Annotated table of contents
Adi Ignatius, the editor in chief of HBR, introduces the spotlight section on the employee experience. Several articles offer data and analysis to understand why employees disengage and even quit and suggest remedies.
Idea watch
2. HBR Team, Reducing the risks of corporate activism
New research provides guidance on how to the estimate market share risk that comes with taking a public stand on social, political or cultural issues. Market share risk is a function of two main factors: the divisiveness of the issue and the congruence between the firm’s stance and its mission and values. To mitigate risk, any position should be the result of wide collective deliberation, and it should not be allowed to distract from the core purpose. Protecting the base and working in cooperation with other organisations are also key. Joe Tripodi, former chief marketing officer at several US large consumer products and financial companies, illustrates these points with instances from his career when activism was successful and others when it backfired.
3. Juan Martinez, People who keep company secrets find more meaning at work
Michael Slepian shares the results of his research with colleagues on the impact of secrecy at work. Often information is shared on a need-to-know basis, and this can foster feelings of inclusion but also isolation. Negative effects, such as fears of breaking the law or backlash due to inadvertent indiscretion, can be minimized when there is clarity about why it is important to keep a secret and who else knows. Employees should also be provided with scripted answers to difficult questions.
4. Rodolfo Spielmann, the CEO of NatureSweet on what happens when you champion workers
Rodolfo Spielman, the CEO of NatureSweet describes its culture of inclusion and focus on workers. Operating in a low margin industry, NatureSweet, a B-corp enterprise, grows fresh vegetables, such as tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers, at several locations in the US and Mexico. The company has achieved consistent double-digit growth and high levels of retention by sharing the benefits of increased productivity with its workers, through higher wages and support for training. Exemplary colleagues are nominated by their peers to have their portraits featured on packaging and to present their stories in publicity videos.
Spotlight: What companies get wrong about the employee experience
5. Ethan Bernstein, Michael Horn and Bob Moesta, Why employees quit
Bernstein et al., look at the interaction between push and pull factors in the decision to change jobs. They suggest that employees look at jobs as opportunities ‘hired’ to achieve certain results, typically to get out of an unsuitable situation, to regain control, to achieve alignment between life and work, or to take the next step. This typology of expectations can be used to design measures that will sustain commitment and prevent the job switching that is so expensive for companies. The authors recommend early two-hour interviews with new hires to determine initial aspirations and motivations and to assess the fit between these and job descriptions. Roles could then be redefined in more concrete and realistic terms with help from the HR department. There are concrete suggestions and examples, including an interview guide and pointers for how to lead these conversations and processes.
Many good companies gather a great deal of data about employee sentiment, in a variety of formats, including surveys, interviews, performance reviews, digital traces of interactions and others. However, they can struggle to make sense of this seemingly contradictory and complex feedback data. The article offers several guidelines for crafting appropriate actions in response. Employees need to feel heard, and this includes acknowledgement of underlying problems and conflicting views, however threatening. There is a need for safeguarding privacy and provision of meaningful follow-up. Several examples illustrate how these objectives may be achieved.
7. Eric Anicich and Dart Lindsley, Reimagining work as a product
Anicich and Lindsley ask companies to treat their employees with the same care they demonstrate for customers and to be willing to adjust jobs accordingly. They offer a tool to assess how well jobs are designed from the point of view of the employees. The main criteria are that jobs play to the employees’ strengths and produce value for the company; each aspect of the job is measured for the time devoted to it and the feeling of reward or dislike it elicits.
Features
8. Constance Noonan Hadley and Sarah L. Wright, We’re still lonely at work
Typical approaches to tackling loneliness assume that teams or in-person working are sufficient remedy, since loneliness is a personal problem, and lonely employees are simply needier than others. For a more realistic understanding of the causes and prevalence of loneliness at work, Hadley and Wright offer a measurement tool with five statements and responses on a 5-point scale. There is also guidance for action to create a culture of connection, including how to design slack and opportunities for socialising into the flow of work, to actively recruit members, and to use simple social activities such as free communal lunches, time for chitchat in meetings and happy hours.
Transformational innovations in large, leading companies consist of changes that redefine customer expectations through superior value, reducing costs or resolving enduring problems. They are hard to pull off, even in ambidextrous organizations, and in this article Koen et al., aim to add to the body of knowledge on innovation through a close study of two case studies at Procter & Gamble: Always Infinity menstrual pads (2008) and Oral-B iO, a high-performance electric toothbrush (2020). The article distils advice on how to tackle four major challenges: providing sufficient leadership; building the right team; unlocking resources; and building consensus around big-bet decisions.
