Episode 110: How Uber Used Employee Listening to Develop its Return to Office Strategy (Interview with RJ Milnor)

On the show today, I am talking to RJ Milnor, Head of People Analytics at Uber, about the work he and his team have been doing around employee listening, hybrid working and productivity. Throughout our conversation, RJ, talks about the journey that Uber embarked on to use people analytics to better understand employee sentiment, during the pandemic, and how that work has shaped Uber's approach to hybrid working and employees returning to the office.


In this episode, we discuss:

• How Uber conducts employee listening and how it's approach to surveys and continuous listening has changed throughout the pandemic

• Some of the insights that RJ’s team has gathered on employee productivity, focus time, and collaboration, while everyone has been based at home

• 
How Uber has shared data and insights with the rest of the organisation, to help the business and employees make better decisions.

• How people analytics greatly influenced Uber’s return to office strategy and how both the CHRO and CEO, use the insights in their communications to the rest of the company

• RJ’s thoughts on how HR can add business value, as we start to come out of the pandemic

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Interview Transcript

David Green: Today, I am delighted to welcome RJ Milnor, Head of People Analytics at Uber, to The Digital HR Leaders Podcast. Welcome to the show RJ, for the second time actually. Please can you provide listeners with a brief introduction to you and your current role at Uber? 


RJ Milnor: Thanks, David, it is great to be here again and great to see you. My name is RJ Milnor. I am the Global Head of People Analytics at Uber, and I have got the real pleasure of supporting a team whose mission is to empower leaders and employees, to make more evidence-based decisions. And we do that by unlocking the power of people data and a lot of people ask, okay, what does that mean? How do you do that? Why do you do that? And for us, it is really all about helping the business and our employees thrive, by providing more actionable insights.

Our team is really based around having people analytics and research, serving all of our global business and people functions. 
So we have responsibility for providing those insights across our business, handling our people data infrastructure, and also handling our people data privacy, which is a huge issue now and will continue to be, also data security. 


David Green: Great. Before we get into your current work in more detail, it would be really good to understand a little bit more about your career history and how you got into HR in the first place. 


RJ Milnor: Yeah, of course. So when I think about my work, the focus is really about increasing business impact through our work force. That has really been the focus of my work probably, for the past 15 or 20 years, David.

Specifically, I think what really energises me, is thinking about how changes in our talent management approaches and really how we think about work, can have a real impact on our profitability and total shareholder return. 
And that has been a common theme, really the red thread, across my work for a couple of decades, that makes me sound old David, but for a while now.

Talking about career history, prior to Uber, I led people analytics and strategic workforce planning at a couple of large fortune five companies. Before that, I actually developed and sold people analytics products, and for anybody that is a people analytics practitioner or an aspiring practitioner, I really recommend that in your journey. It is a great way to really understand the user and develop user centricity, but it is also wonderful to build a sales mindset and a sales skillset. That serves everyone well as they develop in their career and become a leader in whatever field. Then prior to that, I spent about seven years in research and consulting with a company called Corporate Executive Board, now Gartner, which was an amazing experience really learning about next practices in human resources, working with amazing companies around the world, but also learning how to build a rigorous research study and think analytically and critically. But to answer your question of how I got into HR in the first place, it was actually in financial services, specifically in investment banking. If you take the dial back to the beginning of the millennium, so in the early two thousands, right after the first .com bubble burst.

We were trying to understand, how do you value these companies that have high revenue and zero profitability? And one of the questions that came out was, well, is there a way to quantify human capital? We were starting to do some work around that, specifically quantifying leadership bench strength, and I became fascinated by what human resources had the potential to become. So specifically, can we really think about applying statistical techniques and even financial models, to how the workforce operates. Also, how changes in talent management strategies or philosophies, could empower employees, but also drive more business impact through that. 
And this is in the early two thousands and that is what started me on this journey into human resources, which I knew nothing about as a young investment banker at that time and I have never looked back. 


