Stephanie Lovinger Roseman, Chief People Officer at Fortis Fire & Safety

Show Notes

Onsite-First HR: Fortis Fire & Safety’s CPO on Transparency, Incentives, and Practical AI

Summary

How do you build trust and clarity for a largely frontline, onsite workforce amid inflation pressures and AI-fueled change?

Stephanie Roseman, Chief People Officer at Fortis Fire & Safety—a national provider of fire suppression, alarms, and integrated security—shares a practical playbook.

She breaks down what her latest employee survey surfaced (financial squeeze, job security, career growth, and communication) and how Fortis turns data into action: branch-level insights, manager enablement, and company-wide town halls.

Stephanie details her transparency mantra—“I’ll tell you everything I can as soon as I can”—and how she handled benefits changes with in-person roadshows and red/green clarity on employee impact.

She’s also simplifying complexity, shrinking the handbook to a 40-page core, and building transparent incentive programs that reward productivity and safety behaviors. Finally, Stephanie dives into practical AI: scaling personalization in performance and development, boosting recruiting capacity, and cross-referencing HR and operations data for analyst-level insights—plus AI coaching tools that help managers practice tough conversations.

Expect concrete, repeatable tactics for any people leader supporting onsite teams.

Timestamps

[00:45] – What Fortis does and why HR in fire/safety mirrors “background” risk prevention

[01:53] – Employee survey findings: financial squeeze, job security, growth, and comms; onsite-first culture

[03:59] – From data to action: branch-level insights, manager enablement, and upcoming town halls

[06:26] – Benefits changes done right: face-to-face roadshows and red/green impact clarity

[10:05] – Simplification: 40-page core handbook and building transparent, behavior-based incentives

[13:01] – Personalizing development at scale with AI: clearer paths to the next level

[14:03] – Practical AI in ops and recruiting: cross-system analytics and capacity for high-touch hiring

[17:33] – AI coaching for managers and why “safe practice” improves tough conversations

Takeaways

- Turn survey data into local action: equip frontline managers with branch-specific insights and clear follow-ups.

- Practice radical transparency with boundaries: “Tell everything you can as soon as you can” to build trust.

- Make benefits changes unmistakably clear: meet people in person and label positive/negative impacts directly.

- Simplify to strengthen understanding: distill policies into a short, usable core and treat employees like adults.

- Tie incentives to observable behaviors (e.g., productivity, driver safety) with criteria everyone can see.

- Use AI to scale, not replace: automate sourcing and analysis, and support managers with coaching tools.

Sponsor

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What is HR Voices?

HR Voices is a scenario-based podcast for People Leaders who’ve actually had to make the call.

Each episode brings experienced HR and People leaders into realistic, anonymized workplace scenarios—the kind you recognize immediately. Performance issues. Messy conflicts. Investigations that don’t fit neatly into a policy box. Instead of talking about their own companies, guests react to outside cases and walk through how they’d think it through in real time.

There are no right answers here. What you’ll hear is judgment: how seasoned leaders balance risk, fairness, legal reality, and humanity when the stakes are high and the path isn’t obvious.

HR Voices is for HR, People Ops, legal, and leaders who want to hear how other smart humans actually handle employee relations—without confidentiality breaches, hypotheticals that feel fake, or a lecture on “best practices.”

Rebecca Taylor (00:17)
Hello and welcome to HR Voices. My name's Rebecca Taylor. I'm your host and I'm here with Stephanie Lovenger Roseman. She's the Chief People Officer at Fortis Fire and Safety. Stephanie, welcome. Thank you for being here.

Stephanie Roseman (00:29)
Thank you so much for having me.

Rebecca Taylor (00:31)
Can we start off by telling us a little bit about your role and about Fortis and what you all do?

Stephanie Roseman (00:37)
Sure, so I'm the Chief People Officer here at Fortis Fire and Safety. What we do is fire safety systems and integrated ⁓ security, but what that actually means on a day-to-day basis is you go into a building, you'll see the sprinkler systems on the ceilings, fire suppression systems, fire extinguishers, alarm systems, or even unfortunately, like on college campuses, all of those lockdown systems.

