Experience, Inc.. Jill Popelka
our business health, our customers, and the risks and opportunities in our future. I think about our business metrics all the time, but my focus is on employees. It's an ever-changing landscape, but the only way to drive growth and innovation and improvements in our business is to stay close to our people and our culture.
I'm not suggesting it's easy to change culture. I'm not suggesting we can even agree on what's happening in the world of work. I hear some people talk about the unique opportunities that exist right now, and job openings that exceed in number the people able or willing to fill them. Moments later, I hear people lamenting that they're working harder than ever, because their colleague left and there's no one to fill the gap, and they're told to “suck it up,” doing more work for the same pay. Which has made them feel – bizarrely – simultaneously more valued and less valued. One worker we spoke to said she was of two minds about a dress code at her place of employment: “There are no uniforms here, so it's a more casual job, which is both a positive and negative,” said Anna, manager at a food market. “Positive because you feel you can be more yourself, we all feel it, which leads to more camaraderie, and I have made so many good friends among my co-workers, which was so helpful during the pandemic when they were the only people I would see. But then the casualness made some people take the job less seriously than they should.”
There is no one view or definition we can all agree on.
The other day, I asked my son, Cole, an 18-year-old member of the iGeneration and a future employee, “What is experience?”
“A great experience,” he said, “is memorable and impactful. Whether it's negative or positive, you learn something from it. Oh, and other people are involved.”
True, I'm biased, but I find that to be about as eloquent a description of the concept as I've come across. At its core, experience is about gaining knowledge, changing the way we understand and operate in the world around us. As I referenced earlier, a recent survey stated that the single biggest factor for determining whether people stayed with a company was the availability of opportunities for learning and development. We are fortunate that our knowledge economy allows so many with curiosity to educate themselves, to set themselves up for something better.
And there is some social element, an opportunity to engage with others.
When employees talk about setting themselves up for something better, there are many things to consider.
Photo Source: SAP SuccessFactors/Adobe Stock
The whole self framework is a lens into how employees experience change and opportunity throughout their careers. Each employee has a unique experience, the elements of which include work styles, mindsets, experiences, aspirations, passions, and more. These elements dynamically change just as we do.
In an ideal scenario, employees can align their whole self with their work. They feel a sense of hope, efficacy, resilience, and optimism. This sense of fulfillment is described as having high psychological capital; thus people become far more encouraged and motivated by their work: They can take on anything. When psychological capital is higher overall, it creates organizational durability in times of change.
When it comes to reskilling and upskilling, the whole self framework can be employed to help people autonomously seek out opportunities. In turn, they feel a far greater sense of connection to their organization because their work aligns closely with who they are and who they wish to become. They can navigate unpredictable circumstances but are also more likely to engage autonomously; think creatively; experiment with new ideas, roles, or opportunities; and evolve from paper pushers to mountain movers for their organizations.
Organizations can develop talent as well as create and access a rich set of data. Businesses can gain real-time insight into what inspires their people, to better understand what programs are effective and what skills are being developed across their workforce. Leaders will know how best to pivot their talent at a moment's notice, whom to bring on, and where to redeploy — all in a mutually beneficial way. For every opportunity an organization can provide, it will have a transformative effect on both the individual and the business.
This connects the dots: where an employee's whole self is fulfilled, psychological capital is high, and it spills over across teams and broader areas of the organization, at scale, to transform culture and drive better business outcomes.
We want work to be meaningful. Nurturing. Passion-satisfying.
Joyful.
I sincerely believe that when employees find their purpose and passion, the strength within them that represents their unique value: That is when they experience joy at work.
What a concept! Who could have thought such a thing 3,000 years ago, or even 100?
The X Factor: A Belief in People
People are at the heart of everything. This isn't news. Our experience colors everything, in life and at work. Yet it feels a little strange to talk about fulfilling experience in the same breath as “work.” For so long, the vast majority of business enterprises and their leaders made no real attempt to transform work and all that comes with it into something enjoyable and inspirational. For consumers, yes; partners, sure; shareholders, you bet; executives, absolutely.
Employees? Not so much. It's taken far too long for the worker to be properly valued, much less considered the linchpin to success. Who in business leadership or management considered their employees' work-life balance before, say, a generation ago?
At our core, we believe that human beings need engagement. We believe we deserve dignity and respect. We deserve opportunity and a path to betterment. We don't always achieve the ideal of having a superior human experience, but we at least chase it, for ourselves and those we care about. We aim to achieve it at home and in school, in our relationships, in our socializing. We try to enhance experience for our spouses and partners, children, parents, students, colleagues. Experience can hardly be teased out from what we do; in many ways it is what we do. It's all we do.
But let's be honest: It's often not, especially not in our work life. For far too many people and far too many companies, there's work … and then there's life. There's work … and then there's whatever isn't work. Where a gap exists between the two – where work feels like something apart from and less nourishing than life – how do we shrink it?
A requirement for building an employee-first culture is a belief in people. I know this from firsthand experience. All of us have skills, a unique set. But if people are put in defined, limited situations where they can't or don't thrive, they may just stay there, frustrated, joyless, far less productive than they could be, enduring a bad experience themselves and ill-equipped to provide positive ones for customers and/or fellow employees.
When I first landed in Singapore to take a new leadership position within SAP, a woman named Sarah, a part-time contract worker, gave me my badge and the keys to the office. Sarah had been hired as an office assistant, in charge of keeping my calendar and filing expenses. But I could right away see her superpower. She made me instantly comfortable in a foreign country. I was by myself – my husband and our two kids wouldn't arrive for another six months – and Sarah quickly became so much more than an executive assistant. She created a great experience for me.
One day, I told Sarah, “You know what? You're really good at creating a great experience for people. Why don't you plan our next quarterly meeting? That way, you're in charge of giving others what you've given me.”
“But my job is to put things on your calendar,” she said.
“I know that. But I'm asking you to challenge yourself. I can see you're good at a lot more than calendars.”
I was not at all surprised that the rich agenda and experience Sarah prepared for our entire, diverse Asia Pacific and Japan team was extraordinary. Sarah quickly grew beyond