Chapter 3
How a CMO of People Designs the End-to-End Employee Experience
In this chapter, I’ll focus on how the CMO of People designs an immersive employee experience. I’ll explore how a marketing mindset reveals new ways to enhance the employee experience.
Why the End-to-End Concept Is So Useful for the CMO of People
Marketing functions often talk about the “customer experience” instead of the “service we offer.” Does this way of thinking bring any value to HR?
If you run a theme park, you might focus on whether the customers like the ride—after all, that is the service you are offering. You could overlook the fact that they had a miserable time in the parking lot. Disney is famous for seeing its theme parks as a complete end-to-end customer experience. It wants every aspect of the customer’s experience—from parking the car, to buying a ticket, to waiting in line—to be a good one. Not all organizations see marketing from this viewpoint, but many who do dominate their niche. Starbucks, Amazon, and Disney are all good role models for understanding how a focus on the customer experience comes to life.
HR can take this idea from Marketing and apply it to the employee experience. If they do it right, they will turn the experience into a competitive weapon that will attract the best talent and get the most out of employees at work. This is a way of looking at employee experience the C-suite will relate to—it is a business strategy that drives performance.
Organizing Principles
The main organizing idea is “end-to-end”; It provides a simple way for the organization to think through the entire employee experience. The concept also quickly leads us to understand that the employee experience is not solely an HR concern—or worse, a buzz phrase that recruiting uses to pitch candidates; it is something the whole company delivers. Mapping the experience helps us break through the organizational silos that often hamper HR.
The concept of touchpoints also complements the “end-to-end” strategy. Touchpoints ground the broad idea of an end-to-end experience with the specific moments when bringing the experience to life. A touchpoint occurs when an employee opens the employee handbook, walks into a meeting room, or receives a survey to complete. An employee’s life is full of touchpoints; HR (and, more generally, all of management) must contemplate the touchpoints they are responsible for and determine how to ensure they deliver the right experience.
Each touchpoint will enhance or degrade the employment brand. It might be expedient to create an expense form that suits Accounting, even if it is difficult to fill out. However, if we see this as a touchpoint, and an unpleasant experience at that touchpoint would undermine the brand, then we might work up the discipline to fix it.
Why It’s a Competitive Weapon
If the employee experience were just about making employees happy, then it would improve retention, but it wouldn’t necessarily be a competitive weapon. The employment brand should include the critical values that drive performance. These values might be “competing to win” or “zero defects” or “fast to market”—there are many options; the common denominator is that they tie the brand to business results.
Consider how you should design a meeting room to make it a touchpoint that enhances the experience. We might think in terms of appropriate chairs or attractive artwork—in other words, ensure that it conveys the right image. If we want brand to be a competitive weapon, then we would also think about how to design the room to drive productivity. You’ve probably walked into rooms that kept you from being productive for the first ten minutes because the technology was hard to set up or the whiteboard markers had all run out of ink or the seating wasn’t conducive to the brainstorming that needed to get done. We want an experience that conveys the right messages and helps the work get done. The experience should speak about your operating norms (effective management tips or product demonstrations if applicable) and culture (color schemes or signage about values). Creating this kind of experience requires collaboration between the director of employee experience and the people in Real Estate/ Workplace Services, Communications, and IT.
For the CMO of People to get full value from the brand, they need to underline that it’s an end-to-end experience that drives productivity and allows employees to do their best work.
What Can You Do Today?
When you walk into a meeting room in your organization, what brand messages does it intentionally or unintentionally convey? Are there any touchpoints where the employee experience prevents employees from doing their best work? Could you improve these touchpoints and use them to show people what you’re trying to accomplish in building an end-to-end experience?
How to Map the Employee Experience
How we map the employee experience will guide how we design it.
The concept of the customer journey comes from Marketing. It might seem blindingly obvious to focus on customers, but compare it to Marketing’s classic “product-centric” view that directs attention toward “product, price, and positioning.” The customer journey concept focuses attention on the end-to-end customer experience.
Figure 3.1 shows how Marketing’s idea of the customer journey might be applied to employees. It shows the series of steps an employee goes through from the earliest moment of a candidate’s awareness of the company at the start of the recruiting process to their role as “alumnus” after they have left the company.
