At K2, we believe that our people are our greatest asset and the key to delivering an exemplary customer experience.
For this reason, their experience of life at K2 is extremely important to us, and we want to enrich it as much as we possibly can. Equally important is the experience that K2 delivers to its clients’ assignees, and this too we want to elevate, ensuring that it remains unmatchable within the industry. Our unwavering focus on both employee experience and customer experience – with our customers being our assignees – is a true source of pride for us, and so we wanted to share with our audience the multiple ways in which we are currently investing in people – our own and our clients’.
Employee Experience
In crafting our employee experience, we focus on involvement: “tell me, and I will forget. Show me, and I may remember. Involve me, and I will understand”. (Confucius, philosopher). When a new hire joins the K2 Family, they are immediately signed up to our onboarding programme. They attend live onboarding events with members of the Senior Leadership Team and are introduced to each department via onboarding videos, helping them to develop a strong understanding of how the business operates right from the get-go. Alongside the training that they receive via our online training platform, whenever possible, employees are offered shadowing, mentorship and secondment opportunities, plus they are invited to take part in management/leadership workshops. These opportunities provide our employees with practical experiences which are more engaging, memorable and persuasive than forms of training built around instruction or demonstration.
Our focus on involvement can also be seen in the richness of our intranet and the scope of our reward and recognition programme. With a daily dose of fresh content that ranges from personal updates to new resources, office event write-ups to new contract announcements, our intranet helps to keep our colleagues connected and engaged. When it comes to reward and recognition, our aim is to make our employees feel as connected to the business and to each other as possible. For example, the KINETIC Benefit, a long-term profit share scheme, inspires a positive culture of long service and collective ownership, and the Q Awards, a biannual reward and recognition programme, strengthens the connections between our people by encouraging them to publicly recognise each other’s contributions.
Customer Experience
We have clear feedback loops which span the entire business, enabling us to keep our finger firmly fixed on the assignee experience pulse. For example, the Relocation Manager loop: our Relocation Managers commit to building strong, trusting relationships with their assignees, giving those assignees the confidence to ask questions and share concerns. As a result, developing issues can be nipped in the bud and Relocation Managers can monitor the undulations in assignee experience, responding to dips by making changes and analysing the peaks to see if they can be extended. Another example, the service partner loop: on the ground in 186 countries, our service partners have full visibility of developing situations likely to have a negative impact on an assignee’s relocation. They share this information with us immediately, then provide us with regular updates, giving us the opportunity to manage the situation/mitigate its effects, thus protecting the assignee experience.
We are continuing to develop our service offering, with a particular focus on Technology and Marketing – two of the six pillars that combine to form our current business plan, KINETIC. From a technology perspective, we are currently working on a new solution – Core Flex. Via a mobile app, Core Flex will blend a set of pre-defined services with a range of additional, optional services that assignees can choose from, making their experience more personal and streamlining their transition into the DSP support phase. From a marketing perspective, by leveraging the technical and creative skills of our expanded Marketing team, we are steadily increasing the range of unique, high-quality resources that we are able to produce and share with assignees. For example, earlier this year we produced a series of films for a hedge fund client’s assignees, providing them with a highly relatable (the films featured current client employees), relevant and inspiring guide to their new home city.
By investing in people we protect our experience mission, ensuring that our people and our clients’ assignees feel that they are truly seen and truly heard.
For a business within our industry to be both successful and sustainable, it is critical that they deliver a positive experience for both employees and assignees. At K2, we take this to the next level, delivering experiences which are unique, personal and unmatchable.
