NorthWestern Energy's The Outlet, Bobbi Schroeppel, VP Customer Care, Communications & HR

No, I can't actually. I feel like we just hired you maybe five years ago.

I'm probably like having an extra teenager around the house since you got rid of Jackson. Now I'm your only teenager. But I do remember, Tom. It must have been a while because I do remember giving Jackson's baby clothes to have hand-me-down baby clothes from our kids now. So they're all gone to college now.

Not in the title, but some other duties would be labor safety and energy efficiency and demand side management. I forget about demand side management of Montana.

Totally by accident. I had graduated from college and it was right around the early 90s when we were in a recession. So jobs were somewhat hard to come by. And we were moving out to a smaller town outside of Minneapolis. My husband was going to go into the family law practice and I really didn't want to commute my entire life into downtown Minneapolis to work for a larger corporation. I thought we would spend our entire existence in this small town that he would stay at the law practice. So I knew if I got into a large corporation that at some point to go anywhere, you're probably going to move. So I had a neighbor, we bought a house, and I had a neighbor who worked for a company called Righand Electric and they happened to be hiring dispatchers for both electric and home security dispatchers and it was seven miles down the road. So she got me an interview and I honestly thought I was going to interview for like an electrician and I really didn't understand what the heck I was going to do working for an electrician. And of course, it didn't take me very long to figure out what was going on. I don't think I had really thought about it. I think my parents had been served by what was called Northern States Power at the time. And I, like most people, didn't really think about the fact that there are different utilities out there and there are different utility models. Of course, I think about it a lot now. So I did that for about three and a half, four years. I did go out in the field as their first female electric use consultant. So worked a lot with contractors and homeowners on off-peak metering and demand side management types of things. And then ultimately came back in, put my college degrees a little bit more to use, which was sociology and statistics, and started doing some market research for them. And then I got a phone call about a job at Northwestern Energy in here on South Dakota and I was like, okay, why not hear them out. Righand was smaller, so I knew there wasn't going to be as much long-term growth opportunity. Great co-op, so I don't want to say anything but good things about them. So anyway, ended up coming out to here on to interview, got a job offer in market research and marketing, and 27 years later, here I am.

You know what? When you look back at that, that wasn't chance. That was actually like this is what you were meant to do because the passion that I see in you feeds through to everybody around your entire team and beyond.

No, but it didn't take me long. Like most employees that come to a company like Northwestern and end up staying and having a long career here or in our industry in general, it doesn't take very long in the right culture and the right energy company to realize how quickly what we do is so foundational to just everything that goes on in this country. And if you think about, we're at our best when things are at their worst, right? When there are massive storms going through or whatever and how just, I mean, we have such a unique and foundational purpose. It didn't take me very long to grasp that and we hear that from employees all the time, including new hires. They're here for a matter of months and they're like, 'Oh, I get it. This is really special work.'

Oh, you know what that one is? It was a 2005 ice storm in South Dakota. Bar none. I mean, I think that at the peak of that storm, we had about 85% of our customers out of power. Fortunately, we were able to get large percentages of them back on within 24 hours, but they were hanging on by a thread, if you recall, Tom, and those single feed transmission lines coming into our bigger cities. And the thing that made that ice storm so unique from my perspective is generally ice storms of that magnitude, you often see them going down just another notch or so south of us, more down through like Oklahoma and Kansas and whatnot. But do you remember how much snow we got? And then it was subzero temperatures for days. So it didn't melt. Nothing melted. It just kept piling on and there were blizzard conditions and it was, I mean, I remember just what the state had to do to get plow roads so that our crews could come through North Dakota and come down into South Dakota because North Dakota didn't get hit like we did. So we could get MDU out here, we could get Black Hills from the west. I think we had Excel Ottertail folks in town. And that's when you really, speaking of special, that's when you really understand what this industry is about. There is no other industry that rallies like our industry to help out another company.

Yeah, I think that storm probably took years off of our cultural integration in a good way. I think prior to that there was a lot of animosity, the smaller utility buys the bigger utility and all of that. And some of the first crews to roll into town were folks out of Montana that drove all night came through North Dakota, and after they, some of them I think spent weeks helping clean up, but at least two to four weeks even after we got the power back on helping to clean stuff up. And I remember talking to some of the Montana crews and they would say, you know, the South Dakota system is small, but I think they gained an appreciation for how well built and how well engineered and well built it was when they came and worked on it, because it really is probably one of the premier systems in this country, which is why it's so reliable.

Oh, I think the role that I've played in getting the company where it's at today. I think the fact that what we just talked about, the fact that there is virtually none of that us versus them. I mean, it's like, you know what, we're proud of old Northwestern Public Service. We're proud of Montana Power, but I do believe that we have a culture now where everybody realizes we are better and stronger together. And I think the way we have this company structured, it's very flat. Most of our leaders have responsibility for that function across the entire company. Certainly in the support services at the corporate level, but even in communications, we don't necessarily operate in silos. And I think looking at the culture we have today compared to where we were 20 years ago is an amazing story.

