Intro
Broadcasting live from the Business Radio X studios in Dayton, Ohio. It's time for Dayton Business Radio. Now, here's your host.
The Mag
Lee Cantor here, another episode of Dayton Business Radio, and this is going to be a good one. Today I have with me Terry Salo And Terry Wilson with Strategic HR Inc. Welcome.
Terry Salo
Thank you, Lee.
Terry Wilson
Hi, Lee.
The Mag
Before we get too far into things, Terry, and it's dealer's choice, which Terry, once they answer this, tell us about Strategic HR Inc, how are you serving folks?
Terry Wilson
Terry, I'll take it, we are an outsourced human resources management firm working with organizations with Lean HR or no HR departments, we help our clients but delivering HR solutions and, and also recruiting great talent, we save our clients time by tackling their HR challenges, allowing them to focus on what they do best.
The Mag
Now, Terry Salo, you've been with the firm a while, tell us about how you got there, and a kind of little backstory?
Terry Salo
Oh, sure. Thank you. Well, I've done one, strategic HR for two years. And, you know, I moved to the Dayton area just a few years ago, and was looking for a firm to join that, you know, just provide an excellent service, strategic HR, you know, we've been in business for 25 years, so have a very strong business foundation, about 90% of our clients come through referrals. So, you know, got a great reputation in the community.
And, you know, I've had about 25 years in HR myself, predominantly working, you know, in a corporate role and in a large business environment, but I switched to consult will because, you know, I do find that there's a real need for, for peace, especially for organizations that are like small to medium size, where perhaps they don't need somebody full time, but they need that expertise, or they need that extra pair of hands. And I found that strategic HR, you know, delivered that, you know, they certainly have a great following.
And we've got a great team of professionals, both as consultants and recruiting experts that, you know, we're kind of a one-stop, anything and everything HR, we've got the expertise, and I personally just enjoy having the camaraderie and the team, you know, behind me, all of us while we might be the primary consultant at a client site, you know, we have a whole team of colleagues that we can draw experience from, and we help each other out in that way. So I just think it's a great model, and it's a great organization to be part of,
The Mag
What is the pain they're having, where they go, you know, what it's time to call the strategic HR? Folks?
Terry Salo
That's a great question. And we do get that a lot is so you know, when should we consider, you know, bringing somebody on, and what we tend to say, you know, certainly size has a component, the larger you get, as an organization as a lot more legal compliance issues, and just a lot more people issues to deal with. So as you grow as an organization that sometimes can be an indicator. Other times is, you know, usually, HR is being done by somebody as a second hat, you know, it's the controller or the office manager, or a CFO, and when they're having to spend more time on HR related issues and people issues that aren't really in their wheelhouse, that usually can also be an indication that you need to bring in an expert.
And then the third thing really is just growth, you know, as companies grow, as they are expanding in different locations, or getting into different types of, let's say, fields, where now they need to bring on different types of talent, they need to develop that talent, you know, they might have a strong business model, but as they start to grow and to get in different industries, they may say, you know, I need to bring in someone who can really help me, not just grow my workforce, but help prepare them for the future and keep us on that path of success. So, you know, there's not a one size fits all but those tend to be the hotspots for where we see clients call us that say you know, it's time to bring in an expert or another pair of hands to help supplement our own team.
The Mag
Now, are you industry-agnostic? Or do you have specialties?
Terry Wilson
It runs the gamut, Lee we have the consultants that we have within our firm, all have a number of years each, and come from all different industries. And each one of the consultants for that matter, have worked in more than one industry. I, for example, have over 30 years of experience, over 15 years of it in manufacturing 10 years and public transportation, three and a half years in retail all in HR courses but in varying sizes of businesses, and that's representative of all our consultants. So the nice thing is that each consultant has basically been around and had just have myriad experiences. The even better part is that we rely on each other whenever we have a situation where it stumps us, that rarely happens. But sometimes if it does, we can always turn to each other and say, Hey, what do you think of this? And we've, we've generally had answers every time. And not just something to satisfy the client, we've had a lot of times where just the clients were ecstatic about the answer we came up with. So that's been a real, real fun part of this job, and helping our clients and especially in the Dayton area.
The Mag
I would imagine from the client's perspective when they are getting you may be there as their main contact. But having the backing of a firm that has such a diverse background and such a deep bench, you're bringing so much more value than one individual could possibly bring. But how did you lean on that to help your clients through this COVID where a lot of those people were maybe for the first time having to implement a remote workforce protocol or work from home or go back to work at the office protocol? How did you kind of use the whole best practices of the team to help your clients?