10. Lynn S. Paine and Suraj Srinivasan, How robust is your climate governance?
Paine and Srinivasan identify eight criteria that define effective climate oversight at board level. Four are attributes of the board itself: it has access to pertinent information about the company’s climate profile; it has a clearly defined mandate to oversee climate; it has the appropriate structure to do it, in the form of coordination through a designated committee, but with all committees taking responsibility for elements relevant to them; and finally, the board has the expertise to exercise effective oversight. The other four conditions are linked to specific actions and activities: the board can say what the climate positioning and strategy are; it probes the management’s plans; it incorporates climate execution in performance evaluation; and it is aware of challenges.
Govindarajan et al., argue that it is possible to design products that won’t become obsolete, by anticipating the future and bringing it into solutions in the present. This requires a shift away from the ‘use and throw away’ attitude and it has already been shown to work with products in education, toys, sports equipment, and in manufacturing that use hardware and software that can be (pre)configured and updated. The competitive advantages of such products are obvious, from flexibility and continual innovation to positive social impact; they can also be to deployed within a variety of models for capturing value and charging, which are explored in the article.
12. Mark Abraham and David C. Edelman, Personalization done right
Customers have become used to getting recommendations for all kinds of purchases and experiences, but how accurate or even welcome are they? Abraham and Edelman show with examples that it is possible to build a personalisation index that captures performance across five criteria or dimensions of customer experience: how well the customer is empowered, known, reached through well-orchestrated touch points and effective demonstration of benefits, and ultimately delighted. The authors provide diagnostic questions for these criteria and offer suggestions for how to weigh the results to hone interventions. According to this research, industry leaders usually are very good at personalisation, generating superior revenues.
13. Prabhakant Sinha, Arun Shastri, and Sally Lorimer, A better way to link sales and marketing
Part of delivering on the promises of personalisation is to find a better way to link sales and marketing, argue Sinha et al. This in turn requires building and deploying a digital customer hub capable to coordinate lead generation, sale interactions and procurement decisions. The article comes with practical guidance on how to do this, from choosing the right structure in terms of size, activities to be orchestrated, and relative balance between sales and marketing, to actual building up, using examples from Intuit, Schneider Electric, Microsoft and others.
14. Jianwen Liao and Feng Zhu, How to avoid the agility trap
Following the received wisdom that strategic agility is the desirable and appropriate response to intense technological change can destabilise companies by eroding their competitive advantage as they chase ever changing short-term trends. This article argues instead that focusing on the constant features that make the critical difference in a particular sector can provide a much more secure basis for long-term success. Such constants include cost, efficiency and customer experience in retail, or safety, reliability and design in car manufacturing. The authors explain in detail how this kind of strategic focus can be achieved and use a variety of examples to illustrate.
Recruiting from the board can send a signal of weakness, suggesting that the company has limited choices due to underlying performance or leadership problems. However, board members may be well qualified for the CEO role, especially when they have demonstrated efficacy previously and have industry and institutional knowledge. The article then goes on to specify, with examples, when it might be a good idea to recruit a board member as CEO, the pitfalls to avoid and how to boost the chances for success.
Experience
This article provides a conceptual lens for thinking about life after employment. At its core is the distinction between what we know to be our self, including aspirations, needs and wants, strengths and weaknesses, and the life structure, the practicalities of how we spend our time, the objectives we meet or drop by the wayside. Mapping activities to visualise life structure at any one time can help assess how aligned they are with the needs of the self, identify what can be changed, and adjust. This is illustrated by contrasting examples of a successful and a less successful transition to retirement.
17. Jill Avery and Thomas Steenburgh, Case study: Should we deploy a Gen AI salesbot?
A digital marketing company based in Chicago, with a 7-year track record as a public company, confronts the pros and cons of adopting Gen AI to address their profitability lag. First-mover risks include divesting control to an AI provider, managing unpredictability, and safety and privacy concerns from employees and customers. The executive team discuss, and outside experts weigh in.
18. Gretchen Gavett, Getting over overwork
What are the causes of overwork? Is overwork the result of individual choices, and thus entails individual remedies, or are structural factors to blame? Without entirely discounting the latter, the four books reviewed here look at personal transformation, the role of ambition, the (puritan) work ethic, and rest. They give us permission to slow down and approach work in our own terms perhaps contributing to a more supportive work environment overall.
19. Alison Beard, Life’s work interview with Ketanji Brown Jackson
Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to serve as Associate Justice at the US Supreme Court, is now the author of a memoir, Lovely One. In this interview she answers questions about her career choices, management style and approaches to setbacks and racism: choosing her battles carefully and staying disciplined and focused on the work.
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