How We Do Things Differently at Launchways: We Live Our Values

by Carolyn Kick | Jan 17, 2020 | Employer Brand, Employer Branding

Just about every company these days has a mission, vision, and set of core values. But all too often, these documents are reviewed once a year by leadership then filed back away in a drawer. In these cases, they remain hollow ideals rather than a reality of life at the company. Sometimes this happens because the company followed the trend without really knowing what it meant. Other times, businesses want to live their values, they just don’t know how to realize their values in their business goals and day-to-day operations.

Through our role as HR and benefits consultants, we’ve gotten to know hundreds of companies over the years who struggle with this exact challenge. And we’ve had the chance to guide them through the process of integrating their values into everything that they do, particularly by crafting values-driven benefits packages and human resources processes.

We’ve seen what works, and we’ve also seen what doesn’t. And we have also seen how businesses transform and grow when they start realizing their values in their day-to-day work.

This is one of the best things about being part of the Launchways team. We’ve taken the lessons we’ve learned from working with our clients to heart and live our values every day, in every way.

Our values shape who we are as team members, collaborators, and consultants. They fuel our personal growth and make us invested in the success of our coworkers, our company, and our clients. And we get the chance to help our clients live their values and build more productive, engaging, and rewarding workplaces.

Let’s take a look at what it means to live our values at Launchways, including:

• The Launchways Core Values
• How We Make Our Values a Reality of Life at Launchways
• Values-Driven Customer Relationships
• Helping Our Clients Live Their Values

Launchways’ Core Values

Before we dive into how we live our values, here’s a quick overview of what our values are, as described by CEO Jim Taylor:

Resourceful

We are a resourceful organization. We take initiative, we own the challenges that are set before us, and we embrace the work of finding solutions, no matter what it takes.

Driven

We are a driven enterprise. We’re passionate about what we do, and we strive to always go above-and-beyond for our clients and each other.

Change-Maker

We’re a disruptive business. We’re unafraid to do things differently, especially when we think it can yield better results. We’re confident in our ability to improve the industry.

Thoughtfully Candid

We’re a reflective and honest brand. We value constructive conversation and believe that differences of opinion can make conversations and businesses stronger.

Community-Builder

We’re a community-minded team. We’re always looking for new ways to support members of our Launchways community while also engaging with the greater Chicago community.

How We Make Our Values a Reality of Life at Launchways

A values-driven workplace starts from the bottom-up. No amount of cajoling from the C-Suite can make a company’s values a reality. Every employee has to buy into the values and make them an intentional part of how they interact with their work, their coworkers, and their clients. Only then will a company’s values become a driving force in the company culture.

That said, there is a lot that a company’s leadership can do to get employees to take ownership of company values. Unsurprisingly, with over fifteen years of experience consulting with thousands of businesses, Jim knows a thing or two about how to build a values-driven organization. And he built Launchways around our core values from the ground up. Every process is shaped with the company’s values in mind – how and who we hire, how we run our meetings and share feedback, how we talk to each other across every level of the Launchways team, and how we are encouraged to grow and advance within the company.

And it’s worked. Our values are an integral part of what we do and how we do it. They help us treat each other with honesty and integrity, encouraging us to be our best and most authentic selves, to genuinely care about our fellow team members, and to be deeply invested in our clients’ successes.

It makes all the difference in the world to go into the office every day and work alongside friends and peers towards common goals with a shared vision, mutual respect, and open communication.

Values-Driven Customer Relationships

At Launchways, we know that we do best when our customers thrive. And our values define every aspect of our relationships with our customers. We become an extension of our clients’ teams, as invested in their success as we are in our own.

One of the main expressions of our values-driven approach to our client relations is our consultative sales model. Essentially, we provide our clients with solutions rather than products. We never go into a client relationship with the plan to “sell them” on specific products. Instead, we identify their needs first and then find the HR technology, benefits, and business insurance solutions that meet those needs and that help our clients accomplish their business goals.

