In this week's episode, Laurie shares his article on the redefinition of Within People’s employee experience, getting to the heart of what we want the experience of work to feel like. The result? our own equitable employee experience mapped out.

Learn more about Within People and the work we do here

Hi, I'm Laurie coming to you from Vancouver.

I'm going to read an article I wrote back in February of 2022 about the

experience of designing our employee experience, which when I say it,

like that sounds a little meta.

But employee experience is definitely the new buzzword on the block.

It's taking over from employee engagement, building on employer value propositions

and unseating the employee journey.

And all for good reason, work's changed and we've written and spoken a lot about

how and why, but the gist is that people are rethinking how they want to work.

So forward thinking leaders are getting proactive on how to design experiences

that meet those new needs for flexibility, connection, reward, and growth.

We know that's not about getting a bunch of new perks lined up.

We know it is about creating a mutual set of promises made and kept between

employee and employer that define the experience of working here.

And as we've been developing within these frameworks for that,

we've also been getting more curious about our own experience.

So partly to test things out and partly to address some

challenges we're experiencing, we did to us what we do to clients.

So this article is all about some of our learnings from that journey.

And if you want to check out the promises, we ended up making.

Have a look on our blog at, withinpeople.com.

Okay, here it goes.

We just 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.

But 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 it 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 and at times challenging often

enlightening conversations about freedom and self-responsibility

compensation and equitability, what it means to grow as individuals and the

collective in a self-managed business.

The process forced us to find creative ways include voices from all our

partners across our global partnership.

Most of the frameworks we use with our clients get a trial run on

ourselves first, that way we get to explore different ways to the

outcome, and maybe more importantly, get to feel what it's like to be

in our client's shoes for the ride.

It's thrilling slash terrifying, by the way.

Back in November, we committed to sharing our employee experience, promises together

with our learnings, from the process.

So here, those are.

First up is the flexible lens.

The core promise we make around flexibility is that all needs are heard

and integrated to support personal freedom of when, where, and how we work.

And the promises we made around that are: that we use time in a way that works for

us, having honest conversations about what we need that enable us to integrate client

partnership and life commitments that we choose places that create an inspiring

and impactful experience, considering the needs of partners and clients to

ensure where we work is accessible with everything required for success, that

we leverage our talent by following our energy and passion, playing to our

strengths to keep the business growing and to meet client project outcomes.

And that we make the space to share and hear what people need and

balance to the needs of the business.

Understanding that everyone's on a journey to knowing and voicing their needs.

The second lens is connected.

And the core promise that we make around connection is open communication,

creating spaces that invite and celebrate diverse talent and perspectives.

The promises that we make behind that?

Are that we form self-organizing autonomous teams with clear fluid roles,

acknowledging the roles we require and ensuring autonomy by reinforcing

that anyone can take on leadership.

We make timely decisions, using clear processes that leverage expertise

and collective intelligence, trusting those who initiate and hold the

decision process and ensuring everyone affected by the decision can be heard.

We share information transparently to give everyone a full view of the

business, using inclusive and accessible ways to get information that builds

understanding reinforces trust and empowers partners to take responsibility.

We invite people in to build our partnership together, embracing

diversity and living our shared values, celebrating difference, and the unique

ways we each show up to our values while committing to rituals that

strengthen our connection to each other.

The third lens is rewarding, and the core promise we make on the experience

of rewarding is choosing the work that is most meaningful to each of us and

being valued for our contribution.

The promises we make behind that, are that we choose the work we love to do

with the people we love to work with aligning work to our purpose and The

Within Way, make a meaningful impact.

We recognize individual contribution through feedback and appreciation,

being seen and valued for what we bring as being vital to impact and growth.

We set our own goals for what we want to earn and share in profit together,

winning and sharing work together while being paid equitably for the value we

bring and the responsibility we take, we define what success looks like and

measure the journey of profit impact and joy, committing to clear outcomes

for ourselves, our clients and our partnership with regular feedback rituals.

And fourth is our growing lens.

The core promise we make around the experience of growing is each individual

is set up for success to grow in their own way as our business grows.

The promises we make behind that are that we're set up for success through a mutual

exploration of what's needed to thrive.

Embarking on a structured, tailored self directed journey of immersion

that recognizes different needs.

We commit to investing in our personal and collective growth in line with our

vision, taking responsibility to develop in ways that work for us using regular

feedback and support from the collective.

We work through conflict and an intentional and timely way committing

to using resources and training, to have crucial conversations in a way that

respects and meets people where they are.

And we honor the decisions.

Each individual makes for their wellbeing, taking responsibility for

our own wellbeing, with support and understanding from the partnership.

Why redefine our partner experience?

A little background on what was happening in and around the business

that set this process in motion.

First, 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.

Second, 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.

And lastly, the pandemic precipitated a backflip in working practices and a

mass reshuffle and employment globally.

In short, we saw the world asking for a long overdue reimagination

of how work has 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 slash mad scientists, we needed

to test that on ourselves first.

Five key learnings from redefining our experience.

I asked the team to share what they learned along the way.

Here's what they came up with.

Number one, if the outcome's 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, isn't a separate set of commitments, but a constant query

on every promise that gets made.

And if you want the experience to reflect the need of all the individuals in the

team, all their voices need to be heard within the process of creating it.

Number two, 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 processes work 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.

Number three, 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 premises.

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.

Number four, 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.

Number five, 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 Blue Shift 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

acknowledgement that we're not perfect on this is reassuring and galvanizing.

So where next from here?

Bev's our newest partner and didn't take part in the process itself,

but from her early observations and exposure to our partner experience,

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 three critical Within partner

promises to focus on, to bring consistency to our experience.

The first is connected to growing and it's that we work through conflict

in an intentional and timely way.

We recognize we are lacking in some of 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.

The second, this connected to rewarding.

We recognize individual contribution through feedback and appreciation.

Feedback's not as consistent as we'd like it to be.

We know that we need better rituals and more focus to our feedback conversations.

And the third is part of our connected lens.

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've woven

action on each of these three areas into our goals for this year, and we've

dedicated resources of time, energy, and budget to help us deliver on them.

And our clients are investing in mapping and shifting their

employee experiences 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 give us a call.

Thanks for listening everyone.

We hope you enjoyed learning about redefining Within's employee experience.

Tune into our podcast every other week for more episodes on what's happening in

the culture and leadership space, what's on the minds of leaders committed to

change and other future of work content you crave Re-imagining Work From Within is

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