I recently sat down to chat with Lori Almeida, Global Chief Talent Officer at Siegel+Gale. For those of you who may not know, Siegel+Gale is a global brand strategy, design and experience firm. Using facts, intuition and creativity, they blend science with art, unlocking the power of simplicity to help organizations realize their full potential. Lori has been at Siegel+Gale for almost twelve years and before was in a variety of HR roles at Sea Gate, Merkley+Partners, and ABC Carpet & Home.
An abridged summary of our conversation is included below.
What was recruiting like for you before Covid?
Our business model is brand experience and design. We have account people, strategy people, design, experience, we have some writers, that’s the production people, that’s the bulk of our business. Pre-covid, it was wonderful to run these sort of speed-dating, show your book, kind of events. It enabled us to see a ton of people's work samples and really get out there and meet the talent. We were able to go to the schools and see the rising stars, and try to get in early. It was just a whole different ball game than now.
And now?
Now they’ll send us a link and we look at it, but it’s harder to create that relationship that you would build. Before, if somebody came to an event at our offices, we would have wine and we would have cheese and they could talk about their work. You could build a rapport around seeing if they wore a jacket you liked or a shoe you liked, something you couldn’t necessarily get in the virtual world.
It was different, and I think even in the sense of, when you're speaking to someone, being able to read their body language. It’s so much more challenging in a virtual world, because I can’t see if you’re sitting perfectly straight but you’re sitting on your hands because you're so nervous. If you were in the same room, it was just a little bit easier.
So our strategies have changed a little bit in how we find people. Obviously it's not in-person anymore. It’s all virtual, and we have a lot of people I've never even met in person. And I think on the opposite side of the coin, it’s much easier to build relationships across geographies once people are in the door. In the past before covid, I would call London, I would schedule an appointment to talk to the head of London, and we would get on a call and talk, but it was so much legwork to get it done. And now we use Slack quite heavily. If I see the head of London on Slack and his green light is on, I just hit the telephone button and he pops up. I feel like there’s much more across-office connection, because the time zone thing is gone. There are hours that we’re in the office that overlap and when you see the light on that he’s there, it makes it a little bit easier to communicate.
I think internally it’s a little bit of a struggle with respect to once we hire the people and get them onboard, how we're acclimating them to the team. It takes a little bit longer to onboard someone virtually with: here’s where all the assets are, here’s how you get to this, here’s how you get to that. When you’re sitting in a room, you can just lean over and point to it on a screen. So the getting-up-to-speed is a slower process, which is very frustrating, but it is what it is.
I think we’re getting a lot of employee referrals right now, with people reaching out to colleagues of theirs, saying, oh it’s a great place to work, you want to be here, can I send your resume to our HR department. And we do offer a nice referral bonus depending on how senior the person is that you refer, so if you happen to know someone that’s great, it's a way to make a nice little side gig of cash flow. I think as we move forward through covid, we’re not going to go back to 100% in office, I think we’re always going to stay hybrid. So there is going to be that element of, you may not see everybody every day. You may see them once a month. So we are going to have to really figure out a way to make those relationships solidify. We do a lot of culture building events throughout the year. In New York we’re in a unique spot because we can partner with London and we can partner with L.A. and San Francisco, whereas to do the west coast and London, it's just too big of a gap. So we can do events that will include different offices, building up those cross office relationships.
What kind of events are you doing?
We’ve done trivia, we’ve done bingo, we’ve done paint and sip, we’ve done origami making. We did a lot of wellness-type things like yoga and meditation, and then we’ve done cooking class. We hired this woman who was a bartending coach, and she gave us this recipe and we all made it and drank it and it was so fun. Just things to get people connected and not be work connected all the time. The work thing is, yeah we have the commonalities of you’re working on the same client I’m working on etc.
But you really want to make those personal relationships stronger because that’s what really keeps people.
We’ve found that the clients of ours who have been proactive on these cultural issues have seen some benefit to going remote. Has that been your experience?
I have seen the benefits just because in reality, our office would not accommodate everybody if they showed up at the same time. We are some sort of hybrid workplace. Whether you're in the office twice a week, three times a week, once a week, depends.
