Kellanova

Heather Wheaton

Heather Wheaton, Senior Director of Human Resources at Kellanova, brings over 15 years of HR experience across the medical device, pharmaceutical and consumer goods sectors. Holding a doctoral degree in Management Organizational Leadership and certifications as a Clifton Strengths Gallup and Hogan Coach, Heather also serves on the HR Advisory Board at Grand Valley State University. She enjoys the outdoors and spending time with family in Portage, Michigan. Her responsibilities include strategic HR Business Partner for the approximate $1B North America Frozen Foods business including 3 manufacturing plants.

The intricacy of employee management reaches new heights as business owners move toward workplace diversity and inclusion. Considering the needs of different employees is essential now more than ever. As highlighted by Heather Wheaton in this interview, it is fundamental for cross-functional departments to openly but strategically embrace technology and upskilling to embrace the shifting workforce paradigm.

Maintaining high levels of employee engagement and retention

We take a personal approach to employee engagement and retention. Everyone is motivated and engaged differently. Understanding those motivations and ensuring our employee value proposition, both at the corporate level and more importantly, at our business unit level is important with regular check-ins to get feedback and their specific needs.

Key workforce planning implemented to meet growth objectives

Kellanova has implemented different approaches. For instance, we run a learning management system that provides bit-size external and internal learnings that employees can leverage when right for them. Thinking about a fit-for-purpose organizational design, we have identified what skills and capabilities we want to buy versus grow. This methodology allows us to assess the criticalities of our business and the timing of when those skills are needed. A third initiative is the commitment to learning and integrating digital and AI systems to make these routine or non-value-added work more efficient, providing our employees the time and capacity to upskill.

“Thinking about a fit-for-purpose organizational design, we have identified what skills and capabilities we want to buy versus grow”  

Measuring the success of effective development programs

Over the years, I have leveraged diverse tools like Tigerhall and LinkedIn Learning. Other development programs have been developed internally through Davenport or third-party vendors. Our KPIs consist of usage, pre and post-evaluations involving talent moves like promotions and lateral moves entailing the participation in special projects to name a few.

Impactful HR management practices transferable across diverse industries

Best practices are changing. We must be diligent about where we want to fall on the continuum. Do we want to lead the creation and alignment of what is best practice in a certain area, or do we want to lag? These questions have acceptable answers depending on the strategy and very rarely can you lead in everything.

Workforce productivity, operational efficiency and the digital transformation

We are still in our digital transformational journey, a continuous effort. With scale, most companies are starting to evolve to cloud-based human capital management (HCM) and totally automated (TA) systems that allow for accessibility. This includes the use of communication apps, performance management and administrative tasks. The use of People analytics could be a game changer and how we can tie them to business results for creating predictive modeling, faster and more reliable decisions is where we are starting to see a greater need.

Developing competent HRs

Be genuinely curious and continuously reinvent what it means to be “in HR.” The world is ever-evolving, and we need to pace with it.” these guidelines are the most influential in my career. What I strive to be are sometimes the most difficult to grow in people: learning agility, courage, a solution-oriented mindset, empathetic communication and the ability to work within cross-functional teams. Having a balance between technical and soft skills is where the sweet spot to high performance lies.