LM Ep 97
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What parts of your talent or HR career do you value the most? In retrospect? What did these parts give you and how do they help you today? In today's episode, my guest explains Waze to build a well-rounded perspective and paints a picture of how he strategically applied that perspective to a recent large [00:02:00] acquisition.
My guest is Matt Chapski. Matt is VP of HR at Force Inspection Services, an oil field services company located in NICU Alberta. He has over 15 years experience in industries ranging from pharma, industrial construction, airlines, and oil and gas. In this episode of Talent Management Truce, you'll discover how to gain insight into your own organizational culture through experience outside of it, an intentional approach to integrating a larger firm after an acquisition and strategies to navigate a really tight as in 5% tight labor market.
Matt was a terrific guest and we even shared a few laughs. Please enjoy our conversation and thanks for listening.
Hello and welcome back to Talent Management Truth. I'm your host, Elisa Mitchell, and today I'm joined by my guest Matt Chapski. Matt is Vice President of HR at Force Inspection Services out of Alberta. Welcome to the show today. Hey, thanks for having [00:03:00] me. My pleasure. So let's begin by having you share a little bit about your background, your, your career journey to date and, and, and what you do.
Sure. Yeah, you bet. No, I grew up in the HR world a little bit by accident. Like a lot of, I think people in the industry and, and the profession. I originally took a bachelor of arts liberal arts at the University of Alberta and was an English literature major and psychology minor.
And so, and after four years, I figured I would have a better understanding of what I wanted to do with my career. And, and at the end of four years, I found out I, I had even less of an idea. And so I ended up taking a, a gap year and did the teaching English in Japan thing for a year and came back and put some miles on my soul and, and just really had a chance to figure out what I wanted to do then.
And, and ended up in the school of Business at the U of A and majored in hr. Was really fortunate to work with some really great companies afterwards. I cut my teeth in the pharmaceutical industry. One of the big four pharmaceutical companies one of the [00:04:00] oldest pharmaceutical companies in the world and 50,000 employees worldwide, and they had a Canadian presence in.
Mississauga or Canadian head office and they had purchased a company previously in Edmonton and I was there for a couple years. Loved it. Ended up moving into industrial construction and I was there with a large construction outfit working on the industrial construction side in oil and gas up in Fort McMurray and elsewhere.
And really enjoyed it. And then moved over to the airline industry for a little while. Always as a generalist, I was kind of bouncing around to different industries, but always working as an HR generalist and, and having a chance to support our Different client groups and different customer groups in different capacities, but always had kind of touch points with different areas of human resources and, and talent management.
And then moved over to the manufacturing world for a little while and, and then ended up here at force Inspection Services. I'm currently the vice president of HR and came back into a world I love in oil and gas and, and been here for just over a year. Just under a year now.
Just here. Okay. Alright. Yeah. [00:05:00] Yeah. So I love just the, it it, I had this visual as you were speaking of you just sort of going around experiences in your generalist role, in your business, partner roles and so on. It's sort of like, Ooh, let's try this industry and see what's going on. What did you notice as you sort of look across all of those, diverse experiences, what did you notice was the same and what was different?
it's really important for, HR and talent folks to work in different organizations to get, different fields for different business units and in different industries because you get a better, well-rounded perspective on how the profession is perceived and valued in different capacities.
And what I mean by that is, you know, for example, when I worked in the airline industry, we were heavily unionized. Unions had a lot of collaborative nature with the organization. Went to a different manufacturing sector and the unions had a very different relationship with management. And not one was good or bad, or right or wrong.
It was, you know, one was very collaborative, one was very, very [00:06:00] adversarial and for different reasons. But. You know, it's kinda like living in different cultures where you don't really understand very much about your own culture. Sometimes you know, your own home until you've had a chance to live somewhere else or travel somewhere else, or go on holiday somewhere else and see how the other side does it.
Right. It's so funny that you say that because you mentioned that you, you taught English in Japan during your gap. Yeah, I, I lived in, in France for a year. I did my third year at university for my undergrad in, in. Nice. And, I did learn quite a bit about sort of my own culture. 'cause I think you're in this reflective mode as you're kind of in this place of, you know, you're comparing.
