This episode features an interview with Guido Ditto, Senior Manager of internal communications and employer brand at Coursera. Guido works with Coursera executives and teams to inform, engage, and connect colleagues around the world. Since joining the company in 2019, he has optimized information sharing with a new intranet, helped employees stay aligned to the company’s lofty mission during hypergrowth, supported the company's transition to remote work, and led comms during Coursera’s IPO. Previously, Guido led creative strategy at New York University. On today’s episode, Guido shares his takeaways and advice from scaling Coursera’s comms team from pre to post IPO, how interns and early professionals should think about their comms careers, and how to build meaningful professional relationships with executives.
This episode features an interview with Guido Ditto, Senior Manager of internal communications and employer brand at Coursera. Guido works with Coursera executives and teams to inform, engage, and connect colleagues around the world. Since joining the company in 2019, he has optimized information sharing with a new intranet, helped employees stay aligned to the company’s lofty mission during hypergrowth, supported the company's transition to remote work, and led comms during Coursera’s IPO. Previously, Guido led creative strategy at New York University.
On today’s episode, Guido shares his takeaways and advice from scaling Coursera’s comms team from pre to post IPO, how interns and early professionals should think about their comms careers, and how to build meaningful professional relationships with executives.
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“The way you build trust with anybody, with a colleague that’s next to you or a leader that relies on you or an executive who is looking to you for an answer is by being your true self. And showing them that you are open to sharing your complete self. And so that sort of gives them a reason to trust you.” — Ditto Guido
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Episode Timestamps:
*(2:35) - Guido’s current role at Coursera
*(3:55) - Segment: Storytime
*(6:50) - Building confidence in comms/HR
*(9:10) - A career/project Guido’s worked on that changed his perspective
*(12:40) - How Guido marketed himself with no traditional IC background
*(15:25) - Segment: Getting Tactical
*(19:50) - Guido’s process for collecting/analyzing IC data
*(28:45) - Building relationships with executives
*(32:15) - Segment: Ripped from the Headlines
*(35:10) - Experiencing/leading Coursera’s IPO
*(39:15) - Segment: Asking for a Friend
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Links
Connect with Guido on LinkedIn
Connect with Amanda on LinkedIn
http://www.simpplr.com/podcast
[00:01:57] Amanda: Guido. Thank you so much for joining me today. [00:02:00] How are you doing?
[00:02:01] Guido: I'm doing really great. It is. Uh, gray rainy day in Seattle where I'm based. So it's pretty usual, nothing out of the ordinary
[00:02:10] Amanda: really love gray, stormy weather.
[00:02:12] So I, I always say that about Seattle and think that maybe that's I should just move there cause you know, some people prefer sunshine. I prefer green
[00:02:20] Guido: weather. Yeah. This gives you a good. I will admit there are some really nice sunny days. I've heard it's
[00:02:26] Amanda: great out there. So I know some of my, I like the music scene and the food scene out there too was really awesome.
[00:02:32] Um, but if you wouldn't mind, just tell us a little bit about your current role
[00:02:35] Guido: at course. Awesome. You know, it's really hard for me to summarize my role very briefly. I am a senior manager of internal communications and also handle and for your brand. And so really. Sort of combined two really important pieces of what I think is the employee experience.
[00:02:55] And also, you know, how candidates perceive the company. [00:03:00] I focus a lot of my time in internal comms as we grow our employer brand function. And in my role as an internal comms lead, I work a lot with our executives and our executive team to help inform our community of a growing. Large number of employees around the world, uh, around company priorities.
[00:03:22] And what's happening at the company during a really, you know, put unquote unprecedented times, right? It's where we're tackling a lot of internal growth, but also external circumstances in my role. I think one of, one of the biggest things I focus on is making sure that our employees have a bridge to our executives and vice versa.
[00:03:41] Um, and information is shared between all groups of, of course Ariens. Um, but there's a lot of important work that happens, you know, outside of that, building that connection and that trust.
[00:03:52] Amanda: All right, we're going to move into our first segment's called story time.[00:04:00]
[00:04:03] Segment: You've
[00:04:04] Amanda: had a few very interesting internships, Dreamworks animation. New York times a big favorite of mine. Looking back. Is there something you can share with us, a learning experience, um, that you can take that you've taken out of? One are both of those programs.
[00:04:18] Guido: I had the honor of being an undergraduate in New York city.
[00:04:24] And that really gives you the ability to, you know, make a path for yourself. And to me, that started with building a resume using through a lot of great internships. And I was really lucky to intern at companies that I really loved and admire and are globally renowned and are sort of at the top of what they're doing.
[00:04:43] And so what those opportunities taught me, I would say. Is, you know, I was usually the youngest person in the room as an intern. That's pretty normal. And I was interning as a freshmen, which is pretty unusual. And so what I learned pretty quickly is that like [00:05:00] age in the workplace really shouldn't matter and it doesn't matter.
