Building Blocks | The Newsletter for the People Builders community | Edition 1 💌
Stories, thoughts, and tools from People leaders helping each other navigate the new world of work
Hello, People Builders! 👋
Today, I am truly excited to launch with and for you: Building Blocks – the exclusive monthly newsletter for and by the People Builders community!
The aim of this newsletter is to give a voice to our community members while shedding a light on your building endeavors. It’s also about sharing valuable tools and resources that can facilitate your efforts in building thriving remote, hybrid, and distributed workplaces. Also, it’ll keep us informed about what’s going on and what’s coming up for the community, and keep the conversation flowing as the community continues shaping and growing!
Please share with me in the comments your wishes, ideas, and feedback to make this newsletter as valuable as possible.
Thank you for reading!
Marie
In this issue 💡
For this first edition of Building Blocks, here’s what we have in store:
Building Voices – Marie takes the mic 🎤
Builder Kit – Gill’s Guide to Global Mobility 📘
Building Together – Community events this month 🗣️
Building Voices — Marie takes the mic 🎤
To kickstart this section of the newsletter, I thought I would take the mic and introduce myself. Some of you may already know me, but for those who don't, I'd love to give you a little background on my journey.
By means of (re)introduction, I’m Marie, your guide and partner in the newly created People Builders community.
I've been working as a People professional for about 10 years, mostly in large multinationals and startups in Europe. I've always been passionate about shaping thriving company cultures and facilitating the alignment of individual growth paths with collective business goals. This made me feel like an anthropologist, an architect, and an artist all at once.
But after a while, I found myself feeling exhausted and frustrated. I felt like I wasn't making the impact I wanted to, and I was losing my sense of purpose and meaning in my job.
Despite having a deep motivation, the best intentions, the knowledge and expertise I collected over the years, and the efforts I put into growing as a strong and legitimate People professional, I regularly felt like I was fighting a losing battle. When you’re not invited to key strategic discussions for the tenth time, when you have to re-explain the value you provide to the business, when you’re coming up last on the board agenda for 3 quarters in a row—it can be soul-crushing.
So, when the opportunity at Oyster came along, I felt that this was my chance to connect with ‘my’ people and re-appreciate through others the value, care, and passion of People leaders. Secondly, I felt that it was time for me to use the experience I had gathered so far to do something useful for my peers, while also learning something new myself. Lastly, I felt that by getting a different perspective on the People function and the role of a People leader, I could catch my breath and discover new ways and tools to empower my peers and help build truly innovative, people-centric, and really cool types of organizations to work for.
With People Builders, there is this fantastic opportunity to rally like-minded People professionals with big ambitions, who are innovators and creators, all around the globe. I believe that the world of work is changing rapidly, and I want to contribute to putting People leaders front and center, showing the world what they are made of, and helping them shine as the real leaders of the future of work.
I hope you’ll join me for the ride!
Builder Kit — Gill’s Guide to Global Mobility 🌏
Last week, I spoke with one of our People Builders, Gillian Jose-Riz, who was transitioning out of her role as Director of People & Culture at Bettermode, a community platform startup with headquarters in Toronto, Canada.
Gillian used to own Bettermode’s end-to-end employee experience for a fully distributed team of 40 peeps based in Canada, the US, and other parts of the globe. Her biggest challenge? Ensuring a consistent experience for her globally distributed team.
Enabling Bettermode’s employees to work from other countries temporarily in the fairest and most compliant way possible has been one of her most noticeable projects. And she has been kind enough to share her Guide to Global Mobility as a way to help others build their own global mobility policies. BIG thank you, Gill!
If you have suggestions, feedback, or comments on the guide, feel free to reach out to Gillian. And if you have useful resources and tools you would like to share with other People Builders and add to our Community Remote & Hybrid Worksuite, let me know!
Building Together — Community events this month 🗣️
More People Builders events are coming up this month that you don’t wanna miss!
First up: 🗓️ Is async work working for you?! – February 17th
A new Conflabs where we’ll discuss common challenges and share best practices and tactics that have worked for us, as we fight against work days packed with back-to-back meetings. This workshop will be your opportunity to explore with other People leaders how to find the optimal balance between synchronous and asynchronous work, and how to help teams thrive in a remote-first environment.
🗓️ What is the role of the office in the future of work? – February 28th
Joined by expert guest Jack Mardack, co-founder at Oyster, we invite you to join us at our next Dream It, Build It think tank to explore the habits and mental models associated with the office, and how these are holding us back from building thriving flexible workplaces.
To start off the reflections, we recommend reading Jack’s article about: ‘’Unlocking the next gear of knowledge work’’. Register for our event to continue the discussion!
Over to you 🤗
I know a lot has already been said about this particular topic. But I still would like to know from you:
Last but not least 📫
I’d love to know what’s going on for you People leaders these days. What keeps you awake at night? What keeps you busy? The more we can have conversations about what is top of mind for you, the more I can make this community a valuable space for all of us.
If you feel like sharing and chatting, I look forward to hearing from you in the comments!
Great start Marie! Excited to see more.