Over the past few years Microsoft has gone through a culture journey, exploring what change was needed to remain competitive with the likes of Apple and Google. The focus on understanding their employees’ behaviors, pain points, and motivations from a point of empathy has led the organization to shift its mindset towards purpose, learning and development.

“By fulfilling the basic needs of an employee first, you can then explore the true impact of higher self-actualization needs”, according to Kathleen Hogan, Chief People Officer & EVP, Human Resources. Microsoft has identified the 5 Ps of Employee Fulfillment that is a critical element to the company’s employee experience strategy.

If we do not focus on employee experiences, companies will find themselves repeating history. Teams will revert to working in silos, innovation will decline, employee satisfaction will plummet, employees will leave, customer satisfaction will decrease, brands will deteriorate, and recruiting will become even more difficult.

Elizabeth Gartner is an Employee Experiences Leader at Microsoft. She has always been passionate about challenges that improve processes and experiences. After almost 7 years with Microsoft, 6 different roles, and 3 HR organizations – there was always one thing in common with the job description. Curiosity was required. Elizabeth strives to empower globally diverse teams to find creative solutions to the ever-changing modern workplace. She’s currently focused on the challenge of incorporating her team’s Employee Experience strategy throughout Microsoft HR to influence company policies for over 120,000 employees.

Today with Elizabeth we talk about:
- What the Employee Experience means at Microsoft.
- What the employee journey looks like in the organization.
- What are Microsoft's 7 Step Methodology to bring the Employee Experience to life.
- What are the main themes important to employees to feel engaged.
- How the company approaches manager training & development.
- We also talk about employee experience, automation and personalization, as well as employee data and analytics.
- Elizabeth shares tips on where to start in your EX journey and which pitfalls to avoid.

Note: you can follow Elizabeth on LinkedIn and Microsoft on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

Support for this podcast is brought to you by LifeGuides. LifeGuides helps companies increase employee engagement and reduce presenteeism loss, by providing a human-to-human network to help employees through their Life Challenges.
LifeGuides pairs people who are going through a specific Life Challenge, with Guides who have gone through the exact-same Life Challenge. As Match.com pairs people for love, and Doctors On Demand finds doctors for patients, we match a Guide to each employee’s specific Life Challenge.
For employers, LifeGuides offers a range of customized plans, which support your employee families with one-on-one support, offers empathy, experienced guidance and are highly-affordable.
Find out more at www.lifeguides.com.

If you want to send me feedback, suggestions for future topics or guests, you can reach me at [email protected] or on Twitter @eX_Summit. 

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