Employees participate in PD@GE (the app and desktop tool) by capturing touchpoint conversations with managers, sending insights to colleagues, and continuously tracking or modifying their priorities. Here are two scenarios for employee use of the PD@GE app.
Option 1 (an employee experiencing a Performance Development priority‐
setting touchpoint): An employee at GE wants to walk through the projects they are working on to discuss priorities with their respective manager. As they do this the manager asks some challenging questions, such as “What's the solution you're providing for your customer?” “Who's the end user of this?” “Is it adding value to them?” “How do you know?” These are all focused on value and impact versus tactical to dos and tasks. As the employee leaves the meeting with the manager, they have a 10‐minute window before another upcoming meeting, so they open their PD@GE app and add new priorities based on the conversation. A key thing to point out is that employees are trusted by their managers to update their priorities. They also send their manager an insight that was learned from the conversation.
Option 2 (“imagine” scenario): Similar to option 1, imagine walking into your manager's office. You have a list of the goals that you want to set for yourself. You have the tactical elements set up, and you are ready to start working on them. You think you'll just need to report them out to your manager and then be on your way. Instead, your manager reviews the goals and then asks the same strategic questions as in option 1. You realize that you are missing feedback on one of your priorities. However, your manager thinks it has potential but pushes you to test it with your customers and then come back with any adjustments based on their needs.
As you leave the meeting, you walk down the hall to your next meeting.
After your meeting ends, you feel a buzz in your pocket coming from your phone. You receive a push notification saying, “You have just received an Insight.” You open the app and see that your manager sent you a Continue Insight that says: “Thanks for bringing your goals to our meeting. They were well thought out and aligned to our overall strategy. I look forward to
hearing the results of the tests that you'll run with your customers based on that one priority that didn't have direct input just yet. Let's set up another meeting when you feel you have enough detail to adjust or change that priority.” You've just lived and breathed Performance Development at GE.
You collaborated with your manager to create value for your customer.
You've received real‐time feedback that has helped you learn and grow. And you're empowered to try something new, test it, learn from it, and adjust it.
The scope of this project was grandiose to say the least, but it shows how a large organization like GE was able to leverage the employee experience feedback loop to drive change and test ideas based on employee feedback and insight.
EXAMPLE: AIRBNB
Airbnb is a marketplace that allows people to rent out local listings in almost every country around the world. Today the company has over 2,000 employees around the world and is a great example of how the employee experience design loop can be applied to something rather
unconventional…food. David McIntyre, Airbnb's global director of food (how awesome is that?), explained how the company's approach works in the context of the employee experience design loop. It's important to point out that at Airbnb, food isn't a perk or an amenity. It's a purposefully
designed strategic investment for the company. Its approach to food can be summed up in one word, Sobremesa, which is a Spanish word meaning “the time you spend at the table after you finish eating.” At Airbnb food is a way to get employees to talk, engage, share, collaborate, and build community.
Respond
Airbnb provides three meals a day for all of its employees. A menu is sent out via e‐mail before each meal, and at the bottom of these e‐mails,
employees can click on a feedback link. There's also a dedicated e‐mail address for the food services team that employees can use anytime they want. Finally, the Airbnb team also conducts a food and beverage
satisfaction survey around once a year. Using these mechanisms (in addition to some in‐person conversations), employees provide all sorts of feedback
to the team, which ranges from general praise to specific requests for things such as more gluten‐free options.
Analyze
The food services team considers all the various feedback mechanisms and then looks at the collected data to determine a few things. First is general satisfaction of the food and beverage offerings to determine whether
employees are happy with what they receive. Second is the balance of food options. In the surveys Airbnb seeks to balance healthful, indulgent,
familiar, and exotic options. Ideally, it would see its menu show around 25 percent in each of the four categories. Third is the usage patterns of the employees: which meals and how many meals they consume in the office.
Fourth, David and his team look at how food affects the culture of the company by asking employees where they connect with their peers most often. Last, Airbnb tries to determine how food affects the overall outcomes of the business by looking at things such as productivity, recruitment, and retention. According to its data over 90 percent of employees say that the food and beverage programs help make them more productive, and over half acknowledge that food affects their decision to work at and stay at Airbnb. Although Airbnb does look at quantifiable data, sometimes it also makes decisions based on observations. For example, it might notice that it is getting a lot of e‐mails requesting more vegetarian options, so then that becomes a priority item.
Design
David and his team have a very solid understanding of what the employees at Airbnb want and need when it comes to food and beverages. As much of their food as possible comes directly from farmers, so they know what is in season and what is coming in. The menus are designed quarterly based on the four seasons of the year, and everyone from the chef to the dishwashers provides feedback on the menu choices. The team considers everything from halal and vegetarian options to special gluten‐free or even paleo diets, not to mention food allergies that some employees might have. The team, of course, must also look at costs and what is practical and feasible.
The results from the food and beverage satisfaction surveys are always shared with all the employees so that they have transparency about why
certain decision were made and why some options were chosen. Each Airbnb office has its own chef (whenever possible), which means that each is responsible for his or her own cuisine based on local preferences. There isn't a single head chef for the entire company. This allows for much greater personalization.
Launch
Launching the new food items is a matter of the chefs preparing, cooking, and placing the food out for employees to eat. It's amazing how much work goes into this. I've visited its headquarters in San Francisco a half dozen times and am always blown away by the quality and diversity of options. It also has a pastry chef who devilishly creates little treats that get wheeled around on carts throughout the day. The main mechanism for how it actually launches food is its opt‐in e‐mails, which showcase the menus of the day along with all the ingredients that are used in preparation. A picture of a relevant Airbnb listing also accompanies each menu to help remind employees of the mission of “Belong Anywhere.” This means that if the menu is inspired by Filipino food, employees will see a listing from the Philippines.
Airbnb also offers cooking classes and little pop‐up shops in various parts of its offices. For example, it's common to get an e‐mail that says something along the lines of “Today from 2 to 3 PM we are offering matcha tea lattes in the upstairs kitchen. Come grab one and say hello to your coworkers!”
Unlike traditional products or services that take time to create and are launched once, food is something that all employees consume globally and multiple times a day.
Participate
This is the fun part! Employees get to eat all the amazing things that David and his team work so hard to create and to prepare. Then they provide feedback to the team and the cycle repeats!
The employee experience design loop can be applied to any situation where employees and the organization collaborate and communicate to create something, solve a problem, or identify an opportunity. Oftentimes
organizations are stuck in the design for mind‐set, and this approach really
forces them to shift their perspective to the design with mind‐set. It's
something many of the Experiential Organizations practice regularly, and it can also be called cocreation. This explains why the likes of Google,
Airbnb, and Facebook are always ranked as such great places to work (and why they scored so high in the Employee Experience Index). Employees are quite literally involved in designing and shaping their own experiences, and these organizations are obsessed with getting employee feedback. Of course, none of this is possible without an unrivaled level of transparency.
NOTE
1. http://fortune.com/2015/06/03/ge‐immelt‐chat‐transcript/.