We redefined Within’s Employee Experience. Here’s what we learned.
Getting to the heart of what we want the experience of work to feel like took time, honesty and focused creativity. The result is our own equitable employee experience mapped out.
Let’s cut to the end of the story.
We’ve got a mostly final draft of our partner experience mapped out. (We’d call it an employee experience, but we don’t have employees). It’s a set of promises - that we all articulated together - describing the experience of working at Within People. It’s a mutual contract between the business and the people in it, defining how we enable flexibility, connection, reward and growth.
It was built on the back of honest, at times challenging, and often enlightening conversations about freedom and self-responsibility, compensation and equitability, what it means to grow as individuals and a collective in a self-managed business. The process forced us to find creative ways to include voices from all of our partners across our global partnership. And it pushed our Google Slides formatting skills to the limits.
Most of the frameworks we use with our clients get a trial run on ourselves first. That way we can explore different ways to the outcome, and - more importantly - get to feel what it’s like to be in our clients’ shoes for the ride. (It’s thrilling/terrifying!)
In our November newsletter we committed to sharing our employee experience promises together with our learnings from the process. So here those are.
View our full Partner Experience commitment here
Why redefine our partner experience?
A little background on what was happening in and around the business that set this process in motion.
We’d run a big listening exercise about the experience of being a partner last year, and learned how different that experience is for different people - in many important (and some concerning) ways
We’ve been on our own learning journey on diversity, equity and inclusion, which had us ask some deeper questions about how partnership is experienced consistently
The pandemic precipitated a backflip in working practices and a mass reshuffle in employment globally - in short, we saw the world asking for a long overdue reimagination of how work is experienced
So we worked together to innovate the Within Way® and create an approach for clients to guide that kind of reimagination. The process we developed guides you to recontract the experience of work with your employees, by co-creating a series of mutual promises between them and the business. And like any responsible strategists (/mad scientists) we needed to test that on ourselves first.
5 key learnings from redefining our experience
I asked the team to share what they learned along the way.
If the outcome is going to be an equitable system, the process had better be too.
Anique noted that “inclusivity and equity has to be intentionally brought into each promise you make.” DEI is not a separate set of commitments, but a constant query on every promise that gets made. And if you want the experience to reflect the needs of all the individuals in the team, all their voices need to be heard within the process of creating it.Use creativity and curiosity to support inclusivity.
Kendall spoke to the need for various approaches and “pathways to outcomes that had us experimenting with different types of creative exercises to hear thoughts and generate content”. We did that to test and learn what process works best, and in doing so discovered that different tactics work for different thinkers. A diversity of routes into discussions allowed a diversity of opinions to shine.
Getting the language right is critical.
Definition is key to this process. It’s a job of packing a whole lot of meaning and representation into simple words that can be held up as promises. Nikki spoke to “clarity of language being extremely important, so we all know what we really mean by a specific promise.” This isn't a copywriting skill, it's being able to reflect what you hear with integrity.
Trust the process, especially when it gets bumpy.
For me, being integrated into the process was interesting. I’m usually holding the space for my clients, with a gentle confidence that we’ll get to where we’re going (because I know where that is). Not so here. There are times of despair when it feels like aligning on a consistent experience for everyone just isn't going to be possible. And times of anxiety when we’re in conflict over what a promise needs to say. My learning: Those moments of discomfort aren’t signals the process is failing. In a quest for alignment, they show we’re dealing with the knots that need unpicking. And this reinforced for me how important it is to have a coach guiding the process.
Move quickly from promises to plan.
Holding ourselves in a thoughtful process (with Jeff’s hand on the wheel) was essential here. Without that, an undertaking this big and wobbly would have toppled over. We had the masterful Patti from BluShift strategy help us identify as a group the areas of the experience we needed to work on next. In Jeff’s words: “that’s giving the map momentum right away, and the explicit acknowledgment that we’re not perfect on this is reassuring and galvanizing”.
Where next from here
Bev is our newest partner, and didn’t take part in the process itself. But from her “early observations and exposure to our ‘PX’, it’s clear that individuals are at the heart of it but the collective commitment of the partnership is what makes this experience possible”.
To that end, we’ve mapped out the shifts we want to work on to show up to the experience we’ve defined. Through this process we aligned on the three critical Within Partner promises to focus on to bring consistency to our experience:
[GROWING] We work through conflict in an intentional and timely way
We recognise that we are lacking the skills to enter into constructive challenge with each other, and that we don’t have enough shared stories of positive outcomes from conflict in our culture
[REWARDING] We recognize individual contribution through feedback and appreciation
Feedback is not as consistent as we would like it to be - we know that we need better rituals and more focus to our feedback conversations
[CONNECTED] We make timely decisions using clear processes that leverage expertise and collective intelligence
As a self-managed business, decision making can look and feel different from where partners have worked before. We need more clarity on our decision making processes and more practice to build our decision making muscle
To demonstrate our commitment to shaping an equitable experience, we have woven action on each of these three areas into our goals for this year, and we have dedicated resources of time, energy, and budget to help us deliver on them.
And our clients are investing in mapping and shifting their employee experience too. We’ll be building these learnings into our approach with them.
If you’d like help redefining your employee experience, or building a more equitable working environment, please get in touch.