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Following its divestment from IBM, The Weather Company faced the considerable task of becoming a standalone business while guiding employees through a period of major organizational change.
For Chief Human Resources Officer Michelle Kilroy, building trust throughout that transition has depended on visible leadership, regular communication and greater transparency. It has also meant closing the loop on employee feedback, ensuring staff can see how their input is shaping decisions across the business.
Kilroy joins the HR Grapevine Podcast to explain why trust should be viewed as an operational advantage, how leaders can reduce uncertainty when they do not have every answer, and why an organization’s external credibility begins with the experience it creates for its own employees.
Host: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the HR Grapevine Podcast. I'm your host, Benjamin Broomfield, head of content here at HR Grapevine. And I'm joined today by Michelle Kilroy, chief human resources officer at The Weather Company. Here, Michelle oversees the organization's human resources function globally, where she partners across the business to develop and implement progressive talent strategies to attract, grow and retain top talent. She is also an advocate of developing women in leadership and is part of the governing body of the chief HR Officer Forum in Atlanta. Michelle joins us to discuss why trust is a business accelerator. The organization should prioritize internally to build credibility externally, including how to handle transparency and reduce uncertainty, while also sharing advice on how to ensure employees see their feedback acted on. So a really lovely episode lined up, but firstly, a warm welcome, Michelle, and thank you for joining us.
Guest: Thank you. I'm happy to be here today.
Host: Well, maybe to kick off. You could take us through. Why you see trust as more of a business accelerator rather than a cultural value.
Guest: Absolutely. I mean, I think we all understand that trust is central. It's paramount to everything we do. And so trust we see is really the operational multiplier in any kind of business exchange. So ultimately, I think we see trust as something that converts from strategy into execution, because we know that employees effectively want to have an environment where they have high trust. They want to have an environment where they can provide trust and where they can certainly receive trust from the from the business. So at the Weather Company, I think we do that quite well. It's ultimately something that, you know, you continue to get better at and you continue to evolve. We're not there. I don't think you're ever done building trust. It's really an everyday exchange. So ultimately, I do think trust is a currency. I think I like to talk about the relationship bank account. So ultimately, you're constantly making deposits or withdrawals from that bank account. Everything you really do or don't do, I think contributes to that. And so we'd like to talk about in terms of, you know, contributing to trust or consuming trust is you have to contribute. So if all you're doing is making withdrawals from kind of from the culture, you know, you can you get into a potential situation where you're, you're overdrawn on your account. So again, I think you've got to contribute to that culture that has trust in your exchanges with every, you know, every individual, every customer, every exchange you have. But that's not just at the leadership level. I think that's at the employee level throughout. So there's a tax that every business I think pays when you have a lack of transparency. You know, example, we recently, I guess not really recently anymore, really two years ago we divested from IBM to private equity. And as you can imagine, going through that type of, you know, change in your business, there is a tremendous amount of questions by employees and really, frankly, leadership as well. So in that kind of situation, we really have to think about what is changing. We have to think about what we can share, what we can't share. We have to think about how we can communicate with our employees early and often, and helping people get to know, like, really what the new expectations are, what's changing, what's not changing. And then from a business perspective to like most of people know us probably from the Weather Channel brand, right? Your, your most trusted news source for weather. And we really are the most trusted news source by America, according to a recent review by YouGov and, and certainly one of the most trusted brands in the US as recently, you know, shared by Morning Consult. So we're excited about that. But we have to be able to be trusted both internally, because that trust really exudes externally in the business dealings that we have. So you can imagine whether is definitely a high stakes can be a high stakes environment. And so that trust becomes really important. And we need to have trust internally to be able to exude that trust. I think externally with our customers.
Host: It would be wonderful to talk a little bit more about that, actually, because I think, like you said, for especially considering that the kind of services that you're offering, having that external credibility is really important. But, you know, for, for all organizations, to an extent, having that level of, of external trust from whoever the stakeholders might be is going to be really important. But how do you see that feeding through from the way that you can prioritize trust internally then to the knock on that, that, that that has externally with, with whoever the end customer or individual might be. Talk to us a bit more about the relationship between those two.
