Employee Experiences and Moments You Can't Afford to Miss!

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Navigating the evolving landscape of human resources, the focus is increasingly on crafting personalized and meaningful employee experiences. Joris Luijke, former Chief People Officer at Atlassian and Squarespace, and co-founder of Pyn, shed light on this trend during our recent HR Leaders podcast.

"Personalization is key. We're focusing on making each interaction meaningful," Joris shared. His approach revolves around leveraging automated, context-sensitive communications to enhance the employee's journey, fostering a sense of belonging and appreciation.

A critical aspect discussed by Joris was streamlining communication. "By reducing communication volume and focusing on relevancy, we create a more engaging and less overwhelming workplace," he explained. This approach ensures impactful interactions, tailored to each employee's needs.

Joris then delved into how Pyn aids in mapping the employee journey. "Identifying key career moments allows us to engage effectively, making each employee feel supported and valued throughout their journey with us."

He also highlighted the calming effect of the tool on the organizational environment. "With Pyn, we provide managers with the resources needed for crucial conversations, reducing stress and creating a more tranquil workspace. It's about empowering managers with the right tools at the right time."

Addressing manager training, Joris pointed out the shift from traditional methods to real-time, contextual support. "Technology like Pyn empowers managers to lead more effectively, adapting to challenges dynamically."

Joris concluded with insights on the future role of HR technology. "As technology evolves, it will continue to shape organizational cultures, enhancing efficiency and the overall employee experience."

Enjoy the episode and click here to try Pyn’s new Employee Journey Designer tool for Free.

Episode Highlights

How to create a personalized employee experience?
How to recognise and support employees at the moments that matter
How to reduce the volume of communication through personalization
How to Map the entire Employee Journey using Pyn’s new FREE to use tool

Recommended Resources

Follow Joris on LinkedIn
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Made for global and remote teams, Pyn helps you plan and schedule messages at key moments across the employee journey.

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🎙️ Automatically generated Podcast Transcript

Joris 0:00

If someone has been in your team for a year, and it's probably time to have a career conversation with them, the manager doesn't have to remember that. They just get sent a notch into communications that they receive as a little template on how to have that growth conversation. Next one on one, they can just like follow those instructions. That's a massive load off a manager's shoulders

Chris Rainey 0:24

Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the HR leaders podcast. On today's episode, I'm joined by Joris Luijke, former Chief People Officer at Atlassian and Squarespace, and co-founder of Pyn. During the podcast your shares how to create a personalised employee experience, how to recognise and support employees during the moments that matter how to reduce the volume of communication through personalization, and how to map the entire employee journey. Using pens new free to use tall. As always, before we jump into the video, make sure you hit the subscribe button, turn on notification bell and follow on your favourite podcast platform. With that being said, let's jump in yours. Welcome to the show. How are you?

Joris 1:09

Very good, Chris, how are you?

Chris Rainey 1:10

Good. Thank you for staying up late for us. Yeah, probably.

Joris 1:15

Drill. I wake up early for the US audience and I go to bed late for the folks in Europe. Yeah, it's my life.

Chris Rainey 1:23

We probably can't tell that from your accent. But you're in Australia. Right? Right now

Joris 1:27

I'm in Australia. Yeah. Born and raised in the Holland's moved around the world, really. I lived in New York lived in Spain. And now back home in, in Sydney, Australia,

Chris Rainey 1:38

this call to take a step back for a second, tell us a little bit more about yourself personally, and sort of your journey to where we are now. After

