When Binder joined Asana, there was no semblance of a people org. HR responsibilities were distributed across the startup, with different pockets of people each tending to different parts. Enter Binder. 

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“There were a zillion different things that I could have done coming into that people role,” she recalls. The key challenge for any early-stage people leader? Knowing which to tackle first. Binder breaks it down in simple terms: 

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Step 1: Talk to loads of people, not just the leadership team

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The worst mistake new people leaders can make (or, frankly, execs of any function) is assuming they know what’s right for a company without getting to know its people. Binder’s first step - and one of her key takeaways from her first few months at Asana — is straightforward: Take the time to talk with the people who make up the org, and identify pain points from there. What’s critical here is not just sitting down with folks in the leadership seat - you need to climb up and down the rungs on the ladder.

“In the first three months, I got the chance to meet with at least 75 of Asana’s 100 employees. I wanted to hear from them directly about what they felt was most important for me to focus on,” says Binder

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For folks going on a similar listening tour, she puts the types of questions to ask in these conversations into two buckets:

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Personal development 

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Don’t jump into the specifics of culture or HR just yet. “First, I want to know about their work and hear specifics about things like product features and customers.” Binder relies on four go-to questions: 

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• What are you working on?

• What are your personal goals, this quarter and this month?

• What have you achieved?

• How have you been challenged to grow recently?

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Org-wide painpoints

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After establishing some rapport and understanding of a given person’s place within the org, you can then move on to the broader culture questions. Binder relies on three when trying to identify underlying pain points percolating across the org:

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• What’s making you uncomfortable?

• What's something that's getting in your way?

• What do you think is one thing that, as a company, we should get better at? 

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Successful interviewers come out of these conversations with a better picture of the organizational puzzle and understand which pieces might need to be shuffled to create a better fit. At Asana, Binder approached it much like a user researcher. “I cataloged the responses and organized them to find patterns like ‘40 people mentioned this.’ They may have used different words, but I cataloged them as, for example, comp-related.”

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"People and culture can seem really squishy - but it doesn’t have to be."

 

Step 2: Use an engagement survey to layer on quantitative data

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In-person interviews aren’t the only way to collect data and are best paired with an engagement survey to take the pulse of the organizational health. Poring over the results of a company-wide survey can make it easier to identify themes that are bubbling under the surface.

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For Binder, this was one of the first tools she used to identify issues at Asana — but here’s where it becomes a combination of art and science. 

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“You can't just take that data 100% at face value - you have to overlay some judgment on it. For example, I knew from a benchmark perspective that we were paying competitively, but our surveys were telling me that employees didn’t feel confident about that,” she says. Digging deeper, Binder identified this as a comms issue, not a comp one. “So I quickly moved solving that problem up on my list of priorities, because it was both a big one and relatively easy to solve by giving some clarity to the compensation philosophy.”

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Step 3: Create a roadmap that makes tough choices. 

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Once interviews have been conducted and surveys reviewed, it’s time for an action plan. An initial people management roadmap should serve as a guide for the first 18 months of the process - not only for people leaders themselves but also for those around them. 

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“Of course, I didn't just create and decide on that roadmap myself. I got buy-in and support and alignment with the founders, Dustin and Justin, and the rest of the leadership team. But once we decided on the direction I codified it, published it and marketed it,” says Binder.

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Getting this down in writing is essential, she notes. “By creating some sort of written plan, you have a framework to turn to when people start asking you questions,” says Binder. “So even if they don’t agree with your order of priority in terms of what to tackle, they’ll understand your methodology and where their particular pony is.”

Here’s an example of an initiative that got prime placement on the roadmap: “Something that bubbled up loudly early was that, in order to scale, we needed to shift the way that we recruited from this startup ‘all hands on deck, let's recruit as many engineers as possible’ to a more professionalized and operationalized recruiting model,” she says. “How many roles, what kinds of roles? What does your pipeline look like? How many interviews can you do in a week? What kind of sourcing do you need?” So operationalizing the recruiting engine got pole position on Binder’s 18-month plan — and took over a year to achieve in full. 

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Step 4: Over-communicate until you start to annoy yourself

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Binder jokes that, at times, her Head of People role can start to feel more like a Chief Communications Officer position, and that’s just as true now as it was when Asana was much smaller. With the roadmap set - sharing this broadly is key. As is repetition.

"To pull off successful communication, sometimes you need to share the same information so many times that you get annoyed by the sound of your own voice."

Take the above example about demystifying Asana’s approach to comp. “We had this issue where, even though we had this great comp program in place, people either didn’t know about it or just didn’t understand it. That was a real shame, and it created a lot of chaos, so we implemented an educational program to solve that,” says Binder. 

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“As one example, people have very different levels of understanding about how equity works. So one of the things I did was invest in education at two different levels - a 101 version where people got to learn at the very basic level how stock options work, what an exercise price is and what a cap table is. And then there was a 201 version for people who had more experience. Separating those groups meant that the beginners had a safe space to ask those basic questions.”

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Whether you’re demystifying comp or introducing a new performance review system, default to communicating more than you think is necessary. Sending a one-off email or an offhand mention in an All Hands meeting isn’t going to cut it.