Three teams comprising 35 students across eight different MIT departments and Wellesley College have been at work since fall 2025, designing critical early infrastructure elements that a moon base would require. This June, their designs were recognized with five awards at NASA’s 2026 Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts — Academic Linkage (RASC-AL) Forum. 

Among 75 submissions and 14 finalists, the MIT teams earned first and second place in the competition, as well as three best-in-theme awards. The Exploration-Class Lunar Integrated Power SystEm (ECLIPSE) team won first place overall and first in its theme category, lunar surface power. The communications and navigation constellation team, MELIORA, won second place overall and first in its theme category on Mars communications, position navigation and timing, which included a strategy for proving the design at the moon. And CHEESEBURGER, a campaign to mine and process lunar regolith into oxygen, metals, and bricks, won first in its theme category, lunar technology demonstrations. 

“NASA spent the spring telling the world what critical early infrastructure their upcoming permanent moon base will need,” says George Lordos, a research scientist and lecturer in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro) and in System Design and Management (SDM), who co-advised all three teams. “Over 30 MIT students spent this academic year designing much of the moon base — systems for generating, storing, and distributing power; robust systems for positioning, navigating, and communicating; and early experiments with essential technologies to live sustainably off the moon’s own dirt.”

A power grid for surviving lunar night and winter

The hardest constraint on NASA’s moon base is staying powered, because a failure in life-support power would doom the crew within hours. ECLIPSE is a reference design for a lunar grid engineered to stay up for more than 99.995 percent of the time — fewer than 27 minutes of downtime a year in the worst-case scenario, the standard demanded of the most critical data centers on Earth. It pairs two power sources that fail in different ways: banks of 20-meter solar masts in the sunlit highlands near the south pole, and, for the roughly 18-day stretch each year when the sun drops below the horizon, a pair of buried 20 kilowatt microreactors the team named CARROT, (Compact Autonomous Regolith-shielded Reactor Operating for Ten years). The CARROT reactor, a novel design developed independently by the ECLIPSE team, ended up being similar in design to NASA’s SR-1 reactor for the 2028 mission to Mars, both aiming to maximize speed-to-deployment. 

“Burying each reactor 1.3 meters down shrinks the keep-out zone from kilometers to meters, so crews can work nearby, and it saves tons on required shielding mass,” says Taylor Hampson, a PhD student in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and ECLIPSE team co-lead.

The full design delivers an initial 120 kilowatts using a grid of buried aluminum cables and shielded direct-current power equipment. Laser-equipped rovers provide “Frontier Power” capability, beaming up to 10 kilowatts to sites beyond any cable, from a shadowed crater to a new outpost before its own grid exists. Patrick Riley, a graduate student in the Department of AeroAstro and ECLIPSE team co-lead, says the design’s point is to put reliability ahead of mass: “We sized it so the most likely failures never reach the moon base inhabitants, and so it scales from a first crew of six up to industrial demand without interrupting a commercial lunar economy.”

A network for exploring the moon and Mars, and calling home

MELIORA acts as the base’s relay and GPS. Although RASC-AL framed the communications, positioning, navigation, and timing competition sub-theme around Mars, the team also proposed a plan to validate their design in lunar geometry first, in step with the agency’s strategy to prove technology on the moon before extending it to Mars. To find the best design, the team ran a trade study across 5,764 candidate constellation geometries. The result grows from an initial three satellites to 23, returns more than 100 megabits per second to Earth-orbiting data networks over free-space optical links, and pins a user’s position to within 10 meters. For the Mars design, four relay satellites parked at gravitationally stable Lagrange points keep the link alive even during solar conjunction, the weeks when the sun sits between the two worlds and ordinarily cuts communication. On the surface, a user needs only a portable radio terminal and a chip-scale atomic clock — a timekeeper the size of a matchbox. 

“You should never have to think about whether the network is there — it just is, the way you don’t think about a cell tower,” says Ekaterina Tiukhtikova, an undergraduate studying both AeroAstro and electrical engineering and computer science (EECS), and a MELIORA team co-lead. “We put almost all the complexity up in orbit, so everything on the surface stays portable and simple,” adds Clayton Lieberman, a graduate of the SDM program and team co-lead who wrote his thesis on MELIORA.

