How a start-up business is helping their team to ‘level up’

Olga Klimentieva, head of people and culture at DiviPay, has created the ‘Level Up Academy’ to provide industry-specific, company-wide training. The HR Leader spoke with her to find out more.

“For us, it was extremely important to make sure that everyone had an opportunity for professional development…we wanted to give everyone an avenue to participate in a number of different courses and training. So, we created an academy called ‘Level Up Academy’,” she said.

DiviPay was founded in 2016 in Surry Hills and is an expense management platform, with Ms Klimentieva joining the team in January as head of people and culture. Since then, she has implemented the academy as an internal training and professional development program, covering four key areas.

One of the four cores of the program is ‘people leadership essential training’. Ms Klimentieva shared that “we really want to give them [people leaders] the tools to really motivate their teams and make it a really pleasant and productive environment.”

“Every single people-leader, so someone with a direct report, must go through a number of different sessions. And they start from unconscious bias in interviews and in general, effective interview skills, all the way through to probation management, effective growth plans, [and] setting goals,” she said.

Everyone at DiviPay is able to participate in the second core element, ‘people skills training’, as a part of the Level Up Academy. Ms Klimentieva explained that this component covers a number of interpersonal, mindfulness and communication skills in addition to navigating hybrid work.

“What is really important to us, both across the organisation but in people leadership essentials training, is hybrid meetings. [It’s] something that we've received a lot of feedback that people would love to understand how to do better and what they can do to engage people because we're a hybrid organisation. We have a lot of people that are remote workers, but then we have people obviously that are in the office and that's their preference. So, that was a really important part of training that we provide for everyone.”

She explained that most organisations forget about implementing these same skills into higher leadership roles, and created the third component, the ‘ELT [executive leadership team] Bootcamp’ to address this at DiviPay.

“Everyone, even our co-founders, needs to continue to build a lot of self-awareness, needs to really lead with empathy. So we're continuing to work on those skills with them. There's a programme designed specifically for them which we've kicked off already.”

The fourth component, the ‘Emerging Leaders Programme’, is yet to be implemented, and Ms Klimentieva told HR Leader that she is excited to see what this programme can offer for future people leaders.

“Those really high performing, high potential people that potentially could…start leading a team. Or even if they're an individual contributor but very much close to promotion, we really want to be able to give them some strategic insights, business acumen, how to read a budget, what to do with a budget. Those kinds of foundational skills that they might not have had in the current role that they're doing.”

“We do have career pathways that we've developed internally...there's always a fork in the road because you can continue to progress without having to lead people. So it's really important for us to let people know that you absolutely can continue to develop, can continue to grow, can continue to receive promotions as an individual contributor or you can take the path where you're coaching, leading people. So there's absolutely those two pathways. So it's important for us to recognise that,” she concluded.

The transcript of this podcast episode, when quoted above, was slightly edited for publishing purposes. The full conversation with Olga Klimentieva is below.