Lynn Sonnabend, Phr, Shrm-Cp Email & Phone Number

Mendota Heights, Mn, Us

Proactively managing and optimizing the holistic, end-to-end employee experience, ensuring alignment with the organization's strategic goals and growth trajectory.• Provide thoughtful, strategic, and wildly transparent support and partnership with leaders at all levels of the organization.• Develop, implement, and continually evolve and refine the organization's employee experience strategy to foster a positive work culture, enhance engagement, and promote talent retention. • Create thoughtful, effective, and simple mechanisms for collecting and analyzing feedback for areas of improvement and innovation. • Facilitate open and productive communication channels between employees and their leaders. When conflict arises, identify issues, and provide guidance and support to leaders and employees to resolve quickly.• Collect, analyze, and present data to tell a compelling story to various audiences (Board of Directors, Senior Executive Team, HR Leadership Team), driving clarity around solutions and next steps.• Develop and update policies and procedures, reflecting relevant employment laws and regulations (in both union and non-union environments), hold a standard of excellence for compliance, while removing the complexity often associated with it.

Mendota Heights, Mn, Us

• Participate as a key member of the HR leadership team and client teams, an integral part of decision making and crafting the right business strategy and aligning talent to business needs. • Build strong relationships with leaders and client groups based on trust and candor.• Provide insights that enable business leaders understand capabilities needed to attain high performance. • Translates business strategy to HR strategies and actions, proactively anticipating changes and implications to the business and working with leaders to enable changes• Partner with leaders to develop strategic and operational workforce plans. Assess and anticipate demand and supply of talent and capabilities needed to execute on business objectives in the short and long term.• Coach leaders and build understanding on performance management, employee engagement and compensation as key processes that drive high performance.• Understand stakeholder perspectives at multiple leadership levels and partner with organizational leaders to ensure proactive, effective communication strategies and processes for issues or situations of varying complexity.• Builds change capability within the business and manages constructive conflict related to change efforts.• Develops and uses HR metrics and analytics to provide insight to the business.• Responds to employee concerns and provides employee relations guidance to managers in order to ensure effective application of company policies/procedures and company culture to minimize risk. Investigates root causes of employee relations issues and develop strategies to address/reduce them. • Manages HR programs, including project planning, execution, status updates and a communication strategy.

Saint Paul, Mn, Us

• Lead HR team; provide coaching and development to HR team, created 5-year strategic plan• Member of the leadership team, consult on strategic planning, budgeting, and growth initiatives• Develop compliance programs and deliver annual compliance training for all leaders and employees• Analyze data to identify trends and measure ROI on HR initiatives• Create processes and routines for hiring, onboarding, performance management, payroll, and compliance• Direct compensation and benefits strategies, including launching a 401k program and paid parental leave• Manage recruiting for all employee (100+) and contractor (450+) positions across 2 companies at all levels• Wrote and updated 30+ job descriptions, setting outcome-oriented expectations with leaders and their teams to drive performance• Champion of employee engagement and company culture, rolled out annual employee engagement survey and action planning strategy• Scoped and transitioned to new HRIS

Minneapolis, Mn, Us

• Managed the methodology, routines, and execution of enterprise-wide performance and talent planning for 340,000 employees; activities included performance management, talent and succession planning, goal setting, and ongoing performance and development conversations. • Co-led an enterprise test to improve employee outcomes and engagement through performance and pay processes. Responsible for creating recommendation on performance and pay methodology for 340,000 employees. • Supported team member engagement survey, resulting in over 90% participation; support included data analysis and business leader action planning. • Facilitated succession planning process for senior leadership (approximately top 300 leaders), focused on creating talent plans that support business strategies. • Consulted on and created materials for Board of Directors succession planning process with a focus on transforming talent data into easily translated talent stories. Partnered extensively with senior HR leadership and data analytics teams.• Partnered with cross-functional team to develop HR policies (e.g. corrective action) to improve business outcomes while adhering to legal and regulatory guidelines.• Drove increased utilization of internal resume system, which led to enhanced talent analytics at all levels and locations. Improved connections of internal talent to enterprise needs through a targeted communication campaign on the internal resume system and project to improve data utilization by recruiting team.

Minneapolis, Mn, Us

• Identified training needs and made recommendations for HR position-based training for 10+ roles across multiple locations. • Delivered training for HR-driven company-wide initiatives including benefits enrollment and onboarding programs that required consistent experiences across HQ, retail, warehouse and global environments. • Managed project to develop and implement training strategy for Canadian headquarters and field HR positions, including the creation of learning plans and training materials for 200+ employees.• Facilitated cross-HR initiative of 30+ stakeholders to determine a consistent approach to organizing, communicating and training company-wide HR content.• Led the analysis, design, development and implementation of training strategy for supply chain HR core role evolution into strategic HR business partners.

Minneapolis, Mn, Us

• Implemented training tracking system to supply chain network; which led to simplified processes and 50% cost reduction and 40% reduction in administrative support.• Reduced expenses by $40k and team support time by 80% through leading a cross-functional project team to create and deliver a best practice website for the supply chain. Created new employee learning plans and training materials to reflect new structure, impacting 15,000+ employees. • Performed learner analysis and created training proposal for supply chain maintenance system upgrade.

Minneapolis, Mn, Us

• Created and launched training program for mechanics in warehouse environment.• Developed and implemented training for automated food and general merchandise warehouses.• Consulted on and implemented training effectiveness measurement strategy.

Minneapolis, Mn, Us

• Coordinated week-long monthly training sessions for 50+ employees. Conducted analysis and made recommendation to decentralize training session, saving over $300k a year. Created training and process guides for group coordinator role.• Facilitated all distribution training tracking system and processes.• Managed and audited team budget.

Minneapolis, Mn, Us

• Communicated product specifications for 8-10 merchandising programs (30-50 SKUs each) a year.• Negotiated pricing with vendors to reach desired 50% markup.• Executed and improved merchandising and sourcing processes.

Masters Of Education, Human Resource Development

B.S., Retail Merchandising