CHAPTER 25
Where to Start

Many people reading this book are doing so because they want to help redesign their organizations to focus on employee experiences. For me, it's quite clear that this isn't an option; it's the only option. The future of work is about completely redesigning our organizations to put employee experience at the very center of how they operate. The journey is not easy but the rewards along the way are great. As I have tried to make abundantly clear, everything in this book isn't meant to be thought of a checklist. Remember, it's not so much about what your organization does as it is about how your organization does it. So how can you go about creating an organization that is able to deliver on three environments and 17 variables in an amazing way? How can you create an Experiential Organization?

YOU HAVE TO CARE, REALLY CARE

This book acts as a guide for organizations looking to create employee experiences, but it cannot teach you or your leaders to genuinely care about the people who work there. In fact, I don't believe this is something that can be taught. If you, your managers, or your executives do not care about the employees or the team members you work with, then this entire book will be completely useless. This is one of the key distinctions between the truly Experiential Organizations and everyone else. They don't invest in employee experiences for the business value. They invest in them because they care, and the business value comes as a result.

This might sound a bit corny, but have you ever tried to replicate a recipe that a family member perfected? It doesn't quite come out the same. When you ask him or her (typically a grandmother or grandfather) why his or her dish tastes better even though you followed the recipe exactly, he or she typically responds with “because it was made with love.” It's not just about what you do or about what you make. It's how you do it. I cannot stress this point enough. What does caring actually look like?

Barry‐Wehmiller is a global supplier of manufacturing technology and services with over 11,000 employees. During the 2008 recession it, like many other companies, was forced to make a very difficult decision: sacrifice (lay off) people for the success of the organization. Bob Chapman is the CEO of Barry‐Wehmiller and he described the painful decision he was being forced to make. However, Bob isn't an ordinary CEO and Barry‐Wehmiller is no ordinary company. This is an organization that genuinely cares about its people, so much so that it even measures divorce rates and the “hearts” of team members. Bob thought of his organization as a family, so his thought was “What would a family do if someone were struggling?” Usually, the other family members will come together to contribute resources to help get him or her back on his or her feet. With this concept in mind Bob decided to try a bold idea. Instead of laying anyone off from the company, what if everyone just took a month off work? This way everyone kept his or her job, but they all took a bit of a cut. All of the team members embraced this idea. Some even volunteered to take off more time because they were more financially comfortable. The entire organization came together to support one another.

This is what it means to genuinely care about the people who work at your organization. It's about truly understanding and appreciating the impact that your organization has on people's lives, both inside and outside of work.

DEFINE A REASON FOR BEING

The foundation of creating an organization that puts employee experience at its center is creating a Reason for Being that:

  1. Focuses on the impact to the world and people
  2. Is not centered on financial gain
  3. Is something unattainable
  4. Rallies employees

The Reason for Being wasn't something that I looked at as binary yes or no question. Instead it was evaluated on a 5‐point scale. Out of all of the 252 organizations analyzed in this book, the average score was a 2.16/5, or roughly 43 percent, a staggeringly low score. Some of the organizations with a perfect score on this include Cisco, Airbnb, Facebook, and Google. Organizations that scored 0 on the Reason for Being include PepsiCo, FedEx, and ExxonMobil.

Google's Reason for Being is “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.” In Work Rules! Laszlo Bock wrote, “This kind of a mission gives individuals' work meaning, because it is a moral rather than a business goal.”1

Everything the organization does and stands for can and should be traced back to the Reason for Being. This includes the values that are created, the way the workspaces are designed, how employees work, the tools that employees use, and how managers lead their teams. This is just as important for start‐ups as it is for large global organizations. Oftentimes the senior executives decide on what the Reason for Being of the organization is. However, I encourage you to bring your employees into this process and get their feedback and perspectives on how they would enact the four qualities above. As organizations evolve and adapt and as business models change, the Reason for Being can be adjusted as well.

BUILD A PEOPLE ANALYTICS FUNCTION

The goal of people analytics is to help organizations make better informed decisions based on data and research. This is very much an exciting and growing practice area inside many organizations around the world, some of which still have all of their employee data stored in Excel spreadsheets!