At Launchways, “out-of-the-box” packages are out of the question, and it would be anathema to us to suggest that a client adopt a product if it isn’t the absolute best solution for their business.

This approach doesn’t just deliver better results for our clients, it also makes our work a lot more rewarding and engaging. We approach each new client with a fresh perspective, using our skills and experience to develop unique solutions and solve their specific challenges.

In short, we get to be strategic problem-solvers rather than succumbing to the uncaring monotony of the hard-sell.

Helping Our Clients Live Their Values

A significant part of living your values is making sure that the way you treat your employees aligns with your company’s core values. That means that your benefits and human resources processes need to be aligned with those values.

In our role as benefits and HR consultants, we get to help our clients align their people-processes with their values. For example, we’ve helped companies who value employee safety overhaul their workplace safety practices and we’ve helped companies who value diversity and inclusion implement more inclusive benefits packages.

Even after we’ve implemented the initial values-oriented solutions, we continue to help our clients live their values over the long run. Because we deliver scalable solutions, we build long-term relationships with our clients. Our clients regularly turn to us as they face different business or human resources challenges, and we guide them towards the strategies and solutions that will keep them faithful to their core values.

This is a unique aspect of our client problem-solving that goes beyond reducing their costs, expanding their benefits, or streamlining their processes. We don’t just get to help our clients succeed – we empower them to make sure their employees succeed as well.

Key Takeaways

If there’s anything we’ve learned from our years of guiding businesses through the process of maximizing their human potential, it’s the importance of company values. That is why we live our values in every aspect of how we work and do business at Launchways. Here’s what living our values looks like at Launchways:

• Putting our values at the center of everything we do
• Developing relationships with our coworkers and clients that are based on trust and honesty
• Delivering meaningful solutions for our clients through a consultative sales process
• Helping our clients live their values by aligning their benefits and HR processes with their company values

What it Means to Be Driven at Launchways

by Carolyn Kick | Dec 20, 2019 | Employer Brand, Employer Branding

Here at Launchways, we take our core values very seriously. They aren’t a list of aspirational ideals that we wrote up on a wall. For us, they really are the soul of our company and are at the heart everything that we do. This is largely because our team members own the values as much as company leadership does. We take the time to review the values every year and allow our employees to shape the values and hold leadership accountable to live up to the values.

One of our most important values is the idea that Launchways is driven on an individual, team, and company-wide level. We aren’t content to just show up and do the minimum. We’re determined to win big for our clients, our team members, and for ourselves too. This sense of drive has ripple-effects throughout our organization. It is a cornerstone of our vibrant company culture and employee community and the foundation for our innovative people-focused solutions. Without our drive, we wouldn’t be able to fully live our other core values.

So what does being driven look like as an employee at Launchways and how does it set our experience apart from working at other professional service firms? In today’s post, we’ll cover how we:

• Own our work and are dedicated to professional development
• Fuel collaboration through shared purpose
• Foster mutual trust and a sense of community
• Respect each other’s intentions, empowering diversity and growth

Owning Your Work and Professional Development

One of the most significant impacts of living our “Driven” value is the extent to which it allows us to own our work and development as a person and as a professional. We don’t do what we do because someone higher in the organization tells us to. We don’t do it to impress our coworkers. Rather, our drive comes from within and is nurtured by our peers who value the same.

That might sound a little idealistic but it really boils down to the Launchways principle of putting the right people in the right seats. We carefully vet potential employees so that our team is made up of similarly driven and dedicated individuals across all departments. And we know that no one is going to be good at everything – but that everyone is good at their own areas of expertise. So we take the time to identify aptitudes and put people in the roles that let them take advantage of their skills. And our employees have a unique amount of leeway to shape their roles to suit their personalities, work styles, values, and talents so they can do and be their best.

