We now live in a feedback society. Survey technology allows companies and brands ask us our opinion on their products and services and will we sometimes also offer that opinion when they haven’t asked us via review sites.
So how then can companies harness this culture of feedback to improve their recruiting and their employer experience? I can think of no one better to answer this question than Becky Cantieri who is Chief People Officer at SurveyMonkey and my guest this week.
As you might expect, SurveyMonkey use employee feedback to build everything about their culture and Becky has some fascinating stories to share
In the interview we discuss:
• The people challenges SurveyMonkey face
• The critical importance of employee feedback
• Where in the employee lifecycle SurveyMonkey are collecting feedback
• When and how they act on this feedback
Becky also offer her advice to other employers on how to create a corporate culture driven by feedback and tells us what’s next for SurveyMonkey
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast is provided by SurveyMonkey. For HR. SurveyMonkey helps solve some of the toughest challenges facing HR professionals today. From recruiting to retention to offboarding, SurveyMonkey gives you the expertise, speed and scale you need to collect any type of employee feedback. So whether you want to improve employee experience, increase employee engagement, or streamline program application management, SurveyMonkey can help start collecting and acting on employee feedback to attract, engage, and retain top talent for your business. Visit www.surveymonkey.com MP HR- Solutions. That’s www.surveymonkey.com MPs HR Solutions. And learn how to start building a better workplace.
Matt Alder [00:01:18]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 156 of the Recruiting Future podcast. We now live in a feedback society. Survey technology allows companies and brands to continually ask our opinion on their products and services, and we’ll sometimes also offer that opinion when we haven’t been asked via review sites. So how then, can companies harness this culture of feedback to improve their recruiting and their employee experience? I can think of no one better to answer this question than Becky Cantieri, who is Chief people officer at SurveyMonkey and my guest this week. As you might expect, SurveyMonkey uses employee feedback to build everything about their culture. And Becky has some fascinating stories to share.
Matt Alder [00:02:11]:
Hi, Becky, and welcome to the podcast.
Becky Cantieri [00:02:14]:
Hi, Matt. Thanks so much for having me.
Matt Alder [00:02:15]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you tell everyone a little bit about yourself and what you do?
Becky Cantieri [00:02:22]:
Sure. So I’m Becky Cantieri and I’m the Chief people officer at SurveyMonkey. I like to think of myself as really being responsible for the candidate and the employee experience at SurveyMonkey and being a really, really valued partner to our leadership team and driving the right business outcomes.
Matt Alder [00:02:43]:
So could you tell us a little bit more about the sort of people function itself at SurveyMonkey?
Becky Cantieri [00:02:48]:
Sure. So we have a couple of groups that make up the people function. We have a core team of people who are focused on talent acquisition and kind of bringing in the best talent that we can for the roles that we have. We have a team that’s focused on the employee experience and partnering with our business leaders across the organization to really drive highly productive and highly engaged teams in the pursuit of of business outcomes. We have a team that focuses on our rewards and making sure that we’re really, really competitive and offering the right value proposition to our Candidates and our employees. And then we have a team that’s focused on employee growth and development, our talent development team. So that’s kind of what makes up the people organization at SurveyMonkey and the group of us that’s really aligned on helping achieve those business outcomes, as I mentioned.
Matt Alder [00:03:45]:
Fantastic.
Matt Alder [00:03:46]:
Stu, could you sort of talk us through the main challenges that you face at SurveyMonkey?
Becky Cantieri [00:03:52]:
Sure. We have so many great, interesting challenges and problems to solve, which makes the job really, really fun every day. But a few to highlight is one, we are in a very, very competitive market for talent. We are at almost full employment. Attrition rates across the industry and across industries are higher than they’ve ever been. And there’s lots of really comp employment opportunities here in the Valley. So we, like everyone else, are really working hard to get our name out there to identify and attract the right talent for our open opportunities. And it’s just a really competitive market to do that in. So it keeps us on our toes and it’s something that we are really, really focused on on an ongoing basis. In addition to that, you know, telling your story is a challenge. Now, we have at SurveyMonkey, we have the great benefit of anybody that you talk to, no matter where you are, on the train, out to dinner, anyone that you encounter and you tell them that you work at SurveyMonkey, they say, oh, my God, I love SurveyMonkey. I use SurveyMonkey for employee engagement, for customer feedback, for this or that. But then the challenge is translating that conversation from being about I love using it to that’s somewhere I would love to work. I’ve heard amazing things about that. So really developing our employment brand and our value proposition and how we talk to candidates and our employees on an ongoing basis about why they should bring their time and talent to SurveyMonkey. So kind of two big challenges that we spend a lot of time thinking about.
