Building Blocks | Edition 3 💌
Stories, reflections, and tools from People leaders helping each other navigate the new world of work
Hello, People Builders! 👋
Some of you may remember the community co-creation workshop we hosted with a group of early People Builders at the end of last year. It was an instrumental part of the community's early success. Therefore, we would like to involve more of you in the design of the People Builders community...
On the 3-month anniversary of the People Builders community, I am excited to inform you that we’ll be taking community involvement to the next level with the launch of our People Builders Ambassadors Program! 🎉
Would you like to become a hands-on shaper of People Builders?
In this issue
In this edition of Building Blocks, here’s what we have in store:
Building Together – Community events this month 🧨
Builder Kit – Choosing your optimum working model 🚧
Building Voices – Mayra takes the mic 🎤
Over to you — [From Transform] 🗣
Thanks so much for reading!
Marie
Building Together — Community events this month 🧨
A new month is starting and we have a full calendar of events ready for you! 🥳
These are direct responses to your feedback. We really hope to continue supporting and elevating you with meaningful moments and inspiring ideas, resources, and tools that the People Builders community will keep generating in the next months.
A dedicated time for People leaders to scratch their heads together, challenge their thinking, and break out of outdated mental models. If you’re craving an aha moment that has the power to open the door to innovative and breakthrough ideas, this Dream it, Build it think tank with guest Jack Mardack is for you!
In this edition of Dream It, Build It, we'll be joined by guest Kim Rohrer, Principal People Partner at Oyster, to discuss what it takes to maintain remote teams’ morale and motivation after layoffs, restructuring, and reorganization. We’ll share tested practices to help keep up people’s spirits and brainstorm new ways to maintain team members’ motivation during tough times.
Compensation, benefits, equity. Those get ultra complicated in a global setting, don’t they? Needs, expectations, and laws vary from country to country. Where in the world do you begin? (Literally!)
Since we learned that global total rewards is a hot topic for our community, I wanted to share the Oyster Deep Dive event taking place this month, where you can learn more about creating a total rewards strategy for global teams with the Oyster Total Rewards launch.
Builder Kit — Choosing your optimum working model 🚧
Whether it’s on-site, hybrid, or remote, the working model that will work for your organization is unique. But can you tell which one is the right one for you?
Our Conf-Labs last month aimed at identifying the key advantages and trade-offs of four distinct organizational structures – on-site, hybrid, remote, and co-located – to determine the workplace model that would best suit the needs of a given team and business.
Thanks to the collective power of those of you present, we created a lean playbook to help choose, evolve, and make the case for a model of work that will optimally support the ambitions of your team and your company.
We hope this tool can equip you with validated arguments and proof points that will support strategic conversations with your team, functional leaders and managers, or executives… Tell us how you found it!
PS: If you’re curious about the workshop discussions, you’ll find the Miro board and playbook stored in our People Builders Hub.
Building Voices — Mayra takes the mic 🎤
A few weeks ago, I had the chance to speak with Mayra Massuda, Head of HR at RebelMouse, an AI-enabled CMS and creative website performance agency. RebelMouse has been a fully-remote company since 2016. In the almost two years since Mayra joined from Sao Carlos, Brazil, the company has grown to close to 100 team members spread in 32 countries around the world.
During our conversation, Mayra shared how a high degree of flexibility was one of the cornerstones of RebelMouse’s company culture. As we all know, flexibility is key to the workplace of the future (maybe even the present?). Yet, I was intrigued by the kind of flexibility Mayra was talking about with the RebelMouse team.
At RebelMouse, we say that we have a 'fluid structure’. We adapt to our needs, everything is very personalized and individualized. For instance, our engagement survey or our performance review cycle cannot be structured according to the market. The frameworks have to be different and think anew specifically for RM. We do a lot of testing and experimenting.
A telling example are the PTO guidelines we’ve just launched. Basically, people can take all the time off they need. So the structure we provide is really about assuring flexibility for everyone. We provide managers with the autonomy to coordinate time off with their team members first and foremost. We inform people about how many PTO and sick days people take on average.
Another anecdotal example is that a lot of people I work with never show their face on camera! Our CEO is cool with that, and so this is not a problem for us. We want to really respect people’s individual choices and vulnerabilities.
Our internal page is where we gather information about our HR processes and benefits. It's an example of how we keep everything transparent and accessible so that people can count on some structure knowing that we are also flexible.
While flexible work is a necessary approach to talent attraction and retention, the degree of flexibility that organizations offer tends to vary tremendously. I became curious about where this RebelMouse’s cultural take on ultra flexibility and individuality came from.
This comes from our CEO who is a transgender woman, and who wanted to break stereotypes of Silicon Valley startups. She created RebelMouse with the desire to provide a space where all identities are welcome and understood. We do have many Black, Asian, and Latin-American people, also LGBTQ+ people, and immigrants who left their home countries, and we are very understanding of diverse identities. So flexibility and inclusion have really become the base of our company culture.
I asked Mayra how employees perceive this part of RebelMouse’s culture and how they react to it.
I believe that first, we hire people who like this type of flexibility. For instance, we don’t have a structured performance review cycle. I have regular meetings with managers where we check tenure, possible promotions, projects their team members are working on, performance KPIs (if the team has some!), etc. During these discussions, I do my best for managers to avoid biases like recency biases, for instance.
Most people feel comfortable about us not having a strict performance policy. Despite that, in the past I have received a lot of questions from employees who were wondering, “Am I doing well? Are people happy with my performance?’’ So I had to encourage managers to have 1:1 conversations about career progress and personal life, on top of just talking about work delivery.
Now that this structure has been provided to managers and as long as they keep discussing performance and development in 1:1s, people appreciate it. I can remember at least 5 people from my records who changed roles internally. The success really came from us giving the opportunity to shine where they do best, and them knowing they had the flexibility to try something different. They also knew that their manager cared for them and their progress.
In practice, leaning towards high flexibility and individuality has its fair share of challenges. When I asked about her biggest challenge, Mayra explained that it was all about finding the balance between allowing high flexibility and establishing soft structure as the company grew.
It can be really hard from a People point of view. We need to not go so deep into the details and to remain flexible with the rules. We also need to be comfortable with taking decisions and making exceptions and adjusting to specific situations. It works for us as we are still small, but I am conscious that we may not be able to sustain this as we grow bigger. So I'm always working on keeping the ball rolling and making improvements that will make our structure more scalable. This was the most important learning I had since I joined RebelMouse.
Are you (or have you been) in Mayra’s shoes? Let us know your experience in the comments and don’t hesitate to connect with Mayra on Linkedin!
Over to you 🗣 [From Transform]
During our 2 days spent at Transform last month, the People Builders team interacted with global People leaders and professionals about their experiences of employee-centricity. We’ve asked them what employee-centricity meant to them and wanted to know more about their challenges in being an employee-centric company these days. I am sharing the top outcomes of these conversations below, and also asking you: