Summary: In this episode of the HR Impact show, CheeTung Leong interviews Shana Sweeney, the Chief People Officer at SugarCRM. They discuss how SugarCRM transitioned from a partially remote hybrid team to a fully remote team eight years ago, way before the COVID-19 pandemic. Shayna shares insights into the challenges they faced with hybrid meetings and promotion opportunities for remote employees. She also explains their structured onboarding process and the importance of mapping out the employee journey. The episode concludes with Shayna's advice on how to manage the employee lifecycle for remote or hybrid teams.

Key Takeaways:

SugarCRM transitioned to a fully remote team eight years ago, which made the transition to remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic easier.

Hybrid meetings with some people in the room and some people on Zoom were challenging and hampered productivity.

Remote employees had fewer promotional opportunities compared to in-office employees, leading to a focus on addressing this issue.

SugarCRM has a structured onboarding process, including executive meetings, check-ins, and surveys to ensure new hires feel supported and engaged.

The company mapped out the employee journey and identified key moments that matter, such as promotions, life events, and departures.

Chapters:

[0:02:06] Evolution of SugarCRM's remote work policy

[0:05:06] Transition to a fully remote workforce during COVID-19

[0:07:07] Challenges of hybrid meetings and collaboration

[0:10:22] Effective onboarding process for remote employees

00:12:50 Creating connections and channels for employees

0:14:09 Correlation between survey question and likelihood of leaving

0:17:52 Ongoing adjustments to support employees at different stages

0:20:57 Tips for managing the employee lifecycle in a remote or hybrid workforce

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She's the Chief People Officer at SugarCRM and it's a real pleasure to have you on the show Shana.

Shana Sweeney: Thanks. Thanks so much for having me.

CheeTung (CT) Leong: For those of the listeners who may not be aware, could you share a little bit more about what SugarCRM does?

Shana Sweeney: Yeah, absolutely. So at SugarCRM, we sell customer experience software. We sell an entire platform of software that helps Salespeople sell, marketers market, and customer service people give their customers exemplary experiences.

Shana Sweeney: Our team is very small. So first of all, we have about 500 employees located in 13 countries around the globe. Unlike a lot of employers our size, we do provide direct HR services and employ people directly in those countries. So I have an HR team of three people and we're scattered around the globe with different expertise for different regional areas.

We try to make customers for life. And so we try to make employees for life on the HR side. We support employees everything from, hiring recruitment, onboarding all through their employee life cycle and employee journey and everything that comes with it.

What was the evolution like over time?

Shana Sweeney: So I've been with sugar for about eight years. When I first started we had a couple larger offices in some locate. We had two in the U. S. And one in Germany and I think a really small Australia office. But we also had about 20 to 30 percent of our employees were home based employees at that time.

We were hybrid before hybrid was a word, we just didn't have a word for it then. So we dealt with a lot of the issues that people are dealing with now. And then even with our office space, , everyone had flexible working time and hours. No one was really in the office five days a week. There's probably a few people that were because they chose to be.

So the more we had food or celebrations or big meetings that always brought people in. Those days we didn't have those things there were significantly less people in. We had a lot of challenges with meetings because in the hybrid world with meetings, you have some people in a room, you have some people at home.

We had meeting rules on the wall for dealing with that where we'd appoint one person as the meeting coordinator where anyone that was at home could ping them and say I need to say this point, but I can't get a word in edgewise. And that person would be responsible for stopping the conversation in the room to say, this person on the phone has something they want to say.

We started thinking Hey, we already have all of these people working from home and it seems to work well. Why don't we just start expanding recruiting anywhere so that we can get a better talent pool. We think we can make this work from all of the things that we've learned along the way.

So we started recruiting all over the globe. Our employee population started growing globally. We had people everywhere. I think when COVID hit, we were about 50 50 home based versus office based. And so we were in frankly, in a great place to transition really easily to home based work because we already had everything in place to support the home based employees.

Here's how you avoid burnout. Here's how you build effective boundaries. And then during COVID, our leases were coming up for a lot of our real estate. We were like, you know what, we think we can make this remote thing work. And so we let all of our leases go and we committed to being basically a home based workforce,

CheeTung (CT) Leong: What made you guys move towards a hybrid type arrangement from the get go? Was that from practicalities of having a distributed team, or was it more for talent attraction which did become a greater feature later on?

CheeTung (CT) Leong: At the same time, you mentioned also the engineers were not really coming in full time. So was that for practical reasons, just give them more , focused time , to do their work?

