We sat down with Shanda Nikkel, Xenium’s Implementation Manager, and asked her about her 30-year career at Xenium–the roles, changes over the years, and advice for people on a similar career path.
What’s your role at Xenium?
I’m currently the Implementation Manager, and I’ve been doing this role since 2012. I just had my 30th work anniversary. Time flies, right? It does feel like a long time. A few of us at Xenium started our careers with Express, where I also began. And I’ve been working with Xenium since its inception in 2000.
How did your Implementation Manager role come to be?
From the beginning, part of my role has been onboarding new businesses. So back in 2000, even before that, we were doing PEO services. And then that was part of the HR role to onboard new business, so I’ve been doing it forever. And even when I was an HR Account Manager, it was still part of my role.
After my daughter, Ava, was born in 2006 and I returned from leave, I didn’t want to return to the HR role and wanted to shift to be more internal. For example, I was already doing contracts and onboarding new businesses. I oversaw the new state setup, so I already had many roles. Plus, I was administering our 401k plan. It became apparent that the work needed to shift to where I focused on new business. We were also doing ASO by then. And so, I moved to where I was focused on implementation and shifted all the contracts and compliance work to others.
What led you to work at Express in the beginning?
I was a temp at first, so I worked for the Wilsonville Express office doing temporary work. I even left for a bit and did a temp-to-hire job, but it wasn’t working for me, so I came back to express. That was really when I reactivated myself. Patricia Callahan Bowman was like, well, we need a receptionist, and I was like, all right, I could do that, and it just snowballed from there.
Since you’ve been with Xenium, what’s your favorite part about our work here?
What was exciting in the beginning was all the new stuff that you were learning, and you were continuing to learn and how you figured it out and the continuing education. And that persists even in the implementation role. There’s still stuff daily around new paid leave laws and state setup, and we’ve moved into a new environment with Covid and remote. So, I think that’s still what I really enjoy is the continuous learning aspect of it. I also really enjoyed that I started where I did because it gave me an overview of the entire operation from start to finish. And I appreciate that I learned that along the way, and I continue to learn all the time.
What has changed over the years in the field? What’s the same, and what is it different?
What stands out to me is the level of complexity of what we are dealing with now versus what we dealt with 20 years ago. It takes more people, more minds. More processes. I think that for me, what’s the same is the people. The relationships and the people at Xenium. We have that culture of being friends and coworkers and enjoying being with each other.
What are the challenges facing our industry in the near term and in the long term?
It’s kind of the same as my other answer – the complexity. Especially in my role, I need to know a little about everything to be able to talk to new clients coming on and to be an advisor because it’s ever evolving. COVID has really caused this explosion of remote work. You now have employees in 50-plus states. That brings that complexity that’s sometimes hard to keep up with. That’s where I feel some of the challenges, personally.
What advice would you give to someone who’s just starting out?
Our model of HR is different than being an in-house HR person for one company because, with one company, you have one thing to focus on. But in our business model, you could have 50 clients to focus on. My advice is that sometimes you take a deep breath and ensure you’re asking for support. Just know that you’ll have these pockets of time where it’s going to feel like I can’t take care of all my clients. But building that relationship and having that breadth of knowledge is gratifying.
How do you see your role evolving in the future, and what are your goals?
With the complexity and the number of new clients we’re continuing to bring on to meet our sales goals, we will be forced to evaluate and continue to grow our implementation process. We’ve been working on trying to make sure it’s efficient. I see myself being able to take the lead with the team and to be able to come up with different ways and better ways, if we can, to make it easier, not only for ourselves but also for the clients that we’re implementing.