Cultivating Change: Nurturing Well-being and Diversity at Work with Leslie Day-Harrell

Listen now to discover actionable strategies for fostering inclusion and well-being in the workplace, with insights from Leslie Day-Harrell, Executive Vice President of Associate Experience, on The PX Pulse Podcast!

Narrator: Welcome to The People Experience Pulse Podcast, your gateway to the new frontier of human experiences at work. On The PX Pulse, we’re all about elevating experiences, fostering belonging, and building remarkable workplace cultures in a fast, evolving world.

How can workplaces foster both individuality and inclusion amongst their people while effectively encouraging wellbeing? In today’s episode, our hosts Vicki Flier Hudson and Jeff Bond chat with Leslie Day-Harrell, Executive Vice President of Associate Experience and Head of Corporate Real Estate at Jackson Healthcare. Jackson Healthcare is a family of highly specialized healthcare staffing, search, and technology companies. In her role, Leslie Day-Harrell leads the overarching strategy and unified approach to the associate experience. This includes careers, environments, and opportunities that enable associates to thrive and that support health and wellbeing in all areas of their lives.

You’ll learn how Jackson Healthcare navigated the COVID-19 pandemic to create an environment that contributes to the health and wellbeing of their associates, the importance of loving people uniquely, both professionally and personally, and the practical steps Leslie takes to help create a supportive environment where people flourish.

Stay tuned to hear from Leslie how Jackson Healthcare is fostering physical and emotional health, career and personal growth, and spiritual and social wellbeing amongst more than 2,000 associates and over 20,000 clinician providers across the United States.

Jeff: All right, welcome everyone. Today we have Leslie Day-Harrell, the Executive Vice President of Associate Experience at Jackson Healthcare. And I could go on and on and on about how amazing Jackson Healthcare is as a multi-billion-dollar organization that does culture, stakeholder orientation, and people experience like no other. And so, for all of you who like us are passionate about creating remarkable people experiences in the workforce, you are in for a treat today. So, Leslie, welcome.

Leslie: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

Jeff: My pleasure. And so excited to be here with my co-host, Vicki Hudson. Vicki, how are you?

Vicki: Hello, I’m doing great, Jeff, how about you?

Jeff: I am great. We are going to jump into a topic that’s near and dear to my heart, which is navigating change with unique love. Love has a place in the workplace. How do we balance values and workplace evolution? Let’s jump in.

So, Leslie, you had mentioned having a conversation with Shane, your CEO, who I respect and admire dearly, about loving people uniquely. Could you share with our audience about that conversation and what loving people uniquely means to you and at Jackson HealthCare?

Leslie: I will, I love telling this story and I actually tell this at new hire orientation that we do because I think it is just, it’s a powerful story. So about 10 years ago, I was meeting with our CEO and actually Rick, Rick Jackson, and we were having a conversation about our kids. I have three children. He has three children. And I think it was around Christmas time and I was saying, oh, if I buy one of these, I’ve got to buy three of these.

And I just remember he looked me squarely in the eyes. He said, you know, I learned a long time ago that the best way to love your kids equally is to love them uniquely. That was a moment for me that literally I feel like the world stopped spinning because it was so profound. Because all of a sudden it underscored for me, I had my aha moment where I was like, oh my gosh, that’s exactly what our culture is all about.

Here at Jackson Healthcare, truly, every person is loved uniquely. Meaning every story, every person, their contribution, everything that makes them original and unique, uniquely them, is loved, treasured, valued, and appreciated here. And we just don’t take a one size fits all approach to our associate experience strategy, and we prioritize building strong, healthy relationships to get to know people on that level. And really connecting them with the social fabric of Jackson Healthcare. So, when he said that to me, it made me realize, oh my goodness, this is why sometimes in our organization, it takes a little bit longer to get things done. And I literally the first two years, being with Jackson Healthcare, I just kind of banged my head against the wall, going, oh my gosh, you know, everything that used to work for me, normal methodologies with former companies I’ve been with, didn’t work as easily here and I couldn’t figure out why. And when the light bulb moment happened for me, and I realized it’s because we care so deeply about our sense of community that we’ve got at Jackson Healthcare.

