Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Today on Culture Leaders Daily, we bring you my conversation with Carmen Amara, the Chief People Officer for Yelp. We talk about her career in HR and the culture of Yelp, including her remote first strategy ever since the pandemic, and why they made that choice, which is especially interesting in the face of widespread return to office policies going on into the new year, plus the impact of ai, the importance of coaching and mentorship, and how leaders don’t have to choose either people or profits just like us here at Culture Partners. Carmen’s philosophy is that you can do both. Please welcome to the podcast Carmen Amara. Okay, so Carmen, thank you so much for joining us today. So why

Carmen Amara:
That’s such a great question. When I think about how I came to hr, it wasn’t something I knew that I wanted to do. Coming out of the womb, I was raised by two working parents. They were both in manufacturing leadership positions, and it was really instilled in me early on the work ethic and the importance of having a career. So I always knew that career was going to be important to me, but as I was trying to decide what it was that I wanted to do, I just felt this conflict and the narratives that had been presented to me, it was sort of like this false duality between you can go and do something and that will help to set you up financially or you can go do work that has purpose and that you feel connected to. And I struggled with that very early on in my career and even selecting what it was that I wanted to do for a profession.
My original designs were to be a journalist actually until I did an internship during college and I thought, well, maybe this may not be quite as glamorous as what I had thought it would be. And my parents had really wanted me to go to business school, and I just remember these conversations with them around, oh, I don’t really want to sell my soul to the corporate machine. But as I came out of school, I really found myself just really trying to search for what would it be that could help me feel like I was having an impact in the work that I was doing, but was also able to eat more than Ramen for lunch. And so I did. I think my parents were happy as I entered the workforce and then realized I didn’t have a lot of business fluency. I’d gone to a liberal arts school, which was a great education I think, in terms of helping me to develop my critical thinking skills, which still served me well.
I started classes in business school and then ultimately enrolled in MBA programs, but I dabbled in things and nothing just really felt like they left me feeling a bit empty until I was actually pursuing a marketing role. I had a business school class that enabled me to use my writing capabilities and I thought seemed really interesting. So I ended up getting a job as a marketing manager for a small HR consultancy, and then just actually got really enamored by the work. I didn’t know anything about HR up until that point and found myself working with HR consultants who were working with people in roles like mine now and helping them to create bespoke leadership development programs or other kinds of performance-based systems. And it really clicked for me. I said, wow, this is a really interesting way to help businesses solve complex problems to the lens of people, but also helping people to develop capabilities and really broaden their skills in a way that felt good and impactful to me.
So that was really my entryway into hr, and it was finally, after probably six or seven frustrating years in the workforce, I finally found something that really made me feel like, oh, okay, I can see a path for me here and I can come to work and have a purpose. And so that really still sticks with me today. I think what keeps me motivated and going is being able to work in an organization where I can help create cultures where people can come and thrive and really are focused on building people first employee experiences, because it is cliche, but it is true. We spend the majority of our time in the workplace, and that really makes a difference in the quality of people’s lives. So helping people to come to a place where they feel that they belong and they can contribute their best and have that impact is really what keeps me going. That’s my why.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Okay, so it’s to make an impact in a positive way while also not going broke by just

Carmen Amara:
Well, there’s that element of it. I mean, I think that was my early decision making process. I think today I am less worried about eating ramen and more motivated by how do we create these environments where people like to come and work and do meaningful and challenging work.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah, I mean, I think that’s a lot of HR people’s why, frankly is I want to do good, but I also want to raise a family in a comfortable way and I’ll join the machine, the corporate machine, so to speak, but I’m going to do good within that machine. And that’s something that I often play with. I mean, that’s been part of my journey figuring out what I want to do is I don’t want to go broke, but I do want to make an impact and I think I can make an impact within a system that is arguably not always positive for employees by default, but I think that HR people can get stuck in trying to figure out that balance because when HR people are too people focused, then I think they’re not taken as seriously by the other departments. The CFO, the CEO, the people who are focused on the bottom line and who maybe aren’t as focused on people then feel like HR isn’t strategic or have you found that tension throughout your career between HR and the rest of the organization that’s really focused on profitability?

