Building Blocks | Edition 4 💌
Stories, reflections, and tools from People leaders to help navigate the new world of work
Hello, People Builders! 👋
You may remember the announcement of the People Builders Ambassador Program launch last month—a new group of masterminds and community builders, eager to invest their ideas, effort, and energy into bringing the People Builders community to a whole new level.
Today, I am truly excited to reveal the names of our 6 official People Builders ambassadors: 🎉🎉🎉
Cory Rose | VP of Total Rewards & HR Business Partners @The Aspen Group, Advisor for PeopleTechPartners, Dado & Milio - Chicago 🇺🇲
Gillian Jose-Riz | People Operations & Talent Consultant, @ Bright + Early - Toronto, Canada 🇨🇦
Kimberly Bringas | Strategic People Partner @Drizly - Denver 🇺🇲
Mariss Rafuse | Human Resources Business Partner, Manager @Global Furniture Group - Toronto 🇨🇦
Natalie Kent | People Partner @Dixa - Berlin 🇩🇪
Paola Tartaglione | People & HR Lead @TaxScouts - London 🇬🇧
Please join me in a round of (virtual) applause to welcome and thank these incredible fellow People leaders who have generously volunteered to help shape the future of our community. *You rock!* 🤘🧑🎤
We’ll be kicking off the work next week with an Ambassadorship Kick-Off Workshop. Stay tuned to hear and see more of the outcomes of our gathering! 😃
In this issue…
In this edition of Building Blocks, here’s what we have in store:
Building Together – Community events this month 🤓
Builder Kit – Tools to support a disillusioned workforce 💡
Building Voices – Sian takes the mic 🛀
Over to you – Feedback on Building Blocks 🏗️
Thanks for reading and sharing!
Marie
Builder Kit — Tools to support a disillusioned workforce 💡
Have you seen your workforce engagement scores stall these past quarters? Are you running out of ideas to motivate and inspire your team members? Are your leaders starting to wonder about what’s really going on with their people and why the heck team productivity is tanking? In a nutshell…
What the shuck is going on these days?!
The Oyster team recently put together an exclusive report after surveying 2,500 global knowledge about their general state of mind. In light of the pressure we’re all facing in a fast-changing and complex world, here are some of the top findings:
74.6% of people said they find it hard to focus on work because of the cost-of-living crisis.
Rising costs of living, economic downturn, and COVID-19 were top stressors for survey participants.
75.2% of respondents said taking time off was very important to their wellbeing, while only 13.5% said the same about access to well-being benefits.
A large plurality (49.7%) of participants said their #1 priority in life was their mental health, while career advancement was ranked #5.
What may this mean for you as you try to identify the most valuable actions you can take for your team during these difficult times?
If you are thinking of upgrading your benefits package (but don’t necessarily have the money for it): Make your employees a favor and simply offer them time off.
If you ask your employees to return to the office, make sure to safeguard their flexibility and to minimize any impact on team engagement.
Double down on creating an inclusive, safe working environment (especially if you’d like to retain and support your female workers): Is there a way you can bring your DEIB strategy up a notch?
There is so much more to extract from this report which could be valuable input to your people strategy for the rest of 2023. Let us know about your learnings and takeaways in the comments!
Building Together — Community events this month 🤓
You told us in last month’s poll that your biggest challenge to being a people-centric employer is to maintain connections remotely. Many of you are continuously experimenting with new methods and tactics to sustain human connections in remote and hybrid environments. We were lucky enough to explore and capture the most successful ones during our two People Builders events last month.
Dive into the session outputs and recordings here and here. You may find some inspiration… (In case you do so and test it out in your organization, make sure to share the learnings with us! 😉)
What do we have planned for you this month?
Don’t miss out on this engaging and efficient collective brainstorming that will get you ready to nail down your WFA policy in a pinch. We designed this Conf-Lab edition in partnership with the HR Ninjas community to help you piece together the essential components of a WFA policy that's attractive to talent, while compliant with local laws.
An interactive working session to explore the challenges remote managers face, and identify the risks of micromanagement in distributed work environments. Come join us to bring fresh strategies back to your organization for empowering your remote leaders to succeed. Your chance to grow a remote leadership culture away from micro-management – based on trust, autonomy and empowerment.
