Improving employee experience

Improving employee experience with Jimmy Rose

Making employees feel supported and trusted starting with the onboarding process

I'm excited that you're joining me. I've got a great interview for you with my friend Jimmy Rose from Cotiviti. He is the Vice President of Employee Experience. I got to know Jimmy. He has been a longtime subscriber and a fan of the show. He has been tuning in to a lot of my live interviews on LinkedIn. We started chatting and ended up getting on Zoom and talking about all the things that he's been doing in his career and with Cotiviti. We’re talking about doing some work together and I was impressed with the approach he's taken to building development programs, especially employee experience and onboarding. I wanted to get him on to share some of his thoughts on those things. I hope that it will inspire you to up your game with regards to employee experience and maybe onboarding and building in some self-awareness into your leadership development programs as well.

If you are looking for more inspiration, I wanted to let you know and remind you that we have a lot of great webinars and content on our sponsor site AdvantagePerformance.com. Things about unconscious bias, using Multipliers concepts to lead through a crisis, career development from my friend Christine DiDonato, shifting in times of crisis, and so much more. Head on over to our sponsor website AdvantagePerformance.com. Here is my interview with Jimmy Rose.

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I'm with Jimmy Rose, Vice President of Employee Experience at Cotiviti. Jimmy, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Andy. I know the name is hard to pronounce. It's meant to be a combination of collaboration and creativity. That's Cotiviti. It’s marketing.

We want to talk about employee experience and onboarding as well as maybe a little bit of career development. I wanted to share that with our audience. It's something that's important for everybody to learn about. Before we do, let's start with a little bit of who you are and how you got to where you are.

I'm a Georgia boy. I was born, bred and grew up on the coast in Savannah. I went to Georgia Tech for my Bachelor's degree. I wound up getting a couple of degrees in Industrial Engineering from there. When I picked Industrial Engineering as a major, it was the most sought-after engineering. It was third in the country on that US News & World Report, our article that comes out every year. When I graduated, it had dropped to the bottom. I was looking for a job. Back then, typing was still a skill that people needed and I could type about 125 words a minute. I was hired by a company to type their business plan. That's how I got into healthcare. It was a healthcare startup called First Physician Care. I moved to another startup and stayed in the healthcare realm and I was in operations for twenty years.

It is tough to operate a business without employees who are engaged in what they're doing and who believe in the purpose of the company. Click To Tweet

I was the guy that when there was a problem, they would say, “Let's throw Jimmy on that problem and see what happens.” I gained a reputation as the fix-it guy. Something that I noticed was that throughout my entire career in operations, talent development and culture in the organization were important and central to everything that I did. I talked with our CEO and our COO and I said, “I've contributed as much as I know on how to contribute to operations. I like to get into HR and advance what we're doing in talent development.” They said, “Go for it.” It was a great thing to have leaders in the company who would hear, find an opportunity and be okay with that kind of switch. That's how I wound up in human resources as the VP of Employee Experience.

What Is Employee Experience?

This idea of employee experience, you and I live, breathe and talk about it every day, but not everybody may be familiar with that. Tell me what does employee experience mean and why is it so important?

It's important to separate it from the HR structures. For me, what is reporting into me is internal communications, organizational effectiveness, performance management, employee engagement, learning and development, all of those things. That may not be true for everybody in an employee experience role in another company. What we're all concerned about are the moments that matter for employees from their first experience with the company as a potential employer to what is the experience like when they finally leave. Are we creating an environment? Are we creating a set of experiences and the peaks and troughs of your life cycle with the employer, with Cotiviti, that makes you want to stay, that makes you feel valued, and that allows you to contribute at your highest level? That's how I see employee experience.

A lot of people and companies talk about customer experience and how important it is to treat your customers well. We don't hear as much about employee experience, but I've heard the mantra that your customer experience will never exceed that of your employee experience. Do you think the same way?

I certainly believe that. One of our corporate values is customer focus. It's not employee focus, but we do recognize that without employees who are engaged in what they're doing and who believe in the purpose of our company, it's tough to sell that business. It's tougher to operate that business if you don't believe it. The experience for the employee has to be there. It has to be as big and as important as we strive for excellence in the customer experience too. They just look different in some ways.

You're talking about two different focuses, but they're certainly related because your employees are the ones that are providing that great experience to the customers. If your employees are having a terrible experience and they don't like coming to work, they're probably not going to treat their customers very well. You want to treat your employee as well, so they'll treat your customers well.

Employee Experience: Employee experience is about creating a set of experiences that makes employees want to stay and feel valued, and that allows them to contribute at their highest level.

