The sun is shimmering off of the Charles River and reflecting up into the eyes of dozens of competitors floating in their canoes, swaying at the starting line.
It’s not summer camp.
It’s not a rowing crew from nearby Harvard.
It’s a business meeting — in a way.
The canoers are all teammates at Kensho, the AI accelerator for S&P Global, and this specific scene was one from the company’s annual “Collab Week” back in July. Collab Week became particularly important in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, when Kensho employees were working remotely.
Since then, Collab Week has become a perfect example of Kensho’s company culture taking shape in the real world. The week offers dedicated time to brainstorm and be creative under one guideline for engagement: teammates must always come into discussions from a place of kindness.
“There’s just no substitute for the energy, collaborative spirit and magic you feel when getting together face-to-face instead of screen-to-screen,” wrote Chief of Staff Meaghan Cassidy in a blog on Kensho’s website. “While our day-to-day team operations are a reflection of our hybrid Work from Anywhere policy, events like Collab Week that foster spontaneity and in-person connection are essential to building our culture.”
How can a team intentionally create spontaneity? While it might seem like an oxymoron, the team at Kensho actually does have an answer.
“During Collab Week, we intentionally don’t set full, all-day agendas,” another Kensho blog notes. “We leave space for Kenshins to make the most of their time together by whiteboarding and brainstorming, conducting retrospectives, gathering for meals and team-building events, and even just grabbing a coffee or going for a walk one on one.”
Creating intentional time for brainstorming, communicating clearly and jumping right into implementing those new ideas are all DNA building blocks for Kensho’s culture — even outside of Collab Week.
What is the culture at Kensho like?
The culture of Kensho evolves around five main concepts:
- Action bias
- Collaboration
- Trust
- Forward-looking approach
- Culture of continuous learning
How a Culture of Curiosity Creates Kensho’s Tech
The culture at Kensho might look something like this in action: In one of Kensho’s dedicated learning timeframes , a new idea surfaces for a solution in the product suite. The team decides to put this idea into action, which means gathering a group together to bring it to life. While assembling that team, Kensho leaders make a point to skip things like “unhelpful hierarchies” and homogeneous perspectives.
“We collaborate, using our teammates’ diverse perspectives to solve hard problems,” the company website notes.
While working on that project, team members make a point to communicate openly, honestly and from a default mode of kindness with one another.
Add it up, and it becomes the workplace culture at Kensho — make time for curiosity and when it’s time to get to work, communicate in a way that’s open and honest. The company makes a point to note that this should all be from the baseline understanding that diversity is celebrated at Kensho and everyone should be able to be themselves at work.
And making time for curiosity isn’t just a lofty goal on a company website. Leaders at Kensho protect their team’s time so that they have plenty of it to explore and learn new things. This exploration time is where the culture of Kensho and the tech that the company develops intersect.
The company’s leaders are intentional about creating opportunities for people to take a pause and pursue different ways of learning or innovating. For example, the company hosts “Knowledge Days” on the first Thursday of every month, during which engineers are encouraged to sign off and learn a new skill or do a deep dive into something they want to explore.
In addition, engineers at Kensho have reported spending roughly 16 hours a month on side projects, like the ones that the company’s “Team Impact” initiates.
What Team Impact Does at Kensho
Team Impact is an internal group at Kensho made up of teammates from different departments, who are in charge of leading the company’s volunteer work. The group began after a 2019 employee survey revealed that teammates wanted to use their technical skills as a form of service to their communities.
“Contributing to holiday gift drives or helping to build houses was great but didn’t really use our skills,” the Team Impact page on Kensho’s website notes. “Kensho has one of the best teams in the worlds of data, machine learning and software engineering, and it was clear that we could have a much larger impact by putting down the hammers and picking up our keyboards.”
Right now, Team Impact has three main areas of focus. The first is data journalism, a slice of the team that focuses on the impact that accurate and inclusive data can have in the future of tech. For example, in 2021 the data journalism team held a Wikipedia Edit-a-thon to add more articles — and more in-depth articles — to Wikipedia about women in STEM fields. In one day, Kensho editors wrote 19 new articles, drafted 17 more and improved upon 56 existing ones. The team also created a browser plug-in that brings up Wikipedia pages for any highlighted text, in the hopes of combating misinformation.
The second portion of Team Impact focuses on environmental sustainability. This section of Team Impact works on a lot of different projects, but one example was when the team worked with environmental nonprofit Climate Neutral. The volunteers from Team Impact were able to work on back-end development and helped the organization create a new UX navigation.
Professional Development Perks at Kensho
One of the biggest ways that Team Impact is able to give back is by offering the skills of team members in service of different causes, particularly ones that are of interest to them. To keep those skills sharp, team members can utilize the professional development perks that Kensho has available.
- Continuing education stipend
- Customized development tracks
- Job training and conferences
- Mentorship program
- Promote-from-within
- Lunch-and-learns
- Continuing education available during work hours
- Tuition reimbursement
The third section of Team Impact is educational equity, which helps improve data and research that supports accessible education. For example, one of the members of Team Impact developed the College Equity Dataset, which brings together data on student earnings and racial and economic background, then combines it with data on things like student debt. Team Impact’s educational branch also offers technical mentorship to local schools.
Team Impact doesn’t always stay siloed into these three areas. The group developed the “police use-of-force data project,” as another example. The idea was to automate the analysis of police use-of-force documents from around the United States. The team used eight recommendations — compiled by Campaign Zero’s 8 Can’t Wait program — that were identified as ways to reduce police killings and save lives. Team Impact was able to train Campaign Zero’s existing dataset and build a web scraper to help compare use-of-force policies from Google and MuckRock.
The uniting factor behind all Team Impact projects? It’s a place for Kensho employees to use their technical skills to help their communities — with the support and carved out time to do so while on the Kensho clock.
How DEI is the Foundation of Kensho’s Company Culture
The DEI strategy at Kensho is part of the company’s culture because it informs how teammates work together before a project ever starts — diverse perspectives is how hard problems get solved.
Kensho’s DEI webpage notes two primary goals that are at the heart of its strategy.
One: make sure that every teammate feels comfortable being themselves at work.
Two: make an active effort to broaden the diversity of applicants applying to Kensho.
On the webpage, CEO Bhavesh Dayalji explained, “At Kensho, we build AI/ML solutions that structure unstructured data, making important insights discoverable and empowering our customers to make decisions with conviction. Achieving this vision requires us to attract, hire and develop a team that reflects the diverse pool of people, perspectives and talents we see in our communities.”
“This vision requires us to attract, hire and develop a team that reflects the diverse pool of people, perspectives and talents we see in our communities.”
The first goal comes to life in a few ways. On a smaller scale, inclusion at work might look like a new hire being paired with an “onboarding ally” to introduce them to Kensho culture and social events. It also might mean attending a Lighting Talk, one of the once a month sessions where employees can present for five minutes on any topic they want as long as it’s not work related. In the past talks have covered things like Venezuelan heritage, Purim celebrations and sign language for video chats. On a larger scale, the company has a documented equal pay policy.
The second goal is tied to tangible aspects of Kensho’s recruitment strategies, meant to bring in more women and BIPOC applicants. The hiring team at Kensho recruits directly from historically Black colleges and universities, offers diversity-focused referral bonuses to current employees and uses platforms that have a focus on diversity.
Intentional efforts, like the ones at Kensho, are important tactics to create an equitable workplace.
“Intentionality” might be a good unifying word to describe the entire culture at Kensho — intentional time set aside for curiosity and learning, intentionally open communication and intentionally making the most out of volunteer time by offering technical skillsets first.
