Irene Hendricks

▶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 Irene to the Built by People podcast. Irene, 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.

▶0:54GuestAbsolutely. Thanks for having me. And Dave, I guess the best way to encapsulate my career journey is a bunch of different industries, destinations, and stages of companies, but always in the HR field. I've done everything from HR business partner to leading talent acquisition to the full stack for startup scale-up organizations, and thrilled now to be about 6 months in my time at Vimeo.

▶1:24HostIrene, I want to dive into your experience at Vimeo. You know, having been there 6 months, curious to get your perspective on how Vimeo's people-first strategy has evolved during its growth phase and what steps you've so far taken to attract top-tier talent to the organization.

▶1:44GuestYep, absolutely. Well, Dave, as a global organization, one of the things that's very important to us is making sure that culture and our employee offerings resonate in all of the markets that we do business in. We're officially in 11 countries right now, entering a couple more markets this year. And so we're about evenly split between the US and our global markets. And so we really try to make sure that we've got members of the people team on the ground in all of those markets to give us that real-time feedback. And make sure that what we're doing from a culture perspective resonates across all those locations. We've done a reboot of our organizational principles this year. And so while we had a great set of principles before, did a refresh on those to really help our whole culture anchor in our principles as an operating rhythm. Another thing that is very important for us is having connective cadences. And what I mean by that are ways that we come together as a dispersed organization with some remote, some hybrid, and some in-office employees in all of those different locations and time zones. And so we have some very intentional ways that we communicate and cadences to keep us aligned as a company and as a culture to make sure we're all pointed to the right north star.

▶3:06HostI want to dig a little bit deeper into that by asking you the question of what approaches you found to be effective in fostering a culture that is both inclusive and driving creativity at Vimeo?

▶3:19GuestYep, absolutely. So I think, you know, I'd be remiss if I didn't say that we believe in eating our own cooking. We have a lot of passion for the creator community, but we also have a lot of passion for mid-sized businesses and enterprises that use the Vimeo product. And so that's at the front of everything we do in terms of employee engagement. We simulcast our employee town halls around the globe, but of course we also record them. And we really embed that into the ways that we provide learning to our employees as well as asynchronous communications. And I think so often there's not a great substitute for live communication, but the video solution is really key and is the absolute best way to convey concepts in bite-sized and accessible ways.

▶4:15HostAnd Irene, how do you align human resource strategies with Vimeo's business objectives to drive success across the organization?

▶4:25GuestYep. So I think what I'd say about that is as an enabling function and as a supporting function, we start with What are the objectives and key results for our company? It's a great time to be talking about this because it's January and we're going into our OKR process. We kind of completed that right before the holidays, and now we're sharing out those OKRs across the organization. And we look at those really as a foundation for individual and team goal setting. So we think about What are the big rocks at the enterprise level? What does that translate to in terms of each team? And I'll talk about my team in a second. And then how do we break that down into its component pieces to make sure every Vimean, which is what we call our colleagues, shows up every day with a very clear sense of what success looks like? And so I, I guess a couple examples there. One is we're really trying to anchor on making sure that we are being agile in responding to new skills that need to come into our organization, SaaS company. So obviously technical skills are really critical. We've got an ambitious roadmap in terms of new features that we want to embed into our product set. And so that permeates both our talent acquisition function as well as the way that we bring folks together. We call it our gathering strategy to make sure that we're connecting people and having those strategy sessions and those live conversations that accelerate connection within folks. And we also have a growth strategy, which really focuses on making sure we're pouring into and investing in our people. So those are a couple of the highlights, and I'm happy to dig in more if you like.

▶6:13HostIrene, in what ways do Vimeo's products and tools contribute to enhancing employee engagement within your organization?

▶6:21GuestSure. So I'll give a couple of real-time examples. And I think for us, it's really all about making sure that we are getting information to people quickly and consumably when they need it. It's everything from newsworthy events and like, you know, how are we supporting colleagues when things are happening that are top of mind either in one of our regions to enablement kinds of work and making sure that folks have the information they need as leaders or as colleagues to do their job. Via recordings. We use written communications. We have an intranet, which we're actually refreshing and updating. So all of those things play a piece, but what we find is more and more things that we do in the Vimeo product set are the ones that are the most consumable and the most accessible to our workforce. And I'll give a personal example. I was about 3 or 4 weeks into my role at Vimeo, and I was taking my youngest child to college, first year of college, dropping her off. And it happened to be the exact same week that we had People Team Global, uh, town hall happening. And so rather than saying, okay, let's reschedule it, or I'm gonna miss it and have one of my direct reports cover it, I recorded a Vimeo. And so I was at that meeting via Vimeo, even though I couldn't be there live.

▶7:44HostWhat lessons have you learned about building strong corporate culture throughout your career? Especially in a competitive tech landscape?

▶7:52GuestI think there are 3 things that I would anchor on. One is that culture is built by everyone within it. And so, you can't sort of mandate or impose a culture, but what you can do is listen, you can iterate, and you can coalesce around principles of a culture, processes, artifacts that really help anchor that culture and give people congruence in their experience. I think the second thing is making sure that when you are either bringing people into the organization or developing into leadership roles, that they are culturally congruent, avoiding this sort of brilliant jerk phenomenon of people who can really deliver and actually build on that experience, um, for colleagues. And then I think the last thing is to be a bit flexible, agile, iterative. I think about the beginning of my career, many, many years ago, didn't have computers in my workplace. We had people actually writing messages down on little pink pieces of paper. And, you know, the way that we work globally and asynchronously now is amazing, but it requires very different tools. And if we were still working with little pink pieces of paper, I think that we'd have a culture that couldn't be as technology forward and as creative as it needs to be.

▶9:20HostIrene, any parting advice you'd like to share with our audience?

▶9:24GuestOh my goodness, so many things. But if I was going to anchor in one thing, you know, it's a trite saying, but to thine own self be true. And so what I would say is if you are thinking about joining an organization, make sure that the product and what that organization is about really resonates with you. Make sure it excites you. Make sure that it's something that's interesting to you. And then a day at work really feels like a very joyous experience.

▶9:54HostIra, thank you so much for joining us on the Built by People podcast. It was a pleasure to have you involved.

▶9:59GuestWell, thanks for having me, Dave. I appreciate it very much.