Please congratulate the Q3 winners for the HR Pillar Award!

Category: Customer Experience

UVA Human Resources proudly recognizes Abby Hall, a Data Concierge and Workforce Planning & Analytics Enablement Consultant on the People Analytics team. Her continuous commitment to enhancing customer satisfaction and self-sufficiency has left an indelible mark on the UVA community. Here are some of Abby's contributions:

1. Building Customer Self-Sufficiency: Abby worked with a finance director in the School of Medicine to find and run supplemental pay reporting. She actively listened and was very knowledgeable about human capital management (HCM) reporting in Workday. Her time made a material difference in the finance director's understanding of reporting in Workday, which improve the director's efficiency.
2. Staying People Focused: Abby establishes and maintains positive relationships by making sure customers feel heard and appreciated. Her people skills are evident in her ability to swiftly adapt to the needs of the customer, ensuring a personalized experience. 
3. Providing Leading Expertise: Abby is deeply knowledgeable about reporting HCM in Workday and leverages this expertise to create impactful solutions. Customers have expressed that her guidance has materially improved their understanding and efficiency.

Abby truly delights in assisting people, a sentiment that comes through clearly in customer feedback. Even when a problem needs to be referred to another department, Abby remains involved, following the issue to ensure it gets resolved. Her approach embodies not just technical prowess but a genuine, compassionate commitment to helping people. Thank you, Abby!

Category: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

UVA Human Resources proudly recognizes Maria Terry, HR Business Partner for the School of Medicine. Her day-to-day relationship-building and support for her colleagues have left an indelible mark on the UVA community. Here are some of Maria's contributions:

1. Creating the LatinX Employee Resource Group: Maria spearheaded the creation of the LatinX ERG, providing representation, a welcoming and inclusive space, and community building for Latinx employees across Grounds through resource sharing, social events, and positive networking opportunities. 
2. Championing Bi-Lingual Pay: Maria has worked in collaboration with HR stakeholders and Medical Center Leadership to advocate for pay incentives for Spanish speaking and bi-lingual translators. She researched how peer medical centers are handling this concern, cost/budget, and what type of education is needed to test an employee’s proficiency. She wants to ensure that every patient understands their health care plan and this can improve health care disparities in the surrounding communities. 
3. Living Her Values: As an Army Veteran, having served in Iraq and supported soldiers across the United States, Maria adopted values from her military experience such as loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity, and personal courage. These values are part of her everyday mindset, which embodies both the "great and good" in President Ryan's strategic plan, and the people-focused DEI category.

Maria has been an amazing thought partner on every topic imaginable in HR. As a mentor to students in MOCHA/WOCHA as well as bringing salsa lessons to the team to recognize Hispanic Heritage Month, she's an amazing colleague, culture champion, and HR leader for the School of Medicine. Thank you, Maria!

Category: Exceptional Execution (team category)

UVA Human Resources is pleased to celebrate the outstanding collaborative efforts of Brandon Kenty, Mary Carter, and Alex Jeter, a cross functional team who collaborated to improve a manual out-dated process in HR. Their combined contributions have significantly enhanced HR operations and positively impacted the UVA community. Let’s look at the team’s collective achievements:

1. Identifying Areas of Improvement: The team created a report that captured old benefit change events that were saved for later or awaiting action in an employee's inbox, but which were stale events past their enrollment window. Leveraging  a mass operation management function in Workday, they were able to identify these stale events and cancel them
2. Innovating Beyond the Problem: The team then identified that the same application could be used to clean up almost 7,000 events that were sitting in the system since HR went live in Workday. This not only saved countless hours of work that was previously done manually, but also prevented employees from inadvertently wiping out their benefits with a stale event that they chose to act on.

Brandon, Mary, and Alex were willing to take risks and explore unchartered territory in the area of benefits events in Workday, looking for novel processes to improve the current process of addressing stale benefit events. Their curiosity, collaboration, and openness to create a better solution led to improving efficiencies and serving the customers even better. Thank you, Brandon, Mary, and Alex!

Category: Exceptional Execution (team category)

Liz Menter and Kim Wood have been instrumental in building, launching, and executing a functional career services offering for UVA staff members to empower and support our staff, which aligns perfectly with President Ryan's "Great and Good Plan." Their combined contributions have significantly enhanced HR offerings and positively impacted the UVA community. Let’s look at the team’s collective achievements:

1. Building Relationships: Liz and Kim have already worked extensively across Grounds, building relationships and looking for points of collaboration across UVA's diverse environment, with partners in UVA Health, Finance, Facilities Management, Advancement, Student Affairs, and more. They are resourceful and extremely adaptable, and this adaptability has lead them to successfully pivot the launch services around any and all obstacles that they've encountered.
2. Launching the Career Navigation Center: Despite the challenges associated with launching a brand-new initiative, Liz and Kim hit the ground running as soon as they joined the team in March of 2023. By early May they had successfully launched a library of career resources for UVA staff and built out the very foundation of what this coaching service would look like. Within a short span, they have successfully developed and implemented a range of services and programs, resulting in significant positive outcomes for our staff members.
3. Building Careers: Within 60 days of the launch of the program, measurable success could be seen. When a manager approached them for support for a team of nine temps looking to transition to permanent employment, Liz & Kim built tailored workshops for this group and supported them 1:1. Six of the nine temps were able to secure full-time positions at UVA prior to the end of their temp assignment, and a seventh recently secured a full-time role at the university. The remaining two took new temp assignments and continue to work with the coaching team.
4. Embodying Excellent Execution: Kim and Liz built off the foundation that Heather Newton and Joe Arton created when conceptualizing the program, and were able to execute within two months of their hire date. Since the soft launch of the program, they have coached on a 1:1 basis over 175 employees, many of whom have already applied for and secured new roles at UVA. Throughout the soft launch process, Liz and Kim maintained a net promoter score in the high 90s. To date, 96% of participants would recommend this service to a friend.

Liz and Kim constantly seek innovative solutions to further bolster the success of the Career Navigation Center. They are able to stay current with industry trends and best practices while also offering a truly customized solution to each customer that participates in the service. They are unwaveringly committed to the success of the project - going above and beyond the call of duty not just in service of customers, but to ensure the success of the project overall. They have set an incredibly high standard of success in just over six months with the team. Thank you, Liz and Kim!