Joris 1:43

university. I, you know, I did some odd jobs. And then I landed a job at a company called Atlassian, which was back then still a small company I stayed at for six years during their massive massive growth, leading HR for the company, which was such a big learning and an amazing time. It's a great brand. Then after that, I moved to New York. And at the same at Squarespace, another fast growth tech company did the same damn. And then I did another stint at a company called Typeform. In Barcelona. Same thing there. You know, after all these jobs running HR, I experienced the same problem time and time again, which led me to becoming a founder because I wanted to scratch my own itch. To solve the problems that I had. Running HR and actually trying to build solutions. I've been incredibly lucky, I caught up with a wonderful human being John Williams, who's the co founder of culture amp, another big player in the HR tech space, John and I joined forces and we started painting, which is a at all in the employee experience space. That's kind of my journey in very, very short, what was the he was trying to scratch. HR teams are wonderful, but we're very reactive. That's the nature of our job. People constantly come to us with requests for help and support and guidance. As they experienced all these moments that met I like during their employee journeys, you know, people maybe getting promoted, they move teams, they move countries, they entering the organisation, they're exiting the organisation, they may change job levels. All have these moments where people need guidance and support are often forgotten. And nothing is more frustrating running HR than have it than knowing that these moments will, will occur knowing what information people need at those moments, but just not being able to be there for the people when they really need us. That's the problem that I wanted to solve. And that's what we do with pin we provide people automatically if the right information at the right time as they experience key moments that matter throughout your employee journey. Like a quick example, let's say a person moves from zero to one or more direct reports, we recognise that automatically because they've just become a manager. And we can automatically send them information on what they need to do and know in their first days as a manager, right, they probably need to run a kickoff on a one, we can send them information on how to run a kick off one on one with their new direct direct reports.

Chris Rainey 4:09

What was the traditional way of doing that?

Joris 4:11

Manager Training, you know, when I was running HR, I would like have an organisation like LifeLabs coming in or like a training provider. And every half a year we would like train our managers that the problem, of course is that although those are great events, and generally speaking, those training sessions are well rated by people who attend. The problem is that a people have to wait for a while until they get that training. Secondly, by the time they have to apply the information that they learned it's probably already too late because they have forgotten half the stuff.

Chris Rainey 4:42

You've basically missed the moment a lot

Joris 4:44

of things just fall between the cracks. Might or people just don't get the support. That's the reality manager training is generally speaking something that does get covered. But let's say a person is coming back from parental leave. How often does the manager come to HR too late? In a situation like that, how often does the manager not put together a return to work plan? Let's take another situation a real life situation when I was running HR at Squarespace, we had a massive customer support team. And sometimes a manager would come to me saying, hey, you know, I've got a big performance issue with one of my support agents, I will be thinking, like, what happened, right, this support engineer was doing fine performing fine a few months ago. And now you're talking about letting them go right, and what's going on here. Now that the person's NPS score, CSAT score may have been dropping for a few weeks prior to that the managers didn't even notice, or they're like a 26 year old team lead themselves, you know, either didn't hit their radar, or they didn't coach the person through a moment like that we've been, we can automatically identify a moment like that happening. And we can send coaching material to materials to that person's manager. So if a support agents has a drop in CSAT, we pick it up. And we can send coaching materials to that person's manager. It's those types of moments that really matter, that are often lost. You know, those aren't crucial moments,

Chris Rainey 6:04

I kind of asked the question for most that was specific about training, but overall, how are you identifying the moments in the past? Was it just manually doing it? Like, what was the

Joris 6:13

manually doing it? Yeah, I mean, you pull reports, sometimes your hrs, they'll send out like a little notification, right? Like a little nuts, people ignore them often, right? Like, for example, someone when someone's anniversary is coming up, you may get like a little notch from bamboo, HR workday, but they're very impersonal, and our system notifications, so people ignore them. So with pin, we can automatically detects, hey, someone's five year anniversary, you should probably celebrate that differently from your three year anniversary source. So here's the information for how to handle a five year anniversary, we can send that from your HR business partner as a direct Slack message to that business manager a few days prior, right? It's all super, super personalised, it feels like HR is everywhere, in a very personal way. It's slack, sending out these pitiful personal notifications from your HR people, to the people in the organisation, as they experienced these moments. And then it's super contextual as well. Like if we sending a instructions on how to handle return to work for returning parent in Germany versus the US where the rules are slightly different. You will get different content sent to you. If you ask how we did it at Atlassian. For example, we just we've put everything on Confluence on our handbooks. And our wiki is right those wiki is became this massive ocean of information no one could possibly find anything, right? And Information Management in companies is a big problem.

Chris Rainey 7:43

I feel like one of the biggest winners also, of course, the employee, but whoever is the managers, right? There's so busy, they already have a hard enough job as it is trying to remember all of those moments, then it's impossible, let's be honest, to be able to totally to be able to do that.