Guest: Yeah. I mean, as I was saying, I think ultimately the external brand is a reflection of your internal reality. So if our customers feel confident in our employees and our employees feel confidence in leadership, I think that really speaks volumes to when you're dealing with customers. We know that people's experiences with you and with The Weather Company, the Weather Channel, all of our consumer brands and all of our B2B side, which is actually a huge part of our business as well. So those experiences that people have really create beliefs. And so those beliefs we know, drive decision making, whether that's to, you know, do business with us or whether, you know, on the consumer side that you're coming back to us as a source of truth. When you have questions about your what might be coming up for your, you know, fun picnic all the way to planning an event from a business perspective. Also, you know, aviation, for example, we work with a ton of huge airlines and a number of other big brands in terms of helping guide the decision making there. They're using around not only business, you know, safety, business continuity, but also perhaps with their marketing efforts or things like that that help use that information to drive their business direction.
Host: Wonderful. Well, it'd be great to get a bit more into the weeds of how this can be done in practice, and how you can make those deposits in the bank, to borrow your analogy from before. Well, what are some of the steps that you take in at the Weather Company over the last few years? Obviously, especially that huge transformation I know has created that real mandate for building trust. But what are what are some of the practical ways that you go about building trust with employees and investing in that from, from the side of the organization and the leadership team?
Guest: I think probably the thing that comes to mind most of all is looking back at our change from, you know, IBM to private equity. As I said, that is a huge change for individuals. I think I may be misquoting, but I think IBM has close to one hundred and eighty thousand employees. We have far less than that now that we are a standalone business. So, you know, in many ways we had to stand up HR or people in culture from the get go. So nothing transferred over from IBM. We didn't have staff, we didn't have systems. So that was a big part of my world coming in several years ago was to help stand up that HR function for our standalone company. So ultimately we had the opportunity that, you know, to, to fast forward, I like to say, in that we didn't have to go through all the iterations of, you know, how HR evolves, whether that's from a systems perspective, technology systems, that is what we've seen work well, what we haven't seen work well over the decades of, of HR, but we were able to kind of leapfrog a lot of that, I think, and be able to bring in from day one, a more modern approach. So some of the things that we have certainly done are your basics. You've got to be able to build leadership trust as we've been talking about, and that has to do a lot with leadership visibility. So making sure that our leadership is out and about and be seen. Yes, we're doing things like town halls, but I think that leadership, visibility and the leadership communication becomes so important, and it can't just be held at the top leadership level. It has to be driven throughout the entire organization. So we very early on took an approach through holding manager previews. I think in a large organization prior, you know, with that many people, it's hard to drive communication through all the different levels. So anytime we were having a big update or a change within the organization that impacted, you know, the broader organization, we started doing manager previews where we brought managers together ahead of any type of, you know, whether we were rolling out the bonus program or revisiting things like job architecture across the entire organization. We're bringing those managers together to make sure we're answering questions to kind of, you know, kick the tires on everything and make sure that we're ultimately answering questions that the managers may have or as employees themselves, they might have questions. So I think that becomes super important. I think one thing everybody's talking about right now is AI is, as I'm sure you're well aware. And so I think that's something that we've been using for a number of a number of years. But AI is really in our DNA. You know, we're still a human led culture. We definitely use data to inform us, but we absolutely use empathy to lead us. And so some people use that human over the loop approach or that mantra. I recently heard someone say human in the lead of the loop. And I kind of that's kind of stuck with me because I think that that type of philosophy also applies to our people strategy. So yeah, I think that's ultimately an important thing to do is to think about the different ways, both formally and informally, that you can connect with people, help them understand, again, your motivations, your expectations. And it's early and often, I think becomes really, really paramount to those relationships.
