Why Employee Engagement Is so Important at Netguru: Q&A With Dorota Piotrowska

“Internally, we boost promoting our culture and employee advocacy through such initiatives as Onboarding, including the Culture part co-run by the CEO and myself, peer2peer Netguru Hero Awards for setting an example of acting in line with Netguru values.”

Dorota Piotrowska, head of people, Netguru, talks about how their company-wide human-centric culture is the basis for their robust employee engagementOpens a new window policies. She discusses how talent leaders can foster employee engagement and a growth mindset in a rapidly scaling, digital, and remote-first organization.

In this edition of #HRTalk, Piotrowska puts the spotlight on the need for leaders to create a sense of belonging, inclusion and equal opportunities in team members. She also shares some steps HR leaders can take to build a healthy work environmentOpens a new window .

Key takeaways from our interview on why employee engagement is important:

• Top tips on how an agile mindset works to manage a multigenerational workforce
• Learn what a deliberately developmental organization is
• Upcoming projects to follow in employee engagement at Netguru

Here’s the edited transcript from our exclusive interview with Netguru’s head of people, Dorota Piotrowska:

Dorota, to set the stage, tell us about your career path so far and what your role at Netguru entails.

I worked in the L&D field for many years, then expanded my work experience to adjacent disciplines: recruitment and diversity and inclusion management. I made sure I had both a sound academic background and diverse experience. I then moved on to explore the theory and the best practices of organization design and development.

All this, I believe, prepared me to take up the challenge of building the HR at NetguruOpens a new window while preserving the company’s spirit and drawing on the market’s best practices. When I joined the team in the fall of 2017, we had an effective recruitment team and a freshly created EB & Community team, but I still needed to design the entire candidate and employee journey. Since then, I have expanded the team from two units (4 people) to five units to be able to act in an agile and forward-thinking spirit. The five units – Recruitment & EB, Community & EB, Knowledge & Development, HR Business Partnering and Sustainability/Social Responsibility are 26 people strong now.

How is Netguru’s culture and employee value propositionOpens a new window positioned to attract the best talent?

Netguru has just made it to the top 10 EB leaders in PolandOpens a new window along with such companies as IKEA or Google. I believe it was possible thanks to our focus on culture, so crucial for a modern, agile, remote-first company. Pervasive culture 4.0. based on trust, transparency, partnership, empowerment, and clear values and norms forms a stable backbone around which we build our agility in a distributed team.

We’ve been putting a lot of effort into making our human-centric culture and norms cohesive throughout the company and understood by our candidates, newbies, and more tenured employees. Our culture bookOpens a new window is but one example of it.

We also put a lot of emphasis on communicating the Netguru way and culture to our candidates through different EB formats and channels. We share knowledge via online formats such as CodestoriesOpens a new window and our blog, run meet-ups and workshops and support thought leadership of our people. We also invest in SM channels. The Humans of Netguru series and Instagram takeover are some of our flagship EB initiatives showing Netguru as seen by our teammates.

Internally, we boost promoting our culture and employee advocacy through such initiatives as Onboarding, including the Culture part co-run by the CEO and myself, peer2peer Netguru Hero Awards for setting an example of acting in line with Netguru values, Netguru values world cafe aimed at ‘translating’ values into observable behaviors, or various community building, social engagement,Opens a new window knowledge exchange and integration events.

In your opinion, how can talent leaders foster employee engagement and a growth mindset in a rapidly scaling, digital, and remote-first organization?

It all boils down to genuine servant leadership. Our leaders’ key role is to build inclusive bridges between the company and the very many changes that it goes through in order to be able to scale fast and remain agile. Learning and helping others learn from their mistakes is a key skill required not just of our leaders.

To help leaders understand and prepare for the role, we have designed Leader Onboarding, which encompasses 16 modules in 4 paths.

The Culture path consists of the following modules:

• Netguru Values and My Values
• Radical Candor
• Communication Guidelines
• Change Management

Moreover, it is crucial in our distributed teams that our leaders foster a sense of belonging and inclusion, equal opportunities and individual care for their team members through team rituals and being mindful of their individual team members’ aspirations, expectations, and needs. It is not an easy role. Here again, we do our best to train leaders within our Leader Onboarding within the Context Path, which includes the following modules:

• Feedback Conversations Challenges
• The Role of a Leader at Netguru
• Netguru Strategy
• Agile Leadership at Netguru
• Consulting Mindset

 

Team Leaders are also supported by the HRBP team in all people development and performance matters. Each department has its own dedicated HRBP to advise and assist if need be.

Learn More: How to Drive Innovation in the Workplace: Q&A With Kellie Romack of HiltonOpens a new window

How does the digital and agile mindset tie in with today’s multigenerational workforce? What concrete steps do HR leaders need to take to foster a healthy work environment?

Regardless of the generation or any other dimension of diversity, today’s VUCA reality and rapidly digitalizing workplaces require people to work on their growth mindset, i.e. agility, embracing constant change and ambiguity. In digitalized workplaces, 90% of everyday communication is devoid of non-verbal language, because it happens online, mostly through tools such as Slack and Jira, so it’s prone to misunderstandings.

