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Experience Action. Let's stop just talking about customer experience, employee experience and the experience of leaders. Let's turn ideas into action. Your host, Jeannie Walters, is an award-winning customer experience expert, international keynote speaker and founder of Experience Investigators, a strategic consulting firm helping companies increase sales and customer retention through elevated customer experiences.

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Ready Set Action

Jeannie Walters: 0:28

Hi everyone and welcome to a special edition of the Experience Action Podcast. I had the privilege of attending the X4 conference hosted by Qualtrics in Salt Lake City in March of 2025. I met tons of people, heard many, many speakers, saw lots of exciting technology. But today, what I'm bringing to you are two interviews that I was able to conduct with some interesting people I think you'll benefit from knowing. Now, I had the opportunity to talk to both Heather Brace, who is the Chief People Officer at Intermountain Health, as well as Mike Milliron from IMG Academy, where he serves as the Chief Operating Officer. Now, they both have unique perspectives, so what I wanted to do was share with you some of the different ways that they looked at things within the same context. I encourage you to sit back, listen to this wisdom and think about how you can apply to your organization. I'm going to let them introduce themselves and then we'll jump in. First up, I got to talk to Heather Brace.

Heather Brace: 1:39

I'm Heather Brace and I am the Chief People Officer for Intermountain Health. We are a large integrated health system based in Salt Lake City, Utah. We have 68,000 employees across 600,000 square miles and we have facilities in six states in the Intermountain West and I've been with Intermountain for 25 years. I've wound my way through the organization from a frontline leader to Chief People Officer.

Jeannie Walters: 2:07

Next, I had the opportunity to talk to the Chief Operating Officer at IMG Academy. Mike from IMG Academy, tell us a little about your role.

Mike Milliron: 2:12

I'm the Chief Operating Officer for IMG Academy, for our campus division that we have located in Bradenton, Florida, and I oversee our operation as thousands of campers 10,000 youth campers that come to us, a world-renowned boarding school with over 1,500 student athletes and what we think of as a one-of-one training destination for groups and tournaments and professional teams from all over the world. So it's a vibrant environment and it's something special for sure.

Jeannie Walters: 2:46

So, when it comes to developing both employee experience and customer experience, and when thinking about the many, many layers of customers and those that they serve at these institutions, I really wanted to know what does engagement look like there? So here's what they had to tell me.

Heather Brace: 3:00

A couple of years ago we pulled our team and just began to think about what is the employee journey. We noticed in our organization that our highest turnover, like many organizations, is that first year, that we have 30% or higher in first year turnover. We also noticed if we can keep somebody up to four years, you can keep them to 10. I mean, that seemed to be the magic number. Four years. You can keep them much longer.

Heather Brace: 3:27

So what's going on in the first four years? And we begin to map what that journey looked like. What are things that are really important to caregivers? Obviously, the first impression you know they're asking themselves does this job meet my expectations? Is it what I thought it was going to be? Am I reporting to a leader that I thought I would be reporting to? Then you have things like my needs. Is my compensation good? Are my benefits good? Do I have good well-being? Can I disconnect from work? Do I have opportunities here to learn and grow? Does someone care about me as a person? And that journey goes all the way until the last impression: somebody leaves, either voluntarily or non-voluntarily.

Heather Brace: 4:06

When we measure all those moments that matter and we have survey questions that kind of guide each of these moments that matter in the organization, we can really determine where the emphasis needs to be placed. So today, and a large part of it is because we've gone through a very big merger so we've had to lose a lot of cheese around benefits and pay and titling. That is an area where our score is quite low and, you know, I think it's a bit of a result of inflation has gone crazy. There's some national trends that play into this, but there's also some things that we can control, which is how well do our caregivers know where we're going? How well do they know about their benefits? How well do they know about how we keep a pulse on compensation? So it's really helping us dial in and see, on those moments that matter, where do we need the most emphasis.

Mike Milliron: 4:57

We anchor back into our purpose. So our purpose at IMG Academy is simple and it's powerful and it's to empower student athletes to win their future. So that kind of serves at the center of a lot of our work, which also then helps us enrich the lives of those students and ultimately for our staff as well. So there's a lot of activity and actions that we've been able to put in place in that regard. But in terms of truly enriching their lives, it's how do we create the best programming in the best environment with the best staff to best empower these students to win their future? And what we have found? When we're able to do that, we're also enriching the lives of our staff as well, because our staff are very much purpose driven. They're there for the students and they're there to empower them. So by winning for the students, we ultimately end up winning for the staff. But we focus on both their experiences with as much intentionality, as much personalization as we can and with the hope that we do enrich their lives and we do empower them to win their future.

