Face-to-face meetings provide 'raw feedback'
Editor’s note: This is the second of a seven-part series taking a look at some of the best practices of Canada’s award-winning employers. In this instalment, we take a look at how Microsoft keeps employees engaged.
Employees of Microsoft Canada have a perk many would envy: One week, every year, they’re freed from meetings, training and any other internal obligations. The “You First Week” is simply meant for them to catch up.
It really means they can focus on whatever they want that week and nothing else can interfere with that, says Sharif Khan, vice-president of HR. “Our people are so bombarded and trying to get out to customers and there’s a lot of internal stuff that eats up a lot of their time.”
Microsoft Canada also uses an annual survey to get a handle on employee satisfaction. Within the MS Poll, employee responses to questions about team collaboration or career satisfaction are used to rate leadership and management capability. Every manager with five or more employees is assigned a “favourability rating.”
The poll is also used to gauge how employees feel about company culture, the general climate of Microsoft and how well they’re realizing their career potential. Those scores are released in May and, by September, every director must submit an action plan to Khan, which they’re expected to follow up with quarterly employee reviews to measure the progress.
During the year, Microsoft Canada’s country leader, Phil Sorgen, and Khan go on a “My Microsoft” tour, in which they meet in small groups with Microsoft’s nearly 1,000 Canadian employees, from Vancouver to Halifax.
Last year, employees said they wanted more flexible benefits. Khan and Sorgen responded with a draft version they brought on their most recent tour. The face-to-face meetings, which involve both question and answer sessions as well as play (such as skiing in Vancouver), are “incredibly valuable because you get raw feedback. You get a really good sense of the pulse of the people who are right in front of the customer,” says Khan.
The MS Poll gives leaders a metric to evaluate the strength of the company’s leadership and its employee base, says Khan. That raw data underscores HR initiatives and gives the 10-person HR team selling power for new ideas, even those that receive lukewarm reception initially.
A few years ago, the HR department introduced a new tool to measure training and readiness that would track people’s progress against role-specific training.
“It was like a 10-pound load in a five-pound bucket the first year we introduced it,” he says. “It was too much training. It was too quick. It was just an amazing amount of flack we got on it. Now it’s just working beautifully in its third year.”
Similarly, a few years ago, Khan’s department introduced a career development initiative called Career Compass — to underwhelming success.
“In our first year, on the MS Poll we got flat results on career and ‘realizing my potential,’” he says. “It’s quite common that we don’t see results in the first year of implementation. Results often come in the second or third year.” Sure enough, in the second year, they saw an “uptick.”
Khan has learned to stick by his beliefs and not wait for all of the necessary buy-in before proceeding with a policy or program that he feels is in the best interest of the company.
“What I’ve learned, in many years at Microsoft, is that we’re probably not as patient as we could be around change management — and maybe that’s not a bad thing,” he says. “There’s often a sense of things coming down a bit too quickly but there’s also a sense that we can’t afford to wait. It’s a very dynamic industry. It’s a dynamic market. Sometimes it’s okay to have some resistance, as long as you’re not putting the organization through an unfair or unproductive level of disequilibrium. There has to be a positive outcome.”
Khan has also learned not to push forward with too many ideas at once. Managers are more receptive to small doses of change — one or two initiatives a year — than a handful of things all at once, he says.
“Be very selective. Pick what you really want to be successful and make it successful.”
Danielle Harder is a Whitby, Ont.-based freelance writer.
Employer Snapshot
Microsoft Canada
Head office:
Redmond, Wash.
Number of employees:
1,000
Number of HR employees:
10
HR reports to:
The country manager
Year company founded:
1985
What company does:
Provides software marketing, consulting and local support service to customers across the country
