Navigating HR Challenges in the Solar Industry

Herve: I will say that our business is stronger than it has ever been. Heather: The success of growth and where I see companies growing consistently really is your people. I mean, the story is not does it make power? Because they all make power. The story is what does it power? This is what solar installers need to know with your host Herve Billie and Joe Mahamati. Herve: Hi there. It's Herve and Joe in what Solar Installers Need to Know, where we interview solar CEOs and experts on how they run their business on the solar cluster. We ask their private revenue numbers. We give actionable advice and learn about trade secrets so you can run and grow your solar business. Joe and I built a solar company from 0 to 12,000,000 sales and got successfully acquired. If you'd like to do the same or do better, go to sunvoy dot com slash blog to get actionable behind the scenes lessons on running and growing your solar business. And now without further ado, let's jump right into the next episode. Hi. And welcome to another episode of what solar installers need to know. Welcome to the podcast, Heather. Heather: Thanks. I'm really excited to be here. Herve: And, Heather, we've been working together quite for some years at at Ipsen Solar. But before you got into the solar industry, you had a full career at Schneider Electric for, I believe, six years. Heather: Yeah. So I was at Schneider Electric for about six years. I came through an acquisition with them, through a smaller company, and I've been in HR for a little over twenty Herve: years Twenty years. And I know you like merchant acquisitions. You told me that once, which is a very different conversation. But you also have your own company right now, RCR Consulting Group. Tell me a bit about that company. How many other solar companies you have as customers? Heather: Absolutely. Ipsen and working with Urvegg, you were one of our first clients that we ever worked with in the solar space. It really helped us get our start. Today, we support 12 different solar companies across The United States of varying sizes, anywhere from a couple of employees all the way up to about a 150 employees. It's our largest solar company that we support today. Herve: Alright. Well, maybe my first question to you is about HR horror stories. Maybe not about the Solar Air specific, but can you tell us about some some specific stories you you had to deal with? Heather: Gosh. There's so many. I think that's a hard one to narrow down. I will share one that recently came up that was a first for me, which doesn't come up very often anymore. But we had a situation where an employee reached out to us that they wanted to change their name, which isn't abnormal. Right? I mean, that happens. People get married, divorced, what have you. And when they provided us the document, it was a full name change. So they were changing their first name and their last name. And as we started looking at the paperwork a little bit more, we also noticed that the date of birth on the ID was different than the original date of birth that they had submitted to us. Herve: That's hard to change. Heather: Which immediately from an HR state, right, my spidey sense goes off, and we had to start, like, digging into it. And we actually found out that this employee had been subject to a fraud situation. And so she needed to go and reissue everything, her Social Security card, her IDs. We needed to update her entire profile. We need to do retroactive returns on her because she basically had almost an entire new identity and how you have to navigate that to obviously make sure that we don't have a broader employee identity theft situation. So just a unique one that recently came up weird. Right? I see my face and you're going like, what? But these are the things that come up in in HR. Herve: Know? It's just being in a situation birthday. How can somebody change their birthday? Heather: Right. Well, apparently, her original documents have been fabricated. So, you know, using things like e verify, which is required now in a lot of states to help identify and verify documents becomes really important to help substantiate that somebody is who they say they are and helps verify that the documents are real. And, like, just that I nine process, right, is one of those administrative tasks that come in of wanting to make sure that that I nine documentation is right and that somebody's looking at it and, you know, looking at the picture to make sure, hey. Isn't this the person who says that they are? And that sort of thing. And it's getting to have a lot more attention. Right? And, you know, I know there's a lot of cuts that are happening in different parts of the government, but this is an area that is getting a lot of attention. Alright. Wanted to make sure you've got you know, you're hiring people that are legally allowed to be working in The United States. And one of the areas that they're talking about funding is to come in and start doing more I nine audits, which hadn't been a thing previously. Herve: Yep. Alright. Well, speaking about what actually happens today in, maybe politics. But in the solar industry, there's a lot going on. Over the years, she spoke more about hiring and what needs to happen there, how to, have that process. Don't really wanna speak about firing at a moment, but a lot of solar companies are already