Episode 10: Listening to Your People in a Fast-Growth Company with Tia Fomenoff

Employee ExperienceFast-growthCompany Culture

Aug 28

Tia Fomenoff has always loved helping others solve their problems—whether she’s placing people in their dream jobs, working with customers to make more money, guiding small businesses on the uses of social media or even recommending great restaurants to acquaintances. In today’s podcast, Tia shares in-detail how she and the leadership team have listened well to their employees, even adapted accordingly to the extent of giving a $2000 mental health spending limit for every employee!

Her unconventional career-path began in northern British Columbia in the non-profit and tourism industries, then shifted to focus on digital marketing and customer success at high-growth tech companies Unbounce and Buffer. Tia is now the Senior Director of People and Culture at Thinkific, where they build software that enables entrepreneurs to create, market, sell, and deliver their own online courses.

Some questions Tynan asks:

What are company leaders today realizing is the most important thing for their businesses when it comes to culture?
Are you seeing a lot of mobility (people bouncing around) between startups in your city? How do you deal with that?
When a startup Founder & CEO decides to introduce a Director of People & Culture role, what are they thinking?
As a non-native People & Culture leader, what has been the most challenging part of stepping into your role & what have you learned about yourself?
How do you balance non-traditional experience with the need for the compliance that a Chartered Professional in Human Resources (CPHR) brings? How do you split up these responsibilities on your team?
What is the difference between culture fit and culture add… and what does values fit seem to be something you look for when hiring?
How do we build cultures where people speak up?
How do we properly survey our employees? How do people at every level of the company bring forward ideas to leadership?
What mistakes have you made in your hiring over time?

In this episode, you will learn:

Great recruitment becomes a primary competitive advantage in a high-paced, fast-growing tech cities
How to transition from a different area of business (e.g. in Tia’s case, she was in marketing) to People & Culture (P&C)
Having a non-strict-HR background can be an advantage for a leader in the P&C department, you can understand all the roles & their needs, how to help people grow & be happy opposed to having a key focus on compliance
Diversity is very challenging to obtain when looking for culture fit. When you look for a values fit however, you will be rewarded in the beautiful diversity you have in your organization.
Amazing to see that when people are encouraged to adopt the value of “We give a shit” how people will roll up their sleeves to pitch in when needed.
Set up a channel for communication of new ideas to leadership! Having a flat structure internally allows for people to bring ideas forward to their people leader, even one level above without much feeling they are stepping out of place.
Structuring your employee engagement surveys with (1) evidence-based questions, (2) net-promoter score (e.g. How likely are you to recommend working at Thinkific to a family or friend) and (3) free and open-ended questions (e.g. What’re your favourite things about working here? What are some things we can do better?).
How to act on your employee’s suggestions, group them into themes, and then make them fully transparent by sharing them with the whole company so people know of the progress towards change and understand what is happening!

Connect with Tia: