Hi Alexandra, you are a developer at Hedvig. We would like to dive into what life at Hedvig’s like on your end. But first, can you tell us a bit about who you are?
I am originally from London but moved to Stockholm almost two years ago. I really love living here, particularly in the summer! In my spare time I enjoy exploring the Stockholm area and archipelago, climbing, playing tennis, catching up with friends, learning Swedish and saying hello to every single dog I see.
How would you describe life at Hedvig from your point of view?
I have found life at Hedvig to be exciting, rewarding and a huge learning experience. We always joke that the only constant at Hedvig is change! This is partly because our team is growing rapidly and we are expanding into new markets, but also because we regularly reflect (both within our teams and on a company level) on how we are doing and whether there are any changes that we can make to further improve our processes, working relationships etc. I really feel that everyone cares a lot and I love that we don’t settle and are always striving to improve.
I also have a lot of fun at work, looking back at my time at Hedvig I have been lucky enough to be involved in a lot of really exciting and varied projects. A personal highlight was being part of the team that launched Hedvig in Norway. It was a big project and required a lot of work, but it was very satisfying to see what we managed to accomplish in a short amount of time, and everyone learnt a lot from the experience — we also had a great celebration together afterwards.
I am surrounded by a great group of people who are extremely talented but also really fun to be around. We have an after-work every Friday and (pre-corona) there are always groups of people meeting up to play paddle, go climbing or perhaps go for a cycle. Even whilst lots of us have been working remotely this year we have kept our after-work’s going and this week we even held a virtual wine tasting!
Can you describe our culture, with authentic words?
To me our culture is all about being a great team. We trust and support one another, work together and take ownership so that we can all be the best and most genuine version of ourselves whilst driving our goals forward. Our culture is central to everything that we do at Hedvig, from recruitment to how we work within and across different teams, how we set and monitor our goals and how we interact with each other. Just like the size of our company, our culture is always growing and improving, and I feel confident that we will continue to prioritise it.
What is your experience of our values Empathy & Trust, Ownership, Collective Thinking and Remarkableness in practice?
We are given a lot of trust at Hedvig, we are able to work flexibly, in the office, from home or from anywhere if needed. This trusting and flexible attitude has enabled me to work from the UK on occasions when I am visiting friends and family and the ability to do this is something that I greatly appreciate.
We have a big focus on asking for and giving feedback to our colleagues with the aim of understanding more about ourselves, each other and building trust. We want to maintain and grow our culture of talking to each other rather than talking about one another! It may not always be the easiest thing to give or receive constructive feedback but, if given and taken in the right spirit, it can be truly enlightening; I have certainly learnt a lot myself. Perhaps one way to think of this is, only a good friend would quietly and kindly let you know that you had food stuck in your teeth; we want to be that good friend to each other!
Collective thinking is something that is central to how we work at Hedvig, in our tech team we refine problems and potential solutions together, sometimes code the solution in pairs or small groups, review each other’s code and regularly reflect and debate on how to improve our ways of working. On a wider company basis, we also try to harness everyone’s different perspectives and experiences to come up with solutions that work for everyone. I was recently amazed that when our People and Performance team were working on creating a salary philosophy, they invited everyone in the company to take part in workshops so that they could take into account everyone’s views.
We definitely have a remarkable team, and this is really evidenced every Friday when we have a ‘Demo’ (a meeting where people show interesting things, they have done that week). I am always incredibly impressed by what my colleagues manage to achieve, from the complicated claims that our customer experience team handle with such empathy and understanding, to our web-team who recently won an award from IDG for creating the best finance website in Sweden for 2020, to our creative team who continually come up with incredible design work, adverts (and AMAZING company merch).
We also have regular “Hack Days” when people come with fantastic ideas of things that we could build. These days are great fun as you are able to take a pause from regular work and put all of your energy into being really creative. I am happy to report that a number of the projects that were started during a “hack week” have gone on to be implemented fully by Hedvig! Organising events like hack days or other team social events aren’t part of anyone’s job description and are a great example of how Hedviger’s take ownership for more than just their daily work.
Why do you think trust is so important?
Truly trusting our colleagues allows us to stop stressing and worrying as individuals and share the work and any individual pressure we may feel as a team. If we are open with each other about our worries, limitations, differences of opinions and great ideas we are able to solve these issues together and focus on the task at hand. The more we dare to open up and feel the benefits of doing so, the easier it is to do again and so the trust continues to grow. I have learnt a lot from my team-mates at Hedvig. I often feel this is because no one is afraid to ask the “stupid questions” (which almost always turn out to not be not at all stupid and often lead to more interesting conversations and ideas) that perhaps wouldn’t be asked if we didn’t trust each other.
Working as a developer and for a start-up you create great features but also sometimes break things in the process. About a month into joining Hedvig, we had a critical bug, everyone worked together to solve the issue and once the bug was fixed, I was part of my first ‘Post-mortem’. To me, this meeting sounded quite ominous, but I was impressed to see that the meeting explored what went wrong and why but the main focus was on what we learnt from the experience and how we could stop the same or similar situation from happening again. There was absolutely no finger pointing or blame attributed to any team members. I instantly felt that everyone really trusted each other, and I could trust them to support and help me solve an issue rather than fearing I would be blamed if I introduced a bug into our system.
Thanks a lot for your time Alexandra, it was very interesting to hear your story!
Sanna Westerberg,
Chief People & Performance Officer