Joris 7:59

I mean, manager enablement is not just manager training. Yeah, it is providing, as you say, goes not just to managers, for the people in their team, if someone joins your team from another team, like an internal move, you probably have to have a transition meeting between old manager, new manager and that transitioning employees. That's good practice. Now, at Atlassian, we may have had a template for that somewhere hiding in unconference. No one is gonna read that, that if the message comes automatically from your business partner to to the manager with how to how to handle transition like that. It's super timely, it's super contextual. Of course, it's going to be picked up, it's almost easier to use the information than it is not to that's the power of the system.

Chris Rainey 8:42

are you linking this back to like, employee benefits as well? And like learning resources? Yeah,

Joris 8:50

totally. Yeah. Like on the learning, like sometimes you may link back to like, work ramp or do CV or any LMS systems. Right. So we are like the communication layer in between? Yeah, like things like open enrollments, right. I mean, this is the bane of existence in HR teams, annoyingly have to remind people to do things as it relates to their benefits, you can just set that up like an open enrollment period, and all those notifications will run out of medically, if let's say a person has hardly taken any annual leave in the last six months, we can nudge the person's manager saying Hey, Toby has hardly taken any annual leave. We would recommend you having a chat with them hidden during your next one on one and this is how you can handle a situation like that. So what we do is we are very good at nudging people and and for hundreds and hundreds of moments that matter during the journey. We also supply the content so a company doesn't have to like think of okay, what do I communicate to employees at all those models?

Chris Rainey 9:51

Oh, really? That's cool. Makes it we've

Joris 9:53

got the largest library of employee communications in the world like I you know, I doubt that anyone has more Then Then pin has an assistant,

Chris Rainey 10:01

I didn't realise that you actually provide the templates as well. That's really helpful. Yeah, yeah, sometimes you got it. Yeah. Okay, that's great. Now what do I write?

Joris 10:09

Exactly? First of all, back in the old days, like you would if you wanted to use it, create something like this, you may have sticked, something together, you may have used Zapier or whatever to connect data with. And then you still have to think about the content as well as the personalization of the content. And by that time, you're just like throwing your hands up in the air. Okay, I give up, right? Because it's just too much,

Chris Rainey 10:30

especially when you want to create a custom experience for every employee, right? Yeah. But yeah, you can't do that without technology. Got medically manually.

Joris 10:40

And in other professions, this has been like used for a long time you were on a podcast, you do a lot of marketing, right? You use tools like HubSpot or Marketo, right, to communicate with folks out in the market, right, somewhere along the customer journey, not the employee journey, but the customer journey, people are being notified, right, if you poke around on someone's website, or an open a few Instagram posts, surely, you're going to be enrolled in some kind of a sequence of communication that is sent to you probably, to sell something to you, right? We're not selling anything, where we're providing helpful contextual information that gets you know, gives people confidence to deal with any situation at work, but the concept is the same. It's not the customer journey. It's the employee journey. It's not marketing automation. It's the automation of healthcare communications to folks, as they experience stuff.

Chris Rainey 11:31

Why do you think that's taken so long? Like you just said, we've been doing this with our customers for so long?

Joris 11:37

Why is this is Dutch expression, which is, it's, it feels like kicking in an open door. Yeah. Which is like, it's so obvious for the life of me, I can't understand it. And I really, truly believe, of course, we hope it's going to be pin that takes up the biggest slice of the market. But I believe that there will be a pin in every organisation in the world where people choose Pin as their PIN is, you know, that's a different discussion altogether. And that's an execution problem. But I think just like in marketing, you can't under like, you can't imagine a world without marketing automation anymore. Yeah. And why haven't we used that inside organisations, we have way more data on our people than on a unknown prospect out there in the world.

Chris Rainey 12:21

And I feel like that, especially the new generation coming in, they kind of demand experience. Expect expert maybe demands a bit strong, but they expect that experience not

Joris 12:33

that long ago, we were sitting next to each other in the office, right? So if someone came back from parental leave, you would know, right, if someone would join your team, you would know, but I think remote and the move to hybrid and more distributed organisations has definitely made this more important. So you could probably get away with a little bit more before that in a large organisation or in a distributed organisation, you're just too disconnected, what pin does is it really creates these connections and just reminds people, hey, you know, you've got a person who's sitting on the other side of the world, they're coming back from parental leave, they have their one year anniversary coming up, or it's their day 90. And you're gonna miss those moments without sitting next to someone, what is the

