Driving Business Outcomes Through Human Centered Design: Empowering People Managers to Engage and Enable Employees to Deliver their Best

We’ve embarked on a multi-year journey to create a manager ecosystem, amplified by digital innovation and human design thinking, that builds managerial skills and leadership capabilities now and into the future, champions our rich and robust talent philosophy, and enables our people to thrive.

This case study represents one of the submissions for i4cp's 2025 Next Practice Awards, winners will be honored at the i4cp 2025 Next Practices Now Conference. You can also view other Next Practice Award case studies.

Summary

At Vertex, people managers fuel our culture and help realize our mission of bringing transformative medicines to people with serious diseases. We are committed to supporting managers at every stage of their leadership journey and have built an ecosystem to support their work across the enterprise, geographies, and the employee lifecycle.

Business challenge

Vertex has reached a pivotal stage of global growth and expansion. As we grow across geography, portfolio of therapies and employee population, it’s imperative that we have a clear plan to preserve and nurture our innovative and inclusive culture. We’re magnifying our focus on critical capabilities as we scale to support our increasingly complex business, R&D engine, commercialized disease areas, and projected employee growth.  Today we have 1,600 people managers, representing ~25% of employees globally (slides 1-2). Employee engagement survey data continues to show what we’ve long known: managers have a significant impact on employee satisfaction (slide 4).

Solution – Scope & Innovation

We recognized the role of people manager as more challenging and important than ever and acknowledged the criticality of investing in managers to lead us to our next stage of success. In 2022, we began a multiphase approach to develop a holistic enterprise-wide ecosystem to support managers in understanding their roles, performing with confidence, and growing as leaders. Within this ecosystem, managers are supported across the following domains (slides 3-end):

1. Know Your Role – equipping employees as they onboard into the people manager role with clear expectations with programs such as Managing at Vertex and Employee Relations for People Managers.
2. Perform in Your Role – offering just-in-time support for quarterly processes and tools to strengthen their teams through People Manager Forums.
3. Grow in Your Role – providing ongoing leadership development journeys and concentrated skill building with Manager Excellence and topical workshops. 

First, we launched Lead: Foundational Manager Excellence to support new people managers in developing into their critical roles as inclusive leaders. The inaugural cohort-based enterprise-wide leadership development program established Manager Excellence standards focused on Leading Self, Leading Teams, and Leading the Business.

In Lead, managers learn to better understand themselves and how they show up as leaders. By teaching them how to flex communication styles, own their reactions, and connect strategy to vision, we develop managers who are confident, adaptable, and authentic. We broaden their focus toward building teams through purposeful goal setting, stretching others through coaching, and delegating to empower others and generate impact. Finally, we help them to lead strategically and maximize impact by fostering a culture of growth through constructive feedback and open debate to elevate their team’s contributions.

In 2023, we expanded Manager Excellence programs with Propel: Experienced Manager Excellence, differentiated leadership development that reinforces the basics and hones the skills of established managers. Given the span of control for experienced managers, Propel doubles down on leading others, focusing on effective delegation, coaching, and nurturing team cultures where employees feel they are heard and belong. Propel also offers topics on influence, presenting and leading with vision.

Both Manager Excellence leadership programs leverage research-backed adult learning best practices and were co-designed with vendor partner BTS to transform skill building into sustained behavior change. Managers learn through a combination of formats, including:

• Independent self-paced online modules to learn core principles
• Immersive social workshops to deepen understanding through group discussion and simulation, amplifying our culture of “better together”
• Guided application to try new concepts, practice new skills, and reflect on the experience
• Small group coaching pods to connect, reflect, explore, and learn from peers’ experiences

In 2024, to maintain momentum and ensure people managers share a vocabulary around what ‘great’ looks like in the context of being a people manager, we introduced Managing at Vertex. This interactive session, introduced by our Executive Committee and facilitated by our CHRO and HR leadership team, is comprised of seven modules:

1. Introduction: An introduction including grounding information on Vertex’s employee lifecycle, talent philosophy, and the managerial role
2. Foundation: Vertex’s approach to organizational design, job architecture, flexible work guidelines, and inclusion, diversity, and equity
3. Attract & Hire: Vertex’s approach to talent attraction and hiring including programs and processes to promote inclusion
4. Perform & Develop: Vertex’s performance lifecycle and approach to employee development and manager requirements such as supporting individual development plans and career conversations, expectations for goals, feedback, and annual reviews
5. Reward & Recognize: Vertex’s approach to Total Rewards, which emphasizes compensation and how managers can differentially reward exceptional performance
6.  Engage & Enable: Critical HR contacts and how to leverage employee survey scores to identify engagement opportunities
7. Conclusion: Review of what “great” management looks like, actions and available reinforcement resources

This offering is digitally sustained by the My Vertex employee portal which hosts the Manager and Career Hubs.

