Plastiq named in Best Places to Work by Built In Boston

I am absolutely delighted to share that Plastiq has been named one of the “Best Places to Work” by Built In Boston for 2019!¬†These awards recognize companies that go out of their way to provide employees with the support they need to thrive. At Plastiq we highly value our Engineers and gave them lots of opportunity to expand their responsibilities. We also put a lot of focus on work/life balance. We’ve shared a lot of information on how we support our employees on our Built In Boston Profile.

Taking a step back, what does it mean to me to be a great place to work? To me, it represents 2 key elements:

1. 1. Great Work Environment
2. 2. Strong Work/Life Balance

1. Great Work Environment

You spend most of your waking hours at work. You spend more time with the people you work with than with your family. Given those facts, to me it’s critical that Plastiq offers a great working environment, one that every Engineer is eager to come to every day and feels motivated to give their best to the company. We have invested a lot in our Engineers to give them great learning and growth opportunities. We send out team members to conferences and encourage them to network at local Meetup groups and events. We use our 20% rule (where 20% of our team’s monthly capacity is devoted to internal Engineering work) to give us the opportunity to work on new technologies and reduce technical debt. We let our Engineers set out their learning goals and then line them up with projects that give them an opportunity to learn. We’ve encouraged our Engineers to tell us what role they want and then support their transition to that role ‚Äì for example, our ‚ÄúChief Architect‚Äù at Plastiq started as a ‚ÄúSoftware Engineer in Test‚Äù, and many of our full stack Engineers joined us initially as specialized UX Engineers. We use our War Room Wednesday construct to bring the entire team together to learn a new skill/technology or solve a challenging technology problem, together. These are just some of the steps we take.

2. Strong Work/Life Balance

I personally believe that it takes years of hard work to become an overnight success, so we need to pace ourselves. Building a company is a marathon not a sprint. We do work hard and sometimes need to go the extra mile, but we deliberately take time off when we need it. We put people first and our high retention rate is a direct result of this. While we have expectations (tickets, timelines, deliverables), we don’t care about when and where you do your work. What we care about is that the work gets done and done well. We realize that “busy” doesn’t guarantee productivity and “present” doesn’t guarantee engagement.

If you need to take the afternoon off to pick up your child from daycare or run personal errands, and continue your work from home at 8pm, great. If you need to work from home because you have a really hairy technical issue to resolve, no problem. If you need to travel back home and want to work remotely for a few days, do it. As long as the work gets done.

One of our engineers, Marie Cuddy, made this statement on our blog: “There is a great level of trust within the team, as long as your work is getting done there are never any issues with having to balance your personal life. Plastiq also has amazing benefits and is ahead of many much larger companies in terms of vacation and maternity/paternity leave.”