The Great Resignation and Reshuffle. Quiet Quitting. Quiet Firing. These headlines create fatigue as every workplace situation is monolithically labeled as an ‘era’ or ‘phenomenon’ that we all need to fret about.
That’s not to dismiss the changing context of work. A global pandemic, shifting generational and social attitudes about mental health and the workplace, the mainstreaming of AI, and the decentralization movement (blockchain / Web3 / et al) all started real and necessary conversations about how, how much, where and with whom we work. Many rubrics, models, and CX approaches have been turned inward by companies looking to address employee experience.
For customer-facing businesses, concepts like the service-profit chain linked employee satisfaction to better performance and to customer satisfaction. Despite economic concerns, or maybe because of them, engaging the people who will deliver the company’s brand promise is a smart move.
How best to cut through the complexity and find a meaningful way in? There are basic fundamentals to address first, based on universal human truths. Providing a sense of purpose, whether that’s ‘big P’ brand purpose or simply ensuring engaging work, competitive benefits and perks, alongside a sense of inclusion and psychological safety, are all fundamental to building a compelling employee value proposition and employee experience.
Beyond the basics, there are opportunities that companies miss when they don’t employ their brands as a critical lens to employee experience. Companies would be well served to use their brand’s point of view to drive increased clarity, a sense of authenticity and greater relevance for their own workforces.
Figuring out the ‘what’ of employee experience can be as simple as organizing efforts around focus areas: Signals, Symbols, Support, and Skills. The ‘how’ should take a major cue from your company’s brand — defining how your employee experience initiatives should feel, act, and look. Many companies start with articulating an Employee Value Proposition (EVP) connected to brand strategy. It’s a great start but needs to be swiftly put into action to have power.
Signals
A good place to start setting the tone is by identifying meaningful actions that bring your brand to life with your people.
Dating app Bumble helps people find empowerment and healthy connections — in dating, friendship or business. Its brand community is also focused on tackling inequality, abuse and misogyny. In that spirit, the company updated its PTO policy to give unlimited time off (which is sometimes a precursor to no one using very much time off), but with required minimums to ensure employees were forced to step away. Also within this policy, the company decided to shut down its offices for two weeks of the year for collective time off and set specific time off allocations for life events like birth and adoption as well as for difficult life situations like grief and domestic violence.
By applying their brand mission in specific and pointed ways, Bumble delivered its brand authentically, making a discernible impact for employees.
Symbols
Another critical way to imbue your brand’s point of view into the employee experience via tangible environments and artifacts.
When WM (Waste Management) was looking to design and build new headquarters, the company wanted the space to embody its sustainability leadership position. The building was the first LEED v4.0 Platinum Core and Shell Certified project in the US. A living plant wall spanning several stories was grown specifically in the brand’s colors, forming a visual connection point between WM and its sustainability goals.
Other symbols might be less overt — but still as telling as to the intent of the employee. Is there a library of physical or digital learning materials in a company that seeks to value creativity or personal growth? Does the company apply its external or customer experience within its own walls?
Adobe’s Lab82 project is billed as an “employee experience lab” aimed at understanding how Adobe employees will want to work in a hybrid future. What started as a physical innovation space was adapted to serve the needs of Adobe employees — current and future. One of the findings was that by adopting the ways of working piloted in the program, new hire developers reduced the time to delivering their first code by 35 percent. The Lab82 project is public-facing and has strategic aims that benefit the workforce and Adobe as a company, of course, but also serves as a symbol of the Adobe core values of ‘Innovative’ and ‘Involved.’
Support
There is evidence that happier employees can equate to happier customers. As a consumer in a retail or food service context, we all can feel the difference when employees are performing well because of their company’s support — uniforms, software, policies — and when in spite of it.
On an enterprise scale, IBM has been exploring this link and found that about two-thirds of customer satisfaction scores can be attributed to employee engagement. Diane Gherson, head of IBM HR, reports that a five point increase in client engagement on an IBM account is linked to a 20% increase in revenue. One policy to have emerged from this thinking is paying for guest travel when an IBM employee has to travel over the weekend — and allowing employees to decide how to deal with the tax implications of the reimbursement.
The updated travel policy gave agency back to employees in two ways — supporting work-life balance and through a functional, financial benefit. All of these efforts are in line with the IBM brand and mission to “make the world work better.”
Sharpening Skills
A McKinsey study showed that three quarters of employees reported it was important for companies to invest in skill development to help them keep pace with technological change and another study showed 76% of employees would “be more likely to stay with a company that offers continuous training”. It makes sense that employees would be more engaged in gigs that help them achieve professional, and even personal growth. But building robust learning initiatives (internal ‘universities’, funding external courses, etc) can be a daunting task with an unclear return on investment.
Auto manufacturer Daimler created a digital learning platform (‘Massive Open Online Conversation’) with Wolff Olins aimed at showing leaders across the business how to translate their new leadership principles into everyday actions. The program had stimulus and activities that were interactive, peer-to-peer, experimental and available on-demand. The global program ultimately influenced 13,000 employees, with 80% of participants reporting that they would strongly recommend the experience to a colleague at its conclusion. Daimler’s head of business innovation found that the program “helped focus innovation by translating our brand into a tangible platform for generating and executing ideas.”
By taking a brand lens, companies can focus their efforts on learning programs that 1) create a positive experience for employees and 2) center learning on topics relevant to what the company is trying to achieve.
A brand-led experience
By identifying even one meaningful initiative in each focus area and leveraging your brand story and character to shape your actions, companies can start to build toward an employee experience that delivers meaningful value to their workforce.
Cover image source: Louis Reed