Because we get to work on what we’re passionate about and good at, it’s much easier to build and maintain our drive. There is so much room to grow within the organization that there is no limit to our ability to grow ourselves and our careers as we work on many different types of projects to serve unique client needs. As our Senior HR Consultant Christine Lewis put it,

“Something that is really unique about working at Launchways is the ability that each of us has to explore different areas in our career and participate in projects that we would not be able to at another company. Our roles are not very siloed so we get to work with many different teams. Tackling HR issues in so many different environments has allowed me to grow my career much faster than I could working in-house.”

It also means that we get to take ownership of our projects. We feel comfortable and encouraged to come forward with ideas for projects or solutions and we help each other realize those ideas. Our mutual drive allows us to have more control over our work and a greater impact on the results we deliver for our clients. Our driven team is the key to Launchways’ innovative solutions.

Fueling Collaboration Through Shared Purpose

At Launchways, we’re not just driven on an individual level. There’s a sense of energy as soon as you walk through the doors and become immersed in the team environment. We’re each passionate about our own projects but we also get to work together to realize the goals on an individual, departmental, company, and client level.

This mutual drive gives us a sense of shared purpose. And because we openly acknowledge our different strengths and backgrounds, we can easily reach out to coworkers to fill in any gaps we might have and deliver our solutions to the client. There’s no foot-dragging or complaining about diverting resources from other projects – people are happy to get involved and help each other succeed. One of our Client Success Advocates, Hannah, said it best when she told us,

The team atmosphere is my favorite part of working at Launchways. There is always a sense of support and there is a lot of trust. You can really trust your teammates to back you up and we are all in it together. It makes me feel really safe, capable, and ready to be myself. 

Earning Trust and Respect to Foster Community

At Launchways, we all have a shared passion for always doing what’s best for our clients while growing and learning new things. And no one questions each other’s dedication. We know how much our work means to every single person on the team and how hard we all work to make great things happen for our company and our clients.

And when you get so many passionate people together in an office and give them the resources they need to take ownership of their work and do what they know how to do best, something truly remarkable happens. You don’t just build a company culture. You create a community.

Our mutual drive creates the kind of genuine trust and respect that is necessary for deeper connections and an organic community. All of the realizations and benefits of our “Driven” value we’ve covered so far add up to make Launchways a special place to work. Launchways is where people are comfortable sharing their true selves and appreciate each other for who we really are. And this environment isn’t just individually rewarding, it also gives us the space to forge meaningful relationships. As our long-time team member Maribel Espinoza says,

“Everyone here gets along so well that I call it my second family. Coming to work with great people in a great atmosphere makes my work even more rewarding.”

Respecting Intentions Empowers Diversity and Growth

Working in an environment in which every person is driven and passionate about their work allows us to avoid many of the kinds of miscommunications that can derail teamwork, growth, and innovation. Because it creates the trust and respect that allows for community, it also lets us have full trust in each other’s intentions. This means that we listen to each other seriously without taking anything personally: enabling us to realize one of our other core values of being “thoughtfully candid.”

Once you trust your coworkers’ intentions implicitly, you open up a whole new world of possibilities for productive collaboration and personal growth. Everyone is comfortable to be themselves and share their genuine opinions and perspectives even if, and sometimes especially if, they differ or conflict with those of others. Having so many diverse perspectives at the table allows us to think outside of the box and truly innovate as a team and as a company. It fuels our individual and mutual drives and allows us to push each other to help us do and be our best. All without causing hard feelings.

And this diversity, equality, and willingness to push each other applies at all levels of the organization. Our CEO, Jim Taylor, had this to say about how our team drives his work:

“What I like about the Launchways team is that, simply put: they’re good at what they do. They make me driven because they hold me responsible to be the best I can be and there is a level of mutual respect that exists that has taken me to a place that I have not been before in my career. We’re not afraid to disagree on things and know that these different opinions will take us to the best possible place. And our relationships are authentic and rewarding, so we don’t take disagreements personally.”

