You need to start by understanding not only the sentiment of your employees but their concerns.
If you have no idea (positive or negative) of what's happening in your workforce and how
they're feeling and what they're thinking, how do you know not only what actions to take but where
you want to go and how you help your people do that? It starts with listening and understanding.
That's Ali Fuller, General Manager of Employee Experience at Workday.
Solving for employee experience is about simplifying the digital experience,
recognizing that our employees and managers have access to upwards of 140 applications.
When we've done research, that's what we learned from most of our users.
How do we help simplify that and then, ultimately, help them do their job which is navigating very
vulnerable things, developing teams, growing their own careers, returning to work? How do
we simplify that experience but also in elevation to the things they're really trying to achieve.
Ali, when we talk about employee experience, what does that actually mean?
It really means the technology that employees use to (in the case of Workday) grow their teams,
further their careers, attract and retain great people, really achieve business results,
the technology that lets them do that. But again, in vulnerable moments.
I think what we don't recognize sometimes is the things that people come to Workday
to do are incredibly important. And so, an employee experience is not just about
the technology but what it's in service to. I think that's incredibly important.
Why has this become so important at this moment in time?
I would say, over the last couple of years, it's been a growing top priority for not just CHROs,
CFOs, CIOs, but the entire C-suite. But in the last two years in particular,
it's gotten exponentially more important. There is actually a statistic that we've
been following by Willis Towers Watson that 94% of the C-suite is focused on employee
experience as a top business priority over the next three years. That's up from 54% two years
ago. When you think about 54% to 94%, it goes to show you how it's so top of mind for people.
I think, again, back to the people aspect of it, talent is so incredibly important to
people achieving their business results and keeping happy, engaged employees. And so,
it's important that employees have the experience not only they deserve but that they expect.
From your standpoint, really focused on this employee engagement aspect, how do
you support employees? How do companies do that? You need to start by understanding not only the
sentiment of your employees but their concerns. If you have no idea (positive or negative) what's
happening in your workforce and how they're feeling and what they're thinking, how do you
know not only what actions to take but where you want to go and how you help your people do that?
It starts with listening and understanding. Then the second piece of that is acting on that.
If you have a deep understanding of people's concerns but you do nothing with it,
obviously you can't continue to enhance that employee experience. It's really taking
action that drives your leaders and business forward on top of that insight and sentiment.
Then lastly, understanding it. How did that actually go? Measuring the experiences you
deliver and then, again, listening again. That employee experience lifecycle is a
constant iteration. It's not something that we can do and walk away from.
It's really what we call at Workday "Listen, Act, Analyze." How do you
tie all three of those things together and continue to listen-act-analyze across that?
Ali, given that we're listening, we're analyzing what's going on, we're taking those measurements,
we're formulating action plans, how does this relate to retaining and attracting employees?
To me, it's incredibly important that customers understand how employees feel
because, when we talk about retaining top talent, happy employees stay at companies.
In particular, employees want a good people leader, and they stay at companies for good
managers, and they leave companies when they don't have a good manager. Really putting the manager
at the center of that employee sentiment and conversation is incredibly important.
I can give you an example at Workday. About two years into COVID, we really learned (through that
sentiment analysis) that our employees were burnt out, and that's not surprising. A lot
of employees and customers were burnt out. We had a prolonged period of transformation here.
But, once we learned that, we decided to take action on it as Workday, and we created what
we call "Thank You Fridays." It was about every month; we gave an additional Friday off for people
to just focus on their health and well-being. We saw employee satisfaction and retention
go up. We saw, again, that listen-act-analyze cycle happen over not even years – over months.
Can you describe some of the characteristics of organizations that do this well,
that are really successful with employee experience and really engaging their employees?
Wanting to have a deep understanding of your people's concerns is rare because you have to
be open not only to hearing the things that aren't going well but also doing something
about it. If you're going to receive that sentiment, you need to be tied to be able
to take some action. Again, going back to employee expectations, that's what they expect.
I think it's a "show, don't tell" aspect. Once they see that you're going to do something
about it, we get more and more feedback. Let's take Peakon for example. I actually
go in once a week, and I will react to the feedback. I'll reply with confidential comments.
Then we see more sentiment and feedback coming in the following week (with surveys) because
they feel heard. They feel engaged. It's not just going into an ether or a black box,
and so I think it's incredibly important again to create that cycle because then
they have trust that you're doing something with the feedback they took time to give you.
