Fresh Tilled Soil is full of design-obsessed user experience experts who partner with clients seeking innovative digital solutions to grow their business. Read on to learn more about how Fresh Tilled Soil works, what’s important to their culture, and how Kin helps them keep everything rolling.
Who are you, what’s your role, and your favorite hand-held food?
[EP] I’m Emily Powers, Director of Operations & Finance here at Fresh Tilled Soil. My favorite hand-held food is Belgian Frites.
What’s the story of Fresh Tilled Soil?
[EP] Fresh Tilled Soil is a digital design and strategy firm based in Watertown, MA. Our name is a metaphor for unearthing great potential. Our job is to work alongside our clients to imagine, sketch, design, wireframe, prototype, code, and test beautiful products for web and mobile – usually websites and applications. We are 11 years old and are currently a cozy team of 26.
What’s great about working at Fresh Tilled Soil?
[EP] Wow, big question for the person responsible for this department. We have an incredible wellness program which includes run club, cycling club, on-site massage, yoga, spontaneous planking, and team outings like hiking, BBQing, or enjoying a nice dinner out.
These types of perks, along with things like unlimited paid time off, parental leave, and workstations are all appreciated, but above all, it’s the culture that makes a company great to work for – at Fresh Tilled Soil we are empowered and trusted to do our best work whenever, wherever, without questions asked or red tape. This type of trust is hard to come by and makes this a truly great place to work.
Please share some insight into Fresh Tilled Soil’s approach to employee and workplace operations. How has Kin played a role?
[EP] We try to keep our HR/People Ops running like a well-oiled machine (doesn’t everyone?). We strive to have a clear system for those processes that are repeatable – for example, we have a 44 step onboarding process to bring someone onboard as smoothly as possible.
Kin has had a huge impact on the welcome our new hires receive. Before Kin, someone would show up and only maybe know who to talk to, or where to go, or how to handle paperwork. It was scary, believe me. Now, our new hires receive the incredible onboarding welcome email from Kin.
Through this tool, before they start with us they already know who we are, how we operate, who their teammates will be, what tools they’ll use, and oh yeah, their paperwork is all done before they even start. We also love Kin for goal-setting, check-ins, and never missing a birthday or workiversary, ever!
Anything notable going on lately?
[EP] We’ve just launched a new Objectives and Key Results (OKR) initiative which I’m really excited about. Our team is always asking the hard questions and questioning the norm. This means we are brimming with ideas and constantly testing new systems, processes, and products – we found it was getting a little chaotic with all these ideas and projects bouncing around! With our new OKR system, we pick just 1-2 Objectives to focus on per quarter as an entire company, then we set our key results or goals to ensure we have a clear goal post.
If someone has a great idea they’d like to pursue within the larger company objective for that quarter, great! If it doesn’t align with the objective, it will have to wait for a few months. This keeps us all super focused and rowing in the same direction