Matt Alder [00:05:42]:
Now, I know that feedback, employee feedback in particular, is kind of a key part of your strategy. Why is employee feedback so important to you?
Becky Cantieri [00:05:53]:
Yeah, so for me, it is the genesis of where all great ideas come from. You know, in my role, this is kind of the best people job in the world, I think. Of course, I may be biased, but working at SurveyMonkey because how we use our product has fundamentally changed how I operate as a people leader and how we operate as a team. And I have to acknowledge that so many of our great ideas have come from employee feedback. And it comes, you know, directly where they give you direct feedback on satisfaction levels. But it also comes from the comments they make and the insights that they share with you. So, you know, for example, every, every year as we go into our open enrollment process, we run a benefit survey. And the intent is to understand how our offerings are working for our employees. Are they meeting their expectations? Are they meeting their needs? Do they value how we’re investing our dollars as it relates to their benefits? And this last year when we did it, that the feedback was, you know, wonderful across the board, they were high satisfaction, everything was working well for employees. It was kind of an embarrassment of riches, to be honest with you. Everyone was really pleased with our offerings. And then I started to read the open ended answers of just like, do you have any thoughts or ideas on how we might be able to do this better going forward? And there was one question, one answer, where an employee named three of our janitorial services workers by name and they were curious if they had the same level of benefit coverage and the same level of support from their employer as they are employed by a third party vendor, as we did. And it just made us curious about that in particular and led us down this road of discovery where, as you might expect, they weren’t on par with what SurveyMonkey was offering our full time employees. So we created a set of standards by which we wanted all of our vendors to meet in what they offered to their employees. And we were able to, across three of our primary vendors in San Mateo, our corporate headquarters, bring those employees with some investment from SurveyMonkey, but bring those individuals up to par with that of our employees. Now, that wasn’t an idea that I thought of. That was an idea that came from a question that employees were asking us in the spirit of wanting to ensure that people who work alongside of us and have a really great impact on the employee experience have a similar level of benefit and coverage. So it’s just so many of these great ideas come from employees and they come when you ask for feedback and you ask great questions.
Matt Alder [00:09:01]:
Absolutely fantastic stuff. That’s a really great story. Just to, I suppose, drill into this a little bit further. I mean, can you talk us through which stages of the employee lifecycle that you’re sort of utilizing this employee feedback?
Becky Cantieri [00:09:18]:
Sure. So we use it at every single point of the employee lifecycle, to be honest. We ask candidates following their interview processes, what their experience was like when they came to meet with us or engage with us via phone. We ask hiring managers following a recruiting engagement how we’ve done it, servicing their needs and how great of a match we’ve Made in identification of talent for their teams. We do biannual employee engagement surveys. We measure employee belonging and inclusion. And as part of our off boarding process, we do exit interviews via survey. So you know, we use it at every single touch point with our employees as our opportunity to have conversations with the people that matter most to us at scale.
Matt Alder [00:10:17]:
So you kind of mentioned one example of where you’ve acted on very specific feedback. I mean, sort of more generally, I suppose, more strategically, you know, when and how do you act on the feedback that you get from these surveys during the employee lifecycle?
Becky Cantieri [00:10:33]:
Sure. And I think that’s a really important question because from a strategic perspective, if you’re going to ask questions and you’re going to ask employees for feedback, you have to be prepared to listen. You have to be prepared to come back to employees and tell them what you’ve heard and what you’ve learned and what you’re going to do about it. And it’s also okay to say sometimes there may be feedback that you heard that you may not act on for one reason or another. But that’s core. That’s core to asking, is to being willing to act and take action upon what you’re hearing. So that’s really important to us. And there’s so many great examples at SurveyMonkey of how we’ve acted. And specifically in the category of talent acquisition, you know, I mentioned we ask our candidates for feedback about their experience and, and we were hearing or seeing a trend of feedback from our candidates that our interview panels were not well organized. They were asking the same questions over, you know, if you came in to meet with four or five people, three of them may ask you similar questions. So we started to see this theme in our feedback and we took it as an opportunity to create interview training for both our hiring managers and all interview participants where we were encouraging them to run a really well organized process to ensure that we had individuals on the panel who had areas of focus and were prepared with their questions and how they would engage with the candidate to best assess that area of focus. Now, not only did it provide our candidates a much better experience because we appeared more prepared, we were not overlapping and asking the same questions. But it also keeps your panel very, very focused on the most important criteria for the job and is an opportunity to mitigate or eliminate bias that could creep into the process. So I mean, that’s a pretty strategic outcome is to be able to really revamp your interview processes to get all of your participants prepared and ready to go and to Be able to mitigate bias as you go is a really, really great outcome. And that’s kind of one another example of how we act on the feedback that we receive.
