In this episode, I talked to Karin Andrea Stephan, co-founder of Earkick. Karin's whole life has been about connecting and bridging gaps between people and misunderstandings. With Earkick, a remote-first company based in Zurich and San Francisco since 2021, they empower individuals, teams, and organizations to become their best selves and to measure and improve their mental health and well-being.
Karin shared her experiences of improving the mental health of employees and Earkick's, as a fully remote company. We discussed these three main topics:
1. Giving the right tools to employees to improve their mental health
Earkick is an app that helps individuals to improve their mental health. At Earkick's, Karin confirms that they also use their own app to track how are the employees doing. With it, there is an AI algorithm that gives the person personalized suggestions based on their data, and it's completely private, effortless, and free.
2. The perks of working at Earkick and the benefits to employees
Almost every company has good benefits, and sometimes these benefits give you clues about how the company culture might be. At Earkick they try to avoid meetings. They also have one every Wednesday, where employees prepare a presentation to show their colleagues where they are at. There's no real working schedule, they have flexible parental leave, team-building activities, and a generous referral program.
3. Having massive curiosity and simplicity s part of the company culture
One of Earkick's values is massive curiosity. In Karin’s perspective, massive curiosity is the antidote to depression, anxiety, and toxic environments because massive curiosity means that "you don't know". Not knowing something is the basis of curiosity that makes you go out and find things. Karin confirms that it helps employees make decisions better and recede micromanagement. Everything in their company culture needs to be simple, even communication needs to be simple, and the way they interact with each other.
Show Notes
00:17 Episode begins
01:41 How Karin Andrea Stephan ended up co-founding Earkick
03:29 About Earkick
05:47 Why is personal health so important
09:50 Earkick’s company culture
15:00 About the minimal meeting culture at Earkick
17:27 How Earkick monitors employees’ well-being
20:12 Earkick’s values and purpose when hiring new employees
22:25 How to make sure employees are aligned with the purpose of the company
23:23 About Earkick’s team
25:12 Tips for remote teams who want to create a strong company culture
27:42 End of the episode
Karin Andrea Stephan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karinstephan/
Earkick’s website: https://earkick.com/
About Daniel Abebe: Daniel is an entrepreneur at heart with a business and marketing background. He has been working with and for fast-growing startups since 2013. His passion is to create and engage with inspiring people, and his experience in no-code development and entrepreneurship turned into his best leverage to do just that.
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