Join America Back to Work, a weekly podcast, video, and blog series that covers timely and relevant topics affecting the labor market and workforce with industry experts. The series includes recruiting, hiring, retention, employee satisfaction, customer service, background screenings, and more.
From the Experts: Making Work a Win-Win for Employees and Employers
In this week’s episode of America Back to Work, S2Verify co-founder and chief strategy officer, Arnette Heintze, sat down with Lyndsay Bliss, vice president of human resources at Carus.
Bliss joined Carus in 2020 with more than 15 years of global human resource experience. Most recently, she served as vice president of human resources for INEOS Composites, where she was responsible for the human resource function of a $1 billion business spanning 17 countries.
She’s a true labor relations expert during a time when it’s becoming a critical skill set for all HR professionals—regardless of whether their workforce is unionized or not.
In her sit-down with Heintze, Bliss explains how she fell into labor relations when the business she worked for at the time was changing rapidly.
The previous labor relations expert had left, and she was forced to research and learn alongside her team from the ground up—in order to navigate a tricky contract designed to procure raw material for their chemical plant.
“Nine times out of ten when you’re talking about labor, it’s really about listening,” she says. “It’s about listening and really understanding what the other side is saying.” The goal: is to come up with a win-win solution that respects the demands of both sides.
That contract negotiation in the early days of Bliss’ career was scheduled to take two long weeks, but she finished in four days.
“We finished with a contract we were proud of from a company perspective, and the union was proud of from an employee perspective. They felt like–for the first time in a long time—the company actually wanted to hear what they had to say.”
Today, she’s an expert when it comes to developing organizational solutions that align people strategies with business initiatives.
Get more of her tips on how to navigate labor relations and changing employee tastes, attitudes, and behaviors in the face of rising inflation and an impending recession. Click here to listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.