EP 130: Navigating leadership transitions and the future of work with Jennifer Christie, Chief People Officer at DocuSign

Join host James Mackey as he speaks with Jennifer Christie, the Chief People Officer at DocuSign. Together, they will delve into the topic of leadership transitions and the changing landscape of HR in the tech industry.

Gain insights into the impact of CEO transitions, the role of AI in HR, and what the future of work looks like. Discover new perspectives on communication, culture, and talent strategy in the tech world.

   0:42 Jennifer Christie's background
   2:04 Navigating CEO transitions and leadership changes
  7:54 Communication and culture during the CEO transition
13:49 AI's impact on HR work
24:37 Future of work and return to office policies
34:43 Hybrid work and building stronger teams

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Our host James Mackey

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:27

Hello, welcome to the Breakthrough Hiring Show. I am your host, James Mackey. Thank you for joining us today. Really excited for today's episode. We're joined by Jennifer Christie. Jennifer, thank you for joining me.

Speaker 2: 0:37

Oh, thank you for having me, James.

Speaker 1: 0:39

Yeah, I've been so excited for this episode for so long. Now, for a few months, I've been really looking forward to chatting with you. So, before we jump into the topics that we outlined, can you please share a little bit about yourself with everyone?

Speaker 2: 0:51

Sure, I'll just do a couple of highlights. So I really entered the HR space in the White House in the Office of Presidential Personnel and got most of my training, I would say, at American Express, through a number of different jobs. I'm on my third Chief People Officer job now at DocuSign. I had a longer stand at Twitter before I joined DocuSign now X, but most people know it as Twitter. So I'm at DocuSign now and DocuSign for those of you who aren't familiar is the company that really pioneered eSignature, which is the way that people sign contracts and agreements around the world, anywhere, anytime. We're moving into different spaces now around managing agreements end to end with our customers. So exciting time. We have about 7,000 employees and we're serving over a million customers and over a billion users in 180 countries, and I've been in this role since June of 2022.

Speaker 1: 1:51

That's really cool, and all your experience, everything that you've been doing over the past several years, is exactly why we wanted to have you on this show and learn from you and understand exactly your thoughts surrounding everything related to people and executives and running organizations, and so it's going to be a really fun conversation. So for the first topic, we talked about essentially how executives think about driving change and innovation amongst leadership, talking through CEO changes, basically everything surrounding leadership transitions. That can be a quite difficult thing to tackle for organizations, particularly for larger organizations, and I would love to get your thoughts on this. Maybe we can just start very high level on why this isn't so important and how companies should think about approaching this, and we can possibly dive into some more tactical or actionable steps for folks as well.

Speaker 2: 2:40

Sure Listen. It's been a massive amount of change in the environment for people who work in HR of the last few years and we've had to navigate external and internal changes and definitely CEO transition or, frankly, any executive level transitions are very impactful to organizations and changes that really need to be navigated thoughtfully from 2021 to 2022. I actually oversaw four CEO transitions across three different companies and it made me realize when I saw them in such succession and in such a compacted amount of time. It really made me realize there's some key learnings there and some HR folks will never experience a CEO transition, but they're happening more often, especially in the tech sector. Things are moving rapidly. Investors want action and change and so these changes are happening more frequently, so I do think it's something worth us thinking about because they're big changes for companies.

Speaker 1: 3:37

Yeah, absolutely. I guess right now too, particularly over the past few years, we're seeing a lot more transitions, possibly just due to everything that's happening. We've had investors, venture capitalists, on the show recently, and what's been really interesting is they're talking about the shift in executive skill set that they've been looking for, and I think this makes a lot of sense of tracks, given what's happening in the economy. They're looking for folks that they're a lot more financially savvy and have a deeper understanding of running in a more sustainable way, understanding things such as unit economics, making sure that they're able to scale in a way that at least has a clear path to progress, profitability. People that are not solely focused on growth at all costs, but more so, maybe, focused on, again, the financial aspect, maybe also customer strategy retention. What are we doing to get stickier, to really make sure we're preserving our customer base? Folks that maybe understand.

Speaker 1: 4:31

Okay, let's say, if it takes a while for, in tech, to go back to a growth market, how do we retain our customers? Is there a path forward to grow? Can we slow down, sharon? How are we going to do that? Is there a way to upsell? How do we even think about our product? Is there other things we can be doing to align with what our existing customer base needs, and so it's been very interesting talking to VCs, and even we've had some CEOs of some of the biggest category leading tech companies in the world come on and we recently had a conversation with one of the category leading recruiting tech company.

