Alexandra Erman

▶0:01HostWelcome to the Built by People podcast, where we share the stories and insights of the world's top HR leaders. Join us as we dive deep into the minds of HR executives, uncovering their strategies, challenges, and triumphs in shaping today's workforce. I'm excited to welcome Alexandra to the Built By People podcast. Alexandra, thank you so much for joining us. And as a starting question, I always love to ask if you could share a little bit more about your career journey.

▶0:55GuestHi. Hi, Dave. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. My career journey, I started in internal ops, which is, you know, finance, administration, and people in startups where only one person could cover the whole three areas. So it was like little startups back in 2005. And from one startup to another, I grew in this role. And sometime in the course of that, I realized numbers are numbers, but people are much more fun, and I want to focus on the people function, and that's how I ended up really doing that first at AgoraPulse, slowly but surely handing out finance and really focusing on the people function, and then at StreamSets, and then now Before.ai. So yeah, that's where I come from. Long time ago, I was an art dealer, but that was my years of entrepreneurship, and maybe one day again, but for now, I'm enjoying the function and constantly looking at human behavior and team productivity and things that really interest me.

▶1:57HostAlexandra, as someone who has built the people function in a fully distributed company, what are the unique challenges and opportunities you've encountered and how have you overcome those?

▶2:09GuestSo I've always had a global role and I've always liked it, probably because I'm myself an immigrant and, and I like the diversity of different countries and different people and different culture and working together has always been very fulfilling for me. The challenges, I think there are many challenges. It depends what kind of format your company has. If you're HQ-centered and have remote location, you're going to find some sets of challenges. If you're fully distributed, it's another set of challenges. When a company is heavily HQ'd somewhere and has remote teams, then they're remote. And so, you know, the intentionality around inclusiveness needs to be different. Because the mothership in a country with this mentality and the culture of that country, and then everybody else is somewhere else and different and reports to that mothership, that creates challenges. It's different. It's, we're fully distributed. There's no mothership. When people ask me like, so where are you located? I'm everywhere, nowhere. We're work from anywhere. So that's our main policy. So of course, you know, on the compliance side, the biggest challenge I would say is the complex legal landscape across countries and knowing how to navigate those and finding the right partners to navigate those. Are you going to have contractors? Are you going to have employers of records? Are you going to set up an entity or not? Are you going to use a PO? All those things you have to learn to do them or have done them before because they are challenging. And then, you know, how you're going to figure out the way you want to operate as a company in a fully distributed system. Do you want a mirrored work-life? In an office, but in a distributed setting or not. And if you're trying to mirror that, I'm going to say you're probably looking at it from the wrong angle because it's not going to happen. The challenge is, do you have enough documentation to make sure that everything can happen asynchronously? Do you make sure that your communication style is asynchronous? Do you make sure that you coordinate time zone in a way that you can have the last meetings possible or the meetings that you really need to have For us, really creating a platform, we use Confluent and we document everything. And then we use Slack and we don't expect people to reply right away. They reply when they can. And also we have this AI bot that we call Agatha that is in Slack where you can ask Agatha, where can I find that? And it goes pick in our documentation where the answer is so that you don't have to ping someone. You ping Agatha and that's the joys of AI.

▶4:50HostYeah, well, you, you've got a lot of experience managing global teams throughout your career. How do you maintain culture, integrity, and equity, especially across different time zones and cultures?

▶5:03GuestYeah. So, I think culture is made by the way people behave. And so, the tone we give to our company is one of trust by default. It's one of ask anything. It's one of everybody collaborates. It's one of, you know, pull up your sleeves, we're in a startup. And so if we convey this upon hiring pretty well, and the joiners will be like-minded and they will behave the same way, then the, you know, the diversity doesn't matter because the mindset is there, whether you're in India and Nepal and Bulgaria or in the US, it's really about a mindset. And that's how we maintain the culture is we're in there and we kind of operate the same way. We behave the same way. Are we different in the way we answer people when we talk? Of course. Is our syntax, English syntax, lacking? Of course. Do we make mistakes? Of course. But the root is common. And also to feed with this culture is we have a very strong mission that is very uniting. BeforeAI is at the forefront of predictive AI in cybersecurity where we predict intelligence attack and therefore our people real crime fighters. We are very united around that. But for the things that we do in my team and the people team to maintain some kind of engagement and show that we care is that we celebrate all holidays. So not everybody is off. There's this thing that goes on Slack every Friday. Hey, next week, this is what's going to happen. This team is off, and this is why, and this is what they celebrate, and let's honor them for that. And this team is out. Things like that. We try to stay aware of local context also very much. Conflicts, elections, natural disasters, whatever happens so that we stay close to our people and reach out personally when it's time to do. We build equity through having, although we have compliance rule, time off management could be a nightmare. And this country have so many days mandatory and that country zero and that country 32 and that could. So we try to keep a baseline for everybody. Everybody gets 25. If your country says you get more, you get more, but everybody else is aligned on a median level that makes sense. And so that even though their country doesn't force us to give them that many days, they still have them so that they don't have to compete with another person in another country and feel bad about it. And we try to align all equity and benefits in the same way, the way the total comp also is thought in that. Way, and that's how we try to maintain equity. We also give support for global mobility. We have virtual connection points. We have virtual games that we play as teams, and we also divide two time zones. We have one available for one half of the globe and one available for the other half of the globe so that everybody gets a chance to socialize. And if you can't sleep in the middle of the night and want to join our social, feel free to do it, but we definitely don't expect you to do so. And we have team retreats and annual retreats where we actually get to meet because at the end of the day, meeting is great.

