HR Vision Podcast #29 – Building a people-centric culture ft. Maria Alekseeva

Ivo:
Hey everyone, and welcome to the HR Vision podcast. I'm your host, Ivo, and every week I'm going to have a conversation that matters about HR. This week I have Maria Alexeeva with me. Welcome Maria. How's it going?

Maria:
Hi, everything's fine. Thank you!

Ivo:
Thank you for joining us today. Yeah, today we will move away from the technical side of HR technologies. Maria is a content specialist. She worked in multiple IT companies and has a very interesting experience with HR making. Making her mostly interested on employee engagement and relationship building, which will be the theme of this episode. So Maria, are you ready?

Maria:
Yeah, definitely.

Ivo:
So let's get to it. This should be a fun one.

Alright. Let's start like we always start. Please give us a little introduction about yourself. Who are you? Your experience? A little bit of that.

Maria:
Well, my background lies in the organizational psychology. I studied for five years, and then for another extra year later on. I started my career in HR, first as a recruitment intern. Then I moved to the learning and development field and I worked there for a while as a learning and development coordinator. We had a quite a big team within big human resource department and we handled all trainings and onboarding activities for KPMG. So that's how it started.

Ivo:
Right, and what made you choose the psychology area?

Maria:
Yeah, you know how it starts with lots of psychologists. You wanna help people, but at the end you just wanna help yourself, and then you start exploring what you actually want. and at that point I because I'm from Moscow, Russia. I didn't feel that the industry was developed enough to really jump in as a psychologist, and in its traditional sense as a therapist.

The HR industry was quite big already back then and around 2010 I felt that's a good opportunity to start my career there. And you can apply a lot of psychology in that field, and I actually wish we had more actually psychologist right now in human resources, and not just human resources generally. Not only those who know the local laws realy wel, but also those who can deal with the humans. Yeah, that's something we miss.

I see the trend that see a lot of people going for organizational psychology courses, or just getting a degree. And I hope we had more people in charge having that knowledge.

Ivo:
No, I can understand that you're dealing with people after all, so it make it make sense that you understand people, how they work. How can you help them - I think that's a good point indeed.

you just you mentioned that you collaborated with HR as a learning and development coordinator. So now we are not in that field anymore. Or at least not for now. So what are for you the main takeaways you have from working closely with HR?

Maria:
There are many! The main ones from my specific experience is that when you work for a large international business, you have to connect the dots and you have to think about what people really want. In terms of learning and development. Is that sometimes company pushes people to get certain trainings that have certain mandatory trainings and then voluntary trainings that they can sign up to. But in many situations it really collapses when they have a lot of projects.

When you work for a consultancy firm, you have those seasonal projects. When people work day and night, and they have no time for those trainings. And still we as a part of HR try to push them to have those trainings and that's where the problem begins. You have to really know how the business work and you have to serve the people, because it's not about having those trainings executed. It's about serving people with different skills that help them do their job in the best possible way. And I felt at some point that there was a misconnection in a large organization.

This should be more of a conversation going between those HR partners sitting in certain departments, say tech or legal and the learning and development team serving them. That's one of the things and 2nd is about technology. The systems we use for scheduling those trainings and the administration part also: it has to be more user-friendly. Many times it takes hours to learn how the system works and that's ridiculous.

Imagine you have to learn for a day or two how things work. It should be quite intuitive and it should be easy to work with. Otherwise people feel "OK. I'm not even gonna look at this system because I'm not sure if I press the right buttons". That's very important that technology should be intuitive and easy to use. And have all the questions answered in itself.

Ivo:
Alright, so from what I understand you have two main issues here. One is that the company needs to understand what the employees are going through. The amount of work, the workload that they have. If they are capable of complying with those mandatory voluntary training. And the second one is having tools in place that helps them be more efficient in their daily jobs, that's the two main issues that you pointed out.

Maria:
Yes, when it comes to training specifically, it should be easy to plan your learning and development ahead and find ways to be more sure what to pick and when you want to have it done. And due to certain reasons, sometimes just because there are so many trainers involved and other you know factors in play, you cannot have this freedom. But I feel that organizations have to give more freedom to employees because it's about actually them, rather than the HR department.