Each organization has its own approach to people analytics, including what the team does, how large the team is, what its priorities are, and how the team is structured. David Green, the global director of people analytics solutions at IBM Kenexa Smarter Workforce, has done an amazing job of compiling stories and examples that he has been sharing on his LinkedIn page, which I encourage you to check out. Many of the stories and examples in this section come from David's interviews and from the introductions he has made for me to various people analytics teams. Although many great case studies, stories, and people analytics examples exist, they are all rather unique. Still, there are some common attributes that the most successful people analytics teams share.

Start Small

Remember that many of the organizations like IBM, Cisco, and Microsoft have been in the people analytics game for a few years now, but even these teams had to start somewhere. Start with the basics, such as looking at any existing employee data you might have, including surveys, compensation and performance data, and tenure. See what insights and what advice or action items you might be able to share with various business units. Just by looking at these data points, you might be able to identify the relationship between pay and performance, the relationship between performance and tenure, and which teams are the highest performing. Ask a few basic questions, such as:

  • What's the average tenure of employees?
  • Which teams perform the best?
  • How large is each team?
  • Do people who get paid more stay longer?
  • Do people with more senior job titles stay longer?

If you recall, one of the best ways to create employee experiences is by knowing your people and that starts with people analytics. Everything you do and all the data you look at should be centered on knowing your workforce better. This team is typically composed of data scientists, visualization specialists, engineers, and other very smart people who understand how to collect, analyze, visualize, and interpret data. It's common to find several PhDs on people analytics teams. This function also needs to work with the various lines of business to understand their challenges and potential solutions.

I recently spoke with Alexis Fink, who is the general manager, talent intelligence and analytics at Intel Corporation, which has around 100,000 employees. Her people analytics team comprises 25 really smart individuals. She had some great advice for organizations looking to begin their people analytics journey.

The first thing organizations should do is to start with what she calls “the what questions.” These are basic questions about composition and patterns in your workforce, such as “What is the average team size?” “What's the diversity of our workforce?” “What is the average tenure?” These are basic questions that organizations should be able to answer based on data they already collect. If your organization isn't collecting any data, well, then you have much bigger things to worry about!

Once basic data is in place, the next step is to look at the “why questions.” Examples of these are “Why is one group more successful than another?” “Why are the high‐performing managers doing things differently?” “Why does this group of employees have more internal movement than a comparison group?”

Ideally, organizations can then look at predictive questions. These include “Employees with these attributes are more likely to leave—what we can do to stop that?” or “What are the factors that are driving effective team performance, and what can the organization do to affect that?” This level is where the ability to foresee and even change the path of your labor force comes into play!

These three question layers can be thought of as a type of maturity model. Start with “the what questions” and work your way up.

Identify the Required Skills

According to an article that David Green wrote called “The HR [human resources] Analytics journey at Shell,” the 100,000‐person oil and gas company focused its capabilities and skills on six areas (taken verbatim from the article):

  1. Data Science and Statistics: data cleaning, merging and modelling
  2. HR Practice, Policies and Procedures: best practice and Shell specific
  3. Business Understanding: what is employee performance and what is the impact of employees on particular business results
  4. Consulting: Effective communication/storytelling and building analytics capabilities
  5. Assessments/Psychometrics: Design, validation and evaluation of behavioral assessments
  6. Employee Surveys: Design and evaluation of employee surveys2

Dawn Klinghoffer is the general manager of the HR business insights team at Microsoft (one of the Experiential Organizations). In another great article by David Green called, “The HR Analytics Journey at Microsoft,” Dawn shared how they structure their people analytics efforts. The HRBI (Human Resources Business Insights) organization is made up of four teams (again taken verbatim from the article), which are:

  1. Workforce Data Insights—this team is focused on providing analytics and reporting to the HR Line organizations supporting our businesses. Typical skill sets include: MBAs with consulting and business analytics skills.
  2. Workforce Data Programs—a team providing analytics, measurement and reporting for our COEs [Centers of Excellence] and the programs that they run. Skill sets: Program managers with experiences in business analytics as well as MBAs.
  3. Workforce Data Solutions—this team owns our analytics and reporting tools & technology, and comprises team members with more of a technical background—Skill sets: experience in IT and/or program management on the technical side.
  4. Advanced Analytics & Research—this team specializes in advanced analytics & research and comprises skill sets such as industrial/organizational psychology, statisticians, and mathematicians.3

According to Klinghoffer organizations should start with something that is very doable and beneficial, such as looking at attrition. This can be broken down by certain locations, functions, teams, seniority levels, and the like. Exit surveys can be conducted to help provide data for attrition.

