Flagship Features: Putting Employees First with Maria Madrigal, SVP of HR

Video Transcript

Welcome to another episode of Flagship Features I’m Amelia Beamer here with my co-host Don Toole as well as Maria Madrigal who is our SVP of Human Resources. Thanks to you both for being here.

Thank you. All right Maria do you mind kicking us off by telling us a little bit about yourself?

Absolutely. Thank you both for the invite. Let’s see, as Amelia mentioned I’m the senior VP of Human Resources. I’ve been at Flagship for heading on two years I’ve been in human resources for over 25 years. I love working in HR Fields. I honestly can’t imagine doing doing anything else.

Well you know you’re definitely our champion for the HR world. And kind of talk to us about what have you seen as the largest uh some of the bigger changes in in new things that you’re having to deal with uh with the with the changing times.

Sure Don that’s a really good question obviously compliance has been a big component ensuring that we keep our employees safe but from a human aspect I’m talking about life priorities the pandemic shed some light in the workforce mental health has been you know pretty big people getting kind of isolated at home because of the pandemic so that has really impacted on how our workforce reacts. Absolutely and speaking of the workforce the facility services industry continues to experience a staffing shortage can you talk a little bit about how Flagship has adjusted its approach to recruitment and retention.

We work very closely with the talent acquisition team on coaching and mentoring to really enhance their screening and interviewing techniques we also work with vocational schools and trade schools we work with non-profits we also work with foster care centers to make sure that for those individuals that are aging out of the system that they look at us as potential employers of choice.

We are to be commended because one thing that at Flagship we have had tremendous growth across all of our verticals and and you guys do a great job of always keeping the position filled but talk about our learning and development because I really think that’s one of the key things that that I get excited about that I see you and your team put in place can you give us a little more insight into that.

Sure uh I’m gonna give you our secret sauce we always joke and we we tell our new hires that we hire them to retire them and what this means is our approach to learning and development is to support our employees it starts at the onboarding process and from there we really talk about career development so they could come in as your traditional janitor but there’s also so much opportunity we provide career development, leadership development, and Beyond so really our goal is to create a learning opportunity that fosters collaboration, critical thinking, and problem solving this is an area as you mentioned Don that I really believe that sets us apart from our competition we have done an outstanding job building a solid pipeline of leaders to support our growth trajectory and that really is um unique and I’ve worked for many different Industries and by far Flagship is really the best at this.

Maria can you maybe comment on how Flagship is working to blend the different generations within our workforce.

Absolutely that’s a really good question we have four different generations uh within Flagship workforce and everyone has different communication styles one of the things that we do is for every supervisor that comes into the organization we do multi-generational diversity training that’s part of our D,E, and I initiative again really understanding not just you know delivery but also understanding the different you know nuances that it takes to communicate with one individual delegation all those things and again that’s part of our employee engagement as well.

You know and as a company we we are uh committed to always improving our diversity equity and inclusion across the organization and from your perspective what does that look like exactly. The one thing that’s really unique about Flagship is it’s not a buzzword for us we are committed to making our workforce an inclusive space uh we have implemented several employee resource groups we have a military veterans group we have a pride group just to name a couple additionally our employees well-being is always important to us we created and implemented a wellness committee. We also have an employee activity committee most recently one of the things that we heard from our employees is I want to be able to speak a different language whether it’s English, Spanish whatever it may be and so I’m really pleased to to say that we did roll out a language learning program to ensure employees have the tools to be successful and we have gotten really good feedback in fact we have a waiting list of a couple hundred people because they want more and so again that sets us apart from our competition I mean we really are serious about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

What an amazing effort thank you Maria. That’s all our time for today but this has been such an insightful discussion thanks to you both for being here. Thanks Maria. Thank you so much. Have a good day.