So it's something I really feel like we're kind of slowly shifting from serving the organization to serving the employees, it's now more about the people than organizations alone. That's I think a very nice trend. It's going slowly, but it's happening.

Ivo:
Yeah, just a question. For a lot of companies, I can imagine saying "Yeah, we have goals, but we have things that we need to achieve and these people they need to develop those skills. And we pay them to do that as well." What do you think could be the consequence? If a company says "OK, I'm sorry, but you need to do it anyway." What do you think are the risks there?

Maria:
You know, we deal with all kinds of businesses and right now there is a trend to kind of copy paste certain strategies or values. Especially in the startup industry. For those tech corporations. And the fact is that you have all kinds of businesses that will never be able to adapt to that, and they don't need to adapt to that, because they have their own culture. There are actually still companies where there is a very strong hierarchy. Where you do what you asked to do. And that's OK, as long as you have the right people working for that company. If they're OK with that, and some people are quite OK with that, and they need to be told what to do, in a good sense.

But what's important is that you don't communicate to the outside world when you look for new people, or you don't communicate internally that there is freedom or there is that kind of agile/dynamic culture. You have to say we are very organized company in a way that we have a strong hierarchy. We have very defined tasks. That's fine, and the most important thing is that you need to be authentic. Be authentic is communicating the same things that you are actually doing, and that's very hard because a lot of those things are not trendy or not accepted by the general audience, but if you are authentic you will always find the right people whenever you are, wherever you are, you'll find the right people. If you have this match.

If you actual employee experience matches what you promise both internally and externally, when speak about recruitment marketing or in general marketing. That's the key.

Ivo:
Yeah, I understand. So let's dive into the main topics you just mentioned. Employee engagement and relationship building. Why is that so important in your view?

Maria:
One of the things is that I was thinking how I can apply my psychological background and within HR. I think it boils down that relationships are key to everything. So if you're able to build the right relationships. Relationships that have trust at its core; long term with you people, with your employees, but also with your partners and customers. Then you able to thrive. Then you don't think about you know. "How can I do this today, tomorrow." You have the kind of compass that guides you. And it again comes down to authenticity and clarity and those kind of basic things that you have in general in relationships between people, saying actually applies to organizations.

It might be more complex, and you have more channels top down, etc. But it comes down to trust, authenticity and consistency, clarity.

Ivo:
My follow-up to that would be: Do you think most companies do that because my feeling is no and it's a very hard thing to do. Because you have business schools in the middle and then you have people that you hire that work, people that you hire that don't fit the culture. You know every company has a different culture, so it's probably a different thing to to achieve. What do you think about that part as well? What is the fundamental work that a company needs to do in order to achieve that higher employee engagement and building better relationships with their employees?

Maria:
Yes I agree with you completely, that there are just a few companies that manage to get to the level that they are truly authentic, that they build a culture that reflects their vision/mission. That exactly answers the question "why" they exist. And the problem here is I think is the basic fear. It's like the fear we have as people, as individuals, we fear being rejected. We fear not finding our place in this world. The same comes the same happens with businesses. They're afraid to be who they are because then of course they're afraid they cannot sell; cannot get profit; cannot be successful in this market.

That stops them from actually communicating what they are. In general, in life you cannot create the meaning, or you cannot copy paste the meaning from another company, bring it to yours and say these are the values we all have analytical mindset. We all are super agile, you name it. You have to find the meaning by asking the questions to your own employees because these are the people who create that culture and recreate it every day. These are the people who name your products, who approach your clients in a certain way.

Because of course because they have their own psychological background, but mostly because they are part of this environment that makes them do things in a certain way. And the more you feel connected to the culture, the the more authentic you behave with clients and the easier things happen. It's like if you're happy at your job if you feel connected, you're more productive. So that's something that businesses have to accept, and it's very difficult because a lot of our management is not trained, and you don't have those. I feel that most MBA programs, or in general high education outside of psychology. They don't get trained to understand those things, which are actually the basics. We don't get a lot of children to have it at school. How how you build relationships, what's the ecological communication, those kind of things? Very basic concepts for life.

The same comes the businesses. They don't understand it. They think about processes in a very practical way, but it's not how it works, especially when we talk about businesses that are based on experience, that's something nothing to do with production. It don't make bread or things like that. Although in those businesses, so also applies, but you create knowledge. You create that kind of value. It's all about people and how they think about your product, and how they are eager to implement it for your clients.