Let’s be generous and recognize that this is a first step in the right direction. It looks holistically at employee touchpoints from start to end.
From the perspective of a CMO of People, there is one significant shortcoming in the perspective of the journey as shown in Figure 3.1—it does not focus on the customer (i.e., employee). The steps in Figure 3.1 follow the workflows and activities of the HR department. For example, it starts with “awareness” which is where HR advertises a job, followed by a candidate “inquiry” which HR responds to, and through all the steps HR needs to bring a candidate to “offer/acceptance” and from there to HR’s onboarding process right through to the time an employee exits the organization. The focus is actually HR-centric, not employee-centric. If we redo this exercise with the employee experience foremost in mind, then we end up with the customer journey shown in Figure 3.2.
Compare the first three steps in Figure 3.1—Awareness, Inquiry, and Initial Screening—to the first three steps in Figure 3.2—Leadership, Direct Manager, and Workplace. Figure 3.1 leads HR to focus on what it must get done; Figure 3.2 leads HR to focus on the experience it must deliver. The candidate should experience the passion of leadership, the interest the direct manager shows in them, and the excitement of the workplace.
It’s difficult to overestimate the importance of redrawing the customer journey. This employee-centric perspective leads to a raft of decisions, small and large, that creates an immersive employee experience.
Design Perspective
This employee journey map clearly exemplifies how the CMO of People model is rooted in design thinking. First, the experience is seen as a whole; it is an integrated offering, not a set of stand-alone processes. Secondly, it is seen from the perspective of the employee, not HR. The primary goal is not to do something that is convenient for the HR administration, but to do something that delivers the desired outcome: an exceptional employee experience that drives results.
What Can You Do Today?
Create a “back of an envelope” map that details how employees experience your organization throughout their journey. Does anything stand out as a sore point where the experience is not aligned with what you want to achieve?
The Importance of “Predictable” and “Immersive”
A CMO of People will talk about a predictable and immersive end-to-end experience that drives productivity. Those are a lot of words, but each one has a purpose.
In the previous section, I talked about an end-to-end experience that drives productivity. Now let’s add in the last two concepts: predictable and immersive.
A Predictable Experience
Starbucks is the gold standard for a predictable experience. Customers can walk into a Starbucks anywhere in the world, from Beijing to Berlin, and be confident about their experience. Does your employee experience deliver the same predictability?
Predictability sets a high bar for the employee experience. Starbucks would not be satisfied with the result that “most of our stores are clean” or “our baristas are usually pleasant.” They put so much effort into predictability because one bad experience can undermine dozens of good ones. Customers like to know what they’ll be getting—it’s no different for employees.
Since managers have a big impact on experience, it’s a good idea to set expectations by orchestrating a baseline experience that managers have with new employees. The orchestration demands coordination between Recruiting, Onboarding/ Training, IT, Real Estate/ Workplace Services, and the manager. The manager should see the results of this effort in its impact on making a new employee productive. Perhaps it is worth pausing to note how this focus on a predictable experience executes; it presumes an organizational culture that sees this kind of collaboration across silos as a natural way to operate.
Predictability also drives productivity. People are more effective when they know what to expect. People are more focused when they’re not distracted by an inconsistent experience. I’m serious about the phrase I keep repeating: “A CMO of People architects an immersive and predictable employee experience to improve productivity and drive performance”—each word in this phrase matters.
An Immersive Experience
When Electronic Arts launched its game Battlefield it treated employees to an army helicopter landing on the work campus—that’s a fine example of creating an immersive experience. As with “predictability,” the term “immersive” is meant to raise the bar on what we expect the employee experience to deliver.
If the workplace experience is simply pleasant and generic, then it’s not immersive. The goal is to go beyond employees liking the company or accepting its goals, and to get to the point where they deliver their best work because they believe in it.
To achieve an immersive experience, take care of all the touchpoints in the end-to-end employee journey and ask how to increase it a notch to create a memorable effect. You won’t often have army helicopters, but the sum of everything you do should create a “wow” in employees that encourages them to feel that the company is a special place to work.
