Associate Director - Culture Communications & Strategic Projects

(Full remote flexibility with optional, occasional travel to HQ in Boston, MA)

We’re looking for a leader to drive strategic initiatives in the employee engagement and DEI spaces -- a curious and adaptable person who’s eager to identify ways to apply their experience to our organization and help us build inclusive and engaging solutions for our employees. As a member of the Culture & Inclusion team led by the global head for Culture & Inclusion, this role will work closely with senior leaders and business stakeholders across Wayfair. You will play a crucial role in helping Culture & Inclusion thrive by ensuring we remain focused on identifying and articulating our key priorities as the company scales. You will be a key strategic partner in the design, execution and communication of the global DEI and Culture strategies.

The below key responsibilities will be influenced, informed and prioritized by this leader: 

• Serving as a strategic thought partner to the Culture and Inclusion team leads and and to the Global Head of Culture & Inclusion - Form and share your perspectives on how we can improve on a wide variety of topics (e.g., operating model, team culture, cross-department collaboration, transparency). Help us identify blindspots, surface new opportunities, and remain aware of issues affecting team productivity and/or morale. 
• Driving implementation of strategic cross-cutting initiatives - Ensure alignment around, transparency into, and execution follow-through for cross-department initiatives (e.g., roadmapping, codifying and spreading standard best practices, cross-department resource planning, etc.). 
• Helping us communicate clearly to internal and external audiences - Hone, articulate, and craft the messaging around the team’s vision, strategy, impact, learnings, and roadmap. Identify and optimize for the most effective channels, media, emphasis, and tone for each key audience. Produce and coordinate large all-hands, leadership and Social Impact meetings, creating and shaping strategic communications hands-on. Write newsletters, quarterly reports and blog posts read by current and potential employees, customers and partners. Design processes to efficiently generate quality content as we scale.
• Stewarding our culture and empowering leaders and teams to detect and resolve cultural issues - Discern where we can improve our culture of inclusivity (broadly, and on specific areas of concern) by analyzing existing data sources and thinking through the best ways to collect data and assess forward looking strategy. Work with the Culture & Inclusion leader and the team leads to contextualize your findings and build action plans to address pressing needs. Lead strategic initiatives aimed at solving cross-functional inclusion issues. Design and deliver best-practices in the form of toolkits, discussion guides and other related materials in partnership with the C&I team members and based on discussions with key stakeholders in talent and across the organization.
• Guiding our teams’ career development and partnering with leadership to ensure fair, productive, tailored performance evaluation and people management - Make sure managers are aligned on performance expectations (for each discipline) and that these expectations are communicated clearly to employees. Empower managers to coach and create ongoing growth opportunities for their reports. Partner with Wayfair’s Talent department to adapt the performance review processes to the needs of specific functional areas. Implement the performance review process for some teams.
• Making sure our teams are always learning - Set the learning agenda for our teams, identify what resources we should provide, and help develop content when needed. Look for opportunities to scale learning resources across teams. Leverage the expertise of Wayfair’s Learning & Development department.
• Deepening our ties with the tech community outside of Wayfair - Engage with the broader tech community outside of Wayfair, both to strengthen Wayfair’s brand as a top tech employer and to enrich the ecosystems in which we operate. Includes partnership strategy, potentially producing a tentpole annual event, and employer brand content creation, among other activities.   

Skills you’ll demonstrate

• Deft communication - you craft clear, engaging messaging that resonates with a wide variety of audiences, in a wide variety of formats (e.g., slide presentations, email and newsletters, instant messages, prose memos, workshops/meetings etc) (to individuals as well as large groups).
• Systems thinking - You develop a broad and deep understanding of your area, and of the business at large. To make decisions and recommendations, you consider how these systems produce business impact through an engaged and inclusive workforce. You continually find ways to make the systems more effective, efficient, resilient, and scalable.  
• Process excellence - you manage complex cross-functional processes and initiatives precisely, efficiently, and with a bias for action.
• Relationship building - throughout your career you’ve built trust-based relationships with people with a wide variety of personality types, seniority levels, and functional disciplines.
• Results delivery - you have proven experience developing a strategy and driving results across teams in an ambiguous environment while leveraging data from a multitude of sources to tell a story and impact the overarching strategy.
• Strategic thinking - you can think both creatively/abstractly, and analytically/quantitatively. You’re as comfortable hopping up to a whiteboard to break down a problem in a group meeting as you are drawing insights from raw data.
• Entrepreneurship - you develop your own ideas of how to be most effective for the broader business. You help us identify new opportunities to work better, smarter, faster or all three.
• Time management - you excel at balancing your time across a wide range of activities and prioritizing the most impactful work. You’re able to plan out and structure work in a timeline that’s reasonable for you and your colleagues. You can rally a team around an important deadline, but you also know when it makes sense to pivot.
• Collaborative approach - you’re an excellent listener and collaborator. You’re humble, perceptive, and constantly seeking to learn & grow. You’re innately curious. You’re resourceful, resilient, comfortable with ambiguity, curious, not afraid to speak your mind.

This role may be perfect for...

• An experienced DEI/DIB Business Partner looking to grow their scope and get more exposure to senior management
• An experienced Engagement manager looking to broaden their general management and leadership toolkit 
• Someone with 5+ years experience creating measurable DEI/Culture impact in a company with a rigorous performance culture, in a role requiring strong strategic thinking, cross-functional partnership, clear communication, and complex initiative management
• Someone with a passion for building inclusive and engaging cultures paired with a solid understanding of business execution and influencing leadership