#80 Elevating employee experience: Director of EMEA Solutions at Qualtrics, Sally Winston

0:00I think for me, it's the shift towards a space where you can understand how people are feeling without sending them surveys. I think that is quite a fundamental shift in how we think about experience management.

0:19Employee experience is essentially the holistic perception that employees have of their interactions with an organization through their entire journey from recruitment and onboarding through to daily work experiences and beyond. In essence, EX is the foundation upon which a thriving, innovative and competitive business can be built. We really wanted to get an expert on to talk about this fascinating subject and what a guest we have. Sally Winston has quite literally lived and breathed this space since graduating with a psychology degree back at the turn of the millennium. And fast forward to today, Sally is now the director of EMEA Solutions at experience management specialist Qualtrics.

1:01Sally gives us some incredible insight on how leaders from organizations of all shapes and sizes can transform employee experience. We decode the differences between millennials and Gen Zs in the workplace. We define what burnout is and how to spot its signs and what strategies to use for prevention. And we also touch upon some of the biggest employee experience blunders that companies can make and how to avoid them. Sally is a brilliant speaker, very easy to listen to. I'm sure you will agree. It is employee experience expert, Sally Winston.

1:42Thank you so much for coming on the Tech Leaders podcast, Sally. I've been really excited to talk to you. Employee experience is not a subject that I know an enormous amount about, but I am a director of a company and we've got 25 employees. So it's something that I definitely feel like I need to know more about. So thanks for coming on. How are things with you in sunny Dublin today? They're good. Yeah, I'm in Dublin for an offsite and bringing all of my team together. All 60 people from across Europe all coming together for a couple of days. So it's nice to be here with all of the teams. Let's start with a bang then.

2:14The opening question that I always start with. What does good leadership mean to you, Sally? I think for me, a lot of what good leadership looks like revolves around empathy and the ability to lead, and drive a business forward whilst also bearing in mind that the people that you're working with are individuals and humans and everything that you are doing should be built on that basis and I think as someone who's spent most of my career in EX that would be pretty fundamental to how I think about leadership I think the best leaders that I've worked with have really got that balance between you know let's make hard decisions drive the business forward but do so in a way that's empathetic to the people working and within the organization and really brings them on board and on the journey with you.

2:59I think that's key for me. Yeah, that's a great answer. I think empathy is at the core of everything. How coachable is it, you know, the empathy piece? Is it, they talk a lot about emotional intelligence and stuff like that. Do you coach leaders in it at all in terms of developing things like empathy and EQ? Or is it something that you just think you either got it or you don't, you know? That's a great question. I think you either naturally lean into EQ or you don't naturally lean in. I do think it's something that can be learned though. And I think there's a lot of stuff that businesses can do to help individuals, I suppose, surface the things that would, you know, lead them down that path.

3:37Right. So I think you can. I think you can. Like I think it's a constant thing that people have to hone and learn. Even if you've even if you are quite on EQ, you still make mistakes. You still go in directions that don't fit with the perfect. But I think I do think there's a lot that can be done. You know, I've got a group of leaders working for me who are all quite different in personality. Some of them very technical, some of them way more strategic, but all really focusing on their people. And they do so through like, I mean, we will get on to kind of the company that I work for. Right. But we practice what we preach in terms of giving people the insights they need in order to make the right decisions for the people that work for them.

4:18So I think you can you can nudge people along that path, even if naturally it's not, you know, where they would usually go. Yeah, absolutely. That makes sense. Well, let's come back to that then. But in the meantime, can you maybe tell the listeners a little bit about yourself, about your journey from studying psychology, right up to becoming a leader in the field of employee experience and everything in between? Yeah, absolutely. So I started out doing a psychology degree around the time that lots of people did because of Cracker. That ages me slightly, but lots of people went into that space because, do you remember?

4:52With Robbie Coltrane. People wanted to do psychology because they wanted to be like criminal psychologists, right? And it was a huge... That's amazing. I used to love that. I don't know, exactly. And I think there was just a huge surge of people applying for psychology degrees at that moment in time, the late 90s. But when I actually started doing psychology, I think I very quickly lent into what was called workplace psychology, business psychology. It was very much like an emerging topic at the time when I was first studying, this idea that you could really understand and improve how people felt about their place of work.

