The Future of Work at PagerDuty: Why Go Back to Normal When We Can Go Back to Better?
A few months ago, I wrote about PagerDuty’s mission to reimagine the workplace in the wake of COVID-19, and wanted to share an update. When we look back at the last 10 months of work, one thing is clear: We are never going back to “normal.” Though it might sound daunting, I am excited about the opportunity it offers to forge our next normal and to make it a better normal than the one we’ve left. This is a chance to rethink work at PagerDuty for the better, and to serve our customers and communities even more effectively through renewed processes, frameworks, and rituals that will help us write this new chapter.
Before COVID-19, we experienced the same challenges that many organizations do—keeping up with growth, scaling efficiently alongside that growth, and maintaining our strong company culture amidst it all. The pandemic shone a light on those challenges in a new way, giving us the chance to put those challenges to bed and seize this moment of transformation.
We know that we’ll primarily continue operating as a distributed and digital workforce. But rather than announcing that PagerDuty would become remote-first, we wanted to be intentional and consider what a new model for work would look and feel like. While remote work will be a mainstay, we’re moving beyond iterative change to entirely rethink what’s “normal” for work.
PagerDuty’s Future of Work: OneDuty
How we work is more important than where we work. How we make decisions, how we communicate and collaborate, and how processes influence innovation are significant elements. To reimagine everything, we’ve created three work streams made up of Dutonians from teams across the company. They are:
- Culture: We’ll drive organizational and cultural transformation to enable PD and all Dutonians to quickly adapt to our future, laser focused on customer devotion.
- How we work: We will create new rituals, processes, frameworks, and tools to power teams to move with agility, be decisive, and execute rapidly, and stay connected to each other.
- Where we work: We will redefine processes, policies, how we use the office to ensure we safely offer a work environment that allows employees to do their best work, whether in office or elsewhere, wherever it makes sense for the business, customers, and Dutonians.
The workstreams will also collaborate with external partners to design and deploy processes, policies, and tools to enable this transformation. We want to create a rich digital experience that drives the cultural change and behaviors we need to keep succeeding, and engage and equip Dutonians to do their best work from anywhere, in relentless service of our customers, who are at the center of everything we do.
We also have some guiding principles so we remain aligned with our PagerDuty Values. We’ll be guided by an outward and forward orientation, and maintain our customer devotion mindset. When our customers succeed, PagerDuty succeeds. And when we work better, we can serve our customers better through innovation and rapid evolution. Finally, our focus on Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity will remain center stage so that PagerDuty continues to be a healthy and sustainable environment with a level playing field, and where everyone feels like they belong and thrive.
Over the coming months, the teams and the leadership group will have dedicated work hours to devote to the program, and I’ll be back here to tell you more about the next step. I’m excited to be on this journey alongside a powerful group of Dutonians—the opportunities are endless—PagerDuty is here to seize it.