About: Caia is Australia’s first online, on demand health and wellness company for women and their families. Harnessing the full power of technology, Caia is transforming the way women & families access health & wellness support, with a focus on compassionate and human care.
Location: Sydney & Melbourne, Australia
Inclusive, fun & outcome driven: Caia company culture
The three things that spring to mind is that Caia’s company culture is inclusive, fun and outcome driven.
In terms of inclusivity, this is really about giving the opportunity for the whole team to be heard, to be able to share their ideas and feel safe to contribute to the organisation.
The benefits of doing this are really well documented in terms of driving innovation – what you’re doing is opening up your organisation to receiving more inputs, leveraging the expertise and experience of your teams and maximising the diversity of perspectives. And for us that’s invaluable as an early stage startup where we really need to be thinking differently, trying new things and pivoting as we seek product-market fit.
Secondly, having fun. At the end of the day, starting up a new business is always difficult so the ability to be able to work hard but also enjoy what we’re doing is important. Yes we are passionate and deeply believe in what we’re doing, but we need to ensure that we’re having fun on the journey and that we don’t lose our sense of humour.
Individuals who enjoy their work are more engaged and productive as well so keeping that perspective and balance of working hard and having fun is key for us. Being able to have a laugh as a team really helps given the roller coaster ride that is the startup world.
And finally, being outcomes driven. One of the big drivers behind why Caia exists is to prove we could improve the health and wellbeing outcomes of customers that use our services. We deeply believe that there’s a huge opportunity to use digital health to revolutionise how healthcare is delivered and by doing so bring around better outcomes.
As a result, that’s really been embedded into our thinking from day one. And in the same way we apply this focus on customer outcomes, we also apply those perspectives inwardly to our own team. What does this look like? Well for us it’s essentially empowering our team to work the way they like to work – focusing on the outcome of that work rather than where or how the work is being done.
For this to be effective it’s about trusting people to work in a way that best suits their needs and their strengths to get to the outcome that we’re looking to deliver as a team. At the same time, it’s also about ensuring we are mindful and respectful about how others we work with like to work. To get this right we set expectations early and communicate frequently and consistently.
Caia’s team working style: Inclusive, flexible & connected
Work-life balance at Caia
A founding value we established at Caia was that we work to outcomes and our teams wellbeing and health comes first. This not only means empowering everyone in the team to work in a way that best supports them to achieve what they need to get done at work but also recognising we all have lives outside of work too.
Having these values helps to set expectations of who we are as a company as well as remind us that balance between work and everything else is super important.
A big part of this being successful is trusting people to get their work done and communicating regularly so we can keep track of progress, any challenges and addressing where things need to change.
We work between Sydney and Melbourne so we use a blend of tools and techniques to do this – from morning team huddles on Google Hangouts to Asana to communicate and share status updates around tasks. Having the tools in place for us all to work remotely together from the start gives us the flexibility to juggle things between work and home. This has been even more important given the recent situation with COVID-19.
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Every company approaches culture and work-life balance in their own unique way. Company Cultures is a project by Balance the Grind to showcase different workplaces and cultures from around the world.