Matt Vance: Hello, and thank you for joining us today. question for you, what do you Covid and Ai have in common? They might seem completely unrelated, but both have and can Okay, so sorry. I have to do that part over again. Sorry about that.

Justine Lee: I want everything to be the best.

Matt Vance: Okay here Best time to mess which happens sometimes. Okay? Hello everyone. And thanks for joining us. Question for What do Covid and AI have in common? They might seem completely unrelated. But both have and continue to change our world. Today, we’re talking about change management and how leaders can be more purposeful when creating culture change in organizations. We have Justine Lee with today, she works within

Matt Vance: You Utah Valley University’s People and Culture Office, overseeing culture and communication where she strives to create that positive employee experience for Uvu’s. 6500 employees, Some of her projects include developing the National and Regional winning Leadership and Staff Competencies Program program. So that’s amazing. Completely New employee on implementing remote work and conducting hundreds of hours of leadership and executive coaching and training. Using the Berkman method. She was recently awarded Uvu’s Employee Award of Excellence and Alumni Award for her ability to quickly, achieve by an up and down the chain of command to deliver these employee programs successfully. That’s amazing. And Thank you so much for being here with us today. Justine

Justine Lee: Thank you so much for having me. I love the work that you all are doing excited to talk about it.

Matt Vance: We are too. Thanks for joining us. So just to kick things off Justine, we’re curious, company culture is kind of a niche space when you talk about all the different careers that are out there, but how did you get into company culture?

Justine Lee: Great question. And I totally agree. I really wish when they had career days, in elementary school, that there would have been somebody that came in and talked about being a culture leader, right? I think more than naturally, gravitated towards that, but I didn’t even know it was a job. In fact, I was only an undergrad at UVU and I got my undergrad in public relations. And while I was at UVU, I was an ambassador for UVU where I did recruitment for prospective students. So I would get campus tours and I would give presentations at high schools and different things like that. But my dream job, like my plan. When I graduated, I wanted to work up in Park City at one of the super fancy resorts. Like the Waldorf,…

Matt Vance: That’s awesome.

Justine Lee: A story is the month, right, I know it sounds super glamorous. I think I just wanted to go to really fancy parties. I think that was really fun. And when I was and at Uvu, that’s called a creative element center, where they have career counselors, and I was meeting with one, my last few semesters and she recommended that I do some job shadows, just to make sure it’s what I wanted.

Justine Lee: And I’m really grateful that she recommended that because I was able to set up some job shadows and realize that while they were really awesome opportunities, it was absolutely not what I wanted to do. So, I kind of floundering for a little bit as I think a lot of recent grads end up getting a part-time internship, like a temporary one at a tech company doing some training and marketing stuff and I really liked that. you want to go on that space but my He at the time actually worked at Uvu and their people and Culture Division as an intern. And he told me when the training and development position opened up and told me to apply. So, I did and got it. And really just felt into this world of just amazing impact. And again, I had never really thought about people and culture work, but I was able to come within my own people, and culture division, that really advocated for innovation for trust for taking risks, for failure and allowed me to grow.

Justine Lee: Really fast within the organization and accomplish a lot of things really quickly that I’m super grateful for. And I will probably be here a long time because I absolutely love the work culture.

Matt Vance: It’s pretty lucky that you got into a position like so early in your career where you were given that trust and you’re obviously, So reliable and have pushed yourself to the limits to achieve great things And so that trust has been rewarded and it’s amazing. And we’re gonna get in to that more. So you have four years of tenure at UVU two and a half years in your current role leading culture. So you’ve really grown what has been the key to driving change in such a short period of time in a large organization, the University.

00:05:00

Justine Lee: Great question. I think universities are pretty well known for a better bureaucracy. There’s lots of rules and lots of hoops. They have to jump through, and I think a big part, I do want to give a little bit of a caveat, and before I dive into this, and recognize the privilege that I do have both working at an organization that has built in structures to implement change and I’ll talk about but also being in a position that the leaders that I have. It’s really rare, especially somebody at my age to have an opportunity to institute institutional wide change. And so, while yes it’s my personality and stuff, a lot of it is the leaders that I have in the organization that I work with. But I do think a lot of the principles that we’ll talk about can be applied in any position and even like a microscale within a team versus a whole organization. But I would say, the biggest key to delivering and these really quick impactful changes and jumping through some of this bureaucracy is being able to achieve organ.

