The Survey After Three Years: How IDX Reset Employee Trust and Transparency

I have teams in the regions, so it was important to get from them not only what their concerns were, but also to get a sense of what's happening in your region. We kept it really broad and basic and we had a mix of multiple choice responses, mix of the ratings, like a 1 to 5. The survey was confidential, but you could always get a sense of what region the response came from. Welcome to Voice Activated, the podcast dedicated to unlocking the power of employee feedback. I'm Sean Fitzpatrick, founder of Telemap and your host. In each episode, we'll dive into real world examples and best practices, as well as some lessons learned from employee surveys, Pulse checks, focus groups, 360s and more. If people are at the heart of your business, you're in the right place. Expect open conversations, practical advice, inspiring stories from from companies that are getting it right, and some reflections from those who've hit a few bumps along the way. Tune in, listen up, and let's activate the voice of your employees. Today I'm joined by Veronik Robinson, Chief People Officer at idx, a digital first company that's redefining employee engagement. Veronik has led HR transformations across global teams and is passionate about using feedback to drive change in organizations. Today we'll discuss how leaders can ask the right questions and truly listen to their teams and involve employees in shaping the changes they want to see. Veronik, welcome to the show. How are you? I'm really good, thank you. Sean, tell me a little bit about your journey. How did you end up into this role? So you're now the Chief People Officer at idx and you've been in it for how long? For coming up to 12 months. 12 months now. So how did you come across this role? Were you at IDX before? Did you come from another organization? Just talk. How did you end up here and how'd you aspire to get into it? Well, I joined IDX in 2022 and I was the Talent Director for Europe when I joined and subsequently I got promoted up into the Chief people officer role 12 months ago. How did I hear about IDX? Well, I was reached out directly by their recruiter and I was just in a place where I was interested in exploring a new opportunity. We'd just come out of the lockdown restrictions in 22 in the UK and the most appealing was that it was an office where people were actually going into the office. And I had spent the previous two years and a couple years before that being kind of more or less fully remote. So the idea of working with People and feeling part of a team again was the most appealing. I didn't really what, what they did and that was sure interesting. Good, good. Tell me a little bit, Tell us a little bit about idx. So we know sort of the type of organization you're leading and what, what it looks like from a, from a, you know, people and talent perspective. Yeah, so we're a digital communications company. We're a great mix of people and different areas of business. But ideally I'd say that how we would describe ourselves is as a business that puts the clients first we specialize in. The core of our business is building and hosting websites, mainly for businesses that have IPO'd or are due to IPO. Right. So that was core of our business. But it's quite nuanced in the sense that we also build out with these websites a lot of content, strategy and design. So, you know, there are, there are a mix of people and different personality types within the business. Now we were just talking earlier and you talked about starting to think about employee listening and voice of the employee. When you just took on this role over the last 12 months, what did you have in place or what did you establish to get going around trying to tap into the voice of the employee? Well, when I became the chief people officer, one of the first things I wanted to do was actually understand how the employees felt about being at idx. Right. We had had some change in leadership and we hadn't actually had any engagement surveys or any real opportunities for employees to feed back to us for the three years prior. So. So I immediately launched a people survey. It was a global one because I felt it was really important for us as an exec team to know how people truly felt. It was confidential, 100%, as these things always are and should be. But it was also really important that the employees felt that they had a voice and that we would listen. You know, when you think about these types of surveys and when you're about to launch this, it'd be interesting to hear a little bit about executive alignment and intent and how you brought the rest of the C suite on board of leadership. And what conversations did you have? Did you, did you just sort of bring it up and say, okay, we're doing this, or did you have to get buy in from the rest of the team, Talk a little bit about that executive sort of alignment that is often so critical in these types of things? Well, I was really fortunate that, you know, I work with a C suite that are very open to employee communications and engagement. And feedback, but we just hadn't ever done these things before. Right. So it didn't take a lot of persuasion. I did kind of go in with it. This is my idea, this is what I'm planning to do. And it was more of a, you know, are there any objections? Right. But I didn't get any. We were about to hire in a new CEO at the time as well. And before he joined, I shared with him this is what we were doing and he was really on board with that. So there wasn't a lot of pushback, there was a lot of buy in because I think we all appreciated as well as the wider