How a seasoned HR leader is redefining onboarding, AI, and leadership development
“If there’s one thing that I’ve learned throughout my career, it’s that change is the only thing that’s constant.”
So says Lynn Roger, longtime Chief Talent Officer of BMO Financial and now CPO of Bayshore Healthcare, in reflecting on her four-decade-long career.
She’s built her career around this philosophy and demonstrated a willingness to embrace risk and drive innovation, offering valuable lessons for HR professionals navigating today’s rapidly evolving employment landscape.
Reflecting on her career trajectory, Roger emphasizes the importance of embracing change.
“I’m a big risk-taker,” she shares, adding that for her, credibility with other business leaders in the organization is a crucial foundation to her approach.
Credibility is built upon action, she shares, starting with listening intentionally and understanding the challenges of other leaders. "And together with my team we create solutions that build that bridge, between strategy and people."
Leveraging AI for employee experience
Despite her reservations about AI in recruitment, Roger is not opposed to using technology to improve the employee experience; at Bayshore, she is leading efforts to implement AI solutions that streamline access to policy information for frontline workers.
“We’re working on an AI solution that would create a consumer grade experience for the employee to just type in, ‘I need help doing this,’ and then the information would be gathered from the policy.”
Roger’s vision is to make HR support as seamless as possible – especially with in-home employees who are more disconnected from the employer.
“I’m a big advocate of making it easy for an employee to interact with their employer by ethos. And so I want to make it seamless,” she says.
“I’ve been around customers my whole career, and that’s always what we try to do, is make the experience seamless for customers. My goal is, make it seamless for employees as well, curate the content they need exactly when they need it, and give them micro-bits of it instead of going through 20 pages.”
Adopting with caution: using AI for employee ease, not recruiting
However, in the face of the onslaught of AI automation, Roger’s approach has been more nuanced, choosing to use the technology to “create capacity” through friction-point specific deployment; while she recognizes the potential of AI to support HR operations, she draws a clear line when it comes to recruitment and selection.
“I have a very strong point of view on AI and recruitment. Basically, I’m not a fan of AI and recruitment, especially when it deals with selection,” she says, pointing to recent instances of AI hiring gone wrong as reasons for caution.
“It’s just not inclusive … we’re a human capital business. This is our business, and so I don’t want to use AI in the selection at all. This is a people-centric organization, and we’re going to have people talking to people making decisions about people.”
Transforming onboarding to reduce turnover
One of Roger’s key initiatives at Bayshore has been to overhaul the onboarding process for new hires, particularly in the context of high turnover rates in healthcare.
“A lot of the individuals were leaving in the first 90 days,” she says.
“What I wanted to focus on is, let’s create a sense of attachment to the organization in those first 90 days.”
Recognizing the unique challenges faced by home-based healthcare workers, Roger’s team adopted an agile, multidisciplinary approach with an aim to make the first 90 days of a worker’s employment as seamless as possible.
“We’ve had great results in the satisfaction of our employees in the first 90 days, but also importantly, in the retention,” she says.
“So we’re continuing to progress along that journey, and bringing other roles into the onboarding journey, which includes automated provisioning,” such as immediate delivery of necessary equipment upon hire, eliminating the need to rely on HR professionals to coordinate ordering.
She also acknowledges the difficulty of maintaining personal connections at scale, another area where automation is easing the process: “When you’re doing high, high number hiring, large numbers of hires, it’s hard to connect with everyone. So we try to make it easy for the leader to connect with them.”
Investing in leadership development
Roger’s commitment to continuous learning and leadership development is evident in Bayshore’s new training programs, using curated LinkedIn Learning courses to train senior-level employees on leadership.
“They have online courses that they do on their own time, but we also bring them back to do case studies for our organization. This is a new thing that we’ve started,” she says.
“And for the first team, their case study, we’re doing kind of a Dragon’s Den approach, where they’re going to pitch their idea, and we may implement one of those ideas.”
The program is structured to foster collaboration and innovation across the organization, she explains, adding that the focus on management training ensures that values “cascade” through the entire organization.
“I think it’s really important to set the tone of development and leadership accountability at the top of the house, and cascade that down through the organization,” she says.
“So we’re very intentional about starting with the top and working our way through the hierarchy.”
The impact of these programs is already being felt, Roger says, as she has seen leaders gain self-awareness from the learning process, a quality she highlights as valuable.
“When your organization is going really, really fast and you’re really, really busy, leaders don’t take the time to reflect on the impact they have on others. They’re not very self aware,” she explains.
“They don’t get a lot of good feedback. So I would say that there’s been a big ‘aha’, and also an appreciation for the leaders that are going through the program that we’ve invested in, because they’ve learned a lot about themselves that were maybe blind spots. If you’re not self-aware, then how can you let new ideas come in? I don’t believe that you can.”