We install them and then we do all of the servicing and maintenance on them. We do regular inspections that are required by law and then if we find any deficiencies, we'll repair those as well. So we get to take care of people when they're least thinking of it.

Rebecca Taylor (01:19)
It's funny because I immediately start to see connections between what you do and the HR function in general, right? It's kind of like operating in the background to make sure that everything's safe and okay. And then, you know, sometimes it's only when things start to go wrong that people start to kind of realize who you are and what you do. ⁓ And it's just an important critical kind of background and backbone to what everybody kind of experiences in any space, right?

Stephanie Roseman (01:44)
Yeah, absolutely, it's a great analogy.

Rebecca Taylor (01:46)
Yeah. So we talked, we started to talk a little bit about this. ⁓ but I want to kind of chat a little bit more about what are, know, as you're kind of looking at managing a workforce going through just so much change between technology, hybrid work, onsite work, remote work, whatever that might look like. What are some of the challenges that you're facing right now as an organization or even just as an HR team?

Stephanie Roseman (02:10)
Yeah. So the insight that I have, we actually just did an employee survey. And so I would say attention to what the employees are feeling right now. Financial squeeze. Right. I mean, I everyone's feeling a financial squeeze given what's going on in the economy. Job security and career growth. Like those are the three big things that we heard in addition to like general communication needs from our employees during the survey. We don't have the

the hybrid remote issue because our technicians are on site. So what we're selling is people there servicing what you need. And so we really enjoy being an on-site workforce. I know this sounds cheesy. I get a lot of energy from being in the office with other people. And that's the team that we've built here is people that enjoy being together.

Rebecca Taylor (02:59)
it sounds cheesy. think it's like everyone has their, everyone has their thing, right? Everyone has environments that they thrive in and environments that they don't. And I don't think that there's a one size fits all solution for everybody. And I think if you're, you know, if you find that being on site, you know, is great and you have a workforce that feels the same way too, it's like that's, let's, let's just do that. I think that's a good thing. Yeah. So you talked a little bit about some of the surveys that you've done and some of the things that

you've kind of surfaced job security, I think is something that I see sort of across the board too. It's like even because you see so many talks of layoffs, you see just a lot of people worried about technology like AI taking their jobs. There is just a lot of fear, I think, even if someone's job is secure, right? It's like sometimes you have to kind of navigate to helping people to kind of differentiate between what they see and what their sort of live reality and sort of situation is within their role.

⁓ you know, so when you're looking at results like that, what are some things that you typically do to kind of start to either share that type of feedback with the broader employee base, meet with leadership teams, act on it? Like, what's your typical approach once you start to see that data?

Stephanie Roseman (04:13)
Yeah, so we did a couple of things. One, obviously, we looked at the data and sat with the executive leadership team and talked about what we could do from where we sit. But truly, our frontline employees are counting on their branch management for those types of reassurances and that type of information. So we broke down the data in many, different ways and sat down with branch management and talked about what their specific branch needed and was like.

was looking for and we're taking some actions in relation to what the feedback was. We're actually having a town hall next week to talk through with all of our employees, here's what we heard you say. One of the most important things everybody knows out of a survey is, we heard you, here's the action that we're taking and then following up and saying, and here's the action we took, remember this is what you told us. And so we're gonna follow that pattern, we are not inventing anything unique but learning from others.

And really being transparent. think our employees are really seeking information. Just transparent information. What are you doing? What are you investing in? Where's the money going? How are we going to have job security? How are we going to continue to be able to grow? And so we're investing in different areas to ensure that for all of them. And we're going to be really clear with them about where those investments are and how they're going to tangibly see them.

Rebecca Taylor (05:33)
I think it's great that you're being open and transparent too, because there's, I'm curious kind of what you think about this, because there's always sort of been this call for transparency from employees, right? And there's companies that have transparency as a value, and that means, it can mean so many different things. So how do you balance the line between sharing information openly and transparently with the workforce and also balancing things like executive privilege information or, you know, things that.

is not maybe for mass consumption, but I guess how do you kind of balance that?

