Are your employees engaged in meaningful work? Are the managers devoted to employees’ success by providing regular coaching and feedback? Do the teams feel empowered to make decisions and working with mutual trust? Are your organization’s workplace policies and culture conducive to enhancing employee engagement? What are you doing to transforming employee experience, a critical step to getting ready for the daunting times ahead?

Contributor

• • Lisa Kerns, Chief Information Officer, Fareway Stores

Transcript

Sanjog Aul [00:00:00]:
Hello and welcome to this segment on CTN. To learn more please visit ciotalknetwork.com and the topic for today is Transforming Employee Experience and our guest is Lisa Kerns, who is the Chief Information Officer with Fareway Stores. Hi Lisa, how are you?

Lisa Kerns [00:00:15]:
Hi Sanjog, thanks for having me on the show.

Sanjog Aul [00:00:18]:
The honor is all ours. So the topic today we picked up, I’m sure as part of you being a leader and working with your business counterparts, you are trying to make the business go places and it can happen only if the employees are on board, they are fully engaged, they feel they’re doing some meaningful work, they feel that they are being taken care of by their managers and they are feeling that the team that they are part of, they are all working together with mutual trust and they’re able to make decisions themselves. So that’s a lot of things that employees want. Let’s compare that to what new are they looking for today and how has that morphed from say the last decade in terms of employee expectations which they have from their employers?

Lisa Kerns [00:01:12]:
Certainly the culture is something that is always changing, it’s always growing, it’s always adapting, especially as we bring in new employees that are younger in our workforce and certainly we’ve recognized the same things that a lot of companies have recognized, that our younger employees are really very experiential based. They want a position where they can really develop great experiences, that they enjoy working in a company, enjoy being at work every day, and most importantly, that they are learning and that they are increasing their knowledge in a particular space. Certainly that’s changed over the last decade. I think employers have always been interested in those things, but especially where we are based in Boone, Iowa. Iowa has a very low unemployment rate and it’s a great place to work, lots of jobs and lots of competition for jobs. So certainly, as the economy has improved, we face greater competition for the same workforce and we want to be able to attract and retain employees just like everyone else does.

Sanjog Aul [00:02:19]:
So what you just mentioned, and you did refer to the new, the younger workforce, but then we always have had the multi generational workforce and it was 10 years ago and it is now but do you think there is something changed in the environment, in the way the business is running, the way the face of off of how we do work, the quality and the pace that has created some expectations which are different than what you saw 10 years ago?

Lisa Kerns [00:02:56]:
Most definitely and in our business, we are a very traditional grocery retailer. We’ve been in business for about 80 years. We celebrated our 80th anniversary in May and employees do tend to stay with Fareway for a very long time. It is a career company. You can be here your entire career and so we do have very much so that multi generational effect with the employees. We have a significant number of employees that have been here their entire career and are looking at retirement now as well as we have people that are just coming in brand new in the workspace with a lot of retail companies in particular,

Lisa Kerns [00:03:38]:
retail tends to be an incredibly fast paced business and you especially in the corporate offices, it’s not always typical to see that long term career growth with a company, especially in the retail organizations but we’re a family owned company. We are certainly very traditional. This does create an interesting situation in that we do have all ages and all spectrums of employees on this. For us, it’s not just how do we engage the younger employees, it’s also how do we provide the type of experiences and the career experiences that all of our population wants to have and to some extent there is a little bit of constructive conflict that goes on with that. I think that certainly the marketplace is changing and it’s getting faster out there, particularly in retail, particularly in grocery retail these days

Lisa Kerns [00:04:35]:
and so the need to go fast in some ways can conflict with older traditional values that are, let’s do it the way that we’ve always done it and sometimes that constructive conflict can be a very good thing and can help propel us forward. It’s definitely a very dynamic environment here at Fareway, that’s for sure.

Sanjog Aul [00:04:55]:
So the urge and or the need to go fast, does that automatically require that we start scrambling at the employee level or is it just gearing up so that even if you want to go faster, that means you just need to become nimble?

