This transcript is auto generated
00;00;00;00 - 00;00;23;20
Tom Godar
Welcome to Blackwell’s Labor Law Insider podcast. This is your host, Tom Godar. I’ve been practicing in the labor law sector for more than 40 years, and I can tell you that in no time of my practice has labor law had greater changes than in the last five, six years. We began the podcast in May of 2021, following the election of President Biden.
00;00;23;25 - 00;00;49;12
Tom Godar
And elections have consequences. And under the Biden administration, a new National Labor Relations Board with the new general counsel reshaped labor policies and they were very consequential. During that time because it was so important to stay on top of liberal issues. The family of Husch Blackwell labor law counsel more than doubled in its coast-to-coast reach to assist our client.
00;00;49;15 - 00;01;18;11
Tom Godar
Well, we’ve since had another election. In the January of 2025, President Trump was inaugurated to his second but non-continuous term. And once again, we’re seeing significant changes in how the National Labor Relations Board and its appointed members, the GC right now an acting general counsel, and the board members are going to interpret the National Labor Relations Act and its associated laws.
00;01;18;14 - 00;01;53;27
Tom Godar
So once again, we’re continuing a wild ride of labor law. It’s not likely to change soon. So buckle up and enjoy the Labor Law Insider podcast. It is great to have you joining us at the Labor Law Insider today. I am really excited about today’s episode. It’s going to be a little bit different. We’re going to have a guest from outside of Husch Blackwell and its family to join us and tell us a little bit about her positive employment experience in the organization that she’s been leading for nearly a decade and that she’s been working with for two decades plus.
00;01;53;29 - 00;02;23;05
Tom Godar
But before we do that, I did want to give you a brief update as to what’s going on at the National Labor Relations Board. Some of you probably know that this month voted out of committee were the last of the National Labor Relations Board members that had been proposed as nominees by President Trump. And so right now, we have James Murphy and Scott Meyer teed up as the next member of the National Labor Relations Board.
00;02;23;05 - 00;02;59;20
Tom Godar
And if and when they get confirmed, the board will once again be at a point where it can make decisions It will have three members in a quorum? Also, the Senate is poised to confirm Crystal Carey as the agency’s general counsel, having operated without a quorum for nearly a year with an acting general counsel, Bill Cowen. This will be a change, and it may be as soon as next week when the Senate, the full Senate, will take up the confirmation of these members and of the general counsel.
00;02;59;23 - 00;03;28;06
Tom Godar
Let me tell you, we will be sure to have a special Labor Law Insider when that takes place. I give you our take on it, but I wanted to let you know that we're getting closer to having that magic quorum and having a general counsel in the National Labor Relations Board. Let me now pivot again to today’s episode, and I wanted to introduce my friend and my fellow board member and sometimes client Liz Filter, President and CEO of VARC, Inc.
00;03;28;08 - 00;04;08;07
Tom Godar
Liz serves in that role and leads the organization in executing a mission of providing employment and other life skill opportunities for children and adults of varying abilities throughout Wisconsin. As I said, for more than 20 years, Liz’s dedicated her career to the lives of others, as does all of her mission driven employees. She’s a passionate leader, an advocate for strong communities, and in that role serves on a lot of boards, including the LaCrosse Chamber of Commerce, the Workforce Development Board, the Disability Services Provider Network, the Wisconsin Chamber of Commerce, and other activities.
00;04;08;09 - 00;04;32;16
Tom Godar
Liz has recently led her organization to acquiring and opening two inclusive childcare centers and has recently announced, a merger with another like organization, VPI in Appleton, taking VARC’s reach from the western side of the state to the eastern side of the state. And Liz does it with a smile, with intelligence, with grace, and with a real leadership. Liz.
00;04;32;17 - 00;04;34;26
Tom Godar
Welcome to the Labor Law Insider.
00;04;34;29 - 00;04;44;09
Liz Filter
Tom, it is my pleasure. And that is quite an opener. I hope I can live up to all those kind words now, in your podcast and in the future, as I’m leading this organization.
