Q&A with Laurie Stead, Assistant to the Chief Human Resources Officer

Laurie Stead is the assistant to the Chief Human Resources Officer. She coordinates quarterly efforts to celebrate CLC faculty and staff when they reach significant milestones of employment or are recognized by peers for displaying CLC values.

Q: Introduce yourself, your role at or connection to CLC:

I am a lifelong Lake County resident and a proud CLC alumna. I became employed by CLC 10 years ago and have had the opportunity to plan and coordinate many employee anniversary celebrations and awards presentation. I am a “behind-the-scenes” person, so I appreciate this opportunity to talk about CLC’s employee recognition programs.

Q: Describe CLC’s employee recognition programs.

I serve as the coordinator of CLC’s quarterly Values Recognition Awards and Milestone Anniversary Celebrations. I keep the celebration ball rolling by posting announcements to the CLC Hub (our internal communication tool), sending invitations, ordering treats, setting up the space and more.

Values Recognition Award nominations are accepted each quarter with the purpose of spotlighting CLC employees who have lived out one of the six values: excellence, purpose, integrity, compassion, unity and inclusion. It is my role to compile the submissions for the reviewers, removing names and other details to help control bias during the review process. The values recognition selection team, made up of representatives from CLC’s employee senate groups, reviews and scores the submissions. When the scores are tallied, I contact the recipients and announce the winners on the Hub. At times there have been so many awesome submissions that we have a tie!

I invite the award recipients and nominators to attend the next Chat with Lori presidential webinar, during which time the nominators read their submissions and the award recipients offer brief “acceptance” speeches. I love it when an employee hears their award nomination read to the webinar audience of 200 employees, and then speaks from their heart to accept it. The speeches are so genuinely heartfelt that they give all the webinar viewers the warm fuzzies.

After the Chat, as a final touch, the nominator personally delivers an engraved award, along with goodies, to the values award recipient. The quarterly timing of these celebratory events makes them particularly meaningful, as the work and anniversary is fresh in our minds.

It is so important to recognize employees, and each year, CLC holds four quarterly milestone celebrations to recognize those who have worked at CLC for one year, three years, five years, and so on. It is not uncommon to have multiple employees celebrating 20, 25 or even 40 years. Each celebration draws 50-100 attendees.

In the last five years, we collaborated with Engineering faculty Dr. Jan Edwards, who manages the Baxter Innovation Laboratory. She engages CLC engineering students to produce colorful acrylic CLC shields using a 3D laser and tools that one- and three-year employees receive as desk ornaments. Five-year anniversary honorees receive a CLC Yeti mug, and those with 10 or more years at CLC are invited to select an anniversary gift from a catalog.

Q: What is a change you’ve seen in CLC over the past five years?

In the past years I have witnessed so many positive changes at CLC that include branding of our hallways and exterior, to our social media presence to the programs that we are now running and continuously improving such as New Employee Orientation.

Q: What is special about how CLC has evolved to meet needs and challenges?

I appreciate CLC’s dedication and support to our employees by providing the space to meet as groups such as our employee resource group (ERGs) for the LGBTQ+ and Latinx ERG, for example. I enjoy hearing about the activities and the support these ERGs provide for one another as well as students.