Building the Culture & Company At Which I Always Wanted to Work by Mark Hewitt
When we started EQengineered in June of 2017, Julian Flaks, EQengineered's CTO, and I set out to build the company at which we always wanted to work.
Firstly, after many years living in and around Boston proper, I had moved back to southern New Hampshire. Like many people, the dart landed where I grew up. And, commuting into Boston wasn't conducive to a good work/life balance. Therefore, EQengineered was founded as a remote-first company.
From the onset, we focused on defining a culture grounded in the values that we strive to live, in practice. The dialogue started with what Julian and I expected of one another to establish the baseline of expectations for our future team. We arrived at the following four key values.
EQengineered’s Core Values
Integrity: The quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness/the state of being whole and undivided
Transparency: Free from pretense or deceit/readily understood/characterized by visibility or accessibility of information
Reliability: The extent to which an experiment, test or measuring procedure yields the same results on repeated trials
Trust: One in which confidence is placed/assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something
These timeless, evergreen values have grounded our belief that in today's complex work environment, everyone has talents, warrants respect and appreciates being given the opportunity to demonstrate their own best example and excellence. At EQengineered, I tell everyone I interview that,
"Big brother isn't watching. We encourage everyone on the team to make the best decisions they can at the time with the best information they have. Intent counts more than technique. We aspire to be personally accountable, and accountable to our teams, clients, and our company."
We also coach our team through the lens of our values, grounding accomplishments and areas of improvement in the ethics, ideals, and norms by which we govern ourselves. Raw talents are honed, and growth talents and attributes are evolved.
We also provide flexibility in how the team governs their schedule and application of effort. We do typically align to a regular work schedule, but appointments, errands, and life's demands are for everyone to balance and manage.
I also encourage people to work when they are most productive, and be present at the important life events. To set an example of this being accepted, I for one often take a walk to help clear my head and organize the day's priorities, attend the kids' and my wife's key milestone events and sports, and often take my two black labs to the beach at low tide (which doesn't subscribe to a standard schedule).
"Your schedule is yours to own and manage. The expectation is that the needed work will get done and work/life balance is core to our way of operating."
The most pervasive, authentic trait of our team and culture is that we are a group of passionate, perpetual learners. The team holds a variety of passions, both discipline specific (in digital, technology, design, data engineering, project and program management), and much more broadly. Underpinning this thirst is the drive to snack on, struggle with, and saturate in new knowledge, while learning and teaching others, be it sharing with colleagues, clients, or our community.
My favorite conversation that I have overheard at EQengineered was an interview that Russ Harding, our Microsoft Practice Lead, was having in which he said,
"We expect people to cheat on the test when they get stuck. We have a lot of talented, smart people who are here to help, and have likely encountered the risk or challenge with which a team member is struggling. And if we haven't, we can more than likely solve or find a work around to the blocker. You will be expected and encouraged to leverage your colleagues to clear obstacles and lower the stress of struggling with a challenge alone."
The posture and needs of our team demands diversity of talent and people, geographic flexibility, and various ways to contribute to high expectation outcomes. EQengineered evidences the expression that "the parts are greater than, and define, the whole."
The workforce of collaborators that we have built and will continue to grow translates to a team made up of part-time contractors, full-time contractors, formal employment, and volunteers.
Unequivocally, we will continue to strive and endeavor to create EQengineered as a workforce of collaborators, not a hierarchical organization of employees.
I hope to find an opportunity on which to collaborate and learn together. Please reach out to me directly to share your talent and collaborator excellence insights at mark@EQengineered.com.