Employee Success 101

A lot has changed in the way businesses operate over the last few decades. In general, there have been a couple of major shifts in what companies prioritize.

In the 80s and 90s, most businesses were built around shareholders. Decisions were optimized for maximizing the capital value and maximizing the return on shareholders’ investment, even if that meant carrying out mass layoffs to balance the books.

To paraphrase an analogy from Simon Sinek, that’s like the coach of a sports team making training and team selection decisions based on fans’ opinions and reaction. Clearly a flawed model.

In the mid-to-late 90s, more and more companies started to take customer experience seriously, with Bezos and Amazon at the helm. But it wasn’t until we were well into the 2000s, that companies included Customer Success as a business function.

Businesses have limited control over ‘customer experience’. Customers have experiences, whether or not they’re orchestrated by the company.

‘Customer success’, on the other hand is highly concrete. Most companies have dedicated Customer Success Managers and Customer Success teams. CS folks have specific goals measured through specific metrics.

Shareholder success to customer success. What’s next?

We believe that companies that will outperform their competition in the long run, will be the ones that prioritize Employee Success.

They’ll have a deliberate strategy for Employee Success, and a business function dedicated to it with very specific goals and metrics.

This is already happening in companies like Salesforce, Sysdig, etc.

What is Employee Success?

Employee Success (ES) is an approach to running your business where employees across business functions are aligned with the business goals, and enabled to achieve their piece of the business goal.

This means that employees have a clear line of sight from their work to business impact, and get all the tools and technology they need to be successful at helping the business reach its north star goal.

It requires companies to shift their mindset from employee support to employee success. Employee Success is a key prerequisite to customer success and business success.

Why is Employee Success critical for the business?

Businesses can set lofty goals and even zero in on a viable strategy. Where most businesses fail is execution. They can’t achieve their goals unless they have the right people with the right set of skills. Employee success needs to be involved right at the goal-setting phase and work closely with leaders across business functions to enable them to achieve their piece of the overall business goal.

They provide strategic partnership and counseling/guidance to functional leaders. This includes identifying the skills and knowledge required to achieve the goals and helping them close the skill gap via training, talent acquisition, or both. It’s important to note that they may not be responsible for the tactical recruitment process or the technical L&D.

Employee Experience vs Employee Support vs Employee Success.
How are they different?

Employee experience, like customer experience, is a fuzzy term.

When we say CX, do we mean the website design or the product UI? Are we referring to the experience with the sales rep or how seamless the onboarding or data migration was?

In contrast, ‘Customer Success’ is highly concrete. Most companies have dedicated Customer Success Managers and Customer Success Teams/Functions. CS folks have specific goals measured through specific metrics.

Employee Success will soon become a common practice within organizations.

Same with Employee Support. Just like customer support is not customer success, employee support, in and of itself, is not employee success.

Who owns Employee Success?

Employee success cannot exist in a silo. It has to be collectively owned by the business leader, the IT leader, and the HR leader. The CEO needs to evangelize the philosophy and drive a culture of employee success, the CIO (or equivalent) needs to operationalize employee success with the right products, and the CHRO (or equivalent) needs to bring in the right people and processes.

Employee-centric organizations often have teams and functions dedicated to ES. Their job is to champion the employee success mindset and enable business functions to help their employees grow, thrive, and be successful.

What are Employee Success teams and managers responsible for?

The job description of the Employee Success function may vary from company to company, but broadly, they work cross functionally and own the responsibility of helping employees grow, thrive, and succeed.

Some of these may include, but may not be limited to:

• IT Business Partners – The IT leader needs to focus on aligning IT strategies with business goals within an organization. They need to work closely with senior leadership to understand the organization's strategic goals, challenges, and opportunities and start initiatives to support these business objectives.
• Workplace Services – Workplace Services, or Facilities Management, refers to the management and coordination of the physical work environment and services within the organization. These services aim to create a productive, efficient, safe, and pleasant work environment for employees.
• Employee Communications – Ensuring that all the teams stay updated with the high-level business goals, strategy, and progress along with key milestones. Important updates and business decisions need to be shared with employees while being judicious about where to draw the line to avoid distracting or overwhelming them.

ES also works closely with Data Analytics to leverage data and analyze trends to derive insights. This can help identify areas for improvement, guide decision-making, and measure the impact of IT initiatives on business outcomes.

As we mentioned earlier, Employee Success is more of a mindset and an intent. Some companies will include more or fewer of these as a direct responsibility of the ES function. What’s important is that businesses empower the function to maximize the success of their employees across the breadth and depth of the organization.

What are the benefits of implementing Employee Success
practices for the business?

Employee success can contribute to the business goal on multiple levels:

1. Employee productivity – When employee success becomes more ingrained into the DNA of an enterprise, it helps reduce the time to value for new hires, that is, faster onboarding, role ramp-up, and promotion.
2. Performance management – Employees who have a clear line of sight from their work to business impact are more fulfilled. They go beyond their call of duty and this reflects in the overall business performance.
3. Talent management – Employee success will closely work with functional leaders in hiring the required talent or by upskilling and transferring interested internal talent to fill the gap.
4. Employee lifetime value – Turnover is a lagging indicator of the state of employee health. Investing in employee success and providing a nurturing environment where they can thrive and grow leads to compounded returns.

How can businesses be successful at implementing Employee
Success?

The problem employee success teams need to solve is too systemic for one person or team to tackle in a bubble. It needs to be a top-down drive backed by the CEO and executed in close collaboration with the leaders of the different functions.

The business leader will need to evangelize a culture of Employee Success in the company, the IT leader will need to bring in the right technology, and the HR leader will need to align the people, processes, and policies with the ES philosophy.

Conclusion

The age-old power dynamic between employee and employer is undergoing a radical shift given the ever-increasing expectations of new-age employees.

Everything from policies, and technology, to company culture must change to put employees and their success at the centre.

It's in the best interest of the enterprise to adopt Employee Success as a core philosophy since it is the foundation to deliver business success.

There is no doubt that companies that constantly choose to ignore their employees and their success will soon be left behind. The ones that choose to put employee success first, will thrive.