American Express's Monique Herena on 2024: Don't let your ego get in the way of embracing change

• Monique Herena is the chief colleague experience officer at American Express. 
• Herena said it's good to "get better and evolve and make changes." 
• Herena's insights are part of Business Insider's year-end leadership series, "Looking Ahead 2024."

The last few years haven't been without challenges, but there have been great opportunities to learn as well, Monique Herena told Business Insider.

She serves as the chief colleague experience officer at American Express.

One of her major takeaways from 2023 is that evolution is key.

"We need to be able to evolve and pivot where necessary," she said. It's key to "not have an ego." After all, just because "we rolled something out at one point doesn't mean we can't get better and evolve and make changes and listen."

For Amex, that meant really leaning into flexible work policies, which include a 30-day allowance per calendar year for many employees to work from any location without coming to the office.

While the financial services company — with more than 77,000 employees globally — has a hybrid work model that involves three days a week in the office, Herena said Amex's flexibility has helped the company with recruitment and retention.

Herena has a unique title — she's essentially a chief HR officer and a culture officer. "A lot of times, people just think I made it up to be interesting, but there's a lot more behind it," she said. She described CEO Stephen Squeri's vision as including "more collaboration, with less of a hierarchy and less formality" and how the company started to refer to employees as colleagues. This led to HR becoming "tightly linked to the business strategy," and a priority was "placing colleagues at the center of everything we do," she said.

"I focus on helping people develop to be at their best, and serve our customers and consumers," Herena explained.

Herena's insights are part of Business Insider's leadership package "Looking Ahead 2024," which digs into vision, strategy, and challenges across corporate America.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What are you looking forward to most in 2024?

I continue to be focused on delivering a really consumer-grade end-to-end experience when it comes to the growth and development of our colleagues. That means just setting a really high bar on what's working well for them. We do that powered by data insights. We have a lot of pilots around AI, and I'm looking forward to growing great leaders at every level.

We want to continue to be a leader in our area, but the way we do that is by growing the best leaders in the business. We have products for our employees that we develop, and that are our leadership model, and our career-growth model — these models that teach our colleagues what the Amex ways are.

We create an environment where colleagues can work with their managers to really grow and be their best so we can retain them and continue to challenge them. They're the ones who are going to help us deliver in 2024.

What are you most concerned about for 2024?

Change is constant. Our colleagues are carrying some level of stress and anxiety with them throughout the day. No one is immune from some level of stress and anxiety across their physical, financial, and mental health.

We really are focused on continuing to have a culture where we support people. So no matter what's going on in their lives — and a lot of great things are going on in our colleagues' lives — there's also data and research that people go through some tough stuff, too.

In our most recent colleague-experience survey, which is our annual engagement survey, 90% of our colleagues feel our benefits and our programs really support their well-being, and 91% of them feel supported by their leader.

What's one thing you got right in 2023?

We really did focus on taking a breath. It's been an interesting few years. Besides the flexible work model, there were several learning and development programs. We were asking ourselves, "How do we start to perfect those and make sure they're working for people in a post-pandemic world?"

We're viewing mental health and physical health in a more holistic way. So we want to make sure our colleagues are serving our customers while working in a flexible way. But are they taking care of themselves so they can really show up and be their best, day in and day out?

What's one thing you got wrong in 2023?

I don't think we realized our voluntary attrition was going to be at an all-time low.

People love the company and are highly engaged, which is wonderful.

We had to get really creative around continuing to make sure that our colleagues were growing. When you have natural voluntary attrition, it opens up space to move talent around to create new opportunities. When you don't have some of that healthy attrition happening — and people want to stay — you need to get a little bit creative.

We had to get very intentional around providing more opportunities for career progression, lateral moves, promotional moves, more on-the-job learning in terms of development, and really ensuring people felt engaged and challenged.

People really love getting that additional experience when there are not as many job postings.