Lisa Kerns [00:05:14]:
And I think that’s a good way to put it. Nimble is a great word. Adaptability is also a really good word. Certainly I’ve found that in my career in retail, the single greatest, say, personality aspect that I look for in employees is adaptability because the retail world is very fast changing and it depends on what organization you’re in. Some have to move incredibly fast, some not quite so fast but there can be quite a shifting in priority in response to the competitive landscape, in response to just changing consumer tastes and preferences. So definitely it’s something where individuals, people that we hire need to be able to exist in that kind of fast changing world where priorities are going to shift

Lisa Kerns [00:06:06]:
and they could shift in some organizations, they could shift weekly where your roadmap really does change quite rapidly, back and forth and so having employees that have an ability to adapt to those changes very quickly is very important. That’s, for me, that’s the key trait in the retail trade when we look for employees, both in the. On the store floor as well as in the corporate office.

Sanjog Aul [00:06:31]:
If you had to fold someone aside as an employee, no matter which generation, and you ask them to go beyond what they have learned that they should be doing as an employee, what is it that you would like to see as a response? That they say, yes, whatever you say, my master and I will do it for or are you expecting them to challenge why and then if you have a good rationale, then they follow what is the business’s expectation today?

Lisa Kerns [00:07:05]:
So I think that in that type of a conversation, really, it starts with really knowing employees on an individual basis. So there are certainly certain career paths and certain jobs that employees individually may want to take, and then there are those that they may not want to take. So a great example is an employee that maybe wants to grow into leadership. They want to grow into a either a domain function that they own that domain function, and they own the strategy and the budget and the workforce, or just resource management, maybe. So in working with an employee like that, we talk about what does that world look like, what are the types of capabilities or the types of skill sets we want you to be able to develop, and what are the types of things that we want you to do. So in having those conversations with the employee, when those opportunities come up and we ask them to reach out and do more, hopefully we are doing that in the context of something that they’ve already shared with us that they would like to develop into. What’s interesting is every now and then I’ll have an employee that really wants to be at that senior leadership level

Lisa Kerns [00:08:24]:
but then when we ask them to do the individual tasks, they really like doing the tasks that they’re doing today instead and you can’t have it both ways. Certain jobs have certain key functions that they need to be able to do in order to get the title, to get the pay for that job and we’re perfectly fine, in a lot of cases, if employees want to keep doing the job that we’re doing, those jobs are important and we need them but if the employee wants to have a different job or wants to grow into a different job, there are steps that they have to take to get there. So a lot of times that’s the center of the conversation when asking an employee to grow outside their comfort area is, in the context of those career discussions that we’ve already had, that this is how you build those skills to get there. Quite frankly, though, sometimes it happens where once employees have a taste of those skills, they say, I don’t really actually want to do that.

Lisa Kerns [00:09:19]:
I don’t like that and that’s okay. That’s just self discovery and figuring out what it is that you want to do with your time all day and what you enjoy doing and what you don’t enjoy doing. All of this is it’s really important to have those continual career development conversations with employees to figure out what is it that today, at least, that they want to do and we don’t have to get married to a career path for our entire life. We can change, it’s okay but for the time being, what do they see are areas that they want to grow in and then seek to join up the tasks that they’re doing with those.

Sanjog Aul [00:09:56]:
So you’d find different types of individuals who may work in your team. One are, okay, give me what you’d like, I will ace at delivering that. Second is the person says, I got it done yesterday. What next do you have and the third one is where a person will come, I’ll say, I did all of this, but then I want to fundamentally take on something which is outside of my comfort zone, how can you make that happen for me. With these three flavors coexisting, what is it that you are after, of course, you as a leader would have a conflicting priority because on one hand you want to get the work done, the tasks that you have but a good leader also develops other leaders in the process. So you also have kind of a responsibility to nurture such people who essentially have shown an initiative to become the leader or others that you see have the leadership potential but just are a little more passive. What is it as a leader you are doing to first of all identify these different flavors and then spend some time and getting even your direct reports to spend the time so that you are morphing these individuals into managers and then leaders.

