Ariana Gett

▶0:00IntroAnd in one of my roles at a very small company, I was asked to fire my replacement.

▶0:09HostWelcome to the Built by People podcast, Ari. We're so excited to have you on.

▶0:13GuestFor having me on.

▶0:15HostOf course, Ari spent nearly 4 years at edX where she helped guide the community through its acquisition by 2U and its separation from MIT. She's now head of people ops at mabl, where she's maintained an 83% employee engagement score year over year, which is absolutely incredible. I can't wait. I hopefully we can go into that, later on. Um, but just to warm up, what's the wildest thing that's happened to you in HR that of course you're allowed to talk about?

▶0:42GuestSure. Actually, I'll share an example of just before I got into HR. I was an executive assistant for 7 or 8 years before I moved into an HR role. And in one of my roles at a very small company, I was asked to fire my replacement. So I had hired someone on who was gonna take over my EA work. They weren't really working out. And, uh, the founder of the company sort of came to me and said, look, it's not working out. Someone needs to let this person go. Can you do that while I go run some errands?

▶1:16HostOh my gosh, she's like, I'm actually gonna step out, and when I get back, she's gone.

▶1:22GuestYou know, now looking back at it from an HR person, a professional in HR, it's funny the things that you sort of already know to do with someone. Like, I remember being neutral. I remember them pushing and saying, can you reconsider? And I said something around like, we've already made the decision, which now it's like, I use that, I use that language anyways. It was horrible, honestly. Actually, afterwards I bumped into another coworker and I burst into tears because I was so not prepared to be doing that. But it's just a wild thing that happened before I even that my trajectory was into HR. Yeah.

▶2:01HostEspecially like not even as a manager. You know, you're just like, as a manager, it's like, okay, maybe I'll have to fire someone. Right. But then like, not even as a manager, like I can't even imagine. Oh, that's so scary.

▶2:16GuestBusiness, no HR. This is what happens. It's a good plug for having HR. Yeah.

▶2:21HostYes. So then did you, did you start HR at that company or did they—

▶2:25GuestNo, I was fully an executive assistant. We had no HR at all, so it just was a little wild west. you know, that's, that's what we see sometimes.

▶2:35HostSo did the founder do all of like the payroll? Like, like how did that, how did that

▶2:40GuestHad someone who would come in and help with like payroll, taxes, accounting, but they were in maybe once a week, but otherwise it was, it was a very small company.

▶2:50HostGotcha. But firing, that was left up Okay. Modernizing mabl's recruiting included gender decoding job description. What did, like, how did you, what did you do beyond, beyond just that?

▶3:13GuestYeah, so, um, I was so lucky. I found mabl and I really related to their values, and I knew going in that they actually already had someone internally who was acting as a head of DEI, and this was someone who volunteered to do that. They weren't living in that role. They had an engineering role and they had that on as like another hat. Uh, so when I walked in, I knew they wanted more. And I was able to immediately say, hey, I have a great website, let's go to this website and use the gender decoder. You can literally look up gender decoder and you're going to find a couple websites that will help you figure out the right words so that it's not too masculine, not too feminine. So I was able to implement that. I think it was day one of my time there, and people were excited just to have something that they can lean into and feel better about. And then over my time at mabl, because it's so important, Honestly, we have a value of authenticity and a value of support, and those things just are, they're hand in hand with DEI. We really cannot decouple our work around belonging and perspectives. Insight is another value of ours. We need new perspectives to have great insights. So, so it's really embedded in what we do. We've been able since then to really lean into our employee resource groups. We've funded them so they have a budget. We pay our ERG leaders, and we have an executive sponsor assigned to each one so that they feel really like they have an executive who's going to have their voice in the room at executive meetings. So it's been a really, like, not, I, it has not been a hard journey in DEI. It's been a very rewarding journey in DEI. And actually, we, we saw, we saw that women 2 years ago were leaving at a faster clip than men. And we leaned in and that's one of the reasons we leaned into ERGs and funded them and moved to help women at mabl to really find a place in a community. And that's one of our largest ERGs with over 20 women who get together quarterly and we have a book club and all kinds of wonderful things.

▶5:19HostFun. What other ERGs do you guys have?

▶5:23GuestYeah, we have veterans. We have a veterans group. We have an LGBT group and we have mabl Gives Back. So where there's volunteer opportunities. And then we leave it open. So if anyone ever wants to raise their hand, as long as they sign up to do 4 quarterly meetings and have goals in mind for the group, we basically judge them on that and then we pay them a stipend for stepping in as the leader as long as they follow all of that procedure.

