PMP - What HR Can Borrow From CX to Scale Engagement

[00:00:00] Hi everybody.

David Rice: Welcome back, uh, to our, the latest in our community event series that we're always hosting here at People Managing People. We host these to give our audience a chance to engage with expert experts who contribute to our people managing people, content and communities. So we're happy to be able to, that you can, we're happy that you were able to join us today and take part.

Uh, my name is David Rice. If you didn't already, already know that I'm the executive editor of People Managing People. And to kick things off, we're going to, well, first of all, I always invite everybody to tell us where you're joining from in the chat. So go ahead and tell us. Uh, love to hear where people are from.

Uh, we're always surprised at the reach of these things. It's pretty amazing. Um. Also we wanna learn a little bit more about you. So we're gonna throw a poll up and find out what your biggest obstacle to automating the employee experience is. And while you do that, I'm gonna go ahead and just like run through some housekeeping items.

'cause uh, we have to do it and I'll try to be quick. Um, first thing is this session is being recorded. It'll be available shortly afterwards. Uh, we may use some clips from it on our website or social channels, so you might see it there as well. Your cameras and microphones are off by default, so you will not appear on the recording itself, so don't worry about that.

Uh, the chat also does not appear in the recording, so. Please feel free to use that to share your thoughts. We've got a lot of experienced folks in the room today, so let us know if you agree or disagree with anything we're saying, and let us know what has or hasn't worked for you on this front. Um, sometimes we see people having an entirely different conversation in the, in the chat and sharing all kinds of cool insights, and we encourage that.

So please use that. Um, I've got some questions prepared for our speakers today that we'll be discussing live, and then after about 40 minutes, uh, we'll open it up to questions from the audience. Use the chance to ask smart people your questions, right. Um, anything you wanna know about automating employee experience or improving the employee experience, what you, whatever you would like to learn from today, uh, enter those into the chat as they come up and we'll get toward the, we'll get to them toward the end of the call.

We may ask a few in real time if they're hyper relevant, but, uh, otherwise we'll set 'em aside and make sure that we get to 'em at the end. Um. And yeah, that's about it for the housekeeping item. Now today's session is gonna focus on what HR can learn from customer experience to scale engagement without losing that human touch.

And we'll be speaking with some really great voices, thought leaders in the space. Uh, so first up we have Mary Poppen. Uh, Mary is the president and CXO at, uh, is it Horizons or HR Horizons, horizons [00:01:00] Horizons. Uh, she's the author of Goodbye Churn, hello Growth, and a Leading Voice in Customer and Employee Experience Strategy.

She's got decades of experience in SaaS and HR tech, and she helps companies align people, process and product to drive lasting growth. Uh, Mary, welcome.

Mary Poppen: Thanks David. Hi, Dora. Really good to be with you guys today. So looking forward to the conversation.

David Rice: Absolutely. Alright, next up, uh, we have Adora Ikwuemesi. Uh, she's the founder of Kinder Consulting and a trusted advisor to founders and execs on people strategy.

Uh, she's got a career spanning HR transformation coaching public sector reform, and she's known for empowering leaders to build resilient teams and HR pros to thrive in complexity. So, Adora welcome.

I think we had you on mute,

Dr. Adora Ikwuemesi: see? Yes. Thank you. [00:02:00] Alright, I think I'll just off mute. Okay. Thank you. Nice to meet you again, Mary, and looking forward to the conversation.

David Rice: Absolutely. We may have one more joining us. We're not sure, uh, if she's able to make it or not. She had a little bit of a, some things come up, so, but possibly joining us would be Vanessa Monsequeira.

Uh, she's a VP of people at Gorilla and a leadership coach who treats employee experience like product design. So hopefully she's able to hop in with us and we'll introduce her when she gets here. Um, but if not, we are certainly happy to have the two of you. So, uh. Little context setting for the session.

You know, given what's going on right now, there's a lot of changes in the workplace. There's a lack of trust. Disengagement is in increasing, it's already pretty high. Everyone is expected to implement automation wherever possible, right? Employee experience as ever, [00:03:00] plays such a key part in how we, how people engage with our employers, and whether or not we get it right, uh, is gonna play an integral part in the success of our orgs moving forward.

We've dumped millions into research, experimentation, and learning around the customer experience, which is easy to understand, right? These, uh, you want folks to buy your products, but how we get people to buy into being part of our organizations and goals is equally important to the overall success of the business.

And so that begs the question, right? What can we learn from customer experience and what we've, what we've developed there and apply it to employee experience? Where do we know we can't automate? Where is there opportunity to enhance the employee experience and our ability to shape it with automation?

So, with that in mind, I wanna start here. I'm curious about looking at some of the most valuable things that CX teams have learned down the years, things that HR teams maybe often get wrong in your opinion. And I wanna start with Mary on [00:04:00] this, uh, and let you kind of open us up.

Mary Poppen: Yeah. Well, thank you. This is, uh, this is a great question.

Uh, and one I think many of us have, uh, been looking to solve, uh, for a long time. One of the things that CX does really, really well is listens to the customer across the entire journey, and they leverage that data to make informed decisions about how to improve the customer experience. Right. In HR doesn't always take the approach of listening to employees across the entire life cycle, but maybe only at key change times in the organization, or once a year in an engagement survey, which really isn't enough to know what's going on with your employees on an ongoing basis.

Right? So I think really taking that model from CX and applying that listening strategy across your employee life cycle will give companies that, you know, insight and sort of ongoing [00:05:00] trends that will help make the best decisions on where to improve employee experience. Then the other thing I'll add is CX usually does and is in a position to, to do a really good job on cross-functional alignment and driving results across functions to improve the employee, uh, the customer experience.

