Guild’s Commitment to Our Team

By Suzanne Stoller, Chief People Officer

As Guild’s Chief People Officer, I lead a team focused on our workforce, including the best ways to empower our employees and ensure their ongoing success. One truism for our team is that success and meaningful contributions to our business are tightly intertwined with personal factors, including one’s own feelings of safety and security.

We all do our best work, in other words, when we’re not worried about the most important things.

So many factors are out of our control at this time. By focusing on what we can control and providing a promise to our Guild employees, we believe we’re doing our best to provide some degree of certainty in uncertain times. We will continue to do whatever we can for our team and for the workforce and students they serve.

This is part of the reason we shared with the Guild team this week that our company joined an effort led by Salesforce, signing a no-layoff pledge for the next 90 days as our nation fights the spread of COVID-19. For a mission-driven company, it’s important that we reflect not just the responsibility we place on ourselves as corporate citizens but also as members of our community.

At the same time, no one here is under any illusions about the current environment. Every business has to make decisions based on their own situation, and many organizations are facing incredibly hard and painful decisions at this time. As an organization, Guild recognizes its privilege — and that recognition is another part of what motivated us to make our decision-making public. We want to do what we can to encourage other companies who might share our position to make a similar promise to their teams.

In a trying and deeply uncertain time, Guild sits in a fortunate place, and our mission — unlocking opportunity for the nation’s workforce through education — is more vital than ever. We are grateful to be able to do what we can to protect our team and their important work.