The key step for equipping people to cope with all those challenges is, again, education, on top of clear collaboration rules and inclusive company culture.

One example of how we went about this at Netguru is the Personal Agility diagnosis we ran for all our leaders to make them aware of what it takes to be a successful leader in a digital, agile workplace. All leaders were then to set a development plan around selected agile leadership competencies related to Individual Domain (Purposefulness, Learning Mindset, Change orientation) and Social Domain (Empowerment, Relationship management, Collaboration).

The next step is making our leaders aware of various cross-cultural differences (internal, external and organizational) and challenges, and showing them how to cope with them.

What does the term “deliberately developmental organizations” mean to you? What is the difference in the way a Chief People Officer and a Chief Human Resources Officer would approach this term?

Chief Human Resources Officer implies to me more of a transactional, technocratic role in general. CPO is to be more about managing the Human Relations (as opposed to Human Resources) function in a knowledge-based company. Knowledge harvesting, socializing, exchanging, curating is all crucial to development in our business context.

The underpinning of healthy deliberately developmental organizations is, of course, the blame-free culture 4.0. CPO is the guardian of that culture and needs to make the values and norms as tangible and pervasive as possible.

Surely enough, specific collaboration and knowledge management guidelines, as well as great digital tools, are needed to ensure that.

We believe in the best possible mutual match at the recruitment stage, and culture fit check is one of the first stages of our recruitment. We check for one attitude fundamental to making our employees successful and letting them contribute to Netguru’s success: a growth mindset. We define growth mindset as being open to change, able to question the status quo in a constructive manner, to give and receive transparent ongoing feedback, being adaptable and resilient, and learning from one’s mistakes.

Learn More: Designing the Employee Experience: Q&A with Sonia FiorenzaOpens a new window

Tell us how AI and IoT will be instrumental for HR and business heads to successfully implement agile teams.

For me, the key consideration here will be how to strike a happy medium between AI/IoT/automation and the human-to-human approach in the entire candidate and employee experience. It’s tempting to rely on AI. AI, however, will and should not supersede EI.

Can you give us a sneak-peek into any upcoming projects at Netguru on employee engagement that you are most excited about?

We are super excited about the second edition of Burning Minds, our annual, 3-day, all-Netguru internal conference, and chillout retreat. It’s all about top quality, internal knowledge exchange, and meaningful team integration. The 2019 edition was a blast. As an aspiring deliberately developmental organization, we keep improving and raising the bar. The 2020 edition is bound to be even better. We expect 600+ people to come. It is quite an exciting challenge for sure, especially keeping in mind that it is the all-Netguru community-building highlight of the year. 

Burning Minds – Netguru’s Internal Conference

What are the key trends you are tracking in recruitment and employee engagement?

Regarding the candidate and employee journey, I think that authenticity is a top trend. It is crucial that the message sent to potential candidates and the way you send it is cohesive with what they will experience in the company. It also needs to balance modern tools and approaches with a human touch.Opens a new window

When it comes to employee engagement, I’d say it will increasingly be psychological safety and fast-track development. People thrive in psychologically safe, inspiring places, which give them ample opportunities for growth, according to Josh Bersin’s irresistible organization model. I very much subscribe to that.

I believe becoming a deliberately developmental organization is one of the trends that are in line with this model.

More and more companies are heavily based on innovation and knowledge. They need an inclusive organization design ensuring a safe, empowering environment to own, always experiment and innovate. The informal organization design elements such as values and standards, norms, collaboration rules, incentives to engage in knowledge exchange, etc. are key here. It’s surely worth reviewing if they are in sync with the formal ones, such as KPIs, responsibilities or decision processes. This is what we revisit regularly at Netguru.

Another growing trend is embracing the remote work scape with its intensity and reduced personal context. On the one hand, people want the flexibility that remote-first companies offer. It has been the number one EVP element defined by our teams for three years in a row. On the other hand, it is quite a challenge to create healthy and efficient remote-first organizations. As our experience shows, fostering a safe culture based on trust, transparency, partnership, empowerment, and clear values and norms is fundamental here, together with great digital tools and clear collaboration guidelines.

Learn More: Solving the Work-Life Balance Conundrum: Q&A with Rachel Mooney of Snow SoftwareOpens a new window

Neha: Thank you, Dorota, for sharing your valuable insights on why employee engagement is important. We hope to talk to you again, soon.

About Dorota PiotrowskaOpens a new window :

Dorota Piotrowska is the Head of People at Netguru, the consultancy, product design, and software development company recognized for its growth by the Financial Times, Deloitte, and Forbes.

Dorota is responsible for building Netguru’s culture and employee value proposition to attract the best talent across the tech and business industries. She’s in charge of recruitment, knowledge and development, HR business partnering, community and engagement, CSR, and Netguru’s total rewards strategy.

About NetguruOpens a new window :

Netguru is a consultancy, product design, and software development company founded in 2008. Netguru builds digital products that let people do things differently – offering consulting, tools and resources to companies of all shapes and sizes – to make beautifully designed digital products in a way that’s fast and fits their needs. 

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