Nasdaq Spotlight: Rich Taylor on Leading Culture in a Remote Environment

This month, we highlight how Nasdaq is making an impact through its health and wellness practices, especially one year into a global pandemic. We interviewed Nasdaq leaders who help employees navigate well-being and work-life integration in a remote environment. Rich Taylor, Vice President of Employee Experience at Nasdaq, discusses leading culture in a remote environment. 

Talk to us about your role as the Vice President of Employee Experience at Nasdaq. What does it entail?

I look after many of the aspects of working at Nasdaq that make it a positive experience. This includes typical “HR” things like training, career development, and diversity and inclusion, but also broader cultural aspects like a sense of empowerment, an innovative mindset, and whether it’s easy or bureaucratic to get things done at the company.

What has been one of the biggest opportunities or challenges while leading Employee Experience at Nasdaq in a remote environment?

I’m very skeptical of an Employee Experience leader who doesn’t actually get out from behind their desk to spend time with employees and understand how they are doing – but in a pandemic, we haven’t been able to travel. So we’ve had to find new ways to engage, including Zoom-based Listening Sessions and much more frequent All Hands meetings (which has been 100% driven by our CEO Adena Friedman).

How has the meaning of company culture changed amid a pandemic and remote work?

Many aspects of Nasdaq’s culture have been amplified during the pandemic. For instance, Nasdaq people are known as effective and efficient, and this has never been more true than when the entire company basically had to transform to remote work in the space of a couple of weeks – which we did, without missing a beat running many of the world’s markets. But a less prominent aspect of Nasdaq’s culture has been brought to the forefront, and that is empathy. We have a lot of kind, generous people at Nasdaq, and we have been very patient with each other as we’ve juggled demanding work roles alongside rambunctious kids at home, barking dogs, and sometimes just needing to take a break.

What have you learned employees value as part of Nasdaq’s culture in the last year?

Employees have expressed a great deal of gratitude for how Nasdaq has put employees first and provided a sense of security during this tough time. Things as simple as mailing out face masks early in the pandemic, giving each employee an allowance to spend on home office equipment, and promising no mass layoffs all went a long way to reassuring people that we actually were all in this together, and we would come through it together. Our employee engagement scores jumped up significantly in response.

How has your team encouraged the professional development of employees in a remote environment, especially employees who are experiencing burnout?

The pandemic accelerated our transformation to a digital-first operation, meaning we rapidly adapted classroom training and even new hire onboarding to be engaging online experiences. We also took the opportunity to introduce new professional development opportunities, including a core curriculum for everyone at every career level, a new mentoring program, and new technology training to keep Nasdaq on the cutting edge of SaaS and cloud development. We coupled this with providing extra time off in the form of “Flex Days” and new benefits like backup childcare and the Calm App to help people deal with a new, demanding work-life situation.

The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.

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