Bill Kerr: For many businesses, the post-Covid “new normal” includes a mix of in-person and remote work. Hashing out the who, what, and when, and measuring productivity can be contentious. But in 2023, more than a quarter of employees split their time in this hybrid mode—close to four out of 10 in larger firms. The fully remote model, while less common overall, is almost as popular among larger firms. Not surprisingly, tech companies have embraced work from home more enthusiastically than other sectors. What does it take to succeed as a remote-first organization? What skills do firms need to make it work? And is HR up for the task?

Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m your host, Bill Kerr. My guest today is Tia Silas, CHRO of the e-commerce company Shopify. We’ll talk about what it takes to run a predominantly remote organization and how to secure and develop the highly sought-after skills needed to compete in e-commerce. We’ll also talk about the evolving role of HR, which is becoming more strategic across the enterprise. Tia, welcome to the podcast.

Tia Silas: Hi. Thanks so much. So glad to be here with you.

Kerr: Tia, maybe we could start with a little bit of your background and how you came to head up the people function at Shopify.

Silas: Yeah, great. So the TL;DR [too long; didn’t read] of my story is, I’m a concrete-jungle kid. I grew up in New York City. My mom was an administrative assistant, and my dad was the first version of an Uber entrepreneur—he rode a gypsy taxi cab. They instilled some great values in me, mostly around work ethic and self-agency. Had a really great academic journey, and then ventured into the world of work. Grew up in retail—so big-box retail industry—and learned a great deal about the business of commerce, and then eventually e-commerce. Ventured into more traditional tech companies, where I got to learn the R&D language, and then landed in financial services, where I got a deep dive in great experience around markets. So landed at Shopify and have embarked on what I think has been a pretty interesting HR—or what we would call “talent transformation”— over the past year and a half.

Kerr: While many organizations have embraced a hybrid work model—or at least are trying to work through the mechanics of a hybrid work model—Shopify decided to go fully remote. Talk to us about what drove that decision.

Silas: Yeah, our belief is that you can be highly productive in a digital work environment, and we see that, in terms of lines of code written. So there’s no restraint that we need to be in a physical space in order to do great work and that a job shouldn’t define where your kids go to school. And so, traditionally, most organizations—or the way work has happened, certainly pre-Covid—is that your opportunity within an organization required your physical presence, and it requires you to be in a set ZIP code. And it’s our core belief and our principle that work shouldn’t necessarily structure or drive the decisions around your personal life. During Covid—and our choice was to go fully remote, because our belief is also that you either optimize for fully in-person or you optimize for fully remote. The in-between actually leaves you with some inequity—and so our gamble and our bet was that fully remote and building a digital-first workplace would be the best version of work for us.

Kerr: As with most fully remote organizations, it’s not that you never meet up in real life. So tell us a little bit about how you have structured approaches to physical spaces, the ability to do these “bursts.” Describe just a little bit the mechanics behind it.

Silas: In-person interaction is actually quite important at Shopify. But we do that in a way, again, with great intentionality and around a set of key principles. We do something we call “bursting.” We have about eight locations around the world and something we call “partner ports.” Ports are places where we go to do work. These spaces are not set up like traditional workspaces, where people can go in and work every day, but they’re places we come together to solve hard problems. So a team can actually identify that there’s a key critical problem that they want to work on together in person. They use our “bursts” to come together for a few days in one of our physical locations, and they work together around all aspects of that problem—and both ideating around solutions and, in many cases, building and prototyping solutions. This is a really great aspect, I think, of, again, being a digital company, but understanding that there are times, again, where the physical proximity or working together is actually quite significant and productive. And we see that. There’s no restriction to how many you can do. We see it heavily used by our teams, and they actually mark these as great ways, one, to build community and comradery, as well as, more importantly, they mark it as a great way, again, to solve a really intense difficult problem together.

Kerr: And as you think about the home locations of individuals, are there requirements that you’ve placed around what it must look like in the background and what kind of equipment needs to be in place?

Silas: So we’re very focused on collaboration tools. We’re very focused on studying the effectiveness of teams. We’ve had a lot of chatter around how we’ve thought about meeting times, and we have a great philosophy around, we call ourselves, really, we’re attempting to be a “crafter’s paradise.” So we want an environment where people can spend more time crafting or building or working on the things that are really their subject-matter expertise in pursuit and fulfillment of our mission. And, again, we’re looking for all signals in our environment that we are setting up conditions that allow people to spend more time to build as opposed to doing things like sitting in meetings for hours and hours. So always constantly evaluating both the tools and the ways of working to optimize for digital and work, in general, to be completely honest.

