November 2024 All Hands Call
During this All Hands Call, we heard an update on the Educate! Experience (EXP) climate change initiative in Uganda. We also celebrated our cultural tenet “Always Learning” by hearing practical examples of how this mindset drives our work in Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E).
Finally, we revisited our 2024 org-wide priorities and explored the tremendous progress we have made this year.
Ask Boris Anything: Since I was unable to address these questions on the call, please read below for my answers to the Ask Boris Anything questions we received.
Question: In what ways does the executive team envision enhancing our organizational culture and employee well-being initiatives?
Answer: Culture is and always has been a top priority for me - it is the part of our work that I care most about. In all the research I’ve done on scaling organizations, effectively scaling culture stands out as the most important piece. Culture is ever-evolving and each member of this team contributes to a healthy work culture! And, we have set out some priorities for 2025 to continue to intentionally build upon our foundation:
First, we’re continuing to prioritize culture in our hiring. We hire for 51% culture alignment when we look at the blend of culture and skills. It’s a top organizational priority to not only hire to meet our growth and team needs but also to hire people who will positively contribute to our team culture.
We’re also working to ensure we consistently provide a transformational onboarding experience for new team members. The People Team is working to build additional resources and support for those of you bringing new people onto your teams to give people a culturally aligned on-ramp into their roles at Educate!.
When it comes to well-being initiatives, we're committed to fostering a thriving work environment where our employees can flourish. To achieve this, we will be evaluating and enhancing our well-being initiatives. Here are some of the initiatives we already have in place to improve employee well-being:
We are prioritizing flexible work arrangements through a hybrid work model. We want to empower teams to balance their professional and personal lives and aim to reduce stresses related to transiting daily.
We’re encouraging teams to build in focus time. If you haven’t, please implement your focused work hours by blocking your calendar and limiting unnecessary meetings in line with our Half Call November initiative.
We offer access to health and wellness resources to support our employees' physical and mental health. If you have questions about what you can access through your specific medical plans, please reach out to your country's HR team.
We’ve emphasized building strong team connections through initiatives like happy hours to provide opportunities for team members to connect, collaborate, and recharge.
I want to really emphasize that we encourage our teams to take breaks and unplug. I try to lead by example on this by taking time off myself. It’s a common phrase that, “it’s never a ‘good time’ to take leave,” - so I encourage you to book your leave in advance - log it in BambooHR, block your calendar, and treat it like you do your top priority projects!
Finally, we value our employees' input and use feedback from our annual engagement surveys to identify areas for improvement. While we’re still reviewing all of the outcomes of our recent Engagement Survey, we checked in on this and the need to continue to think about how we support the work-life blend of our team came through in your replies. We appreciate drawing our attention to this important part of your employee experience!
By prioritizing employee well-being, we believe we can create a more engaged, productive, and resilient workforce. We're excited about the future and want to continue improving on what we are doing and look for even more innovative initiatives to enhance the employee experience.
Question: What new areas of innovation or experimentation is the organization excited to explore next year?
Answer: This is a great one, and very timely as we work to finalize our 2025 priorities, which leave plenty of room for innovation and experimentation. We’ll focus more specifically on these in an upcoming All Hands Call in the new year, but for now, I’m excited to share these briefly. For EXP, we’ll continue exploring how to further integrate climate action and sustainable entrepreneurship within the model design to better build climate literacy and resilience amongst youth. We’ll also be working to innovate our Education System Solutions product, positioning it for growth in Tanzania and in the future elswhere. In addition to running the PBA Expansion Program, we will be pursuing opportunities to deepen how we support governments in secondary education reforms. For example, in Rwanda and Tanzania, we’ll be working to support wider systems adoption of data-driven decision-making. We are eager to continue scaling our OOSY bootcamps, focusing on generating greater impact that tracks towards 6x ROI in 3 years in preparation for an RCT for SkillUp. We’ll also work towards delivering an RCT for the Original SEED product in Uganda and keen to see what learnings that drives.
Question: How do you perceive the impact that Educate! is having in Rwanda? Additionally, how do the results from the activities we’re implementing align with your vision and mission for Educate!?
Answer: Thanks for this question. The purpose of our work in Rwanda has always centered around sustainably changing the education system. This is primarily accomplished through teacher behavior change and integrating incentives to orient the system towards a competency-based curriculum, which in turn results in better and more relevant learning outcomes for students. We have already demonstrated proven impact through an RCT of the Exchange teacher training model - which showed that the model successfully shifted teachers’ pedagogical skills through the adoption of SkillsLab. It also saw improvements in business ownership for girls and an increase in university enrollment. And we are continuously working to strengthen this impact. Ultimately, through the PBA Expansion Program, our impact goal is for students to build the skills necessary to start businesses back home as a way to earn money. This continues to align with our mission and vision. We have shifted our approach in Rwanda to target greater adoption in pursuit of sustainability. Educate!’s involvement in PBA, and really positioning it as a government-owned program, aligns with our vision that the system delivers the impact on its own.
Watch the recording below.