Lisa Kerns [00:11:14]:
So one of the things that we do, we have conversations a lot at the leadership level and one of the things that I’ve done as part of my career I feel fairly strongly about is the really dislike putting people into buckets and labeling them and figuring out who’s good at X, Y or Z, because these things change all the time and it’s just my impression of the situation and it certainly shouldn’t control someone’s destiny. So one of the things that I do quite frequently is when we are putting people in various situations and we’re giving them opportunities along the path that they would like to take or on a path that we think that they would be good at. We’ll put them in situations where we know it’s possible that they might not succeed and in some cases we want to watch to see what they do. Now, we’re not going to let anybody hurt themselves. We’re not going to let anyone hurt the brand

Lisa Kerns [00:12:16]:
but one of the things that I teach my leaders as well is as far as this idea, and you use the word kind of morphing. I try to encourage my, the leaders that work in my organization to not try to develop people to basically be you, not try to make them look like you. They’re not always going to do the things the way that you do them. So I, this is just my style. I tend to be very outcome oriented, not process oriented. So it’s not so much the way that you do something that I care about.

Lisa Kerns [00:12:47]:
I care about whether or not we achieve the outcome that we were looking for. So there are absolutely times where I’ll put an employee into a role and I’ll actually cringe in meetings while it’s going on but at the same time, just because it’s not the way that I would do it doesn’t mean it’s not going to be successful and it’s critically important that we let people develop their own leadership style and develop their own approach to things and that we have a way of being able to help them get on track before they go too far off track. We need to let them to develop these things because we don’t want to have an organization full of people exactly like us. Especially in retail. We need all kinds of people with all kinds of thinking. So we don’t want to have everybody that same

Lisa Kerns [00:13:35]:
and it’s something that I think that it’s hard to overcome, that companies want to hire people that look just like them, that talk just like them, that are, quote, a good fit. It really makes me cringe, too. No, I really want people that are different, that’ll do things differently than I will because I don’t always have the right answer. A lot of times I might not even have the right approach. They might have a different kind of a relationship with the people we’re trying to inspire to get to make decisions. So we want to be able to put them in situations, see how they do, let them figure out how to approach things with some counseling from us but we really want to be able to develop them into the leaders that they’re going to develop to, not the leaders that we are. So a lot of that takes a lot of patience and a skill set on the leadership committee that is not quite so controlling.

Lisa Kerns [00:14:24]:
We’re trying to develop people into carbon copies of who we are today. So a lot of that is really just a patience and a you can’t control everything. Focus on what the outcomes are going to be, make sure that people understand what it is that we’re trying to get to, and help them develop what path they’re going to recommend taking to get there.

Sanjog Aul [00:14:46]:
Let’s take a quick break listeners. We’ll be right back and Lisa, when we come back, let’s look at the very core of what makes a knowledge worker, which is the especially in IT here and while we’re talking about employees in general but a lot of us have converted ourselves into knowledge workers and we are still looking for that experience that we get from working at an employer such that it gets our creative juices flowing. We feel that we will have greater success, we will have daily satisfaction and also we’ll have smile on our face as we go about living our day or a workday. What is the recipe that would work well or has worked well for you in helping that employee achieve all three? As a result, that person is going to be most engaged and deliver the best they can. Let’s explore that listeners. We’ll be right back and talk more.

Sanjog Aul [00:17:48]:
Welcome back. So, talking about knowledge workers who are who feel incented with different type of incentives than someone who’s just doing manual work, who are building widgets, then there is something to be said about their experience as individuals and not as corporate employees where they feel that they really moved forward in their career today. They had satisfaction of whatever they want to do the way they wanted to do, they were able to do it and then it was a fun experience so that they could have smiles and laughs along the way. So it moves that individual to almost a next level of engagement, which is what you want at any given time, given the pace at which we want to move as companies and also the output we want from these people. So is that kept in mind as we are managing and leading people to develop the employee experience?