Justine Lee: Organizational buy-in from the entire organization. So from the employees on the ground, getting there by in, and their input throughout the whole process, as well as accomplishing, and achieving decision maker buy-in throughout the whole process. If you have those two things you can really accomplish anything. I’m happy to dive into any aspect of that. That you think would be interesting.

Matt Vance: Yeah, I actually would love to hear a little bit more about it. I’m guessing, it’s like a survey that you have for employees and for students to gauge their buy-in, along the process. That’s kind of what you mentioned. Tell me a little bit about the surveying that you guys do.

Justine Lee: Yes, yes for And so I think that the first step before we even dive into the research feedback is humility and recognizing that just because we are employees and we work with employees a lot. We are not like the subject of better experts and everything that employees need, everything that employees want. And so being able to remove ourselves and get into a headspace where we’re humble enough to receive that feedback, I think is The second step is actually conducting the research and so things that I found successful are doing surveys for sure but also focus groups, that’s really where we’ve gotten the biggest impact. So for example, I mentioned one of my very first projects was completely revamping the whole onboarding experience and pretty quickly. I realize that those are really big projects that had a lot of pieces and while I was a new employee at the time and I could have said I’m a new employee I know what they need and I decided to

Justine Lee: Together for focus groups. The first two, we got employees that had been at the university less than three months. So new employees and we got them in a room and we put up these massive poster boards, sticky notes and we handed the markers and we had four sticky notes and they had different time frames on them. So the first one was after acceptance. Then we had the first week and first month and we had them go around and say What information do you feel like you needed at each of these time periods. So after you accepted your position, What did you need to know before your first date? Those kinds of questions. Then the other two focus groups we did were We got supervisors who would hire employees within the last three months and we did the exact same activity. So he said as a supervisor, What do you feel like employees need to know at these time periods? And that’s really where we got our content from these focus groups in addition to some surveys and…

Matt Vance: Right.

Justine Lee: interviews, And so I think that that’s a big part because then even if employees weren’t part of those groups or surveys if we can communicate to the campus and we’re implementing

Justine Lee: Me is the initiative. That’s where we got the content. They feel like my people like me were taken into consideration and helped build this. And so, I think that’s a really big part of it, is that research part at the beginning.

Matt Vance: So a small follow-up on that. How were you able to ensure you had? I guess a diverse representation from all the different departments and the different demographics. As part of that focus group program, how are you able to kind of get a balanced perspective?

Justine Lee: Yes, great question. So that’s super important, right? Because onboarding for our grounds team is very different from our recruitment, like a donation team that’s like getting money from the university. And so, we sent out the survey and the focus group invitation to everybody. And then we looked at who would respond for the first focus group. And that’s how we developed our second focus group as we looked at the areas that weren’t represented and we specifically reached out to leaders in the area and said, Hey, do you have anybody that started within three months that you’d be willing to send to a focus group? Because you’re right, we wanted a very diverse population and that’s also where the survey came in handy as we got a lot more responses to the survey than we had on the focus group.

00:10:00

Matt Vance: I like that. And I’ve done focus groups as well. And I think they do provide a different I guess depth to the feedback that you get, because you’re having this human to human connection in person or maybe it’s virtual sometimes depending on the situation but obviously sticky notes. I mean unless there’s some program, I don’t know about virtual sticky notes, but I think that’s something a layer that’s really good to have. Is that a human feedback opportunity?

Justine Lee: Yeah, for And I think another big piece of that is not only getting their feedback at the development, but as you’re building the program, it’s an iterative process where you’re sending it out and getting feedback at different points. And once you have the final product, you go back to the people that provided feedback and you say, Hey, here’s a final product. And here’s how we took your feedback and your content into consideration while we were building this, that’s gonna immediately make them feel like an owner, they’re gonna become an advocate, they’re gonna tell their co-workers about it. They’re gonna tell their leaders about it and that’s a good way to help it spread, because they feel like they were part of that process.

Matt Vance: That’s cool, I think that’s a really good way you took initiative to communicate with these focus groups and then the communication continued from there. So I think that was such a smart way to get buy-in from the organization as a whole and we want to talk a little bit as well about how you’ve gotten buy-in from leaders and executives. And you’ve kind of mentioned that there’s a really great culture there. but I’d love to hear just how you manage those relationships.