Host: One of the points you mentioned in that response was sort of really drawing, I suppose, on that two way communication between the organization and employees, making sure that those channels are there. And I think that that's sort of often the real common frustration that you see with whether it's the, the old annual engagement survey or just sort of feedback opportunities in general is that, you know, it feels like maybe you're just employees are taking the time to give up their insights. That goes into an echo chamber and then they never hear about it again. So how do you go about creating those sort of full circle feedback mechanisms so that when staff sort of take that time to give that feedback, to share their voice, that they can hear and see that acted on.
Guest: I mean, I think we all struggle with that candidly. I think we do look for look for opportunities to gently remind, if I can say that our employees, how we're connecting back to those, the feedback that they've provided. So yes, we do the global engagement survey annually, as a lot of organizations do, we do the pulse surveys, but we definitely lean into the kind of you said we did so that we are helping people almost see from a marketing perspective that what we are evolving and what we are focusing on is very much a part of their feedback. I do think you have to be, you know, authentic and you have to be able to understand for people what matters to them. And I think one of the challenges we have is like, that's different for every employee, right? That's what makes it really, really hard is what builds trust for me may not be the same thing for somebody else. So we do have different audiences, right? We have shift workers, as you can imagine, we work with contractors, full time employees, remote employees, people in the office. So we also have to think about when we are sharing with people what we have done, and maybe even when we're sharing what we can't do or are able to do, because, look, we do have budgets, Right. And so sometimes there are perks and benefits we would love to be able to offer, as I'm sure all organizations do. But we do have to be mindful of budgets. And so it's really around prioritization. You know, we use that prioritization to help guide us, right? We use the data on that front. But as I said, I think you do have to remind people what you're doing. What have you done for me lately, so to speak. And that's just something that is a constant reminder. Um, but again, I mentioned like our CEO is out and about. And so ultimately, you know, outside of the engagement surveys, our CEO and myself do ongoing roundtables, right? With smaller groups of individuals. That's certainly very helpful. And what we've found through those is that it's actually not just feedback that's rich that comes out of that. It's the connections that people are building across the organization. And we often will get into conversations about business topics and business problems to solve. Whereas, you know, maybe sometimes, candidly, we, we may be preparing for getting a lot of feedback on, you know, X, Y, or Z topic. But it's really when we get into those opportunities where people even go beyond feedback and like I said, get into these business solving because they're passionate about whether they're passionate about our innovations and our technologies and what we can do. So, you know, ultimately, trust is, is not built in a single town hall. It's built in closing the loop whenever we can and people want to be heard. So I think ultimately trust grows and we have the opportunity for people to see that their input is, is being shaped with the outcomes that we have. But I do think candidly, we have to remind people what we're doing and what we have done, and that is connected to their feedback
Host: With this sort of level of communication as well. I suppose to your point, you can you can take a year, multiple years to build trust. You can lose it very quickly if things aren't handled properly. And sometimes with that transparency, maybe there's, there's an element of risk as well in terms of wanting to be vulnerable, wanting to be open, to give that context and understanding whilst at the same time maybe not adding to to some of the uncertainty, the fear, anxiety. You know, for example, at the minute, coming back to that example of AI is a great one, but it could just be with anything going on in the organization as well. So is there an element of being careful with sort of the extent of transparency? There are certain things that should and shouldn't be communicated to reduce uncertainty.
Guest: Yeah, I think that's always a hard one because we want to be as transparent as possible, because we know that is a huge piece of the trust tax if you're not being transparent. Um, but I think we also know that when you don't provide some information, people will guess. So I've always loved David Rock and the Neuroleadership Institute. You know, everything that we talk about in terms of building trust ultimately comes down to, you know, people. Transparency is really making the why as clear as we can and making that tied to what is happening, why, why it is happening. But we also know there are times where we can't be honest. I shouldn't say honest, but we can't be transparent. And so we want to reduce uncertainty as much as we can. So I'd rather tell somebody, you know, you're probably wondering this, right? Just kind of naming it. You're probably wondering who your new boss is, or you're probably wondering if this, if we're shifting our focus on technology A to technology B. So I think acknowledging that people may be wondering about these things becomes really important. But being able to tell them like, we don't have the answer to that yet, or we're not able to share that, I think does help in those moments where you are just not ready yet. I do tend to say to employees with more transparency comes more questions. And I think that's very true. But we have to remind people that in being transparent also means we won't be able to answer all those questions either because we haven't tackled it yet, as I said, or we may just not be in a position to share it at that point in time.
