Evolution Week

Evo has just wrapped up its first spring Evolution Week. Evolution Week was a time for individuals to improve their skills, teams to discover ways to collaborate better, and the company to get to the next level.

Evolution Week is not just about finding a teacher or finding a course. It is about thinking how we can creatively use our resources to evolve as people and teams.

-Fabrizio Fantini, Evo Founder and CEO

Our team devoted a large part of their busy schedules to experimenting, learning new technical concepts, and developing skills that will help them do their jobs better. In fact, our teams devoted, on average, more than half their time during Evolution Week to discussing and practicing new technologies, skills, and approaches. We collectively spent over 300 hours sharing knowledge.

How Evolution Week worked

Evolution Week was a bit different from the usual learning weeks put on by companies. We didn’t have a set of required courses for different roles to work through, nor did we require any team member to spend a particular amount of time learning. Instead, Evolution Week employed totally self-driven learning.

Team leaders (and quite a few resourceful team members) led discussions and hands-on learning sessions in areas of their own expertise. Anyone was free to join the sessions most relevant and interesting to them, regardless of who was hosting. Not only were many sessions well-attended live, but these sessions were also recorded, so that busy team members could benefit from the sessions later.

I appreciated Evolution Week a lot. It gave us the opportunity to align on best practices and allowed everyone to learn from colleagues by sharing knowledge, exploring new technologies, or just having more time to explain a key concept we want everybody to know. A varied skillset is vital and one of our biggest strengths!

-Giuseppe Craparotta, Senior Data Scientist and Head of the Pricing Team

Some teams even experimented by changing over to new platforms and techniques to see if they would improve Evo operations. All of this was done remotely, while maintaining full service and dedication to our clients. The Evo family proved to be wizzes at balancing priorities, too.

I think Evolution Week was even better completely done remote. It gave us more flexibility to combine learning sessions with regular work and deadlines.

-Pietro Quaglio, Evo Data Scientist

Goals achieved during Evolution Week

Evo’s ultimate goal is always to give better results to our clients. To that end, our goal for Evolution Week was to develop new ways of doing our jobs that would give better and faster results to our clients. The team seems to unanimously agree that this week achieved that goal.

The feedback I got was quite enthusiastic. The team enjoyed the opportunity to focus on learning, especially since they usually do not have time to step back from their roles and improve. This week, they had that freedom.

-Federica Vola, Evo HR Manager

Each team could focus on self-defined learning priorities without limitations, significantly increasing the impact of this week. Not only did our team members come away from this time with new proficiencies, but they also bonded as teams. Since experimentation and discussion were key aspects of our approach, teams worked toward shared goals. Even the newest members of the Evo family could contribute.

Now that we are back to our normal schedule, we will apply what we learned to further optimize the way we build and use our products. We are excited to deliver more efficient and more effective results to our clients. We look forward to expanding these successes even further during our next Evolution Week.

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