HR chief Elizabeth Norberg is pursuing a ‘bigger, bolder’ agenda at SharkNinja

For Elizabeth Norberg, the chief people officer role is about more than just HR.

As EVP and global chief people officer at SharkNinja, a household appliance manufacturer based outside of Boston, Norberg oversees not only people operations, but also corporate communications, real estate, design, and construction.

Norberg took on this broad remit with the support of SharkNinja’s CEO, Mark Barrocas, she told HR Brew at a conference in April.

When Norberg joined SharkNinja in 2023, the company had a “very traditional HR practice,” she said. With Barrocas’s support, Norberg and her team are pursuing a “bigger, bolder agenda,” beyond “the price of admission HR stuff,” she said.

On the day-to-day, this means Norberg considers how everything from office feng shui to learning and development affect the “end to end experience” for employees at SharkNinja, which makes high-tech appliances such as red light masks, robot vacuums, and ice cream makers.

As SharkNinja invests heavily in AI, Norberg’s team is spearheading initiatives she hopes will drive innovation among the workforce, as well as quell anxieties about its impact on job stability, she said.

A “student of the business.” Norberg, who held executive HR roles at companies including Foot Locker and Northwell Health prior to joining SharkNinja, said she tries to learn as much about the business as possible when running people operations.

She told us she first made the connection between HR and business results early in her career, while heading up HR for a Westin hotel in Denver, where she was in charge of recruiting employees.

At the end of the year, the general manager congratulated Norberg for contributing to key business metrics like customer experience and revenue. “I remember thinking, no, I just hired a bunch of people,” Norberg said. “It was the first time in my career where I learned that the work that I and we, the team, do, directly impacts really important parts of the business.”

Another feature of Norberg’s HR playbook is caring about the CEO, executive, or board agenda as much as her own, she said. “My CEO at Foot Locker said, ‘Sometimes I forget your HR, Elizabeth,’” she said. “With all due respect to the business of HR, I just found that to be one of the greatest compliments.”

Hacking to innovate. AI is currently a key priority for SharkNinja’s CEO and, in turn, Norberg’s team. In a recent May earnings call, Borrocas said that the company expects AI to “touch every part of our business,” from product development to marketing to supply chain strategy.

SharkNinja is spearheading a number of initiatives to promote AI adoption throughout the organization, including a four-day hackathon dubbed “Jailbreak” that the company hosted in late April. During this period, the company suspended all meetings for a large part of the employee population and challenged them to solve business challenges using AI.

A number of entries were selected to be produced at scale and deployed throughout the organization, including two focused on “re-imagining work” and another on “winning culture as a competitive advantage,” Norberg said.

While SharkNinja’s executive leaders are all-in on AI, Norberg acknowledged that employees do have anxieties tied to the technology, and what it will mean for their jobs. To address these concerns, the company is leaning on “mindset performance coaches” that were developed in-house and launched last year, she said.

If an employee is worried about what impact AI might have on their job security, these coaches “can help them drill down to what’s driving what they’re thinking, and then help them to create some practices to overcome that,” Norberg said. If an employee’s job simply won’t exist in the same way as a result of AI, a coach might prompt them to consider other career paths at the organization.

“We’ve had some really productive conversations with team members around developing new skills and new experiences for them to take on whatever their next challenge might be,” Norberg said.

Culture as a competitive advantage. SharkNinja is growing, with plans to hire an additional 700 to 1,000 employees this year across regions including Asia Pacific and Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

As Norberg leads this expansion, she tries to think about how factors like office locations and design can contribute to SharkNinja’s culture, and in turn attract top talent.

The company subscribes to the principle of feng shui and tries to design offices “that are supportive of team environments and teams coming together,” even if it’s at a ping pong table or in the cafeteria, she said. Norberg’s team is currently redesigning some areas to integrate team members from different departments like accounting, finance, and product development, which has helped open up “natural silos” that previously existed, she said.

Integrating such decisions into the HR function, she said, “has really been game-changing for us.”