00;04;44;12 - 00;05;07;25
Tom Godar
Well, you’ve already lived up to them within the world of VARC and other organizations where you served. I’ve been a member of the DSPN, Disability Service Providers Network for many years and its predecessors, as has Liz. And I’ve watched your leadership there and I know it will continue. Tell us a little bit more about VARC. Maybe its history, what it does on a day-to-day basis, the kind of folks you employ and the kind of folks you serve.
00;05;07;28 - 00;05;34;10
Liz Filter
I’m happy to. We were founded in 1975, in a small town in rural Wisconsin that you’re familiar with. And many of your listeners may be as well called Viroqua. And it’s a population of 5500. The members of the community and some concerned parents of adult children with disabilities didn’t have a lot of options in the mid-70’s for programing for folks.
00;05;34;13 - 00;06;11;13
Liz Filter
So they designed something. And at the time it was operating in a church basement, providing some social and life skills. Looked very different in the mid-70’s, where institutionalization was commonly present in most communities. And it evolved over that time to begin partnering with small manufacturers, doing some subcontract assembly and packaging services. And it really has grown over the decades to really a world class assembly operation where we have now approaching nine co-packaging and co-assemble facilities throughout southwest and south central Wisconsin.
00;06;11;15 - 00;06;52;01
Liz Filter
And as you mentioned, on the east side of the state, through a merger in Racine in 2024 and our upcoming merger with Valley Packaging or VPI in Appleton, and those locations are there in providing employment programing and training services for adults with a variety of disabilities, developmental and physical and otherwise. And since that time of our inception in Viroqua, we’ve expanded, of course, into all of those locations, but into a diverse array of programs as well, to also include day programing and employment, skill building, community employment, and supported employment programing.
00;06;52;04 - 00;07;25;24
Liz Filter
As you mentioned, we've expanded into some youth operations through the development of both our afterschool and summer youth program for kids in lacrosse, but also through our inclusive child care model, which we're also looking to expand throughout the state as time goes on. So we started small, like many nonprofit organizations do, and in January of 2026, we will have about a thousand employees and serve about 2500 children and adults throughout Wisconsin.
00;07;25;26 - 00;07;42;12
Tom Godar
Well, that’s quite a story. And I’ve had the pleasure of working with VARC, the previous CEO, as well as you as these changes have been taking place, I don’t think I go all the way back to the inception in the basement, but I got on that bus ride quite some time ago, and it’s been a delight to watch.
00;07;42;14 - 00;08;20;04
Tom Godar
And one of the reasons I wanted to bring you on board, for our listeners, is because it’s not unusual at the end of a podcast, when I’m talking to colleagues or talking to other labor law insiders about what’s the takeaway. And oftentimes the takeaway is building a culture, adopting policies, using training, making the place one where people are less likely to be concerned about those things, which might be a violation of the National Labor Relations Act, less likely to be very engaged and saying, I need a third party to represent me because things are going pretty well.
00;08;20;04 - 00;08;40;09
Tom Godar
Things are never perfect. We know that you have with that many employees and that many locations, you can’t quite always see what's going on. And I know that creates a great deal of opportunity for people to lose some of those cultural ties, but I wanted to talk to you about how you sort of build some of them and how that has served you.
00;08;40;14 - 00;09;03;26
Tom Godar
Let me start out with the beginning, if you will. When you're looking at bringing in a new employee, whether it's an employee in an hourly position or employee with a great deal of responsibility within, oh, at the end of their title or a director level, what kind of steps do you take to recruit and then to winnow out the best candidates from the worst candidates and then ultimately to orient them?
00;09;03;27 - 00;09;40;21
Liz Filter
That's a great question. And we had to ask ourselves what this looked like internally as well, because it starts with the experience from the very beginning of the process by which we're recruiting someone, and that experience starts to set the tone of what the organization feels like, that first initial contact that someone gets when we're interested in talking to them about an open position, for example, that permeates through the entire process, from recruitment into conversation, into a hire, and then into onboarding and training and so on and so forth.
