Amanda Bailey, Vice President of Human Resources, Brown University
On this episode of The 3rd Question we talk with Amanda Bailey – Vice President of Human Resources for Brown University, as she discusses the groundbreaking policies for students and employees that she’s initiated this year to address the changing priorities in the current climate.
Video Transcript
Ryan:
Hello, and welcome to The 3rd Question. A public sector and higher ed thought leader series that we've got going on here. And today we are lucky enough to be joined by Amanda Bailey. Amanda is the VP for HR at Brown University out in Rhode Island. So, Amanda, thank you so much for joining me today.
Amanda Bailey:
Yeah. Thank you, Ryan. Well, pleasure to be here and really excited to join in our conversation. Thank you.
Ryan:
Well, we've got three questions for you, but before we get started, I'm going to ask if you could just give our audience a little bit of an introduction about who you are and about Brown University and maybe your title and role there.
Amanda Bailey:
Absolutely. So, I'm the Vice President for Human Resources at Brown. I've been at Brown for about two years in this role. As most of you know, Brown is located in Providence, Rhode Island. I lead the central university HR team for our university. We are one of the few Ivy League institutions in the country and really happy to welcome our Brunonians back for the fall term. We started yesterday. And as most of you know, Brown is uniquely positioned with multiple graduate degree programs, as well as a variety of different undergraduate programs that span across the country and across the globe. So, very excited to be here and talk with you about it.
Ryan:
Thank you. Thank you. Well, we appreciate it. So let me start off with the first question. As the VP for HR at Brown, I've read that with COVID happening that everybody's been dealing with it in their own way. You guys had made some shifts on what you were doing to keep your workforce, professors, students, everyone safe. And with some of those shifts, I saw policy changes that were probably enacted much quicker than normal. The childcare policy change for example, is something I saw.
Amanda Bailey:
Yep.
Ryan:
I guess I'd be curious about other policy changes that you were able to implement from an HR perspective. And then secondarily, what about on the technology side, as far as changes to continue to support what was a remote workforce, might kind of still be a hybrid workforce going forward?
Amanda Bailey:
Yeah. Thank you so much for asking both of those questions and you're absolutely right intuitively about both of the evolving changes that have created policy and procedural changes driven by our team to submit recommendations and fully supported by our senior and executive leaders for the benefit of making sure that we met a few really key criteria. And here at Brown, we really measure a lot of our dialogue and discussions, considering all things as much as we can against a standardized set of considerations. I think that type of framework really helps us be thoughtful, compassionate around our employee's care, and around the care for our students. Both who've remained on campus since March and who we're welcoming back very shortly for the fall term.
Amanda Bailey:
So, a lot of our policy changes surrounded childcare most recently. Back to March, we immediately were doing multiple levels of review, multiple different constituent groups. Our team, legal, other operational teams, looking at evolving guidance through the state's lens and what was coming back from our department of health, through CDC, and multiple other federal agencies. And it drove the considerations of
what type of policies we needed to put into place.
Amanda Bailey:
One of those was key. Looking at the safety and welfare of our employees was immediate. Through my lens in particular, alongside looking at the care and safety of our students who needed to remain on campus, mostly our international students.
Amanda Bailey:
So for the employee side, we really wanted to make sure we could first foster a sense of safety for them. We received recommendations from across multiple units and approved a paid leave time off policy for up to 10 days, really giving our employees a chance to feel that there was a safety net, regardless of whether they had paid time or not. But the most important concept behind that policy was, we care about you and we need you and your loved ones to know that you're being taken care of while you're here at Brown.
Amanda Bailey:
Within a very, very short accelerated time, we moved almost half of our workforce to remote operations. And I say very, very short because as I look back now, six months in, it's about ten days. Ten business days.
Ryan:
Wow.
Amanda Bailey:
It was an incredible amount of alignment, collaboration that was ongoing, and just orchestrated steps that we had to take alongside each other. Multiple units, 10 to 15 units, and different departments collaborating in think tanks at the same time. And that really successfully helped us move safely our workforce into the remote environment while managing at the exact same time, our employees who needed to remain onsite to keep things going and to maintain the safety and care for our students.
Amanda Bailey:
So what we thought we needed to do as our primary goal, and still to a large level is our priority here in HR, was how are we managing the care for our employees who are doing all this? So the paid leave time off was a significant policy change we did very early. And since that time, we've been looking at modifying existing policies, those around benefits, those around designations for categories of our employees, we had to create a new designation category to make sure that we were accommodating multiple different circumstances that would affect our employees. So, what I mean by that is we had to really make sure as we were looking at the safety pieces, de-densification in compliance to all the guidance, were there situations where we had employees not needing to be on a Brown location for the whole day, but maybe for part of the day?
