Think Company

We have always been a remote-friendly company (but admittedly have gotten better at this over the past year), and in our weekly resource planning efforts we have always capped work at 40 hours a week (including time set aside for training, internal meetings, company events, etc.). We don't use the term "unlimited time off" because that creates angst and confusion for people—we let folks know that time off is important for individuals, their families, and the health of the company too. On average, people tend to take 21 days of PTO a year. But we use the term "flexible" so that if you've got that once-in-a-lifetime trip or opportunity, or something difficult going on at home, that we can work together to make it work as long as we plan for it.

Employee feedback has told us that one of the most important things is folks just wanting to know how decisions are made at the company—transparency around what decisions are made at what level, by whom, and basically understanding our internal RACI structure for decision making. So, we're in the process of documenting this so people have a better sense of how they can influence decisions they have specific interest in; in general, we ensure that this happens by having a leadership team structure that includes various groups of stakeholders with expressed goals for them to represent their team members/reports in decision making. By the same token, we have a well-defined company structure and are clear about the jurisdiction of various groups and empower them to make decisions and only escalate/inform as needed. 

In general, our leadership team consists of the following groups with their own rituals, meeting schedules, and collaborative pathways with the others: Owners, Officers, Strategic Planning, People Managers, Strategic Leads, Principals. These teams convene together at specific times for various reasons but all in service of defined strategic goals—everyone meets together along with the rest of the company at our Quarterly Meetings. 

The expressed goals of this large leadership structure are to:

We provide an overview of what we've been up to lately in the DEI&B space.

We seek out individuals from different minority groups primarily through deliberate outreach and cultivation of relationships with organizations like HopeWorks, Code Differently, minority Chambers of Commerce, and others—this has already resulted in hires as well as establishing a minority candidate pipeline and amplifying the message that we are interested in hiring people from all different minority groups.

As for removing unconscious bias, we continue to experiment with blind resume and portfolio review, have changed requirements for "Think Exercises" as part of the hiring process to allow for individuals to select other options (and have hired folks using those other options), and have reviewed our process with experts like Shift Profile and expect to continue to refine as we progress... for all of these things!

We do set aside budgets for personal development - as a baseline we put $25 each week (up to $5000) into a training budget for each individual. We also provide free access to industry relevant training platforms, hold regular "Discipline Interest Groups" for sharing and ideating within the company, hold cross-department collaboration and sharing sessions, and identify senior individuals who can serve as sounding-boards for each project (they are not team members). All Thinkers have a manager that works with them on long term career pathing, holds regular 1:1s, and guides them through our (currently) annual review and feedback gathering process. We also use Paylocity as a platform for both anonymous and named feedback capture and sharing on an ongoing basis, and have dedicated channels in Slack for gathering input, sharing work for critique and collaboration, etc.