Lisa Kerns [00:18:46]:
So I think that one thing that helps employees a lot is when you’re working in a company or in a team or in a department where everyone seems engaged, everyone seems to like to come to work today, everyone takes an active interest in what’s going on and behaves like a strong team. That is something that seems to be compelling to a lot of people, at least what I’ve seen. Now there are also those individuals that don’t want any part of that. They just want to come in, they want to sit in their small quarter and they want to do what it is that they do all day and not talk to people and steps fine too but certainly the more that you have an engaged team, the more that you have a group of people that supports each other and work together, I think that provides a lot more enjoyable experience for the employees. One of the ways that I try to help different team members and different organizations, if people feel a sense of ownership in their area and their job and what they are doing, and to some extent that means having greater responsibility and accountability in your area. So one thing that I like to do is I try to create domain owners in different areas. I’m well known for having very tiny teams for very large companies.

Lisa Kerns [00:20:05]:
So I run a very lean IT organization typically and get an immense amount of work done with a shockingly small number of people but part of the way that I do that is to create different areas where the people, while they might not have staff that are 60 deep, they do have ownership over their area. They need to do figure out what the strategy is for that area, what the tool sets are going to be, who’s going to use what tool sets, when, where and how in the company, develop budgets for those areas and really have a say in how we use tools or technologies that are part of their domain. So in that sense, we try to help create leaders that may or may not actually have any staff direct reports. They don’t have to in order to be great leaders and want people that kind of understand that they have ownership of their area and can really see how they’re contributing to the greater strategy.

Sanjog Aul [00:20:58]:
So based on what you just said now, in such cases, is it something that you do to transform their experiences as an employee so that they get to the best level they can, or you hire and custom tailor an employee based on what your outcome was and that’s how you go about achieving what you intended to?

Lisa Kerns [00:21:21]:
I think both are true. Certainly you can hire and look for certain stats in how they approach situations and how they look at things, but you can also develop from within. It takes time, but it takes the change management approach. You can actually change an organization. It is, it can be as slower, as fast as you want it to be, but people can be different six months after you start in a company than they are when you get there. Certainly it’s something that I think you need both with. It’s not a situation where if you look at the staff, hey, they’re not what you necessarily want or you have a different target in mind.

Lisa Kerns [00:22:03]:
You just need to be able to say, here’s where we are at point A and here’s where we’re going to get to at point B. It’s a fair point when doing aggressive change management that maybe not everybody is actually going to make it there with you. That does happen. You may lose a few people along the way if you drastically need to change an organization but generally I find most people make it there, okay but the biggest thing is back to that ownership kind of idea is there are. Definitely there’s a skill in being able to take people who maybe don’t feel like they have ownership of some things and to really make them believe they have ownership and then hold them accountable for that ownership that they have.

Lisa Kerns [00:22:43]:
In some cases, that’s a really scary place for people to be and it’s a lot easier to say for a rock set a situation, why we never do this? Why don’t we ever, no one ever does X, Y or Z and we never seem to do this as a company. There’s nobody else here except you. You’re the one that would do it if we were going to do it. So it’s definitely a path that can be uncomfortable for employees to take from one position to another position, especially when we hold them accountable for getting there and owning their own career path as well as part of the mix but I think those are the keys to engagement is being able to say, yes, I own these things and yes, I have a say in these things and that’s what makes it exciting for me to come to work every day, is that I understand that I sign up for that and I understand that helps our organization and how that does that.

Sanjog Aul [00:23:35]:
So one is to look at say a direct report or somebody being managed or somebody being led, say by you within your department but then there is also a factor like how the organization is doing as a company, as a business. Then how is it seen by the community? How is your HR or other business units that this person is interacting with? How is that whole experience because what you’re trying to do is to make this person feel that they are in the right type of organization and that only doesn’t depend on how Lisa treated that person. So how do you and you cannot control every aspect of that either. So what do you do to influence so that this person gets the absolute best experience possible?

