Since transitioning to a fully remote operating model, Yelp has benefited from some great business successes, such as reduced turnover, higher productivity, and a more engaged workforce.

How did they do it? Through their investment and commitment to delivering the best positive employee experience for their workforce.

So, to understand more about how Yelp is creating a positive employee experience within their remote working operation, tune into my conversation with Yelp’s Chief People Officer, Carmen Whitney Orr.

Our conversation is an interesting one. So, expect to learn more about:

• Why Yelp decided to transition to a fully remote operating model.

• What it takes to create a positive employee experience in a remote working operation.

• The importance of employee listening and how Yelp is improving its approach and acting on the insights

• Carmen’s top advice for companies looking to switch to a fully remote working operating model, and much more.

Listen to the full episode below. Enjoy!

Support for this podcast comes from Workday. You can learn more by visiting: workday.com 

David Green: It's generally accepted that the pandemic has accelerated many of the aspects of the future of work.  The last three years have seen numerous organisations adopt remote and hybrid working models.  There are many complexities to consider when building an effective virtual workplace.  These include fostering team collaboration and imbuing a positive employee experience amongst remote workers.

A company that's made significant progress in this area is Yelp.  Since transitioning to a fully remote operating model in 2022, Yelp has invested considerable time and effort into ensuring their employees have the best possible experience and it has proven to be a huge success, with Yelp reaping the benefits of improved employee retention, higher employee engagement and access to new sources of talent.

So, in today's show, Carmen Whitney Orr, who is the Chief People Office at Yelp, and I will be discussing the strategies Yelp is taking to create a positive employee experience in their remote working operation, and the integral role employee listening has played throughout this process.  I started the conversation by asking Carmen to share a little bit about her background.

Carmen, welcome to the show.  Before we dive into the conversation, please could you share with our listeners a little bit about yourself and your role at Yelp?

Carmen Whitney Orr: Hi, David, thank you so much for having, it's great to be here.  So yes, a little bit about me, I have been in HR for, I'm dating myself, but the better part of two decades now.  I got my start in HR at Home Depot, where I really grew up in HR and had an opportunity to dive into many facets of human resources.  After that, I spent ten years at eBay, where I was really focused on helping them to transition to a centralised HR model, as well as supporting a number of the operational and strategic business partner organisations.

As I was approaching my ten-year anniversary at eBay, I received a call from a recruiter who was looking for a Chief People Officer at Yelp, and I was just immediately intrigued.  I have moved around quite a bit for my career and have always used Yelp.  I've been a long-time fan of the product, it's just always been a great trusted resource for me to find out what's new in my new neighbourhood, or as I'm travelling where the best places are to eat or the best services to find; so, I was immediately intrigued.  And the way I think about looking at companies is always through a lens around purpose, people and culture.  And as I dove in and had my conversations with the leaders at Yelp, it ticked all three boxes for me.

So, I joined Yelp in January of this year, and it's been an amazing journey so far.  We've been really focused on our full-time transition to remote work and really, for the people ops organisation at Yelp, helping to connect our people to our mission and our culture, while really enhancing the work experience, which is now remote.

David Green: I'd love to understand, and I'm sure our listeners will as well, what prompted Yelp to fully embrace remote working?

Carmen Whitney Orr: I think it was really a combination of first listening to our employees and also seeing what was working for the business, and the juxtaposition of those two things told us that remote was the future of work at Yelp.  We were sort of forced into this collective experience, all of us, in early 2020 when everyone was at home, almost overnight, and we really had to rethink ways of working.  But I think really quickly, a lot of the long-held myths about working and the reliance on working in the office were debunked.  We've seen many businesses, Yelp not excluded, really thriving during that time, showing record business results.  So, it really proved to us that our employees can be just as productive and our business can be just as successful while embracing a remote workforce.

Further, as we listened to our employees, as we had been moving into this model, they were really very strongly telling us that they had a preference for remote working and they didn't want to come back to the office in fact.  So, we do employee surveys and through the course of the pandemic, did a number of surveys to gauge employee sentiment and also see how people were doing, and we found about 86%, in our most recent survey, indicated that they preferred remote work.  At the same time, they self-reported that they felt even more productive in a remote situation, with 93% of both employees and managers saying that they could meet their goals remotely; 87% indicating that they were more effective working remotely; and that was really backed by our really strong productivity and business results.

So, 2021 was a record revenue year for Yelp, we've continued to have a really strong performance in 2022.  We've just closed the third quarter with another record quarter, so those things really told us that this was the future for us.

David Green: And in terms of the spread of your employees, can you give us an idea of countries, cities, that that spans?

Carmen Whitney Orr: Well, this has dramatically changed since we've moved to a remote workforce.  So, prior to the pandemic, our employees were spread primarily around our eight office locations; 97% of folks were in the United States.  Fast-forward to today, I think 17% of our employee footprint is global, over half of our technology and engineering organisation sits outside of the United States; we're in six countries now and in all 50 states, so it has really dramatically changed our employee footprint.  We're able to recruit talent regardless of geographic location.  Our employees are able to move to locations that best suit them and their lives, either for cost-of-living reasons, or for whatever other reason.  So, quite a few have taken advantage of the opportunity and have moved locations.  So, it's really altered our footprint.

David Green: I'd love to hear about your experience, but also obviously what you're leading from a Chief People Officer perspective, around how an onboarding employee experience can work on a remote setting.

Carmen Whitney Orr: Yeah, I was super-curious to see for myself how it would work to onboard remotely, as I had been doing it for a couple of years prior to joining Yelp, and I will be honest, I didn't feel disadvantaged at all.  In fact, what I found on the candidate side, which was also true on the other side of the desk, that the process itself can be much more expeditious, it can be more inclusive as you think about the interviewing process, so I think that enabled me to probably have more touchpoints into the organisation before I started, as well as just an easier experience, and certainly the timeline was more compressed.

Then, for onboarding, similarly I've had large global roles for the last ten or so years of my career, so if you think about the way that that would have gone prior to being in a remote environment, you'd hop on a plane, you'd go to the various locations, you'd meet people, and that would take a couple of months to do.  I just was delighted, because it fast-forwarded that so much, and I think it again levelled the playing field, I was able to connect with people very quickly.  It also, from a Chief People Officer seat, it gave me the opportunity to then go through the process like a new employee of Yelp would and really get that bird's-eye perspective.

So, I'm actually one of two C-suite leaders that Yelp has onboarded since we've gone remote, and who are located outside of the Bay area.  So, our team has gotten more distributed as well and it seems to be working quite well.

David Green: And out of curiosity, again if we think about employee engagement, because obviously you've talked about part of the reason you've moved to remote working is because you asked employees what their preferences were, have you found any difference in the level of employee engagement since Yelp shifted to remote-first?

Carmen Whitney Orr: So, as we compare our surveys year-over-year, when we look at the most recent engagement survey from 2021 to our survey earlier in 2022, we actually saw a 5-point increase in employee engagement, and we saw a double-digit increase in intent to stay, which is really meaningful and was great to see, and our employees continue to tell us that this is their strong preference.  So, I would say all of the indicators have been really positive, that our employees tell us that they are able to take advantage of the time that they don't spend commuting to focus on their family or to get a workout in, or to do other things that are meaningful to them in terms of work/life fit.

We've also tried to really help them set good boundaries around work and life, giving them some tools, this is always a challenge.  I think being in a remote work environment, one of the challenges can be that the workday can spread from dawn to dusk and beyond if you're not careful about that, so really trying to give them the tools through things like core hours, core working hours, really being very mindful of meetings and time zones and encouraging leaders to make sure we're recording meetings, and that folks aren't attending after hours if they don't need to be.  So, I think those are the things that we've been trying to do to continue to support employee engagement as we're remote.