[00:05:04] And it's really just your, you know, what you bring to the table, your skill, your expertise, your perspective. Um, and so I've found that even now to this day, I'm usually the youngest person in the room where it happens and luckily those experiences and those internships taught me that that is irrelevant.
[00:05:23] And you know, you really can fight your fight in the room just as well as everybody else can. And so I think that's what I appreciate most about my internships is that sort of empowerment to make a contribution, to share your idea, to speak up, uh, no matter your level, your role, your title, or your years of experience on.
[00:05:43] Amanda: Yeah. I've recently had an intern myself and honestly just treat them just like any other employee on my team. Really just trusted them, which felt like it could have been a little intimidating realizing, which is like, here help you, you do this story, you create this video, but I'm hopeful that he, he [00:06:00] appreciated that.
[00:06:01] Um, but now he's, he's, he's got a full-time role in communication. So I, I can understand. I'm assuming that's changed how you work with interns. Some of you have some, of course, Sara or anywhere else
[00:06:11] Guido: as well. Absolutely. When I was at, uh, New York university doing communications for students there, I, we, I was part of a group, a mighty group of administrators who built a, a pretty innovative internship program where our students had full reign to posting on social media.
[00:06:29] Um, you know, it was really authentic content. And at the time a lot of other administrators were like, how can you give interns and students the keys to the kingdom? Right. They can post anything, but really it's just about trusting them to do their best work. Obviously they have a lot of, um, And they will do their best work when you, when you put that trust.
[00:06:48] Yeah. If you, if we have
[00:06:49] Amanda: any interns listening to this in terms in communications or even HR, it, what would you say to them right now to really get them fired up and passionate or build confidence? [00:07:00]
[00:07:00] Guido: And, you know, the, the one thing I've learned definitely over the years is everybody else is just as sort of unsure at first of whether they're making the right.
[00:07:13] You know, you, you sort of tend to think like, well, this is a C level executive. They know the answer immediately, and they're going to come in confidently, say we're going to do this and it's going to work. And it doesn't always happen. So I think I would tell interns and really early career professionals that you're not the only one questioning whether you made the right call.
[00:07:31] Everybody really is at the end of the day. And so that sort of evens the playing field.
[00:07:36] Amanda: I didn't even take that one step further for anyone listening and say, that's kind of how adult life feels most of the time. Some of us look like we're doing it very easily and well, but we're all just like, is this right?
[00:07:46] Are we doing this right?
[00:07:49] Guido: I have a really great close relationship with my mom. And so we talk about pretty much everything. And I think at one point I was maybe it was like turning. It was a big milestone birthday and I turned to her and it was like, [00:08:00] mom, when did you feel like you were in a. And she's like to be honest, some days I still don't feel that way.
[00:08:09] You know, some days I still wonder if I've like become an adult. Um, and she's got two children she's, you know, she's definitely an adult in anybody's eyes. And so that was also really helpful to understand like, okay, we're all sort of trying to figure it out.
[00:08:22] Amanda: Yeah, absolutely. I think about the law because my friends and I are really starting to talk a lot about it, like imposter syndrome and what that feels like.
[00:08:29] And I think that's just a, sort of a piece of that puzzle when you don't know, am I doing this right? How did I get this far? So I think that's just such a great message to share. I don't know if you've ever felt that way.
[00:08:41] Guido: Oh, absolutely. Like almost, almost, you know, weekly, daily, right? I think it's, I think what I have learned in it's a very normal.
[00:08:49] I think it's actually a good sort of gut check. Sometimes
[00:08:52] Amanda: the first time I had ever really heard about it, I was listening to an NPR story and they were interviewing Tom Hanks and he has it like really bad. And I was like, oh, Tom [00:09:00] Hanks has imposter syndrome. Holy smokes.
[00:09:03] Guido: American hero,
[00:09:04] Amanda: Tom Hanks. Yeah.
[00:09:06] Syndrome. Um, anyway, moving on here, I'm looking back at your career. Very impressive. You've done some really amazing things. Um, would you share with us a change you've made or a project you've completed in the internal communication space? That's impacted how you think about internal communications?
[00:09:22] Guido: So a lot of my career before my role at Coursera.
[00:09:26] Technically or legitimately called internal communications. I worked for many years at a university. It's also happens to be the university where I went to college. So I had a very, very strong bond with the community there, but my focus was communicating to students sometimes to faculty members. And so it technically you could say, okay, that makes sense.
[00:09:48] That's internal. We just didn't really call it that. And so when I started my role at Coursera, I was a little bit nervous. I mean, talking about imposter syndrome, right? Like I was like, I've never had a title in internal [00:10:00] communications before. And so. What I ended up learning over pretty quickly was this sort of idea of metrics and internal comms.