Building Voices — Sian takes the mic 🛀
How to address the genuinely thorny topic of returning to the office?
This is what I wanted to explore with Sian Cox, Chief People Officer at Rocketmakers, a certified B Corporation™ that designs, develops, and delivers ingenious software for startups, scaleups, and corporates. Rocketmakers has adopted a hybrid working model since the pandemic with their main office in Bath, UK—hosting a team of 48 employees.
When Sian joined in August 2022, Rocketmakers was a small 15-year-old software company with 27 members of staff. During the pandemic, the team grew to 54 members with many people onboarded remotely. Sian and the team did a great job during this time to retain the positive, supportive, and caring company culture that won them awards in the past.
As signs of the end of the pandemic arose, Rocketmakers decided to take a bigger office since they knew they had grown and wanted the flexibility to grow further.
The assumption at this point was that people would want to come back to the office, even though they got used to working from home. Pre-pandemic, the thing that really made up the Rocketmakers’ culture was a strong bias towards collaboration and learning. The way people learned was to learn from each other: A developer would be figuring out a coding problem with 4-5 others around them, talking through the issue and helping each other out. That was the time that being in the office was the norm, even though the company had always supported flexible working. Now, the company is still keen on promoting this collaborative and learning environment but it’s proving difficult to get everyone on board and through the door.
We have some people who love the collaborative environment and are in the office every single day of the week, but others don’t want to come to the office each week for a variety of reasons! Things changed for some during the pandemic. They may have children, family, or pets to care for, or they genuinely prefer to work from home. For others, it may be that the cost of living in the UK has affected them.
Despite that we do see the benefits of the flow of conversations with people we work with in the office. Sitting around talking about something makes such a difference if the whole team is around. I especially worry about the younger generation and their career development, as we hear that this aspect of life at Rocketmakers isn't as great as it used to be. Is this down to the lack of collaboration?
I was curious to hear more about the concrete efforts that Sian and the team put in place to keep their collaborative and learning culture alive in a hybrid setup. Sian explained:
We do a lot to encourage social time in the office with pub quizzes, monthly team drinks, or game nights. These initiatives are mostly employee-led, and it seems that the social stuff is taking care of itself. To encourage collaboration and learning, we haven't forced anybody through the door, but we are trying to encourage them to come to the office because we believe it is fundamentally better in person.
It feels like people are slowly starting to trickle into the office more, especially junior members of staff who we’ve encouraged to come in so they have more learning opportunities, especially through overhearing conversations. We set up space for pair programming and we are fortunate to have some of our pre-pandemic and more experienced employees regularly coming to the office willingly who can pass on their experience, but we would still love to encourage more.
Sian openly expresses her difficulty with the matter:
Hybrid working is also a huge switch for me. I've been in HR for a long time so it’s a big learning curve for me too. At this point, I am wondering: What do we do? How do we make hybrid work better? How can we create an environment that gets people in the office for good reasons? I am torn about remote and hybrid work because I do really think people need to get together regularly; there’s nothing worse than being the only one who is remote in a meeting and missing out on the little joke or similar that happens in the room, but I also know that flexibility is key.
So I asked Sian what she would love to hear from the community to help her out. Her answer?
All the answers!... But more specifically: What is the best way to find out from people what would work for them? Beyond only asking the question, also what have others done to draw out the right model from their people and build with them?
Building upon the EOS model that helps Rocketmakers run its business, Sian left our conversation with the idea of deepening the conversation she was having until now with her ‘People team’ – an appointed group of designers and developers who have the responsibility of being the 'voice of the people for the business'.
Up to now, we've asked the People team for their opinions on the matter but maybe we need to go one step further and go into a workshop with other crew members to identify what we could do next.
Have you run a collaborative workshop with team members to define a hybrid working model that would work best for them? Do you have ideas for optimizing the use of the office for learning and collaboration, while keeping up with individual flexibility? Have you identified successful (or unsuccessful!) ways for teams to learn and collaborate in a hybrid environment?
Share your building endeavours with Sian and our community in the comments, we want to hear from you!
Over to you – Feedback on Building Blocks 🏗️
This month will be the fourth edition of Building Blocks. I’d love to hear from you about what you’ve appreciated so far and where I could do better. Please share your feedback with me via this Google form. You can be sure I’ll put it into action in the upcoming Buildings Blocks editions!