I'm a competitive swimmer. What I love most about the sport is that you race individually to contribute to your team's overall score. Your team is (hopefully) comprised of athletes who excel at swimming different strokes, various distances. The diversity of the team's skill is therefore critical to its overall success. I've found this to be consistently true about teamwork – especially in my role leading employee experience.
It can be a real challenge in a large organization to balance employees' expectations with business needs. So, how does an organization build a scalable, responsive, and magnetic employee experience that also delivers exceptional business results? The same way a winning swim team outperforms its competitors – by bringing to the table top talent from different departments.
At TD Bank we’ve created the Employee Experience Council (EEC). The council is comprised of senior leaders from every department across TD Bank. These leaders act as the voice and agent of their team, providing holistic representation of our organization and peoples' needs. While HR is the sponsor of the council, it is driven entirely by its members. This provides a unique leadership opportunity for talent across the organization, a feature that helped secure senior executive buy-in for this approach.
How it works
HR acts as the facilitator for the EEC, convening the council and providing the guiderails to keep it on track. Individual members bring forward opportunities to improve the employee experience. The council prioritizes those opportunities and develops the strategy to execute it within each member's business. In this way, businesses share accountability for the employee experience, delivering results far beyond what HR could achieve on its own.
Measuring success
The council has seen tremendous results since its launch a year ago in January 2018:
- 100% satisfaction rating for redesigned orientation: In 2018, the EEC re-envisioned TD Bank's orientation program for new employees. The new, in-person orientation experience was piloted in various markets with a 100% satisfaction rating from the 350+ new hire participants. In 2019, we will implement the new program across TD Bank, replacing the current virtual experience.
- High utilization of deliverables: Through surveys and focus groups, EEC members identify real-time pain-points for employees and managers. For example, managers across the organization told us that the process for onboarding new team members was complicated. So, the EEC developed simple, real-time resources for current managers onboarding new hires. Utilization rates of those resources have surpassed our expectations.
- Model replication: The EEC's success has been so significant that the model was replicated at the global level, enhancing the colleague experience across the enterprise.
When the business drives the employee experience, the resulting outcome is a well-rounded representation of what employees want and what the organization needs. After all, happy and engaged employees lead to happy and engaged customers.
A version of this article originally appeared on LinkedIn.