Listen up, employers—your people want things that are good for business too. Just ask DJ Casto, executive VP and CHRO at Synchrony.
Last year, the consumer financial services firm centralized roughly 100 campus-hire interns at its HQ in Stamford, Connecticut. Synchrony, which codesigns employee offerings with the people who use them, also listened carefully to what those interns wanted.
That yielded a valuable discovery.
“The No. 1 benefit that they were looking for us to invest in, and it was important for them to join the company, was to have more dedicated therapists or wellness resources,” Casto tells me.
So Synchrony hired a full-time psychologist, in addition to the 22 wellness coaches it’s brought on over the past several years.
A certain group might push for such a benefit, but it’s used throughout the workforce, says Casto, whose company does credit card financing for partners such as Amazon, Lowe’s, and PayPal. “Typically what we find, because it’s codesigned with the employees, is the adoption cuts across the entire Synchrony ecosystem.”
Synchrony, which ranks No. 5 on the latest Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For list, has good reason to heed team members.
“We always take a step back and say, ‘How are we helping them to be their best, both personally and professionally, to drive peak performance?’” Casto notes. “If that’s your anchor, then what are the suite of offerings that we need to provide to help them do that? And the first step in that is really intentional, active listening.”
One key listening mechanism is the annual employee survey conducted by Fortune partner Great Place to Work, which also does pulse surveys throughout the year. Anchoring the annual survey is an index that gauges trust between employees and the leadership team, Casto says: “Through the feedback that we get, we codesign a variety of benefits and support.”
To that end, Synchrony, which has 20,500 team members in the U.S. and Asia, takes an agile approach. For example, after hearing that many contact center associates want to stick around for the long haul, it began offering a 12-month tech apprenticeship program early last year.
But rather than go all in, Synchrony started small—with fewer than 10 people in the first cohort. All of them landed full-time roles.
The company launches such programs like a minimum viable product (MVP), Casto says, using a term from the startup world. “We want to make sure we get it right,” he explains. “Because the worst thing you can do is do an apprenticeship where you know the skill transfer isn’t working the right way, and then also we’re not seeing the translation to job placement.”
Casto would rather see a handful of folks succeed at first, creating a multiplier effect when it comes to employee interest. “And we, from a business perspective, can look back and say, ‘That ROI made sense,’” he says. “That investment that we made in the employee, it actually generated a really great hire for us in an area like cyber or AI or info security in general.”
Casto suggests that leaders get comfortable with active listening tools and channels, such as surveys and roundtable discussions. Synchrony holds a monthly town hall called Ask Us Anything that includes CEO Brian Doubles. “[Anyone at] any level in the company can ask us, as the leadership team, anything that they want across the business,” Casto says.
He also recommends going the agile, MVP route with new employee offerings.
“It might feel uncomfortable to not have it fully baked and all worked out,” Casto admits. “But you will garner a lot of trust with your workforce on just being completely honest about this: ‘We’re piloting this for 12 months. You’re going to help us codesign it. We’re going to have a lot of feedback loops along the way.’ They want to be a part of the solutioning, and oftentimes, they have the best answer.”
That’s giving credit where credit is due.
Nick Rockel
nick.rockel@consultant.fortune.com
