HRchat Podcast
Listen to the HRchat Podcast by HR Gazette to get insights and tips from HR leaders, influencers and tech experts. Topics covered include HR Tech, HR, AI, Leadership, Talent, Recruitment, Employee Engagement, Recognition, Wellness, DEI, and Company Culture.
Hosted by Bill Banham, Bob Goodwin, Pauline James, and other HR enthusiasts, the HRchat show publishes interviews with influencers, leaders, analysts, and those in the HR trenches 2-4 times each week.
The show is approaching 1000 episodes and past guests are from organizations including ADP, SAP, Ceridian, IBM, UPS, Deloitte Consulting LLP, Simon Sinek Inc, NASA, Gartner, SHRM, Government of Canada, Hacking HR, McLean & Company, UPS, Microsoft, Shopify, DisruptHR, McKinsey and Co, Virgin Pulse, Salesforce, Make-A-Wish Foundation, and Coca-Cola Beverages Company.
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Podcast Music Credit"Funky One"Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
HRchat Podcast
The Human Touch in C-Suite Decisions with Chelle O'Keefe, Associa
What makes a truly effective CHRO in today's complex business landscape? Chelle O'Keefe, Executive Vice President, Chief Human Resources Officer at Associa, brings refreshing clarity to this question through her remarkable journey from psychology graduate to C-suite leader.
The power of Chelle's approach lies in her unique perspective: despite never taking a formal business class, she's mastered the executive suite by focusing on the fundamental thread connecting all her work—understanding human behavior. "The common thread through my entire background is human behavior," she explains, detailing how this focus has guided her through roles in learning and development, change management, communications, and even marketing before landing in HR leadership.
Chelle shares the strategies behind her impressive achievements, including an 80% internal promotion rate and 30% reduction in turnover. Rather than adopting off-the-shelf solutions, her team developed leadership competency models by studying their own successful leaders. This authentic approach created a powerful eight-month development program that transformed their talent pipeline. On retention, her philosophy is wonderfully straightforward: "Leadership is absolutely the first thing that drives that turnover rate," combined with directly asking employees what they want through simple polls rather than complex engagement surveys.
Leading HR for an organization with 300 branch offices serving 7.5 million residents worldwide presents unique challenges. Chelle discusses how they manage cultural alignment during acquisitions and maintain cohesion across dispersed locations through their "Associa Book" of values. She offers practical wisdom on AI implementation, suggesting leaders focus on automating "painful repetitive tasks" rather than getting overwhelmed by the broader concept.
Perhaps most valuable is Chelle's candid insight into executive influence: "You have to be able to speak the language of the business to sit at the table. That's just table stakes." What truly differentiates exceptional HR leaders is bringing humanity to the C-suite—building relationships, having tough conversations, and sometimes being "the only adult at the table." In a world increasingly focused on technology and metrics, Chelle reminds us that understanding people remains the heart of effective leadership.
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Welcome to the HR Chat Show, one of the world's most downloaded and shared podcasts designed for HR pros, talent execs, tech enthusiasts and business leaders. For hundreds more episodes and what's new in the world of work, subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit hrgazettecom and visit.
Speaker 2:HRGazettecom. Welcome to another episode of the HR Chat Show. Hello listeners, this is your host today, Bill Bannum, and joining me on the show today is Shelley O'Keefe, Executive Vice President, Chief Human Resource Officer over at Associer. As a seasoned executive, Shelley has worked across industries including healthcare, financial services and professional services, bringing a holistic and data-driven approach to solving complex business challenges. With more than 300 branch offices across North America, Associa is building the future of community for more than 7.5 million residents worldwide. That sounds pretty cool. Hey, Shelley, how are you doing today?
Speaker 3:I'm great, Bill. It's early on a Monday morning, so hopefully I've had enough coffee to keep it entertaining today.
Speaker 2:Yes, shelley is very, very kind and gracious to record with me first thing on a Monday morning. So we'll go easy on you, shelley, first thing on a Monday morning. So we'll go easy on you, shelly. Shelly, you've had a rich career spanning HR, marketing, communications and organizational development. How has this multi-disciplinary approach and background shaped what you do as a CHRO over at Associate?