I think for us it’s been nice. I used to commute, and to me, it’s nice that I'm home for breakfast with my kids and when they get out of school I'm home and they’re doing their homework. It’s nice not having to get on the train an hour and a half each way. Those three hours, I use them to take a spin class, to make dinner for them. I use it for things that help me become better balanced between work and personal life.
“Nobody has ever left and said it was due to being remote, usually they want more”
Do you feel that going remote has been net positive or negative for employee retention?
I don’t know if it's the remote working that has caused it, but we have had a lot of people leave and a lot of turnover. I think when people leave it's been for positions offering fully remote, all the time. I think we’ve seen people leave for west coast tech companies, double-pay. But nobody has ever left and said it was due to being remote, usually they want more of the remote stuff. You still have the more seasoned people at the company that feel like, I need to see butts in seats to validate that you’re actually working. I personally think that’s an antiquated view, because my team is all over the country, and for the most part they work on the NY time zone. But if they were to say to me, this isn’t good for my life, I need to work on the time zone I live in, I would be fine with that too, because we would overlap for a good chunk of the day. I want people to have work-life balance and find fulfillment outside of work as well. I think now that we’ve been able to be remote so successfully for so long, it's hard to make the argument that being back in the office is better.
A bit of a point of no return. You’re adding more time to your day without that commute.
It's really big. I moved outside of the city five years ago, and when we were in the city my commute was probably a half-hour. I lived uptown and our office is down by the World Trade Center. But because I was in the city, I had my city routine. I would go to the gym before work and then I would get to work by 9am. It all worked out. Once I had the commute to factor in, I was like, I don't want to give up the gym. But if I went to the gym before work I would probably get there at 11am, which probably wouldn't go over very well.
I think I'm much more productive and happier when I get my workout in and I just feel better, so I think that’s important and I think a lot of people feel that way. Even if you don’t have children or a dog, or other commitments, even if you live alone, people are looking at work very differently. Almost in a more European sense of the word.
You have to be very mindful when you’re unplugging at the end of the day. I know my team, they’ve worked with me for a long time. I don’t send them emails after hours. I program the email to come in the next morning, because I know they’re going to answer me. And I’m like, we’re not curing cancer, come on, you don’t need to answer me, I send it because that’s when I think of it. When we were in the office, I would have sent it without any remorse for sending it. Now I feel like: it's 5:30pm, I can't ask them to do stuff anymore. Everybody’s turning their computers off, and I set the example. I turn mine off.
“If you’re not really getting that sense of unplugging, it all gets blurred very, very quickly, and people feel like they’re burning out”
This comes up a lot with remote work. When are you at home and when are you working? If your boss sends you an email at 10pm, and you see it, are you going to jump on the computer and deal with it? And if you don’t, you have to figure that out.
You do. I reported to the CEO’s, and they frequently ask for things off-times, on weekends, random times, and I feel like, I'm pretty senior, I respond on the weekends if they ask me. But sometimes you really need to unplug. And if you’re not really getting that sense of unplugging, it all gets blurred very, very quickly, and people feel like they’re burning out. So it’s a tough balance.
So it sounds like one of the things you’ve done is you have some rules for when you’re going to send emails out. Is that something that you’re clear with your team about: this is how we're going about it?
We came back from over break and my whole team was sick. So we were closed for Christmas break, we get back and everybody gets Covid and they’re really sick. They’d already been vaccinated, but they’re sick. And it wasn’t like they were home with Covid and asymptomatic and perfectly capable of working. They’re feverish, sick, throwing up, they’re out of commission. I haven’t been sending them anything. I just have been doing everybody’s stuff to keep the trains running and hope everybody gets paid on the 15th. Because everybody’s out sick, and I needed them to be able to get better and recharge and then come back. I do have to be very cognizant of it.
“Now there are people that have no desire to work on staff and [just] want to work on really cool projects”
Everyone is talking about the Great Resignation. It sounds like you felt that you had a fair amount of turnover. From your standpoint, it seems there is some truth to that. What are you doing to address it?