David Green: Yeah, it's interesting, because I was thinking when you were speaking about the engagement results going up because let's be honest, this is an employee preference.  Some employees in other organisations, they prefer being in the office.  Is it helping you from an attraction perspective, not just from the geographic flexibility it gives you, but from actually attracting employees who, from a lifestyle perspective, want to work from home; is it helping you attract maybe from other organisations that maybe you would have traditionally competed for talent before, is it helping you attract some of those people as well?

Carmen Whitney Orr: Well, we certainly believe so.  I mean, it's been a little bit noisy in terms of the data over the last year, just given the competitive nature of the workforce, which we'll see what happens with that dynamic over time.  Anecdotally, with the comments from candidates who we're talking to, many of them call out the remote nature of the work as being one of the primary reasons that they're attracted to us.  We have seen increased traffic to our job postings since we have gone fully remote, and we've also seen the roles that we source for, those have become much more efficient in terms of being able to attach candidates to those roles.  So, it does absolutely seem to be the case that we are able to attract better talent; there are a lot of variables in there of course.

David Green:  Okay, so let's dig in a little bit more to the wellbeing piece that you were hinting about when we were talking about the employee engagement.  There's a lot of research out there.  I mean, The McKinsey Health Institute published a great piece of research earlier this year that said 1 in 4 employees -- I think they surveyed about 15,000 employees, so quite a lot, not McKinsey employees obviously but from various companies around the world, and 1 in 4 were experiencing symptoms of burnout, which isn't good, and I think we can relate to that throughout the last few years because there's been a lot going on.

What it does highlight as well is that employees are seeking a different type of support from employers, there's definitely more focus on wellbeing and mental health.  Now, I know that Yelp is an organisation that is really valuing the voice, needs and opinions of employees; what have you found that your employees want?

Carmen Whitney Orr: Yeah, David, such a great question and I would just say first of all, one of the silver linings of the pandemic, to me, is the fact that it has brought mental health and wellbeing more into the forefront and into the dialogue in the corporate world, and I think that is so critically important.  So, we've normalised it a bit more and recognised that we need to be focused on our employees as whole beings and care for them holistically, and not just think about them as that one segment of their professional life.

As part of our employee listening strategy, we have actually made a number of changes to the benefits programmes at Yelp.  So, in 2021, we ran a benefit survey and pending the outcomes of that survey, we launched a number of new benefits, including work-from-home stipends to ensure that people are set up at the home to work comfortably and effectively; but also introduced counselling services, coaching services, professional development reimbursement, and increased time off and wellness time for folks, really in that recognition that people need to have that time and space to take care of themselves and that's really what they desire.

Those have been really well received.  We've actually just finished our 2022 benefit survey.  We've expanded it a bit to talk more about benefits and employee programmes at Yelp.  But what we found was really high satisfaction, in the mid-80s with our benefits, I think largely due to some of the changes that we made.  And we also found that the wellness reimbursement -- so we provide a monthly reimbursement for employees to use on wellness benefits of their choice and it's actually very broad, so enabling people to utilise that for anything from fitness classes to mental health coaching programmes to running tights.  I mean, it kind of runs the gamut, it's pretty flexible. 

But we asked people in this survey, as more of a conjoined analysis, which benefits they found the most valuable.  Over half of our employee base told us that the wellness reimbursement was the most valuable benefit.  As a result of that, we increased this year the amount of reimbursement, on a monthly basis, for our employees.

David Green: So you've talked about, I know Yelp is always looking at enhancing its employee listening strategy; can you share more on this, because this is something we're seeing from organisations around the world, that they're really stepping up their listening programmes in terms of frequency and everything else, and I know that listeners are always looking for guidance on this on what other organisations are doing?

Carmen Whitney Orr: We've been trying to streamline it a bit, so moving from more focused on the corporate wide census to a blend of approaches.  So, this past year, we did three companywide surveys and next year I think we're looking at doing two, but those are supplemented by pulse surveys within different organisations, active listening through focus groups for specific issues, as well as a number of different surveys that we do around the employee lifecycle, so things like the candidate experience and onboarding and development and exit.  So, we'll survey in those places as well.

