I was reshuffled after only a month at SumUp; this is how this move boosted my onboarding experience

I joined SumUp as a Sales Operations leader but the pandemic created an opportunity for me to lead the squad in charge of helping SumUppers adapt to working from home.

Ariadne Nardeli — Sales Ops Coordinator | Remote Work Squad Leader

I had been in Sales Operations at SumUp for only a few weeks when the invitation to lead the Remote Work squad came up. The company had transitioned 100% of its workforce to work from home almost overnight and now they were putting together a multidisciplinary team who would help SumUppers get the best of their remote experience.

I had a general idea of how remote teams worked because, a few years before I joined SumUp, I had founded a company that connected digital nomads and freelancers to companies who needed on-the-ground information in the locations where these professionals were. Yet, while the company I founded operated with people who were already working remotely and therefore knew how to work in a distributed setup, the challenge at SumUp was about supporting people who mostly had never worked distributedly. So I knew that there wouldn’t be much of my previous experience that I could use in the new project.

In addition to knowing that I had no experience in the particular context of the project, I knew that, having been at SumUp for only a month and a half, I was still learning about the company, the culture and the people. When my direct leader, the Head of Sales, invited me to take over the remote work initiative, I felt plain fear. “Can I really lead such an important initiative during my onboarding?”, I thought. Earlier in my life, when I found myself in similar crossroads, I’ve always chosen to take my chances in spite of the fear I felt. So I said yes to leading the Remote Work squad.

It’s been 2 months since that yes. The team and I worked hard to support SumUppers in their new setup, from ensuring that they had better infrastructure at home and could take the necessary furniture and equipment from the office, to designing a financial support program to help people pay for the raise in household expenses now that they were full time at home. We’ve worked alongside other teams, like People, to support leaders in leading their distributed teams and to leverage our Employee Mental Health program in the pandemic context.

When the first month ended, we had our first retrospective session. As the team highlighted what we had done, what we had learned and what we would like to celebrate, I knew that was a journey of gratitude and growth for all of us. For me particularly, listening to the team’s feedback about how glad they were to have me was also moving because it made me realize two things:

1. The reshuffle was a big boost to my onboarding experience. Hadn’t I been reshuffled, it would probably take me months to have the same perspective about SumUp, to learn about its culture and get to know the people I met;
2. I am not a Sales professional only, even though Sales and Business Development are the biggest part of what I’ve done professionally so far. I know now that I can work on different areas and lead people with different backgrounds and expertise — and manage to deliver great results with them, even when I feel fear.

In the next and final story of the Reshuffle series, you will meet Rodrigo Kleinert. He took advantage of his knowledge and experience in one of our Sales Programs to get reshuffled to a squad specialized in Customer Acquisition. The move got him on track to become a Product Manager, a career change long awaited by him.