Alexis from Intel identified three core groups of skills that organizations should look for:

  1. HR domain knowledge—understanding things such as the recruiting process, job structuring, compensation, and leadership and management advancement approaches
  2. Analytics mastery—true expertise with numbers, analysis, and data sets. Oftentimes these people have higher education degrees, such as PhDs. Data visualization is also a crucial skill, but oftentimes those who are good at analytics are also good at data visualization.
  3. Data management expertise—ability to know how to access, compile, clean, manage, and organize data in a meaningful and usable way.

Oftentimes three different people possess these three skills. Chances are your organization already has these people in house. It's just a matter of bringing them together.

A lot of the success of people analytics depends on making sure that humans are filling out the right information, completely, accurately, consistently, and in a standardized way. Depending on how well your organization has been doing on this front, it can take weeks or years before the people analytics function can provide valuable insights.

Have Executive Support, Typically the Chief People Officer

Every people analytics team I have spoken with has mentioned this as being a crucial factor for long‐term success. In most organizations the people analytics function actually sits within HR (or whatever the people function at your organization is called). Ideally, you will have the support of many executives from different business units who all see the value of people analytics. After all, even though this function might sit within HR, the data and insight can be applied across the entire organization. Executive support helps ensure resources are being allocated, expectations are being managed, and decisions are being pushed through.

Alexis also pointed out a few other areas of consideration when looking to garner support. It's important to remember that in many organizations, the primary currency of HR has always been relationships, intuition, guidance, and what many would consider to be soft skills. Some might view a shift toward analytics as something that can threaten their jobs because it has the potential to eliminate the need for those soft skills. It's important to manage this relationship and help team members understand that both soft skills and data are vital and must work together. Last, people analytics teams should learn to build a strong relationship with legal teams because labor and employment laws are quite strict, and not everything that the people analytics team is able to do is considered legal. It's important to understand where these lines are drawn.

Train the Organization

People analytics is still very much an emerging area of practice, which means that the majority of employees inside of your organization might not know what this team does, how to leverage its skills, or even what questions to start asking. As Henry Ford famously said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” It's helpful to provide guidance to the organization on what the purpose of this team is and how other departments and functions can leverage the skills of the people analytics team. This will help them understand how to ask the right questions.

Tell Stories

Most data and analytics teams comprise some very smart people with PhDs. Although the work they do is fascinating and valuable, it's quite useless if the right people aren't able to understand the insight in a meaningful way. Imagine a people analytics team is presenting what they learned about a particular marketing team to the leader of that division. If they show off their calculations, the models they used, and what the findings of their analysis were, then the marketing leader probably won't take much action. However, if this same people analytics team is able to create a narrative around what the data means, then chances are much higher that the marketing team will take action.

BUILD OR IMPROVE THE EXPERIENCE TEAM

Let's face it; HR used to be boring, outdated, and inspiring. I know it's hard to hear but it's true.

That's because this function was traditionally responsible for things such as hiring, firing, compensation, talent acquisition, and governance. Although these things were and continue to be important, they aren't exactly innovating how work gets done, and they are certainly not focused on employee experience. However, today we're starting to see a new HR that is virtually an unrecognizable function. In fact, the very name and title of HR are starting to disappear and are getting replaced by more human‐centric roles and names, such as people, talent, and experience departments. This people‐centric aspect of the organization is becoming a core component of how work gets done, and sitting at the very center of everything is employee experience. Of course, this isn't about just changing the title of HR leaders. It's about getting them to think and act differently.

Although many of the traditional components of HR still do exist, this group of professionals is now on the very forefront of exploring what the future of work is going to look like. HR is responsible for figuring out how to create an organization where people want to show up to work. This is a very exciting and unique challenge and opportunity. Everything that I explored in this book is something that HR teams around the world are going to be tasked with guiding, but the organization as a whole will be tasked with implementing it. The role of HR has morphed into organizational design and innovation that has to look at the technologies employees use to work, the spaces in which they work, and the culture employees are surrounded by.

BMC Software has over 6,000 employees around the world, and it is one of the few organizations that has a chief employee experience officer. Her name is Monika Fahlbusch. I spoke with at length with Monika to understand how her role and the HR function are evolving to focus on employee experience. BMC Software used to have a chief human resources officer, but as many other forward‐thinking organizations have realized, both that function and the naming of that function have worn out their welcome. Monika and her team wanted to create something that better reflected what this new role and function was really about, employee experience. BMC Software, like many other organizations, has a customer experience team, but rarely do organizations apply this same approach or mentality to look inward at employees.

