As a leader in my company, I want to consistently push my team and our company into new territory when it comes to how we engage in the workplace. I want us not to be confined by the usual boundaries of old school HR. We want to show people that HR, or POPS (short for People Ops) as we call it, can be done in a way that impacts the bottom line but also does something very special for our employees; it creates meaning in their work and it helps us build a community at FiveStars that can’t be duplicated.
I signed up for IDEO U courses as part of my continued obsession with learning and growing as a leader, and because I have a lot of respect for IDEO in general. I’ve followed IDEO for about 15 years now and I love Tim Brown’s refined approach to leadership. The way we work is changing, the impact we want to make at work is becoming more important than ever in our daily lives, and POPS needs to adapt, embrace, and iterate on it all with a fresh and creative approach.
The creative and innovative philosophy driven by Tim Brown and the IDEO family—especially in their classes Leading for Creativity and Storytelling for Influence—has impacted the way we approach our work. In Tim’s course, he introduces the topic of “leading through questions.” The question we set out to answer at FiveStars was:
How might we improve the employee experience and make it memorable through fostering meaningful relationships?
We’re obsessed with the employee experience and we want it to have a big impact in people’s careers, not just here at FiveStars but far beyond that. So, a year and half ago we went to work to prove our theory that if we create a memorable employee experience we’ll be able to build a strong community of people that are highly engaged—which leads to great business results. Here’s a small sample of what we put into action after taking the IDEO U courses.