Kerr: I want to circle back to the crafter model in a second here. But continuing a little bit longer on the remote and being a global organization, where are you finding the current frictions? You’re probably, like, two, three years into this, and so you’ve gotten most of the basics down. But what have been some of the harder problems to tackle?

Silas: Yeah, I think that actually being remote—and the decision to be remote—actually unlocked more for us than friction created. We now have a global playground in which we can recruit, and we often talk about, because we’re not restricted to geography, we can really just have a mission to find the very best in the world, no matter where they are. Our focus has been on, how do we curate the right people with the right skills. And then, we know that there are behavioral attributes that make you more likely to be successful at Shopify. Things like resiliency and a sense of self-agency is really important here. Accountability. And so it’s more of those behavioral aspects that we get—on top of the technical skills—that have become more interesting. And how we pursue those and recruit for those across the globe has been something that we continue to get better at. Similar to many organizations—whether you’re remote, hybrid, or fully in-person—we are always optimizing for the best ways for global teams to work together. We don’t get to excuse ourselves from the complexity of time zones. So we think very thoughtfully around the structure of teams, how we work together, when we work together, and how to build as much flexibility as possible into those things.

Kerr: Tia, culturally, one could imagine—and Shopify originates from Canada—you can have some image of a Canadian company or an Italian company or a Mexican company. Likewise, if you were to even take a large conglomerate, you could imagine an Italian division, a Mexican division of General Motors or of Siemens. Do you feel that there’s still some cultural differences or some connections around some of Shopify’s employees that are in certain geographies or regions and some character that comes through, even in a fully remote organization?

Silas: Yeah, I think, of course, I think it’s hard to say you fully excuse yourself from, like, regional hubs create community, and there’s certain ceremony or traditions that happen based on geography. Most of that, we’re trying to actually say, “Okay, how does that actually help us to be a better version of an organization?” And, again, how do we look for any pitfalls? We’re also primarily North America, so we’re an EST-centered organization, and we’re also unapologetic about that—both in the hiring process and how we do work—where there are plenty of people who are willing to accommodate or work around that. And so I think there’s both a give and take from the organization and the employees. Making commerce better for everyone can be nuanced by geography, it can be nuanced by what people need. You could take those differences, and maybe even some of that hub mentality, and you can say, “Actually that works against us in terms of building community.” I think more of what we see in Shopify is that, because we’re so heavily focused on the mission, we’re generally using that to say, “How do we tap into that to think about, how do we satisfy the needs of our clients geographically?” through the eyes and the lens of the builders who deeply understand and can empathize with, again, the entrepreneurs and the merchants that we have in the market.

Kerr: Tia, let’s link back to the “crafter” phrase that you brought out a little bit earlier. It’s not just something that’s important to your company. You’ve decided to split off career tracks of managers and crafters as being separate. Tell us a little bit about that logic and how it plays out in the careers of Shopify employees.

Silas: Something important to know about me. I started off talking a little bit about my background, and I’ve now spent two decades in the craft of HR work. And it’s work that I absolutely love; I wouldn’t choose anything else. But I’ve also got a healthy disdain for some of HR, and it is also a craft that really hasn’t changed much, if I think about it in the last 20 years. Yes, we’ve got new tools, we’ve got new technology, but in most cases, we’ve leveraged that new technology to just do the same things we’ve always done—faster, maybe. Maybe a little bit better. The opportunity that we’ve taken at Shopify is, actually, what we refer to as “first-principle thinking,” asking ourselves, “What do we need to do? What do our employees need most? And how do we do that?” And so our philosophy around career tracks changed as a result of this way of thinking. We spend a lot of our time actually curating the best talent in the world. How do we actually give them time to actually build? And, in addition, how do we build incentive systems that inspire them to build over a long period of time? And when we started looking at traditional career tracks that exist in many different organizations, it typically looks like this: I start off as an individual contributor, where you give me tons of time to build. I’ve got my hands in the work. You promote me again. Okay, maybe you let me spend a little bit more time building. But at a certain point, where you’re going up a traditional corporate hierarchy, we actually tell you something really interesting. We say the only way to move up is actually to put your tools down and manage a team, because managing a team is the thing that gets you to the top of an organization. And two results happen out of this. Some people take that challenge, and they find inherently they’re great, both at crafting and managing, and they excel as managers. Others take that duty on reluctantly. They put their tools down, they stop building, and maybe even despite their passions, they figure out success. And then others do things—what we refer to as the “Peter Principle,” right? It’s kind of like, “I go up the organization until I’m completely incompetent. I just, like, this is not my thing.” And we looked at this and we said, “Oh my gosh, this is actually”—and by the way, every organization operates this way. It’s kind of insane. But again, it’s like things that we have carried in the HR org for generations, and we haven’t really scratched our heads to say, “Is this fit for purpose, given how work has happened?” So we decided to do something really different. We decided that we actually want to create two separate career tracks at Shopify. One for crafters—crafters are typically what you refer to as individual contributors who build—and one for managers—and so these are people who actually are intuitively motivated by the idea of enabling teams and creating environments for crafters to be successful. And we made it such that at Shopify now, you can actually accelerate and grow in your career as a crafter to senior levels. You can not only grow your career, but you can be compensated in a way that is commensurate with how a manager would be if they were progressing up a manager chain. And that we’re not going to cap that, because we believe that we actually get the most value from building.