It really is a community of we see you, we hear you, we operate with love and grace and we want people’s perspectives on things and we just include a lot more people in our conversations here. And so, it takes longer sometimes to get things done but at the end of the day, there’s such a wisdom to that and everyone feels seen and heard because they get to contribute to the conversation. And so, it just resonated with me and again we were just talking about our kids but it was so profound the impact of that really influences the way our culture it really is the underpinning of our culture here is we love everyone uniquely.

Jeff: It’s a, it’s a beautiful vision. And for those who don’t know, Rick is the founder and CEO, correct me if I’m wrong. Shane is his son who’s carrying that legacy forward.

Leslie: That’s right.

Jeff: The company has grown immensely since its humble beginnings to how many associates now under your purview?

Leslie: I think we’re at 1,200 now in Alpharetta. Nationwide we have far more than that.

Jeff: Far more because you’ve placed many, many people in healthcare professions and their vocation and you’re doing staffing work. And so loving people uniquely amongst thousands of people is the vision here at Jackson Healthcare, which is pretty incredible. What do you think, Vicki?

Vicki: I’m inspired by that because I think it applies in so many contexts, not just this one, that message could apply to a lot of the organizations that are listening in right now. And when I was thinking about my next question, Leslie, I was thinking about how part of loving people is seeing them through change, right? And in some ways it’s easy to be loving when things are really stable, but managing change is a part of any organization.

So how has your team successfully navigated significant change while maintaining that core value of loving people uniquely and the rest of your values of your company? And can you share an example when your values remained intact, maybe despite the challenges that you faced?

Leslie: Yeah, so at Jackson Healthcare, our corporate mission and our values of Others First, Wisdom, and Growth, they never change, but we do, our culture does change and it evolves, ensuring that we remain connected to the needs of our associates in this ever-changing climate, I mean, ever since 2020. But a key ingredient to successful change management is just to keep asking questions, to listen and to not be afraid to pivot.

I will say, one of the things that is so significant about our organization, this goes back to including people in the conversation, is that we, we ask a lot. We’re not afraid to say that we don’t know the answers to things. And I think that’s important with change management. We lead with optimism, but we have a lot of feedback loops that we utilize. And we do that either through listening tours, focus groups, health surveys that go out. We are so connected. So I think that’s a big part of change is kind of understanding, helping lead people through change is understanding kind of where they are and where any resistance may be, where the hesitations are. And the only way that you know that is if you’re asking the question and being willing to listen to that and making whatever changes are happening within the organization you don’t ever want that to feel like it’s happening to people. We want them to feel like they’re a part of that evolution and a part of that progress and a part of moving forward.

I would say COVID obviously was a time that significant change for everyone. And our focal point for our associate experience strategy was really to make sure that we kept people connected. I think that’s one of the biggest parts of change is to stay true to our Other’s First mindset and considering each situation from our associate’s perspective before we make decisions that would impact them.

And so, I think keeping that a priority, understanding like, you know, putting yourself in their shoes. How is this going to land with them and in not guessing at it, but asking the questions and pivoting, making changes along the way. It really is. It’s about evolution.

Vicki: That is so exciting because change is common to all humans and I think humans in general are not all that fond of it. And so, the act of actually iterating the change and reaching out to people allows them to have those natural emotions of resistance and difficulty but have a feedback loop by which to acknowledge some of their fears. So, I think, again, that’s another thing that all of our audience can benefit from. What do you think, Jeff?

Jeff: Yeah. And I wanted to hone in on for anyone who’s less familiar, what, what does a listening tour mean for you at Jackson Healthcare? Maybe what’s an example of how you have implemented it? How long did it take? How did you do it? How did you collect the feedback? Just curious about some of the tactical aspects of that.

