HUMANITY AT WORK
Every workplace these days seems to claim an amazing corporate culture. Before I worked at Gusto, I was skeptical about how people-centric any company could be. However, since becoming a Gustie I’ve discovered that it really is possible to have a remarkably “human” enterprise as an employer.
Working at Gusto means bringing your authentic self to the office each day. To illustrate what this means, I agreed to document a week in the life as the leader of the Customer Experience Insights and Operations (CXIO) analyst team.
What is Customer Experience Insights and Operations? We like to think of the Insights and Operations team as the group who conducts and optimizes strategy, operations, and systems for the business. On CXIO, we do that for the Customer Experience part of the business.
This means we use data A LOT. So it was only natural that I took a data-based look at one of the most family intensive weeks of my year: back to school week, which was a short week due to taking most of Friday off for my husband’s 40th birthday. It also happened to be an important week at work for building the team and driving the business, two categories of attributes Gusto values highly in People Empowerers or PEs (fun fact: Gusto doesn’t have managers; we have People Empowerers).
It’s a great week to analyze because although it’s an outlier, it’s like taking a microscope to the intersectionality of my life as Gusto PE, community member, mother and wife.
In this analysis, I assumed my waking hours were 6am-10pm, so 16 hours a day, 80 hours a week. It breaks down to 55% dedicated to work (broken out into Building the Team, Driving the Business, Self-Awareness, and Service), 33% dedicated to my family’s well being, and 12% dedicated to myself and my personal health.
Gusto expects its PEs to excel in three core areas: Driving the Business, Building the Team, and Modeling Self Awareness & Gusto Values (i.e. investing in understanding yourself and others, modeling a growth mindset, and demonstrating resilience).
I was close to evenly divided on Driving the Business and Building the Team, with less time focused on Self-Awareness. Surprisingly, I spent nearly as much time on service as I did on self awareness, due to two initiatives I was working on through Gusto for veterans’ families and computer literacy for low-income women here in Denver. (fun fact: Gusto encourages us to volunteer and even gives us a yearly allocation for community service).
I was pleased to see I got about 10 waking hours dedicated to personal health, which includes a few hours of gym time, getting ready for work in the morning, sitting down for lunch with a colleague (instead of at my desk), and reading a non-work related book at night.
If I shortened my denominator from waking hours to daytime working hours, you’d see the percentage of work go up, but I don’t think that tells the whole story of this week. If you’re interested in seeing how each day went, keep reading!
August 26, 2019
Monday
6:15 am: Wake up and get ready for the day. I usually start Mondays earlier with a workout but my 17-month-old was up during the night with a fever!
7 am Breakfast with the kids.
9 am: Every Monday morning I do weekly planning, which involves a review of my calendar, ensuring the right meetings are in place. I also keep a bullet journal where I list any of my “do not forgets” for the week, labeled “G” for Gusto or “H” for Home. Note to self: we are celebrating my husband’s 40th birthday this weekend. I can’t forget to pick up his present!
10 am: Prep for Biz Loyalty, our monthly performance review meeting, with our COO and interim head of CX, Lexi Reese (see Tuesday).
11:30 am: Take my oldest daughter to her first day of her new school. We have an amazing au pair who will do this from here on out, but I could not miss taking her on her first day!
I have a tradition of hand-painting their back-to-school signs with them. I know they’ll think it’s cheesy one day, but I’ll probably make them take pictures with these signs when they are in high school. As you can see, my oldest is already serving me up some skepticism.
12:30 pm: One-on-one meeting with one of my team members. One-on-ones are central to the relationship between PEs and the Gusties on their teams. These meetings are Gustie-led, and aimed at helping remove blockers, think through problems together, and discuss career development.
Here we are in one of our meeting rooms, which like all of our meeting rooms is named after types of customers, which we call Gustomers!
2 pm: CX Leads meeting. Every Monday, the 4 PEs in CXIO meet together with Lisa Robinson, who empowers us all. In this meeting, we went over the calendar and commitments for mid-year planning, the game plan for our CX strategy projects and operational projects, looked at metrics provided to us by the marketing teams, reviewed our quarterly objectives and key results, and began planning for end of year.
3 pm: Match talk with a potential external candidate for our team. At Gusto, the first step for job applicants is a match talk with the hiring manager, in which s/he determines if the applicant is a good fit for the position and whether the candidate should progress to the next step in the process.
3:30 pm: I fill out the scorecard for the match talk and prepare for some of the meetings and briefings I have later in the week.
4 pm: Biz Loyalty Prep.
5 pm: Head home for dinner (my husband cooks- thank you!) and bedtime routine (always bath and books) for the kids.
9 pm: Log back on for a review of the Biz Loyalty agenda for tomorrow.
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August 27, 2019
Tuesday
5:45 am: Upper body workout at my gym, E3 Fitness. I consider skipping because I know this is going to be a long day since I’ll be volunteering with Veterans with Gusto this evening. However, I know that if I don’t work out on Monday or Tuesday, it sets me up for a bad week.