Speaker 1: 5:02

Come on the show and they're actually making a core change to their product offering. Like their core product, they're shifting to meet the demands of this market, to try to eliminate more churn. And what was really interesting about it was like what if the market start? People are saying maybe the market will start bouncing back in 2024? Does it really make sense to do that large of an overhaul or this large of an addition to your product?

Speaker 1: 5:27

And basically what he says is like well, you know it could rebound. We could start to see a lot more growth towards the end of the year. However, at this point I have to run the business with the assumption of we don't know when that's going to be, and so we're going to make sure we can do what we have to try to retain and get back to growth by building our product out this way, moving forward. So, anyways, very long wind away, saying it's just been interesting to see a shift in terms of how people are viewing essentially the executive function, the skill sets that folks are looking for, both from the VC side, and then also, quite honestly, the mindset shift that I'm seeing among CEOs that I'm speaking to, like the way they're talking, their thinking is, quite honestly, drastically different than what I was hearing 18 months ago.

Speaker 2: 6:08

No for sure.

Speaker 2: 6:09

But listen, regardless of the business reason for making a CEO change, because every organization is going to be different it's on the people side of things. It's like major surgery for an organization to go through a CEO change. Even if it's planned, even if it's an internal successor, it's a major shift and I think sometimes we don't really appreciate the impact it has on an organization. And especially if someone has been a longer standing CEO, if they're a culture driver, if they had set expectations with an employee base that was following them, they have a leadership team that is aligned to them in different ways and there's a power dynamic on the leadership team that might already be established based on that leader and all of that kind of goes away when you have a leadership change in the sense of it's completely reset and that's very jarring for an organization across not just the CEO change but it has ripple effects throughout an organization that I think sometimes we don't fully appreciate how much that can be and have an impact on an organization and how well that needs to be thought through.

Speaker 1: 7:13

So what are the biggest areas of concern? Right, so we talked about culture, we talked about alignment with leadership. I would think that the immediate concern that I would have is surrounding communication. Engagement. Alignment would be an area like that. I could see things slipping pretty badly when there is a CEO transition. I'm wondering if there's some core areas, like holes, that companies can fall into essentially during a transition. What are the areas that you're most concerned about to prevent when you're looking at a CEO transition?

Speaker 2: 7:48

Yeah, I think, and whether it's a CEO transition or you can really take these lessons down to if it's a senior member of the team transition. But I think people do focus on the comms a lot. I think communication gets a lot of attention in terms of how do we want to communicate externally and internally about this change, what are the reasons behind it? All of those things. What I think it's left a little bit on the side and is equally important is the impact on the direct team and even further down in the organization. There's people who may have joined a company because of a leader, or they may have been recruited by a leader, or expectations about their career may have been set by a leader. When that leader leaves, it does have those ripple effects.

Speaker 2: 8:34

So I think that as we think through any kind of change, we really need to think about put ourselves in the shoes of the people that might be most impacted, like core inner circle, and then take it out a few levels as well and really think about who are the people in the company that are going to be most impacted. Are they also culture drivers? Do people also connect to them? So if they become loose and decide this isn't the place for them anymore, do they unloose, unseat a lot of other people in the organization. So I think we think a lot about top level communications and immediate retention issues potentially, but I don't think we sit back and really put ourselves in the shoes of a broader set of people that could be impacted. That will really help either stabilize or destabilize the company if it's not done well.

Speaker 1: 9:22

Yeah, I really like all the points you just made. Recently we had a chief people officer of Stack Overflow come on the show, debbie Shotwell, and it was really cool to talk with her because when we were talking about her role, her point of impact and running people, organizations and just generally speaking, being a good executive and running a category leading company, these types of things, she really came down. Internal communication with the employee base, constant feedback loops, really driving engagement and making that a core part of the culture, listening to people and it was just really interesting because the level of communication that she and her executive team basically implemented was a lot right. Like the CEO every week was writing a hands on letter, like he was doing it himself, not a communications team, marketing team, he was writing a letter to the company. They had all of these processes put in place, for employees could, of course, do anything from like surveys, but also one on ones and all these different types of communication channels and feedback channels, and then when they would implement feedback, they would make big announcements and it was just this constant flow of information back and forth.

Speaker 1: 10:31

And I think what gets really hard over the past few years is that the economy let's just talk about we're talking about the tech industry.

Speaker 1: 10:39

To be clear, the economy in tech has been a little all over the place, to say the least, and companies are making big decisions, such as potentially executive transitions.

Speaker 1: 10:50

Right, there are concerns across the board when it comes to revenue growth, when it comes to churn numbers and running a P&L and expectations from a board and whatnot, and you're trying to communicate and you're trying to like really sit in the seat of every employee that's going to be impacted, but then you're also trying to focus on, like product strategy and everything else, and I think there's a lot of executives too.

Speaker 1: 11:15

It's been a it's been a challenging time, right, because it's you feel like you're getting pulled and all these different directions. I think that's like partially why we see some of these. There have been. We've seen a couple of missteps where sometimes folks have felt like maybe not enough emphasis has been put on the people perspective during a big transition, and I think what I've learned speaking with top executives and people such as yourself too, it's like just yeah, that internal communication, really sitting, like really trying to feel and understand what it's going to be like for different employees on the team and just like a lot of communication and transparency all of the time is basically the, the main lesson that I think I've learned personally as a CEO and then also just speaking with executives such as yourself.

Speaker 2: 12:00

Yeah, I'm not disagreeing. I definitely think communication is important, but I think really take in a minute before you start firing off communications to really understand the broader impact of the organization and understanding, before you're communicating out, your listening, and so I think the listening piece has to happen before the communication piece and you really have your hand on the pulse of what's going on. What are the aspects of culture? Culture is a big word and it can. It impacts a lot of different things. But understand, like, how do people describe the culture? Is it going to change? Is it intentionally going to change? What are the parts of the culture that you want to keep the same? That you think makes the company strong?

Speaker 2: 12:35

But if it's a new CEO coming into the organization, there needs to be a lot more listening right Than immediate communication.

Speaker 2: 12:42

If it's somebody who's been at the company, it's a plan successor, they have their hand on the pulse of that already and they can start some of that work in advance, that passing the baton type of thing.

Speaker 2: 12:52

When it's not a passing the baton situation and it isn't this kind of longer transition, you've got to really think on your feet around. What are the most important things we need to do immediately? How do we stabilize the organization? Who are going to be those people beyond the executive team that we can tap into, that people are going to listen to and that are going to help us manage this transition, that we need to see if they can be on board with the way we're headed in the future and what the change is going to be. But I think you can expect there to be more change when you bring in a new CEO, versus you have a plan. Successor would tend to suggest that you're going to stay on the same path. It's just time for someone to move on and it's time for someone to elevate, whereas if you have a new CEO coming in from the outside, it may suggest more changes is on the way and so just maybe a little bit of a different approach.

Speaker 1: 13:40

Yeah, that's a really good point. I actually hadn't really slowed down and thought about that before, but yeah, so I would assume somebody coming in from the outside is probably going to shake things up potentially a little bit more, bring new strategies, ideas to the table. It makes a lot of sense to me. Look, that's super interesting. Thanks for slowing down with me on that topic. Let's talk a little bit about AI in the HR profession. This is going to be a fun one as well. I want to start with your thoughts here. What are you currently seeing in the HR space? Are you seeing any AI being implemented more recently? Maybe we can also talk about the future, what you think AI is going to be changing the HR space over the next, like you know, two to five years. Essentially.

Speaker 2: 14:16

Yeah, I'm so excited about it actually because you know, ai has been around a long time. This is not a new thing, but generative AI and the ability to really create content out of multiple different sources and summarize multiple data sets is really transformational, and there's so many different ways to leverage that within the HR space and I think about it in three different ways. One way is around. There's so much work that HR teams typically do, especially I want to focus on tech, because especially tech companies that are earlier stage companies, so they may not have all the foundations and systems and tools and processes that may be more mature organization has in, say, like an American Express, where I was before, or a longer standing company, you've got a lot of people, especially in the HR space, doing manual things, and there are manual things that take a lot of time. They aren't particularly exciting to do, but you just need people to do them. And I'll give you some examples All the different employment contracts that we are managing on a regular basis.

Speaker 2: 15:18

Somebody's got to track. When is that sign on bonus going to be paid? What's the term? Are there other special conditions of employment? There's a lot of things around just managing our data, things around with our recruiters, for example, going through so many different resumes, especially now in the tech space. Every role that gets posted, you get hundreds, if not thousands, of resumes and recruiters want to spend their time really diving into the backgrounds and the role requirements with people who are really qualified for those jobs. But how do you sort through all those resumes to whittle it down if you will, and know where to focus? So I think AI can really help us move into a different space around that and really, with a little bit of a shameless plug for DocuSign, it's one of the areas I mentioned before that we're getting more into and helping manage end-to-end agreements. So using AI across employment contracts that use DocuSign to tell you when something is coming up, to tell you when a contract for a contract employee is expiring, and have more insight into how to manage those processes. It's great using ID verification that we launched in July to help with I-9s, but it's just not requiring those face-to-face meetings which have always been challenging, certainly during COVID.

Speaker 2: 16:37

But now that we're out of COVID, the government is going back to a lot of those same old requirements.

Speaker 2: 16:42

You don't have the leeway that you used to have to do some of those things virtually, and now we have a better way to do it.

Speaker 2: 16:48

But AI is empowering all of that, and the other aspect of it I think that's super exciting is around career paths and career development, Because, again, in the tech space people move around a lot more than they do at some established companies where they spend 10, 15 years, maybe their whole career, at one company.

Speaker 2: 17:07

People don't do that in the tech space, and so you might know what a person's background and capabilities are in the job they have today, but you don't always know what do they do before. You don't have people just understanding what Sally can bring to the table or what someone else can bring to the table, because you just known them for a long time. You just might know them today and what they do today, but they have some much more to bring and I do think a lot of tech companies struggle with career development, career planning, how to help employees see their next job. Ai can be leveraged in so many ways to help plot those paths for our employees. So I just think there's a lot there that we can use the generative AI for. That just takes HR in different spaces.

Speaker 1: 17:47

Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of the big category leading tech, like recruiting, hr companies, they're building out more so their own internal AI functionality. I'm going to start to see a lot of fragmentation to where there's going to be a lot of like little AI tools out there on the market, at least at first, but I think over time hopefully we're not going to have to add 10 different SaaS products to our tech stack. Ai right, hopefully, like our existing tech provider can actually just do it. So we don't want to have that Just do it for us.

Speaker 2: 18:16

Yeah, I do think as well, something that, again, I think earlier stage companies struggle a little bit with enabling managers in more of a self-service way.

Speaker 2: 18:25

You have HR business partners that usually get involved in hand-holding managers doing things for them in systems and those kind of things, because they need to be focused on some of the other things that they're doing and it takes longer to get to a manager self-serve type of environment and I think this customer service quote, unquote customer service tools around AI can really help with some of the basic answering of questions, directing them to the right information that right now they're pinging on HR business partner to do. I think the bigger challenge is, once we sort that out, we're going to have HR business partners that are like, okay, now what do I do? We've talked to, oh, I wish they could get into more strategic spaces, I wish they could work on other things. We're going to allow them to work on other things. So we have to be ready and make sure they have the capabilities to lean into those strategic things around org design and leadership development and coaching and all of those things, because they have been swamped in many circumstances with more of the hand-holding and more administrative work.

Speaker 1: 19:25

Yeah, I think the longer that we've had things like chat, gpt, since chat GPT was initially announced, I'm actually growing a little less concerned when it comes to job displacement. My initial thought was like this could tank the entire economy If we replace displacement. There's a lot of academic papers that are peer reviewed from well respected schools saying, okay, 25% of jobs are going to be disrupted, there's going to be massive job displacement. It's a huge risk to the economy. We could face even things like mass unemployment If it progresses faster than we were able to regulate, and all of those, I think, are legitimate threats.

Speaker 1: 19:57

However, I would say that I think we're all like learning more about the capabilities right now of language systems, and there are specific, there are limitations, at least at this point, and, of course, technology is going to continue at advance, right, but I think, at the end of the day, people are going to move faster, but you still need the people for the most part, to do the work, and so I think, like from a HR business partner perspective, it's less bogged down to answering a lot of these day to day questions.

Speaker 1: 20:25

I think it's going to be a huge use case where there's just like chatbots available to answer any types of questions related to somebody's own personal package of any sort employment situation or questions about the company or whatnot. But there's still other things that HR teams, other teams are doing to progress any kind of progress related projects. More time can be spent on that. So I think companies are going to move faster, we're going to be able to change faster and I think that we're going to see an accelerated rate at how organizations can roll out and implement new changes, so opposed to saying hey we have this new initiative.