Leslie: So listening tours can be anything from the most literal aspect of it, meaning that I or someone on the associate experience team just cruises along the floors and we might have a topic that we want to just talk to people about. We will randomly ask questions impromptu, which sometimes just start much deeper conversations and sometimes we very strategically target a specific audience that may have a lot of energy around a specific topic.

And sometimes it’s just that we will pull in various groups, random samplings, because we want to make sure that we always get diversity of thought, and also too diversity of not just thought, but of dispositions, personality types, sometimes introverts, extroverts. We’re very intentional about making sure that we hear everyone’s voice. So, the way that we’ve done this a variety of different ways, sometimes we will simply book a conference room and invite people tell them give them a little teaser on what the topic is going to be. But people love being heard and I think the fact that we have historically our track record for asking the questions, listening and making changes based on the feedback they’ve given us We have a very solid track record that people here are very eager to give their opinion, give their advice. And so, we’ve done it through. You know, just simply getting everybody in a room. Typically, we like to not do more than 10 or 12 people because a lot of times we take very deep dives into, we’ll go at this with one specific topic and we will take much, much deeper dives into it. Other times we will do, you know, Teams call, we’ll put a group on Teams calls. Sometimes we do it through a combination of sending out a survey first, just a really nice easy, quick response survey that will kind of tee up the general consensus of a topic that I want more information on and then I’ll gear conversations that we really kind of go down the rabbit holes whenever we meet with people in person but it really it’s a very engaging process and from that typically what I will do is I’ll take all of the feedback received looking at it from a very objective perspective and simply report the findings, correlate the things that can tie together or look at you know cause and effect relationships there and I will put that in a summary that I then typically will share with our executive team and including Shane Jackson as well and we review these and we make decisions based off feedback that we get.

I mean it’s amazing the influence that our associate has over driving our change and sort of the way we view projects and the way we want to evolve into the future. A lot of that is driven from feedback. I’ve never seen an organization that truly, I know a lot of companies ask the question, most of them don’t listen and even fewer actually do something with the feedback that they get. It is so important for them to feel that they’re a part of our tapestry of connection and that their voice really does matter and they see that. So when we call it a feedback loop, it’s really a loop. I mean, it’s a continual, but that’s just kind of an example. So listening tours are either literally me kind of touring the floors or someone on the team touring the floors or doing more structured sit downs. Sometimes it’s even one-on-ones. We’ve done this. We’re very big in doing retrospectives when we have large projects. We just recently implemented Workday. We talk about a large change impact to all associates. And we, you know, so we did an enormous retrospective on that. It took about 3 months so that we can learn and get better from it. And so that’s kind of an example and that is continuous. If the executive team comes up with a topic they’re like we’re just not understanding where people’s minds are with this then guess what we go out and we ask through one of those different modalities.

Vicki: Amazing. I love especially the emphasis you put on doing something with the feedback. Cause I think you’re right, a lot of organizations ask for it, but associates can get even more, feel more left out if they then don’t do anything with the feedback because it feels performative. And at Jackson Healthcare, it sounds like it is the farthest thing from that. So.

Leslie: That’s right. Well, a perfect example you had asked a moment ago, about an example of how this worked through some of our associates at surveys over the years, we noticed in 2021, there had kind of been a trend that we needed to do a better job of recognizing our associates. And so we implemented in 2022, we implemented, it was inspired by Gary Chapman’s Love Languages, and we sort of converted that into love appreciation languages in the workplace so that we can understand this goes back a little bit to that loving people uniquely. We understand that people want to be recognized in different ways. And so for those of you that are familiar with Gary Chapman’s work and the love languages, you know, there are five different love languages in the workplace. We call them, you know, appreciation languages, love appreciation languages. And so we actually did this for everybody on the resource team that we had a really fun session where we said, look, we want to understand how we can show appreciation to you and recognize you in a way that resonates uniquely with you.

