Remote working, flexible working and distributed working were all big topics last year in a debate that has jumped forward ten years during 2020. So what does the future of work now look like? How will remote working develop as we move forward and how can employers build culture and a sense of belonging with a distributed workforce.
My guest this week is Tami Rosen a Senior HR Executive with leadership expertise at startups and Fortune 100 companies, including Atlassian, Apple, and Goldman Sachs. Tami recently took an instrumental role in developing a framework for the future of work called “TEAM Anywhere” and has a vast amount of knowledge to share on remote and distributed working.
In the interview, we discuss:
• Why a company’s people strategy is its business strategy
• Being people-centric, not office-centric
• The continuum of distributed working
• Balance work and life remotely
• Opening up global talent pools
• The importance of collaborative moment for connection and belonging
• Building culture in a distributed workforce
• Asynchronous working
• The need for better tools
• Hopes for the future
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:01:23]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 309 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Remote working, flexible working, and distributed working were all big topics last year in a debate that’s now jumped forward 10 years during 2020. So what does the future of work now look like? How will remote working develop as we move forward? And how can employers build culture and a sense of belonging within a distributed workforce? My guest this week is Tami Rosen, a senior HR executive with leadership expertise at startups and Fortune 100 companies, including Atlassian, Apple and Goldman Sachs. Tami recently took an instrumental role in developing a framework for the future of work called Team Anywhere and has a vast amount of knowledge to share on remote and distributed working. Hi Tami, and welcome to the podcast.
Tami Rosen [00:02:24]:
Thank you for having me today.
Matt Alder [00:02:26]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Tami Rosen [00:02:32]:
Sure. I’m Tami Rosen and I’m an HR executive who spent a lion’s share of my career working in Fortune 100 and also startup companies leading HR teams.
Matt Alder [00:02:45]:
Before we sort of get into some.
Matt Alder [00:02:47]:
Of the topics that we’re going to.
Matt Alder [00:02:48]:
Talk about, tell us a little bit more about your backstory because you’ve had some really interesting experience.
Tami Rosen [00:02:54]:
Absolutely. So you probably are noting I have a nice New York accent, so I was born and bred in New York. I went to college upstate New York and had my first job back in New York City as a loan officer and a banker. So the dream of HR was not even in my eyes as I graduated college and started my first job, but found really quickly that I Loved working with people and helping the companies grow and develop. What I didn’t love was actually spending time doing all the write ups and all the paperwork around it and accidentally fell into an interview actually at a recruiting firm that was placing technologists on Wall Street. And I took the job because I really enjoyed the people I met and started making placements as a recruiter and saw what a great thing it was to give people their first opportunity to get the job of their dreams. And after about a year and a half I decided that maybe I wanted to start my own recruiting organization. But I knew that I didn’t have sort of a good partner to do it with and I didn’t have the money. So I took a contract recruiting job at Goldman Sachs with a plan to be there for six months and get money, find a partner, start the company. Well, clearly that didn’t go my way because almost 17 years later I became an entrepreneur within Goldman Sachs and helped to build out recruiting teams, HR teams, diversity programs, including the LGBT Ally program, and much, much more. It was a great experience. And that’s sort of like the first part of my career was really just about discovery, what I loved and learning. And the second part is when I took the leap and moved out west with my family, which was at the time my two kids, my husband, two cats. We’ve recently acquired a Husky in the last few years and started a job at Apple in Apple hr and then Apple University. And Apple University was a great experience because that actually gave me sort of the rounding out of studying culture and helping leaders wrestle with the tensions in culture through using business school teaching methods. And that was amazing experience. And now part three is where I’m at right now in my career where I’ve been a chief people officer at some cutting edge startups as well as technology companies and really helping to lead the people strategy and helping companies see that the people strategy is your business strategy.
Matt Alder [00:05:22]:
Fantastic stuff. So you’ve worked with and worked in some of the big tech companies and obviously for the last few years those companies have been aggressively recruiting, aggressively growing and interesting to watch them sort of really drive forward some of the technologies and some of the methodologies that have been used in recruiting. How is the pandemic changing things? How’s it affecting the way that tech companies hire?
