RULE #1
1
MAKE THE WORKPLACE AN EXPERIENCE
The Focus on Employee Experience
We want work that is more than just challenging, we want meaning, purpose and an emotional connection to our work and one that gives us opportunities to learn and grow.
Engaged employees are a rare breed. Gallup reports only 32 percent of U.S. employees are engaged in their jobs—meaning only one in three workers is psychologically committed to their work and likely to make a positive contribution to their employer.1
Organizations have been focusing on increasing engagement levels because they see the link between employee engagement and productivity. Engaged employees come to work each day with a sense of purpose, leave with a feeling of accomplishment, are more productive, and achieve higher levels of customer satisfaction. Gallup reports that highly engaged employees have higher well-being, healthier lifestyles, and lower absenteeism than their less-engaged or actively disengaged counterparts.2
Disengaged employees cost U.S. companies over $450 billion in lost productivity per year, while organizations with higher levels of employee engagement report 22 percent higher productivity. According to Jim Harter, Gallup’s chief scientist, Workplace Management and Wellbeing, “The general consciousness about the importance of employee engagement seems to have increased in the past decade. But there is a gap between knowing about engagement and doing something about it in most American workplaces.”3
However, forward-looking companies from Airbnb to IBM are moving beyond a singular focus on increasing employee engagement to purposefully designing compelling employee experiences, which fuel increased levels of engagement.
Diane Gherson, chief human resource officer of IBM, sees this movement to employee experience as part of the evolution of the HR function. As Gherson says, “Over the years, the HR function has moved from developing programs to match the competencies IBM needs, to creating a shared service model for optimizing efficiencies and now to designing personalized employee experiences.”
There are several key drivers to intentionally designing employee experiences, including the fact that all generations of employees (not just millennials, born between 1982 and 1993) are approaching the workplace with a consumer mindset. With the rise of mobile technology and a rapidly expanding on-demand economy, employees now expect a similar experience at work to the one they have in their personal life. At the same time, organizations are recognizing the need to create one seamless experience for both employees and customers.
Gherson explains how HR systems and programs currently stack up against these increasing expectations: “For much of the last decade, HR has been about outsourcing, standardization, globalization, and self service, all at the expense of the individual employee experience. Regrettably, when an employee interacts with HR, the experience is often a lot more like an experience with the Internal Revenue Service than Zappos.”4
HR needs to focus more on creating one seamless experience that is memorable and compelling and connects to the individual employee on an emotional level. How are organizations doing this? According to Eric Lesser, research director, IBM Institute for Business Value, “The key to designing compelling employee experiences rests with leveraging analytics to gauge the current employee experience in a similar manner as your company measures and evaluates the customer experience.” Lesser goes on to say, “Analytics will move a company from just reporting data to developing insights about what is important to employees and creating a value proposition based upon this.”
One interesting example of this is the IBM HR team’s award of a patent to predict retention risk for employees in key job roles. Anshul Sheopuri, People Analytics director, is the point person, leading a team in using analytics and machine learning to calculate employee retention risks. He does this by analyzing the relative importance of several employee risk factors, such as location, compensation, employee engagement sentiment, and even manager engagement, at the aggregate level for specific countries and job roles. Then it’s the job of the People Analytics team to identify employee groups in key job roles at risk of finding opportunities outside of IBM and to propose a program of manager intervention to prevent departures. This initiative has been reported to save IBM over $130 million, as measured by the avoidance of the inevitable costs of hiring and training replacements. The key to the program has been not only the calculation of employee retention risk but the creation of a playbook for managers to use with potential high-risk employees for engaging them in mentoring sessions or continuing learning and development opportunities.
At the heart of the increased interest in designing compelling employee experiences is the recognition that creating an emotional connection is what will ultimately drive the greatest levels of engagement. A study by Adam Grant, a management professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, reinforces this.5 Grant studied a group of students who were raising scholarship money by calling alumni and asking for contributions. He asked a former student who had benefited from a scholarship made possible by fund-raising to talk to the group of students. Grant found that after the talk, the group raised 171 percent more money as a result of this explicit emotional connection.
Communicating a sense of purpose is at the forefront of the minds of business leaders today. In fact, it’s become central to the public dialogue. A recent study conducted by Oxford University’s Saïd Business School found that public conversation about purpose increased five times over since 1995.
