Shifting to Remote-First With Yelp Chief People Officer Carmen Whitney Orr

In this episode of Redefining Work, I’m excited to sit down with Carmen Whitney Orr, chief people officer at Yelp. Carmen and I discuss her early roles at Home Depot and eBay, starting at Yelp during the pandemic, and how she’s helped Yelp become a remote-first organization. We also discuss the findings of Yelp’s recent Remote Work Report.

Carmen has been in HR for over 20 years. She spent 10 years at Home Depot before moving on to eBay and then Yelp. 

Carmen is a first-time chief people officer and like her previous roles, this position has been another developmental role. Each position has provided Carmen with many opportunities to learn and grow in HR and in business.

“I think I've been really fortunate in my career to have had the opportunity to work for a few really great companies … that gave me an opportunity to move pretty frequently and explore different facets of HR,” Carmen says.

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Many Paths to HR Leadership

There’s no one definitive path to becoming a chief people officer or chief HR officer. Some people work their way up through HR, while some take a non-linear path through other business functions. 

Yelp is Carmen’s first chief people officer role, although she gained a wealth of experience in functional, customer-facing and field roles over her career. Handling a variety of roles, including as a business partner, gives her a complete perspective of the business.

“There's no such thing as 100% preparation,” she says. “And if you wait to be 100% prepared, you're going to sit around and be waiting. And so, I think what I've relied on is my ability to learn and be agile and utilize my resources.”

Yelp’s Transition to Remote-First

Carmen started at Yelp during the pandemic, when the company was questioning long-held beliefs about where work was supposed to take place. Unlike many companies, Yelp never implemented a return-to-office strategy.

“To the leadership team's credit, they looked at what was happening and listened to the sentiment of the employees and understood the business results,” she says. Instead of trying to force pre-pandemic norms, Yelp leadership “decided early on to kind of really lean into being remote first,” Carmen adds. 

The data backs up this decision, as ‌87% of employees say the remote-first model improves productivity. Yelp has also benefited from a more diverse talent pool, including by race and geography. 

“From a diversity standpoint, we're proud of the results that we're starting to see,” Carmen says. “We have seen over that period of time about a 4% increase in employees who identify as Black. Our manager-level positions, we've seen an increase in underrepresented minorities, from 10% to 18%, and over 46% of our managers identify as female.”

And while Yelp had only 3% of its employees outside the U.S. before the pandemic, that’s now at nearly 20%.  “So we're really recruiting talent on a global scale and opening the aperture to talent in locations that we just didn't have access to before,” Carmen says.

Yelp’s Remote Work Report

Yelp’s recently released Remote Work Report includes an analysis of Yelp search location data and what it reveals about where people have moved to during the pandemic. The report revealed that many West Coast and Northeast cities and states lost people to other regions, including the South. States with increased Yelp searches are also experiencing higher business growth.

Yelp has benefited from this geographic dispersion firsthand, starting with applications. “We've seen an increase of almost 200% in the applicants for our general administrative positions and 25% in our sales positions,” she explains. And the company is filling open positions 25% faster.

“We still have room to grow, and there's more effort that we are planning to make in this space,” Carmen shares. “But, we’re starting to see some fruits of our ability to recruit diverse talent regardless of location.”

People in This Episode

Carmen Whitney Orr: LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Yelp Remote Work Report‌