Michael Latsko, Senior Director, HR Strategic Initiatives, UVA Human Resources
On this episode of The 3rd Question we talk with Michael Latsko, Senior Director, HR Strategic Initiatives at UVA about how HR has the opportunity to be a leader, not a follower, when it comes to technology, attracting talent, and advancing policies within their institution.
Video Transcript
Ryan James:
Hello and welcome to The 3rd Question, a video interview series with public sector thought leaders from around the country. Today I am excited to be joined by Michael Latsko, who is a senior director of HR strategic initiatives at the University of Virginia. So, Michael, thank you so much for joining me today.
Michael Latsko:
Glad to be here.
Ryan James:
Well, before we get started into our three questions, why don't you give the audience a little bit of a introduction of who you are, your background, your role, et cetera.
Michael Latsko:
Sure. Happy to do so. Hi, I'm Michael Latsko, I'm part of the HR leadership team at the University of Virginia, which is a public R1 research university based in Charlottesville, Virginia, founded in 1819 by the third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, flagship university of Virginia, and a site of a Level 1 trauma center, a cancer and hospital, as well as an academic medical center with the School of Nursing and the School of Medicine. We have about 3.8 billion in revenue, about 25,000 students, both in undergraduate and graduate programs across 12 schools. There's about 3,100 faculty full-time and 14,000 full-time staff in the college and 12,000 in the health system.
Ryan James:
Wow.
Michael Latsko:
Right now I'm in the HR organization, as I said, and the leadership team is broken into three pillars, service, talent, and something we call impact and decision support. And so I'm now serving as the interim assistant vice president for impact and decision support in addition to my job is a strategic initiative senior director. So, I have responsibility for all the total rewards programs, which is compensation, benefits, wellness, and our faculty and employee assistance program, our people and data and technology, our continuous improvement and project management function, as well as all the back office of HR. So, budget, procurement, facilities, and then communications and strategy. I'm also the immediate past president of the HR Virginia, which is the Virginia SHRM State Council, an affiliate of the National Organization Society for HR Management.
Ryan James:
So, you've got one or two things that you're dealing with on a daily basis, it sounds like.
Michael Latsko:
Just a few. Yeah.
Ryan James:
Well, I appreciate you taking a few minutes to share some thoughts with the audience today. So, let's get into it. We'll get into our first question. I'd love to hear your thoughts around, really, the evolution of HR as you've seen it, maybe more specifically in the higher education space, and in talking with your peers and what you see there at your university. I always hear about the challenges and opportunities that there is around attracting the next generation and retaining talent as well. Because in your backyard, you've got people on a four year, five year, six year cycle, or I guess some people might take a little longer to finish college, to get through, and then they have that next opportunity in life. So, with all of that, talk about how you do that from an attraction of that next generation of talent, and maybe a little bit about what you've done from a technology perspective to show this generation and your current employees what they want and what they need.
Michael Latsko:
Yeah. It's a great question, and full of layers of onion, which I'll try to peel back as we go.
Ryan James:
I tend to do that.
Michael Latsko:
Yeah. It makes it more interesting. So, I've been in HR at UVA for about 10 years and I came to HR accidentally, right? I didn't grow up thinking, "I'm going to be an HR person." I spent the first part of my career, actually, practicing law. So, I went to law school and then I worked in the private sector, mostly technology companies and always on the business side. So, not in HR, right? It was there that I eventually came to build and lead a team, right? Which meant I had to figure out how to develop people, have conversations with them about performance. I had to hire and fire people. And in my early career, there was a lot of industry consolidation, which meant that we were buying a lot of companies and then integrating people into the fabric of our culture.
Michael Latsko:
And that's when I really began to understand this thing called culture, right? And how organizations use their people, right? To accomplish so much of what they need to do and how important it is to understand what motivates people, what the drivers are for the organization and for people. Now, I went to UVA college and law school, but I never really considered going there to work because the things that I've heard are that the practices and underlying back office infrastructure and technology were decidedly last century, right? And I found that to be enigmatic and slightly oxymoronic, because what was happening in the classroom, right? In research laboratories and in the hospital in the clinics was all this cutting-edge research looking for cures to diseases and cancers.
Michael Latsko:
And there's lots of creativity and innovation, even in the world of pedagogy, just how people were taught. And so that, I think, has brought higher ed to the tipping point where they had to be more innovative and creative and more technologically savvy, right? While balancing that legacy and tradition, which I think is so important to higher ed, right? You have alumni who have this romanticized or ideal notion of what college used to be like, and they don't really want that to change, right?
Ryan James:
Right.
Michael Latsko:
And some of the faculty probably share that same sentiment, but having to dare greatly, right? And to figure out how we move forward is the higher ed challenge. And so that's where I think higher ed in general, right? On most things administrative and including HR is still a follower rather than a leader in this regard. But in HR at UVA, we've tried to lead the way. And we've done that in regards to technology, as an example. A couple of years ago, we put in a new system that replaced three old systems because we merged together the HR organizations in the hospital and the academy, and we have a 501(c)(3) clinical practice plan. So, there were three separate systems, three separate HR organizations. We brought them all together because we thought the power of scale and economies of scale could provide a better service, and we were fighting each other for talents, right? Across these three different organizations in our limited geography in Charlottesville, right?