Terry Wilson
Well, I will say that, for one, we immediately went into action when COVID hit. I can remember the day when we were scrambling. I think as all employers were as all of our clients were to make some sense of it. But for us, we knew that for us to score clients, we really had to be on top of what is it the businesses must do. So I can't we kind of look at in waves. So there was a wave one, which is right at the front end of the crisis. And that's when businesses were handling the immediate needs for quarantines, the onslaught of information, the shutdowns, furloughs, and leaves were being considered the Cares Act was coming out. And it was coming out literally on a daily basis. And so for us, we collectively had to make sure that we were all staying on top of it. So we could give good counsel to our clients.
After we got through the onslaught, in the beginning, came wave two. And that's when we were really helping businesses, employees navigate a different work environment. That is many times a remote work environment, or a word people were dispersed, they weren't working next to each other anymore, they were spread out. And we also had to deal with and help our clients with managing stress and anxiety. We had to help them navigate unemployment, we had to constantly assess the business and make pivotal moves to ensure that they had some sustainability for the long term.
We were helping our clients to manage through the payroll Protection Act of small business loans. How do you help people when they're going on furlough? How do you bring them back? For many of our clients, the experience of dramatic change in their workplace, that is where they had to do things like altering their work schedules, daggering, their shifts, doing remote work, and so on, was a big enough challenge. But add to that, employers who wanted to ensure that their employees were not traumatized with the changes in good feel, they could deal with being on furlough deal with their own sickness or their family sickness, or not being at their place of work, which had formed such a big part of daily life. Our clients asked for help on this because they cared about their employees. And so we were there for him the whole way.
Terry Salo
And Lee, and just to kind of piggyback what Terry said, you know, as a team, we also were able to collectively to draw on our own experiences and what we saw our clients dealing with, but we acted as a team to help provide resources to so, you know, we collectively, you know, we had to meet on a regular basis remotely through zoom calls, we were meeting three times a week, just to stay abreast of all the changes, you know, the new regulations, and, and we would also consolidate a lot of tools and resources at any given time, you know, whether it was CDC guidance, or if it was guidance on, you know, return to work, or, you know, how do you handle someone who may feel like they've been exposed? Or what about an organization that needs to look at downsizing or restructuring? Instead of all of us tackling all those pieces, you know, we put together a lot of task forces, you know, internally to say, let's tackle these issues, so that, you know, we can draw resources quickly.
And so part of that was creating toolkits, you know, have we very quickly created employers Coronavirus, a guide free guide on our website that kind of drew upon all these resources in one spot and that was free to anyone who wanted to access it. So it kind of helped just Being able to expedite answers if people had questions. So you know that those were some of the things we did as far as putting resources on our website. We developed a lot of toolkits, you know, things like Terry had mentioned, just, you know, what your response if somebody should come down with symptoms or causative? You know, what considerations do you need to give for furloughs or layoffs. So, you know, step by step guide that we can kind of talk in our clients through, as well as things like webinars, you know, we hosted a regular webinar throughout the COVID crisis and an HR panel weekly, to be able to just provide information, you know, out to the community, you know, we would partner with local attorneys to kind of present up to date information as things were coming out.
So that, you know, employers and our business professionals could just jump on those webinars. And then, a week to week, we would, as a team, take turns hosting HR panels where people could call in and ask a question, and we provide guidance. So we've just thought it was really important not only to help the clients that we were working with directly, but this could be a good steward of the community, the business community, you know, providing guidance, resources, and then we did have the benefit of having a deep team, where we can all take different aspects of the crisis, and say, let's tackle this because it's going to come up. And by doing so we were able to put together a lot of resources.
And I think even today, as consultants, we continue to pull those guides up, because we're having to continuously reference them. I think that again, it helps to show the bench strength that we have as a team and for our den clients. You know, we're providing immediate answers, because we really a lot of effort in place and a lot of extra work to make sure we were abreast on the issue.
The Mag
Now, if dealing with COVID wasn't enough for you guys, how did you kind of then have to pivot a little bit and respond to the social unrest? I know diversity, equity, and inclusion is an important tenants for a lot of businesses. But when this was bubbling up, how were you able to kind of help them navigate those waters?
Terry Wilson
Well, Lee, we've definitely seen an increase in the calls, requesting information and training on these topics. And we're finding that many employers are responding to the social unrest and diversity and inclusion topics. We recently, as an example, participate in a roundtable discussion about diversity, and equity inclusion for a chamber of commerce here in Ohio, we've had one on one discussions with business leaders, and their leadership teams, about the whole topic. We've seen clients who basically chose to handle this topic in different ways.
We've had some clients who chose to have daily calls with their employees, just to make sure that if anybody had concerns about the unrest, and how it affected them or affected, you know, working with their, their fellow co-workers, they would have regular meetings, we had other clients where they just wanted someone to come and help facilitate a discussion about this topic. But it's definitely something that made it an even more interesting work environment when you have to deal with the stress of COVID. Combined with that that was going on. I mean, diversity and inclusion are not new topics. And nor is unconscious bias. And HR, we deal with the downstream effect of that, on the occasion that we have to help employees and businesses to deal with that by incorporating best practices to ensure that you have a respectful, inclusive work environment. That's what we tried to do to help organizations.
