Prior to the pandemic, leadership roles started to evolve because of an increasingly competitive landscape and a need for digital transformation. Especially in HR, where we’re often seen as defensive coordinators, HR leaders have now taken a more important role as the quarterbacks of companies, helping to drive culture and business strategy by influencing and collaborating with several functions of the company.
Over the last four months, leaders of all businesses have had to shift their priorities and put a greater focus on managing and supporting their employees. We sat down with Chief Human Resource Officers from diverse industries to learn more about how they have been leveraging communication to stay connected with their workforce and drive business continuity during these unprecedented times.
Brian “Skip” Schipper, CHRO at YEXT
Q: How are you keeping employees connected, productive, and aligned?
A: This is a great question, and it’s not monolithic. There are things that we are doing as a company, but then each function – and region of the world where we operate – is doing things that are more reflective of their leadership style, or their country MDs, for example. As for what we do as a company – we have, and have always had, a company weekly all-hands that was a combination of in person, broadcast, and recorded to all the Yext offices around the world, and we think it’s even more important to have these meetings in a time like this. I have chosen for my own department to have all-hands meetings to start the week, and I end the week the same way, which is way more informal. I typically update the team on things that are important for the people and places teams, but then also update the team on what is going on in the company more broadly – while keeping it fun. […] I’ve always believed that the most effective communications include a combination of things that are done regularly and predictably (e.g. company all-hands), and things that are more unpredictable. […] I am not too concerned about the format specifically, so much as being sure we can do everything that we can to stay connected – both as a team and as a company.
Q: What are some ways companies can cut through the noise and ensure information gets to employees?
A: I think that leaders from companies probably were believing that their company was a place where people work far behind the reality. […] Thinking about the company as a place is an outdated notion. So replacing places, now, are companies’ communications platforms, intranet sites, and the kinds of communications experiences that the leaders of companies put in place. I think that train left the station actually much longer ago than most people realize. All this situation has done is take all those trends, all those impacts, and just accelerate them. […] What the company is today, what the culture is today, are the shared experience you create, and they are mostly virtualized experiences.
Mike Bokina, CHRO at Siemens
Q: How are you keeping employees connected, productive, and aligned?
A: First and foremost, a role that we play in HR, and EHS, is ensuring we have the right protocols and the right polices, because we have different kinds of employees in terms of where they are going to work and what their expectations are, so that helps the businesses localize their approaches. I do think holistically, what we’ve been focused on is communication. For example, I have been sending out a weekly email to all of our employees to give them updates, and talking about states’ and local regulations and how Siemens is handling them […] to keep everyone well informed, and to keep that overarching guidance that we as a leadership team are on it. The feedback that we’ve received from employees is that it helps them settle, and gives them a centered view that the company cares about them and that there’s plan in place. So, we have the overall communications and then the protocols that follow.
Q: What are some ways companies can cut through the noise and ensure information gets to employees?
A: We have an intense focus on the local aspect. In my own organization, with HR Business Partners spread out all over the country, we centralized the tools but then also have sessions with HR Partners to say, “here is a tool for you, here is the intent, now here are five other tools that you may be able to use.” This is where the partners are really doing consultative work with local managers on what it is that they need, what are the topics pre-pandemic, in the midst of the pandemic, and where do we want to be in the future. It has been an effective strategy because of that localness. […] How it works in our site in Charlotte versus another locale is for the employees to decide. That’s where you utilize the overarching concept, but you let the local organization take it.
Mike Rude, CHRO at Open Care Health
Q: How are you keeping employees connected, productive, and aligned?
A: We are encouraging our managers to communicate more frequently now that their teams are remote, and on a minimum weekly basis we want our managers to be connecting with their employees even for a few minutes, it doesn’t need to be a long 1:1, just enough to make a personal outreach and connection with people. […] It’s about frequency, making sure there are regular connections with people just to check in, and it may not be work related. I think the future is going to be about connecting with the whole person, and finding out what’s going on with them, and showing them that you’re interested in their life outside of this, because they’ve to deal with that in this setting and with working remotely.
The other things that are critical is to figure out, to the extent that it is possible, are the more objective metrics around getting work done. It’s going to challenge those managers who believe, “unless my employee sees me watching them, or I see them in the office, their productivity is not going to be strong.” It is really going to be difficult for that type of manager versus one who is clearly defining the output, saying “here is what is expected of you from a deliverable standpoint, and I will be able to track your ability to deliver on that.” Managers will have to focus more on the deliverable and the results.
Q: What are some ways companies can cut through the noise and ensure information gets to employees?
A: We think about it in different types of tiers; the kind of information, and the different types of channels. Like most companies, there is the email that we use, and typically for more corporate common message from our CEO or COO, we’ll use a broad email blast out to all individuals. Then there are communications by functional areas – functional leaders will have separate meetings, and separate calls. We also expended our technology in getting our communication in a more social dynamic, and we launched a communication app across the organization that allows groups of people to create their own communities (e.g. North East pharmacist, HR functions). We don’t track that – we allow people to set that up, but we also use that tool for broadcast messages, and we found that multiple mediums, when we can also access them on our phones, gets better reach within the organization.
Interested in hearing more from CHROs? Tune into the GuideSpark Leadership Series for the full interviews and more.
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