Mike Milliron: 5:56

We have students at our core and we have campers and we have NFL teams and we have pro tennis players. We have all of that happening with an equally complex operation as well. So what we try to do as much as possible to make sure that we win on all fronts and create the what we call an unrivaled campus experience is what we try to do is we have a very robust listening program, so it's very important for us to listen. We always say it's always on, so we always have a some sort of listening exercise happening, but it's equally as important to actually learn from it and then ultimately act and communicate back with whether it's someone serving food or whether it's a professional tennis player what we've heard, what we're doing about it and what they should expect, which is unrivaled transparency in that regard. Those are a lot of the activities that we try to have in place and we've gotten pretty good at it, but there's always room for improvement, but we're proud of where we are today.

Jeannie Walters: 6:48

And, of course, in this work, both on the employee side and customer side, we rely on feedback. Feedback from employees through engagement surveys and other techniques, as well as, in Mike's situation, parents, students, staff we've got to think of everybody. So here's a little discussion about feedback.

Mike Milliron: 7:08

We went from two and a half years ago where it was infrequent, questions weren't necessarily relevant. People couldn't access the information in real time to really empower them, and

Jeannie Walters: 7:18

By people you mean the staff?

Mike Milliron: 7:20

Yeah.

Mike Milliron: 7:20

I'm sorry, our staff and they weren't able to close the loop. So that's kind of that was our starting point, and then what we were able to do was we were able to build, really from scratch, a very robust listening program that has relationship surveys as a part of it, but then also has journey-based ones as well. So there's always something occurring in the space in that regard, but we need to make sure, on the other end, our staff is empowered to act on it and they're empowered to listen and they know how to do it, and that's something I'm super proud of. The work that Lauren and her team have been able to do is to truly empower that staff to access the information in real time and then to be able to act on it.

Heather Brace: 7:59

We moved to Qualtrics a couple of years ago through our employee experience processes and it's been a great way in real time to be able to assess how people are feeling. Traditionally, I think, organizations have done employee experience surveys once a year. We too did that about seven years ago and found it largely unhelpful. Because what does an employee remember? They remember probably what happened in the last 30 days. So we're missing 330 days of the year of how people felt. So we started doing employee engagement surveys more frequently.

Heather Brace: 8:36

We do three full surveys a year and then we do micro surveys in between, taking slices of our population, because it helps us keep a pulse on what the sentiment is. We can see like we make a change in the organization. Does it increase engagement, does it decrease engagement? And I always say I think it's really sentiment.

Heather Brace: 8:56

I think pulse surveys all along in the year is how does someone feel at any given point of time? And then you take what does that look like for the whole year? And that to me, is what engagement is. Like, how engaged are the employees, because you can see them bounce back up and down based on things that are happening in the organization. So that's really how we're listening. We're trying to find other ways besides surveys, through town halls and open forums and rounding, and finding ways to get in front of people. And, probably more importantly, just how do you continue to humanize the roles that are executive leaders at the top, people who largely have grown up in the system but now are a little further away from the front line and sometimes we can feel really distant. So how do you keep you know, connecting and also making sure that people know you're relevant and you're a human being as well?

Jeannie Walters: 9:49

And I thought it was interesting that, no matter who I talked to, we always came back to accountability. Here's what they had to say about that.

Heather Brace: 9:57

At the basic levels of does an employee stay because their schedule is good or bad? Do they like their leader? Do they want to grow in a way that we're not supporting them? That is a frontline leader's responsibility and so helping to define what are the responsibilities at each level. Also, how does a leader engage their own team? You know we have this situation where we would get engagement surveys that would just be the leader reading the results, never having a conversation, never engaging in ideas. But we try to help leaders understand. This is just. This is an accelerator to help you amplify conversations.

Heather Brace: 10:36

I think most people want at least three things. They want clarity. I want to know what my expectations are. I want to understand what my role is. Where are my boundaries? I think they want to feel valued. They want to feel heard. They want to feel listened to. And they want to be developed. And those are three areas that we focus on alot with leaders. I use a phrase alot engagement is simple but it's hard. It's hard because it's intentional. It doesn't just happen. You don't like snap your finger and say, oh, we're now engaged. It requires a leader to get to know their people personally and professionally. It requires them to communicate. It requires them to reiterate messages. It requires them to be kind and direct at the same time. You can do both of those things. It requires them to hold people accountable. People are watching. So I think most of the things around engagement are just basic human elements and I just wouldn't overthink it too much, but monitor, measure and monitor what is important to the organization.

