Redefining Workplace Inclusion: Caretaking Equity & Solar Advancements | Staci Schwartz, Primergy

Catherine: Hi, I’m Catherine McLean, Founder and CEO of Dylan Green. And today I have with me Staci Schwartz. Staci is the VP at Primergy and she’s based in Portland, Oregon.
Thanks so much for joining me, Staci.

Staci: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Glad we got to do this again.

Catherine: So I’m really excited to have you on the podcast because one of the things you and I have been talking about is highlighting more of the work that the amazing HR leaders are doing in our industry. And so hopefully you’re the first of many HR leaders that we start to talk to that can bring, I think, some real value and real insight into the space. Can you introduce yourself and tell us a bit more about your current role?

Staci: Sure, happy to. My name is Staci Schwartz. I’m based in Portland, Oregon. I have been in HR for most of my career, which has been for a long time, about a quarter of a century.
As my kids say, I was born in the late 1900s, which is lovely. And yeah, in most of my HR career, I’ve spent in the renewable sector. I really love renewables. I love the employee profile that renewables attract. Makes for a fun job in HR to be surrounded by people that the sector has. And yeah, I’ve been with Primergy for about two years. I get to oversee the people function and it’s been a super fun ride. I’m excited to see where it goes.

Catherine: Primergy seems to really prioritize work-life balance and meeting employees’ needs in all aspects of their lives. For example, Primergy provides overnight breast milk shipping for nursing mothers who have to travel for work. This thing blew my mind when I read that. I was like, wow, can you share some other examples of what you all are doing to lead the way when it comes to employee benefits and work culture? And why is it such a priority for you all?

Staci: Yeah, for me personally and obviously professionally in my HR kind of approach, I mean, I think employees perform at their best professionally when they’re at their best personally.
And I think having a remote first culture as well for us really helps to kind of facilitate people working around their lives a bit. I don’t think there’s really a work-life balance. We kind of just strive to have a better kind of blending of those worlds, I would say. So flexibility and scheduling, we have pretty generous time off programs, whether it be our discretionary time off program, which we don’t have like normal traditional banks that you’re accruing over time. You just take the time when you need the time. And I think a culture that really has an appreciation for people needing to take the time to do whatever they need to do, right? Whether it’s doctor’s appointments or I need to go take a hike or I need to take my dog to the vet or whatever it is that people have lives that are not priority.
And we, I think, really appreciate that. And we recognize sometimes that your job is not in your top priority, nor should it be all the time, right? Sometimes my job as a mom is gonna take priority over something else that’s work-related. And so I think as a company, our culture is very receptive to that. But then also, we’re asking women to travel, maybe while they’re still breastfeeding. So giving them tools to be able to help facilitate, I think, their work life and meet their personal needs is super important. Like holistic kind of wellness, I think it’s something that’s really important to me personally, I think to the company as a whole. So providing financial fitness seminars, as well as the kind of traditional fitness challenges that we do, like walking and those types of things. We’re about to offer a mental health first aid training for employees just to really kind of like tap in to kind of the emotional wellbeing piece. So, I think from our perspective, creating a culture where people, we can kind of meet people where they’re at is pretty critical.

Catherine: Yeah. You’ve had to work outside the home while you were having both of your boys. You’re a boy-mom. You had a recent post talking about how childcare costs should be discussed at the next presidential debates. Can you share more about this?

