At the beginning of the pandemic, we moved from an in-person company to a fully remote company. At the same time, we started growing significantly. As we passed 50 employees, I started to see some discussions and behavior that didn’t “feel like us”. At that point, I started talking to leaders at other companies, and eventually decided to codify and get serious about our values.

To create our first draft, we started with a “write down some notes every time something doesn’t feel right” exercise. What’s the feeling? What happened? How would you have expected the situation to go? Recognizing anti-patterns was really helpful to understanding what really mattered.

Then, we had some generative sessions. What makes Hatch unique? What do you say when you describe our company to friends or colleagues?

Since then, we use employee feedback, engagement survey results, and exec team feedback to revisit and refine our values.

How do we know our values are resonating? We did a survey and found that 90% of people who work here can name and describe all six values.

We rolled out the values by starting with a typical all-hands release, followed by some team-level discussions. The key was consistently reinforcing them in slack, meetings, shoutouts until they became part of our vocabulary. Our values are part of our interview process and I personally review our values with every single new employee.

The biggest challenge for me has been folks asking to expand our list of values.

“Why don’t you have anything that says you care about customers?”

I really want to stick to our core and what makes us unique. We care about our customers, but so does everyone else.

Words matter. In the early days of releasing our values, people chose to apply their own interpretation as to what they meant. Now we’re a bit more concrete: here’s the value and here’s the behavior that shows you’re living this value. This was a missing component early on.

People Over Process has been the most difficult to communicate. Early on, people interpreted this as “Dave hates process”… which isn’t true at all. What it means is that relationships matter, and strong relationships will overcome the gap in any process. But the reverse isn’t true; even the best process won’t overcome a gap in relationships. It’s nuanced, which is why it was hard to communicate.

We anchor on our values to reinforce the things that are going right, and as a tool to debug when things are off track. If you search on any of our value titles in slack, you’ll find hundreds of threads referencing them. Our employees made slack emojis, and they get posted regularly. It’s a regular part of what we do and how we talk.

Ann Crady Weiss

David Weiss

I created this to codify our company values, as we were navigating the transition to fully remote and growing significantly.

Company Values at Hatch

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