Tami Rosen [00:05:53]:
So I think it really depends on the company. And some companies, as you may have known, have gone on freezes or slowed down and have focused internally. Others have really sped up their recruiting because now they see there’s a lot less competition for talent. And they’re also able to reach greater talent in different locations. So what I am seeing in the recruitment side is, is that the reach and the ability to access talent that are in different locations outside the traditional borders of where an office was located is greater. Also starting to see companies thinking about unique ways to reach talent. What has changed only slightly is really the method to which people are recruiting. I think instead of the in person and flying people in, they’re doing everything over Zoom. I don’t know how effective that will be over a long run, but right now it’s been quite effective. And I think over time you’ll start to see new tools and ways in which you can recruit that will help enable the actual process of recruitment. But for now, I think people just sort of substituting Zoom for in person. And I think at the more junior and intermediate levels, the virtual interviewing is working very effectively and companies are getting a lot of great talent. I know companies, including one of the companies I worked at, where they hired thousands of people during this time in all different locations and have been onboarding those people remotely. I do think at the more senior levels for recruitment, it’s harder and it’s taking longer. That’s because they feel the more in person is more important. And I think people are going to have to learn how to reconcile, if we’re in the state where we are today, of doing more things virtually.
Matt Alder [00:07:44]:
And I suppose that leads nicely onto my next question about. About doing things virtually. It seems like for sort of most of the last two decades, we’ve been arguing about remote working and working from home and will companies embrace that and what does the future of work look like? And 2020 has obviously sort of thrown everything up in the air. And all companies have had to embrace people working from home. And I. The debate at the moment is what the future of that, what the future of that looks like in the experience of the people that you’ve been working with. What does this look like for those technology companies? Are they going to be, you know, massively embracing virtual teams? How do you see it sort of panning out?
Tami Rosen [00:08:28]:
Well, I see it as a continuum. And there’s some people that because the pandemic and we don’t have other options, we are all virtual right now. We’re all distributed and they’re just making the best of it and substituting in person meetings with Zoom meetings. And I think when the tide changes and the pandemic’s over, you’ll see some of those companies just go back to the traditional ways they work, other companies will kind of have a flavor of it. And I think the flavors will exist anywhere from being a little bit more flexible to allowing people to take more work from home days or more flexing their hours to companies that go fully distributed. And I think there are kind of three elements that people need to think about as they design their programs. One is, how do you help employees harmonize their work and life and find the time in which they can work and the place in which they can work best for them so they could be most productive? The second piece is really reaching talent all over the place. And in the past, we’ve been relegated to the offices in which we work and a small radius around them and where people migrated. And now if you open up that you can get talent all over and really increase the diversity of the talent you have that could come to bear to support your team and mission. And then the third piece is to just be able to give people the ability to harmonize their life. And then to reach talent everywhere is just not enough. You have to find those sort of collaborative moments where you can intentionally collaborate both digitally and also in person, for connection and belonging. So I think companies are going to have to look at those three elements and figure out based on their mission, based on the work that they do and the type of workers they have, how they want to work and not really be focused on the where. They have to be more agnostic to the where. And then once you decide how you’re going to work, really figure out the physical locations you’ll need in order to have the deliberate and intentional collaboration. So I do see a lot of the tech companies moving towards the more distributed environment and less to the traditional. And I think they’re taking that leap because Covid has shown us that we can do it and be productive.
Matt Alder [00:10:42]:
Just digging in a bit deeper into the distributed workforce. You talked about finding those moments for collaboration and people getting together. Can you sort of talk a little bit more about how companies can sort.
Matt Alder [00:10:59]:
Of build a culture or build an.
Matt Alder [00:11:01]:
Employer brand if they’re working in that distributed way?
Tami Rosen [00:11:05]:
For sure. Well, I’ll start with just giving sort of the belief system that we all have. We all believed because we went to an office every single day that we were incredibly productive. We collaborated incredibly. We had so much innovation. And that just, you know, those collision moments or the water cooler moment added something amazing to the company that we wouldn’t have had if we didn’t show up to work that day. And that’s actually not true. And the reason it’s not true is we know people were frustrated with the open floor plans. A lot of people spend their time with their headphones on. There’s a huge line item in every single budget that is called off sites where we take our whole team and we go to some beautiful location just so that we can collaborate and actually innovate. So if we can kind of go to a beginner’s mindset and start thinking about what is the most effective ways to collaborate and when, and when is the best time to have those deliberate, asynchronous, deep thinking moments that we need individually and how those work together, I think companies will do a lot better. So to your question on collaborating, it’s going to look different for every single company and I would recommend to people to look at both digitally collaborating over Zoom or over other tools that might come to bear as well as really finding those deliberate moments to get together. Because people need a sense of belonging, they need a sense of identity from the companies they work with. They want to feel like they’re towards the mission and in order for them to do their best work, they want to come to work with people that they really enjoy doing it with. So I think you’re going to have to be creative. Do I have the solutions right now? No. But I will say that this is really the thing to solve for and the exciting work that us in the HR fields can really take on board and lead.
