We’re terribly excited to be relaunching our newsletter, PynPoint, today. Going forward this newsletter be dedicated to serving the establishment of an incredibly exciting and new HR area: Employee Experience.
This newsletter is for HR folk responsible for implementing a modern employee experience function. Our goal is to create clarity on this new role’s mandate, provide tools & learnings, and give access to employee communications for key moments and events.
I've been lucky to lead HR at some of the most progressive companies, including Atlassian and Squarespace. Though we implemented aspects of 'Employee Experience', at the time the role was both poorly defined and lacking the right tools. That has started to change.
Since launching Pyn, I've collaborated with an incredible community of Heads of EX. We can’t wait to share resources, tips and learning!
What to expect from this newsletter:
Tips of the Trade about the role, tools and techniques, including free tools like Journey Mapping, Success Measures (KPIs), Employee Audience Segmentation, and more!
Upcoming in Your HR Calendar: Keep up with upcoming holidays, observances and cyclical HR events, and get free communication templates.
Stories from EX Leaders: Learnings from Heads of Employee Experience who tell how they are building this new function in their companies.
Learnings from Inside, by Stacey Nordwall: : Vulnerability and success stories on designing the employee journey inside Pyn
A quick Google Trends Search shows that interest in "Employee Experience (EX)" skyrocketed 600% in the past decade. 600%!! We thought the best way to learn more about this skyrocketing career was to talk to the people living it.
So, we interviewed EX leaders from brands like Uber, Vimeo, and Yelp. And we learned that Employee Experience is terribly exciting. But also defined terribly.
The consistentchallenge of this new role is educating folk internally on the role itself and its priorities
Why so? "Because EX can be everything and anything,” explains Natasha Loughlin - Head of EX at Findex.
Head EX at Yelp, Shilpam Moddet, adds that, “People, and importantly leadership, don't necessarily understand the role’s value." Vimeo’s Head of EX said that, "Clarifying the role scope as well as roles and responsibilities is paramount."
So, here’s my goal. I want to unpack everything Employee Experience. Including the role’s mandate, the success metrics, interview guides, ways to communicate your value to your CEO, the tools, the key skills. Everything!
How can we help each other? I’d love to connect with more Employee Experience and bring folks together to discuss the more challenging EX topics.
If you’re keen, connect with me on LinkedIn and I’ll send you a note when I'm organising any EX workshops of meetups. Or, take a back seat and let the information come to you (just make sure this newsletter doesn't go to spam!)
Prepare the employee communications you could consider sending in your company. Currently with a strong US focus, but soon more personalized based on the countries you operate in.
We spoke to Oyster’s Head of EX, Kim Rohrer at length about her experiences building this new function and about Employee Listening / Surveying.
Employee ‘listening’ and garnering employee sentiment is one of the core functional responsibilities of Employee Experience.
“We’re still working on how we can best hear and capture the feedback of our diverse population without only reacting to the loudest people. Not everyone processes information, or feels comfortable giving feedback in the same ways, so it’s important for us to consider a wide variety of opportunities to share.
Multichannel feedback is even more important for fast growing distributed teams. As we grew from under 20 to over 600 in just 18 months, our communications had to scale, including our channels for feedback.
We use a combination of 8 methods in order to surface insights regardless of location, department, role/level, or communication style:
Employee engagement surveys (via Culture Amp)
Daily mental health/burnout checkins (via Kona),
One-on-one checkins; not only Employees with their Managers and Managers with Employee Experience, but also regular check-ins from Employee Experience with different folks at all levels in the company.
#ask-[team name] channels for people to ask a specific team (including leadership) any question big, small, deep, or silly (via Slack)
Q&As kickoffs or product launches (via Slido) and for our leadership team (via a Slack channel with the option to use an anonymous Slackbot)
Private inquiries sent to PeopleOps to answer sensitive questions (via Asana)
Quick, light polls on a variety of timely topics (via Slack)
Individualized continuous feedback (via Pando)
Share and act on feedback quickly. People need to see the connection between feedback and change. We continually remind people what you're doing with their feedback.
It's not enough to listen and not act, and it's not enough to act without sharing. You can listen all you want, but if people don't trust you to act on their feedback, you're not going to hear much 🙂"
In companies with an Employee Experience function, roughly 25% have DEI as part of their scope. Regardless, the Head of Employee Experience will need to ensure that DEI is woven into the employee experience strategy.
Key to build a strategic DEI framework is to not start with programs, ERGs or workshops - but to start with an accountability mechanisms.
With the guidance of our DEI consultant, we reviewed the work we’d done and found that we had a lot of policies and practices already in place, but we had yet to connect them to a foundation that would allow us to scale and keep us accountable.
It's a mistake lots of companies make. The most important work still needed to be done!
In the weeds - To create our foundations, we first have to take our values and operationalise them. For example, we’re creating:
a new structured values interview for use in our hiring process
an equitably-designed performance review process
standards that outline expectations for managers
This creates the accountability mechanisms that our policies and programs can then be built upon.
Our learnings and successes - when you’re building, you have to start with the foundation!
While it can feel easier to start the journey by building the pieces (e.g., crafting trainings, organising groups, or developing policies), those won’t feel grounded or be as successful if the foundations that hold people accountable aren’t in place.