It doesn't always happen on the HR side. It's almost like HR programs are hrs responsibility and they have to influence the functional leaders to take action instead of having cross-functional alignment and ownership of employee experience across functions, right? And to share data and, um, actions like they do for cx.

So I think those are kind of two areas that, that I would focus on.

David Rice: Hmm. Oh, customer experience professionals talk a lot about moments that matter. Right. And I'm curious, how can HR teams start identifying these key moments across the employee lifecycle and know which ones need [00:06:00] that human touch right now, Dora, you've done some research around employee engagement, particularly in the remote setting, which I think a lot of us are very interested in.

And I wanna start with you here. But in your opinion, what are some of those key moments that matter for employees and that they need that human engagement?

Dr. Adora Ikwuemesi: Okay, thank you. Right. One thing I I love about customer experience, and I would say the best of HR has always. Taking the same approach. I mean, hr, when you talk about good HR and you talk about bad hr, it's like a, it's like a spectrum, right?

I find that the best HR teams are customers, are, are employees. So if you look at, uh, performing HR team, they typically will have like an HR scorecard. And if you're familiar with scorecards, you know, there's usually a customer segment, right? You know, you have, like if you're, if you are familiar with scorecard, you know, you'd have financial [00:07:00] KPIs, you have customer KPIs process.

Yeah. With HR teams, you know, really high performing HR teams. We typically have employee in place of customers. So immediately I already see the synergy. I see that, you know, the customer experience and employee experience are two sides of the same coin in, in my opinion. And when we talk about moments that matter, uh, I liken it to, in, in cx I would call it the customer journey mapping.

Right? So what would typically happen in, in customer journey mapping is like, you know, brands anticipate the needs of the customers, right? And they create moments of delights amongst at touch points, right? So do we, I think the best HR teams do very similar, right? In the, in terms of the parallel is that they use an employee journey map to uncover key [00:08:00] engagement moments.

And of course, where do these happen at times like onboarding, uh, career growth. Feedback loops through like maybe the performance management system. And of course in remote work, which is where most of my research is, we focus on that. You know, how engagement is different in a remote work context, right?

So in based on my research, remote employees often feel disengaged at transition points, right? Because onboarding is very different. In an office is very different from onboarding in, you know, in a remote setting because you never get to see the person just compare, you know, you can't even compare it. So if leadership is not proactive, then it's even a more difficult, uh, you know, battle there.

So I think for me, when it comes to moments that matter, we can borrow, we look at, when we look at cx, we look at the [00:09:00] customer journey. When we look at from the employee side, from hr, we look at the employee journey and we can use, you know, you know, their key moments where we can create a delightful experience, such as when people are being onboarded, when they're transition, you know, during their performance reviews or, you know, things like that.

So that's where I see the, the similarities.

David Rice: Excellent. Well, Vanessa's been able to join us. Vanessa, welcome.

Vanessa Monsequeira: Thank you so much. In the world of remote work, it was part of my time and confusion, uh, in Amsterdam. So super lovely to talk, um, meet with, with y'all and have this awesome discussion. Thank you.

David Rice: Excellent. Well, we're just, uh, we're just having a door weigh in on sort of, uh, moments that matter in the, and how to kind of identify those key moments in the employee life cycle and know which ones need the human touch, which was versus which ones maybe are more ripe for automation. Uh, and [00:10:00] I'm curious to get your thoughts to kind of help welcome you into the session, you know, what are some of those moments that are kind of ideal for both?

Vanessa Monsequeira: For automation? Um, I think maybe a step back, I think before we automate things, um, there's kind of that, excuse my French, be like shit in, shit out If your, if your process is not good and you just automate it, there's clinks here. So I think, um. Talking like building on what Adora said in terms of like the customer experience.

I think before we even look at automation, it's thinking through what are we trying to achieve here? And for me, I come from the world of building people as a product. So I think at the end, end game, if you like, what is the true product here that we're trying to build? So one of the case use cases is onboarding.

If that's our product, what is the ideal? Experience and then what is the product we're trying to build and where do we automate and where do we want a personal experience? But I think automation's become like a really sexy word. So everyone's just like, let's [00:11:00] automate things. But then you are putting Zapier or N eight N through like someone getting something from their um, a TS to the HR tech system.

So I'd say that was the first thing is we, in our people team, we've kind of zoomed out and said, what are the core products? The main product in the people space is the employee value proposition. What are the augmented products around employee experience? Around performance, sorry, around onboarding, around performance, around career progression.

And then I think what we're looking at is where do we still need manual human operations? And then where do we automate? So at the moment, if I'm transparent at Gorilla, I'm still like, today's actually my one year enroll. We're still looking at auto like simple automations between the tech stack, which we had to put a full tech stack in from the onboarding experience.

Um, and I think our next level of automations and then even augmentation to ai, it's might be my dream for like over a decade, is personalized learning journeys. Imagine if you could actually have the automation and [00:12:00] that intelligence to augment someone's team leader or their coach and a manager to start helping them look through what do I automate in my one-to-ones with my team as a team leader, and then when do I need that, um, additional intelligence around areas of gap and areas of growth.

Um, if I look at maybe an area of automation that has backfired, um. To be fair, I don't think we've had anything that's truly backfired, but I'm sure we've had a few mishaps in the onboarding experience as well. And I think if we truly look at any product, whether it's a SaaS product or the employee experience, onboarding is the most important part for speed to efficacy and making people have longer retention.