Manager Hub, launched in 2023, empowers people managers to support their employees’ needs and equips them with data they need in a transparent manner. Through the following domains, it provides a digital infrastructure, operational knowledge, tools, and insights managers need to lead their teams and deliver for patients:

• My Actions: Centralized manager-pending actions such as Onboarding asset provisioning, Offboarding Manager Checklist, and direct links to approvals in Coupa, Oracle and Workday making it a one stop shop.
• Team Spotlight: Provides an overview of a manager’s team and insight into new employee onboarding, work anniversaries, and recognition awards. Managers are nudged to acknowledge anniversaries and high fives (feedback in the moment) their direct reports receive or to remind their team of unused paid time off!
• Equipment Tracker: Creates transparency into a new hire’s laptop status — Manager Order Guide, address confirmation, equipment shipment and delivery status. If a new team member is starting onsite, the manager is alerted when equipment is ready for pickup. This was implemented to manage the expectations of when a new employee has what they need to succeed
• Manage My Team: Supports easy access to workforce plan, learning compliance, recruiting, headcount status, employee goals, IDPs, employee profiles, talent cards, skills intelligence, and Gig development opportunities
• Data as a Service: Provides one-click navigation to Sentiment Survey Feedback, People Analytics dashboards, Vertex Fact Sheet, recognition dashboard and Total Rewards Portal (for U.S. and U.K. employees) where a manager can see employee total compensation packages, compensation benchmark targets and trends
• Key Events: Displays a view into monthly events and deadlines like Workday Goals, Performance Check-ins, and Manager Evaluations
• Toolkit for Managers: Provides direct access to trainings and resources such as extended worker resources, employee relations, varied feedback channels, and Workday how-to guides
• Quick Links: Displays direct links to MentorcliQ, Workday, the Vertex Foundation portal, Concur, Coupa, and Career Hub

Career Hub was designed to bring Vertexians transparency around career navigation. It also provides managers an overview of job families, competencies and proficiency expectations targeted by role and level, and includes a competency assessment tool that employees, managers or peers can complete. Over three years, 20% of employees have participated in more than 700 gigs across the enterprise, we have seen  5-point sentiment increases in manager effectiveness and career conversations, a 50% growth of internal applicants, and have achieved 26% internal placement to open roles resulting in a five-year cost avoidance prediction of $90-110M due to talent retention.

Results & Impact

We’ve developed a framework for program impact assessment using participation metrics, participant feedback surveys, employee engagement surveys, and where possible, ROI calculations. 

Manager Excellence program results:

2023 Lead & Propel graduates had a 58% lower attrition rate and a 5-point increase in sentiment scores on questions related to career growth and outlook. 100% of participants felt they were able to apply skills and concepts from the course. Calculations based on average salaries and self-reported time investments show that Lead & Propel had a 533% ROI, equal to ~$3.1M benefit to Vertex’s business.

These programs elevated the standard of manager excellence, and the resource investment has yielded significant ROI.

Managing at Vertex results as of October 28, 2024:

Upon session completion, 93% of managers agree that Managing at Vertex met its stated objectives, 85% agree that they have been well-equipped to apply the knowledge they learned, and 74% feel their role as a manager will become easier after completing the training.

Conclusion

Scaling the business requires scalable solutions. As we’ve built our manager ecosystem, digitally scaffolded by the Career and Manager Hubs within My Vertex, we’ve experienced lower attrition among-, and greater sense of self efficacy reported by- People Managers. We have confidence managers feel empowered during critical moments as we endeavor to support Vertexians throughout their employment journeys. Listening is key to our success. We provide a distinctive culture of care and support because we know that enabling people managers to be their best will bring out the best in every Vertexian.