Matt Alder [00:13:07]:
Are there any kind of other innovative examples or ways that you’re using this employee feedback?
Becky Cantieri [00:13:15]:
Sure. So one of my favorite examples and one of the examples that I’m most proud of is the creation of our belonging and inclusion survey. So we have for a period of time been working with Carol Dweck and her team at Stanford. Carol, as you may, or as you probably know, is the founder of the growth mindset. So we’ve been working with Carol for a long time in an effort to be able to measure belonging and inclusion and see if there was a way to measure employees sense of belonging or inclusion. Because while demographics is an important component of diversity and inclusion, that inclusion piece is also really, really important. So we worked closely with them to put together a belonging and inclusion survey that we piloted internally at SurveyMonkey last year, which was great. And then as a follow up, we worked with Paradigm and refined the survey a bit and have made it now available for anyone, any SurveyMonkey user, to be able to deploy to help measure belonging and inclusion. The reason why I think it’s really innovative is because prior to this, people didn’t really have a reliable tool or necessarily even believe that you were able to measure belonging and inclusion. And in working together with them, we believe we’ve been able to put together a set of measurements that best assess an employee’s sense of inclusion in the workplace. And there are kind of three primary pillars of measurements. One is around growth mindset, and that’s the belief that people can grow and learn. The second is around belonging, uncertainty, and how others feel that they are included, valued and respected by their colleagues. And then the last is objectivity, which is about the perception that advancement at your company is based on fair and objective criteria. And it’s kind of first of its kind. So we’re really, really proud of it and we think it’s a really innovative approach to using employee feedback. And we’ve certainly gathered some really, really great insights ourselves when we’ve run our belonging and inclusion surveys.
Matt Alder [00:15:44]:
So what would your advice be to other employers in terms of creating a culture driven by employee feedback?
Becky Cantieri [00:15:51]:
Yeah, so I again, I’m a firm believer in being curious and asking great questions and wanting to have conversations at scale with the people who. So I think let your curiosity lead the way and make sure you’re really willing to listen and to take action on the feedback that you hear. And don’t be afraid of feedback because like I said, I do really think that some of the greatest ideas, the greatest innovations, the greatest solutions to problems that you might be experiencing come from the voices of your employees. And it such an important channel for employees to be able to share their voices and really feel valued in the workplace.
Matt Alder [00:16:43]:
Final question. What’s next for SurveyMonkey? What are you looking forward to about the future?
Becky Cantieri [00:16:48]:
Yeah, so I’m really, really excited to continue to find innovative ways to participate in our industry using the SurveyMonkey platform. I shared the example of our belonging and inclusion survey. I shared the example of our vendor benefits. But that is really work that we find wonderfully innovative, exciting, and something that we’re really, really proud of. And it’s not only an opportunity to impact the lives and experiences of our own employees, but to encourage our industry and other employees to do the same. So we really want to continue to help move many things forward through the innovative use of our platform. So really having an impact that’s bigger than just within our walls of SurveyMonkey. And then second, I’m really excited. As part of our IPO process, we are launching a foundation, SurveyMonkey for Good. And I think it’s another really great opportunity for us to amplify our impact in the communities in which we work. So, you know, while we’ll continue to do really, really great HR and have, you know, really to really drive value for our own organization, we also want to drive value and have a huge impact outside of our walls.
Matt Alder [00:18:13]:
Becky, thank you very much for talking to me.
Becky Cantieri [00:18:15]:
You’re welcome. Thank you for having me.
Matt Alder [00:18:18]:
My thanks to Becky Cantieri. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts or via your podcasting app of choice. The show also has its own dedicated app, which you can find by searching for for recruiting Future in your App Store. If you’re a Spotify user, you can also find the show there. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com on that site, you can subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join.
