“How would you improve toilet paper?”
Few interview topics surpass the curveball status of this innocuous and strange question. But for HealthJoy Chief Product and Technology Officer Jason Williams, it’s a staple question with an essential purpose.
If landed successfully, it wrests a candidate free from their rehearsed answers and, hopefully, reveals a deeper image of how they handle new ideas, their comfort with shifting to meet the needs of the room and their passion for improving everyday issues — echoing the core values of the HealthJoy team.
Williams describes his curveball approach to interviews as an opportunity to understand how candidates will eventually add to HealthJoy’s people-focused culture — one that values qualities that can’t be quantified by a job description alone.
“How people talk about what they do outside of work gives a great sense for how they are wired to conduct themself as a member of our team,” said Williams.
What HealthJoy Does
HealthJoy’s app simplifies the healthcare experience for customers by offering a guided and unified approach to affordable, high-quality healthcare.
HealthJoy’s Culture of Participation
HealthJoy hiring teams dig into a candidate’s interest in fresh ideas because fresh ideas from employees are the lifeblood of the company’s culture. By regularly polling the global team, leadership can invest in new initiatives that directly and tangibly benefit the employee experience.
HealthJoy’s culture committee — a group of cross-functional volunteers — regularly meets to hold open-door discussions on future events or programs inspired by feedback from the team. One recent example is a new employee learning and development program, HealthJoyU, which was formed directly in response to the company’s annual employee survey.
VP of Talent Management Meg Deporter describes HealthJoy’s success as hinging on the overall happiness and hard work of its employees. Programs like HealthJoyU and GROWing at HealthJoy — which offers opportunities for team members to lead or support companywide initiatives — create more pathways for team members to have a personal impact on the trajectory of their careers and the organization.
“It's important that employees realize that they control their career journey and can directly impact how we achieve our goals, with HealthJoy here to support them along the way,” said Deporter.
“Employees control their career journey and can directly impact how we achieve our goals, with HealthJoy here to support them along the way.”
An essential part of HealthJoy’s culture is emphasizing the individual people behind the healthtech products. This includes an egalitarian approach to new ideas from employees, showcased in a recently established annual product pitch event, where individual contributors are invited to share proposals they believe would be most impactful for the company’s mission.
Williams notes that the first iteration of this pitch event generated many excellent ideas.
“I'm proud that the ideas generated in our pitch event make up a significant chunk of our tech roadmap for this year,” said Williams.
The product pitch event encapsulates HealthJoy’s cultural feedback loop of empowering employees and energizing the business. The secret to the team and the company’s success is investing in the strength of the team; by investing resources internally, HealthJoy is directly investing in benefits for their customers, as well.
VP of implementation Una Ilisinovic credits the focus on individual growth and team-building as crucial parts of the HealthJoy machine.
“By giving the freedom for connection, collaboration and creativity we see the most impactful changes to our business,” said Ilisinovic.
“By giving the freedom for connection, collaboration and creativity we see the most impactful changes to our business.”
Coming Together
As a remote team spread between the United States and Europe, finding intentional opportunities to gather as a team is a priority for HealthJoy. The year 2024 will include the company’s first-ever global summit in Poland, bringing together team members from across its international offices.
Ilisinovic affirms that these moments of togetherness reinvigorate the human side of teamwork, especially for a remote team. One of her favorite moments of the year is the implementation team’s post-peak season brunches — held in person in both the United States and Ukraine — where team members gather over a meal to celebrate one another for a job well done.
“Having a good culture and environment — where people want to talk to each other, want to collaborate — is reflective in the work they do and how they show up every day,” said Ilisinovic.
Making Culture a Daily Commitment
Driven by HealthJoy’s founding values, the team strives to celebrate one another daily. Leadership at HealthJoy understands that a diligent, iterative approach to culture is the most effective, weaving values into strategy conversations and celebratory shoutouts and taking a vested interest in the little things that matter to their team members.
“It’s the small wins that build momentum and contribute to longer-term change and commitment,” said Deporter.
Outside of daily work, HealthJoy employees are likely to see senior team members joining and recruiting for group social events like team workouts and local kickball gatherings in Chicago’s parks. Williams sees these moments as the often-forgotten cultural complement to good policy: building bonds together, day by day.
“I learned in the military that driving a purposeful, people-first culture is a commitment that takes daily vigilance and reinforcement,” said Williams.
“I learned in the military that driving a purposeful, people-first culture is a commitment that takes daily vigilance and reinforcement.”
HealthJoy’s leaders strive to set the standard for the culture they want to create, and they do so with a real interest in the passions and curiosities of the entire HealthJoy community. Whether they’re carving out time to share knowledge on a particularly niche topic or, in the case of the recent mercury retrograde, spending time researching in order to join a heated team discussion, team members demonstrate their commitment to one another with genuine care.
For this company with a mission to help customers get the care they need as quickly and conveniently as possible, it’s only natural that its team members take extra time to keep one another energized, inspired and ready for the next challenge in the journey ahead.
“It is the active choice to walk the talk in small ways every day that makes the difference,” said Ilisinovic.