Kerr: And do you have a sense of where, long-term, the mix of crafters and managers will sit? Let’s say 20 years into a person’s career, will it be evenly split between those? Are crafters going to be the majority? How do you kind of envision the long horizon?

Silas: Crafters will inevitably be the majority. It is, again, one of these things, where we’re unapologetic about the greatest thing that you can do in an organization is build. We also know that, okay, come out of this kind of story around crafter-manager. We’re also obsessed around organizational health. I think that we will continue to practice restraint in inflating the number of managers. We also believe management is a craft. It’s a type of craft. And so the idea is, we don’t inflate this group, but the group is a group that we invest in. Let’s teach them how to be the best possible managers ever, such that growing in a manager track is really, again, demonstrate the ability to unlock the potential of crafters, right? Like you’re promoted because you have the secret sauce for how to make crafters actually 10X themselves.

Kerr: In your compensation model, you’ve adopted something that’s kind of flexible, a la carte, that’s very different from traditional offerings. Tell us about that.

Silas: Yeah, so this is another really great one where, again, we went to first-principle thinking, and we said, “What do we want from our compensation system?” Taking into account some of the feedback that—one, I’ve gotten in my 20 years of experience, but certainly at Shopify—we were getting about the compensation system, it boiled down to a few things. We wanted simplicity. And simplicity is interesting, because it shows up when we think about Shopify building the best products in the world. One of the things that Tobi talks about, our CEO, and our leadership is really this aspiration toward simplicity. And so as it polled through internally, we said, “We want our compensation system to be simple, easy to understand.” It didn’t make sense that when you would ask the question to someone, and in many organizations, you say, “Well, tell me about your compensation at Shopify.” And people would have to reflect and say, “Okay, let me think about my pay stub here. Oh, I’ve got some equity over there. Oh, I think I got a reward for something that I did in this place. My benefits, I kind of know what the value of that is, but not really sure.” And it’s so evident that something, that if you are really thinking about recruiting and building an organization of high performers, the one thing that I want them to truly understand is how they are rewarded. That should not be a gray [area] or a “I’ve got to go to four different places to figure that out.” And so simplicity was key. Agency was the other. So we wanted our employees to have more control over how they chose their compensation. And I’ve always worked in organizations where you give someone a base salary, maybe there’s a bonus, maybe there’s some equity, but you typically are like, “I’m telling you what it is; I’ll give it to you if I want to give it to you. It’s based on kind of company performance.” And so I say, “Hey, great performer, your job is worth X, and then I’m going to take 30 percent to 40 percent of that and tell you, yeah, I’ll pay you, maybe.” So we said, “Actually, no. If we do our work to say we’re actually curating the strongest performers in the world, we’re recruiting them, we’re developing them, and we’re invested, then what’s the right incentive system designed to go along with that?” And we landed at a program that we call “Flex Comp.” And Flex Comp is, essentially, you have what you call a “total rewards wallet.” We tell you what the value of your job is. That’s no different than any other company. Every HR leader in the world is out benchmarking and saying what the value of a job is, and we put that in the form of an offer letter and tell you. The difference, in terms of how we then execute on that, is that you actually decide how much of it you want to invest in equity versus cash. And so we have a system that, we have principles of that, and then we built actual tooling—so interactive tooling where people go in once a quarter and they determine based on their wallet size how much they want in equity, and they slide it, literally in a slider, and how much they want in cash each quarter. There’s also other really great features. So we give you kind of what we call a “flex spending account,” which is like a kitty that you can turn into—in the U.S., you can turn some of that into “Shop Cash,” which is dollars that go into our merchant community. So what I love about that is, we figure out how to take an internal system and even give that mission alignment, where your dollars can voluntarily be recycled back into our merchants to buy products from their store. But this power of agency was a big one. It means that companies lose control. It’s a little bit of, in order to make that work, to optimize for agency with employees, it means that the traditional leaders in an organization have to be able to say, “I’m not going to make that decision.” And that felt right to us, again, based on this environment of the future of work being more around attracting and recruiting highly skilled people, holding them accountable in the workplace, and then compensating them fairly as a result of the return. And, again, for us, this idea of them pursuing and actually satisfying a mission and the work that we want to do.