Ivo:
Yeah, do you think it's easier to set up this culture in a... Well, I think so. Maybe this is a rhetorical question. Maybe it might be easier for a start up to reshape culture and try to listen more to the employees because it's a more agile, more dynamic organization. How do you do that in a big corporate that's been in the market for like 30 years or or 40 years. You know that there's a certain culture and all of a sudden they pick these theories around HR, and you know, getting people in great shape and they promote yoga sessions and stuff like that.

Do you think it's just for show? Or do you think it's really possible to change from within, from a cultural perspective? It probably takes a long time, does it not?

Maria:
Yeah. The short answer is patience. The answer to that question is patience. But it's very difficult, and I've seen it in my own experience.I feel the most important thing is in the case of those organizations, very large ones; hierarchical, is that you need to put somebody in charge who will advocate for that. If you don't have somebody in charge, then all the initiatives, no matter how much effort you put in it, will fail sooner or later.

If you have somebody in charge, then that person can make the right connections with the people who have the knowledge. Why do we do it? What's important for us? How can we make the shift in a certain direction? And plan long term? And then you take the babysteps and you see... Something we can also learn from startups, not just copy past it, but just the practices you can do like exercises. You can experiment. You can do small tests and see how it works.

So say we wanna have we wanna allow our employees to have more freedom and more ownership over their own goals, say, performance management. In this case you just say you as an employee have the right to choose your goals. Instead of having straightaway conversation with the manager who tells you, you know by the way we need this, this and this: execute. So it starts with very small things, but as long as you can measure the impact, you start small and you see if people of the organization adapt to it, if they accept it. How different departments react. That's the only way to go.

If you don't have this leadership in place, and if you act too quickly. If you do a lot at once: "Here it is completely different way of working." I think that lots of people will rebel against it, and that's understandable because you kind of you just wipe the whole culture, and they say no, you know guys, that's how we gonna work now. It never works and in many cases it just leads to a massive resignation.

That's what happened actually last year, when people realized they just don't belong to the culture anymore. That happened to many businesses.

Ivo:
Indeed, what what do you have to say about the recent move towards more remote and hybrid work? Was it something in the making already before the pandemic, but I guess the pandemic just accelerated it a bit? Do you think it's a move towards that - Companies moving towards allowing remote work, is it actually helping their cultures and helping them take care their employees? At the end it just helps with employee engagement and all?

I have a second question, but let's go there first. Do you think it helps? How do you see this movement?

Maria:
Yeah, I was thinking about yesterday. Also because we started discussing to have this podcast. And I thought: "OK, actually deep inside I feel that the pandemic and this shift to remote first and hybrid working, actually just revealed all the troubles that had been hidden before that. Something that we, you know it's not a biggie, it's OK, we just go to the office. We have those meetings, we can figure things out.

And now you are faced with this remote environment where you cannot fully control people. You have to trust them all. Trust people, that's a big you know... How can we trust each other? And that really revealed a lot of problems. And of course, those companies that had already cleared policies in place, remote policies and also had more trust in their culture. The ompanies that already implemented certain technologies to help people do their jobs no matter where, only those succeeded. Or at least. They are doing better than the others. That's the main thing.

The second thing is that, again the trust. I feel that a lot of HR processes that are in place are not adjusted to this new reality. And a lot of businesses feel that there will be moments when we go back to normal and this thinking, OK, it's the second year. It's already actually two years. At least in the Netherlands, where we are from, it's already 2 years since the that working from home became normal and some businesses still think we're going to get back to normal. That really keeps them from changing the culture. That kind of sticking to the past and not moving towards the future. That keeps us away from really doing better.

That also happens to people, of course. We always think it's going to be fine. It's gonna be like it was. Face it, it will never be like it was before the pandemic. You have to accept it and you have to make changes that make your people comfortable doing their jobs at home. Both at home, both at end in the office, from anywhere, basically.