Carmen Amara:
Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, I think I found myself falling victim to it too. I remember a moment, I was probably 15 years ago now, the communications leader that I was working with at the time, she wanted to talk to me about happiness at work, and I just had this visceral reaction and say, you can’t do that. If you go and you talk to a leader about happiness at work, they’ll just throw up all over you. So I certainly incorporated that. I have evolved my thinking quite a bit. I mean, I always thought those concepts were important, but it’s like we have to hide what it is we’re trying to do in terms of focusing on soft skills, which I hate. I wish we need to banish that term I think, or really making people feel good about coming to work. I mean, it’s such a false choice. I mean, we need to change that narrative. That is a business strategy. People need to, when people feel good at work, they do better work.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
And it’s funny because I believe business generally, the CEOs of the world have thoroughly embraced that concept when it comes to the customer and when it comes to the employee, there’s a lot more coming and going from that belief system when times are tough, we go from that belief system, we divest in people oriented initiatives, and when times are good, then we’ll invest in those. But investing in the customer experience never goes out of style. And so it’s interesting to me that it’s so intuitive when it comes to our customer, but not necessarily when it comes to our employee. And that’s part of what I would imagine you also play in that world with Yelp. I mean, you’re all about the customer experience. I mean, what is the mission statement of Yelp? I’m curious. It’s got to have customer experience somewhere in there.

Carmen Amara:
We connect people with great local businesses.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
There you go. Exactly. So it’s all about connecting the people, the customer with the business. And so does that become pervasive in the internal culture in some way? Is it an easier sell, so to speak?

Carmen Amara:
Yeah, I think I have been super fortunate to be able to work at a place like Yelp, and I was very selective when joining the company. I was at a point in my career where I knew it was time for me to make a choice to go and do something different. And I was talking to a number of organizations and all of the roles and the companies felt like, okay, that could be interesting, but nothing really hit my heart until I got the job spec for Yelp. And it was just one of those moments where I read the job spec and I looked at the site and I said, that’s my job. And it was just so super clear to me, but it was because I could tell that the culture was one that I wanted to belong to, and it’s super focused on inclusion and belonging, and that has been foundational to Yelp, to Yelp’s core, and it’s a really special place, and it’s a really special mission and set of values that we espouse. So I do feel super, super fortunate in that regard to help carry that torch and make sure we preserve that and evolve it as we have moved into this remote environment. But it hasn’t certainly been the case in every place that I’ve worked. So yeah, I mean, that is just super important to me in terms of the work that I do and that my team does.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
So in 2022, Yelp announced they were going to be focusing on a remote first strategy for employees. You were already remote before that, but it was sort of a declaration, so to speak.

Carmen Amara:
So everyone, we were forced into this collective experiment of remote work when the pandemic hit. Yelp was an office-based culture before that, and even in our employee value proposition had actually talked about the way that you feel when you walk into a Yelp office. So I think there was a lot of early skepticism. We have a large sales force, and so the hypothesis being these sales folks need to be together, that’s part of what makes this work and what makes it special. But it actually became pretty clear early on that it was working for the company, it was working for our employees, so we heard it in our employees sentiment data. Almost 90% of our employees told us they actually preferred working remotely. We were seeing fantastic business results, and the pace of innovation was still strong. So we really took those three things and the company decided to make that decision first. We never actually set a return to office date. We opened our offices when it was safe to do so, and our employees actually voted with their feet. And on any given day, we had less than 1% of our offices being occupied.
Yeah, I mean, that really led to us then saying our strategy has been we will match the need for office space with our employees need for it. And so that has really resulted in us at this point. We have a small office presence in the US and San Francisco, really small presence in Canada for utilization and visa reasons. But I mean, our office footprint is almost non-existent at this point.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
So that’s significant cost savings too. I mean, what’s interesting is you’re saying this was a results-based decision to let people stay from home. We saw results go up, they said they didn’t want to go into the office, and then we got to reduce costs. So why do you think this has been so why are CEOs forcing people back into the office five days a week now? I think this is going to be a major trend for 2025. It’s begun the five days a week, not even just the three days a week. That was the first battle. Now we’re back to five days a week and everyone’s claiming it’s because they’re losing their culture. What’s really going on there in your opinion, since your experience has been so wildly different from what they’re claiming?

Carmen Amara:
Yeah, I mean, it’s hard to say what’s actually happening at other companies. What I can say is that at Yelp, these decisions have been data-based. And so what I do wonder is with these mandates and the claims about culture, is that in fact grounded in data?
I don’t know. Or is it what drives trust and perception of trust? I think at Yelp, we have elected to listen to our employees, and that has been foundational to our decision making around our remote posture as well as being grounded in the results of the business and then the foundation of trust that we have with our employees. And that works both ways. And so it will be interesting to see with these office mandates. I think with the economy, we’ve gone from the great resignation a couple of years ago to the big stay. Now the balance of power has shifted more toward corporate culture, but these things are cycles. And so what happens to trust at this point and what happens when the balance of power shifts more toward the employee? I don’t know.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah. So have you taken the savings from real estate expenses and invested it into other people oriented initiatives? For example?