Amanda Bailey:
And so with that, all the considerations and discussion led to creating a new designation for our employees. So there've been multiple different policies that exist already that we've revised. The paid leave time off due specifically to the coronavirus was a brand new one that we rolled out. I'm very proud of that.
Amanda Bailey:
I want to touch on the technology that you mentioned briefly. And what we identified were some technology needs. And as you can imagine, from talking to a lot of colleagues right now in the education space, we have learned a lot about the value and the value add of being able to work in a remote environment successfully. And like many of my own colleagues in the higher education space specifically, we thought early on in March, this would be six to eight weeks, we weren't sure. Now we understand very clearly, and what we knew in the back of our minds was always going to be the long run, right? We're in this for the long haul. From a public health expert perspective, and we have many, many renowned scientists and deans at Brown to be able to have known very early that this would be for the long haul.
Amanda Bailey:
So even though we wanted to anticipate linear thinking, we knew we had to plan. And so our technology ramp up, our colleagues in our information systems area really put that kind of thinking cap on. For the long haul, how can we do this? So Zoom became our friend, lots of tutorials, lots of different ways to engage technology. And what I thought was most helpful as a value add was being able to still maintain a sense of community, even though our workforce is mostly remote on the operational side. And so being able to do that really forced us to be innovative and creative to leverage technology. So not just Zoom, but maybe virtual walk-a-thons or videos or using our FaceTime with our phones and connecting with each other while we were engaging in wellness events. Going out to portals with our wellness and benefits vendors and being able to leverage different activities that we could do during the day, small yoga sessions online and being able to leverage a lot of different systems that will create that community for us, but then also allows us to manage business on a day-to-day basis.
Ryan:
Right. Well, from that HR side, like I heard a couple of things that it seems that coronavirus has really highlighted the need for empathy from an organizational perspective. It's just becoming more and more of kind of top of mind for HR leaders like yourself. And then that community culture aspect, too. Like how do we make sure we maintain or build on the culture that we have here in a different environment? So it sounds like you guys are going down that same path. So [crosstalk 00:09:34]
Amanda Bailey:
Absolutely. That's one thing that I can say I'm honestly very proud of. We kept those two at our forefront. What will our culture need to sustain? Which is part of how we operate today. And empathy came straight to the forefront, illustrating and demonstrating to the best of our ability in all ways possible, care for our students, care for our employees, and those two together spoke to how we maintained our community. And that was really a great thing.
Ryan:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's talk about that community. So you have a talent pool that's always coming in the doors and graduating as alumni. And so, I hear as I talk to HR leaders really in the education, higher ed, and public sector space, I hear about the challenge of attracting talent. And I'm always curious when I'm talking to a higher ed organization from an HR side of the house, you've got this talent sitting there. However, we are now in a time where you've almost got four or five generations in your workforce. And so those young, newly graduated students, they have very different expectations about what a job entails about the technology they use, the career path, et cetera, than someone who's closer to retirement.
Amanda Bailey:
Right.
Ryan:
And so I guess my question is, what have you done at Brown to try and maybe attract some of the talent that's in house-
Amanda Bailey:
Right.
Ryan:
...become employees? And then also, how have you handled that multi-generational workforce challenge that everybody has?
Amanda Bailey:
Yeah. I think that's a great question. You're absolutely right about being a challenge that we don't think is going to reduce in intensity, not just for the rest of this year, but going into the next two to three years, quite honestly. So, really happy to be able to share that one of our priorities in human resources has been, how do we measure and maintain a level of career progression for all of our employees? And that is regardless of whether our employees are two, three years, four years from retirement, or just entering the workforce for the very first time and joining us here at Brown. And so with the diversity of experience, that is lived experience across that spectrum, what we wanted to do, and what we've done, is promote all opportunities that employees can learn about in different ways and not be surprised.
Amanda Bailey:
And because we're a very large institution and not be surprised that, oh, that job is out there. So making sure that we advertise our positions in as many places as possible. So we do it on social media, we do it on our regular site, we have our HR business partners who also promote and understand what the upcoming vacancies are and can always have us available to answer those questions. Because we feel that the more we can communicate that, the more we can leverage our internal talent.
