The Value of Co-Creation with Guild Education Chief People Officer Lorna Hagen
In this episode of Redefining HR, I’m joined by Guild Education’s Chief People Officer Lorna Hagen. We discuss her career journey across a range of countries and industries and her latest role: leading the people team at Guild Education. We also discuss the importance of co-creation across teams, how Guild Education is setting up this function, and how it helps them to be in service to their team and clients.
Lorna’s career started with managing people. After two years in that role, she realized the value of being involved in the design and management of programs that elevated employees. As her career progressed, she became intentional in the industries she worked in and the roles she obtained. “I've done several different kinds of rotations in order to get to where I am,” says Lorna.
Lorna is a three-time CPO and, with her prior experience in big companies and startups, she has been able to take the best out of each situation and apply that to her current role. Being a mission-driven person, Lorna is thrilled to be working with Guild Education, a purpose-driven company. She shares that Guild Education works with major employers in the U.S, Fortune1000 companies “to re-imagine and then redeploy their education benefits for employees.”
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Ep 106 Guild Education Chief People Officer Lorna Hagen
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Benefits of Co-Creation
Lorna comes from a training background where she was told that “you don’t forget you work for the management of this company, not the employees.” Fast forward to the present day and she begins to think about how she can co-create with her employees, rather than building things in a vacuum.
After seeing another CHRO successfully achieve this strategy, Lorna realized that many CHRO’s need to get into this way of thinking. She shares that the biggest role for CHROs is helping their direct reports understand the value of co-creation. “I find people are so dependent on kind of their own knowledge and success and execution,” Lorna shares, “and the idea sometimes of co-creation, especially with someone that's outside of say recruiting or LNDO or especially compensation is so anathema to how they've operated in the past.”
Over the course of the pandemic, HR leaders are listening more to the needs of their employees and co-creating with them as opposed to designing to employees. This has allowed HR to utilize the employees’ expertise and collaborate with them.
Guild Education’s Mission for Collaboration & Co-Creation
Lorna says the one thing that hasn’t changed is “really thinking about our team as ‘in service of.’” Her leadership philosophy aligns with that statement. She sees her team as being in service to the mission of Guild Education, to the workers they support, and to their employees.
Not all would agree with or apply this philosophy, but it has proven to be successful for Lorna. Adopting the mindset of being in service to her students affects the way that she builds her team. She looks at it in three phases: foundations that are beyond reproach, digitizing employee experience, and having innovation and service for both clients and students.
Setting Up for Success
The first phase or horizon focuses on the foundation of what works. Lorna describes this as “a rip and replace type of year and era.” She adds, “I would say we are all responsible for making sure that we're not relying on the things that worked 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago.”
In the second phase, Lorna asks, “How do you digitize the employee experience?” Focusing on enablement and engagement through technology is critical, especially if a person is in a digital workplace. Lorna notes many people are “working through computers all day long, and you're not actually talking to your manager, walking into their office or, you know, leaning across their cube.”
With the final phase, the focus shifts the innovation and service to the student. For Lorna, it is about understanding how to set up the foundational, digital, and employee experience programs in order to say to “our customers or potential customers, ‘Here's how the Guild product works for us’ and hear all the things that we have set up at our company to enable a real seamless transition of upscaling and rescaling.”