Top CHROs Share How To Engage Employees: by Robert Reiss, Forbes July 2018

Jul 20, 2018, 03:30pm 1,308 views #BigBusiness

In our digital world the CHRO role is elevating as they work to create the workplace of the future. Elizebeth Varghese, general manager talent, IBM North America puts it this way, “Disruptive technology is revolutionizing the way we work, driving a need for new types of talent and skills, and empowering employees to demand consumer-grade expectations in the workplace.”

To explore what the world’s leading companies are doing to engage their employees, on June 26, 2018 I held a roundtable discussion with these top human resource executives, discussing culture, digital and how to engage the whole organization:

• Arielle Meloul-Wechsler, SVP, People, Culture and Communications, Air Canada
• Elcio Barcelos, CHRO, Fannie Mae
• Linda McHugh, CHRO, Cleveland Clinic
• Melanie M. Foley, EVP and Chief Talent & Enterprise Services Officer, Liberty Mutual

Robert Reiss: Talk about your culture.

Linda McHugh: Two things that are most important to our employees are more continuous feedback and providing development opportunities. We have a coaching culture mentality for our managers, and then focus on business and development goals for every employee, no matter what their role is, both personally and professionally.

Arielle Meloul-Wechsler: I’m proud of the collegiality of our culture. Our teammates really have each other’s backs and that makes a huge difference. Related to this is leadership. We really believe that every single person in the company is a leader and has the ability to make the internal or external customer experience the best that it can be.

Melanie Foley: We’ve recently enhanced our culture to one that focuses on flexibility. We want all our employees to do their best and feel they are professionally and personally excelling, and can give our customers the protection they need and ask for from us.

Elcio Barcelos: The employee culture of our organization is centered around the purpose of the organization. The center, the sun of our culture, is ‘Why do we exist? What do we do? What is our mission? What is our purpose? What is the business strategy?’

Reiss: Is there one word that’s at the heart of your culture?

Foley: People

Barcelos: Purpose.

Meloul-Wechsler: Communication.

McHugh: Empathy.

Reiss: In our digital world of big data, what are you doing to match the internal employee experience with the experience you’re trying to deliver for your customer?

Meloul-Wechsler: We all know about Alexa in our home and now on our employee app we have Lucile to answer basic queries. She’s called Lucile and not Alexa because Lucile was our very first flight attendant 81 years ago. So our employees can now ask Lucile things like “Lucile will Flight so-and-so be on time today?” and get the answer. We’re also teaching her to become more and more intelligent, and as she gets more intelligent, she will also adopt other languages because we are a global company. Our employees are also engaged in testing other customer enhancements like baggage tracing. So just sort of cool, different ways to get our employees engaged in our customer experience while also improving their own experience as a team member.

Barcelos: One of the big benefits of AI and robotics in the workplace is really “How do you take the fog away and pull the meaningful streams of information that come from all the data that we actually have?” to then create this amazing employee experience, which is the hyper-customization that is required today to provide that optimal experience.

McHugh: We've been working with Press Ganey to do correlation studies by unit, by hospital of patient experience mapping to the caregiver experience scores of that unit and see if there's direct correlations between the two, because we believe that there are but we don't have truly validated statistical analysis that says that. And I'm not sure if you're familiar with Press Ganey, but of the 5,000 hospitals in the United States, they do the patient experience scoring for 3,000 of the 5,000 hospitals. So they have a very large database to pull from to be able to help us benchmark those correlations.

Foley: We were just named winner of the 2018 Digital Workplace of the Year Award for a digital assistant that we developed to simplify our employees' lives by helping them manage their day-to-day tasks, like to-do lists, notifications, and approvals in a more intuitive interface.

Reiss: As you develop employee strategies, what is the key to connecting with your entire organization to drive execution of strategy?

Barcelos: Shifting the paradigm from “senior leadership owns culture” to “an employee-centric culture” that is highly relevant to the purpose and transparent and always connected.

Foley: Honest two-way communication, authentic leadership.

McHugh: The CEO as an authentic leader that empowers frontline caregivers and leverages culture carriers throughout the organization.

Meloul-Wechsler: Transparent two-way communication, because communication builds trust and trust in my view is the secret sauce to a strong culture.

In summary … In further conversation with Elizebeth Varghese she developed her original idea, “In a study done by IBM and Globoforce, research states that employees who feel they have a positive professional experience are 52% less likely to leave the company. Blockchain technology can simplify HR processes such as recruiting, payroll and employee data. Technologies such as cognitive and blockchain can turn the HR function into a company’s biggest competitive advantage.”

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