We recently asked the team their top three reasons for working at HowNow and thought it was a great opportunity to share their thoughts. Go on, be nosey and take a look.

We’ll often mention how important it is to understand what motivates your people, so it would be a bit hypocritical if we talked that talk and didn’t walk that walk. Well, we recently asked the team their top three reasons for working at HowNow and thought it was a great opportunity to share their thoughts and how we went about it.

A few tips on how we did it

If a form was going to take you an hour, would you fill it in? Most people would say no, a few people might have said yes - but in those cases, you’d have the problem of how much information you’d have to sift through in their responses. Well, we went straight ahead with just one question, to tell us three things you like about working at HowNow. It’s quick for people to complete and easy for us to work out the themes in their responses, which we’ll do in this post.Of course, we care about the not-so-glam feedback and constructive criticism people want to give, but it all comes back to the idea of the right format. It's not something that's easily captured and discussed through a short-form survey - it needs to be approached differently.

Themes from our team: what they like about working here

People

From feeling “like my kind of crowd” through the interview process to working closely with our founders and the rest of the team on a daily basis, it all came back to the happy, smiling faces we see every day (virtually). Despite all the challenges over the past year or so, we’ve struck a good “balance between work chat and social stuff”. We’ve solved escape rooms together, tried to master recipes over Zoom and taken so many virtual quizzes together, it’s impossible not to have developed a strong bond.

Collaboration

If you sow the seeds for great relationships with people, don’t be surprised when a beautiful collaboration tree grows. Whenever we brainstorm or work on projects, it’s an open forum where “ideas are welcome from the whole team”. As one of the HowNow bunch described it, we’re “organised but not strictly departmental”, which means everyone’s ideas are “respected and looked into”.A mixture of openness and respect for shared curiosity are what make it easy to work with everyone else in the team.

Product

When you’ve got your trunk, roots and branches, it’s time to just enjoy those colourful leaves - in our case, that’s our product. Our people and relationships are often the foundation for our product to blossom. Why? Because as some of the team pointed out, they think it’s awesome and even more awesome that they can have a direct impact on how it develops.

Freedom

Trust, freedom, flexibility, however you want to label it, being able to take ownership of your role and having the space to do it plays a big part in how much you enjoy it. And it was a sentiment echoed across the team’s responses. Whether it’s the creative control or the room to grow, it’s part of the HowNow culture.