This is reinforced by PwC Next Gen research, a global study of over 40,000 millennials and non millennials that found the emotional connection to work and its purpose drives retention in the workplace.6 Millennials in this study reported that working at a company with a strong, cohesive, and team-oriented culture was important to their workplace happiness, even more so than non millennials.7
Employer Rating Sites Put the Spotlight on Employee Experience
Millennials expect employers to think about how their company provides an emotional connection to work. But isn’t that what we all want out of work? A growing number of employer rating sites promote themselves as making it easier to find the match between what we want as an employee and what the company offers. Employer rating sites have become a global phenomenon, as shown in Table 1.1.
Table 1.1 Samples of Global Employer Rating Sites
The global rise of employer rating sites such as Glassdoor, JobAdvisor, RateMyEmployer, and others has increased the importance of how a company communicates its purpose, vision, values, and culture. These websites allow employees to rate organizations based on such factors as culture, engagement, employee training, and management. Interestingly, 61 percent of job seekers seek company reviews and ratings before making decision to apply for a job.8
Just as TripAdvisor popularized for travel and Amazon.com for books and other products, now everyone, including current, former, and prospective employees, can publicly rate organizations, share their engagement level, and provide specific feedback. On Glassdoor, anonymous feedback is provided by a simple three-point rubric of Pros, Cons, and Advice and a summary rating of one to five stars. For Pros, raters are prompted to “Share some of the best reasons to work at the organization.” For Cons, raters are asked to “Share some of the downsides of working at the organization” and then are prompted to offer “Advice to management.”9
With job candidates and employees now empowered to provide instant feedback on employers, we are seeing the “yelpification” of the workplace, where, at any time, employees can rate a company’s culture and management just as they rate a hotel, restaurant, or movie. In much the same way that marketing departments have become customer-centric, human resource departments are now equally focused on understanding their employees’ needs and wants. This means applying a relentless focus on transparency and responsiveness in the workplace.
As more employees use an expanding set of these employer rating sites, power is shifting from the employer to the employee. The question then becomes what should companies do about this?
Research firm Monitor 360 took a close look at the Glassdoor.com feedback for Starbucks and found some interesting insights. In the world of retail, Starbucks is regarded as a champion of employee engagement, recruitment, and retention. CEO Howard Schultz claims that Starbucks’s relationship with its people and its culture constitutes a sustainable competitive advantage. At the time of this writing, Starbucks had a 3.8 out of 5.0 rating on Glassdoor, compared with 3.3 for Peets Coffee and 3.0 for Dunkin’ Donuts. How did Starbucks garner better relative ratings about its employee experience? Certainly, Starbucks increased its perks, such as full health benefits for part-timers and tuition reimbursement for Arizona State University’s online courses. But are these the real reasons? Monitor 360’s analysis of over 5,500 employee reviews of Starbucks on the Glassdoor site revealed a number of distinct narratives that employees shared about Starbucks. Many of the narratives focused on the pride employees feel in working at Starbucks more than the discrete set of benefits offered employees. Of course, they favored the healthcare and tuition benefits, but just as importantly, they were emotionally connected to Starbucks’s mission to “inspire and nurture the human spirit—one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time.” One of the strongest narratives was stated by a Starbucks employee: “Working here is more than a job—I’m proud to come to work and to serve excellent coffee to my community. My team is fun, the company gives me health and dental, free coffee, and parking, and I have flexibility to pick my own hours.” On the day we checked, another reviewer posted, “The culture of Starbucks is far superior than any other place I’ve worked.”10 What Starbucks learned from this analysis was that purpose-driven narratives tied to the company mission and values should be consistently communicated across the entire employee life cycle from recruitment to development and engagement.11
In an article for the Huffington Post, Sophie Sakellariadis explains how companies can process the information from employer rating sites and build proper responses, stating, “Companies should consciously design their communication and engagement initiatives around the unique narratives their employees hold to and be responsive in addressing their unique concerns.”12
What can other companies learn from the Starbucks experience?
1. Carefully listen to employees to better understand what motivates employee engagement.
2. Build reviews of your main employer rating sites into your people process. Reach out to employees who were just promoted or have just completed a new-hire onboarding program and invite them to provide their feedback.
3. Assign a team to analyze the data and provide insights to the organization on actions to take in responding to employee feedback.
4. Use the data from analyzing employer rating sites to inform your HR strategy.
5. Capture content from employer rating sites to audit and authenticate your employer brand so it is real and speaks to prospective and current employees.
