If 2020 taught us anything, it’s that as humans, we must be able to rely on each other to grow. In the San Francisco tech world and beyond, professionals have created virtual discussion groups, hosted digital breakfast clubs and encouraged new employees to share icebreakers with unfamiliar faces on the other side of a screen.
And while such practices have brought team members together with varying levels of success, they’ve also served as a vehicle for side conversations and shared interest identification. And that alone is just as valuable.
“It’s easy to spend all day on Slack or in back-to-back Zoom meetings,” Nurx VP of Engineering Chris Maxwell said. “We’ve found that it’s important to take time to get to know your co-workers by making intentional space.”
Below, he and Liftoff’s Marlene Arroyo share how prioritizing their personal well-being as well as championing peer support has allowed them to better guide their teams during inevitable ups and downs.
While the work associated with creating a more racially just and equitable world might start with a single person or group of people, it needs support to succeed. According to Vice President of People Operations Marlene Arroyo, that’s a quality that employees at Liftoff, a mobile app marketing agency, are known for. During the height of the Black Lives Matter movement this summer, team members found virtual ways to rally together to support each other and their communities.
What’s your proudest achievement of 2020? What about it makes your team so proud?
Since March, we have interviewed 2,872 candidates, onboarded more than a dozen new Liftoffers, celebrated 155 company anniversaries and expanded our global footprint to Berlin.
I am incredibly proud of my team for successfully leading our company through the challenges of the pandemic across the globe. I’m beyond grateful to them for managing through it all while supporting one another, as well as Liftoff at large. Our business is thriving thanks to the dedication of our teams around the world.
What was the biggest challenge of 2020 for your company, and what did your team do to overcome this challenge?
One of the biggest challenges our people ops team faced this year was helping our company and employees navigate critical social and political moments while being remote. Our company culture is strong, fun and supportive. Before the pandemic, it thrived on daily in-person interactions, walking one-on-ones, office lunches and team events.
When we went fully remote and had to come to terms with the tragic deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, it was heart-wrenching. Many of us were struggling to work through our own emotions, so it was difficult to know how to effectively be there for each other. We still did our best to rally together around our team, create open channels of reflection and conversation and support our communities to further the cause of racial justice and equity. As I look back, I wonder how we might have experienced this same event differently under “normal” times. Still, I’m comforted by the knowledge that our strong company culture would have aided the healing process under any circumstance.
It was a wake-up call that the challenges of the pandemic were influencing my mental well-being.’’
What’s the most important lesson you learned in 2020, and how will you carry that lesson with you into 2021?
2020 has primarily been defined by an abrupt and complete shift to remote work, meaning months of virtual meetings and physical distancing. The toll of this has been multi-layered, and personally, it made my job feel like a grind. It put me in a mental and emotional state where I was treating my job — which I’m passionate about — as a long, arduous series of tasks. It was a wake-up call that the challenges of the pandemic were influencing my mental well-being. Of course, I wasn’t alone in experiencing such changes.
People operations professionals are often called to this career because of our passion to support others. We do this for the love of and conviction in our jobs. Times like 2020 have been crucial reminders we also need to manage our own emotions and mental well-being.
Consequently, a lesson I am carrying forward into 2021 is to pause and express gratitude to my team and my colleagues for their contributions. As a company leader, my goal with this practice is to create a culture of appreciation, cultivate my own positive connections with others (which is important to my own well-being), and brighten a colleague’s day.
Not every meeting requires a set agenda. At telemedicine company Nurx, having dedicated, but unstructured, time to chat with peers about favorite books or coffee preferences allows employees to build a camaraderie that working from home makes difficult. VP of Engineering Chris Maxwell said that setting goals for more intentional interactions has improved collaboration across the board.
What’s your proudest achievement of 2020? What about it makes your team so proud?
Our proudest achievement of 2020 was developing our headache and migraine service line. We can now treat patients with moderate migraine symptoms from the safety of their homes. Bringing this service to life in the time of COVID-19 has been a huge benefit for our patients who are staying home in quarantine.
Developing a new service is challenging. It required close coordination and multiple teams to add new capabilities to our patient experience and tooling to our care platform. Everyone had to lean in as we learned new ways to collaborate while working during a pandemic. I am proud of how the team worked together and focused to bring this new way of care to our patients.
What was the biggest challenge of 2020 for your company, and what did your team do to overcome this challenge?
Discovering how to work remotely in a pandemic has been the biggest challenge by far. Our focus has been learning to create moments for intentional collaboration and communication. It’s easy to spend all day on Slack or in back-to-back Zoom meetings. We’ve found that it’s important to take time to get to know your co-workers by making intentional space.
We regularly take time for an engineering book club, group lunches without work and coffee pairings with people around the company. Teams regularly dedicate time to work together over video without a set agenda, to simulate the connectedness and spontaneous setting of an office environment. We even made time to meet in a socially distant setting outside as a team, which has reenergized our relationships.
For our new engineers, onboarding remotely can be challenging. We help folks get acquainted with the company by assigning onboarding sidekicks to help team members learn about Nurx and navigate our culture. We also develop custom onboarding plans for each individual so they know what to expect over their first 90 days. We have found that being intentional about these moments has kept the team together as we have been apart.
We’ll use this time to keep learning how to work better together.’’
What’s the most important lesson you learned in 2020, and how will you carry that lesson with you into 2021?
When faced with a situation that doesn’t have a rule book — like the pandemic — I have learned to be intentional with our interactions and have empathy for others. We’ll use this time to keep learning how to work better together and improve upon how we collaborate in a remote-first world.