Speaker 3:Yeah, great question. The common thread through my entire background is human behavior. So when I was in university, that's what I studied. I studied psychology. I thought maybe I'd take a different path in the corporate environment but ended up in learning and development and really loved the idea of shaping human behavior to impact an organization, but also to impact those leaders' lives, and so really started in that direction. And then leadership development.
Speaker 3:Learning and development isn't enough. It has to operate in a broader ecosystem, and so I got into change management and into communications. I had an opportunity to play in marketing for a little bit. That was really fun and it's really the flip side of the coin. So marketing is customer behavior instead of employee behavior. But it's still how do you influence human behavior towards the goals that you're trying to achieve? And then all of that seemed to be a natural pathway into the HR role. So there is a common thread, even though it's it's been through different disciplines in the corporate environment. But it's always served me really well, although the irony is I still, to this day, I've never taken a business class. So you know, today I operate, you know, in the C-suite and spend a lot of time in spreadsheets and with data and have had to be a little self-taught and also choose some mentors to really learn some of the finance and accounting components of business.
Speaker 2:Very good, and what's the best thing about your job?
Speaker 3:The best thing about my job is the people I get to work with every day, and I feel like that's a very cliche answer, but one of the questions that you and I talked about that may come later is what are the things that are important for HR leaders to bring to the table so that they can have a seat at the table? And certainly data and those components and AI and everyone's talking about all of those pieces, but what I love the most is to be the human at the table and to be the person who has the tough conversations with the other executives, that that hold space for the employees, that make sure that in all of the conversations that we're considering that our business, especially, is people serving people, and so how do we make sure that? Certainly, we need to evolve and we need to look forward and consider all of these great advances in technology, but how do we treat one another? How do we help our employees get there? How do we think about this very human organization as we plan for the future?
Speaker 2:Okay, love it. Thank you very much. Now, then, you've done some pretty cool things in your career so far. So, for example, in past roles you've achieved an 80% internal promotion rate. That's very impressive, congratulations. What specific programs or practices helped cultivate such a strong internal talent pipeline?
Speaker 3:Yeah, at the time that we really set off on that initiative, we were having a lot of challenges bringing people into our organization and having them be successful. Our organization we serve communities. It's a very niche industry and we are the largest in the industry and therefore it's a tough talent pool, and so we were pulling people from hospitality and other like industries and really not having a lot of success, and so we started to ask ourselves what makes a leader here successful? So, instead of going out and finding different leadership competency models, we decided to really work with our internal leaders and the ones that had had great careers and been really successful in our organization, and we said what makes you successful? Tell us the traits.
Speaker 3:Let's study all of these leaders and develop a competency model out of their leadership that then we can use to then train internally. And that's really the foundation. So we just used our internal models, we developed a competency framework and then we developed our leadership training around that, and one of the key positions that we focused on is really our branch president position. So you mentioned we have over 300 branches across the world and we looked at that branch president position and said, hey, how do we make sure that we are being successful at training and preparing those future leaders for those roles, and so we developed, using that competency model. We developed an eight-month learning development program that put them through a lot of different experiences so that when an opportunity for them came available they were ready, and that really helped change our promotion rate, certainly in that position.
Speaker 2:Okay. So internal hires are great for a whole bunch of things. I mean, you hinted there at knowledge transfer, for example. You know, if you can retain those people and you're giving them all that wonderful training, why wouldn't you want to then develop them into leaders? But would you also agree that it's important to have fresh blood? It's important to bring new perspectives into the company whenever you can, because maybe that enriches company culture 100%.
Speaker 3:So what's interesting is so we went through that process and we flipped. You know we were hiring about 80% externally, we flipped it to about 80% internally. Where we're landing today is, to your point, a little, some of that fresh blood, as you would say, or fresh thinking that really helps move the organization in a different direction.