Chris Rainey 13:16

impact of missing those moments that matter? What you're looking at, from the research that you and the team have done, there's

Joris 13:21

a cognitive load for managers, if you're here, like you hear a lot about managers feeling very stressed. And that's increased. One really great benefit is that they don't have to hold all of these moments in their heads, and they don't have to then think and research what they then need to do and say, if someone has been in your team for a year, and it's probably time to have a career conversation with them, the manager doesn't have to remember that. They just get sent a notch into communications that they receive. There's a little template on how to have that growth conversation. So they literally can follow the question. It's right then. And there, they next one on one, they can just like follow those instructions. That's a massive load of managers shoulders, we have as a mission and a company to create calmer organisations. One part of that is the calm of people feeling more confident and calm in situations. And secondly, because we are sending communications that is very targeted, which is you sent less communications, the volume of communications decreases. It's just more targeted communications, you're kind of trying to battle this endless communications that just goes to everyone. That should only go to a handful of people.

Chris Rainey 14:29

That's the big issue, right? Because then people just don't even open the messages. Yeah,

Joris 14:32

give you one example. Like when I was, you know, of course at Atlassian we had global offices, let's say be what Hollywood come up with in office in India, the Valley Big Deal Festival of the lights, I would send out like a communication like that to everyone in the company or to all managers on what to do in a situation like that, which in that case was a happy situation or holidays coming up. Now with pin we can instead target a manager who's let's say in New York City with a direct report. was in India and identified that manager and sent them a message around just before the volley, saying, Hey, your report has divided coming up, maybe wish them a happy time with friends and family. And by weight, by the way, be aware that they're not going to be in the office for some time, that is me sending communications to a handful of managers versus hundreds of managers, right, we've every time we send communications on mass, people are going to start ignoring it. That's, that's something we really try to avoid. One of

Chris Rainey 15:28

the quotes I saw from you was when we impact communication, we impact culture.

Joris 15:33

The reason for that is, if you think about culture, what is culture, culture is merely people behaving in a certain way, the majority of the time, right, if the majority of your people have lunch together on a Friday, the majority of the time you have a culture of having lunch together on a Friday, right? So it's really, you know, getting a bit geeky here, if you can manipulate or nudge people towards certain behaviours, you can therefore affect culture, if you want to instil a culture of feedback, you can weave in the, you know, timing nudges, you can nudge people towards providing more feedback at all those moments that matter, right? If you have one culture of urgency, if you want a culture of whatever, you can actually notch it, but you have to be close to the actual moments when people behave in a certain way. And you have to be able to systematically do that. So a system like pin is capable of changing behaviours, and therefore changing cultures over time. One

Chris Rainey 16:33

of the things that came to mind while you're saying that, and because I had a conversation recently with Chief people, Officer rivian, she's gone from couple of 1000 employees to 20,000 in three years, and one of the things he was talking about is, how do you scale? Culture is

Joris 16:49

a prime example. I Helen finally ran HR at Atlassian after me, Oh, yeah. So she was she was actually at Atlassian as well. Okay. Okay. So she, she has gone through that scale up, like multiple times as well, I think ultimately, the problem that we have in HR, in these fast growth companies is that we kind of losing touch with people, right. And this is where you feel like if you're a one on one and 50 people, you still feel very connected. And you know, you're 1000 people, and suddenly, people feel really grumpy, because it doesn't feel like you know, they're being supported and listened to anymore. Now pin those very well is, because it's automated, you can basically be anywhere at any point at scale. So it's almost like there's a little HR Angel sitting on the person's shoulder, whispering in person's ears, like, Hey, you should be doing X, Y, and Zed. Anything you can do at scale, is able to impact culture as you grow. And there's the there's the you know, the stick approach, like, Hey, you must do X, you must do Y to the multitude of rules. And this is often happens in larger growing companies, the bureaucracy starts to build up, there's more and more rules, and people get grumpy, grumpy because the old guard says I was going on with all these rules, right? That can have a very detrimental effects on culture, the better thing give people suggestions on what to do, and almost make it easier for them to follow the suggested behaviours versus not to follow the suggested behaviours. The example of the growth compensation done properly, or, you know, having a culture of celebrations for a recognition programme or celebrating someone's five year anniversary, or one year anniversary, all of these things to be scalable. Anything that is manual at that skill is just not going to happen. I give you one example of a culture of onboarding through bodies, body programmes, generally speaking, fall flat, within, you know, even at 150 people, they can fall flat because there's so much manual labour involved like in person HR says, like, oh, this new hire starting, I'm going to select this buddy and connect them together. It's kind of like fall over. I tried it last in it kept me It killed me. It's so hard to manage a programme like that. But if you get building technology to scale that it's so much easier. So for example, if pin you could send like to the hiring manager, they've received a little slack from the onboarding specialists as a direct message automatically saying, Hey, your new hire starting a few weeks time, can you please select a buddy it automatically within slack, they can select the body, it will show the bodies who have been selected multiple times in the past weeks, because, you know, you don't always want to select the same people. The system just run from there. The body then receives a message on the day one of new startups starting with a suggested Slack message saying hey, this is how you can introduce yourself, again making their life easier as well. That is scaling culture by nudging people