Justine Lee: Of. Absolutely. I feel like

Justine Lee: It really comes down to your views, Core values, which are exceptional accountability, and exceptional results. And using those values to actually manage up and build strategic relationships and usually beneficial relationships because ultimately what can really help us build those advocates is making our leaders’ lives easier, right? And so exceptional care, right? It’s getting to know our leaders as a person, not putting them on this God pedestal being super scared of them Beginning to know their likes. They’re just so their family and their hobby and getting to know them as a person. Whenever it is realistic and exceptional, I am the one to initiate accountability conversations. So if you have a leader that comes to you and gives you a project or five projects or whatever that looks like, instead of waiting for them to come back and say, Hey, what’s the status on that You provide regular updates, and say, Hey just want to, check in, Here’s two paragraphs summarizing where I’m at these projects. Let me know if I’m heading in the right direction, and then with

Justine Lee: Optional results. It’s delivering on those results. It’s being confident and competent and being able to make your supervisor or your executive or whatever. That looks like your leader’s life easier by helping them reach their goals, it’s aligning your projects and your priorities to their priorities and goals and helping them accomplish the things that they want to do. And so I think the foundation is the relationship and that way. It builds trust and all of the other projects will have that trust as just kind of the foundation.

Matt Vance: That’s such a great way to institutionalize managing those relationships. You were able to just list off those values, it was nothing and so that shows like that, UVU really actually has those values and that you’ve not only created them, but you understand them, and you use them.

Justine Lee: Yeah, I appreciate it. and obviously, every culture is gonna have its issues, So I don’t want to be like wow, you’ve used perfect in every way 100% always does these. But I truly do feel like everyone that is there believe in the mission of the university believes in these values wants to accomplish them and when everyone’s bought in like that it does create a culture of trust because you trust that everyone’s working towards the same shared goal and when you have that common goal, it becomes us against the problem the competition of me versus you.

Matt Vance: I think that’s great and winning as a team realizing that within the work environment that there are actual relationships and they’re different from other types of relationships that you have in other components of your life. But there they are a relationship that should be acknowledged. We need to be aware of it and then manage those relationships as well. Both

Matt Vance: our team members and our leaders as well, when we’re trying to create change in an organization. So let’s talk a little bit about a specific thing that has changed within Uvu. I know that sometimes, being in a similar role, myself driving company culture, sometimes you make a suggestion about changing something and they say no because, the executive team, they have a different point of view where they can see other parts of the business in a different light. and our job in the space is to bubble up those things that we see from our perspective, that could be valuable to the organization. So let’s talk about UVU. Tell us a success story of something that has changed. What was that thing? And just kind of tell us about it.

00:15:00

Justine Lee: Yeah, a great question. I feel like there’s almost three questions within that. It’s like, How can we help increase buy-in with executives? Right? Especially when we might not see all that they do and they don’t see all that we do. There’s a specific time. I don’t do that UVU and I lost the third one but I’ll talk about those two for sure. and then there’s also nothing.

Matt Vance: Okay, yes.

Justine Lee: What do you do when they say No? Right. Those are kind of like

Justine Lee: So first I would say, when you are trying to implement a change and you need to make a decision, make your buy-in and you have this relationship. Do you have this executive advocate, you’ve built that foundation, really making sure you’re to include them from a very beginning and that will probably be easy if they’re one giving you the project, right? So for example, we developed a supervisor review and that idea came straight from present to Muniz, so super easy to get executive buying because she wanted it to happen. But there might be times where we have experiences that they are not seeing and we have ideas that we want to implement and we need to get them on board and have those conversations and present clear concise benefits of the programs. I think that’s really important and then once you have that executive advocate, then it’s building out more executive advocates and getting feedback from executives throughout that editor process. So we’re talking about getting buy-in from the organization from the employee level. Throughout that process, you should

Justine Lee: Also be ideally meeting with other decision makers and getting their feedback, And so the example that I’ll talk about here in a second is the leadership competency experience and throughout the whole process when you’re doing focus groups and surveys, I was also meeting one-on-one with most of our executives, especially ones that had experience and leadership development and saying hey, based on your doctorate whatever thing that you did at the very end, I can’t remember the name of it, that was on this topic. What expertise do you have? We can incorporate. So that way when you go to present the final product, a lot of people already in your court, you have a lot of people that already feel again, bought in, they feel like co-owners, it’s like contributors to the project and they’re going to be more likely to be open to it. And so I think that’s kind of the first question of how to get that decision maker buying. It’s getting your executive advocate to try to make as many as you can, and then at times leveraging your executive advocates, relationship and political capital, right?