Making oxygen, metal, and bricks from lunar dirt

After power and communications, the third essential pillar of a lunar base is living off the land. The moon’s own regolith can supply oxygen to breathe and burn, metal to build with, and shielding to hide behind for protection from deadly radiation. CHEESEBURGER is a campaign of five robotic payloads that prove the supply chain one link at a time, followed by integration of the five into the first end-to-end lunar industry. 

The payloads carry a kitchen’s worth of names: SWISS prospects for the richest ore, BRIOCHES digs and sorts the regolith, BACON casts it into bricks, GRILLED MEAT melts it electrically to pull out metal and oxygen, and AVOCADO is the robotic builder that stacks the products into structures, including interlocking Moon BRICCSS that shield a habitat from radiation. The food theme was born during a January team outing at Sandwich, Massachusetts. “Naming the prospector SWISS and the metal extractor GRILLED MEAT turned a wall of acronyms into something the whole team could enjoy,” says Cesar Meza, a graduate student in AeroAstro and CHEESEBURGER co-lead. “It sounds like a joke until you see that each acronym clearly describes a serious piece of hardware doing one job in the pipeline.”

Thirty students, eight departments, and three teams for one moon base

More than 30 students contributed across the teams, from AeroAstro, SDM, Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE), EECS, Mechanical Engineering (MechE), the Technology and Policy Program, the MIT Sloan School of Management, and Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), along with a student from Wellesley College. Several student mentors and faculty advisors worked across more than one team, which is why ECLIPSE’s grid is sized to power CHEESEBURGER’s processing, CHEESEBURGER’s regolith handling is used to bury and shield ECLIPSE’s grid, and all three projects are designed to translate moon base lessons for a future mission to Mars. The teams were advised by Olivier de Weck, the Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics and Engineering Systems and interim department head of AeroAstro, who led ECLIPSE; Kerri Cahoy, the Sheila Evans Widnall Professor of Aerospace Engineering, who led MELIORA; Jeffrey Hoffman, professor of the practice in AeroAstro and a former NASA astronaut, who led CHEESEBURGER; Koroush Shirvan, Atlantic Richfield Career Development Professor in Energy Studies in Nuclear Science and Engineering, who co-advised ECLIPSE; and Lordos, who co-advised all three. Much of the day-to-day mentorship work is led by PhD student volunteers and runs through the MIT Space Resources Workshop, which Lordos founded in 2019.

“The winning teams demonstrated how academic innovation can support Artemis mission goals,” says Daniel Mazanek, RASC-AL program sponsor and senior space systems engineer at NASA’s Langley Research Center, in NASA’s announcement of the awards. “Their work highlights the important role student research plays in shaping future space exploration.”

NASA expects astronauts living on the lunar surface for months at a time by the early 2030s — the window ECLIPSE, MELIORA, and CHEESEBURGER were designed for. The picture the three teams had worked toward is unified: a crew at the lunar south pole, the lights on through the winter night, the network always up, and the first oxygen and bricks coming out of the ground beneath them. 

“A permanent base is no longer a slide in a strategy deck; NASA begins landing the first elements in 2027,” says de Weck. “Studies like these three let the agency see, before the concrete sets, how its power, communications, and resource choices depend on one another. That is precisely when independent, integrated architecture work has the most influence on the real plan.”

RASC-AL is administered by the National Institute of Aerospace on behalf of NASA. MIT has a long record in NASA’s student design competitions, with recent winning teams including the  HYDRATION Mars water production system, the Pale Red Dot Mars homesteading architecture, the deployable lunar tower MELLTT, the MARTEMIS lunar Mars analog campaign, the MAPLE autonomous lunar robot pathfinding system, the CERBERUZ lunar recycling project, and the THERMOS cryogenic fluid management system. This work was supported in part by NASA, the Massachusetts Space Grant, MIT AeroAstro, and the MIT Space Resources Workshop. One student was supported by a NASA Space Technology Graduate Research Opportunity Fellowship.

