Investing in employees is not just a good practice—it’s a necessity, particularly in challenging times. Companies must prioritize their people across all facets, from recruitment and retention to leadership development. When the going gets tough, the best organizations focus even more intently on their workforce, knowing that their success is deeply intertwined with the well-being of their employees.

This was the core message shared by a diverse panel of industry leaders at the From Day One’s September virtual conference. Moderated by independent journalist Jenny Sucov, the discussion explored the various strategies companies are employing to put their people first in today’s uncertain environment.

Recruiting in Rural Areas

Marvin, premium manufacturer of custom windows and doors, is based in Warroad, Minnesota, with over 17 locations across the U.S. and Canada. They’ve struggled to find enough workers in smaller communities, so they took a different approach.

Panelist Renee Rice, senior director of communications and culture at Marvin, says to address the problem, they implemented the Path North program. They work with staffing agencies to bring in employees from Puerto Rico and different areas of Florida.

“It definitely has been a successful program for us,” Rice said. “We've hired over 150 employees at a couple of our major northern plants. Some of them have come on their own. A lot of them have come with their families, and they’re truly becoming a part of the community so that they want to stay with Marvin for the long term.”

Marvin also worked with local schools to help them prepare for an influx of students, and with with local grocery stores to make sure there is a variety of foods depending on the population coming in. By fostering a sense of belonging, Marvin ensures these employees are more likely to stay with the company long-term.

Their key to success comes down to providing stability, a sense of security, and community, says Rice. Companies can’t think of culture as separate from business, she says. Culture is in the service of the business. Not only that, but it’s not static. Organizations should expect culture to shift, especially as business and people change.

She suggested that companies ask themselves the following: “Where is the business headed? But then also how might our culture need to evolve to best enable and. best support that business strategy and that business direction?” It takes a lot of research but it’s important to keep your eye on it to truly understand your company culture.

Employee Engagement

DocuSign recently underwent a rebranding effort, evolving from a company known primarily for electronic signatures to an intelligent agreement management firm. But it wasn’t only about what the company offered customers—it also involved an internal cultural alignment.

Panelist Iesha Berry, VP, chief talent and diversity officer at DocuSign, says that they engaged with employees so they could be an important part of the rebranding journey. To support this cultural shift, DocuSign has implemented several initiatives focused on employee engagement.

One key effort is the creation of a talent brand video that offers a day in the life perspective at the company, including insights from leadership and employees worldwide.

The panelists spoke on the topic, "People First: The Crucial Role of Investing in Employees in Challenging Times," during the virtual conference (photo by From Day One)

“We created a video that highlights DocuSign with a global view, including a message from our CEO and our president of growth, but also including employees from around the world talking about their roles [day-to-day],” Berry said. The initiative aims to attract and engage new talent, focused on increasing diversity and accelerating career development.

One very successful employee engagement initiative was a company-wide hackathon, designed to foster cross-functional collaboration and innovation. The event involved over 550 employees from around the world put into teams from different functions to help develop different types of thought leadership and foster a differentiated employee experience.

“Through the hackathon, we had 110 projects,” she said. “The goal was to bring our values to life, particularly our innovation value, our simplicity value, our trust and unity value, and, of course, our customer focus value. And as a result, we had 30 plus teams and winners from around the world that were recognized for their efforts to deliver hacks that will ultimately be assessed for particular potentiality of getting a patent.”

The CEO was thrilled with what our employees were able to deliver, Berry says. Beyond the hacks, the shared vision and engagement was everything.

Employee Retention

Chedraui encompasses three grocery chains: Smart & Final, El Super, and Fiesta. Joe Tischbern, VP of talent development and engagement at Chedraui U.S.A., says recruitment isn’t the issue. With 25,000 across its grocery stores, the issue is retaining talent. “It’s not hard at an entry level to get a lot of people to apply for jobs. My very unique career path is that I went from cashier a lot of years ago, I won’t say how, long ago, to vice president today. And one of the things we try to do is help people find themselves,” he said.

Some who start at entry level in college may not initially think it will be a long-term gig. But then there are others who wonder if there are opportunities if they stay. Can they move up? How? So they’ve created career paths so employees can better see how to get there.

“We do it very intentionally,” Tischbern said. The results have been promising. “While we might have very high turnover at entry level, we have much lower turnover once people get to, let’s say, full time status, and then move toward management, very low turnover, because people can see the career path for them.”