Key Takeaways

Here are some of the key takeaways of what being driven means for us at Launchways:

• We own our work and our professional development, which makes it easy to be passionate about what we do
• Our mutual drive helps us work together to accomplish goals on an individual, team, and company-wide level
• Common purpose and dedication to our work does more than facilitate productive collaboration: it builds vibrant and meaningful community
• With everyone sharing the same sense of drive and purpose, we trust each other’s intentions, which lets us share our diverse opinions to maximize our outcomes and growth

The truth is that the core value of being Driven defines who we are and what we do at Launchways. It makes our office somewhere that is full of passionate, dedicated individuals who are hell-bent on being successful and really making a difference in the work that they do. And it builds a community based on trust, respect, and deep relationships.

Are you interested in joining the Launchways team? Learn more about our career opportunities here.

How Community Building Shapes the Launchways Experience

by Carolyn Kick | Nov 21, 2019 | Employer Brand, Employer Branding

One of Launchways’ core values is to be a Community-Builder. Our team is community-minded and constantly looking for new opportunities to foster a richer community within Launchways and in the Chicago ecosystem. This common vision of bridge-building helps us form stronger bonds with our coworkers and more productive partnerships with other businesses in the greater Chicago area.

We approach our role as community-builder in two fundamental ways:

• Fostering the Launchways community
• Building a community outside our office walls

Fostering Community at Launchways

Why We Believe in Building a Launchways Community

In our mission to help our clients build thriving teams of top talent, we often address the topic of how to create a vibrant, engaging company culture. But within our organization, we believe in taking it a step further and creating not just a culture but a community.

Companies have a culture, whether they take steps to shape it or not. Letting it lie fallow can cause that culture to become toxic, and tending to it can help engage team members and make work more meaningful. A company community cannot exist without consistent and dedicated work by company leadership and every single team member. The risk of not putting in this work is not a toxic community, but the lack of any sense community at all. People will still come into the office, log their hours, and go home. But they won’t care about their cubicle-mates or see their work as helping themselves, their coworkers, and their company succeed. Simply put, they’re employees, not team members.

For that to happen, companies have to foster a community in which everyone is invested in helping everyone else grow, succeed, and pursue what matters most to them.

How We Foster Community at Launchways

We know that as an employer, you need to create organizational structures that will become the foundations of an organic and employee-owned community. So, we have implemented several systems at Launchways that help fuel our community and allow it to take on a life of its own. Each step seems simple and inconsequential on the surface but, added together, they completely transform how we interact with and think about each other as teammates.

Meetings are the main formalized touch-points that employees have with each other and with the company as a whole, so we have focused our efforts on creating community-minded meetings. We start each week with an all-hands-on-deck meeting where each team member discusses their number-one project for the week and any roadblocks they need help on. These meetings allow us to see what everyone is working on, celebrate their accomplishments, and seize opportunities to help each other whenever possible.

Another large part of a community is having a sense of working together for a common goal that everyone shares. As we advise our clients, we have integrated our values, mission, and vision into every policy and process in our organization so our team members can become their stewards. But we also hold quarterly all-company meetings to review our goals and progress towards those goals together as a company. These meetings drive home the reality that we are all working together to accomplish the same goals.

Beyond meetings, “shout-outs” are a core part of the Launchways community. Front-and-center in our office is our “Shout-Out Board” where we can recognize our coworkers on a daily basis for doing an awesome job and representing our core values. We also share highlights from the Shout-Out Board at our Monday all-hands-on-deck meetings so that we can celebrate each other’s accomplishments together. You would be surprised at how much a whiteboard builds a supportive and engaged community.

Stepping Outside Launchways: Fostering the Chicago Business Community

Launchways is constantly forming new partnerships with businesses and organizations in the broader Chicago ecosystem so that we can engage business leaders in a strong community. Some of our key business partners have included Hyde Park Angels, FinTEx, and the Illinois Technology Association.

