Panel Perspective

We do a quarterly pulse survey to get input and feedback from our employees with ongoing communication. We moved to the quarterly approach to be more frequent and actionable. We ask a very short list of targeted questions on a quarterly basis. This year, for example, our priorities were around fairness, fun, and achievement so we directed our questions to focus on a fair and fun environment. People love feeling a sense of accomplishment, and we want to make sure we’re creating this environment and providing the right tools. We have made progress within this around frequency. We used to do surveys annually, but in this world, we’re just so used to working so quickly that if we have a one or two year cycle, it feels like it’s taking longer to create change.

Working with organizational goals is where we start with everything. We begin our process by discussing our organization’s global and regional goals. From there, we work with our business leaders to discuss the talent and people implications of those goals and priorities. We set our People & Culture goals to align and then confirm the metrics that we’re going to be measuring. Certainly for us as a growing service organization, retaining our talent is very important. We’re committed also to diversity and creating an inclusive environment where people feel that their opinions and ideas are valued. We track how effectively we are maintaining and improving diversity within our organization regularly. For example, today 62.5% of our executive team is female, and our metrics around women in leadership overall are very strong. Tracking this data and building plans around it helps us align our HR practices to strategic goals. Like most organizations, we still have more work to do around analytics. We have reasonably sophisticated data and analytics for our talent acquisition practices and are now working to improve our analytics capabilities for the rest of our HR practices.

We’ve made several changes directly resulting from employee feedback. First, for some context, Cielo is growing quickly. We’ve quadrupled in size since 2011, which means that sometimes we outgrow practices faster than we realize! We’ve always been a very transparent organization and we share business updates in “All Hands” meetings run by our C-suite regularly. Over the past year, based upon direct employee feedback, we’ve been able to change the format, style and frequency of these meetings to better meet the needs of our business today. When we were smaller, we could hold meetings like this in person with everyone in a conference room. Now, with employees in over 10 service centers and 33 different countries, we still have to keep everyone informed, however that approach clearly won’t work. Based on continuous feedback and experimentation, we’ve changed the frequency and structure of these meetings, and we use technology differently to make sure that all employees, whether remote or in a primary office, have a great experience. The biggest challenge from growing so quickly is making sure we never get too far away from our employees or customers, and listening to them both is the best way to do that!