Justine Lee: And so, for example, my vice president, she recently asked me to put together a working mother’s conference for you to view employees, which is super exciting.

Matt Vance: What?

Justine Lee: And so I did all the work I sent out the emails and we got pretty good registration but we wanted to be bigger. So I was like, Hey Marilyn, I want you to let’s talk to the executives. I want you to kind of talk to them and let’s get them on board and let’s have them share it. and at one of her meetings she said, Hey the expectation, like we’re gonna host this and I want all of you to be there. And so now we have the President of the university coming. We have every executive coming. It’s just totally expanded so sometimes using the relationships and political capital that they have can be really beneficial as well.

Justine Lee: So that’s the first question of managing and those relationships to get decision makers by and second question of how we’ve been able to do that. As an example, I mentioned the leadership competency experience. What this is, is we have to develop six leadership competencies. They specifically tie to where you view values. So like I mentioned, those are exceptional care, accountability and results and the six competencies are developing others. Promoting an inclusive culture, Communicating clearly in candidly holding yourself another’s, accountable, delivering results and managing effectively. And those are the things that we want our supervisors, Our leaders, to be competent in order to have a successful culture at Uvu and live our values. So we developed these competencies and then we’ve tried to weave them into every aspect of the employee experience. And so we have recommended hiring questions. So in search committees are hiring for a supervisor position. They’re asking questions related to these

Justine Lee: Ship Competencies. So ideally we’re hiring. Supervisors already have a lot of these expectations. And competency we have new supervisor orientation and we talk about these competencies and all the resources as part of the onboarding process then we have what’s called the UVU Read Workshop program where we have about 20 different workshops each workshop specifically tied to one of the leadership competencies.

Justine Lee: Because we don’t want to just drop these competencies on people and say, good luck hope you figure it out, we want to provide resources and that’s what that training program is. And then the feedback portion is we have the supervisor review that I mentioned earlier where employees can anonymously evaluate their supervisor on how well they’re meeting these competencies. And these expectations and based on that feedback, they’re then referred back to training. So it’s this continual cycle of them continually developing. And so, how we develop these competencies, we did focus groups, we did surveys with employees. Like I mentioned, I met with executives. We tied them to the values so that the President already felt pretty bought in knowing that I came from the values that she is. I’m kind of developed for the university Once we had all of this developed, then we were able to implement it. We had a lot of that buy-in. Some of the results that we’ve seen and we’ve had a 20% decrease in employees leaving because of conflict with the supervisor.

00:20:00

Matt Vance: Wow, that’s huge.

Justine Lee: And that was a big thing. We noticed because we did an excess survey, that was the number one reason people were leaving the university. I think that’s pretty universal. Quit leaders, not jobs, right? And so yeah,…

Matt Vance: Yeah. Yeah.

Justine Lee: in the last three years, we’ve been doing this 20% less percentage of employees that have been leaving. We also see people that go through the UV lead program, that get the certification that we offer. 30% of them have gotten a promotion since we’ve implemented the program. So it’s helping them career advancement-wise and those people that go through the program they get on average a 10 to 20 percent higher supervisor review result the year after they get the certification. So the program is effective in helping them become better leaders for their employees. So yeah,…

Matt Vance: Incredible, that’s amazing.

Justine Lee: times it’s been successful

Matt Vance: And you mentioned your third thing was what to do if they say no, right.

Justine Lee: Yes, yes, because that is very valid and I have had that happen before. So my recommendation with this would be not to lose hope because you probably still planted a seed. So, an example of the time this happened to me is that Mina co-worker? We were noticing as we were developing some training around annual reviews and performance development, and things that there is kind of an issue with compensation because our annual increases, we’re tied to the annual review results. So people were really inflating their scores to try and get higher increases, And so, I did a ton of research and kind of found that for our specific situation tying annual increases to the annual review, didn’t make a lot of sense. I’d probably be better off to offer an annual cost of living increase and then have money set aside for performance bonuses. As people did awesome things throughout the year, right? So money would be specifically attached like a project or behavior or something. Awesome.

