Ashley is the Vice President of People & Culture at Thermacell Repellents, a company with a mission to liberate people who love the outdoors from the harmful effects of insects. She has passion for transforming traditional “HR” by adding more humanity into business and creating a virtuous cycle where people & business unleash their unique potential and thrive. As an avid outdoors family, Ashley, her husband and daughter enjoy traveling, ATVing, snowmobiling, and boating! When they aren’t adventuring, you can find them on their mosquito-free patio with friends and family catching a sporting event or movie around the fire.
Recently, in an exclusive interview with CXO Outlook Magazine, Ashley shared her professional trajectory, insights on how leaders should encourage a healthy work-life balance for employees, her favorite quote, future plans, pearls of wisdom, and much more. The following excerpts are taken from the interview.
Hi Ashley. Please tell us about your background and areas of expertise.
I have 16 years of business administration experience working with both large and small companies in the finance, pharmaceutical & nutraceutical industries. My areas of expertise include people, culture and social impact strategy development. I have a passion for transforming the traditional “HR” function by adding more humanity into business and creating a virtuous cycle where both people & business unleash their unique potential and thrive.
What do you love the most about your current role?
I love that I am able to learn and growth with the business as we expand globally. Each day is full of variety, new challenges, and an abundance of opportunities to learn. I’m obsessed with learning new things and teaching and coaching others too.
What initiatives do you think should be implemented to support employee well-being and mental health within organisations, and how should leaders encourage a healthy work-life balance for employees?
Leaders should model work-life balance for their folks. For example, ensuring they take their paid time off, put that out of office message on, planning and delegating in advance to ensure they actually honor their rest time. Walk the talk if you will. In those rare occurrences that business can’t wait, and they are unable to model it fully, leaders should be more thoughtful of the optics of catching up at night, early in the morning. While they may not expect the same from their team, it becomes a hidden expectation of this is what it takes to get ahead and can cause burnout for people who aren’t getting compensated the same way. I highly recommend leaders are more intentional about leveraging technology like the send later button in outlook before hitting send at 1am on those emails they’ve been needing to catch up on! One other major way for leaders to encourage balance is to ensure they are checking in constantly on what’s on the plate of their team, and what are the most important things right now (i.e. next 90 days). Not every team member is going to raise their hand and ask for help prioritizing so it is important to create a rhythm for connection and environment where people feel safe to be vulnerable. After practicing it for awhile, it becomes the norm, and everyone is better for it.
I think organizations should really look at their PTO packages and ways of working with folks out as a way to ensure folks are able to avoid burnout. For example, instead of folks saving their vacation time for the holidays, Thermacell commits to a company-wide global shutdown between Christmas and New Years. This is a way that everyone shuts down together, so no one is coming back to an inbox full of emails and feeling behind. We start the year off right and it builds great momentum in the early part of our seasonal business sprint with everyone being fully rested and recovered together. Additionally, we offer 12 paid weeks of parental leave for new parents to use intermittently in their child’s first year.
We are now looking at adding sabbaticals to our package after folks reach certain years of service to incentivize longer tenure and a commitment to keeping people refreshed and reinspired. With proper planning and excellent communication anything is possible even in small businesses.
What strategies do feel are necessary to foster a culture of diversity, equity, and inclusion within global organisations, and how to measure their effectiveness?
I believe that the most effective strategies for DEI are ensuring that companies have representation in leadership roles which can only be done with hiring, developing & promoting from within. Additionally, DEI strategies only work when they are deeply supported from executive sponsors but driven and authentically led by members within the community and are inclusive to allies as well. At Thermacell, we have 3 current DEI committees: Women in Business, Communities of Culture, and LGBTQ+. Each of these committees has a dedicated executive sponsor who plays the role of coach for the committee chair. They serve as an enabler to help the committee advance its agenda within the organization, spending most of their time learning and teaching, and in some cases influencing process and policy change where we weren’t aware we had blind spots. We are in our infancy (year 2) on launching these committees, but fully expect effectiveness to look like great attendance as a % of headcount at their education sessions, and perhaps some real projects for my team to tackle if needed.
Secondly, we ensure that the concept of diversity is broad across the organization. We value all types of diversity in the traditional sense, but also diversity of experience & thought. We nourish this concept by having all of our teams take personality assessments and map our unique humanness to take time to appreciate each other’s superpowers and determine the best ways to leverage those while working together. The AI platform we use syncs to calendars and gives daily coaching on how to work together best with the people you are meeting with daily. Effectiveness of this program is hard to measure, but we do test the value via surveying employees formally and anecdotally. It’s now part of nearly every onboarding and annual retreat process for teams.
If you could have a one-hour meeting with someone famous who is alive, who would it be and why?
Being from New England this is probably very cliché to say I would want to meet Tom Brady! He was an underdog for years and through relentless hard work and dedication became a titan in his industry and now beyond it. I would love to learn from him more about his mental toughness and unwavering drive for success and just how he does it.
Is there a particular person you are grateful for who helped get you to where you are?
It’s hard to just name one because I believe I have a village of support beginning at home with my husband! Related to my career opportunity, I absolutely wouldn’t be where I am today without Robert Craven of Scale Passion. He and I worked together for 6yrs at MegaFood as a dynamic duo of vision and activation. I learned a ton from him on organizational leadership, leading with purpose and creating positive impact. Our time together was invaluable for my career progression, and I will forever be grateful for his willingness to coach, trust, and give me runway.
How do you keep your mind healthy and stay resilient? And how do you motivate your team?
I keep my mind healthy on the daily by creating moments of oxygen in my very busy calendar to take a few minutes of respite. Sometimes that means a walk, going for a drive to get a coffee, or just walking to the office connecting with people and high fiving. Additionally, I am very intentional with my calendar to scheduled time for weekly reflection of wins, challenges, and gratitude. I motivate my team with short and long moments of teaching/coaching wherever I can. I teach them something new, or how to do something better, and then empower them to run with it next time. The personal and professional confidence that it builds is invaluable to self-actualization and inspires them to continue to do more and better.
What is your favorite quote?
Wake up and look for the opportunities you want, if they aren’t there, make them!
Where do you see yourself in the next 5 years?
In the next 5 years I see myself leading a world class global People, Culture & Social Impact team. Thermacell has a lot of runway ahead and I’m excited to help bring it and our people to their fullest potential.
What advice would you give to anyone starting out on their career in your industry?
Learn everything about how your business runs, how it makes a profit, who does what and why. Learn how your role can contribute to top and bottom-line results. Make your knowledge of the innerworkings of the company a valuable asset as you build relationships and serve company leaders and employees to enable frictionless execution of the mission and to deliver business results with urgency. Help create the virtuous cycle of the business winning so it can invest back in its people and so on. I see a lot of very passionate people leaders fail where they can’t connect their why to the business need.