HR lessons learned from LinkedIn, Salesforce, Drobo, and Slack

For HR teams, hypergrowth (a chief aim of any enterprise startup) often presents major challenges. Traditionally, HR teams fill business needs over time, as new needs arise. However, hypergrowth stuffs all growing pains into an radically accelerated timeline — making it difficult for HR to recruit quickly enough or do enough to maintain an engaged workforce. In the space of a single year, a rapidly-growing enterprise startup can seem like two or three entirely different organizations.

To discuss the challenges of human resourcing for the enterprise, we invited several experienced HR leaders onstage at our 1to100 event: Steve Cadigan, former VP Talent, Linkedin, Ernest Ng, PhD, VP Global Employee Success Strategy and People Analytics, Salesforce, Mihir Shah, CEO, Drobo, and Dawn Sharifan, Head of People Operations, Slack.

The panel was moderated by James Richards (Executive Director, Trinet). You can watch full video of the panel below or read on for a few takeaways from the discussion.

Define hiring metrics from the beginning — and trust them

Many startups go through periods in which they simply can’t hire quickly enough. However, throwing bodies at problems is not the same thing as smart scaling. When HR is forced to hire without a clearly-defined strategy, the results aren’t often good. People get discouraged, become disengaged, and leave. Successful scaling requires a considered, intentional approach to hiring based on planning and pre-established metrics.

“I think every HR person will tell you it’s about balancing ‘urgent’ and ‘important.’ While you’re trying to build the track while the train is going down it, you’re also trying to plan for five years from now. Balancing those two things is very challenging.” — Dawn Sharifan, Slack

“You just can’t let hiring be that impediment to your growth. And so you just have to be really sure about your metrics and also, the things that you’re hiring for. Whether it’s the competencies, or culture fit, those things well defined from the very beginning, so that you can hire against those things, at scale and at speed. — Ernest Ng, Salesforce

Culture is an essential part of an enterprise startup — but it’s often misunderstood

Much of the discussion focused on the topic of “culture” — a Silicon Valley buzzword if there ever was one. (The subject also came up during several other panels throughout the day.) Contrary to what some execs believe, culture is not simply a fluffy idea or a list of words on internal poster. Culture can seem like a lofty idea, but in practice, it’s actually very concrete. Culture is the result of the thousands of decisions made across an entire organization, at all levels.

“Transparency, culture, diversity. How people define them and how people work through them are very, very different. Every company says the word, but how do you live it?”— Dawn Sharifan, Slack

While individual players certainly influence culture, no single person is ever entirely responsible for it — not even executives. Culture lies in the hands of employees.

“What are the three to five things that we’re going to operate on? How we treat each other, how we treat our investor’s capital, and how we make decisions to make this business successful. And now that conversation shifts from a top down culture push, to ‘Hey, these are a set of folks who have worked together a lot longer than I’ve been there. You guys define the culture.’” — Mihir Shah, Drobo

Since culture describes how a company lives out its beliefs and values, in a real, practical sense, employees will be turned off if they feel a disconnect between what a company says it believes and what it does. This kind of false culture can actually hurt a company more than help it.

“If you don’t believe in culture, please don’t put the effort into trying to write or articulate what a culture is. Because if you’re going to do what you’re going to do and it’s different than what you said, you’re worse off than if you had never talked about it.” — Steve Cadigan, LinkedIn (former)

Healthy culture comes with a host of real, tangible benefits

In a ultra-competitive market for talent in which employee tenure at startups is constantly declining, healthy culture is synchronous with HR success. It bolsters employee engagement, helps recruit top talent and can persuade employees to remain with a company, even when compensation shrinks.

“We had to get serious about culture, not because we got smart about it, but because we had to. It was the only asset we had. I couldn’t pay people more. We had to say, we’re only going to win the war for recruiting if we become the place the best people want to be.” — Steve Cadigan, LinkedIn (former)

“I reduced everybody’s comp by 10% when I first joined. Nobody left. They were excited about building something, and doing something for the future. We had zero turn over on a reduction in salary. Think about that.” — Mihir Shah, Drobo

Creating culture requires intentionality and transparency — and that takes guts

Building a healthy company culture is not for the faint of heart. It sometimes requires a deliberate decision to slow growth — which on the surface runs counter to the ethos of the enterprise. In other situations, it calls for radical candor and transparency in the face of bad news. These things require bravery from executives.

“You can’t think of culture as an afterthought, when you’re at $100 million. It starts at the very beginning. For Salesforce, Marc started the company with the culture that he wanted, and he was very intentional about that from day one. And that’s what you take into the hyper growth stage of your company. Because that’s the sort of, the heuristic that everybody works on — that culture.” — Ernest Ng, Salesforce

“I think that [a lot of] people are committed to the idea of transparency, but then you have to have a difficult conversation, and it’s really easy to back away from it. So doing that, and building a culture with intention takes a lot of bravery, and it takes a lot of commitment. And I don’t think people talk about that enough.” — Dawn Sharifan, Slack

This panel was part of NextWorld's 1to100 conference. For more content and videos, visit: https://insights.nextworldcap.com/1to100/home