Sometimes people get confused culture with having massages in the office, a ping-pong table. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about creating an environment in the company where employees feel supported and trusted like they matter and the work they do matters. It might be great to have an environment that's playful or that accepts play and creativity in that way. In the same way that you might see in those iconic representations of Google and their office space or IDEO. At the heart of it, it's not about the environment only. It's about what we're creating for the employees to feel worthwhile and valued like they're contributing something that matters.

Successful Onboarding Process

There are all different aspects of employee experience that people talk about. The fact that it starts with recruiting, finding the right people and how they're treated through that process, whether they're hired or not. There's a lot about development and what happens when people leave the company. One of the big focal points or one of the most important parts of the influence that employee experience and how employees feel about the company they are with is that onboarding experience. How does it feel when they walk in the door? Are they welcomed? Are they treated like family or they just hand them a laptop and tell them to get to work? I know you've got a lot of experience building great onboarding programs. What do you think is essential to a successful onboarding program?

At its simplest, it's caring about what that new employee experiences when they walk in. It's putting the need to have that caring exhibited in a physical fashion. What are the markers that show the employee that you care about them when they arrive? It's simple things in some cases like ensuring that their name is already on their cube or at their desk or something, that it's spelled correctly. It's the name that they prefer rather than the name that's on the W-2. It's knowing that right away there's someone who they can contact, that their network within the company is already being built. One of the things that we are trying to push out to the entire organization is a buddy system.

That's not novel to have a buddy when you come in. What we're trying to do is have that buddy communication start anywhere from two weeks to four weeks before the start date. There's a relationship that's starting between another person in the company who can answer all the weird questions like, where do I park? How does that work? What is it going to be okay to wear on the first day? What's it like to work with Jimmy? It's getting the honest scoop so that when they come in the first day, they feel like they know more. They know something that's useful and a lot of the jitters can be removed. That's one way that we exhibit that caring feeling to employees as opposed to the other things.

Some of it we don't always do great. There's the compliance training that everybody has to go through. That's one of those hurdles that you have to get through. Some companies find interesting and cool ways to do that. I don't think we've found an interesting and cool way to do it. That's only one aspect of onboarding. Onboarding in classes or in light groups has a huge capacity to build a sense of community and belonging within that group. We've had a lot of success with that in the past.

What you mean is instead of bringing people in singularity one at a time, try to bring people in classes or cohorts so they have that bonding experience of starting together. I've been in companies like that where you always remember the people that you started together, especially if you go to a bootcamp or an onboarding program together. You build that rapport, that trust, that friendship throughout and people that you can go to say, “I'm struggling with this,” or “I'm trying to figure this out.” You mentioned the buddy system too. You give everybody a buddy when they come in. I assume this is someone that's been with the company for a little while or a volunteer who can help mentor them and show them the way.

Your employees are the ones that provide a great experience to the customers. Click To Tweet

The buddy volunteering is a pretty critical aspect of that because if you assign a buddy and that buddy feels like, “I'm being graded on this,” or “It's going into my goals in the performance management system to be this buddy,” the engagement with the buddy is more perfunctory. You need a buddy who wants the experience for the new employee to be great. They want to share it. That's not a role for everybody. It's almost like great buddies are born, not assigned. You have to be careful with that. Buddy volunteering is a key marker whether or not that person is ready for that task.

How do you find people to volunteer for that stuff?

You have to be watchful. You have to look for the people who naturally do it well, who seem to naturally buddy up with somebody or with a new employee. People who are friendly and want to share. You have to be looking for that. I guess it is a passive thing. You're constantly looking for it in the background. You can't expect that it's going to come walking through your door. You have to go out and find it.

Importance Of Self-Awareness

You’ve got to keep your eyes open for that talent. Those people that you know could be great mentors and leaders, as it would with the managers hiring and promoting managers. You and I have talked in the past. I know you've been involved in building some great leadership development programs while you've been there. One thing I remember that struck out, and we were very aligned on this, is in one of the capstone programs you built, it started with self-awareness. I wonder if you could talk about the importance of that because a lot of programs go right into what it means to be a leader, whatever it may be, without starting with that understanding of yourself.

That's absolutely critical. Self-awareness is where we learn whether or not someone is going to be coachable at all. Understanding how people feel about coaching and how they assess their own ability to learn and what the gap is between where they are right now and where they could be is an important starting point. It’s the indicator of how well they're going to do in the rest of the program. If you're working with someone with little self-awareness who thinks they're already at the top of their game, then how much are they going to accept?