Stephanie Roseman (06:07)
Yeah, one of the things I've always said to my teams and I say it a lot here as well as I'm going to tell you everything I can tell you as soon as I can tell you. So they know that there isn't anything that's being withheld. It's being done. So in a malicious manner, because I think that's where employees start to distrust is if they feel like something scripted or not genuine. And so I will tell them everything I can tell them as soon as I can tell them. One of the examples of that was

Rebecca Taylor (06:14)
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie Roseman (06:35)
We went through open enrollment and we had a fair number of changes. And I said to my CEO, I'm gonna hit the road. ⁓ I wanna stand in front of these employees. I wanna walk them through what the benefits are. I wanna answer their questions. And I want them to tell me if they hate the benefit changes. I wanna hear it. I wanna hear why they hate it. Data's great, but also it's very...

You get the larger picture, but there are individual stories and the individual stories are important. And so I try to get out, I try to share with them what's going on, hand out my business card, they're free to contact me. I'm not gonna hide behind something, just hide behind it. If I can't tell them, I'll say, can't tell you. Here's when I think I can get you the information. And I think that starts to build trust.

⁓ And I think it helps them to believe in what you're saying, right? I think that's the important part is that they know they can count on you to share the information that they need to know.

Rebecca Taylor (07:32)
Yeah, like that you're not, sometimes it's kind of like if there are uncomfortable changes, our human instinct might be to avoid any type of conflict around that or whatever that is. And I always say that HR is always about being braver than the things that you're afraid of, because it might mean that you might hear feedback that's uncomfortable. It might mean that, you you're dealing with employees that aren't satisfied with something and.

we don't get to not participate in those conversations. Like we have to, if anything, really lead those and embrace them even when it is uncomfortable, especially around things like benefits, right? Because that's the part of the job other than salary that really kind of influences someone's livelihood. you know, especially I know there's been a lot of changes to benefits this year.

in general, just because of the change of cost and everything like that. So I know that you're not alone and anyone who's listening to this is not alone if you've also been having those types of conversations with your employees because it's important to be able to show up and kind of give them the space to react or the space to kind of chat and ask questions.

Stephanie Roseman (08:36)
Yeah, one of the things that we did in that vein was when we laid out the plan designs as well as the costs, we on the slides directly, if it was a positive change for the employee, it was green. And if it was a negative change for the employee, it was red. I said, I'm going to call it right out. want you to understand what's changing and understand the financial impact to you so you can make an educated decision about which plan you want to be on. And I got a lot of good feedback about that because they were able to, you know, it wasn't like I was

Rebecca Taylor (08:49)
Mmm.

Stephanie Roseman (09:05)
playing a game where they had to go hunt for the information, I was laying it right out.

Rebecca Taylor (09:08)
Yeah,

yeah. I think it's really smart too, because it's like that's sometimes with benefits, it can be confusing. You know, even if it's terms that we might know very well, deductible, premium, all these things, like when you're speaking to someone who doesn't live and breathe that language all the time, it can feel really overwhelming to understand, wait, is this a good change? Is this a bad change? Like, what does this mean? Yeah, I think that's really smart. And I think it also kind of shows a really good partnership with.

Stephanie Roseman (09:30)
Exactly.

Rebecca Taylor (09:36)
leadership and with employees to be able to kind of say, we're gonna help to give context to this information. We're not just gonna give you the information. Because context is really the stuff that most people are craving, I think, when they ask for transparency.

Stephanie Roseman (09:49)
Yeah, absolutely.

Rebecca Taylor (09:52)
So we've talked a little bit about the challenges, which are kind of, you know, I think part of the role, but I think it's also fun to kind of talk about the other side of things too. Like, you know, what's something that you're excited about that you and your team are working on right now?

Stephanie Roseman (10:06)
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of things that we're working on, simplification, I think, is kind of the theme of the year. we just went through, we're about to launch our new handbook where we took it from hundreds of pages down to a core handbook of 40. Very simple, easy to understand because that's the goal, right? Like these are adults, we want to treat them like adults. That was one thing. The other is designing incentives.

Rebecca Taylor (10:12)
Mmm.

Yeah.

Yes.

