As a young company in the well-established insurance industry, one thing is absolutely critical—it’s the team that makes our secret sauce. From the outset, we knew that our ability to deliver the superior insurance experience we promise to our customers and partners hinged on a team that not only brought a mastery of the core issues but could also play different positions when called upon and were interested in learning about adjacent roles.
Nurturing our culture has been a key focus from day one because it gives our company a persona and dictates how our team members connect to one another and to our company’s overall vision. We want our culture to be worth protecting and, in turn, we want our team members to want to protect it. That isn’t something you can mandate from the top: it has to come organically and be enforced communally.
We spent time in our early days developing a set of microexperiences for our team members—essentially a set of expectations we want from each other and demand of ourselves. We walk through these with every new Joyner and ask that each and every member become a culture champion. One of these microexperiences is focused on listening, because we believe honest, constructive, and thoughtful feedback—internal and external—makes us better as a company.
Leaning into this, we launched our inaugural team member feedback survey this April. At only eighteen months into Joyn’s journey and 28 team members strong, it was important to establish a baseline using a well-recognized, reputable company. We chose Great Place to Work®, the global authority on workplace culture, employee experience, and the leadership behaviors proven to deliver market-leading revenue, employee retention, and increased innovation. Not only were we able to rely on the Great Place to Work® standard set of questions, but we were also able to add a few bespoke questions to gather additional feedback relevant to Joyn’s current benefits offering, team get-togethers, and performance review ideas.
We are immensely proud that in our inaugural survey, 100% of our team members said Joyn is a great place to work. And while nothing will beat what our employees sincerely think and say about their experiences working with us, we’re also proud to now be Certified™ by Great Place to Work® based entirely on what current team members say about their experiences.
While the survey is a benchmark and report card, the work is never done. As we move forward, we’re establishing a yet-to-be-named employee advocate group to help us focus in on prioritizing feedback areas, soliciting input, and making recommendations.
Outlining values is the easy part. Living them is always the challenge. We are honored and humbled that our team feels we are doing so, and we are thankful for their role in holding us, themselves, and each other accountable to them. Doing so are the table stakes if we expect to make good on our promise to create a better way of providing insurance and a far better experience for clients and customers.
About Great Place to Work Certification™
Great Place to Work® Certification™ is the most definitive “employer-of-choice” recognition that companies aspire to achieve. It is the only recognition based entirely on what employees report about their workplace experience—specifically, how consistently they experience a high-trust workplace. Great Place to Work Certification is recognized worldwide by employees and employers alike and is the global benchmark for identifying and recognizing outstanding employee experience. Every year, more than 10,000 companies across 60 countries apply to get Great Place to Work-Certified.