How much will they learn that might be contrary to their natural instincts. We found that starting off with a 360 process and then also some carefully selected psychometrics. There's a lot of controversy about the utility of psychometrics and I would never say, “Let's put our hiring decisions and our promotion decisions down to the result of a psychometric test.” Once you pick one that's got good science behind it and you learn to use it well, then it can be helpful in understanding how this person will interact with others in the learning environment. It helps guide and coach them. I'm a proponent of that and the 360, which is very powerful.

Self-awareness is really where we learn whether or not someone is going to be coachable at all. Click To Tweet

Do you have any partners or tools that you've used that you recommend in that area?

We had a lot of good luck with the Hogan, which I'm sure some of your readers will be familiar with. I know that there's a lot of negativity out there around the MBTI and the science behind that. I'll say one thing in favor of it. If you've used it and know how to use it and interpret the results, there's a benefit in the language that it offers, particularly around helping people communicate. That's where I found the most value with the MBTI. It’s building bridges for communication between people. That has not generally been a tool that we use at the start of a learning session, but it's usually baked into some other part of the program like on how to communicate with impact because it's great shorthand for understanding differences in how people interpret communication.

I've heard those controversies too, but it's a simple way to understand that people have different personalities and different communication styles. It's a way to relate to people. I took the Myers-Briggs assessment when I was in business school in 2005 and many years later, I still talk to people all the time like, “What's your type?” You guess people's type and you get to know them like, “You're this,” or “You're that.” Also, one of the things that it did for me for a long time and it helps me educate other people is truly understanding what it means to be an extrovert versus introvert. The stigmas that come with those people like introverts don’t like people or extroverts are noisy and talkative. It's more about the energy, where do you get your energy and how you interact.

It creates a common language to talk about personality differences. Whether or not it holds up 100% to the science or is as predictive as some others, it’s not always the relevant point. It depends on how you're going to use it. With any psychometric tests, you have to be careful about the purpose behind it and what you're trying to get out of it.

I have to ask, what is your type, Jimmy?

I'm ENTJ.

Employee Experience: It's very difficult to build a culture from the inside out. There has to be a unifying force at the top leadership of the company that sets the direction.

When I took it, I always thought I was an ENTJ, but then I realized years later that I'm definitely ENTP because I'm very disorganized. As you can tell, I showed up late for this interview as I do for a lot of things.

I was on fifteen minutes early.

That proves it. You are an ENTJ and I'm definitely an ENTP. I also got certified many years ago in the Hogan but I haven't used it. One of my big takeaways from the Hogan is I can see how it's so useful, especially at the executive level. As leaders move higher up in the ranks is how our strengths can become our weaknesses or can sabotage us. It's similar in the Multipliers program I run. How things that can serve you well as an individual contributor early in your career can then backfire when you become a manager and you're trying to lead people. To me, the Hogan was a great way to build awareness around, “These are the things that could go too far and I need to keep an eye on this.”

I love that learning in Multipliers about how your strength can be an unintentional diminisher for somebody. That's so true about our development as we go through our careers that what was useful at one point is not necessarily going to be the same useful skillset or a good tool in your toolbox as you are in a different role or at a different level in the organization. You constantly have to develop. You can't rely on every tool that you developed or every skill that was helpful before we have to grow and evolve as the role changes for us.

It's going to change over time. We're going to change over time. One of the things that's true as I've learned from working with a lot of organizations is that the higher up you go or the more senior you get, the less feedback you get. People agree with you. They don't give you the feedback you need and it becomes harder to improve. That's why self-awareness is so essential in leadership. A lot of leaders that fail is because they're lacking that self-awareness.

For a long time, I worked in an organization where we all agreed that we would treat feedback as a gift. Having that as an unintentional value of the organization was powerful because you can open the gift, you don't have to keep it. It may not be great and it might not be useful. It may not even be accurate, but if you treat it as a gift, then you can accept it and look at it from a good point of view that isn't being defensive around or feeling attacked by it but treat it as a gift. That particular leadership team was open to feedback and fairly regularly did 360s on themselves. The 360 view went pretty deep into the organization. They were guided by feedback.

Feedback is a gift. Click To Tweet

Creating A Great Culture

I spent seven years working for BTS, the global consulting firm. That's one thing I learned when I started there, that feedback is a gift. We got it often in every program we ran. If there was somebody watching, you would get feedback. That's how I became a great facilitator because I would often have observers or we'd practice in the office where we got out. It was always tough every time, but then I would learn from the feedback and I would get better. I’m still learning from that all the time trying to improve because it is a gift. I like what you said. You don't always have to accept it, but there are ways that that's the way we can improve. Speaking of that, I mentioned feedback was ingrained in the culture of the company I came from. We talked about employee experience and onboarding, setting the stage when you come in somewhere. The topic of culture is so complex, but what do you think are a couple of other elements that are important to creating a great culture?