[00:10:10] And, you know, there's really so many different ways. You can try to add metrics into your work. You know, I, whenever I'm writing, my OKR is quarterly. I type in Google. I, I do the search all the time because the answer still isn't found for me, but it's, you know, what are normal KPIs? Like what are the usual KPIs or metrics for interim.
[00:10:29] And every time I find resources, the answers aren't good enough for me. You know, it's usually how many people opened an email, how many people saw a slack post. And so, you know, to me, what I've learned and, and a change, you know, back to your question to change to me that I've sort of implemented in my work.
[00:10:48] And I've had the privilege of really focusing on those that Coursera is we're not going to track every day. How many people open an email from our CEO or from our chief people officer. To measure [00:11:00] whether the email was successful or that campaign worked, what we're going to track is the actual desired outcome of that message.
[00:11:07] Right. And so most of the time when you're writing for your HR team or you're helping your HR team create, you know, a campaign or communicate an important deadline, um, the outcome is. Making sure that most of your population enrolls in, you know, health benefits in the U S during open enrollment period, because if they don't, don't miss out that window and then won't be able to make changes otherwise.
[00:11:29] And so the outcome for us is not, did everybody, did everybody open the email? It's really like, what did we intend them for them to do? And did they do it? And usually we can sort of attach it to an outcome like that. Yes. A hundred percent of employees enrolled in benefits. That's easy to. But a lot of the times you can't, right?
[00:11:47] A lot of the times you're sending a message to build trust with your community, to help your employees feel supported during a really difficult time. And so tracking that is a little bit harder immediately, but I [00:12:00] think over time you have ways to do it. And you sort of have mechanisms like annual employee surveys to try to figure out, you know, whether employees feel like they're supported, whether they have a good connection with leadership that they trust the executive team.
[00:12:13] And so those are the things that. I'm more proud of rather than, you know, really small metrics that are very tactical.
[00:12:21] Amanda: Yeah. Like unique clicks, how many unique clicks it doesn't really tell this story. I love that. I think that's really worth calling out when you're creating some sort of communications campaign.
[00:12:30] What does that desired outcome? And then how can you try to start to measure for that? That's really great to hear. I really love hearing that. Um, I'm going to take that with me as I move on. I just want to go back to something you said, you said you knew you didn't have a traditional background in internal communications.
[00:12:45] So when you apply for this role course, Sarah, talk about how you marketed yourself. Um, not having that traditional background or those titles that people often think are important. Would you, would you, would you speak to that a little bit?
[00:12:58] Guido: My [00:13:00] manager and the person who hired me. I sort of give them a lot of credit for taking what I think was a sort of risk, right.
[00:13:07] In somebody who didn't come from the traditional tech company background, growing an internal comms function in a high growth tech company with many years under their belt in Silicon valley. And so I'm really grateful for that step they took. And so I think. You know, when I was applying for jobs, I, I didn't want to leave my, my previous job.
[00:13:27] I actually left because I moved out of the state and moved to the west coast. And so I sort of had to look for a new, a new, a new gig. And, um, I really wanted to be in education. I love being an education, obviously Coursera is in a tech company. And so I really just sort of focused on what things I did really well in previous roles and connect that to.
[00:13:51] What I knew, you know, a communications role would need to do so when I was applying to jobs and I was trying to market myself in this new sort of tech world, right. [00:14:00] I think I just focused on, on the strategic skills, the, the strategic, the creative skills that I know are really important in communications, whether you're communicating to a huge consumer base.
[00:14:11] And you're, you know, you work in the marketing department in consumer marketing, or you're communicating to a much smaller community of maybe a thousand. The practice is still the same. You have to create content that compels people to take an action. And so I think I really focused on just showing that I had created work that moved people.
[00:14:33] In a direction that we desired to move them in. And so I pointed a lot to campaigns. I built at New York, New York university, where, you know, we wanted to promote our mental health services and we're tracking not how many people open an email about mental health services, but you know, whether more.
[00:14:53] Utilize those services on campus during maybe finals week, for example, right when we know it's a really stressful time. So [00:15:00] just understanding like the basics of the job, regardless of whether it's internal or external, you know, the basics are you're creating content. You need to be a good writer. You need to tell a good story.
[00:15:10] You need to compel people to act and marketing yourself in those, you know, basically.
[00:15:16] Amanda: I'm going to move on to the next segment, cause I'm really interested in digging deeper into your work. So one of the, one of the next segments called getting tactical,
[00:15:24] Segment: I'm
[00:15:24] Guido: trying to figure out tactics and it'd be prevalent.