So I think we just, you know, if someone gets, um, an email that doesn't make sense, um, or just an onboarding experience, it kind of creates a funny first taste in their mouth. I think conversely, I know [00:13:00] this has happened in a company when after they did, uh, a LE wasn't my experience, but they did a level of re um, reduction in force and people still started getting like the, um, the swag packs because it was automated and they hadn't done a proper offboarding.

I think that's a pretty painful kick in the gut, that something's really great in terms of its automation, but hasn't read the climate or the tone for employees.

Mary Poppen: Vanessa, I just, you just made me think of something else. Just, um, if things can be automated, doesn't mean they necessarily should be Right, right.

Yeah. Um, I was actually, I, I worked, um, for a company that actually decided to automate fully the performance and compensation letters and sending them out in the organization. And, um, not only, you know, did that sort of take away the opportunity from the manager to have that conversation with the employee at the end of the cycle, but what happened was people got the wrong letters.

Um, and it caused a lot [00:14:00] of anxiety, anger questions for hr. Um. They didn't know like how many wrong letters had gone to how many wrong people. So they had to recall. It was just a nightmare. And so it just leads me to believe, like in those situations, always, I think the human side of that kind of process and wrapping up that experience with that human touch makes such a difference, right?

But in this case, it went to the extreme, not just automating the message, but it was wrong, you know? So just, uh, just reminded me that certain things you should really ask yourself, you know, we can automate this, but is it gonna have the ultimate impact we want?

Vanessa Monsequeira: And I also think on, based on that, if, if you are gonna automate and you know, something's high risk, like are you gonna spend enough time doing the user testing on it?

Um, 'cause I think from the CX and then a product perspective, they spend a lot of time user testing, high risk things for, for customers and clients. Absolutely.

Dr. Adora Ikwuemesi: [00:15:00] Yeah.

David Rice: Um, yes. In cx, we, you know, personalization, that's everything. Right. Um, I'm curious, and Adora, I'll start with you, but everybody feel free to weigh in on this.

Um, how can HR teams personalize at scale without overburdening people teams, or, or maybe even like, crossing boundaries a little bit?

Dr. Adora Ikwuemesi: Hmm. I think it's, even just listening to that, it's, it's a paradox, isn't it? 'cause personalization and skill. Like, you know, is it, is it even feasible? It's just every time you think about skill, you think about something you can automate and do a lot of quickly.

Right. And I, I believe just to buttress, um, on what Mary. Um, has said it's, it's difficult, uh, it's difficult to take out that [00:16:00] human element. I think the most important from even the examples Mary gave, gave and Vanessa have given as well. Once they're highly emotional or personal, then it's, it's very difficult to automate and it's dangerous and risky to automate.

Um, another thing I would say on personalization. Again, if we look at CX, personalization is fantastic because, you know, I even love the idea of, you know, in marketing personas, right? When you understand the persona, you can develop a product. The same thing you're doing in product design, if you segment your employees and you know the different demographics or you know the different personas.

Let me not say demographics. 'cause demographics can be limited to age and, and it's not just about that. It's about interest, about values right now that helps you with designing your products or your solutions. So is it scalable? Well, [00:17:00] with ai, if you get the right data in, yes, then you can do it as long as it's accurate.

But the problem with automation, just like Mary's example, is just one thing needs to go wrong and everything is wrong, right? It could just be one dataset. Because I've had a similar experience in, um, doing some data analysis in which a row was empty. Just one row. Sorry. Yeah. Just one data sets not a row, just one.

You know, and the whole computation is wrong because AI or sometimes automation doesn't know that if I don't have this information, I, you know, I should alert or I shouldn't, you know, compute. And it does it anyway. And that's how it mixes up. Letters belonging to this person, to that person, because there are probably just one data set that was missing and it didn't know how to [00:18:00] respond to that because it wasn't programmed to deal with that type of challenge.

Yeah. So I, I would say that it's, you know, um. With advancement in technology, it will be possible, of course, you know, because once it has data on a particular person, it can definitely personalize for you. As long as it has all the data, it can, it can give personal, you know, it can personalize all the outcomes or the solutions for each individual.

So until you get there, if you are able to train your systems to that point, then you get personalization. Personalization is great. Everyone likes to feel special. I would like to know that this was specially designed for me, right? You know, it, it's a great thing, but obviously it comes with advancements in technology and you can't afford the errors because if you, if it, if, if, if it makes a mistake, then the personalization, what should have been a really joyful, delightful moment, [00:19:00] becomes a very emotional, disastrous moment.

Just like the examples that have been cited.

Mary Poppen: And I just, um, to kind of add, add to that. I was, I was just thinking, and I saw Mohamad posted something on, on Netflix, and sometimes I think we maybe get caught up in personalization being kind of one-to-one. And I like to think sometimes personalization actually is just having choices.

So reward and recognition systems I think are a great example because you can build a great scalable process and program, but leave it to the individual to have options that feel very personalized, right? They could have, um, wellness equipment that, you know, they could share with their family. They could choose vacation, you know, um, gift cards or something and, and go with their family.

So sometimes I think we just need to, to think about personalization as a starting point, being, giving them some choices.

Vanessa Monsequeira: Yeah, I think [00:20:00] riffing off that, I just put like a, I, I'm sure everyone's seen this picture, which is like, you know, well when you do customer experience or UX research and then people go and build and maybe they over-engineer things and we're personalizing.

So what Adora is talking about is like, do you actually need that level of personalization or marry as well? So I think sometimes we over-engineer it and so I'd really be asking myself what is the minimum viable product we need and are we over-engineering it or is the people say like in that picture they need a seat and what they want is a swinging tire and we're trying to personalize and do all these complex things or we don't have the data sets and people actually probably don't even want that.

So I think a lot of this in true customer experience and before that the UX is understanding, um, what people want, build the right thing and then build the thing. Right?