Isn’t This Pretty Basic Stuff?
Helicopters aside, you might think that creating an employee experience is pretty basic stuff. That’s a fair observation. There is nothing in the concept of a predictable, immersive experience that requires special skills or new technology. What’s special is recognizing how taking this concept seriously will contribute to creating teams of highly productive employees. If we continue to think of the employment brand as a real factor that drives performance, and not window dressing to attract candidates, then we’ll use the end-to-end experience as an organizing principle for much of what HR does.
What Can You Do Today?
Is there any aspect of your company’s employee experience that has a bit of a wow-factor? One that contributes to an immersive experience? An event you run or a particular program? Find the best example and hold it up as the type of end-to-end experience you want to achieve.
How to Create the Discipline Needed to Make the End-to-End Experience a Reality
We’ve been looking at the concept of a predictable, immersive, end-to-end employee experience as a guiding principle for an HR function. The challenge is not so much in understanding the concept of the employee experience (i.e., the employment brand)—it’s having the discipline to make it real.
The Concept Is Straightforward; Why Don’t All Companies Apply It?
It’s easy to see how the concept of “customer experience” translates to the idea of “employee experience.” However, despite HR’s focus on employees, seeing the world in terms of the employee experience doesn’t come naturally. HR has heavy administrative and compliance responsibilities. When HR needs to quickly fill a lot of job vacancies, it’s natural to focus on getting it done, rather than thinking about what the process feels like from the candidate’s point of view. When it comes to compliance, the emphasis is on forcing employees to stay within legal and policy guidelines, rather than wondering how this links to a predictable experience. No one will disagree when you say that HR should promote a positive employee experience; however, if you are serious about making that happen, then you must recognize that this mindset does not flow easily from HR’s core duties.
It’s also natural for leadership to see the employee experience as “nice to have” rather than as a competitive weapon. Without creating the shared vision with your executive team colleagues, investment in the extra effort required to create a predictable, immersive experience is unlikely to be forthcoming.
Ongoing Corralling of Executives
Let’s look at two components that organizations can put in place to create the necessary discipline to sustain an effective end-to-end employee experience. The first is keeping executives aligned. All executives have their own priorities; Even if they fully buy into the concept of using the end-to-end employee experience as a strategic weapon, they will always have competing priorities. The CMO of People and employee brand director must consistently act as champions for the employment brand and corral executives who over time will see a measurable difference.
In particular, the CMO of People must use data to continually articulate why the employee experience is a competitive weapon and how well the company delivers that experience.
A Rolling 18-Month Strategy
A second component for creating discipline is an 18-month rolling HR strategy that is reviewed quarterly. A longer strategy plan, such as three years, felt too long for a fast-moving business; a shorter period, such as six months, felt too short given that some of the things we wanted to do had long lead times. Each quarter, we’d review what we had achieved (looking for data to inform our judgment) and review our plans for what we needed to do in the next 18 months.
These strategy meetings ensured that we could have sustained a focus on the many different things we needed to do to sustain the brand.
Figures 3.3, 3.4, and 3.5 show how we told the story of HR strategy at Shutterfly.
What Can You Do Today?
Review the processes you have in place to bring discipline to creating an immersive and predictable employee experience. Are they strong enough? If not, what can you do differently?
How to Create a Brand Book
A brand book is a crucial tool in maintaining the employment brand.
Marketing departments create brand books to help them create a consistent brand.
A brand book provides general guidelines on issues like mission, tone of voice, and the company storyline; it also provides specific guidelines on things like fonts, colors, and logo usage. No one is surprised when the CMO of Amazon, Coca Cola, or Skype produces a brand book. No one should be surprised that a CMO of People will create a brand book for the employment brand.
Here’s an example from my time at DocuSign at the highest level of mission:
–Why. Our vision is to empower the world to keep business digital.
–How. Our mission is to enable anyone to transact anything, anytime, anywhere, from any device. Securely. This is how we do it.
At the more granular level, the brand book has:
–Tone of Voice. We are collaborative and passionate. We work as a committed team. Our voice is conversational, fun(ny), confident, and professional.
