In this Talent Tales episode, talent.imperative Founder Nicole Dessain had the honor to interview Elles Skony, Vice President of Talent Management at Centro.
Elles’ creative superpower is “communication”. She believes that HR can come up with the best programs or initiatives but if they are not articulated in an engaging and humorous way then they are not going to be embraced by employees.
Elles is passionate about enabling every HR professional to become excited about the employee experience. One of the ways she fosters this is by networking with other HR professionals of mid-sized start-ups in Chicago. While there is competition for talent, this collaboration encourages taking a systems perspective towards making people’s work lives better by sharing best practices and lessons learned.
Elles leverages design thinking as a framework to prioritize HR initiatives at the beginning of each year and to define the employee experience at Centro.
And here is how it works: For each stage of the employee experience, the HR team identifies the feeling that they want to invoke, the narrative to happen, and analyzes data to assess how they are doing for each step and how to improve it. This all results in a SWOT analysis that is completed annually and drives HR strategy planning for the year.
One of the barriers Elles encountered in bringing this approach to the organization was that theoretically the plan makes a lot of sense, but the key is for it not to get lost in the day-to-day of HR operations and to keep the employee experience top of mind (e.g. by adding it to the quarterly HRLT agenda). And sometimes things just get in the way of providing the ideal employee experience. So it’s important to remain nimble and flexible and to constantly iterate on the plan (a good design thinking practice).
The approach Elles takes to bringing the employee experience programming to business leadership is by reviewing bi-annual talent data and by proactively creating associated action plans so there is a clear line of sight between data and programming. Conversations about the employee experience happen more organically with the business and in a more structured way within HR.
The measurable impact Elles has seen after introducing the design thinking driven approach is that Centro’s talent data has improved and the HR team is becoming less siloed. This year they are planning to experiment with dedicated “HR Task Forces” that will be keepers of critical stages in the employee experience (incl. onboarding, rewards & recognition, and intern strategy & programming).
Want to find out how to use memes for effective HR strategy communication? Watch the entire interview on YouTube or listen to the Podcast.