David Rice: Absolutely. Um. You know, what I forgot to do was share the poll results. Um, I think we've got, uh, some results that, uh, Michael's gonna put up.[00:21:00]

I say, here we go. Um, let's see. Biggest obstacle seems by far is that risk of losing personal connection and trust. And like we said at the out outset, we, and as we've seen, seen on a lot of our recent events, trust is this ongoing issue. You know, I want to get everyone's thoughts on this because, um, this is something I, I find fascinating.

How much does automation actually undermine trust? Because we're seeing with like the younger generation, they don't always mind it, right? But then at the same time. They want to go into the office and build relationships. So it's almost like the things that you think would be intuitive are not, you know, I, I think a lot of us would've been surprised when we found out that so much of Gen Z wants to work in person.

Right. Um, I'm curious what all you all's thoughts is on like, sort of the ri the, how do I put this, the actual [00:22:00] like overall risk of automation to, uh, trust, I guess. And anyone feel free to jump in. I'm gonna make that one walk if you have a, a opinion on it, please.

Dr. Adora Ikwuemesi: I think, let me go. I, I think. You can't, how do you have trust without a relationship? Right? Relationships are very key for trust to happen when if you, if there's no personal or human touch you, how do you trust something that you don't have a relationship with? So I see them as, you know, trust and relationship are one and the same.

And relationship. You have relationships with people, not with things, right? Absolutely. So in my, in my opinion, definitely, you know, trust goes hand in hand which [00:23:00] relationships, which mean personal connection. They might not be physical in terms of, you might not be seeing the person face to face, but you are communicating with them, right?

Because the, the basis of any relationship is communication. So whether the communication is virtual. That's a different matter. It doesn't really matter. But as long as you're communicating with someone one-on-one, then you can build a relationship and you can build trust. It's difficult to build. How do you, you can trust a system, I guess in, in a sense, but that's level of trust is not the same as how you trust the human being.

That's based on, you know, the capability of a system, not on having a relationship in which you can be vulnerable. Um, and of course, you know, with vulnerability comes a whole different sense of, you know, of relationships. So yeah, so that's the perspective I would see it from

Vanessa Monsequeira: for me. I love [00:24:00] that. I think anything that is human, like real people centered, where you need a human connection, you probably don't need to automate it for me.

I just think we have to decide what's the outcome that we, what are we automating in the people space? Because some things don't break trust. Like if, um, I have an automation that sends out all my reporting from my a TS and my, um, my HRS, and doesn't mean that I need, or someone in my team needs to tinker around manually with spreadsheets and like wicked automate, go for like, you know, go for it.

There's no issue with automating things that are administrative, that are monotonous and that have zero, like almost zero risk that's employee facing, but that enables the employee experience. Um, I think there's different parts in automating, like cleanups within tech systems, compliance and reporting.

It's kind of like that's what automation should be for us. All the boring things that we have to do and that people waste their time doing. Um, I think also automations, if we [00:25:00] have popular, popular documentation, like proper documentation, automate how we find that, use augmented intelligence to find those things.

And even sort of automating, you know, certain things that suggest people's learning pathways in a learning management system. There's really no risk there at the moment. None of those are really personal, but someone's manually sitting behind there. I think there's the pieces that we shouldn't fully ever automate, like should, should be kind of stock standard like employer relations and conflict resolution.

Um, performance management conversations, use automations or augmented intelligence to help but not replace hiring decisions. Leadership and succession planning. There's so many things that are more, anything that's more sensitive and that, you know, it's a litmus test. Would I feel a high level of emotional in this?

How would I react to this? That's generally a good litmus test to say. It's probably shouldn't be automated, and I think. To be fair, automation is almost yesterday's story. Everyone's looking [00:26:00] at what's the game now with automation, augmented intelligence, and then full ai, artificial intelligence. And I have to be honest, I don't think most people, and I can say that in different teams I've led, have even got automation, right?

Due to the data story. So I think that's almost like level one where we all need to be like level 10 already. Um, so I think sometimes the sexiness of automation have led to some of, like the things Mary was talking about is like, let's not automate for the sake of automating. And I remember I was at a great talk by Dom Price, who's like been one of the work futurists at Atlassian, and he stole part of this quote from somewhere else and he'd said, A fool.

With a tool, it's still a fool. You've made them faster and potentially more dangerous. So I think once again, it's like first principles, what are we trying to solve for? And then let's look at the automations and the intelligences on top of that instead of going tool first and solution first.

Mary Poppen: Yeah, I love, I love those examples and I was also [00:27:00] just thinking about kind of trust, um, on a couple of different levels, right?

One is trust in the data and that you're gonna have what you need to be successful or have something that's gonna make you unsuccessful. The other piece I was thinking is that people start wondering, okay, this automation is gonna replace me. Or this automation is going to double my workload, not be helpful.

Right. So you're able to scale customer quarterly, you know, partnership meetings great. Now you can do 20 instead of ton a quarter. Right. So I feel like it's, it's also that, and it comes down to what Adora was saying about communication and being transparent about what you're trying to accomplish. To your point, Vanessa, the objective, right, of using the automation and then being really clear with people, what is the outcome we're we're trying to accomplish?

And what is their role in getting there too, right? Because they play a role in helping the organization. So I feel like all of those pieces tie together with trust [00:28:00] coming to communication and transparency probably being the most important.

Dr. Adora Ikwuemesi: Yeah. Hmm. And I think, uh, I, I, I love the litmus test on anything that would be emotional, right?