Speaker 1: 20:59

We wanted to go live by 12 to 18 months from now. Maybe we can do it in six months, because our people aren't spending 70% of their time doing stuff that these chatbots could probably do. Right, exactly.

Speaker 2: 21:11

It makes it a more interesting HR job too at the end of the day right, working on more strategic issues and, like I said, of my team I say just of what you said I don't think AI is going to replace you.

Speaker 2: 21:21

I think it's going to enable you and I think it'll help you move faster and I think it'll allow you to elevate and work in spaces that you've wanted to work in for a long time but haven't had enough time and bandwidth to do so working with leaders on org changes or coaching leaders on specific situations.

Speaker 2: 21:37

I don't think we'd ever be able to train a bot to look at all the different instances that you could come up against. That's why you need humans and human resources, like you need people with judgment, and you need people who understand the lay of the land and understand the nuances of the leadership team and what the org is trying to do and the business strategy, those folks who are on the front line. They know these things because they're there and they have that empathy and they understand the people who are involved and so they are able to make those decisions and judgments based on those things. So I don't I think it would take a long time to train a bot to give the right advice that we could trust around some of these issues that are so sensitive and strategic for the company. Yeah, I say you're not getting replaced, you're going to get empowered and elevated and ability to work on all the things that really you want to wake up in the morning and do.

Speaker 1: 22:24

Yeah, for sure it's been interesting, even for my own company, like I've leveraged it. My company, secure Vision, does contract recruiting and better recruiting RPO work for the tech space, and it's been a tighter market. For what about the last 12 months? We've even longer than that now. Like we started to see a decline, we started to see layoffs in tech, and so we were looking at our pricing model and looking at rolling out a different pricing model to maybe help companies in this environment be a little bit more comfortable to move forward with their services.

Speaker 1: 22:52

And I remember I basically punched in a few parameters to hey, this is what we're currently doing, this is the pricing, here's how it works. We want to change a structure that has a lower amount on this end, but that also has. I put parameters around a pricing model and how I wanted to offer a second type of model and I maybe wrote four or five sentences and it punched out like a whole new pricing model that I can use and it just accelerated. Of course, like I had to put in the parameters, I had to think through what I wanted. It punched out a bunch of stuff that was really accurate and really good. Of course, I had to do a final review, but it was pretty interesting. It's just helping people move faster. There would have been no value independently if there wasn't a human evaluating it and figuring out how to make it work. So there are some things where I feel like they can essentially replace humans. There's other things where it's like there's a lot of things where people have to be able to review it.

Speaker 2: 23:42

And for sure I'm going to date myself here.

Speaker 2: 23:44

When I was in college, I did not have Google there was no such thing and so I literally had to truck over to the library and pull out card, catalogs and books and all that kind of stuff to do research and then fast forward.

Speaker 2: 23:58

There's Google and there's other ways to find information more quickly. I see this as the same type of next level change that's going to accelerate us. Just like I don't pull out a map anymore to figure out where I'm going, and I put in an app and it tells me exactly how to get there, where to turn all those things, I'm still going the same place. It's just more efficient to get there. I still have to drive, I still have to take myself there and I have to figure out where I want to go and why and when and all those things. But this is one of those things. Like the Internet, I think that is going to provide us next level changes, but doesn't fully replace the needs that we have and the things that we want to get accomplished. It just makes it easier and better for us.

Speaker 1: 24:39

I agree with you completely, and so I think this is a good time to transition to our final topic. Today I want to talk to you a little bit about future of work and return to office. This conversation is starting to bubble up again On the show we talked about several times about a year or two ago on in office versus remote hot topic. I think everyone got a little burnt out from it. Everyone was talking about for quite a long time.

Speaker 2: 25:03

I think people got weary of talking about it, but it's not because the problem has been solved. I think they're still struggling with it, the ones that are willing to admit that they haven't nailed it, and I have yet to see a company come out and say we figured out the perfect formulas. I think people are weary of talking externally about it just because they want to get their act together and they're still sorting through what it is. But believe me, when I talk to my peers, it is definitely something that is top of mind.

Speaker 1: 25:26

Yeah, I know, but it's interesting. I feel like it's starting to come up again. We're starting to see more companies right, bring this up again, start thinking about it. More big tech companies start to really push for in-office returns and so it is becoming, I think, for a lot of folks again like top of mind right now, and I would be really curious to hear from you what are your thoughts on this. I think you mentioned DocuSign is going through a return to office phase right now.

