Coworking with Kim Colucci

On Wednesdays, we schedule our weekly 1:1 with HR Brew’s readers. Want to be featured in an upcoming edition? Click here to introduce yourself.

Kim Colucci is people director at Mixbook, the creator of a web-based design tool with 65+ employees and contractors based in the US, Philippines, and Moldova, which borders Ukraine. We asked Colucci, who is based in San Francisco, what it’s like to support employees who are working in a region at war.

Our interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

How would you describe your specific job to someone who doesn’t work in HR? My role is to lead a team of people who help enable other employees to thrive in their role and throughout all roles they might have (or want to have) throughout their time with the organization. My team owns the employee experience and all of the processes, touchpoints, and deliverables that go with that. This includes assessing things like employee engagement and satisfaction, delivering tools like trainings or workshops, and ensuring we’re both compliant and competitive in the markets we operate in.

What’s the best change you’ve made at a place you’ve worked? We’re currently in the process of shaping our people team to operate more like a product team—gathering “user” [employee] insights and using them to more speedily deliver “feature” requests and improvements to areas such as our Total Rewards. This change, over time, will allow us to look at the people team as an outcome-oriented team vs. an output-oriented team—something very exciting that I’ve never really been able to do in HR roles in the past.

What’s the biggest misconception people might have about your job? I think there are a few things. One, HR is not the sole function that creates and delivers on culture; “culture” is a function of the entire organization, starting at the top, that needs practice and care. Additionally, there’s a misconception that all HR professionals are extroverts; while, yes, we’re “people people,” we often have our own underlying reason for why we love being in our seats, and it’s generally not because we’re extroverted.

What’s the most fulfilling aspect of your job? I love creating an environment that helps to unlock the potential in people—this is actually how I was inspired to become a people-person myself! Building the community for your employees to do their best and feel their best is so inspiring.

How have you been supporting your team since the start of the war in Ukraine, which neighbors Moldova? The month of March was a hard one for us. I think that the team in the United States felt this empathy fatigue, wanting to help [employees in Moldova] but not really being able to feel like they could, or not really knowing how to help from afar. Whereas our Moldova team, of course, was in the thick of it.

We certainly pulled out all the stops and allowed for a lot of flexibility, relocation support…wellness, mental wellbeing, social wellbeing, financial wellbeing—all of [those] aspects. On the ground in Moldova, we supported our teams how they needed, with what they needed. From my perspective, it’s been a lot of figuring out both sides of it. Like, what does it mean to be supported as a whole human, knowing that people have families and other loved ones that they’re supporting during this time? So what does that look like for our Moldova team?

Then, also, really understanding what support could look like for our US team. So we did things like hold self-care hours, where it was blocked off time on the calendar to do what you needed to do for your own self needs. We brought in coaches and other experts to support our team from a mental wellbeing perspective as well.

What trend in HR are you most optimistic about? Why? The future of work is here! I’m excited by the idea of using more data to help deliver on people/HR programs, where we’ll be able to more quickly iterate and deliver meaningful tools, programs, and more to our teams on a more consistent basis.

What trend in HR are you least optimistic about? Why? I’m still uncertain of what [the future of work] all means for size, scope, or definition for people teams in the future, and I still sometimes worry about how HR can advocate for the necessary resources to really pull off this “future of work” in a scalable, repeatable way.

Tell us one new or old HR tech product or platform that’s made your life easier, and why. Gather is a super neat people ops automation tool that allows us to streamline our onboarding processes as well as a number of other administrative tasks (birthday celebrations, reminders, etc.) in a customizable way. It was recently acquired by ChartHop, so we’re excited to learn more about them in the future, too!

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