From happy Chimers to happy members: How Molly Payton drives engagement for Operations and Member Experience at Chime
Molly is part of Chime’s Operations and Member Experience (OMX) team, which we’re highlighting in honor of National Customer Service Week. Read on to learn more about Molly’s role and the importance of the member experience at ChimeⓇ.
In her five years at Chime, Molly has held various roles across the Operations and Member Experience (OMX) team, from working with agents and vendors daily to coordinating between cross-functional teams regarding product and marketing support materials. She’s been the person who listens to call recordings—the familiar “This call may be recorded for quality or training purposes”—and the person responsible for the strategy for telling 4,200 agents that a process is changing or a new product is launching. And, in the fall of 2021, she was a part of the founding group of OMX’s Culture Committee, a natural step for someone who was often volunteering to organize team events and gatherings.
“I’ve always been passionate about peoples’ experiences at work—it’s intuitive to me that if we feel good, have a healthy working environment, and feel valued, that’s a good thing,” Molly says. “We spend so much time at work, and I’ve always been interested in helping improve that experience for myself and others.”
So, in June 2022, when OMX developed a program manager role for employee engagement, Molly knew it was the perfect role for her. “At Chime, we’ve never had to convince a leader why having engaged employees matters—people here understand that having an engaged workforce isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s better for business,” she says. After discussing the role with her manager, Molly stepped into it. “I’m doing work that I had previously done voluntarily—only it’s now my full-time job,” she says. “Honestly, it’s cheesy how much I love my work.
Driving culture and engagement through collaboration and feedback.
While Chime has its Voice of the Member team, which advocates for what members say and want, Molly’s role is to do the same for OMX Chimers. “We need to understand what our employees care about and what will impact their experience,” Molly says.
The main goal of her program is to help create an environment where OMX Chimers can be their best selves and do their best work. Her mandate is to deeply understand the employee experience within OMX, diving into the unique opportunities and challenges that the OMX team faces. From that understanding, Molly provides insights to OMX leadership and supports the design, implementation, and maintenance of initiatives to address those opportunities. For example, Molly maintains the OMX quarterly pulse survey as a measure of engagement and a way to understand areas of opportunity. She regularly reviews the results with leadership and bases action plans upon them.
“One important thing when I started in this role was to understand that if this role failed, it would be because I or others thought I was the only one responsible for this work,” Molly explains. “We’re all responsible for our culture and engagement—my role is to help steer and support how we create that culture.”
One of Molly’s favorite parts of the culture the team has co-created is around employee recognition. The team’s obsession with tacos became their main form of peer recognition. They give virtual ‘tacos’ to celebrate each other over Slack, and when the team was planning OMX Together, Molly used her knowledge that recognition is a huge part of engagement to incorporate an awards portion into the event.
To keep a pulse on how the OMX team is doing—and whether her work is making an impact—Molly focuses on the engagement score she calculates from quarterly surveys and participation scores. “If folks aren’t participating in surveys, that’s a sign of engagement in and of itself,” she says. She also does check-ins across the team and sits in on meetings to gather qualitative feedback.
From managers to members: How effective leadership trickles down.
To connect her work to broader member experience outcomes, Molly looks at the many layers of work that impact our members—seeing her work as an inner layer of the ‘onion’ of OMX. “A lot of engagement is about enablement and whether Chimers have the tools and clarity they need,” she says. “So we peel the onion a layer deeper to ensure we’re enabling our OMX managers. After all, to have the most impact at the individual contributor (IC) level, we must focus on managers who directly impact the employee experience every day. There’s a reason they say that, ‘People don’t quit jobs, they quit managers.’”
To enable managers to enable their teams, Molly focuses a lot of energy on ensuring managers feel supported, have the resources they need, and know what’s expected of their teams—thereby delivering a higher level of consistency in employee experience across OMX. “Providing people with the resources they need—whether that’s coaching, templates, processes, or tools—leads to more effective change management, greater career development opportunities, and smoother operations overall,” she says. “All of these things contribute to smoother product launches, better resources, and improvements for our agents, which translates to a better experience for our members. It’s a long trickle down, but the connection is undeniable.”
Building culture as a team effort.
Since taking on her role as Senior Program Manager for the OMX member experience, Molly has launched the team’s quarterly surveys and implemented new methods of supporting managers. She spearheaded Chime’s very first in-person OMX team gathering, OMX Together, which had a deep impact on the organization’s sense of connection and togetherness. “Coming together as an organization for the first time in person at OMX Together has to be one of my proudest moments of this past year,” Molly shares. “The team works so hard every day to deliver the best member experience possible—it was an honor to do right by them and give them the same kind of exceptional experience they give our members.”
While we can certainly celebrate Molly’s many accomplishments, she will always bring us back to the core tenet of her work: that she cannot succeed at it alone. “This work is a shared commitment,” she says. “When we see how engaged our team is and the impact that has on our agents and our members, that’s how we know it’s working. We are all invested in this work and creating our organizational culture together—and I couldn’t be more proud of how we’re doing it.”
In the year ahead, Molly looks forward to the next evolution of OMX: “We've proven that we can get our work done, set ambitious goals, and exceed them,” she says. “We've worked hard to establish a solid foundation for how we operate, and now we're at a place where we can really make a positive impact for Chime in how we support our members.”