Shana Sweeney: Yeah, it was to give them more focus time because we found that, at least on the engineering side, it's a lot easier to code when you're not having distractions during the day. When you can have like a meeting free day and you can just absolutely have that deep work and that deep focus. We saw, better products coming out, better quality, happier engineers because they weren't getting pulled into different directions. So we had started migrating that way so that they could have that deep work focus.

Shana Sweeney: I think the meetings were probably the hardest with, some people in the room and some people in zoom. That was one of our biggest struggles with hybrid. And it definitely hampered productivity. We saw productivity and collaboration increase when everyone was on their own zoom meeting and working remotely.

But that hybrid, like half in office, half not in office, it was definitely a challenge on the meeting side. Cause people couldn't get their point across. When you're trying to collaborate and share ideas, it can be really hard if you can't even get a word into the meeting. While we tried to have the meeting coordinators didn't always happen, or sometimes the person was not great at it and we'd get so caught up in the meeting, they'd forget to look at their computer to see that people were pinging them about stuff.

CheeTung (CT) Leong: So either having everyone in the room or nobody in the room and everyone's remote. So it sounds like that was an unsolved issue, pretty much. very pertinent today because so many companies are still trying to make that work.. The second question I wanted to ask about was you mentioned promotion opportunities for people who are remote. Now that is something that a lot of companies are still facing today. There are two approaches to it. There's the stick approach, which is if you don't come back to the office, you're not going to get promoted. Then there's the softer approach, which is, come back to the office and then, over time you get exposed to mentorship or whatever it is, and it helps you to advance your career.

How did you guys solve that if at all?

Once we had discovered the issue, we raised it and raised awareness and we ran some internal programs to try to help people who are home based manage their own career and speak up more and have a little more engagement and have those conversations with their managers. But it was a really difficult challenge to solve because if you're in front of people you tend to be recognized more and memories are short and people really like to focus. There's the immediacy effect in performance reviews where people only think of what just happened recently. And that was happening with promotions.

CheeTung (CT) Leong: When we look at just managing a team that's fully remote. How do you onboard them effectively?

Shana Sweeney: We start at the pre boarding stage because we have people in different regions. They may have notice periods where they may not start for three months after they've accepted a job or, two months. And so we send a little gift, after the person signed, but before they've started, thanking them for choosing us.

So we group new hires in monthly basis, each month and each executive goes through, we meet with the new hires, we talk a little bit about here's our department. Here's what we do. Here's how you work with us. Here's what our values are. So that they're integrated a little bit more into the company.

They know how we work. They have that visibility into how things work across the company and how the departments work together. Then we ended in an ask me anything session with our CEO, where people have the chance to just sit down with the CEO and chat and ask any questions that they might have from everything that they've learned. We run this continually and so as to not overburden our executives, cause at first we were like, Ooh, they're never going to sign up for this. They're really busy people,

We got their buy in. We paired up some of the executives that had similar functions.

That kind of breaks up the time and it was a lot easier sell for us as HR to go to the executive team to say, we want 1 hour of your time a month. We get great feedback from it. We have no turnover in the first year. It's 0 percent people just don't leave in the first year. That's been pretty consistent.

We also do a check in at 90 days to see how employees are doing. We have just a short survey, and there's one question on the survey Is the job meeting the expectations that you thought when you started.

If people say no on that question, they're more likely to leave. If anyone says no we do an intervention with the manager to say, Hey, this employee isn't getting what they need. We need to make sure that we're supporting them. So the manager will sit down with the employee and check in.

There's even a channel for roller derby. You name it. And so that gives people also a chance to have some connection with people outside of their department. Managers have a template when they onboard someone, they plan out their first week and set up meetings for their new hire.

So their new hire can meet everyone on the team and, also have time to do some compliance training, which is less exciting part of onboarding. There's a lot that goes on with, making people feel welcome. We also send them a gift after they've started of company swag, since we don't have a physical office.

So they could have some physical representation of the company.

All the different activities for the new hires, all the scheduling that's going on, the gifts that you've got to send out.

Shana Sweeney: In our HR system we have built in task lists that assign the different tasks to the different people on the team. It makes it pretty easy to keep track of. And then we also have some separate checklists. We have a lot of processes, but we have checklists so that we don't forget steps.

CheeTung (CT) Leong: You tie their responses on the 90 day survey to their likelihood to leave. Obviously, this works because you're seeing zero first year attrition, which is incredible. I love the data driven approach to this.

How did you make that connection?

Shana Sweeney: I'm a data nerd and I will run regressions on just about any data I can find to see if there's any type of correlation, just because I think it's interesting. So we had started the survey and I was looking at turnover data and I was like, Oh, a few of these people, this was years ago were leaving in the first year.

