In early 2020, while New York City was still bustling in a pre-pandemic world, Hollen Spatz was paying close attention to Singapore — where the impact of the then-nascent coronavirus was making an impact.
As the VP of people and operations at ClassPass, the digital fitness platform that gives customers access to a wide array of workout classes for one monthly fee, Spatz oversees all HR functions for the company and its 400 staffers stretched across the globe. So in the weeks before COVID-19 made its way to the U.S., Spatz and her team were watching the impact of the virus as it started its spread.
It was a frightening time, but it helped Spatz get a jumpstart on creating a roadmap to support the company’s workers throughout the pandemic. The
Spatz recently chatted with EBN to share how her approach to managing a global workforce evolved through the pandemic, how those challenges are still shifting today, and why she knew that the HR team alone could never have all the answers.
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ClassPass has always had a globally distributed team. How did that change the way you responded to the pandemic?
I spend a lot of time reflecting and thinking about what the last year and a half would have looked like if we had a workforce that was all in one place. And it would have been so different. The complexities might not have been as extreme — even today, we have to recognize that the conditions of the pandemic, even when it comes to vaccine access or restrictions in a particular market, can vary across geographies. But at the same time, we were well-equipped to respond, and had the ability to be super nimble and change direction quickly.
Almost like you had a bit of a head start?
In the sense that we were already distributed and that we didn’t have employees in the same office every day, yes. We were in no way a
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In those early days, before COVID-19 was truly a global event, what was it like managing across time zones?
We started to see how our employees in Singapore and other parts of the globe were impacted earlier than when it hit the U.S. I remember reaching out to employees there, and it was just wild. The concept of a lockdown was so unfamiliar. So we wanted to understand what they were going through, and how we could get them tangible things like masks and Clorox wipes to make them feel safer. It was about being receptive when they asked to change their working hours because there were only so many hours when they were allowed to go to the grocery store depending on their neighborhood. It was about communicating, often, and consistently from one voice.
Have those challenges gotten easier now?
We’re still leaning on our teams and people within local markets to understand what’s really happening on the ground. What’s working, what’s not? What should we change to better support our employees? This is maybe a silly example, but we were trying to organize a voluntary happy hour for our team in Missoula, putting together a little gathering at a local place. And our team reached out to let us know that booking any events in the service industry is really tough right now, because there’s such a bad staffing shortage there. But I couldn’t know that unless I’m talking to our team.
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Did learning about all these nuances change the way you will consider the issues your staff might be facing moving forward?
We’ve really worked to make sure this has been a truly consultative process, which has allowed us to understand how employees’ experiences are different. We created a cross-functional team, because we didn’t want decisions to be made within an HR bubble. So we gathered working parents, we gathered workers who were remote prior to the pandemic, we gathered employees in different functions — managers, non-managers — and people from different parts of the world. It’s really helped us understand what we’re solving for.