The Future Workplace Experience: Five Principles to Live By
While companies are reimagining the “place of work” by providing access to a host of amenities such as gym facilities, subsidized massages, and gourmet food, some are moving beyond just creating “trophy workplaces,” to focus more expansively on creating what we call the Future Workplace Experience. The essence of this is to integrate all the elements of work—the emotional, the intellectual, the physical, the technological, and the cultural—into one seamless experience for the employee. This is shown in Figure 1.1.
Figure 1.1 The Future Workplace Experience
What Does Make the Future Workplace an Experience Mean?
What goes into creating compelling employee experiences? Mark Levy, chief human resource officer (CHRO) and global head of Employee Experience at Airbnb, explains: “At Airbnb we bring our vision of belonging anywhere to life. This vision creates a total experience for employees, spanning the food they eat together family style, to our award winning workspace, to the care with which we recruit and train them. For example, our Airbnb space has moved from open space floor plan to a ‘belong anywhere working environment’ where an employee can work from any number of workspaces: what we call the kitchen counter, the dining room table, or the living room, to work alone or congregate with the folks they’re working with to create this sense of belonging.” The engagement scores from a recent Airbnb employee pulse survey show the impact of the Airbnb focus on employee experience:
• 90 percent of Airbnb employees recommend Airbnb to a friend or colleague as a great place to work.
• 86 percent of employees state they are proud of the culture at Airbnb.
• 83 percent of employees state they feel a sense of belonging at Airbnb.13
These internal engagement scores are consistent with the public ratings received by Airbnb on Glassdoor.com. According to the Glassdoor ratings, 93 percent recommend the company to a friend, 95 percent approve of the CEO, and the company has a 4.4 overall rating on the 5-star scale.14 What’s interesting here is that Levy is not bearing the sole responsibility for enhancing the employee experience. His scope of responsibilities reflects his expanded vision, and his role as CHRO and global head of Employee Experience at Airbnb blurs the lines between the functions of marketing, communications, real estate, social responsibility, and human resources.
Levy is responsible not only for typical HR functions such as recruiting, talent management and development, HR operations, and total rewards, but also for “facilities, food, global citizenship, and a secret sauce of community managers called ‘ground control,’ which is the network of community managers who engage with Airbnb employees daily.” The goodwill that these ground control employees generate is the key to improving employee satisfaction and connection to work. As Joe Gebbia, cofounder of Airbnb, says, “Everything at Airbnb is a continuation of what it’s like to be a guest in somebody’s house.”
Taken together, our five characteristics of the Future Workplace Experience tap the full engagement potential of a company’s global workforce.
Emotional Experience: How Companies Provide Flexibility, Purpose, and Meaning in the Workplace
Workplace flexibility, together with being a purpose-driven organization, taps into the core values of what motivates employees to feel connected to their job. Clearly, flexible workplace policies allowing employees to work when and where they want are fast becoming employer criteria that cut across all generations of employees. According to a survey by online job site Career Builder, the typical nine-to-five job will soon be dead. Career Builder asked 1,000 U.S. employees in fields that typically have traditional work schedules (such as IT and financial services) about their work habits. The survey found that 63 percent of survey respondents thought a fixed nine-to-five workday would soon be obsolete. Additionally, Career Builder’s chief human resource officer, Rosemary Haefner, says that “about half of the research sample said that they check or respond to work e-mails outside of the office, and nearly two in five said they continue working when they leave the office.”15 All of this demonstrates how work is becoming more of a mindset than a fixed place, time of day, or location.
Phyllis Moen, a professor at the University of Minnesota, and Erin Kelly, a professor at MIT, ran an NIH-funded study to examine the interplay among work, family, and health. In an experiment with a technology company that preferred to remain anonymous, which the researchers called TOMO, they divided workers into two groups. The first group was randomly assigned to be the control group where the workplace flexibility policy was simply “at the discretion of the manager.” The other group, the experimental one, participated in a new workplace flexibility initiative where employees could work wherever and whenever they chose as long as projects were completed on time and business goals were met. Not only were managers trained to be supportive of the new workplace flexibility policy, but they were also provided with a special iPod that buzzed twice a day to remind them to think about the various ways they could support their employees as they managed both their work lives and their home lives. (The special iPods highlights a creative use of technology-driven prompts in the workplace!)