employee base going through change, the exec team themselves had gone through a significant change and we were able to sit around a table and speak about it quite candidly. But getting that feedback from the employees just wasn't happening. It was probably happening in pockets. They might speak amongst themselves, but then it wouldn't necessarily be informed, it would just be their opinion. And so what we wanted to do was understand what they were thinking, how they were feeling, so that we could then implement change wherever possible. So that's good. So there's a lot it seemed like wasn't because sometimes there's objections or concerns or someone have had that experience, but especially coming in with a new chief people officer, you and a new CEO, it really provides a real nice baseline for looking where you're at and what you know, what improvements you can make and measure some of those improvements going forward as you go back and ask and measure again in the future. I would think. Is that how you're thinking about it or what was sort of the thinking in terms of, you know, not just the one time, but you think about it as a journey or a period of time or a longer roadmap. Yeah, so it's exactly that. So I launched it earlier this year as the baseline prior to the CEO coming in because I wanted to understand what they felt about current leadership. And the intention is to use that as the baseline so that when we do more, we're able to look and see where we've improved, where the conversation, dialogue has changed. And more importantly, it was to show the employees, well, you, you told us X. So we acted and we made this change here or we implemented this new process or this new procedure because we heard and then we want to continue to do that and build upon it. And I'm sure that our challenges will change with each iteration of survey that we roll out. But you don't want to do it too Often. Right. Like you don't want to. They just feel like constantly I'm being asked to fill this out whilst also doing my day job. So it's, it's, it's periodically. We are looking to do another one in the new year. The new CEO has been in now for around six months. We've had a new CFO as well, and the business is definitely growing and taking a different direction. So we want to touch base with them again. But I'm hoping to do these at least as a minimum of twice a year. Oh, good. Yeah, you certainly don't want to do it too often. You know, employees are no problem providing feedback. They'll roll up their sleeves and give you all kinds of. As long as they have a belief and confidence that your, your team is going to, and the rest of the organization is going to do something with the results, they know that you're, you're not going to do everything because, you know, you get all kinds of feedback and, you know, some good, some like, okay, that's just impossible. We can never, you know, it would be nice to do that, but that just can't get there and they realize that. But to see, to see stuff happening really gives them confidence that, you know, they have a voice in the business and that's often really important. It'd be interesting to hear a little bit about questionnaires. How did you go about thinking about the design? Of the questions did you sort of take. Because there's all kinds of approaches to asking questions and the thinking of question. Did you customize any of them? Did you tweak any of them? Did you take it sort of some standard ones for, for business norms or benchmark norms out there? How did you go about thinking about the design? Well, we actually did it through Google Forms, so we didn't use a vendor that came with like a standard template of questions. So it was me and my team initially. We sat down and thought, well, what, well, what would we ask? Like, what would we like? What are our concerns? So I have a global team, it's seven of us, so it's quite a lean team. And we're in the different geographies. Right. So I asked them, you know, what are the questions you have? What are the concerns you have about the changes that have happened about the future of the business? And then I also asked the exec team, you know, so that was the basis for it. We, like, didn't have a standard template to roll out. It really was generally born out of what do we think they have Concerns about. And some of it we knew. Right. So it's, you get a sense of what people are talking about and what people have concerns about, especially from the people team, because we're usually the ones that get the pushback, you know, so we, we based it on what we wanted to know. And also, you know, some really obvious ones around. Right? Sure, yeah. Well known ones that have been studied or researched over the years. And, and you're right. Often, you know, you're right. The people team often has a pretty good sense. You know, you guys typically have a very close ear to the ground. So you, you know what some of the issues are. But what I find too, in a lot of times it either does two things. It, it's like, oh, you know what, that was more of a, of just a squeaky wheel that we heard a lot of. And maybe it wasn't as, or it confirms what you sort of intuitively felt through dialogue in the grapevine. But, but now you have data to accelerate decisions and give you more confidence in maybe decisions around talent and talent policies and programs and initiatives. So it does a couple of things. Can dispel myths, but also reconfirm what you have a good feeling for but don't always 100% know. And the data really helps you move that. I know idx and maybe you've experienced that, you've worked at IBM also some really big global companies and IDX has