The company went through a lot of changes in the past several years, following the purchase of El Super and Fiesta. Each of the three grocery store chains had unique ways of doing things, and they had to come together into one corporate office.

“The interesting moment was when we all moved into the office together, and we had to look at each other and say, Okay, how are we going to go to work?” There wasn’t a lot of trust at first, which was understandable. So they implemented a learning program so they could all learn together.

“What we found was that as people learn together, their walls start to come down.” They also involved store leaders and developing core values. Turns out, they all mostly wanted the same things. But to have that ownership and trust was invaluable.

On the corporate side, one of the companies was used to having a lot of meetings, but another one had hardly any. So they had to look at the reasoning behind them. Do we need them all? Or are there any key collaborations we’re missing?

“Now they’ve found a happy medium. And I think that was one of the, one of the beautiful moments that we saw as we came together.”

Leadership Development

ThinkHuman is a leadership development organization, including cohort-based programs and executive coaching for senior leadership. Founder and CEO Meredith Haberfeld says they have the opportunity not only to hear their own employee challenges, but also facets of what clients are facing.

“We are hearing much more from the collective employee voice, the desire for security. If you imagine the pendulum swing, there are times where it's a growth economy,” she said. In times like those, people are thinking about their next job opportunity. But the pendulum has swung the other way. “Right now, it is much more of a mode of, how do I ensure that the company is secure and my job is secure, and that I'm doing the right things to have an important place here over time?”

Along with that, employees want transparency. They want employers that are honest about the state of the business and the work. Employees always want a sense of community inside the workplace, and focusing on managers and leaders can help to make that happen. They must intentionally focus on creating that sense of community within the organization, she says.

“People leaders are really coming to understand they have to create that interconnectivity within their teams and cross functionally. That really strengthens the fabric for people to feel like, oh, I have a place here that I can feel inside this community.

Since the pandemic, ThinkHuman saw a lot of investment in frontline managers who were the core of the teams, so companies needed to equip them with proper training and the tools to be the leaders they needed to be.

A few years past the pandemic, that has shifted somewhat. Now, there has also been a push on investment in senior leaders, rather than frontline managers. “I think with the global uncertainty and election year, we’re seeing a lot of more conservative approach to how people are running their business and employees wanting security and transparency.”

That’s good, she says, but companies should not forget about their managers. Leadership development at all levels is key, as it trickles down to employees and helps put them first.

Carrie Snider is a Phoenix-based journalist and marketing copywriter.