▶8:17HostAlexandra, I want to talk about psychological safety in a distributed environment. Can you share your approach to fostering that in a distributed workforce?

▶8:26GuestYeah, I don't think it's any different from distributed or not distributed. The mechanism that one has to put in place to ensure and nurture psychological safety or pretty set, you know, it's, it's kind of a theory. If you have equal time taking, I don't remember how it's phrased. Everybody has the same amount of time to talk during a meeting and every idea is welcome and nobody is going to be shamed or berated or diminished or put down for speaking up, then you have psychological safety, whether it's in person or distributed, the principle is the same. The thing that we've been doing in order to give stronger support to our teams that might feel disconnected or isolated is that we have dual management at Before AI. We've created a system of dual management. And so everybody has a manager who's not their functional manager and who really supports them in their everyday work, their work life, in their personal growth and their development. They're doing their performance management on a weekly basis. And then they have a functional lead who, you know, leads the team on the technical side of things, assigns projects and things like that. And so because of that, there's a double trust component where people always have someone to talk to and they can rely on the same person, even if they change teams or they change projects, even if their functional lead changes for any reason, they keep the same manager. So there's the continuity. That we really emphasize on. I mean, it's, it's not flat, but it's rather flat organization where everybody is encouraged to speak. And we also have, in the same trust by default philosophy that we have, we tend to say, if you want to do something, go ahead, do it. Ask for forgiveness rather than permission because time is of the essence. So we have this thing where we say, okay, Use a little acronym, D.U.E.R., unless otherwise directed, and say, okay, D.U.E.R., if I don't hear in 4 hours, I'll run with this. And if no one says anything, run with it, and then we'll figure it out. If it was the wrong run, we'll clean it up. If it was the right run, kudos. So that gives a lot of leeway and a lot of autonomy to people. And autonomy is, of course, one of the bases of motivation, but it's also necessary for us because we're far away and separated by time zone, but also because we're in Series D and we need to run fast. It's like, hey, we don't have a lot of time to spare on thinking about things. So yeah, we have high engagement right now. We stay connected as much as we can. We're very focused on development through the people partnering. We're really very focused on life at work of our people. Their check-ins one-on-one are respected. They're really about the employee.

▶11:25HostI wanna build on some of the culture discussion that we had today in the context of performance management and at the stage that you're at, Series B, how do you approach performance management and compensation strategies at the stage you are at? And what are some of the key people initiatives that you believe are critical during your growth phase?

▶11:47GuestFor me, performance management is a daily job. It's not an annual review thing. And so we've created everything around this. And I think at the basis, is your job description clear enough? Does it bring a role description that is really clear to the person when they onboard? Is the 30-60-90 clear also? Do they know what they're going to do? Because their onboarding is all on Confluent. People read through A ton of stuff. They watch videos, they do trainings. Nobody's there to hold their hand. They have buddies, but they're so far away, right? They're self-starters by essence. We tend to hire self-starters, so they're going to run, but they need to run with clarity. And once that is set as a basis, then they set goals with their functional lead and their people partners, and then they do their job. And then we just review the goals. So we use a tool called Flint. It's a platform for productivity and performance management. It's rather easy to use and it's really well done for us. I mean, I really love the way it works because it has the one-on-one feature, but it also integrates with Slack and their AI scrubs Slack and creates journal entries for people. So it's really built in a way that if it sees your name in a channel talking about something that looks like a theme, that looks like something you're working on, It's going to grab that and creates a journal entry for you saying theme, I don't know, product B management, whatever it is with all the sources from which it grabbed, it will create a few bullet points and what you've been doing and what you've been working on. And so it helps people look at what they're doing in a different way because it's created for them and they can tweak it, of course. But then when we have one-on-ones, we're like, okay, tell me about this. You know, tell me about this project. How is it advancing for you? How is it going? So all the material is there so we can continue to have those conversations. Where are you at? How do you feel you're doing? And not, well, we think from this past year review, which doesn't mean anything because nobody remembers a year-end review. That's not true. We remember the last 2 months, right? Here we go from one, one week to the other. And, and that's how I approach performance management to answer your question.

▶14:08HostAlexandra, what parting advice would you like to share with our community?

▶14:12GuestWow. If you— I don't know about what, about distributed teams?

▶14:19HostSure. You could talk about distributed teams or any general advice you'd like to provide to your fellow HR professionals.

▶14:25GuestIntentionality. Start with a strategy, not the operational. Start with where you want to go and what do you want the company to look like? And then reverse engineer. It's not, hey, I'm doing a program, let's apply a program. It's what does the company need? What do you want it to look like? What do you want your philosophy of management to be? What do you want your compensation philosophy to be? And once you've said that, working with your leadership team and you have clarity around that, then reverse engineer and then create the programs that actually are good for the company that you work with, not the one that you worked before or not, you know, the one that it's not. That's probably the best advice I'd have. Yeah.

▶15:07HostAlexandra, thank you so much for joining us on the Built by People podcast. It was a pleasure to have you involved.

▶15:12GuestThank you for having me. It's been, it's been really nice. Thank you so much. I really appreciate the opportunity.