting norms that we can put together to make sure that people do feel supported and that they can be productive in that setting?
Amanda Berry: One of the most common, I don't want to call issue or maybe just an issue.
It's not a problem I'm hearing for HR folks faced is managers didn't know how to manage remotely. I could say the look on your face, you are, you know what I'm talking about. So I'm wondering how you're working with people managers maybe in over the past two years, and even now getting everyone comfortable with this.
And how do you manage someone fear in Maine and they're in Milwaukee? How do you do that? Different time zones, different countries and
Danielle Tabor: foremost. It was really eyeopening when this happened, because there were so many people leaders who had. We can't work from out. I can't trust this person to work remote.
I need to keep an eye on [00:15:00] everything that they're doing. And it made everyone treat the people that they work with. Like adults, you are forced to trust them. And what did we find out? Oh, we found out that people know how to do their jobs and they can be trusted. They are adults. They're responsible adults who care about putting out good work product and.
Th th the mindset had to shift. We had to start moving away from. Micromanagement, not every people leader was a micromanager by any means for some people leaders, this was very easy and we're a diversified workforce from a geography standpoint. And so we're used to managing teams of people in different locations and in many cases, but there are teams that were always in the Portland office, in the LA.
In the Toronto office. And they had to be together from eight 30 to five 30 or whatever it was. And what we realized is it doesn't have to be like that. And so making sure that people leaders [00:16:00] have the skillset that they need to manage through that as incredibly important, whether that is change managers.
And that they understand how to get themselves through the change curve, whether that is coaching and feedback. There's less of a focus on, let me manage every task that you're doing today. And let me give you feedback and coach you on how to do things more productively. It's about creating. Space for people to be the most successful version of themselves.
And that isn't necessarily just managing by metrics. Yes, that's part of it, but it's really, how do I develop the people on my team to be the best that they can be. That shift has been an incredible experience for us here. We still have a long ways to go with it, but we had a lot of really open-minded people leaders and.
I think because of that, we were able to [00:17:00] successfully navigate the most frustrating parts of the pandemic. That's
Amanda Berry: such a good call. I feel like everyone, I know who was working remote during the pandemic, and even now they work harder than they worked when they would go on.
Danielle Tabor: And that's a really good point though, too, because some people were like, okay, I'm here with my computer.
I don't have anywhere to go. Some people are alone in apartments in New York city. What are they going to do? They're going to work. We actually had to look at that too and make sure that that wasn't going to become an issue because it did in some cases. And we needed to come up with ways to combat the burnout from that perspective, because it wasn't good for anything.
Amanda Berry: Can you
talk a little bit about that? I don't that this is common. I know I have felt this. I think everyone who's worked from home has felt this my home office is in my home. I see it when I go by my bedroom, when I go to the bathroom, when I go to the guest room. So it constantly there. And if I come in here, I'll just check my email real fast and I [00:18:00] never shut it down.
And I think that's a very shared experience. So what are you all doing? Sort of come at that burnout. I know you said a great designation everyone's been impacted. I totally get that. But other things you're doing to try to manage. Burnout and keep your employees healthy. Happy.
Danielle Tabor: So there's a few things here.
One of the things that we realized early on was that no one was taking time off. They were saying, I don't have anywhere to go. I don't need to take time off. And we realized it was getting bad people. Some people were on the verge of mental breakdowns because they didn't have anything or anywhere to go our solve for that.
And temporary, as it may be, was to create days that we called Emburse unplugged days. And that was when we shut the entire company down. And it created space for people because if you were to take vacation time, if you will. You're still getting emails. You're still getting slacks regardless of whether or not people are respecting your time.
[00:19:00] There's always that email waiting for you. If. Put together this situation where the entire organization is shut down and you give guidelines saying there is not to be any slack. There's not to be an email. There are no meetings. And the leadership of the organization is following that. Then it gives people that space to breathe.
They can focus on mental health. Right. So maybe they don't have anywhere to go, but maybe they spend the day reading a book. Maybe they get to go outside for a walk. Maybe they get to walk their dog or try a new recipe or something like that. Something that gives them a break from the monotony and really helps them be more creative when they return.
Combating burnout from that perspective was really important to us. We also thought it was a great opportunity for us to focus on employee education, learning, and development. We started what we called at verse educate days. Same idea here where the entire company. [00:20:00] Shuts down for the day and focuses on learning activities.
So that might be you're reading a specific book about something you're attending a seminar, whether it's live or virtual. We had trainings that we put together on our products, on the market, on the direction of the organization for people that wanted a little bit more information there. It's evolved so that there are people teaching meditation classes.
Now, what we had decided we wanted to do was create some space for people to use their minds in a different way. We love how passionate people are about their work here and how excited they get about the products that we create and experience that we create. They're even more creative when they have that space to do something for themselves.
Amanda Berry: Personally, you mentioned
that those education days, what was that Emburse educate your educational background is in adult education or a minor in education. I want to talk about how that helps to create a better employee experience. I'm assuming you helped implement those days. How did you get to that idea and how do you think that's helping [00:21:00] the employee experience
Danielle Tabor: my background in adult and higher education and my minor in education during my bachelor's.
What's really important in thinking about how adults learn it's different than how children learn. And we have to be able to meet adults in various ways to help them engage in what it is that we're trying to get them to engage with. So there is not one size fits all. As we know, there are various types of learning styles, and so we want to be able to provide.
Variety there. And so I didn't come up with this on my own. I worked with our L and D manager. It was her idea. We just spun it out so that we were giving people opportunities to learn in various different formats. And so that's how it came about. I think. Not only will we take that and how we educate our employees, but also just how communicate in general to employees.
