Trent Savage, CHRO at Mountain America Credit Union

Show Notes

From Frontline to Future-Ready: Mountain America’s CHRO on Skills, AI, and the Employee Experience

Summary

How do you align a frontline-heavy workforce while preparing for AI, labor shortages, and shifting leadership aspirations?

Trent Savage, Chief Human Resources Officer at Mountain America Credit Union—the eighth largest credit union in the U.S. with 3,700 employees, 100 branches across five states, and $22B in assets—shares how his team is building a skills-based, AI-ready organization without losing sight of member-centric service.

Trent explains why flexibility must be defined by role, how rotating talent through branch roles deepens empathy and performance, and why workforce planning must be tightly integrated with talent pipelines.

He details a six-pillar employee experience model tied directly to engagement metrics, a dynamic skills ontology to power internal mobility, and a transparent approach to AI that blends social and technical systems.

Expect practical guidance on moving beyond AI dabbling, upskilling for problem-solving work, and preparing leaders and employees for the 2026 shift from pilots to productivity.

Timestamps

[00:45] – Guest intro: Mountain America’s footprint, growth, and member-centric culture

[02:56] – Frontline vs. corporate: role-based flexibility and rotating talent through branches

[05:47] – Leadership pipeline shifts: Gen Z aspirations, retirements, and looming labor shortages

[07:55] – Workforce planning meets talent management; AI strategy and the socio-technical lens

[11:11] – Upskilling now: automating transactional work and elevating HR as thought partner; change management for 2026

[16:51] – Operationalizing EX: six-pillar blueprint, linking engagement to manager action, and journey mapping pain points with IT/facilities

[20:49] – Building a skills ontology: AI-enabled benchmarking, role-based learning paths, and transparent internal mobility

[22:21] – Closing advice: get out of the transactional and into strategy, org design, capabilities, and change

Takeaways

- Define flexibility by role and rotate leaders through member-facing work to build empathy and performance.

- Integrate workforce planning with talent management; know your pipeline health and readiness for critical roles.

- Move beyond AI dabbling: set a clear strategy, over-communicate, and balance tech with culture using a socio-technical approach.

- Upskill now for problem-solving, holistic thinking, and collaboration as automation removes transactional work.

- Operationalize employee experience with a clear, manager-owned EX model tied to engagement data and journey-mapped fixes.

- Build a skills-based organization: invest in a dynamic skills ontology, use AI to benchmark, and connect skills to learning and mobility.

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Emily Fenech (00:34)
Welcome to HR Voices. I'm Emily Fenech and today I get to hang out with Trent Savage, who is the CHRO at Mountain America Credit Union. Welcome Trent.

Trent Savage (00:43)
Thank you, great to be with you.

Emily Fenech (00:45)
Yeah, so Mountain America is one of the largest credit unions in the US. Can you tell me a little bit more about the organization, your employees and your role as CHRO?

Trent Savage (00:55)
You bet. Mountain America is the eighth largest credit union in the country. We've got a little over 3,700 team members across five states that we operate in. We have about 100 branches and we have about 22 billion in assets as an organization. So we've been growing a lot over the last few years. It's exciting time for us and great to see the membership that we support.

Emily Fenech (01:20)
Yeah, you are going, you gotta update your Wikipedia because the numbers are already out of date.

Trent Savage (01:24)
I know

it doesn't take long. When I started here eight years ago, we were at eight billion. So pretty significant growth in that time.

Emily Fenech (01:32)
That's great. Can you talk to me a little bit about the employees there? of like where are they based? What is their primary role? How are they distributed? Are they all in one area? Yeah.

Trent Savage (01:44)
So we, like I said, we've got, we operate in five states and we have branches in several of those states. So I'd say about two thirds of our team members are in what we call our member service organization. So the bulk of those are in our branches. We also have a fairly large call center that supports our members. And then the rest really are distributed across corporate roles. We're headquartered in Sandy, Utah. That's where our big corporate office is. A lot of our,

call center, service center, remote or hybrid. And then our branches obviously is where a lot of our people are. So we've got a great organization with a great people. Some of the things that I absolutely love the most about Mountain America, in my career, I've worked for a lot of different organizations. And the ones that I've enjoyed the most are the ones that are really focused on taking care of the member. That's one of the things I appreciate about Mountain America. We've got a very member-centric culture.

