I am proud to announce that my brilliant Employee Experience team (Bob Gerard, Ishha Nagrath, Vijay SS and me) just won the Bronze Brandon Hall Award for Excellence in the Employee Engagement category. This is a wonderful feather in our caps. Of course, we didn’t do it alone; there were many other players in this story, to whom we owe a debt of thanks.
What’s the story? Well, three years ago, we realised that we needed to move away from treating HR and senior stakeholders as the experts in people’s careers, to seeing our employees as the best judges of what they needed to be successful. What could be more engaging for our people than knowing that we cared about their needs and desires, and weren’t making assumptions any longer? That everything we designed for them really did meet their needs, and help them overcome the obstacles in their way?
So we set up a team and processes to start talking to our people. And we stopped using the picture of HR processes as our guiding framework (employees don’t much care about HR processes), and created a framework that was all about the employee’s growth in and through the organisation (employees DO care about that). We constantly asked the question, “What do our employees need to be successful for our business?”
Sounds like common sense, doesn’t it? But not many HR functions are doing it yet. Human Centred Design is used a lot when designing for customers, but this is a new way of designing for employees’ needs.
You might be asking, “how can you pay so much attention to the needs of the employees, and not the needs of the business?”
Well, taking this approach reduced the renege rates (people not turning up on day one), increased the engagement of new joiners, made it easier for people to find a role internally, and the list goes on. Saving money, and increasing performance levels at the same time.
So what is good for the people IS good for the business.
What’s your point of view about that?
