'At the end of the day, you don't have a company without the employees,' says the company's Head of People and Culture
Céline Maasland (pictured below) says her time in customer-facing roles left her with a simple HR rule: design every interaction for the person on the other side.
“They really set me up well in terms of thinking about ways that you always put the customer first, or you're always trying to think of the customer in any sort of business that you're running,” says Maasland, who’s the Head of People and Culture at Ottawa-based RV rental marketplace RVezy. “I try to put the employees at that same kind of level — at the end of the day, you don’t have a company without the employees.”
Maasland joined RVezy in 2018 and assumed her current role since 2020, following customer success, dispute resolution, and junior HR positions. She leads people and culture as a “team of one,” supporting an organization with seasonal swings: demand spikes in summer and eases in fall and winter.
Managing seasonal demands, candidate experience
RVezy hires heavily for early-career roles, such as young professionals and summer students, says Maasland, noting that the entry-level market is unforgiving for that demographic right now. “There’s a lot of competition and a lot of young people are really struggling to get those first opportunities, and I've heard a lot of companies think that they can have their pick, so they've let a lot of that human element kind of fall to the wayside and it's much more ruthlessly competitive for a lot of roles,” she says.
In that climate, she tries to keep recruiting and onboarding humane and clear, rather than transactional. “I’ve tried to take things the other way for us and focus more on that human element, and I think that’s helped the employees and myself in the end,” she says. “It's made everyone feel a lot more comfortable and confident, and I think it's those small touches that make a difference — life is tough enough, so you want to be more comfortable and at least enjoy going into work.”
A challenge for seasonal businesses is the risk of overhiring for the busiest months and then spending the rest of the year managing idle time — a lesson Maasland says RVezy had to learn through trial and error: “The busy season is four months, it’s a third of the year, and the other two-thirds are really what’s more realistic,” she says.
When RVezy staffed full-time roles for the summer surge, quieter months created an engagement problem so the company shifted its strategy to build a leaner year-round full-time base and rely on a structured student program to scale up in the busy summer season, according to Maasland. “We staff our full-timers based on only what’s needed in that fall and winter period, and then we’ve built out a pretty robust student program for the summer months,” she says. “We know exactly how we train them, we have all of that built out and we continue to improve it every year, we know exactly how they're going to be managed and what they're going to do when they come in.”
The program is repeatable, because the company has defined how students are trained, managed and assigned work — including specific tasks students can do versus full-timers.
Meaningful work, positive engagement
Maasland says the student program and how work is managed through the busy and quiet seasons has made a huge impact. “Now, in those quieter times of the year, everybody still has meaningful work to do, there's a lot of big projects for them to take on,” she says. “The full-time team really has a fulfilling role that they can do year-round — because of the seasonality, we go in almost three trimesters throughout the year and each one is quite unique in the type of work that we're doing, so there's a lot of variety for the team.”
In addition, her customer-facing experience served Maasland well in building the summer student program, she says. “I always try to think of the processes I'm building internally as if I was on the other side, and think about if I was going through this process myself, how would I feel, what would stand out to me in a positive way, and what would help me open up more so I can bring my best self,” she says. “I think that that's really helped, and we've gotten really great feedback.”
RVezy operates a hybrid workforce with a downtown Ottawa office, with most of its approximately 70 employees coming in two or three days per week, says Maasland. The anchor is a weekly in-office day for the whole company, so town halls and social activities can happen face-to-face. This is augmented by another day in which specific teams co-ordinate coming in together, which Maasland says makes in-office time purposeful.
In summer, Maasland sees an organic shift as students come in five days a week and pull others with them. “You have all these young people, they're all excited, they're motivated, and the energy is really palpable and you can feel the excitement of the team,” she says. “And that brings in people who otherwise might think it's a little bit quiet in the office — in the summer, there's a lot going on and they like that.”
Maasland says she reinforces that momentum with in-person recognition and events that mix departments. “I’m pretty specific about mixing people up so that they're talking to people outside of their general day-to-day team,” she says. “Even after a few instances of doing this, you start to see relationships form between people who otherwise maybe wouldn't talk to each other in a given workday, so it gives them more of those relationships so that next time they're in the office, they have one more person to talk to than they did before.”
Making the people function central to the business
Since assuming her role in 2020, Maasland believes that the people function has become more central to RVezy’s business decisions and she’s become more involved with the senior leadership team. This has been reinforced by the company elevating employee experience as a company pillar and building people goals into its objectives and key results (OKRs), says Maasland.
“Previously, it was always something that was just happening in the background, but I think now people are really starting to realize the importance of the employee experience,” she says. “And making sure that people aren't just getting their work done but are satisfied and happy with the work that they're doing and the job that they're coming to.”
Maasland believes that the increased focus on retention and culture and her involvement in conversations at an earlier stage has made her job easier. “I’m certainly having business leaders come to me sooner,” she says.
But she cautions that strategy doesn’t erase the workload realities of a small function. “I’m a team of one here, so I'm doing everything people-related typically, but just as that strategic focus has increased, I've certainly had to figure out how to prioritize the work,” says Maasland. “I have to do a little bit more and figure out what I can delegate to others — an excellent example is that previously, I was doing all of the student hiring myself, but in the last year or so, it's just not realistic for me to do all of this, so I've spent more time training different leaders to figure it out.”
That created space for bigger projects, including a compensation strategy refresh in the fall, work on salary bands, and rethinking performance evaluations, says Maasland.
