Ever since January 2022, we have had an employee representative seated on our board of directors. Paul Osman was the first employee to hold the position; when he left the company, Alyson van Hardenberg took over and filled out the rest of his time; we then nominated her to serve another year in that seat.
We have one year remaining on the experiment we negotiated with our board; in 2026, we’ll need to decide whether to argue to re-up the experiment or not. But for the next year, we are thrilled to welcome Jess Nunn to our board of directors as our employee representative.
Why Jess Nunn?
Jess has been with Honeycomb since 2021; she is the manager of our Support Engineering team. Our previous employee board reps both came from engineering, so was really important to Christine and me to pick someone from the go-to-market side of the house. Jess is someone who is known to most of our fast-growing company and trusted broadly.
Being an employee board member requires a unique intersection of skills and strengths. We ask this person to present our quarterly board deck back to the company, along with explaining how it went. This means they have to be able to synthesize a lot of very high level financial and strategic information, understand it, and communicate it back out to everyone else. It’s also a position with a high degree of trust. All execs at honeycomb need to balance our commitment to transparency with the responsibility to handle information responsibly and sensitively, and craft communications carefully; this role is no different.
The first time I met Jess was at our company all hands offsite, two years ago, when she fearlessly informed me of several areas where we weren’t doing as well as I would have hoped from the perspective of cultural inclusiveness. People who speak uncomfortable truths are rare and special, and this built a ton of trust with me right off the bat. I am overjoyed to welcome her to our board.
As a final treat for you all, our outgoing employee representative, Alyson van Hardenberg, has written a summary of her learnings and takeaways from her time in this position. Enjoy!
My time as employee board member
This month, I’m wrapping up my term as Honeycomb’s employee board member. I’ve been in this role for the last 2.5 years, taking over from Paul Osman when he left Honeycomb in 2022. Over that time, I’ve learned a lot about how boards work, I’ve learned so many acronyms, and I’ve run a few experiments to try to get the role to have greater impact on Honeycomb as a whole. As I pass the torch to our next employee board member, I’m looking forward to moving into the role of mentor and getting to ask questions about what the mood in the room was like.
When I first started this role, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Paul had attended two board meetings, and nobody was really clear on what would make a successful employee board member. As I look back on the last 2.5 years, three main skills stand out:
- You need strong skills in building relationships with people. I found I got way more out of my conversations with folks and my role when I invested time in building relationships with them. I had a much easier time reading the vibes of the board meetings when I knew the motivations of the other board members. I was more likely to ask questions of the executive staff when I already chatted with them on a regular basis. I found it was also important to go to the social meetings at work and develop relationships with other folks outside of my main teams. When people knew who I was, they were more likely to ask me questions about board-related topics.
- You need to be able to synthesize the information presented, the questions asked, and the vibes in the room back to the company in a way that’s not scary, but still maintains the goals of transparency. Distilling a 2.5 hour meeting into 10 minutes at the company all hands is always a challenge. I want to do justice to all the different departments, and think through the reception of the overall message I’m presenting to the company. But, it’s also really important to me that my coworkers can trust that I’ll share what was said in a board meeting in a way that’s transparent and truthful. A tricky balance to strike.
- You need to be trusted to keep confidential information confidential. There are sometimes in the board meeting where information is shared that is important to keep to yourself until the right communication plans can be put into place. It’s a privilege to get to be in that room, and this is a responsibility that’s incredibly important to take seriously.
Over the course of my term as employee board member, I’ve been asked if I’d recommend that other companies do this. My answer is: absolutely. It’s a lot easier to build up that trust and invest in those relationships in times of stability and growth. By establishing a regular cadence and flow of information, I’m able to invest in building trust today so that it’s there when we need it in the future. My coworker, Winston, put it beautifully: “The thing that matters most to me about the employee board member is the trust it builds, because you’re fighting to make information available and recognizing that the messenger is just as critical to trust as the message itself.”