Ivo:
I think one of the main things is that a lot of companies didn't have the heat on production or something, so the employees were working from home and still being productive in a lot of business. Don't get me wrong, of course. You know hotels, restaurants and all suffered a lot. I'm not saying that, of course they did, but like for office jobs, a lot of things just stay more or less the same in terms of productivity, and people got a taste of their freedoms as well. Like I don't have to commute anymore. I don't have to sit in the office for for the whole the whole week. I can do with this from my home and still be productive. And I think that made people think, probably they prefer more of a hybrid thing.

Now my follow-up question to that is that you also spoke about building relationships and the importance of that. Don't you think it's harder when people are far away and just through a screen communicating through a screen, does it make building relationships harder? How would you fix that if we indeed move towards more hybrid than the remote work?

Maria:
Yeah, it's a good question. I think it makes building relationships different. It does kind of keep us from making those connections and have these relationships. It's something that's not very natural, right? You just kind of looking at the screen. Is it the avatar? Is it like a likely real person?

In real life you just have all those components of communication. Like verbal communication and nonverbal communication. And sometimes when I sit in front of you, you cannot see, for example how I move my legs. Well, I like you cannot fully absorb all the all the information and that, especially when you have a conversation without video. That's completely like a mystery. Who's that person? You know, I'm having an interview - who is that person behind the picture? That might be difficult because you cannot read the mood. You cannot anticipate on some reactions.

That's one of the things. And we just, we are social animals and having those social interactions on top of our everyday work is very important to feel connected. That's something that doesn't happen a lot in the virtual environment because everything is planned. We have a meeting. OK, we join the meeting. We discuss it. We might have a small talk before, but then then that's it. And when you in office, of course you have more of that extra communication. You go have grab a coffee, you go grab lunch. You have sometimes those situations, social situations that allow you to connect deeper. So definitely if hybrid remote is possible in your organization, I think that's the best idea. That's the best way to go.

Ivo:
Yeah, I would agree with that. I think people will miss those small things that seem like details but are important for building relationships. Because fully remote. At some point you're going to be disengaged. I don't see unless you have a very task oriented kind of job, that you can do from everywhere. You don't have a lot of meetings and all that. You just do your your thing and that's it. I guess that will be successful, but for people working within a team and you know that requires teamwork. If you do it remote all the time, at some point my feeling is that you're gonna be disengaged because you don't connect a level deeper.

I'm not saying that you should be friends with everyone that you work with, but that part of creating relationship knowing something about someone? Makes you more engaged. It's just natural. We are social animals indeed.

Maria:
Yeah, and that we kind of see each other in different situations. You know you see more of a 3D person rather than just your coworker. It helps you connect deeper and understanding. It's like: communication is difficult, and especially when you have in your team or between teams people of different cultural backgrounds, which happens a lot in global organizations, you know you have to put some effort to help those people connect, and these things don't happen that much I feel. AndI don't know. Sometimes organizations really put effort in having those cultural trainings, but most of the time that doesn't happen.

If you have a real office real time office. These things happen naturally when they have lunch break. You can discuss all like you. OK, I'm from Russia. You're from media, tell me yeah, I would do things like this and it like this and then OK that's why we do things this way and then you start actually understanding each other much better. And then you solve work issues much better and easier. It just happens more naturally. In remote environments, you have to put effort intentionally to achieve that.

Ivo:
I think so. I agree with you. And how cool is that as far as I'm concerned, how cool is that to know other cultures and work with people from different backgrounds. That enriches you as a person to know more things about other people?

Maria:
I think it's both beneficial for your personal development, but also for working in international environment. Because you know there are there are more and more organizations. I think it grows every year, that everything becomes global. Almost everything, so you have to be more culturally literate. You have to understand those things even at the very basic level if you want to be successful in your career.

Ivo:
Definitely. OK, moving on to the next question that I have for you. Which is kind of a... not a provocation. Nothing like that, but why marketing? Why did you switch from that background to HR to marketing? And now you search for something that combines both. You are in an HR tech company working as a marketer these days.

Maria:
Back then, when I started in Human Resources, I still liked communication and I didn't know how to combine those things. How combine human resources and communication. Things like corporate communication, your employee communication, employer branding? These things almost didn't exist at that point, at least in the country I come from it wasn't big. It was all about recruitment. Finding the people, head hunting, and a little bit of graduate marketing was going on, but nothing at the scale we have now. Diversity and inclusion. Employer branding. You name it. You can have it all.

