There are some days when Eric Peguero’s first work meeting is at the crack of dawn. Those are days when he needs to collaborate with teammates based in India, and the meeting starts as early as 4 a.m.
“I might then have other early-morning meetings with teammates in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, then continue throughout our domestic East Coast, Mountain and Pacific Coast hours,” said Peguero, principal diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging manager at Pluralsight, a global software and workforce-development tech company.
A 4 a.m. curtain call might seem like a red flag, but at Pluralsight, it’s exactly the opposite. The company makes a point to connect teammates logging in from all over the world, while giving them the flexibility of a remote environment to balance their day.
“Without remote and hybrid work, it would be much more difficult to accommodate our global work schedules without spending 12-plus hour days in the office,” he said. “During some of these long days, I may start and stop my work schedule in order to be flexible and maintain work-life balance and healthy habits.”
PLURALSIGHT’S FLEXIBLE PERKS
Pluralsight has a hybrid and remote work policy depending on where team members live. Both include quite a few perks that help support a better work-life balance.
- Home-office stipend for remote and hybrid team members
- Summer Fridays
- Generous parental leave and flexible return-to-work program
- Family medical leave
- Unlimited paid time off
- Floating holidays
- Flexible schedules
The company culture also encourages team members to only schedule a meeting if it’s truly necessary, so when there is a meeting, everyone in attendance is eager and ready to collaborate.
“One of the guidelines in our playbook that resonates with me the most — after so many years seeing this done unsuccessfully in corporate America — is ‘no unnecessary meetings,’” noted Peguero. “We really live this one. We default to asynchronous communication. I often find myself solving a problem with a colleague over Slack or while collaborating in a document simultaneously. This, in turn, makes meetings more focused on what really needs to be accomplished and allows us to move more effectively and efficiently through our goals.”
Ways Pluralsight Stays Connected
Staying connected in a remote and hybrid environment is a high priority at Pluralsight, and its team uses several methods to maintain this connection, including:
- A travel policy and calendar that intentionally brings team members together on a recurring basis for in-person collaboration and connection.
- Slack interest groups, such as the Get Lit Book Club, Other People’s Pets and Dad Jokes
- Employee resource group-led programming, from virtual panels and check-ins to activities and events
- Quarterly town hall meetings and monthly Q&As with leadership over Zoom
- Team in-person on-site and virtual off-site activities, such as escape rooms, bingo, trivia, etc.
Peguero added that just the act of everyone being on a video conference instead of in a room became “the great equalizer,” as he calls it.
“It means that we were all even, equal and present,” he explained. “Having a remote-first organization allows us to build a more diverse employee experience, drawing from our team members’ perspectives domestically and abroad. This has a direct impact on the fabric of our organization: Our products are richer, our perspectives are broader, and our services are more comprehensive.”
The Playbook Origin Story
Being a distributed team is clearly a good fit at Pluralsight. Which isn’t surprising, the vast majority of workers — 98 percent according to Forbes in 2023 — want to work remotely at least part of the time.
Pluralsight took the time to make sure the team member experience was equitable, no matter where someone was located. In the process, the people team was able to make companywide communication a more accessible experience for everyone.
After transitioning to remote work due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the team saw that employees were having trouble building interpersonal relationships with each other across so many time zones and cultures. The communication between teams and teammates required more intentionality.
Cue: the Distributed Work Playbook.
Today, the playbook has team resources and guidelines around ways of working. An example might be how to create a detailed project summary and road map throughout Google Drive, or when to use Slack versus an email.
“When you encourage folks to be structured in the way that we communicate, everyone benefits from that,” said Peguero.
“When you encourage folks to be structured in the way that we communicate, everyone benefits from that.”
And benefit they did — the team was able to include more teammates in important discussions, document strategy sessions in a way that now keeps teams united with other departments and gives new teammates historical context for every move the company makes.
Peguero shared the example of someone on the team who lives in Australia. With the playbook, now meetings are scheduled during that person’s work hours so they actually can participate. And when a team member can’t show up to a meeting, the team will adhere to the playbook’s best practices and send out a summary or the recording of the meeting. This lets every team member get caught up, participate and share their perspective.
Why is Remote/Hybrid Right for Pluralsight? It’s Cyclical
Why does Pluralsight stick with remote and hybrid work models, even when so many employers are pushing for more time in the office from employees? There are a few main reasons that create a cause-and-effect loop that’s yielded nothing but positive results.
- The flexibility of remote and hybrid work allows Pluralsight’s talent acquisition team to reach a broader pool of applicants.
- A broader pool of applicants allows Pluralsight to bring in better talent from diverse backgrounds.
- The newly global team required a revamped, streamlined and clearer communication guide.
- The new communication guide allowed Pluralsight to become even more accessible, and thus bring in more diverse talent.
DEIB Benefits
Shortly after transitioning to remote work, Pluralsight leaders pulled together the quarterly diversity report for the board. And they noticed something new.
Everything was green.
Pluralsight investigates its hiring practices to ensure that diverse identities are being represented, marking progress towards these diversity metrics with red, yellow or green. Green means a specific, diverse identity increased during that quarter’s hiring.
For several quarters in a row, all of the diverse identities listed were green. Shifting to a remote work environment blew wide open the company’s location limitations for hiring. And with a recruiting net that wide, Pluralsight’s diversity expanded exponentially.
Remote Internships for Underrepresented Students
After moving to a distributed work model, Pluralsight was able to offer remote and on-site internships for students of underrepresented backgrounds through its InternXL and HBCU IMPACT programs. Every summer, the company now hosts a cohort of interns from underrepresented groups — and at the end, Pluralsight has remote jobs the interns could move into without having to relocate.
Now, Peguero hosts DEIB Office Hours meetings for people leaders, “as a college professor would,” he noted. “Once a week, I hold an hour on a video conference bridge so that any people leader knows where to go to get any DEIB question answered or get a consult on any issue they may be facing. And once a month, this meeting starts at 4 a.m. to accommodate our people leaders across the globe
He concluded, “We are all building an environment of inclusion and belonging.”