00;09;40;21 - 00;10;11;09
Liz Filter
So there’s some pretty critical moments that can happen. And we had to take a look and pull apart where we’re inserting positive momentum in that process and where we're getting in our own way. So first of all, one of the things that we discovered was the length of time in which it takes in order to realize a position is needed to posting it and having things approved go through multiple approvals in the organization, people getting contacted, and what that experience looks like.
00;10;11;09 - 00;10;34;24
Liz Filter
If they’re having a phone screen interview called to be selected for an interview, the time that lapses between when they’re contacted again, all of that matters because it sets the tone for what our priorities are and how we're interacting with people, whether they work here or not. So future employee contact is a cultural kind of stage setting that we needed to identify and peel apart what it looked like.
00;10;34;24 - 00;10;56;19
Liz Filter
And so what we realized is we’re getting in our own way, the time in which it takes to get back to people in today’s environment was far too long, in that they’ve got two other offers by that time, so we don’t have the luxury, like perhaps we did in 1998, to drag our feet and talk to people and take our time getting back with some direction or some decisions.
00;10;56;22 - 00;11;16;21
Liz Filter
So we had to peel it back quite a bit. We also needed to identify why so many touchpoints were needed in terms of approvals, because it slows the process down and our own supervisors weren’t feeling empowered to be able to make decisions on behalf of the people that they wanted to hire, without additional directors and etc. being involved.
00;11;16;23 - 00;11;44;14
Liz Filter
And so we needed to take a look at the training and tools that we were providing to supervisors, and then give them the authority to make decisions on who to hire accurately and appropriately, and then leave it to them to be able to own that responsibility and own the process from there. And that expedited their ability to move through the hires, gave them a lot more autonomy and authority on having conversations.
00;11;44;15 - 00;12;06;22
Liz Filter
We had to make sure that proper protocol were followed, and that they were making offers in a way that was compliant and following, you know, all of the procedures that were within the illegal parameters and authority that they had, but moved everything else out of the way. We became large with a larger employee base faster than ever within the last ten years, I would say.
00;12;06;22 - 00;12;30;24
Liz Filter
And so we needed to reform our infrastructure related to our hiring practices to accommodate for that growth. And that was one way in which we could do that was to remove a little bit of the hierarchy and red tape that existed in hiring practices, and that proved to be fairly successful in allowing the responsibility of the supervisor to take hold rather than having to go through multiple means of approval.
00;12;30;27 - 00;13;08;08
Liz Filter
And so that was helpful. We're in the process currently, of reforming the method by which we and the lens by which we conduct our interviews, meaning where we have traditionally had conversations with folks, was around their skills related to the position. And where we're transitioning is to evaluate characteristics that we believe are culturally impactful to our organization, more so than their fulfillment of all the required criteria of the job.
00;13;08;10 - 00;13;49;23
Liz Filter
So, for example, where typically we might be asking very specific questions related to their skill set on a given type of role we actually need to be evaluating. Are they a team player? Are they motivated? Are they going to show up and ask examples of how they can demonstrate those things? Are they self-directed critical thinking? We can teach the rest for all practical purposes, with almost every other job that we have, aside from very technically based positions like IT and compliance related positions like HR, for example, everything else can be taught.
00;13;49;23 - 00;14;17;02
Liz Filter
But those characteristics need to exist. And we have found that focusing on that as part of our hiring culture will be of greater service to the organization. So that's the beginning portion of an employee’s experience, but also a cultural shift in who it is that we're looking for and what qualities need to exist and then build in the rest in terms of training and onboarding and finding the resources and tools that people need in order to learn their work appropriately.
00;14;17;05 - 00;14;23;16
Liz Filter
But those critical skills are what we can't teach and what we have to have present, or it's not going to work.
00;14;23;19 - 00;14;44;08
Tom Godar
And as I think about all of the places in which people can trip over laws, for instance, being unhappy because people post negative social media accounts, they get on glass ceiling or other places that get a call on that every month. How do I have posts taken down? What are the greatest ways to do that is not to ghost people who apply.
