Building Blocks | Edition 5 💌
Stories, reflections, and tools from People leaders to help navigate the new world of work
Hello, People Builders! 👋
Welcome to the borderless age of work, accelerated by the wonders of modern remote and hybrid ways of working. Being part of a global team opens up a world of diverse perspectives and amazing opportunities, but it also introduces its fair share of challenges.
Most of us strive to create a global culture that celebrates Diversity, treats employees Equitably, and cultivates a feeling of Inclusion and Belonging. With the best intentions leading the way, the journey to a successful DEIB strategy can be quite a ride, filled with ups and downs.
Are all your employees feeling valued? Are your policies fair and equitable? Are you familiar with the diverse faces of your team? How do you track and share your progress in building an inclusive work environment? And most importantly, how can you tell if your efforts are making a difference?
We want to be part of your DEIB journey!
That’s why People Builders is serving up its “seasonal specials” on the topic of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging, all tailored to a global workforce.
Thanks for reading and sharing. Keep building!
Marie
In this issue…
Building Together – Community events this month 🤩
Builder Kit – Creating a Work From Anywhere Playbook 🗺️
Building Voices – Marjorie takes the mic 🌈
Over to you – Your take on AI 🤖
Building Together — Community events this month 🤩
Don’t miss out this month on our DEIB event specials, an Oyster webinar, and a new People Builders Connect, IRL in Barcelona!
How can you create your DEIB strategy at a global scale? Together with expert guest Jeffrey Ims from Upwork, we’re diving into the topic of global DEIB strategies. This strategic think tank puts the topic of inclusivity on the table when you need to account for the global footprint of your organization.
How can you underpin your global DEIB strategy with the right dataset? We know that balancing often-conflicting compliance requirements around DEIB, differing social norms around identity and disclosure, and the inconsistent supply of benchmarks makes it a challenging endeavor, to say the least… Guided by DEIB expert guest Danielle Little from Peoplism, we’ll work together to hack a methodology and approach to global DEIB demographics.
We’re delighted to host a People Builders Connect exclusively curated for our community in the sunny, lively city of… Barcelona! Join us for after-work drinks where you’ll get to meet fellow People Builders in real life while tanking on new inspiration to navigate the future of work together.
Are your contractors really contractors? Misclassifying contractors can present real risks to your business, and failure to stay compliant can lead to fines, penalties, or in the worst cases—class-action lawsuits. Join our Oyster webinar to learn when and how to safely convert contractors into full-time coworkers.
Builder Kit — Creating a Work From Anywhere Playbook 🗺️
Have you pinned down your Work From Anywhere policy?
Last month, we hosted a fun and insightful working session to highlight the key components of a compliant yet attractive Work From Anywhere (WFA) policy for a distributed workforce.
We shared useful insights about the compliance and regulatory requirements surrounding global mobility and identified key risks, challenges, and benefits of WFA policies. We also addressed crucial considerations when defining and implementing a WFA policy, such as:
How can you build the trust foundations required for WFA to work? E.g., how can you ensure that managers and team members have no doubt about the fact that their teammates are indeed working from another part of the world and not just on holiday?
How can you plan for increased complexity and workload, and scale the internal operations and processes required for the WFA policy to be applied smoothly?
How can you educate employees about the risks they are taking, and communicate how a clearly outlined WFA policy, even if constraining at times, can actually protect them?
We put some time and effort into summarising all these invaluable insights and lessons into a WFA Playbook—now available to all our People Builders community members!
Building Voices — Marjorie takes the mic 🌈
Exploring DEIB at Qonto through the lens of remote work.
This month I’m talking to Marjorie Boruel, Talent Acquisition Director at Qonto, a finance solutions management tool for SMEs that “makes life easier for all entrepreneurs.” Qonto was created six years ago and operates today in four European markets with an employee count of 1000+ people living near their five physical offices in Paris, Milan, Barcelona, Berlin, and Belgrade.