[00:22:00] I gave a shout out to the internal comms team earlier, but thinking about how an employee gets a message, is it written, is it verbal? Are they visual? It's all of those different things. And just thinking about how we can meet employees, where they are every day. So different that you have to think of just different ways to do things so that it gets absorbed.
Amanda Berry: When we go into our
last segment is called, asking for a friend,
Producer: was
destined for a friend, a asking for a friend
Amanda Berry: What do you think are the biggest challenges? The HR people world are going to face over the next, let's say five
Danielle Tabor: years. I really think the future of work is all about employee experience. Everything shifted with the pandemic and as leaders, what we need to understand is what employees truly need. And how we can [00:23:00] realistically meet those needs.
So we need to consider the whole employee here. There are basic needs that must be met at absolute minimum stability. People don't need to have anxiety about whether or not their job is stable. They need a healthy income, they need healthy benefits, but we also need to start thinking about family community.
Social and environmental impact. It just expands right. Previously they used to be human resources that was focused on policy, procedure, compliance. Those things are obviously still incredibly important and they need to be focused on as well, but it goes so far beyond that, where we read that. I need to win over the hearts of our people.
If we want an engaged workforce, that's going to be incredibly important as we go forward. And it's challenging. It's not obvious all the time, so we need to be open-minded and we need to be able to address.
Amanda Berry: As you're saying [00:24:00] that when you say the human resources, it makes me think we got to really be thinking about that whole human, right?
The holistic human and not just the work human. You mentioned you were very pregnant and had a two year old. You're bouncing your baby. That's part of now your human experience at work. And I love how your company's thinking about that and being flexible and having some programs and initiatives around.
Danielle Tabor: I'm really proud of the stamps that the leadership team took during this time, because they didn't have to, and to feel that supported was an incredible experience.
Amanda Berry: What advice would you give someone who's stepping into a role like yours for the first time, especially at this time with the pandemic remote work.
Danielle Tabor: Two big things that I would focus on. One is do everything you can to expand your network. So making sure that you are talking to other leaders better in the people, operations space, other leaders in your industry, that you are networking with people in other functional. [00:25:00] So really better understand the business, the market, but also surround yourself with a team that's really, really capable.
I have an incredible team. They have incredible ideas. I do not come up with this stuff on my own. I want to make sure that they feel empowered. To come up with creative solutions to begin initiatives and to really focus on what this employee experience looks like. It's not up to me to come up with all of this on my own.
People have better ideas when they feel like they're supported and get. Get creative and they can, you know, brainstorm with others and they can go to their teams for ideas. Some of the best ideas in the organization come from entry-level employees, because if you're up here, And you're only thinking about your own personal experience.
How are you supposed to meet someone who's just entering the workforce? [00:26:00] Making sure that you're creating an environment where empowerment is celebrated. I think it will be a much easier road for you than if you were to come in and roll with an iron fist or whatever it is that you want to say.
Amanda Berry: Yeah, absolutely.
Well, everyone I know is trying to get better at their jobs. What does that look like for
Danielle Tabor: you? For me, it's about feedback, feedback in so many different ways. We ask for feedback from our employee base. I ask for feedback from my team. I asked for feedback from my peers being open-minded to feedback and really.
Being able to give yourself time to digest it and understand how you can improve yourself. I find that incredibly useful for me. I also have a coach, so I'm very fortunate in that case where I can lean on someone and get really vulnerable with someone. Vulnerability is something that scares some people, but it's certainly a good quality to have when you're trying to get better at your job.
Amanda Berry: As I coach like [00:27:00] a mentor.
Danielle Tabor: Yes. Just to go back to what I said a few minutes ago, making sure that you're surrounding yourself with really smart people. You don't need to come up with everything on your own, but if you can help empower someone or help lift the voice of someone around you, that's how I've gotten to where I am.
For me, it's all about inclusive leadership and making sure that I'm creating a team environment where people feel comfortable. And willing to contribute. And so that's how I get better at my job.
Amanda Berry: Great. Well, Daniel, this has been a lot of fun, but before I let you go, is there anything you want to say that we didn't cover today?
Danielle Tabor: I think right now, especially more than ever. If we're trying to define who we are as an employer, it's incredibly important to have a strong set of company values and a mission that everyone can stand behind. And so for us, that's this mission of humanizing work and giving people [00:28:00] the opportunity to provide us with feedback.
We get into these scenarios where maybe we had a misstep and. Someone will say that does not humanize work. And we have to look at that and say, oh, okay, well we did miss step. And how are we going to pivot to fix that? Making sure that you're constantly living by that and that people see that is incredibly important.
And also just tying it in your core values. Into the decisions that you make. We have this set of core values that we feel very strongly about. It's called see it by the way, sincerity, empathy, empowerment, individuality, and teamwork. And yeah, it's really fun. And we hire by those core values. We look at promotions through the lens of those core values.
We celebrate those core values on a quarterly basis. We give out awards for those core values, and if we're committed to creating this employee [00:29:00] experience and this culture of humanizing work, that we're really truly living by those core values and that our leadership team is doing that as well. And so just celebrating that as much as we possibly can.
And. Really reinforcing it in all of the different areas in the organization. I think that for us, especially right now where there are so many different challenges, this has helped kept us grounded. Yeah. So
it's
Amanda Berry: like you do a really good job of bringing those to life, demonstrating those values and we're trying.
Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Well, thank you so much. Uh, let our listeners know where they can find you if they need to reach
Danielle Tabor: out. Sure. You can find me on LinkedIn. That's probably the best. And then if you have any questions about our company, you're interested in new opportunities, visit Emburse dot com slash careers, and you can find out all about the team and what we're doing to humanize.
Amanda Berry: That's great. It sounds like a great place to work, Danielle. So thank you so much for joining me today. This has been [00:30:00] great.
Danielle Tabor: Thank you. I appreciate it.
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