It's difficult to build a culture from the inside out. There has to be a unifying force at the top leadership of the company that sets the direction and says, “This is what we're about.” It needs to be simple and simply said so that you can latch yourself onto it. At a level where someone's day-to-day job does not feel very grandiose, they need to see the bigger picture. There's an old story about someone taking a walk along the road and he comes across someone who's on the ground laying some bricks. He asks, “What are you doing?” He's like, “I'm laying bricks.” He walks a little further and comes along to the next person who's a little further along in the job. He asks, “What are you doing?” “I'm building a wall.” He comes to the third person who's a little further along in the construction process. He asks this person, “What are you doing?” He said, “I'm building a cathedral.”

That's the person who sees the big picture and can directly relate their day-to-day work to what's being built in a metaphorical sense as well as the physical sense. That's the biggest key. It’s defining the purpose behind what we're all doing. Culture can be easily defined as how work gets done. It's not the posters on the wall. It's not the expression of the values. Those things all feed it, but culture is about how do we get the work done here. If it doesn't start with an understanding of why the work is important in the first place, you’ll have a lot of trouble building a culture that's lasting or meaningful to people.

It's a strong connection to the strategy that we're doing, to the purpose, people understanding why they're doing what they're doing, which is so underrated that there’s not enough guidance given on that, and pride of ownership in the organization is what I heard too about the cathedral story. That reminded me, maybe it's a silly example but it stuck out to me. I was grocery shopping in a grocery store called The Fresh Market, which is a chain out of North Carolina. I’m sure you’ve got one there in Atlanta. I went to the deli manager and I asked him if they had any ricotta cheese. He pointed across the other side of the store to the dairy section and he said, “If I have any, it would be over there.”

It struck me when he said that. It wasn't, “If they have any,” or “If we have any.” It was, “If I have any.” It took me. I felt like he was taking complete ownership of the inventory that they had. For a while, I got emotional about this moment. I was like, “That's cool.” I was walking around the corner thinking about it and I came around another corner. He was walking across towards me holding it out. He had gone and got it, and he was handing it over to me. That was cool. You don't see that in too many stores. The service was great and it makes me want to go back there.

I first learned about this in 1998 at the Disney Institute. The whole seminar for a couple of days we were there was about customer service and how you deliver customer service in the Disney way. One of the stories that I've carried with me forever was about answering questions. The example that they gave was a park-goer or a guest as they call them, going up to an employee or cast member as they call them and saying, “What time is the 3:00 parade?” It sounds like a pretty obvious answer, “It’s 3:00, you bozo.” They say, “Here's how we want that question to be answered. The 3:00 parade will come by here at about 3:15.

Employee Experience: Culture is not the posters on the wall nor the expression of the values. It is about how you get the work done here.

If you want to get the best pictures possible of the parade, I want you to stand over there by that bench and you'll get the best pictures as the parade comes by, but I see you've got small children with you. If you want to have a chance for Jasmine and Aladdin to come out and dance with your kids, then go stand over there by that tree because that's where they're going to stop and you'll get a good chance to become part of the parade if you stand over there.” The difference between the two answers of, “The 3:00 parade starts at 3:00, you bozo,” versus all this other information, which is the stuff that the person wants to know but didn't know how to articulate. That's the difference between somebody who's caught the fire and the other person who's doing the job.

More About Jimmy

That's a great story and a great example. That's why Disney is so good at what they do with the Disney Magic. Jimmy, thinking back across your career so far, what's been your greatest accomplishment or proudest moment in your career?

One of the things I'm most proud of doing was the last college hire program that I built. This was something that started completely by accident. We were preparing to put a book out in the market to either sell the company or to merge or to give our investors some relief that they were ready to get out and we needed to find some new capital investors in some fashion or another. My CEO came to me and said, “Jimmy, you're about to get busy. You need to hire somebody who can take about 30% of your work off your plate right away.” We had gone through another hiring program. I said, “Give me those résumés.” I started looking through the résumés and I hired this guy right out of college. He was 22 and had graduated from Georgia Tech. He was the seed point for an entire program that we built over the next couple of years that brought in classes of college students and essentially created great corporate citizens.