Emily Fenech (02:41)
No, I love that. a diverse workforce, with a workforce, some of which is frontline and member facing and some of which is tucked away in an office. Does that create any challenges for you as when you're trying to set people strategy or what is that like?

Trent Savage (02:55)
Well, think what it, I don't know if I'd say it's a unique challenge to us. think all businesses have unique challenges, but I think it provides opportunities for us to think about things differently. a couple of things that I like to think about in particular, when COVID hit and everything, flexibility, hybrid work was really important. What we focused on as a strategy was flexibility. So we didn't say hybrid work, we just said flexibility because...

flexibility would mean different things to different people in our organization. We obviously can't have our branch team members working at home. That doesn't work to take care of the member, but we could allow shift swaps and other types of things that gives them flexibility. So that's one thing that we focus on that's probably not drastically unique. I think the other thing is, is ⁓ given that we're very member centric as an organization, we want to ensure that we have people rotating through different roles and experiences.

that give them the opportunity to interact with that member. they're our branch facing roles. ⁓ That's a big part of our organization that we wanna try and move talent in and out of as much as possible. Cause we want our team members in corporate roles and other roles to really know what it's like to support our members. And so those are some of the, I don't know if I'd say challenges, but unique things that we're trying to do here.

Emily Fenech (04:15)
Yeah, have you found I speak with a lot of CHROs at restaurants retail health care They have a frontline as well and and they often talk to me about how What people want in a career is changing. Is that something that you've seen?

Trent Savage (04:30)
Yeah, think it's true. ⁓ There's interesting things. There's some research coming out recently that talks about some of the Gen Z population and others that they maybe don't have the same aspirations to get into leadership roles. That's concerning for organizations. We want to take people and develop them. Mountain America is a very heavy ⁓ promote and grow our own talent. So we want to develop our own. We've tried to put in some very

sophisticated systems just to enable us to be good at that as we grow. But it's a challenge. You've got to have people. I think it's helping or kind of forcing us to rethink about leadership. One of the challenges that I see coming over the next few years is a talent shortage. There's a lot of the boomers that are retiring. Some of the early Xers are retiring. You look at some of the Trump policies around tariffs, and this is a non-political statement.

⁓ But what those will do is they're repurposing work back to the US. Again, that's going to put a strain on the labor force when you've got some of the retiring and exiting and you've got more business coming in, which in a lot of ways is hopefully great for the country. But finding labor to do that work, I think over the next few years is going to be a real challenge for us. And especially if they don't want to take on leadership roles. so I'm hoping some of that is just a...

short-term blip, not the reality that we face. But I know there is a lot of focus with ⁓ some of these younger generations around kind of work-life balance and other types of things. that, you know, we live in a turbulent world right now and that stress and change in the environment that we're in, you know, it might be something that is a long-term issue that we face in terms of getting leadership with some of these younger generations.

Emily Fenech (06:21)
Yeah. How are you or other leaders that you admire sort of rising to this challenge? you starting to plan for that? Are you starting to think about that? Or is it really early days? Yeah.

Trent Savage (06:33)
Well, I think we've been thinking about it for about a year and a half. There's a couple of things that we do. We've put a lot of effort into workforce planning and really being sophisticated of tying workforce managing management into talent management. There's got to be a good sink you. And so what that looks like is really understanding, you for example, like my branch management roles, we have a really good grasp of how many roles we turn per year branch manager.

We have a really good grasp of our assistant managers and how many of them are ready to take on branch manager roles, how many we'll have to go external for where we're going for those roles. So I think that the integration of workforce planning and talent management are critical. I think the other one is, as you know, that we're all talking about is AI. I think there's huge opportunities with productivity savings there. I think we've got to be really intentional about how we leverage AI.

