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Joanne Peterson, Chief of Human Capital and Development for LA Metro

On this episode of The 3rd Question we talk with Joanne Peterson, Chief of Human Capital and Development for LA Metro, as she discussed developing future leaders, relationship building and the "silver tsunami."

 

 

Video Transcript

 

Ryan James:

Hello, and welcome to The 3rd Question, a video interview series with public sector thought leaders from around the country. I'm your host Ryan James, and today we are lucky enough to be joined by Joanne Peterson. Joanne is the CHRO for LA Metro here in California, where lucky I get to live too. Joanne, thank you so much for joining us today.

 

Joanne Peterson:

Well thank you. I'm honored with the invitation.

 

Ryan James:

So, before we get into the three questions, I'd love if you could just give us a little bit of an introduction of who you are, your role, what you oversee and maybe a little bit about LA Metro too.

 

Joanne Peterson:

Sure. I've been with LA Metro over five years, it's an organization of more than 11,000 employees. We serve all of LA County with transportation services, that's buses, light rail, a little bit of heavy rail and subway, and as well as the HOV lanes that you see when you're in LA

 

Joanne Peterson:

So those 11,000 employees do a wonderful job of moving almost 1.4 million people a day pre-COVID, those numbers are down significantly because of the impact of the pandemic. However, we are really committed to moving the county, and the county is approaching 11 million people.

 

Ryan James:

Yeah. Well I use those HOV lanes a lot with three young'uns, so appreciate that part. All right, well let's get into these three questions. So, as someone who's been with LA Metro for a little over five years, and I'm sure you've had a lot of initiatives from an HR perspective and goals, how have those changed because of the pandemic from an HR perspective? Some people are talking about how timelines are moved forward and expeded--they're faster--some have slowed down or changed completely. What has that been for your world?

 

Joanne Peterson:

Well I think the biggest initiatives in the past five years have been around developing the future leaders of the organization, about really creating a talent pipeline into Metro given that the demographics are a high risk of retirement. And how are we going to do knowledge transfer? And what is that succession going to look like?

 

Joanne Peterson:

We've made big investments from tuition assistance to leadership development programs at the local and at the national level for our workforce. Those initiatives have been very intentional to make sure the demographics looked like our future workforce, that it looked like our emerging workforce. So we've really done some work to include women and people of color as we build the future of the organization. You know they might have thought, "Oh now we've done all this work and things are slowing down, what's going to happen with all these ... Are we going to put all these emerging leaders on hold?" And actually what we've able to do is take that energy that we have developed through those investments and help them do some really unique problem solving with us. So, we've engaged our emerging leaders on kind of a recovery plan for the organization and how we're going to move forward. So, it's been something I wouldn't have been able to predict, but it's been a great way to engage those people in the investments that we've made.

 

Ryan James:

Have any of those initiatives slowed down or sped up because of COVID? Because I've heard, as I talk to thought leaders like you, I've heard that COVID has really fast-tracked things that would have taken three or four, six months to get done, they're happening in weeks now.

 

Joanne Peterson:

Yeah. I think we see that throughout the organization that when it gets down to it, if it absolutely has to happen, we can really move something much more quickly. With the leadership investments we've slowed them down in the fact that we don't have courses, we don't have (our) educators coming in, but one of the things we know is important to developing leadership and that is the relationships that we build. So we have taken more energy and we've advanced a mentorship program. So, these folks are having a one-to-one relationship with senior leaders in the organization and still continue to have that support as we move forward. That's one of the initiatives we've moved really quickly. I think some of the others are just some very simple technology things, moving to electronic signatures on some things and fillable forms and stuff that had kind of been there and thought, "Yeah, that would be a good idea." Well, we're making that happen really quickly.

 

Ryan James:

Well, that is a perfect segue into my second question, because I understand as a Metro provider, you're providing your customers access to information through technology, apps and website, schedules, all of those different types of things. And that's kind of an expectation right? As the public, that's what they expect. But what I continue to see lag in the public sector is technology around employees, the actual people doing the work for the organizations...at least in comparison to what you see in the private sector, there tends to be a bit of a lag. So like you said, just digital signatures. That's a good, it's a great change, but it's been around for 10 years on the private sector side. Well, with some of those challenges around technology and you talk about, you already mentioned it, the silver tsunami that you're facing, the multi-generational workforce that you have, what have been the challenges around technology adoption as you try and move some of those things with this diverse workforce? And then I guess, secondly, on the technology side, what would you like to do with it from an education and self-service empowerment perspective?