[00:15:28] And I didn't have to worry about tactics too much. Here I am in charge and trying to say, why didn't you sleep? Suit tactics,
[00:15:34] Segment: tactics,
[00:15:37] Amanda: something you mentioned earlier. Core service for, you said some about from 300 to over 1100 employees. Can you talk about how that the effort involved in changing making sure communications goes from those 300 to 1100, just some tactical differences you see from where you started to where you are that you have to be aware of.[00:16:00]
[00:16:00] Guido: So I think in the growth, there's a natural sort of understanding that with scale comes a lot more. And so you have to, you know, the more you scale, the more noise you're going to be sort of battling against and the more you your message needs to stand out. So I think that's one piece I always try to keep in mind.
[00:16:21] I think at the same time we were growing a lot while we all had to shift the way we worked. And during a time when we were used to sitting next to each other in an office, and then all of a sudden we could. And we were each in our own homes. And so that was another thing, you know, in addition to the noise that you would expect normally during.
[00:16:44] If we then had sort of like fewer in-person channels,
[00:16:51] like a personal community base sort of message. Sharing or information sharing where people say, Hey, did you see, did you hear about [00:17:00] this? I heard about this in the hallway. Like, let's go to this event or, Hey, did you know, the deadline is tomorrow? Like let's actually fill it out together. So you lose out on a lot of that sort of.
[00:17:10] Amanda: And sometimes that scale, that big, that fast, I was like two and a half years you've been there. So it can be difficult. And just wondering if you could share any advice on what you've learned with them,
[00:17:18] Guido: when you're scaling that quickly, you need to make sure that, and especially while everybody's working from home, everybody should have access to the same information at the same time or at the time that they need it most.
[00:17:31] So I'm really glad. That we actually, you know, I was hired in July or June, 2019, and the first project was you need to implement a company intranet. And, you know, I worked a lot of months into, in building, in building our intranet and sourcing a great platform and understanding what we really needed. And then the pandemic started in the U S and we shut our offices down.
[00:17:57] And so the timing actually worked. [00:18:00] What worked well on our end, because we were ready to launch a platform that would give everybody access to the same information at the same time. And so without that, without tools where your employees can actually, you know, log in and see the same content that their colleague in another part of the world can also see, we probably would have been pretty lost and employees would have felt.
[00:18:28] Uninformed and sort of misaligned and unsure of, of what was happening across the company. So I think that that's one piece. Another thing I've learned is that you really, as you scale, you sort of have to become a little bit. A lot more disciplined, right? In shifting the communications practices of your company.
[00:18:48] When you're a smaller company, you're a little bit more lax around. Okay, fine. Everybody has access to post on this channel and then you sort of triple in size and you're like, well, if we allowed everybody to [00:19:00] share and send an email to everyone at the company, how many emails are we gonna be? Right. And so, so you sort of also have to be a little bit more disciplined and, and that's a bit of tough change management, right?
[00:19:10] Telling some of your longest tenured employees, Hey, you know how you used to be able to send an email to everybody, you know, maybe when it was the company's anniversary or your colleague's birthday, like we can't do that anymore. Um, and so, so that's been something that I think has been actually, uh, top of mind for us as we've got.
[00:19:30] Uh, big of an unexpected challenge, but really important. Yeah,
[00:19:35] Amanda: I want to talk about that intranet. You implemented her through the grapevine, of course, that you, you happen to know you had a 91% adoption rates by prioritizing the pain points within your company, which you verified through use. I'm assuming like user surveys, user research.
[00:19:52] Can you talk about how you went about getting that research, collecting that data and then, um, you know, sort of analyzing it and planning for what you were going to do.
[00:19:59] Guido: Yes. I [00:20:00] love talking about this because it's, it's one of my favorite stories and my earliest memories at Coursera. So like I said, I was hired in July of 2019 and day.
[00:20:08] One was like, this is your work. This is your project. You actually own a company. Okay. That is to implement an internet. And, you know, as like a first time at a large tech company, I was like, what is an OKR? Why, why was it a company? Okay. And what do I own it? So, you know, after I got over that a little bit, I understood the severity of it, that, and the sort of the importance of making sure that we got this right.
[00:20:32] And so, you know, in those early conversations, it was, it became a little bit clear to me that different stakeholders had different ideas about what could solve. This challenge that we were trying to solve. Um, and the original challenge was sort of came, came to light in one of our employee pulse surveys pretty early on.
[00:20:51] And so, you know, you'd have different stakeholders say we should have really sort of timely news content on the internet that you [00:21:00] might expect from like a 10 person internal cons team globally around the world, you know, that has the capability to create like, you know, what's happening today at work sort of.
[00:21:11] As a one-person team. I knew that that'd be really difficult for me to do in addition to all the other things I had to do. So it started to become clear that different leaders have different ideas. And I, I thought, you know, we really, what we're trying to solve is this pain point for employees, not what the communications teams should be.
