The challenge
In the past year alone, Beauty Pie has more than tripled the size of its team, growing from 50 to 160 members of staff. And all during a global pandemic.
As Charlotte explains, expansion at this pace comes with challenges: “It's a fast-paced environment. The people who work here thrive on the speed of growth and are resilient to change. And this year has certainly challenged that.”
“With such rapid growth, we have been thinking about how we can scale our people processes and how we can support this many people when we are growing so fast.”
Beauty Pie's approach
Beauty Pie has been focusing on an L&D offer that focuses on helping managers develop autonomy on how they manage their teams. Managers will attend various courses throughout the year, learning skills on everything from career coaching to looking after employees' mental wellbeing. “We want to be known for having the best people managers as an employer", Charlotte says.
When line managers are all trained to such a high level in interpersonal skills, it empowers them to take on more of an active role in the whole employee journey. Onboarding 110 new starters in a year, for example, is a stretch for a small People team — but once managers are trained they can help take on some of these responsibilities.
“
We have to think about how we can support people while growing so fast
This has benefits for employees too, Charlotte adds. “Often, you may not always want to be introduced to the company by someone in HR. It feels much more beneficial to have your manager introducing you.”
After more than tripling its headcount in a year, Beauty Pie picked up a $100m Series B in September 2021.
Where Spill comes in
“We were in the second lockdown going through the dead of winter and we noticed a shift in morale”, Charlotte told us.
“I read an interview with Calvin [Spill’s founder] and liked the story about his parents being therapists and him wanting to make it easier for other people to access therapy. It felt like a great way to support employees, so we signed up!”
Like many startups, Beauty Pie uses Slack for pretty much everything. “The fact that it lives on Slack and therapists could be accessed via Slack was incredibly appealing. I know several people have signed up to the video therapy sessions and we’ve had very good feedback so far from employees.”
Charlotte has also found that Spill helps to support managers as part of their new extended roles. “Managers are finding Spill helpful in setting emotional and personal boundaries between them and their teams. As they start to offer more people-focused support, boundaries become even more important. Spill allows them to offer confidential support without judgment or bias in the situation.”
And the extra space freed up by Spill allowed the People team to focus on things like building the psychological safety and togetherness that employees feel. They’ve done this in several ways, including introducing revival days, which allow team members to take time off on an ad-hoc basis if they need to, and introducing a new social committee and other bonding initiatives to strengthen the sense of community that everyone at Beauty Pie feels.