The results of the Moen and Kelly experiment supported the view that workplace flexibility is much more than creating a new policy; rather it is about changing an entire culture. The study found that employees in the experimental group met their goals as reliably as those in the control group. However, what’s most interesting is that employees in the experimental group reported being happier, sleeping better, and experiencing less stress. This reduced stress level also cascaded to their families and children, who also reported less stress in their own daily lives. And a year following the experiment, the employees who experienced the new workplace flexibility reported less interest in looking for a new job and leaving the company than the control group.16
The importance of workplace flexibility cannot be overstated. As companies expand into emerging markets and across time zones, the nine-to-five office will be slowly replaced with a work-from-anywhere mindset. But workplace flexibility has to be embedded in the culture rather than be considered the exception or seen as a perk for doing a good job. For companies that want to be magnets for top talent, workplace flexibility is smart business, as well as an important recruiting and retention tool.
Workplace flexibility is a benefit desired across the generations. According to the Future Workplace “Multiple Generations at Work” study of 1,800 multigenerational employees, almost one-half of each generation responded that a flexible working environment is very important to them.17 In its “Connected World Technology Report,” Cisco found that workers value flexibility over almost anything else.18 Those surveyed selected flexibility as the second most important factor, after salary, when considering a job offer. In fact, 66 percent of American millennials said they felt that an organization that adopts a flexible, mobile, and remote work model has a competitive advantage over one that requires employees to be in the office from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. every weekday.19
While multiple generations of employees expect and want workplace flexibility, employers are seeing the benefits of workplace flexibility as a strategic lever to deliver business results. American Express’s Blue Work program marries work-style preference with workspace. The Blue Work program has identified four types of workspaces: hub, club, roam, and home:
• Hub-based employees have jobs that require face-to-face time in one of the company’s office locations.
• Club employees go into a hub office no more than three times a week, because they either work part time or work some days from another location, such as home, a client’s office, or another American Express campus. Club employees check into a hub office and are given space to use that day.
• Roam employees are almost always on the road or at customer sites and seldom work from an American Express office.
• Home employees are based in home offices—set up with assistance from the company—on three or more days per week.
As reported in Forbes, American Express’s Blue Work program is not just a real estate program but also embeds training on how employees can be successful as remote workers. Reflecting this, the Blue Work program includes a series of training programs to guide both employees and managers through the productivity hurdles that can accompany the transition to virtual work. Some of the topics included in the training are “How to Use New Technology Tools,” “Tips/Tricks to Be a Mobile Employee,” and “How to Lead in a Mobile Environment.”
The results include a savings of $10 million to $15 million annually in real estate costs and a realization that workplace flexibility is not just an employee perk but a strategic initiative.20
Providing Purpose at Work
Beyond providing choice and flexibility, forward-looking companies are also intent on providing purpose at work. At SunTrust Banks, Inc., where over 26,000 employees work across the southern United States, the company has moved from being mission driven to purpose driven, where the purpose is promoting financial well-being for SunTrust’s employees and clients. A survey conducted for SunTrust by a Nielsen/Harris poll among 2,049 adults found that 40 percent do not have $2,000 saved for an emergency, a third have no retirement savings, and 70 percent feel a moderate to high level of financial stress.
This lack of financial confidence led to the creation of a campaign known as “Lighting the Way to Financial Well-Being.” For the bank, success goes beyond financial performance to also include the impact the bank has on the lives of clients, communities, and teammates. SunTrust chairman and CEO William H. Rogers, Jr., eloquently sums this move to a purpose-driven company when he says, “People respond well to a company that’s bigger than itself.”21
Many companies that have traditionally been mission driven are now moving to being purpose driven. Tom’s Shoes became one of the best known brands to millennials through its purpose-driven call to action, where for each pair of shoes sold to a customer, Tom’s Shoes buys a pair of shoes for a child living in poverty. At SunTrust, “Lighting the Way to Financial Well-Being” positions the bank to be a leader in purpose-driven organizations by building financial confidence into its employer value proposition and creating an offering for both its customers and employees.