The Mag
Are you seeing any kind of trends or anything you can project out for the rest of the year in the Dayton area?
Terry Salo
Well, I know that Terry and I both have continued to see the increased need and just supporting employers who are seeing an increase of COVID. In their own workplace. Those who were quarantined and maybe shut down for a while are not coming back, or they never shut down, but are starting to see, you know, again, either employee who have come down with the illness or symptoms, or a family member or a roommate. And we still find that some of our clients that we've been working with regularly are contacting us saying, Well, we have another scenario, another incident that may be a little bit different. Yeah, there's a little twist to it. So I think that for the next several months are still going to be responding to how do we handle an employee who is exposed or feels that they, you know, has tested positive? How to do the appropriate contact tracing in the workplace to identify who else may need to be quarantined or, you know, be particularly cautious with health screening, and what the ramifications are, you know, do you ship the workplace down? Do you increase some of the return to work guidelines? I think that is not going to go away anytime soon.
And we're going to continue to be you know, having to respond to those kinds of issues. Will, we also see some of our clients turn out often talking about we have a client in Dayton, who asked us, you know, they felt that they, they returned to work, they followed all the governor newlines guidelines, but they wanted another person just to kind of do a walkthrough, you know, are we doing everything we should be? So, you know, that's just kind of taking a much more proactive view.
And then other clients, who may be initially just, you know, let employees kind of self certify that they were okay to return to work. Now, we're taking a lot more aggressive stance to say, no, we want to, we want to go ahead and contract with somebody to do taking or take advantage of some of the technology that's out there, you know, there are there are cell phone platforms and other kinds of virtual tools, that employees can kind of go through the self-assessment on their own. And, you know, the HR department or the corporate office gets it gets a report. So investing in those kinds of tools that you would have never thought of six months ago. So those are just two trends that come to mind. Terry, anything else to add on that front?
Terry Wilson
There's just a lot of pain that we've seen our business managers have experienced because of this, even when they remained at work, whether it was manufacturing, whether it was healthcare, whether it was a business that did software development, whatever it was, there was so much that a manager in the management teams of these businesses had to do to rethink how do we do business, satisfy our customer and keep our employees safe, all in the midst of all this that's going on.
And many times they had to restructure the floor plan. They had to decide now, where are people going to work and they can't, we can't work like we used to many businesses have changed. And the feeling that Terry and I have had is that we've seen some businesses that feel like they may not go back to the way things used to be.
Because they've they're now finding, there's actually some perhaps efficiencies, there's advantages. They didn't realize how well people could work in the way that they're working now. So we think that there's some businesses that may say, you know, what, if we have a certain segment of our workforce that works remotely, maybe we'll keep it going that way. But the whole experience of dealing with that for the first time, I tell you, it was tough enough to try to keep the doors of the business open.
But when you have to completely reorganize, and restructure how you do business, it's like trying to change it to the tires on a moving car. So it that's the kind of environment that we had to help our clients with. And some of that was working with business leaders to say, let's break it down. We'll get through this.
The Mag
And that's one of the advantages of working with a firm like yours, that you have that expertise, you're not having to bring people up to speed from Ground Zero, these are people that can just jump in and work with that moving vehicle. They don't have to be educated about a lot of things, they've already seen a lot of things.
Terry Salo
That's right, we kind of identified, I would say even probably about four to six weeks ago, as a team, because some of the issues that we were seeing also with some of our clients is what are we going to do post-COVID. You know, once the crisis has kind of settled down, people are back to work or getting more back to work. What are some things that we need to start looking at so that we're not caught off guard? So kind of reevaluating, with some of our managers? What were the priorities? And how do we reprioritize? You know, how do we rethink what our future is going to be in the next six to eight months? And it may be that it's completely changing the strategy. It may be, you know, we've got suppliers and customers that are have changed. So we've tried to also be kind of thought leaders in we need to think past the immediate, and also foresee what are some challenges that you know, might come about that we can start preparing for now. And so we've done a little bit of work with our clients, you know, in doing just that, because they too have realized, you know, we've got to think longer than just what's happening to the end of summer.
The Mag
If somebody wanted to have a more substantive conversation with you or somebody on your team, what's the website?
Terry Salo
Yeah, that'd be great. Well, we are on the web. It's www.strategichrinc.com. We also can follow us on social media as well. We have a Facebook page and a LinkedIn profile. And so any one of those avenues would work.
The Mag
Good stuff. Thank you so much for sharing your story today.
Terry Wilson
Thank you, Lee. That's great. We appreciate it.
The Mag
All right. This is Lee Canter. We'll see y'all next time on Dayton Business Radio.
Image source: https://strategichrinc.com/meet-the-team/