Ryan:
Right.
Amanda Bailey:
Which is exactly what we aspire to do, is make sure first that our community understands where the opportunities exist, and maybe if they're not interested in it, they'll talk to another colleague within our community, and if they're not interested in it, maybe they'll refer it and share it with somebody who's in the area or in the region. And that has served us very well to make sure that we're not only identifying the positions to the appropriate audiences. And through a diverse set of sourcing sites, social media, regular advertisement, and through other meetings, but with that ability to advertise the jobs, comes what kind of skills and talent can we learn about from our existing workforce today? And I think that allows us a really good pulse on not just knowing where it exists, but also capitalizing through our talent development team, where we may need to offer some professional learning opportunities.
Ryan:
Right. Yeah. They may start making that job recruitment instead of a shotgun approach, a little more of a sniper approach. Like we know these are the skills needed because of the gap, so let's go find the person that has those skills, as opposed to just hope someone finds the job.
Amanda Bailey:
Yeah. I think you're absolutely right. What I'm really proud to be able to share that at Brown we do well, is not wait passively for the applicants to come to us. And it's not an easy thing to do in a large organization. So I totally empathize with my HR colleagues out there who haven't yet been able to get, and I can't say we've mastered it, we've improved it, there's always something you can do better. But I think for all of us in HR, we understand the imperative behind not waiting for the applicants anymore, but going out deliberately and saying, these are the skills and talents we're looking for, wave your hand and we'll come find you. But trying to approach it as from as many different lenses as possible.
Ryan:
Got it. Well, Amanda, we've gotten to the third question. So, the third question for you today, I have got some different time machine fun things, and I'm going to pick a book for you the time machine by H.G. Wells. And so my question is this, you've worked in the public sector or the edge of higher ed space for a few years now, in a few different roles, and if I gave you the time machine from this book, and you could go back to any point in your career and give yourself advice or change how you did things, what would it be and why would you do it?
Amanda Bailey:
Yeah, that's a great question because I happen to be, and I'm sure you know this as well, Ryan, I've been in HR for 20, 25 years now. It's been a joy and I've seen for myself firsthand how this industry has been in disruption, how it remains in disruption, and I think that's a really great thing. I think that change is a great thing. So, if I were to look back, I probably not beat myself up too much for making the decision to decide to devote my career to human resources. I went in it for the right reasons, and what I've seen over the past decade, maybe 12 years or so even, were other colleagues of mine from other industry sectors with specialization of skills in other areas, legal, business administration, finance, migrate into HR positions.
Amanda Bailey:
I've had the luxury and the privilege without knowing it of staying in this space and watching the impact and the ability to watch how it reverberates. Watch how HR, when successfully executed, when it's working well in an organization, when we can recognize and be allowed to improve, and be an environment to consistently improve. I have been in this very, very lucky space to see how that's shifted from the days of just, you know, managing payroll sheets, and time, and hours for the employees to sitting in strategic planning sessions and really being able to be at the forefront and being asked and being trusted as a partner to think about where do we go next as an organization?
Amanda Bailey:
I can't think of another professional area that's shifted in that much, right? The needle, where it's shifted that significantly, than HR. So I think if I were to go back, while I was contemplating, whether I pursue a business major or in finance and marketing, or stay in HR, and I decided to stay in HR when it wasn't as popular, I'd probably go back and tell myself, "Hold on, there's something that's going to be more impactful that you're going to really enjoy this decision of remaining committed to this profession."
Amanda Bailey:
And what I foresee next, in the next 25 years, is that we're going to continue alongside the rest of organizations transforming as workforces change, this way in which we do work changes, and maintaining some of the things we touched on together today. How do we maintain culture? How do we maintain the values that are really close to us and bringing back the human into the workplace as we leverage technology? So I foresee the next 25 years looking very much from a strategic lens and continuing to push HR to be at the onset of conversations, is just the direction we're going in today. So, that's what I say.
Ryan:
Got it, got it. Well, I appreciate it. So, Amanda, I really appreciate you taking just a few minutes to answer our three questions today. It was a pleasure getting to do this with you and for any of our viewers, there's other interviews like this with thought leaders, you can always go to the3rdQuestion.com and subscribe there and see others. But Amanda, thank you so much for taking a little bit of time with us, and I really appreciate and look forward to staying in touch with you.
Amanda Bailey:
Thank you, Ryan. Same here. Be safe and thank you very much. Bye bye.
