Executive Vice President & Chief HR Officer, NVENT ELECTRIC PLC
Environmental, Social and Governance Report, with Lynnette Heath
In this HCI Webinar, Dr. Jonathan H. Westover talks with Lynnette Heath about nVent's Environmental, Social and Governance ...
About Lynnette Heath
Lynnette Heath, Executive Vice President and Chief HR Officer at nVent Electric, has spoken publicly about her role as ESG people pillar executive sponsor and the company’s environmental, social, and governance initiatives. In podcast and webinar appearances in December 2023 and December 2024, she discussed nVent’s approach to performance reviews, employee development, and diversity goals. She stated that the company established representation goals for gender and U.S. racial diversity in management, and that it has improved its representation. She also noted that nVent had no employee resource groups five years ago and now has nine with over a thousand members globally. Heath said that if people leaders do not complete a people-leader goal, they cannot receive an overall rating above “meeting expectations,” which affects their bonus and merit increase. She described the company’s culture as “results with caring” and said that Millennial and Gen Z workers are demanding that organizations take ESG issues seriously. In a December 2024 appearance, Heath also discussed her personal experience caring for her father, a disabled veteran with dementia. She said she was worried he would forget her while she was away on a week-long vacation, and that her brother had asked their father if he knew who he was, to which he replied “my wife.” Heath said she was excited to visit New York and see her sister and an old friend, but added, “Will I relax? I don’t know.”
Transcript (11 segments)
J
John0:14
Lynette Heath, welcome to the conversation today.
L
Lynnette Heath0:17
Thank you, John. Glad to be here. It is a pleasure to be with you.
J
John0:21
You're joining us from the Minneapolis area. I'm south of Salt Lake City in Utah. Today we're going to be talking about nVent's report, environmental, social, and governance report this year, to talk about these really important issues. It's something I really enjoy talking about. I'm kind of a big believer in the social impact space. I talk a lot about these types of topics generally, but also as they connect to organizations and people within the organizations as a mechanism to help reinvigorate people, align people with meaning and purpose, not to mention all the other positive outcomes that come as we focus on these sorts of important issues. As we get started, I wanted to share Lynette's bio with everybody. Lynette Heath is nVent's Executive Vice President of CHI and Chief Human Resource Officer and ESG People Pillar Executive Sponsor. Prior to joining nVent, she was the Senior Vice President of Global Human Resources at Twin Cities-based Entrust Data Card. Again, a real pleasure to have you. Anything else you would like to highlight by way of your background or personal contacts before we dive on in?
L
Lynnette Heath1:27
I would just say I've also had the pleasure, as many of us in HR are able to do, to work in a variety of industries. I was with General Electric for a number of years before going to Entrust Data Card, which is Entrust today, and working in financial. I was in healthcare before that with McKesson HBOC. And now really thrilled to be at nVent, which is in the electrical industrial space. One of the great things, as I mentioned earlier, about HR is that we're able to experience so much. Over my career, I've been able to bring all the learnings with me to where I am today, and that's just been a benefit which I'm really appreciative of.
J
John2:06
Absolutely. HR is a really fun, dynamic space to be in. I know people conjure up all these mental pictures of Toby in The Office and some of these lesser desirable caricatures and stereotypes, but it's a wonderful place to be. The ESG component to all of this is one of the things that has evolved over the last couple of decades into something that is a really important part of any business, and it's something that people get really excited about. I think everyone can get excited about it, but particularly Millennial and Gen Z workers are demanding this within organizations. They only want to work for organizations that are taking this stuff seriously, and it is a real motivator and driver for them in their careers. From a social standpoint, from a global citizen standpoint, these are things we need to pay attention to. But from a simple bottom line, 'I want to attract and retain good people' perspective, it makes all the sense in the world, and the business case is really strong for all of us.
L
Lynnette Heath3:16
Absolutely, agree 100% with what you said.
