The Changing World of Hybrid Work with Yieldstreet’s Joel Greengrass

Better People Podcast

Joel Greengrass is an experienced Chief People Officer and Operations Executive with 30 years of experience building and scaling companies.

With a passion for the full employee life cycle with an emphasis on talent and culture development, DEI, organizational design, and talent acquisition Joel transformed his career from management consultant to becoming the Chief People Officer at Yieldstreet. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of The Better People Podcast:

• The characteristics you need to be a good People Officer.
• How to create a good onboarding experience.
• How to improve your skills as an HR leader.
• The most effective and efficient hiring process.
• What to do when your employees make mistakes.
• The difficulties of working with a fully remote team.
• How to maximize the potential of hybrid workspaces.

Resources:

• Yieldstreet

Connect with Joel Greengrass:

• LinkedIn

Connecting with the hosts:

• Holly DePalma on LinkedIn
• Margaret Uhrich on LinkedIn

Quotables

• 8:14 - “You realize that when somebody starts a new job it doesn't matter if they've been working for 20 years or if they've been working for 2 it’s still a lot like your first day of school. You’re so nervous leading up to the first day and are the other kids going to like me and what should I wear and how do you make people as comfortable and as excited as possible as quickly as possible because my goal is I want people leaving their first day more excited than the day that they said yes.”
• 12:38 - “Part of the thread throughout is your instincts, I think our spidey senses we ignore those a lot and we do things the way that we think they're supposed to be done and the reality is yes there’s a lot of law within the world of HR, and employment law and it’s getting more fun there every day but I still think there’s so much latitude to do things differently and think out of the box and have fun and for me, it was how do I combine those two and find that happy sweet spot.”
• 17:04 - “I truly believe in my soul that you should be treating people the way that you want to be treated and I’ve never met a single person who’s come to work trying to do a bad job or trying to screw something up and therefore when somebody makes a mistake or doesn’t do something at the level that you want them to my first thought is that’s an opportunity, that’s an opportunity to invest in that person, help them learn how to do it the right way and it’s not just the what to do but it’s the way, give them the context, help them understand how that connects to the wellbeing of the company because that’s your purpose and at the end of the day when somebody makes a mistake again to me it’s an investment opportunity.”
• 24:50 - “There’s no way that if you’ve never met somebody in person that you can have the same relationship as if you’ve been sitting down with them in a room or an in-person brainstorm session where you've got whiteboards and flipcharts going around the entire room, what we can do on video now is incredible and I shudder to think what we would have done if Covid had hit us 20 years ago, would we have been faxing and sending pages back and forth to people so we’re so fortunate to that standpoint but it’s still not at the point where it replicates real human behavior.”
• 33:54 - “Dip your fingers into everything in the company, learn what is going on beyond your four walls or your virtual four walls, I think it’s really important from an HR perspective to have as much context around what the business does, why they do it, what decisions are made, whether they using goals or KPIs or OKRs what do those look like at the top and how does what you’re doing supports those, I really feel that the more operational you can be as an HR person, and I don't mean that with regard to HR operations I mean in relation to company operations the more effective you’re going to be.”