Building a Culture of Well-Being in the Workplace

Several high-profile employers have lately dropped their hybrid work policies and are calling workers back to the office, and some are doing so in the name of culture. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is facing a potential “employee revolt” after he announced in mid-September that all workers would have to be in-office five days a week starting January 2025, reversing a policy in place since the pandemic. In the official announcement, Jassy claimed the decision is intended to strengthen the company culture.His reasoning may be misguided. According to research from Gallup, the way employees are managed is four times more important than their work location when it comes to employee engagement and well-being. “Essentially, it’s the relationships workers have–with their coworkers, managers, leaders and organization–that are significantly evolving,” Gallup’s report reads. “Many organizations are radically retooling the ways they do business, leaving many employees, including managers, stressed and disconnected.”The employee experience is felt at the team level, said Steve Arntz, co-founder and CEO of workplace social connection platform Campfire. “Probably 70% or more of what you experience from a culture standpoint is built on your team, with your manager, with the people you work with directly.”Arntz was part of a discussion on cultivating well-being through workplace culture during From Day One’s September virtual conference, where panelists discussed preserving culture during major disruptions and how to find opportunities for reinforcing well-being.Protecting Employee Well-Being During Times of Great ChangeGuiding and preserving company culture is especially difficult during enterprise-wide changes, like mergers and acquisitions or major leadership overhauls.Cile Lucas is the director of culture and team member experience at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. When HPE prepares for acquisitions, she works with the M&A and the corporate development teams to assess how the workforces will mesh. Using standardized questionnaires, they assess both HPE and the incoming company, “so we know the potential issues we could have when those employees join, and we can put mitigation plans in place.” Lucas said that, most importantly, she focuses on what the teams have in common, not what separates them.HPE is slated to acquire networking firm Juniper Networks later this year, bringing in 11,000 new employees. “There’s been a huge culture assessment,” Lucas said. “We sent an extensive survey to our employees, talking about our specific culture. We have a culture workstream that’s part of the integration team to talk about, ‘How do we marry those two? How do we need to rethink what our culture looks like based on their behaviors?’”VF Corporation–the company that owns a cache of footwear and apparel companies including Timberland, Vans, and The North Face–saw a major leadership change in the last year, and in the headwinds, the HR team held fast to the company values, trying to maintain a sense of consistency for employees. “Talent can be an incredible way to embed, support, and elevate culture,” said Lauren Guthrie, the company’s chief belonging and talent officer. “It’s really important to make sure we’re building leaders that are culture-builders as well, that they’re thinking about the culture of their most immediate teams, and that they’re considering their leadership development and acumen an important part of their performance–just like any other easy-to-quantify aspect of technical performance.”Listening to Employee Resource GroupsAt one of the world’s largest data center operations, Equinix, the VP of global rewards Todd Cowgill works with employee resource groups to improve the company’s benefits packages and make them more user-friendly.“Some of our groups were having challenges utilizing the services,” he said. “So for key problems and situations, we built out use cases and storyboards.” For instance, for employees dealing with long-term health matters, Cowgill’s team identified all sources of support: the people within the organization who can help, the company’s short-term and long-term disability programs, and available psychological support services. “We had all the services that the people needed, they just couldn’t figure out how to stitch it all together,” Cowgill said. It was their ERGs that showed them those services needed stitching.The panelists spoke about "Cultivating Well-Being Through Workplace Culture"Workers are a valuable resource for discovering gaps in well-being resources, like access to medical care, preventative medicine, and early interventions. Employees should be empowered to ask for the things they need, said Victoria Lee, the SVP and chief medical officer at Lucid Diagnostics, a company that offers testing for esophageal cancer risk. But, like Cowgill found, not all workers will readily know what to press for or what’s already available to them. “Education is really critical when people think about workplace well-being and mental health. A lot of people don’t really think about disease until they’re suffering from symptoms,” said Lee.She believes employers have an obligation to fill the gaps created by healthcare deserts. For instance, depending on location, some workers may have access to highly specialized screening tests, while others may be hundreds of miles away from care. “So, how do we level the playing field when it comes to something as important as preventative medicine, making it accessible to everyone?” Lee posed. Lucid brings testing to offices, so even those without local access to care can get screenings they need.ERGs are rich channels for identifying well-being needs, but they’re easily overburdened. At VP Corporation, Guthrie retooled the company’s resource groups to reallocate work and divert responsibilities to the right parties. Their ERGs had become “catch-alls” for culture transformation, policy reinvention, and brand feedback. They even stood in for consumer focus groups.“We wanted to re-anchor them around the promise that every associate in our company should be able to feel an authentic sense of belonging and be celebrated for the uniqueness they bring to the organization,” she said. Brand leaders are now assigned ro consumer engagement and brand feedback strategies, the company’s DEI team is in charge of getting employee feedback and converting those ideas into policies, and ERGs have a new name: belonging communities. “Let’s call them what they are,” Guthrie said. “They sit at the intersection of associate experience and well-being through the lens of belonging.”Very often, balancing employee well-being against business goals takes a good deal of commitment from HR, but considerably more from business leaders who answer to the P&L. “You don’t max out productivity and preserve well-being at the same time,” said Arntz. As the CEO of a venture-backed company, Artnz says he’s guilty of trying to achieve both peak output and peak well-being. “We have investors, we’ve raised money, and we need to provide a return on that investment.” To stave off burnout, don’t aim for the maximum, aim for the optimum, he said. Something closer to 70% is a better goal than 100%. “Let’s keep space for connection, for collaboration, for innovation, for well-being, and for breathing.”Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about work, the job market, and women’s experiences in the workplace. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Quartz, Fast Company, and Digiday’s Worklife.