00;14;44;08 - 00;15;04;11
Tom Godar
It’s to pay attention to them even when they're not getting hired is to look for character rather than skill, and saying, this is one place where we can develop, and this is a place where it’s really what you hire the wrong person, and then you can't just refine that person. You might refine their skills. So I love the things you’re talking about.
00;15;04;11 - 00;15;24;06
Tom Godar
And they do have all sorts of legal implications. If you’re looking at skill sets. Well, that's one thing. If you’re looking at character, you’re not looking at race, you’re not looking at gender, you’re not looking at age. So that also keeps you in a good position for all of those kinds of challenges down the line list. Tell me a little bit about what you do want to bring someone on board.
00;15;24;06 - 00;15;44;20
Tom Godar
You vetted them. You’ve given some authority to your supervisors. You refine to what they’re looking for. I presume you have what you consider well, drafted job descriptions that also have character issues tied to them, not just skills. What happens once they’re on board? Where are they going for the first day or week or month or six months?
00;15;44;23 - 00;16;16;22
Liz Filter
Yeah. So we’ve got a couple of positions within our HR department that are constantly designing what the onboarding, training and ongoing experience of an employee needs to look like. Those two positions are an employee experience manager and training and development manager. And those are critical in that first experience. But I’m going through the development of an employee through their life cycle, all the way through their exit and even post-employment.
00;16;16;22 - 00;16;46;22
Liz Filter
Those are important components of their experience and their relationship with our organization, and they're valuable. Once that employee is onboarded, of course, there’s all of the standard processes that we take. They walk through their benefit packages and the employee handbook, and there’s a thorough meeting, either with their supervisor directly with human resources. But we also built in some pretty thorough onboarding checklist so that nothing is missed.
00;16;46;22 - 00;17;20;21
Liz Filter
And we’ve had to utilize this and build it over time, sometimes from lessons learned, things that we wish we would have gone through with a former employee, or from feedback that we’ve received when we’ve surveyed employees on what their experience has been with the organization. So there’s all of the required things that we need to go through. But but also the typical things that sometimes we forget about and or when there's multiple people responsible for the onboarding, because we have a lot of supervisors and a lot of locations, they may not always remember these things.
00;17;20;21 - 00;17;49;03
Liz Filter
So we wanted to create some formality and organized way in which this could be recorded. So we’ve got some onboarding paths that are kept and housed in an employee intranet, which was new for us in the last few years. There’s an onboarding orientation video that introduces myself, introduces our HR leaders so that people, I can’t meet everybody in person were too large at this point, and many organizations can’t, regardless of their size, have all of their leadership be in front of everyone.
00;17;49;03 - 00;18;07;13
Liz Filter
But it was important for me to be able to say to people what we do, who we are, introduce them to the organization. From my lens, what my expectations are of them, what my expectations are of their managers, what accountability means for our organization, what servant leadership looks like within our organization, and introduce them to some of these concepts.
00;18;07;13 - 00;18;38;23
Liz Filter
Right from the start, that was really important, and that is all incorporated within that employee’s first day and first week. So we have a checklist and we have work instruction. And we have all kinds of things that people can use. But there’s a few things that are pretty important. And that’s establishing what our culture is with those areas that I mentioned and then ensuring that supervisors are completing a day one minimum and a week one at minimum, check in with them with some very specific questions that every employee gets, such as, what have you learned so far?
00;18;38;23 - 00;19;01;10
Liz Filter
What kind of support are you needing? Do you feel comfortable with the information that’s been provided to you so far? Where can we pivot to? Can we start introducing these things? Are you feeling prepared? What kind of feedback do you have? That kind of canvas to make sure that people feel secure with the information that we've provided and are ready to take the next step into learning the mechanics of their job and their function.
00;19;01;10 - 00;19;23;10
Liz Filter
And that we’ve recorded that so that folks have had an opportunity to say, I understand the information that’s been provided to me. I’ve had an opportunity to talk through it, or I’ve been given permission to opt out of this based on the information that we’ve had. And that is completely okay. We’re also creating a culture around we're going to use these checkpoints because we don't want to get too far in this process and have you change your mind later.