Lisa Kerns [00:24:24]:
Because it certainly can’t be dependent on me and it shouldn’t be dependent on one leader. Although great leaders, if they exist in an organization, can do a lot as far as keeping employees happy as well as attracting new employees but they do have to do it on their own and it can be done outside of your own organization. In fact, that’s where it’s, to me, it’s a little bit the most fun is to be able to do that with people that are outside of your organization, that they don’t report to you, they don’t have to do what we tell them to do. You don’t really have any control over them but how do we get them to be engaged and step up and do the things they need to do? Which happens actually a lot for IT because in order to do in a consumer facing business, in order to do what we need to do as it, we need our business partners to do things too

Lisa Kerns [00:25:13]:
and it’s critical that they are out there, that our marketing team is out there doing a fantastic job, our merchandising is doing a fantastic job. Our store operations are really knocking it out of the parks, trying to make sure that those organizations are healthy and functional and looking at technology and really are being open minded, sometimes that can be a challenge. So if we can help inspire and turn those people on and get them to be collaborative with us and set up portfolio structures that help us decide together what the roadmap is going to be. I think that also increases engagement of the business partners, particularly with IT. I want all of our business partners to be really engaged with our IT organization because we’re here for them. We’re not an IT company. We sell groceries. So we really want a high level of engagement with our business partners and I think that is an enjoyable experience for both parties when we do that.

Sanjog Aul [00:26:17]:
So what we can measure is what we can improve, what is possible realistically in terms of employee experience that we develop and that too holistically, as I just mentioned in my previous question about not just what they get say in here, we are taking say an IT employee not only what they learn and or they do within that department, but how is the rest of the organization performing? How’s the rest of the business units and business users are treating them? It is about looking at the measurement of where they were earlier, what you did and where did it go. Is there a little bit of science to it or you come every day as a leader and say, hey, I did the right thing, I invested towards those, building those relationships and that should translate to some better employee experiences or do you have a way to make sure whatever strategies you are doing to elevate employee experience, you tackle them, you measure them and if they’re not going right, you go and tackle them again but what you do, how do you go about it? How do you measure it? Let’s see if that’s even possible. Please stay tuned listeners. We’ll be right back.

Sanjog Aul [00:29:27]:
Welcome back. So we speak about what you can measure is what you can improve and when we talk about measuring with something like employee engagement, employee experience, this could turn fuzzy, people could hide behind aggregate numbers, et cetera. So have you been able to chip away at it and convert into a science yet?

Lisa Kerns [00:29:51]:
I’m not sure if it’s all science or not, but I would say to look at organizations as a living, breathing entity because they are as such, it shouldn’t stay the same all the time. It could change, it could grow, it could shrink, but it’s okay to have it be different. So one way that certainly a lot of organizations measure employee engagement, employee satisfaction, is the employee satisfaction survey. There’s ones that are out there that are really great, have great questions. There are ones that you can kind of screw up and not have the best questions. The biggest thing with doing an employee satisfaction survey is that if you do a survey and you highlight various areas that you want to focus on, it’s not, doesn’t have to be everything but if there are key areas that you want to focus on coming out of that, say, actually take action. If you’re not going to take action, don’t do the survey because it just makes it so much worse

Lisa Kerns [00:30:52]:
but if you take action and then survey again within I would say six to 12 months, do a follow up survey to see if those measures have changed any. So that would be one way to do it with surveys. Other organizations use employee turnover as the measure of how successful they are and the one thing that I would say when looking at turnover, and this is at least in my experience in terms of turnover, some turnover is healthy and it’s good. If you develop people the right way, they may grow their careers and outgrow you, which I think is always a great thing. Organizations are not necessarily just going to continue to create positions just to give people promotional opportunities. We create positions based on need and so there are areas where we may not have a growth path for someone.

Lisa Kerns [00:31:44]:
We may not have what it is that they’re going to get to and I don’t want to have someone sacrifice what could be a great executive leadership career just because that growth path doesn’t exist for them in their present compan but sometimes it’s okay if people outgrow you, if you mentor and develop them, and yes, one day they might lead, leave and they’re going to go on to be awesome someplace else or a lot of others some places. One thing to look at is where you have maybe a success like that, where you have someone that is they. They’re not leaving because they hate you. They’re not leaving because they’re angry. They just need to grow, and you can’t give them the opportunity that they want. Think of that as an opportunity.

