A few years ago, we hosted a pivotal company-wide retreat in Nassau, Bahamas. Company culture is integral to working at Cuebiq, and the theme was “Cuebiq Connect.” All the events we participated in were grounded in this concept, including various workshops, games, and dinners. One of the main exercises of the retreat was brainstorming and developing Cuebiq’s core values. The goal was to establish values that everyone in the company could agree on and embody in the workplace.
We spent hours discussing what different ideas meant to us, presenting our thoughts to coworkers, and voting on which values were our favorite. In the end, the leadership team selected five values based on our conversations, and these have become intrinsic to life at Cuebiq. This process allowed every employee to have a say, and so it resulted in a set of values that feel authentically us. Here at Cuebiq, we live by these five values and let them guide our beliefs, decisions, and actions.
1. Connectivity
Just as Cuebiq connects data to create insights, Cuebiqers connect to each other to increase operational empathy, better ourselves and our clients, and achieve more as a team. We strive for open dialogue across the company and do all of our work on interactive platforms like Slack and Google Drive. Connectivity is an elemental part of our collaborative company culture. We empower our employees to think outside the box and use active listening to affirm their ideas. We also place importance on bonding outside work — there are weekly happy hours in the office; softball, soccer, and bocce teams; as well as a book club and Italian language lessons, just to name a few.
Our retreats are a great example of how Cuebiq stays connected, especially with offices around the world. It’s crucial to communicate frequently and effectively between Milan and New York so that everyone is on the same page. In the Bahamas, the entire company came together, and we got to know our coworkers from NYC, Milan, Washington DC, and Chicago. This was an excellent opportunity to have conversations face-to-face, without time zones and an ocean between us.
2. Transparency
Transparency is critical at Cuebiq and involves being honest, providing feedback, and ensuring clear communication in order to instill trust among coworkers and clients. Internally, teams are encouraged to talk openly about problems, challenges, priorities, and goals. We share our projects with each other and make them easily digestible and accessible to establish a common understanding across departments. There is a delicate balance between privacy and transparency, and we aspire to maintain the highest level of integrity both internally and externally in how we manage this balance in our projects and relationships.
Transparency has played a massive role in our growth as well as in our data collection strategy. This past June, we launched our Consent Management and Data Provenance (CMDP) solution, which enables users, partners, and customers to provide proof of consent and data provenance across all Cuebiq solutions. This blockchain-based solution promotes transparency, so that Cuebiq customers making an information or product request can be fully assured that the data they use is always compliant with GDPR and CCPA.
3. Customer Centricity
At Cuebiq, our customers are our priority. We power long-term relationships with them (as well as partners, internal stakeholders, and data subjects) by building trust, solving problems, and adding value to their investment. All of our actions are aligned with customer needs based on feedback and analysis. We keep customers constantly informed and pride ourselves in anticipating issues before they happen. We tackle complex customer challenges with comprehensive solutions and always aim to provide the most positive customer experience we can.
4. Innovation
Innovation is key in our fast-paced, data-driven world. At Cuebiq, we value ideas that challenge the status quo, disrupt the market, and provide thought leadership. We cherish intellectual curiosity and we learn from our mistakes. We have a bold, “fail fast” approach to what we do, which creates an environment conducive to creativity and respect. We are also always forward-thinking, and we consider our current privacy policy “future-proof.”
One way in which we’re innovating outside the typical scope of our business is by using our data to support nonprofits and universities. We call this our Data For Good initiative, and through it we’ve contributed to hurricane relief assistance and natural disaster planning. In one of our most recent projects, we partnered with MIT to use our offline first-party location data to understand spatial economic inequality in Boston.
5. Get Shit Done
This value is all about putting our ideas into action, and it showcases who we are — passionate, resourceful, accountable, and committed. Our objective is to achieve our common goals and deliver measurable results at the right pace with excellent quality. This mindset keeps us innovative and easily adaptive to change. We don’t take “no” for an answer and we don’t give up until we find a solution.
Strong core values guide how an organization thinks and behaves, and they result in the most successful business decisions and the strongest relationships because they are authentic to who we are. Core values should be visible in every aspect of company operations, and at Cuebiq, they are apparent in everything we do, from groundbreaking nonprofit research to fun after-work softball games.
If you’re interested in learning more about Cuebiq and our company culture, be sure to check out our current job openings.
Cuebiq’s Data for Good initiative is being continued with support from the Spectus.ai data cleanroom and their Social Impact professionals. Their commitment to positive social impact through the ethical and responsible use of location-based data makes further insights possible. We invite you to visit https://spectus.ai/social-impact/ for more on contributions to academia and research partners.
