Unily CEO Chris Ciauri on Using Technology to Nurture Experience

[00:00:00] Oh my goodness, bad touching, harassment, sex, violence, fraud, threats, all things that could have been avoided. If you had Fama, stop hiring dangerous people. Fama.io You know what I like about I Solved? Everything. I Solved is PeopleCentric, and in a PeopleCentric world you need a PeopleCentric solution.

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[00:00:40] From tracking to recruiting to onboarding and clients from payroll to benefits to time and labor management, transform your employee experience for a better today and a better tomorrow with I Solved. For more information, go to isolvedhcm.com Welcome to PeopleTech, the podcast of workforceai.news, I'm Mark Feffer.

[00:01:02] My guest today is Chris Chowley, the CEO of Unilever. We're going to talk about employee experience and a lot of its nooks and clannies.

[00:01:21] For instance, it's linked to customer experience and business results and how organizations can use technology to help employees do their jobs and feel valued at the same time. That's on this edition of PeopleTech. Hey Chris, welcome.

[00:01:38] Unilever, your focus is really on experience and you've been talking lately about employee experience. I wondered, could you talk about the overlap between customer experience and employee experience because they do have a bunch of commonalities, don't they? They do, Mark.

[00:02:01] I'm sure you looked at my background to raise it even more of a relevant question, but I spent a decade at Salesforce. I was part of that decade of investment, tsunami, somewhere near a trillion dollars spent on trying to help organizations of all sizes optimize around the customer.

[00:02:28] One of the things that really attracted me to Unilever was, I think we're in a period or maybe it's a decade or entering a decade where the same investments that went into optimizing around customer haven't happened around employee.

[00:02:48] So I think generally speaking, there's a lot of opportunity to drive better employee experience, productivity, engagement, all the factors that you, when you hear the different analysts and people who are analyzing the market and certainly COVID played into that.

[00:03:08] But I think there's a general disengagement and you see stats that up to 80% of workers are disengaged or not aligned to the company's mission and vision.

[00:03:20] So I'm excited, I think Unilever is in a great position to be one of the clear leaders in a space that I think is just going to be really exciting.

[00:03:31] There's so much that we can do for employees and lots of learnings we can take from how we optimize around the customer.

[00:03:39] One reflection I've had sort of almost a year in and talking to a lot of our customers, we're fortunate to be a leader at the large end of the market. So iconic brands like McDonald's, L'Oreal, Interstin Young, CVS, etc.

[00:04:01] And what they're all talking about is it kind of ended up in this situation where they came out of the pandemic and you've got changing workforce, you've got an explosion of technology. You've got a lot of noise for the employee.

[00:04:15] And I think ultimately what that's created is a lack of organizational velocity.

[00:04:21] And what Unilever is helping our customers to do and this is what I've kind of teased out with them is I think we can really help companies work through that maze of how do I create organizational velocity in the context of a modern workforce.

[00:04:40] They're going to figure out how to strike that balance and find organizational velocity because they recognize that a lot of the dynamics around the way that people work, the structural workforce itself in terms of generational shift. They're going to figure out how to optimize around that.

[00:04:59] And so we kind of think that's the game. Organizational velocity is going to be the game over the next decade. Well, it makes sense in that there's so much talk nowadays about employees and consumers are essentially the same people.

[00:05:13] So you have to be treating them in very similar ways. The thing is everyone sort of says that but do you think employers have really figured that out or do you guys still have to do a lot of convincing?

[00:05:27] I think our industry is going to have to be part of driving that change. And it's interesting. I can do this a little bit with you given the context of sort of, and I'll use the terminology if that was the customer experience decade.

[00:05:43] This is going to be employee experience decade. Companies recognize they had a problem going back 10 or 15 years ago, which is the world's customer became multi-channel. That was like the first crack. And so everyone was trying to figure out customers are coming.

[00:06:03] They're coming at me in a different way. I've got to rebuild the way my organization deals with them, the way my people deal with them.

[00:06:12] My technology has to allow me to get the right information or have the right interaction with the customer at the right time with the right information. And those that optimized outperforms like it was pretty clear.

[00:06:27] And while you would have leading companies in that, you certainly would have had some technology vendors, your strategy consultants, your big consulting firm sort of really starting to understand like, okay, what's the path for a company to go do this?

[00:06:46] I don't think, you know, without sort of that relationship between those four pieces, I don't think companies would have been a successful, nearly successful moving through the order. In fact, they wouldn't have been able to do it without great technology and better strategy.

[00:07:01] I think the same thing is going to happen on employees. So I think we have a lot of responsibility to try to help companies move to organizational velocity when the employee context has changed so much. And it has.

[00:07:20] It seems sometimes like the whole idea of employee experience sort of goes up and down. I mean, we've been hearing about it for a while. Is the whole thing coming back? Yeah, it's interesting.

[00:07:34] You know, one of the things Mark, I wanted to do and I didn't get a chance to, I was doing a little bit of research on that at the very end, I found an article you wrote about the experience winter.