Carmen Amara:
We have. So we’ve invested them the savings back into the business. We have invested a portion of the savings from offices into t and e. We do, although we are fully remote, an important part of our strategy is what we call our IRL strategy. In real life, we still think there’s a need for meaningful in-person connection. So that is something that we do. Our employees on average gather at least once a year for face-to-face time, and that’s largely focused on building in-person relationships and connection. And then we’ve invested savings back into the business and the business strategy.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
So the in real life is just a retreat essentially. It’s getting people together.

Carmen Amara:
It is getting people together.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah,

Carmen Amara:
Go ahead. We mainly leave that to the discretion of the manager. So we get our senior leaders together once a year, and for the most part, we let individual teams decide what makes the most sense for their organizations.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
That’s great. And what are story slams,

Carmen Amara:
Story slams? I just recorded one myself. Culture really, storytelling is powerful, and leadership in general stories really carry the culture of an organization to a large part, our values are really central to who we are. And so a lot of our story slams will revolve around inviting employees. Our yelpers as we call them, to tell stories about, for example, the one I just recorded was around our values and one of our values is authenticity. And so I was telling a story about a time in what does authenticity mean to me and a time in my career that I was called upon to be authentic. And so it’s really about our Yelps telling the story of what Yelp means to them or our values mean to them in their own words, and sharing that in the power of story.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
And then how is it distributed? So will everyone at Yelp see your video at some point, or is there a depository

Carmen Amara:
If they choose to tune in? There is a depository. So actually this one I think we will do live, we’ll have a live event, and then there’s also video recordings where people will be able to go and view them.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Very cool. I mean, one of the things that I have been researching lately is the pandemic was not just a pause. I mean the pandemic was transformative. Your story, Yelp’s story is a perfect example of that. We entered a new phase of reality, we learned something, we had an experience that shaped a new belief about what was possible. In Yelp’s example, you realize that in fact, you could be remote first and you could thrive with a remote first culture. So going back to pre pandemic ways is literally impossible because we’ve had an experience now that has been forever transformative. We have new information that we didn’t have before. And one of these things that I think people leaned really heavily into was empathy based leadership because of what was happening, the fragmenting of ourselves and our consciousness. And so how does empathy play a role in leadership at Yelp or in your position specifically?

Carmen Amara:
Yeah, empathy has always been really important to leadership, whether we have used those words. I think your point about the pandemic being a really pivotal moment and really elevating our consciousness around the importance of empathy in organizations and as leaders is an important lesson that I hope we never lose. I mean, we’re literally, I mean, you’re piping into my home. We are into people’s living rooms. You see their children in the background life, in the kind of environment and work are intersecting in ways that have been made visible where not we don’t come to work as our work self and leave the rest of it behind. We’re whole people who come to work. And so I think for me, the pandemic really highlighted the importance of acknowledging the person as a holistic being. So one of the things early on, I mean Yelp was good at recognizing the importance of that.
And so we did some early training, equipping our leaders around how to ensure that they’re leading with empathy, and that really is at that intersection of work and life. And it’s just a core part for us around who we are as an organization. It is embedded into the development that we do, but it’s also embedded into the way that we think about implementing programs, policies. I mean, hr, it’s great to have a policy, but when we’re black and white about things, it doesn’t really consider the context or the person or the nuances at the center. Yeah, I mean, I think for me, it’s something that I’m particularly passionate about, and I hope that that is something that evolves, continues to evolve and become part of the fabric of organizations from the pandemic.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
And in my experience, there’s some leaders who are very empathetic naturally, and I think those are some of the leaders that you read the books about. And then there’s leaders who struggle with that a little bit more. And so can it be taught, are you trying to teach that? I mean, is empathy a class in your l and d program, or where do you focus on growth for leaders?

Carmen Amara:
Yeah, we do. I mean, we actually do have some skill building around empathy. And can it be taught? I think it can. And then I think where you have examples where that’s not being lived, then you have to address it because that erodes culture. And so it’s the whole balance between the what and the how, and you have to have both.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah. Then sometimes inaction can be even more detrimental to culture than action, right?