That's kind of what we do. Like, oh, it's so different the way you do this here. And you know, for instance, even I took a course on English grammar at the university Denise and learned more about grammar than I had in my entire secondary education. Right, sure. Around my own language. Through wow.
The eyes of the French prof. Right. Like it was really strange. [00:07:00] And I love and so working in Japan was very different because of their the expectation of you know, committing to one organization and identifying with the organization that you work with. You know, it was written in the contracts of some of our Japanese staff that they had to attend so many work events, parties in the evenings.
Wasn't. In our contracts, but that didn't stop us from attending all the parties. And now, you know, 20 years later, I still That was formative years for attending all of the work parties. Right. Until the very end of the evening. So I love it. Well, so, so this idea of, you know, I think, I think travel, I think living in other countries is, is, is a, a beautiful experience if, if it's in, in the cards for people because of the perspective it gives you.
And then you were talking about, you know, across all of these different industries. It created this well-roundedness. Mm-hmm. This, this ability to sort of say like, I think you pick up on things differently, right. When you've had to flex to different styles, whether it's in labor relations [00:08:00] or in mm-hmm.
Top down, bottom up. Like however things get done. And what's rounding out? My experience now is I've always been with fairly large outfits. Like the smallest company I'd worked for was 4,000 people. Right. And a lot of them were multinational, a lot of 'em were you know, you're kind of buried in the middle.
You know, middle management or, or elsewhere. And then moving to where we work right now at Force Inspection Services, it's more of a boutique size although we're growing and so now seeing you know, how large companies get large and seeing it right from the size that we're at right now, it gives a different perspective as well.
So that's kind of been my latest journey or where I've ended up with my journey is being with this organization now that's in that hyper growth phase. Yes. So, the, the interesting thing too that you and I have been chatting about as we've been getting acquainted is, is also that the, the firm, so force inspection services, I wrote it down, let me see if I get this right.
Sure. It's a [00:09:00] tubular inspection and repair service. Yes. Perfect. Oil and gas industry. Yeah. We gotta get you in our sales team, our marketing team. We could get in advertising. That's perfect. Look at me.
So with with this new firm that you've been at, So you recently went through an acquisition and, and I want talk about this because this is a slightly unusual scenario where mm-hmm. Course inspection is the smaller company buying a much bigger company. Yeah. And with any m and a, you know, for, for talent, HR professionals, listeners, I'm sure many of you're nodding your head, there's a, there's a whole lot of work that comes with mergers and acquisitions, with that transition with supporting.
Employees to, to make that, that change, that shift. And in this case I'm particularly interested 'cause I'm like, wow, you've got like a, a, a larger critical mass coming in. So the way they've done things now, coming into the way you do things [00:10:00] and how have you and your team approached that? yeah.
It's a great question. So I joined the organization, like I said, just under. A year ago, and it was to help with the acquisition and, get everything, all the due diligence that has to get done. And then of course, after the deal gets done, then starting to merge two cultures and all the integration activities that have to, and then running it like this brand new business.
We wanted to be really intentional leading up to the transaction. We wanted to be really intentional during and post-transaction about how we were evaluating the cultures. What's similar, what's different? Evaluating the histories, what's similar, what's different? The people, you know, how the, they can compliment each other.
With the oil field services industry, it's a, it's a huge industry, and yet it's a really tight knit industry. People know each other, people spend lots of their work history with each other and force inspection services and the, and the company that we acquired, [00:11:00] there was a lot of cross pollination between the two, both with staff.
Both with customers that we had been fighting on bids for we've had staff come to our side and then staff go the other way and then come back. It's, oh wow. It's, it's been a lot of shared history fierce competitors in the industry for a long time. And so when the acquisition was announced, what was the top priority for us is we wanted to ensure that there was never a feeling of a winner and a loser.
We never wanted to feel as though there was the sense of, oh, we've, we've won, we've taken over our competitor, now we're growing. Now you're gonna do things the way that we did them because we bought you. That was never something that we wanted to look at. I was talking with one of our, One of our lawyers who does m and a work, and he said the reason that he went into m and a part of the reason he loves it is because it's a part of law where there is no necessarily a winner and a loser.