For example, we’re big gift givers. Rick and Shane are huge gift givers. They are so generous. And we do Christmas gifts. We do a lot of that. I just think naturally we think everybody loves gifts. I give a lot of gifts. And so, we found out through our study that we did, our session on love language is an understanding what resonates with the majority of our associates, we found out that words of affirmation were actually more important than gifts, gifts being at the bottom. And so, we implemented a platform, it’s a full recognition program where we have continued, and we call it the Kudos Cup, and it’s where everybody can submit anything from simply a high five, like, hey, so and so rocked it at their jobs to something even more complex where people get very specific or tie something that they did back to one of our core values and just embodying our core values. And so, we rolled that out in 2023, the Kudos Cup, which was immensely, it is so participative. We broadcast all of the kudos every month and that in our mid-year and our kickoff meeting, we actually have what we call the Golden Helix Awards, which are kudos that then really speak to embodiment of living one of our core values. And we give out really nice gifts. So it kind of speaks to, you get the public recognition for the people that want the words of affirmation. We do that on a monthly basis now. And then we do give gifts and prizes and wonderful things to kind of even more fully fulfill that. And I will tell you, that is one of those that people immediately felt the impact of their feedback that they gave us. And it feels good for us because we know what everyone’s love languages are now. So it’s very helpful. It’s a terrific tool for managers because, you know, if there’s someone you want to show appreciation to, they did a really great job, or they’ve made really good progress on something. You know, if someone’s primary love language is words of affirmation, then that’s the person that you want to stand up in front of everybody at your team meeting applaud them, recognize them, or if quality time is their primary love language, then you give them a day off because that’s what they value. So, it is made it where it just ties back to that first question that you asked me is how we uniquely love our people. It’s by getting to know them and we tie that, we weave that into hopefully everything that we do, at least we try to. And so that’s an example of how our feedback loop or listening tours, you know, we, we created this recognition platform as a direct result of what we saw and heard them say that they needed and we’re seeing the beautiful residual effects of people feeling that appreciation and that recognition in a way that’s unique and special to them.

So, it’s a long answer, but that is an example that you would ask for on how we kind of bring that full circle.

Vicki: Yeah, I just love this so much because it really also is a great role model for appreciating difference. You know, like the fact that you have these feedback loops, but then you implement things in different ways for the different people, that probably has a trickle effect to a lot of other things in which difference is valued. And so your role modeling, like actually leveraging difference, which is so important. So I just, I was inspired by that.

Jeff: Yeah understanding and role modeling difference, like actually taking the time to understand what makes people tick and what their love languages are. And, and I, and I love that you just basically made a business case for love and business. And so I love that kind of combination of it. And so you talked about the Kudos Cup and then the golden, what was the other part of that?

Leslie: The Golden Helix. So yeah, our logo has the DNA helix in it. And so we, so yeah, it’s the Golden Helix. They get a gold trophy and it’s, we try to hit all of the different things. You get a gift, you get time off, you get, whatever resonates with you. We kind of have a, it definitely, it’s not a one size fits all.

Jeff: I love that. And you kind of touched on this with, uh, touring the floors and kind of this tapestry of connections. So it’s evident in that, that you had made the decision for many of your associates to come back into the office environment where the prevailing narrative today differs of fully distributed, fully remote versus return to office and all that, and you made a decision to bring associates back to the workplace during the height of COVID-19. And I’ve heard Shane articulate some really compelling reasons why, but would love to hear your perspective on how that helped you to focus on associate experience and that decision as a whole, what that meant for you as a leader.