According to SunTrust’s chief human resources officer Ken Carrig, “SunTrust believes so strongly in the importance of financial well-being that the company sparked a movement, called OnUp, to help people one step at a time build their financial confidence.” OnUp had its debut with a commercial during the 2016 Super Bowl. Before sparking this movement, SunTrust began to fulfill its purpose with its employees first by offering a comprehensive, behavior-changing learning program. “The financial fitness program features eight learning modules that help teammates and their families set and achieve goals aligned to their values,” adds Carrig. The curriculum starts with assessing one’s financial goals, and then each pillar focuses on a different aspect of building financial confidence such as establishing a savings account, creating a budget, improving one’s credit score, or creating a will.
“The incentive,” continues Carrig, “is for all teammates, no matter what level, to receive $250 when they complete the first phase of the financial fitness program. When teammates complete the second phase of the program, they receive another $250 and that can be placed into either a savings account, a 401K, or health savings account. In addition to financial incentives, teammates are allowed to take a Day of Purpose, a paid day off each year for them to take care of their personal financial well-being.” According to Scott Katz, group vice president of Learning Solutions, “Offering this type of curriculum to our teammates, coupled with their job-specific training, equips them to perform even better with our clients.”
Clearly, this movement is also created to give SunTrust an advantage in the marketplace, as so many Americans admit to having little savings for either emergencies or retirement. As part of the bank’s strategy, SunTrust is diligently measuring the impact on customer and employee engagement and retention levels. So far, Carrig reports employees who have completed the financial fitness program are nearly 15 percentage points more engaged than those who did not complete the program. And those who complete the program are also demonstrating higher performance levels on the job. SunTrust is just one example of how the power of creating purpose and meaning for employees and customers can produce an emotional connection and deliver business impact.
Intellectual Experience: How Companies Are Rethinking Employee Development
If you care about increasing employee engagement levels, then you should be focusing on how to reimagine and rethink your company’s learning and development. Research by Aon Hewitt, published in the “Trends in Global Employee Engagement” report, reveals a consistent, statistically significant relationship between higher levels of employee engagement and financial performance. Specifically, a 5 percent increase in employee engagement is linked to a 3 percent increase in revenue growth in the subsequent year.22
Some forward-thinking organizations are making the connection between engaged employees and business results. At the heart of this connection, is rethinking how they develop their employees. The Aon Hewitt research reports several ways to increase employee engagement including: building inspiring leaders, creating and communicating a compelling value proposition, and tying learning to overall career development.
However, according to a study conducted by the Association for Talent Development, only 38 percent of learning and development professionals think their organizations are ready for learners of the future. Companies now recognize that engaged employees take charge of their development and learn every day, not just when they are in an instructor-led or online program. How do they do this? Often by informally searching the web with their smartphone and finding what they need, when they need it. Marketing officers realize smartphones are ubiquitous in our lives, with mobile devices currently outnumbering people.23 Most consumer brands have a “mobile-first” strategy, meaning that innovations often appear first on a mobile device.24
Now consider what would happen if HR departments pursued a similar strategy. We are seeing the “consumerization” of HR, a term we coined to refer to the need that organizations have to create a social, mobile, and consumer-type experience for employees inside the company. As MIT research finds, the expectation of social and collaborative tools in the workplace is no longer just a millennial request: 57 percent of individuals across the ages of 22 to 52 bring digital expectations to the workplace.25
So what are companies doing to put learning at the fingertips of learners?
At Qualcomm, the company has created the Qualcomm Employee App Store for employees to access a number of apps selected by the company. The Employee App Store numbers more than 80 apps for learning, communication, health and wellness, news, and virtual meeting facilitation. In order to make the app store successful, the learning team at Qualcomm uses what it refers to as guerilla marketing techniques. This means they will have a limited release of an app, perhaps only 500 licenses, and this is released to one internal group. Often this creates an internal buzz within the company with employees asking, “What’s coming next?” The goal here is to mirror what works in consumer marketing and use this in HR to build excitement and usage among Qualcomm employees.
Other companies are joining Qualcomm to provide learning at the moment of an employee’s need. Janice Burns, the chief learning officer of MasterCard, sees more and more of her department’s time and resources going to facilitating and motivating employees to access curated, publicly available learning, rather than designing and delivering company-sponsored training programs. Burns shares this, “We are seeing our employees search the web to find a MOOC (massive open online course) a TED Talk, podcast, or blog, to fulfill their personal development needs. So we are now doing this for them by curating publicly available content to align with their career development needs.” This is a huge shift in thinking about the role of learning. It’s now about bringing learning to the learner, and this is increasingly happening on their mobile devices!
