Ep 324 – Patsy Mangan (Chief People Officer, Scribd)

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1. Flexibility works better when you stop treating office attendance as the goal

When Scribd expanded hiring beyond the Bay Area, the company discovered a much broader talent pool — and a distributed workforce that was working well.

Instead of forcing that workforce back into a traditional model, Scribd built its own approach: Scribd Flex. The idea was simple: give people the freedom to do their best work wherever they do it best, while being clear that flexibility does not mean employees will never need to show up in person.

The key distinction is intentionality.

“We didn’t want to require people to come to an office just so they could say they came to the office, or just so they could swipe their badge one, two, or three times a week.”

For People leaders, the question shouldn’t just be, “How many days should people come in?” It should be, “What work or connection actually gets better when people are together?”

2. Optimize for concentration of attendance — not frequency of attendance

Scribd eventually learned that flexibility alone wasn’t enough. Employees valued the autonomy, but organic team meetups weren’t consistently creating the connection and culture the company wanted.

So instead of adding two or three mandatory office days every week, Scribd introduced monthly “hub days.” On the third Wednesday of each month, employees within commuting distance of a hub gather with their local coworkers — and everyone comes in on the same day.

“We focus less on how often people are together and more on making the time they are together the most valuable.”

Those days are intentionally meeting-light and designed around activities that benefit from being face-to-face: whiteboarding, shared meals, relationship-building, and hallway conversations.

3. Autonomy and accountability aren’t opposites — but autonomy requires clarity

A common argument against flexible work is that leaders need physical visibility to know whether people are performing.

Scribd’s philosophy is almost the opposite.

“Visibility does not equal performance to us. Clarity around expectations is what we believe drives performance.”

That belief led to GRIT, Scribd’s performance framework built around four dimensions: Goal-oriented, Results-driven, Innovative, and Team-focused.

Every role has expectations across those four dimensions, which means employees can understand what strong performance actually looks like in their specific job. Scribd Flex gives employees freedom; GRIT gives them clarity.

If you want more autonomy in your organization, don’t compensate with surveillance. Invest in much sharper expectations instead.

4. Performance management feels like a black box when one rating has to explain an entire year

Traditional performance systems often collapse everything an employee did over twelve months into one final rating.

Scribd wanted employees to understand the inputs behind that number. So instead of receiving one broad score, employees are evaluated independently across each GRIT dimension.

“Every single one of us excels at some things. Some parts of our jobs we do great. Other parts of our jobs we could do better.”

That creates a more useful conversation. Someone might be strong on results and innovation but have room to improve in how they contribute to the team — or the reverse.

The practical takeaway: before eliminating performance reviews because they feel cumbersome, ask whether the real problem is the review itself or the lack of specificity inside it.

5. A more complex performance system can actually feel simpler to employees

There’s a growing temptation to make performance management lighter by removing ratings, reviews, or formal structure altogether.

Scribd went the other direction.

Its performance mechanics became more detailed, with defined expectations by role and level, quarterly conversations, multiple performance dimensions, and a thorough calibration process. But employees responded positively because the system reduced ambiguity.

“All of a sudden, it wasn’t a mystery what their manager was evaluating them against.”

The important distinction is between complexity for employees and complexity behind the scenes. A system can require more design and rigor from HR while creating a much clearer experience for the person being evaluated.

And calibration matters: Scribd reviews scores across each GRIT dimension to account for managers who may naturally be tougher or easier graders. That investment in consistency is part of what makes employees trust the process.

6. Becoming AI-native means redesigning work — not just giving everyone AI tools

Scribd thinks about becoming AI-native in phases. The first phase was adoption: get tools into employees’ hands and encourage people to use them.

Now the company is in what Patsy calls the “redesign” phase.

“Expectations and how work gets done and what output looks like is fundamentally different than it was a year ago.”

That means revisiting far more than workflows. Scribd is looking at how AI changes performance expectations, hiring, career paths, promotions, job descriptions, and even the skills worth adding through new headcount.

One emerging hiring question is especially useful: is this new role adding a specialty the organization does not have today, or is it simply adding capacity?

If the problem is purely bandwidth, AI may increasingly absorb some of that work. Human hiring can then concentrate on differentiated skills, technical depth, and — critically — judgment.

As Patsy put it, output is becoming easier. The harder thing to evaluate will be whether someone applied the right human judgment to produce it.

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