David Green: It is really interesting, you are probably seeing it as well, that the investment communities have a growing interest in, let’s call it human capital. We have seen the moves by the securities and exchange commission in the US, for companies to disclose more about human capital. We have seen the ISO standard now, around human capital reporting. This is a real opportunity for people analytics teams for HR leaders really, to start providing the right information that A] supports shareholders, but it also helps the business make decisions.

I think it is a trend that has almost been reactivated. You were looking at in the early two thousands, so I think that was very ahead of the time for the organisation you were in, but investors are now more often looking at human capital information, aren’t they? 


RJ Milnor: Absolutely and we saw the changes to the SEC reporting that happened a couple of years ago, and that was a watershed moment. That was a long time coming. So there were a lot of initiatives that came up to that. There is a continuing focus, especially in the ESG community, around how do we give investors more information? I think an important focus there, David, is not just providing information but providing context. Today, one of the challenges is not getting stuck providing a metric, or getting put into a box of I need this number, but providing the right insight and information that tells a story of the business. 
That is where people analytics can really provide value. It is not just being a reporting function saying, here is your headcount number, or the turnover, or how many hours of training, but here is what is actually happening in our workforce and how that is contributing to our business strategy and achieving our business objectives and goals. And that is a very important piece of information. 


David Green: Yeah and certainly we are going to talk throughout the rest of the conversation, more around the link between people analytics and business outcomes and employee outcomes as well.

As you said, you have been around the people analytics space now for more than 10 years. It has changed a lot as of that time hasn’t it? What impact do you think, the pandemic has had on the field in general and how did it impact people analytics at Uber?

RJ Milnor: Well, it is a great question. I think it was catalytic in many ways. We talked a lot in this forum and other forums, about how the pandemic shone the spotlight on the role of the chief people officer and really put them in the forefront in so many ways. You have had wonderful chief people officers on this program, talking about this. In many ways I think people analytics is often at the right hand of the chief people officer, providing them with insights that they can then take action on. When I think about the pandemic and what we learned through it and how it changed the field for us, two things come to mind both in terms of how it changed HR, but also the business.

The importance of empathy and the importance of user centricity and those are, as I mentioned, critically important for the HR field and people analytics, but also critically important for business. 
So let's start with the first one, empathy. Really understanding how important it is to have empathy. Empathy for our employees, our workforce. From a business perspective, how important it is to have empathy for our customers, our riders, our earners, our merchants, the communities in which we operate. 
It is critical for us to build with heart, which is one of our values, but to be able to build the right products, to be able to be the best company that we can be.

And I will tell you a quick story about empathy. The very beginning of the pandemic, about 90% of our workforce changed work location. They went from working primarily in the office to totally working from home. We conducted a quick survey because we needed to understand how our employees were doing, how was their wellbeing and also, how we could help. One of the things that we heard, particularly from caregivers was, was I just need my peers, my colleagues and my managers, to understand what I am going through right now. Especially for caregivers, I am having to work early hours and late hours because of my other responsibilities. I have got these meetings I have to attend to, there are things that I could really use help with. And we addressed those things fortunately through the feedback in that survey, but what I really need right now is some understanding. 
And so that empathy is incredibly important and we are continuing to build that into our work and train that. We have heard this from other places as well, it is becoming an incredibly important leadership skill, if it wasn't already I think we are recognising now, that it is. The second piece is user-centricity specifically in our case, putting employees at the centre of the conversation. In the past, I think we did a lot of talking about employees as a HR function and specifically as people analytics communities. Then we did a lot of talking to employees. I think now we do a lot more talking with employees and having a dialogue with employees. That is where employee listening is so important, it is not just employee listening, it is actually having a dialogue in a conversation.

And then, if I was to add one more thing, David, besides that empathy and user-centricity, it would be speed. So really out of necessity, we had to do a lot of things much, much, more quickly during the pandemic. First and foremost, because safety was an issue. The safety and health of our employees. So there were many processes that we had to stand up, do new things and do all of them extremely fast. That set a new bar in terms of the speed with which we move and get things done and I don't think that expectation moved. So now, we know we can move that quickly, we can move with that sense of urgency and the laxity and while we may not always need to move that quickly, we know we can. I think the expectation is there and we have that of ourselves to move that quickly.