 

Joanne Peterson:

Yeah. Well, things such as open enrollment and how people are going to adjust their benefit levels. We really need to do that electronically completely now and not have some of the options that we've had in the past. For some of our employees who are more comfortable with technology, that's all fine and good; but we have a very diverse workforce and we have people that, that is not their strong suit. And so we've had to do some additional training and some coaching and some hand-holding to help people through those processes.

 

Joanne Peterson:

I think that one of the things that we've done with COVID is we've put together a COVID dashboard and we make that report daily to our workforce and we have access to our executives and we can actually track COVID cases, the numbers in California, the numbers in the Bay area, Metro because they're somewhat comparable. Numbers in LA County and then the numbers in our organization, and where they are. We have a lot of work locations. And is there something here that's saying, "Oh, there's a pattern that we might have some risk." And that tool has become something that people look at many times a day just to make sure we're staying on top of creating a low risk workplace. In this day it's very much helping them.

 

Ryan James:

What about when it comes to employee development and education, as you try and knowledge transfer to the younger generations, do you use things around technology for that as well?

 

Joanne Peterson:

Oh absolutely. We're doing classrooms, virtually we have a lot of training going on and that is because policies and practices are changing, we're needing to readily say, "Oh, we have some new leave requirements that are coming out of the federal government. Here is a one hour training that we're going to put out for all supervisors and managers and the staff have gotten very comfortable at delivering those. And behind the scenes, the technology pieces, our staff have also developed the ability to put these together very quickly. And there's something that people can save and go back to and look at, and we're getting very positive feedback in that area.

 

Ryan James:

That's awesome.

 

Joanne Peterson:

And then we also use LinkedIn Learning and we promote that. So there's that engagement in LinkedIn Learning has tripled during COVID. People might have some time in the evening and they're looking at a course they might be able to take. And I think overall it's just sharpened the tools for the use of technology across the workforce.

 

Ryan James:

That's great. That's great. Well, we've gotten to the third question, the name of our series and the third question for you. I am going to pick today as regular viewers know is we have time machines that I use and today I'm picking the DeLorean for you from, Back to the Future. Don't know if you remember a little Marty McFly action there. So Joanne, you had a pretty diverse public sector career. You've worked at city and county and now in the Metro vertical...if I could give you the DeLorean and you could go back to the future, you go back in time to appointing your career, your public sector career and tell yourself something, or maybe change how you approach something. What would that be and why?

 

Joanne Peterson:

I think it would be about really driving innovation at a faster level than I did. I think for some people, when they think about my contributions, they might see that as the hallmark of my career because everyone agrees I'm highly innovative; but there were a lot of times that I held back because I was concerned that, "Oh that's out there for these folks." Or, "I'm not sure the organization has an appetite for that." And in hindsight, at this point in my career, looking back, I would have changed. I would change it. I would take more risks in bringing forward more innovative solutions, even though we're in the public sector, we have...solutions.

 

Ryan James:

Well listen, I think the public sector needs more people with that mindset because if you see the impact that is made, when people like you and people who have the innovative mindset get instilled into an organization, I don't see it happen as much with people who've had a long public sector career. So I welcome that. I see a lot of times when people come from the private sector into the public sector, they bring that. So, you're a rare person to have that mindset and have had such a long public sector career. And it's very welcome.

 

Joanne Peterson:

Well, thank you. You know I tell people my greatest strength is that I attract really talented folks and I just have a incredible talented team around me at LA Metro. And it's taken them a little while to understand the pace of innovation, but they've got it now. And I think that they will do great things for the organization going forward.

 

Ryan James:

That is awesome. Well, Joanne, thank you so much for taking a few minutes to talk to us today here. And for any of our viewers, if you want to see more interviews like this, you can go to the3rdquestion.com and you can subscribe and we look forward to more conversations with thought leaders in the near future. Thanks a lot, Joanne.

 

Joanne Peterson:

Thank you. It's a pleasure.

 

Ryan James:

Bye-bye.

 

Joanne Peterson:

Bye-bye.