Tea and her family love exploring their new home in Pennsylvania and finding fun family activities like apple picking.
Each year, our company sends out periodic feedback surveys to gather a range of perspectives from our employees. If you’ve ever wondered about the methodology behind these surveys, one of the chief architects is Teanna Blees, people analytics program manager. Tea draws on her Ph.D. in industrial organizational psychology to create surveys that touch employees at every point in their careers here — from the interview and onboarding process through mid-career professionals and employees leaving or retiring.
“My role is pretty widespread,” Tea says. “A large piece of it is automating people data for our HR organization and leaders across the company to make it more accessible and easier to use and understand.”
The data Tea collects and interprets helps our HR teams better grasp the new hire experience, track key demographic data and provide information around turnover rates, among other statistics. In short, these metrics help leaders across the company make better-informed decisions, all while helping us gauge and improve our overall company culture.
“It’s exciting to represent the company’s collective voice through surveys, data analysis and culture studies,” Tea says. “Ultimately, I’m serving our people.”
MEET Tea
Your title is people analytics program manager. Tell us what you do.
I own all our feedback surveys across the employee lifecycle, everything from understanding the experience of those who apply for our jobs to measuring the effectiveness of our leadership development programs.
I created a series of quick surveys that are sent at different points throughout the job applicant experience so we can better understand how they perceive our processes and systems. I gather data from our annual surveys, pulse feedback surveys and exit surveys — pretty much any touchpoint across the employee lifecycle — to better understand the experience of our employees. I also create satisfaction surveys for things like our intern and people development programs and our IDP process.
I then use the data to answer questions about the business and our people. For example, we’re interested in understanding what leads to engaged employees. I put data from our various feedback surveys through different analysis methods to determine what organizational, leadership or employee characteristics have potential to drive engagement up or down.
What led you to choose this job?
I went to grad school with Katie Kirkpatrick-Husk, who was in this position before me, and she talked about how fun the role was. When she moved on, I was in the market for a new position and I really liked how the job touched all areas of the employee experience, not just one specific area.
I loved the idea of being able to work with everything from leadership development programs to using data and metrics to understand talent and performance management to using data to enhance recruiting efforts.
Tell us what your day is like.
I often start with ad hoc requests from leaders across the company who have questions about how to access certain data points or what those data points mean. I’m always consulting with people who are trying to better understand existing data. I also create systems to automate smaller, more frequent requests and work to embed feedback loops into existing processes.
Our leadership development programs are great examples of how we use feedback surveys. They allow us to evaluate participants’ value and enjoyment in the programs and understand how the programs lead to long-term learning retention or changes in behavior on the job.
What’s your favorite part of your job?
I get to work with such a wide variety of people in different areas of the company, which is really cool. I love building relationships and learning about what's happening in other businesses. Our entire TICC team gets to experience that feeling of working with everybody because our work touches so many people across the company.
You must have some challenges. What are they?
We run very lean as an organization. I often want to be forward thinking and creative in how we can build people analytics to serve the business in a more strategic sense. We're still learning how to use data to make decisions across the organization to support our people experience. There's always something else to be done or to catch up on, which can take away from dedicating time to that forward-thinking piece.
Tell us something about your job that might surprise people.
They’re often surprised to find out that my background is in the psychology of people at work, not in data and statistics. People analytics is really just a small piece of what I do. I have a lot of expertise beyond analytics that I can use to help people figure out how to implement meaningful changes based on the insights we glean from data, so I like pulling out those skills when I get involved with new projects.
Who are your customers?
I work with HR leaders the most, but also leaders across the company for a variety of projects that come up throughout the year.
Ultimately, though, I serve every employee. I’m the midpoint between employees offering their confidential feedback and the leaders who need to hear it. I feel a lot of responsibility in representing the collective voice in a way that’s truthful to the feedback we received, but that also protects the individual employee who provided that feedback. Upholding that commitment to confidentiality is very important to me.
What does your work area look like?
My husband Will also works for Weyerhaeuser, and we recently moved from Washington to Pennsylvania with our 2-year-old daughter to be closer to family. Right now, our home office is also our living room and our daughter's play area. We have this really big window in front of our desks that looks out into the woods, which provides a lot of natural sunlight and frequent deer, fox and coyote sightings.
Tea takes a photo of her husband Will, who works in our corporate HR organization, and their daughter Sofia as they walk down Sunset Lane, where they’re in the process of building a house.
When you were young, what did you want to do?
I wanted to be a paleontologist — until I went on a week-long dig. It was one of the hardest things I’d ever done. I decided that I was not going to dig for dinosaur bones with a toothbrush for the rest of my life. It just wasn’t what I thought it would be!
Then I thought I’d be a WNBA player because I’m 6-feet tall and I was pretty good at basketball way back when.
Tell us about your other interests. What do you like to do when you’re not at work?
I enjoy mentoring young girls, and a passion project of mine is re-packaging leadership development theory, practices and trainings and making them accessible to a younger generation through things like personal branding and helping young girls understand the unique value they bring to the table.
I also coached CrossFit and enjoyed competing as an individual athlete for four years in Seattle. Here in Pennsylvania, Will and I use our land, driveway and home gym to work out. We also spend a lot of time outdoors as a family, going on walks and finding new things to do in the area.
Tea, Will and Sofia love to work out as a family.