I will give you an example there. That COVID survey, I just mentioned that we did in the very, very, early stages of the pandemic. Designing that in house, building the survey, administering it, that would typically for most organisations and for us, take weeks to do. We did that in three business days, because we had to. We are very fortunate to have a very gifted team, to be able to do that. That is now the expectation. And while we don't need to design and administer every survey in three business days, we know that we can and we are never going back to taking weeks to do it. So I think there is that new expectation of, we now know the speed with which we can operate. 


David Green: Yeah and I suppose that now extends to listening. If employees see that the company is listening to them, showing empathy, taking action on what employees say, and communicating that they are doing that, then you can't go back from that. You have got to keep it going. It is almost like once the genie is out the bottle, you have got to keep delivering on it.

And obviously one of the areas that you have really invested in and you have shared some of that along the journey, is the investment that you have made in employee listening. Could you talk us through that journey you have been on, with regards to continuous listening?

RJ Milnor: Yeah, it has been a fun journey and a lot of it was precipitated by the pandemic in some way, so it is a wonderful tie in question that you are asking here, David.

So Uber, has had employee listening in different ways for quite some time. We used to run a semi-annual survey, but what we recognised is that a lot can happen in six months. So we needed something to fill the gaps so that employees can tell us what they need, when they need it and so the leaders, then also process owners, can respond in a more timely way. And that is really where continuous listening came from for us. 
We have been thinking about continuous listening for some time. Why I say the pandemic kind of precipitated that, is that when we entered the pandemic in early 2020, we needed something more timely than every six months. So it was that catalytic event. That survey I mentioned, the COVID survey, was the beginning of continuous listening in a lot of ways for us. I mentioned earlier, we needed something to understand how our employees are doing and how we can help. We got a lot of insight from that. For instance, I mentioned that one of the things we found was that caregivers were having a harder time than others, particularly caregivers with children less than five years old. 
And so that gave us a lot of information about how we could help them from processes we can put in place, how to give them more flexibility, even things like creating flexible work hours for folks, giving people the freedom to miss meetings, creating behaviours around recording meetings, especially not essential ones, and coming back to them later. Simple things that we can put in place quickly and come back. In that particular case, after six months, we saw a meaningful increase, in that caregiver cohort, on engagement, satisfaction and intent to stay. And so that really got the ball rolling for us.

This is something that we need to do on a regular basis, on a steady state basis and so we began the continuous listening program from that starting point.

When we think about continuous listening, what I really think about is continuous response. So it is not just hearing, it is responding. Going back to that point earlier about user centricity, that it needs to be a response and a dialogue. 
So we did a couple of things structurally. One is, we moved from a semi-annual survey cadence to monthly surveys. Those monthly surveys went from being census, so surveying all employees, to representative samples of our workforce. That really helped alleviate the survey fatigue.

Then we also cut the length of the surveys. We didn't want these surveys to be, big things that take 15 minutes to do, so we cut the surveys to make them much more digestible and bite-size. That was kind of the beginning of our more monthly cadence around continuous listening, that stemmed from our initial COVID survey that happened at the beginning of 2020. I mentioned that continuous listening is, in my mind , really continuous response. It is hard to drive response, if our stakeholders aren't aware of the results. We can't just keep it all internally and have this wonderful corpus of data, so we need to be transparent and walk in daylight here. 
We did that through a series of products that we deployed out. One is, Manager Dashboards. So making sure that our leaders and process owners, can see the results. We also have an Employee Dashboard, where employees can see their results and then we are also communicating with our employees. We do that typically through our Global All-Hands, we have we a bi-weekly cadence of meetings with all of our employees and so we will show up every once in a while, on those and say not just here are the results, but here are the insights. Here is what we are seeing from these. Here is what it means.

And then we can communicate through other channels too, email, Slack, those types of comms. 