Leslie: We definitely were on the cutting edge of bringing people back, but we, and this is one of the many, many wonderful things. Shane is so intuitive about understanding what drives human behavior and what we as humans need, and that’s connection. And now, post-COVID, everybody’s talking about that. There’s a lot of buzz out there, but at the time it really was following, I think really coming from a place of wisdom. We know that we need each other. We know that we operate better together. We know the detrimental effects of isolation and we already had such a deep sense of community, and we knew that by creating a sense of normalcy for people, we felt that was our obligation to them. And so we didn’t wanna push anyone so far out of their comfort zone, but we have people that came back April and May. We even had some people that never actually left. We immediately implemented the most stringent protocols from a cleanliness perspective. I’ve got a really great engineering team and I think we bought out every Clorox wipe, every Clorox, everything way on the front end. It’s like I secretly felt like we had hoarded all of the supplies for the United States here at Jackson Healthcare. We didn’t mean to, but we had a lot of it. So we had a really clean campus, really clean. We felt comfortable inviting people to come back. We knew that they needed that place of normalcy. So we kept a lot of our health, our clinic stayed open throughout the duration, our fitness center stayed open through the duration. We really, I mean, a lot of companies I know took a lot of amenities away, but we said, no, if there’s one place that makes sense for our associates, we want it to be here at work. We know that they can do their work there, but we knew the effects of that isolation over time. And it just, again, I think we’ve got a lot of really smart people that have studied that, that understand that. And so preemptively and proactively, we really tried to encourage people coming back. And we had a high success rate in that.

People trusted us. People trusted that we would not lead them astray. We didn’t force it. We allow people to make their own decisions around that.

But I look at the success of our company in the last five years. And although I don’t know that you could ever directly correlate it back to some of those decisions to get people back to a place of normalcy early. And again, we were one of the first ones I know of to bring people back. When I say May, I mean May of 2020, we had people coming back into the workplace. And kind of didn’t stop from there. And I look at the success that we’ve had emotionally, socially, and as a business. And I have to tie it back to that decision. And we never professed to know that we knew all of the answers then, but we surrounded ourselves with experts in the field that made a little more sense out of some of the chaos that you would get in the media and the news. And so people trusted us, and this goes back to a culture of very deep trust here. And so we were successful.

Vicki: So Leslie, that is such a unique point of view because you’re right, I don’t know any companies that were bringing people back so early, but it sounded like you did it so successfully and you did it with so much intention. But COVID aside, I’d love to ask you about other examples of events or initiatives that were organized to bring associates together.

And probably more importantly, how did those events contribute to turning the workplace into such a supportive and connected environment? So we’d love to hear some other non-COVID examples.

Leslie: Yeah, yeah, it’s good not to talk about those anymore. Yeah, there’s so much exciting stuff happening now. So, um, I always say this as associates we are always consciously consuming our environment and so we at Jackson Healthcare have always been very intentional both with the physical work environment as well as the emotional work environment. So the physical environment, I mean it just creates a pathway for activating on our culture.

I always say it’s a physical manifestation of our culture and we get to weave the tapestry of the emotional connections within that physical presence. And we do that through fostering community and creating opportunities to build high quality relationships. That is so important to us here. And this is when we all excel. So to put it in terms of positive psychology, which I enjoy, I study a lot of positive psychology, we strive to create a place that people get to come to rather than they have to go to. And that to me is sort of a distinct difference. When we look at what are initiatives or things that we do to bring associates together, it’s creating an environment that people want to be at. That is the magic to it. That’s the magic.

So it’s not inviting people to come back and sit in a cube with no interaction and boring, boring, boring people create those social connections. And so again, it’s creating a place that people get to come to every day rather than they have to go to, because this is where they can ultimately find happiness, flow, meaning, love, gratitude, accomplishment, growth, trusting relationships, and from that, we get human flourishing. And that ultimately is part of our mission, our goal at Jackson and me personally. I take a lot of, I just take that really seriously. I feel like part of my mission, my purpose here is to create human flourishing. And we do that through all of those things I mentioned before, helping people find happiness, flow, meaning in the work they do, purpose, love, gratitude, accomplishment, feeling that they’ve done something productive, growth, having trusting, healthy relationships. And so the power of what happens when the right conditions are met for human flourishing is life-changing, and not only for the individuals, but for companies as well. And I think because we have leaders who lead with love we’ve been given this incredible playground, if you will, to build all of these wonderful opportunities to hit all the marks on all of those things I just mentioned, which yield human flourishing.