Qonto started as an office-first company, with no option for Qonto-ers to work remotely. Post-pandemic, Qonto-ers have the possibility to choose between two types of employment contracts:
56% of employees are on a ‘standard contract’ that requires them to spend 2 days per week in the nearest office.
44% of employees are on a so-called ‘custom contract’ which gives them the flexibility to work full-remote while still having the possibility to come to the office once per quarter.
Like many other companies, Qonto shifted their working model to adapt to the new reality—shifting from an HQ-driven business model to a more flexible, regionally distributed working structure across Europe. I was curious to hear more about the DEIB opportunities that Qonto discovered once they started to hire remotely.
Extending our talent pool beyond Paris and France has been a great lever to support Qonto's rapid growth. In the past, relocation was often necessary to get people to move to Paris. We missed great candidates because of this. Now you can join Qonto but keep your personal life as is. This has been a huge shift.
We were also able to retain our non-France-based tech talent who were previously freelancing for us by offering them a permanent contract with access to ESOP and other benefits. This means a lot to them and gives us the ability to retain them.
Regarding diversity, hiring people from many places has allowed for a stronger cultural mix: 49% of Qonto’s workforce is international (non-French), and we have people from 72 nationalities today vs. 30 in the early days.
Especially for us in the tech industry, working on gender parity has always been a priority on our DEI roadmap. We’ve made great progress since 2022 and managed to increase by from 40 to 44% our gender parity. We hope that, as we continue to hire remotely, we’ll be able to sustain this uptick in female talent joining.
I asked Marjorie about the reality of managing this new diversity and the potential challenges she and her team were facing at Qonto.
Our remote policy allows us to attract different kinds of people than before—especially parents and women, who can now better combine their professional and family duties thanks to our flexibility. This has compelled us to adapt the company to these profiles who may think differently about their professional life.
Qonto used to be, and still is, a very demanding work environment because of our rapid growth trajectory. The new motivations that employees bring to work have made us tackle the topic of work-life balance. It has also opened us to the idea that people will continue to invest themselves in their job but differently, and maybe not as much. And while this is new to us, we’re starting to see that this might also eventually benefit the company in different ways—for instance, when they bring skills that they have developed outside of work.
Ultimately, this makes us wonder about the future of work, our role as a company, and what our focus should be as a People/HR team. For now, the question is: How can we continue to support employees with more flexibility while ensuring that they have the right level of investment in their work?
Looking ahead, I was curious about what direction Qonto was steering the team towards on their journey to strengthen and develop their approach to DEIB through the lens of remote work.
Our North Star remains our employees and how to improve their well-being. This means that we aim for inclusivity by design, and think of how to offer the right, meaning inclusive, perks for our diverse team.
We are continuously wondering whether we should update our remote policy again for our more distributed team. We want it to be fair to all our employees and more effective in fostering innovation, productivity, and belonging.
Remote flexibility can be a great offering, but if everyone is working remotely, we know that it won't foster innovation and learning as much. It’s great to attract different profiles, but they may also need more guidance, e.g. women who embrace a new career as a software engineer or junior employees. So we need to be able to adapt our remote policy accordingly, preserve our office culture to foster creativity and teamwork, and continuously strive to create an inclusive work environment.
The way ahead for Marjorie and the Qonto team is, as Marjorie puts it: ‘‘A problem with no solution but the game is still to try to solve the problem!’’ Marjorie believes that: ‘‘if we as a community can share experiences with one another, and gather feedback and experiences, we can keep them in mind and use this knowledge to avoid common pitfalls in designing a ‘less imperfect solution.’’
… I couldn’t have said it better!
Over to you – Your take on AI 🤖
While some major international companies have decided to ban or limit the use of ChatGPT at work, we’re curious to know how you’ve been using generative AI for knowledge management and support in your People teams, and would like to understand the general sentiment of the community on the topic.
From 30 responses onward, we’ll be able to provide you with an insightful report curated to our globally diverse audience! So, tell us…
How do you feel about using AI in your daily work?