Somebody gets, you know, [00:12:00] the value that they have for an asset, somebody else gets the asset and it's a, it's now a, a partnership. And that's how we wanted to really approach this. So, we have been really intentional about evaluating all of our different programs. During the acquisition afterwards, we didn't wanna assume, okay, the seller was going to be jumping into our safety program or our quality program.
We're going to evaluate all those different programs from scratch. Or computer software. Do you go onto our system or their system? Well, no, let's evaluate them and see what's best from both. Let's start from the beginning. We were looking at, when we're still looking at a branding strategy, does it make sense to rebrand the organization to something different?
Because it is a different entity than what it was before. Fundamentally even our benefits, so from an HR perspective that had a benefit program. We have a benefit program. Well do we just start now? Something completely different, which is what we did. We went back to market. We even went back to [00:13:00] a different benefits admin provider.
Oh, wow. And that benefits provider was the one that. The seller originally used, which we thought, great. These are the nickel and dime things that as an organization that was just purchased, it can make it feel and seem a little bit more normal. Right? Their benefits card's the same, even though the pro program might be slightly different, right?
And so, you know, being really cautious that we're not just smashing the two programs together, but understanding how the two can integrate and creating something that's brand new, that was something that was really important for us. Oh, I really, I just wanna underscore that. So not smashing, like I pictured, you sort to like mash to squash us together.
So it's not about, about mashing up, it's, it's integrating well, and I'll give you another example. We had, I. We had a celebration here a couple weeks ago. We had a pancake breakfast for our employees. I saw Justin in there. No. Yeah, yeah. It was a cowboy hat. Yeah, I know. [00:14:00] Yeah. Maybe not in the oil field sector.
Maybe he would, but he hasn't been Justin Trudeau for, for our non-Canadian listeners. That's right. Yeah. He no, we had this pancake breakfast where everybody was invited and it was in part to celebrate our 20th anniversary. We just had this like a month ago. So Forest Inspection Services and. You know, 20th anniversary.
The organization that we purchased though has been a lot older and we had employees who. Have been with their organization longer than 20 years. Yeah. And so we wanted to honor their service awards with a, you know, a plaque and a gift and all the rest and come up and our c e o shakes their hand and gets some pictures and, and everybody can get recognized.
And so on the 20th anniversary of our company, we were giving employee service awards for 20, 25, 30, 35 years. So their service actually is longer than what the company's been around for. So did their certificate say like minus five minus, yeah. Yeah, we totally should have done that. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
That would be good. That's wild. But what a [00:15:00] beautiful way to kind of, to, to merge, to integrate, right? Yeah. Versus cash. To honor both, both things at the same time. How do you feel it went over? I think pretty good. Yeah. We've had leaders from both the buyer and the seller involved in, you know, doing postmortem.
How do we feel the integration is gone? How do you think it's going? We're constantly reaching out with employee surveys. We feel as though there's a real opportunity for us to Integrate our operations organizations even more than what we have so far. So we're gonna start unifying physical locations, which is something that we haven't done yet.
And so we're getting our management that existed on the foresight as well as the seller. We're getting them both involved in redesigning what the new location's gonna look like. And so, making sure that operationally it's not one set of procedures versus another. It's actually maybe something completely new.
Right. Yeah. Beautiful. Yeah. There's so many things to think [00:16:00] about. Right. And it's, it's, it, it, it, it doesn't just, just touch obviously HR operations, it's the entire entity, right. That, yeah. That is impact. Yeah. You wanna take the best d n a that you can possible from both, right? And, and, and it's, and it's all in the little, you know, details.
It's not necessarily, you know, keeping the company, the original company's paint colors on the walls that have the old company logos, although that could be part of it. Or keeping the artwork on the wall. It's about, like I said, the day-to-day stuff that the frontline workers are gonna be doing so that they are.
Feeling comfortable, like I said, with our operations programs, quality programs, safety programs. It reminds me of, I'm married and have two wonderful kids. And, and when my wife and I, after we got married, I moved into her condo and it became very obvious the both of us, that it still felt like her condo.
