When it comes to supporting a company’s mission, it is up to the people themselves to carry it out every day. And while establishing a set of core values is important, it’s not enough to keep a company’s mission-driven culture alive.
At an employee level, carrying out a company’s mission might look like helping a co-worker finish an important project or making sure a client’s needs are met. In this sense, employees can fulfill their company’s mission by embodying the ambition and drive of its founders, whether they’re working with the product or the people.
For organizational leaders, inspiring team members to believe in a company’s vision — and pursue it — requires effort. Yet, by fostering a palpable sense of community within an organization, this feat is far from impossible. There are many ways for leaders to cultivate strong workplace communities, from instating companywide celebratory meetings to holding meaningful one-on-one conversations.
For tech leaders across NYC, encouraging a sense of camaraderie among employees is crucial to rallying teams around a company’s vision. Built in NYC recently checked in with 12 local tech leaders to learn how they’ve successfully galvanized their teams around their company’s mission. In part one of this two-part series, we'll hear from six of those leaders about the values that drive their work.
Quartet Health offers technology and services in an effort to help people get the right mental health care. Vice President of Marketing and External Affairs Erin Fitzgerald plays an integral role in furthering the company’s mission to improve the lives of people living with mental health conditions.
As a team leader, how do you translate your company mission into specific actions or goals for both the company and individual teams?
Quartet’s mission is to improve the lives of people with mental health conditions through technology and services. This mission orients our team and the work we do. For example, the marketing and external affairs team uses OKRs to drive clarity around the work we do and how it advances business metrics and growth.
As a part of the framework, we have four team goals that ladder up to the mission. From there, team members’ objectives and key results cascade down, spelling out measurable wins that each team member works toward during the year. This provides our team with clarity on the impact of their work to advance the mission of the company. Moreover, the mission constantly serves as an opportunity to take a step back and understand the human impact of our work, especially when we are solving hard problems. (Rebuilding our mental health care system is not easy.)
What aspect of your company culture or values most reflects your company mission
Quartet has five values: Be an advocate, seek diverse perspectives, show up with earnest, build trust and be kind. Of those values, the one that most strongly reflects our company mission is “Show up with earnest.” This value notably came to life as we transitioned to a remote workforce in March 2020 for COVID-19.
At Quartet, everyone is working hard to deliver in their role. This trust and commitment to helping people get the mental health care they need made the transition to an entirely remote workforce highly successful. The value, “Show up with earnest,” is also linked to the capabilities we have as a company to grow. This is seen at all levels of the organization including among the senior leadership team, where grit and determination are paired with a commitment to transparency and collaboration.
Be an advocate, seek diverse perspectives, show up with earnest, build trust and be kind.
What role do your team members play in building, strengthening or celebrating your company mission?
On the marketing and external affairs team, strengthening and celebrating our company mission is inherent in all we do. On the communications and PR side of the house, we get to leverage storytelling to share our perspectives and drive awareness about the work we do to help people get care. This includes working with the media to place op-eds or announce new partnerships and building our social media channels. Moreover, through our marketing team, we communicate directly with our users — patients, mental health providers and referring providers (including primary care providers) — to help them learn about Quartet, understand our value prop and take action to sign up and stay engaged.
Lastly, we recognize that we must collaborate with other leaders to build a system where every person with a mental health condition can get the care they need. Through our public engagement and policy work, we facilitate convenings with diverse cross-sections of leaders.
Talkspace operates an online therapy platform that enables people to easily connect with licensed therapists. As executive vice president of B2B at Talkspace, Matt Savarick helps further the company’s mission to make mental health counseling more accessible.
As a team leader, how do you translate your company mission into specific actions or goals for both the company and individual teams?
When I think about our mission to break the stigma around mental health and increase access to resources, I’m reminded, first, of how many conversations we have internally about our well-being. Whether it’s in one-on-ones or our group all-hands, we’ve built a culture where people feel safe, open and caring. We internalize that by valuing the adoption and penetration of our services — not just externally, but internally. Every employee has unlimited access to Talkspace, and we’ve expanded this to partners and family members, given COVID-19.
We approach hard conversations, externally and internally, with a view that each party would be better served if they adopted an ethos of warmth.
What aspect of your company culture or values most reflects your company mission?