Well, and I have to give a lot of credit to a lot of other individuals. Lorie St. Aben, Trisha Davis. I mean there's a number of our supervisors but yes, it's been a journey. If you recall Tom, up until I think it was 2014 or so we operated two billing systems. So we were fairly limited, we were exchanging calls between the South Dakota call center and the Montana call center but really putting that common billing system in really pushed us over the edge and allowed us to bring everything together. So we went through a period there where you were either in Montana in the call center or you were in here on, but we just continued to get better and more integrated and stronger. And today you just call one of the 800 numbers and it doesn't matter. You're going to go to whoever whichever person is available to serve you the fastest. So we've got Montana customers talking to people in South Dakota on a regular basis and I'm complimenting them all the time and vice versa. But then what the next, and we've been able to put in a lot of technology. I mean, where we are today with our technology platforms that allow us to run those contact centers and then to get into artificial intelligence and sentiment analysis and I could go on and on, but it's just great stuff already and great stuff on the horizon. But the other thing I want to touch on that I never thought I would be a proponent of but I am is the work from home for customer service agents. When that came about during COVID because we wanted to try to figure out how to keep our workforce healthy, unfortunately we had just done that big Genesis platform upgrade. We wouldn't have been able to do what we did if we hadn't gone live on that thing like I think we went live like December or January and by March the wheels were coming off the bus. We've maintained that model and I think it has really opened up the recruiting. I mean, we've got customer service agents in Glasgow, Montana. We've got them in Nebraska. We've got them all over Southeastern South Dakota, Montana. And they're all just one big machine working to serve customers and they do more than take calls. They handle email and other types of requests, but they're a great group. I do miss all the food that used to be in the call center all the time because that's one of the downsides.

Yeah. No soup Wednesdays, no popcorn Fridays. But I do see those folks are still engaged. They're not just these remote employees that you never deal with. We have volunteer events and they're there. And that's a testament to the company and the company giving them the opportunity to still be at home but yet still really a part of this company.

Honestly, it depends on the day or the week. I would say right now it varies. It really depends on what's going on. It depends on what might be on the board agenda. Like if I'm doing in July for example, I'll spend a lot of time leading up to that on HR because that's deep dive into HR type stuff. But then other parts of the year it's all about customer experience. And it flows. So I would say it's all fairly balanced and I try to keep it balanced. But the reality of it is that the customer care organization as is HR and corporate communications they all have very strong leadership teams in them. So they're all very well run which means that I don't have to spend a lot of my time on day-to-day activities. When they need some day-to-day help, they'll reach out, but I try to spend more time on strategy.

Well, so you remember the great recession of 2008. I think at that point in time our average retirement, because we do have nice benefits and retirement benefits, so people can most employees can generally retire maybe a little earlier than you might in other industries. Anytime somebody kind of hit 60 to 62 and they'd been with the company for so many, kind of the rule of 85, they would start retiring. Then we saw almost overnight a couple years added on to that when we went into the Great Recession. Maybe it's gone back a little bit, but I feel like we sort of kept a hold of some of that uptick where people started to stick around more like 63, 64. So pre-COVID, we were predicting that we were going to have not even a wave, I would call it steady waves. It's been and we knew it was going to go on for years, where you were just going to have higher retirement levels and we have seen that and it's been manageable. I think if we were to have any kind of significant economic slowdown, I could see some people putting their retirement plans off for a year or two and all of a sudden they look at their 401k and they go, 'Eh.' But it used to be we didn't hire. We hardly hired. And if you were going to get into Northwestern Energy, you basically got lucky or you came in an apprentice program or you came in as a customer service representative. And that's all changed. And just the way we recruit, you used to just put it in the local newspaper, and now we're on all the job boards, we're actually using AI to some extent with getting our jobs out there. But right now, and this is just my gut, I do think we're seeing a return towards an appreciation for the stability of the company. I think there's been enough shakeup in other industries and including what's going on at the federal level. There are a lot of people out there that are either unemployed or afraid they're going to be that I think are looking at companies like Northwestern through a 'I'd like to be there' lens. We've never had a hard time hiring, but three or four years ago there were certain positions in IT and whatnot that I think we were struggling more. That has changed pretty quickly overnight. The other thing that's changing is as more and more companies are pulling back on their work from home and telling people, 'Hey, we want to see you in the office more,' it's working to our advantage because we have a hybrid policy, but for the most part, we make no bones about it. We are a work from office company because a lot of our workforce can't work from home and we want everybody to be there. The other thing I was just reading an article in the Wall Street Journal is seeing for about from COVID until recently there was what you call frequent job jumpers, the people that were moving around from one job to the next, they were getting rewarded financially to do that. That gap has gone away now and the people who actually stayed in their career at their existing employer are now kind of financially almost as well off as the people that jumped jobs but then subsequently maybe lost them or are facing pay cuts because of tightening the belt. So you're seeing that go on. And I just think right now we're seeing our applicant pools are very strong. We're seeing jobs that we had open for a couple of years filling. And in some instances we're seeing two or three applicants we want to hire and in some cases we're hiring more than we were expecting to hire for that role. Linemen same thing. I think it's stabilizing and I think the question is going to be where does it go from here? And I don't think anybody really knows because it's going to depend on what happens with the economy.

