Vivian Welsh of Veeva Systems: Five Things You Need To Know To Successfully Manage a Remote Team
Trusting them to work from anywhere. They can work remotely or come to the office on any given day. What matters is the quality of their work, not where it is done.
As a part of our series about the five things you need to successfully manage a remote team, I had the pleasure of interviewing Vivian Welsh.
Vivian Welsh serves as Chief People Officer of Veeva Systems, a global leader in enterprise cloud solutions that helps the life sciences industry develop and bring medicines to patients faster and more efficiently. She leads global employee success for Veeva and is responsible for ensuring that its people processes and culture scale well, as it continues to grow. Vivian leads the company’s efforts to attract, develop and retain the best talent. She pioneered Veeva’s new university graduate development programs and also reinvented Veeva’s talent attraction model for experienced hires. Vivian is dedicated to bringing great people to Veeva and has a strong passion for ensuring its employees have a great experience and career.
Vivian has been in the software industry for 20+ years since starting her career at PeopleSoft. She has a software implementation and project management background with strong functional and technical product experience. She has held various leadership roles and has experience building and managing both small and large high-performing teams.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would love to get to know you a bit better. What is your “backstory”?
Thanks for the opportunity to share my story! I started my career in consulting at PeopleSoft 21 years ago, and since then have held several positions prior to joining Veeva 13 years ago. When I first started at Veeva, I implemented our software for our customers. After a few years as a consultant, I developed and ran the consultant development program, which was the start of our Generation Veeva program. Generation Veeva is a professional development program for new college graduates in our consulting, engineering, analytics and business consulting functions. We are currently hiring 350 new college graduates to join our growing Work Anywhere team.
I studied Business Administration and Management Information Systems at Florida International University and live in Jupiter, Florida, with my husband and three children. When I’m not working, I enjoy golfing, boating, and spending time with my family.
What advice would you give to other business leaders to help their employees to thrive and avoid burnout?
We can all experience burnout whether working remotely or in an office. Employees should be given the proper tools, training and resources needed to do their best work. They should be given autonomy and encouraged to bring new ideas to the table. For all this to work, there needs to be trust between the manager and the employee. Make sure to prioritize relationship building so that you have that trust.
When it comes to avoiding burnout there are several practices that can help:
- Set “calendar norms” — block out ‘no meeting’ time slots on calendars to take kids to school, pick them up, lunch, work out time, etc. It’s important to take physical and mental breaks throughout the day.
- Don’t overschedule calendars — leave time in the day to get work done.
- Be OK with carving out “catch up time” — this may be over the weekend, but helps start the week with more balance.
- Prioritize tasks that drive the greatest impact — it’s important to manage deadlines and be flexible, especially when unexpected, more pressing assignments come up
- Set boundaries — reach out and communicate with a manager if overburdened.
- Spend time focusing on and completing one project at a time — having several partially completed projects can feel overwhelming.
- Find ways to connect with colleagues outside of the work — socializing and making connections is always healthy!
- Make sure to schedule time off to recharge.
Ok, let’s jump to the core of our interview. Some companies have many years of experience with managing a remote team. Others have just started this, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Can you tell us how many years of experience you have managing remote teams?
I’ve been managing remote teams since I started working for Veeva 13 years ago. Founded in 2007, Veeva grew up remote friendly and transitioned to a full Work Anywhere company when the pandemic hit. Work Anywhere means Veeva’s 5000+ employees can work in an office or at home on any given day, whichever works best for them. Our Work Anywhere policy has helped to widen our talent pool, leading to candidates with diverse backgrounds, perspectives and ideas.
Managing a team remotely can be very different than managing a team that is in front of you. Can you articulate for our readers what the five main challenges are regarding managing a remote team? Can you give a story or example for each?
Companies that are new to managing remote employees/teams may run into challenges, but leadership can adopt remote-friendly tools and strategies, and set the direction to overcome these potential obstacles from the start.
Here are some examples:
Challenge: Collaboration
Solution: It’s not about where your employees physically do the work, but rather the quality of the work they’re doing. If you provide teams with the proper tools, training, resources and support from the start, challenges related to remote work will be minimized. In addition to regular weekly virtual meetings, Veeva maintains offices in its major hubs in Pleasanton, Boston, Columbus, Philadelphia, NYC, Raleigh, and Toronto where teams can meet in person and collaborate as needed. We also organize our product teams within one time zone of each other, so they are generally working during the same hours.
Challenge: Managing Productivity
Solution: The success of remote work over the past 18 + months shows that managing productivity can be done just as easily with dispersed teams. Some tips to managing remote teams include:
- Set aggressive but clear goals to keep employees engaged and on task.
- Provide clarity on assignments and priorities to keep employees focused.
- Trust the employee and give them the right level of autonomy to be productive.
- Check-in regularly with the employee to ensure they have what they need to keep moving the needle.
Challenge: Maintaining corporate culture
Solution: Have a clear vision and core set of values that are used for making decisions.
Veeva’s core values — do the right thing, customer success, employee success, and speed — guide our decision making and define our culture. Doing the right thing means that we are concerned about more than just financial success and return to shareholders. We recognize a responsibility to customers, employees, environment, and society.