Ali, you've mentioned this three-step process: listen, analyze, and then act. Listening is one
of those terms that's very easy to say, not so easy to do. Would you drill into that a little
bit? What does it mean to listen in this context? I would say it's passive and active listening.
Things like searches or the natural language people are putting into our bot, all of those
things that people are trying to find information in the system, that's an active entry into the
system but it's passive listening. How do you take that sentiment that's happening across and,
in this case, one customer and surface that? But then it's also active. It's asking employees
how they feel and then marrying those two things. What's happening that's implied
and passive in the system with what they're actually telling you through active listening?
Then how do you make sense of that – not only listen but understand, identify trends,
use natural language to connect different ways that people might be saying the same
thing – to really help a business understand again what's happening in this system
(both explicit as well as implicit)? How do you know what questions to ask?
It's funny. The employee often knows the question to ask sometimes, which is back to my passive. The
way that they're putting things into the system and the way they're searching, that often tells
us the right question to ask. You've set up the listening.
Then there's measurement. What are we measuring and why are we measuring it?
Let's take an example of diversity and inclusion. If you see a theme emerging with a very specific
subset of your population and you decide to distribute a journey or create learning content
to help them feel more included and the company to grow, to be more inclusive, how do you know
that you got the result you were looking for? You have to measure. It's measuring (again,
back to the employee) how they feel about that experience.
We look at engagement statistics. Did people interact with that journey, for example,
open it? Did they complete it? Did they watch the learning content? Did they scroll
to the things that were beneath the fold? We surface all that to customers so that
they understand what they built in terms of taking action on that sentiment was
not only well received by employees but was used in the way that they expected.
Okay, so we've listened. We have measurements. Now it's time to take action. What's next?
We've seen customers take action, the first one being learning and enablement content for their
people. In the example, I know I mentioned health and well-being. If there are a lot
of resources out there, sometimes people just don't know what they have access to
and the tools that are at their fingertips. Really being able to enable their people
with learnings, trainings, a variety of other ways of doing information,
the employees feel supported because it's really about that targeted, big moment.
Personal leave is a great example. How do you help people navigate that?
Return to work is actually probably one of the main ways that we've seen customers use this.
Employees then have this feeling that this is useful, this is helpful, and the tools
and the organization is actually behind me. For an employee to feel like it's useful and
helpful, it has to be personalized. I know this won't surprise you because you talk to a number
of people. That's really what technology has done in the last, I would say, ten years is personalize
experience. You should have information that's different because if we want to a
hyper-personalized experience, it has to know you and has to deliver content that's unique to you.
Let's talk about managers and the role of managers in creating employee experience
and driving the sentiment of employees. When we've spoken with our customers,
managers play the most critical role in retaining and attracting
top talent. It's not even just for an employee experience but to achieve your business goals.
If you think about the role a manager plays, not only are they driving the business forward;
they're developing their team alongside that and really making them the most effective that
they can be. When we think about an investment, that's what a lot of our customers are doing is
investing in the employee experience specific to managers because it pays dividends towards
happy employees, effective employees. People leave companies when they have
a bad manager. That is single-handedly the top reason that people will leave a company,
but they also stay at a company because of a manager. If we can support the manager,
ultimately that has a downstream impact in terms of supporting the employee.
What about helping the manager with the repetitive operations, tasks,
activities that the manager so often has to do? It needs to be an experience that not only puts
the manager at the center but recognizes what the manager wants to achieve. Then ultimately,
how do we remove friction, the things the manager doesn't need to focus on?
Anything you can do to remove the drudgery, as you say, those repetitive tasks, that's
going to make the manager's life just easier. I think, in a lot of cases, it means not asking
the manager to come into a system at all, and so we have something called Workday Everywhere,
which is our strategy of really meeting users (employees and managers) where they're already
working (in tools like Microsoft Teams and Slack as two examples).
Ali, employee experience is so important. What's the best way to start? It's so easy to talk about
these things but sometimes starting is hard. It's really hard, and I would say most of our
conversations with customers, there's this desire to want to do something. There's no
debate that investing in the employee experience is critical. Our customers all agree on that.
It's really not only how do you start, which is the question you mentioned, but what does
good look like. It's choosing to start and taking quick action but being iterative; or customers,
whether they wait too long to take action because there is that desire to get it perfectly right
or to have everything kind of tied in a bow. We've developed the intention to do something.