Physical Experience: How Companies Rethink Workspace
Today, top talent with in-demand skills can choose to work anywhere, anytime—which may mean working at home, working in a client’s office, or going to the workplace. We are seeing companies spending more resources on creating trophy workspaces, which function as a reward for coming to the office. Workspaces are becoming healthier, incorporate better lighting, are more comfortable, and are more fun! The office cubicle is increasingly a relic of the past, as a growing number of employees instead carry their laptops, tablets, smartphones, and wearables with them, making the desk and cubicle obsolete. Instead, the office of the future will be what Steve Gale, London head of Workplace Strategy at M Moser Associates, an architecture firm, calls “convivial workplaces,” where workers socialize, swap ideas, and develop a greater sense of shared purpose.26
Clearly the design of the workplace impacts employee performance, engagement, and innovation. Gensler, an American design and architectural firm, surveyed 2,035 knowledge workers across the United States to examine the design factors that influence the organizational culture of the workplace.27 Currently only one in four workers reports working in an optimal workplace environment.28 The rest struggle to work effectively, resulting in lost productivity, engagement, and opportunities to innovate.
While the workplace is connected like never before with e-mail, enterprise social networks, instant messaging, and mobile messaging, these connections can also translate into distractions and a compromised ability to focus on one’s work. According to Gensler, knowledge workers are yearning for a workplace that is designed to enable collaboration without sacrificing the ability to do focused work. Gensler finds that effectively balancing focus and collaboration leads to a more creative and innovative workplace, as highlighted in Figure 1.2.
Figure 1.2 Benefits of balanced workspaces
Airbnb’s workspace blurs the line between work and home. It includes a kitchen; a library; a nerd cave; the demo den; a place to meditate, practice yoga, or write on the walls; and a green atrium with 1,226 square feet of beautiful greenery that stretches up to three floors high. Workspace design amenities are quickly becoming recruiting tools, recognizing the value of using elements of the outdoors, including incorporating plants and murals of bucolic scenes, to create more productive workspaces. In fact, Airbnb has pushed the limits in designing its customer call center operation in Portland, Oregon. “Rather than windowless work stations where employees read off teleprompter screens, the open-space call center is appointed with shared desks, long couches, light wood, and exposed brick,” according to Wired’s Margaret Rhodes.29
The staffers of the Airbnb customer call center do not have a traditional desk. Instead, they are provided with “landing spots,” similar to the cubbies given to children in elementary school, where employees can charge all their devices. This leaves space for custom-designed conference rooms, couches for reclining, big communal tables, and small nooks for chats with colleagues.
Research is proving the importance of giving workers control over selecting the workspace that suits them. Steelcase conducted a global study among 12,480 participants in 17 countries to examine key workplace behaviors around the topic of workspace.30 Interestingly, workers who have a greater degree of control over where and how they work, who are free to concentrate and physically move during the day, and who can work in teams without being interrupted were more engaged at work. Figure 1.3 shows that 88 percent of employees report being highly engaged if they are able to select a place within the office based on the task they are doing. Choice over where one works and the amount of privacy one feels in the workplace are emerging as critical factors to employee engagement.
Figure 1.3 Engaged employees have more control over their experiences at work
In addition to workspace, another important factor that will differentiate the workplace of the future is the creation of community managers charged with providing a memorable workplace experience through meet-ups, education programs, social networking, frequent communications, and public recognition.
Technological Experience: How Companies Leverage Smart Technologies
Today the convergence of mobile, cloud, and social technology—or the Internet of everything (IoE)—has driven us toward a more connected and collaborative work environment.
