In this CHRO Perspective episode Tania Garrett, chief people officer at Unit4, shares how organisations can deliver a strong employee experience during periods of significant change.
Tania reflects on how Unit4’s shift to cloud-based services has reshaped the way people work and why employee experience must continuously evolve alongside business transformation. She explains how flexibility, connection and purpose need to coexist in a hybrid world, and why listening to employees is more important than relying on assumptions or one-size-fits-all programmes.
The conversation explores how Unit4 measures employee experience beyond simple attrition metrics, the role of engagement surveys and referrals, and why purpose and values are foundational to trust and engagement. Tania also shares three practical principles HR leaders can use to design employee experiences that remain relevant as expectations continue to shift.
A good employee experience is about being able to equip the business to focus on what matters to everybody while at the same time being prepared to be more agile given that priorities and needs are constantly evolving in organisations today, says Tania Garrett.
As chief people officer at Unit4, Garrett is laser focused on the employee experience as the company moves from a traditional software business to a cloud-based one. This, she says, is a “huge change” not just in terms of products and customers but also how its people support its customers.
What this means, she says, is that “we have to take our people on that journey of change. And it also means that we have to think constantly about our employee experience and how we keep our people engaged as we go through that level of change with them.”
Garrett is something of an expert in employee experience, having previously led international employee experience at Adobe, well-known for excellence in this area. In this video interview she discusses how Unit4 is developing a flexible working environment and fostering social connection in a hybrid world, what good and bad employee experience looks like and what metrics are best to measure employee experience today. Plus discover her top three tips for creating an excellent employee experience in your organisation.
About Tania Garrett
Tania oversees the company’s people success function where she is responsible for talent acquisition, learning & development, compensation & benefits, as well as regional HR field teams. Tania brings more than two decades of human resources experience, spanning various industries and geographies within established industry leading organisations and is well versed in providing HR leadership in international high-growth businesses. Throughout her career she has helped to guide companies through complex acquisitions and mergers and has a proven track record in organisational design, as well as leading multi-location teams to deliver high level employee experience.
Tania joined Unit4 from Adobe where she led international employee experience, covering the EMEA, APAC and Japan regions. Prior to joining Adobe, Tania held the position of group HR director for a legal services organisation and also worked for Experian as HR director across EMEA. Before that, she was head of HR and HR services at Towers Watson, a leading global professional services company. Her career started at Valspar, culminating in the role of human resources director across EMEA and India.
Transcript
Why employee experience matters during constant change
All businesses are kind of undergoing a lot of change at the moment and I think Unit4 is no different. And I think technology companies are also very high on the change agenda. So it does work well. I think Unit4 is on its own change as a business.
We're moving from a sort of more traditional software company that operates with, sorry for the technology language, but from an on-prem business and moving to the cloud. And that is a huge change, not just in terms of the products and our customers, but also our people and how they think about how they support our customers.
And what that means is we have to take our people on that journey of change. And it also means that we have to think constantly about our employee experience and how we keep our people engaged as we go through that level of change with them.
What a strong employee experience looks like in a hybrid world
A good employee experience is finding the balance and being able to equip the business to focus on what matters to everybody, but at the same time being prepared to be more agile given that priorities and needs are constantly evolving.
We're doing some interesting things around our people experience that may, I think on the face of it, feel somewhat diametrically opposed. So we are focusing on things like creating a flexible work environment - giving people the opportunity to work how they want and where they want, obviously within reason on the 'where' front. But also making sure that people still have that local connection.
Balancing flexibility with connection and belonging
And that's one of the things we hear a lot of, which is I want that flexibility, but I also want connectivity. So we're having to really balance that out and make sure that both of those things can co-exist.
So we are very much promoting the flexible working environment. So we have a programme called Flex4U, which means first of all, unlimited holidays so people can take holidays they want. They can work where they want, again within reason.
We all know there's some complexity around that challenge. And then they can flex their days based on what they need to do. And so we have a really flexible approach. But having said all of that, some of the feedback that we get through the survey is people are missing that social interaction.
And so that's the biggest thing I think we are struggling with and other companies are struggling with. And one of the things that we've done, again not particularly revolutionary, but we've created social committees in our locations and said to our employees, look, you own this. You decide what your local teams want to do.
If you want to get together in the summer or over the winter holidays or whatever it might be, here's a budget. You go figure it out. You decide what is the right thing for you locally, but whatever it is that drives connectivity, then this is on you to arrange. And people are doing things from things in the community together or they're having parties or whatever it might be.