Speaker 2: 25:50

Yeah, we call it future work versus return to office and I'll explain why. But yes, I would say probably during the pandemic, like many companies, everyone went remote and there was a lot of talk like when were we going to open offices again? And then it became like are we going to open offices again? What's the posture going to be? And we kept punting it down the road, especially as we had a new CEO coming in. And then we gathered together after he joined to talk about what is our point of view, what do we think is the best thing for DocuSign? And we got the broader leadership team together to really noodle on this and get employee feedback and try to understand what do we think the best thing for DocuSign was and where we landed was.

Speaker 2: 26:28

We knew that we weren't going to take away all the flexibility that people enjoyed during COVID, because the world had changed too much. You can't go back I don't think to five days a week. That's how I lived. I worked 30 years of my career five days a week in an office and it's amazing. Just a few years of disruption can completely dismantle norms that people have become so used to. But no one in our company thinks that's the way we're going, but we thought we missed a little bit of not being in person. There were some things around culture and collaboration that we weren't getting done in the same way with remote. So how do we thread that needle? And so what we did is, instead of saying, okay, if you live near an office, come in, Because we hired a lot of people in remote roles that didn't live anywhere near an office and so that seemed a little arbitrary and unfair, it is to say, oh, if you happen to live near an office, you've got to come in.

Speaker 2: 27:17

So what we did is we looked at each of our jobs and job categories across the company and said we're going to give your role not you, but your role a job designation. Do we think that your job needs to be hybrid, meaning coming in a couple of days a week to work collaboratively with other cross-functional teams, or do we think your job is more effective and can be effectively done fully remotely? And so where we netted out was about half of our roles in the company are fully remote as a job designation and about half of them are what we call hybrid, with the expectation that someone would come in two days a week. And that's what our kind of rule is. If you will two days a week and the timing is also important we said it's two days a week in the office and it's from 10 to three that we expect you to be in the office, like a core hours, so that way, if you want to have flexibility in terms of when you commute, come in early, leave early, come in late, leave late, or just come in from 10 to three, you might be working at home a little bit before, a little bit after you fill out your day.

Speaker 2: 28:17

But we wanted to provide some of that flexibility on the commute. And what we also said was that if we hired you to be a remote employee but suddenly you find yourself in a hybrid job designation, we're gonna honor the fact that you're in a remote role. You can work remotely in this job designation. When you look for your next role and you wanna stay remote, then look for a job that's designated remote. But as long as you're in this role, you can continue to work in the way that we hired you, Cause we didn't wanna do a bait and switch and wanted to honor the promises that we made people who had joined the company during that time.

Speaker 1: 28:51

Yeah, I think that's smart, right, and that way you're preserving the culture and maintaining trust with employees, and I think that's a big part of the culture too right, it's you wanna? The companies that kind of drew a very firm line and said we turn to office or you're no longer gonna work here, right?

Speaker 2: 29:05

Or move and you have to be near one of our offices and that kind of thing that's. Another company chose to do that that's. I'm sure they have reasons for that, but we just didn't think that was a good fit for doctors.

Speaker 1: 29:14

I don't, I wouldn't, I don't think it's the best idea. First off, it's gonna I feel like it's gonna cost, even just from a pure financial business perspective, whatever that means, right? Not even looking at a culture perspective. It's just gonna cost the company a ton of money. Employees are gonna become less engaged, it's gonna be a lot of attrition, you're gonna lose employees that even aren't impacted, and that's so. It just seems so unnecessary. At the end of the day, it's in office, remote. You want to recruit and inspire an incredible group of people, and you have to focus on culture to do that.

Speaker 2: 29:43

And people are the initial cause of all success in business, and so I agree, and I do think that the market in tech is what it is right now and a lot of companies have done layoffs and there's probably a lower number of tech roles out there, and so it does create a tighter market.

Speaker 2: 29:58

So I do think there's some folks that once that market opens up cause we know it does, and I've been around long enough to know that this ebbs and flows and the market's gonna open up again and it's gonna be a hot market for tech talent and people will have options. People will have more choice potentially than they do now. They may feel like they need to abide by rules in terms of move here or lose your job, kind of thing, but when that opens up, I do think this is gonna be a major criteria for talent in deciding how they wanna work, and they'll choose companies that provide them the opportunity to work the way they wanna work. And companies can maybe demand some things now that in the future they might end up having to be more flexible about to attract the talent they need.