According to Monika HR needs to have an innovative mind‐set that goes beyond traditional HR policies. HR professionals must be the agents of change, creative thought leaders, and the spokespeople for the employees they support. This is what prompted BMC Software to make what many would consider radical changes.

Monika owns all of HR, facilities and real estate, employee communications, community (external giving), and even IT! All of these things fit quite nicely into the three employee experience environments explored in this book. Out of all the organizations I have researched and spoken with, this has been the only instance where I have heard of IT reporting to HR. According to Monika, this new organization that we are going to see will be designed using data and stories. It's going to be up to HR (or whatever this team will be called) to ask, listen, and act on this information.

Google's People Operations team comprises one‐third traditional HR practitioners, one‐third consultants from top‐tier strategy consultancies, and one‐third analytically minded professionals who have at least a master's degree in something such as organizational psychology, mathematics, or physics. This approach may or may not work for you, but it has certainly worked for Google.

Figure 25.1 shows how the role of traditional HR is evolving.

Illustration of Evolution of HR.

Figure 25.1 Evolution of HR

Regardless of how you decide to structure employee experience at your organization, the main point is that this a new and emerging role whose purpose is to create a place where people genuinely want to show up to work by focusing on culture, technology, and the physical workspace. This isn't simply about changing the name of the HR function to employee experience. All the factors and variables discussed in this book must become a part of your team's arsenal.

DEPLOY FEEDBACK TOOLS/MECHANISMS

Every one of the Experiential Organizations listed in this book has thorough feedback mechanisms that connect the voice of the employee to the decisions that the organization makes. Without this bridge there is no such thing as employee experience. The goal is to create the employee experience design loop, which was discussed earlier in this book where I looked at how General Electric (GE) and Airbnb were implementing this kind of process. Feedback in an organization can happen in only two ways: in person or through technology.

In‐Person Feedback

Perhaps the largest area of impact where organizations are seeing the implementation of feedback mechanisms is during the annual performance review. Organizations such as Adobe, T‐Mobile, Cisco, and others have made a dramatic shift away from this framework to instead focus on more real‐time conversations that happen regularly. In these oftentimes informal discussions leaders are encouraged to not only get to know their people on a professional level but also inquire about their aspirations, goals, and dreams. These open and candid conversations allow managers and executives to better make decisions that affect their people.

Feedback via Technology

As we saw in the GE example earlier, technology is a powerful mechanism for creating a real‐time communication, collaboration, and feedback system. For the past few years we have seen organizations around the world invest heavily in internal social networks, custom‐built apps, videoconferencing solutions, and other technologies that allow employees to stay connected to one another and information anywhere, anytime, and on any device. Creating this type of connected organization means that feedback can be provided in real time from anyone.

BMC Software does an outstanding job of this with several technologies it deployed and built (based on employee feedback). These include a new employee intranet built from the ground up and shifting away from traditional unified communications solutions to a more mobile friendly and modern workforce. Along with some other technology enhancements, employees at BMC Software are able to provide feedback to one another anywhere, anytime, and on any device, creating a truly mobile workforce.

In August of 2015 the New York Times published a rather scathing article by Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld about Amazon called “Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace,” which made it sound like the company is one of the world's worst places to work. A handful of employees were used as sources for the article. I found that quite interesting because Amazon is one of the Experiential Organizations that scored exceptionally high in areas such as having a physical space that reflects the values of the organization, diversity and inclusion, and having a sense of purpose. However, Amazon also scored poor (for an Experiential Organization) in areas such as having managers who act as coaches and mentors and investing in the well‐being of employees, both of which were huge points of contention in the New York Times article.

After this article was published Amazon made several changes, and perhaps the most impactful is the introduction and the widespread scale of Amazon Connections, an internal system used to collect employee feedback. Originally this was used just for blue‐collar workers but has since been rolled out to white‐collar workers as well. According to a Bloomberg article by Spencer Soper, “Amazon Wants to Know How Its Employees Feel Every Day,” “Dubbed Amazon Connections, the internal system poses questions daily to employees to collect responses on topics such as job satisfaction, leadership and training opportunities.” Teams then compile and analyze the feedback into daily reports, which are shared with Amazon.4 This is certainly a noble effort by the company to make sure that it is constantly focusing on creating great employee experiences. Not coincidentally, all the factors mentioned in the Bloomberg article are also part of the 17 employee experience variables discussed in this book.