But what we're really trying to do is make sure that we're connecting the dots, so there's a lot of different data points combined with many other data points that we have.  And so, if we really want to generate actionable insights, it's thinking about how do we connect all of this great data that we have, and then how do we get that in front of the right stakeholders so that we are able to take action.  As I said, we are very deliberate as we talk to our employees about, "Here's the feedback that you gave us and here's the action that we're taking as a result of it".  So, as we do our quarterly town hall meetings, I'm always a guest at the town hall meetings to talk about employee listening and then the specific actions that we're taking, so continue to link and label and make sure that employees know that we really value their voices, we want to hear them and that we're going to take action on their feedback.

So, as we move forward, it's really more about continuing to be very targeted and streamlined as much as possible, and connecting the different data points that we have.

David Green: It's impressive that in just about a year, you've achieved so much actually already.  I can imagine this being quite a big learning journey.  What would you say has been your biggest learning on the journey so far?

Carmen Whitney Orr: Oh, so many; how much time do we have?!  I think first and foremost is onboarding into a new organisation and then onboarding into an organisation that has decided to go remote; we have to reimagine everything.  So, as we think about designing programmes, the old playbooks don't necessarily work any longer.  I think one of the cool things is, one of Yelp's values is, and one that really resonated with me as I was interviewing is, "Be un-boring", so think about doing things in an unconventional way.  So, that's been a real blessing as part of this, because that's really part of the fabric of the organisation and has given us licence to think about designing processes differently in a way that's going to work for Yelp and a way that's going to work for our remote environment.  So, I would say that is one piece.

Then also, just onboarding into a new company, really making sure that there is enough context and understanding to avoid some of those tripwires that you might find when trying to design, so it's a little bit of go slow to go fast to make sure that our programmes have the impact that we want them to have.

David Green: And in many ways, I guess, that's quite a good message for all of us in HR, that actually in our organisations as HR professionals, we are actually having to help the organisation reimagine everything.  Obviously, the example with Yelp is that you've moved to remote-first organisation, but if we think about all the other learnings perhaps from the last couple of years since the start of the decade, with its fairly inauspicious start with a global pandemic, as you highlighted, employee wellbeing is really at the forefront now and I don't think there's any going back on that. 

The message has got through to senior leaders within the organisation as well, C-level, it's not just us in HR, who generally come into HR partly because we care about people, but it's actually the whole organisation.  And we're starting to tie wellbeing to business results as well, which is quite an interesting development really compared to maybe where we were a few years ago.  I'd love to hear your thoughts on that, Carmen.

Carmen Whitney Orr: Yeah, I hope there's no coming back from it, to your point, I think it's a really important part of the dialogue.  And if we think about human-centred design and creating organisations that are people-first, I think that is really going to serve us well.  One of the personal learnings that I've had over the course of the last few years is, and you talked about burnout, but just the importance and impact of rest on productivity.  So, just simple things like taking more breaks and building in more scheduled rest time, I noticed for myself, has enabled me to be a heck of a lot more focused and productive when I'm on at work, and I've really tried to instil that in my teams and think about the way that we drive that from a cultural perspective at Yelp as well.  I think we do that pretty well. 

I know the whole concept of work/life balance is not something I ascribe to; I like to think more of work/life fit.  So, how do we think about creating work environments that work for people and that they can make fit for their own personal goals in a way that it still enables us to meet the business goals.

David Green: People listening to this, generally HR leaders, HR professionals in organisations around the world, and many of those companies may be thinking of moving to a remote-first model.  What piece of advice would you give to those HR professionals or companies that are considering to do this to help set them up for success?