David Green: And of course, results, insights, and then actions we have taken and what outcomes have resulted from the actions as well. I know we are going to talk a little bit about that as well, particularly in relation to something with your CEO. 
Obviously surveys are a one area, what other investments did you make in tools and technology as well? I think you looked at some passive listening technologies as well. 


RJ Milnor: The employee listening or continuous listening can mean different things to different folks, so I am really glad that you asked the question.

We take an integrated approach, combining the active and passive. Let me dig into both those terms, because those might be new to some people or they can be confusing too.

When I talk about active approaches, what I mean is surveying employees about their sentiment. Within that bucket of active listening or traditional surveys, of course we do it all electronically, but we had different types of surveys or different products, within that part of our continuous listening program.

For instance, we have the monthly surveys that I just mentioned, these are our shorter surveys that go to a representative sample of the population. That gets this great signal on some very key metrics that we are looking at. We are trying to understand collaboration, we are trying to understanding a lot of different elements inside there.

We also have surveys that are designed towards different parts of an employee's journey at our company, their employment life cycle. So it could be, they get triggered when someone is a candidate so before they have even started with the company, or during their onboarding. And so we manage those surveys as well, that are designed to understand a very specific part of their employment journey or their experience.

Then we also have the core employment survey, that we are now doing once a year. I think of that as like a tent post survey, there is a lot inside of that and we go very deep in that.

So all those fit in the active side of our continuous listening program.

When I talk about passive listening, what I mean there is collecting aggregate, de-identified, data. 
So nothing at the individual level, we are talking about aggregated team level data.

Here, what we are doing is we are looking at things like meeting volume, collaboration time, lots of data about how teams are working.

When you combine sentiment from the active approach with how work is actually getting done, on the passive approach, magic happens. And that is where I think the insights really come in. You can get some good insights on the sentiment, some great insights from the sentiment and the comments, it is a rich source of information. You can get some great insights from the passive side, the quant side of the house.

When you bring them together, that is where a lot of the work happens but it is also where a lot of the real magic happens. You can understand what is really happening in your workforce, where the right interventions might be and where the recommendations might be. 


David Green: I think that leads on nicely to the next question. I think that's given you some incredible insights around employee productivity, focus time and collaboration, while people have been based remote, hasn’t it?

RJ Milnor: It has and we are continuing to monitor this closely. One of the things that we noticed, I mentioned about 90% of our workforce had a shift in location they went from being primarily in the office to working from home, is that collaboration increased. 
Collaboration within departments and even across departments increased significantly after working from home. And what we realised is that people were in more meetings, with more people, for more of the day. As we looked across this combined dataset, what we started to understand was that time in meetings, went up by about a third after going to working from home. I think the number of meetings went up by about 40%, but also we were having larger meetings. So the number of employees in a meeting, went up by about 45%. At the same time, what we were seeing was that the sense of informal connections and the sense of community was actually decreasing and that was where the sentiment is coming in. One of the things we were also looking at, was how much time is being spent in what we think of as focus time. When I say focus time, what I mean is two hours or more, of uninterrupted time that you can dedicate to a process or task. The time that you can really dig in and work on a project or a specific body of work. And what was happening was that as meetings were going up by a third, or 40%, focus time had actually dropped by 30%. So as we are trying to be more productive, we are trying to collaborate more, we are all working from home or a distance from one another, we naturally say, we need to collaborate to get work done, that means we need to meet. I need to meet with more people because that is what's going to create more productivity, that is what's going to get the work done. We were cannibalising this focus time, this dedicated time to get work. At the same time, one of the things that we started to ask ourselves is well, then what is happening with productivity? And that is a really sticky question to answer because productivity means different things to different organisations. I don't think there is a single definition of productivity. So for instance, just within our company, different divisions will measure productivity in different ways, based upon the work that they need to do. 
We worked with a lot of those different divisions and understood how productivity was changing.

The other thing that we started to do was we said hey, let's ask the employees, how productive do they feel? And we learned a couple things. One is, that self-reported productivity, if you simply ask an employee how productive are they feeling right now? It tracks extremely well to the measures of productivity in their organisation. So people are actually fairly good measures of their own productivity. So that was a good realisation for us, that a self-reported measure, in the active listening component, could be a good proxy for productivity.

The other thing we learned is that productivity and focus time were extremely correlated. 
So as people were going into more meetings, trying to be more productive and they were sacrificing the focus time, it was a bit of a treadmill right there. You are trying to be more productive in the meetings, but they are eliminating the focus time which actually helps them be more productive.

So we started to share this information and also started some experiments to help people to get more focus time. One of which was, I kind of describe it as a virtual assistant, that would help reschedule meetings on folks' calendars to block that focus time in and to make sure they were getting a certain amount of focus time a week.

We are seeing positive results from that, thus far. One of the areas that we are trying to dig into now, is really helping think through what types of meetings will drive more productivity and collaboration. 
That is not just about having more collaboration, but more effective collaboration. That is in the very early stages, but a body of work that we are digging in to right now. 


David Green: That is really fascinating and for those listening that want to find out more about that focus time tool that you have mentioned there, RJ, I think you co-authored a HBR article with Rob Cross towards the end of last year. I think there was a couple of guys from General Mills, as co-authors as well in there. So definitely recommend people checking that out.

So how have the insights that you have gained through employee listening, both active and the passive, influenced your strategy around return to office? And, how has Uber decided to adapt this over time, to accommodate employee feedback and obviously all the different locations that you serve? 


RJ Milnor: One of the things that I am most impressed by and really proud of at Uber, is how the company has built its work philosophy and the way it is thinking about return to office, around employee feedback. We are looking at return to office in a way that focuses on employee choice, while driving business outcomes. Employee feedback has been an incredibly important part of that, so it has been a fascinating journey. If I take you to the second half of 2020 and the very beginning of early 2021, we were doing a lot of sensing around employee perceptions of work from home, of hybrid, when the pandemic ends what are your perceptions, what would you like to do? 
And what we heard at that point, was that the vast majority of employees preferred the hybrid model. What that meant for most of them was working from home up to about two days per week and as we canvased the external research, we were seeing a lot of that as well. So there were several meta-analyses showing a two day work from home model would strike that balance between, balancing work-life responsibilities and also having strong relationships with coworkers. We were really trying, from a company perspective, to optimise for productivity and engagement, culture and community, flexibility as we knew it was important then, and also collaboration. So we were trying to optimise for all of these things while also building in employee feedback.

What that led to was an initial work philosophy, or return to office approach in early 2021, where we had at least three days in office at someone's home office, where they were initially located. Which made a lot of sense and I think we heard that from a lot of organisations around that time.

We continued to listen, as we always do with continuous listening, and what we found was that employee's perception started to shift. What we also started to see through the analysis, was that employees had different needs. I give tremendous credit to our own leadership, for listening to that feedback and listening to what we were providing with continuous listening and having the courage to change tack. That is a very difficult thing to do and so I am personally, extremely proud of our own leadership team for what they did.

But to give you a sense of what we started to see in the first half of 2021, the perceptions were largely the same. What came out in the data was a strong preference for flexibility and we continue to see this. Slightly more employees, very slightly, for a full-time work from home option. But, what we really saw was this continued desire for a hybrid model, but with expanded work from home options. There was this big difference in favourability between, very specifically between, two days working from home and three days from home. So there is a real big inflection point there. One of the biggest takeaways, at least for me, and maybe this is common sense but employees aren't monolithic. People have individual needs, preferences, and desires and when we looked across groups of employees, whether it was by function or location, there are some very strong trends across groups that were different from one another. And so what that told us was there is a need for more flexibility. While the first approach made sense, was rooted in data and based on employee preferences, it might be time to revisit. 
And so again, huge credit to our leadership team for listening to that and then having the courage to revisit a very big decision.

In the middle of 2021, we did revisit that and we anchored around a hybrid and return to office model and it focuses on employee choice while maximising those business outcomes. 
The high level is that we trust our employees to do the right thing and we want to give them the freedom to choose to work where they are going to be the most productive. And so we changed the model of return to office, based on that employee feedback to give folks, first off, the flexibility to choose their office location, based upon the offices we have and where we are doing work. More flexibility around when they are in the office, so moving away from that 3/2 model, three days in the office two days at home, to about half of the time in the office. Because we do believe there are real benefits from being together in the office, but then half the time could be, maybe it is five days in the office one week then five days working from home the next week. The flexibility to work totally remotely and then also the flexibility to work anywhere in the world for four weeks of the year.

That was really rooted on the changes that we saw in the employee feedback and perceptions and we continue to listen and learn and iterate as we go.

So we are continuing to use continuous listening to understand those sentiments and iterate.

David Green: The way you rolled it out, the kind of revision to the approach to hybrid, was really interesting, I think, and really talks to what you were saying about the involvement of the leadership team at Uber.

Can you just tell us how that was announced and the role you played as the people analytics leader and how that involved the CHRO, Chief People Officer and the Uber CEO? 


RJ Milnor: Yes, David, it was particularly fun. We are a data-driven company and so we wanted our employees and our teams to understand, first off, what we were doing with continuous listening but also where our work philosophy and return to office approach came from and that it was based on employee feedback. We wanted to be very open and transparent about that. As I mentioned a little bit earlier, we have a global all hands meeting that happens every two weeks, and it is for all of our employees around the world. We are doing them hybrid now, combination of live and virtual. Back in last year, of course it was all virtual. The way that we rolled this out was actually, I joined one of our global all hands and at the beginning of the all hands, I introduced the workforce to continuous listening. And so by that time, everyone, or most people at the company, had taken a survey. The vast majority of folks had, at least one, of continuous listening, so they had experienced it but they may not have understood the entirety of the program and why we were doing it.

So I introduced them to what continuous listening is. I shared what we had found, some insights that I shared with you just now, about employee preferences on work from home and some other things that we were seeing. The importance of flexibility, how preferences had shifted and how preferences were also different between groups and other folks, and the importance of flexibility that we were seeing.

Then that led in to the announcement of our new return to office policy that was led by our CEO and our chief people officer. And so based upon what we had just shared, the employee sentiment, that led into the new way that we were looking at our work philosophy and how we want to return to office, based upon those elements of flexibility I was just mentioning earlier.

So it was a great transition. A wonderful way to be able to share how we are listening to the workforce, but also how we are taking action. One of the teasers I left in my session was that, you were moving from test to prod, so we have been testing over the past several months and now we are moving to production and making this a steady state thing because this has been so successful. We are listening to your feedback and we are taking action on your feedback and you will hear from Dara, in a minute about that. And then we handed it over and actually showed how we made a significant change based upon what employees are telling us.

David Green: And it is a perfect example of how people analytics informs business decisions and creates business outcomes and you can't get a better example than that really, I don’t think. 


RJ Milnor: I think, when we talk about continuous listening, continuous response, and that idea of user centricity, we really do want for employee voice to be baked into the decisions we make and what we do. And so I do think it is a great example. 


David Green: That leads on quite nicely to, maybe a future evolution in people analytics. 
We are certainly starting to see it with certain companies, particularly on the west coast of the US actually, where workforce and workplace data is increasingly coming together. So I would love to hear how the people analytics team at Uber, has been involved in decisions around space utilisation, office configuration, and any changes that Uber has made, since the pandemic, to its offices. 