IMPLEMENT COOL SPACES, ACE TECHNOLOGY, AND CELEBRATED CULTURE

Through people analytics and feedback mechanisms, your organization should get a very solid sense of what your employees care about and why. This foundation is what will allow you to go from using the 17 variables above as a checklist to using them as a framework to create amazing employee experiences. Depending on how aggressive you want to be, you can tackle as many of these simultaneously as you want. In fact some of them actually go hand in hand.

Technological Environment

  • Consumer grade technology: Deploy technologies that are modern, beautiful, and useful. Stay away from legacy systems.
  • Available to everyone: Give everyone access to every technology (hardware and software) whenever and wherever possible.
  • Focused on employee needs: Understand how and why employees work before giving them tools your organization thinks they need. Talk to them, interview them, and observe them.

Physical Environment

  • Workspace options: Forget about open or closed spaces. Create multiple workspaces based on how employees work. Give them choice.
  • Values reflected in the workspace: Avoid having your values seen as lip service. Try to create physical manifestations of your values in the workplace.
  • Being proud to bring in friends or visitors: Allow friends, visitors, and strangers to tour your spaces. If you aren't ready to do this, then revamp your workspace! Your workspaces are employee experience centers.
  • Workplace flexibility and autonomy: Focus on inputs, not outputs. Implement flexible work programs and treat your people like adults. Let them have autonomy and flexibility but also the accountability that comes with them. Work‐life balance has become work‐life integration.

Cultural Environment

  • Sense of purpose: Show employees the impact they are having on customers, the community, and the world. Make the connection between work and impact by telling and sharing stories.
  • Fair treatment: Teach employees about biases and how to avoid them. Provide open communication channels for employees to share concerns or issues without judgment or penalty. Create employee committees to help ensure fair treatment.
  • Feeling valued: Listen and acknowledge employees and make changes to the organization based on their feedback. Provide adequate compensation and benefits. Recognize employees for the hard work they do by creating special programs around this.
  • Managers acting like coaches and mentors: Get rid of the old stereotypical manager mentality. Hire and train managers to focus on the success of their people. Create ongoing and open conversations about work and life between employees.
  • Feeling like you're part of a team: Acknowledge team, not just individual, performance. Create communities of passion and of interest. Allow employees to share their stories and experience with one another and with the world.
  • Ability to learn something new and advance and get the resources to do so: Give employees access to multiple learning resources whether they be proprietary or third party. Understand what employees want and need when they talk about advancement.
  • Referring others: Most organizations in the world have referral programs, but simply giving employees money won't get you more candidates. Focus on the employee experience, and others will refer prospects because they want to, not because they are being paid to do so.
  • Diversity and inclusion: Partner with third‐party organizations that focus on diversity and inclusion, and make this an initiative that is tied to executive compensation. Create internal groups and committees around various diversity and inclusion efforts. Adjust hiring approaches if needed.
  • Health and wellness: Invest in the whole employee, not just the physical or mental aspect. This means going beyond just a gym and healthy food options. Do your best to take care of your people.
  • Brand perception: Share stories of the impact your organization is having on employees and the community. Participate in the various lists and rankings that rank and highlight exceptional organizations. Strive to be an ethical organization that positively affects all those who come in contact with it.

EXAMPLE: ADOBE

Adobe is one the Experiential Organizations that I researched for this book, and here's what it is doing for each one of the 17 variables, sometimes quoted directly from its website.5

Technological Environment

Consumer Grade Technology

  • Employees are offered a variety of laptops, tablets, monitors, Adobe software, and so on and can select the technologies that work best for them and their job function.
  • They also have access to Adobe software, which is built with the consumer grade mind‐set.

Available to Everyone

  • All of the 15,000+ employees at Adobe have access to Adobe's creative software and a 24/7 digital learning environment where they can learn professional skills anywhere and anytime.

Focused on Employee Needs

  • In addition to the modern software, hardware, and device options that employees have at their disposal, they have access to workspaces with state‐of‐the‐art videoconferencing, interactive whiteboards, and a robust intranet platform where employees have access to real‐time company information, development resources, and tools they need to be effective in their roles.
  • All of these things are based on what employees need and want to be successful at work.