staff in, you know, the UK over, over in America, in India. Have you, how did you think about looking at the data? Because how they perceive the workplace in India might be very different from in the UK than from, you know, the US and, and so on. So, you know, did you, how did you approach that? Because that could be sometimes challenging around the different cultural, you know, expectations and norms of how people expect the workplace to be. Well, I have teams in the regions. Right. So that's why it was important to get from them not only what their concerns were or what questions they had around the business, but also to get a sense of what's happening in your region. Like what, like what field do you have for where people are most concerned or have the most questions. We kept it really broad and basic. Like we didn't go too complex on the questions and we had a mix of multiple choice responses, we had a mix of the ratings, you know, where it's like a one to five, how would you rate this? And also provided commentary so they could respond to the question and then give us some comments. Right. And the results was great because it Was quite so the survey was confidential, but you could always get a sense of what region the response came from. So you wouldn't necessarily know who, but you would know, for instance, okay, that definitely came from India. Or these concerns really feel like it's more from the India employee base than the UK employee base. Like we're able to discern that just kind of based on some of the responses. But the approach was just to get a sense, a kind of temperature check from the people team in the various regions. First, any surprises when you got the data back or anything that confirmed you say, okay, we had a good feeling about this and now we see it in the data or boy, that sort of came out of left field. We didn't really expect to see that as prevalent. Maybe you see that in the comments or some of the scores a little bit different. Talk a little bit about any of those things, either surprises or confirmations of data. The biggest surprise was and this was a really small group, like a really tiny percentage, but there was some that said, you know, like we, we asked a question around the existing leadership team and it was just a form of questions around do they trust them? Do they feel heard by them, do they feel they're accessible? And you know, there was a couple of responses that was like, you know, they weren't sure who the leaders team were. Right. Because, because there'd been so many changes and I was quite surprised by that. And a group of us where it was like, I thought that's pretty obvious because we kind of said it, but okay, you know, but there was more confirmation. So communication, we just didn't communicate enough. They like weren't enough business updates and insights into the business and transparency and those two kind of go hand in hand. Like the more you communicate, the more people feel a business is transpar as long as you're communicating on the right things and you're not just sending out kind of empty messages. Yeah, communication is always a tough one in employee feedback because you always want more. But you're right, you got to have the right things because, you know, more information that doesn't help employees is not useful either. But getting that communication is always a challenge. I'm not surprised about the leadership one, by the way. It's not unusual where as you especially get into, you know, 400, 500, a thousand employees and you know, people are doing their job, they have a boss and then their boss is a boss and you know, somewhere up there there's a leadership team, but you're not always paying attention to that, so it's probably not surprising that, you know, you might get a group of employees like, well, I don't even know who they are. What we see sometimes are companies will put in brackets when they ask about the leadership team. They'll actually put the titles or even the names of the leaders. And it does two things. A survey sign, two employees, here's the team. Right. So it sends that message out, but it also then gives them the context as to, oh, that's okay, I'll respond with those people in mind. But that's a, it's a very common challenge around, around that, especially as organization set. So you got the data in, you created some reports. Have you shared the results out with the leadership team, the next level management, the entire organization? How have you thought about sharing out or how did you go about doing that? Around sharing results. So the first round was we shared it with the CEO because he was new in. So we shared it with him so that he was kind of aware of what he was coming into, like in terms of the culture and vibe. Right. So that was the first kind of round and then it was the exec team. And then we have like a weekly standup across the regions. We shared the results with them. So organization was aware of what the challenges were and we had the new CEO do it. Oh, good, good. Yeah. Ownership of it. And then he ran his own kind of mini version where he was asking people to message him directly with questions for him. Right. And so we kind of joined the two together and he kind of had this big announcement on kind of taking ownership of what they had raised as concerns and the changes they wanted to be made and the ones that we could do. And he rolled those out. Oh good. Yeah. With a new CEO, that's a great way to do it, to have the CEO share the results out, talk about the results with the different teams. And it gives, it often gives them a structure to have these dialogues and discussions and content