Consider the large number of today’s professionals who use two or three mobile devices for work and personal use. Added to that, Cisco’s “Connected World Technology Report” finds 60 percent of respondents would abandon their laptops in favor of a mobile device for their work and professional use.31 With the growing demand to work from anywhere, the future workplace will depend on organizations harnessing the power of smart technologies to drive employee engagement and satisfaction. IBM is one company that is leveraging its suite of analytics technologies and social engagement platforms to reimagine the performance management process. But the story of this reinvention is not only which smart tools are deployed to reinvent performance management but how IBM embarked upon the process. IBM’s use of design thinking was critical to the reinvention process. IBM’s CHRO Diane Gherson engaged employees with an initial blog post on IBM Connections, IBM’s social platform, inviting IBMers to join her in reimagining performance management. This post garnered over 200,000 page views from the 380,000 global employees and led to a spirited online discussion looking at the future of performance from several angles, such as “Should one’s goals be private or public?” “How can we apply design thinking to this process of reinvention?” and “How closely should performance be connected to talent decisions like stretch assignments and compensation?” The initial blog moved to a series of online discussions producing volumes of employee comments, which were analyzed to mine insights. The results were reported in more online discussions, each step playing back what Gherson and her team had heard, occasionally asking employees for clarification (“We heard this—is that what you meant?”). Says Gherson, “Our process was iterative and relied on design thinking to incorporate the needs and expectations from our global employee population. We even invited our employees to help us name the new performance management process and some took this so seriously some asked if there was an absentee ballot as the deadline was during a time when they would be away from the office and email.” Further, Gherson and her team used a common vehicle of design thinking, creating empathy maps, to ensure the new design would resonate with managers and nonmanagers across all IBMers.
Employees were so involved in reinventing the performance management process, they suggested designing it as a mobile app and even coined the name “ACE,” which stands for appreciation, coaching, and evaluation. The idea was met with enthusiasm. The new vision for performance management encompassed these three important areas: appreciation, to feel motivated and continue to do your best; coaching, to accelerate your learning and energy where it really matters; and evaluation, to know where you stand, set expectations, and feel reassured. About 90,000 employees are now active users of ACE—not only seeking feedback but also giving feedback . . . to both their managers and colleagues. ACE is designed to deliver constructive feedback, asking employees to share “What’s the one thing I could have done better” rather than “Tell me what you think of Jane’s performance.” And instead of relying on anonymous feedback, ACE feedback is signed by a colleague and, in doing so, provides the employee receiving the feedback with the context for this.
Using smart technologies also applies to what happens inside the workplace. Sam Dunn, CEO and cofounder of Robin Powered, created an app for the process of booking a conference room inside a company. Robin Powered has created a room-booking tool that runs on mobile devices, web browsers, and tablets. Essentially employees book a room from the app, and then the app automatically detects room occupancy. Plus there’s a twist for mobile users —running in the background is an iBeacon that detects when you’re in a room and allows for accurate real-time check-ins on your calendar. So what happens to the role of the receptionist? According to Dunn, “This role has either been downsized at some companies or morphed into a series of higher value roles either as a Community Manager or Technical Support Manager.”
Finally, the same apps used in our personal lives are being brought inside the workplace. For example at Airbnb, employees use WhatsApp to create a constant flow of communications. As Mark Levy explains, “I created a staff immersion week where everyone in the Employee Experience group travels to a different office in the same week sharing photos, learnings, and insights on WhatsApp, rather than having a traditional ‘All Hands Meeting.’ I believe our use of the latest smart technologies is a powerful way to both communicate with and understand the nuances of local Airbnb offices around the world.”
Smart technologies are also being used in the workplace to predict optimal environmental conditions based on personal preferences. In IBM’s blog Designing Employee Experience, IBM reports the company is experimenting with sensor-based systems that can recommend and even modify temperature and noise levels to best suit an individual employee’s needs. It’s a brave new world of work when employees are empowered to create their own workplace environments! The workplace of the future is about creating and enhancing the experience at work. As Paul Papas, global leader of IBM Interactive Experiences, says, “The last best experience that anyone has anywhere becomes the minimum expectation for the experiences they want everywhere.”32
Cultural Experience: Incorporating Transparency and Responsiveness into the Workplace
Transparency in the workplace is becoming the currency of leadership. Just as individuals want to know how and where the scarf they bought online was made, they also want to know the inner workings of their employer. And it is getting easier to discover details about an employer from any number of social media sites. Increasingly, employees are approaching the workplace as consumers, and they want the same consumer type of experience at work.
What does corporate culture look like when transparency is put into practice? At Airbnb, employees freely share why the company is a great place to work. Scan the Airbnb Glassdoor.com page (where CEO Brian Chesky has a 97 percent approval rating), and you will see comments like “This company is mission driven with an incredible culture and one where you are encouraged to be yourself.”33 Or “Airbnb creates meaningful experiences, whether it is the candidate experience, travel experience, or website experience.”34 However, the comment that sticks out most is “I am in my 50s and I work for Airbnb. And this is by far the best job I have ever had. Airbnb is creating something that touches people: experience, memories, relationships, who else does that?”35
Transparency is also practiced by traditional firms such as Telstra, the largest telecommunications company in Australia, where David Thodey, former CEO of the company, was a visible, digitally engaged, and transparent leader.