–Color. The DocuSign color palette features a predominantly blue scheme accented with DocuSign yellow and additional hues from our brand.
A brand book would typically be 30–100 slides long (it’s more like a PowerPoint deck than a manual).
HR wouldn’t normally create the employment brand book entirely on its own for a couple of reasons. First, it must align with the company’s overarching corporate brand. It’s a disaster waiting to happen if you let the external customer-facing brand diverge from the internal employee-facing one. If the brands diverge, sooner or later it becomes so visible that it damages both brands. Secondly, HR normally doesn’t create the brand book on its own because it’s a lot of work and requires skills not found in HR. Marketing could loan some of its employees to HR to help create the brand book.
An example of a brand book is shown in the Appendix.
What Can You Do Today?
Start creating a brand book that documents the rules around the end-to-end employee experience. Once you have the beginning of the brand book, use it to get executives aligned on its application across all channels. This becomes an educational process for them and you. Don’t get bogged down with trying to get all the details into the brand book—just start by writing down the most important principles you want the company to follow. You’ll build it from there.
How to Design the Job of Employee Brand Director
One role you’ll probably need to sustain a predictive, immersive, end-to-end experience is the employee brand director. We’ll look at what that role does and how to staff it.
Creating the Role of Employee Brand Director
If your organization is serious about sustaining an end-to-end experience that drives productivity, you need a person who is responsible for coordinating what happens at each touchpoint. That person is the employee brand director, who would report directly to the CMO of People. The employee brand director has a view across all the HR functional areas to ensure predictability of the experience through the employee’s lifecycle.
Issues an Employee Brand Director Might Consider
The employee brand director would usually be working in collaboration with other leaders; often doing hands on work themselves, sometimes providing guidance to others. Here are some examples of tasks an employee brand director would be involved in:
–Review interview questions to ensure that they align with the brand. For example, if the brand emphasizes teamwork but the interview excludes questions about teamwork, then something is amiss. The employee brand director would identify and address the oversight.
–Edit role descriptions to ensure that they align with the brand. For example, if the employment brand emphasizes customer focus, then most role descriptions should include accountabilities related to serving customers.
–Coach authors of official communications to all employees (e.g., CEO) to support the brand. This coaching could include surface issues like font and colors, deeper issues like tone, and, most important, checking that the messaging is consistent with the brand.
The employee brand director delivers the day-to-day manifestation of the concept of a predictive, immersive experience at each employee touchpoint. It mirrors the attention to detail you would see from any fine craftsperson intent on creating a product of superior quality. If you are serious about a competition-beating employment experience, then you have to sweat the details—which means that you need someone whose job it is to sweat the details.
What Can You Do Today?
Look back at the list of three issues that an employee brand director might consider. Who is keeping an eye on those issues in your organization?
The Concept of Sustainable Foundations
All great marketing starts with a great truth about the company. Too often, companies try to communicate something they want to be or an impression they want to give. However, if you start working against truth people eventually see through it. That backfires both in terms of how customers see you and how your own employees see you.
̶̶ Brad Brooks, CEO of OneLogin, former CMO of DocuSign
The concept of building sustainable foundations is relevant to any business model, and is of special interest to the CMO of People because of how it plays out with the employment brand. Foundations are the things you need to get right before you begin to build anything substantive. In many companies, the employment brand is just a sales pitch that talent acquisition hopes will attract candidates. It often reflects what the company wishes it were like, rather than accurately saying much about what the company is truly like. In many ways, it’s just a short-term tactic with no long-term or strategic significance. It’s like putting up a nice looking storefront that leads into an unfinished store.
In the CMO of People model, the employment brand is, as I’ve said throughout this book, a competitive weapon for driving business impact. It’s what brings in and keeps the best people, and it guides the creation of an environment that allows them to do their best work.
If the employment brand is to mean anything, it must be real; it must reflect how the company truly operates. If management likes the idea of being an agile company but is in fact slow and bureaucratic, then the solution is not to dress up the employment brand with false promises—the solution is to fix the actual culture.