kind of rethinking how they were in their business, so that strategy or process improvement. One key aspect that I believe is about accountability. You can't do anything if nobody feels accountable. So I remember having like a lot of long thoughts about how to improve accountability. Do you have any advice or or any ideas about how to improve accountability in a solar company? Heather: Yeah. So I think one of the big pieces needs to start when you first hire somebody. Right? So there are people who innately have gravitate towards being accountable as individuals. And looking at that through the interview process and helping to make sure that you're hiring people that have and share that similar mindset of what you're looking for in the organization. And then to me, it starts day one of the employment process. Right? Making sure you're setting very clear expectations. You know, what what are you expecting them to accomplish? What are their deliverables? What are those goals that you are setting? Making sure you're meeting with that employee regularly to help set that expectation, addressing things as soon as it happens. Human HR, I feel like a lot of times we tend to avoid conflict. Herve: Mhmm. Heather: This is not a situation. Right? If you see it, say something, address it. Make sure you adjust that in a professional manner. Right? Don't do it in front of people. Be respectful. Right? In that communication, seek to understand, maybe why they didn't do something or what may be happening or why they're calling out, that sort of Herve: Yeah. Absolutely. So the to increase accountability, it starts at the beginning when you hire people, set up expectations correctly, have job descriptions, adjust your job descriptions. Now for management team, when it's like, well, we have already job descriptions in place. What is something else where they can make sure? Because you can delegate things to people, but if they don't take it and run with it, they don't feel ownership, then it's not happening. So there's only so much you can do by delegating and giving tasks to people. So is there something else that you can advise to get more accountability in place? Heather: Yeah. So I again, I go back to looking at some of the basics. Right? So one of the concepts I know a lot of small businesses follows, like, the EOS methodology. And one of the big things that they talk about is right people, right seats. Right? So if somebody doesn't and they also talk about accountability charts. Right? So what is that person? What is that seat accountable for and responsible for? And is that person in that seat the right person to deliver on those accountability tasks? One of the things we see a lot in small businesses is, a habit of maybe somebody's not performing real great in one role, and we decide to shift them to another position. That doesn't necessarily mean that they have the right knowledge, skills, ability to be able to be successful. So it's one of the areas I would say if we start noticing that somebody's not taking that accountability, I would really encourage managers to really take a look at does that person really understand that role? Are those expectations clear? And are they the right person to be in that seat? To me, I would say is if you're going through and checking all of those and truly are being it's a critical of your process and that decision making, 95% of the time, would say you're gonna see a misalignment in one of those four areas. Herve: My next question was about growth in a solar company. What do you see is hampering growth? Maybe it's also related to having the the right people in the right seat. Right now, a lot of solar companies are either struggling, need to invent themselves, or just wanna keep growing instead of just plateauing. Do you have any advice on the from the HR point of view what what it could do to to keep that growth momentum? Heather: Yeah. So I would say to me, I think the success of growth and and where I see companies growing consistently, whether it's in the solar space or or in other industries, really is your people. It it is, I believe, a secret to success. It can be a differentiator in the market is making sure you have those right people in those right seats, making those tough hiring decisions, whether it is I'm going to wait to find the right person for this role and not settle. During the hiring process, I think every manager's been in that spot where we've maybe, you know, settled and then later on regretted and been like, we knew in the beginning this wasn't the right fit, but we were desperate. Don't make those desperate hiring decisions. You know, balancing to make sure we're, again, holding people accountable. I would say as far as growth, I do see businesses that are, you know, leaning into some of the areas that other businesses aren't wanting to grow. So especially with, like, the inflation reduction act that's out there and if you do some of the larger types of commercial projects that may need you to do some certified payrolls and are subject to prevailing wage, We know that some businesses are shying away from that because it's scary. Right? There's a lot of compliance, a lot of reporting. It's a new area that most solar companies haven't dealt with if you're not in the government contracting space. And because of that, a lot of businesses are there's opportunity out there, and a lot of