And what an incredible thing as a leader and as a company, if you feel like you’ve had some tiny influence into bringing out the very best of a person, that they’ve become the very best version of who they were born to be because they work for Jackson Healthcare. I mean, if a company can say, because they work for me, we have been able to really, this person is flourishing in all of those areas that matter, that create true ultimate happiness and drive our sense of purpose, then to me, mission accomplished. Success on the business side is a byproduct of all of that. If you hit these, if you hit three or four of all of those things I mentioned then you naturally are driving the success of your business because you’ve got people that are aligned on what their ultimate purpose is. They’re happy, they’re healthy, mentally, physically, financially, and all of the ways that matter.

And I think all of our leaders here really take that to heart, you know, that we have this beautiful opportunity to influence the lives of everyone that we touch. And it’s a big task but we’re given so much freedom within this framework to really drive change and to make a difference in the lives of people. And I get excited about that. I get excited about if we can create this incredible environment here where people want to come to and they can make a best friend at work. They feel a sense of normalcy here at work.

They can work out, they get the mental health support they need, they just have beautiful spaces. We have sacred spaces on campus where they can just go sit and have a moment if prayer is important for them. There are places, quiet places they can go, whatever their place of faith may be. There are places here where they can practice that. We play, we play a lot. We do really fun things on campus. We curate really special activities. We do, I mean, the list goes on and on and on.

Every month we do things, Better Together events that are curated sometimes, you know around certain times of the year like we’ll have big, you know events in the piazza that we’ll do, family reunions we have family fun day, we bring carousels and spinning wheels and cotton candy and all the families come and it’s in every single month We realize this we did this prior to 2020, but we really amplified that in 2022 and people became so engaged in that and they said, we want more, we want more. It just nurtures their souls. And it really helps us accomplish that human foraging that is so important to us. And so we do a lot of things.

We implemented in 2021 a program called Positively JH, and it really just reinforces all of the good things that are happening in people’s lives and we broadcast those, the things that they’re willing to share and we amplify that, the successes and root each other on and really celebrate those things with each other. And so also part of Positively JH, we do a lot of things around mental wellbeing. For example, this past year we gave everyone a gratitude journal with some inspiring prompts along the way to kind of, you know, generate thought in their gratitude journals and so we have initiatives under the realm of associate experience that fall under the Positively JH, which is really just about infusing positivity in our workplace and prioritizing positivity in the workplace. There’s such profound implications towards optimism and hope and positivity. And there’s a lot of research backing the importance of that towards people’s happiness factor. When they’re happy, they’re more productive and they’re more productive and more successful in every aspect of life. So it’s kind of the domino effect of this and all of this, you know, weaves into a place of wellbeing and we are in the healthcare industry so wellbeing matters on many, many levels for us. And so we want our people being the healthiest and the most well they possibly can be in every aspect of life.

And in every avenue that we can have an influence in that we want to, because we feel like if they’re thriving, then the work they do and the people that they interact with, the clinicians, the hospital groups that ultimately are serving our patients, then it’s the triple effect of that. And that is our hope and our prayer every day is that, you know, we infuse this positivity here. We fill people’s buckets and to pay it forward, it continues forward ultimately to the patients across the country and the world that we serve.

Vicki: It’s so great to get such specific advice for our people experience leaders who are listening because there’s a lot of companies I think that talk about positive psychology or wellbeing in the workplace. There’s a lot of buzzwords that are going around sort of centering on that subject, but you really provided those specific examples of how that looks in reality. So that hopefully our listening audience can even go back to their desk today and say, you know, there’s one thing I can do. I can organize an event or I can maybe start a listening tour or a survey. So we really appreciate the specifics that you shared with us. Wouldn’t you say, Jeff?

Jeff: Likewise. Yeah, I really, it’s not often that you get into the tactical and the way it’s practically applied within businesses. And as kind of a final closing here. I want to speak directly to our listeners who say, this sounds amazing, Leslie. Y’all are a $10 billion plus business and you have a huge budget that you can apply towards people experience initiatives. We don’t have that, right? We have a small budget or I’m a leader that wants to commit to associate or people experience in my business. Where can I just start small and make a small action? And so, what advice would you give to that listener today to have maybe like one practical takeaway that they can apply if they don’t have the big budget to attach to it, but they have the commitment and the drive?

