What does a business grounded in delight look like like? Admittedly, it is not a word that pops up often in most leaders’ lexicons, but for Jane—an online platform for allied health and wellness practitioners based in North Vancouver—delight has been a foundation upon which the company was built. We sit down with phil di loreto, Director of People Operations at Jane, to explore the difference delight can make at work—for those who genuinely care about people, customers AND profits.

Key Takeaways:

• Making delight the North Star of internal and external customer experience can be a powerful business driver;
• Fostering delight throughout the employee life cycle requires both leadership commitment to transparency and a new principle of ‘care’ in management; and
• Delight never rests but demands ongoing diligence as the innovation of yesterday becomes today’s mainstream expectation.

From the start, Jane’s co-founders and co-CEOs, Alison Taylor and Trevor Johnston, infused delight into both their philosophy and product—and its impact on the business is undeniable. With ‘manager care’ scores at nearly 100% and turnover of less than half the tech industry average—all while growing over 47,000 clients worldwide and expanding their own team to 530 employees working remotely across Canada, the U.S. and the UK—the dividends of delight have continued to deliver.

“The concept of delight is just integral to Jane’s culture, a foundational aspect of what and who we are. We are still a founder led company and for Ali and Trev, delight is something that is near and dear to them in terms of the Jane experience,” said phil. “It's the experience we want our customers to have when they use the Jane app product. It's the experience that we want our customers to have when they call and interact with our customer support team. Delight is our bar.”

The Dividends & DNA of Delight

Jane’s approach creates deep relationships with customers, and it has has been an important factor in how the company has grown, with the vast majority of new business still coming from word of mouth that is driven by their customers’ self-admitted “love” for the product.

According to phil, Jane’s success story really boils down to the founders' firm commitment from the start to keep a firm eye on profitability while keeping delight—as measured by how people experience the product and interactions with the company—first and foremost as both a business deliverable and intrinsic driver of culture and results.

Naturally, those experiences do not occur without the same commitment to the employee experience, and that is something Jane constantly strives delivers on with measurable success.

“For us, it's about having a healthy Jane team. There are all kinds of different definitions of employee engagement, but a simplistic one sticks out for me—employee engagement is how positive your employees feel about being at work. I think that really shows where we overlap with the concept of delight at Jane. We want you to feel positive about the interactions that you're having with your peers, with your manager, about the work you get to do, about where your career is headed. It's this idea of feeling positive.”

Of course, making that happen for a team of any size requires more than a core nucleus of commitment, which is where’s Jane’s managers play a key role.

An Onus on Managers Who Care

When everyone reported directly to Alison and Trevor in Jane’s early days, phil notes, they were able to have a direct impact on fostering a delightful team. As Jane has scaled to over 90 managers, the responsibility of fostering a delighted team has shifted from the co-founders to each and every individual people leader.

“Where we put a lot of the onus of employees having a delightful experience at work is on the manager. So there are things that we do at the macro company level to create delight such as our company retreats and “holiday gift-giving extravaganza”, but we put a lot of responsibility on managers to be fostering delightful teams and their own delightful micro culture,” said phil.

“We’re really big fans of Russ Laraway, who's done a ton of research on management and leadership. He recently came out with, *When They Win, You Win: Being a Great Manager Is Simpler Than You Think.* That book went a little viral at Jane because his research actually uncovered that 70% of the employee experience is impacted by the manager.”

“Knowing that the manager has such a huge impact on the employee experience, we put a lot of focus on making sure we have great managers and actually built our own in-house manager training program called Leading with Care and Purpose,” said phil. “The logic is that care is a huge part of our foundation at Jane. We care deeply for our customers and we want managers that care deeply for their team.”

To take an accurate measure of that care, Jane also asks a question that Laraway recommends for every engagement survey—‘Does my manager care about me as a human being?’

“That question is key because if you know that your manager cares about you as a human being, it just makes a huge difference in your psychological safety— knowing that if something goes off in your life, if something were to happen, knowing your manager cares about you really matters” said phil. “As of our last Health Check in May 2024, we scored 98% on that question.”

Delight in that care carries over directly to engagement as well, with the most recent engagement survey pegging 86% and scores over 90% well within the norm. “It can fluctuate, and we also know it’s seasonal since we do it a couple times a year, but we are consistently in the top 10 percentile of employee engagement according to Culture Amp’s benchmarks. It’s unbelievable to see.”

Start With Care, Not Performance

Those types of numbers are driven in part by another of Laraway’s wisdoms, breaking all managerial efforts into two core responsibilities—delivering an aligned result and building a thriving team.

“Ultimately, managers need to make sure their team is delivering an aligned result. Is your team rowing in the same direction the rest of the company is? It’s one thing to deliver results, but it’s much more powerful—and harder—to deliver an aligned result to hit our bar of delight together” said phil. “That’s where the concept of care is key at Jane. We know performance is important to help more helpers—Jane’s mission—but what’s slightly different is that we believe that you start with care before driving performance—making sure our managers are enabling the success of their people for their teams to thrive and then focus on delivering an aligned result.”

That puts the priority of people first and foremost at Jane.

“Our belief is that if you have to start with the foundation of care. Don't start with performance. Don't start with driving and pushing your team to deliver. Start with care,” said phil. “It’s a delight to know ‘my manager cares about me and my career. My manager cares about the things that I want to accomplish in my life. My manager cares about the fact that I have a family and priorities outside of work and what that looks like for me. My manager cares that I am obsessed with Ironmans and that training for me is really important to integrate that into my workday and what that looks like. My manager cares, truly cares—with this, I know I can thrive in my role.’”

Put Care Before Growth For Profitable Results

And indeed, this approach has been a significant component in Jane’s overall growth.

