Building HR Trust at Vossler
CLIENT
INDUSTRY
Media
LOCATION
Kirkland, WA
SIZE
<50
PRIORITIES
Benefits, Compensation, Job Descriptions, Employee Relations, Onboarding, Compliance, HR Tech
About Vossler
Vossler is a hybrid creative agency and production company. The owners, three brothers, operate the business with integrity and exceptional standards, with a team working hard to create outstanding audio and visual content for high-profile clients across a range of industries.
The Need
Vossler’s last HR manager had just left the company, and Jonathan and Nathanael Vossler were making plans for what to do next. The company was growing quickly. Having quality HR leadership and practices was going to be important during this next phase of growth. The problem was that they’d just learned from their staff that employee confidence in the company’s HR practices was suffering. Prior HR leadership had made promises that the employees felt went unfulfilled. Jonathan and Nathanael took their employees’ concerns seriously and made rebuilding employee confidence in HR leadership and practices a company priority.
Resourceful Response
When Resourceful’s lead consultant, Andrea Allard, met the Vossler team, she emphasized that she would prioritize better communication flow between employees and management to help employees feel they had a better understanding of opportunities, business needs, and where the business was headed. Instead of promises, there would be increased transparency and education around the boundaries of transparency that enable the leaders to lead. She started out working every other week on-site, but quickly moved to every week to resolve the list of priorities that would re-establish employees’ confidence in HR.
In addition to prioritizing communication, Resourceful tackled a number of missing or outdated policies, covering everything from credit card use and travel to meals and paid time off. They put a new handbook in place to better reflect the evolving culture while taking insurance requirements into account. They moved on to revamp job descriptions, performance reviews, and compensation, drawing on the expertise of Resourceful team member Kiersten Adams.
“Being able to tap into the knowledge of my team makes me a good business partner. I don’t have to spend valuable hours researching a topic that another team member could just advise me on.”
Andrea Allard, HR Consultant, Resourceful
Andrea developed a strong remote working relationship, with occasional on-site visits. The team checked in on priorities weekly, using Slack and Zoom to stay in touch as needed. She made sure that all of her work integrated well with Vossler’s existing systems, including BambooHR, Basecamp, and Dropbox.
Meaningful Results
In just over a year, Andrea witnessed a culture shift. She worked with management and employees on direct and open communication around challenging topics, and they successfully built trust with their team members as new people joined the company and others moved on.
