#HighGrowthMatters spotlight: Head of People Shaira Javier Shares Her Top Priorities for 2023 Planning

This interview with Shaira Javier, Head of People at Supermove, details a Series A company’s top priorities as 2023 planning begins, including what retention strategies they’re leaning in on and how they are preparing for active and upcoming pay transparency legislation.

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and concision.

Tell me about your background and what led you to Supermove.

I started my career in talent acquisition. From there, I became the Talent Acquisition & HR Lead, (essentially the Head of HR) at a company called Apollo, which is a sales intelligence and engagement platform. I joined when we were a Series A company with 25 employees, and by the time I left, we had just raised our Series C, at nearly 200 employees with talent located across 32 countries.

Supermove’s CEO, Wonjun, reached out to me earlier this year, and I saw a fantastic opportunity to take what I had learned at Apollo and begin building People foundations from scratch again.

What are your current top priorities at Supermove?

My vision is to recruit and retain world-class talent that exemplifies both balance and productivity. So our first priority is hiring, nailing our ideal candidate profile, and making sure that the employees we bring in are fit for startup culture. We want to find people who are “Owners, not Renters” – essentially anyone who acts as if Supermove is their company, provides results, and wants to grow.

Secondly, I want to create a workplace that epitomizes work-life harmony and making sure that our employees are recognized and that they feel they’re being heard, so we’re currently putting their feedback into action and also refining our total rewards strategy.

It can be challenging to achieve that work-life harmony, and measuring employee burnout in a remote environment can be very difficult. Especially at a startup – where everyone is expected to wear a lot of different hats and really work hard and grind. To help, we distribute an engagement survey on a quarterly basis. This allows us to gather insights such as how employees are feeling about their workload, what challenges they may be experiencing with their managers, and how connected they feel to fellow employees. I also personally connect with employees one-on-one to really dig deep into how they’re feeling about their work, goals, and relationships.

How are you thinking about retention heading into 2023?

Compensation, total rewards, and intangible recognition play huge roles in our retention strategy.

One big project for us right now is going through a career-leveling exercise and making sure each individual at Supermove feels that they have a trajectory within the company and the support and resources they need to work towards that.

We have also done a lot of work around our total rewards program, which consists of five pillars: compensation and benefits, wellbeing, training, development, and recognition. There are two sides to this program – the tangible and intangible components. Tangible tactics include compensation, bonuses, merit increases, etc. Then there are the intangible factors, like kudos and pats on the back, that hold emotional value.

We provide full benefits for our employees and their dependents, and then they trust their compensation is competitive because we share our philosophy and process for sourcing reliable data.

When it comes to training and development, we offer a learning management system (LMS) that enables our employees to become subject matter experts on our industry and have other development programs we want to eventually provide throughout the year.

Lastly, wellbeing plays a huge role in our retention strategy. Of course, we do virtual events like yoga classes and related activities like breathing exercise, but this can be more difficult as “wellbeing” can mean something different to everyone. We do want to keep providing these activities, as well as additional mental health resources.

At the end of the day, these strategies are a work in progress because we are always shifting and implementing employee feedback. I do think the first key-component is having those one-on-one conversations with each employee.

Are there specific questions you ask to get a read on employee engagement or happiness?

One question that we have in our engagement survey right now is, "is there anything you would change about your work-life harmony?” and “how can Supermove help you with that?"

I believe these questions are important because some people can work 10 hours a day and feel happy. Others really need that time away and the ability to have clear defined boundaries between work-life and home-life – even when working from home.

This balance is really something that you need to curate for each of your employees, because again, it's not one size fits all.

How is active and upcoming pay legislation influencing your compensation planning for next year?

We’ve set the foundation by communicating our compensation philosophy with our employees, and we already provide a salary range in our job postings.

The next project related to this is applying these pay ranges to our headcount plan for next year, based on our updated career-leving framework and merit promotions.

In Q1 of next year, we plan to create a handbook that outlines our people operations programs, compensation structure, and this career-leveling framework, so employees have a dependable resource to reference as questions arise.

How can the OpenComp community best support you?

Having a reliable source of data that is relative to a company of our size and statistically significant is always helpful. I’m also thankful for the library of resources you’ve created. I’m a team of one, so it’s valuable to have all of the information at my fingertips as we build from the ground up. I look forward to following as new trends arise in HR and compensation.

About Supermove: 

Supermove was created to empower moving businesses to truly go paperless - automating timesheets, job forms, contracts, & operations, ensuring compliance, & reducing headaches. Digital bills of lading, estimates, digital inventory, claims, fleet management – your end to end solution with all your need to haves with one company in one place.

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Lexie Sirak is a Senior Campaigns Coordinator at OpenComp and previously worked at JPMorgan Chase & Co. She pens the monthly High Growth Matters Spotlights. Connect with her on LinkedIn here.