Business at the speed of or technology at the speed of value.

Well, it depends. In South Dakota and Nebraska, I don't know, maybe there were 12 to 17ish full-time meter readers. We had some part-time. So let's just say 20 people in South Dakota, Nebraska. Companywide, we had a few more.

Yeah. So what we did was we literally sat down with each of the individuals to get an idea of what their aspirations were. Now, there were some that were like, you know what, I'm willing to stay until I'm no longer needed and then my path is I want to retire because that's where they were at in their career. And then there were just a few that we treated them fairly, but there wasn't a seat on the bus for them. But for the most part, particularly the full-time employees that had been here, like the one you're referring to, we were able to find comparable or even better roles as far as pay for them within the organization. And we held certain positions open because we knew that in looking at their resume and interviewing them, we kind of knew that they would be a good fit for that. So we worked very hard on that. We have the same thing going on out in Montana. It's less of them, but the same thing going on where I tend to believe that for the most part, if you're in a situation like that in a company like ours and you really want to stay in the company and you're committed to upskilling or reskilling and you have a good reputation for being highly engaged and hardworking, you're going to land somewhere.

Well, if you go back to the Montana Power Northwestern Public Service merger, the thing that made that work from a service quality perspective was the fact that we were at least initially out of the gate with the exception of some corporate finance systems, we were really running those companies separately from an operations perspective. They had their own standalone IT systems, their own call centers. So we didn't really have any significant operational conversions to do right out of the gate. On the hydros, we did. They were in one sense a self-contained unit of about 85 individuals because they hadn't necessarily been, the hydros versus coal strip is two different things. But there was a lot of system IT work to lift them out of there and bring them over to Northwestern so that we could monitor and continue to run those dams. The employee side was a little less complicated because they mostly for the most part just stayed in their existing job. So if you were a hydro operator at Madison, then you remained a hydro operator at Madison. And there were a handful of them that we integrated into like human resources or we got a community relations manager out of that if you recall. And we didn't have to get that community relations manager because she could have stayed with what was PPL Montana at the time, now Talon, but I knew she wanted to come to Northwestern and I knew she was awesome and I knew we wanted her and so I was like, there's an opportunity. We'll just put her on the list of employees that we want and she came over and gave us a decade of successful dedication and all of that just recently retired. So there were a handful that we made some strategic moves. And it's just even internally there's not a lot of hiccups. There's not a lot of pushback and everybody just instantly feels very comfortable with what we're doing and comfortable how the operation is. And that's the key there, Tom, is we've been fortunate that we haven't done an acquisition that required a significant restructuring right out of the gate or significant layoffs. I think we would be very cautious about something like that because there's a lot of social fallout that comes from that and I don't think that's who Northwestern wants to be. I think the Energy West acquisition is another one where it's 50, 55ish employees. But we're going to make a job offer to all of them. And we're committed to that because it's our culture and bad things come from not treating your employees well.

Well, speaking of Big Sky, we are headed out there in April, so let's hope that the snow is still there. They've had decent snow coverage this winter. So we do still ski. Don't get out on my mountain bike as much as I did when I was younger, but we are going to actually go up to our place in Wisconsin in August and do some mountain biking up there because it's fantastic trails. What keeps me busy? I do go to the gym a lot. I go to Solidcore sometime. It's one of the most fantastic unique experiences you'll ever have. And you'll think you'll go in there thinking, yeah, I'm in good shape. My core is strong. And you'll realize it's not until you go a certain amount of time. And it's kind of like Pilates reformer on steroids. So that, we do a little traveling. Now that our son lives up in the Twin Cities, we get up there probably a little bit more often than we used to to see him and his fiance or go to a golf or football game or the Black Keys. I think that's the latest thing that he wants us to go to. But it's fun, we just run up there for a weekend and come back home.

Basketball coach. Yeah. We'll see what that means.

We love South Dakota. It's good people here.

Yeah, I do. In fact, I'm leaving tomorrow to go to Chicago.

You bet, Tom. Talk to you later.