J
John3:21
All right, let's go ahead and dive on in. Can you frame up for us a little bit the background behind the environmental, social, and governance report at nVent? When and why you started getting involved in this space, and then we can start to unpack this report.
L
Lynnette Heath3:36
Sure. You may or may not be aware about nVent and just who we are and how we formed. We're a fairly young company. We spun out of Pentair just over five years ago now. Thinking about that time when we were forming, it was really exciting, and that's what drew me here: being able to launch a new company but be set on a really solid foundation. We were able to take a step back and say, 'Okay, we have wonderful foundational attributes, but who do we want to be? We're coming out with our own brand new name. Who do we really want to be as an organization?' We had some thoughtful discussions around that. Over the first couple of years, it was really just standing us up and making sure we could function and operate. But then having the opportunity to say, 'What's next? What's out there?' Knowing that ESG is really important, to your point, we hear from all of our constituents and key stakeholders that it matters. So what are we doing? We started with that first report just as a baseline and have put a really strong strategy behind it. I'm really thrilled to be able to be the people pillar owner and talk about what that means for the organization. You can look at the building blocks that we put in place since we spun. We have a Chief Inclusion and Diversity Officer. We didn't have that role when we spun. We didn't have any ERGs, which we call I&D, inclusion and diversity, in the organization when we spun. We weren't gathering on a regular basis that feedback from our employees in terms of surveys, hearing what's on their mind, making sure we have a robust program around that two-way communication, and a variety of other ways that we're focusing on our people and making sure that our people know they matter. We say they matter, but they're feeling it every day. After going out to our different locations, unsolicited, people would tell me, 'We feel the focus on people here at nVent. We feel that people matter. It's more than something that's just said.' For me, that's so important, and that helps fuel the leadership and the drive around that S-tier point in ESG, although all of it matters of course. That helps bring back for me to the organization, not just to the HR team, but our executive leadership team and our people leaders who we bring together twice a year in a people leader call and talk about, 'Here's what matters. How are we showing up? What shadow are we casting for our people?' It's really important that they all feel it all around the world, and we've established that. It's been exciting. Here we are, we just celebrated our five-year anniversary May 1st, which is a thrill, hearing the feedback from our people and coming up on our third report.
J
John6:24
That's really exciting. Like you said, every organization has to start somewhere, so you start with the baseline and then you can start to get to the point where you can do this every single year. Anyone who's listening who's like, 'Oh, that's great, I would love it if our organization did this, but we're so behind,' I mean, everyone starts where they're at, and don't let that be a reason to not begin.
L
Lynnette Heath6:49
Exactly. You mature every year in terms of what you're reporting, how you're reporting, the different stories. As you mature on what you're reporting externally, of course with that comes the internal development: do we have the infrastructure in place to capture the data we want to report on? Are we making sure all of our people leaders and our people are focused because it matters? That comes with maturing. But I can tell you, by having that external report, it drives an internal focus as well. There's really a dual benefit of not just educating the world on some of the great things that we're doing, but also making sure there is that focus internally because our people read it, they care about it, and they get excited. They think, 'Wow, we could even do this next year or the next year.' So it drives that internal excitement as well as accountability.
J
John7:42
Something you mentioned a minute ago made me think about another reason why some people are hesitant to get into the space or hesitant to start tackling it: this concern around performative ESG work or social impact work. I'm really happy that people are concerned about that. I want organizations to do real stuff and not just the PR machine, not just performative measures. I've talked to lots of people that are like, 'Yeah, but we're just not there yet, and anything that we're gonna do is just going to be performative.' Can you start just by talking to us about that? As you're a new company, you're spinning yourself up, you're starting your first baseline report, you're maturing, you're building the plane as you're flying. That first year you're simply not going to be able to do as much as you're going to be able to do in year three. There's always this imposter syndrome, I suppose, on a personal level, but as an organization we can have it too. So how do you deal with that concern around, 'Are we just doing performative stuff, or are we really doing this?'