An empathy-first approach: People leaders should 'taste the soup'
The best way to understand both customer and employee pain points is by experiencing them for yourself.
Business success comes down to one thing: giving people what they want. Sales and revenue flow from providing the best possible experiences to customers, and employee engagement and retention stem from providing exceptional employee experiences.
But with so many companies missing the mark, it’s clear that intuiting your people’s needs is much harder than it looks. So, what exactly is the secret to delivering winning experiences that keep both your customers and your employees coming back for more?
Understand your people
It all begins with empathy – the insight that comes from knowing how a given experience actually makes people feel. For people leaders, having direct exposure to the highs and – more importantly – the lows of employee experiences is invaluable. It makes all the difference between building a culture you merely think is great, and one that actually is great.
This is how we kick off a process we call “tasting the soup.” As a leadership team, we are committed to not just ladling out values and norms to our employees and expecting them to land successfully. Instead, we immerse ourselves within the very experiences we hope to deliver so that we can better understand and identify how to improve them. This approach is also the cornerstone for how we better our customers’ experiences, too.
Savor the flavor
Nothing builds employee empathy better than putting yourself in your team members’ shoes. Don’t just consider company culture in the abstract. Find ways to meaningfully understand the experience of your employees, and build your values based on that understanding. This approach can be taken at all levels of the organization, but it’s perhaps most important for leadership. That’s the premise of the “taste the soup” approach: those setting the values should prioritize living by them too, so they can understand exactly what they’re serving out.
A company that encourages a culture of blamelessness can’t have a manager calling out an individual employee who (accidentally) missed a bug in the code. Or, if Slack-free meetings are a new mandate from the C-Suite to facilitate creative conversation and collaboration, the CFO can’t be answering messages during a budgeting sync. Once those values are built and implemented, everyone in the company needs to own them by putting them into practice. Only then will an organization be able to savor the sweet results of tasting their own soup.
Scaling this across — and out — of the organization
Building a great employee experience requires creativity and focus. But most of all, it requires gaining insight on how your people engage with your company values and culture, so you can know what’s working and what isn’t.
The best way to understand both customer and employee pain points is by experiencing them for yourself. The next best way? By reviewing the data on their experience. As you scale, you’ll find it more and more difficult to walk a mile in your people’s shoes. Quantifying feedback on an employee survey or analyzing how employees interact with your employer benefits will give you scalable insight into the best opportunities you have to impact employee experience.
Bottom line: understand your employees first — then build out your company culture and values based on insights you gain from their experience. If you don’t first taste your own soup, don’t even think about ladling it out to someone else.
Melanie Oberman is executive vice president of people at Heap.
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