Staci: Yeah. First of all, thanks for structuring the question in a way that says working outside of the home, because women who maybe don’t work outside the home and are stay at home moms, that is a very hard job. That is a lot of work. I appreciate people who say they work outside the home. So thanks for that.
I think, if you have had kids and had to kind of go through childcare costs, it’s just crazy. And I think it’s really, unfortunately, contributing to just this huge gender pay gap, right? I mean, just high childcare costs continue to disproportionately affect women. I mean, sadly, that’s just kind of how it is. It just really reinforces these systematic disparities that exist for women from an advancement perspective. I think often, women end up with childcare responsibilities. Maybe a family gets to a point where they have to make a difficult choice. I can’t afford childcare. So who’s going to quit their job and watch the kids? And oftentimes it is women who take that responsibility. And when they do go back to the workforce, they aren’t making up that pay gap that they missed very often, right? They’re not kind of picking up where they left off.
It’s not as common. And so I think it starts to limit their earning potential. They’re working a reduced schedule, or like I said, leaving the workforce altogether.
And so it really is continuing to widen the gender pay gap. So for that reason, I think that’s a huge, just as a family, it’s a stressor, right? Talking about trying to be engaged at work. And if you’re stressed about how you’re going to pay the bills or how you’re going to get your child, how you’re going to deal with childcare, I think that’s, you’re not giving your people, the employees are not allowed to be kind of their best selves with that kind of hanging over them.

Catherine: You know what’s interesting about that? I’ve noticed this year that there seem to have been more men who have stayed home. I’m not saying tons, I’m just saying I definitely noticed an increase this year over year, over year over year. And I am starting to feel as well that the men who have said, I would be the stay at home parent while my partner goes out and works are almost having a stereotype that they’re now having to overcome when they go back into the workplace. Which is really an interesting thing just to like put out there on like a whiteboard and think about. To go it definitely goes, it can go both ways, right?

Staci: Right, no, I agree. I think that the interesting thing about that is if those men are returning back to the workplace and there are women in decision-making roles, the women would see that as a huge plus and really applaud that. And I think again, when you continue to have more men, maybe who have traditionally stayed at home stayed at work while the wife has been at home, they might be more likely to assign ill will towards that person or like unconscious bias or something. Why did your wife stay home, right? So the paradigm is starting to shift, I mean, obviously quite slowly. But I think it’s shifting in the right way. I mean, even I think of things like time off programs. We have a really generous family leave policy that applies to men and women and it’s equitable and that you can take 16 weeks of paid leave within the first year.
And those programs are only as good as you’re willing to allow those employees to take that time and you’re encouraging them to take that time and that they are not, you don’t have a leader who’s like, oh my God, why did you just stay? Why did he stay home? You know, he didn’t have the baby. And so I love that Primergy is very encouraging. We’ve actually had probably more men than women take the leave right now and have taken all of it, right? And have been encouraged by their managers to take all of the leave that’s available to them.
So oftentimes it gets pieced out throughout the year, but sometimes people take a couple of months off. And so the manager’s like, hey, don’t they have four more weeks left? I’m like, yeah, they do. And he’s like, go take that four weeks, right? And this time hasn’t come back.
So I think having, starting to encourage that and not having a scarlet letter for doing this is important.

Catherine: And I think also men being more involved in the beginning can really set the tone for the future, right? So Primergy’s been tracking its progress when it comes to DEIJ initiatives. For example, you mentioned having hired a large amount of women in recent months. I’d be interested in any data or metrics you have on DEIJ initiatives that you’re able to share, as well as recommendations that you have for clean energy companies who are trying to replicate what you’re doing.

Staci: Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think we just really in 2018, last year, kind of started to benchmark what we’re doing. We engaged a company to help us in a DEI assessment just to kind of see how we’re doing across all of our just general initiatives, how employees are feeling about inclusion, those types of things. So we won’t see the year on year until we go through that again to kind of see if we continue to trend highly in the scores we did really great in terms of employees’ perspective on inclusion and in general, how we’re doing diversity-wise. In terms of traditional statistics, we were about 46% women. I’m super excited about the growth that we’ve had in our female population at Primergy. I think when I started in September of 22, and I’ll look at my calendar, we were like 38%. So a meaningful increase. We’ve probably doubled our size since then. I think we haven’t had as much of that success on the pure like ethnic diversity side, those types of things. I think we’re still kind of hovering around mid 40s for people of color in terms of percentage, which is about on par with the U.S. workforce, but we would like to increase diversity from that perspective as well. It’s hard to do that, I think, in our industry. And so we’ve chosen to really invest more in the candidate pipelines internships and trying to expose more women in underrepresented groups to careers in renewables so that those pipelines start to get more plentiful with diverse candidates. But I will say, I think I feel pretty good about diversity from a more broad perspective in terms of age, capability, experience.
I think we’re able to do a really good job of bringing in different people and being intentional about that when we hire people, right? Like, hey, don’t we already have someone who has that background? Like, should we get somebody with a utility background or somebody really trying to make sure that we’re not just hiring people just like us, that we’re hiring people with different backgrounds and experiences to add to kind of Primergy’s talent pool.

