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?
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.
The foundation of creating an organization that puts employee experience at its center is creating a Reason for Being that:
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.
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.
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:
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.
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):
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Consumer Grade Technology
Available to Everyone
Focused on Employee Needs
Workspace Options
Values Reflected in the Workspace
Being Proud to Bring in Friends or Visitors
Workplace Flexibility and Autonomy
Sense of Purpose
Fair Treatment
Feeling Valued
Managers Acting like Coaches and Mentors
Feeling like You're Part of a Team
Ability to Learn Something New and Advance and Get the Resources to Do So
Referring Others
Diversity and Inclusion
Health and Wellness
Brand Perception
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.
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.
Let's look at what these moments that matter actually are:
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.
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.
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.