8:30 am: My second daughter’s first day of her new school is today. I take her to school and give her a huge hug. We have another tradition of setting up a menagerie of animals next to them for their first-day-of-school photos, dating back to when they started school at 18 months old.
10 am: I have a one-on-one meeting with another team member who is currently remote but about to relocate to Denver. We discuss her first project, make a plan for stakeholders she should meet with, and discuss technology accesses she might need. Finally, we discuss her timeline for moving and what support I can provide.
11 am: I conduct a face-to-face hiring interview. Once you pass through the match talk, generally speaking, you’d come in for a half-day onsite and interview with multiple people.
12:30 pm: I have another match talk with another CXIO candidate, and fill out the score card.
1:30 pm: Biz Loyalty meeting with Lexi and key partners. At the end of each month we gather to review the month’s CX performance metrics and leading indicators we’ve identified as critical to predicting future success. It involves a great deal of preparation to scope out the different sections of the briefing and discussion, as well as suss out “the story.”
3:15 pm: One-on-one with my PE, Lisa. We discuss how the hiring is going — I’m hiring two more analysts — as well as current projects I’m working on, relating to end of year readiness and building the team.
4 pm: I meet with partners on the Onboarding and Invite teams to calibrate some of our hiring targets for this quarter.
4:30 pm: Depart the office with Veterans with Gusto affinity group to head to the Fisher House to serve a homemade meal to military families. We have many affinity groups at Gusto. The Veterans with Gusto group’s mission is to recognize, connect and utilize the value and experience of our service member community to include military service members, veterans, family, and friends of all nationalities.
Fisher House is an incredible nonprofit organization providing housing to military families while their loved ones are convalescing and/or going through terrifying medical issues at nearby VA or military hospitals. More often than not, families must travel long distances to be near their loved ones. As you can imagine, hotel costs can really build up.
Here’s our group of volunteers!
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August 28, 2019
Wednesday
7:30 am: Get kids dressed and ready for school.
8:30 am: Drive in to work (listening to Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility for our CEO Josh Reeves quarterly book club).
9 am: Look at candidates who have applied to CXIO; indicate to the Invite team if any should move forward into match talks.
10 am: I take some quiet time to crunch numbers relating to growth and CX hiring. We’ve built a few models over the past several months to conduct predictive analysis in this area. As part of the quality control and evaluation phase we periodically audit the numbers with progress we’ve made. With multiple stakeholders, this often involves asking questions: “Do we have the most updated numbers here?” “Any movement since we last talked?”, etc.
10:45 am: Organize orientation sessions and schedule tours for Women with Gusto’s upcoming volunteering project at the Women’s Bean Project.
11:30 am: Attend CX staff meeting. This meeting is where Lexi Reese, in her capacity as interim head of CX, meets with all the CX directs who operate the business. CXIO plays a support role in these meetings, providing analysis and updates where required. Here is a photo of the end of the meeting where Lexi is asking us to rate the meeting on a scale of 5: “Fist or Five!”
12:30 pm: Lunch.
1:30–3 pm: One-on-one meetings with newer members of the broader CXIO team.
3 pm: Demystifying “Situational Leadership” session with one of the members of my team. I underwent SLII training in July (thank you, Gusto!), and believed it would be more impactful if I explained the approach to those I empower. Specifically, jointly agreeing on development levels for each of their Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) for the quarter.
The idea is that every person holds a range of developmental skill levels, depending upon the task they are doing. For example, one’s aptitude for building a strategy deck might be higher than one’s aptitude for managing a cross-functional project, depending on experience. As such, the person who empowers should adapt their leadership style from directing (the most involved) in low developmental situations, to coaching (medium involvement) for intermediate development levels, to delegating (the least involved) to more expert level situations.
5 pm: Meeting to review a colleague’s memo relating to a potential vendor relationship.
5:30 pm: Go pick up husband’s birthday present at the Apple store.
6:30 pm: Go home to do bath and books with the kids. The girls are obsessed with the Magic Tree House series!
9 pm: Read my book.
August 29, 2019
Thursday
5:45 am: Lower body workout at E3
10 am: Conduct market research interview relating to a vendor relationship.
10:30 am: One-on-one meeting with one of my team members.
11 am: Face-to-face hiring interview. Fill out scorecard.
12–2:30 pm: PE 101 training. Alyssa Thelen, pictured here, led this training. It is based on how to give feedback and how to respond to certain situations in the workplace.
2:30 pm: Recruiting sync with my hiring partner on the Invite team to go over candidates for the open positions on my team.
3 pm: Match talk with another candidate.
3:30 pm: Knock out some of my to-dos coming out of our CX Leads meeting.
4:30 pm: Review candidates for hiring position.
5 pm: Go home to enjoy dinner AND bedtime routine with the kids, plus pack for husband’s 40th birthday celebration in Vail!
August 30, 2019
Friday:
8–10am: Knock out a memo evaluating project management software our team is considering using.
10 am: Out of Office! Good friends begin to arrive to celebrate my amazing spouse and life-partner. He helps me do this little thing called work-life balance! Here’s a picture of us rafting down the Colorado River!!!
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