Physical Environment

Workspace Options

  • The spaces at Adobe are modern and vibrant, with a largely open floor plan. There are also plenty of communal areas and alternative workspaces, such as cafes, telephone booths, outside patios, conference rooms, and other community spaces.

Values Reflected in the Workspace

  • The core values at Adobe are “Genuine, Exceptional, Innovative & Involved.”
  • Adobe has completely redesigned its 143,000‐square‐feet headquarters in the Bay Area to include a modern and innovative vibe, which includes a game area, a gym, meditation spaces, and even an artisan sandwich shop.
  • Adobe has a program called Kickbox where any employee is able to get access to a $1,000 prepaid credit card and an innovation workshop to come up with a new idea or concept.
  • The mainly open floor plan, gorgeous new design, Kickbox program, implementation of the enhanced workplace technologies, and investments in the community and diversity all help make the Adobe values come to life.

Being Proud to Bring in Friends or Visitors

  • Adobe sites in San Jose, San Francisco, Seattle, and Lehi offer an annual Adobe Field Trip once a year where employees bring family to work to participate in a variety of fun activities.
  • Adobe regularly hosts tours for students, and employees are able to bring in friends for a tour pretty much anytime they want.

Workplace Flexibility and Autonomy

  • The working relationships are owned and defined by the employee and manager. Together they determine the flexibility and autonomy needs. There's no official company‐wide policy that everyone must follow.
  • Adobe is also piloting a flexibility plan for employees who are returning from a lengthy leave to ease back into work (for example, from maternity leave).

Cultural Environment

Sense of Purpose

  • Adobe measures purpose (as it defines it). In fact, 91 percent of employees believe that Adobe and its products have a positive impact on society.
  • Adobe works hard to help foster a sense of purpose in three ways:
    • Provide rich volunteer opportunities
    • Connect employees directly to the customer experience
    • Create a sense of pride in Adobe as a company
  • Adobe makes sure it hires people who have a genuine interest and drive to change the world and affect communities positively.
  • Leadership capability training is also available for all employees at every level to help them accelerate and grow their careers.

Fair Treatment

  • Adobe has several networks, including AccessAdobe, AdobeProud (LGBTQ), Adobe & Women, Asian Employee Network, Black Employee Network, Hispanic & Latino Employee Network, and Veterans Employee Network, to “help foster an inclusive work environment.”
  • It received a perfect score and the recognition of being a Best Place to Work for LGBTQ Equality on the Human Rights Campaign's Corporate Equality Index.
  • Adobe partners “with Stanford University's Clayman Institute for Gender Research as well as Catalyst to access resources, research, events and a community of diversity and inclusion leaders.”

Feeling Valued

  • For careers, Adobe developed a learning environment that fosters a learning culture that includes a leadership development program for all employees and access to real‐time skills development through a digital learning platform. In addition, Adobe offers an educational reimbursement program of $10,000 per year to help employees who want to pursue further education.
  • Employees are recognized for their innovation, and commitment to customers and one another, through various awards, such as Founder's Awards and team awards.
  • Adobe has great wellness and financial benefits for employees and their loved ones.
  • Various community celebration events are held throughout the year for employees.
  • Adobe does company check‐in surveys (it was one of the first major companies to abolish annual reviews). Each employee receives a survey once a year, but not everyone will take it at the same time. There are four survey periods per year, and employees are randomly selected to take it during one of the assigned periods. Adobe then gets the feedback and modifies whatever is needed.

Managers Acting like Coaches and Mentors

  • Adobe offers several programs to encourage mentorship and coaching.
  • “Development programs for female employees include the Women's Executive Shadow Program, Worldwide Field Operations Leadership Circles, Voice & Influence Circles and WOMEN Unlimited,” along with an annual women's summit.
  • A yearlong Campus to Adobe Life development program is available for hires right out of a university. Throughout the first calendar year of joining Adobe, university hires are automatically enrolled. This program is designed to complement the comprehensive onboarding and integration plan managers have for their employees. The Campus to Adobe Life program includes regular one‐on‐one sessions with a professionally trained Co‐Active coach and events for socializing, networking, and building business acumen.
  • Adobe managers have a genuine interest in the success of their people and provide individual coaching and mentoring to employees.

Feeling like You're Part of a Team

  • Adobe Life is a behind‐the‐scenes look of what it's like to work at the company. This program features tweets from employees, a magazine (which highlights everything from outstanding employees to community involvement efforts), and photos.
  • By creating all these communities and sharing the content about them, employees very much feel like they are a part of a team.