businesses aren't taking advantage of it. Herve: Another piece is where you you were at Schneider Electric, and there was a quote of yours where you said that you would use 25% labor hour savings by stopping inefficient meetings. You have some companies where you have too many meetings where you can be inefficient. I also noticed one company had just no meetings anymore at all. Like, nobody from management speaks to the to the employees anymore. To me about, like, could you explain to audience about having the right meetings in place? Not to what what what balance are you looking for? Heather: Yeah. So I think every business is different, right, on what those needs are. It definitely depends on, are you an in person organization? Are you a remote organization? Right? You know, again, your installers may need a different level of support than if you've got, you know, your project managers that may not be reporting into an office and how that support is is happening. As far as finding that right balance, right, I would say making sure we're very intentional with meetings. Why are we having this meeting? Who needs to be on this meeting? Finding opportunities of does somebody need to be on just maybe the first part of that meeting for that discussion, and beyond the entire time? Or do they need to be on the entire time? Right? So do you stage that meeting? Right? So if you need to have, you know, maybe five people that are a core part of leadership on that meeting, we need, you know, maybe HR in for the first ten minutes. You need project management in for the next ten minutes and have it scheduled. Giving people the authority and empowering them. Right? And, this gets into some of that accountability piece where empowering employees to say, hey. This doesn't make sense for me to be on this meeting. And giving them that latitude to be able to speak up and saying, hey. I may not always or I may not always need to be on this meeting. Or doing things like, hey. Let's touch base and say, do we actually need to have this meeting today type of conversation? I would say the reverse is opposite too where we see a lot of inefficiencies is employees or teams, right, that go back and forth on email where if they had just picked up the phone and had a quick two minute conversation, it would have solved the problem, and we would have resolved it. So there's a balance. So, you know, helping provide those guidelines, again, empowering employees to be able to speak up and say, hey. This doesn't necessarily make sense. Or, you know, I don't need to be on this entire meeting. Or maybe it doesn't need to be a weekly meeting. Maybe it needs to be every other week. And periodically doing those assessments, it's so easy for us to get stuck in a rut, or just kinda get in that habit of, like, I'm just used to every Wednesday at 10AM. I'm going to have this meeting and this is what happens. And not sit back and question periodically and say, does this meeting still make sense? Are we accomplishing what we need to accomplish? Herve: Yeah. One thing is to change the the length of a meeting. If you have one hour meetings all the time, can you just not change it to a thirty meeting two minute meeting and see if you always go longer, you know you need one hour. But I also feel like if you always put one hour, you're gonna use the entire one hour. So changing just the regular cadence of the meeting, just make it does regular cadence meaning make it thirty minutes instead of one hour makes a big difference too. There's another piece where when you walk into a company, maybe when it becomes a new customer of yours, what are some hints that you see about this company is well won? Not just from an HR point of view, but just a feeling or, like, do are there some hints that really shows you, like, this is a strong company that I wanna have as a client or the opposite, like, I'm do not want this company as a client because it's never gonna work. So can you speak some about those those things? Heather: Yeah. One of the first things we look at is turnover. And in the solar industry, that's a hard one. Right? Because you naturally based off the position, right, you're gonna have higher turnover than norm, the other position. Right? But there was a group that we worked with where their average tenure was six weeks. Herve: Six weeks? Heather: And six weeks. And their longest tenured employee had been there for three months. And this business had been in existence for about five years. That's a huge red flag. Something's something's broken and something's going on here. Right? I would say, normally, what I'm looking at is, okay. Art, if they're coming and saying, hey. We wanna work with HR and we need help. Normally, I'm like, okay. Let's like, we can get to the bottom of it. We quickly realized that, you know, for this leader in particular, like, they just weren't engaged or wanting to really change. They just wanted to basically shift their problems over to someone else, and that really led the the leader didn't have accountability. Right? And so that just led down. It had a trickle effect. Right? And so getting to your question as far as, like, how do we tell if kind of an organization's got their stuff together is we definitely look at that piece. Like, employee satisfaction, how committed our employees to the organization. You know, there's definitely those paper aspects of HR. Right? Do