One of the key attributes we hire for and measure is kindness. We conduct performance reviews, and kindness is a metric that affects salaries and bonus structures. We approach hard conversations, externally and internally, with a view that each party would be better served if they adopted an ethos of warmth. And most importantly, we encourage people to bring their whole selves to work. That means if your child is on Zoom, we want to meet her. That means, if you’re in need of an afternoon nap or paid time off, we want you to feel comfortable making the ask.
What role do your team members play in building, strengthening or celebrating your company mission?
The mental health of our employees has really been tested in 2020. Whether it’s the murder of George Floyd or the pandemic or the rising unemployment rate, it feels as though the tragedies outside have touched just about everyone inside. We encourage and expect all Talkspacers to reflect on what they want to do, own it and propose an initiative. One team member initiated deeper learning and reflection on anti-racism, so we sponsored lunches and free books for everyone to read at the company. Another wanted to celebrate Pride at Talkspace, and we sponsored and coordinated the event. There are no limits. If you have an idea, we want you to run with it, and we will support you along the way.
Citizen’s app makes 911 alerts available to the public alongside live stories, real-time updates and user-generated content. Head of Community and Culture Prince Mapp plays a large role in supporting the company’s efforts to protect people and their loved ones.
As a team leader, how do you translate your company mission into specific actions or goals for both the company and individual teams?
Citizen’s mission is to make your world a safer place. We do that in multiple ways by helping you protect yourself, your community and your friends and family. We hear stories highlighting Citizen’s real-world impact every day, whether it’s a comment from a user that their dog was safely found thanks to our notification or a firefighter reporting via a livestream that they were better able to assess a building blaze with dozens of users’ real-time videos from the ground. I use these examples to remind my team that seconds can save lives, and that means taking pride in our accuracy and timing.
What aspect of your company culture or values most reflects your company mission?
One of our company values is “Permission to fail.” We encourage employees to take calculated risks and learn from any failures. Because we’re building something that the world has never seen, we know that we’re going to make mistakes along the way — and we embrace those mistakes, recognizing that they can lead to new discoveries. One risk we recently took was expanding the focus of our reporting from primarily 911 alerts to COVID-19, as it aligns with our mission. We’ve seen that users have found great value in understanding the rate of spread in their communities.
Because we’re building something that the world has never seen, we know that we’re going to make mistakes along the way — and we embrace those mistakes.
What role do your team members play in building, strengthening or celebrating your company mission?
Our 24/7 team of analysts send 911 alerts directly to our users every day. With each alert sent, they know they have the potential to save someone’s life. Whether it’s a report of a missing child or an apartment fire, they take great care to ensure alerts are timely and detailed. Another crucial extension of our mission is to keep your data safe. Our engineering team works tirelessly to ensure that we’re only storing data when doing so is necessary to operate our services and protect our users. Our infrastructure is designed to safeguard your data, minimize access and retention and anonymize personal information.
CLEAR is making it easier to move through the world by using biometrics — like your fingerprints or face — to verify your identity at places such as the airport or sports arenas. As executive vice president of growth, Catesby Perrin helps drive the company’s mission to make people’s lives simpler, safer and more secure.
As a team leader, how do you translate your company mission into specific actions or goals for both the company and individual teams?
CLEAR’s mission is to strengthen security and create frictionless experiences. CLEAR rests at a moment of incredible growth with exciting new deals and opportunities arising every week. That gives us a regular opportunity to make our mission and goals tangible, translating them directly into specific contexts where we can put them into practice and bring them to life.
As an example, we recently launched our Health Pass product and have teamed up with the NHL to use Health Pass as the health screening and access credential for everyone taking part in their Stanley Club Playoff bubbles in Edmonton and Toronto. Our ability to deliver a more secure experience for every participant in those experiences, as well as helping the NHL get back to play, allowed everyone to see our mission in practice.
All across CLEAR, our amazing employees work to strengthen security and create frictionless (and safe) experiences.
What aspect of your company culture or values most reflects your company mission
While many parts of CLEAR’s culture and identity reflect our mission, several specific aspects of our company values have helped us thrive during the current pandemic: our indefatigable employees, embrace of change and bias for action, and obsession with creating frictionless customer experiences.
When COVID-19 hit and shut down so much of our economy and day-to-day lives, we immediately saw an opportunity to help bring people back quickly and more safely. Identity and health screening, coupled with consumers’ desire and right to privacy, is a problem we’ve been preparing to solve for the last 10 years. In less than two months, we delivered our new Health Pass product, dramatically enhancing the functionality of our mobile app for consumers and creating a privacy-centric way for businesses to reopen their doors.
