Earlier this year we made the decision at Remind to begin a search for a VP of People Operations (or what companies used to call a VP of HR). What drove this decision at our company — was it because we hit a magic number of employees and felt we needed to check a box? Nope.
The main reason we feel now is the time to add this member to our executive team is because our company’s organizational design and complexity has evolved so dramatically over the last year. More specifically, how we operate as a company has broadened to include full teams and executive leaders across the core areas of a software-as-a-service (SaaS) business: product, engineering, sales, marketing, success, and finance. Thus, now is the right time to bring in a leader who can help galvanize the various people-centered efforts at Remind, and therefore in defining this critical role we have identified five important areas in which this person must excel.
Recruiting, hiring, and on boarding. Our VP of People Operations will play a central role in how we bring new team members into the company. We need our people leader to be creative and strategic in how we approach hiring and team building in today’s competitive hiring environment. Key to this effort will be how we build the Remind brand across various talent acquisition channels so we attract amazing people who want to impact the lives of tens of millions students, teachers, parents, and administrators in the education sector.
Personal and professional development. Our VP of People Operations will oversee our manager development (“MDev”) efforts which we have designed to create a culture of team engagement at Remind. Through MDev we have focused on the alliance between managers and team members. Most notably, we’ve focused on the critical duality of the manager-team member relationship that connects a manager’s investment in their employee’s long-term development to the employee’s commensurate investment in her/his near-term performance that supports value creation for our company.
Diversity and inclusion. Our VP of People Operations will serve as the point person orchestrating our companywide efforts to ensure that Remind continues to foster a diverse and inclusive workplace environment. Like every company in Silicon Valley, we must make recruiting and retaining a diverse team a top priority and, to this end, we must embrace the broadest definition of diversity. Further, each and every one of our team members must feel included at Remind at all times. Diversity and inclusion are indeed challenging topics to define, execute, and measure, yet we need a leader who will hold us accountable to the goals we set — and the initiatives we pursue — across these two important cultural dimensions that help drive Remind’s long-term success.
People operation experiences and systems. Our VP of People Operations will manage the full scope of foundational experiences and services that support our entire team. This goes beyond a perfunctory check box called human resource information systems (“HRIS”). These core experiences and services more directly speak to the ways in which we support the daily efforts of our team members and their family members across all important areas, from health care benefits to maternity/paternity leave policies to how we come together and have fun as a team inside and outside the office.
People first. Finally — and most importantly — our VP of People Operations will need to be phenomenal at connecting with every single member of our team. They’ll need to know everyone by their first name and come to their work with an amazingly high level of empathy. That said, at times they’ll be asked to deliver direct feedback to team members that perhaps isn’t what an employee expects (or wants) to hear. Ultimately, our VP of People Operations needs to love working with people — challenging everyone on our team to do their best work while also supporting each team member’s growth. The VP of People Operations we bring into Remind must love their role, love our company, and love connecting meaningfully with everyone on the team.
Now is indeed the time for us to bring in a People Operations leader. We have invested from the bottoms up to build important efforts like manager development and diversity and inclusion, and we have created strong layers for how we approach recruiting and people operations systems and processes. And while there will be much for this leader to wrap their arms around at Remind, we are excited to add a strong voice to our leadership team and an important contributor to how we continue to build Remind into the largest and most important communication platform in education — a communication platform where learning happens for millions of students in the U.S. every single day.
Originally published on Medium on April 28, 2018. This Substack version is maintained as the canonical archive.