In this Talent Tales episode, talent.imperative Founder Nicole Dessain had the honor to interview Diana Marchese, the Director of People Experience at Snyk.
Diana’s superpower is taking ambiguous ideas, breaking them down into actionable items, and then turning them into tangible results.
Diana shares that she entered the design thinking world as an art teacher. She feels as though she organically applied a design thinking mindset when collaborating with her students and thinking holistically about their experience of the student. In 2015, Diana pivoted her career and moved into the field of workplace experience. She realized that students and adults have the same needs and wants: to be heard, to feel safe, and to make an impact.
Diana joined her current company, Snyk, in January of 2020 - right before the pandemic hit. She spent her onboarding months helping to transition the company to a virtual organization.
Diana acknowledges that the pandemic was a huge opportunity to truly apply human-centered design practices to the way we work – to practice empathy and to meet employees wherever they were. One of the activities the people team at Snyk did early into the pandemic, was to get together at the “virtual Zoom table” and to map out the entire employee lifecycle. They discussed how each function played a role at key milestones and what they wanted the employee experience to look like.
Diana was recently quoted in The Wall Street Journal about her work in helping transition Snyk to a hybrid workplace. She is applying a human-centric approach to this effort as well. One of the first things the team did was to listen to snykers to understand what had been working and what might need to change based on the lessons learned during the pandemic. Diana then used the insights gathered to create three personas (1 – in office; 2 – flex; 3 – remote) distinguishing the different ways of how and where employees wanted to work. They then shared these personas with employees as prototypes to get feedback, address questions, and get a sense for which persona they might choose. Based on these testing conversations, the people team clarified aspects of the personas and created a change management and communication strategy.
A key message throughout was that all employees were invited to co-create this massive hybrid work experiment and that there aren’t any obvious answers, thus acknowledging that while this is an experiment, Snyk is committed to building the right solution for its employees.
Want to learn more about the surprise findings Snyk uncovered in their hybrid work transformation research? Watch the entire interview on YouTube or listen to the Podcast.