My co-founders and I started NEXT Insurance in 2016 because we wanted to make insurance for small businesses and self-employed professionals significantly better, simpler and more affordable.
Our goal was to help businesses be more successful by transforming what are often cumbersome tasks into painless experiences. We created a platform where business owners can purchase their coverage, access certificates of insurance and service their policies in a matter of minutes, completely online.
Back then, we only had a few employees, so it was easy to ensure the work everyone was doing aligned with our core values.
When a company is small, you feel the culture because everyone’s working so closely together. But as a company grows, it becomes more difficult to discern what the organization truly values.
That’s why we decided to create a culture guide to share with our employees who now work in offices and remotely around the world.
Why NEXT’s culture matters
Now that we have over 600 employees working at NEXT and AP Intego, a company that joined us in March, we need to be more explicit and intentional about the principles and values that are most important to us.
When you bring people together from different companies and locations, everyone brings their past experiences with them. They have different values, different standards and different ways of doing things.
These differences make us stronger as a company, but we also have to unify them with core values that guide us in helping our small business customers thrive.
Our culture guide provides the roadmap necessary to create a cohesive workforce. It explains the guiding principles for how we want to serve our customers, work with our partners and interact with our colleagues every single day.
How we created the culture guide
Although four core values have been guiding us since we started Next — be unstoppable, dare to simplify, phenomenal service, play as a team — we began developing Next’s culture guide in 2020 to better articulate what they mean in practice.
Many people participated in the development of the guide, including every member of the executive team, long-standing employees who have been with us since the early days and new team members.
We conducted interviews and had small breakout groups to learn about what they think is important. We encouraged them to share their thinking about why they selected certain behaviors and principles over others.
We distilled their feedback into the four key values that guide everything we do at Next today and in the future.
Putting our values into practice
We’re proud of the work we did to develop a guide we can live by. It’s all too common for corporate values to become something companies pay lip service to at their quarterly meetings rather than a set of principles they embody on a daily basis.
We live out the values we have identified every day in our interactions with each other, our customers and partners. We’ve embedded practices into our day-to-day operations here at Next to make sure that happens.
We hold each other accountable, encourage feedback and celebrate our wins. And when something doesn't go as planned, we use that as a learning opportunity.
If we do something that’s not true to our principles, we salute the one who notices it and raises the red flag so we can discuss it, fix it and learn what we can do differently next time.
We’re proud of the culture we’ve created at Next. We look forward to continuing to grow and provide our customers with the phenomenal service and insurance coverage they need to protect their businesses.
Join us! NEXT insurance is hiring for numerous roles based in California, Texas, Israel and remote. Learn more on our careers page: https://www.nextinsurance.com/careers/
