Enova Values in Practice: Accountable for Results

By: Kaitlin Arntz, Public Affairs
April 17, 2014

In part, the purpose of the Enova Values is to help employees discover their own best practices. By asking them to be accountable for results, employees inevitably become more interested in their work, which makes for a better product.

Set High Expectations and Make It Happen

Setting high expectations is important for any business that wants to succeed, as raising the bar is the only way to continue improving. One Enova group that continues to raise expectations is the Data Services team. Tasked with tracking, storing and processing raw data into useable information, Data Services provide Enova with a key facet of our day-to-day services.

Stella Nisenbaum, one of our developers, was recently recognized for being accountable for results in her work. When a request was made for a significant amount of specific, synthesized data, Stella found herself initially optimizing queries, before finally taking a key role in the project. “Since I wasn’t on the project from the beginning, it was a little bit muddled for me at first,” said Stella. “But once we understood what was needed, it was just a matter of executing.” Not a small task, as Stella would go on to spend 100+ hours on the project.

Always Add Value

Adding value seems like a simple idea — when given a task, do whatever you can to improve the final product, whether it’s asked of you or not. But putting it into practice can be far more challenging. For Stella, adding value to this project meant evaluating not just the data she was asked to evaluate, but the instructions for delivering that data as well.

“Essentially, the way that we were being asked to deliver the data wasn’t the best way to deliver it, and it ended up that our changes clarified the process and the data.”

Use Data to Drive Results

There’s no team where data-driven results are more important than Data Services. They spend each and every day searching for the best ways to track and deliver data in the interest of optimizing results, and many of us at Enova look to their example when we utilize data.

Stella’s project was motivated by deriving results from data, but like so many projects that begin with a simple goal, it led Stella and her fellow developers to insights that could help them with similar projects in the future.

“Certainly a part of this job is looking at each task in its own terms, because every one of them has characteristics that will make it unique. With this specific project, we gained a lot of insight into ways that we can optimize this process the next time around.”