What if you treated your workplace culture like a product? One that employees actively choose to 'subscribe' to or opt out of? The biggest expense for the majority of companies is on their people operations. An average of 60% of a business’ budget goes directly into their people, and as such, this expenditure should be well-spent and efficiently used.
But as with any major business investment, challenges come with it. This task is particularly complex because employees are just as critical to your business as the products or services you offer. That’s why adopting an integrated, aligned approach to your company’s culture is key. Think of it this way: your employees are the customers of the culture you’re building, and the employee experience is the product you’re delivering.
In a recent discussion with Jessica Zwaan and Matt Bradburn, we explored the concept of developing your company’s culture and employee interactions as a product, and how you should be engaging in business strategies to retain and optimize this talent through your people management. In the workplace culture of your organization, you can transform employee experience with product management principles for greater engagement and increased performance, but how can we execute this within our current business models? Let’s explore the three key challenges to implementing a product-centered office culture.
The first challenge here is to shift your way of thinking and start to view your role as product-centered rather than people-centered. Instead of being the Chief People Officer, you need to become the Chief Product Officer of the Employee Experience. Your employees are the customer, and the product they are buying into is the experience they’ll have while working at your company, the office culture, and they’ll subscribe to that until they resign.
To address this challenge, you need to fully embrace your new HR role within the organization and realize the alignment between product and people. In product funnel diagrams, it shows the progression a customer goes through when they are considering buying something - and your employees go through a similar process when they are deciding to apply at your company, and ultimately join and become a part of your office culture.
From product advertising to acquisition to purchasing decision, this experience is reflected with your employees. They begin at employer branding, then recruitment, to offer and acceptance. The process of becoming a part of your company is extremely similar to buying a product. It therefore makes sense to align them and use the same strategies to improve the employee experience, like you would with a customer. Your employees are the customers of the company culture that you’re building, so it’s up to you as the Chief Product Officer of the Employee Experience to deliver a great product.
P&L, or profit and loss, is therefore crucial to your new role in people management. As already mentioned, an average of 60% of a company’s budget goes into its people, and as you are now viewing the employees with a commercial mindset, you need to keep in mind the potential profit and losses with them, too.
You need to have the responsibility, as well as the fiscal awareness, to know the possible profit and losses that could be incurred when you suggest a new product. In line with our analogy of the employee experience being the product, it’s important to view that any changes made to workplace culture could positively or negatively impact the office culture. A profit would be more engaged employees, increased performance, and losses here would be the opposite.
You need to view your HR role as a commercial one, and align your people management skills with P&L implications.
The C-suite, otherwise known as the team of executive leadership that have a “C” at the start of their titles. In most companies, they are going to be the ones deciding if your changes to workplace culture can go ahead. However, it doesn’t matter if your ideas for new products to enhance employee performance are good if you’re not speaking the same language as them to promote it. Again, think commercially. If you have a product you want to market to teenagers, you’re going to strategise accordingly, and the same applies here. You’ll be marketing your product to enhance employee experience for approval by your C-suite, so talk the same language as them. By doing this, you’ll get more buy-in from your executive team.
Being commercially aware is just the first step; the next is truly understanding the business. Often, HR or people managers have a deep understanding of an organization’s people and their needs, but they may lack visibility into the broader business operations and how workplace culture influences them. Aligning employee engagement with business objectives is crucial, and this can be achieved by fostering stronger collaboration between HR and other managers, which ultimately drives a more cohesive and productive culture.
A lack of engagement with other managers can be a barrier, but a great way to enhance the employee experience through a product-centered approach is by introducing a cross-functional concept.
As the head of HR or a people manager, it can be easy to just launch a product for employee experience that you think will enhance office culture. However, it’s much more beneficial to work dynamically across all teams before doing this.
This can be challenging due to the way many organizations are structured, and issues can arise from organizational design. Instead, consider adopting a more dynamic structure, which allows for better planning and forecasting of changes. By factoring in employee turnover and understanding why employees leave, you can adjust the products or initiatives you offer to improve office culture and enhance retention.
An organizational silo occurs when you have very separated teams, and while they work well together in the flow of that team, they are completely removed from the other teams and larger workplace culture of the organization. Overall, it leads to a lack of collaboration and communication and can impact the quality of products you’re offering to your employees.
To eliminate this, consider implementing cross-department teams to gain insight from each of them and how they all impact each other. It therefore becomes a holistic approach. This way, everyone becomes responsible for attrition, and the office culture experiences better development with this involved structure and improved quality progression, too.
As a people manager or the head of HR, you’ll constantly be receiving feedback about how products you’re implementing to improve the employee experience are positively or negatively impacting the office culture. Through this feedback, 1:1 meetings, and other troubleshooting conversations, you’ll be receiving valuable quantitative and qualitative data about what’s working, and more importantly, why it’s working. Make comprehensive notes of this feedback to help you improve your employee experience products even more.
You’re launching projects to improve your workplace culture products for your employees, but how do you know you’re actually solving the problems in your organization? This is a key challenge where delivering people's experience as a product is concerned, as it often lacks tangibility, but it’s extremely important to address.
The first step to solving this challenge is identifying and understanding the problem you’re trying to solve, especially as it relates to the whole organization. If, for example, you’re querying employees about how satisfied they are with diversity and how they’re being supported in that aspect, in this instance, it wouldn’t be ideal to only look at the average statistics. Instead, to truly understand any problems you may be having with diversity, you must listen to those who have a diverse background instead of looking at the average office culture and response. An important issue like this won’t affect everyone in the organization in the same way, so you can’t take an average approach here: it needs to be specific.
You also need to focus on output metrics. These measure the output results of an activity, such as revenue, retention, and performance. When trying to solve a problem with your employee experience products, find a way to measure an output metric like performance to see if you’re been successful in resolving the issue.
Similar to the use of output metrics, use a measurable method to measure problem solving. Analyse key performance indicators (KPIs) to see how successful you've been in managing employee relations, and consider analysing talent using your existing data for Employee Lifetime Value (ELTV), impact with Return on Investment (ROI), and development with Net Revenue Retention (NRR). Using tangible research methodologies to measure intangible values, like the employee experience or workplace culture, it will help you analyse and solve a problem, and show what you want to do in order to achieve what you desire.
These insights from Jessica Zwann and Matthew Bradburn are all about engaging your employees through HR and people management, but it’s about using these already existing people management skills to enhance office culture and serve your ideal customers - your employees. A product-centered approach for the workplace environment is unique, holistic, and essential to creating an exceptional workplace culture experience for your employees.
To watch the webinar in full, visit the Pando website, as well as explore more of our resources, including our latest e-book, Building Manager Buy-In for Competency-Based Performance. With Pando, we connect your growth and impact to drive performance in your organization.