you have a handbook? Are you do you have policies? Right? Are you in compliance? Those sorts of things. But, really, at the end of the day, we really look at who's the leader, what do they value, and how are they showing that accountability. Right? A big one we look at, not that every leader's here, but, you know, do they adhere to some type of that servant leadership mentality as far as, you know, are they there for their people, and are they in this for the right reasons? And if that answer is yes, 95% of the time we can work with them, and they've got that basis that we can help to develop an amazing company. Herve: Thank you for those those things. Well, you also mentioned employee handbook. Do most solar companies have it somewhere taking up dust, or is it a tool that is used? And every time there is a problem, you're like, what's in that handbook? And either go update it or at least point towards it. Like, what do you see is most common in the industry? Heather: What is most common? It's all over the board. Some don't have any some have a handbook and don't follow it. That I would say is probably one of the risky, right, to me. I would say whether you from a nature standpoint, I'm always gonna recommend having handbooks. Right? And then the next piece is is making sure you follow it. But with the handbook, it doesn't need to be this super big legalese document. You want it to be something that people can relate to, people can understand, and then you wanna follow it. If you're not following your policies, don't have them. That's where we see companies get into a lot of trouble. I was working with a group recently. I love my examples. Right? I was working with a group recently. We had an employee complaining that their PTO accrual wasn't correct. PTO is one of those sticky ones because depending on the state you're in, this is an accrued benefit, very similar to wages, and employees can be owed it based on the way the handbook is. And they were not adhering to the policy. A previous manager who was no longer the organization had granted written exceptions, which also dangerous, right, but had never actually put those into place. And so it you know, we basically had to go back five years to correct five years of errors. I don't even know if I can call it that because, you know, it you know, what was happening in the handbook wasn't happening in their payroll system compared to what the manager said. So we had three different things that were happening that we basically had to unpackage. Herve: Sounds fun. You're Heather: a fan of Herve: Well, that brings me to my next question about who do you represent. Is the HR department always representing and helping the CEO and management of the company, or do you help and represent the the installers and employees of a solar company, or or is it both? Heather: Both. You know, I usually use the analogy for HR. The right HR professional should be a bridge, essentially connecting the two sides and helping to navigate those different views, those different priorities. And there will be times where we are going to push back on employees, and there are gonna be times we're going to be pushing back on executives. At the end of the day, though, to me, our role is to support the business and helping a business make the right decision for them, and helping them navigate. What does that look like? Herve: You spoke about, like, the the the bacon these bacon rules in the highway where there's more opportunity sometimes in commercial solar. I see several residential installers moving more into commercial space. How is that affecting HR? Do you hire the same type of people, or or is there a different process, maybe amount of people necessary for a job at certain times? What are some big differences h r y between residential solar and a commercial solar company? Heather: Yeah. We see differences. One off of we don't always see success on people that have worked primarily in the commercial space moving into the residential because the commercial jobs tend to be much bigger. And so it's much more repetitive, and so they may not have had the full depth and breadth of experience. Sometimes on the commercial sides too, they may not have as much experience working, like, on the roofs and some of those safety protocols and some of the exposure specifically to the electrical work. Not that they're performing work as electricians, but as, like, an electrical assistant, or that sort of thing. Where the commercial side we see tends to be again, it's it's I'm doing this, and I'm doing this all day every day versus the solid you know, it's it's a much smaller ecosystem, right, in the residential as far as, like, I'm doing all of it, right, type of situation. And so that talent pool is going to be very different. We also see for the commercial, you may need to stack up very quickly for a short period of time to stack that commercial project, where on residential, that work tends to be a little bit more consistent. And so those offer packages travel rate is another big one that can come in with the commercial piece as well. Herve: And, you know, when we were talking about hiring, you know, I like to hire everybody and give them a chance, a second chance, a seventeenth chance, and so on. And you have a really a skill to talent to identify the right individuals. I think maybe CEOs tend to say, like, I can interview and hire