5:29And there was something about that that just really resonated with me and led me down the path of thinking I wanted to work in that space, much more so actually than like some of the more traditional sides of psychology. I think also I was really keen to just get into work and get into business. And this was the fastest way to do that. So I went to work for a research agency that was one of the first companies really delivering what at that time were employee surveys. I stayed within that company for two decades. And throughout that period, employee surveys became employee engagement, which became employee experience.

6:06And it became something that every company did, as opposed to just the ones that were kind of at the front end of thinking around HR strategy. And it also became much more technology driven as a practice with organizations, you know, big organizations wanting to do things quickly, wanting to be able to access views and then distribute results super quickly to their stakeholders. And the technology that was used within that space moved very, very quickly. The company that I worked for was much more of a consulting firm and a research agency. And I think that's quite interesting in terms of my move into the world of tech.

6:41We had a technology division and I used to be responsible for building out the ideas and the designs of product. And then the technology team would build out the product and work in collaboration with the team that I led. And then it got to a point, I think, in the evolution of employee experience where a number of suppliers came into the space who were much more disruptive. Qualtrics, the company that I worked for, was one of them. And you could see that there was just a huge amount of innovation and investment going on, you know, like in many industries, right? Lots of industries were disrupted by groups of companies who just saw that they could do things better.

7:15And it became really clear that in order to progress personally in my career, but also in order to be part of the next wave of what employee experience would look like, I probably needed to join one of the tech companies that were operating in that space. As I was starting to think about that, I got approached by Headhunter to go and work for Qualtrics. Qualtrics were always at the front of my thinking in terms of who would I want to work for? Who do I think is going to kind of ride the next wave? Who would be exciting as a company to work for. And then I joined Qualtrics in 2019. We were called the solution strategists, and they are essentially a group of subject experts, most of whom come either from consulting backgrounds or who've worked in client organisations.

7:59And we essentially help companies understand what could your experience strategy look like? And then how could our technology fit into that strategy? What were the key milestones in your career that stand out and set you on the path that you ultimately ended up taking. What sort of stands out for you? That was a pivotal moment in my career. A lot of what I do now is about, this is a very high growth company, right? A high growth industry. So a lot of what I do is about introducing our solutions to new customers and very much working hand in hand with our business development team. And I, very early on in my career, I moved from consulting into sales and I spent quite a long time in sales and leading sales teams.

8:40And that I think was a pivotal moment because it taught me that I actually really loved the energy of that type of an environment. I love working with salespeople, leading salespeople. And I love the kind of designing out what the customer needs and then handing it over to someone else to actually deliver. And that was definitely pivotal. And what was interesting is my dad was a very senior salesperson in L 'Oreal. And I think I kind of got that gene from him. so selling something very different but um I think I just got the sales gene it's in my it's in my bones so I spent a long time working in sales and building out a sales team and then I moved into other roles within the company so I was putting I was usually put in charge of things that needed to grow or things that needed to change so I led out a consulting team I built out a practice focused around the public sector and for a while I then when we were acquired by an advertising agency, I then spent time thinking about how you could connect our solutions to the solutions of the advertising agencies.

9:46All of those moments, I feel, took me in different directions, let me test out different skill sets. Some of them involved leading teams of people, some of them didn't, which I think was really useful and actually kind of interesting because there were certain points in my career where I really wanted to lead people, certain points where I didn't I wanted to step away and do something else and then come back to that and I think that definitely with some of you know when I'm when I'm talking to people in my team about their career development and their career progression I try to iterate to them that it's really important that you don't see your career as just linear and that you take all the opportunities that come to you because they're how you find where your joy is and where your joy isn't and then you move on to that And where you find your joy is different depending on your life stage, I think, and the evolution of the company that you're working in.

10:38Yeah, no, absolutely. That makes total sense. So in terms of CX, what are the sort of key differences that have surprised you about when you moved into CX? Do you know what I mean? Was there anything? I didn't realize quite how different it was or whatever. What things stood out for you as being very different? I think, and this is one of the reasons why I think it's sometimes challenging in businesses for EX and CX teams to connect and to talk to each other. I think they come from very different perspectives. From a CX point of view, often a lot of the work originates in something that's quite operational.