Kerr: This mix that you’ve been describing—of, first, remote-first organization; second, a thoughtfulness and flexibility toward how compensation might be aligned; and then also this recognition of how different types of contributions—might lead one to also think that Shopify is going to embrace a lot more gig workplace in the future, a lot more contingent or different work arrangements. Is that true? Or is this affecting your full-time, part-time, contingent work mix?

Silas: Yeah, we maintain the flexibility to say we’re going to structure our jobs around the work that needs to get done. Interestingly, we found that, while we love tremendous flexibility around the way you work, how you work, even the hours of the day that you choose to work, the one thing that is pervasive is that it’s a lot of work. And so we staff toward something we call “P-Zeros,” which are like, we have a system of project management across the company that we all plug into, and on a quarterly basis, we’re actually saying, “What are the biggest priorities? What’s next ahead?” And we staff ourselves such that the things that are P-Zero—so these are things that are most critical to our mission—are always supported with the right number of people. It’s very rare that we have more people than we need to support our priorities, but it’s usually full-time, it’s a lot of work. We always say, even if you go on our career site, we are really in the habit of telling the truth about what it looks like to work at Shopify. And it’s probably not this picture of, “I work remotely, and I sit under a tree with my bike next to me and eat my lunch and occasionally tap on a computer.” We’re doing hard work here, and we work long hours, sometimes, to support that hard work. And so we find that a majority of our workforce, yes, is in fact mostly full-time employees, but we don’t lock ourselves into saying that there isn’t a body of work or a future need that might warrant us to structure it in different ways.

Kerr: It sounds like the transparency you are trying to bring on the compensation side, you’re also bringing on these job descriptions and postings to let people know what it’s like to work at Shopify.

Silas: We looked at the website, and we saw a story that wasn’t our story, and we said, “Actually the worst thing you can do is attract highly skilled people into a work environment that isn’t real.” And, again, we feel strongly enough that there are attributes of certain people—or their characteristics—that actually make you more successful here than not. And so it became really important for us to have an employee value proposition or a story that was real. It’s about, again, we have this phrase here: “We are trying to make the jobs easy so the work can be hard.” So we’re not trying to portray… we don’t want the jobs to be hard. We don’t want a lot of meetings. We don’t want our tools to be clunky. We want you to seamlessly plug into work with the commitment that you’re actually going to do things that are really hard, but hopefully feel are incredibly rewarding.

Kerr: One of the big themes of the HR world over the last decade and more—and especially looking toward the future—is HR leadership taking much more of a stake in strategic decisions of companies—talent as being the critical resource. So I’d love for you to talk to us a little bit about your collaboration with the Shopify CEO, Tobi Lütke, and how that plays out, day to day.