I think HR especially has got to be very engaged in their respective business on how businesses think about it. ⁓ My sense is there's a lot of businesses and we've gone through this and we've tried to correct some of this, but I think a lot of businesses are early on in the dabble phase of AI. ⁓ Some are getting better at starting to figure that out, but I think we've got to really be over-communicating to our team members. What does that look like within our respective organizations?

⁓ team members are scared. If they whiff that there is AI that's gonna replace their job, they're gonna be gone. And I think we can manage and control that if we're being proactive on communicating what our strategy is, how the impact will be to them. It's funny, many moons ago, back when Toast was invented and I was in graduate school, they...

I read a book about socio-technical systems and I was dusting off that book recently because I think for HR, that's one of the core things that we are going to have to think about is the integration of social systems, culture, people, those things with technical and especially AI because we had that with the web and some other things. Over time, we've had that.

But this next phase, especially as you look at like an agent tech AI, I think is significant.

Emily Fenech (08:55)
Yeah, it absolutely is. The thing that I find odd in all of these conversations is that most people leaders I talk to are worried about labor shortage and finding people. And yet they also bring up that people are afraid their jobs will be replaced. I struggled. mean, I'm not an economist, but I struggled to make sense of some of the, I think it's just in the types of functions, right? Like for certain types of roles, it's really difficult to keep them full because everybody wants more. ⁓

Trent Savage (09:22)
Yeah.

Emily Fenech (09:23)
And then those are the exact jobs, you know, the white color, you know, spreadsheet roles that can way more easily be automated than something member facing or something. I'm preparing food and being in a physical space. It's going to be harder for that to be replaced.

Trent Savage (09:42)
Yeah, yeah, it is interesting. I think in like a work environment like ours, You know, some of the issues with the labor shortage is automation with AI, not just AI itself, but automation of processes. And I really do hope a lot of that transactional work that our people do, we can take a lot of that off. And I think that's something that, you know, the next generations need to be really thoughtful about, right?

how do you become good at problem solving? Like looking at problems holistically, leveraging technology and collaborating with others, right? It's all those skills that AI necessarily can't do. That's where the value creation is gonna come from the people side. And I think what we've got to do in organizations, you know, for years in HR, we've talked about upskilling. Well, the time is here. It's like right now. If you haven't already started it, I'd say you're behind the curve. Like it should have started a couple of years ago.

You know, we really have got to think about how do we help our people upscale from a lot of that transactional work because AI hopefully will replace and automate a lot of that, which should give us a lot of productivity gains in organizations, but yet have people that have the right skillsets to again, create that good balance between the social and technical systems that exist. And I think as HR, we've got to be really

thought leaders in this space in our business and partnering. If we have our business developing AI strategies and we're not engaged in those conversations, we need to be because we represent that social aspect and we've got to be thought leaders in helping our business think about the balance between those two. Otherwise, I think our cultures are going to get a whack and people will go.

Emily Fenech (11:32)
You know, I mean, I agree with you and I like that you're saying out loud that there, think I hear a lot from people in these conversations that no one's behind because this technology is so new. And I think in some ways that's very, very true, right? What I think what they mean is no one has this fully figured out. And that's true. I stand behind that, but I do think that there, might put together a list of like, if you haven't done these three, four things, right? If you haven't really started yet, you are.

officially behind, right? And I do think I agree with you 100 % upskilling is one of those. If you haven't started experimentation, you're behind. If you haven't had executive level meetings between your IT teams and if they're not already collaborating, you're behind. If you haven't tapped into your knowledge bases yet and made those sort of accessible, you're behind. I'm trying to think of what else would be on that list,

Trent Savage (12:24)
All of those things. I think that you're right. We're on the early phase, but what I would say is I think in 2026, more and more organizations are going to move from piloting and testing and trying to know we've got this down. Then now we're going to start seeing those productivity savings and some of those other things are enhancements. so again, for me, one of the things I think we've got to do is be thoughtful about the communication side.

you're talking about all those impact areas. Well, there's the whole communication and change management side, right? It's like, how do you help people not be afraid of this and not have this feeling that, because my guess is in 2026, we'll start seeing places where AI is leveraged, where in the past we would have used more employees. And so as others see that, we don't want them to freak out thinking, I'm next, right? And so we ought to be thoughtful about the communication and change management.

