Why I’m no longer an HR lady?

I’ve been working in HR for almost 10 years. From the very beginning internally and never worked in an agency or outsourcing company. I was taught that HR should be a “people department”: approachable and trustworthy among all employees and managers. Not as one, where the HR people appears only when hiring and firing happen. This approach was close to my heart as well.

At the same time, the HR named people as resources — the one that you can get or rid off whenever they are not needed. Something was wrong, right?

During a couple of last years, we can observe that more and more companies are changing names from Human Resources to People Operations, People and Values, People and Culture, etc. We tried to do the same in Doplanner. We collected different names that were fancy at that time and even did a survey among all HR people asking which one do you like the most. I felt that if we only change the wording, not our attitude, it’s gonna be super artificial. Hopefully, it was not only my feeling and after the survey, nothing changed for a while.

When you work in Tech environment you can get inspiration from many places. I got mine while talking about a user and customer journey with our Head of Design during the Christmas party. It was amazing that when thinking about the product development you take into consideration all the things that user or customer do with our platform. We start to talk about this approach with my boss, Lucek and in the end, we came up with the idea that it’s super similar to what we do (or would like to do) in our area. From the very first moment when you hear about Docplanner as a company to work with till the moment when you left us but still are our ambassador.

Employee Journey in Docplanner

We extracted 8 steps of people’s journey connected with our company:

1. It all starts at the moment when you are not looking for a job, but you know some companies that potentially seems to be a good option in the future. It may be because of their product or because of their Employer Branding. All in all, you know them and feel that they might be a great place to work.
2. Then, you start thinking about the new job. You check what open positions they have, what they offer and what is the EVP. You feel that it’s easy to make a decision about applying, that the mission is great and you can talk with the company even without commitments.
3. Do you want to try? Great! Your experience during the recruitment process evaluates your assumptions about the company’s culture. Do you like the people that you’re gonna work with every day? Do you feel that the job match to your talents? Are you enough engaged and curious to continue in the process (no matter how many stages is ahead of you)?
4. and 5 :)Onboarding and trial period are the next stages when you evaluate if this is the right company for you. You should feel very welcome from the very first day, learn all the rules, and already feel like a part of the team. All this to make a decision whether you wanna stay in the company or not. But also you feel that you know what is expected of you to get the contract prolongation.
5. described above :)
6. You are a part of the team — do you still feel that you belong here? Do you find a career path for you and still feel like there is a lot to do in front of you? Do you and your manager and peers go well together and build good relations? The more you are in the company, the more pros and cons you see, do you still feel that would like to be here in 2 years from now?
7. Even if you decide to leave, your feelings during the period of notice are important. Was this time respectful, full of recognition that you deserve? Would you recommend working in the company even though you are leaving? Do you feel that the time spent in the company was a good investment?
8. You are in the new company, but each time you see or hear about the company’s success you feel pride that you were the co-author of it and a part of something important.

As you can see it’s all about experiences and feelings when your professional path cross with the company. That’s why we decided to change our team’s name from Human Resources into People Experience.

Just for the record ;) I know that some companies have Employee Experience teams (like AirBnB for example) but we don’t like the term “employee”. The first reason is that we always believed in hiring entrepreneurs, not employees (working on goals vs tasks). Secondly, we are not taking into consideration only hired employees but also their experiences before and after joining our company.

After showing the concept, we all felt that this is what we were looking for. And that it can be a starting point for our strategy.

KPIs time

When we knew that we want to make this journey the best we can, then comes the question about metrics. We are a goal-oriented company, we want to have indicators that can prove us, that we are doing a good. So we start thinking about how to evaluate each step. To be honest, we are still working on it, especially in the areas that are our weak points, but below you can find some inspirations:

• Employer Branding (point 1 and 2) — no of followers on our social media, no of spontaneous applications (we have dedicated job offer for this: Anything is Possible), traffick on our career page, etc.
• Recruitment — time to hire, candidate experience survey or eg. % of not accepted offers
• Onboarding — feedback about the process, % of people that decided not to prolong the contract
• Being in the company — Officevibe score, turnover, no of referrals
• Ambassadors — no of people that come back to the company, no of referrals from our alumni.

Photo by Free To Use Sounds on Unsplash

Evaluation time

Then, based on the indicators, we could evaluate how much we do in these stages in every country. Which areas are the ones that we can be proud of and the ones that we have never touched before? We did it by marking each area with:

• A (we do a lot of things here and can be proud of this area)
• B (we do something here, it’s ok but still need to rethink our actions)
• C (we have never touch it, or did something small, didn’t check the results)

Of course, there were differences among countries based on the challenges and the “age” of each office but we saw that recruitment is something that we have worked a lot on. And that we did almost nothing in the Offboarding process. We could also prepare a strategy for the next year: which areas we want to improve (eg. moving from C to B or from B to A) because we see that it’s needed for the business. We always wanted to do things that impact the business goals, not only the ones that are fancy. That’s why the Ambassador’s program (for our alumni) is still not something that we’re gonna do this year.

Planning time

This way of looking at the employee journey may be helpful in:

• Deciding which projects we should do next — you have a vision for the next year, you have the indicators, so then it’s just working with your team about what to do to get there :)
• How our Px structure should look like — should we have separate people for specific stage/stages (vertical structure) OR one person that will cover all stages for specific teams/departments (horizontal structure) OR even something else

This way of looking at the employee journey also let us add more and more layers, eg. we want to be a culture of feedback so what we can do in every stage of the employee life cycle to boost it? But it’s a topic for another article, soon.

That’s the story why I’m no longer an HR lady and how I became a People Experience lady. But still, more things to do than was done :)