What exactly does a leader like Thodey do to be dubbed a transparent leader? At one point after the Telstra internal social network was launched, Thodey asked the entire company, “What processes and technologies should we eliminate?” According to Charlene Li in her book The Engaged Leader, this question received more than 830 responses and gave Thodey an intimate look into what was not working at Telstra.36
In addition to practicing transparency in the workplace, companies are also becoming much more responsive to employees and incorporating responsiveness into the recognition process. At Panasonic Avionics, a company of more than 5,000 employees spread across 46 countries, David Heath, the chief human resource officer, explained how he recently moved his company’s recognition system conducted manually to an instant online platform the company branded “High Five.” In doing research Heath discovered that one-third of the employees who had worked for the company for more than 10 years had never had anyone say thank you. His solution was the High Five platform where employees and their managers contribute instant performance feedback. Interestingly, what Heath uncovered was a pent-up demand for this type of responsive feedback. Says Heath, “In fact, our employees in Asia Pacific region have had the highest engagement rate versus other parts of the world, 93 percent engagement rate, as compared to 83 percent in US locations. I suspect our employees in Asia see the High Five platform as a safe way to provide their feedback.”
It’s not easy to achieve all of the above. But some companies come admirably close, and others are to be applauded for trying. As the philosopher Thomas Hobbes points out, life can be solitary, brutish, nasty, and short. If we spend about a third of our lives sleeping and about another third working, doesn’t it make sense for a company to provide a workplace experience that allows us to fulfill our personal and professional goals?
Enter the Chief Employee Experience Officer
Creating a compelling employee experience assumes a deep understanding of the needs and expectations of employees. It is truly employee-centric. This requires a senior executive to work across key functional disciplines as diverse as human resources, real estate, marketing, IT, and internal communications. In response to this vision, some companies are creating a new role in HR, chief employee experience officer. Forrester has designed this new role that reports to the chief people officer, Lucia Quinn.
The new role is focused on creating an extraordinary employee experience, one where new hires stay at the firm and are engaged during their first few years. Often research shows that employees with tenure of less than two years leave because of frustration with unproductive and poorly optimized work processes.
Jon Symons at Forrester is filling this role, and he comes with a background in corporate communications, outside of HR. Symons is charged with forging an emotional connection between Forrester employees and the Forrester brand, and he is doing this by strengthening the Forrester employer brand on Glassdoor and other employer rating sites and identifying Forrester employees who can become ambassadors for the employer brand.
We will see many other companies creating the role of chief employee experience officer with the goal of identifying one person responsible for all aspects of employee well-being that impact employee engagement. A workplace must meet employees’ emotional, intellectual, physical, technological, and cultural needs, and this can lead to creating a deeper bond with employees and in the process and creating a more compelling employee experience. The vision of the Future Workplace Experience is one where key C-level executives in HR, global citizenship, IT, real estate, marketing, and internal communications come together to design an employee experience that is both a holistic and compelling one. This is already happening at IBM, Airbnb, SunTrust, and Forrester—to name a few companies where the CHRO either has oversight for expanded functions beyond HR, as is the case of Airbnb, or where the CHRO values the importance of creating a seamless and impactful employee experience.
Designing a future workplace experience requires a multifunctional perspective. This is not simply an HR initiative; rather it is one that is woven into the fabric of the business. When this happens, the future workplace experience can positively impact employee engagement.
MY ACTION PLAN
Myself
• What can I do to learn more about providing a compelling experience in the workplace?
• How can I use design thinking to reimagine the employee experience?
• What are our competitors doing in this area?
• What opportunities and barriers do I see in partnering with other functional areas, such as marketing, internal communications, IT, real estate, and global citizenship, to provide an extraordinary employee experience?
My Team
• How does our current employee experience impact the attraction and retention of new employees?
• What new skills does my team need to partner with other functions, such as marketing, IT, internal communications, real estate, and global citizenship?
• What track record does my team have in partnering with these functions?
My Organization
• Are we doing enough to capture insights about the employee experience?
• How could improving the employee experience at our company impact employee engagement?
• What can we learn from the customer experience and use internally with employees?
• Who has primary responsibility for designing employee experience at my company? What functions are involved today in doing this, and what functions can be recruited to join this effort?