RJ Milnor: Yeah, I think that is a wonderful frontier for people analytics and there is a lot of work that can be done. We are dipping a toe in it, is probably the best way to describe our work here. But there is a lot more that we can do, I get really excited by the topic. For us, offices continue to be central to our view of collaboration and also how we think about our cultural identity. It is a place where our employees can build a sense of community, engage, and collaborate with one another and so that linkage between the data and the people analytics, and the workplace and workplace design is a really important one. To give you an example, David, in the second half of 2020, we began asking our employees, through continuous listening, about the advantages of working from home versus working in the office. What are the trade offs? Even getting into detail about, hey, what types of spaces do you value most inside the office? That information was insightful, it also helped inform a lot of how we were designing the workspace. We partner very closely with our workplace and real estate team. Some of what we learned was, what employees valued most was the informal interaction with their colleagues and the improved collaboration that happens when you are in person. Maybe not surprising based on that, the rooms they valued the most were the kitchens and social areas, we have great food snacks, but it is also the collaboration that comes in those places, the serendipitous moments, there is impromptu conversations where a great idea sparks, in the collaboration areas. 
Our workplace teams, the design teams and the real estate teams, have done an amazing job taking that feedback and running with it. So when you look at the design of our office spaces, particularly the larger ones which we think of as talent hubs, there are a couple of key elements that they are baking into those, to make them attractive places where people want to come and collaborate and ideate together, but also that reinforce our cultural identity.

Going back to some of those topics I mentioned earlier, we were trying to optimise for productivity, collaboration, community, those areas.

First, many of our spaces have an activity-based work design, that encourage natural movement. Where we can move to different places to do the type of work that we need to be doing, in the moment. Maybe it is at a desk, maybe it is in a conference room, maybe it is out in a solarium or a library or a coffee bar. I need more interaction with folks. I need less interaction with folks. I need a quiet space. a loud space. So it really encourages that natural movement.

It also reinforces our culture, where we have a mission to change the way the world moves, for the better. So then it is encouraging that movement. It is reinforcing our culture.

We have incorporated fitness centres and interconnecting stairs, to guide employees to move around. It also really helps with our wellbeing at the same time.

There is a tremendous amount of social and collaboration areas, reinforcing what we saw in the data. When you think about the importance of D&I, we have designed our spaces to be inclusive and representative of the diverse workforce that we have. So all gender restrooms is a good example of those.

Care rooms and nursing rooms are an important design element in our workspaces.

But also, having design that evokes and reinforces our culture. Going back to the spaces, when we get together in these spaces, we want places that reinforce who we are as a company. 
We kind of exist in this nexus between the digital world and the hyper-local, where we can go anywhere and get anything. There is a local flavour to each office that is really a celebration of the city that we are a part of.

So you have these design elements that invoke movement, it is part of our mission, but also a celebration of the local area that we are in. Whether that is Mexico city, or Amsterdam, or New York, or Chicago, San Francisco, whatever it might be. It has been a real pleasure to see that interconnection between people analytics and workplace design.

I also think there is just a wonderful frontier there as we are just at the very beginning as a world really, of this hybrid work movement.


David Green: I couldn’t have put it better. It is definitely a frontier area for people analytics and organisations as you said, because hopefully we are going to be entering the hybrid world this year, and things will change. We will continue to listen to employees or understand how they are using the workspace versus the work that they are doing from home. We would be able to provide insights on that but also be able to provide advice to the employees, to managers, to leaders, around more effective use of the workspace and that might lead to more redesign as well. So, yeah, a really fascinating topic. I think we could do a whole episode on that. It would be really interesting to hear what the reaction been from the business, to all the additional insights that you have been generating through continuous listening? And, what are you going to be working on next? I presume expectation levels have risen as well?

RJ Milnor: The biggest compliment that we can get, as a function, is for action to be taken based upon our insights, that our insights are informing policy and informing changes is to me, a huge, huge credit and huge success for the team. And so I think that is an excellent response, where we see it informing a work philosophy or RTO or different things. In terms of continuous listening, we have had a wonderful response. 
We continue to have strong response rates to our surveys from employees, they are leaning in. We get questions at our different meetings about employee sentiment and on average, I believe, around half of managers every month, are accessing their survey dashboards. Which for a people product, is a pretty good utilisation rate. 
One of the things that I look at closely is a particular question that we ask in our surveys, we ask this in our monthly surveys as well as our annual survey, which is, do you believe action will be taken on this survey? Do you think that action will be taken on your responses? Traditionally in years past, that has been a relatively low response question. Over the last year we have seen that go up 17%. So we are seeing a very strong trend up on that. And that for me, that is a critical success measure for continuous listening.