But I think something where we miss it is that. We don't always take our time to assess whether there will be an emotional component to it. And without going into the details of the, um, Workday lawsuits, I'm not looking at it from a legal perspective, but recruitment, I've always been an advocate or recruitment is one of the most time consuming HR processes.

And I personally have always advocated for automating as much as you can. Right. And of course as getting as much data as you can because it'll help it be more efficient, be faster. But we see a clear case where the recruitment process and [00:29:00] all of us have been in a situation where we have applied for jobs.

And in this case someone applied for jobs, had applied for a hundred jobs, and they got, you know, they're getting automated rejection. How did this come to light? You get a rejection before you even finished typing. Like literally, how could they have reviewed my application so quickly? So it was obvious that AI automation was doing the short listing, and obviously there must have been key words it was looking for, but this person was able to say, look, I've, I've been discriminated against based on, you know, my age, or you know what, whatever.

And look at it. It's such a big, it was such a big risk. And you know, they have been, you know, the company has been sued and the judgment has been in the favor of, of it's now a class action, right? So no one would've seen this risk, [00:30:00] right, because they automated. But guess what? And this is what happens with technology.

Without that human direction, it's, it goes wrong. And in this case, what could have happened differently? Maybe someone I don't know, could have overlooked the recruitment process. Because employees, not just employees, even potential employees. 'cause that's a, a moment of, you know, moments of truth. Let's borrow from cx you know, the recruitment process.

That's a touch point, right? When potential employees get to, you know, experience your process. And in this case there's like a, a failure. There's a, a, a customer service breakdown of sorts. In this, it's it's potential experience or potential employee breakdown because they didn't feel like they were given a fair.

Assessment or a, a fair short listing. So the, these are things that we need to, the risk, [00:31:00] I think we are not very aware of the risk yet. And I believe that as we continue to, you know, experiment and technology continues to advance, we will see, I, we, I wasn't expecting this. I can't, you know, as an HR practitioner, I wasn't expecting this lawsuit, right?

Because we didn't think that far. And I think experience will give us more instances in which we will be able to decipher and think broader to how no one thought that somebody applying for a job could sue a company because they felt they were discriminated by a tool. And guess what? One of a very interesting thing in the judgment was that I think, you know, the company said that they were not an agent or an agency, so they shouldn't be.

Held responsible. And guess what? Why? The judgment said the AI in this instance was acting as their agents. So that was why the judge rule. You're not an agency, but ai, [00:32:00] a tool that you've invested in is your agent. And we can't, there's, we, you know, we, we can't sue ai. You are the company who's made that investment.

So that's a very interesting perspective, and I think there's a lot of lessons for all of us because even, you know, we, we, we don't always know all the possibilities and all the scenarios that could play out. We just know what we know. And, you know, it's, it's interesting to see how this unfolds.

David Rice: Well. So, uh, we've got maybe about 25 minutes left.

I do wanna remember, remind everybody, please, if you have questions, put 'em in the chat, or you can submit 'em in the Q and a, however you prefer. Uh, we're gonna start kind of collecting those and making sure that we get to ask those. Uh, but I wanted to ask this too before we kind of move on to that. Um, and Mary, we'll start with you on this.

Uh, I'm curious about mindset shifts that need to happen inside hr just to start thinking more like a product team or a CX team when designing employee journeys. [00:33:00]

Mary Poppen: Yeah, that's a great question. I think, um, one of the biggest mindset shifts that needs to occur probably in a lot of organizations, at least a lot I've worked with, is that employee experience is not hrs job.

It is everyone's responsibility should be built into the operating cadence of the company, right? Just like, um, alignment on actions across business priorities and customer priorities, employee priorities should also be part of that conversation. So I think that's a really big part, and it's not just leaders and managers that own it either.

The employees play a role in their own engagement, their own experience. So giving feedback and speaking up and being part of the solution, um, not just, not just, you know, announcing the problems, but actually being a part of it as well. Um, is, is a key part of getting the whole organization aligned. And then cross-functional alignment too, just on overall people strategies.

So having HR at the table [00:34:00] in those boardrooms and talking about, I think Adora, you were mentioning the scorecard, right? There should be a customer scorecard, an employee scorecard, an operational scorecard, all of these things. Are really important, but I feel like a lot of times that people piece is left out of the conversation unless there's an issue.

Vanessa Monsequeira: Mm. I think for me, we really look at how we structure ourselves as a products team. So I can I lean over and get my book? Yeah. I'm a big fan of, um, spas book Built for People, if anyone can see that. And they can also see that it's got my fake, that is my real bookshelf, but differently but built for people where she really talks about understanding that each company has three products.

There's the product and service you sell to a customer. The second product is the company's financial instrument. Anyone in the SaaS world or private equity or shareholder, they don't really care about the actual physical product. They care about the financial instrument, what's their return on investment?

And the third [00:35:00] product is the employee experience and the business model is the subscription service. And employees keep subscribing for an experience that they're being delivered to. Mary's Point doesn't just mean the people team, everyone's delivering on that employee value proposition or experience team.

But even getting, so I kind of talked to my executive team when I joined, like this is the model we're going towards. And then understanding after, if people is truly a product, how do we actually change our structure internally? So that was the first mindset shift for my team. We're not structured in people, business partners, talent, we're looking at feature teams.

So we are acquisition, onboarding, performance development, employee experience platforms and back office. And how are we developing features that we help people delight our customers who are employees, um, to really think about how we. Develop, test, iterate. So the whole CX and UX journey, how are we building things with and for people and letting people know we're not gonna design the most beautiful, perfect thing because we're a product team.

We're gonna give you a first slice, a minimum [00:36:00] viable product, get your feedback and iterate. We're gonna do the user testing with you, we're gonna do the user experience with you. So for me, it's not just a mindset shift that's important, it's also the skillset shift. So the mindset shift comes more with the skillset shift.

