Episode 70 Melanie Tinto, Chief Human Resources Officer at WEX

Thank you, and I'm thrilled to be joining you here today, Greg, and thanks so much for including me in your series to talk about an important topic that's very near and dear to my heart.

Sure, happy to. So I grew up in the beautiful state of Maine, in a small community here. It's one of our more popular tourist attractions near Acadia National Park. I actually come from a long line of small business owners and entrepreneurs, so I'm actually the first in my family to graduate college, first female, and first and only family member. I've always had a love for numbers, so I started my career in accounting. I went locally to the University of Maine, and then went on to get my master's in business with a concentration in finance at the University of Connecticut. And I think throughout our talk today I'll talk a little bit more, but I've moved quite a bit over the past 20 years, where I really found my love for executive development and ultimately the role I'm in today. And now I'm settled back in my home state, which is a pleasant and wonderful surprise. And when I'm not at work, Greg, I spend time mostly with my family and enjoying the outdoors. You usually see me out mountain biking or downhill skiing every chance that I can get.

Yeah, a couple feet last week, although we did have the fat tire bike race. It was a lot of fun.

Sure. So at WEX, I'm the Chief Human Resources Officer. And WEX is a financial technology service provider company, and we operate across several sectors: fleet, travel, and healthcare. And we provide technology solutions that help simplify our complex payments processes. So for example, if any of the folks listening today have a gas card or a health savings card in your wallet, or if you've booked travel through an online travel agency, you're likely using one of our core products. And my primary focus areas here, Greg, are primarily talent, succession, total rewards, employee development, engagement, and things like inclusion and diversity, and particularly a strong focus on culture globally at WEX. And with our growth strategy, as you can imagine, we have a fair amount of M&A work as well.

Well, I've been here for almost three years now. And prior to joining WEX, I was at a company called Medtronic, and there I was focused on talent acquisition, talent management, and also their Chief Learning Officer. Prior to that, I spent time at several other Fortune 100 companies including Walmart, Bank of America, and Hewlett-Packard. And there I primarily focused as well in areas such as executive development, organizational design and development, and talent. And in all honesty, I've had some pretty incredible colleagues and bosses along the way, and those individuals helped craft the unique career that I've had. So if you think about some of the bosses that I work for, I've actually worked for several of them more than once at different companies as they progressed in their careers. And that's how I ended up in the HR field today, through a leadership development program that I had early in my career. I moved in and out of HR roles in intervals such as finance or product strategy, but really it was those folks taking a chance on me and helping to grow my career, and part of that through those transitions. I've been involved in several areas of diversity and inclusion, primarily focused in women's focus areas at first. I was appointed to a leadership role on a women's resource group at one of the companies I worked at. I was also responsible with my team to build curriculum and really help shape and advance the agenda in the areas of diversity and inclusion. So I'm excited to continue that journey here at WEX. And we really had a great launching point when I joined the company. We've always been focused on growing talent, and I'm not sure if you know this, Greg, but we have a female CEO that runs our company, Melissa Smith. And so we have just a great grounding of female leadership across our executive team and then deeper into our organization.

So I'll share my perspective. My perspective is that inclusion and diversity really help shape the DNA of a company. So the pillars of diversity and inclusion need to align with the culture and the values of the company, which is a bit personal to that individual organization. And for me, DNI at the macro level really involves the company's philosophy and vision for employees. So it starts with a strategic vision and roadmap that articulates where you are and aspirationally where you want to be as an organization. And while there are similarities at every company, through my experience I've seen the important part of how diversity and inclusion is discussed and how it resonates with employees is really how you describe it relative to your culture. So the words and actions have to matter, and they have to align. And what I mean by that is when you talk about or describe your aspirational mission, it has to be transparent and real for your employees. It has to be something that they can tangibly feel and that they can believe. And if you have a focus on ensuring, for example, that you're recruiting diverse talent into your organization, you need to have a culture that really embraces and supports that talent of diverse backgrounds. What you don't want is having someone come in the door, you hire them in, and then you hire in all this great talent to your company, only to have a culture that really doesn't embrace it and allow individuals to be their authentic selves and to align with what you described in the recruiting process. So you have your words and actions on both the process, what you say to talent, and what you actually deliver as an organization and as a fabric of the culture has to align for that to be meaningful and for that to work as an action that you drive toward improving diversity and inclusion.

Sure, happy to talk about that. So we've developed a strategy to drive our diversity and inclusion practices across our workforce, our workplace, our community partnerships, as well as our marketplace. And so we've launched various programs and resources to support diversity and inclusion throughout the past several years. And those have included the creation of employee resource groups, which I'm very proud of and passionate about, to serve as touch points for employees and allies and foster culture belonging at WEX. So it's a great way for employees to really connect, talk about their similarities, talk about their challenges, and also to focus on some of the key areas like development, for example, and really create a grassroots effort to improve our diversity and inclusion efforts. We've also accelerated the launch of an employee resource group specifically focused on supporting our Black colleagues and allies. And we hold open forums, and we've held several a few last year relative to employees to discuss the impact of racism, and we continue to do those. And we're actually celebrating Black History Month this month, as I'm sure many of the other companies are as well.

Sure. So we have several different employee resource groups across the company. The team has done a lovely job of creating core process and playbooks in terms of what's the structure, how do we have a group of employees that take the leadership helm to drive those particular resource groups. And it really has been driven by employees, defined by employees, and led by employees in terms of their efforts. And the passion really shows through in terms of what they're able to deliver and the actions that they focus on. The way we structure them internally to give them more focus is we have an executive sponsor that's aligned to many of our employee resource groups. And that's an executive sponsor primarily from our executive leadership team. And that responsibility is really to help guide and shape the strategy, as well as to continue to be an ambassador for that particular group. And so while these only started a few years ago, many of them, we had one prior to a few years ago, Women at WEX, but we've continued on that journey to expand our employee resource groups. And we've had great focus from the employee community, and really, they've driven their own passion and growth through their own networks and through collaboration.

So the mechanisms that I talked about in terms of the playbooks, as well as the connectedness across the various leaders that happen to run these groups, has been incredible. And when I think about one of the experiences we had over the holidays, obviously COVID has kept us all behind closed doors and at our homes for many months now. And over the holiday season, a few of the groups wanted to give back to the community, and so they found an opportunity to collaborate and do what I'll call a drive-through donation effort, where employees came together from these various three groups. They each identified a charity that was important to them and that really resonated with their particular group, and then employees rallied together, did a drive-by drop-off, and we just had an incredible sense of community through a socially distanced donation and charity event, while all of these ERGs were coming together. And so I think just their passion, their focus and commitment, employees and their focus and commitment on our culture and our values, really shines through, and it's just been really exciting to see it blossom over the last year or two.

It really is, and to your point, it makes my job a whole lot more fulfilling when you think about a leadership team that embraces and is bought into a diversity and inclusion strategy. And I think back even to engagement when I first joined WEX, we talked a lot about the sense of belonging. Do employees have a sense of belonging? Do they feel that they can be their authentic and true selves? Can they bring their full selves to work? And we talk about this constantly at the executive leadership team level. We talk about diversity and inclusion and growth of others, and how do we develop and advance our employees. So those are important pillars that we continually focus on, and I think it's why we have such a vast array of diversity even at the leadership team level and at our board level. And when I think about our board and their commitment, one of the things that we talked about last year was how do we show our commitment to diversity and inclusion, and how do we make sure that we're walking the talk. And our board of directors rallied quickly behind that and said we want to be part of it. And one of the things we did was a simple awareness campaign relative to unconscious bias. And we started at the board level. It was basically what is unconscious bias, how do you identify it, and the realization that everybody has it, and how you can actually leverage techniques to make sure that you are focused on minimizing unconscious bias. And so the board started that, the executive leadership team also went through that program, and we've cascaded that and continued to cascade that through WEX. And so I'm really proud about that commitment and focus. In addition, over the past two years, we've actually had additional conversations with our board of directors on our vision, on our roadmap and strategy. When I talked about the pillars that we're focused on, the board has been a critical advocate and really sounding board for me as well as the other leaders across our leadership team to continue to develop and advance in this space. So long before there was a public sense of urgency around this, there certainly was a passion at WEX and has continued to be over the past several years.