Over the past year, we have worked with our business partners and organizations like FinTEx and ITA to host educational events for business and HR leaders in Chicago and the whole of Illinois. Just this October, we brought together five business leaders and HR experts for a panel discussion on tackling key diversity and inclusion challenges at our D&I Summit. We welcomed over 60 HR professionals for a complimentary dinner and open bar, which certainly got folks networking and community building. And the panel delivered an incredibly comprehensive look at D&I strategies for businesses going into the 2020s.

We also worked with our business partners to host a CFO breakfast that brought growth-minded financial leaders from around Chicago together to learn new actionable strategies to take back to their business, especially around the increasing role that CFOs play in their company’s HR strategy. And on the other side of the same conversation, we partnered with ITA to host an “HR Now” summit for HR leaders to help them form stronger collaborations with their finance counterparts.

Beyond hosting events, Launchways also partners with other businesses and vendors to provide additional resources and value for our clients. This isn’t just the right thing to do to help our client community and form the best relationships we can with them, it is also a great way to create a symbiotic community of businesses in related industries, all working together to meet the whole range of companies’ HR and benefits needs.

Key Takeaways

Launchways takes its role as a community-builder very seriously because we know that being part of a genuine community makes work more meaningful and rewarding and that every company has the responsibility to help build and uplift their local business community. This core value impacts just about every aspect of how we work and do business at Launchways. These community-building initiatives contribute significantly to our community-building efforts, including:

• Leveraging weekly and quarterly meetings as community-building touch-points through open communication and judgment-free discussion of projects, challenges, and successes
• Publicly celebrating coworker accomplishments on a daily and weekly basis
• Hosting events for business leaders in our ecosystem
• Partnering with businesses and vendors to bring our clients the best range of services possible

If working in a community sounds as good to you as it does to us, we would love to welcome you to our team. Check out current openings and get started with your Launchways journey by heading over to our Careers Page!

At Launchways, Employees Bring Their Authentic Selves to Work

by Jim Taylor | Oct 31, 2019 | Employer Brand, Employer Branding

At Launchways, we know that what makes us different is what makes us strong and that our team members thrive when they can be and share their full, authentic selves at work. Supporting and encouraging each of our team members as whole people, not just as productive employees, is one of our top priorities and fundamental values. We think it’s not just the right thing to do, but also the best way of creating a positive work environment and a productive team.

So what does living this principle look like at Launchways, and what effects does it have on our work? Here are some of the key points I’ll explore:

• The reasons behind our approach and how it fuels our creativity
• Authentic communication between Launchways employees
• Work styles as unique as our team members

Why We Value the Individual at Launchways

Many companies are talking about diversity and inclusion nowadays and language about inclusion is making its way into more business’ value statements and employee handbooks. But how many employers put these words into action and do everything they can to support each employee and what makes them unique?

At Launchways, we understand the struggles that companies face tackling D&I and building a thriving, productive team. We’ve seen first-hand what works and what doesn’t. We know that divisions and conformity are toxic to a company’s culture and that businesses do better when they make sure that every single employee feels comfortable to be themselves without fear of being judged or penalized. We know that helping your employees succeed is the best way to make your business succeed, and that means supporting their growth and fulfillment in all aspects of their lives and all facets of their individuality.

Now, we know that saying we want all of our employees to feel comfortable and encouraged to be their 100% authentic selves may sound cliché. But living this value every day and in every aspect of our business makes an enormous difference for our team members, our culture, our clients, and our bottom-line. Communication is clear, morale is high, and we all work together to build up ourselves, each other, and Launchways.

From an employer perspective, this approach makes good business sense. Having diverse voices at the table is a surefire way to develop more successful strategies and initiatives. Studies show that greater gender and racial diversity leads to increased profitability and value creation. But to see the business results of your gender, racial, sexual, and culturally diverse team, you have to create a safe space where every employee is free to be and express themselves. When people are comfortable being themselves, they bring their whole selves to work and share their unique perspectives that can result in innovative solutions.

