This page is maintained by @Joanna Ciecierska (Head of People & Culture), @Florence Chouet (People & Culture Manager).

Personal and professional development plays an important role in our culture. We have implemented a variety of tools, guides and policies to help each team member and our leadership team with their development.

We are committed to broadening this toolbox to ensure our company is equipped with the necessary tools to successfully attain our objectives.

Our People Development Initiatives

Structured Onboarding

Our comprehensive onboarding process at HelloBetter is designed to ensure a seamless transition well before your official start date. Our People Team, in collaboration with your Direct Manager, works diligently to provide you with everything you need for a successful first day. We handle equipment setup, access, and your first week's agenda. You'll engage in informative workshops and introductory e-meetings. Gain insights into our mission, product, culture and teams. Meet your team, grasp role expectations, and receive the support for a smooth landing into your new role.

👉🏽  Read more here: Onboarding process & Onboarding evaluation

Comprehensive Training Plans

At HelloBetter, we have Training Plans that define the individual requirements for all employees, as well as for specific teams and roles. The purpose of our Training Plans is to raise awareness and ensure understanding of the regulatory obligations related to the business we operate in. Moreover, our Training Plans ensure that role- specific competencies are developed and maintained, as well as being able to adapt seamlessly to role changes.

Here are some examples of the topics covered by our Training Plans: Code of Conduct, Information Security, Data Protection, Introduction to Medical devices & QMS, SOPs, Risk Management, leadership essentials.

Leapsome Learning Journeys

Through our People Tool Leapsome, we are happy to offer interactive learning journeys to our team members. The learning journeys consist of self-study micro learning (short articles, videos), and mini quizzes to be completed.

We already cover a variety of topics ranging from learning materials designed to foster your knowledge gained from the onboarding workshops, as well as guiding you through diverse people processes such as 1on1s, Development Reviews etc. Additionally, we offer optional soft-skills trainings, such as “Giving and Receiving Feedback”, along with other training modules which are part of our training plans outlined above. This initiative is a work in progress, as we continually expand this library with more learning opportunities.

Personal Development Budget

Beyond our internal learning initiatives, we value your unique learning needs. To promote your personal growth and development we allocate an annual budget of 1000 Euro for your development. Working students, interns, and positions with a 520€ salary also receive 500 Euro if they stay with HB for more than 6 months. This allocation is not transferable to the following year.

1:1s

As a team, we believe, good communication is the key to a healthy culture, smooth (remote) onboarding and a successful team.

We understand 1on1s to be one of the most essential parts of building a close relationship with your Direct Manager and supporting your personal development in the best way possible.

During your onboarding and probation, you will have a lot of 1on1s with your Direct Manager, which are already scheduled in your calendar when you join our company. After your probation, you and your Direct Manager have to decide on the frequency. We recommend having 1on1s at least monthly.

The 1on1s with your DM are run in Leapsome. This gives you great chance to make the most out of your 1on1s with clear agenda and talking points, digitalised, easy to track meeting notes and next steps.

Feel free to approach the People Team to share your thoughts at any time to help us improve our team culture constantly.

Development Review Process

At HelloBetter, we're dedicated to fostering growth and empowerment within our team. We've established a structured and transparent Annual Development Review process designed to provide our Team Members with a clear pathway for personal growth.

We believe in recognising and celebrating the achievements of our team while collaboratively exploring opportunities for their ongoing development. With their valuable work, they enable us to achieve our mission to make evidence-based mental health care universally accessible, affordable & effective.

To streamline this journey of growth, we are using our People Tool Leapsome. This tool not only automates our Annual Development Reviews, ensuring consistency and fairness, but also puts a strong emphasis on our Team Members' individual growth. It's designed to make the review process efficient and focused on their ongoing development.

Leadership Development

At HelloBetter, we care very much about strengthening our leadership team because we understand that they are the key to our company’s and team member’s success and well-being. We put a lot of effort and care into bringing the “right” candidates into our company. We look for exceptional people with leadership capabilities who will help us to transfer our mission and vision into actionable goals, will lead the team to achieve great results and inspire them to grow within our company. Therefore the People Team takes an active role in supporting the development of our new Leaders right from day one, so that they have the necessary tools and skills to shine in their role.

How has it started: Leadership Experience Program

From the beginning of our company’s journey, we invested time and resources into leadership development. In hindsight, it was one of the elements that actually helped us to avoid quite a lot of growth pains. Each newly nominated leader was invited to our HelloBetter Leadership Experience program covering both operative leadership onboarding, networking and strength-based leadership training & coaching.

New program: Leadership Learning Journey

With the company growth, there is a continuous need to support our leadership team. We understand that they need to be equipped well to manage the challenging world and constant change that has a huge impact on the individuals and business environment. Therefore, we have introduced our Leadership Learning Journey.

What is Leadership Learning Journey?

Our Leadership Learning Journey is a portfolio of topics related to leadership capabilities that we want to strengthen amongst our leadership team. With this new program our leaders will develop and deepen leadership-relevant skills and grow with us.

With this journey, we want to adapt a continuous learning approach. With self-paced learning and workshops happening regularly, we want to create a space for ongoing knowledge and experience sharing. We will never stand still. Additionally, we want to put more emphasis on transferring the theory into practice, hands-on experience and on-the-job learning.

The content is divided into four different categories:

Our new Leadership Learning Journey is a work in progress. We will continue to invest in this portfolio, tailoring it to our leaders and business needs. Final result in a few months time will be a curated Leadership Learning Journey with a defined audience based on the needs, tenure, experience and attendance requirement.

Coffee with Joanna

This initiative is led by our Head of People & Culture and the purpose is to help our employees in their development during the individual development sessions. Joanna dedicated her Fridays to anyone who seeks a guidance in own development or faces any work related challenges, or simply would like to discuss any ideas.

👉🏿  Read more here: Coffee with Joanna

TGIT

At HelloBetter, we strongly believe in the benefits of knowledge sharing amongst all our employees. That's why we introduced "Thank God it's Tuesday" sessions a while back – a chance for all our team members to join in and learn together. During this meeting, we aim to share our knowledge or skills that will help others to learn something that it’s outside of their daily tasks. This not only nurtures a culture of sharing across teams but also deepens our understanding of different teams responsibilities. Through these exchanges, we learn skills that help us to be more effective in our work and to adapt quicker to future needs.

Last but not least, TGITs is great opportunity for networking and celebrating diversity. Through this broader knowledge we can support in overcoming challenges.

👉🏻 Learn more about TGIT here: Rituals and events

Sharing is caring

As a part of a Working Group project, we have created a library full of learning materials and external resources that we recommend to our colleagues.

Currently, this space encompasses a variety of materials focusing on different topics such as feedback, mental health, and cultivating a remote-first culture. The library consists of microlearning (short articles, videos, podcasts) and e-learning (online courses) recommendations on these topics. We hope that going forward it will be a great starting point for other learning topics / materials / knowledge sharing and through this we will support each other in our professional development.