For me, it's extremely important. If you think about building a sustainable company and focus, it requires intentional focus on diversity and inclusion in everything that we do. And if you think about why it's important, you need a strategy and roadmap that articulates the vision and strategy. It also helps you communicate to others, it helps you show meaningful progress, and it helps keep you focused. And if you think about the way most companies run their businesses, they always have a strategic business plan that sets their vision, aligns their organization, they focus their goals and align their goals to it. And the same discipline, in my mind, should apply to a DNI strategy. Crafting that vision, crafting that strategy, staying focused on it, and continuing to build momentum along the journey is the best way that you can make meaningful progress in the space of diversity and inclusion.

Sure, and again this is the flavor for WEX, it could be different at other places. But it talks about what's the charter for the leadership team of each of the employee resource groups. So who's part of it, what's the mission and charter of that particular group, what are some of the focus areas in which that group will target and address, what are some of the mechanisms from a communication, branding perspective that they may want to focus on as well, and what's the role of the executive sponsor, how do they engage members across that employee resource group. So there's several different component parts if you think about a best practices book. And you start to think about what are the key elements to help get someone started so that they have a baseline playbook for it. It's very similar to what we've done for the employee resource groups is just giving them a way to accelerate their momentum. As we build on our journey, additional elements will start to play into there. There will be focused areas around results in the focus areas that they've chosen, so what are the metrics that they want to continue to improve. Do they want to see more targeted focus on recruitment? Is it more about development and advancement? And what are the ways we can do that? How are they fully engaged in the community? And so we help kind of shape their strategy just like you would a business plan using that playbook, using techniques. And we also are in the midst of designing and we'll be delivering in 2021 supplemental training for our employee resource group leaders as well.

I think it's very important because without the metrics, it's hard to say whether you're making meaningful progress or not. At times, especially for those organizations that are newer to considering and reflecting on how they're going to address the area of diversity and inclusion, sometimes it feels like it's daunting. And in reality, when you look at the numbers, you look at the metrics, you really articulate what you're trying to improve upon, it makes it much more palatable and doable. It's like taking one step at a time. You need to understand where your baseline is, you need to make meaningful progress but also reasonable goals to start that journey. And I think the metrics and the data start to provide a little bit more concrete focus versus dialogue and discussion without that data.

So it really is critical in terms of how you focus DNI into the fabric of everything that you do. Right? So if you think about, is it rooted in your values? Is it focused in your core systems, whether that be compensation structures or reward systems? Is it focused on how you think about encouraging and celebrating people to be their authentic selves? Right, it's part of the words and the actions that you choose. It's part of the areas that you reinforce and celebrate. And it's about the messages that the organization sends, anything from how they engage with their employees, to how they focus on the community through philanthropy, through their supplier diversity chains, etc. It really permeates the fabric of an organization and can be a powerful positive momentum for an organization as well, and a great unifier across employees.

Yeah, it can be daunting, especially if you're just starting out on this journey in terms of how to address it. And I always start with the basics of transparency and accountability to ensure you're really focused on providing clarity. And that's just with ongoing communication, it's with focus on sharing where your progress is being made, what you are focused on. And you're correct, it's a ton to unpack. If you think about not only what you're doing but why you're doing it and where your organization is along that maturity curve, it really is a challenge. And without a clear vision and roadmap, I found just in my past experience that a lack of focus on the truly critical items for your organization can make it difficult to make meaningful progress. And there are many people that have a passion for diversity and inclusion and the component parts that make it a success. What I found is that in the past, without a roadmap, it can be a bit overwhelming. So what happens is there are many great ideas that come at you, and you're constantly chasing the newest idea. That roadmap helps to keep you grounded. It provides a way to communicate to employees and to leaders, or for those that are publicly traded, the board. It's an opportunity to set your course and continue on that course and move forward. Otherwise, at times, I've seen where organizations didn't have that strategy and that clarity, they were constantly chasing the newest idea, initiative in the marketplace, and it just didn't either resonate for employees or wasn't able to get traction. The other piece that I found with some of the organizations that are just starting out and the challenges that they might face is they say, 'Well, we don't have the resources, we don't have a lot of funding that goes along with this.' And it's really about stopping and saying, 'Where is the passion? Where is the momentum that we can leverage?' If you think about our employee resource groups that I talked about, we didn't have dollars that backed those up. We had passion, we had commitment, we had a focus, and we had a small group of people that really wanted to help unify and make this great for WEX. And so I think that's a huge opportunity: just that culture carries a lot of positive forward momentum for employees and for a company. And so many companies do have a lot of dollars that they can spend relative to diversity and inclusion, but don't let that preclude you from starting. There are certainly opportunities to do that with a small group of people, with leadership commitment, and a whole lot of heart.

