“You cannot grow a company unless you grow the people,” says Marissa Andrada, Chief People Officer at Chipotle.
“’How are you?’ or ‘What’s going on?’ is typically what comes out of my mouth when I run into team members that I work with, or even new people,” Andrada said, describing her human-centric management style to Comparably CEO and co-founder Jason Nazar during the recent webinar, “Leading with Compassion to a Winning Culture.”
Andrada says most employees, especially those new ones, react with surprise that an exec seems to be so genuinely interested in their day-to-day.
“I’ve always been curious about why people show up every day and do what they do to,” Andrada says. “I always want to know what really motivates our employees and why they’re excited about what they’re working on.”
That curiosity leads to tremendous fulfillment at work for Andrada on a personal level.
“There’s a peace around the end of the day. I know it’s business, but we have human beings working in the workplace and there’s no better way to understand that we’re human than to connect with people one-on-one, so you can really understand what it is that they’re interested and excited about,” said Andrada. “Or maybe they don’t want to talk about what they’re working on. Maybe they have something that’s really bothering them, or an idea that that might help the company. I think that’s how you keep it real in an organization.”
Andrada argues that she wants to create the kind of environment where people can feel free to be themselves: “I think that unlocks and helps to bring the best out of everybody. How can you expect you unlock potential out of people unless they feel like they can be their full selves?”
EARLY CAREER LESSONS
Talking about her earlier career, Andrada points out one thing about working culture that she had to learn from experience. She found that, in her formative HR roles at different companies, she too often submerged her real personality.
“When I was 20 or 30 years old, at the companies that I was a part of, there was a profile. There was a way you needed to dress, a way you needed to speak, and it was all about fitting in instead of being myself,” she says. “’Can I be me or do I need to sound exactly like the people who have way more experience than me?’ I think that was the hesitation and I wish that someone early on inspired the confidence in me to say ‘Yes, there is a profile and certain competencies needed for this culture, but you can still be yourself.’”
Moving on to working for Universal, she was surprised to discover that she her immersion in the lingo of her former corporate experiences that she wasn’t communicating her real self at all to – in that case – a more receptive audience.
“’We’re so excited you’re here, we love your energy, we love your ideas, but you speak a different language,’ they told me,” Andrada says. “So, I had to unlearn all of the corporate jargon and all of the HR jargon that got in my way. No one’s going to listen if you can’t relate to them and meet them where they are and speak their language.”
VALUES
The story of Chipotle distilling its values down to the core four that they currently hold dear is a fascination example of the kind of compassionate, humane, and employee-centric methodology Andrada and the rest of Chipotle’s HR leadership gravitate towards.
In 2018, the leadership team took a day to look at Chipotle’s 25-year history in the service of coming up with a list of basic company values.
“It was actually on the twenty eve of our 26thanniversary,” Andrada remembers. “We were in the basement of our new location working on this list of values, and we came out of that day with nine of them.”
From there, HR leadership turned to their employees.
“We actually went out to the restaurants and found times to have conversations with employees to let them know that the new leadership team was trying to figure out the language of our core values as a company and we want you to take a look at it,” Andrada continues. “They voted on what really resonated for them, on what truly what makes sense to them in their world and how they experience their job and their company every day in the restaurant.”
From the process of collecting employee feedback, the list of values was honed down to six. A meeting with the Chief Restaurant Officer and Andrea’s team in August 2018 harvested another round of feedback, resulting in the list being further sharpened down to five. Hands-on CEO Brian Niccol made a few pivots to the language, and then there were four.
“We facilitated many conversations over seven or eight weeks ultimately to get to these four,” Andrada mentions.
- The Line is a Moment of Truth – “If you think about that amazing beautiful food line of real safe cooked food for our guests, it’s really the front line.”
- Teach and Taste Chipotle– “There is a lot of detail around our are classically cooked food. The fact that you can show up at 6:30 or 7:00 a.m. in the morning, and we don’t open it till 10:30, and our employees are cleaning and chopping onions, making the frying the tortilla chips, et cetera. But it’s also a metaphor for you know we need to be able to bring people along in this culture.”
- Our Food is Real and So Are We – “We want to create an environment where our people can be themselves and bring their best.”
- The Movement is Real – “We believe we source better ingredients, and we believe we hire better people, and that what we’re doing around the culture of food has really been groundbreaking.”
“We make sure that we are creating an environment that is co-created with our employees and again grounded back in the values,” Andrada adds.
CHIPOTLE CULTURE & BENEFITS
Chipotle has announced several initiatives recently that underline how multi-layered the company’s compassionate approach to its employees really is. Among them:
- 100% of tuition costs coveredup front for 75 different types of business and technology degrees through Chipotle’s partnership with Guild Education, providing the opportunity for all eligible employees, including crew members, to pursue a debt-free college degree through an expansion of the Chipotle Cultivate Education benefits program.
- An enhanced Paid Parental Leave (PPL)program for Restaurant Support Center and eligible field employees to 12 weeks for birth moms and four weeks for new dads and individuals adopting children. The company recognizes that giving its employees plenty of time to bond with a new child is crucial to their development.
- Unlimited PTO for senior level staff will help reward the leaders who are ultimately accountable for innovating and supporting the brand’s mission to Cultivate a Better World.
- Access to mental healthcare and financial wellness for all employees in 2020 through Employee Assistance Programs and enhanced benefits offerings. “Our vision for people is to create a culture where employees can thrive and pursue their passion and by extending access to all levels and enriching our Employee Assistance Program, we are ensuring that our employees can build mental fitness and bring their best selves to work every day,” Andrada said.
WHAT HR LEADERS CAN DO
Andrada attests that one of the most important roles of an HR leader is bringing extreme clarity on the issue of who a company is at heart and what it stands for. And that means truly understanding a CEO’s mindset.
“You can’t be a successful HR person if you can’t understand what’s motivating the leader that you’re partnering with,” Andrada says. “Know the CEO and what’s most important to them and help them articulate that vision. Helping them pull that vision out is really important, because values start at the top.”
“Let’s get really clear about who we are and what we stand for,” she says. “Get really clear on your purpose and why you exist. For us, our purpose has always been about cultivating a better world and it’s been about food with integrity. I think that food with integrity also translates to people of integrity. People always talk about Chipotle being such a sustainable organization, and I say ‘Yes, we are with our food and we should be as well with our people.”
“Don’t forget that they are human beings and that they are pouring their heart and soul into this company, whether or not you know it,” Adrada concluded. The advice I would give leaders is ‘Don’t forget that. Make sure that when you are sharing your vision that it’s not only about the how and the why, but that it’s also about capturing the hearts and minds of your people to help bring to life this vision that you have. That’s the role that your HR partner can play for you.’”