The team was incredible — indefatigable in their pursuit of delivering this solution which, while a natural extension of our business, was nevertheless completely new. While our tireless persistence was a driving force in getting Health Pass off the ground, our obsession with the customer experience has helped our many partners, including the 9/11 Memorial and Museum and the NHL, facilitate safe and touchless environments.
What role do your team members play in building, strengthening or celebrating your company mission?
The CLEAR team constantly demonstrates a commitment to both building and fulfilling the company’s mission and values. All across CLEAR, our amazing employees work to strengthen security and create frictionless (and safe) experiences. For example, our CLEAR Ambassadors have continued to provide our members with a safe way to travel throughout the pandemic. In addition, our growth team has an unwavering determination to help our Health Pass partners safely bring employees back to work. This determination is highlighted by the many CLEAR team members who traveled to Canada to ensure the NHL could safely return to play.
Remesh’s platform provides information about populations, enabling users to have live conversations with their audiences at scale. Vice President of Engineering Mike Bruni supports the company’s efforts to help people understand each other better through technology.
As a team leader, how do you translate your company mission into specific actions or goals for both the company and individual teams?
Remesh’s mission is to help us understand one another. Our software helps anyone instantly understand a population, so our day-to-day development directly furthers that mission. The challenge is carving out time for activities that further the altruistic mission but not the commercial business. The solution is to recognize that these things are never convenient and to just do them anyway. For example, with the election so near, we've dedicated engineering resources to the democracy.ai project. They leverage our tech to promote open conversations between segments of the electorate that otherwise don't communicate with each other.
Humility is the most important value. It acknowledges that others have ideas worth considering and fosters listening, which is a prerequisite to understanding.
What aspect of your company culture or values most reflects your company mission?
From an engineering and personal perspective, humility is the most important value. It acknowledges that others have ideas worth considering and fosters listening, which is a prerequisite to understanding. It also promotes good engineering — a willingness to be critiqued and to critique others is fundamental to our engineering process at Remesh. This applies to code review, obviously, but also to design reviews, architecture discussions and engineer-sponsored tech talks. Our team leads foster environments conducive to these discussions and encourage participation because it's how we get the best solutions and level people up quickly. This is much easier when folks leave their ego at the door.
What role do your team members play in building, strengthening or celebrating your company mission?
Our software is our primary tool to promote the company mission, and typically engineers rely on the mission to influence product development and design. Recently, one of our teams used this to identify opportunities to improve what we call "the participant user experience" and to justify the effort. The mission also plays a hand in our day-to-day work lives and is a component of our culture. A prominent example is our collaborative tendencies. Often, its impact is more subtle, but not always. I've seen our mission used as the ethical basis to argue positions on important technology questions.
Healthify helps organizations address the social determinants of health. As chief solutions officer, Cesar Herrera rests at the helm of the company’s efforts to build a world with greater access to healthcare.
As a team leader, how do you translate your company mission into specific actions or goals for both the company and individual teams?
Healthify’s mission is to build a world where no one’s health is hindered by their need. On the surface level, this seems like quite a lofty goal, but we’re fortunate to truly be able to make measured progress toward this goal. This progress is demonstrated by both our company and team goals. Specifically within our network management team, all of our KPIs are tied to our mission: the number of services made, the number of referrals made and the percent of engaged community partners. We recently hit a huge milestone of one million searches, and we celebrated this as a company even while being remote.
What aspect of your company culture or values most reflects your company mission?
Generally speaking, everyone at the company almost self-selects to come here and is driven by the mission statement. There isn’t a single person who comes to Healthify that isn’t driven by that mission, and therefore, we’re deeply committed to the communities that we serve. Every person who comes to Healthify wants to make a difference, from sales to product to HR, which brings a driving passion to expand access to services in at-risk communities. This directly relates to our company core value to “Rise above the status quo.” Every person here is striving to change the way that healthcare works.
There isn’t a single person who comes to Healthify that isn’t driven by that mission, and therefore, we’re deeply committed to the communities that we serve.
What role do your team members play in building, strengthening or celebrating your company mission?
For the network management team, our mission is our job; they are intrinsically linked. There is nothing about the network management team’s work that isn’t tied to that mission. We are responsible for building contractual relationships with community social service organizations, which are meant to provide services to individuals who would normally seek services by going to the ER. In building those relationships, we’re able to seek out that mission every single day. My team is not unique in that; every team’s work directly contributes to that mission.
