With freedom comes choice, and this immediately opens our talent pool to a much wider net. (Image: Shutterstock)As people leaders in the new era of remote and hybrid work, we are continually focused on the health and sustainability of our people. As we are building–and in some cases rebuilding–strategies to take organizations into the future, many people leaders are grappling with the looming question: How do we architect a successful remote-first business strategy?
What if it is not about remote versus hybrid versus in person? Or what days you are seen–or not–in the office, virtual or otherwise? Let’s instead take the learnings we can from the global pandemic as we design the future of what work looks like, make a radical shift and proclaim: We are all human first.
Related: Leadership is about your people
For so long we have asked people to adjust everything in their lives to accommodate work. What if we flip it — so humans can thrive as individuals and then they can show up in work, for their family, in life — they can be their best selves. We call this approach: A Human First Business Strategy.
Achieving business objectives starts with listening
One of the most important things we’ve done is that we’ve taken the time to really listen to our people. We’ve trained and encouraged our managers to be better listeners and to communicate to leadership what they are hearing from their people.
Flexibility and options: Keep the focus on employees as humans first because work is not a one-size-fits-all endeavor. We must continue to create strategies that fit the organization and are appealing to our employees for their unique needs.
Freedom to be who you truly are: It’s up to the individual to decide where to live for their best life. With freedom comes choice and this immediately opens our talent pool to a much wider net and more importantly, gives our existing talent more freedom. We focus on performance and output–the talent creates the lifestyle and structure that works for them.
Ensure access: We strive to remove barriers to allow people to work the best for their unique needs. By making accommodations upfront, the talent pool becomes more diverse because location, childcare, elder care, and traditional work hours can all be structured to attract and retain candidates who were previously shut out of the talent pool.
Offer super competitive compensation and benefits: If your company pays better, has a better culture and benefits than the competition, candidates will flock to you and stay as their needs are met.
Mindset shift for organizations
While we recognize it may not work for every organization, our approach is that companies need to shift, to adapt to people. The seismic shocks from the pandemic have caused people to reprioritize how they work and live. For people to truly thrive, we must start fitting work into life, versus life into work.
We believe in creating a culture where people decide what is best for the employees, not for the company. We are all humans in different places in our lives and careers. Life is not linear and it shifts as we shift and as the seasons of our life unfold. We asked how we can help our people reach their full potential – no matter where they are in their career progression–or where in the world they are located.
We understand that not everyone thrives in a fully remote or in-office setting so for those who want the option of both, we have invested in hubs at WeWork locations in San Francisco, London, Warsaw and Berlin where we have the highest concentration of people. We’ve also invested in global WeWork access for all employees so they can work from any WeWork location of their choosing.
When we support our people as humans first, we are participating in helping these individuals thrive.
Put your people first and company performance improves
If you put people first, this will often take care of itself. One clear example is our recent decision on compensation bands.
For decades, most companies have been using outdated compensation models, partly basing employee compensation on geographic location. Higher compensation for employees living in tech hubs like San Francisco and New York and lower compensation for areas inside the coasts like Omaha, Birmingham and Pittsburgh.
As a human-first company, we decided to make a bet on our people and change the outdated models of compensation by taking a progressive and human-focused approach, recently announcing a United States-wide salary band. So no matter where you live, the compensation is based on the role, not the location. All salaries in the U.S. are based on the San Francisco pay scale.
We are also now making plans to implement the same compensation band across Europe with London-based salary compensation for all EU-based employees in the new year, which is even more progressive.
We want our people to create the environment and life they want for themselves. If they want to live in a big city they can. If they want to live in the countryside that’s great too. In addition, people have real human needs like going to take care of elderly parents for extended periods or other life changes and we don’t believe that should affect compensation structure. Offering a competitive comp strategy and allowing people to decide for themselves.
Another initiative that came out of listening to our employees this past year was how much we needed to invest in mental health in order to provide the support that our employees needed and make sure we foster an environment that allows them to do their best work. We created a multi-pronged strategy to quickly meet the demand of mental health.
We invested in access to resources, healthy and realistic work-life balances, and creating a culture where people could openly talk about mental health. We offer all our employees 27 days of paid time off and four mental health days per year that do not have to be approved. These days are offered in addition to PTO days to recognize and bring to light the impotence of mental health. Our health care benefit plan also includes mental health and therapy benefits.
As it stands today, we’re having our best business performance in company history as our teams continue to outperform going into our fourth quarter (2021), and the surveys we’ve put out prove that our people and our culture is thriving.
We are mindful of creating a healthy working culture and giving our employees the assistance that they need to do their best work. We will continue to differentiate ourselves by driving a high-performing people-first culture.
To be a success, human-first requires strong organization and processes, and a culture where psychological safety, trust and accountability run deep. We’ve had to accelerate organizational maturity and development, invest into our managers and obsess about clarity, transparency and alignment. While we do great work as a remote organization, we believe we still need to meet in person from time to time to deepen our relationships.
We are proud of our efforts to put our people first and want to continue to lead by example. Nothing is more important than your people and we are thrilled to make the investment into them. We will continue to put our people first, listening and implementing solutions that work for everyone, focusing on our company value of “We’re Human” first.
Jason Medley is Codility’s chief people officer, where he manages the People Ops, Talent Acquisition, and IT & Security teams. He brings with him experience scaling multiple VC-backed technology companies through hyper-growth. As a recruiting leader and thought leader, Jason works closely with our customers, Go To Market teams, and Product to help push the limits on Codility’s capabilities in the market.
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November 10, 2021 at 09:24PM
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