Last June, we kicked off our first Values Award ceremony to recognize employees who exemplify our values. Fast forward to this year, the same celebration has become an integral part of our team culture and an exciting tradition employees look forward to. As we reflect on our third celebration, we are reminded of how dedicated our employees are to living out Nextdoor’s values each day.
The companywide ceremony commemorating our Values Award is a highly anticipated company meeting with employees dressing to the nines for Nextdoor’s own version of the Academy Awards — even our new employees don’t shy away from wearing their formal attire! The All Hands meeting had so much energy and made our employees feel so connected, even in a remote work setting. As the winners were announced, the Nextdoor employee-only messaging channel was met with a flurry of messages of congratulations and kudos to our employees. It was incredible to see how employees experience the feeling of connection and excitement during the ceremony in the comfort of our homes.
Let’s get to know our Q2 2021 Values Award Winners!
Earn Trust Everyday
Winner: Nora Burke, Sales Team
Nora earns trust every single day, not only from her team, but from many other teams she works with in the organization. She is thoughtful and organized, and puts her fellow colleagues first.
“Nora consistently shows up, listens, and then actually does something to address a process failure, unhappy employee/client, or missing information. She creates processes or policies around the feedback she is given by her team or teams that work closely with hers. A great example of how she demonstrated this value is when she heard from a few people on a team she works closely with were not getting the information they needed in an efficient way… Nora created a template for her team to complete whenever they made a request so that all of the requisite information was proactively passed along and always included in a clear and consistent way. No one asked Nora to do this, but that’s the beauty of Nora — she observes and gathers feedback and then takes it upon herself to do something to make work better and more efficient for her teammates. This leads to a foundation of trust in Nora that makes her unique and a pleasure to work with.”
Customer Obsessed
Winner: Tasha Graham, Finance Team
Tasha is someone who our employees can always rely on. She truly is customer obsessed and works hard to answer all questions to ensure everyone at Nextdoor is paid in a timely manner.
“Tasha has more customers than probably anyone else at the company. But more than that, she is constantly in a position to be bombarded with questions and issues, and always manages to keep her cool and make sure the job gets done and everyone is happy and paid on time. A great example of how she demonstrated this value is during Q4 and into Q1 while she was helping launch and stabilize Workday HCM, while also preparing for all year-end payroll tax reporting, and working issue W-2’s and corrections. She manages to do it all with a smile and a great attitude.”
Invest in Community
Winner: Liz Kreitler, Product Team
Liz has worked hard to invest in community since joining Nextdoor last April — everything from product launches to maintaining a vibrant community for the KIND employee resource group.
“Liz truly embodies this value in her everyday life. A great example of how she demonstrated this was when she relentlessly worked long hours with moderation work on the NOPS during the election period. During this critical and stressful time, she still had the energy to lead the KIND employee resource group initiatives and sincerely check on her other teammates (like myself). I am so grateful to have a neighbor like Liz here at Nextdoor!”
Act like an Owner
Winner: Fumi Balogun, NOPS Team
Fumi is an incredibly strong advocate for our customers. She takes full ownership of projects and sees every detail through to completion in order to make a positive impact internally and externally.
“A great example of how Fumi demonstrated this value was her work with the partnerships team to launch the partner edit of the claimed businesses feature. She brought up key use cases throughout the creation of the functionality that significantly improved the clarity and value of the feature to our businesses (reducing case load to just two case reports). She was a partner throughout the building of the feature identifying key use cases and NOPS needs. She ensured thorough documentation and detailed tests were executed with the engineering team. I am grateful for her partnership throughout the process.”
Experiment and Learn Quickly
Winner: Maddie Neveaux, Product Team
Maddie is constantly seeking out new ways to improve a product. She thinks quickly on her feet and is intentional about delivering value to our customers. There isn’t a day that goes by where she isn’t experimenting and learning quickly from the work she does.
“Maddie is able to work cross-functionally to define the problem space and break it down into the starting point and the learning point experiments to give each feature value to our neighbors. A great example of how Maddie demonstrated this value is in the flagship Ask a Neighbor product. Maddie started with notifications for Ask a Neighbor and learned quickly that personalized notifications improve the feature value to our neighbors. She then worked with the Machine Learning team to improve the notification sent to neighbors most likely to reply. All with the goal of increasing the number of posts that get a response as the framework for the experiments she launches.”
Think Big
Winner: Jef Cunningham, Design Team
Jef is a deep thinker who works to bring the customer’s vision to life. He has been described as a design visionary who inspires his colleagues to think big as well.
“He is a visionary on the design team that pushes all of us to think in a big, bold, yet human way. A great example of how he demonstrated this value is his phenomenal prototyping and design work that is often shared broadly to communicate big projects like Browse and Follow Neighborhoods or future visions. He’s always thinking outside the box and isn’t afraid to go against the grain of what Nextdoor has always done.”
Congratulations again to these inspiring individuals. Nextdoor employees are so proud of all you have accomplished and we thank you for being great representations of living out our values. Not to mention, we are constantly inspired by the well-crafted words and ideas that accumulated to over 300 nominations this time around.
Although we would love to celebrate our employees in person, we are grateful to see the ways our employees are inspiring others in the community and to see the great progress this program has made over the course of a year. We look forward to seeing the continued efforts of our employees and we are hopeful that our next Values celebration will take place in our new office!