This group is about seventeen who went through the program that started in 2013. They don't work for Cotiviti anymore. Most of them moved on to other roles, but they're all still close. I'm still in contact with them. They still contact me for coaching and mentoring advice on how to buy a wedding ring, life advice, those kinds of things. They're still together. They still have parties together. They rely on that network that they started building with us many years ago to help leverage each other's experience and capability in their careers as they go forward. They created great value for Cotiviti when they were part of that program. What they're doing now is even bigger than what I imagined. Being part of that and being their coach at the very start is one of my proudest moments.

On the flip side, what's been your biggest failure or mistake and what did you learn from it?

My biggest failure was assuming that I knew a lot more about something than I did. It's early on and there was a lot of pressure in this startup. I was put in the role of developing marketing. I’m like, “I'm an industrial engineer, what do I know about marketing?” I figured, “I'm smart. I've got a couple of degrees from Georgia Tech. I graduated pretty high in class. I can figure this out.” The mistake was not granting credibility to the depth of knowledge in a particular domain like, “I can figure this out on my own. I can learn it fast.” There are experts for a reason.

Learning that early on helped me later because I could quickly identify through my self-awareness like I don't have it and there's no way that I can have it. I need to find the person who does, whether they are outside the company or inside the company. If we go back to Multipliers, that is another key idea there of being a liberator and being the debate-maker. I don't have to be at the center. I can recognize that other people have great ideas to start with. They don't have to hear my ideas first or at all. Learning that back in 2000 was freeing for the rest of my career.

You need to hire somebody who can take about 30% of your work off your plate. Click To Tweet

I love the reference to Multipliers. We definitely speak the same language, referring to the book by Liz Wiseman. I also run a program based on that where we teach people about these concepts and how to be a multiplier and avoid those diminisher tendencies. There are a lot of things we do that accidentally diminish our people. We get to learn those lessons along the way, which is great. Jimmy, is there a trend in talent development that you've been following closely?

What I'm seeing is a more global awareness that this is an actual thing. It's not enough to throw out some learning and development opportunities or have a career development conversation once a year during the annual review. We already know that that's not enough. I'm seeing companies understand maybe for the first time that there is more they're there. I'm seeing my colleagues struggling with building this for the first time and looking for support from their senior leadership. The senior leadership recognizes this is an important thing, but we have no idea how to get there. I'm seeing more and more of my colleagues grasping for, “How do I quickly build a point of view around what talent development is and can be for an organization.”

It's real and an important strategic part of almost all organizations out there that at least I talked to you, which is great. Jimmy, we already talked about Multipliers. Is there another book that you often recommend or has made a big impact on you?

There's a book I read called Hacking Innovation. It's by a guy named Josh Linkner who's a speaker and innovator. He's written several other books, but I found this particular book interesting. He takes a look at the seamy underside of computer hacking. He takes that dark and mysterious world, drags it into the light and then extracts. What are they doing that allows them to do these terrible, dangerous and damaging things? What are they doing that we can apply to the positive side of innovation in our company or in a marketplace? That comparison between the seamy underside of activity, that there is something incredible to be learned about how to pivot, how to do more with the little that you have. He calls it getting scrappy. I thought it had amazing insights for how to apply the ideas of innovation to anything that you're doing.

I haven't read that one. I'll have to check it out. For anybody reading who is looking for ways to accelerate their own careers and become more successful in the world of talent development, what's one more piece of advice you would give?

Leverage this time that we're here at home for your own learning. There are incredible resources at your fingertips. Many people like you are offering free opportunities to expand and grow. I'm still working the full day so where does the extra time come from? I no longer have three hours in the car. I don't have an hour and a half commute each way to the office. That has created an immense opening in my calendar to do things that I struggled to find the time with before. Look for those moments. Accept the invitations that you've got to be getting by the handful. Check out some of these webinars and expand your network. That's how you and I met. It's been an innovating and exciting time in the area of learning more about the things that I love.

I'm big on investing time consistently in learning and development as well as networking. I know we’ve both been doing that. Our sponsor, Advantage Performance Group has been doing a weekly webinar series and we've had a lot of great webinars, The Secret Sauce of Digital Learning, Uncovering Gender Bias and Multipliers. The next one coming up is all about career development with my friend and colleague Christine DiDonato. If anybody is looking for some great webinars, check out and head over to AdvantagePerformance.com. There’s a whole bunch right on there. Jimmy, this has been fantastic. I know people can find you on LinkedIn if they want to connect. I want to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on and share some of your experiences with us.

Thank you, Andy. I enjoyed it. It's great fun.

• Cotiviti
• AdvantagePerformance.com
• Multipliers
• Christine DiDonato
• Hogan
• MBTI
• Hacking Innovation
• LinkedIn - Jimmy Rose