But we are trying to foster that social connection as well as offering this hybrid world, which again that was what they told us. And so really good feedback from some of the people in the business.
How to measure employee experience beyond attrition
I do think that a good employee experience means that you can't just centre on one type of employee and we have to make sure that we are listening all the time.
And I think one of the things that we do really well at Unit4 is we listen. So we have a weekly engagement survey, which probably feels like a lot, but we get really good input from our people through those surveys, which really allows us to understand how they feel, what they're experiencing, what they want us to do more of, what they want us to do less of.
I think the engagement survey really matters. We get really good data from that survey. It allows us to not just get ideas from the teams but also to really track our overall engagement so we can see how people are feeling in general.
And I think it just gives us a really good overall metric and barometer of the engagement levels in the business. So, I think engagement surveys, used well, are a really good metric. I've seen them used really well and I've seen them used as a bit of a tool to bash leaders with and I don't think that's right.
And I think there are other sort of softer things that we look at as well. Things like our internal recruitment numbers. Looking at referrals oddly. I know that that might seem like an odd one as well but I think if we are getting a decent amount of our open vacancies filled by referrals from our own employees that's a really good sign that people are willing to promote the business and promote employment with us to their friends, to their family, whomever it might be. So I think even those kind of softer things are important.
And we can't do away with things like attrition but I think attrition is becoming much less of a metric to measure as it relates to overall engagement or happiness because, as you and I have discussed before, the tenure of employees is getting shorter. I don't think we are all the way there with people just turning jobs every 12 months of course, but it's definitely getting shorter and I think it's much more acceptable that people leave after two years or three years. And therefore attrition becomes a little bit crude because often it's viewed as a negative if you have high attrition whereas actually going forward, attrition needs to be understood.
I think you need to understand why your people are leaving and are they good leavers, are they leaving as a happy person, as opposed to just being super upset because your attrition is at 20% or whatever it might be. So I think attrition is still an incredibly useful metric. I think it's how you dig into that and what you do with that data that's going to change on a going forwards basis.
Why purpose and values shape engagement
I think engagement goes beyond benefits. It goes beyond wellness days. It really speaks to does the company have a mission? And not your old-fashioned kind of mission statement, but what does the company stand for and what are the values of the organisation?
And if you have that and you can communicate that to your employees and you can harness their energy around those things, I think that goes a long way to driving engagement. And I would say Unit4 do that very well. We have four very important values and we harness them. We communicate and we try to make sure that everybody understands them, therefore they can operate within this kind of almost DNA framework.
Where I've worked before where it hasn't worked well is that has been missing. There's not been a consensus around what is the company here for? What are we trying to achieve? What are our values? And when that's missing, everything else is very difficult. You can tack on benefits, you can tack on engagement things but absent a really shared understanding of what we are all here to do, I think absent that it's very difficult to drive employee engagement. And that's where I've seen it done badly, where that's missing.
Practical principles for designing employee experience
So I think first and foremost I go back to, and I know I keep repeating this, but I think it's understanding the purpose of your company and what values are really going to enable that purpose and actually bring that to life. And I think that's your starting point because as we said before if you then put in place a whole bunch of engagement things, which people feel either they're disingenuous or they're too many and they don't make sense to them, then I think they won't have the impact necessarily that you want.
So I think understanding the purpose and the values of your business, and if you don't have them, establish them, work with senior leadership and your CEO to establish that and make sure it's clear and make sure it's something that everyone in the business really understands.
I think the second thing is listening to your employees. They're the ones who assess the employee experience. So don't make assumptions for them. So many people think that employee experience or engagement is an HR thing. It's so wrong. We can create the programmes, we can come up with creative ideas, but the reaction to them and the assessment of your employee experience, that sits with your people. So listen to them. They'll give you great feedback. They will help shape your employee experience. They'll help guide you in terms of things that are going to work and not work. So listening is absolutely critical.
And I think the last thing for me is be ready to iterate and change. What works this year or next year probably won't work the year after.As we said before, the last kind of three years have been so, so crazy with changes and things that happened that none of us could have predicted. So we all had to pivot our employee experience, right? So I think we had to get used to that notion of we live in a much more fluid world.
We live in a world where people have choices. We live in a world where people expect more from their employers than just going in 9-5 and being paid. And therefore we have to be ready to listen, ready to iterate and ready to change and be okay with it.
About the author
