HR and Marketing: Collaborating to Create a Super Team

Grad Conn

March 13th, 2020

•

4 min read

One year ago, Sprinklr’s Chief Culture and Talent Officer Diane K. Adams and I stood on stage together at the annual Sprinklr sales conference and announced T he Sprinklr Way—a set of core values that guide the company. For reference, here they are:

It’s ok. Be fearless.
Sprinkle, don’t shout.
Fix it, don’t complain.
Never, ever give up.
Passionately, genuinely care.

From the very beginning, HR and marketing worked together to discover these values, and incorporate them into everything we do—both internally and externally.

These core values aligned our employee branding with marketing messaging to create one cohesive Sprinklr brand. When we look at who we want to hire in HR, we look for people who align with our core values. And, when we promote our brand image, we are promoting our core values.

There’s a symbiotic relationship here: When employees feel engaged with their employer, they will communicate positive messages about the company. HR helps employees feel engaged, while marketing helps guide employees to share certain content about the brand. Making employees happy is vital for Sprinklr, because employees who genuinely enjoy their work are more productive, more successful and more supportive. Happy employees are strong team builders and collaborators. We like to say that happy employees equals happy customers. And not only do we like to say it, it happens to be true.

This partnership between marketing and HR is rare, but it’s powerful. Our culture and talent team is focused on the experience of our employees. Marketing is focused on the experience of our customers.

TalentCulture #WorkTrends Podcast Recap

Diane and I were recent guests on the TalentCulture #WorkTrends podcast where we discussed this partnership between HR and marketing. We spoke about collaborating on the employee experience, the company’s brand, employee engagement, and employee retention.

For example, Sprinklr’s employee advocacy program is one of our most successful strategies to increase brand awareness (a marketing goal) while encouraging employee engagement (an culture and talent goal). The content is also a collaborative effort – it is created by the marketing team while the culture and talent team builds the strategy around how it is distributed to employees.

Regarding increasing employee retention, we discussed Sprinklr’s Employee Delight Assurance Program (EDAP), which ensures that every leader meets with their direct report and discusses their Employee Happiness Index – a rating of how happy the employee is at work from 1 to 10 plus three recommendations for what might increase their happiness.

EDAP encourages transparency and trust and has resulted in an increase in voluntary employee retention. These open conversations create a culture where people can thrive personally and professionally. The program is also applied to customers so that client-facing teams know immediately when there is a potential problem and can work closely with the customer to solve it.

When asked about the future of work, both Diane and I agreed that leaders will be required to be more flexible and open to changing their ways of working due to the continued digital disruption of the workplace.

Check out the full podcast here!