We’ve continued to put a focus on building an open and empowering culture while challenging each other to keep growing as people and doers by grasping and maximising learning opportunities. We’ve refined our values, formalised policies and procedures and put plans in place for moderate growth.
The core team has remained the same this year (Becky, Simon, Sarah and Rachel one temporary addition - Ashe who came on as our talented copywriter and content producer and has since moved on to pursue a whole new career in disability support work!).
Gillian Pereira continued to drive The Business Pickle. In addition to the strong and lean crew we’ve continued to collaborate with a bunch of quality humans joining our growing list of expert freelancers.
We've since started improving how we recruit and expand the team with a content producer and designer joining the team. Check out our careers page for openings if that might be you.
Special shout out to legends who were almost part of the team – looking at you James Cook, Julia Chua, Lisa O'Sullivan, Celine Tan, Wesley Rodricks, Marnie Hawson.
How we live our Harvey values
“It’s not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are” - Roy E. Disney of Walt Disney Co
We live, breathe and believe in the impact of business for good. But what does this look like?
Over the last 12 months, we got to questioning and crafting our 6 defining values that guide our team behaviours and how we work with clients and partners.
Callout: These were formed from the whole team’s input but especially Ashe Davenport who consolidated all of our thoughts and feelings and brought her own perspective of what was distinct about Harvey.
Care squared
We care about our client’s mission because it matches ours: make the world a better place. We dig deep to do our life’s best work so we can create as much positive impact as possible.
Listen, act
We listen intently to our people’s needs and create meaningful, tangible action. We don’t spin our wheels. We connect with the work first, then focus on the solutions.
Point of view
We have a thoughtful, sometimes nerdy POV, which may not always be the most popular one. We offer best practice recommendations while being flexible enough to adjust things as needed.
Fluff free
Our approach is lean and efficient, ensuring we deliver the best value while keeping the approach light and fresh. We take quality ingredients (great people, research, tech, etc) and cook them just right.
Yesness
We have a crack and discover our hidden talents. We own our learning and self-development. We say ‘yes’ to new opportunities, and bring in specialists when we need to.
Heart sleeves
We ask for help and keep it real. We admit when we get it wrong. By sharing our feelings in a thoughtful, vulnerable way we help others feel safe enough to do the same.
Building an open, understanding and empowering culture
When it comes to how we operate as a team, we try to be as egalitarian as we can by openly setting our work priorities and impact areas. Being too collaborative about this has proven, at times, to be confusing or the team feels like we’re spinning our wheels - we’ve acknowledged this so are choosing when to open things vs. set directives and move forward.
Weekly wraps and reflection sessions
In which we share what we're grateful for, a personal achievement, acknowledge someone for anything, and other highlights.
Daily virtual stand-ups on Slack
Where we check in on one another, and go through our challenges, priorities and focuses for the week.
Monthly Impact Updates
Where we provide a transparent overview of how we’re tracking financially, review our clients and pipeline of new clients coming in, highlight a client project and share and celebrate each person’s ‘greatest hits’ for the month.
We review our strategic goals, projects & reflect on what we should start, stop and continue doing. We nominate two pieces of client work the team were particularly proud of to be shared in detail. (Here’s a more recent example from October)
Equality, wellness and flexibility
We formalised our flexible work arrangements
- Compressed work schedules (9 days a fortnight) – we all take every second Friday off.
- Remote working – enabled team members to move to Sydney and Castlemaine, and Rachel worked from Malaysia for 4 weeks - now a formalised policy.
- Weekly coworking – every Tuesday, we meet up at our office The Hub for some IRL human time.
- Flexible school drop off / pick up hours.
- However, we’ve decided we need to keep the ratio of part-time to full-time to a maximum of 30% as it becomes hard to manage and build a culture beyond that.
Understanding and supporting the transition from maternity leave
Becky shared what she learnt with the transition to motherhood and return to work from maternity leave in a blog. A topic that is not talked about enough with structures lacking in supporting this life changing transition for women in the workforce. “The last 3 years have been stretching with COVID, birthing two babies and running a business. Being a parent has taught me so much. It’s made me work smarter, and be a lot kinder to myself.
But returning to work was more challenging than I ever imagined and I wondered why people don't talk about it much?
I’ve finally found the time to pen down my thoughts on what I’ve learned through the experience. I hope a new parent reads this and feels less self-critical and more aware of the value they’re bringing to the world. Because we’re valuable people. Even when we forget our names at the cafe. In fact, especially then” - Becky Smallchua, CEO Harvey
Growing ourselves as people and doers
Adaptability and growth is big around here, and over the last 12 months, we’ve built a tonne of learning and development into everyday life.
- Monthly development coaching sessions, and detailed development plans
- Dedicated time on projects (not billed to clients) to learn everything from workshop facilitation to Webflow development
- Daily technical and relationship skills coaching including frameworks, tips and feedback
- Weekly Lunch-n-Learn where we get together as a team to open our minds to new areas outside of the day to day
- Continued to up our tool nerd level across all the tools we love, see below
Tools we loved
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Yay! I failed again!
We had a fun improv session with the folks at Impro Melbourne to help shake off negative self-talk overthinking, embracing taking risks, positively ‘failing’ and building on each other’s ideas All principles key to Harvey and life. We shared more about this here.
Tidying our employee handbook & policies
As we prepared for our B Corp re-certification with the inclusion of the ‘Workers’ category this time round, it pushed us to review and create a formal employee handbook and policies which will help us as we continue to grow.
We’ve openly shared them publicly in our governance section.
