The ‘heart’ in her HR-spanning title, she says, is less punny and more precise. “Gary wants me to keep the pulse of the company. We recently agreed that I need to meet and talk to every single one of our more than 2,000 employees,” explains Silver.
You probably know VaynerMedia as the energetic advertising agency that tops $1 billion in annual ad spend and racks up social media wins for Pepsi, Bose, Budweiser, and Duracell. Content-heavy, fluent in TikTok and TV alike, the agency’s disruptive approach to advertising attracts top-notch global talent. Yet in VaynerMedia’s early years, says Silver, employee feedback was neglected and retention issues were papered over with pay hikes.
“We’ve been around for 15 years. I‘ve been there for 10 years. Before I joined, people would just walk into his [Gary’s] office and say I need a raise. He’d say how much? $30K, $10K, a trip to Hawaii, here you go. We were very generous, and we didn’t ask questions… It was like Santa Claus every day,” she recalls.
Today, VaynerMedia is a transformed company with a very different way of engaging employees. In a talk for the Face Value series Silver covers how to transform workplace culture and what it really takes for change to stick.