And so we were there for about, I dunno, three months. And then we said, okay, now it's, try to time to get somewhere. New that's both of ours and we can kind of start fresh where it's mine and [00:17:00] hers. And we need more space. Anyway, analogy. Yeah, that's a super, an analogy, right? To think about that. 'cause I, you know, I do, I I work with a variety of different companies in different industries as well as having, you know, my own corporate experience.
But it, but it is interesting 'cause some companies really, you know, the acquiring ones often have this, this not often. I'd say maybe it's 50%. Some of them have a more controlling kind of, impulse around how they want to integrate. And I'm using air quotes here to how to integrate the, the acquired company.
Right. They feel like, okay, well it's time to do it our way, the right way. You know? So, and I think what I'm hearing from you, it's about let's not be right, but get it right. Yeah, exactly Right. No, that's well said. Yeah. Okay. I'm, I'm going to steal that from my own and next time we're in a meeting. Oh, feel free.
Yeah, that's right. It's not mine. I stole it. Really? I'm sure it's somewhere, but I, but I, that comes up a lot and certainly in coaching, right? Like what if, what if Right. This needed to get it right versus be right. Mm-hmm. 'cause that's something that we can all [00:18:00] afford. Yeah. Go out a little more. Right. So, okay, so we've got this This merger and acquisition that that's happened and, and, and you're traveling with that and it's, it's, the integration is going well.
Something you'd also mentioned to me is, you know, and I'm thinking about it in terms of all of these new, new, not new, they're not, they're not new to themselves, certainly the 25 year service, but they're new coming into this new entity and you've got a labor market where you operate in a niche, large, yet niche industry, and there's like 5%.
I think unemployment. Yeah. 5% unemployment rate right now. Yeah. Close to a labor shortage, right? Mm-hmm. So what do you do with that when it comes to, you know, your, your workforce? Management? Yeah. Yeah, for a big part for us, I mean obviously recruitment and selection piece is key. Really ensuring that we're being diligent about hiring the right person is, is everything.
The bigger focus for us is, Retention is, you know, the, the sentiment of it's much easier retaining an existing customer [00:19:00] than going out and seeking a new customer. That's how we look at our employees, where we wanna take our time making sure that we bring the right person into the organization.
And then really investing in our people. So part of the. Value proposition that we have as an organization is that we grow our own talent. So, an operator, an inspector in our organization doesn't need necessarily a red seal ticket or they don't need a university education. We've got folks from all corners of the world, from all walks of life making a living and starting from the ground up.
And so they can You know, have a variety of different ways that they're able to grow their own competencies and, and challenge themselves and contribute to the organizations in different ways. And so what we're trying to do is reward people. So align our compensation structure. So we have a fairly rich benefits program.
We have a really rich R s P matching program. And so it's intending on rewarding people for staying with the [00:20:00] organization as time goes by. And then we also do things like tuition reimbursement if they want to go to school. And different allowances. You know, as, as the, you know, cold winter months come for clothing, we don't want have that seasonality that comes with, Hey, now it's minus 30 and I find an indoor job.
No, we want to try to keep our talent grow it. And then the other piece that we're gonna be launching is a learning strategy for our organization so that it's aligning our competencies with our values. We're aligning that both with career road mapping. So what can you come to expect working in this organization?
For people who are familiar with the oil and gas industry, it can be very cyclical. You know, commodity heavy in terms of the price of oil. And what we wanna do is we think that we find value by being as sustainable as we can with our employment opportunities with people to make sure that they stay with the organization in the long run.
So they're not riding the roller coasters, the ups and downs, and then find themselves outta work. [00:21:00] So, all of that to be said is, you know, when it comes to a labor crunch, which we're in right now, is it's a long game. We wanna grow in a, in a sustainable way, right? So, okay. And so, I, I wanna acknowledge that you're launching this learning strategy and, and aligning competencies and, and you know, looking at career mapping and so on.
'cause we know from from so many studies over the past. 20 plus years, actually. It's not net new, but it just keeps getting confirmed that, you know, there's all this great pay stuff with the benefits in the, in the comp and the, the R S P matching and tuition assistance. All that stuff's great. And for many listeners, they may not have some of those things.
