5 Ways To Customize The Work Experience
In a recent article we mentioned work experience is one of the most important keys to attracting and retaining great people. In this interview we sit down with Porch’s VP of People to talk about how creating customized work experience and management experience has helped them to grow.
Ease is thrilled to be partnered with HR Transform to create a new series on the future of HR. We will be traveling around the country interviewing HR leaders at the world’s most innovative organizations. Ranging from early-stage startups, growth startups to enterprise leaders.
Read the full interview here:
– Hi, I’m Nathan Harris and I’m here at porch.com to talk with Dena a little bit about the Porch culture and how their goal to be a partner with every homeowner is looking, and what the future of HR looks like as well. So go ahead and tell us a little bit about Porch.
– Thanks a lot, Nathan. Porch is about five years old now, and we have 500 employees here in the US, and our goal is to be a lifetime partner with homeowners. So if you need home repair, or if you need ongoing home maintenance, Porch should be your go-to place to provide those sorts of services.
– That’s awesome. So over the five years you know this companies evolved I know you’ve come unto the team recently, What have you seen, even in just your time here as a shift in the workforce, or the culture, and how is change in leadership kind of impact that?
– Great question. So when I think about my time at Porch so far I’ve been at Porch since September of last year so slightly under six months, and when I came on board they were actually in the middle of re-rolling out their value statement And so the five values that are critical to Porch. And that’s actually one of the reasons I came to Porch. Because their number one value is no jerks, no egos. And so working here at Porch means that everyone has an equal voice. Frequently you’ll see our CEO he doesn’t have an office, as a matter of fact he doesn’t even have a desk. And so he’ll finds an open table and sit there and work. And people just come up to him throughout the day. And that’s how Matt wants to make sure we have an environment where everyone can thrive.
– That’s amazing so, that kind of goes right into our goal of HR transforming how things are changing in culture and that’s definitely a big one, right. So what do you define as HR transformation? What does that mean to you?
– It really mean ability in, my title is actually VP of people. And the reason that it’s VP of people is because when you think about what really makes the difference it is the people of the organization. Recently we use to be, we use things to talk about HR and Human Resources definitely get to the heart of the fact that there is a person who’s coming to work everyday to give their best to your company. And so when I think about transforming our function of Human Resources or people what it really means is that we have to be in tune to the changing work habits of our employees, that come… that come to us. So if they are thinking more about gig economy. How to make sure that we give them an intensive experience immediately so that they feel value. Or if we have employees who are at a different stage of life and what they are thinking about are benefits or longterm career. How do we make sure that we have that kind of experience for them as well?
– That’s amazing, because with us being in the gig economy that is exactly why people feel like they need to leave such a corporate setting because they want their rapid growth and intensity.
– Right.
– That’s awesome to see that you identify that. So to check that perspective and to have that agile mindset there has to be some form of advice that you’ve gotten. Or something that stuck with you along the way. Does there anything that sticks out, that’s help mold your perspective?
– Sure I use to work for Dance Balding who actually leads Zillow here in town. And one of Dan’s advice was look at every employee as and individual and then think about how all those individuals experience how you can scale them up and create almost like a personalized HR experience for people or personalized work experience for people. And so we try to apply that here at Porch. Where we think about things that can scale. But then we also think about every individual and how to create and awesome experience for them.
– That’s awesome. So with that, that mindset from the past, now lets look at the future. What do you predict for the future of HR or workforces? Is there something that you see happening and changing? That you would kind of call out that you know like this is what I’m betting on.
– Continued customization. So, and what that means is that every employee wants to kind of customize what the work experience looks like. And so in some cases, that’s how you interact with benefits I want to be able to tap when my benefits on my phone, And I don’t want to have to call the benefits person. Or it means that I want to think about how I design my own career. We talk earlier about the gig economy and so what that means, I want to feel like I’m getting a great experience now I’ve learned something and I’ve moved on to another great experience. And so what we need to figure out is how do we. How do we create these customize employee experience for people within our own companies so that they don’t feel like they need to go and leave in order to have like growth or have that kind of customized experience.
– That’s awesome. So and what thing that you identify in there to create that customize experience was that you went back to technology.
– Yes.
– So, when you think about technology in the workspace some that you have today, maybe something that you want to see come into it, what technologies are you using now or do you want to see?
– The number one technology I’d like to see is actually, something that would help me customize my manager experience. And so we talk about, typically we use to do employee surveys once a year. Now we’ve gotten to the point where them at Porch we do them twice a year but I would love doing them that on going sort of feedback so that my managers can see, how happy are the teams does the team feel like they are landing their goals and their accomplishments? And be able to have that sort of digitizes ongoing coaching experience for managers.
– That’s amazing. So real time feedback. That’s so imperative, especially with that future generations that are coming. They want that feeling of growth. Then want that feeling of value. Which is something that they can rave about, share about. Ans that’s really important. So that last question I have I guess is. What is the biggest thing that you think needs to change from the old to get us to the new?
– Oh, that’s a great question. I need to think about that. I would say the thing that needs to change most is probably us as HR professionals. We need to really make sure that when we think about our workforce are changing and so when we look at millennials, we can’t sort of think of them as millennials and we need to treat them like as millennials is the problem we need to say wow
– Different species
– Exactly. If you wanted to say the same thing about baby boomers, the same thing about Gen-exers and so the reality is, every generation of people works differently and so we need to not look at it as a bad thing, but rather look at it as how do we create the right customize experience so that people can come to work and thrive. So really us the professionals need to change a little bit.
– That’s amazing and we couldn’t agree more and these are the types of conversations we’re having as we go around the country interviewing HR leaders like Dena about that future. Because we want the feedback, we want to share it with you. So you can give us your perspective as well. So keep following us along on the HR transform series. We’ll have more exceptional conversations just like this one.
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