Michael Latsko:
We're not a major metropolitan area. That just didn't make a lot of sense. So, this is a cutting edge technology in the cloud, right? So, that certainly helped us to say, "We're moving out of legacy. We're moving into where the future is." We use other adjacent technologies, things like WalkMe, it's called, in Salesforce, and Kainos to help. So, these are things that are showing that we are not necessarily trying to be a follower, but a leader in this regard. And that then tells talent, right? The potential to get talent that, "Hey, you want to be someplace where it's happening, then you need to look at us," right? And then that's also being mirrored in our new overall university strategy and the new health system leadership, which is really trying to move things forward to build a bigger, better, more forward looking institution.
Ryan James:
I love it because I will say that in talking with the municipal world and the higher ed world and the K-12 world, higher ed does seem to be, for a lot of the reasons you just mentioned, they're trying to push to be more of a leader than a laggard. In general there seems to be a bit of a follower mentality in public sector. But I would say that some of the things it seems like you've implemented are definitely more on the front end of trying to show that leadership as an organization.
Michael Latsko:
Yeah. I mean, I look at it this way. When we talk about it recruiting, right? Bringing in developers and things. They don't want to have to deal with legacy technology, right? That's been around for a long time. They're looking to work on cutting edge things as well. And like you mentioned earlier, we've got this constant pool of possible candidates with our graduates. And yet having been here for the number of years they spend in Charlottesville, many of them are dying to get out and sow their oats in a larger community, right?
Michael Latsko:
They want to go to D.C. or to New York or to Chicago. But now we're finding, of course, that you can be anywhere, right? And work for anybody or any organization. And so again, that's another way for us to think about rebranding ourselves and having these interesting use cases, right? For technology and for other things that can help, then, create that employer brand, which is going to be more attractive to our own.
Ryan James:
No, I think that's great. And I'm sure for a lot of the viewers of this series, they're looking for ways to be on the front end of being, not a follower, but being a leader. So, that's great.
Michael Latsko:
Yeah, and it's not easy.
Michael Latsko:
Let me add one other thing. It's not easy just to even think about the paradigm of managing remote workers, right? Because I had to hire somebody back in November and they asked me, "So, are you willing to have the person be anywhere?" And I was like, "Oh." Here I am, HR, right? I've got to model the way or lead the way. I can't then say, "No, I need my person here in the same town with me." But again, that's the change of the paradigm and it's making everyone cock their head to the side and go, "Hmm-
Ryan James:
"We can do this."
Michael Latsko:
... what is really truly important and how can we change to evolve?"
Ryan James:
Yeah. We just had an event a couple of weeks ago with some public sector thought leaders on a panel. We talked a lot about what COVID has done from a... It's fast-forwarded transformation because you were forced to, but it also has fast forwarded policy changes too, because you were forced to. As rough as 2020 was, it's also there's been some positives that have come out of it and I've seen that specifically in the public sector space.
Michael Latsko:
Yeah. I mean like the old saying, "You can't un-ring the bell," or, "It's hard to put the genie back in the bottle," right?
Ryan James:
Yeah.
Michael Latsko:
There's really no going back.
Ryan James:
Yeah. Well, so because you were the former president of HR Virginia, SHRM Virginia, I think you'd probably have a very unique perspective. You've obviously had a private sector career as well, but HR was more public sector for the most part. But you've got this great perspective, I'm sure, because you've been interacting with dozens of HR leaders from around your state, both public and private sector. So, based on those conversations, some of the things you've heard, I'd love to hear your thoughts on what you've seen as some common challenges that both verticals have, but maybe some thoughts about how to combat some of those challenges unique to both verticals as well.
Michael Latsko:
Yeah. It's a great question. And first of all, I think the pandemic leveled the playing field. So, this divergence between the public and the private perhaps has less distinction now, because at the core we're dealing with people, right? And my old saying is, "People are messy." And dealing with that, I mean, that's a good thing for HR because it's kind of like job security. But the messiness, right? Was made abundantly aware during the pandemic, in that we had to deal with people working remotely. We had to worry with health and safety and wellness. People just taking care of themselves. Not getting sick from the pandemic, certainly, but also just the anxiety and mental anguish. And then dealing with childcare. Dealing with elder care, dealing with dependent care, dealing with all these things that had been at home. And now you were at home with all of that.
