In this episode of Redefining HR, I spoke with Envoy’s chief people officer, Annette Reavis. Envoy is a workplace platform that helps companies manage hybrid work. Annette and I discuss her background, her career transition from finance to HR and her thoughts on building hybrid organizations. We also dive into her past experience at Facebook. 

Annette has had an incredible career, but it didn’t start in HR. She first worked in public accounting, where learned all about client support and how to drive change through the business. 

Even as Annette continued with her finance career, she did many things that are relevant to HR, including planning events and recruiting. She started to feel that she wasn’t using her entire skill set to the fullest extent possible — specifically, what she considered her “secret sauce” of coaching and mentoring. 

“I came from a family of teachers, educators. My dad had a Ph.D. in education, focused on counseling, and really that’s what I do best,” Annette shares. “And so I took the foundation of finance, and really from a business perspective, and then made that transition into being an HR VP, where I could help leaders. I could coach and mentor them, but then I could also help them run their businesses.”

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Setting the Foundation for the Future

Before her role at Envoy, Annette was vice president of HR/HR business partner at Facebook and spent 10 years overall at the company. Annette could have taken her talents anywhere with her experience. Ultimately, Annette decided to join the Envoy team for an important reason — her belief in the problem Envoy is solving. 

“I truly believe that people have to get out of their houses and back into the office in a hybrid way,” she says. “And for me, hybrid — and for us, hybrid — means you spend part of the time in the office and part of the time at home, and that time in the office is around collaboration.”

Working cross-functionally helps to solve problems together and allows employees to have “unstructured problem solving and unstructured laughter and joy,” Annette says. By contrast, a workday based around video calls is structured and doesn’t allow for unstructured environments where progress is made. 

Annette has the opportunity to build unstructured productivity and joy in the world of work through Envoy’s product. “We are really setting the foundation for what that future is.”

Helping Companies at Envoy

Envoy is helping companies manage hybrid work. But the workplace platform is doing much more to create a safe and sustainable return to the workplace.

Envoy is an app that workers can download to their phones, and it serves multiple functions in a hybrid work environment. “If you do track vaccinations, it allows you to input the vaccinations. It allows you to say who’s safe to come in the office,” Annette shares.

The app also enables leaders to assign workstations or desks for their employees in a way that makes sense for hybrid because “everyone’s not there every single day,” she says. “So you don’t need a specific desk assigned to everyone”

Envoy also helps people also book meeting rooms and see who else is on-site for potential collaboration. Employees can also join what Envoy calls “neighborhoods,” where people can sit and work together.

Building the Neighborhood

I knew about Envoy before the pandemic, and I’ve seen how the product has been uniquely positioned to adapt and evolve to meet today’s needs. One thing that stands out in this app is the ability to create workplace neighborhoods. This feature has also helped the Envoy team build a better workplace culture for their own team.

The neighborhood is more than just assigning people to sit next to each other. It’s about understanding who everyone is and how they work. “What we are trying to do is make sure it doesn’t feel like we’re seating people specifically. Because, again, they’re coming in the office in a hybrid way. But we want to make sure that we understand how people can work together,” Annette explains.

This feature allows the Envoy team to look at who people are sitting next to and even what days are good for events like happy hour, seminars, team-building or other activities. The Envoy app offers unique benefits based on how companies use it. For Envoy itself, it’s a way to elevate their workplace culture.

“Building community is the next phase for us,” Annette says.

People in This Episode

• Annette Reavis: LinkedIn, Envoy website