Why Being “Fiercely Authentic” Is Part of a Company’s New Set of Values

Marta Pateiro, head of organizational development, diversity, inclusion and culture at Pernod Ricard, cites her immigrant background as being instrumental in her approach to corporate culture. Her mother arrived in the U.S. from Spain with an infant Marta, just $200 in her pocket, and little understanding of the English language.“That cultural perspective and growing up with a family that struggled early on but did everything they could to live that American dream is what shaped me and how I think about culture – always appreciating people’s perspectives, where they come from, understanding who they are, how they were raised, and what’s important to them,” Pateiro said.Now, Pernod Ricard, a long-established company, is rolling out a new set of values to define its culture, based on employee feedback and its corporate evolution. During a fireside chat at From Day One’s September virtual conference, Pateiro spoke about how inclusion, connection, and a passion for challenge are being woven into the fabric of the organization.Seizing the Current Cultural MomentPateiro has always been drawn to companies that encourage authenticity. “I always think about aligning myself to organizations that give you that opportunity to show up as who you are, and that celebrate differences,” Pateiro said. But pre-pandemic, that was harder to achieve, she says. “We were living in a time where it was a very different mindset,” Pateiro said. During and after Covid, technological advances in corporate communications and connectivity have allowed employees to engage on a deeper level and access services that can be more personalized.Megan Ulu-Lani Boyanton of the Denver Post spoke with Marta Pateiro of Pernod Ricard during the fireside chat (photo by From Day One)Corporate values are also becoming increasingly important to job candidates, especially younger generations. “We hope that drives more candidates to us,” she said. One way the organization brings its values to life is through videos on its career website to make sure it’s attracting the right talent.Launching Updated Corporate ValuesPernod Ricard recently launched its new set of corporate values, while also reminding the team that some of them are not actually so new, referring to them as “legacy values.” “They’re still tied to things that are important to the business, but they're updated to reflect where we are today in this global economy. It’s an evolution,” she said.Pateiro suggests that most companies review their values every five to ten years, just as Pernod Ricard did. It’s important to ask questions like, “Does this actually match up with what we’re doing today? Is this aligned to our business priorities? Do they align to our people?” she said.For the bottom-up approach, they collected employee feedback in a uniquely personal way. “They asked employees to send videos of a day in the life as a Pernod Ricard employee,” Pateiro said, citing videos that came from the factory floor, corporate offices, and work-from-home set ups. Over 3,000 videos came in, with employees citing how they feel about the company and what is most important to them.For the top-down approach, “the leadership team got together to say, ‘Where do we see ourselves in the next three to five years, from a business strategy standpoint? And so, in order to be successful, what does that look like?’” Pateiro said.After data collection and intense brainstorming and analytics, the company came up with four core values:Grounded in the real. “We are a business that has soul,” Pateiro said. The phrase also cleverly refers to how the liquor company literally makes its products, with plants that come from the ground. Fiercely authentic. “Everyone was proactive in sharing how important it was to feel like they could bring their whole selves to work. That was a key theme that came up in almost every video,” Pateiro said.Connected beyond borders. Employee videos came in from 770 locations around the world. “We are global, and that's important. We need to make sure that we are open to the world and open to understanding the different diversities and perspectives that come with that,” Pateiro said.Passion for challenge. “It is a different time coming out of Covid,” Pateiro said. “There are different socioeconomic changes that impact how we are doing business today.”Becoming “Fiercely Authentic”“What does it mean to be ‘fiercely authentic’ on the job?” asked moderator Megan Ulu-Lani Boyanton, neighborhoods reporter for The Denver Post. It doesn’t mean workers can just boldly say whatever they are thinking without consequence. Instead, “it just gives them the permission to feel psychologically safe,” said Pateiro. “We still have our integrity around respect for one another, understanding that we are still colleagues, and we still need to be professional, but making sure that they feel empowered.”The word choice for the values was carefully aligned to the language used by employees in the videos, reflecting the intention and emotion behind their feedback.Measuring the ImpactPateiro said Pernod Ricard is scheduling pulse checks over the next few years to monitor the success of the new value system. After launching the values at a town hall, a survey was immediately sent out to see if employees understood what was happening. “In the coming quarters [we’ll ask], ‘Is this living up to what you were expecting?’ How are you receiving it?’” Then a new category regarding culture will be added to the annual employee survey.Defining, launching, and monitoring values is not a communications department task, Pateiro says, but instead falls into the category of change management. “It’s [about] how you change mindsets and how you change your customers’ perspectives,” she said. “It’s living it through the products, the solutions, the things that you’re offering, as well as how you’re showing up in the marketplace.”Ultimately, Pateiro emphasizes, the values should be driven by the employees – whether you are working with a long-established corporation or a startup. “It’s your workforce that makes your culture,” she said. “The organizations that do the best are the ones that tie that cultural framework to every part of the ecosystem.”Katie Chambers is a freelance writer and award-winning communications executive with a lifelong commitment to supporting artists and advocating for inclusion. Her work has been seen in HuffPost and several printed essay collections, among others, and she has appeared on Cheddar News, iWomanTV, On New Jersey, and CBS New York.

