Some companies build great products but are horrible to work at, some have great culture and never get to product-market fit, and very few are wonderful places to spend most of your waking hours and also produce something happily used by millions of people.
Justworks is in the rare third category above. My first few months working here have been nothing short of amazing and inspiring. As I said to Isaac Oates, our CEO, on our Pride 2017 float… this is a very special company; I’ve met with over 100 companies since I moved to NYC four and a half years ago, and this is one of a kind.
Why am I so enamored with this company, it’s mission, and the team? It comes down to values. Buzzword alert! I know. But unlike many startups in Silicon Valley and Alley, the culture of Justworks is in fact the sort of thing that HBS case studies will be written about.
I will spend the next two dozen paragraphs listing all of the wonderful things our company does to encourage and reinforce the stated values. It might seem like I’m providing a recipe for anyone to follow. But, I believe that the level of intentionality it takes to create and sustain culture like that which you find at Justworks is even more rare than product-market fit. So read on to learn about some options to consider when trying to build and reinforce your core values into your culture.
Let me start by listing our values.
Compassion, Openness, Grit, Integrity, and Simple. Internally referred to as COGIS. Really, we say things like “That’s not COGIS, so let’s not do it.”
1. Compassion
Other companies may call this empathy, but compassion takes it to another level. Don’t only attempt to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, show them you care.
Not surprisingly, this value is best seen on our Customer Success team which sets goals for satisfaction levels that match the most loved consumer brands. To reinforce the importance of the targets, we celebrate positive customer feedback with a physical board where notes are pinned up and a Slack channel where comments are posted and shared. On the other side, we do in depth research into why customers churn and where their frustrations are to see how we can make it better for others.
But it goes so much further than customer success. So that all employees understand the value of what we do for customers, at least once a month at our weekly All Hands meeting, we bring in a customer for a fireside chat with a top exec. One or two representatives from a member company describe their business and how Justworks allows them to focus on their mission.
As a demonstration of compassion for not only customers, but coworkers, we make time for each other. Many specialty teams (Business Intelligence, Sales Operations, Front End Engineering, and more) set aside 2+ hours a week for “Office Hours”. This time is not for them to do their own work, but for other Justworkers to come and learn from them. We don’t want our co-workers to become frustrated because they can’t move forward on hard problems and we want them to be empowered to solve them independently in the future.
There’s a similar “Ambassador” program in the product/engineering organization. One elected member of each Pod (product specialty) makes themselves available to other teams. Rather than say “figure it out”, we say “let me help you understand.”
2. Openness
Radical transparency can be frightening for certain organizations. It often means that employee salaries are made public and that the executives share all the ongoing problems with everyone.
In reality, that rarely happens and that isn’t what being transparent is about at Justworks. It’s about being upfront with our customers and each other. It’s about executives being willing to answer hard questions when things don’t go as planned. It’s about having OKRs and a product roadmap that everyone can see and contribute to. It’s about dedication to diverse voices filling the seats at the table.
This is best seen in how accessible our executive team is. I’ve been able to sit down with every executive we have; they have all been more than willing to spend time with me to get to know me and help me understand their team’s objectives. They have their own daily standup out in the open where anyone can hear what’s said. They don’t sit in offices, but in a centrally located area of our office where anyone can come by and chat with them. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t closed door conversations that happen, but there is a good balance.
The second big example of our dedication to openness is our diversity goal. We want to be as diverse as the NYC workforce and are on our way to accomplishing that goal. We have this goal because we collectively appreciate that diversity is necessary for us to serve all of the various small businesses in the USA. To do that, we need be open to the voices who represent the range of the American experience.
Our CTO’s proudest contribution to transparency is our sanitized massive data warehouse. His goal: to help every employee answer questions they have about customer and member trends while also maintaining the privacy of our customers’ sensitive information. This helps product people like myself make more informed and hopefully better decisions.
Remember those Business Intelligence team office hours I mentioned earlier? I’ve become a regular and can now read and write SQL. The ability to research trends and deep dive into individual customer scenarios has been crucial in my ability to understand the current situation and prepare strategies for the future. I know other managers feel the same.
Finally, we provide extensive Learning and Development opportunities to all staff. Professional trainers brought in to teach in everything from negotiation to project management and meditation. This effort probably is not thought of as openness to others, but to me is part of that value because it shows how we want people to explore where they want their career to progress and are open to where they might grow into. I have been very impressed with the number of employees who transfer between teams as new roles are opened and how supportive their manager are of this growth.
3. Grit
I’ve only been with the company for a few months, so I haven’t had to do too much hard work or all nighters, but I love the attitude we have around the time periods when we know teams will need to burn the midnight oil.
Our business is seasonal. There are times during the year when companies renew their health insurance and choose next year’s plan options. There is the period of Open Enrollment for all of our member employees. There’s IRS reporting in the beginning of the year and what’s referred to as “Surge” when many companies evaluate changing HR providers. It doesn’t seem like there’s a month in the year when there isn’t a big something going on.
Even with all the pressure that comes from making sure tens of thousands of people get their paycheck and have access to medical coverage, we try to make work as fun and enjoyable as possible. We have team T-shirts printed with a group’s established name. Some teams work together for a few days in the Hamptons. Others have breakfast brought in every morning to make life just a little bit easier. Our leadership knows that to encourage hard work, you must reward and respect your team’s efforts.
4. Integrity
This value is the one that comes up most often as we make product decisions. It can best be summed up as doing the right thing. With this guiding principle we choose not to pass on minor rate increases for workers’ compensation insurance which would decrease many people’s paycheck by a few pennies. It’s the same reason we provide helpful tips throughout the platform to answer people’s questions and why we create countless documents in our HR Resource Center.
Integrity is part of the reasoning behind the team that I lead. We cannot fulfill our mission of leveling the playing field for small businesses if we do not serve the smallest among them. Justworks is the only PEO that insures companies with less than five employees, and it’s my team’s work that makes it possible.
But it goes beyond the product we build for our customers and their employees. The way we treat each other with respect from the executives on down is also a reflection of integrity.
The prime example of this is the “Shareholder Meeting” that Isaac and Mike Greten, our CFO, have for all new employees. Rather than having HR explain stock options, our top executives sell each team member on investing in the company. They show the most recent pitch deck for institutional investors to all of us and then provide financial advice concerning taxes generally reserved for those wealthy enough to have personal financial advisors. I have never heard of another startup that does that and challenge all of them to.
5. Simple
The final value in COGIS is simplicity. Any product manager or engineer will tell you that we are problem solvers. At Justworks, we believe the simplest solution is the best solution. We design our platform to be the easiest for admins and employees to use so that they too can solve problems using the easiest path.
Our Employee Success team optimizes internal processes for simplicity as well. When our company got too large for our twice annual retreat to feel intimate, rather than try to find one way to make everyone happy, they chose a more simple solution; give each team the budget that would have been spent and let them choose what to do. This simplistic democratization is also the way we give back to the community. Everyone gets 5 days to volunteer as they see fit.
Many companies struggle as they grow to create opportunities for employees to meet coworkers on other teams. Ours came up with a scalable solution, Random Lunch. Each month we are assigned into a group of five employees and provided a stipend to have lunch together. Is it a perfect program? No. But it’s simple and it works. So is “incentivizing” everyone to get on the bus to our annual retreat by having the breakfast sandwiches only available onboard. It’s literally the little things that make a difference.
I’ve now spent a few thousand words detailing SOME of the intentional decisions Justworks has made to become one of the best places to work, where core values ring true throughout our product and team. Possibly the most amazing thing about all of it is how simple to execute the execs make it appear.