Carmen Amara:
Absolutely detrimental.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
But I mean, this is exactly the thing we were talking about and how you started, which is the tension between the making money and the doing good within business as executives making decisions. Sometimes your top sales guy or gal who is not very empathetic and maybe destructive in terms of personality to let them go because of the eroding effects on culture when they’re doing so well for the bottom line, that can be a tough decision to make. I mean, in the long term, anyone can make the argument for why the ROI will be there. But in the short term, as the leader who’s trying to get a goal by the end of the year, it’s hard to pull the plug sometimes. How do you encourage leaders to make the tough sometimes counterintuitive decisions?

Carmen Amara:
I think that is a tough call to make, and I think our tendency is to hold on people too long, and we always want to try and coach people and give them some of the benefit of the doubt. And I do think we owe that to people to give them feedback and enable them to try and grow and improve. But when it’s not happening, I think as you pointed out, it just has that lasting effect on the organization and it will drag down the organization. So that’s really, I’m encouraging a leader to make a tough call. It is really looking out for the broader team and the long-term, and sometimes they need more coaxing than others, and sometimes we hold on too long.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
And so what do you do for your own growth as a leader? You’re at the top of your game now. What is it that you do to get to whatever the next level is? What is the next level for you?

Carmen Amara:
Oh, that’s a really great question. Next level, next chapter. I don’t know. What do I do for my growth and development? I am super passionate about coaching. A few years back I got an executive coaching certification. I think it helps me both hone my own skills as well as to help others elevate theirs. And that is one of the things that drives me is helping others recognize the potential that they have within and see them do things that they didn’t think that they could do. So I try to also be to practice what I preach. I always have at least a coach, if not two, because I think we all need a sounding board. As you in a chief people officer role, you don’t often have people that you can talk to internally within the organization, and that can be a bit lonely. So I do lean heavily on coaches as well as external colleagues for feedback and advice. And so I try to stay up to date on what’s happening in the industry. I’ve got a real passion for health and wellness and mental health. And so I don’t know what it is, Jessica, but I think there’s some triangulation of these things that would evolve into whatever the next chapter is for me.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah, interesting. So have you seen, I’ve been talking to leaders and businesses about mental health and wellness generally right now because an area of interest for me in terms of research, and I’ve asked the question, have you seen an impact in your business based on an increase in the mental health instances of your employees? And it’s a resounding yes, either in the form of taking time off or requests for certain types of benefits. I mean, what is Yelp doing for health and wellness for your employees, and have you seen an impact?

Carmen Amara:
I mean, I think we certainly have seen from the pandemic on that you see strains on people. We see increases in leaves and disability claims for sure, during early days of the pandemic, partly based on our employee listening strategy. We did implement a number of additional benefits for people. So we have a wellness stipend that people can use very open and broad based for physical mental wellness. We enable them to have access to coaches as well as trained and licensed therapists. So those are all things that are really super important to us. We’ve undertaken a thorough evaluation of our benefits as well as do a feedback survey on our benefits to understand from our employees what are the things that they value most from a physical, mental health and financial health standpoint. And that has allowed us to make some changes in the way that we allocate our investment dollars for our benefits.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
And so what’s next for Yelp? What’s the big next mountain that you’re climbing collectively?

Carmen Amara:
Well, we have been focused on our product led strategy, and I think there’s some exciting things on the horizon. We’ve continued to most people think about Yelp as, oh, I have this restaurant that I want to go to. Let me go and look at this review. And so that is certainly foundational to us, our restaurant, retail and other business. We have really leaned heavily into the services category over the last several years, and I think we are now at 14 consecutive quarters of double digit growth in our services industry. And so that servicing the generating great leads for our services pros and connecting consumers to great services businesses will continue to be part of our focus for 2025. And I think lots of exciting things in the AI space. Machine learning has long been part of the way that our developers develop new product innovations, and we’ve got some really exciting things on the product to look forward to.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
That’s interesting. So I mean, I would imagine, well, I know I’ve been hearing it in the conversations I’ve had on this podcast and so on with AI advancement and the question marks about how might we take advantage that can also create a sense of fear with employees about, well, wait, what does this mean for me? Am I going to lose my job? Am I going to get replaced? Especially with AI agents which are now becoming popular. Have you run into that friction?