[00:21:29] We're not trying to solve what the communications team should do. Took myself totally out of that equation. And just really wanted to understand what employees were having trouble accessing. Why they were having trouble accessing that information. And so followed up on our employee pulse survey, and I did a smaller, more focused, shorter survey to employees that I think around 40% of employees participated in at that time.
[00:21:57] And meanwhile, we have around, we usually have around [00:22:00] 98% of our employees participate in our employee pulse surveys. And so use that information in the shorter survey to really drill into. Okay. You know, you're telling us, you have a hard time finding company-wide information list. The top three that come to mind right now, you know, like yesterday, when you got onto your computer, what could you not find?
[00:22:21] And so, you know, I really just gathered all of those inputs and started to identify that it was truly company-wide information that employees had a hard time finding, not team to team, you know, like information within my team. I know where that. Maybe that's in Google drive or Google docs or a shared folder, but it's like, what's her travel policy.
[00:22:42] A lot of people were having a hard time finding that. And so, you know, using that more focused survey, using that survey to then go into sort of workshops with different types of groups of employees to say, you know, do you think this solution would work? Do you think if we did this, would it work? Um, so really taking the time to dive [00:23:00] into the research and not be afraid to maybe pause.
[00:23:03] An important initiative, which I did a few times. I said, we're not going to achieve that OKR in time because we need to pause and really make sure we're doing, you know, we're really understanding the pain point really well. And then I think that the second piece is our intranet does a really great job at solving those pain points because we understood exactly what features we were missing.
[00:23:25] You know, you could, you could, it's a really saturated market. You can find a solution out there in many different combination of. But we specifically needed one in which, you know, I can name the top two or three priorities and we needed one in which I could find an org chart and really understand who does what, because we were going so fast right now, all of a sudden, I don't know the person who just joined last week.
[00:23:51] They maybe they joined when we were virtual. And I sort of, you know, I'm getting an email from them requesting some information as from work. And I don't know. So I [00:24:00] really want to understand some context, who's their manager, you know, what do they do? Should I answer this message? And then the second most important thing was, you know, we need a solution that has really reliable governance meeting.
[00:24:15] I can trust that this page is up to date because there was a system in place that ensures that it is, and that system is automated and, you know, I don't have to chase, you know, 10 people to say, Hey, the page that you created last year is outdated. Like, are the links still working? Is that information still true?
[00:24:34] Our solution has, has a really great fix for that. And it's automated and people get a ping every six months, which my customer success manager tells me is a little bit too often. But, you know, we knew that that was a big pain point. And so we focus on that, right? We prioritize confirming that invalidating pages, confirming that the content.
[00:24:54] Amanda: Yeah. As someone who has also implemented an intranet, that's one of my biggest [00:25:00] issues is keeping that information. Correct. So this is many years ago before, you know, a product like the one you use was even available, you know, running reports, anything that hasn't been touched in a year got yanked because you have to do that.
[00:25:15] Having outdated information. Probably worse than not having any information about it at all. Um, cause there can be so much just button and bad information out there. You mentioned that, you know, you had a 98% participation rates on your survey, you know, your employee surveys. How do you get employees to participate at that rate?
[00:25:32] What you see? I
[00:25:33] Guido: would say that there's probably a few things we do to get us there. And then there's a piece that is just sort of natural to Coursera and it's just part of the culture that I can't take anything. For the few things that we, the tactical things we do are we invite one member from each organization, from the company to join our core team and really be the champions within their organization.
[00:25:58] So we, we usually provide [00:26:00] them with, you know, here's a communications plan. This is, these are all the messages that are going to be going out to the country. You can supplement it with your own nudges, to your colleagues who know you, who trust you when your name pops up, they'll probably check. Right? And so that's one piece.
[00:26:18] We sort of expand the circle of ownership and accountability, um, and have sort of influencers help us. And we give them tools and, and drafted language. And, you know, w we make it really easy for them to. Lift some draft and share it with our circle. So that's one piece. The second piece is we, we do have a lot of fun with it.
[00:26:44] We sort of make it into a competition. I'll create these little fun gifts where we show, you know, the bar chart for each organization changing and growing over the span of 24 hours. So, so we sort of create a little bit of fun in that way and use multimedia and have [00:27:00] that competitive spirit. But I also think that the thing that really helps us achieve that is we, you know, we have a really engaged community.
[00:27:07] Our APS tells us that we are all here because. We want to build a company. That's helping people get free access to the world's best education. And so we sort of understand the importance of being fully engaged. And so I think that's just a unique part of our culture. Like most of the people are really clued in and, and want to participate and want to share feedback and, and appreciate those opportunities for open dialogue.
[00:27:34] Amanda: We want to point out before I forget that your webinar where you discussed. The process of implementing sort of this research and implementation venting your internet is out there. It's on the assembler website. I've listened to it last week. It's really well done. It's almost a really good blueprint for anyone looking to do this.