The full teams:

ECLIPSE — Team leads: Taylor Hampson (graduate student, Nuclear Science and Engineering) and Patrick Riley (graduate student, AeroAstro). Reactor team: Liliana Arias, Sydney Menne, Julian Rocher and Pavel Shilenko (graduate students, NSE). Power management and distribution team: Evrard Constant and Mary Foxen (graduate students, AeroAstro), Janhavi Joglekar and Asma Patel (undergraduate students, AeroAstro). Solar and architecture team: Zachary Dawson (graduate student, System Design and Management), Sreeja Akula and Ian Jimenez (undergraduate students, AeroAstro; EAPS), Yohan Lim (graduate student, AeroAstro/Technology and Policy Program), CJ Taglienti (graduate student, AeroAstro/MBA). Student co-advisors: Yana Charoenboonvivat, Lanie McKinney (AeroAstro), Palak Patel (MechE). Industry mentor: Sully Marigliano-Crevecoeur (Technetics). Faculty: Olivier de Weck (lead) and Jeffrey Hoffman (AeroAstro), George Lordos (AeroAstro and SDM), and Koroush Shirvan (NSE).

MELIORA — Team leads: Clayton Lieberman and Katiyayni Balachandran (System Design and Management), Ekaterina Tiukhtikova (undergraduate, AeroAstro and EECS), Celvi Lisy (AeroAstro). Team members: Thomas Harrington and Zachary T. Barnes (SDM), Asael Acosta (undergraduate, AeroAstro). Student co-advisor: Lanie McKinnery (AeroAstro). Faculty: Kerri Cahoy (lead), Jeffrey Hoffman and Olivier de Weck (AeroAstro), and George Lordos (AeroAstro and SDM).

CHEESEBURGER — Team leads: Cesar Meza (graduate student, AeroAstro) and Elizabeth Romero (undergraduate, AeroAstro). Team members: Rachel Dunphy, Shreya Kothnur, Hailey Polson (undergraduates, AeroAstro), Christopher Kwon, Jose Soto, Lanie McKinney (graduate students, AeroAstro), Marvin Martinez (undergraduate, MechE), Ananda Santos Figueiredo (graduate student, Technology and Policy Program), Evangeline Haiqi Wang (undergraduate, Computer Science and Psychology, Wellesley College). Faculty: Jeffrey Hoffman (lead) and Olivier de Weck (AeroAstro), and George Lordos (AeroAstro and SDM).

Most employee recognition programs start with good intentions—but quietly fail to deliver. Not because leadership doesn’t care, but because recognition gets designed in ways that slow it down, limit who can participate, or make it feel generic.

Before we dive in, I want you to sit with something for a second.

Think about a time you worked really hard on something. Maybe you made significant progress on a challenging project, or maybe it was your service anniversary. Something happened and it went unnoticed. Maybe it even caused you to leave an organization because you felt like your work was consistently being ignored?

That experience is more common than we’d like to admit. According to our research, lack of recognition is a top three reason employees leave their jobs. Two in three employees wants more recognition for the great work they do. And employees who feel recognized are 2.7x more likely to be highly engaged. Organizations know recognition matters—but they’re not set up to do it well.

The good news: these are design problems. And design problems have solutions.

Why most employee recognition programs fall short  

At Quantum Workplace, most organizations we work with understand that employees need to feel valued, and they want their employees to feel valued. The intent is always there.

But when we look at how employee recognition actually shows up in the day-to-day, there are often gaps—and these gaps aren’t necessarily due to one big failure. It’s a series of small design problems that add up to having far less impact than we want to see.

Recognition coming too late is one of the most common. Someone did really great work at the beginning of January, but they don’t hear about the impact until a quarterly review in April. That moment is already gone. Manager-only recognition limits who and what gets seen. Recognition without context—without describing the impact, without explaining why it mattered—just doesn’t land.

Because of all of this, sometimes we start designing employee recognition programs in ways that end up unintentionally holding it back. The program gets slow, infrequent, and over-controlled.

The 5 design considerations that transform employee recognition  

When we study the organizations that are really turning recognition from a program into a culture, they’re making very deliberate design choices. Here’s what those choices look like.