And so, you know, I often get asked, well, what do, what, what can we do instead? And it's focusing on the culture piece. So, you know, I think helping people be very clear on. What it, what it looks like to be successful, right? What are the behaviors that are expected in different roles? That's where your competency piece comes in.
I think that's really key. Mm-hmm.[00:22:00] You know, since retention is such a core focus for you, what else do you do when it comes to culture? And it kind of links back to the merger acquisition conversation too, right? Mm-hmm. Like how do you create that sense of, of cohesion? Of belonging? Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's a great question.
Well, there's a lot of focus that we have as a senior leadership group. After the acquisition, we get together on a fairly regular basis and talk about some really big questions You. What is our, you know, we talk about mission statements and vision statements, but we do it in a really Available way, you know, why are we here?
What is the benefit to the world for, for what are we doing here? We revamped our core values right after the acquisition to say, okay, let's start right from the beginning. What, you know, as our senior leadership group, Do we leave the lead, these values ourselves? Is this reflective of the organization?
Should it, what do we want to filter down to our employees? And then the last time we got together, we even got together with some guiding principles as a, you know, as a senior [00:23:00] leadership group, how do we want to govern ourselves and how do we wanna model the way for our. Mid-level meet managers and our mid-level leaders and our frontline supervisors and our individual contributors so that we're able to say, okay, if we're going to engage each other in a certain way, this is what the expectation is.
This is what the value is with working for this organization. Just to be really, really clear, because unless we're clear at that level, we're never gonna get clear at every other level. And so I think that. When it comes to engagement, surveys go out. In any organization I've been in it, you know, data gets looked at.
You can be, I've been on a top 100 employer list, you know, four times in my career. It's great, you know, it's great branding. But it depends on what you do with the data, right? And at the end of the day, what do you say about the organization? How likely you to stay with the organization. These are key, key factors and it's what you do with the data that really makes the difference.
So, yes, I could not agree more. I, it's not a check checkbox [00:24:00] exercise, right? Oops. No. You know, we did this engagement thing and we're, we're done. Because it's all also only ever a snapshot in time. Right. Well, and it gets parsed and analyzed and reported on, and often months have gone by for some big organizations.
And then how useful is it? And at the end of the day, you never wanna feel as though you've arrived. Alright, so you have great results. And now you can say, well, yeah's only one piece. Exactly. You can't take the foot off the gas because you never got there in the first place because you were happy with, you know, X percentage or, or a low turnover or whatever metric you wanna establish.
You wanna keep striving for better and that's how you got to be great in the first place. Yeah. And, and it's not, it's not sort of the checkbox exercise, nor is it a, a one what's the idea? One, stop suits. All right. Like, one thing, it's about, I'm always an advocate for multifaceted approach. Like, how do we, how do we come at x from multiple angles, right?
Because everybody. You know, has their own set of, of baggage, of perceptions, of experiences and so that they're [00:25:00] bringing with them. So, You have to consider that, especially when it comes to retention. So what, what, what are all the things we can put in our bag of tricks? Mm-hmm. So, you know, you've got a lot of those, those, you know, the baseline, the comps of some really great stuff that you're doing there.
And then I'm hearing very much in the culture side, it's you're leading. From the top, right? Like really being very intentional. Here's how we wanna show up our guiding principles, here's how we want to model the way. Mm-hmm. And I, I, you know, kudos, I really wanna acknowledge that. 'cause I think that is how we do impact culture positively, right?
Because starting at, you know what, 'cause people are watching, right? Mm-hmm. What are we showing them? Never, ever underestimate the impact that your behaviors have when you're showing up to work. Right. Because people are watching and even for things that you're not paying attention to. Yeah. Oh yeah.
It's so true. Okay. So thank you for giving us a bit of a window into, into that whole piece. And I, I really I wanna emphasize again for listeners this idea that, you know, sometimes we get stuck on [00:26:00] acquiring, right? Like, how do we acquire talent? And, this, this other idea of, you know, especially in the tight labor market, let's focus more on what's, what's within our control internally, around how we retain and how do we engage over the long haul.