Carmen Whitney Orr: I would just say, listen to your people, really understand what folks are telling you matters.  And if it matches with what drives the business, I don't see any reason not to follow employee sentiment.  I think people really struggle.  I mean, we see the headlines right now about companies forcing employees back to work and feeling very arbitrary to employees when there isn't good rationale.  I'm not saying remote, it doesn't work for every company for every role, but if there is a case for it and your employees are telling you that that's important to them, then you'll get more productivity out of your folks if you give them that flexibility where it's warranted.

David Green: And is this something that you're continuing to track?  So, obviously you're looking at things like productivity from a self-reported perspective from employees, obviously looking at managers about their ability to get things done, looking at intent to stay.  Are you looking at other things such as how people collaborate, innovation, those sorts of things as well, from people working remotely?

Carmen Whitney Orr: Yeah, I mean we do measure productivity, and that looks different depending on the different part of the organisation.  So, obviously for our sales organisations, it's fairly easy to measure; for our engineering organisations, I mean still we look at the way of how we're tracking against our product roadmap, what are we shipping, meaning what are we releasing and are we on track for that.  So, yeah, I think combining with those metrics as well helps give the fuller picture.

David Green: We're going to move to the near future now, Carmen.  What's next on the agenda for Yelp's HR function; what are you going to be working on as we progress through 2023 and into 2024 even?

Carmen Whitney Orr: Well, we have a lot on our plate, but one of the things that I'm really excited about is our focus on leadership development.  And, to the point of post pandemic, remote working, this is another opportunity to reimagine what leadership development looks like in a remote environment, because the capabilities, as you know, for leaders to lead in this space have changed, and I think some of the expectations and shifting dynamic between worker and workplace require new skills for leaders. 

There's some great research out of Gartner that shows that you can build emotional proximity, regardless of location, and just by virtue of being together in an office building doesn't mean you have emotional proximity.  So, these are skills that can be developed in leaders, like empathy and leading it with empathy and intention, but there's deliberate work to be done to enable leaders to do that and to enable them to coach folks in this virtual way.  So, those are some of the things that we will be working on, is really how do we build a more robust leadership development curriculum that's really suited for the current environment that we're in.

David Green: And then finally, Carmen, this is the question that we're asking everyone in this series.  You kind of touched on it a little bit there from a leader perspective, but how can we as HR help the business identify and prioritise the critical skills it needs for the future?

Carmen Whitney Orr: Yeah, David, it's a great question.  I think it really speaks to the nature of true human capital planning, so how do we connect the business strategy with the people plan and really get a true understanding of what are the capabilities that we need to deliver on today, but also how do we take a forward look and understand how the business is evolving and what capabilities we're going to need in the future, helping the leaders to think forward to if there are gaps, how might we close them.

I think the only way to do this is really thinking about do you know your talent and do you know the capabilities that are going to be required to deliver against the plans?  And then, how do you think about growing your talent, or acquiring the capabilities that you're going to need in the future?  So, I would think that's one thing.

Then, I guess the other is, just harping back a little bit to our earlier conversation, be willing to throw out your old playbooks and reimagine what the business needs now.

David Green: Good advice there.  Carmen, I've really enjoyed the conversation.  It's really good to hear from a Chief People Officer in a company that has removed to remote-first.  I think it's instructive for listeners to hear what was behind that approach and how you're measuring it from an ongoing process afterwards really.  So, thank you very much for being a guest on the Digital HR Leaders podcast.  Can you let listeners know how they can stay in touch with you, follow you on social media, and find out more about your work and Yelp?

Carmen Whitney Orr: Sure.  Thanks, David, I've really enjoyed the conversation as well, and yes, if you want to follow us on LinkedIn, we post lots of great content that shows our amazing Yelpers and some of the cool things that we do in the community to help connect people with great local businesses.  And if you like, you can also connect with me there on LinkedIn.

David Green: Brilliant.  Well, Carmen, thank you very much for sharing your story with our listeners, and I look forward to hopefully connecting with you again soon, maybe even seeing you at a conference maybe in the coming year.