11:11So a lot of the work that companies do in that space is about very productive, proactive fixes of customer experience problems. Whereas EX can come from quite a strategic viewpoint that in some businesses, some stakeholders might consider it a bit fluffy. It isn't. It absolutely isn't fluffy. Right. But it's often about big picture topics like learning and development and vision and connection of individuals to a company. And it's much more about big picture change than it is about individual in the moment interaction and engagement and change. And you're seeing those two things come much closer together.

11:47But I definitely think that is a big difference. I think also the people doing that type of work in the CX space are much more traditionally research savvy. So they, you know, they understand methodologies. You know, they come from a slightly different background. They're often much more hands on in how they want to use data and get kind of quite in the weeds with the data. Whereas EX people tend to be less naturally from that background, although we're seeing that we're seeing the two come together much more closely. I would say in the last couple of years. Yeah, sure. How have employee needs changed?

12:22Let's say in the last, I'm just trying to obviously put it in a timescale, but let's say in the last 10 years, what are the sort of most profound changes you've seen in what people need from their employers, I think is a better way to describe it. I think it shifts over time. There's a lot of talk in the EX space about different generations of employees. So you will have heard about the phrase millennials right millennials now actually are at a point when they're running businesses and we've now got the next generation gen z of and then i think we're on the generation after that now and often it's talked about in terms of how those generations expect different things from organizations they typically expect their careers to not be within one company right so they want they also want more opportunities to learn and develop quickly but their expectation is that they will then move on.

13:13We're seeing definitely a rise in the importance of purpose within businesses, businesses having like a very clear sense of strategic purpose, issues like climate change, etc. Very close to the hearts of people coming into the world of work and, you know, and others as well, right? It's not just something that young people care about. I think they would be two areas in the space in which in terms of technology, I think what's been really interesting for companies in terms of how they think about employees is individuals expect actually quite a high level of technical capability within organisations.

13:47They expect the tools that they're using within companies to be the same as the tools that they're using in the real world. They expect to be able to, you know, in our world, they expect to be able to share their views whenever they want to. They expect a quick reaction and a quick response. And they expect the technology that they're working with to work. And that's led to the rise of, you know, some more disruptive technology companies helping organizations structure their businesses in a way that, you know, it's not acceptable that your laptop wouldn't work, for example. There's some really interesting data on that topic around how employees will leave companies that don't have the technology that they need to help them do their jobs.

14:27I think patience has changed as well. I think the younger generations just want everything at their fingertips, don't they? What is the biggest difference, do you think, between millennials and Gen Z? I think it's interesting, right? Because I, as now an older person, I remember back to being at the start of my career and I think I was pretty impatient. So I'm not sure that impatience is really any different. You know, I think when you're at the start of your career, you want to know that you're progressing, but maybe that's just a personal thing. I think what the research suggests is that the next generation are more realistic than millennials were.

15:01Millennials are known as the generation that were really quite visionary. They had lots of expectations of adventure and opportunity and were very bold in their asking for that experience at work. Whereas this generation has grown up in a different time economically, which then, if you completely believe in this concept, right, because there's lots of debate over whether it exists or not, which then leads the new group of people to just be a bit more realistic about where do I want my career to go? So what company should I pick on the basis of stability, security? But also, am I confident that this company has got what it takes to survive disruption and to grow and develop in the future?

15:41I think that will manifest itself in the same types of themes. You know, people want career development. Yeah, sure. They want an opportunity to have a say. there's perhaps particularly post-COVID there's more expectation of work-life balance and that companies have more flexibility than previously I'd say the themes are similar but they just they shift depending on what's going on in the broader economic environment and climate. Yeah absolutely no I think that's a really that makes total sense so you mentioned COVID there obviously that's a bit of a ground-shifting moment for employee experience I mean everyone saw the difference, obviously the work from home revolution happened and lots of other things.

16:22What were the sort of biggest profound shifts that you sort of saw from that, from the pandemic and the ensuing two-year period that we're sort of in now? What's changed? Yeah, so I think the biggest shift that we saw in terms of employee experience measurement and the conversation about employee experience measurement was that companies very quickly shifted into a space where they embrace the idea of more continuous listening and faster paced, more reactive listening. And it was really interesting because we launched a product right at the beginning of COVID that was free for organisations to use.

16:56And it was called How Are You? And it was essentially just a really easy tool to just check in with how people were feeling. And it was picked up pretty much immediately by thousands of companies. And I think what it opened up is a door that was about, we can ask people simple, quick questions. We can get that quick feedback and we can do something about it and we don't need to treat this as an area that needs to be very well thought out and you know very well controlled etc so that was really exciting obviously since covid lots of the research that we did shows that there are fairly significant issues associated with burnout coming into the workplace blurring of the boundaries between work and home and you know obvious issues relating to just the broader context that people are living in and then now the the key theme is hybrid working and return to office and how do you get the balance right between really embracing the positives about what happened during covid in terms of flexibility and productivity with the benefits of being in the office as well and everything that that you know that brings yeah so burnout is something that i think personally i can only speak for myself when we shifted over to working from home then all of a sudden your house becomes your office.

18:12You must have heard this story a thousand times, but I really struggled with that and burnt myself out on multiple occasions by working for too long. It was kind of like the novelty of having a spare bedroom as an office. I just wasn't switching off. I was not switching off. I was constantly in a state of working. And it took me a while to really address that, you know what I mean? Come to terms with this hybrid working setup, because it changed a lot of people's lives, isn't it? So the question I have for you, Sally, is what is burnout? What signs do you look for in people to sort of identify that they are experiencing burnout?

18:48Yeah, so I think that I'm not a scientist, right? I'm not a doctor. And there are lots of different definitions of burnout that range from quite severe in terms of mental health issues towards more you know just a tendency towards individuals feeling like they're not entirely in control of you know and that they're um they've lost a sense they've lost a sense of control they might lose a sense of purpose and that they essentially just get to a place where they're exhausted by work and then you know there's more scientific definitions of how that shows up and what the implications and dangers of that are I think when people use the term burnout they're often more thinking about just that feeling of kind of complete overwhelm and overwork and you know we did some research that showed that a pretty significant proportion of people would identify themselves as being in that space where they just felt like they were completely exhausted and overwhelmed by the amount of work that they have to do and unable to kind of see the wood for the trees.

19:50Sure what signs do you look for then? When we think about data we kind of talk about there being three types of data that you can work with. And the bringing together of those data, those data on any topic gives you, you know, a sense of the reality of what's happening. So you've got operational data, and you've got behavioral data, and then you've got experience data. And a lot of what we do is about like bringing those three things together to really give like a holistic picture. We actually acquired a company at the beginning of this year, who really focused in on the behavioral data measurement space.

20:23And one of the things that they do, they track things that would show signs of burnout, like individuals working late hours or a number of emails sent outside of working hours, volume of conversation, volume of workload. If I'm looking at my team in particular, I would look at things like there's a certain number of customers that any one person in my team can confidently and comfortably handle before they get to a point where they're just completely overworked and overwhelmed. And I would look at data like that, right? If somebody's got, I don't know, they're having 20 conversations in a week.

20:59That's usually too many to be able to do a good job. And that then leads to a feeling of overwhelm and burnout. But there are tools and technologies that you can use to really properly track that kind of activity. I think there's a really interesting moment coming whereby there's all of this data available that you could do really good things with. But it's about how you balance that with employee privacy and make sure that you're using that information in the right way. That makes total sense. So in terms of your customers and companies you've dealt with in the past and heard about, what are the biggest employee experience mistakes that leadership teams and companies typically make, do you think?

21:37You don't have to land anyone in it, do you? I think there's a few things. So I think when we look at the employee journey, right, the life cycle from when you are attracted to a company, when you interview with a company, all the way through to when you leave, there's a period at the beginning of someone's career when from the moment they join for the first few months is absolutely fundamental to whether that person's going to be happy and successful within a business and I think there's I can think of multiple examples where companies have not fought hard enough and have not planned enough for that onboarding experience to be successful it's not just about like has the person got the stuff they need do they have the training they need have they got the support system it's also you know are they being regularly checked in on with their managers way more frequently than you would think they would need to be do they understand the vision are you already starting to talk to them about what their career opportunities could be and have you made the prom have you made promises during the interview stage that are just not materializing so that not taking enough care of the onboarding experience is definitely one area Yeah, absolutely.

