Her Story
About Stacey
My entire career has been driven by seeing how compensation and benefits impact real people's lives. I started on the brokerage side out of necessity when my husband was working for the in-house service and we were moving a lot. What began as transactional work evolved into something much more mission-driven when I moved to the employer side, where I could be more hands-on in understanding how I was driving and impacting the culture of the business. I'm more service-oriented than money-oriented, even though I like to have both. One of my most memorable experiences was when ACA was being implemented and we cut a plan by 30% while expanding all the benefits. One day, a group of five people came to my office just to thank me because they had gotten hearing aids they had never been approved for in their whole working career. It struck me how something we're doing on paper has such profound impact. At the nonprofit, we went through nine compensation studies over seven years to raise the living wages of our lowest-paid teachers, working collaboratively throughout the community after the teachers went on strike across Oklahoma. I learned how compensation really impacts the greater community and the challenges of working with federal funding restrictions. Now I'm excited to dive into compensation at a much larger scale while working toward my Certified Compensation Professional certification and eventually my master's degree. I want to be part of the changes happening in the global work environment, the gig economy, and how employers support employees in these evolving models.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Stacey
01What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
Find mentors. Definitely. We have the Society of Human Resource Management, the local group here, and that's one of the things that we try to promote, is changing the way that that is interacting with the community. In this field, at least with human resources, it's very taxing in some environments, and there's a lot of times that people enter the field and they don't understand how to navigate toxic environments or how to make an impact. Sometimes you just have to leave toxic environments, but sometimes you can really make an impact. And how do you do that? What are some strategies? And once you do do that, how do you maintain corporate buy-in into maintaining a healthy work environment and dynamic? People just need somebody to help teach them the practicality of things. You can learn things all day long, but when you're in an office environment, sometimes you want somebody to help you understand the practicality, somebody that you can walk through things and talk through things that you might be tossing around where you may not have that psychological or the group safety to be able to do that at work. It's important to have a broad support group in that regard.
02What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
Integrity. I feel like the research shows that HR teams are leaning more towards developing innovation and creativity with AI starting to come in, and you can't do that if you don't have an environment where people feel safe to be creative. A lot of the times where those toxic environments are, it just stifles the ability for people to grow and develop new concepts and new things, and be open to different ways of doing business, and different ways that people will approach business. I'm very much a diversity type of mindset as far as being inclusive of people who have neurodivergent approaches to things, people who have backgrounds that may change the approach that they have to business, and just understanding it's okay in business to understand how to make your team work better, as opposed to trying to get everybody to formulate in the same way.
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