Lisa Kerns [00:32:29]:
When you have that open position, can now bring in somebody else who offers a different dynamic, who offers a skill set that maybe that you don’t have. So it’s not always a negative thing. When you have people that exit your organization, look at each and every position that you have as an opportunity, not just to develop the people that are within it, but when you have a flat that opens up, what are you going to put in that slot, especially if you are really aggressively controlled on headcount. Make every position count when you do that.

Sanjog Aul [00:33:06]:
Talking about meaningful work, that’s quite a buzzword nowadays to say, okay, everyone should be doing something meaningful, and that’s the key to employee engagement and good employee experience. What is an objective definition of meaningful work when everything is transient and how do you make it happen at an individual employee level because that’s how they would measure that, is it meaningful for me?

Lisa Kerns [00:33:34]:
One of the things that I hear a lot in companies, I think the single greatest thing that I hear from people is that as a complaint is I don’t understand what our company strategy is, and I don’t understand where I sit within that company strategy. So one of the things that is very important to me is to be able to, for an organization, develop a roadmap. It doesn’t have to be complicated. It’s not 300 pages. It can simply be a portfolio in the simplest of fashion but essentially, what are the goals of the organization over the next one to three years? What are the key things that we’re trying to achieve? What are the projects that we’re going to do to try to get there and what is the employee, at an individual level, their role in that project? This is standard oil or flight strategy work but it’s being transparent with employees to show them that work, to show them what that strategy is, all the way down to the individual projects that they’re working on. So for me, that seems to have been the key aha.

Lisa Kerns [00:34:40]:
for a lot of people is if they can see, so their individual role connects directly to a key goal that the company has that is the magic for a lot of individuals but leadership and corporate leadership, not just Individual departments and IT but corporate leadership needs to be comfortable sharing their strategy but these are the people that are going to get you there. So it’s always crazy in an organization to have a strategy and have, it be unclear to people what that strategy is that

Lisa Kerns [00:35:13]:
I would say hit on executive leadership and senior level management if they’ve not been able to convey that across the organization in some cases just because they don’t have it. There are actually a lot of companies that don’t have a documented strategy and that’s okay. We just need to roll up our sleeves and put something down and say yes, that it could change, it could change tomorrow but that’s what we think a strategy is for the next couple of years now let’s make sure that we’re doing the right project to satisfy that strategy and that our employees know how their role in that project supports that overall goal.

Sanjog Aul [00:35:51]:
So what you just mentioned definitely is a strong, a good approach to tackling the direction where you mentioned we should be going now. Look at it as an employee, but if you looked at it inside out means that person looking for an experience, a way to live their life, a way to build their career. Is this everything that we do at the leadership level today or with respect to employees is mostly aggregate or are we moving towards a little more individualized or a fit for purpose profiling and intervention so that individual employees experience is maximized?

Lisa Kerns [00:36:33]:
I think that is definitely the way of the future is to make sure that it is personalized. Like so much that we’re doing today with consumer experiences is that it is a personalized approach. The tough part, a lot of people I think have trouble with realizing is that it’s going to change over time. We’re not going to try to tell an 18 year old that you have to decide before you go to college, which could be for the rest of your life. That’s really scary but, what employees want, where employees want to go, what they want to do with their career. They’re not going to have all the answers. They’re going to have some, at least for the near term as far as what they want to do

Lisa Kerns [00:37:12]:
but it’s going to be continually changing and growing and critical for their leadership to know them as an individual, to know what’s right for them, what works for them, to be able to help them get to a role that they maybe would like to do. Even if it’s maybe not a role within their own organization but if it isn’t personalized, then it’s probably not appropriate but to make it personalized, though, and we’ve all heard these words before, the employee kind of has to own their own career development, so they have to have a strong say in what it is that they actually want to be able to achieve. Even if it’s just what do I like to do, what do I not like to do? I’ve had a lot of employees that have said I really want to go do X, Y or Z and they get there, they try it out a little bit and they say, I don’t like this at all and that’s okay. Then we look at what was it that you thought that you liked about it in the beginning? Let’s try to dissect that, take it apart and figure out how maybe we missed on that, or maybe that there’s another growth path that might work out better for you.

