Our values

Progress in healthcare has enabled people to live longer, happier lives. Despite major advances in technology, healthcare delivery is largely broken. We want to change this. If we succeed in /wiki/spaces/AWELL/pages/2999255055, there will be faster progress in healthcare, people will live longer and care teams will have more time for the human aspects of care.

This is a tall order. To get there, we need to align lots of moving parts toward our common goal. The way we do this is by making our culture explicit, fostering it, and protecting it. If we would not be good stewards of our culture, entropy will kick in. The outcomes would then be fragmentation, confusion, misalignment, and drift.

Like any other company, we value honesty, respect, inclusiveness, and collaboration. These are basic values we live daily and set the minimum bar when we hire new people.

Culture is what makes us unique as a company. The software can be copied, and a sales playbook repeated. But the aggregate of our actions toward our team members and external stakeholders is unique. Culture is how we interact with each other every day, how we get work done, and how we behave as individuals. It helps us make conscious decisions and trade-offs. What makes us truly unique is how we:

• Rise by lifting others

• Take big swings

• Give and expect a lot

• Move with urgency

Rise by lifting others ↗

We obsess over how we can make the people around us succeed, starting with our customers. We root for the success of team members and challenge them directly to help them grow. We are inclusive and kind. We know our weaknesses and find others to complement us with their strengths.

• You think customer first

• You continuously give, receive and act on feedback

• You seek to first understand, then talk

• You don’t act as a blocker but disagree and commit

• You put team and company success over individual success

• You recognize great performance and give praise

Take big swings 🌠

We are creating tools for the next generation of care teams. We won’t get there by taking incremental steps. When we decide to work on something, we make sure the result is significant. We set ambitious long-term goals and relentlessly pursue them through curiosity, courage, and continuous learning.

• You think big

• You show curiosity and seek to explore

• You start with the end in mind, then work backward to plot how you’ll get there and adapt along the way

• You take on hard challenges

• You do the best work of your life

Give and expect a lot 🙌

We lead our most fulfilling lives with high levels of autonomy and trust. We hire people who set high standards and expect others to do the same, making it easy to give freedom and flexibility.

• You contribute positively to the team, company, and wider world

• You own your decisions and hold yourself accountable for your results

• You value freedom and autonomy by showing responsibility and ownership

• You raise the bar for yourself and the team

Move with urgency 🚀

The lives of patients are in the hands of the care teams using our software. When we fail to deliver or slow down, it matters. We take this responsibility seriously so we relentlessly prioritize, take decisions fast and get things done that matter most.

• You make wise decisions fast, despite ambiguity

• You get down to the root cause when there is a problem

• You prioritize and can choose what not to work on

• You act and do not overthink

• You choose progress over perfection

• You seek new insights and use them to course correct

• You find ways around blockers and don’t see a “no” as a dead end

This is how we roll

We improve relentlessly

Compound interest might be the most powerful force in the universe. We believe continuous improvement is a close second. Matter of fact, it’s also a form of compounding. If we improve just 1% every day for 365 in a row, we’ll be 37x better than at the beginning of the year vs 1500 worse if we do 1% worse every day.

We are a team, not a family

Quoting Tobi from Shopify:

*Shopify, like any other for-profit company, is not a family. The very idea is preposterous. You are born into a family. You never choose it, and they can't un-family you....The dangers of "family thinking" are that it becomes incredibly hard to let poor performers go. Shopify is a team, not a family.*

We default to transparency and openness

We share liberally and strive to keep confidential information to a minimum.

We care personally and challenge directly

We practice radical candor. No one explains this better than Kim Scott.

We’re not afraid to have tough conversations. We first try to get to a “that’s right” from the other person, stay kind and respectful at all times, and argue the ideas, never the person. We have short toes and don’t become defensive if someone points out something to us that we consider our own turf.

We write more than we talk

We limit meetings to maximize maker time. Decisions are written out so they can be shared with others and we can come back to our thinking process later. We document our learnings relentlessly. We write assuming others have low context.

We prioritize progress over perfection

We set high standards but we know that chasing perfection is useless. Setting big goals and making significant progress towards them is our focus. Our quality analogy is to go 2 turtles deep on everything we do.

We have short toes

Quoting GitLab:

People joining the company frequently say, "I don't want to step on anyone's toes." At GitLab, we should be more accepting of people taking initiative in trying to improve things. As companies grow, their speed of decision-making goes down since there are more people involved. We should counteract that by having short toes and feeling comfortable letting others contribute to our domain.

At Awell we value cross-functional collaboration. This means at any time someone with a different viewpoint could bring relevant insights to your domain, even if it’s not their expertise. We strive to embrace this and see it as an opportunity.We are a diverse and fully distributed team of highly productive people that loves to work together. At Awell we continuously shape the ingredients of world class team work including how we communicate, see problems, make decisions and have fun. Most of this is easier said than done.

On the following pages you can read more about our team members, see what tools we use and how we roll.