I conducted an online interview with Robin Anderson, an HR thought leader who has been an executive in several successful tech and marketing companies.  She is currently Vice President of People & Culture at BlueDot, a high-profile Toronto-based tech company that uses data analysis and AI to empower infectious disease response. 

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Based on Robin’s background I planned to focus the interview on Human Resource learnings from our course and related areas including organizational structures, work environments and employee motivation/rewards.  While you can look at my planned questions here, as we got into the interview and I learned what Robin’s company did I realized she could also have an interesting take on how these areas are changing thanks to COVID.

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To start I wanted to understand what’s most important to real-world HR professionals from all the materials we covered in the course. It was interesting to hear how fierce competition is for hiring talent and how that has forced a shift in HR focus to what she called the overall employee experience and how has changed not just compensation but everything from policies and procedures to working hours, vacation time, benefits and more. She suggested that while the mostly legal and compliance HR aspects that were much of our course were important foundations, they basically set out the minimum you are required to do for staff.  She said that if you only do the minimum today though, it would be very difficult to hire and retain people. So the shift is to focus on the end-to-end employee experience kind of in the same way companies have focused on customer experience as a way to get and keep customers.  Policies, benefit programs, working hours no longer have a one size fits all approach but are flexible to best meet employees' needs.  My take on this is that it is good for employees but for HR this means there is a greater need now to create an environment where there is trust communication, collaboration, etc. since flexibility makes that more difficult for a company overall.

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Robin also has an interesting take on organizational structures but some of her opinions might be because she personally likes to work at companies that use a specific structure (flat).  Her explanation of why flat org structures work better especially in tech companies made sense. Creating innovative products requires collaboration with different teams, resources and skills in a company and they have to move fast to compete so a flat structure is almost a necessity to compete. Add in Robin’s comments about how offering flexibility to staff only adds to that so it’s almost "operate a flat structure or die" for tech companies.  She did say, however, that once a company gets to a certain size that flat also has challenges and in the interview, she talks about how a matrix structure can combine the benefits of flat with the ability to keep a large company aligned. 

 

The last area we focused on was workplace environment and employee motivation and how she’s dealt with the change in those through COVID. I learned that the key term here too was flexibility.  While Robin’s company tries to create a workplace environment that matches their culture of being collaborative and working in small cross-functional teams, they have had to figure out how to do that while giving their team flexibility to work in a way that best fits their situation.  Their office is currently open but they don’t require people to come in and let them work from home, they let people set their own work schedules so they can balance things especially in COVID, etc.  It sounded like Robin felt that this was something they hadn’t completely figured out yet and that she thought her employees were missing things like the social aspects of the office even though many of them like working from home. When it came to motivation and rewards it sounded like at least in COVID, employee motivation has shifted to be more about employee support. Robin talked about how their team had been hit hard motivationally because they are so close to COVID data and impact globally so they motivate through support - adjusting their vacation and working hours policies, adding a variety of mental health support resources along with the flexibility things we talked about earlier.

 

My biggest takeaway from interviewing Robin was how it seemed that there is a lot of creativity and problems solving skills HR and business leaders need to have to take things like we covered in this course and adapt and expand them to meet real-world needs. And COVID seems like it's an example of the kind of thing that can come up that makes you have to continue to adapt as an HR and business leader.

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