▶5:53HostWow. That is incredible.

▶5:58GuestWe're pretty small right now. We're 72, I think. Yeah, so it does make it a little bit easier. You can build a community and really get to know every single individual. I know that's not true at larger companies, but I also believe in the foundation that we're building. So as we scale, it continues to be this really remarkable company. Yeah.

▶6:18HostBut it's cool because it's even as a smaller company, you can do something like that. You know, like I feel like, like bigger company, it's like, oh, I'm in a smaller company. Like we're, we all know each other. We're all, you know, like close. It's like, but even as a smaller company, you can have those, those resources those communities. So that's great. That's great. Speaking of mabl, 89% of employees agreed their performance is evaluated fairly after you introduced 360 reviews. Which part of designing that process was hardest to get right?

▶6:54GuestYeah, you know, we introduced, um, 360s and performance evaluations in a system. So in the past they were happening, but everything was sort of happening in Word, Google documents. They were not, um, more structured. They were not happening in a place that future managers could see that progress. And because the organization, I think the hardest part is the way that our go-to-market, we call it our success team, the way our success team operates and their needs feel very different than our product org, we call it our builder team, and their needs. So, you know, we wanted to bring it together as much as possible. And I think that's a common thing in HR. You really want everyone to go through the same process. Have a, you know, comparative feeling of, okay, I'm, I'm getting the same thing, whether I'm in this role or a role over there. But the questions and the process, we had to adjust it a little bit so that on the engineering side, it's deep self-reflection around what were the outcomes of the things that I created. Because, you know, it's, it's easier on the success side to think about outcomes because you're connected to revenue, you're getting commission. But on the engineering side, you might build a lot of things, and even though those things are beautiful and innovative and amazing. What is the actual customer outcome? That can be a lot harder to connect back to. So the questions are really focused on that. And then the success side, it's really focused more on like, are there little skills or things that you could be doing to get even better at your job? Because you already know if you're making your commission or not making your commission. So we were able to tailor it, but we did pull it together so it happened at the same time of year, which sounds like not a big deal, but they were happening months apart and there were no calibration meetings. Across the company. So we, we did pull best practices in, make sure that we're talking about it. We all agree on what good looks like and we can, you know, help employees to grow because really at the end of the day, that's all we're trying to do. If you're successful, we're successful. We want everyone to just get better over time.

▶9:02HostTotally. What would you say to HR leaders that are like implementing something like this to tell their employees? Because I know that sometimes for employees it's like maybe like dreadful or like scary, right? Like, because it's like, oh, my performance is being graded right now, right? But it's like, what would you say to other HR professionals or even like maybe employees that are listening that like about a performance or like a yearly review?

▶9:31GuestI always have said, I remember a slide like 2 jobs ago where we would say performance should not be a surprise and we would have like a little birthday surprise on there. Like, it should not be like that. You shouldn't show up to the meeting and feel like, oh, what, what, what are you saying about my performance? And I think, if you can build that into the culture, and that's part of the 360s, right? If we can kick off 360s after every large project or after each quarter ends, so it's more fresh in your mind, you're getting feedback throughout the year. Then when you get to the end of the year, it should feel like a repetition of what you've already been hearing and maybe just a summarization so that you already know, what am I going into? What do I need to do moving forward? So, I think you can calm a lot of nerves if you are communicative as a manager and if you're an employee who's willing to ask when you don't know. So, really, I guess I would say both of those things. I always tell my employees as I'm onboarding them to be an advocate for their own career. And that means saying when something's not going well. That means saying what you want. You know, are you trying to get to a promotion? You want to make more money? You hope to move to a different role? Be your own advocate because sometimes you, you hope your manager knows those things, but they can't read your mind either. And the more we know, the better we can sort of tailor your growth to get you to that goal. Yep.

▶10:56HostI love that. I love that. It's like, I feel like, yeah, even I've, I've been a manager and having like a team, like, right? Like you, I can't, I don't know what you want. Right? Like, I can do everything that you, that I think that you want, right? But I can't read your mind. So, I love that. When 2U acquired edX, you pulled together the HR information to close the deal. What does HR hand over in a moment like that?