Host: Well, I think it's really clear from all of the answers so far that there is just a huge investment in creating that culture of trust within the organization scenario. Obviously, with that transformation over the past few years as well. And that separation has been a real focus. So what have you seen in terms of feedback from staff around sort of the work that you've been doing? Presumably it's, you know, this is resonating with them, but there sort of some results that you've seen might be, I know folks might look at engagement around their sentiment, different areas of measuring. So what sort of results have you seen from taking this approach?
Guest: Yeah, I think both in our engagement survey results and anecdotally, right, what we're actually seeing in the organization in terms of how people are interacting with each other, how they're responding to change, I think becomes another, you know, sign or reference or data point. So we have definitely had our engagement survey scores have gone up. You know, candidly, we'd like them to go up even more. But as you can imagine, you know, two years ago, we're divesting, as I said, from a huge company, there's a ton of change there. We've also had a number of leadership changes as we're, you know, building for the future. But I think ultimately, you know, we've got to be able to, as I said, hear those employees, make sure they know we're acting on it. So ultimately, we've got to ground our workforce in the mission. And I think we can be radically honest about that with individuals. And we are hearing that in conversations with employees. I think people are feeling more grounded, as I said, in terms of what's going on in the organization, what direction we're going, there's more energy and passion that I think we're seeing exuded day to day. We're seeing a lot of the silos break down. And as I said, like, right, candidly, we all have to be honest with ourselves that that takes time, that takes a lot of time. And that takes, you know, continued trust building, continued engagement, but there is no doubt we can kind of feel it or taste it. Maybe in the water, for lack of a better description, in terms of what people are telling us in terms of what people's energy is around learning new things, working with other departments. And so while we see that both in the engagement scores rising, we're seeing it more anecdotally as well.
Host: Wonderful and really just to bring it back full circle to, to some of those great results. You mentioned at the start of the episode, all of those impacts that you're now seeing across the organization, those silos breaking down, that engagement, that that level of energy and positivity, that's something you're then sort of seeing really shape TWC external credibility as well. In terms of those results that you've seen, how you're viewed in the external market?
Guest: Yeah. I mean, I wish I could talk about all of the wonderful things we're seeing happen in the external market. But, but certainly both from the consumer side as well as on the B2B side, we like to think of it in terms of our trust flywheel and empowering the experts. You've got to empower our internal experts to be able to make sure that our external credibility is being seen by experts in their own businesses. I think the biggest thing that we can see, as I mentioned earlier, are those kind of accolades that we have had around being the most trusted news source. That's an incredible honor, frankly. And then to be one of the top trusted brands that's across all brands, not just news, is also incredible. So that when you have somebody else who can speak for you and not just speak for yourself, I think there is no substitute for that, right? And I think ultimately, when the storm arrives, whether that's a corporate storm or whether that's an actual storm, we want to make sure that nobody faces that alone. And that goes for our customers as well as our employees. That's the ultimate expression of trust and being where, you know, being there, where it matters most is crucial both when we have those changes internally and when we have those changes, or I should say, our external customers, whether that's on the business side or the consumer side, when that matters to them as well.
Host: Definitely. Well, it's just wonderful to kind of hear really just such a clear example of how that kind of perhaps strategy and approach that, well, not necessarily sits within HR, but being that sort of through HR and kind of across the organization internally is then feeding into to those success stories for the organization too. I think that's what, yeah, a lot of people in our, in our audience would, would love to be saying as well. So Michelle, thank you so much for taking the time to join us on the HR grapevine podcast and taking us through really this, this investment in trust and love, that analogy of the trust tax as well and paying in there. So thank you for joining us. We really appreciate you taking the time.
Guest: Thank you for having me.
