There is one thing that more than half of workers in the United States would take a pay cut to experience: a workplace that shares their values.
It’s not just a draw in the United States; Finding a company that shares one’s values is a top priority for more than two-thirds of workers in Europe.
Teams that are working toward a common mission — and who get there through shared values — are one of the biggest draws for job seekers.
That’s why Built In spoke with four tech professionals who shared what it looks like when their company values are put into action.
Chime designs member-centric banking apps with easy-to-understand financial tools.
Name a recent decision that clearly reflected your values — and what changed as a result?
One decision that strongly reflected my values was during a complex payments-platform migration, when I identified a potential reconciliation bottleneck before it became critical. Early validation jobs comparing old and new event streams showed signs of performance degradation as data volumes increased. In regulated financial systems, accuracy and reliability cannot wait until failures occur, so I chose to act proactively.
Although improving the reconciliation layer was outside my roadmap, I analyzed the architecture, redesigned the workflow and provisioned dedicated compute resources to keep validation stable and scalable throughout the migration.
The impact extended beyond engineering efficiency. Engineering and finance teams were able to validate data confidently, identify edge cases faster and focus on solving real issues instead of worrying about system reliability. It also improved collaboration by shifting discussions from operational concerns to progress.
For me, this demonstrated two of Chime’s values — “be an owner” and “respect the rules” — by proactively ensuring critical financial systems remained accurate, performant and audit-ready during a high-risk transition.
What habit keeps cross-team work moving — and how do you track its effect?
One habit that keeps cross-team work moving is creating clarity early and often. After meetings or technical discussions, I make it a point to turn conversations into written decisions, action items and simple progress updates that everyone can reference asynchronously.
I’ve found that this reduces confusion and prevents teams from losing momentum when priorities or dependencies shift. Whether it’s a design document outlining requirements and metrics, or a weekly update highlighting progress and blockers, having a shared source of truth keeps engineering, platform and partner teams aligned.
The effect shows up in faster execution and smoother collaboration. Teams spend less time revisiting old decisions or clarifying ownership and more time moving work forward. It has helped reduce delivery friction and accelerate the path from planning to launch, which ultimately means we can deliver reliable solutions to members faster as they work towards unlocking their financial goals.
How do you make recognition fair and visible — and what metric shows it works?
One thing I appreciate is that recognition is tied to how you work, not just what you deliver. Programs like Chimetacular encourage people to recognize teammates by connecting their contributions to a specific company value and the impact it created. It moves recognition beyond “great job” into real examples of collaboration, ownership and problem-solving.
I’ve seen that firsthand both by nominating peers and by being recognized by teammates for cross-team ownership during high-pressure projects. Since this recognition comes from peers across functions, it feels authentic and inclusive rather than top-down.
A few things help show the system is working: strong peer-nomination participation, recognition coming from multiple teams instead of a single organization and the consistency of value-based stories in nominations. Those are good indicators that recognition is part of the culture.
We also make work visible through “demo hours,” shoutout channels and shared updates where teams celebrate launches, lessons learned and technical wins together. It creates a culture where people genuinely support each other and reinforces our “win together” value every day.
FareHarbor creates tools for tour and activity operators, like boat rentals, food tours, outdoor experiences, events and more. The company has more than 20,000+ clients across 90+ countries.
Name a recent decision that clearly reflected your values — and what changed as a result?
Every year, we run a company-wide hackathon across every team and department. The goal is to create space for anyone, regardless of role or seniority, to identify a process, client experience, internal workflow, or product opportunity that could be improved — then form a team and bring that idea to life.
To me, this is one of the clearest examples of our “be curious and learn” value in action. It encourages people to look beyond their day-to-day responsibilities, ask better questions, challenge how things currently work and experiment with solutions that may not come from a formal roadmap or top-down initiative.
These Hackathons aren’t just a fun internal project (though we do have fun). We believe that people closest to our clients and day-to-day operations are well positioned to see where the needs truly are. Several of last year’s Hackathon ideas made it all the way into our product. These events are a tangible way for employees to directly shape how we improve our business, support clients and evolve our product and processes.
What habit keeps cross-team work moving — and how do you track its effect?