▶11:26GuestYeah, I'm sure it's different sale to sale or, you know, but when the acquisition is happening, they're doing their due diligence. They want to understand in a lot of ways how your culture is going to fit with their culture. So they're going to look at things like values. They're going to look at things like your engagement surveys, but guess what? They're also going to look at things like your Glassdoor ratings. It can be Scary. It can be. So I think it's really understanding your headcount, where your, your investments are going to, what your hiring plans have been. Do you have contractors and what does that look like? So understanding deeply your people and the makeup and the organization so you can answer those questions live, but then you should be ready to hand over things that explain better how the culture is happening in your company. Like engagement scores because they do ask for that.

▶12:23HostUm, tell me your top priorities right now. Hello.

▶12:27GuestTop priority now. We're in such an exciting time at mabl. We sort of are a Series C company that feels like it's acting now like a Series A. So as AI has come in, it's transforming the business. We've always been AI. We're native AI. But the way that we're tackling it and the audience that we're reaching is so different. So we used to reach QA engineers and pretty much solely QA, but now that everyone can be— this is why we have builders as our product org. Now that everyone can be a builder, you're really reaching out to way more than just QA when you're thinking about software testing. So we've had to sort of shift and think about how do we fit into agentic coding? How do we, we use Claude. How do we make it so that engineers don't have to leave Claude to use mabl? And anyway, this has been a huge transformation, not just in the way that we present our product, but in the way that we work, because our engineers are now agentic coders as well. And we've seen them go from, you know, whatever level of velocity they were at before to 3 times, 4 times, 7 times, even 10 times more velocity than when they were manually coding. So that is a unique new use of skills. You need to understand how to delegate and break tasks down so that you can tell the agents what to do. You need to understand architecture and design in a way that maybe you didn't need to know, especially as an earlier level software engineer. So we're sort of shifting and changing the way that we work internally, what the expectations are, and we have built into our, we've built smaller pods across the entire company, so small teams that can move in a really quick way and pivot when needed. That's true for the success team too. So now they're all a CSM, an SE, and an AE, all in a pod for a particular region so that they can, on a weekly or daily basis, check in about what, what's important, what's burning, what's the like priority customer that we're prospecting, who internally needs our help, and what feedback do we need to get back to the business.

▶14:42HostAmazing that you know so much about, like, when I, when I thought about, uh, you know, like asking that question, I'm like, oh, it's an HR, like, you know so much about your business. And I feel like that is what, like, is so amazing about HR. Like, it surprises me so much. About like every day I'm just like, oh wow, like you, like you have to know every, not have to, but you get to, right? Know every aspect about the business of like what is going on day to day, what the teams need, what individuals need. So wow, that is really cool.

▶15:15GuestYeah. It's good. I do think you have to put yourself in other people's shoes a lot. I'm sure I'll say that again, but if you don't understand their experience and what you're asking them to do, it can be harder to understand where they're coming from and the feelings that are coming up around it. So,

▶15:32HostYeah. And that kind of leads me into, um, my next question is, if I shadowed you for a week, where would I see you spending time on things that don't feel strategic, like the

▶15:42GuestKnowing the business is key

▶15:44HostIn other people's shoes?

▶15:45GuestSure. Yes, sure. I mean, you know, we're such a small business, only about 70+ employees. So there are 2 of us in people ops and I work closely with finance as well. So we're our little operations team. So you can imagine, We still are doing quite a bit of work that could be done in automated. So we're working toward it, but you know, you'll watch me running reports to reconcile our 401 and send the report to the 401 recordkeeper. That's not something that really should be done, and I'm trying to get that off my plate soon. But there are all kinds of things like that where we may have to still manually be typing letters or getting information to the right places. And I, you know, we have a new HRIS where we're getting into that right direction, but you see this in a lot of companies. It's very Wild West. You have to figure out the best way to sort of coordinate all of the data that you have. And we're a very data-centered company. So how as HR can we make sure our data is really clean? That takes a lot of time when you don't have the systems to support it.

▶16:55HostWow. what is one initiative you've rolled out recently that you're proud of?

▶17:01GuestYeah, I'll actually share. This has not been fully rolled out yet, but people know that we're working on it. So, you know, at the beginning of this year, as we saw that things started to change, one of our co-founders said to me, should we think about our values? And at the time I thought, uh, I don't know. Our values are so core to who we are. They feel really true still. And now that we've gotten further into it and the whole company is really transforming, we're finding instead of a maturing Series C company, if we're thinking about being more of an agile Series A company, we probably need to add a value that's around this idea of kind of like pivoting and iterating, being more nimble. and you know, cause it's hard. We know change is hard. Change, you'll hear over and over, I'm sure, change isn't going away. It's getting faster. So how do we start to make that just core to who we are and core to the expectations for employees? So nimble has been a word that's really stuck out to me. Someone used it in our employee engagement survey and I thought, oh, that's a beautiful word that we need to be a little more nimble. Yeah. So I'm really proud of it. I think I'm, I'm excited for the clarity that it may provide to people who feel like, why do we keep shifting? Why can't we make up our minds? And in some ways, it's It's not that we can't make up our minds, it's that the phase that we're in, we're still trying to find the perfect market fit. We're still making sure that we're doing the best thing we can for the customer, and that's going to take some experimentation in this new world of what we're, we're dealing with. Yeah. Yeah.