[00:27:51] So I would be remiss if I didn't call that out and say, go watch that Gita does a great job of giving you really the blueprint if you're out there and [00:28:00] you're, you're looking to do it as well. So it's a really great right webinars.
[00:28:03] Guido: Yeah. And in that webinar, I mentioned this. I built. Um, and I'm not sure if it's still attached to the webinar.
[00:28:11] So if it's not, anybody can feel free to reach out to me. I've had some people reach out to me and say like, Hey, you mentioned this scorecard, can you share the file with me? And I did originally in some way, Yeah.
[00:28:22] Amanda: You know, the internal communications were all is such a good group of humans who are always willing to help.
[00:28:28] So I really appreciate you saying that. Um, we'll talk a little bit more at the end and have people can get ahold of you, but I just, I think that webinar's really well done and it's a good blueprint for anyone looking to even implement, you know, a new technology. You can take a lot of the pieces that you did, you know, pull that out and sort of.
[00:28:43] Tweak them a little bit. So it's a really well done the webinar. I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about you work with executives, C-suite leaders, but how you build those relationships and get them to trust you quickly. I mean, internal communications is that's a big part of the role, but if you haven't done that, you have to step [00:29:00] in there rather quickly and build that rapport and trust.
[00:29:02] And I'm wondering if you have any advice for our listeners who haven't done that on how they can do it really well
[00:29:07] Guido: from my perspective, the way you build trust with any. With a colleague that's next to you or a leader that relies on you or an executive who is, you know, looking to you for an answer or support is by being your true self and showing them that you are open to sharing your complete.
[00:29:38] And so that, that, that sort of gives them a reason to trust you. And that sort of sounds a little bit weird, but I I'll share an example. And I think maybe helps illustrate, you know, I was mentioning earlier, like I'm often the youngest person in room, you know, I'm often, I there's so many things that I know on a list.
[00:29:56] If I were to make a list that I'm like, these are things that like, [00:30:00] prove why I shouldn't. I'm the youngest person here. I didn't work at a tech company before, you know, I, I spent most of my time in education. Like, why are you here? It's an imposter
[00:30:09] Amanda: syndrome coming
[00:30:10] Guido: back. Exactly. But I think, you know, there are also many reasons you can make a list of the reasons why you are there.
[00:30:19] Right? And so when I walk into a room, I walk in as myself and I have learned over time and then in my careers. And I've also. Colleagues and leaders and managers who have always encouraged this. So I'll admit I've been blessed, but I just walk in and I meet. And I say, what I think is the truth. And, you know, I speak about my personal life.
[00:30:46] You know, I tell people that my mom is one of my best friends, those sorts of ways. Like when you start to open up to executor, They understand like your motivators and then they understand that what motivates you maybe [00:31:00] is what motivates them. And then it sort of creates a bond. You know, I think it's really easy to be nervous around a leader and to feel like, well, one of the first things I should do is keep my mouth shut, only speak when I'm directly addressed and not share so much about yourself.
[00:31:21] And I think. Does is it sort of creates a, it sort of builds a barrier right between you and that leader. And so they don't really have much to like connect to when they want to turn to you and tap you for your expertise or, or your solutions or your ideas. And so, yeah, I think, you know, I've, I, I talk a lot about my life.
[00:31:42] I talk about ways that I think, you know, things that I think. I can build a really strong relationship and we go from there, right. We connect versus people. And then we sort of go into.
[00:31:55] Amanda: Yeah, I agree. I'm big on that. The idea of humanizing myself, and I'm often found that [00:32:00] leaders who ask your opinion or listen to you, or generally the good, the good kind of leaders, the ones who want to hear everyone's opinion before they make a decision or try something new, um, as well.
[00:32:10] But I'm a big believer in that humanizing, just getting to know on a personal level. Um, I want to go into the next segment ripped from the headlines. X-ray x-ray read all about it
[00:32:21] Sponsor: or stories ripped from the headlines ripped from the headlines.
[00:32:25] Amanda: So you've been at Coursera since the beginning of the pandemic.
[00:32:29] I'm curious, knowing what you know now about your team Coursera, is there anything you would've done differently or handled differently, um, to avoid or solve for any issues that arose because of the pandemic internally?
[00:32:42] Guido: You know, I read a really good piece saying, you know, internal communications professionals have done such a great.
[00:32:47] Hard work during the pandemic, making sure that employees feel like they understand what's happening because of, you know, given for example, COVID COVID regulations and return to work and, um, or not returned to work, but returned to [00:33:00] the office. And so, you know, the, the, the writer was saying, I hope that we don't go back to the days when internal communications teams sort of focus a lot on creating content that isn't as useful.