Chris Rainey 19:45

love that. Where are you capturing all of this data? Is it capturing in HCM or directly within pin? Most

Joris 19:52

of the information comes from the different systems that we integrate with HR is is a big system obviously other systems Maybe Zendesk, Salesforce, if you can throw data out of them, we can basically have a little profile on every single employee, okay. And every time something changes to that employee and police profile, we can action or trigger communication to go out automatically that you can set that up. So the platform basically manages all of that stuff. The thing though, at some point, as we were building all of like this communication is that we're going out at these different moments during the journey, companies started to wonder, but which moments are important to remind you

Chris Rainey 20:30

exactly what I was thinking? Yeah, how do you

Joris 20:33

how do you organise all of those moments. So that was a challenge that we had, that's why we started building a new tool, in addition to our communication platform that basically allows companies to design their employee journey to identify, hey, this is the moment that matters, this is the moment that matters, this is the moment that matters, basically creating an employee journey map. And I know if you've, if you have had like guests on the show who have people who created their journey maps, it's incredibly powerful, and incredibly hard to do. Because you have to literally consider hundreds of moments that can happen during an employee's journey. And then all associated touchpoints as well, like, let's say, the example of a person coming back from parental leave, there's a touchpoint, with the manager of that person, there's a touch point with the employee themselves, those are two touch points associated with this one moment is multiplied. All of the moms have touch points as well, what we created is a employee journey designer that basically provides an overview of all possible moments that you can possibly think of, and then you can say, Yeah, I use this one, I don't use that one, I don't use that one. So you can basically build your own employee journey map, within a flash of the time, like so much faster than you don't have to hold all of those moments in your head anymore. And that's kind of the next iteration of our pindus.

Chris Rainey 21:51

Even more complex, right? Because you mentioned obviously, the touch points, but then you've got the various technology touch points. So because then you're like, Okay, now we've got four different interactions of in 10 different platforms.

Joris 22:02

You want to register this Exactly, right. So when I was doing journey mapping with my team is in the past, I would like go on a whiteboard, and I had all these sticky notes, right. And it became, you know, really difficult very quickly, because of the complexity of all of this stuff. Again, technology solves a lot, right. So we've a software product that actually allows you to do that you can say, hey, these, these, these touch points are served by my system ServiceNow or JIRA Service Desk or and these touch points are served by my ATS my applicant tracking system. So basically, you can assign per touch point which technology drives a successful experience for the end recipient, which is the employee, because there's an employee journey map, right, you can filter. So you can look at your map of all the moments that are served that are served by system x, or system y, you can look at all the moments that are owned by l&d learning and development, you can see all the moments that you currently don't have yet, you can basically filter by whatever tag you have associated with with the touch points, just incredibly helpful, if you want to improve any journey, right? So that's, that's pretty cool.

Chris Rainey 23:18

The secret sauce of this, though, is also just being where they already are. So if they're already in teams stay in teams, they're already in Slack, keep it in Slack. Like, they're not having to go somewhere else. Is it again, it's in their flow of work, right.