Stephanie Roseman (10:35)
for our employees to reward them for productivity, know, outstanding behaviors, ⁓ really going above and beyond. Because of that compensation concern that we talked about earlier, I want to reward the people who are giving that ⁓ extraneous effort. And I want to make sure that we're doing it in actually a very transparent way, right? So you're going to be able to see when your peer gets recognized for

doing one extra inspection in a day, let's call it that. And if you want to be able to increase your compensation, it's a very clear route to be able to do it as well. So I'm excited about that because I think there's a lot of neat things that are happening here in pockets. And I don't know that everyone's aware of them. And I don't know that people realize the advantage they have by having them. So I want to centralize it. I want to celebrate it.

So I'm excited about that because we're in the process of looking at vendors to partner with to be able to ⁓ have that be a very central thing that we can do to celebrate driver safety, because we have a fleet, right, and all those amazing behaviors that people exhibit ⁓ because they're hardworking.

Rebecca Taylor (11:47)
Yeah.

Yeah. I think that's really cool is just being able to kind of celebrate different behaviors and attaching those behaviors to some kind of an incentive. Because that's the hard part is, you know, understanding someone is concerned about salary. The worst thing you can do is say, well, then get another job or it is what it is. And I'm sure you could probably believe, but you wouldn't believe the amount of times I've heard people use that as their response. And it's just the wrong way to build that trust.

And if you can give employees sort of an incentive to exhibit the behaviors that the company wants them to exhibit, either to increase performance or even just adapt the right values, the right behaviors, if you can attach incentives to that, then people are gonna be more realistically willing to do it. Because it's good to be passionate, but sometimes people just need a paycheck too.

Stephanie Roseman (12:34)
And it's clear, right?

Yeah, and it's clear, it's transparent, it's easy for them to understand what they need to do to get more. That's kind of what we're trying to simplify. We're trying to be really clear. And I think those are two things that employees, universally, not just here, but universally are asking for, right?

Rebecca Taylor (12:52)
Yeah,

yeah, yeah. I think AI really helps with that too, not to make everything about AI, but it's just where my brain automatically goes. Because it's sort of, and I actually spoke with this about someone on another episode, AI kind of gives you the chance to scale personalization of someone's work experience or of their workplace experience. Because if someone can get feedback on the things that they do really well and the things that they don't,

then that feedback turns into some kind of a performance plan that sort of says, if you want to get to the next level, here are the performance metrics specifically for the things that you need to do. And then it can sort of track that. It's a way to kind of motivate people the way they need to be motivated, put everybody so that they're not all being told the same thing when they might all have different efficiencies and inefficiencies in different areas. And it's sort of, think, it's the part that

I think is really interesting about what AI can do is the way that it can sort of just sort of allow you to personalize at scale, I guess.

Stephanie Roseman (13:54)
Yeah, yeah, the scaling that AI can do for HR is really one of the most exciting things. ⁓ We're looking at a different technology where AI is going to help us cross reference all of our systems, the HR systems, the operations systems. You know, I don't know that we'll go down this path, but it has the potential to say to us, you know, here's some driver routes. Here's where it could be more efficient. Here's how much you're spending to be inefficient.

Rebecca Taylor (14:08)
Mmm.

Stephanie Roseman (14:20)
because it has salary data too. It's going to have everything. It's an analyst, right? A much less expensive analyst.

Rebecca Taylor (14:26)
Yeah.

Yes, yeah, and possibly a more effective analyst in the sense that someone's still going to have to look at that information and look at that data and the determinate plan, right? But it's like, at least if it can help to create a summary of data for someone to look at, to dig further into different things, it kind of does accelerate the ability for that person to sort of say, OK, I have the foundation now. Now let's act on it.

Stephanie Roseman (14:56)
Exactly, yeah, it'll allow us to move much faster.

Rebecca Taylor (14:59)
Yeah, yeah, I think that's really cool. And so, you know, what are the, what are some other ways that you're leveraging AI in the organization? Cause these are the questions that I get from HR people all the time. Like what are some other ways that, that we can automate? love connecting sort of HR strategy to the business by being able to kind of tie those numbers together. Cause that's always sort of the biggest question that we have from people. But is there anything else that you're looking at too, to kind of either automate either.

a certain job to be done or even a role entirely.