I describe it as a “sustainable” foundation because unlike the foundation of a building which once built will last for decades, an employment brand will erode without constant maintenance. It’s not enough to build great experience now; It must be an employee experience that the organization is confident it can sustain over time, through the highs and lows of the business cycle.
Starting with the truth makes for a strong and sustainable foundation. You can determine the truth by talking to employees. When the culture aligns with something you are happy to share with the outside world, then you can begin communicating your employment brand.
Sustaining Rather Than Launching
It is often a good idea to get staff focused on what is sustainable, rather than letting them fall in love with the excitement of a launch. Launching something new is fun; sustaining it over time is hard work. Continually helping staff to see their work as building foundations that need to last for many years is one way to reduce the risk of the wheels falling off as the company grows.
The employment brand can be difficult to sustain because:
–Newly hired managers might not understand the brand and may inadvertently deviate from it.
–The pressure to achieve short-term results can convince managers to shortchange the brand.
–Lack of attention to the brand, once the initial launch has passed, can lead to its gradual deterioration.
Overcoming these barriers doesn’t involve any special tricks—it just means that the CMO of People must make sustaining the brand a core and ongoing objective. The CEO must hold them accountable for ensuring that they don’t let the employment brand degrade, just as they hold the CMO accountable for not letting the customer brand degrade.
What Can You Do Today?
Consider how much effort your organization puts into ensuring that the employment brand reflects what it is really like to work at the company.
Doing It Right the First Time versus Iterating Forward
There is tension between the idea of building foundations and quickly iterating your way forward.
It’s easy to make an argument for taking the time to build sustainable foundations. It’s also easy to make a case for working with what you have and quickly iterating forward. The problem arises when you notice that, by and large, these two arguments contradict one another.
The resolution lies in distinguishing between what must be done right to prevent future problems and what can be sorted out as you go along. To continue with the architecture analogy, it’s self-evident that you need to get the building’s foundation right even if takes much longer than expected. On the other hand, it might make sense to rush the interior paint job and furniture selection just to make it habitable and then iterate your way to what you ultimately want.
Things to Get Right the First Time
There are five things that stood out for me as CMO of People where it made sense to invest in building the foundation (i.e., to get it right the first time). The following list applies to a fast-growing technology firm, but you might find that a different list is appropriate for your situation. In any case, I focused on getting the following five things right:
- Employment brand
- Organization culture
- Choice of technology infrastructure
- Automated versus manual processes
- The right people
I’ve already talked about the employment brand. You don’t want to go forward with a fake employment brand because ultimately people will notice that it’s false and you’ll create disillusionment that is difficult to fix.
Organization culture is another thing that is easier to get right at the outset than it is to fix later. In companies where the culture is a problem, getting it sorted out should be a top priority since you won’t get the full business impact from your talent if the culture gets in their way.
Within the HR organization, there were two particular norms that I emphasized from the start. One was that we would always come to the table with data. The other was that we would be 80 percent collaborative and 20 percent secretive (i.e., work had to be done behind closed doors). The emphasis on collaboration was necessary because HR usually does just the opposite—20 percent collaborative and 80 percent behind closed doors.
The choice of technology infrastructure is clearly foundational because it’s going to be in place for a decade or more. In my experience, the big decision was choosing an infrastructure that far exceeded our existing needs because we were confident that we would grow into it and that the absence of this infrastructure would inhibit our growth.
Related to technology is the notion that you should get automated processes set up early on, rather than making do with manual processes with the intent to fix them later. The problem with manual HR processes in a growing company is that they end up eating up all of HR’s time and it’s difficult for the organization to get around to fixing them. If you know that you will be doing high-volume hiring in a few years, don’t set up manual processes that can only handle low volumes—automate the processes from the start.
It’s a bit of a cliché that you need to hire the right people, but it needs to be said. If you staff your company with mediocre people because it’s expedient, it will drag you down for years.
Where to Iterate Your Way Forward
If you have the right foundations, then iterating your way forward with just about everything else makes sense. Analytics is one of the most important areas for iterating your way forward. If you wait until your data and analytics are perfect before presenting your findings, you’ll never get anything done. Presenting numbers that you’re not 100 percent sure about can be painful—however, as long as you’re clear with stakeholders about the quality of the data and why it is that way, you’re still better off with some preliminary data rather than no data at all.