▶18:31HostThat's amazing. I, it just like a new question just popped in my head of like, what do you tell employees that maybe are getting used to being nimble, right? Like, I feel like people come into a company and it's like, oh, I'm, this is my job and like, this is what I'm supposed to be doing, right? Like a sure path of like, or their day-to-day responsibilities, right? And then once, once that changes, sometimes it can be very stressful for the employee. Um, so what do you say to employees?

▶19:04GuestYeah, we've been talking about this a bit, actually. I was saying change is messy. We know that when you're learning something, you feel— those are the moments that you have imposter syndrome. Those are the moments where you, you're not sure what success looks like. And I was just saying to someone today, I come to work to have an impact. When I'm not having an impact, I'm kind of like, oh man, what am I doing? Should I be focusing on something new? And so, when you're in this learning phase, you're not having an impact yet, and it can feel very confusing because you're going to work to have an impact. You want to have a purpose. So, what we've been sharing today is, first of all, learning is messy. So we're all feeling that way because we're learning, but also it's happening everywhere. It's not just our company, not just our industry, and we all are figuring it out together. One of the things that I say to our employees, we have such a strong foundation, and one of the things that we see best on our employee engagement surveys is that our people love working with each other. So if you can have that foundation and great people to work with, we are in a prime position to out those solutions. Before other companies do. If we're all going through it, at least we're going through it here where we can work together and we can get to better solutions and we can be authentic and use our voices and find the right thing for ourselves. Yeah.

▶20:23HostThat. It's so incredible. Um, If we sat down again in 12 months, what would you hope has changed most in your org?

▶20:32GuestJenna, that's a great question. I think I would hope that people were feeling the impact of their work. So, you know, again, right now we're sort of back to setting things up and we shifted into all these pods and new teams, but of course there's that sort of, what is it, the like molding, how you form, forming, storming, norming, right? There's all of that that has to happen first. So I'm looking forward to, in 12 months, some of this feels more standard and it's not on our minds anymore, and then we're really digging in and getting into the work and feeling that impact and even understanding how to get better and better from there. You know, it's, um, you get into these phases of the same thing is wrong for a long time, uh, but then I'm, I guess I'm looking forward to some of that learning feeling like, okay, it's learned and now I'm ready to start to focus on the real work and, and build that impact.

▶21:32HostYeah, it's crazy because I feel like making a shift like that, it's like it takes some getting used to,

▶21:38GuestYeah. Yes. For sure.

▶21:39HostRight? Like I, like, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but it's like making a shift like that, it's, it's almost like you. Like the team knows that it's going to be kind of maybe not one step back, but maybe a little bit, right? Where it's like, okay, we were kind of on like a, on a flow and then we made this change and then now we have to like take the time to get back on the flow. But that, like that shift would, I mean, it was done on purpose, right? Like it could help in the future.

▶22:11GuestYes. And honestly, everyone is already building their own flow, but I think the uncertainty they're feeling, I'm excited for that uncertainty to slowly wick away so that they can recognize this amazing work they're doing instead of second-guessing it. I think that's really the— that's the moment that you'll feel like, "Oh, people are going to be great." Yeah.

▶22:33HostI love that. and lastly, if there's one piece of advice for your community, something you'd wish you'd known early in your career, what would it be?

▶22:42GuestYeah. I was having a hard time with this one. For me, it is know your business. And really understand, you know, build trust and empathy for the people you work with. I think maybe a different way to say that is meet people where they're at, because I think it's really, it's easy to, let's say, see underperformance as simply underperformance or an attitude at work as someone showing up the wrong way. But often it's something else. It's something that's underlying that you don't see yet that's going on for that person that you can uncover. And most of the time people want to do their best work. So if you can sort of meet them where they're at, not make assumptions, to me that's been the biggest thing for me. Yeah.

▶23:35HostThat's amazing. You've left so much advice in this, in this podcast. thank you so much for joining me and, um, taking the time.

▶23:46GuestThank you. So great to, to spend time with you.