How Twitter Thrives As A Fully Remote Org w/ CHRO Jennifer Christie
Release Date: 08/19/2020
Best-Self Management
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Professor Marissa King describes the ever-changing landscape of networks and how to strategically build and harness them. She describes the pandemic’s impact on networks, their role in fostering creativity, the challenges of remote work, and how to build networks on an organizational level.
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David Hanrahan discusses adapting to the changes brought on by COVID, building trust through empathy, leading with kindness, valuing impact over activity, supporting mental health, and accurately gauging employee satisfaction.
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Scott Miller of FranklinCovey busts several big HR myths. He explains why leaders cannot create engagement, the most important question for leaders to ask themselves, changes brought on by the events of 2020, a company’s greatest asset, and the importance of radical candor.
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Two members of 15Five’s internal people operations team discuss how they revolutionize performance management. They touch on core values, creating accountability and motivation, and how to promote joy in the workplace.
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Lori McLeese shares how her company has specifically designed a culture for a distributed workforce. She describes how they foster collaboration, personal and shared responsibilities, and the benefits and challenges that come with it.
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Matt MacInnis shares what it means to build a conscious company. He discusses how to focus on existing strengths, build company rituals to support them, and help all your people develop their core competencies.
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Ashanti Branch discusses how we all hide behind psychological masks, but when organizations foster a culture of openness, honesty, and vulnerability, we can remove these masks so that both ourselves and the organization will flourish.
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Joseph McClendon III shares the message of personal empowerment and an employer’s role in supporting it. It takes recognizing the history of marginalization that many people experience. It also means helping your people by supporting their goals and building trust.
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Kristina Johnson shares her experience as a Chief People Officer at a time when the workplace landscape is drastically changing. By looking for positive lessons within crises and promoting dynamism at work, she is helping her organization come out stronger than it was before.
info_outlineIn March of 2020 when COVID-19 hit, many organizations updated their remote work policies at least temporarily to allow people to work from home. Twitter made headlines in May by announcing that a remote work option would be available to their 5,000+ full-time workforce, forever! 15Five CEO, David Hassell interviews Twitter’s head of HR to discuss what Twitter has learned from making this shift after several months.
Jennifer Christie is the VP of People and Chief Human Resources Officer at Twitter. She leads the global people team and works with the executive management team and board of directors to support the strategic direction of the company. Jennifer oversees talent acquisition and management, diversity and inclusion, people systems and analytics, organizational and performance management, and training and development.
Even before COVID, Twitter allowed employees to work remotely as part of their larger strategies around decentralization and Diversity & Inclusion. Now as a fully remote organization, in order to maintain the camaraderie that existed in the office, Jennifer and her team find ways to maintain deep connections between “Tweeps” in the remote space. Additionally, they have shifted their benefits plan to support people’s health and well-being in a new reality where gyms are closed and people need certain staple equipment to be successful at home.
Hopefully, in the next year or so, the health risk will abate and people will begin returning to the office once it is safe to do so. Twitter, like many other businesses, are planning a “return to office” strategy. At Twitter, offices will be available for the people who want to return to a shared physical working space. For now, Jennifer shares how to maintain social and emotional connections without a physical office and why it’s imperative that companies start planning for this readjustment now.
How has Covid created new roles for HR within your organization? Tell us in the comments on the episode page!
Also in this episode:
- Going fully remote and returning to the office
- Helping employees with resources, setting boundaries, and remote benefits
- “Camp Twitter” - Supporting parents when school and camp are closed
- Diversity & Inclusion at Twitter - a comprehensive strategy including transparency, and setting goals that optimize for D&I efforts
- HR as strategic partner to the Board and the rest of the C-suite
Quotes
“If we want to be able to attract and retain this growing employee base that is growing very rapidly, we’ve got to start shifting our culture. We have to shift how we work if we’re going to be inclusive of that work style.” [0:57]
“We want to try to engineer a different experience so people don’t feel compelled to come back to the office if they don’t want to because they feel like they’re missing out on something.” [13:33]
“I don’t think you can nail inclusion if you don’t have a diverse workforce. Decentralization is a key driver of that.” [27:05]
Links
Washington Post: “Twitter Employees Don’t Ever Have to Go Back to the Office (Unless They Want to)”
Keeping Our Employees and Partners Safe During #Coronavirus
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