1. Recognize what matters most

This is probably the most foundational one. The first design choice is: what do we actually want recognized inside our workplace?

Recognition doesn’t just make people feel good—that’s part of it. But it also teaches people what matters. Every time we recognize someone, we send a signal to the entire organization: this is what great work looks like, these are the behaviors we want to see repeated.

We recommend anchoring your recognition program to your organization’s core values. This brings what’s important to life and illustrates what good looks like. Along with meaningful milestones: service anniversaries, goal completions, moments in the employee lifecycle that deserve to be marked.

But here’s what I also want to call out: this isn’t just about what we’re recognizing. It’s also the why. The context, the story behind the recognition—that’s equally important. “Thanks for doing great work” doesn’t tell me anything as an employee. I need to understand what the work was and what impact it had.

That’s the barrier I hear most often. People want to give recognition, but they have a hard time finding the words. The good news is that well-designed employee recognition software can make that much easier.

The practical application:

• Highlight specific behaviors and outcomes.
• Pair everyday recognition with meaningful milestones or experiences in the employee lifecycle.
• Always include specific written context explaining the behavior and why it matters.

2. Make recognition meaningful and specific to the person

As organizations grow, processes naturally get more standardized. That’s necessary. But when it happens with recognition—where individual preferences vary so much—recognition can start to feel generic. And generic doesn’t feel meaningful.

I knew an organization where the only reward available to give employees was a Starbucks gift card. Imagine someone who’s not a coffee drinker just quietly collecting those—”oh great, I suppose this is recognition.” It misses the mark. The employee recognition program was designed for convenience, not for people.

When designing for scale, you also need to design for individuality. Allow employees to opt in or opt out of certain types of recognition. Some people love being celebrated on their birthday. Others are genuinely horrified. Let them choose.

For global organizations especially, small details matter. If there’s a point currency in your recognition software, avoid naming it “bucks” or “dollars.” Something that doesn’t resonate for your international employees quietly signals that the program wasn’t really designed with them in mind.

The practical application:

• Offer real reward choice.
• Write messages that feel personal—not templated.
• Name your reward currency in a way that actually fits your culture, and plan for your full employee population.

3. Make recognition easy, frequent, and in the flow of work

If we get those first two points right, something shifts. We actually want more recognition, because frequent recognition means we’re consistently recognizing great work and making it feel meaningful. That creates a new challenge: how do we get more of it happening?

The answer is removing friction.

Budgets that refresh monthly help a lot. If I can give recognition without mentally calculating whether I’ll have enough left for October, recognition flows more naturally. Integrating recognition into Slack and Teams—where work already happens—removes an extra step that most people won’t bother with. And automated reminders for anniversaries and milestones mean managers don’t have to track these things separately.

Pairing employee recognition with rewards also increases frequency. We consistently see more recognition happening when both are in play. And if we’ve already designed for meaningful, personal recognition—that momentum is a good thing.

The practical application:

• Set a budget built for frequency and allocate by role.
• Use AI and automation to prompt the right moments.
• Pair recognition with rewards to build momentum and reinforce the behaviors that matter.

4. Allow your recognition to scale visibly across the organization

We want employee recognition to be part of how we operate—not a program we run. And for that to happen, everyone needs to feel ownership of it.

That means recognition can’t just come from managers. When it only flows top-down, we’ve eliminated most of the organization from participating in building this culture. Managers set the tone—and the previous design considerations matter a lot for that. But everyone needs a role.

What I also want people to hear: recognition isn’t just something the individual receiving it feels. Others see it. They learn from it. They start to understand what great work looks like across the organization, not just in their own team.

That visibility is what transforms recognition from an instance into a daily norm.

The practical application:

• Open recognition to everyone, not just managers. Make it public and easy to see.
• Have leaders model recognition visibly and consistently—that signals it as a cultural expectation, not a nice-to-have.
• Let others boost or comment on recognition when the impact was bigger than one moment.

5. Design recognition as a leadership signal

This is where employee recognition moves beyond something we do and becomes leadership intelligence and insight.

