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Attracting, engaging and retaining great people in today’s tough talent market takes a compelling culture and an exceptional employee experience.

At Salesforce, we recognise culture as business imperative with real ROI and a key driver of our success, so we put it firmly at the centre of everything we do. And because we have been intentional about our Ohana culture from the start and have invested in employee success beyond standard HR, we’ve been able to rapidly scale our company while maintaining our values. Watch “How Salesforce Became a World Leader in Innovation.”

According to Deloitte’s “2017 Global Human Capital Trends” report, nearly 80% of executives rated employee experience very important or important, but only 22% reported that their companies were excellent at building a differentiated employee experience, leaving plenty of room for improvement in this area.

We’re fortunate that our employee experience earns us recognition as a best place to work as well as passionate advocacy from our employees on Glassdoor and social media. Looking for ways to uplevel your culture and employee experience? Here are our top five culture hacks to help inspire you.

 

1. Prioritise transparency

Employees are at their most engaged when they know where the company is headed, the plan to get there, and their share of the task. At Salesforce, our V2MOM process helps ensure every employee has full transparency into our business plan and their role in it. V2MOM stands for vision, values, methods, obstacles, and metrics.

All employees in the company have their own personal V2MOM that rolls up to the company V2MOM, and all V2MOMs are visible to everyone else in the company in our V2MOM mobile app – which we built on our own platform. We discuss our V2MOMs regularly with our managers, and adjust and track progress in real time right from our phones. It’s a powerful tool that drives alignment, prioritisation, and accountability.

V2MOM is the “what,” but people also want to know “how” they are doing, so we use an app, also built on our platform, to encourage and enable our employees to give transparent feedback to their peers, direct reports, and even their managers. This continuous wave of feedback helps our people improve their performance in real time, not once a year at an annual review.

 

2. Connect employees with customers

Employees also want to understand the impact their work is having, and the best way to achieve that is to keep employees and customers connected. We do that in three key ways:

  • Employees collaborate directly with our customers in our Trailblazer Community every day

  • They learn about our vision, new products, and hear success stories alongside our customers at Salesforce events

  • And if they can’t make it to an event, employees can access a steady flow of amazing Salesforce customer stories online anytime

 

3. Elevate the importance of well-being

Engaged employees passionately drive your company forward faster, helping your business thrive and grow. But all that passion and drive can have an unintended consequence – burnout. If you want to keep getting the best from your employees, you need to balance out all that passion and drive with a focus on well-being.

At Salesforce, we invest in benefits and programs to keep our employees and their families happy and healthy, so they can bring their best selves to work every day. While at work in our offices, employees have access to mindfulness zones, where they can check their phones in a basket and take part in a guided meditation or simply enjoy some quiet time in a relaxing space. And all employees have access to a £100/month wellness reimbursement they can use outside of work for gym memberships, fitness classes, nutrition counseling, massages, and more.

 

4. Champion equality as a business priority

Our recent research on “The Impact of Equality and Values Driven Business” showed that a company’s commitment to equality positively affects employee morale. Employees feel proud to work for companies that stand for equal rights, foster inclusion, provide equal opportunities, and care about closing the gender pay gap. Beyond employee pride, feeling included, heard, and supported at work has an impact on employee productivity and success. When employees feel accepted and comfortable at work, they also feel empowered to perform better.

Our employees encouraged us to amp our equality efforts, and we listened. Today, we are working together with our whole Ohana – our employees, customers, partners, community organisations, and the tech industry – to build a path forward to equality for all. We are taking action across four key pillars: equal pay, equal opportunity, equal education, and equal rights. Want to learn more? Check out the full story at salesforce.com/equality.

 

5. Give employees a purpose beyond profit

That same research showed that in today’s socially conscious society, employees and customers are drawn to companies with a purpose beyond profit. Giving back has been embedded in our culture from day one at Salesforce. Through our 1-1-1 philanthropic model, we’ve given more than $200 million in grants, Salesforce employees have volunteered more than 2.4 million hours in their communities, and we’ve provided Salesforce technology for free or at a discount to more than 34,000 nonprofits and education institutions.

Our 1-1-1 model has been so successful that over 1,400 companies have taken the 1% pledge to join us in giving back.

Creating a healthy company culture is complex and never-ending journey. We are constantly measuring the results of our efforts, listening to our employees and customers, and implementing new ideas to help keep our culture strong as we grow.

This is the fifth in a series of five blog posts that look at how Salesforce engages employees and how you can, too. Read post #1, Use Culture + Tech + Data to Deeply Engage Employees, post #2, Turn Your Culture into a Competitive Advantage, post #3, Wow Employees with Consumer-Like Apps for Work, and post #4, Put Your HR Data to Work Amping Up the Employee Experience. We hope you’ll join us as we share useful insights and actionable ideas on how we have been able to grow the company rapidly while remaining one of Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” nine years running.

 

Create an app-tastic universe for your employees

Remember, your employees have great experiences with the brands they love, and they have the same expectations of an engaging experience with the most important brand in their life – the company where they work.

Want to jumpstart your digital transformation? See how you find the right platform for buiiding apps for your employees by downloading the e-book.