So I invest in my team in doing that. So I think one, that's one piece. I think the second piece. In this model where it's employee experience is helping HR teams understand the employee isn't your only only customer. The board members are also your customer. With, um, people in any tech space, at least people are the highest amount of opex, um, on anyone's, you know, sheet.

So it's understanding. If we're truly thinking like a product or customer team, we have to be thinking in similar metrics to them. We have to be thinking in similar solutions design. And then there's an natural mindset shift in the workforce because I see a lot of modern people, teams wanting to work in this way and what holds them back sometimes is actually a workforce expecting.

A more archaic model of, um, sort of [00:37:00] administrative service policy. Like a lot of people don't wanna do that anymore. Um, but a lot of businesses expect it 'cause that's what they think HR is. So I think for us to shift, it's gotta be like a change champion network at a leadership team level, and the people team themselves knowing how to either not people please or fall back into all mode modes of working.

David Rice: Absolutely. Um, all right, we've got about 20 minutes left. Uh, so we're gonna kinda shift into some questions, uh, from the audience. But before we do that, uh, I want to, first of all, uh. Mention a few things that we have coming up. So we're gonna be trying out a few different things, running some two part workshops later this summer where we try some vibe coding for HR and building custom apps that may help you achieve things that you, you know, need to achieve, but haven't had quite the tools necessarily.

Uh, the first one we're gonna be building something around off-boarding [00:38:00] analytics and how we can make better use of this data. Uh, so registration for part one of the workshop will be open soon and will be sent to all of our newsletter subscribers. So if you wanna hear more from yeah, about that, definitely subscribe to the newsletter.

It's a great way to do that. If you want to hear more from our speakers today, I'd encourage you to follow them on LinkedIn for more insights and best practices and we're gonna put those links in the chat. And, uh, you know, before you take off today at any point, 'cause I know in the next 15 minutes we'll start to lose people.

But, uh, we wanna know, we want you to know that we love feedback. So take a second. Let us know what you thought of today's event. Let us know if there are any topics you'd like to see us cover in a future session. Uh, we read every single one of these that comes in, so that link will also be, uh, in the chat.

So, um, okay, so let's get to some of your questions. Uh, one that was sent to me was said, our leadership team sees our UX folks as a product only function. I have been stopped from pulling them into people products that could help maybe improve some of the features of [00:39:00] our internal systems. How can I sell them on those folks?

Being involved on internal things as well, so we can optimize some of the tools that we're using. I dunno if anybody has experience with this, but just feel free to chime in.

Vanessa Monsequeira: I, um, make friends with the UXs. And so when they have capacity, get them involved. 'cause often then they can tell their, um, team leaders, Hey, I see this as a different way to augment my own career plan.

So it's actually sometimes if you make friends with the people. The second part is I don't rely on the UX team. Build the skills yourself. There's so many great free co courses out there. Help your team understand the, the UX skills I've recently bought. Um, I, um, working with, with the futures kind, um, lovely collective in the uk.

There's other people like that who can teach some of the service, um, design UX principles. So if you can't get them to do that. Start training your team in that, start getting them to be more T-shaped in their skillset. Get your team to become friends with the [00:40:00] UXs. If there's communities of practice within the company, join those.

If there's community of practices outside of the company, there's so many wicked groups out there that are free, some are paid. So I, I think convincing a leadership team is hard. If you can find one or two people within your team that are good people want to back winning horses. Like, I'm not calling people horses, but like that idea of people wanna back winners.

So find a few winners and create that energy. People love energy, people love teams that are succeeding and doing something cool or different. So I would try a multi-prong approach of work through UXs, bring the training into your team and start getting your team members to start being T-shaped and joining communities internally and externally.

But otherwise, I think you might be waiting a very long time to convince the leaders if there's just one approach.

David Rice: All right. I dunno if anybody else has anything on that, but if not, like, well,

Mary Poppen: I'll just say I love Vanessa that you're looking at sort of the free resources 'cause that's always a great way to go. But I was just thinking [00:41:00] it's easier said than done, but building that business case around what resources you need and why, and what the impact's gonna be to the organization.

So if you are gonna, um, outsource some of the UX work for the things that you're working on in your function, there's a cost to that, to the organization where some of the UX team might have capacity and, or it's an interesting opportunity and an employee engagement opportunity to offer them an oppor, you know, the chance to work on something internally and make an impact.

So that's another, another way to approach it.

David Rice: All right. Well, another one that's come in here is, uh, how do I convey my purpose of Culture Change Coach and the introduction, or it says, introduce my, uh, implementation model for fostering culture change to the direct managers who are supposed to be my champions of change. If they're not buying into their roles of being those drivers, or [00:42:00] they're too busy.

Um, this one is kind of a ask me anything. I think, uh, yeah, if anybody has any, uh, advice on this, it would be very much appreciated.

Dr. Adora Ikwuemesi: Okay. I, I think I'll attempt that one because this is something, one, one thing about change is, you know, managers, for example, are key to change initiatives. However, people change when they see the benefit for them.

As long as those managers. Don't buy in, uh, his, I don't know who that person is. He or hers initiative won't. It's, it won't happen, right? You can't run a culture change program without the buy-in of the people who will benefit from the change. So maybe she should be asking herself, I'm assuming it's a [00:43:00] she, but just she should be asking herself the right questions.

Who's the change for? Because if you can't buy in, is I buy into something because I see the benefits. So if she hasn't sold the benefits and the people are not in on the benefits, then they're always going to be busy. We make time for what and we prioritize what is beneficial. To us. So maybe those managers don't see any alignment with it, with what they're trying to achieve.