We are intentional about building relationships and shared ownership across departments before there is an urgent issue. One of our values is “we are one ohana” and that starts with how we interact internally and support one another. Sales, onboarding, support and account management are not treated as separate silos. Each team owns a piece of the client journey, but the client experiences all of it as one continuous relationship. Because of that, we make a consistent effort to work together, share context and ensure clients receive the right service at the right time.
That habit shows up in formal and informal ways. We create opportunities for team events that help build relationships, but we also encourage time spent working side-by-side, problem-solving together and learning how each team thinks about client success. This makes it easier to escalate thoughtfully, align on priorities and avoid handoff gaps that slow down the client experience.
We track impact through sentiment across the onboarding funnel, as well as long-term NPS health. If cross-functional collaboration is working, clients should feel supported throughout the entire lifecycle, not just during one stage.
How do you make recognition fair and visible — and what metric shows it works?
Recognition is a major part of overall job satisfaction, but only works if people feel it is fair, visible and timely. With this in mind, we strive to embed recognition into our culture year-round.
At a company level, we use a committee-based approach so that recognition is not dependent on one person’s perspective. This creates a balanced view of performance, impact and behaviors that deserve to be highlighted. Having various company-wide awards throughout the year ensures that we are recognizing a range of contributions — not just the most “obvious” wins, but also those who are behind the scenes making an impact, living our values in a meaningful way, or prioritizing innovation. At a departmental level, we keep recognition visible through weekly shoutouts along with monthly and quarterly awards.
The result is that good work becomes immediately visible. It helps teams understand who is stepping up, driving impact and contributing to the culture in ways that may not always be reflected in standard performance metrics. Over time, we can look at participation in peer recognition, award cadence, promotion conversations and retention data as signals that recognition is working.
School districts and government agencies use ClassWallet’s technology to efficiently and transparently manage programming that relies on public funds.
Name a recent decision that clearly reflected your values — and what changed as a result?
We review mission, vision, values and employee traits from time to time and believe we had an opportunity to include a larger nod toward innovation as a product-led company and also to enlarge the focus on those we serve and how much we care about the outcomes we drive for families.
Our values are used to make difficult business decisions. When we talk about embedding into the culture, they drive how we hire, recognize, promote, survey and prioritize needs. Additionally, the evolved system ties more directly to business outcomes.
The largest change will be in our 2026 performance management where living the values will account for 30 percent of the criteria that impacts career growth and bonuses.
Another recent advancement was the title change of our most prestigious quarterly recognition to the, “founder’s award.” The person who best embodies the updated values and employee traits receives it. Additionally, “kudos koins,” a new program where the recipient earns “koins” which can be redeemed for company merch, was designed to complement the values evolution. It’s all about driving measurable business outcomes which are felt in our culture and the bottom line.
What habit keeps cross-team work moving — and how do you track its effect?
In the previous 12 months, we created a new team dedicated to cross-team awareness and alignment on deliverables. The weekly meeting of the senior leadership team keeps departments moving together. The SLT is composed of departmental members that report to an executive member and who work together to ensure that company goals are translated into action and delivered. The SLT serves as the connective tissue between strategy and execution. Specifically, this group is accountable for cross-functional alignment and consistent execution (i.e. resource prioritization, process improvements, departmental coordination).
SLT members hold each other accountable to drive alignment and reach goals through the agreed upon identification of the top 10 first half of the year and second half of the year business priorities and keep executives informed of on or off track priorities. We track effectiveness through S.M.A.R.T. goals that roll up linearly to company priorities.
How do you make recognition fair and visible — and what metric shows it works?
We updated our values to include the following: “Feedback: We know that feedback powers progress.” Feedback is in ClassWallet’s DNA, as the whole (much smaller) company used to participate in weekly win/gratitude meetings, sharing a business or personal win.
Our recognition channels have grown and today we utilize peer “shout-outs” on the home page of our intranet (i.e.“Big shout out to Tom for his incredible speed in moving from initial idea to active testing on some potential new AI features for HR. The way you’ve fast-tracked the development process from a concept to a working pilot is impressive!”). In quarter one, 19 percent of the organization recognized a peer (our homepage is the most-viewed so these recognitions are visible to all).