[00:33:13] And I probably think that that's things like, I don't even know, like I I've, as you mentioned, I joined Coursera at such a critical time that I haven't had the time to sit around and do content just for the sake of creating content. Right. And so I think that's one thing that I've sort of started to be a lot more mindful about is like what as an internal comms head of at Coursera, like what can I do or what have I done?
[00:33:38] Uh, that maybe has created unnecessary burden or unnecessary noise. And how can I cut that down? And so I am being a lot more disciplined about how many messages I put out to the company, but at the same time, I'm being a lot more strict around the messages. I allow others to put out to the company. So people will come to me and say, this [00:34:00] project is the most important thing employees need to do this year.
[00:34:04] And so I want to send a reminder. And, you know, maybe earlier on when not much was happening. And when we really thought that that was the most important thing and employees Raiders, maybe we would allow that, but now we have to be a lot more mindful around whether that's true or not. And whether it, once a day, reminders are really valuable or they're just adding to the noise.
[00:34:27] And so I would say, you know, being a lot more mindful that the noise I create, then also being a lot more. Um, with others about the noise they create and helping them be much more.
[00:34:39] Amanda: Yeah, I totally understand that. Um, one of my last roles, you know, running the new, the monthly newsletter, I'd have 30th stories.
[00:34:46] Each of them, four paragraphs long. And just saying like, we have six max focusing on what, what can people really handle on top of their jobs? You know, you mentioned burnout, just working over hours. What can we really give people that'll [00:35:00] digest so that they'll actually look at this and not go, you know, long newsletter.
[00:35:05] It's take me 15 minutes to read this. I'm not gonna write. Absolutely. Um, I want to just briefly talk about, um, you were part, of course, Sarah's IPO in late March as at 2021. Um, can you talk about what that was like for you to be part of
[00:35:22] Guido: that? It was the experience of a lifetime. I would say it, um, you know, when I joined, it was obviously a dream for everybody at the company that we'd be able to do.
[00:35:33] Well, you didn't know when or how. And so it actually happened much faster than I thought it would, from my perspective and sort of from my readiness, I just thought, you know, I was told we were going to IPO in March, 2021, and I was going to be responsible for the event where employees could join and sort of celebrate that moment with our executives and our co-founders.
[00:35:55] We would have loved to be able to do it all in person, uh, bring everybody together, [00:36:00] but we were forced to do it virtually and. It was really important to make sure we created a program that felt really engaging during a span of maybe an hour and a half or two hours, and also sort of elevated it right.
[00:36:14] To like a very special moment since we've been doing a lot of our meetings, virtually a lot of our, all hands meetings like this, couldn't just feel like an all hands meeting. Right. And so we invested a lot of time and resources in creating a really thoughtful program where we heard from. Uh, many different members of our communities, employees, long tenured employees, our co-founders, um, all of our executives, but also our customers and our partners.
[00:36:41] You know, we heard from two college instructors who teach courses on the very popular courses on the Coursera platform. And so that was a really awesome way to like bring them into the day, but it was, you know, sort of my responsibility to make sure that that felt. A milestone [00:37:00] moment. And it was a lot of work, but we were able to celebrate it in a really meaningful way.
[00:37:05] Amanda: And so what's, what's one of the most memorable learning experiences from that. Like if someone's, if someone's getting ready to do this, cause I mean, we're hearing more and more about this. What's what's one piece of advice you would give someone.
[00:37:18] Guido: So I'm going to cheat and say maybe two or three. Okay.
[00:37:21] Because there's a few things that are coming up into the top of my head. The first is, you know, your audience better than anybody else. And so make sure you deliver for them and advocate for their experience. The second tip would be. Make sure it's aligned to something bigger than the day itself. It is a financing event at the end of the day.
[00:37:46] It's a really exciting financing event, but when you're celebrating a financing event, making sure that you have it aligned to something bigger than that is really important. And so for us, you know, we built a program around our five company values every session in [00:38:00] the, in the event. And then I think, you know, the, the last piece I'll say is, you know, for us, it was a live event.
[00:38:06] That we were streaming to people around the world. And so I remember I got in that morning and the production team from the New York stock exchange was like, here's your headset? You are directing the show. And I sort of like, maybe knew that that was going to be my role, but it felt really real when they gave me the headset.
[00:38:21] And I was sort of like, I heard people in the production studio on one ear and I was listening to the speakers through the other ear. And, you know, I sort of had like three things that I had to balance all at the same time. Um, and so. Just have a ton of fun with it and understand that it's like, it's a, it's a once in a lifetime opportunity for many of us, but, but it also is really important for the people on, on the other end.
[00:38:45] And so. Making sure that it's fun for you because it will sort of translate and be really fun.