Recognition can tell us:

• Where is great work happening most often?
• Who is consistently contributing in meaningful ways?
• Where might recognition be missing altogether?

That last question matters—because absence of recognition doesn’t necessarily mean absence of great work. It might mean teams aren’t being seen.

When managers have access to these patterns, they make better decisions in coaching conversations, development planning, and talent reviews. Recognition stops being a cultural add-on and starts actively informing how leaders lead.

The practical application:

• Give leaders access to recognition trends—density, gaps, emerging contributors.
• Reveal high-impact contributions across teams.
• Nudge managers to recognize meaningful contributions based on signals across performance, development, and engagement data.

From recognition program to a thriving culture 

What I keep coming back to: we need to shift from building a program to building a culture of recognition.

Recognition is a top driver of employee retention and engagement. Feeling valued is one of the four conditions teams need to thrive—alongside feeling aligned, empowered, and growing. There’s a real gap between what HR intends for recognition and what it actually delivers day-to-day. The right design closes it.

A employee recognition program is something HR manages periodically. A culture is something everyone owns every day. One produces data. The other produces connection—and connection is what keeps your best people engaged, performing, and committed to the work.

Quantum Workplace’s employee recognition software is built around these principles. From peer-to-peer recognition and meaningful rewards to automated milestones and real-time analytics, it gives leaders the tools to make recognition consistent, visible, and connected to the work that drives results. Because when employees feel genuinely valued, great teams don’t just perform—they stay.

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Imagine working at a warehouse or office sometime in the near future, and you’re asked to help a new trainee learn the basics of their job. The catch: It’s a robot. To teach them, you might want to play a game of “show and tell” — that is, physically showing how to do something a few different ways, while also explaining what you’re doing.

Let’s say you asked the robot to place some coffee on your desk without disturbing you during a Zoom call. You’ll prefer that the robot doesn’t get too close to you and the laptop so that it doesn’t interrupt your meeting. To enable this behavior, the robot should be trained with data that clearly demonstrates the full task. Computer scientists have attempted to explain manipulation tasks to robots by recording lots of physical demonstrations or writing extensive directions. But if you don’t have both, the machine is likely to misunderstand what it needs to do.

It’s laborious for humans to do all that showing and telling, so researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have automated the process of teaching a robot, while clarifying instructions automatically and using nearly five times less demonstration data. Their “Masked Inverse Reinforcement Learning” (Masked IRL) approach uses a large language model (LLM) to elaborate on ambiguous prompts based on the data collected from a user’s demo. Another LLM then narrows down which details an algorithm should incorporate into a motion plan, so that a robot can safely complete chores in homes, offices, and factories.

“Our approach could come in handy when a human interacts with a robot but doesn’t want to spell out all the details of a task,” says MIT PhD student and CSAIL researcher Minyoung Hwang, who is a lead author on a paper presenting the project. “We’re minimizing human effort by enabling machines to get to the bottom of what users really want.”

According to Hwang, Masked IRL can help robots safely maneuver in settings where there are elements a human might not describe in a prompt, but that are crucial nonetheless. For example, a machine grabbing you a snack from the kitchen may not know to avoid bumping into your laptop. Likewise, a factory robot placing items into different boxes must carefully navigate around shelves.

To learn new tasks in these situations, Masked IRL uses the robot’s sensors to capture information about its surroundings. These components also log each movement of a kinesthetic demonstration — a training approach where a human physically moves a robot to do a specific action. It’s sort of like being the machine’s physical therapist, bending joints in a particular direction to show a robot how to grab, move, and place objects.

MIT’s system then calls on an LLM to compare this sequence of motions (called a trajectory) to the shortest possible path. The model also elaborates on what might be unclear in a prompt, turning a request like “stay close” into “stay close to the surface of the table.” Using the trajectory comparison and clarified directions, the LLM begins to understand why the motions it was trained on are important to the task. 

A second LLM then evaluates details of the environment, such as the position of obstacles and the shape of the robot’s target object. During this process, it “masks” (in other words, ignores) the elements it deems irrelevant to the task at hand, scoring each one as either a “1” (important) or “0” (not so much). For example, whether or not a user was leaning on a table during a demonstration would be a “0,” making it irrelevant. Any detail considered a “1” is incorporated into the final action plan by an algorithm.