How to Upgrade Company Culture—And Make It Stick

“For years, I had a front row seat for how lack of culture or toxic culture can have an incredibly negative impact on an organization. The seat that I had was defending organizations in the court of law, in front of judges and juries,” said Elaine Becraft, the head of human resources for Siemens Healthineers, a branch of Siemens that makes the machines that carry out a lot of the diagnostic blood and urine testing around the world. She learned that the distance from no culture to toxic culture isn’t very far.Becraft, a lawyer by training, was no longer interested in playing defense as problems materialized, nor did she want to lead the clean-up crew following a culture-related disaster. She wanted to be proactive in creating a motivating and inclusive culture, so she joined HR. “I felt like we could do better.”I interviewed Becraft for a fireside chat during From Day One’s September virtual conference on creating a healthy and durable culture. She told the story of how the company upgraded its company culture, and instituted processes to make it last.How to Rewrite Company Culture–And Make It StickIf Becraft was to avoid playing defense or repeating post-incident disaster relief, she knew that Siemens Healthineers had to upgrade its culture: to state its purpose, name its values, and identify the behaviors that reinforce them. But where to begin?“So often you see companies where it’s top-down: Maybe somebody in the C-suite is in charge of developing culture, or the CEO says, ‘I’ve got this great idea, let’s just run with it.’ We went about it a little bit differently.” Becraft is responsible for 15,000 employees in more than 60 countries; to change the culture, she needed buy-in from more than just the C-suite. So she found high-potential talent much lower in the organization and brought them in to debate the purpose and vision for the company.Ultimately, they needed to arrive at something that people would enthusiastically adopt, that “when somebody says, ‘Why do you work for Siemens Healthineers? Why are you excited to be there?’ is the kind of rallying cry that gets employees really excited.” They arrived at this: Pioneer breakthroughs in healthcare for everyone, everywhere, sustainably. That was step one.Step two was identifying the company’s values: Listen first, win together, learn passionately, step boldly, and own it. They deliberately wrote them in the understood first person–that is, “I” and “we” statements–“so my team can come together and talk about whether we are exhibiting these values. At the end of each year in my performance review, I have to talk about whether I’m exhibiting these values.”It takes more than a memo from the top to spread the culture and its reinforcing behaviors throughout a global organization. To grow culture rhizomes–a live system that perpetuates a healthy culture season after season–find the influencers. “Sometimes the influencers are obvious in the org chart, they’re at the top, but sometimes they’re not as obvious, and you have to get to know who’s going to carry your message because they believe in it too.”Journalist Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza interviewed Elaine Becraft of Siemens Healthineers during the fireside chat (photo by From Day One)If the company was to reinforce and reward employees who embody the company purpose and values, then they’d have to reinstate formal performance reviews, which had been retired almost a decade ago, long before Becraft arrived.Of course, change management is easier imagined than done. When leaders told her they wanted a formal mechanism to hold their teams accountable to the new values, Becraft assumed they were asking for performance reviews. It was a humbling experience for the new HR head.“I left out of the gates with my team full of gusto to make this happen,” she said. “But a lot of people in the organization resisted the idea of reintroducing performance ratings.” The strongest resistance came from HR teams. “I thought, they just don’t get it. For 30 seconds, I allowed myself that awful thought. Then I realized that I don’t get it. These are the individuals who, eight years prior, had been the face of this radical evolution revolution to get rid of performance ratings, and now I was asking them to do something different that could be perceived as failure.” She had to slow down and convince the HR teams the idea was worthwhile.Despite the good and necessary attitude change, Becraft wishes she hadn’t let the naysayers have so much of her attention. “At one point, a senior leader said to me, ‘Why are you trying to win every single person over with this? You never will.’” At a certain point, you have to decide what you’re going to do, then do it. There will always be someone who refuses to change their mind.“It’s not possible–and it’s not even appropriate–to strive for one culture, especially in a global organization like ours,” she said, reflecting on the enterprise-level change. “But our common language has really helped us to be consistent. We have our purpose. We know why we jump out of bed, or at least why we log in, in the morning. We are there to impact patients in a positive way. We also have the wording, the vernacular, the phraseology that we use in our values. We practice them with each other, and that really helps.”Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about work, the job market, and women’s experiences in the workplace. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Quartz, Fast Company, and Digiday’s Worklife.

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