Silas: Yeah, I will start with, Tobi is likely the leader I’ve worked with who I feel I learned from most, who pushes and challenges me more than anyone I’ve ever worked for. Part of it, I think, is a bit of being a founder, and Tobi has spent all of his life’s work and passion in pursuit of Shopify’s mission. And he doesn’t actually have a lot of experience outside of Shopify, because he’s deemed that to be his purpose. So I don’t find him very traditional, even when I show up as an HR partner. There aren’t things where I’m, like, “Obviously we would do this, Tobi,” because there is no obvious to Tobi, right? He knows one thing: It’s how to pursue the mission of the work. When I met with Tobi and I interviewed with Tobi, I knew something would be different, because, as an incredible product leader, he had a great vision for what the function could be, and again, saw tons of inefficiency in what existed. And so the journey that we have gone on together is saying, “Take the very best of talent in HR, all the things that we have been learning for decades, and combine that with the innovation and the efficiency that we’ve gotten in our R&D spaces.” The progress, if you look at the craft of engineering over the last several decades, there’s no one who can’t argue that it hasn’t gotten exponentially better. And so my partnership with Tobi has, again, been pushing us to not only to evolve the function and do… like, my entire conversation has been about this idea of, I laugh and I say table flips are complete reinventions of traditional HR work. But it’s also a way of working. I tell people I work in GitHub with Tobi. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’m writing lines of code, but I’ve pushed my first PR [pull request]. We’re collaborating in a space that is very uncomfortable for me and is not where I, as an HR professional, have spent my career. But what we are able to do is, I talk about these inefficiencies. I use workforce planning as a great example. I’ve spent nearly two decades every year doing workforce planning with organizations, where this is what happens—and I’ll tell the story the way that I’ve told the others: October creeps around, and the organization goes, “Oh, shoot, we need to actually start planning for the next year.” And we spend months and months making assumptions and guesses about all the conditions of our workplace in the future. And we start to hard code decisions about staffing, investments in hiring, and all types of things that almost happen, I say, in a tribal manner, because they’re mostly storytelling. They’re meetings where we’re talking to each other. Occasionally we’ll pull up some financial roadmap. But we’re making a lot of assumptions based on precedents and things that we’ve done. This is not, I’m being dramatic, so it’s not totally naive, and it’s a lot of smart people in a room having these conversations. But Tobi and I looked at that process and said, “Okay, well what’s wrong with that?” Again. What’s wrong with that is that the pace and speed at which the world changes in 12 months is just bananas. And so a lot of those decisions that are made typically have a very short shelf life. It’s not that companies don’t adjust, but it makes you think very heavily about the ROI on those. They’re also not incredibly principled. So I say, for example, I’ve been in organizations where we say, “Hey, we need a 10 percent reduction in our workforce.” And then what happens is we say, “Okay, we do a couple of things. Everybody go and take a 10 percent cut,” or, “Hey, you group over there, who isn’t as profitable, you take a 10 percent cut.” The reality is that there’s actually a beautiful science to the shape of an organization. And so what Tobi and I, as we’ve said, “Well, what’s the relationship between parts of our organization? So if the engineering group increases by 10 percent, what does that mean to product? What does that mean to our design team? What does that mean to recruiting?” And we’ve literally codified these relationships, and we run simulations around the organization, which allows us to do in a snap of our fingers what takes three months for most organizations to actually start to reconcile. That happens through the innovation and saying we’re actually going to use the tools of engineering. We use the ceremony and the practices of HR, but the tools of engineering, actually, to get smarter and better and build out relationships. This is one thing. We have this thing we’re building, it’s called the “Shopify Operating System,” and it’s my playground that I get to hang out with Tobi and our COO [Kaz Nejatian]. And again, we’re thinking about codifying these things. We’re putting our HR practices into lines of code. And it also allows for longevity. We don’t forget these things. We get to update them. And we have history, and I found that to be very strategic, incredibly powerful, and something that will outlive even my tenure. We’re building tools and infrastructure to make really great decisions.

Kerr: I think you’re well on the journey toward the algorithmic enterprise that many people are envisioning to the people side, as well as to things like inventory and other places. This is a great segue to talking about skill needs, and it sounds like you have been updating your skills quite a bit—to be able to use GitHub, in other words. Tell us a little bit about what you see as Shopify’s core needs, be they digital, be they sales related. And then, how are you working to staff up around those particular skill needs?