It's a really unique time. think the blend of AI technology and especially like the skills piece and how do we build kind of a true skills-based organization, it's coming together. And if people aren't working on it, I would say they, I think they really run the risk of falling behind quickly. Because I thinking everything's just gonna keep accelerating. I don't think it's gonna slow down.

Emily Fenech (13:42)
No, it's not. Also, a question for you. You don't want to gaslight people, but you also don't want to freak them out. Do you think about that?

Trent Savage (13:55)
That's like the age old issue with talent management, right? Like where do you tell people if they're high potential or not? do you communicate where they are? Like that's just an age old issue.

Emily Fenech (14:05)
Not a new topic. This is not a new topic. It's just a new.

Trent Savage (14:08)
Yeah, but I'm always a fan of transparency. think transparency builds trust. And so I'm more inclined to treat people as adults and say, hey, we're going to be transparent on where we are on this. We want to engage you. And I think a lot of these with the AI, there's an opportunity for us within our respective organizations to ensure that we're engaging various levels, especially frontline people.

⁓ And so that they know what that looks like. They understand the implications and they can engage with us on helping create that in a way that keeps them engaged in the process. And they go, well, yeah, I'm excited about this technology and this change because I helped drive it. And so how do we do that? I think is really critical right now. I think that's a big challenge for us is listening to the voice of the employee has always been critical. I think right now it's like Uber critical.

and how do we engage them in these processes.

Emily Fenech (15:09)
Yeah. Do you have ⁓ any experiments or tools or automations that you guys have been trying that you think is that you're excited about or worth sharing?

Trent Savage (15:20)
Yeah, we've got two that I'm really excited about. One of the things that we've done, I think in the future, as we're talking all these things, more and more being thoughtful about and intentional about the experience that we're trying to create for our employees is critical. And one of the things, Emily, that I've noticed in the past, I think a lot of times in HR, we have a tendency to talk about the employee experience, but that's where it stops. And so one of the things that we did about a year and a half ago is we

we actually changed and we created a six pillar model and said, this is the blueprint for a great employee experience. It's these six items. This is what creates it. And then we shared that with leadership and with managers and we said, hey, this is how you leader, create a great experience. all too often we talk about it, but managers don't talk about it. We need managers to talk about it. And so,

we created these six pillars. And then what we did is we actually took our engagement survey and we tied all of the questions to that experience that we're trying to create. And after the first year, we had a really significant uptick in our NPS and our scores, which I believe is tied to that because now our managers are more focused on creating a great experience for our team members. And they understand, hey, if you have engagement problems, it's these six pillars, start here.

And so I love ⁓ the early signs. I'd say we're early phases of that journey where we're really trying to be intentional about the experience we're trying to create, how we engage our team members in that experience. So that's one area I'm really excited. The second one is around skills. We recently bought some technology and hired a role to really build out our whole skills ontology and we're using AI to help us look at

the jobs we have internally and benchmark externally with AI2C, because the problem is with any skills ontology is it's fluid, it's dynamic, it's not static. And so we're leveraging that technology. And our goal is to build that system in a way that we can ultimately communicate very transparently to our team members, here's the skills that you're learning in your roles.

Here's roles that you may want to go to that leverage your skills because you love those skills, you're good at those skills, but a new opportunity, or if you want to get to other places, here's the skills that are needed so that they can start to develop. And then how do you tie that into your learning system so that people can understand, I can start learning and developing skills in these areas based on where I wanna go. I wouldn't say that's necessarily new or innovative, but what I will say from my perspective,

For the last several years, HR has talked a lot about skills. In my experience, very few organizations are actually doing it well. And I would say we're still early in the process, but I like where we're going with it. And I think it's gonna be a game changer for us long-term in terms of helping our people know what it takes to move in the organization and do work that plays to their strengths. So I'm excited about those two initiatives.