Matt Alder [00:12:50]:
Absolutely. And I think that’s going to be a really interesting time in terms of thinking about those, those challenges and I’m really interested to see how, how, how companies solve them. You, you, you mentioned sort of technology there, you mentioned Zoom and, and, and other tools. What, what role does HR and, and recruiting technology play in all of this?
Tami Rosen [00:13:12]:
It’s going to be a big role. The challenge right now though is that we’ve just substituted everything for video conferencing and Zoom being one of the best. Right. But at the same time, we haven’t really seen what the market’s going to come out with and where all these small startups are going to start thinking about those collaborative tools that you can use. I think if we just rely on sort of the Google documents or SharePoint type tools, that won’t be enough because those really encourage more asynchronous work and very necessary. And I don’t disagree that we’ll have many more of those. And there are tons of companies out there that have tools to help with project management, team collaboration, but those are all asynchronous the thing that I think will be great is to see where the market will yield in enabling that collaboration and reinforcing teamwork and belonging and connection, both digitally and also in person. But the tools will be really necessary. So I guess I’m putting a call out to all those startups and future founders to really create amazing tools that can help us with building that sense of belonging, reinforcing teamwork and connection.
Matt Alder [00:14:23]:
Absolutely. Because zoom fatigue is real and you see people here on back to back video calls all day, just replacing the in the face to face meetings that they had. And there absolutely has to be a better way and you see that companies are solving this problem and working interesting, interesting ways. So which, which kind of brings me on to my, my last question. This is very much a sort of a transitional period. It’s very difficult to accurately predict what’s going to happen next week, let alone what might happen in 18. But I’d be interested to kind of get your view on what you think.
Matt Alder [00:15:01]:
The future will look like. I mean, if we were having this.
Matt Alder [00:15:04]:
Conversation in 18 months time, what do you think or what do you hope that we would be talking about?
Tami Rosen [00:15:09]:
So my pie in the sky hope would be that the pandemic is behind us and that companies are settling into their new ways of working and that they’re showing that a more distributed environment can lead to more, more innovation, productivity, employee satisfaction, and most importantly, well being. Because what we’ve seen during the pandemic is how much stress and strain has been put on our employees. And my fear is that we’re going to have sort of an aftershock of a lot of people just really having to synthesize what they’ve been through and really hoping that their health, both mental and physical health, will be ready for the next sort of chapter post pandemic. So what do I think the future will look like? I think there’ll be a variety of companies that have more distributed workforces. I think there’ll be more companies that will be willing to give people more flexibility. I do think there’ll be new ways in which people work. As you’ve seen recently, some companies have announced we’re not a 9 to 5 anymore. And let’s start looking at how we leverage the clock differently and, and really giving people more ability to choose what time of the day and when they want to work and do they want to do it continuously or if they want to do four hours here and maybe take a break and do three or four hours later. So I think what you’re going to see is a lot of innovative new ways of working and more flexibility that are more people centric versus office centric. And seriously hope that this pandemic’s behind us. If it’s not, and we are in sort of like a mode of every year needing a new vaccine like the flu, I do think that we’re going to just unfortunately be stuck in an environment where more people are not convening in the way we used to in the past.
Matt Alder [00:16:56]:
Tami, thank you very much for talking to me.
Tami Rosen [00:16:58]:
It’s been my pleasure to be here and looking forward to hearing people’s reactions to our conversation. So thanks for having me and have a good day.
Matt Alder [00:17:07]:
My thanks to Tami Rosen. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow the show on Instagram. You can find us by searching for Recruiting Future. You can search through all the past episodes@recruitingfuture.com and on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list to get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
