When it comes to building a killer employee experience, making sure your vision appeals to your organizational top tier enough to secure that all-important leadership buy-in can be a tough nut to crack.
This goes way beyond securing the resource — financial or otherwise — needed to make things happen; and because you're not always looking at a clean ROI in terms of hard cash on the investment in question, finding an approach that truly resonates with your decision makers is the key to success.
It's about connecting that people strategy to those business results — all while backing up your ideas using the hard data leaders love. But how do you do it?
Ashira Gobrin, Chief People Officer at Canadian financial tech firm Wave HQ, Lindsey Sanford, Chief of Staff at global cybersecurity leader Palo Alto Networks, and Claire Jasper, Head of Internal Communications at UK-based wealth management company Quilter, were generous enough to share their secrets at the recent Gallagher IBIS Academy session, STOP Talking About Employee Communications; START Talking About Creating a Global Employee Experience.
It's all about the quid pro quo
'If the design of your people strategy is directly correlated to business results, it's much easier to get budget for something. It's about asking: "How do we get employees to perform at their very best to help the business achieve its results?",' says Ashira. 'To me, the answer is how do you quantify that in a way so that the business understands what it will receive instead.'
And Claire agrees: 'It's not always just about going cap in hand and asking for money to invest. We find really innovative ways to repoint our own resources and demonstrate creativity around how we're delivering. We take on that responsibility to demonstrate how we understand that investment matters — and that we've got to get it right.'
'We looked at what other companies were doing and measurements of productivity in our environment — for example, how did we deliver against our quarterly goals, our financial targets and our aspirations in terms of innovation and disruption,' shares Lindsay. 'Then we used those different moments to convert our executives to this new way of thinking, to improve the employee experience.'
Bring your strategic A-game
'When it comes down to it, very few leaders will not want to do the right thing. Most of what we try to put in place is all about doing the right thing for our employees; and it's really hard to argue with that,' says Claire. 'And if we ever do struggle to state our case, one thing I often ask is: "What do you want your employees to say about working for you and your business? How do you want them to feel?" When you can link that back to the experience they've got and say "here's where we need to invest, here's why it's the right thing to do" it's going to make things better.'
'We worked through a strategy that really met the leaders where they were, using data to leverage our findings in different instances. Each executive required a different level of engagement. Some of them had been working from home for a long time and had embraced it for many years. With them, it was more about asking: 'What did you learn — and how can we use it to help our other employees make the transition in a similar way?' advises Lindsay. 'Then, of course, we had more staunch representatives of in-person collaboration — usually within the R&D and product side. With them, we started to understand their resistance, understand their biases; we brought in leaders from organizations like the NeuroLeadership Institute to really understand what those biases were and how they needed to be challenged.'