Joris 23:32

I mean, one of the big advantages of a system like pin is employees don't even know, the company is like, you know, we work with companies like MongoDB, and similar weapon amplitude and lucid and, you know, open AI, like all these amazing companies, if you ask employees at those companies, have you heard of pen, they probably won't even know what pen is because we leverage the existing communication platforms, right? HR will know. But the folks in the company won't, because they just received a message from Mary in LMD, when they got promoted to be a manager via slack. That's the communication platform that they're used to that nothing changes with him on that. So that's really, that's actually really powerful.

Chris Rainey 24:14

I think everyone listening can understand the value of something like this, but how do you demonstrate and measure ROI? Well,

Joris 24:23

I think there's two areas. Firstly, it's just as CFO is very happy with time savings, just share hours, that you don't have to focus on sending things manually to take take a process like onboarding, yeah. You literally have folks like like coordinating onboarding. If your team grows from 1000 to 2000. People, you don't have to hire one or two new onboarding coordinators. The system can just do it for you. All of those messages can be automated and they can just be one person doing onboarding, seeing, only dropping in when something fails. Basically, I think we like MongoDB, for example, they had a person in learning and development, downloading reports from SuccessFactors. Every week, identifying people who got promoted to manager, she would manually send out communications to those managers, right, the sequence of communications, the programme was amazing, fantastic. But this poor person was doing all of this stuff manually, right? Now, she doesn't have to do that. And in addition to that, she can now see which pieces of communication actually perform better versus others. That's an incredibly powerful, encouraging and positive way of measuring employee experience and measure our work in HR as well. It's just super cool,

Chris Rainey 25:40

it'd be so cool to see the data of like, where we were, where we're showing up as an organisation where I'm at the moment, that matter, right, just having absolute that dataset will be so cool.

Joris 25:51

The vo just having the overview, like statuses knowing Yeah, you know, all the moments that matter and what you do as an organisation and who handles which moments that matter. So you know, you're not siloed anymore, right? It's not like Ellen V.

Chris Rainey 26:05

That's how it is. Right? It's true. l&d started over here, you know,

Joris 26:09

super siloed. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Now, you can see now and you can see, okay, what is my How does my work relates to everyone else's work in the entire employee experience? It's, it's, it's such a better way of measuring your impact, right. So ultimately, it doesn't really matter which l&d programmes you deliver. What matters is what is the experience? Like put yourself in the shoes of a person who actually joins your company and moves through your company all the way through to accidente alumni programme? What is their experience? Like? That's, that's what HR is about?

Chris Rainey 26:44

What are your hopes for the future of this? And

Joris 26:46

remember, like, my first job was a manager. I didn't get any help. You know, I was, people didn't like, provide me with any information. My manager was was great. But he gave me a little bit of coaching, perhaps if there was a real fire, but I feel completely unconfident. I didn't do one on ones. I didn't even know how to do one on ones, right. I don't want anyone to go through an experience like that. I would want people to feel confident in their work. People want to do good work, no one goes to work, wanting to do a shift job, but you just don't know what you don't know. And 100%. Many times, things just go unnoticed. And you're you know, by the time you hit a situation, you may be too late. Like the first time I had someone coming back from parental leave who was on my team. I was too late, not because I didn't want to do a good job. And I was in HR, I should know these things, right? This happens all the time. How many times have I forgotten someone's anniversary? How many times was I slightly disappointed that my manager didn't, you know, reach me a happy birthday? How many times did I really like do a transition of a person moving into my team? From another team? How often did I manage that conversation like that transition? Well, did I actually sit down if that person's old manager and have a three way conversation between the transitioning employee in it the old manager? No, I didn't write because I didn't know. I want people to feel a little bit more confidence.

Chris Rainey 28:16

I think I think everyone listening can relate. But listen, I love what you're doing. And for everyone listening I'm really excited for it to for them to get hold of the employee journey map at all right? So if wherever you're listening or watching right now there'll be a link in the description. So make sure you check that out. Share it with the rest of your HR team as well get together in a meeting use it together, right co create. That is super exciting. I love what you're doing. Haven't really come across any organisations doing this which is kind of crazy. Which is when we when we first connected which is only a week ago. I was like wow, okay, how do I not know about this? Oh, so really excited to be in a team and I appreciate you taking the time out to come on the show.

Joris 28:55

Thanks so much. Was was lovely. Thank you so much.