Yeah, it's a great question. And I think you're right, I think diversity is just one key piece of it. Actually, most of the times that I'm talking about it, I actually put inclusion first. And so I will say with my team, inclusion and diversity, because you can do all the work you wanted. I mentioned that example earlier around recruiting in a great group of diverse talent, diversity of experiences, diversity of perspectives, or thought process or ideas, and without inclusion, it doesn't stick. You have to have that inclusion, that focus on what joins us together. Do we allow people to be their authentic selves? And again, I always use that sense of belonging, but it's so important to build the inclusion. It means we're open to other people's ideas and perspectives. It means that we're okay if someone approaches a project or a program or a process, or even has a different opinion that they'd like to share and offer, and that's okay. And many of the companies that I've worked at, I'm really proud of them because it's been a great focus for frankly all of the companies I've worked at in the past, is focus on inclusion. I think the words and the actions and demonstrating that it matters to a company is important. I think the messaging that you send to employees is critically important as well. And it's also about embracing other people's, not just the way they look, but the way they think, the way they act, and what they value, and being open to that.

Well, I think everyone regardless of their background, their experience, where they are on their journey and their life stage, wants to belong, and they want to be included, and they want to feel heard, and they want to feel valued. And so if you start from that basic premise, then a lot of things naturally fall into place. If you were to ask me, is there an education focus that's different? It could be around the 'why' in helping people understand where they are, and back to the unconscious bias, where did they start, what were their life experiences that got them to where they are today, and how does that shape what they may perceive in terms of the current situation or current challenge. And so you have to a bit open the doors at times for conversation. You also have to be appreciative and understand people's perspectives. And one of the ways we did that this year was just have listening sessions within our organization. Listen to our employees, let them share their ideas without judgment. And it's amazing to be able to walk in the shoes of someone else, whether they're younger than you, older than you, different economic status than you, different education than you. You get a whole different perspective and understand what it's like to live and walk and absorb information from a different person's perspective that way.

Yeah, and I started talking about it before when we were talking about the DNA of the company. You have to just pick a place to start and just really understand where you are and appreciate where you are on that journey. And so part of it is understanding, one, what are the employees going to value and what's important to that company's culture, and really be intentional about defining what it means for you and your organization. And get other people's perspectives. My perspective may be very different than my colleague's perspective. And having that focus group, whether that's through engagement surveys, whether that's through dialogue with others, just listening to how they describe the company, how they describe the organization, what diversity means to them. It seems like it's a step that may take additional time, but it really gives you other people's opportunity to provide their perspectives. And so that's just an important place to start: where are you as an organization, and what's going to move you forward the quickest? Again, a lot of people start with 'we want to recruit diverse talent in.' Well, you need to understand what that means, right? Does that mean we want diversity of experiences? Does it mean we want diverse skill sets? Does it mean we want people that look differently or come from different locations? And if we recruit those individuals in, what's going to be the absorption rate and the acceptance rate of our company? Do we have to do some healing or some development internally in our own organization to be able to go on that journey? And so it's not like it's a one-pronged approach. Obviously you have multiple phases to this. But start simple. Start simple. Look at external best practices, but also make sure that they're going to resonate and be elements that can help your company and your roadmap, because it is individually different depending sometimes on the values of the organization, the tenure of the organization, and just where you are on that stage and your makeup of your employee base. There's different places that you may want to start. What I would recommend also is just really think about the strategic plan. Identify areas of strength and opportunity for that particular company. Find champions who are passionate about the topic and partner with them. Reach out to others who are further along in their journey to tell their story. I think about just the amount of individuals that I connect with on a regular basis, peers that I worked with in the past, other colleagues that I've met along the way, other business leaders that are always willing to share their story. And that network is so important to listen to where they are on their journey. I've never had any company or any individual that hasn't been open and willing to share where they are, where they may have misstepped, what they thought worked really well for their organization. And then taking and distilling that information and thinking about your own short-term and longer-term efforts that you want to implement at your own organization. So be very deliberate. Create your roadmap. Think about the foundational elements. And celebrate your progress, right? Celebrate where you are and where you're going. And continue to communicate those wins. And over time, start to think about what are those meaningful goals and milestones so that you get stickiness along the way, so that you get that momentum that really drives an inclusive and diverse environment.

