How can we reinvent and reimagine talent experiences within organizations? Nick Holmes, Global Head of Career Experience at Fishawack Health delved into this question at this year’s FuelX Talent Mobility Conference with his intriguing and lively session on “The New Age of Talent Experience.”
One of his key messages was that HR leaders need to do much more than just create career experiences. Simply providing employees with learning and development (L&D) initiatives without any growth opportunities doesn’t cut it anymore. We must think about how experiences impact the entire employee life cycle and focus on what makes employees happy.
Research shows that experience promotes happiness — spending on “doing” promotes more moment-to-moment happiness than spending on “having.” In other words, getting stuff makes us less happy than doing stuff. How do we take that concept into our workplace?”
According to Holmes, you work on the meaning of Talent Experience in your organization. “If we don’t create experiences,” he said, “we lose innovation, motivation, and great humans.”
The Four Categories of Talent Experience
So, what’s the look and feel of the new age Talent Experience? Here are four areas to make this come alive:
- Culture – It starts with a mindset, skill-set, and organizational tool set. Start planning a movement within your organization. “You’ve got to create the environment for this to be successful… you can start a movement with one or two people talking about this. It starts with drumbeats, not lightning bolts.”
- Experiences – Categorize what your experiences are. Big or small, just different is OK. New work, gigs, relationships, and jobs.
- Learning – Progress is learning. The Talent Experience world only lasts when skills are being acquired, retired, or inspired.
- Stories – “Maybe stories are just data with a sold,” wrote Brené Brown. How do we get the data to tell a story to drive the business impact we’re all striving and executing for?
The Fishawack Health Journey
Nick Holmes and the team at Fishawack Health utilized pulse surveys in addition to their onboarding and exit surveys to dive deeper into the reasons people join the organization, why they leave, and ultimately understand which areas they needed to improve. The results said it all.
The No. 1 reason why people leave Fishawack Health? Lack of a progression pathway. The No. 2 reason why people leave Fishawack Health is that their skills weren’t being stretched and they felt underutilized. Yet 71 percent of people joined the organization for career development and opportunities, and only 57 percent felt they were given the opportunities to develop skills relevant to their interests.
“In other words, the No. 1 reason why people join us is the No. 1 reason why they leave us.” It was a problem Fishawack Health needed to solve. Here’s how Nick Holmes and the FH team did it. He said:
“When I joined Fishawack in May 2021… I managed to convince Fishawack to sign a contract with Fuel50 before I signed mine. A little bit of leveraging power. So, when they came to me and I started having conversations, they said, ‘We don’t know what to do. We’re losing people within two years. We have all these gaps in our development opportunities, our career learning, and our growth. What do we do?’ I said, ‘We’ve got to give people pathways, and we can do that in PowerPoint or Excel, or we can scale for growth and be ready by 2025 to excel and go again.’ They asked, ‘How do we do that?’ I said, ‘Give me a week. Go meet this team at Fuel50.’ We started with a plan… it all started with Fuel50. They were our catalyst.”
Fishawack focused on four things — Culture, Experiences, Learning, and Stories. As Nick Holmes added, “We live in a world now that the pandemic has shifted, where we are always ‘ON’ about the future … we’re always ‘ON’ and always actioning… (but) sometimes, you need to stop, and we need to encourage more ‘thank you’s.”
The results from all that Fishawack Health has done are very encouraging. People who say they would recommend FH as a great place to work has gone up 5% in the last 11 months, and internal mobility is also up 5% in the same period. They’ve also started to see a shift in culture and a boost in workplace happiness.
Fuel50 enabled us to change the mindset of the organization. That does not change overnight. It changes over time. Fuel50 was part of a technology that we brought in to revolutionize the career experience.
Still, there is more to do, and as Nick Holmes says, “we still have a long way to go.” However, they’ve made those necessary steps to initiate a cultural movement within the organization – starting with “drumbeats, not lighting bolts.”