Ability to Learn Something New and Advance and Get the Resources to Do So

  • All employees are encouraged to become learn‐it‐alls.
  • Adobe has a dedicated page on its intranet that curates learning opportunities to amplify skills and offers learning resources from its Leading@Adobe program and external resources, such as Lynda.com, Harvard ManageMentor, Safari, getAbstract, and its Goldmine Research Portal.
  • Employees are offered memberships to Catalyst (the leading nonprofit organization with a mission to accelerate progress for women through workplace inclusion), and Aperian Global (learning resource for individuals and teams to perform effectively worldwide).
  • Employees also receive discounts if they'd like to pursue learning with General Assembly, Udemy, or Udacity.
  • Adobe offers lateral moves into different business units to advance skills or offers promotions to more senior roles.
  • For fiscal year 2016 year to date, 22 percent of filled positions at Adobe were from internal transfers. Year to date approximately 15 percent of Adobe's employees were promoted.

Referring Others

  • Although Adobe does offer a referral bonus of $2,000 in the United States, this amount varies by country. It specifically looks for high‐performing individuals who can help advance Adobe's industry leadership and people who reinforce the company's values: “Genuine, Exceptional, Innovative & Involved.”
  • Employees can submit the resumes of people they'd like to refer directly to their hiring manager and a recruiter along with a note that explains why their referral would be a great addition to Adobe.
  • The employee referral rate is between 25 percent and 30 percent.

Diversity and Inclusion

  • In July 2016 Adobe released equal pay data for the U.S. workforce, and in 2015, it strengthened its family leave policies for employees in the United States, India, and Australia.
  • Adobe is “working to diversify the tech industry through our Youth Coding Initiative, GenHERation sponsorship, GEM [National Consortium for Graduate Degrees for Minorities in Engineering and Science] Fellowship program, and other strategic investments.” It partners with organizations such as Girls Who Code, Black Girls Code, CodeNow, Urban Arts Partnership, Technovation, ChickTech, City Year, and Code as a Second Language “to further drive global impact.”

Health and Wellness

  • Adobe invests in programs to support employees so that they can be at their best every day. Benefits include medical, dental, vision, 401(k) plan, and exchange stock portfolio.
  • There's no specified amount of vacation days or paid time off for full‐time Adobe employees, and every five years employees earn a sabbatical.
  • Big‐growth locations provide on‐site gyms, and Adobe offers up to $360 per year for gym memberships, bike share memberships, fitness classes, massages, nutritional counseling, financial advice, and much more to help employees and their families maintain a well‐rounded, healthy lifestyle.
  • Some locations also offer locally sourced foods.

Brand Perception

  • Interbrand recently listed Adobe as a top riser and a top‐growing brand, ranked number 63 on the list of 100 companies, up five spots from last year. Adobe debuted in 2009 at number 95.
  • Adobe is known as an employer of choice around the world—listed on Fortune's Best 100 Companies to Work For; Best Place to Work in India, Germany, Australia and the United Kingdom; Best Multinational Place to Work, Most inDemand Employer on LinkedIn; Glassdoor's Best Place to Work; and CareerBliss's Happiest Companies to Work For; Forbes's Most Innovative Companies, and others.
  • Ranked as an Experiential Organization

Highlighting this list of what Adobe is investing in doesn't even begin to do justice to the immense work that the company has put into employee experience. However, hopefully this will give you a sense of what some of those investments were and continue to be. Like the other Experiential Organizations featured in this book, Adobe genuinely cares about its people and it shows.

IDENTIFY AND CREATE MOMENTS THAT MATTER (OR MOMENTS OF IMPACT)

What are the key moments in the lives of your people? This is the first question that organizations have to answer. Cisco has a great framework it uses for this.

You can see the 11 moments in Figure 25.2.

Illustration of Cisco's Our People Deal.