Sanjog Aul [00:38:21]:
Let’s take a quick break, listeners. We’ll be right back and let’s talk about the way we truly are investing in an employee with an interest, of course, building their productivity, making them more aligned to what the company wants and yes, we talk about training, we talk about mentoring, we talk about coaching. Would assigning those budgets enough, yes, we just have conversations with them, is that enough and we just spoke about personalization. So to that end, how are we investing in resources or in that person so that we start moving towards that direction? Are there systems we are developing? Are there other ways in which the employee interacts with the ecosystem? What are we doing beyond the traditional investment that you will be sent for some training and we might assign you a coach? Please stay tuned, listeners. We’ll be right back.

Sanjog Aul [00:41:14]:
Welcome back. Lisa, do you think we have being able to get above the standard training budgets and maybe assigning a coach or a mentor in an organization and go beyond the traditional investment that we make in an employee with an interest towards making that person the best they can be professionally and also enhance their experience.

Lisa Kerns [00:41:40]:
So I certainly think that it’s important for organizations to make sure that they are allocating a certain amount of money to be able to send employees for training and to be able to update skill sets. That’s definitely always going to be true to the point where sometimes we send employees to these conferences, these training and it’s did that work, did that do anything, did that not do anything? One of the things that I’ve seen that works really well is rather than send just one employee to an A conference looking for a lot more opportunity in addition to maybe that, where it’s maybe not the $3,000 a week or $5,000 work training classes, it’s those local things that you can do, those things that are within a drivable distance. For us, things within a drivable distance are within five hours. That’s a pretty wide spread area and there are an awful lot of groups that meet conferences that go on that are either low cost or no cost and for those, I really like to bring people in a group. So for me, what creates a better training for an employee. Quote, training is a shared experience. So if it’s something that they can do with their team, with a group of leadership, where it’s not just them alone or them with one other person, it’s actually a group of people as part of the team that you can talk about.

Lisa Kerns [00:43:10]:
What were the subjects that we talked about during the training? What can we take from this? What are action items that can come out of this? So it’s not just the we went, we sat in a room, we thought something, it’s more of a team dynamic around it. So as much as possible, when I can actually bring a group together for a shared experience and training, that to me goes a lot farther than just an individual conference. When I can do a conference. Something that I really like to see is when employees may go to a conference and their leader may go with them. So it may not be that we can afford to send the whole team and this is where you have to be careful as a leader that you’re not playing favorites, but you can take an employee and you can go to that conference with that employee, that’s great. They get some one on one time with you. They get to also learn from you because they see you in action, they see you engaging people in the conference.

Lisa Kerns [00:44:08]:
Maybe they’re on a leadership track, they want to see what it looks like to be at that next level or maybe it’s even skip level. So I’ve gone to conferences with employees that are not at all just even my direct report and they get to experience it with me and see it through my eyes and I get to see it through their eyes. So somehow pairing this together in a shared experience where we can talk about it as a group and it’s not just, hey, you went to this conference and nobody knows what it is that you saw because it’s hard to get it out of your head. In addition, when employees have ownership of their own domain areas, I’ll ask them in advance next year, what are the things that you were thinking would contribute in your area that you would like to be able to go see and what do you think you’ll get out of them and help them help me plan what the training budget should be for their area.

Sanjog Aul [00:45:01]:
One of the experiences or one of the ways we give employees good experience is when they have a sustained amount of time. They are able to do something where they are growing and they’re developing skills and they’re feeling good about themselves and of course it’s creating results but when it becomes strategy of the week or of the month, of the quarter and something new thrown on their plate when it’s already spilling, that really doesn’t do a whole lot and it’s not that business wants to unnecessarily make their life miserable, but there is a lot of innovation happening and there’s a lot of change happening. Is it a function of that employee to have that DNA where they want this thing for sustained amount of time and that’s why they are detesting it or is it a human thing where any change, but too frequently it’s going to be unnerving but if that’s the case, how do you insulate them from this constant flux and yet get them to contribute towards being relevant to this changing world?