Catherine: Yeah, no, I think that that’s really important. And just actually being aware of it is the first step, right? Measuring it and going to the effort of engaging a consultancy. I think that speaks volumes.

Staci: Yeah, a big piece of it is, you can track numbers and say, oh, we hired more women or we hired more people of color, but if they get there and they don’t feel welcome or they don’t feel included, they’ll just leave. And then your statistic is you just cycling people in and out. And so for us, I think the real metric that we do want to track, right, is inclusion, retention. How do upward mobility, how do people feel about being there? So we spend a lot more time, I think, kind of measuring cultural pieces on that. I mean, obviously we do every quarter share with the company how we’re doing from a gender and kind of traditional diversity perspective just to kind of see where the gaps are and where we have under-representation. But we don’t have any targets to say, we want to get to X percent of this or X percent of that. That’s just not how our approach is.

Catherine: So, yeah. I know you all collaborate with WRISE, which is an organization I think very, very highly of. You’ve sponsored a handful of events with them. Can you share more about partnership and some examples of some joint events you’ve done and like the impact that Primergy has had within that sort of ecosystem?

Staci: Yeah. I mean, gosh, I don’t know what impact we’ve had. I hope we have an impact. We took a different approach in 2024 than we have traditionally. And so I think historically it’s been like, give your lump contribution and people get their membership or whatever. And you don’t really see the impact of those dollars. Well, you see the impact more broadly, right? But you don’t see like, my dollars went to this specific event. So we, a colleague of mine, Bri, Winkler came to me and was like, hey, what are we doing with WRISE? And I was like, let’s revisit that kind of relationship. So we decided this year to kind of spread that financial investment into chapter events, right? Really sponsoring individual chapter events versus kind of like, here’s a lump sum, do whatever you want with it. Not to say that WRISE National doesn’t do a great job with company contributions. We just wanted to have a more active role.
And I think there’s two reasons for that. One, which we wanted to tap into, as HR, I’m always trying to tap into candidate pools. But we wanted to tap into pools of employees, potential future employees, primary employees. But we also wanted to create more opportunities in networking where we do have women in different locations. So we have several of us in Portland, Oregon.
We have a growing contingent in the Denver area. We have some employees in Chicago. So really ensuring that we’re creating networking opportunities for those people as well. Obviously being remote has its benefits, but it can also be very isolating. So making sure that we’re creating some kind of opportunity for employees to participate and build those connections in their own local area was important to us. So yeah, we’ve been able to do really fun things.
We did the Chicago Wine Event, which is one of their bigger events. So that was a fun thing that we did earlier this year. A number of us flew out to Chicago and had a great time meeting people out there.
For Colorado, we’ve done a couple events now. We did a hike, which sadly I was not able to attend, which is a real big bummer, but I know our employees really enjoyed this beautiful morning hike. We did a personal branding kind of wine happy hour where we sponsored headshots. And I actually got to attend that session and met a lot of really great people. I’ve hosted in Portland an in-person hashtag I am remarkable session, which is really out there to kind of help women feel more comfortable with self-promotion. So yeah, so I think our intention is to continue to do those types of things. I’ll be speaking on a panel at the leadership forum and we’re sponsoring yoga. So if anyone’s listening to this and this happens before October, please come to yoga. And we have a number of us going to that as well. So yeah, we’ll probably replicate that approach in 2025. It’s been really meaningful for us as an employer, for me personally, and I know probably for our employees as well.

Catherine: Yeah, I’m so excited about the leadership forum, especially since it’s in Washington, DC. Because I have been on the road a lot.

Staci: Yeah, I’m sure. It’s been a long flight for me, I will say.

