How Managers Can Support Family Leave + New Reflection Experiment
Former Director of People @ Buffer
Buffer People/People Ops Report
January 2017
Applicants
168 -53%
Open blog posts published
14 -1
Open blog visitors
142,867 +19%
Bimonthly team NPS score
51% (-9%)
Team members
79
Revenue in cash receipts
$1.14m +11%
MRR
$1.06m +0%
ARR
$12.8m +0.8%
Expenses
$922k +0.6%
Sharing our manager’s guide to family leave
In late 2016, we launched our new Buffer family leave policy. And in January, we took the next big step toward continued support for parents and caregivers on our team.
Since the majority of our managers are not parents, we realized this was an area in which we could provide a lot more direction. Every parent’s experience is unique, but we want to provide the same support to all our Buffer parents.
The result? Our manager’s guide to family leave at Buffer, which includes best practices for before, during, and after a family leave experience. We hope this will assist our team to better support families, and perhaps some of the resources might benefit your organization, too.
Our awesome teammate, Nicole, conceived and executed this innovative addition to our family leave canon, and we’re so grateful for her ingenuity and creativity on behalf of Buffer parents and families.
New experiment: Reflection hour
One of our beloved values is “Make time to reflect.”
Reflection is often where high-level change and ideas come from, but it’s woefully easy to let it go out the window when things get busy.
So this month, we tried a new culture experiment at Buffer: We asked teammates to block out an hour in their schedule specifically for reflection. We encouraged them to turn off email, turn off notifications, and lose their phones for a minute.
It was a success, with teammates taking this time to do things like meditate, journal, sketch and more!
Here’s some of the feedback teammates shared in a follow-up survey:
- “It was really useful to make time to reflect! Indeed, I’ve just added some calendar events to remind myself to do that each week :)
- “I feel so grateful that we were given permission to build reflection time into our day ?”
- “I really like the encouragement for everyone to take some time. I truly think it is important, and by taking this action we respect two of our values that are often forgotten. :)”
Here’s to more reflective days!
Welcome to our new VP of Finance!
After a long search, we were super excited to welcome Ruth Ku to the team in January as our new (and first!) VP of Finance.
Ruth is based in New York City and has an incredible background in founding, building and managing companies. She started her own business – a sports club – in Sacramento, growing the business to over 200 employees before selling it and moving to New York. After moving, Ruth served as the VP of Finance for ShopKeep and later the VP of Finance for Signpost.
Ruth was born in Taiwan and immigrated with her family to the United States at age 11. She enjoys doing yoga every day as well as reading and listening to audio books. One of her favorite non-fiction books is The Everything Store.
She’s already hard at work on our new financial model, and we’ll be sharing all the details with you as soon as we can!
Over to you
Is there anything you’d love to learn more about? Anything we could share more of? We’d love to hear from you in the comments!
Check out other reports from January:
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