As individuals, we pride ourselves on being good people who are honest, fair, and direct. We treat others with respect. As a company, we strive to be a good corporate citizen, a positive force in the business community, active in our communities, and an example to others.
Veeva became a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) in February 2021, which means we’re legally responsible to consider the interests of those materially affected by the corporation’s conduct — including employees, the community and customers — in addition to our shareholders’ interests. Veeva’s public benefit purpose is to help make the industries we serve more productive and create high-quality employment opportunities.
Challenge: New employee mentoring/acclimating them/keeping them connected
Solution: When hiring new employees to remote a workforce the onboarding process may be different, but with the right processes in place, it doesn’t have to be a challenge. We welcome members to the team using the following tools, resources and activities:
- Pair new employees with seasoned mentors.
- Maintain offices in hubs to enable in-person collaboration when needed; host in-person and virtual events for those interested in getting together.
- Established parent support groups, especially to assist during COVID.
- Upon onboarding, new hires are assigned five other Veevans from outside their team to meet with virtually and get acquainted with in the broader organization.
- OrgWiki: Veeva built its own internal employee networking platform so it’s easy to find and connect with anyone across the company.
- Host speed networking sessions that recreate the coffee break/water cooler chat via an app that pairs employees at random for five-minute virtual meetups.
- If one person in a meeting is remote, everyone joins via their own computer in zoom to make it a consistent experience for everyone.
Challenge: Less interaction with colleagues
While there are a lot of benefits of remote work, a challenge for some may be the lack of ‘on the fly’ interaction with colleagues. With remote work, there’s no “popping your head into someone’s office or grabbing a quick lunch.”
Solution: Here are ways to ‘reinvent’ those impromptu in-person get-togethers:
- Be intentional about setting time to meet with people via Zoom and be organized with how you spend your time and other’s time.
- Share calendars and have transparency on calendars
- Put effort into planning social interactions
- Take advantage of collaboration tools the company offers. At Veeva we use Slack, Zoom, our internal OrgWiki and a speed networking app mentioned above.
In my experience, one of the trickiest parts of managing a remote team is giving honest feedback, in a way that doesn’t come across as too harsh. If someone is in front of you much of the nuance can be picked up in facial expressions and body language. But not when someone is remote. Can you give a few suggestions about how to best give constructive criticism to a remote employee?
When giving constructive feedback to a remote employee, I would suggest scheduling a Zoom meeting with the camera on so you both can pick up on facial expressions and body language. It’s the closest thing to an in-person meeting. I would not do this via email.
With regard to how the message is delivered, I don’t think there is much difference between how I would communicate in-person or remotely. In both cases, it’s important to give specific feedback with details about the situation and give them the opportunity to express their concerns and ask questions.
Can you specifically address how to give constructive feedback over email? How do you prevent the email from sounding too critical or harsh?
As mentioned above, I would prefer to give constructive feedback via Zoom with the camera on to avoid miscommunication, but if one prefers to use email it’s important to set the right tone and write a detailed explanation that covers what needs to be improved for this form of communication to be effective.
Can you share any suggestions for teams who are used to working together on location but are forced to work remotely due to the pandemic. Are there potential obstacles one should avoid with a team that is just getting used to working remotely?
Engineers are a good example of this. Prior to COVID, they traditionally worked on-site at our major engineering hubs. Now that many of them work remotely, they need to introduce more structure into their day to coordinate and collaborate on projects with their peers. They might need to make an extra effort to get help from colleagues. There might be more asynchronous work when not in person together, which is sometimes a benefit when needing heads-down time.
What do you suggest can be done to create a healthy and empowering work culture with a team that is remote and not physically together?
When employees know that they are trusted, have autonomy, and are doing work that is meaningful they are inspired to do their best work. Veeva implements policies that strengthen our culture and empower our employees, such as:
- Trusting them to work from anywhere. They can work remotely or come to the office on any given day. What matters is the quality of their work, not where it is done.
- Giving them a healthy professional development budget on top of their salary to invest in the skills of their choice, empowering them to be the captain of their own ship and own their career growth.
- Offering employees an amount equivalent to 1% of their base salary annually to support the non-profit(s) of his or her choice through our 1% Veeva Giving program
- Not requiring employees to sign non-compete agreements; Veeva doesn’t believe this is a fair practice for employees. We have a strong stance against non-competes, as our CEO, Peter Gassner, explains in his article, “Non-competes are Bad for Employees and the Economy.”
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
I am passionate about creating meaningful opportunities for underprivileged or disadvantaged communities, whether their challenges are physical, socio economical or anything else. Talent comes from all walks of life and backgrounds, and it’s important to give everyone an equal shot at having a thriving career. I believe every organization should make it a priority to advance this cause.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“Don’t worry about the destination; rather do your best work along the journey and opportunity will follow.” When I started as a consultant at Veeva 13 years ago, I did not set out to be head of HR. I just focused on the moment, and over time, my best work translated into tremendous career growth.
Thank you for these great insights!