In our industry, we do see a larger than normal turnover rate anyway. Media, communications, advertising, branding: people move around. The generation that’s coming into the workforce, or that has five years of experience, is of the same generation where every year or two they’re jumping. So we’ve got that layer in there. And then you have a lot of people that have said, you know what, I don’t want to do this. I want to freelance. And now there’s Obamacare. It used to be that freelancers used to work for you to woo you into liking them so you want to “buy,” you want to bring them on staff. Now there are people that have no desire to work on staff and want to work on really cool projects, and they want to be able to say yes and no to projects, versus, you're the employer and this is what you’re going to work on. So, we‘ve had to supplement our workforce with some freelance labor because they're talented and we want them.
The gig economy is becoming more prevalent and we’ve had to embrace it and work with it. For us it's easier if we book a longer term person for a freelance gig, just so we know from start to finish we’re going to have the same person on the project. I think with respect to flexibility that we can do right now, we’re doing as much as we can. Right now we’re back to being remote because of the variant, but I think in the future, we have hired people that will always be remote. They’re not living near an office. And a lot of people moved during covid. They didn’t want to live in a shoebox in Brooklyn. They wanted to be in Baton Rouge, LA. And Syracuse, NY, and places like that.
“It’s allowing us to hire talent from very different areas that we may not be able to hire in NY because they don’t live in NY.”
How did you deal with folks who were going to stay with you and yet were going to move? What were some of the challenges with that logistically speaking?
The tech piece was pretty simple to solve. I think the time zone issue was a bit of a challenge. Everybody initially was like, I’m going to work New York hours. We had a lot of people in NY move to the west coast. And I think now, working NY hours works for some of them because they get out of their work day at 3 o’clock and they have their whole evening ahead. For some of them, it doesn't really work and they’ve asked for different schedules. I think it really depends on each individual team on whether it can be accomplished.
As long as the work is getting done, I don't feel the need to micromanage my team. As long as everybody’s doing what they need to do, and if our time zones overlap for an hour or so to kind of catch up in passing, that works for me. But I think we’ve had to be a little more creative with it because we’ve hired people that live in North Carolina, we don’t have an office in North Carolina, we have no immediate plans to have an office in North Carolina, but we really wanted this person so it’s allowing us to hire talent from very different areas that we may not be able to hire in NY because they don’t live in NY.
So there’s a nice plus side to it as well. You may have this unicorn design person, we actually do have a unicorn design person, who lives in Orlando and he has two small children and he considered moving to L.A. But living in Orlando is pretty good cost-wise rather than paying for L.A., and he’s working L.A. hours, living in Orlando and it's effortless. And he’s been remote since he got here and he’s just been remarkable.
Would you say that overall it's been a positive or a negative, this shift that’s happened over the last couple years? And where do you see it going from here?
All in all it's been a positive because I think people are sort of reflecting on what’s important to them. And I think for a lot of people, being with their families and their quality of life and not their quantity of work is a value. And people are now demanding that kind of flexibility. I think it's a good thing.
I think if your employees are good about setting boundaries and not letting the home stuff blurr with the work stuff, just getting to be a big mess, I think it works. And I think it works well. It seems crazy to me that I should spend money on a train to get into the office to spend money on the subway after I spend money on the metra north train, to have to buy a lunch out, to have to race home to catch a train, to do the same thing to come back the next day when I can have more time in the morning where I can do things that I enjoy, and I’m still putting in the same amount of work.
I’m actually probably more productive because, during covid, or even before, we moved from offices to open seating. Open seating is so disruptive and hard to focus in, and at home it's just me sitting here working all day, and I can get up and make myself lunch, I can go to the gym if I want to. It’s a nicer quality of life.
Some people are really benefiting from it and really thriving from it and some people are finding it more challenging. It sounds like it’s working out very well for you.
It is. I would probably have a very different thing to say to you if I were single, living in 300 sq ft in NYC and in quarantine and I couldn’t see anybody other than my four walls. I think I may have wanted to get out, I may have wanted to be in an office setting. I don’t know.
A big thanks to Lori for sharing her perspectives and knowledge with all of us!
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Rocket pairs talented recruiters with advanced AI to help companies hit their hiring goals. Rocket is headquartered in the heart of Silicon Valley but has recruiters all over the US & Canada serving the needs of our growing client base across engineering, product management, data science and more.