Catherine: It will be a long flight for you. But it just shows the commitment because just going out to California for the Anaheim, it was just, especially as a mom, you can’t just pop over there. It takes a village, like friends watching your kids and parents, grandparents, all the things.
You worked in renewable energy for the majority of your career now, you mentioned. What advice do you have for others that are looking to grow their clean energy careers, particularly women and those marginalized identities?

Staci: Yeah, I think my advice probably is industry agnostic, I would say a little bit. I heard a podcast or something I listened to recently. And the woman said, I’ve been largely over-mentored and under-sponsored my whole career. And that really resonated with me. And that mentorship is super important, but sponsorship is quite critical. And I think, again, especially where decision-making is happening in largely white male-dominated rooms, ensuring that you have people who are advocating for you and who are singing your praises when you’re not around and know what your career aspirations are, offering you up for a project. Having those sponsors, is super, super important. I also think self-promotion is incredibly important.
In those I Am Remarkable sessions, there’s kind of two key slides that we really want people to walk away with. One, which is it’s not bragging if it’s facts. And so really getting women to talk about the great achievements that they’ve had and that accomplishments don’t always speak for themselves. And so sometimes, “oh, everyone knows what I did on that.” And so not making that assumption that those things are happening. So I think as you’re growing, especially as women and kind of underrepresented groups, we tend to not self-promote.
We tend to make ourselves small sometimes to talk to others around us. And so I would say make sure that you’re surrounding yourself with people who don’t make you feel small, people who not only want to hear your voice, but people who will amplify your voice. And people who will advocate and sponsor you when you’re not in the room. And I think that’s, regardless of the industry, that would be my advice.

Catherine: That’s just, that’s such an interesting point. I never thought of it like that, been over-mentored and under-sponsored.

Staci: I don’t remember who said it.

Catherine: I was like, that’s magic. That just so resonates with me. I think also going back to that self-promotion point, I know I personally have gotten good at self-promoting, but I have to do it with an apology in the beginning or at the end. It’s like I don’t mean to brag, but, or I think I’m great.

Staci: There’s always a qualifier, right? Like, I know a lot of people are good at this, right? There’s always this little extra thing. It takes practice. In the I Am Remarkable sessions, we practice. That’s one of the things we do, is practice saying the things that you’re remarkable at, right? Whether it be your company or whatever, really making sure that people are talking about their achievements and talking about it in a way that is factual, right? And there’s a time and a place, right? You’re not gonna go to a friend that just got laid off and say, yes, we’re self-promoted today.

Catherine: We have good emotional intelligence, I think when it comes to things. Before we wrap up, can you provide a quick update on some of Primergy’s recent projects and partnerships for those who are not as familiar with Primergy? For example, I know you recently celebrated the commercial operation of a 690 megawatt solar PV project and a 380 four-hour battery storage Gemini project in Nevada. And you also signed a PPA with San Diego Community Power. Can you tell us a bit more about these projects?

Staci: Yeah, I mean, I think Primergy’s been doing a lot of really great things and we’re at a point in our evolution where we are starting to see some of these projects come to life. The commercial operation of Gemini earlier this year was a huge milestone for us. Super exciting and so proud of my colleagues and all the work and effort that went into getting that project online. I think it was the biggest one in the first half of 2024 per ACP. So we’re really proud of that and it was a labor of love for a lot of people, especially a lot of the early Primergy people who’ve been here since the beginning. So yeah, super, super excited about that.
And yeah, we’ve got a couple that are obviously now operating. We’ve got two that are in late stage construction. Closer to 20 gig now in our portfolio between both PV and BESS.
We’re continuing to grow that. I think just on PV alone, I think we started at 11 and are trying to get to 15 by the end of the year on the 13th now. So really trying to progress those projects along and making some great headway with some of our PPAs and things that we’ve seen published, maybe some other things that we haven’t seen published yet. So yeah, our teams are hard at work and doing some amazing things.

Catherine: Great. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us. I think this is going to be super valuable for a lot of people, some of the things that you’ve mentioned today. So thank you.

Staci: Yeah, thank you so much for the opportunity.