Michael Latsko:
And it used to be, you got into your car and you went to your office and that home stuff certainly impacted you, but it was at home and you were in the office. But now it all came blended together. And so HR and organizations had to think, "How do we take care of the whole worker life," right? Because now it was, you hear people's children in the background. You hear their pet in the background, and that's just the way it's going to be. And if you ignored that, right? You were almost being insensitive to the realities of what was going on. So, I think that's certainly key. I think the other thing is... And I'll throw into that, not just public and private, but also volunteers. So, the HR Virginia and SHRM, we're all volunteer leaders, and we had to pivot as well. Suddenly our in-person meetings, which that's the lifeblood of HR. We love to get together and talk about things and see each other in person, these all had to become virtual.
Michael Latsko:
And so this notion of community, how do you stay connected? How do you create community needed all kinds of creative, innovative ways to keep that spark alive in people. And that was added stress, right? So, your job is stressful now because you were trying to deal with this. Your home life was stressful and now your volunteer life was stressful. And sometimes those were your releases, right? To be able to put yourself into your volunteer work and have a cathartic moment, right? In terms of stress. And so all of these things can crashing together. And so, like I said, you've heard of VUCA, right? The Vague, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous world in which we lived. And this just came to the fore because we never knew what was happening with this virus one day to the next. We never knew what new policies were going to be imposed both at federal and state levels. And they affected every single organization, whether they were public or whether they were private, and then that bled over to volunteer work as well. So, it was a big defining moment, I think, for organizations everywhere.
Ryan James:
Yeah. You're right, I didn't even think about the convergence of the private and public sector in some ways, because everyone was dealing with a lot of the same challenges. Yeah. I mean, I know that's happening, but sometimes I'm so involved in the public sector world I'm like, "You guys are unique. There's a lot of challenges there." But you're right. There's a true convergence of dealing with those challenges together.
Michael Latsko:
Yeah. And where differences may have occurred, right? Is the speed in which or with which one can deal with that, right?
Ryan James:
Yeah.
Michael Latsko:
And so when I came to higher ed from the private sector and I went to a big meeting and there was lots of discussion and somebody said, "Well, okay, well, let's convene again in a month," and I was like, "A month? What about next week? What about tomorrow?" And again, so I think there's a different sense of urgency and that all came crashing together too, right?
Ryan James:
Definitely.
Michael Latsko:
Because suddenly you now had different public declarations, right? That you then had to deal with. For example, with technology. If you didn't have technology that was agile and configurable to be able to deal with some of these things, then you were locked out, right?
Ryan James:
Yeah. Yeah.
Michael Latsko:
And so fortunately those people who had made the investments and had new technology to use could respond a little bit more rapidly.
Ryan James:
Yeah. Well, I'm loving this conversation, but we're already at the third question. And for this season and everyone who's watched this knows I'm a bit of a prop guy, so my third question this year is the blank check, or a check for infinity is actually what the number on here is. So, the question for you, Michael, is, if I was able to give you a blank check to use towards your organization, helping it grow, evolve, or change in some way, I know that I'm sure there's goals and objectives that you have from that strategic perspective. What would you do with it and why?
Michael Latsko:
Yeah. So, I already intimated to where my answer might be headed when I said something about the genie in the bottle, because I thought, "Could I be clever and say, 'I'd like to take my check and exchange it for three wishes for my genie?'" Because really, I think what I would be after is something I don't think money can buy. And where I think money could help, right? Is in education and awareness and things like that. But here's where I'm going with this. I think for employees, I would want them to be more trusting, right? In their leadership. Less entitled, right? I mean, in the higher ed public service, there is this entitlement in the DNA and yet organizations were trying and yet employees may have been demanding more.
Michael Latsko:
And so I think this notion of, trust us. We're going to take care of you to. Be less entitled. And employees, be less risk averse, right? Because we need creativity in these times. For frontline managers, I would want them to be more worthy of that trust, right? To be much more empathetic, right?
Michael Latsko:
To understand this convergence of what's happening at home to bring that together. And then for the upper most leaders in an organization, to be really less focused on details and incremental change, and instead exhibit more charisma and exponential change, right? Because you're looking to leadership during these times to lead in crisis and people need to see people that they can trust who display charisma and competence. And so, can money buy that? I think money can certainly provide resources.
Michael Latsko:
For people to understand what these things mean. And then maybe we use some virtual reality or play acting or role playing right? To see how those change people and the outcomes that might come from that. So, if your blank check gave me three wishes for my genie, that's what I would want.
Ryan James:
Hey, it's a blank check. It can do whatever you need it to do.
Michael Latsko:
Well, it's a great question. It really made me think. I appreciate that.
Ryan James:
Awesome. Good. Well, I really appreciate you taking a few minutes with me today and with our audience to share just a few insights. I'm sure we could probably talk for a lot longer about something like this. But for our audience who's out there, if you want to go to thethirdquestion.com, you want to subscribe and see more of these types of interviews with thought leaders from the public sector, I'd welcome you to do that. Michael, thank you so much for taking a few minutes. I know you've got a busy schedule, so I appreciate it a lot, and I hope you have a great week.
Michael Latsko:
Hey, well, thanks for having me. It was great fun to be here, and you gave me a lot to think about, so I appreciate that.