[00:38:50] Amanda: Yeah. It sounds like, uh, sounds like it feels like an out-of-body experience going through having all that in both ears. That would be, sounds like a lot of fun. I'd have to [00:39:00] drink a lot of coffee.
[00:39:02] Guido: Yeah. So though I didn't want too many liquids in my body cause I had to hang there.
[00:39:06] I had to be in the room for like two hours and a half
[00:39:08] Amanda: and we all know what happens if you don't turn the headset off enough to use the restroom. We've read as guests. All right. Let's move into our last segment, asking for a friend.
[00:39:22] Segment: Hey, asking for a friend,
[00:39:28] what do you
[00:39:29] Amanda: think will be the biggest challenge? And communications for communications professionals, um, in the future, in the next five to 10 years,
[00:39:37] Guido: I think one of the biggest challenges is going to be tools. So, you know, we have tools at Coursera that we sort of source ourselves that we know we use and we vet and we research and we implement because we know they're going to solve a specific.
[00:39:59] There are [00:40:00] also communications tools that sort of predate me and any internal comms team that I sort of inherited. And then there are tools that it implements that have a lot of internal comms components, perhaps, uh, you can think of like direct messaging tools or like even email. And then there sort of the tools that employees go out and like sign up for a trial and then they sort of spread and then like everybody's using this tool.
[00:40:23] And so the world of tools is going to be a challenge that I think we need to make sure. We are not overextending and sort of over a sourcing tools to solve very specific problems because, you know, we've all been to the cheesecake factory and have seen a menu with 300 menu items. And then you're like, well, I'm not going to, maybe I'll just order the same thing.
[00:40:44] I order every day, because like you're overwhelmed by choice. Right. And so I really worry that whenever we, we, I hear a colleague say, oh, we need to source a new vendor for a new tool. And it's going to solve that. And I'm like, Hey, does something else that we currently [00:41:00] use? Could it do the same thing?
[00:41:01] Maybe not at a hundred percent, but at 90%, but the extra, that 10% difference we make up by the fact that like, we already have a lot of adoption in that first tool. Right? So like negotiating those conversations, I think is really important for communications provider. You have
[00:41:16] Amanda: a very interesting career and you've done a lot of really amazing things from the intranet, the IPO Dreamworks, we've talked a little, quite a bit about that.
[00:41:24] What's something you're interested in doing that maybe you haven't done yet that you feel like could be a real good professional bucket item
[00:41:31] Guido: list. I think that's a great question. I, so in my current role, I work a lot with our executives and, you know, I think I sort of say. Part of my role is an executive communications role, but not right.
[00:41:47] Cause there's so many, there's so much else in my role at a bigger company, you'd be able to sort of split that up and say like things aren't executive communications go to this person, other internal communications function, girls go to this person. And so I'm sort of wearing all the hats [00:42:00] I have wondered, like it'd be really great to spend some time doing just executive communications, being able to do it internally the way I do it.
[00:42:08] But also externally, right. Sort of like building up somebody's platform and making sure that they're sharing their perspective with the right audiences in the right way. And so that, that could actually be really fun. I think, you know, working with one leader, focusing on their message, their platform, their frameworks, and helping them share those.
[00:42:27] I think that's probably. What I would say, I should add to my toolkit. Dino, this
[00:42:33] Amanda: has been so much fun. I really do appreciate you being here. I feel like there's a million more questions I could ask you. And maybe behind the scenes, don't be getting text messages or emails from me, but, um, one last thing before we go, let our listeners know where to find you, if they want to reach out.
[00:42:49] And is there anything else you want to share that we haven't covered today?
[00:42:52] Guido: I frequently only. I try to not be on social media very much, but because of the employer branding side of my job, [00:43:00] I'm often on LinkedIn running campaigns or, you know, updating our, our careers pages and such. So you can find me there.
[00:43:08] I am very responsive and have connected with a lot of people who have reached out. Um, and so that's where you can find me one thing I'd say, you know, I think it related to that. Being an internal communications can be sort of lonely within a company because oftentimes it's a one-person role, maybe even two people.
[00:43:27] And so I often encourage people to like build, I love when we can build a community and sort of share, like, what are you all thinking about this particular situation? Like, how are you communicating this to your. I think there's a lot of value in that. And so I'd love to, you know, be part of more of those communities and, and help people understand what we're doing and hear what they're doing.
[00:43:51] I always love that. Yeah.
[00:43:52] Amanda: What it did is internal communications has a great network. That's why, I'm glad to hear you say that. I know when I interview people on this podcast, it's the same people [00:44:00] sharing ideas, wanting to help. Nope. No. There's nothing proprietary about helping people understand, you know, the employee experience, but some, so thank you for joining me today.
[00:44:09] I really appreciate your time. This has been great. Thank you. Thank you
[00:44:13] Guido: so much. Thank you again
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[00:44:38] Segment: To
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