The Transform Dialogues Featuring Prudence Pitter

Okay, we are joined here for the Transform Dialogues, a live podcast at Transform 2025, part of the People Strategy Leaders podcast. I'm Zach. I'm Amy. And we're joined by prudent Spitter. Prudent, welcome. Thanks for joining us live on the floor. Super excited to talk a little bit about the transforming world of work, the employee experience, the role of the leader. Mm-hmm. Uh, to kick us off, tell us a little bit about yourself. Who are you? What is some of the work you're leading? Yeah, so thanks Zach. Thanks Amy. So appreciate being here. So Prudence fitter, global head of hr, leading HR for automotive and manufacturing as well as business and development at Amazon Web Services. And I've been in the HR space for 28 years. One of the things I'm passionate about is employee wellbeing, which is what my panel discussion is on tomorrow, burnout and avoiding, uh, burnout. So happy to, to take this conversation wherever it makes sense for us today. Love that. Well, let's dig into that a little bit just to start. And I feel like the world of wellbeing has, has been a topic for quite some time. It's changed throughout the years. I remember when I first got into it, it was a lot about like, let's just invest in wellbeing to lower our healthcare cost type thing. Now it's a little bit more of a like true strategic imperative. Yeah. And I feel like that's maybe a stance you have on it. Can you tell us like why is wellbeing so important today or how should we be looking at the world of wellbeing right Now? You hit the nail on the head. It's a strategic imperative. It's about engagement and retention. One, I have a podcast as well and one of my podcast guests from season five was sharing with me that employees are taking a look at employer's wellbeing engagement score as part of the decision should I join the organization? And employees, as we know for years, have always valued the importance of feedback, giving feedback, and taking a look at what employers are doing with that feedback. And one of the things that rises to the top is employee wellbeing. What is the organization doing for me as it relates to diet, exercise, sleep, overall benefits, and doing so proactively versus, uh, reactively mental health is a huge part, but getting to taking care of the employee before there is a mental health episode is even more important to employees today. So it's strategic in that it's about the employee engagement and retention. Employees want to feel as if they belong and employees wanna feel as if they're being taken care of. Do you feel like organizations are addressing kind of the discrepancy between how a frontline workforce is maybe engaged in wellbeing versus a corporate workforce? Some organizations do it better than others and I think some organizations pay more attention to some groups versus others. Ve tend to be this assumption that some employees need support more than others and everyone has a thing that they're dealing um, with that somehow ties into their wellbeing. Whether that's finances, taking care of the elderly, having a new child going through a divorce, whatever it is that someone is dealing with, how do they feel that the organization is supporting them? So there's some organizations where they're providing a lot for the frontline employees and not enough for the unquote corporate employees because there could be a thought that those employees have already built the skillset to take care of themself and might, while that might be true, it's not a destination, it's a journey. So what are organizations doing to regularly remind employees about resources that are available? Because there are studies that show that employee assistance programs are underutilized, not because employees don't need them, but sometimes there is that thought process that I go there when the world is crashing versus their resources to help me get to the point of my world of crashing. Do you think there's some resistance, an employee still raising their hand to say, I need help, I need that resource. Like do you think that's part of the reason that they're not utilizing them A big yes. When I talked to employees, there was a thought process of it wasn't that bad. I needed help, but I didn't need that much help. And so I didn't want to bother anyone and I didn't want to seem as if I need to leave or I need time away. I just need that little extra support. And the reason I feel that is, is because we wanna feel as if we're taking care of ourselves. We wanna feel as if we're doing well and sometimes we wait too long to address what we need to address. But if we have leaders as wellbeing role models, so leaders who are saying, you know, last year I needed to take a week off because I lost my pet. Like I've literally had a leader say that, you know, I haven't had a pet since I was young. So I don't have that connection. But I appreciated a leader that I looked up to sharing the impact that losing a pet had on their, uh, family and the fact that they needed to take time away. And my feedback was, can you share that on our next team? Paul, I'd like for you to be vulnerable. I'd like for you to share to, uh, share with others how you take time away when a male leader steps away because they have a birth right. Sharing and normalizing that, that you are there for your wife, you're there for your child, you are there to make sure that you keep the family going and you're stepping away from work to be whole at home. That is, uh, that is also important. So I truly believe that if leaders normalize the conversation about how they stay whole, how they step away at 4:00 PM Tuesdays and Thursdays to coach the, uh, their son's team and then come back online later or pick up work the next day, uh, what are some of the things that they are doing to be whole that helps other employees recognize that, oh, others are struggling too and this is how they address it. And so I can do the same. I love that. That always seems like a interesting tension for leaders to balance, right? On one end, we as a leader may feel that pressure to maintain performance to beyond to help drive the, the, the goals of the organization forward. We also want to create that space for employees so that they can speak up if they're having mental health issues or they need to step away or they're burning out and make it seem like, Hey, it's, you're not bothering me. It's okay to come to me about these things. But then they also need to role model it and take care of themselves during these, these kind of their own high pressure moments. Right. Can you talk more about like that role of the leader? Like how do we balance what seems like competing priorities sometimes, right? Yeah. And, and then what is the role of the leader to kind of hold that space or how, how does one become that leader of today's workforce? A leader who's always on will burn out and a leader who believes that they should take everything on is not sustainable for