Stephanie Roseman (15:31)
Yeah, nothing for a role entirely. We are using some AI to really help our recruiting team gain capacity. So everything from they'll put in details and you know, it'll come up with a standardized job description based on our organization that we can react to, which you know is probably one of the simplest uses of AI, but this is doing it within our organizational bubble if you will, but then also being able to.

Rebecca Taylor (15:39)
Mm.

Hey, simple is good.

Stephanie Roseman (15:59)
click on, you know, hey, these four candidates look great or find me candidates that have this specific certification and email them, tell them we want to talk to them and give them a link to my calendar. it's almost like an assistant for up for my recruiting team to give them capacity because they're, you know, recruiting is such fluctuations in volume that.

I'm not looking to hire and lay off and hire and lay off. What I'm looking for is where do I give him capacity because he's phenomenal and he really builds these amazing relationships with candidates. And my hiring managers are just overwhelmed with how great the feedback they get on each candidate is. So I need to give him capacity because that is something that AI can't do. It can't have that very, very meaningful conversation. so investing in AI in

in the recruiting space has been important for us. And then we're always looking for ways that AI can come in and take away real administrative tasks, things that can buy us more time to make a bigger impact. one that won't work for us right now just because of our size and where we're at, but that I work with just

Rebecca Taylor (17:07)
Yeah.

Stephanie Roseman (17:17)
in my spare time is one that does the coaching, right? So it takes, it does an interest assessment for every employee in the organization and then you get your own coach. So as a manager, if you're managing me and you have to have a difficult conversation with me, you go into this AI bot and you say, I need to tell Stephanie that her performance isn't up to par because she's not meeting these metrics.

Given her motivators, what's the best way for me to have this conversation? Help me practice. ⁓ So there's some amazing, amazing things that are happening, really enabling scale in HR. Where, like, I'd love to have a leadership development person who can go around and coach managers, but realistically, you know, it's not something we can invest in.

Rebecca Taylor (17:46)
That's cool. Yeah.

Right, right.

Yeah, and it's funny because sometimes people are more vulnerable and open to feedback from AI in the sense that if they're using it to prepare for a conversation, not that AI is giving you feedback from your manager, but that if your manager can use AI to help them frame a conversation to then have that conversation with you, people are more receptive to that because they find it more unbiased or they find it less biased.

in some ways, because it can also be more grounded in truth because it's pulling from different data sources. It's not just, I feel that this is happening. It's here's what my interactive data is telling me. Here's how I'm trying to use this to help you to improve. you know, knowing that people are using it to help them do the human part of the management job is, I think, a really good, I mean, for what it's worth. I think it's a good use of it.

Stephanie Roseman (18:56)
Yeah,

I think it's fantastic. I also think human nature is to be sensitive to feedback. And so you can make a mistake with AI and no one's going to judge you for it. And so it's a safer place too.

Rebecca Taylor (19:03)
Yeah, ego.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. It's funny because we see, you know, there's, there's, mean, all voices is in the employee relations space. So it's kind of like, when I was first learning about it, I was like, is that really, you know, that's usually a more sensitive type of work, right? And what it's been really cool is just like learning more about how the product really kind of allows people, allows employees to kind of give feedback and then summarize that feedback so that you kind of have more of a tool for that. And

AI is sort of the thread that connects everything together. it's the part that kind of, it almost makes it so that it feels less personal in a good way. So you can look at the feedback more objectively so you know what it is you need to act on.

Stephanie Roseman (19:50)
Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Rebecca Taylor (19:53)
Well, Stephanie, thank you. I know we're just at time. Do you have any closing thoughts you'd like to share before we go?

Stephanie Roseman (20:01)
I think my biggest closing thought, especially for everyone in HR, is just stay curious. Like ask questions, seek context. yeah.

Rebecca Taylor (20:10)
Yeah, I agree, I'm with you. Curiosity, growth mindset the whole way, right? Well Stephanie, thank you so much for being here and thank you everybody for listening and I hope you all have a great rest of your day.

Stephanie Roseman (20:15)
Yep, absolutely.