Emily Fenech (18:25)
I love it. think in the first one, know, the mapping, I love hearing HR teams who approach the customer, the employee experience as they would in the other areas of business, a customer experience, right? Like mapping it out. How does it feel? What is happening? And then measuring it, right? Like being really data-driven and ensuring everything feels like a good experience. I think being,

Trent Savage (18:49)
That's exactly.

Emily Fenech (18:53)
And in the second bucket too, it sounds like you're taking a data-driven approach to identifying who needs the skills and how much is required and in what areas instead of just everyone's going to take an AI course, right? Like to me, that's not really proper upskill. Like one size fits all is not going to do it.

Trent Savage (19:10)
Yeah, yeah, it's more targeted per role. Per role. terms of, know, here's how you think about the skills, A, to be successful in your role today, and B, the skills you want to start developing to get where you want to go in your career. So I'm excited about that. On the first one, the other thing I'd tell you, you mentioned kind of journey mapping. We actually pulled together focus groups and we asked them, we'd say, hey, where, you know, in our processes, are you feeling like there's things that are getting in your way that are creating a negative experience? And so.

We've really tried to dive deep into that experience and engaging our team members in giving feedback and saying like, this isn't working. This is where there's pain points. And one of our buckets is about productive work environment, right? And so we've engaged with IT and facilities and saying, hey, this isn't just an HR thing. You guys play a big role. So let's talk together about how do we create a productive work environment in terms of office space, in terms of technology.

And there's been some initiatives that we've done with them just to help simplify a few things. So I really like that focus and how it's helped us engage with leaders cross-functionally at the top to help leaders think about that experience collectively.

Emily Fenech (20:22)
Yeah, another solid piece of advice. I really enjoyed this conversation. wondered if you had any, I always like to end these conversations giving our guests the opportunity to share a piece of advice or a closing word of encouragement to other HR professionals who are listening.

Trent Savage (20:39)
Yeah, you know, what I'd say is ⁓ I've worked, had the privilege of working for some fantastic companies over my time and I've seen a lot of different HR models. One of the things I would say to my HR counterparts is don't get stuck in the mud. know, too many HR teams get stuck in the transactional or the business essential work. And the reality is our businesses expect that work like they demand it, but it's not what differentiates us and what...

what they value. You from my opinion, what business leaders value, like highly value from HR is can we help them think through strategy? And with that strategy, as we identify capabilities, can they help us? Can we help our business leaders design the organization more holistically than just an org chart box exercise? And then can we help them?

design that organization around capabilities they're trying to build? Can we leverage talent management? So for me, HR really is more than just our recruiting and our employee relations and our policy and HR operations. Like all those things are important, but they're not what differentiates us. I think what differentiates us is engaging with our business leaders on strategy or design, change management and capabilities.

that are driving the strategy of the business and how do we really help them? So that would be my advice is level up and make sure that we're playing at the right level to support our businesses because that's where I believe they find value and they want us engaged with all of their work.

Emily Fenech (22:21)
Yeah. I love that you reminded me of a friend of mine, Christie, she doesn't call employees, employees. She calls them revenue drivers. Yeah. And when you think of that, if you just start using that language, it totally shifts your mind into like how you treat peep, how you treat revenue drivers. Like your organization wants to make money, like look across, like that's what you hired all of these people to do is, know, so make sure that you're empowering them to go make money.

Trent Savage (22:47)
Yeah, totally. I 100 % agree with that.

Emily Fenech (22:50)
Yeah, well, great. I really enjoyed this conversation. Trent, thank you for taking the time.

Trent Savage (22:54)
Thank you, Emily. Appreciate it. Have a great one.