These masks gave Masked IRL a key advantage over comparable baselines in both 3D and real-world demos because it taught a robot which information to prioritize. Thanks to the researchers’ system, virtual and real robots alike were able to skillfully maneuver objects around obstacles, such as moving a coffee mug around a laptop to different spots on a table. In these tasks, Masked IRL correctly identified users’ preferences, which they didn’t explicitly state in their prompts, up to 15 percent more often than comparable baselines.

During simulation experiments, CSAIL researchers also found that Masked IRL was a fast learner. It required fewer demos to understand how to move the mug than its baselines. They also found that the robots performed better when an LLM cleared up instructions, instead of having the machine try to follow a vague request.

This more focused approach also translated well to a real robotic arm, executing prompts the system hadn’t seen during its training phase. After being trained on 50 kinesthetic demonstrations, the robot carefully moved a cup toward a human while avoiding colliding with a user’s computer — an obstacle it learned to avoid by elaborating on a more general request to “stay away.” It also wiped a table down while “staying close” to it, and handed a user a bag of chips while “staying away” from both a human and a table.

Masked IRL senses and explains what users leave unsaid, but soon, it might “see” it too. CSAIL researchers plan to make their approach more dynamic by equipping it with cameras, allowing a robot to take images of its surroundings. Then it could highlight and focus on specific elements nearby. For example, if you asked the machine to pick up a toy, it might see some bananas nearby and ignore them before handling its target object.

Hwang wrote the paper with three CSAIL colleagues: PhD student Alexandra Forsey-Smerek ’20, SM ’22; postdoc Nathaniel Dennler; and MIT Assistant Professor Andreea Bobu, who is a member of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and CSAIL. Their work was supported, in part, by the Tata Group via the MIT Generative AI Impact Consortium Award, and the Department of Defense. They’ll present the project at the 2026 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in June.

Our mission is to empower every team to thrive. Every team. Including ours.

We believe that thriving doesn’t happen by accident. A thriving team is one where people are aligned around something bigger than themselves, empowered to take real ownership, growing in ways that matter to them, and valued—not in a generic way, but personally and genuinely.

We build tools to help other organizations create that. And we hold ourselves to the same standard.

That standard is why we’re proud to share that Quantum Workplace has been named one of the Top 100 Inspiring Workplaces in North America for 2026—ranking #11 overall and #3 among mid-sized organizations. And we want to tell you exactly what got us there.

What the judges saw

The Inspiring Workplaces Awards are judged independently. Organizations share evidence that reflects their employee experience. Judges look at leadership accessibility, inclusion, employee voice, recognition, development, and culture in practice.

Here’s what the judges said about us:

“Quantum Workplace presents a highly aligned and authentic people strategy that is clearly lived throughout the organization. The connection between purpose, leadership, employee experience, and culture is evident, supported by strong engagement data and a consistent commitment to listening and acting on employee feedback. Particularly impressive are the organisation’s leadership accessibility, employee voice practices, onboarding experience, and focus on meaningful development and recognition.”

“Quantum Workplace demonstrates a culture built on trust, transparency, and genuine care for employees. Overall, this is a mature, people-first organization with a clear sense of purpose and a strong employee experience that appears deeply embedded in everyday practice.”

The values behind #QwirkLife

Around here, our employees go by a different name: Qwirks.

It’s not just a nickname. It’s a philosophy. Being a Qwirk means showing up as your full, unfiltered self—the kind of person who makes the workplace more alive just by being in it. The kind of person who never takes themselves too seriously, but always takes the work seriously.

Qwirkiness prioritizes the individual. It’s the belief that the things that make you you—your quirks, your voice, your perspective—aren’t liabilities to be smoothed over. They’re assets to be leaned into.

That shows up in how we work together. And it shows up in our products, which are built on the premise that every individual voice matters and deserves to be heard.

Which brings us to our four values that make all of this possible.

