Liberty Planck, Head of Remote Experience at payroll and HR platform Gusto, joins ChedHER to discuss how her role became an all-new c-suite position, why hybrid work is such a design challenge, and how companies can adapt.

chedHER

Busting Remote Work Myths

joining us now is Liberty playing. She's the head of remote experience at Gusto, a payroll and HR platform to Liberty. Your role as head of remote experiences is a new c suite position at Gusto. Can you tell us more about this role and your vision for it? Yes, absolutely. Thanks for having me. Um I really believe that hybrid and remote work are here to stay and that flexibility is the future. Gust has been around for 10 years. We serve 200,000 plus businesses, We provide peace of mind through HR benefits and payroll. Um and as you mentioned, the world of work is constantly changing and evolving and our goal at Gusto is to be ahead of the curve. And so we're thinking about how we set up our distributed workforce for success and that's where my role fits in at its core, it's about creating and ensuring purpose and belonging and equitable experiences for Gusts and I think a lot of that is figuring out how to I think best serve our customers as well and our customers are all over the nation. And so we believe that having that represented inside helps us build empathy Um to be able to better understand their pain points as they grow their businesses. Um something interesting for Gusto that we've actually had 47% of our workforce is electing to go fully remote and 30% of our senior leadership is also remote and so for us it's not a short term strategy in the future and so we're in it for the long term and I think my role as a reflection of that now you're a very unique career path. This included working on pictures, finding Dory, one of my favorites to a leader position ship leadership position at Apple. So how did this path get you to where you are today? That was a great question. Um as the head of remote experience, I think because I'm here to build equitable experiences, the a lot of my roles. I've been the first, I'm kind of a builder um and I think that it's part of like I see myself as someone who loves to build the ship and watch it sail into the sunset. And a lot of what I look when I looked through my career, I look at um the common thread and for me the common thread was experienced design. It was something that I didn't notice when I was in it, but when I took a step back and I really looked at it, I realized I really love creating that feeling of being known and belonging. And so I was approached by gusto to use that designer toolkit to understand the way that guests feel in order to build that equitable experience. And so I would call myself an experienced designer even when I didn't have that title and part of what that means is that I really love to use feedback and data as the foundation for designing an experience. Um because I really think it helps understand the mindset, the context and everyone's needs as a way to build empathy in their experience. And so augusto, I'm I'm representing the voice of gusts. I'm working deeply to understand how they connect and communicate and collaborate in this distributed hybrid workforce and I want to set them up to do their best work. Um and so yeah, what drew me to gusto was really the service mindset that they have, they have such an intentionality over how they work and how they serve their customer. Now why is hybrid work design? Why is hybrid work a design challenge? And what do companies most often struggle with? I love this question, employees, my favorite thing to say is employees are going to have an experience whether you design it or not. And so why not design it with intention? I think we're seeing remote and hybrid worker on the rise among businesses of all sizes and so in order to build that enduring experience, we were all doing it in real time. And I think part of that comes down to approaching it from a human centered perspective and a user experience design in order to understand as people change as circumstances change, as the world change changes. And I think that um yeah, having a process in which we do that is really all because of that. Um one of the things that I'm really focused on is trying to create um different guardrails instead of trying to say that in person and remote are the same. They're the same. Or how do we make these experiences equal? It's almost looking at what's unique about each of those. And then how do you design around that versus trying to constantly compare them? And so that's what we're really trying to achieve that cost. Oh is an experience that's equitable and inclusive. Now some companies are skeptical that hybrid work will work as a permanent solution. But what are some remote work myths that you often hear and why do you think they're just myths And this could actually be a sustainable practice? Yeah. This I love this. In order to create an equitable, engaging experience for employees. Leaders have to drop the miss. And a lot of the ones I'm hearing are things around how remote workers are antisocial or pneumatic only um that people are less productive at home um that virtual relationships are are more superficial. Um And then also that all executives are pushing for return full time into office. Um We found in some of our studies that 34% of companies with remote and hybrid workplaces say that they're the skills and experience of their new hires have improved and 27% reported that productivity actually increased as a result of remote work. Um what I think is really key for this is creating systems that enable trust and accountability. I think we have to let go of these outdated perspectives, but we do have to evolve the way we approach them. Um, and so I think that it will help us as leaders build the best experience for employees no matter where they choose to work from. Well, that's thanks to Liberty Playing. She's the head of remote experience at gusto.