[00:07:45] So I'm going to go look at that, but I'm going to presume that that question is coming a little bit from some of those discussions. Our perspective on that is, I think what's happened in a lot of large companies as they moved,

[00:08:01] they're moving through into a pandemic and then out of a pandemic with a workforce that's different to the demographics and the expectations of that workforce are shifting pretty fast. You mentioned one thing that I think is a simple example, which is, you know, if I'm an enterprise,

[00:08:23] I'm not just optimizing the experience of my employees with the tools they use at work, because the reality is they're using their personal tools and their work tools and it's interchangeable.

[00:08:37] It's on my phone when I pick it up to do something at work, like some personal things are wrapped in this. So they've got expectations of experience.

[00:08:46] There's a lot more noise, both because personal and work are hitting together, but also because at work, you know, there's different data out there. But generally speaking, the average employee in an enterprise doubled the applications that they use on a daily basis between 2019 and 2024.

[00:09:12] So explosion of applications, lots of SaaS tools. And so the employees got more information or depending on how you look at it, more noise, more alerts. They've got their personal things coming in.

[00:09:26] And so that's what you hear when you talk to employers though, what are your employees feeling and why are you struggling to get engagement? It's how do you simplify their world as a worker?

[00:09:40] And I think the other complication in that, if you're a C-suite, your leadership in an organization, you've been trying to figure out physical work. So like, okay, I'm worried because I see these engagement issues, maybe I've got nutrition issues.

[00:10:02] You know, obviously if I can keep employees, there's a massive cost savings versus having to try to replace. So you've got all the financial metrics behind it telling you like, this feels problematic. This is a big problem. How do you do it?

[00:10:21] Well, the first I think that almost compulsion for many executive teams is it's got to be something to do with getting them back to work a certain numbers of days a week. You know, our culture has shifted because people aren't here. Let's get them back in.

[00:10:36] We'll rebuild our culture. The reality is you're not going to end up with the same culture. What do people behave like in a company? What are the organizational behaviors, classic definition of culture? That's shifted.

[00:10:52] And so I think you've got to think of culture in the context not just of what's my hybrid or back to work policy, but what about the tools? Because the tools are where the noise is.

[00:11:07] So I think there's a huge opportunity for, you know, company like you know, with a heritage, you know, doing, helping some of the largest most iconic organizations in the world through this build up, I guess, to this crisis of philosophy.

[00:11:28] We have all that experience that I think we can brain enterprise and say, look, yes, physical work place strategy important culture. Like there's a shift and how do you think about that? And then, and then, you know, how do we create a more simple experience for your employees?

[00:11:47] And I think that's where, you know, we call it an employee experience platform. Oh my goodness. Bad touching, harassment, sex, violence, fraud, threats, all things that could have been avoided if you had Fama. Stop hiring dangerous people. Fama.io.

[00:12:16] All right, I want to talk to you for a moment about retaining and developing your workforce. It's hard recruiting is hard retaining top employees is hard. Then you've got onboarding payroll benefits time and labor management.

[00:12:29] You need to take care of your workforce and you can only do this successfully if you commit to transforming your employee experience. This is where I saw comes in they empower you to be successful. We've seen it with a number of companies that we've worked with.

[00:12:44] And this is why we partner with them here at work to find we trust them and you should too. Check them out at I solved hcm.com, you know, because it's not your your father or mother's intranet.

[00:12:58] It's the internet, but the old internet was a static repository of information. This is about like, you know, how do you communicate to your organization and create connections up and down and sideways in organization?

[00:13:15] How do you connect people to the relevant information to help them do their job better? And so I think it's so much different than, you know, that old idea that I think you've really seen that term employee experience emerge.

[00:13:33] And I think that's obviously a take on, hey, this feels like that customer thing we did in the last decade and I think overall the industry made a lot of progress. Can we apply that here with employees?

[00:13:48] And how much of it do you think is sort of philosophy or strategy? Maybe as a better word versus the technology? I mean, can it be that somebody's always? Well, no, no, I'm just but it's it's I don't want it's kind of a chicken and an egg thing.

[00:14:05] But you know, if you've got the tools but you don't have the strategy or the commitment, can you can you really accomplish anything? Yeah, I mean, what when I when I was an executive at Salesforce running a meeting with customers.

[00:14:22] And I'd often get to meeting with with boards and NC level. And when I sensed that they saw a tool or a piece of technology as the Holy Grail, I think it's a business leader. I felt the responsibility to remind them this is an enabling technology.

[00:14:41] And it can make you immensely more successful if you have the right strategy and you have and you have the right business set up to go execute against that strategy. This tool can help you fly.

[00:14:57] I'm going back to my velocity thing, I think it was very much like that in the customer world.

[00:15:02] I think it's got it's the same thing in an employee experience that our customers you've got the clearest strategies and sort of the biggest vision and they understand the connection between culture, workplace and digital.