Speaker 1: 30:38

And I think that's a really good point. I'm glad you said that. Just to slow down on that. I always find it very frustrating when, for instance, when we have to be honest, like when we have a customer that is basing their strategy solely pretty much off, like where the market is today, where the market's gonna be over the next six months, and it's like almost this over emphasis on power dynamics. It feels like almost, and people pick up on that. Right. I think it should be more. Let's focus on what's gonna be best for the culture, attract the best people, what makes the most sense for our own productivity, all these types of things, but it's too short-term focused.

Speaker 1: 31:12

There's a couple of issues. One, I think, again from a culture perspective, it gives this power dynamic feel that I think turns people off, that people don't really love. And then the other aspect too, is you're really setting yourself up for failure. You're gonna go through this massive transition, whether it's more remote or more in office. It's stressful, it's something that people have to think about in addition to doing their job, and it's just it's creating this whole amount like of operational internal work versus focusing on serving customers or whatever else that folks could be working on and then just to do that shift and then from six months to a year in the future, potentially needing to shift back and or to find a different balance. So I think quite honestly, like what we were saying earlier is a lot of companies don't have it figured out. I think the best thing we can do is just really take our time and these decisions, not rushed into them, and sometimes these decisions it might take a year or two to really figure it out, but not to move too fast.

Speaker 2: 32:04

Exactly when we went through this, we said this was gonna be a journey. We launched this in June after lots of conversations and work with the team the leadership team and getting feedback and doing focus groups, and we said this is what we wanna try and so we launched we call phase one, from June to the end of September, where we tried different modules, which days, what kind of perks and things in the office where people found most relevant. We had QR codes posted in all of our offices where people could provide us real-time feedback on how things were going. We had an exception process for people who were in a newly designated hybrid role and could commute but had challenges on a personal level, and so we have an exception process to say work through that with you.

Speaker 2: 32:45

And we recognize this is gonna be a journey to figure out what's the best thing, and I will say that people have found a lot of benefit of coming into the office a couple of days a week.

Speaker 2: 32:54

They still are the majority of their time working remotely. Three to five days a week they're working at home, but they've found that they really and they can expect certain colleagues to be in the office that they work with, and so they find they aren't just coming in and no one's around Like when we were more planful about it. They can expect to see the colleagues that they work with, they can collaborate with, they can get to know on a deeper level and they're finding a lot of benefits from it. And so we haven't had a lot of the I would say backlash that some companies have had about it, because we've been super flexible. We've said we're gonna test and learn our way into this. We're gonna provide flexibility along the way and not be like flip the switch and this is the way it's gonna always be. This is where we wanna go. We believe this is important and we wanna try it long enough to see if it can work and really lean into your feedback about making it a good experience.

Speaker 1: 33:44

Yeah, I think that's the right way to approach it. It feels like it's a team effort. Everybody's working together, right? It's not this Um directive top down. This is the way that we're going to do business, right? I think it's really important in how companies handle this, and it seems like your team's doing it the right way.

Speaker 1: 34:01

I'd love to go up like a layer, actually higher, and when it comes to returning an office, I don't know if I've really seen any studies that really been able to prove to me one way or another what's actually better, and so I'm wondering, like, when you look at return to office, are you seeing any data that's really specific into an office? Teams are more productive, that are and are going to help us better achieve our goals, or is it not? Maybe not numbers based like that on the spreadsheet, but it's more of we're doing this for culture reasons, to make sure that we can continuously attract talent or engage talent. We think that this is the best way to do that, and so this is why we're going to return to office. I'm just wondering, like, what kind of data points or what was really driving the decision there. If you have any more insight, I'd be really cool to hear.

Speaker 2: 34:46

Yeah, what I would say is listen, we don't think that hybrid is better than remote, because we have, again, half of our employees in remote roles and we have the other half working still mostly remotely. So most of the company is more in a remote posture, I would say. But what I would say, what we're trying to accomplish, are two things is how we, how we continue to drive our culture and bring people together so people can get to know each other on a more personal basis. And, because we do think that is important, we are a very caring organization. I think I would call that one of our cultural attributes. We care about our customers, we care about each other and people really did crave getting back together in offices and even people in remote roles. We've really funded travel budgets to allow people to come to off-sites and in office gatherings. They don't have to do it on a regular basis, but we're enabling people who work remotely to get together with colleagues they've never met in person and they really find that valuable.