• Pursue – As a company, we pursue impact. As individuals, we pursue growth. A spirit of pursuit means we are never fully content with the here and now. We have an inner drive and confidence to push forward, and we show courage in the face of adversity. Pursuit is one part vision, one part hustle, and one part grit.
• Team Over Self – Every team member comes with different strengths, talents, and perspectives. Admitting vulnerabilities and relying on others takes courage. Asking for help is a sign of strength—providing that help is our commitment. We seek the voice of others, build confidence in our teammates, and recognize that the whole really is greater than the sum of its parts. Together we empower teams to thrive.
• Revel in Work – We do hard things and put in good work, but we like to experience the joy of working together both in and out of work. Whether it’s revelling in solving a difficult problem together or showing up for field day with the whole team, we Revel in Work.
• Be You – Each one of us is a unique, one-of-a-kind original. What makes us different makes us valuable. Our company is stronger when employees are free to share diverse perspectives and experiences. Our culture is stronger when individuality is not only celebrated and embraced, but expected.

These values come to life through five attributes that guide how we show up every day: curiosity, hustle, flexibility, grit, and care. You can read more about them at quantumworkplace.com/about/culture.

What keeps our Qwirks inspired 

We asked some of our own Qwirks to share what inspires them to work here. Here’s what they said:

“Quantum Workplace inspires me to be the best version of myself because I’m surrounded by people who challenge, support, and trust one another to grow. It’s even more rewarding knowing that our products make a real difference by helping organizations create better experiences for their employees.”

Ryan Herdman, Account Executive

“Quantum Workplace inspires me by surrounding me with people who genuinely want to see each other succeed. The dedication my team brings every day motivates me to show up and give my best in return. When you love what you do and the people you do it with, putting in the effort feels natural.”

Marinna Hunt, Customer Support Specialist

“Quantum Workplace inspires me because we’re focused on helping each and everyone do their best work, and lead by example! Working across teams & disciplines to solve complex problems pushes me to continuously adapt, communicate, and be a better teammate.”

Carter Brehm, Software Developer

“QW gives me the autonomy to be myself and work how I work best, while continually encouraging me to grow and reach higher. I always feel supported when I’m taking on something challenging, knowing that I have the freedom to occasionally stumble while in pursuit of growth, and am constantly motivated by those around me to never stop evolving and learning. Being surrounded by so many brilliant, inspiring people is just one thing that makes being a Qwirk amazing!”

Carrie Hughes, Customer Implementation Manager

“Quantum Workplace inspires me to be the best version of myself because of the people. There’s a genuine culture of support where teammates consistently go the extra mile for one another, and everyone takes pride in building a product that makes a real impact for our customers. What stands out most is that employees truly have a voice. Leadership listens to ideas, values feedback, and turns great suggestions into action, creating an environment where people feel empowered to grow and contribute.”

Abel Avila, Software Developer

“For me, it’s the people who make up QW. Everyone is incredibly supportive, there’s a strong sense of trust and autonomy, and I’m constantly learning from peers who challenge me to improve. Having that kind of environment along with a healthy work-life balance makes it easy to bring my best every day.”

Sivakumar Kailasam, Principal Engineer

A culture where everyone belongs 

Behind this recognition is a group of Qwirks who show up every month to make sure this company is one where everyone truly belongs.

Our Diversity Council exists to ensure that every person on this team can Be You—fully and without hesitation. Made up of 5–7 Qwirks alongside our VP of People and CEO, the council advises leadership, drives real initiatives, and brings the whole company along on the journey. They focus on four things: talent, community, awareness, and voice.

We’re proud of the culture we’ve built. We’re also honest that belonging is never finished work. It takes attention, accountability, and care—every single year.

We practice what we build 

Here’s the thing that moves us most about this recognition: everything the judges called out in us is exactly what we help our customers build.

The listening. The acting on feedback. The development. The recognition. The culture where people feel like they matter.

That’s not a coincidence. We live it here so we can mean it when we tell our customers it’s possible.

We believe every team deserves to thrive. We’ll keep working until that’s not just our mission statement—it’s the reality for every organization we touch, and every Qwirk who calls this place home.