Lisa Kerns [00:46:13]:
I think again, it depends on the individual. Some prioritize better than others. Some need some help focusing on the things that need to be focused on but it’s also important for us that we make sure as leaders that we’re it’s not all about just what are the priorities of the day in giving them that experience. So for me, it’s every day counts. It’s not just the where do I send you to training and that’s the time that we focus on our development. It’s every day, what experiences can we give them to owner areas? So that may be leading a meeting, that may be sending them to work with a business partner on their own.

Lisa Kerns [00:46:51]:
Definitely a huge part of this is making sure that we can delegate those responsibilities to them and making sure that they feel that every day they’re putting some of these things to use. As far as that goes, it’s just a fact of life of business that things do get busy. What I do on occasion is when things get like that, I will bring a team into a room and say, okay, there is an awful lot going on right now. Let’s sort through this pile and figure out what are we doing, when are we doing it, what can we shuffle around, what really needs to get worked on now? What can we push to the back burner a little bit? We do this all the time because we have just way too much piling into the cup that can fit and it’s just overflowing. So continue meetings to together discuss what the priorities ought to be and what we can shift around. Kind of make sure everybody knows what everybody’s working on. Everyone knows what the priorities are and then we can talk about

Lisa Kerns [00:47:50]:
by the way, don’t forget, these conferences are coming up. These things are coming up. Those are important too. We need to make sure that those are in the priority pile somewhere so that we don’t forget those things. So it’s not that we look at those things separately. All of those training, the development opportunities that we had on the roadmap, those are roadmap items just like the projects are.

Sanjog Aul [00:48:14]:
What would you like as contribution from the other business leaders and what changes in workplace policies that you would like to see incorporated or implemented so that we are able to overall enhance employee experiences and let’s also put in this wrench in the system which is already there, in fact, is the remote and the distributed workers, because they may not always see each other. You want to still keep them involved and keep them engaged and also feel that they are getting a great employee experience. What would you like to see the rest of the organization do to contribute towards this?

Lisa Kerns [00:48:55]:
Certainly I’m a huge fan of dress code policies that allow people to be individuals. Certainly in my own company we have a very formal dress code and I think that there are ways that we can work with that a little bit. Most notably, as far as something I don’t hear mentioned a lot with dress code policies. So whatever your workforce policy is, there are always restrictions and there are good reasons for some of those but the one thing I would say about dress code policies, dress code policy for me isn’t as important in terms of, hey, let people wear what they want to wear. It’s about creativity. I feel that I get the best creativity and innovative thinking from people when they are comfortable. So if they are dressed however they want to dress in, whatever they want to dress in, then that’s not so much a focus of them trying to look or be different than maybe they naturally are.

Lisa Kerns [00:49:54]:
I do believe that I get better creativity out of people when they’re not encumbered by things like that. So for me, dress code policies, being flexible are all about pulling out more innovation and more creativity out of people by just. It just has an effect on having people feel freer about sharing things as well as things that we’re looking at.

Sanjog Aul [00:50:16]:
30 seconds, Lisa.

Lisa Kerns [00:50:19]:
We’re definitely looking at an idea of possibly bring your pet to work in certain areas of the organization. Again, trying to make people feel as comfortable as possible. It’s outcome oriented, again, it’s not process oriented, will we get more comfortable people, better ideas, better engagement out of them with some policies that make them more comfortable?

Sanjog Aul [00:50:40]:
On behalf of the show and our listeners, thank you so much, Lisa, for sharing your views on how organizations can transform employee experience and get them to do the best they can.

Lisa Kerns [00:50:51]:
Thank you for having me. It was great being here.

Sanjog Aul [00:50:54]:
Thank you and please like us on Facebook, listeners, search for CTN CIO Talk Network and be sure to follow us on Twitter. Thank you again for listening to this segment on CIO Talk Network. This is Sanjog Aul your talk show host. Till next week take care and god bless.

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