Values-Led Innovation: Making Team Management Easier

At Justworks, we live by our core values of compassion, openness, grit, integrity, and simplicity (COGIS for short). These principles guide everything we do — every day, on every team, across the organization.

“Whenever we’re coming up with something new, we ask, Is that COGIS?” said Jess Harvie, Program Manager on the Product Team. “And for us, that’s really trying to work out whether what we’re doing aligns with our values as a company.”

We’ve written before about how our company values influence design at Justworks. But our values inform other decisions as well. All our decisions drive toward the goal of helping employers overcome challenges and run better businesses.

Want to implement a strong culture based on core values at your organization? Download our free ebook on Hiring for Company Culture to get started.

Tackling the Challenges of Growth

“The mission of HRIS is to provide our customers with the information and the tools they need to be the best employers they can be,” said Joe Blossom, Product Manager.

Being a good employer and running a successful business leads to growth. Of course growth is great, but as a business grows and scales, new challenges often present themselves.

Keeping information organized and secure across your company’s different systems or tools isn’t easy. Preserving institutional knowledge and keeping things from getting lost in the shuffle can take up a lot of time.

Time spent managing all that information is time you’re not spending managing your team. Tools that help keep track of all this for employers will help your business run more smoothly.

With this in mind, Justworks developed new features to help employers to become the best managers they can be.

Learn how our team uses COGIS to develop new features, like Work History.

Introducing Work Histories and Work ID

Work History, a new feature within the Justworks platform, provides employers with an easy-to-access, holistic timeline for each employee and contractor. An employee’s history goes way beyond compensation, and Work History shows it all in one snapshot.

“It makes the employer’s life easier by letting them see specific information like title, pay, department, manager, and which office they’re a part of,” said Liz Zhang, Software Engineer.

This tool also helps you to empower your more senior staff to be better managers, by giving managers access to work histories of their direct reports.

“Whenever we’re coming up with something new, we ask, Is that COGIS?”

Another new feature is Work IDs, a unique ID within Justworks that’s assigned to every employee or contractor at your company. With Work IDs, you can easily link your team member’s information across systems or reports without relying on personal information like last names or social security numbers.

Work IDs are editable and can be changed to match any unique IDs your company already has in place for your employees or contractors. Work IDs help to keep employee information safe, secure, and organized.

Values-Led Innovation

Asking whether each project — including Work History and Work ID — is COGIS is key to making sure every new feature serves our customers in the best possible way. It allows our team to develop easy-to-use tools that help employers organize the information and relationships that make up their workforce, and simple, seamless administration for every stage in an employee’s life cycle.

It also leads us to reach farther and aim higher.

“I think it enables us to realize what we can do, what we want to do, and to never really be happy with where we are,” said Joe.