Silas: We’ve put a lot of discipline into actually writing out requirements for our roles. We did a big job re-architecture in 2023, and we put in place something called “discipline leaders” across the organization. So these are essentially leaders or people who are most masterful in their craft, who are working with us to say, “How do we hold the high-quality bar across the organization within a particular discipline?” And disciplines are just skill groups. So you’ve got HR, engineering, R&D, UX, you can think about them as skill groups. Part of that work, again, has been clearly defining what those responsibilities look like so that we can use those in everything from performance management to recruiting and build into, again, internally how we’re measuring success. We are getting better and better at spearfishing and going after talent. I think that’s always going to be hard for any organization, and that’s hard for us, identifying unicorns in the marketplace and attracting them to come. More of what I think we’re being particular or trying to get better at in some ways is behavioral, which is interesting. I think we have this ability to both attract the right skills, and we also have a strong apprenticeship model. So it’s not only attracting the greatest in the world, but it’s like how do you continue to make sure that they are able to up-level and upskill? And I think we think a lot around the type of people we want, things like continuous learners. So again, as the pace of innovation and technology changes, who’s actually optimistic about technology and will embrace using tools to innovate and be productive? We seek optimism. So it’s also, it may be in the same vein as technology, but we want people who are enthusiastic and have a level of optimism about the future of work and how work happens, and, again, are willing to experiment and test things out. We talk a great deal around this what we call “high-rung thinking,” and it’s a concept that was introduced by Tim Urban, but the idea is we want to operate as scientists. And so we don’t want people coming in with kind of codified, determined ways or set ways of thinking. We like scientists, we like people who hypothesize and in our workplace are willing to experiment and even abandon things that they had once believed to be truths. And so again, we’re spending a lot more of our time saying, “Well, how do you find those types of people in the market? Beyond skills, what are the behaviors and the things that we think the future of work calls for that will really allow us to be a leading company as it relates to talent?”

Kerr: So Tia, we’ve spent a lot of the podcast talking about innovations that you’ve undertaken at Shopify, and I’d love to know whether there’s something you’re trying out with respect to employee training—could be internally, could be externally, could be with new technologies—to try to help people go up the learning curve faster.

Silas: Yeah, I had mentioned that we put in place discipline leaders early in the conversation. And again, as a reminder, these are people that we’ve selected in each of our disciplines or crafts or jobs, things like talent, engineering, UX. We’ve selected leaders to kind of own the quality bar. And one of the things that we’ve been working with them on is really a customized view of what learning should look like. We’re very early in this journey, but the things that we’re experimenting with are a combination of traditional learning, whether that be micro learning and more bite-sized digital offerings, whether it be more apprenticeship models, so what is hands-on, use of things like, I guess a great example for most companies this year are AI tools in the workplace and both zero-to-one learning for those who don’t have as much exposure and then more apprenticeship, real-job on-the-hand learning with tools and developing with tools. When I think about 2024, we’re really diving in, again, to not be wed to traditional ways of how we’ve defined effective learning, but, one, both use the science of how people learn, and again, what works for us in terms of, again, driving people toward mission to really think about how to do this well. Our founder is German born. He grew up in an apprenticeship model, and I tell people that vocational practices show up so much in how we believe people learn and develop at Shopify. And I imagine that some of the spirit of that will always be core to how we think about modern and new ways to deliver learning or craft expertise.

Kerr: Tia, maybe a final question here. As you look ahead, maybe one year out, two years out—as you noted, the world quickly moves on us—what’s the big things that are on your radar?

Silas: I think a good deal of my work is going to be, I think with my data team this year. I think it’s really putting in more rigor around proof points that demonstrate the things we put in place are genuinely working for people. We are definitely driving toward a lot more feedback. So I say 360 feedback, and people think about that in a general way. But think about a feedback system, where everyone in the organization can actually work with you on a project for six weeks and contribute toward an aggregate view of how you’re doing, how you contribute. And so we’re thinking a lot about, not just the productivity side or the impact on the work, but we say, “Was the work actually successful because of you or despite you?” And so there’s a real theme of, “What’s your impact on the team?” And we want that to be a net-positive impact. And so we’re thinking again about, “How do we get signals for that? How do we actually motivate and encourage those behaviors? And how do we think about team success?” And then more pairing. So it’s this idea of, I think traditional HR is focused very much on the individual. We’re very interested in the science of teams. So are there actually three people that, when they work together, they actually produce some special magic? And if so, how do we build that and record that in our people systems as a unit of success, versus something that’s purely obsessing around individual contributions or components? So look forward to that experimentation.

Kerr: We look forward to hearing about how the innovations are playing out. Tia Silas is the CHRO of Shopify. Thanks so much for joining us today.

Silas: Thank you. My pleasure.

Kerr: We hope you enjoy the Managing the Future of Work podcast. If you haven’t already, please subscribe and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts. You can find out more about the Managing the Future of Work Project at our website hbs.edu/managingthefutureofwork. While you’re there, sign up for our newsletter.