Literally, what are the first steps that we should be taking?
Take a small group and distribute something to them. Understand how they're using something.
Understand what works and doesn't. Iterate again, and then go out to your next wave of users.
Where our customers have been most successful is not trying to do something, one thing, for 10,000
employees. Do one thing for maybe 100 employees at this location, understand what works and doesn't,
and then continue to kind of concentric circle out from that because you learn a lot.
We have a commitment to start. We've identified a pilot of 100 employees.
Now what? What are the first steps? One of the main first steps our customers
will take is distributing what we call a journey. At Workday, we have a product
called Workday Journeys. Really what that allows you do to is weave together Workday
and non-Workday content into an immersive experience that has tasks and information
and video content and rich engagement tools. What our customers will do is build journeys based
on what they're trying to achieve and distribute that to their employees like return to work. For
example, our customers will distribute a journey that gives learning content that talks about
what it means to be in an office now with COVID spacing. That actually talks about badge scanning
in a different way – whatever that might be. It has rich learning content. It will have
knowledge articles and policy information. It will have a variety of engagement tools as part of that
that teach employees about what that experience looks like and best prepares
the business for that change as well. What does the team look like? What kind
of team should we have in place to execute this initial pilot?
There are really two parts of the business that participate in an employee experience. There's
the functional side of the business so, in many cases, that's HR, for example, or IT or finance,
that kind of functional group at their company. But then there are those that curate
the experiences that their employees receive. The relationship between those two groups is
paramount for a good employee experience because you have the functional experts,
the people that know that part of the business best, as well as the people that make that happen.
Okay, the next step. We have put this team together. We've rolled
our journeys to our pilot group. How do we get that group to engage, to participate?
It needs to be a push not a pull. I think that's the number one thing that we've seen in terms
of the success as well. Ali, you used the term
push. What do you mean by that? Discovery for users needs to be passive. We need
to meet them where they are as opposed to asking them to come into the system to find something.
When you say pull, what's that? That's really asking a user to come
into a system to be able to do something as opposed to bringing it to them.
What are the typical challenges or obstacles that an organization may face as they're embarking
and pursuing this employee experience journey? The manager is really the heart of some of that
feedback. Managers already are so involved in an employee's workload, how they interact with their
teams, ultimately what they help the business achieve, and so that's not new. It's really,
to your point, enabling the manager to be able to not only do something about
it but feel like it's their responsibility to make sure their employees are engaged.
Ali, when all of this is done well and it's working, what are the benefits?
Having high retention rates isn't enough. Your employees need to be engaged. That's
when they do their best work and that's when they drive the business forward in kind of
the most effective way. I would say happy and engaged employees is one outcome from this.
I think the other thing is really understanding where you have talent
pockets or areas that you need to fill. A compelling employee experience surfaces those
concerns and allows you, as a business, to really act on your people challenges (as well as your
business challenges) in an effective way. Ali, what advice do you have for HR
and their role in making this all happen and participating and contributing to
all of this excellent employee experience? Understanding the concerns is step one. I would
say that's step one for HR is really understanding that and being open to truly understanding, not
just conceptually understanding. And so, getting to that deeper understanding is the first part.
I think the other thing for HR is – and they're not going to like I'm telling
you this [laughter] – really putting some of that back in the hands of managers and leaders
because it can't just be HR that solves these problems. It can't just be the executives at
a company. It has to be the people leaders. They are the most effective conduit and way
to drive an employee experience, and so I would say that's the other thing I would say to HR is
don't be afraid to get the manager involved because they know their people best.
Any final thoughts on employee experience and employee
experience and just creating a great workplace? It's really important, in an employee experience,
to meet users where they are. That is one of our kind of key themes in our experience strategy.
The second part is radical simplification of self-service experiences. Managers and employees
not only need simplified experiences, but they need to get back to their job. They
need to be able to spend all their time kind of driving their business and their people forward.
But the third area of that being tying insights to action. I think what's really important – back
to our listen-act-analyze – is taking all those rich insights and doing something with it but
helping our managers and our customers achieve their results but, ultimately, not asking
them to start from scratch. How do we help be prescriptive with some of those actions as well?
Ali Fuller, General Manager of Employee Experience at Workday, thank you so
much for taking time to speak with us. It's been so great, Michael. And to be in
person, got to love the in-person. [Laughter] It is great. [Laughter]