Wish you had someone to help you figure out your benefits? Meet Dorena Sanchez, every Dropboxer’s personal guide to making the most of the perks we offer
In some workplaces, trying to decipher the exact benefits your employer offers can be a full time job in and of itself. But at Dropbox, our Total Rewards team works to eliminate the jargon, the hurdles, and the impersonal nature of figuring all that out. Meet Dorena Sanchez, the author behind our internal quarterly Care Chronicle and many other employee experience-focused content pieces. She shared with us her approach to benefit communications, and how 2020 has spurred some new adjustments to her process.
Can you tell us a little about your role at Dropbox?
I sit on the benefits team. I’d say our team is really awesome because we get to use a lot of creativity in our programs and how we implement them. Specifically, my job profile is Benefits Employee Experience Analyst, so my job is to make all of our content for benefits easy and delightful. That in itself is such a fun job because I get to put on the lens of a new hire and think of how to make things accessible and easy to understand, while also promoting the great benefits we offer.
What is your favorite part of your role?
My favorite part of being on the benefits side is that I get to work on all of our big emails that go out to the company. Our team is divided between program managers, who work with our vendors to get benefits and perks running, and then me, who kind of takes all that info and boils it down to the when/where/what/how and sends that out to employees.
I think the best part is getting to brand all of our stuff and make it simple for people to understand and utilize. I think a lot of our program managers think of things like, “Okay, step one is that we get the file, and then we send it to the system and it integrates with this other system” and so on, but for me, I’m like “Where do people click to sign up?” I get to focus on the easy details to help people enroll or use a benefit.
Is there anything in particular that you think about when you’re creating these comms that yields a high value in return?
When I’m drafting comms, I try to think of what I used to know before joining the benefits team. I didn’t know how to find a doctor or enroll in vision care — I never submitted any receipts for reimbursement if I had to go out of network to get glasses or something like that. So I try to put on that kind of lens like, what old Dorena used to know? Nothing! So how do I build up a foundation so she understands really simply?
You’ve been at Dropbox for five years and on the Benefits team for two years. How has the dynamic and landscape of your team changed in that time?
Seeing the team form has been really neat. At first it was, “What do we need? Who is our skeleton crew that we need to hire to get things to an ideal place? Who can help us develop different benefit programs?” But now we’re getting to a place where we get to be more creative. We have all the programs running, so the question now is more like, “How can we add someone who can help get the word out about all of these?” We’re also building out our comp team with more leadership of people who have been in the industry longer, so it’s been neat to see the needs of the team change over time, from “what do we need” to “what do we want.”
What do you see coming down the pipeline as we transition into this work-from-home reality?
We’re working on trying to figure out how to make all of our benefits accessible to people. For a long time, normally healthy people at Dropbox didn’t have to think about medical insurance, but now with a global pandemic, people need those resources readily at hand, so we’re trying to gather all of our resources so they’re available and accessible.
What are you doing right now to make the most of working from home?
Right now what’s helping me is maintaining a routine. I’m maintaining things like getting up at the same time, getting dressed, and going for a walk at lunchtime. I’ve learned that in the evening, the best way to transition into “I’m done with work and it’s time to relax” is to go for a short drive to break it up. It’s kind of like pretending to commute home, and it gives me some normalcy!
I’m also trying to find some fun projects to work on that are more creative than administrative. That gets my juices flowing and it helps me to focus more when it’s something I need to brainstorm about. When the work is fun, it’s easier to get stuff done.
Anything else you’d like to share about your team?
My team is unique in that we are all really good at tapping each other when we need help or when we’re unsure about something we’re working on. I’ve seen that a lot in the past month when we’re working on emergency comms about our medical resources and such. We utilize Slack a lot — we have a benefits team channel where we’ll post questions, and we’re all pretty responsive. It’s nice to crowdsource opinions and feedback.
We’re also really good at lifting each other up when we’re feeling anxiety about working from home, or when we’re not sure about the next step in a project, or when we’re stuck. We’re really good at coming alongside each other and helping each other to the finish line.