to frame those discussions. Because he doesn't necessarily know what everyone does in all their different roles, but he can, he can talk to the culture that's happening. Happening. Based on the, on the data that you received back. How about follow up? How did you, or maybe you, because you ran it this year, probably in the midst of it still. How you, how are you going about ensuring you get continued momentum from the feedback? So you got initiatives. Some of them might been, you know, things you could do quickly, some of them might be longer term initiatives that aren't easy to pick off. And, and you Know, low hanging fruit necessarily, but are really important to the business. How did you think about the long term actions versus maybe shorter term initiatives that you can get going quickly? Yeah, well, you're absolutely right. There were the kind of quick wins is what we called them and the kind of main ones that came out was we needed to gain the trust back of the employees. So that's more of a long term. That's, that's more. Continue to set as as an exec team, continue to set goals that are communicated to the employees. I mean like we don't call them goals, like we call them our missions or our statement to them and then acting on it. So actually being in the business, walking that line. Right. So saying you asked for more communication. So immediately we launched a weekly newsletter update that goes out to all the employees. We ask them to contribute to it. So it's what have you been doing? Like what have you been working on? Whether it's deals, whether it's websites being built, whether it's embargoes, social events, like what have you been doing out there? Feed it into us and we collate it into this newsletter and it goes out to our investors as well. We spoke about transparency. So again it was we have these stand ups but we weren't really giving them much of a insight on financial performance. Right. So all of these ties into things like rewards and recognition. So a lot more transparent on business performance. So we have the CFO stand up and do that. Right. So we weren't doing this on a regular enough basis previously across the whole organization, I would say there was probably a select few of people that actually knew how the business was performing, whether we were meeting our goals and our targets. So that's how we did the kind of quick wins was on showing the commitment to be more communicative and to be transparent. But the kind of long, kind of long tail ones are things like the rewards and recognition piece which has to follow through on business performance. So we keep communicating and sharing where we are as a business and our intent to when the business is in a good place and we're all being successful, then there'll be rewards for everybody. And that's more of the kind of marathon of it as opposed to a sprint. What you heard, if I understand, okay, you know, we'd like more updates, more communication, but not only that, more communication with the business and what's going on in the business, how it's performing. So now what you're doing is, you're right, rolling that data or information back to employees on and more regular standups and a more consistent basis because it sound like maybe it's a little more ad hoc. You didn't realize how important it was as a leadership team and you started to realize, whoa, this is a lot more important. And it's challenging for leaders because often you're so close to everything and you hear things well in advance. So by the time you're communicating out to employees, it's like, okay, you want to move as leaders, you want to move on to the next thing, but now you're just sort of cascading it all the way down it. It's, it's a lot. It's almost like sometimes I heard one time, you know, executives really get paid for saying the same thing over and over. And because it's a mind numbing job sometimes because you're like, oh, I've only talked about this enough. But it's because executives often talk about it for months in advance before it gets rolled out. Because you got to, you got to get all the bugs ironed out and the processes ironed out and then it happens. So it's a, it's always a challenge. That communication. Have you thought about, is there any mechanism you have in place to ensure that momentum around communication? Because I know how we've seen it somewhere it'll get going in the first three months or six, lots of energy. But then you know, to keep that energy up, to keep that momentum up because it's, it's easy to like, oh, wow, well, we'll miss it this week and skip it to next week and it can slide over time. It's like anything going to the gym, you're all excited after the new year and that lasts for about a month. And then by March you're like, you know, maybe going every once a week and then by February you're probably every once a, by April, maybe once a month type of thing. So if you thought about sort of that, the accountability of leaders to keep that momentum going. Yes. So we have the managers touch base with the employees through regular one to ones. So that's another opportunity for them to feed things back into their managers in terms of concern. And then me and my team meet with those managers on a regular cadence as well and have our own one to ones. The exec team meets twice a week to go over and it's like a roundtable of all the departments. But it's also my role in those is really to update on what's happening in terms of the polls and of the business and coming up that could be of concern. Things we need to plan for and watch out for. But yeah, it's, it's through the commitment to those regular communication channels