We have a blast at Betterworks. In fact, we have a team named just that. Betterworks BLAST (Betterworks Leadership and Strategy Team) is a group we’ve convened internally that’s aimed at, among other things, developing and fostering our company culture. When the pandemic hit, Betterworks made several internal changes in order to better support remote work and work-life balance. Those changes kickstarted an important conversation about our internal values, and we began to revisit what shapes our organization as we look ahead to the future of work.
As the Betterworks Chief of Staff, part of my job is to make sure that our company culture integrates with the goals of our business, reflects our core values, and applies to everyone on our sprawling, dynamic team. So I was heavily involved in the creation and rollout of our new values, and I’m thrilled to share with our readers a little more about what they are and how they inform (and transform) our everyday work. After all, an organization’s company values set the stage for new hires, show employees about what’s important to the company and why, and ultimately these values show up in quarterly OKRs and the work done each day. So I encourage you to ask yourself, do my company values accurately reflect the reality of my work?
Keep reading to learn more about the Betterworks new company values, and see examples of how we apply these values in our day-to-day work.
Stretch, don’t settle
This value is all about bringing contagious passion to the team as we all work to build the best solution for our customers. Every team member is encouraged to think big, reject the status quo, and be willing to leave complacency behind! There’s plenty of examples of how Betterworks does this but my favorite is a project that’s been recently unveiled for our industry as a whole.
Betterworks marketing just launched In The Loop, a community Slack channel for HR and business leaders. The community is free and focuses on:
- Providing a highly relevant space for peer-to-peer knowledge sharing, networking, and inspiration to our community of users and future users.
- Empowering HR and Line of Business leaders to work in tandem to close the loop between people, strategy, and results.
This channel is not a sales pitch, but rather is a space for industry leaders to inspire, support, and grow through community-driven conversations.
Be a CEO
At Betterworks, we’re all accountable for our own mistakes, our wins, and everything in between. We aim to empower each employee to be their own CEO, owning their OKRs, and bringing a sense of leadership to the work they do.
Our BLAST team is an excellent example of this. BLAST is made up of team members from various departments and roles within the organization. The team spent countless hours crafting our latest values in order to reflect the needs of our company. This was a team effort, championed by many individual contributors who have a powerful CEO mindset!
Do the right thing
In order to do the right thing at Betterworks you must be candid, respectful, and transparent. We believe our actions should match our words, whether that’s fair and honest communication with our customers, or internally with one another.
We recently made the decision to operate as a remote-first organization, and as the world begins to reopen, Betterworks may have small offices or coworking spaces throughout the country, but we will primarily continue to work remotely. We knew that this new way of working meant adjusting the ways in which we supported our employees. We now offer additional stipends for Internet and home office needs, even more flexible PTO, and additional flexibility for those caring for young children or family members at home. We measure what matters, we work on what matters, and we invest in those who matter most to us – our employees. That email can wait until Monday and we believe in prioritizing the mental health of our people first.
Prioritize people
At Betterworks we honor everyone as humans, assume positive intent, and create a welcoming environment for people to bring their whole selves to work. We believe in our team and are committed to enabling them to feel their best – nothing would be possible without our team!
That’s why we leverage Betterworks Engage to learn from our team and help inform many of our decisions. Engage allows HR teams to collect honest feedback from employees to identify opportunities to improve and prioritize the actions that build trust and drive engagement. Last year we learned that many people were feeling added stress due to the pandemic. So we instituted that each Friday we’d all only work a half-day. But with so many new remote and distributed team members, we quickly realized that half days actually make it more difficult in some cases, to get work done. We now all have the second Friday of each month off – and we expect employees to honor that time and truly disengage from their email or work.
I was thrilled to finally unveil these new company values to our team, as these values were built by them, for them. These values will continue to shape our work for years to come, as we grow as an organization, and they are baked into the fabric of our company culture.
To all my readers, take a moment to look at your own company values. Do they align with the expected and desired behaviors of your employees? Do they make sense for the team you have? If not, consider exploring what new and improved values might look like for your team, and how they could transform your organization in ways you never thought possible.