And another thing is that real change, I don't know who the CEO is, but it's, you have to have sponsorship in change programs. And the sponsorship comes from the founder, the CEO of the company. If that person is not back in this culture change initiative wholeheartedly, then the managers cannot be expected to act any differently.

So ensure that your [00:44:00] sponsor is on board, he that should be the first person driving the change. Change culture change is not an HR for initiative or activity. It's a leadership one. So make sure you have the buy-in of the right people and they should be driving the change and collaborating with you, not you doing it while, and you know, you shouldn't be chasing managers to change, especially since the benefits of the change will likely be for their own good.

So she might have some work to do.

Vanessa Monsequeira: Yeah, I always like to clap and just, yeah. Times 1000 saying is like changing culture, even like a champion network is never going to be to, to be able to do it if the leadership team doesn't role model the change. I remember my, one of my earliest leaders said A fish rots from its head.

And so like, leaders aren't on board. Um, I think I've done this a few times before. Um, I was really lucky to work in my early career for a really wonderful lady in the, in the uk and we'd built a change [00:45:00] champion network of 250 and over the time I saw a strong unit and then I saw people fade away. Where people faded away is exactly what Adora said is what's in it for me.

Number one, if they don't see reinforcement of actual change in milestones happening, they don't do it. So my biggest like. Tool or tip would be if you already don't know, leading change by John Kota. It's just like the bible of change management. Look through that, because often when things are going wrong, one or more of those steps are skipped.

Like building the guiding coalition, getting the leaders to communicate by, I think he said a factor of 10,000. I work with leaders and they're like, yeah, I told the, the, the employees this. I was like, you told 'em once or twice. You need to tell them till you are blue in the face and you are sick of hearing yourself.

They've heard it for them. Or second time. Um, and then I think if those people don't wanna do it, find new people. I know that's really easier said than done and you could find different ways. Digital whiteboards. I'll drop, uh, something. I did a LinkedIn post, which gives you the playbook of how to do culture by co-design with [00:46:00] everyone.

But I think often, and you might've done this, so sorry if I'm telling you to suck eggs, whoever's asking this question, but people find culture fluffy. And I love the culture web model by Johnson and Scholars because it talks about the fun parts of culture, like rituals and routines, symbols, um. Stories, but it talks about the gritty parts that no one wants to talk about.

Power structures, control systems, org structures, they are all culture. So I think it's a way to go, how do we make this concrete for people? How do we incentivize them? And how do leaders do this? And how do I start planning milestones from the CX perspective? Mm-hmm. For moments of when people will drop off the journey.

And how do I get retention in this culture strategy? Um, the book is leading change, John. I think it's like John. Oh yeah, you've put it in. Just

David Rice: popped it in there. Yeah.

Vanessa Monsequeira: Like essential for every people person or, [00:47:00]

David Rice: all right. Uh, let's see, we have a couple more here. So, um, as AI gets more integrated into HR tech stacks, uh, you know, what sort of advice do you have for making sure we're not just automating tasks, but enhancing relationships?

Mary Poppen: Um, I'll go, I'll go, I'll go first. I think, um, I think that part of the problem is maybe in just the way the question is formed, which is looking at things as just tasks, right? Because it's easy to just pick and choose automating something without the bigger picture. So I think thinking through what outcomes you're trying to drive and then working backward to what can we automate versus keep that human element right, is gonna make that outcome, you know, come to life.

Um, and also taking a look, I think just at some of the, the risks and implications more broadly, um, because sometimes, again, if you're working in a functional bubble, you're gonna [00:48:00] miss some of those downstream implications for other parts of the organization. Or customers. Or employees.

Dr. Adora Ikwuemesi: Yeah. So I, I think one thing that would be key is a mindset shift from efficiency.

To empathy and fairness. Yeah, I think that's something that we need to look at in hr. So the all, well, the mindset we're trying to change is one of how can we make things faster? Because automation, that's always why we automate. How do we make it more efficient? How do we make, look at the example, the Workday example.

How can we make hiring faster and cheaper with ai? We should be changing this to, how do we ensure hiring is equitable, inclusive, and transparent, even at scale, right? So with automating, because we want to [00:49:00] scale, we want to do it. Quicker, but we still need to ensure that it's equitable, it's inclusive, and it's explainable.

Right? So that is where I see, you know, so that we can obviously limit the risk and limits the negative impact on, you know, people, like I said, we're, it is still human resources. Even if it, or it's people management or it's, you know, but it's still people, it's still human. So we shouldn't take away that human element.

If we use automation, if we use tools, then we should still have a human oversee those, you know, the, the outcomes so that we make sure that there's a final check at least to protect us from, from any kind of issues. Especially, you know, just negative ones that can affect our culture, uh, organization in, in a negative way.

Vanessa Monsequeira: I think something that's [00:50:00] interesting for me and something I meant to say before when we talk, I think we're kind of mixing sometimes automation and the AI augmentation. Something that we didn't have in automation that we're discussing more in AI is we never had automation ethics committee or, or like, it was just like, let's automate.

But ai, everyone's like a, like, shit, what is, like what's happening? Um, so I think at least we're getting ethics for ai, but that also goes back to the base like machine learning. And a lot of this has been there for ages and some of these automation. So what I'm enjoying is, um, saying actually, um, the role of.

The people team is also to be the voice and the pusher of ethics now, and we can take that backwards to automation now from the tech stack as well. So I think that's what I'm working with our people team business, like putting AI Central, I'm sorry, putting Ethics Central to our AI strategy as well. We can't delete that out.