Leslie: I would say there might be two things I would say to that. So, first of all, it goes back to ask questions. Asking means you care and listen. You know, you can’t just ask the question and do nothing with it, but ask questions, listen, and do whatever small things. You know, there is incremental wins, frankly, I think are more impressive than the big wins. It’s the, you know, praising the progress along the way that is so, so important.

And so I think even if it’s through just open recognition of or acknowledging, first of all, being transparent and truthful with kind of where you are and don’t over promise things that you know you can’t fulfill yet, but I think just listening and saying, hey, we want to be better in fill in the blank and whatever these areas are, help us understand how we can reach you in a way that resonates, that speaks to your heart. And then, you know, come up with your list of things and figure out what are the things that are easy wins because a lot of times it doesn’t cost money. And really it is, it’s listening and making people feel included in the conversation.

And I would say the second thing to that is so important and I think it’s just a foundation for us and our culture is autonomy. I think when we give people, I look at where I feel like a lot of people can’t quite get the culture that they’re looking for, I think because they try to be a little too prescriptive on what it looks like. Again, it’s sort of the, oh, we think we know what’s best we’re gonna push this down on you. But again, I think inherently, if we trust people, then we should give them the autonomy to do work the way that they feel most comfortable doing work. And I think having that work-life balance is so important. And I think for companies, figure out a way to be able to give them. Ultimately, what we’re saying is give your people the autonomy to determine how they can produce their best work for you and how they feel like they can show up as their best version, right? And sometimes that means they’ve got to navigate the, you know, the emotion, the mixture of emotions of what makes us human beings, right? And that’s different for every single person. And I think when people feel that they’re in control of their own destiny then we just kind of become the maestros of the symphony, right? And everyone, yes, we’re all trying to play the same music, but we can do it with different inflections. And it’s figuring out how to bring all of that together to create beautiful music together, but allowing people that freedom to figure out what works best for them. I would say that, that is such a critical thing. And I don’t know that a lot of people talk about how important autonomy is. I mean, it kind of feeds into the conversation of, you know, work from home, hybrid models, why people are just really almost demanding that. You know, I think that is kind of the new requirement in the workforce now is to have some sort of hybrid. Really, the root of that, the underpinning of that is people want to have agency over the output of their work and to have some say in how they spend their day. That’s really important. And so you can make tweaks with what you’re doing without compromising productivity, revenue, any of those things, again, just by asking the question, saying, what can we do to make you feel more balanced in your work and your professional lives? And make little changes in that. And again, those don’t cost anything, and I would even argue that at the end of the day, it’s probably more profitable for you to do that than to not.

Jeff: They don’t cost anything recognition and autonomy and that also frees up the leaders to actually be there and serve their people because they’re not so in the weeds of trying to control every aspect of the business and, and so, and people, uh, and giving them kind of the ability to reclaim their time and the way they get work done and empowering them, equipping them, loving them well, you made a great business case today. It’s rare to kind of get into that, that specific and bring it full circle. But I think that’s a great place to close. Vicki, your thoughts?

Vicki: I took away so many things. I think, you know, as a DEI practitioner, I really appreciated a lot of things that you shared Leslie, because they apply, a lot of them applied to that landscape as well. Just, you know, valuing the difference of your associate base, valuing different styles, valuing what each person brings to the table and actually giving something to that and just appreciating and loving those differences. So I’m excited. I loved this conversation.

Leslie: Oh, I do too. Thank you for letting me share this. So you can tell I’m very passionate about this topic as well. And love that I have the opportunity to serve our associates in this capacity.

Jeff: To all those who have been listening, we’ve been talking to Leslie Day-Harrell, the Executive Vice President of Associate Experience at Jackson Healthcare, a great model for people experience. Leslie has been such a gift. Thank you so much.

Leslie: Thank you for having me.