people and just go with it. Do you see is everybody making the same mistake as me? Or do you see maybe at some point CEOs when they grow their company or to to grow and and the company they require to have more HR dedicated people? What do you see there? Heather: Yeah. I think it's, you know, the difference is is anybody who's doing something all day every day, you're gonna get practice at it, right, and a different level of experience. Right? So from an HR standpoint, our job is people. Right? We deal with people every day, and so we're able to suss things out through kind of that screening and that interview process that somebody who isn't doing that all day every day just isn't going to have the same depth and breadth. Said, there's a lot of different ways that CEOs or any hiring manager can help suss out some of it. Right? So there's a really funny YouTube video where it says, like, you know, if somebody was honest in the interview, and it's kind of a mock and, like, you ask, you know, why are you here? And she's like, well, because I need to pay my rent. That's not the real reason. I mean, that's not the answer most people are going to give. And so you wanna ask questions that are going to help get into those behavioral, right, or the whole theory that previous behavior is the best predictor of future behavior. Right? So asking a lot of behavioral interview questions, looking at what has made somebody successful in this role before, and what questions are we going to ask that are similar to that so that I can see, has this person done it? Do they have it? Are they speaking in specifics? Are they speaking in generalities? Are they throwing a lot of buzzwords out there? Some of those types of things are the big indicators of do they actually have what we need? And then last, I really encourage management to hire for personality and fit for the organization versus skills. Most of those hard skills can be taught and trained. Personality is innate, and it's much harder to shift someone's personality. Herve: Recently, saw an interesting, YouTube video about a person flipping the script. It's like when you are at an interview, why don't you as a manager, like, oh, you say you're promoting people. Tell me a recent person you helped get promoted, but tell me a recent person you helped train on something that you knew how to do well. It's like very, like, very fact based. Like, oh, you say you're a good company. Well, explain me very specifically what that means. That was interesting. Heather: Yeah. I had one that recently I was talking to a candidate who was like, yeah. I really value education. I'm constantly trying to, you know, advance myself and learn. I'm like, oh, awesome. Can you tell me about, like, you know, the last training session you attended or the last book that you read? Which to me, if you're saying, hey. I really value this. You should be able to rattle off at least one. And she she was silent. And she's like, well, you know, I've been really trying to prepare and thinking about going for this, but I'm like, okay. But, like, you're saying you got me this. But she couldn't come up with anything in the last, like, six months, year of anything that she had done from a professional development standpoint. So you really wanna make sure if someone says, hey. I value this. Well, yeah, companies wanna hear that, but ask them, give me an example. Herve: Now that you mentioned that, I suddenly have to think about a process we had at Ipsen Solar where when we onboarded people, we had a trainee to go through, like, the the onboarding was fully fleshed out with, like, training that I kept writing to about cybersecurity and and other pieces that we kept adding and updating so that you have a good strong onboarding. That was, a a nice process that I believe you you helped set up. So thank you for that. Last question about HR. Does the h stands for heart? Is there any room in the HR world to deal with emotions? Heather: Absolutely. And, yeah, I you know, some of my HR counterparts may give me evil eyes for that, but I believe what we do again, we're at this we deal with people. We deal with humans. The core part of who each person is is their heart. I really encourage all managers, HR, that's interacting with you. We need to be working in empathy. Right? We need to take the moment to understand where somebody's coming from and put try to put as much as possible ourself in their shoes. If I was that person, how would I wanna be treated? How would I want this to be handled? If I'm not performing, how would I want my manager to address this with me? If I was that person, do I for what I've communicated to them, do I feel like it's been addressed appropriately? Would I be clear that I'm not meeting expectations? Right? What questions how do I wanna be treated? I'm going back to that golden treat rule. Right? Treat others as you wanna be treated. And so, yes, absolutely. I think HR definitely has to have heart. I think leaders need to have heart and empathy as they navigate through the organization. And the most successful companies I see put that for in the front of what they do. Herve: Alondis, nice, wise words. I will leave it at that. Thank you very much, Heather, for being on the podcast. If you'd like to do the same or do better, go to sunvoy.com/blog and get actionable behind the scenes lessons on running and growing your solar business.