Maral Kazanjian, chief people officer at Moody's Corporation, will always remember her first day back after a stint with another company.

“It was like rejoining your family or coming back to your college reunion where everyone knows you and cares about you and is so just happy to see you,” she said during a fireside chat at From Day One’s Manhattan conference. “I wish every person going to work could feel that included and welcome for who they genuinely are, because I really felt it in that moment.”

Kazanjian, interviewed by Emma Hinchliffe, senior writer for Fortune, says that Moody’s cornerstone value is to invest in every relationship. “And what that really meant to us is me talking with you, me engaging a vendor, a colleague,” she said. “How I show up what I do matters. And the way I do it matters just as much.”

Rebranding Human Resources

One way Moody’s invested in relationships with its employees was by rebranding the human resources department as the people department. “We didn’t want HR to be perceived as a back-office personnel function,” Kazanjian said. “We knew that truly we have a SaaS business, but our product, everything about what we do is our people.”

In other words, “the crux of our business is our human capital. And to be an effective human capital function means understanding your business and driving activity that reinforces the things that matter. And for us, that’s trust and relationships.”

Leaders at Moody’s work hard to ensure that every experience within the employee lifecycle, from hiring to talent growth to compensation and benefits, “matters in that value proposition of building a place that you can trust and rely on, and that we can trust and rely on,” Kazanjian said. In turn, that helps Moody’s customers have confidence in the corporation.

What Employees Value Most

Employees like to feel they are connected to doing something that matters to the mission of the company, says Kazanjian. “I hear a lot about, ‘How do we tell the story of what we’re doing to our people and to each job, so they feel like they have a purpose and getting up and doing what it is they have to do,” she said.

Team members also need a sense of psychological safety, which leads to a company operating with integrity. “If you feel safe, you can call out something that feels off to you,” she said. “If you don’t feel safe, you are not going to call it out with the same confidence and comfort.”

Kazanjian emphasized the importance of focusing on the whole employee experience. Leaders at Moody’s recognize that “work is just one component of your life, and no one’s life is the same every day. It’s incumbent on us as a company to create a space that enables people to achieve the goals of the company, while living a life that is as rich as they want it to be.”

The Importance of Inclusion

When Kazanjian rejoined Moody’s in early 2022, one of the first things the leadership team discussed was diversity, equity and inclusion. “We hired a new officer and spoke about the title of that job,” she said. Each aspect of DEI is vitally important, but it starts with inclusion, says Kazanjian.

Moody’s did a lot of rebranding around the idea of inclusion. One of the results was a video posted on the corporate website titled “Stand for Inclusion.”

In the video, they “show vignettes of all different kinds of people at Moody's who look different, who have different experiences, who come from different backgrounds,” Kazanjian said. “We talk about how that mosaic of different people is what creates the richness of our business.”

Having a diverse group of employees gives Moody’s the broadest perspective of insights. “But it also lets every person know no matter where you come from, you are safe here and you are welcome here.”

Mary Pieper is a freelance writer based in Mason City, Iowa.