Speaker 4:Thanks for listening to this episode of the HR Chat Podcast. If you enjoy the audio content we produce, you'll love our articles on the HR Gazette. Learn more at HRGazettecom.
Speaker 2:And now back to the show we are totally on the same page here. Uh, you've also been involved at companies where you've helped reduce turnover, uh, by around 30. Again, congratulations, uh. That is no small feat. What, uh? What were some of the approaches or mindsets that helped you reach that kind of milestone?
Speaker 3:You know, interestingly, one of the things that really influenced my thinking in this area was I was at a benefits conference and everybody was talking about all of the new benefits and how we can structure a better benefit plan to retain employees. And there was someone at that conference who was speaking and she said the benefit package that you're offering is essentially worthless if you don't have the right culture and leader in place. That you're offering is essentially worthless if you don't have the right culture and leader in place. And you know that really resonated with me. Ironically, like I said, it was a benefits conference, but you know. So, going back to what we just talked about, I mean leadership is absolutely the first thing that we feel like drives that turnover rate, and so, by focusing on helping our leaders be more effective and be better in their roles, we absolutely believe that we saw a drop in turnover that was correlated with that. Secondly, you know, when I think about turnover, I think we get a little too complicated sometimes and what we have done is go directly to our employees and just ask them.
Speaker 3:I don't use a built out survey from a Gallup or any of the they're all great. All of the different vendors that offer. The surveys are great. What we do is we do a poll survey twice a year and we ask our employees very specific questions about what they're looking for for their career and their benefit package for in their work environment, and then what we look to do is improve all of those pieces based on their feedback. So it's a little. It seems very simple to me, but at the same time, I think sometimes we get enamored by some of the bigger initiatives and some of the sexy things and we forget that. Why don't we just go ask people and take their feedback and use it to then improve their work environment?
Speaker 2:And in terms of collecting that feedback, is it more authentic, is it more genuine when it's anonymous?
Speaker 3:That's an interesting question. So we've struggled back and forth with those different components and, you know, I think the sign of a healthy culture is the ability to be able to feel that you're safe enough to express your opinion. We keep it and we keep our survey anonymous because we want people to be as transparent as they possibly can. At the same time, we struggle with that idea of you know which way. Which way do you go there? So it's a hard question to answer. I don't know that I have the exact answer on that one.
Speaker 2:All right, and that's an answer coming from experience, though Thank you very much. Now that you've been involved in successful M&A integration, Shelley, what are the most critical steps that HR leaders should take to align cultures and ensure a smooth transition post merger? Because that's no small feat, is it? You know that can involve, for example, a very different company culture. Focus on the go forward.
Speaker 3:It can. Yeah, it can be. I mean, I think you know when I thought about that question, so we're not acquiring kind of acquisitions that are the same size, requiring anywhere from small acquisitions, to, you know, companies that have a thousand, roughly a thousand, 2000 employees, so somewhere in that range. And when we do that it's really important we don't get involved pre-close, so we're not fully involved in the due diligence process. I know that's like the Holy grail for HR is, so we're not fully involved in the due diligence process. I know that's like the holy grail for HR is, you know, be involved in due diligence and all of the things. But we get involved after the close and we start to talk with the leaders.
Speaker 3:And I think there are two things that I really focus on. The first one is how are our cultures similar? We tend to again, our industry is niche and we are looking for cultures that are similar to ours and leaders that have built businesses that are similar to our values, and so we share our values, we ask them to do the same and we focus on the similarities there. And then to really your question. I think the other piece is it's not about pushing our culture on them, it's about celebrating the best of what they already have and the best of what we have and bringing that together and bringing that forward. So we take a slower integration approach. We don't walk in day one and say you're part of Associa, now you will start to integrate, but we keep those owners and sellers pretty heavily involved in the process so that they can help make those decisions and they can help walk their employees through the change management that's required.
Speaker 2:So you've got lots of employees in lots of different locations 300 different locations, as we've mentioned a couple of times so far. How do you go about measuring but also sustaining culture when a company is geographically dispersed and as diverse as a socio?