“I'd say two unique things going for Jane are the genuine care factor and that we've had a non-negotiable since day one—that we make more than we spend. So we've always been profitable unlike a lot of other tech that has always valued growth over profitability. We value growth but not over profitability,” said phil. “That’s been huge for Jane because we didn’t get hit hard when a lot of other companies have in the last couple of years.”

As for Jane’s turnover, which sits around 10%, less than half the industry average, very little of the leaving is on anything but the best of terms.

“We track our reasons for voluntary exits and the number one reason why people leave Jane is personal life events—retraining for a whole new career, stepping away to focus on family. Most of our exit interviews are people gushing about Jane and telling us they don't want to leave. I can count on one hand the people who have left with any animosity or frustration. We put a lot of effort into our employee experience so that you leave as a friend of Jane,” said phil.

A Snapshot of Delight at Work

As for how that care manifests itself, Jane lays the groundwork with personal touches in the onboarding for its fully remote workforce, nurtures it with performance conversations and growth opportunities and celebrates it with annual retreats to bring everyone together for memorable experiences.

“Everyone’s working from home, so when we have newbies at Jane, we like to think it’s delightful to receive a package with your Jane tech gear and some fun times to work from home with,” said phil, pointing out that said pack is preceded by a pair of Google forms—one to pick your tech, the other exploring more personal tastes like your morning cup. “It’s just kind of fun picking and choosing what you need to do your work, but then also getting a box of customized goods. We don't tell them what they're getting in their goodies box because it is just our way to surprise and delight.”

That delightful delivery is followed by four days of onboarding with a wider cohort of new hires led by Sydney Carmody, Jane’s Employee Experience Specialist and joined by the company’s founders.

“We run our onboarding cohorts every two weeks or so and Syd takes everyone through our Jane company timeline, where Jane started, where we have gone and where we are headed. She starts that values-based conversation,” said phil. “Then you have that level of conversation with our founders. Ali and Trevor meet every cohort of newbies and talk to them about where those values came from, how they are lived at Jane and what that looks like. You also get to meet every member of our exec team for a run through of their department. We believe that that's a delightful way to start your journey.”

Delight in Demystifying Compensation

That said, care can only be built on a bedrock of trust, phil notes, which is why transparency and a fair compensation system are enduring principle of Jane’s delight delivery system.

“At Jane, we believe it’s delightful to have a transparent and fair compensation system, so we put a lot of effort into building a system that let’s employees know exactly what they’re going to get. As per regulation, we put our salary bands on all job postings, but internally everyone can see all the salary bands. Our aim is to delight by demystifying compensation, so within salary bands, we have thresholds that folks can work towards to move upward in that band,” said phil. “Our employees know that if they work towards a particular milestone, they will reach that level of according compensation. That level of trust and clarity in a compensation is something we and our teams find delightful—as opposed to to the traditional black box of compensation.“

Jane really focuses on what employees accomplish and their career growth versus managerial kudos, which phil notes, has confounded some managers at first.

“We actually have such a clear, non-manager recommendation model for comp that some managers who join Jane originally feel kind of stripped of that budget autonomy where they decide who gets what,” said phil. “We explain that we don’t do it that way because that makes compensation a black box, injects tons of bias, and people don't trust it. Instead, we’ve given more transparency and power to the employee to work towards these milestones, making it a collaborative approach with their manager, and grow their compensation with aligned results in the process.”

“We also have a separate compensation model for our Customer Support Team that’s both tenure and growth-based (i.e., a clear expectation of salary changes with each year of service with an expectation that you’re growing your career along the way). This, again, demystifies what compensation looks like to team members,” said phil. “Our compensation fundamentals are that we pay for growth, we pay fairly, and we pay clearly. We don’t say we ‘pay for performance’ or ‘pay competitively’ because the research shows that’s not what folks want. They want career growth, they want to be treated fairly and they want clarity on what compensation looks like. That’s how we make the compensation process delightful.”

Ultimately, all of these decisions were made from a place of truly wanting employees to feel cared for, and that is central to Jane’s version of delight.

Lift The Rising Bar of Delight

“When people ask, ‘What's Jane’s North Star? What direction are you going in? What are we working towards?’ Ali and Trev will always say the answer is delight,” said phil, “The bar we set at Jane is high, and you can argue we have achieved a growing team that does in fact feel cared for. We see signal of this through our low turnover, high engagement scores and customers reporting their experiences with our company. Also, that bar is always rising, so we actually refer to it as the rising bar of delight.”

phil notes that product innovations that delighted three years ago become expected industry standards for clients, just as remote work options have become entry stakes for employees.

“When everyone else is doing it, it’s not delightful anymore. So you just have to up your stakes of how to delight your how to delight your customers and that same thing applies to employees. What was delightful for employees three, five or 10 years ago is a non-negotiable now. It's standard,” said phil. “Telling employees they can work remotely doesn't feel as delightful anymore. Shouldn't everyone have that? Didn’t the pandemic set up to be able to work remotely in the first place? I recognize there's a lot of privilege that comes with working remotely too, but our point is, it's a rising bar of delight.”

Accordingly, Jane’s core of care, profitability and transparency remain critical constants to their approach—and everything else is up for constant improvement.

“Delight demands change, so a lot of things we are doing now are going to change because they have to in order to remain delightful. A lot of companies are offering onboarding now and a lot of companies ship packages with swag to people's homes,” phil said. “But is that really our differentiator? No, not necessarily. We do think they are delightful things to offer, but we're always thinking about what comes next. We're really challenging ourselves constantly to find that next thing to lift that rising bar of delight.”

Key to doing just that is asking a question built right into Jane’s Value Statement—Are we still having fun?