COVID-19 has been a challenge for Milestone and the way we work. It has affected workplace dynamics, leadership, communication, and many other aspects of running a global organization. But the pandemic also forced us to create new flexible ways of meeting, being creative and innovative, offering new services, training partners, executing events, recruiting, and onboarding new employees. And those are just a few areas in which we have been on a steep learning curve to establish new ways of managing and supporting our People First culture.

Although the pandemic created challenges for Milestone, being a software company focused on creating opportunities for people and culture has given us some distinct advantages to handling these challenges. Consequently, our multiple initiatives to support agile performance, digitize processes and putting people first have continued.

One of those Milestone initiatives is Grow Together, which provides a range of activities which are now being offered to all employees. The base of this initiative is the energy pyramid that focuses on ways to create energy by working to achieve a physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual balance. Grow Together is a program that includes training, ways to optimize your physical well-being, tips to keep focus on assignments, and an improved practice for planning and holding meetings. Because we believe people in balance make the organization more creative and efficient, Grow Together supports an agile and flexible working culture while strengthening our growth ambitions.

As part of our agile performance culture and management, we have implemented team goals and reviews. This puts the focus on the team rather than the individual, on the way we collaborate at Milestone, and on the way, we set and evaluate goals and success in fulfilling them together with our teams. This has been the standard for our development teams and projects for a long time. To get everybody on board, we are training and sharing the learning from these teams across the organization.