Justine Lee: Somebody did versus just types of their performance review and so we did a ton of external research again. We did surveys, focus groups, we did the whole thing where we were meeting with vice presidents getting their feedback and ultimately our vice president met with the president of the university and the president was I kind of get your coming from but I really value pay for performance. We’re gonna stick with pay for performance but ever since then, we’ve always had a really, really high cost of living increase because it helped her see the value of cost of living. So even though she didn’t adopt the program or the compensation structure that we wanted her to,…

Matt Vance: .

Justine Lee: It planted that seeds to understand the value of cost of living increases. And so, it might not again, go exactly the way that you plan, but I would say Don’t Hope, it’s probably still going to institute some sort of effective change and keep conducting research, he gathering more and more data and try again next year, with additional data or additional solutions or ideas, like, Don’t give up on a program or an idea or

Justine Lee: solutions to a problem just because you were told no once Right. Yeah.

Matt Vance: The purchasing now to date, I matter, is totally all about the house.

Justine Lee: Amen.

Matt Vance: Yeah, 100% Agree. Data is something. It’s a tool to help us make more informed and better decisions. I have a few comments based on what you shared. The first is, when you were talking about the Working Mother’s conference and you were able to get some of the leadership to not only attend but, send out communications and support this event, that doesn’t really cost anything other than some time, there’s no new dollars to spend for that impact. That can make Any people leaders that are listening right now, you have a superpower of influence on people and shaping perceptions and helping create change. and influence, I have a voicemail saved on my phone to this day, from 2018, where a leader that I had sent me a message that was super impactful about a project that I was working on.

Matt Vance: And I still have it saved because it made such a difference to me. So, take the time to

00:25:00

Matt Vance: Sean was when you were talking about. I totally lost my thought right there. that part.

Justine Lee: I talked about a lot. So there’s a lot of

Matt Vance: no, but that Sorry just say, it’ll come back about the stats, just

Justine Lee: leadership competency experience.

Matt Vance: Yes. That’s what it was. Okay, so certainly, okay, so one other thought: Here you talked about the leadership competencies and how they were directly connected to values. Company values are hugely important in my opinion. The Behavioral Guide posts to help shape how people act and your company culture, and your workplace, and having those in place and trying to shape people’s behaviors. It’s not this overhanded, control thing. It’s trying to promote goodness. It’s trying to promote the things that have the best outcomes both for the business to advance and to be profitable and to grow and to have innovation and creativity. But also for individuals to act in a way that is good and supports psychological safety and kindness and respect in the workplace, that’s why you want company values in place. And the fact that you

Matt Vance: As created these leadership, competencies rooted in the values. I think it is phenomenal. And honestly, a poster child, example, of how other companies should consider doing this,

Justine Lee: Of course, thank you. It’s been a little big work in progress and a lot of people are involved. I mean, even within the training program we have 20 different facilitators from around campus, there’s so many people that have contributed to make it successful and we’ve seen a ton of success. We recently awarded a national and regional award for it. It was so successful that we’ve actually translated it into the staff competency experience. So we have staff competencies that are pretty closely tied to the leadership competencies and we have a workshop program and it’s what they’re evaluated on in their annual review and things like that. And the goal with that too is that that way? We’re building some career ladders as well because staff can be competent in the staff competencies and they’re very closely tidal leadership competencies and they can show it’s a pretty short jump right between the staff and the leadership competencies. So I agree a hundred percent like these

Justine Lee: Put since these are really the behaviors that we’re wanting and it also helps us know who’s ready for additional roles as well. It can help people stay in the organization and grow within the organization versus feeling like they have to leave to grow.

Matt Vance: That’s amazing. We’re obviously not the only ones who think that. That’s a great example to follow with the leadership competency program that Uvu has instated and you’ve won awards So, for everyone who’s listening I hope you were taking notes because there’s so many actionable things that were listed here from Justine. She has so much experience for how little time she’s been in her career, it’s amazing. So thank you so much Justine for being on our podcast today. Thank you everyone. Who listened? And don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss hearing the incredible insights of our guests. Thanks for being with us.

Justine Lee: Awesome, big. Yeah, thank you for having me. It is awesome.