Our second most-viewed intranet page is “kudos koins,” a program incentivizing employees while measuring the impact of their choices. It aligns recognition with the contributions that move our organization forward. Contributions must demonstrate measurable or clearly observable business value, strengthen performance, company culture, engagement and shared momentum across teams.
What’s notable is the program’s second quarter launch! It’s working!
Apex Fintech Solutions provides the tools and services that enable hundreds of clients to launch, scale, and support digital investing for tens of millions of end investors.
Name a recent decision that clearly reflected your values — and what changed as a result?
Late last year, our product delivery team faced a choice: continue relying on manual status reporting — which was inconsistent and different across every product team — or invest in building a fully automated metrics platform, even though it required significant upfront effort with a small team.
We chose transparency over convenience. Using AI as our development partner, we established the foundation — automated data pipelines, standardized configurations, and production infrastructure — that would have normally required a dedicated engineering team. AI allowed a small team to move at startup speed inside an enterprise — writing extraction scripts, generating self-contained dashboards, and standing up infrastructure in a fraction of the time traditional development would have taken. That decision came from a core belief that decisions should come from data, not hallway conversations, and that AI could be the force multiplier to make it happen.
Since establishing that foundation, the result has been transformational. Leadership now has visibility into metrics like our predictability index — a composite score blending commitment accuracy and scope discipline — across quarterly planning cycles. Where every product team once reported status in their own format with their own definitions, engineering teams across the organization may now operate from a shared, standardized view of delivery health. What changed wasn’t just the tooling; it changed the conversation. When everyone sees the same numbers, discussions shift from “what’s the status?” to “what should we do about it?” And the fact that it was all built with AI proved that adopting AI as a development practice isn’t just about efficiency — it’s about unlocking capabilities that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.
What habit keeps cross-team work moving — and how do you track its effect?
The habit that keeps our cross-team work moving is standardized, shared metrics with no barriers to access. Before we started, every product team tracked and reported progress differently — different formats, different definitions, different cadences. There was no common language for delivery health. Starting late last year, our product delivery team used AI to establish the foundation — a common set of configurations, team mappings, release definitions, and delivery thresholds — that every reporting tool draws from. When teams across the organization operate from the same definitions of what “on track” or “at risk” means, alignment happens by default rather than by meeting.
We track the effect through several metrics. Cycle time by phase tells us where handoffs between teams create bottlenecks. Commitment accuracy — reconstructed through changelog analysis — measures how well teams deliver what they planned at the start of each quarterly release window. And our portfolio health index gives leadership a single number to assess cross-team delivery health. The speed at which we were able to build and iterate on these tools — thanks to AI-assisted development — meant we could respond to stakeholder feedback in days rather than sprints, keeping the platform relevant and trusted.
How do you make recognition fair and visible — and what metric shows it works?
We believe recognition should be grounded in measurable impact, not visibility to leadership. In any organization with many engineering teams, it’s easy for critical contributions to go unnoticed simply because they happen behind the scenes — the engineer who fixes a pipeline issue at midnight, the team that absorbs unplanned work so another team can stay on track, the individual contributor who builds infrastructure everyone depends on. When every product team reported status differently, these contributions were even easier to miss — there was no consistent way to see who was delivering.
Since our product delivery team established the analytics foundation late last year — using AI to build the tools — we’ve made impact visible by instrumenting the work itself. Our delivery dashboards surface not just team-level metrics but patterns of execution — which teams consistently deliver on commitments, where scope changes are absorbed gracefully, and how capacity is balanced between new features and maintenance. When a team’s commitment accuracy is consistently high or their cycle time improves quarter over quarter, that shows up in the data and gets recognized in planning reviews. The analysis that would have taken hours of manual reporting now happens automatically, ensuring contributions don’t go unnoticed simply because no one had time to compile the numbers.
Using AI to build these tools was itself an act of recognition — it demonstrated that one person, empowered with the right technology, could deliver enterprise-scale visibility that benefits every team in the organization. The metric that tells us this approach is working is stakeholder adoption — how many leadership groups actively use these insights to make decisions rather than relying on ad-hoc status requests. We track whether the data is actually changing behavior: fewer status meetings, faster escalation of blockers, and more informed prioritization during planning cycles. When leaders cite dashboard metrics in their own communications, that’s the strongest signal that the people doing the work are being seen through their results, not just their proximity to the room where decisions happen.