Carmen Amara:
It’s certainly a question on everyone’s minds. I think the way that we talk about is trying to enable our teams to make work even more human with the work of ai. And how do we think about generating efficiencies so that we can do the things that only humans can do well even better, and free up our capacity. So we have our own internal chat, GBT called Chat Bench, and we are rolling out training for our organization to enable our people to, because we know they’re using it and we want them to be able to use it in a responsible and informed way. And I think there’s just tremendous opportunity for, I mean, it’s still so nascent, we don’t even know what it can do for us. And so being able to create communities of practice where we share, oh, did you know that you could do this thing? I mean, just amazing little tips like, Hey, I got this email strand that has 10 pages on it and I can just plug this into our internal chat bench and ask it. Can you please summarize what do I need to take away from this email and what kind of, that’s amazing. Can

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
You email for me? I do not have time for this.

Carmen Amara:
It’s an amazing time saver, but there’s just a lot of little tips and nuances like that in addition to, into the technologies that we’re looking at implementing for helping us to evaluate our qualitative data around employee engagement surveys or help us to look at resumes or automate the interview scheduling process. So lots of promising technology that will eliminate a lot of that manual work for people so that we can focus our recruiters on actually doing the recruiting, for example. But there’s just little ways that I think we’re finding that we can incorporate it into our day-to-day work that will make work much more enjoyable.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah. There’s another area of AI investment that I’ve been tracking my newsletter that comes out well tomorrow as far as we’re recording, it’ll be weeks ago by the time the people are listening to this, but is about this where HR and AI meet with personality assessments. So there’s this new category where everyone take a personality assessment, plug in your info. So now we’ve got your psychological makeup. We know what kind of communication style works for you. We know how you like to process details or not, or what works for you in terms of communication. And then it’s basically an add-on or a plugin, let’s say to an email application. So I’m writing an email to you, Carmen, and the chat bot that’s reviewing the email I’ve just written to. You can tell what will resonate and what won’t, and it make some suggestions and even rewrite the email and say, oh, you know what?
Carmen really is more of a big picture thinker. So maybe you want to start the email with the vision that you’re talking about, the big why, and then you can go into the detail and it’ll rewrite it, maybe make me sound nicer. And then you receive the email and it’s best email you ever got because it’s exactly the way you like to read emails, and then you respond, and then the chatbot or whatever reviews the thing you’ve responded with and says, actually, Jessica’s really more detail oriented, so maybe you want to just make bullet points or something. And so this is supposedly supposed to increase collaboration and reduce friction. And here’s my fear. It’s like we’re not actually going to even be talking to each other. I’m going to have no idea what your personality actually is. It’ll be like my own echo chamber at work of my own mind.

Carmen Amara:
That’s fascinating. I haven’t heard of that. What I have heard though is I think what is actually starting to happen on the recruiting side of the house where candidates are using AI to respond, and interviewers are using AI to ask the questions, and it’s like, okay, at what point is anybody actually interviewing anybody? That’s right.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah, exactly. I’ve seen videos of people on a Zoom call doing an actual interview and ChatGPT or whatever the tool is, listening and giving you the right responses. It’s just incredible. Or even in resumes, right? White text, the hidden white text that has all the right keywords so that you’ll be at the top of the list in your applicant tracking system. I mean, it’s actually quite clever. I mean, you want a candidate that’s smart enough to put that together to get noticed. I mean, that’s creative.

Carmen Amara:
It’ll be interesting to see where it goes. I don’t know. Will it be you and me doing this interview together? Just,

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah, and I mean, what about Yelp reviews? Is AI going to take those over? And then suddenly I’m not going to know where the best Thai restaurant is because actually the Thai restaurant, do you have some kind of security protections in place for that?

Carmen Amara:
So having that first party review experience is really critical to the foundation of Yelp. And so that is something certainly that’s really important to make sure that we are maintaining the integrity of that first party experience. We have very clear policies around that as well as a content moderation team that’s actively looking to make sure that you, Jessica still get to know firsthand what the best Thai restaurant is.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Okay. Well, so it’s time for the last question, which is my favorite question, which is what is something that you don’t get asked about very often in these types of interviews that you wish you were asked more often?

Carmen Amara:
I love this question. I think it ties back actually to the first question that you’re asked and that you asked. And so I think it’s a myth about HR that you would like to debunk, and we’ve talked a little bit about it, but it’s really that you have to choose either profit or people. And to me, it’s really investing in the people is a business strategy. And so that’s a false choice.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
A woman after my own heart. I mean, that is what my whole life is about. So I’m so glad that you’re out there fighting the good fight. Thank you so much, Carmen, for coming on here and sharing with us your expertise and telling us about Yelp. It has been such an honor to learn from you today.

Carmen Amara:
Thank you, Jessica. It’s been such a pleasure.