Modeling Work-Family Balance as an HR Leader with Maven Clinic SVP of People Karsten Vagner
We are back with another episode of Redefining HR. In this episode, I’m sitting with Maven Clinic’s senior vice president of people, Karsten Vagner. In this episode, Karsten and I talk about his career, how his childhood shaped his views about work and the type of mission-driven organization he wanted to work in. We also talk about the impact of the pandemic on parents and caregivers, the power of community in HR and much more.
Karsten was born in an orphanage in Bogota, Columbia, in the 1980s, which was not a great time to be in the country. Hungry and living on the streets, his birth mother learned of an orphanage in the city with a clinic that could help her through her pregnancy. The clinic saved her and Karsten. He was soon adopted and grew up in New York, where he got his first mission-driven job at a startup called Zocdoc.
After five years at the company and learning multiple new skills, Karsten went on to join companies such as AppNexus and Hired, working as the second in command for people teams. And after some sound advice from his colleague, he was ready to lead his own people team. He met with dozens of founders, none of them sticking out until he met Kate Ryder, founder and CEO of the Maven Clinic.
Maven Clinic is the largest virtual clinic for women's and family health, offering continuous, holistic care for fertility, pregnancy and parenting. “I can tell you, as a user myself, my daughter never breaks out in a crazy rash or falls and hits her head between the hours of nine to five on a weekday. It's always at a crazy time, like right before you're going on vacation or something,” Karsten explains. “And opening up the Maven app, booking an appointment with a pediatrician in the next 10 minutes, getting that person to do a video appointment with us, taking care of my daughter, putting me and my husband at ease, as well. It’s just a lifesaver.”
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The Value of Work-Family Balance
Our society has experienced significant shifts in our priorities and life choices, based on what we have experienced in the past two years. More and more people faced burnout and experienced the negative impacts that the hustle-and-grind culture of work was having on their personal lives.
All this has caused people to become introspective about how we prioritize and balance work and family obligations. Karsten says he learned the actual value of time. “The first thing that I learned through this pandemic, like so many others, is just the value of time and how little of it we're given. And how valuable it is, where we spend it, and what we want to do. And how does that reconcile with this hustle culture?” he says.
Defining success as always being on and accessible is something that Karsten thinks about a lot. Still, in creating a balance for himself, he’s learned that being firm about boundaries is necessary. Karsten suggests asking yourself whether you really need your work email or Slack on your phone? Do you really need work in your pocket every day? The answer is no.
While this thought could terrify some people, Karsten has seen tangible results that help him focus on his family priorities. He shares, “Being really clear and intentional with myself about when I work and when I'm not has helped me so much. Over the past two years, I haven't missed a dinner with my family, and I don't want to lose that.”
Reimagining What Success Is
How we view work-family balance is shifting, leaving people to think about what genuine success is and what it looks like. Right now, people define success in various ways — whether it’s how hard they push themselves, how long we work, or how much we show up.
The effects of the last two years are still in the early stages, and we won’t see changes or answers to what success looks like for a while. Still, HR leaders and practitioners have an opportunity to set a standard that employees can follow to achieve their own work-family balance.
Many organizations say that they value flexibility and the separation between work and family, but what are they doing beyond just saying these things? Truly role-modeling these behaviors starts with leaders and must be advocated throughout the organization, not just saying the words.
Flexibility is Key
Flexibility has been a buzzword over the past few years. Everyone is talking about flexibility and wants flexibility within their work schedules. Flexibility as a structure, many people have found, allows them to address the needs of their family, household, etc., that they previously put off until the weekend.
Though flexibility allows for those things, people can easily convert back to old habits. Karsten brings up an interesting view, suggesting that maybe it’s not necessarily the flexibility, but having discipline and intentionality, that’s the key to the new way of work.
“On my team at Maven, we talk often about, if things are good at home, things are good at work. We want people showing up feeling like they've got everything else in their lives covered,” Karsten shares. “And so we have some part of responsibility in that and making sure that they all feel like we know they bring a whole life with them to work.
Right now, we have an opportunity to get to know the employee as a whole person, as someone who knows what they need better than their companies. “It's navigating that balance between kind of the dynamic between employer and employee, and making sure that everybody's getting what they need,” Karsten says.
People in This Episode
Karsten Vagner: LinkedIn
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