22:44I think another one would be the role that leadership play in setting a really strong vision for a company is fundamental. We talk about this concept of engagement in our space, which is essentially as someone motivated, inspired, are they likely to stay? It goes way beyond, are they satisfied? Are they proud? Are they motivated, et cetera? Leadership plays a very crucial role in achieving that engagement. and that's about more regular communication, setting a clear vision and two-way dialogue with employees and feeling like you can have that, you can share your ideas and those ideas will be listened to.

23:22They would be kind of two really obvious ones, I would say. Can I ask you a question about number two before you come to number three? How typically does this work in terms of the dialogue with employees so that you can have that incremental improvement in the relationship between employer and employee? Do you do that sort of anonymously or do you typically, is it just a case of having one-to-ones and face-to-face conversations to get that feedback? Do you get that honest feedback loop? Yeah, I think it depends on the company and I think it depends on the leadership within that organization. It definitely depends how big the company is, right?

23:56If you're a small company, it should, in theory, be very easy to have that dialogue. And that's, you know, one of the things that shifts like from a start in the tech space from startup to, you know, scale up and then beyond that engagement and interaction and closeness of leadership really changes. So that's something that, you know, companies going on that journey need to really think about. It's almost always the case that companies now have some sort of system of anonymous feedback and of checking in with people anonymously. And, you know, that kind of mechanism is, I would say, almost always standard practice now.

24:32But I think you have to combine it, right, with opportunities to talk face to face and to build a relationship and to really kind of, you know, create that kind of culture of two-way feedback. But, yeah, it depends on the company. Yeah, of course not. Makes total sense. So sorry to derail you. You were just about to give me your third biggest mistake employees make around EX. The third mistake I think is to think of employees as like just a homogenous group who all think the same, care about the same, want the same. I think like we're not all the same. People have got different motivations, different things that they care about.

25:08There's a ton of stuff that you can do to really understand that. And I think you can set up all of these systems to create a great workplace. But if they're not tailored or able to be edited to what the individual needs, you're never going to really create a great experience for everyone because everybody needs different things. What's your thoughts on these systems? You mentioned systems there. I think one that had quite a profound effect on me was it's called strength deployment inventory, where you do a couple of questions and you do another series of questions. And basically it tells you whether you fall into three categories and then where you fall into the three categories.

25:42What's your thoughts on these type of tools and psychometric systems to manage people and have context around conversations around employee experience? Personally, I really value systems like that. We use one, which might be, I can't remember what it's called, but it might be similar to the one you were talking about where we think of colours, but there are four colours. So it's red, yellow, green, blue. I think there's tools that help teams understand themselves and help individuals understand themselves. I think they're really helpful. you know there's multiple different versions right and I think if you design your entire business or your entire team strategy around a tool like that you're probably not gonna be that successful but I think as an input I think they're really really helpful I've maybe is the same thing but I'm a very strong yellow red and I know that I lean more into red in times of stress and knowing that is really helpful and then also if I've got I've got people in my team who are much more blue or much more green.

26:39And it helps me to understand how to interact and engage with them when we're not quite gelling or when we're not quite communicating effectively. It's good to have that context, isn't it? And I think what it does give you, especially as a leader, it gives you a framework in which to deal with situations where employees will fall into certain categories, you know what I mean? And it's amazingly accurate in terms of what motivates people as well, you know what I mean? So if someone's more process-orientated, they're just more motivated by structure yes you know it's as simple as that so and it does work you know it's it's just you get the odd outlier who's impossible to categorize because they're their answers are all over the place but uh but yeah you can't have it all but they're usually the good ones they're ones that you can really crack you know they're what motivates them they're amazing you talked a bit about scale sally okay and i i'm really i'm a big believer in this i think company culture and scale.