Speaker 3:Great question. So we have to acknowledge that all of those 300-ish locations have their own cultures and subcultures within them, and yet we want a broader organizational culture, and so we built different things along the way. One of the things that we're a fan of is something called the Asocia book. It's a cultural icon. It's actually a little book that houses our values and some of our key principles that we really live by. We share that with all of our employees. We share it with new employees when they join as well. It's just this is what you're joining, this is what you're a part of.
Speaker 3:At the same time, the question, the word is interesting when you say sustaining, because I don't know that it's about sustaining. I think it's about evolving. Interesting when you say sustaining, because I don't know that it's about sustaining. I think it's about evolving, and so, as we think about you know where our culture has been and where I started, so I joined this organization in 2014. You know, 10, 11 years later, the culture has to evolve and it has to look at.
Speaker 3:You know, before we really focused on, one of our key values is family, and that one gets a little bit of a bad rap these days, by the way. Is the workplace a family or not? But given that we are a privately held company that has a heavy family dynamic to it, family is one of our core values. We focused heavily on that initially. We're really starting to focus on service and look at now how do we create more of a service-oriented culture? We've built a strong family. We've focused on how people really enjoy the people that they work with. How do we use that as a strength to then focus more deeply on service and how do we serve one another and serve our clients? And so our culture is always evolving and we always involve all of our team members, all of our leaders across the organization in all of those pieces. It's not something that we create at corporate and push down. It's something that everyone's involved in in the process.
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Speaker 2:Okay, we are flying through these questions and answers today, shelley. Very good, very impressed. I don't think this is the first time you've done a podcast interview. Okay, let's talk about something we can't help but talk about on this show every episode. At the moment, I've just actually spent the last couple of hours preparing a giant deck talking about AI in the world of work. So let's talk about AI and automation. Specifically, with AI and automation impacting workplaces across industries, how is Associer preparing its workforce for what's next, and what role does HR play in that transformation?
Speaker 3:I'm certainly not an AI expert, but one of the things that you know we've talked about, I mean AI has been part of all of our organizations for a really long time. I think the newsy part of it more lately is generative AI, as opposed to some of the machine learning and pieces that we've had in place. Quite know, you mentioned, we serve seven and a half million residents worldwide. We process then all of those payments and then all of the community invoices centrally so that we can make sure that our communities run. We've had AI as part of those processing centers for years. Now we're trying to build it into the front end. If you can imagine and I don't know, we're not in the UK today, but there are a lot of European communities that are served I'm not currently yet by ASSOCIA, but one day I'm sure. But if you can imagine, post-covid community management has gotten more and more difficult, so people have gotten a little angrier. People expect service a little quicker. Part of that is driven by the technology and so we're looking at different AI components of how can we take some of that more rote, more basic components of that community manager's job off of them so they can spend more time with their board of directors on more strategic work.
Speaker 3:So the way I always think about AI and the way it helped me, not just in our organization but also in my function, was I attended a conference years ago and again, this was probably 2018.
Speaker 3:And people were already talking about AI.
Speaker 3:It was before, probably 2018.
Speaker 3:And people were already talking about AI it was before again generative AI and how can HR use it. And the leader of that session said something that flipped it for me and he said stop thinking about this big concept of how can you use AI and start thinking about what are the really painful repetitive tasks that your team is doing that could be automated. Repetitive tasks that your team is doing that could be automated, that you could think about using different tools to help free them up. That helped me kind of flip it and it had me go right back to my team and we automatically started looking at different ways to do that, and I think we've got to flip the question in different ways, both for ourselves but also for our team members. So when you said, how do we help our teams? We have to help them get more comfortable with it and familiar with it and show them the benefit of it that it can help reduce some of this more administrative, more back office functionality, so that you can focus more on again the people side of your role.