And bringing your whole self to work doesn’t just increase your value as an employee: it also results in a positive workplace and culture that is as vibrant as its members. Who wants to work somewhere that you can’t be yourself? A culture of lived openness invites the human back into business. We can genuinely communicate and build richer, more valuable connections with each other and with our partners and clients. At Launchways, our dedication to openness and authenticity is what makes our jobs so meaningful and makes going into work every day worthwhile and enjoyable.

How Launchways Encourages Employees to Share Their Authentic Selves

Simply put: just saying that you value something won’t make it a reality at your business. That is why at Launchways, we have taken concrete steps to shape our practices and policies around the value of making our employees feel comfortable sharing their authentic selves.

Authentic Communication

Communication is the key to encouraging our team members to share their authentic selves at work. After all, communication is how we express ourselves and our perspectives and if an employer does not support open and individualized communication, they won’t be able to foster a truly inclusive workplace.

At Launchways, we go out of our way to acknowledge and encourage different communication styles. Our team members value intent rather than presentation, which prevents plenty of common office misunderstanding and interpersonal drama. If someone tells it like it is, we acknowledge and support that without taking it as a personal attack. And if someone has a hard time voicing their opinions, we recognize that as well and try to amplify their voice and pick up on the messages they are sending. Now, there are still standards regarding acceptable and unacceptable behavior, but we work hard to acknowledge a wide range of communication styles.

This philosophy goes hand-in-hand with another of our core values, being thoughtfully candid. We don’t just believe in personalized communication, we also support open and honest communication and feedback: being candid. But we also stand for keeping the humanity and feelings of our coworkers in mind, being thoughtfully honest rather than brutally honest and always speaking from a place of trust.

It’s just as important to us that our team members are comfortable sharing their needs and struggles. We want to know the difficulties that our employees are facing and make every reasonable accommodation possible. We understand that our team members will be more productive if they are comfortable speaking up when they need help personally or professionally. We don’t want people blustering and covering up the fact that they are having difficulty on a project: we want them to step up and get the resources they need to get the job done. So we always encourage our team members to be comfortable telling their managers when they are going through a tough time, having a family emergency, or need additional help/support in the office or outside of it.

Work Styles as Unique as Our Team Members

At Launchways, we have implemented two main principles regarding our work that help our team members thrive as their authentic selves.

The first is that we get to work how we feel most productive. We have an enormous amount of flexibility regarding when, where, and how we work. While it’s important to have face-to-face interactions and meetings, we have flexibility determining our daily work hours so long as we’re getting the job done. And we can work from home when necessary: whether it’s because our kids are sick or because we just need to take a break from the office chatter to be our most productive selves.

The second principle is that we get to work on what most interests us. Launchways provides our team members the opportunity to pursue interests and passions. That means that if any of us has an idea for a project or initiative that we care about and think will contribute to the Launchways mission, we get the space and resources we need to make it a reality. You’d be surprised how many game-changing strategies develop when all team members are free to exercise their creativity.

Key Takeaways

At Launchways, our workplace environment, culture, and communication styles are all designed to allow us to share 100% of our true, authentic selves. This freedom has an impactful ripple-effect throughout all aspects of life and work at Launchways and makes us a better, more successful company. As we’ve explored, for us, the dedication to supporting employees’ whole selves means:

• Our team members can grow and succeed as individuals, which helps our team and company succeed in turn
• Employees share their unique perspectives, generating diverse conversations and innovative solutions
• Everyone can communicate in their own way without causing misunderstandings
• We can be open about our challenges and get the support we need
• We work how we want, on what we’re passionate about

We think that our way of doing things is pretty great. We go into work every day to collaborate with our friends and fellow humans, forging deeper connections and producing unique solutions that we get to own as ours.

If you’re interested in joining the Launchways team, view our current openings here.