One, is action being taken on this stuff, are people listening to it?

Secondly, do employees believe that action is being taken on it. Is it visible to them? If it is all happening in a black box, that might be great that the changes of being based on employee feedback, but if employees don't know it, you are not really getting the dividend. I think if I look forward, one of the biggest challenges that we will continue to learn and test our way through is actionability and matching the volume and cadence of information to how quickly leaders and process owners can take action on that information. An example, if I provide updated results monthly, to leaders or to a process owner, that might be interesting to them and they might want to track how they are doing, but they might also ask, and I do get this question, what am I doing with this?

So other than tracking performance against the KPI, or out of just general interest, how do I take action on this? And so that might not be the right cadence, maybe less frequently is the right cadence for someone to be able to take actual action on something. Or at least showing the information to them, giving them a way to interact with it.

On the other hand, if I want to understand how a particular event is affecting sentiment, I might need to listen more frequently. 
And so this is something that we are still experimenting, testing, and learning our way through. In terms of where are we going next? I think I mentioned earlier, it might not necessarily be about more collaboration, it might be about more collaboration when, so between different teams, or different points of a product cycle, or it might be more effective collaboration and so that is where we are really starting to dig in.

In the context of hybrid work, for example, it is not just about how many days do I come into the office or what types of work or jobs are better in office or remote, although it is a valid question. In my mind, it is what types of work are better done face-to-face versus not face-to-face. If I need to do some work around ideation, we are building something or we are working on strategy or product, is that the time to come in the office and be face-to-face with the teams? If I need to work cross function with these teams or iI need to do some real bonding, face to face, with the teams. There are other times when it is not as important.

We looking at that or the structure of meetings, how do we structure the meetings so that they are more effective uses of time?

I think that is where I have got a particular interest right now. 


David Green: Well the time has flown by RJ, as it usually does when we talk. We are on to the question now, that we are asking everyone in this series and we can probably go broader than listening on this one. What do you believe to be the two to three things that HR will need to do to really add business value as we hopefully, come out of the pandemic?

RJ Milnor: David, as always, this has been a real pleasure so thanks for having me on, first and foremost. But I love this question, I am so glad you asked it, I have been looking forward to it. First off, I love that the question is about adding business value, so thanks for adding that question. I think there are two things. First, going back to some of what I mentioned in terms of learnings from the pandemic. To really add business value I think HR, needs to ensure we are taking a user centric approach. Specifically understanding how employees and leaders are experiencing work and our own processes and are we designing these experiences to improve business outcomes? That is why one of the reasons why employee listening is so important, it gives a signal into this.

There are other things that we can do as well and there is certainly a wonderful body of work around DX here. The second, is around actionability. We have a real risk, especially in the people analytics field, of quickly building a mountain of insights that aren't put into action.

So the first takeaway is having a user centric approach. The second is, really digging into a culture of experimentation. Moving to action quickly by testing and learning and encouraging a culture of experimentation and measurement, where we can get to action quickly. It is great to get to the insights and I love the insights being in the people analytics field, but we need to get from the insights to action as quickly as we can, in a responsible way. 
So I really encourage experimentation, disciplined measurement, so we can get that insight to action quickly. 


David Green: And we have arguably shown, in many of our organisations, that we can adopt a culture of experimentation because we have had to, in the last two years. So let's hope we can keep that moving forward. 
RJ, it is always a pleasure to catch up. Thank you for being a guest on The Digital HR Leaders Podcast. You are one of the few people we have had on twice, so that is a testament to your knowledge and experience in this space. Can you let listeners know how they can stay in touch with you, follow you on social media, and find out more about your work?


RJ Milnor: It has been a real pleasure, David, thanks for having me on again.

For everyone listening, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. It is the best way to get ahold of me and I look forward to hearing from you. 


David Green: RJ, thank you very much, indeed and I look forward to seeing you in person.