CheeTung (CT) Leong: Wow.

Shana Sweeney: probably the highest correlation I've ever found in anything HR related.

CheeTung (CT) Leong: Do you remember exactly how that question was phrased?

Shana Sweeney: Oh, it's simple. It's, do you feel the company is meeting your expectations?

CheeTung (CT) Leong: And it's a yes, no question like that simple?

Shana Sweeney: It's yes, no, and undecided.

CheeTung (CT) Leong: Yes. No. Undecided. Wow.

Shana Sweeney: Anytime anyone answered no or undecided, a hundred percent of the time, they did not stay at the company for longer than a year.

CheeTung (CT) Leong: You have mapped out the whole employee life cycle for someone at sugar CRM. Lots of people ops departments say they do life cycle management, but they don't even have that life cycle kind of mapped out anywhere now, but you have. So tell us a little bit more about that process. How do you go about identifying different aspects of that journey, especially when you're not even seeing half the employee population or even more in person ever.

You could drag and drop stuff. We just started thinking about, okay, what are those moments that matter? What are those key things? We wrote them down. Then we decided we'd do focus groups with employees because What if we were wrong?

What if our version of what those moments were was incorrect and we were making assumptions. We did some focus groups with employees. We just picked a cross section of employees from around the globe from different levels, different departments, different countries, we got them into a room and we Just started asking them what are those moments that have mattered in your time at sugar?

And that was a moment that really mattered to a lot of people. Then there were things where people had life events outside of work. We would send people stuff periodically. That was also a moment that mattered to people that they cared a lot about. we took all of that in one, go, and then we started going, all right, what can we do as HR to support?

Also, what did the managers need to support people in these different aspects. It's always going to be ongoing because the employee journey changes as things change in the company. It needs to be dynamic. We would go through and be like, oh, someone's going out on leave.

So lots of different things. Similarly, when people leave, we always try to have people leave with a positive feeling about the company so that if they want to come back. They'll come back or if their new job isn't what they think it is and they reach back out to us, we can hire them [00:19:00] back.

We do have a lot of people that come back to the company after leaving.

CheeTung (CT) Leong: At a very high level, could you describe what you found that the employee journey at Sugar looks like today?

Shana Sweeney: Yeah, obviously it starts with pre boarding and then it moves on to onboarding and then The first 90 days is a pretty strong marker that we found Was the make it or break it time if people felt like they had chosen the right place and felt like they belonged. We also found the year mark was a big piece where people wanted to know how they were doing.

People get married, we send them a gift, which I know, common in a lot of non U. S. countries, but not as common in U. S. employers. When people have babies, we send them baby blankets and a little teddy bear. As people get promoted, that's a stage in the employee life cycle.

As people leave, there's lots of different flavors of why people leave, whether it's voluntary, involuntary, whether it's retirement. We have different things in place for each of those different types of people leaving. When things aren't going quite right. Sometimes people have performance issues. Managers don't know how to coach them. So there's little pieces in there as well.

Shana Sweeney: So just get a whiteboard, whether it's physical or virtual, and start writing stuff down. It doesn't have to be complex. And then... Cross check it with your employees and get a little focus group.

We just did three focus groups with about 10 people each. It doesn't have to be a massive cross section. You don't have to ask everyone. You don't have to do a formal survey. You can have three questions for your focus group and chat with people but have someone be the note taker so that you're getting the quality feedback.

You can ask what are those moments that mattered to you in your employee journey here? Why do you stay here? And they'll tell you all the great things they love about your company, which is lovely and uplifting.

Sit down and think about the things that you can do at those different moments that matter. And then take some people from around the company and ask them their opinion on it. Would you like this? Would you not like this? One of my best recommendation that I can give is in HR, we always have a group of people that are very vocal about anything.

Use those people to get feedback on your programs because they will give you the most unbiased, open feedback of anyone in the organization. So take what you're proposing and then go to those somewhat difficult vocal people and ask them for their feedback. You'll get the best feedback you could possibly imagine. Then they feel like they're being listened to and included. So it's a win all around.

Shana Sweeney: They can find me on LinkedIn. I'm Shayna Sweeney.

CheeTung (CT) Leong: Thank you so much for hanging with us today, Shana. I really appreciate it. And for those of you listening, I hope you enjoyed the show. If you found value in this, feel free to head over to www. engagerocket. co slash HR impact. And join our community and you get more podcasts like this one hitting your favorite podcast player every single week.

So thanks so much for listening. My name's been CT talk to you next time.