Meet Elina Roetynck, advocate for the BlaBlaCar Community
Welcome to Women & Allies at BlaBlaCar; a series of interviews of our team about allyship, support, and growth of the women we work with.
I’m pleased to present to you, Elina Roetynck, VP of the BlaBlaCar Community Relations Team. She radiates experience, and gravitas; a real “I got this” vibe surrounds her. As VP of a vast set of stakeholders, her leadership style requires impressive prioritization skills, and the ability to communicate clearly, listen expansively, and somehow still maintain focus. You can be impressed now, I know I am. It’s a great combination of talents for our series which aims to share more about these traits with our audience. Enjoy!
Tell me a little about yourself, what do you do?
I am VP Community Relations. My team consists of Customer Support, Operational Excellence , Trust & Safety and Customer Success. Our team supports and accompanies BlaBlaCar’s 100+ million community across 22 countries. A very international and a very professional, multiple award-winning team that I am very proud of! My main role is to give vision, organize the work and enable ressources for my team to do the amazing work that they are doing every single day!
I joined BlaBlaCar 6 years ago. Prior to joining the company, I worked in the financial services and investment management space for a few years. I have a very international background myself, I am of Armenian origin and lived in 3 different countries before arriving in France more than 10 years ago. I am fluent in 5 languages and have degrees in Business & Management as well as in Literature.
My international background and love for both humanities and business operations made the work at the Community Relations team a perfect match for me!
What would you tell yourself earlier in your career to steer in the right direction?
I was lucky enough to be able to recognize early enough what I like and what I don’t, what works for me and what doesn’t. And I was lucky to have the courage and support to change things early enough and let go when something didn’t work out. And I can’t stress enough how important it is to test things and not hesitate to change when you are young, because the more senior we get in our work but also the older we get, our life circumstances change and make it more and more difficult to explore different options.
So my advice would be to not be afraid to change what doesn’t feel right, and to experiment different things to find your way, be it within what you study, where you live or what your career looks like.
Are there any moments or experiences in your career that were catalysts for you?
When I studied for my Bachelor’s degree in Literature, I had my very first experience as a teacher. While I adored the work, I understood that this is not the path for me right now and it’s rather something that I’ll come back to later in my career. So I started exploring, both in terms of new options to change my direction in studies, but also for the work. I then worked at an Embassy and realized that a diplomatic career was not for me either, and that’s when I started to look closer to Finance & Management, topics that interested me for a long time from movies & books.
Later in my career, I’d say it’s not as much the experiences but rather people I met, managers, mentors or simply role models who inspired me and acted as catalysts for my career.
Tell me about a time when you felt supported here at BlaBlaCar, or supported another female on our staff
I manage a team of 100 people, with many women in the team and many young women who are just starting their careers. So it is very important for me to show by example that women can have what they want, be fulfilled both professionally and personally as individuals. And that it is all in our hands. What’s important for me is to stay authentic. My daughter can interrupt my meeting in front of the team or colleagues and I think that’s ok, I can leave work early and say openly it’s to take time for myself or my family, and I also don’t hesitate to say “no”, “I don’t know” or “I am not the best expert for this topic” when it’s really the case.
It took time for me to overcome some very typical clichée behavior: constantly asking for permission, apologizing, saying yes to everything, worrying about not being professional. And I overcame it thanks to the very inclusive and very open environment we have at BlaBlaCar, thanks to ExCo members, who in their turn, do not hesitate to openly block slots in their calendar for family or personal affairs, participate in meetings with their kids or animals and just be “human” and not only “professional”.
I think the best thing we can do is to set an example and show to fellow female colleagues that we can reach and successfully run a leadership role while staying true to ourselves.
What do you think companies can do to bring more support to women in the workplace?
To me the most important thing to realize is that women are not a “general concept” or a category. Women are different and have different needs. There is no “one size fits all” solution, even if it’s the most expensive or an innovative one. Every human being has different needs at different stages of their career and personal lives and the best support would be the one that is flexible enough to adapt to most of those needs.
Younger professionals might seek more mentorship and training, while women with family will surely privilege concrete help with childcare and child support. I am sure that women at a later stage of their career or closer to retirement will also have different needs, maybe more help with planning their investments and future after work.
My advice is to approach it the same way we approach our customers. The companies should study the women in their concrete workplace, understand what are “segments”, what are the needs for each of the “segments” and start prioritizing those concrete needs in order of impact and resources available.
What advice would you give to women in your field?
There are many women in Operations Management, but not so many in Leadership roles. In my experience, most women professionals are not afraid of the extra responsibility and challenges or even the stress that a leadership role entails, but are rather conscious about the work-life balance (or rather disbalance) that such a role, especially in Operations, might bring.
What I learned from my experience is that “it always takes a village” and it is naive to think that we can reach everything alone and only by ourselves (and keep a mental sanity while doing it all alone). So asking and organizing for help and support, be it by automating and delegating more tasks at work or at home, by demanding a more supportive environment from the management, or by simply asking for more mentorship and advice from more experienced colleagues, friends and family members, can bring many benefits.
Do you have any role models, mentors, or influencers and how did they impact you?
My mother has always been my biggest role model as she managed to combine and succeed in many different roles: one of a daughter, a partner and a mother, but also one of the most renowned doctors in her country and an internationally recognized specialist.
I think in general working mothers are my biggest source of inspiration, be it among celebrities, famous business leaders or people from my everyday life.
Do you have a motto that you live by or quote that inspires you?
When I joined BlaBlaCar over six years ago, we had 10 “BlaBlaPrinciples” Principles, but today we only retained 6 of them. One of the BlaBlaPrinciples we used to have was “Better done than perfect”.
If I am not mistaken, one of our founders commented this quote as one of the most valuable things to realize as an entrepreneur. I didn’t particularly pay attention to that one until I became a mother and a manager. Both events happened around the same time and were accompanied with a sharp increase in workload and responsibilities both at home and at the workplace. This is when I quickly realized that just getting things done and moving forward is already an achievement in itself and that we can actually lose valuable time and even sabotage our progress and our well-being if we focus on perfectionism and trying to achieve it every single time.