So I, I think I think you bring up an important point. So we're, we're coming close to, to the end of our conversation. Conversation. But one of the things I'd love to kind of get your, your thinking around is you used the word, it's one of my favorite words, intentional a whole lot. And that's come up from the moment I met you and, and just this idea of being very intentional in approach versus getting stuck in day-to-day rhythm.
Right. So how do you personally help yourself be intentional? Yeah, I think it's important to be I mean there's a lot to be said about mindfulness these days, right? Getting disattached from technology not being able to unplug just to understand you know, what you're doing. For me, the big one is trying to take a 30,000 foot view about why am [00:27:00] I doing what I'm doing?
What makes. Me happy as an individual. What gives me fulfillment, what gives me a sense of purpose? And then try to do the same for what, what I'm doing at, at work, right? Why do we get caught into the habits and the traditions and the norms that we do? You come in, you say hi to certain people in the office.
You check your email. You go for lunch. You, you know, just life kind of has a way of speeding by without recognizing about what. You're doing and why you're doing it. So when we're being intentional, it's really kind of dissecting at the end of every meeting, at the end of every day, at the end of every week, okay, well, what happened?
Right? And are we happy with what happened? If we're not what caused it? If we found success and benefited from success? Where did that come from? Right? Was it because we always attribute to our, our own talent, our own brilliance, but at the end of the day, maybe we just got lucky and, and we have to identify when that happens sometimes too.
Do we kind of, fail upwards? [00:28:00] And not that there's anything wrong with that too, but we just gotta understand really closely what's happening and why it's happening and, and that intention will come from that place, I think. So Rich, you're speaking my language. So I just wanna unpack this because this is, this is, this is the work I do both one-on-one and in my, in my group programs and so on, is helping people.
Decide that they're gonna step out, right of the, the day-to-day and the chaos and the mind swirl and choose to take that, what you mentioned, the 30,000 foot view. So it's, it's frontend and backend, the overall process. So what I mean by that is, you know, using your language, take the 30,000. Foot view. And by that you need to decide that you're going to pause.
Mm-hmm. Right. Pause and look up. 'cause we're sort of like heads down, skaters, you know, all over the hockey rink most of the time just trying to get stuff done so it's head up, don't get hit by the puck, but actually go into the bench and see what's happening. Mm-hmm. And [00:29:00] decide how. You want to show up, you know, kind of like the guiding principles you mentioned with your senior leadership team.
And then though there's the, the other part which both of these get missed more often than we'd like as a, as a human species. Right. And I think this is where the magic happens though, being intentional, upfront and then reflecting. So actually saying, well, hey, at the end of the meeting or at the end of the day, what, what?
Happened, what went well, what didn't? What was my role in it? What does this mean for where I wanna go next? Right. How do we wanna prepare? So it's this continuous loop of, action, reflection, and learning. And, and the benefits to you as a leader are immense because it has a multiplier effect. You can then represent yourself well, I.
To those around you, and they give you that same energy back. And the strongest mentor I, or maybe my favorite mentor I've ever had he explained that to me. You know, the world will reflect back to you what you're putting out there, but only if it's the best version [00:30:00] of yourself. And so it's that responsibility.
So be the best version of yourself. and those words are written, they're in a framed you know, they're, they're framed in my daughter's room. They're hanging on the wall. Right. And she and has a chance to go and hopefully reflect on that maybe when she's a bit older. 'cause she's still a little bit young yet, so.
Yeah. Yeah. But what a beautiful thought to bring to her and some modeling that you're doing. Right. You know, like, I think, I think it's so important both at home and in the workplace to be constantly thinking about. How do we wanna show up? How do we want people to experience us? And Yeah.
And that legacy is being about other people, right? And, and understanding It's as strange as personal's legacy is. It's actually about other people. It's so true. Yeah. Well it's, it's even like that exercise where it's like, you imagine you're at your own funeral and what's the eulogy? Yeah.
You right? Yeah. Whoever's saying what, what are they saying? 'cause it is about them and their perceptions and their experiences. So yeah. That's a great point. Yeah. Well, such a pleasure Matt. Thank you [00:31:00] so much for, for coming on the show and having this conversation with me. I've really enjoyed it immensely.
Yeah. Well thanks me too and thanks for having me. Hope it was it was a lot of fun. My pleasure.