Speaker 2: 35:43

The culture piece is definitely something that, from the surveys that we've done, that seems to be resonating with people. I would call it less productivity, more collaboration, because we do have a lot of work. That is very cross-collaboration around our sales and product and marketing teams in particular, and so those are the teams that we really targeted to say we think it would benefit you to come in a couple days a week, but we'll make sure that the teammates that you would work with are also in the office. So it's around this concept of collaborating and building stronger net teams across functional areas, and so that's something we're still testing and we're still figuring out the right balance of that. But anecdotally, we're hearing that being able to work and walk down the hall and see people are being meetings and have that meeting after the meeting and meeting before the meeting, versus just you're on a Zoom and you're off a Zoom, as people have found beneficial.

Speaker 2: 36:33

But I won't lie. Obviously we're still working through this transition and change. It's different behaviors that we are learning. We learned remote really quickly because we had to, because of COVID. We had decades of working in an office full time to learn those behaviors. This is still new, like we're just we're in the early stages of developing those new habits and behaviors that are going to make this really successful.

Speaker 1: 36:56

I love it. And my last question if somebody's working in a functional area that you would, at this point, think needs to be in a hybrid position or be able to come into office part time, would you still interview talent that's only available fully remote, or is it OK if we have somebody in the role that's fully remote? Now there's grandfathered in if you will, but what would you do about if you had a really great candidate that isn't in market, isn't able to do hybrid and maybe even isn't open to relocation? Is that we're no longer considering that candidate, or how do you think about that?

Speaker 2: 37:30

So the way we approach it is if the role has a job designation as hybrid and it's an open role, we first ask the recruiting organization to try to find someone who would work in that hybrid role, because that's no bait and switch, right. You're being upfront with the person right from the beginning of. This is our expectation of the role, this is how we'd like for you to work and you're walking into that with fully accepting that's the way to go. So that's the first order of business is to see can you find somebody that is open to working in this web because it's a hybrid role? And if it's something that they go after, that talent and they can't find the right person for the role, or someone surfaces who is, to your point, a fully remote candidate who can't work in a hybrid way and wouldn't take the job working in a hybrid way, we have an exception process for the recruiter to escalate. That Just to say is this a role that we want to, or is this talent that we want to capture, that we want to make an exception for bringing into this role? And we've had a number of those right. So we're not going to be stern in our position or so stuck in how we're doing this that we will miss out on great talent or we're not going to fill a role with critical talent that we need. But we were.

Speaker 2: 38:36

Again, we're playing the long game on this, but the first start for recruiters is to try to find someone front who'd fit that model, and, interestingly enough, we actually even have people who recruiters going after remote roles, who find candidates who might want to come to the office, and so we have exceptions for that too, especially some of our employees who are early in their career.

Speaker 2: 38:57

They might want to have some of that interaction or mentorship. I know for me personally when I think about when I was back in my twenties I won't say how long ago that was, but back in my twenties I really benefit from just observing things that were going on in the office and having those conversations and having finding mentors that can help guide me outside of just what I'm doing in my job going to a meeting. We do find some different employees at different stages of career who might want to be in the office or their personal situation is such that they can work better in an office. So we're flexible on that side too, and we do find some folks want to working in a hybrid way, in a remote role.

Speaker 1: 39:36

Yeah, I love it. I couldn't agree more, jennifer. This has been a lot of fun this whole conversation. Thank you so much for jumping in on us today and sharing your insights on everything we discussed. This was really great. I know everybody tuning in is going to learn a lot from this and be able to implement a lot of what we talked about into their talent strategy. So thank you.

Speaker 2: 39:52

No, thank you.

Speaker 1: 39:52

Appreciate you having me and for everybody tuning in. Thank you so much for joining us today. We have a lot of great episodes coming up, two more notable ones that you might interest you. They're going to be released over the next following weeks, as we had Christian, ceo of Glassdoor, come on the show, so we should be publishing that episode shortly. And then I have a good friend of mine, ceo of a company called Tenable, publicly traded cybersecurity company. He's going to be coming on the show in the next week or two, so make sure to continue to tune in, and we'll make sure to have some really incredible guests join us so you can learn all sorts of good stuff. Anyways, I'll talk to you soon, take care.