Omada Health’s people chief on HR strategy spring cleaning

Ah, spring. The season of new beginnings.

And nothing says new beginnings quite like decluttering your home—and your HR strategy.

Yes, you read that right. Your HR strategy could use some spring cleaning. That’s not a knock on your housekeeping HR keeping skills—it’s just good practice. So much so that Nancy Vitale, chief people officer at Omada Health, has made it an annual tradition.

“Every year, we’ve gone through kind of a refresh…and it’s happened around this time. Kind of a simple refresh, what still makes sense, how do we add, edit,” Vitale said during a recent episode of HR Brew’s People Person podcast.

She sat down with Kate Noel, SVP and head of people operations at Morning Brew, to discuss her approach to spring cleaning at the digital healthcare company.

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

As the head of HR, what comes to mind for you when you hear the phrase “spring cleaning”?

There’s two types of spring cleaning…One type is just tidying up, my desk is a little messy…And then there might be another kind of spring cleaning, which is maybe a deeper clean, my house needs a remodel…I think about this from my role and perspective and with my team, there are things within the people and culture HR function that we simply need to think about tidying up…our employees, we call them Omadans, can’t find information readily—could be processes or reports or trackers that no longer serve those end customers. But actually in some ways we are in a remodel year here at Omada with our people and culture team. We are setting a new vision and five-year goals at the company level. And one of the things my team is remodeling is a next-generation people strategy. And that requires a deeper clean, a deeper introspection.

What prompted that deeper clean?

It was driven primarily from the business, and that’s how I view what we do. We need to follow the business and be in with the business. So I’d say about nine months ago, our leadership team started talking about what’s the next era for Omada. We went public last year and we are on a growth trajectory and part of that is how do we address two forces of change happening in the world: AI and, for us, GLP-1s. We’re thinking about some new audacious goals over the next five years…And this got me thinking with our own team. We’re a growing organization. Our existing strategy’s been in place about four years since I started with the company…how do we get right in there with the business and the leaders to create a next-generation people strategy that’s going to serve this next era?…But the other thing that one of my direct reports prompted for the team, because we’ve done some of this within the organization, is something called value stream mapping…It’s from lean management…the old Toyota days and lean principles.

What do you mean by lean management?

It’s a way to identify, understand, and document all of the activities that are involved in serving your end customer. And for us, that is our employee base. And so we were actually together as a leadership team last week and we spent a whole day just mapping out the different activities from end to end…we have a lot of systems that maybe create some complexity for our employees and our leaders….the other thing that came clear is we have so many metrics that we’re tracking. Do all of them matter?...this is the early part of that spring cleaning.

What spaces should an HR pro consider first when spring cleaning?

Are we talking a light tidy or are we talking a deep clean?

This is deep cleaning.

I’m going to go back to this value stream map, which identified our big bucket of activities that we carry out in order to bring our services to the organization, to leaders, and to employees. And for us, those big buckets, those big pillars of opportunity, things like the pre-hire candidate experience or the hire and onboarding experience. Then if someone gets onboarded and they’re more integrating, it’s more of those immersion activities…And then there’s the ongoing stuff…cycle-based annual compensation planning…day-to-day inquiries that come up, and it can run the gamut all the way through until we’re exiting someone who is leaving the organization.

Is there one pillar that’s more important?

It’s dependent on the organization…as I will say to my own team, and I’ve tried to live by this too, first is you must be a student of the business. You must understand your industry, your environment, what is true for you in the moment to then answer that question, as opposed to saying there’s a universal truth like this is your starting point.

For more from this conversation, tune into the People Person podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube, or watch it below.