4. Team

Be the best versions of us

“You’re never standing on the outside, looking in. As a freelancer working with Harvey this past year, I feel part of something, though ‘technically’ I’m not. As cheesy as it sounds, their values are an actual thing. You experience it in lots of different ways.” - Lisa, Words for Things

As a freelancer working with Harvey this past year, I feel part of something
- Lisa, Words for Things

More than one way to build a (dream) team

Harvey has gone from leaps to bounds since our backflip last year on not building a bigger team. In addition to the strong and lean crew of Becky, Simon, Sarah and Rachel, we’ve had:

Ezra guest star for a season (hello if you’re reading!)
Gillian, not officially a Harvey team member, but she’s building The Business Pickle, supporting Harvey clients here and there, and we’re supporting her :)
All sorts of quality humans join our growing list of expert freelancers

Special shout out to legends who provided support – looking at you Clara Kiefel-Johnson, Hannah Bailey, James Cook,Julia Chua, Katie Ford, Lisa O'Sullivan, Sharon Behen and Wesley Rodricks.

How we live our Harvey values

We live, breathe and believe in the impact of business for good. But what does this look like? Over the last 12 months, we got to questioning and crafting our 5 defining values that guide our behaviours as a team and the way we work with clients and partners.

As a team, we’re driven towards growth and are constantly in the pursuit of learning.
- Rachel Lai

"As a team, we’re driven towards growth and are constantly in the pursuit of learning. Activities such as our weekly Lunch ‘n Learns, as well as personal development sessions, make me feel encouraged and supported to continue pushing myself to take my skills to the next level." - Rachel Lai

Equality, wellness and flexibility

We’ve continued to place a big emphasis on investing in wellness, flexibility, learning and development.

Of course, establishing a team and supporting their physical and emotional wellbeing is a huge responsibility, and one we take seriously. Our team is mostly women (besides Simon and Harvey), with Becky operating as our sole Director. We’re proud members of the One Roof community and we offer flexible working arrangements and flexible maternity leave.

When it comes to how we operate as a team, we try to be as egalitarian as we can by voting on our work priorities and impact areas. We also hold:

Weekly wraps and reflection sessions, in which we share what we're grateful for, a personal achievement, acknowledge someone for anything, and other highlights.
Daily virtual stand-ups where we check in on one another, and go through our challenges, priorities and focuses for the week.
Monthly Harvey Impact Updates (HIU) – a monthly session where we re-cap our impact goals, highlight a client project and share and celebrate each person’s ‘greatest hits’ for the month!

We were able to successfully implement flexible work arrangements we set out in our goals last year:

Compressed work schedules (9 days a fortnight)
Remote working for the win – team members move to Sydney and Castlemaine
Weekly coworking – every Monday, we meet up in person for co-working at our office The Hub in Sydney and Melbourne for some IRL human time!

Growing ourselves as people and doers

Adaptability and growth is big around here, and over the last 12 months, we’ve built a tonne of learning and development into everyday life at Harvey.

Fortnightly personal development coaching sessions, and detailed development plans
Daily technical and relationship skills coaching including frameworks, tips and feedback
Braindfood Thursdays: Weekly Lunch N’ Learns where we get together as a team to open our minds to new areas of interest

Brainfood Thursdays

We’ve covered a lot of ground already in our Thursday Lunch N’ Learns, from how to use Hubspot to impact storytelling and NFTs, and from bees 🐝 to reconciliation and typography!

How do we do it? It’s simple, really – we have a shared table to add suggested topics, and we take turns leading each week. We also often invite special guest speakers to share their wisdom and we welcome our clients to come along, too.

What’s been on the menu?

NFTs – Simon
SDGs for Business – Gill
Hubspot – Simon
Storytelling and Communication – Gill
Impact Storytelling – Becky
Typography 101– Sarah
Stripo – Rachel
Creating your Theory of Change – Spark Strategy
Reconciliation – Rosie Collins from Beyond Zero Emissions
Facebook Ads 101 – Rachel
RAP – team sharing about country they live on
Experimentation at Scale – Seamus Bellew from Clipchamp
Data Studio – Simon
Social Styles – Bec Penglase from ATEC
SEO – James Richardson from Optimising
Service Design – Connor Forsyth from Designit
Period and Menopause Leave – shared by Sarah from Leigh Dunlop from Future Super

The work I get to do at Harvey allows me to be true to myself by aligning with my values.
- Sarah O'Terra

"The work I get to do at Harvey allows me to be true to myself by aligning with my values... and that's pretty rare. I love that I'm supported to grow and push outside my comfort zone. With every step forward a 100 new possibilities arise." - Sarah O'Terra

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Explore 6 areas of this report

We speak to the five areas of business that were particularly important this past 12 months, then one final wrap up on goals and intention-setting for 2022-23.