Mike Milliron: 11:45

The leaders need to lead by example, like if the leaders are going to be on. If I'm going to be all in on what we're doing from experience, an experience standpoint, I need to walk the walk, so it's important for me to model it for the entire staff as well. So I think that's important work. Work to get buy-in from leadership. That is massively important and we are so lucky at IMG Academy whether you just start, or you're the CEO, or you're in my role, we're all in on it. So that makes the life of kind of our experience team and others a little bit easier to know that you have the support. So really do what you need to do, have the conversations to get that executive buy-in. Because once you have that, if you're building the strong foundation from the bottom, coming from the top, you meet in the middle and you end up in a really good place and you end up building momentum which drives change, which drives culture, which drives expectations, and then you can start to have fun.

Jeannie Walters: 12:41

And with that accountability, that means we have to act. We have to act on feedback and ideas, and so when we are leading customer experience initiatives, when we are trying to really listen to customers of course it's more than that we have to tap in to really hear our employees listen to our customers and then act on that feedback.

Mike Milliron: 13:02

We've actually found that you can do more damage than good if you ask for insights and you ask for learnings and you ask for how the experience was, but then you just sit on it and that's not who we are.

Mike Milliron: 13:15

That's not what we do. So we've made a commitment that if we are going to listen and we are going to ask for feedback, we want to deliver where we can on it or we want to report back that we understand frustrations in certain areas it's maybe not a priority right now or give them transparency as to when we will attack it. We've had breakthroughs in personalization of certain components of the sport and academic experience. We've been able to create these really cool, innovative I don't know if anyone else is doing it what we call individualized personal development plans for each student athlete, and that's academics, that's athletics, it's what we call athletic and personal development. So it's really like a 360 where we align the staff, we align the student and we align the parent on what this plan is for development moving forward. So a lot of that has come through our listening. So, as I think of breakthroughs there's too many, there's a lot to mention, but those are some really powerful ones.

Heather Brace: 14:08

So get your survey results, have a meaningful conversation. Team, in order for you to give a higher score in this area. What would it take? And most people are really transparent. But what caregivers look for, because we've also had people say how do you not burn out your employees with so many surveys? Well, you don't if you follow up.

Jeannie Walters: 14:36

That's right.

Heather Brace: 14:36

If you take action and you close the loops, because then people go, oh wow, this is how I share information in the organization, because people are reading it. So we have actually found very limited burnout due to surveys because people know that we will listen, we will learn from the data and we will act on it, and that's really the loop that we've created in the organization.

Jeannie Walters: 14:53

And then they probably perpetuate that with their teams right and make sure that they have.

Heather Brace: 14:57

Really good leaders do.

Jeannie Walters: 14:58

Yes. So let's talk overall strategy, shall we?

Heather Brace: 15:01

We had this mentality that it's a one size fits all. If it's not good for everybody, we can't do it and we've really backed away from that content because we work in an environment where 40% of our caregivers are non-clinical, 60% are. Very different environments. What works for a professional employee in an office most likely will not work for a bedside nurse, in all ways. So, really letting go of that one size fits all and what works for this group really well, versus what works for this group, and really taking more localized approaches of where do we need to emphasize or de-emphasize?

Jeannie Walters: 15:42

Well, and you all work with vastly different regions as well geographically, so I imagine that would apply to some of those cases as well.

Heather Brace: 15:50

Well, you couldn't be any different in Salt Lake City as you are in Denver, Colorado and Butte, Montana, Cheyenne, Wyoming. I mean just even politically, laws that are different. We're very different, you know. So one size fits all just doesn't really work, yeah.

Mike Milliron: 16:08

There's opportunities to understand where feedback is similar, maybe where some gaps exist and some context is needed, like we were telling a story yesterday. Sometimes what a teenage boy may tell his parents, who are maybe halfway around the world, may may be completely different from what is happening. So for us we've really tried to double down on the transparency to make sure that what we're delivering on campus is also shown very clearly to the parents that are maybe not there. But then when we look at the data points, understand where maybe there's gaps in certain areas and dig a little bit deeper as to why and what may come from it. And what we have found is sometimes there's some opportunity for improvement with communication.

Mike Milliron: 16:51

You have to have a starting point that has a strong foundation and for us that was in terms of just defining customer needs. So what are the needs of our students, what are the needs of our parents, what are the journeys they go through to meet those needs? And start with defining that, understand who's responsible for those, and then you build a really cool listening program that measures against that. Now you have a strong foundation, now you can actually go and change. So I would encourage anyone to start there and just make sure your foundation is strong.

Jeannie Walters: 17:21

Well, I hope you got as much out of these conversations as I did. I want to thank Qualtrics for allowing me to participate in the X4 conference. I want to thank Heather and Mike for participating in these interviews and sharing all this incredible wisdom with us. We'll be back with more episodes of Experience Action, as you expect, but it's fun to do these special episodes every so often. If you have great ideas, of course, we want to hear them, and if you have questions, don't forget you can leave me yours at askjeannievip. Thanks for being here. See you next time.

Announcement: 18:00

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