Figure 25.2 Cisco's Our People Deal

Source: Cisco.6

Let's look at what these moments that matter actually are:

  • First Impression: Cisco knows it has only one chance to make a first impression on employees. That's why it's improving the interview, offer, and first day experiences with the intersection of human touch and digital.
  • My Development: Cisco is upgrading, organizing, and communicating development tools and offerings to help employees continue to learn and grow professionally.
  • My Leader: Great teams need great leaders. Cisco is developing tools and processes for leaders to understand and lead with their unique strengths. Cisco inspires curiosity to explore how to become a great team leader.
  • My Personal Experiences: Developing programs that help Cisco deliver the right support for employees experiencing major life events while adapting to regional and cultural needs, including having a baby, planning for college, caring for an elderly parent, or dealing with a family crisis
  • My Innovation: Empowering every employee to innovate and make a meaningful difference. Cisco is currently focused on its second Innovate Everywhere Challenge and creating a centralized hub for innovation.
  • My Rewards: Striving to create a meaningful rewards experience—including perks, benefits, pay, and recognition—that encourages productivity, attracts and retains talent, and is one size fits one (personalized).
  • My Technology: Simplifying, centralizing, and personalizing Cisco's technology solutions—things such as Refresh, eStore, and CEC [Cisco Employee Connection, its internal website]—to help employees be more productive every day.
  • My Workplace: Cisco is creating a connected workspace that empowers employees to collaborate, innovate, and deliver amazing outcomes for their teams and customers.
  • My Lasting Impression: Initiatives that foster a positive and respectful transition from Cisco, show appreciation for employees' time with the company, and create an environment for a lifelong relationship through an alumni network.
  • My Team: Performance lives in teams so Cisco identified what characterizes its best teams and shared tools with its people to bring out the best in their teams—lifting the overall performance of the organization.
  • My Making a Difference: Cisco is committed to helping employees support causes and the communities they care about, accelerate social change, and invest in a better tomorrow. Cisco is currently doing this by focusing on enhancing volunteering, donations, and corporate social responsibility initiatives.

The framework that Cisco provides here can be a great starting point for any organization. You will notice that Cisco uses all three types of moments that matter: specific, ongoing, and created. For example, First Impression comprises a few very specific moments, such as the interview process and an employee's first day on the job. My Leader addresses the ongoing relationship that an employee has with his or her team. My Innovation allows Cisco to create specific moments, such as innovation jams.

Your organization can start with perhaps two or three moments that matter and then expand from there. Identifying these moments doesn't need to be a complicated or tedious task. Encourage leaders to have one‐on‐one conversations with employees, hold focus groups at various career stages, conduct a few surveys, and leverage whatever technology solutions you might have to get employees to open up. Have a conversation with your people, and ask them what they care about and why. Leveraging the people analytics team will help identify what these moments actually are and will allow you to easily categorize the moments that matter into one of the three categories I talked about earlier.

THINK OF YOUR ORGANIZATION LIKE A LAB INSTEAD OF A FACTORY

You probably haven't heard of Sir Richard Arkwright, but he was actually quite a well‐known inventor and entrepreneur. Arkwright is credited with being the creator of the modern‐day factory (his did cotton spinning). This was the first time in modern business when people were reduced to mere replaceable commodities at scale. Factories were behemoths that had more and better resources to produce more product cheaper and so they did quite well. This factory model was then copied all over the world until Henry Ford further revolutionized this concept with mass production via assembly line. Factory jobs were long, hard, monotonous, and repetitive. Organizations that operate like factories see environments where employees adhere to a dress code, work in similar spaces, don't ask questions or share ideas, commute to and from the office to show up and leave at the same time every day, and work in an environment that is routine, repetitive, and focused on maintaining the status quo. Organizations that operate like laboratories are different, as shown in Figure 25.3.

Illustration of Key Differences Between Labs and Factories, Labs Will Succeed, Factories Will Not.

Figure 25.3 Key Differences Between Labs and Factories, Labs Will Succeed, Factories Will Not

One of the fascinating things about Experiential Organizations is that they view themselves more like laboratories than factories. These organizations don't claim to have all the answers or the best solutions to employee experience (or the future of work for that matter). Experiential Organizations embrace failure, rely on data to make decisions, test new ideas, embrace employee feedback, and encourage and support their people. Not only is this simply the right thing to do, but it also serves as a unique business advantage because the best way to mitigate risks or identify opportunities is by experimenting or testing ideas. Airbnb treats its physical space like software where it is constantly testing and implementing new workspace designs to see what works best. Google tested numerous approaches to get employees to eat healthier foods at work before realizing that the best solution was to put the healthy food choices in transparent containers at eye level and the unhealthy options in translucent containers below eye level. Cisco is testing out a new approach to talent that emulates a freelance marketplace inside of the organization. LinkedIn is playing around with the idea of giving employees badges for new skills they earn at work. The list goes on and on. Think of your organization more like a laboratory and less like a factory.

NOTES

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