Building world class team culture from first principles - with Mindset Health

Mindset Health has an incredible team culture. While this is something we and its team have known from the start, it was recently publicly recognised with Mindset winning this year’s top spot in the Health category of the AFR BOSS Best Places to Work list. 

How do they do it? What’s their advice for other early stage founders setting out to build a team where everyone is passionate, efficient, mission-driven and buzzing to come to work? 

Mindset’s co-founder and co-CEO Alex Naoumidis sat down with us to share his advice. 

It’s a huge achievement for Mindset Health to be named as the health industry’s best place to work by the AFR. How would you describe Mindset’s culture and what makes it stand out?

Mindset Health's culture is very much about having a growth mindset and realising our full potential in order to create products that unleash the potential of users' minds. We have made cultivating a growth mindset a core part of our values, and try to find the balance of a fun, creative and driven culture that constantly raises the bar on the impact we make on our users and the world. 
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What would you say is the best action or policy you’ve put in place to build Mindset’s culture?

The best action we’ve taken is our in-house coaching program – this is something we do that’s very different from most companies. My co-founder Chris and I personally value executive coaching and believe that supporting everyone at Mindset with similar coaching from our in-house coach, Jess, is a great way to help our team grow professionally and personally.

One of our most talked-about (and loved!) policies is our Menopause and Menstrual Leave Policy. This supports the women and people who menstruate in our organisation to be able to place importance on their health, which ties in with the purpose and messaging of our Evia app. 

We’re also proud of our market-leading parental leave policy, with 18 weeks for the primary carer, and our flexible ‘work from anywhere’ policy for up to 4 weeks per year, and our A$3,000 per year employee learning and development budget, to name a few. 

Where did you draw inspiration from in actively building Mindset’s culture? Are there other leaders you’ve been inspired by, or any experiences you’ve wanted to avoid? How do you think about personal and professional development for your team?

Chris and I have never really worked anywhere else! We’re just building the company on first principles, based on where we’d like to work and what environment we think would help us both reach our goals and grow our team as individuals. 

Learning and development, both personally and professionally, is therefore an integral part of our culture and company values. We offer a generous learning and development budget, encourage mentoring opportunities and participation in educational courses, and offer manager upskilling workshops to support our team. We’ve also benefited from the guidance of many great mentors from companies just ahead of us in the journey, including from Startmate and Y Combinator. 

What do you think is the hardest thing about building a team as a startup scales?

Finding the right balance of talent, purpose and drive to help achieve the company goals, while also trying to build a high performing team, as the plane is flying in mid-air! It's a real balancing act to get both of those factors at each changing stage of growth. We're constantly learning and growing as founders and leaders and the company reflects that.

What’s one piece of advice you’d go back and give yourselves on Day 1 of Mindset to put you in good stead for building out your team?

Stay as lean as possible until you reach product market fit – people are incredibly complex and the larger your team is, the more complex and difficult it is to drive alignment towards your goals. ‍

Want to hear it from the team directly?

Keen to work with at Mindset Health? Check out their careers page.