Choosing growth over comfort: An Insight into the Employee Representation Group at GetYourGuide

In this interview, we explore what an Employee Representation Group (ERG) is and how GetYourGuide supports employee representation through this initiative. We’ll chat with Liz Thamm, a Learning Excellence Specialist, about her experience as part of the ERG, its benefits for professional growth and how it helps develop leadership skills while promoting inclusivity and diversity across our workforce.

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Hi Liz! Can you introduce yourself and your role?

Hello! I work in Customer Care as a Learning Excellence Specialist. My job involves designing and delivering learning initiatives based on our processes, procedures, tools, and communication skills. This helps to empower our global workforce so that they can provide quick and efficient customer support 24/7. I also served in the ERG from October 2023 to October 2024. 

What is the ERG, and how does it benefit GetYourGuide employees?

The 23/24 ERG cohort consisted of nine employees from diverse backgrounds—spanning gender, office location, department, and seniority—who dedicated 30% of their working time to representing all 800+ global employees. 

1. The ERG at GetYourGuide plays a critical role in supporting employee representation, ensuring that every GetYourGuide employee feels valued, safe, and heard. A key function of the ERG is gathering employee feedback and directly funneling it to leadership, helping to drive various equity and inclusivity initiatives (like improving parental benefits and encouraging a balanced presence of female engineers within the field). 

2. In monthly syncs with the CEO and senior leadership, the ERG discusses these essential topics to get input and share feedback. Depending on the input level needed from stakeholders, the ERG can be informed, consulted, or collaborated with. 

Our work is often confidential since we work on in-progress topics, global policy changes or rollouts, and sensitive employee situations. We balance the need to keep employees informed with confidentiality, ensuring transparency where possible.  Often, the success of our efforts is recognized when projects are executed without drawing significant attention, an indicator that we’ve effectively advocated for our colleagues behind the scenes. 

How has your involvement in the ERG contributed to your personal and professional growth? Can you give us some examples?

My involvement in the ERG has been the most significant development opportunity I’ve had in my career. No conference, book, podcast, or mentoring session can match the experience of serving my fellow employees this way. Here are a few examples:

1. In one of our monthly syncs with our CEO, Johannes, I learned the importance of strategy, storytelling, and data-driven solutions when addressing leadership. Simply relaying feedback wasn’t enough; we needed to prioritize topics and back up our recommendations with data. 

2. We built upon 2022/23 ERG cohort's work with the Workplace team regarding the telecommuting policy. This process was a deep dive into compliance, strategic decision-making and understanding how to communicate changes effectively and empathetically. Measuring the big-picture implications for our internal policies was a humbling, fascinating, and eye-opening experience.

What leadership skills have you gained in the ERG?

Even though I was an individual contributor in my business role, being part of the ERG meant I had to learn to be a leader from day one.

I was quickly immersed in high-level conversations, and I had a lot to learn about the unique brand of leadership in the ERG.

One of the most valuable skills I gained was the ability to view a topic from multiple perspectives. Working in the ERG  involves helping various teams make changes, deciding how we evolve as a company, making the requisite decisions to keep pace with these changes, and making the tradeoffs needed for every decision.

Some of the key leadership skills I developed in the ERG include:

• Handling sensitive, confidential information appropriately 
• Respectfully disagreeing with my peers while standing firm in my beliefs
• Leading the ERG in two internal workshops to learn together (The Art of Listening; Consensus Decision Making)
• Asking questions to seek more understanding from stakeholders 
• Setting boundaries to preserve ERG working capacity while managing multiple initiatives. 
• Project management: working on year-long initiatives with multiple stakeholders and steps

How does your experience embody our Guiding Principle, “We choose growth over comfort”?

Growth comes from stepping outside comfort zones, especially when faced with high stakes, tight deadlines, and limited resources. At GetYourGuide, I learned that leadership requires integrity, trust, and transparency.

Every mistake presented a chance to improve whilst also helping me to develop resilience and the ability to embrace imperfection.

Can you share some examples of stepping out of your comfort zone within the ERG?

A big one was receiving strong emotions from colleagues. Learning to hold space for them during times of stress, anger, and sadness while also finding solutions was a completely new experience for me.

I also learned to ask direct questions to stakeholders, create dialogues around employee concerns, and push back where necessary to reach agreeable outcomes.

How do you see your contributions impacting GetYourGuide’s culture and values?

Our goal in the ERG is to maintain a continuous open forum for questions and dialogue with leadership. For example:

1. Employees expressed frustration during the Fall ‘23 Global Update when some speakers went over time and eliminated the Q&A. The ERG took their feedback seriously and worked to ensure that future sessions maintained a town-hall-style format to foster open dialogue with leadership. 

2. At the beginning of each term, the ERG defines its core missions: specific goals to drive positive change within the entire organization. For example, we knew employees needed ERG support with performance improvement plans or friction with management. We made it a core mission to define this for our internal ERG handbook with more resources, clarity, and consistency in handling these contacts.

3. We established a collaborative dialogue with People Operations and People Partners to identify patterns and define the ERG’s scope, ensuring we don’t overstep into legal territory. 

This open collaboration with stakeholders is essential for the ERG to make a meaningful impact, as we all strive to provide employees with the knowledge and resources they need to thrive.

What advice would you give to colleagues who are considering joining an ERG?

Joining an ERG can be an excellent platform for your personal and professional growth. You’ll gain an immense insight into how business decisions are made, how leadership operates, how cross-functional teams collaborate, and so much more. 

ERG members don’t fit a single profile. The group benefits from variety and thrives on diversity. Can you jump on a stage or in a meeting with zero preparation and get your point across? Great! Join the ERG. Are you an organizational wizard who can whip up an agenda, calendar, or tracking sheet with your eyes closed? Great! Join the ERG. The group does its job best when people with many strengths decide to contribute. 

The commonality I see, distilled into a phrase, is that everyone in the ERG truly wants their fellow employees to be valued, safe, and heard. 

While much of the work happens behind the scenes, it’s very rewarding. We do our best to flag potential concerns in advance to ensure every project the ERG gets involved in runs successfully and seamlessly.

Apart from the ERG, do you have any other advice for employees looking to enhance their growth and leadership skills?

1. Take an active, curious role in your growth and leadership opportunities at work. They won’t always be handed to you, so identify gaps or areas for improvement and offer solutions. Be proactive, approachable, and friendly; the key decision-makers are just a Slack message away! 

2. People love to help others acquire new knowledge or skills. Ask yourself: what do you want to practice/acquire/exercise/explore? And why? How will it bring you closer to new opportunities?

3. Take time to identify your strengths, and offer them to help others and build bridges across departments. For me, it’s organization. I’m confident when creating a list of steps, timelines, color-coded documents, meeting agendas, and so on. This is my superpower that I get lots of compliments about!

What are your next steps?

For now, I’m allowing myself some rest after a long year of stepping out of my comfort zone with the ERG. I want to take the time to integrate everything I’ve learned into my day-to-day. 

Thanks to GetYourGuide’s Personal Growth Budget—a perk in which the company invests in the development of its employees—I’ve invested in leadership and management books by Brené Brown and Julie Zhou to continue my professional development. 

Lastly, I plan to keep an open, curious attitude. Thanks to my experience, I am comfortable admitting when I don’t know something and know how to ask for help when needed. With that in mind, I plan to take on new tasks and projects in my business role on the Learning Excellence team in Care.

Thanks for reading!

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