long. It will work for a short period of time and then they start to become ineffective and then not at all able to do the job that they were hired to do. So leaders who are sharing what they're doing to take care of themselves and how they are going about it and asking employees like leading with that in team meetings or ending team meetings, um, with that celebrating someone who just ran a marathon and how much preparation it took to be able to do that. Uh, welcomes someone back who took some time off to take an extended, you know, two week trip to go hiking with their family that they've missed for the last two years. And now they're coming back and saying, I did this with my family. Oh, and while I was on this particular trail, here's what came to me, right? And I stopped and I'm like, Siri, you know, help me, uh, take these notes. And helping them recognize that because they took the time to pause, they came back more refreshed, they came back with more and better ideas and help them make the connection, right. Arrested person, like employees wanna do well at work, they wanna be innovative, they wanna be able to do more, but making the connection to this individual paused and they came back pressure and better and these are the ideas they brought back with them. Oh, and by the way, Saturday mornings after my Pilates class on my drive home, I usually have the best ideas. 'cause there's something about exercise and, you know, feeding your, your brain in a different way that helps you be better. Making those connections can help others recognize that they too can do the same. I'd love to kind of focus now this conversation on you as an HR leader, right? Because we in hr, people leaders, uh, are have such like a service mindset to the organization where they tend to burn themselves out as well. Right? And, and I've seen so many, it's unfortunately, but so many CPOs, CHR os step away from their organization over the past year or two because they just couldn't keep up anymore. Right? They needed to take that sabbatical, take some time off to recharge. How do we support a sense of wellbeing and and performance in the HR department? Like what does that start to look like for you as a HR leader? Yeah, starting with the, uh, HR for HR model, I've been hearing that a lot. Now. If you're in a larger organization that's not new, but for smaller organizations it's newer finding that support system. I think one of the reasons why I've come close to you but never burned out is because I've always had a strong support system and I've always had individuals asking, so how are you doing? And pausing to get that response. But not everyone has that. But recognizing that we need that and seeking that out, I reached out to a leader that I admired on LinkedIn, blindly didn't know her, recognized that we had a couple of, uh, similar connections and she responded and she agreed to mentor me. But I recognize that a lot of what she's doing currently and what she has done mirrors some of what I'm doing or what I've done. And what she's doing now is are things that I aspire to. And so I reached out and she was kind enough to to uh, reach back out and, and we now have a connection and met here at Transform in real Life. Oh, that's awesome. As sex says, I know, that is absolutely awesome. So one recognizing if you don't have that support system and asking for it, if your organization has it, take advantage of it. Sometimes we have it and we don't take advantage of it and scheduling time for ourselves. So for me, sleep is definitely one of those that I'm really passionate about. Eight hours of sleep every night and I don't always hit it recognizing if I'm two nights in a row, okay, what do I need to shift, right? And making sure that I am at my best because I know that I need that seven and a half to eight hours regularly to be at my best and working hard to get back there when I'm falling off and asking others to hold me accountable. One of the leaders in my previous organization is my accountability partner. And as I was getting on the plane to come here, I got a text from him and I thought, uh oh, I can't answer this because it's how was last week as far as your workout? You know, three specific things. But it also put things into perspective for me. Okay, so what can I do while I'm at this conference to get back on the workout, um, wagon? And also what are the two connections that I can make that when I meet with my accountability partner, I can say that wasn't just their giving, I made connections and these are the connections and why it's helping me professionally. Oh, and by the way, I made time to make sure I get in my my step. So having that accountability partner is huge. But also recognizing when you can do more for yourself and having that person to help push you makes a big difference. Okay. So we're at Transform. Uh, a lot of it's about the disruptors, the big things coming, the transformations in people in tech. As we kind of wrap up our session together, what are some of the big bold predictions you have or, or big challenges or things people should be thinking about to stay ahead in the world of work? Yeah, what comes to mind for you? Normalizing the wellbeing conversation. Having those regular reminders. Sharing, I need to get my seven and a half, eight hours last week suffered because of the time zones, time zone difference. This is what I'm doing to adjust. How can we leverage technology to feed information to our employees about taking care of themselves and how can we go a step further to personalize it to them? So if I'm doing really great on diet, that's not the truth, but let's just imagine. 'cause that's a huge goal. If I'm doing really good on diet, but sleep is that part of me, there should be a way for an organization to create something technologically that allow employees to put in their wellbeing wishlist. And how can it track them? How can it send reminders and how can it celebrate employees in a way that's personal to them? And for those that feel comfortable with having that big splashy celebration that involve out others, how can we make that possible for them? So I tend to be a little bit more private and I love the kind of one-on-one conversations about my wellbeing, but there's some that want to shout all of their successes and shout when they're not doing well to get that, uh, boost of energy from others. How can we create something that feeds that to employees and it's so personalized that we know how they like to be celebrated. What are the milestones and what's next after they've met the phones? I love that. Well, this was wonderful prudence. Thank you so much for joining our session. Thank you. I have to applaud you so much for being a role model for this space. Thank you. And bringing these practices and these, these mindsets about while being leadership into your own work into the community, uh, it means a lot. So thanks for Participating in this. Thank, thank you both. I appreciate being here. Yeah.