Meet Allie Skeikh at Honeybook

Before joining HoneyBook, Allie was at a tech company for 4 years. She started out as a jack-of all-trades: office manager/receptionist/EA/IT/facilities. As the company grew from 50 to 400 people, Allie’s role evolved into Employee Experience and Events. She joined HoneyBook 2 years ago as the Chief of Office. Now, she’s the People Ops Manager, responsible for making sure employees are engaged and happy.

She was drawn to HoneyBook by the combination of the opportunity and the industry. Allie explains, “My love of events and my love of employee experience sparked my interested in working at HoneyBook. With this job I get to do what I love in an industry I’m passionate about.” She notes that she’s super organized and gets thing done – two must haves for this line of work.

We sat down to talk to Allie about her experience at HoneyBook, a tech company of 100 people, with 80 based in San Francisco, and 20 in Tel Aviv.

What are your responsibilities?
I’m responsible for the day to day employee experience, making sure people are learning and developing, and have what they need to feel happy and fulfilled at work. I handle the HR side of things and oversee high level office operations.

What do you like most about being in Operations?

“I get to create an environment that people want to be in, a place that feels more like life, and less like work.”

What are some of your biggest challenges? 
Often people in operations are reacting to what happens. Learning to look ahead to proactively plan what I work on next is my biggest challenge. 

What is your ideal career path? Why does it excite you? 
Over the past year I’ve been interested in developing people – helping them grow personally and professionally. I would love to focus on that. At HoneyBook, I recently formalized our Development Philosophy and launched our first 360-degree feedback cycle. Each employee also created a development plan with their manager that taps into and develops their superpowers. I love positively impacting people’s experience at work, while also helping them develop skills that they can carry with them for life.

Any advice for other people who want to get into this career? What kind of skills do you need?
I think it’s ideal for the person to be very detail oriented. There’s a lot of juggling, and things to keep track of. But most of all, 

“for the kind of work I do, being passionate about creating experiences for people is key.”

What is an Office Ops best practice that you want to share with our community at Eden?
I rely heavily on Organization Organizers – it’s a fantastic network. It’s a place where you can ask questions like ‘what is your catering budget’ or ‘what is your parental leave policy.’ Office Managers don’t have to be on an island by themselves. It makes all the difference to that have support. I didn’t have that my first couple of years and it was a lot harder. StartupHR is another great network for anyone in HR.

Another piece of advice I’d share — find ways to empower your team to do things. Don’t put yourself in a position where you have to do everything yourself. Give them the tools they need so they can learn how to be self-reliant.

Why did you pick Eden over other vendors?
It was so hard to find consistency and reliability for our random task needs. With Eden, the quality is consistently high and the customer service is incredible.

Can you think of a time that Eden saved the day for you?
We bought these great hanging swings for our new office, but I couldn’t figure out how to hang them with our tall warehouse ceilings. Eden got someone over and they were hung the same day. It was painless and a fraction of what our contractor wanted to charge us.

Eden has saved me countless hours. They literally assembled every piece of furniture in our office and I couldn’t have finished the office design without them

What do you like to do out of the office?
I try to be outside as much as I can and I love going to concerts.

Favorite App: Instagram. Check out HoneyBook! Work: Slack. I’m connected to it all the time. It’s great for communicating with our office in Israel.

Favorite Song: Anything Could Happen by Ellie Goulding. No two days are the same when you’re managing People or Office Operations, and that’s the best part!