It's not all about efficiencies and productivity. There's gotta be ethics here. And I think from an automation perspective, someone, um, and excuse me if I got the person wrong, it was [00:51:00] in the chats. It's something super interesting. Maybe it was, um, it was, I think MJ was saying, Hey, I kind of trust chat GPT more than some people.

Once again, in terms of automation or the intelligence, I'll be perfectly honest to you, I have like coaching chats with chatGPT. Sometimes it's like nicer than some people I've worked with or coaches. And actually people have said that a lot of humans think that sometimes an AI manager can be more empathetic.

Than in a human person. So I think I don't have an answer, but I think we're in this really gray space that could be so beautiful and so cool, and also so dangerous. So I think the more first principles that we can have together to understand what are the ethics, when should we automate, when should there be extra intelligence?

It's gonna take a level of macro thinking that AI could also help you with that answer. But I think we need to do some deeper thinking and problem solving together around this. But I often too, too often, I find people are just going to the solution. When should I automate this? When should I [00:52:00] automate this?

I'm not sure that's the right question anymore.

David Rice: Yeah. What you just said just reminded me of, uh, I was at my mother's house over the weekend and my stepdad asked me a question and I answered it, but then he asked Alexa because it, it's, that's the official source. So

Vanessa Monsequeira: it could be that

David Rice: I do what I was talking about, but I

Vanessa Monsequeira: think people, at least if that gives them the comfort. Sometimes when, you know, you're right, we're like, cool, let's ask chat GBT, and you're like excellent experts. And also there's biases on how people start prompting it differently to get the answers that they want.

But I think, um, going back to some of the conversations around recruitment, if you ask candidates, can we know, uh, put it AI note taker, we always ask, um, something I notice is you can download the transcript and then in the debriefs with the, like on the hiring team mm-hmm. If people aren't sure, we're like, let's prompt the same transcript differently.

And it actually helps bust bias of like. Poor, um, [00:53:00] like annotated comments or I thought this person was a little bit too emotional, or I th thought this person was too quiet. It's like, hey, let's all do different prompts. And it's not the, it shouldn't be the end solution, but it now gives us a really strong base to cut perception bias as well around this.

So, sorry, I went away from automation, but I'm trying to think around real use cases where we're using it. And I think my bottom line is there's so much beauty and danger in this process. So how do we be ethicists and advocates of where it could go? Because it's not stopping.

David Rice: Yeah, no, absolutely not. Um, let's see here.

I think we got one more in here. We probably have time for just one more. Uh, so I wanna ask this. What are some of your favorite tools or some, some quick win type things for automating HR touchpoints that you've found and would like to share if anybody has any? Uh. Obviously not losing warmth or [00:54:00] that, that human element keeping in, in line with our theme.

No.

Vanessa Monsequeira: In terms of tools I'm starting to play, I feel like really nervous. I dunno why some vibe coding on lovable. So I think that's really exciting, just getting on the tools and then just playing around with, um, different levels of, I'm more on perplexity and and chat GPT and we actually just developed our new performance products.

So we also started building like prompts for other people to use. Um, and we've started, I actually nabbed this from, um, another company I had on a podcast developing a prompt pantry because we realized that some people are either. Writing not so brilliant prompts or just too scared to prompt. There's just a fear.

So it's like, how can you be like, Hey, we built this prompt for, um, how I do the overview of my performance review back to CX and ux. I wrote like a prompt for my whole people team to use on, um, doing user-centered [00:55:00] design when we do qualitative data writing a really good prompt of being like a qualitative researcher doing thematic analysis, coding it for emotion, coding it for theme.

So basically that's sort of what we're doing. Simple level prompts and then next level sort of vibe coding. But I wouldn't say I'm doing anything super exciting yet. I'll keep you posted if I do.

David Rice: Excellent. Well, I'm gonna be fully transparent. Lovable is one of the tools we'll be using in our vibe coding sessions.

I love it. It's been an amazing, very interesting tool to start playing with. So if you, it's one of those ones to check out. Um, and like you said, prompt engineering is like a skill in of, in and of itself. Now it's, if you know how to do it changes the results you get drastically. So, all right. Uh, Mary or Adora, I don't know if you have anything you wanna share on this one.

Dr. Adora Ikwuemesi: No, I, yeah, I mean, hello.

Mary Poppen: There's a lot, there's a lot coming. I think a lot to explore. We're actually, uh, as a consulting firm, working with customers to [00:56:00] build out, uh, a pantry. I love that term. We haven't used that. Uh, but action activation is, uh, is a, is an offering that we're leveraging for what to do, like after you listen to your employees, right?

Because a lot of companies get stuck at that, at that stage. But creating a library of nudges that can be used through teams or through Slack goes directly to the managers and is that personalized nudge based on their results. So we're building a lot of that right now ourselves and incorporating it through existing technology, but I think there's going to be more technology built to do that specifically.

So we're gonna get even faster, um, and better at doing it.

David Rice: Absolutely. All right. Well, I don't know if anybody has anything else they wanna say before we sign off, but, um. All right, folks. Uh, they have it. To, to everybody in the audience, thank you for being here. Please take a second to fill out that feedback survey, uh, that it was posted in the chat, so you can let us know what you thought of today's session, maybe submit a topic that you'd like to see us cover in the future.

Of course, a huge thank you to our panelists, Mary, Vanessa, Adora. Thank you so much for being with us today, giving us your time and your expertise. [00:57:00] Uh, it's always so much fun to talk. Uh, so thank you for sharing that with us today.

Mary Poppen: Thank you. Thank you much.

David Rice: All right, well, everyone have a great rest of your day.

Mary Poppen: Bye everyone.