that, that are the standup, that is the weekly update that gets emailed out. It was as simple as pulling together a rota of all the leads and saying this is your week to host the standup and holding firm to it, making sure CFO knows the dates he's doing the financial update to the business. That happens once a month. Those things happen globally. Right. So that's, that's how we've, we've done it. It's because you mentioned a really good word there. It's accountability. And I find that that's one of the hardest things or most challenging things to keep going in a business because people get so caught up in the day to day that taking accountability. When the wheels come off a little bit or when something slips, it's really easy to just say, oh well it's just that one time, like we will get to it another day or you know. Yeah, I've, I've found that us communicating it out holds us to the fire. Like we can't say we're doing this this week and then we just don't. That's good. Yeah, the accountability is a real, it's sometimes a real challenge that way for sure. No, that's excellent. I want to ask you a little bit about. You have such a diverse workforce from the nature of your people, from engineers to creatives and sales, everything in between. But you also have people in Europe, in Asia, in the Americas. How do you think about inclusion in the workplace and equity inclusion? It's often a challenge. And what do you think creates at more of a local level now just a psychologically safe environment. What do you think sort of can help create that or what are the things that do that? And conversely, I'm going to add, you know, what do you think undermines it or can undermine it either quietly or in a noisy way in terms of feeling safe to speak up especially maybe if you look around the table go, I don't look exactly like everyone else here, you know, or my background is very different from them. Just talk a little bit about that. Well, I think it starts from the recruitment process and especially for us. So you know, we have an amazing head of TA who also actively recruits roles everywhere outside of India. So we, we have a hub in India that takes care of the India recruitment and then this individual, she takes care of everything in rest of world and her Style is to be very candid and direct about our business and our culture. And we sell that to them, right. Like we are a hybrid office. We. She sits at her desks like she sits right at her desk and has a team's call with a video on speaking to these candidates. And they can see people walking by, you know, and they get a sense of the feel of the office. And then when they come in for that in office interview, she greets them, they're meeting the hiring managers, but then they see the people and that's the first opportunity they get to see how diverse we are or whether a business is diverse or not. And where she's not in country. If we're recruiting in New York, for instance, what we do is we loop that New York team into that interview process. So when that candidate goes in, that whole team knows this candidate's coming in, this is the role they're coming in for. And again, they get a sense of, of who we are as a people in the sense of the culture. So we kind of hand pick who we have meeting the candidates and then what their experience will look like once they're in for those interviews. Because we know that we're selling ourselves and not just a candidate selling themselves to us. I like that. Yeah, I like that openness too, around having, you know, because it's true. It's hard with remote environment. Used to be you go into an interview, go into the office, you get a feel for it. How do you create that, recreate that as best you can in a, in a digital environment. So, yeah, that idea, you could see people who were going around in the back. It just gives you a better flavor for just those nuance aspects of the culture type of thing. So that's good. I like that. I'm going to just two more questions to wrap up here. One is just around now, look, gone through that first. You know, you've ran that survey the first time with in a few years and first time in sort of a chief people officer role. What are some things that work really well? Yifang. Okay, you're going to do that again so that, you know, like what you got out of it and things that maybe didn't work so well that. Okay, we got to adjust this or change this for next time. So what are the lessons learned, I guess out of the first survey that you just ran? Well, we would certainly hope to use a vendor only because doing the analysis took us some time. Right. Because it was a very good response. It was over between 50 and 60% of the business that responded. Considering it was the first time we'd done it in a few years and all the changes that had gone on, I was pleased with that response. But we had to as a team read through all of those responses and run our own analysis of that data, gain the insight and it was, it wasn't too arduous a task because what we had assumed would be the main kind of issues were actually proven to be correct. So it was self validating. But I definitely want to partner with a vendor to get more insights like sooner so that we weren't waiting such a long time to kind of collate it all and feed it back to the organization. I, I would like it to run a bit more smoothly. But yeah, that would be the only that I would change. Yeah. Okay, good. Yeah, so it's useful to do the exercise. There's a lot of mechanics and process and reporting and all that sort of thing. How do you best manage that? So that's good insight. One last question there and you think about a lot of our listeners