Introducing Jenna Berg, Vice President and General Counsel   

Having been at Fusion for two years, Vice President and General Counsel Jenna Berg brings a forward-thinking attitude and a tenacity for continuous improvement. She and her team create legal protections for Fusion and negotiate agreements to protect the company and increase efficiencies throughout the organization. Jenna explains her position at Fusion, how her teams help empower healthcare professionals, and what her leadership philosophy is in this interview.  

What does your role as the Vice President and General Counsel at Fusion entail? 

As the company’s General Counsel, I'm responsible for companywide legal and risk strategy, and I'm responsible for protecting the people Fusion touches. I think sometimes people hear lawyers and they think we are going to be these roadblocks for them, but our team tries to be the opposite of that. We want to find a way to get to yes, so we wait to hear what the folks at Fusion want do, and then we find a way that we can do it while still protecting the company and our people in the process. 

Can you describe the teams that work under you?  

I have a great team, and I love working with them. We have two arms to our team: the contracts side and the legal side. The contracts team is responsible for ensuring that our sales contracts are accepted and we're able to provide services and travelers at facilities across the country. The legal team consists of lawyers who are doing everything from employment law to working on new regulations that are affecting the staffing industry and making sure that Fusion can continue to operate.  

What are their big priorities?
Our contracts team is well on our way to implementing a contract management software, which will make our entire organization – and specifically our recruiters – more efficient and effective. This allows us to get sales contracts in place as soon as possible meaning we can place travelers in facilities needing them.   

The legal team is really focused on education. We want to educate ourselves and make sure we are experts on the company and the sales process. Once we are experts, we can take that knowledge and help others understand legal and contracts considerations so we can get better agreements in place and tighten processes. Then we can educate people on how the decisions we make will affect things downstream and make better decisions for Fusion as a whole in the future. 

How do these efforts help support healthcare professionals and the facilities that work with Fusion? 

We always say that our goal is to ensure everyone we touch has a better life, and I think we have a really easy way of doing that on the legal team because we are able to take our roles and use them to protect the company, our clients, and our travelers and really look at risk and how ensure we manage it so that Fusion can be around for a long time to continue to serve all these people. I think it's fair to say that on the legal team, there's never a dull moment. We do something different every day, but one thing we do get to do is touch the lives of all of the stakeholders in our business, whether we are working directly with facilities and managed service providers, figuring out the right terms of a contract, or taking those contracts once they're signed and putting them into our system so that all of our recruiters and client managers understand what the terms are. 

How do you work to make sure legal processes and contracts aren’t intimidating for the people you and your teams work with?  

One of the things that we pride ourselves on as legal team across the board is that we're very approachable and very willing to sit down and talk through questions. We work through processes with people, and really make things more everyday language so people understand them. To share a little secret, a lot of those legal terms, they're not really scary at all. They just use big words to confuse people, so we take those big words and put them into everyday language so people can understand what we're talking about. 

Can you explain your professional life before joining Fusion?  

I've actually had a pretty varied career. I’ve worked in a law firm, I used to be a prosecutor, and I did insurance law for a while. I’ve spent the bulk of my career at a couple of different companies as their in-house counsel and having that one company as my client – kind of like I do here at Fusion. I really like that because you get a chance to learn the business and focus on what needs to be done and really support in a way that outside counsel can do but just not as well, or not as thoroughly, and it allows you to work with the team within the business. 

How does that experience help you lead your teams and Fusion’s overall strategy? 

I would say throughout my career, the thing that I've carried with me the most is not necessarily the work I've done, but the people I've worked with. I thank my lucky stars that I've worked with great people and had the experiences I've had in the past. Now I have such an amazing team that shows up every single day, works hard, wants to do the best for Fusion, and when you're surrounded by people like that, you can make a huge impact in a way that you wouldn't otherwise be able to do. I think every experience I've had professionally and, frankly, personally has prepared me for the things I deal with every day in my job. 

How would you describe your leadership philosophy? 

I get the opportunity here to kind of straddle both the legal work and the leadership and strategy, and I know all our experiences prepare us for what we're doing today. You can learn a job no matter what it is, but if you're surrounded by great people like we have here, it becomes a lot easier, and I've been blessed in my life to have that a number of times. 

I feel really strongly that you can offer people opportunities for growth in a lot of different ways. I look at the things that bring them joy in life and the things that make them light up and try to find more opportunities for them to do that. Sometimes there's not going to be a promotion for a variety of reasons, but if there's an opportunity to work on a project or lead others, and I see someone who's got interest or talent in that area, I like to nudge them in the right direction and give them those opportunities that they may not even realize that they could take or that they're qualified to do. For me, it's looking for what makes people shine and what really excites them and gives them energy. We spend a lot of our time at work, so it’s important that we enjoy it. I think if you do that, people want to work hard and do a good job and do the best that they can for the company and the people they work with.