Building Culture When 85% Work Remote, 15% In Labs

Jackie treats every touchpoint—from the initial LinkedIn job posting through offer acceptance—as part of the onboarding experience, recognizing that retention starts from first impression. She meets with hiring managers to align on messaging, coordinates with finance on salary bands, and ensures candidates receive clear communication about values and mission during interviews. For technical roles like scientists, she familiarizes herself with specialized terminology before posting; for creative roles like designers, she reviews portfolios to understand evaluation criteria. This pre-boarding approach has enabled OneSkin to successfully onboard over 10 people in less than a year while maintaining seamless integration across diverse technical specialties.

Rather than allowing silos between PhD-level researchers and business operations teams, Jackie leverages rigorous all-hands meetings where every team—R&D, marketing, operations—shares data-heavy updates that connect individual work to organizational mission. Leadership explicitly explains ongoing experiments and their connection to company goals, which Jackie then translates for employees at all levels including recent college graduates. This structured transparency ensures that regardless of title, every employee understands how their daily work impacts the organization, creating alignment without requiring everyone to possess deep scientific expertise.

Jackie maintains awareness of both internal dynamics and external factors that could impact team wellbeing, such as tariff changes affecting their D2C business model. When external pressures emerge, she proactively equips affected teams (like operations and customer service) with information and communication frameworks before issues escalate. She establishes an open-door policy with explicit invitations to Slack her or book one-on-ones, positioning herself as "part therapist, part strategic leader, part event organizer" to build trust from leadership through part-time interns. This multi-layered approach ensures employees feel safe voicing concerns before they become crises.

Rather than pushing through intense work periods without acknowledgment, Jackie identifies peak busy times and implements tactical recovery strategies. She offers comp days with employee choice on timing, leverages unlimited PTO by explicitly encouraging time off during high-intensity periods, and creates public recognition through all-hands shoutouts and dedicated Slack channels. The key is organizational acknowledgment—when leadership explicitly says "we see how hard you're working and want you to take time off," it carries more weight than a passive benefits policy. This approach maintains high but realistic expectations while demonstrating that employees are valued as the company's greatest asset.

Jackie actively avoids the common startup mistake of sending AI-generated rejection emails with missing names or blank template fields, especially egregious after candidates invest time in multiple interview rounds. She emphasizes that in today's competitive market, rejection communications require thoughtful, personalized feedback and attention to detail across the entire candidate journey—from typo-free job descriptions with listed salary ranges to customized rejection letters. This empathetic approach to candidate experience recognizes that how you treat people who don't join still impacts your employer brand and demonstrates organizational values.

Jackie's core philosophy is "don't wait until something is broken to build it." During her first 30-90 days, rather than immediately implementing fixes, she assesses organizational needs, pain points, and working styles. Then she proactively builds infrastructure before problems emerge: codifying culture, defining leveling frameworks, establishing salary bands—all foundational elements that startups often lack. This prevents constant firefighting and allows her to be strategic rather than reactive. For science-based startups especially, where specialized roles and high stakes create unique challenges, having infrastructure in place before scaling prevents compounding problems.

Jackie reframes wellness from an optional benefit to a core performance enabler, personally practicing breath work, meditation, mid-day walks, and calendar blocking for focus time. She uses Asana with priority ratings and due dates (adapted from engineering sprint planning) and rigorously manages her Google calendar with scheduled blocks for emails, meetings, and focus work. By treating her own wellness as essential to performance—and making this visible to the organization—she models that taking care of yourself enables better work. This philosophy of "when people are well, they perform better" becomes organizational doctrine rather than lip service, supported by tactical time management systems that make wellness actionable.