00;19;23;12 - 00;19;29;23
Liz Filter
If this doesn’t feel good or you're not really understanding or it’s not a great fit, this is the point in which we can check in on that.
00;19;30;00 - 00;19;55;01
Tom Godar
And I loved one of the phrases you used. My favorite business book is no longer a new one. It's called Good to Great by Jim Collins. I think we talked about that in the past was and the phrase that he used before he went to the phrase level five leadership was servant leadership. And he thought that that had a certain amount of connotation that might be understood differently than he wanted it to be understood.
00;19;55;03 - 00;20;03;23
Tom Godar
But describe a little bit about what that servant leadership is. And maybe it's like that level five leadership that Jim Collins is describing.
00;20;03;26 - 00;20;27;12
Liz Filter
Yeah, we talk about servant leadership a lot. In fact, it’s built into our version of a performance review. It’s a competency that is measured across the board for all employees as to how they’re demonstrating that. And it’s important because it distinguishes our shared role in leading each other and leading ourselves, leading our organization and our communities from a position of empathy.
00;20;27;12 - 00;20;50;24
Liz Filter
But accountability. And there’s a pivot from a traditional hierarchical style of leadership and is inclusive in my opinion, and the way in which I describe it to my employees, inclusive of all employees, regardless of title or status or hierarchy. On the org chart. So we're all servant leaders here, and we all have a responsibility to each other to lead our own pockets and cultures.
00;20;50;24 - 00;21;13;14
Liz Filter
And there’s cultures all over the place at park. There’s so many locations and departments and divisions. And while we have a unified organization, one culture, one organization, we’re all moving in the same direction. It would be remiss for me to claim that we don’t have a different culture that exists in Viroque than we do in Racine versus Sauk County.
00;21;13;14 - 00;21;29;07
Liz Filter
In Appleton. I mean, they’re just very different communities. They’re different people. And it’s not fair to assume that they operate all the same. And so servant leadership can really pull us together as an organization under the same model, accountable to each other and for each other.
00;21;29;09 - 00;22;12;05
Tom Godar
I really appreciate those notions that that’s not just for you as the CEO, but servant leadership talks about others that you serve because after all, you’re not making a product for sale, though much of what you do has to do with a product that is shipped out by world class manufacturers and assemblers and distributors. But it’s really about changing the lives of those who are differently abled and allowing them to come to their highest sort of capacity and enjoy and find joy in doing that, which is a pretty cool thing, which means the people on the floor who maybe you hired three weeks ago are also engaged in some level of leadership and their service
00;22;12;05 - 00;22;13;27
Tom Godar
to those that you’re indeed serving.
00;22;13;27 - 00;22;42;14
Liz Filter
Correct, right? Of course. So, yeah, we are a service agency as well. We’re serving our customers, as you noted, and we have an obligation and a responsibility to produce and provide a service to that customer base at very high standard of quality. But we're also and in a much greater way, serving the people that are employees of our organization and clients of our programs in employment and day programs and otherwise.
00;22;42;14 - 00;22;54;04
Liz Filter
And all of the staff that we employ are a participant in a service led and servant led function of work. Because of the services that we're providing.
00;22;54;06 - 00;23;27;24
Tom Godar
I really like ending this part of our discussion with Liz Filter, our CEO from VARC on this notion of being a servant leader, but creating a culture where each of the members of all thousand employees plus are engaged. In that sense of participation as one serving other employees, and especially the clients of those who are differently abled in our working through a difficult world in which that kind of ability recognized and empowered.
00;23;27;26 - 00;23;56;14
Tom Godar
Liz, it’s been really great to have you share some of these insights, frankly, some of your confessions. And then the next run, we’re going to learn more about how employees with bark are treated, how they’re empowered, how they’re challenged, how they’re respected as they journey through their employment career with VARC Inc. And I’m sure that some of you will find even more an interesting word of encouragement and maybe some pointers to grow your own business.
00;23;56;14 - 00;24;07;04
Tom Godar
Again. Liz, thanks so much for joining us, and we’ll be back at you with the Labor Law Insider in just a week or two. Thank you.