Speaker 2:So does that mean that the best companies are companies that offer uh opportunities to reskill in ai? Uh, you know, there are lots of stats out there saying that by 2030, 30 of jobs that exist at the moment will not be there anymore because they'll be replaced by ai. Uh, bill gates, just a couple of weeks ago, as we record this particular episode, said that uh, within probably 10 years, a lot of people might be looking at a two-day work week because AI has replaced so much. Are the best companies, the companies that really value and want to develop their people, are those, the companies that are offering ways to reskill or upskill in AI.
Speaker 3:I mean, I certainly think that is the best approach for companies. I think it's not something we're currently focused on. I think it's interesting to say you focused on. I think it's interesting to say you know AI is replacing this many jobs by a certain year. We've all heard that. At the same time, then what are those employees being re-skilled on? Is it more of the human side of the business, like, what are then the next skills that that organization then needs, as opposed to those jobs are being replaced, fully replaced.
Speaker 2:So the question for me, too, is not just hey, how, how can companies reskill, but what are they reskilling for specifically, as we look at this transition, yeah, and I'm yet to hear a good answer in terms of how we are going to keep all those people in the workplace with AI taking over so much. You hinted at it earlier on. I do want to cover this with you briefly before we wrap up for today. Board relations and executive influence. This is an important ongoing thread in our chit chats on the HR chat show around bringing people, leaders and HR leaders to the top table and making sure that they have a voice that is actually heard and respected and recognized and acted upon by the C-suite.
Speaker 2:You've worked closely with boards and C-suite peers, of course. What advice do you have for other HR leaders looking to build stronger influence and credibility at the executive level?
Speaker 3:I think it's twofold, and you mentioned I spoke about one of them. That'll be my second one. I think the first one is just first of all, you have to know your organization. Be my second one. I think the first one is just, first of all, you have to know your organization. I think I'm humble enough to know that I am a good CHRO for this organization, but maybe not for every organization and so what are my strengths and what do I bring to the table, and how does that fit with what the organization needs? So that would be the first one is just know yourself, know your organization, and make sure that there's a good alignment between those two. And then, secondly, I do think, being that human at the table I know that AI, and I know that data is critical.
Speaker 3:I think that's almost table stakes. You have to be able to speak the language of the business to sit at the table. That's just table stakes. The next level, though, is how do you bring yourself? And then how do you be that person at the table that A has relationships with all of the leaders and B can have the tough conversations?
Speaker 3:I think one of the things that I enjoy most. Going back to one of your prior questions about my job is having those tough conversations and being the person that people know that if you come to me and ask me a question, you're going to get my opinion. I'm not playing politics. I'm actually here to make the organization better, and that means to make the executive team functional and make the C-suite a place that people wanna be in, and so I do think that's part of this specific role and making sure, yes, you have the table stakes and you can speak the business, but you also sometimes are the. This sounds terrible, but I've had it said to me multiple times, so I'm going to say it. Sometimes you are the only adult at the table, and being that adult at the table is actually a critical function for the chro I love and respect that approach.
Speaker 2:I suspect that's why the wonderful jeff wold hey, jeff, how you doing if you're listening today? Uh did an intro, uh to make this uh conversation happen today. So thank you very much, jeff. One last question for you, shelly, before we wrap up for today, and that is how can our listeners connect with you? Is that linkedin uh email address? Are you all over the tiktoks and instagrams of this world? And, of course, how can our listeners learn more about asocia?
Speaker 3:yeah, so, um, I am not uh very active on social media outside of linkedin, so that's for my own personal mental health, but, um, linkedin I'm pretty active on, so find me on linkedin. I'm happy to connect with you. Also, you can learn more about Associa at our website, associaconlinecom, and we're happy to also entertain any future clients as part of that.
Speaker 2:Wonderful and, as always, there will be links in the show notes so you can learn more and connect with Shelley and check out as out Associate through those. That just leaves me to say for today Shelley, thank you very much for being my guest.
Speaker 3:Thanks, phil, it was a pleasure.
Speaker 2:And listeners as always. Until next time, happy working.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening to the HR Chat Show. If you enjoyed this episode, why not subscribe and listen to some of the hundreds of episodes published by HR Gazette and remember for what's new in the world of work? Subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit hrgazettecom.
