Responsive workplace practices begin with listening
The Rhino Foods Foundation team is gearing up to attend the 2024 B Corp Champions Retreat in Vancouver, Canada. The Champions Retreat is a biannual opportunity to connect with values-aligned people using business as a force for good. This year’s theme, “Restore,” encourages us to reflect on our interdependence and opportunities for collective care.
At this year’s Champions Retreat, the Rhino Foods Foundation will be leading the panel: “Beyond Wellness: Helping Employees Achieve Well-being.” Improving wellbeing positively impacts business outcomes such as customer engagement, profitability, and productivity. The panel will bring together leaders from three businesses, representing distinct industries, that take a purposeful approach to supporting employee’s well-being across five domains: career, social, financial, physical, and community wellbeing. Participants will learn practical strategies for prioritizing employee well-being through commitments to fair treatment, opportunities for career growth, physical safety, financial stability, wrap-around support, and ultimately meeting workers’ needs with creative programs that have meaningful, durable impacts on their lives.
Employee engagement and wellbeing are interconnected, with each enhancing the other's impact on performance. Foundational to both is trust. So, how do employers build trust to boost employee engagement and wellbeing? Rhino Foods and the Rhino Foods Foundation have had opportunities to share best practice on this topic in great detail with Talent Rewire, PROVOC and The Ford Foundation but here is the short answer:
By listening, being responsive, and communicating.
To illustrate this point, Lauren McBride, Rhino Foods Director of People and Culture, walked me through Rhino Foods’ recent efforts to refresh its employee engagement survey. Before launching the 2023 engagement survey, Rhino’s People & Culture team worried that the survey had started to become a “check the box” activity rather than a tool to increase engagement and lead to direct action. For the People & Culture team, the idea of “engagement” starts with the company’s ownership of the process more broadly. What followed was a five-month process to boost buy-in before, during, and after the survey was administered.
Reinvestment in the survey began with the People & Culture team, who employed the design thinking process to take on the refresh work as a team. The People & Culture team began with some team learning, engaging in some collective readings and conversations on best practices. They then used the format of “empathy interviews” to develop new or improve existing survey questions. The goal here was to really understand the user experience of the survey and identify what stakeholders are hoping to see as concrete results of the survey. Each People & Culture team member conducted 2-3 focus group discussions with a sample of employees from all departments and collectively identified trends and patterns that allowed them to better understand where there was room for improvement within the engagement survey process. This extra step allowed the Rhino People & Culture team to ensure the survey was an opportunity for authentic input rather than feedback on superficial aspects of the company.
With this learning, survey questions were revised to better reflect the information People & Culture hoped to collect. Knowing that they hoped to gain a deeper sense of employees’ engagement, questions were framed around the 4 Es of Employee Engagement: enablement, energy, empowerment, and encouragement – which all reinforce the employees’ overall sense of wellbeing. Questions were then spot checked with employees to consider language and word choice to ensure the questions would translate appropriately based on language.
By engaging employees at the outset, the People & Culture team not only ensured that they were administering an effective tool, but they also signaled to the wider organization that the results of the survey were important and would be taken seriously. This “pre-work” increased the buy-in of the People & Culture team and the employees that would complete the survey.
The next part of the process that benefited from a critical reexamination was how the data was analyzed and presented. Rather than the People & Culture team delivering results to the Management Team and presenting a few data slides at the company meeting, they wanted to build the Management team’s investment in the results to motivate company-wide impact. After the survey was administered, the People & Culture team engaged in a data dive to understand the results and then they facilitated meetings with the Senior Management Team and supervisors and managers to have each group dig into the data in the same way that they had, which allowed them to make meaning with the data. Based on this collective analysis, People & Culture presented high level learnings at Rhino Day, the annual company offsite, and connected that data with action items that were being considered or reviewed because of the survey. There was also dedicated time on Rhino Day to allow for questions and input to keep this survey alive and action oriented.
As a result of the survey, Rhino recently made some adjustments to their paid time off policy. Paid leave was identified as both actionable and directly influencing employee engagement and wellbeing. When rolling out policy changes, members of the People & Culture and Management teams were sure to highlight the fact that they heard what employees were saying about existing policies and the adjustments were being made in part due to their investment and interest in seeing this change. Making this connection deliberate helped employees to see that their voices do matter and can be influential as Rhino continues to evolve.
Taking the time to slow a process down and engage in listening to stakeholders provides opportunities for buy-in along the way. As Rhino prepared to launch the new survey, the People & Culture team provided avenues for employees to voice their opinions, frustrations, and overall thoughts about the process. This, along with the ability to see their input in action, helped to increase trust. The engagement survey refresh was a reminder that, for some projects, taking the time to go slow and bring everyone along can help the final product have a greater impact on employee engagement and well-being. This approach of critical listening and trust building is at the heart of Rhino’s most successful workplace practices like the Income Advance and Employee Exchange programs.