Alumni Profile:
Tiffany (Levy) Greene '96
Tiffany (Levy) Greene '96
“For me, UMass Amherst and the School of Management offered a pivotal learning experience. The diversity of people and ideas, rewarding internships, close contact with faculty members, and collaboration with other students have all contributed to my success at Teradyne,” emphasizes Tiffany (Levy) Greene ’96. The management department graduate is a human resources partner at Teradyne’s Connection Systems Division, in Nashua, New Hampshire. The division, which employs 1,700 and had sales last year of $398 million, serves the telecommunications, data storage, and other industries through its manufacture of backplane systems, connectors, and high-performance circuits.
“Teradyne has a collaborative culture of learning, so almost eight years after graduation, I’ve yet to say that I’ve stopped learning about business, process, and myself,” Greene observes. “In my role as business partner, I serve employees in different company functions like engineering, manufacturing, and supply chain/logistics. They all have varying needs; the employees are my customers.” Greene and her human resources colleagues each serve different functional units in the organization, but they ultimately expand their horizons by moving between functions. “I might provide ‘one stop shopping’ for a 300-400 person site,” she continues. Professional employees face different human resources issues than employees on the manufacturing floor, so Greene must have an eclectic grasp of all sorts of varying employee benefit and investment options, work-lifestyle tradeoffs, workgroup dynamics, physical and emotional stress and its reduction, and other issues. In addition to her role as an HR line manager, Greene has also held the role of the division’s Learning and Development Manager.
“To determine whether we’re achieving our goal of satisfied customers (i.e., employees), we’re constantly measuring different aspects of our performance against their cost,” notes Greene. Employee turnover, participation in 401k and stock purchase plans, return on learning and development investments, effectiveness of performance management and reward systems, and, of course, the response time by HR staff to employee requisitions—all are fair game for measurement. The HR group, moreover, regularly evaluates aspects of the division’s HR performance against competitors in its industry. “Teradyne is a data-loving society. Just like the rest of the company, we use TQM methodology. At the end of the day, my performance is all about quality, customer satisfaction, time expended, and the bottom line. HR needs to offer solutions that support the needs of our customers. This requires that I fully understand the business realities, the competitive landscape and the market space, our products, process and technology. HR professionals are often thought of as having ‘soft skills’. Although coaching, mentoring and communication skills are important to the HR role, at Teradyne, you need to be good at problem solving, analysis, influencing and managing in an environment of constant change. Without these skills, you can’t be an effective business partner.”
“Discussing measurement issues brings to mind an excellent course in compensation with Professor [Melissa] Barringer during my senior year,” Greene continues. “The course’s central project required teams of three students to create market competitive compensation structures for fictional companies. My team did a great deal of industry research to benchmark our company’s compensation structure as precisely as possible against competitors in the industry.” Greene hopes to expand her professional horizons down the road by traveling to her firm’s Asian manufacturing sites in Shanghai and Penang, Malaysia. (The division also has plants in Winston-Salem, San Jose, Mexicali, and Dublin). But that day will have to wait. “My husband and I just had our first child, a seven-month-old boy. For the time being I’m working thirty hours a week instead of my customary sixty.” she confesses. Without question, that declaration is proof positive of a flexible HR system in action.