So everyone within and outside of payments is on their own journey. Like you said, I've been at a lot of different companies, whether it's been retail, or consumer banking, investment banking, it's been quite a wild ride. And HP, I had the opportunity to work with the technology org. And there's an interesting reconciliation. Obviously we have a heavy emphasis on tech and payments. When you think about the skills development and then coupling that with really building a diverse set of talent, you also need to be bold and forward thinking around growing that particular talent, growing and advancing it internally. Partnering with other external organizations, for example, we have a close partnership with the university so that we can start to build tech talent. We have an amazing internship program that really helps us to grow some of that talent. And when I think about the payments industry specifically, across that spectrum, there's still opportunities for us to continue to grow diverse talent. I see from the metrics and perspectives, if I'm looking across tech companies and payments companies, we've moved the needle a bit, but we still have more work to do. I would say we've moved it more from a female perspective of women in leadership, but there's more to be done around diversity and inclusion if you think on the broadest spectrum. And there are some companies that do actually have a bit of an accelerated format for that depending on the location of their particular headquarters, or just based on what their founding roots were if it's a smaller company that then had explosive growth. And so I've seen different areas across the spectrum. With the payment space, just really different maturity curve there. The good news is, when I think about it across all of these different areas, that there is an opportunity to make meaningful impact through continuing to apply and focus efforts that align on the company's culture across all of these. I also think about the unification of how we start to grow talent collectively together, and I think podcasts like this, other opportunities to connect and deliver best practices, will continue to move the payments industry forward. And obviously some of those larger organizations really have some great foundation already in place. For those that are newer, they're just starting that dialogue. That's something that we can all kind of lean into and learn from.

And Greg, I think that that's just an important part, right? A lot of you're going to hear commonalities across all of the people that you probably talk with in terms of developing systems, developing a roadmap, getting leadership buy-in, thinking about the culture and what fits. There's also nuggets that each of us individually bring that are uniquely different that I think will really be beneficial as people are on this journey or just starting on this journey, or even for myself personally. I have a lot of experience from other companies, but this is never something that's just done, right? You continue to learn, grow, and evolve. You need to be mindful of what's going on in the external environment and really apply that and make it meaningful. So that's why these types of dialogues are so critically important for all of us to engage in.

Well, I guess I would say just take one day at a time. This is work that's really critically important, and like I said before, never done. It's not a one-time initiative. So for those that want to check the box, it just doesn't work that way, right? It's a component and critical part that becomes the fabric of a company's culture. It defines how it focuses on whether it's talent, or how you develop others, how you create community, how you reward others, etc. In essence, it's really threaded throughout everything that we do and how you engage and grow your employees. And just remember to start small and build on a strong foundation. I would say ask questions of others, as I found that other leaders in their space, like I said, are more than happy to share their experiences and their successes. And then ultimately make the decision on what will work best for your company. As you can tell, I'm pretty passionate about this space, and at the end of the day, having a rich diverse workforce creates an innovative environment that continues to benefit all of us. It benefits our customers, it benefits partners, employees. And I'm just really excited that I've been able to share a little bit of our journey with you today, and hope that I can continue to share that passion with others.

Thank you, Greg, I really appreciate it.