Two Who Show the Way - Society for Human Resource Management honors human resource mangers Marilyn L. Weixel and George C. Sinnott

HR Magazine, Sept, 2000 by Bill Leonard

At its Annual Conference and Exposition in Las Vegas this June, the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) recognized two human resource professionals for their outstanding contributions to the field of HR management. The HR professionals received the Award for Professional Excellence, the highest honor bestowed by SHRM. This year, the Society named award winners in two categories: small organization (1,000 or fewer employees) and large organization (more than 5,000 employees).

A Passion for HR Management

Small Organization

Marilyn L. Weixel, SPHR

Vice President of Human Resources

Association Group Insurance

When Marilyn Weixel heard that she had been selected to receive the SHRM Award for Professional Excellence, she screamed. While her genuine reaction would be considered normal by most folks, she was embarrassed because her whoop of joy came during a meeting with her chief executive officer.

Administrators, Carpinteria, Calif.

Of course, her CEO was partly to blame. "I was set to make a presentation about a project that I had really worked hard on," Weixel recalls. "I was concentrating on my task at hand when the CEO's assistant buzzed the meeting and said that the call he was expecting was on the line."

Weixel continued concentrating on her presentation and didn't pay much attention to the call. After all, her CEO is a busy man who often receives calls like that.

But this call was different. It was from Michael R. Losey, CAE, SPHR, president and CEO of SHRM, who was put on a speakerphone and announced that Weixel had won the Award for Professional Excellence.

"I really wasn't paying close attention, so I did sort of a double take," Weixel says. "When I realized it was Mike Losey, and that I had just won the professional excellence award, I just screamed. I was pretty loud and probably made everyone in the room jump. It was just a great feeling to receive that kind of recognition from my peers.

Anyone who knows Weixel would say her emotional reaction typifies the passion that she has for her chosen profession. She simply loves her work and says she can't dream of a better job.

When Weixel was studying for her master's degree in psychology, she discovered that she had an affinity and passion for working with people. But she felt that clinical psychology limited her potential for interacting with people in a work setting and for participating in the fast-paced world of business.

"I really enjoy the business world and workplace and find it very exciting, so I decided while in graduate school I wanted to pursue a career in business," she says. "People considered me a little weird back then that I wanted to get into HR. This was when HR was considered more of an administrative role. The profession has changed so much since then, and I always believed that HR had a lot of potential to become more strategic and make a real impact on business and people's lives."

Weixel took a job in HR management soon after graduating and has excelled in the field since. She began her HR career as a training specialist for Santa Barbara County, Calif. In 1989, she was hired for her current job as vice president of human resources for Association Group Insurance Administrators (AGIA), a provider of administrative, marketing and affinity-based insurance sales to clients such as trade associations and governmental bodies.

When she first began working at AGIA, the company had about 70 employees--all in one office in Carpinteria, a suburb of Santa Barbara. The company has grown to nearly 250 employees in five locations.

"We're still considered a small organization, but we are definitely growing at a good pace, and that's presented some challenges for us in HR," Weixel says.

She says the company has always had a friendly entrepreneurial culture in which employees felt they were part of a close-knit family. While growth and new offices mean the company is doing well, Weixel and her staff have worked doubly hard to make sure all the new employees feel they are a part of the organization.

"We try very hard to communicate company values and culture and to make all the employees feel comfortable and part of the family," she says.

Making employees feel at home at AGIA isn't the only thing at which Weixel excels and works hard. Weixel was instrumental in researching and converting her employer's health insurance benefits from a fully insured plan to a self-insured plan. According to Weixel, the conversion provided better coverage and more flexibility for employees and reduced the company's health care costs by nearly 50 percent.

She also helped to develop and implement a comprehensive wage and salary plan for all AGIA employees. Weixel believes the compensation plan increased the company's ability to attract and retain the best employees and helped to make AGIA an employer of choice in the Santa Barbara area.

"This is really crucial to us, because we face the challenge of operating our corporate headquarters in a very high cost-of-living area," Weixel says. "We have to attract employees, and it's very hard to get people to move into the area because of the high housing costs. So employers in this area end up stealing from each other. Once we hire an employee, it's very important that we do our best to retain them."