[00:15:18] And they're and they're focused on if I can make my employees more aligned, more engaged, more empowered, more connected. By the way, including my customers because people still in most organizations have the biggest impact on your customer experience.

[00:15:46] So, you know, without getting too much into it's knowing people with detail but can you give me a couple of how do you translate this from your intention into you know a reality that actually has an impact.

[00:16:03] Yeah, I'll get I'll give you I'll give you a couple quick examples so maybe on some different dimensions. So in sort of the concept of how do you how do you connect employees to information how do you make things a little bit more frictionless.

[00:16:22] Shell's been a customer for about four years now they use they use the tool quite broadly so so these they use it on the communications alignment connected to mission front and you know departmental all the way up to

[00:16:40] the level messages that communicate to employees through the platform that the employees connect with each other through it but one of the really interesting interesting things they did around simplification.

[00:16:53] And we and we think a platform like us is really unique and set up well to do this because of our enterprise grade architecture and data structures and governance is they said look we've got we've got more than 400 applications. Employee facing applications.

[00:17:12] We know that our employees are spending a lot of time just trying to find the application to then go find the information and they're signing on multiple times. So they created an application portal in Unile, as well launch pad.

[00:17:30] So employees don't have to think about where things are. They're already spending a good chunk of their day in Unile that's where they're getting their their information their articles or corporate communication what's going on with the company what's happening in my department.

[00:17:43] And now I go there, you know getting my HR information their links to my HR information. Now I've got an app portal and I say, hey, take me to SAP take me to Salesforce take me to workday.

[00:17:56] And I'm single time and I'm straight into the system. And so and so there's fluidity in my day such to the extent or reduction of digital friction that shell estimates that they're saving $40 million a year, just from that one place where they figured out if we can reduce context

[00:18:19] we can reduce, you know, toggling and logging in how much time is that worth to our employees. And in the context of an organization like Shell, it's $40 million a year.

[00:18:32] And, you know, you can you can go to the different parts of the value of an employee experience platform and you can find, you know, just loads of different examples of, you know, really really quick payback but more importantly if you add them together.

[00:18:51] And I get my employees helping our organization go at velocity. That's competitive advantage. But that's what the winners will have over the next decade.

[00:19:04] I hope you'll come back and talk more about this because what the the the story that you mentioned about the experience winter. One of the things that was driving that whole idea of of employers backing off was really was financial, that they just may not want to

[00:19:20] they just may not want to spend the money. Are you are you seeing sort of more economic pressure on companies or are they are they really deciding no we this is just sort of a have to we whatever costs we just need to make sure that we're paying attention here.

[00:19:40] Look, I think I think of it in a general level. And, and I talked about some of the reasons but like you come out you come out of a pandemic where you just have a significant change in the way that we all work.

[00:19:54] And so companies are moving through that. And then and then obviously there's you know, uncertainty and volatility and markets and the signals maybe are less clear right now than in a lot of history so yes there's a there's a there's a hesitancy.

[00:20:12] I don't. I think the one I when I've seen the articles on winter and not for years mark but I don't, I don't buy it. And maybe that's partly because I'm an optimist. It's partly because I've seen this movie before.

[00:20:26] And I'll tell you exactly what happened. You know, 1015 years ago, you're coming out of the financial crisis customer everything customer gets disrupted because digital was exploding and you know we had our first we had our first, you know, iPhones and companies said okay,

[00:20:47] I have to make a switch and some said, and by the way that was revenue so it's a little bit easier to spot how to do it.

[00:20:56] And so and so some companies the leaders jumped in some jumped in right behind them those that said they couldn't afford it lost lost significant competitive damage.

[00:21:08] We can go back and sort of probably do a book about that or an HBR article. And I think I think the same thing is going to happen.

[00:21:17] So, like it's interesting that you know the business is going well for us the large enterprises that have that vision of the impact and they are alive this can have and that there's just an imperative to do something or Asians will start to make moves

[00:21:36] they'll try they'll start to figure out how to create organizational velocity with the with the right strategies culture the workplace and the technologies and the companies that start to figure it out will create urgency and those two decided to wait.

[00:21:55] So I think it'll obviously have its differences but I think that's how it's going to play out. Well, Chris. Thanks very much for talking with me. I'd love to have you come back so we can sort of things progressed.

[00:22:13] I'm I'm I'm even more passionate about people and humans and productivity. It's possible that I am about customers from having that experience and only because I think if you get the employee input right, you get exponential performance all the way out through customers.

[00:22:34] So your topics I love. I'm happy to do this anytime. My guest today has been Chris Chowry, the CEO of Unilever and this has been PeopleTech, the podcast of workforce AI dot news. We're also a part of work to find podcast network find them at www.wrkdefined.com

[00:23:06] To keep up with AI technology and HR subscribe to workforce AI today. We're the most trusted source of news in the HR tech industry. Find us at www.workforceai.news. I'm Mark Feffer.