particularly in the human resource field and the professional field around this. If you could give them one, you know, one idea or one mindset shift, you know that they could walk away with, what would that be? What would one thing you'd leave them with given sort of your background experience of moving into, into this role. Remove your offices, sit amongst your teams. That's a new thing that we're looking at and working on. Not in terms of the offices like the exec team and leadership have always sat amongst the wider population. The UK that doesn't happen in all the regions. Right. And so we're pushing that across all the regions but, but the value add in people being able to relate to the chief people officer, see the CEO not sequestered away in a big corner office but actually in sat at the desk helping himself or herself to a couple of coffee in the kitchen. That is invaluable that, that direct access people have to see us as humans as well and people that are also impacted by business decisions. I think it really helps to break down some of those barriers. It's so nice because you talked about trust and enhancing trust particular amongst the, you know the leadership team and the rest organization and and so much of the research shows that just that time facetime with people or interactions with people just enhances the trust and the less interactions just the lower the trust. It's not whether they're doing trusting things or not, it's just that day to day interactions or more Regular interactions. So yeah, that concept of get, get out from behind your desk and spend time with, you know, and it's a great listening way. Listening activity rather, because yeah, you get great data from a survey but you know, going and just watching people do their job, talking to them, talking what's on their screen or what project they're working on. You also get not only what, what they're working on, but you get a sense of what energy they bring, how they're describing it or, or maybe they're low on energy and you sort of go, why is that happening? So it's a, it's a big, very good thing for people to remember for sure to get out from behind that desk and, and spend time in. In the regions and with your staff and the end right down to the front line. So that's great. Absolutely. Veronica, is there anything else you'd want to add or say about IDX or your role before we wrap up? This has been great, by the way. Yeah. Also, I think what's key is, and I know that a lot of companies don't do this so much, but you have to put on those team events. That is investment. I know that CFOs around the world, finance people around the world. Oh no, you know, there's tax implications to do, employee entertainment and it's so costly and you know, it's just some drinks, you know, but you just again, it breaks down those barriers if, if they can relate, if the wider teams can relate to leadership as being just people just as they are. Right. And you can laugh with your chief people officer. The, the amount of boundaries that go up as soon as you say that you work in hr. Right. Because people think police the organization that we're like the people that would tell you off. Right. It just to like see us laughing at the same jokes. I'm not saying like go and make a show of yourself. Not at all. But you know, but that they can relate to you and they know a little bit about personally. It really does help to improve the culture. Yeah. Especially coming into the holiday season. Right. Just, you know, make sure you get out and spend some time because it's a great excuse. Oh it's the end of the year or holiday season to get out and socialize and spend time. And I agree with you CFOs, they just, okay, why do we have to spend this much money? And you know, is that really necessary? Can we not do it cheaper and. Yeah, yeah, maybe can. But you know, it really does impact your employees in, in a real positive way if it's done well. So I like that last one. So that's, that's a good, a good addition to, to the, to the feedback. All right, good. Well, that's it. So excellent, Veronica. It's very good to talk to you and it's a good, good talk around that. So it's around the whole employee feedback. Employee, you know, the voice of the employee and what your experience was like. And, you know, it's, it's brave often to go out and launch a survey, especially early into the role and a new CEO, because you never know what you're going to get back. Sometimes you get really good data back and really. And sometimes you're like, oh, I didn't realize there's such a issue in this area. I think when I, when I tell people that, and these are people from my network that I was going to do this, they were like, oh, you know, people, surveys, you know, but just be prepared. That whole thing of, Kevin, for what you asked for. Right. Because they might come back with things and then what do you do if you can't solve any of it? Right. Yeah. Now I have some faith that we'll be able to solve some of your life. Yeah. You can always solve them. Yeah. Yeah. So that was good. That's good. Thanks for listening to voice activated. If you've heard something that got you thinking, don't keep it to yourself. Share it, talk about it, put it into play. That's how better workplaces get built. When you're ready to move from insight into action, head over to talentmap.com you'll find tools, resources, and strategies to help you lead better with clarity, empathy, and impact. And make sure to follow or subscribe so you don't miss any more real conversations with leaders who know that some of the best ideas for change don't come from the top, but from those employees closest to the work.