At that point I didn't see myself there. There was no playground to do those kind of things and that at some point I decided "OK, I'm kind of done with human resources. Let me see what I can do." and I decided to follow a master in consumer psychology which was the closest field to shift from organizational psychology to marketing. This is basically a scientific approach to marketing. How we communicate with consumers, how consumers perceive certain things and then generally how as humans we act in this marketplace. And that was the first step at that point, and then I decided, OK, I just wanna try try myself in marketing.

Then I figured that content creation was my strongest asset. And that's how it started and I moved to the Netherlands. And then I worked for different businesses. And I landed at FourVision.At the end of last year.

Ivo:
And now you're combining HR with the marketing side. How much did it surprise you - or maybe it didn't - the amount of technology that can be behind HR, that can be there to help HR from one end to the other. From recruitment tool to retirement. How much was that surprising? If at all? And what do you think are the main things in HR technology that people should care for?

Maria:
Actually, the amount of those tools didn't surprise me, but what really I think amazes me still is the complexity. That you cannot just buy something, implement it in your organization and you're good. It doesn't work this way. I really felt like, yeah, it can be this way. But when I started FourVision I'm like: OK. It's not only about the tool, it's about integration with your data. It's about integration with your other system, and it's not that easy. It just takes sometimes months, years even, to make this happen.

What's important is that it's not about only the implementation side, you know the software providers who are responsible for that, it's about your organization collaborating and really providing everything to make this happen. And that really amazed me because I had never thought it takes so much time and so much effort and that you have to do all those tweaks and those adjustments to make this work. At first I just thought you press the button, that's it.

Ivo:
Yeah, like anything in life: Where if you don't have the correct setup, you don't learn how to use it. You don't use it. It won't solve you any issues, it won't solve you any problems. Building a culture it requires patience.

Maria:
Yeah, everything requires a lot of patience and engagement.

Ivo:
Yes. Just one one last question regarding technology as well. From everything that you saw so far in HR technology, being here for the companies that you worked with before, is there any interesting trends that you think HR technology will solve or problems that are coming that HR technology is going to solve? What do you see there?

Maria:
I think the major thing I see now is that companies put so much effort, so many resources in making their products and customer facing products look super user friendly. The best they can be, and when it comes to each other technologies, it's just like "OK... It works. Don't touch it."

That's the thing. We need to put more effort in it, because a lot of times it's B2B, right? We have B2C products customer facing, and a lot of them is B2C. But when it comes to B2B HR products, they lack that certain ease of use. Not all of them, not always, but it happens. And they're not that intuitive. They're not that easy to use. And I think the goal will be like that you don't need any training at all to start using the tool. You just use it and then you have those tiny pop-ups.and same day you started using it, you know how it works.

If you need some extra functionality's you could just learn as you go on your job. Unfortunately, a lot of tools companies use require training, and they generate a lot of resistance, and that's the least we need from our employees. It has to be actually the opposite. You have to be willing to use the tool. It's like your goal to place every day. You have to be comfortable. Like the interface, it has to be attractive to a certain extent. And it has to be clear to all kinds of people no matter where you are from. If you use the English version, it has to be crystal clear or it has to be translated to your local language. So these kind of things I feel can be improved still.

Ivo:
Yeah, do you think? I think that's a very interesting point of view. The fact that you should make B2B products work like B2C products, right? It's some there are still people that are using those tools, so even if it's an internal use product for a company, it should be easy to use, great UX, great UI.

Maria:
At the end. These are the people using them.

Ivo:
I think that's a great a great point of view. OK, that's all the questions I had for you today. I don't know, do you want to say anything or did you enjoy it?

Maria:
I definitely enjoyed it. It's interesting to think in the past, see what I've learned and apply it to my current experience. And yeah, it's interesting when somebody asks you questions and you never ask those questions yourself. I think that's very useful to do those things, and have those conversations with your own place also within your company. What's you know? What's your opinion about things? How would you change this? How your previous experience applies? Because those questions we always ask at the interviews. And then we forget it, it's work time and everything is forgotten. But I think it's important to have them.

Ivo:
Good, I learned a lot today. I appreciate you coming here Maria and for everybody listening: I hope you enjoyed the episode. We'll be back next week with another episode. Take care. Bye!