What Can You Do Today?
Consider what really needs to be put right before the HR organization can move forward. Is there one area where you’ve been trying to iterate your way forward when you really need to shift priorities and get it sorted out now?
Making It Happen
The following tips will ensure that a sustainable foundation isn’t overlooked.
There’s no neat formula for avoiding the common fate of rushing ahead with what’s expedient instead of building foundations, but here are a few tips.
Give it a name. The phrase “sustainable foundations” captures the idea that there are fundamentals we must get in place before we can think about frills. It is the notion that these fundamentals must be something we can and do sustain. If you make that phrase a guiding principle for the HR organization, it’s more likely to be taken seriously.
Rely on your team. As an energetic CMO of People, the risk is trying to do too much yourself, at which point you get dragged into the weeds and don’t have enough time for strategic issues. This is in part a question of delegation, but it’s also a question of not under-hiring for positions. Don’t hire people with the thought that they’ll be fine because you can supervise them—hire people who are so good that they don’t need your supervision.
Get in the habit of asking simple, uncomfortable questions. A lot of good management comes from the willingness to ask obvious questions that people might be avoiding because the answer will be uncomfortable. For example, asking, “Who is responsible for ensuring that will happen?” often surfaces a truth that people around the table know: the item isn’t going to get done. It’s better to ask the question than it is to let people pretend everything is fine.
What Can You Do Today?
Is there a simple question you should be asking even though the answer will likely be uncomfortable?
Outside Perspective: Gregg Gordon
An expert provides a fresh example of mapping an experience.
Gregg Gordon, author of Your Last Differentiator: Human Capital, sees mapping the employee experience from an Operations perspective. He notes that what Marketing would call “customer experience mapping” or HR might call “the employment journey” is similar to a tool from lean manufacturing called “value chain mapping.” In all cases, the idea is to break down each step in a process and lay it out on paper so we can see what’s happening from different stakeholders’ perspectives.
Gordon shares an employee/ manager journey map on an everyday process: dealing with an unplanned absence (Figure 3.6).
What leaps out from the map is that the process is neither easy nor efficient from the manager’s and employee’s perspectives. Not only does the experience get in the way of being productive, but it also sends the wrong brand message about “how we get things done around here.”
The company Gordon works for, Kronos, builds workforce management software, and they use this kind of mapping to redesign their products. For an organization, this kind of mapping highlights problem areas they should change.
Perhaps one takeaway for the average HR manager is that while a phrase like “value chain mapping” or “employee journey mapping” may sound intimidating, the application is pretty straightforward. You can do this mapping on your own—you probably don’t need a consultant with specialized skills.
Whoever in HR is running a particular process (such as dealing with absences) will know how to do all the steps. What “mapping” does is get everything down on paper in a fair amount of detail. It will often surprise the individual just how much is involved when they take the time to write it out. When it’s down on paper, it’s easier to see how the process might be improved.
From a CMO of People perspective, an important part of the mapping work is that it’s done from the perspective of an employee working through the process, not from the perspective of HR. We want to understand how the employee experiences the process—Is it tedious? Unclear? Seemingly unnecessary?—rather than looking at the process from the viewpoint of the HR professional who is managing it.
Another takeaway from Gordon’s example is that mapping the employee journey isn’t something you do once and then file away. This tool, this way of thinking, pervades everything HR does and is relevant to a big-picture view of the whole employee lifecycle and also to the specific everyday actions, like calling in for a day off.
Takeaways
–The employee journey diagram outlining each step in which employees interact with HR is one of the most powerful tools for quickly conveying some of the main elements of the CMO of People approach.
–The brand book takes an abstract concept and makes it real; it also marks the intense collaboration that exists between Marketing and HR.
–Words like “predictive” and “immersive” have real meanings; they set a standard for the type of employee experience you need to create.
–The difficult part is not in the CMO of People concepts—it’s in creating the discipline to apply those concepts.
–The term “sustainable foundations” is helpful in getting leaders and HR to invest in those things that will be needed in the next few years to enable the company to scale.