PEAK6
What's the Work-Life Balance Like at PEAK6?
Frequently Asked Questions
PEAK6 approaches workload and work-life balance with a strong emphasis on flexibility, sustainable performance, and intentional team practices that support employee well-being.
Flexible, employee-centered approach to work: PEAK6 offers a hybrid work model and flexible schedules, allowing employees to manage their time and balance personal and professional responsibilities. This flexibility is a core part of how work is structured across teams.
Supportive leadership and proactive workload management: Managers play an active role in monitoring workload and preventing burnout by maintaining regular communication, adjusting capacity, and encouraging healthy work habits like taking breaks and disconnecting after hours. Leadership also prioritizes open conversations about workload and well-being.
Culture that prioritizes sustainable work: PEAK6 emphasizes “sustainable excellence,” encouraging employees to perform at a high level without sacrificing long-term well-being. The culture supports continuous improvement while recognizing the importance of balance.
Intentional ways of working: Teams use structured practices to protect focus time and reduce unnecessary stress, such as shifting meetings to asynchronous documents, setting feedback timelines, and creating dedicated collaboration blocks. This helps employees stay productive without constant interruptions.
Team structure and support: Teams are designed to reduce context switching and allow individuals to focus on their core responsibilities. Cross-functional collaboration and shared ownership also help distribute work effectively and ensure support across the team.
Outcome-focused work environment: Employees are guided by business outcomes rather than rigid deadlines, which provides flexibility in how work is completed and reduces pressure from arbitrary timelines.
PEAK6 approaches flexible work arrangements with a strong emphasis on adaptability, trust, and employee well-being, enabling employees to balance their professional responsibilities with personal needs.
Flexible and adaptive work structures: PEAK6 supports flexible schedules that allow employees to manage their time in ways that align with both productivity and personal responsibilities. This adaptability is built into how teams operate day to day.
Remote and hybrid work options: The company offers a hybrid work model, giving employees the ability to split time between home and the office while maintaining collaboration and connection. This flexibility is a core part of the employee experience.
Manager-supported flexibility: Leadership plays a key role in enabling flexibility by maintaining open communication, adjusting workloads when needed, and supporting employees through changing personal circumstances. Managers prioritize sustainable performance and individual well-being.
Culture of trust and accountability: Flexible work at PEAK6 is grounded in trust. Employees are empowered to manage their time and focus on delivering outcomes rather than adhering to rigid schedules. This approach reinforces both autonomy and accountability.
Support for different life stages: PEAK6 provides benefits that complement flexible work, such as parental leave, family medical leave, and wellness resources, helping employees navigate different life stages while continuing their careers.
Alignment with well-being priorities: Flexibility is part of a broader focus on well-being, supported by practices like protected focus time, async collaboration, and intentional workload management. These approaches help employees maintain balance while contributing to meaningful work.
PEAK6 supports employees’ mental health and wellbeing through a combination of comprehensive benefits, flexible work practices, and a culture that prioritizes sustainability, support, and balance.
Well-being as a core focus: PEAK6 emphasizes sustainable performance and “sustainable excellence,” encouraging employees to balance high performance with long-term well-being. The culture reinforces the importance of maintaining health while delivering strong results.
Comprehensive health and wellness support: Employees have access to robust healthcare benefits, including medical, dental, and vision coverage, as well as mental health resources and Employee Assistance Programs for counseling and support. Additional wellness programs and resources further support overall well-being.
Flexible work and work-life balance: PEAK6’s hybrid work model and flexible schedules help employees manage stress and maintain balance. Practices like async collaboration, protected focus time, and outcome-based work reduce unnecessary pressure and support healthier ways of working.
Supportive leadership and team culture: Managers actively support employee well-being by maintaining open communication, monitoring workload, and encouraging healthy work habits such as taking breaks and disconnecting after hours. Leaders also create environments of psychological safety where employees feel comfortable discussing challenges.
Family and life-stage support: PEAK6 provides benefits that help employees navigate personal responsibilities, including parental leave, family medical leave, and caregiver support resources. These offerings reduce stress and support employees across different life stages.
Purpose-driven engagement: Employees benefit from working in an environment that encourages innovation, ownership, and meaningful contributions across industries. This sense of purpose and impact can contribute positively to overall engagement and well-being.
PEAK6's Candidate Tradeoffs
If you’re weighing whether PEAK6 is the right fit, these are the core tradeoffs to consider.
- PEAK6 places greater emphasis on organization-wide flexibility and autonomy than on tightly standardized schedules and uniform work structures.
PEAK6 Employee Perspectives
Recently, Built In Chicago sat down with PEAK6 Engineering Manager Leonard Schwartz II to learn more about how he keeps his team happy, healthy and hungry to press on.
Developers will inevitably face challenges in the workplace, and some might lead to burnout. What warning signs do you look for in your software developers, and what actions do you take thereafter?
Software engineers indeed face high burnout risk due to demanding workloads, tight deadlines and constant technological change. As managers, we must understand these demands and prioritize prevention over reaction.
While some engineers may push themselves excessively, it’s important to remember that such tendencies can be early indicators of burnout. Watch for warning signs like declining work quality, absenteeism, apathy, negativity and “hero ball,” or doing everything solo.
To prevent engineer burnout, managers can:
- Communicate regularly with engineers to understand their challenges and capacity.
- Adjust workloads based on capacity, delegate tasks, and consider flexible arrangements.
- Promote healthy work habits by encouraging regular breaks and disconnecting after work hours.
- Regularly review internal processes and working agreements to ensure they support sustainable workload
By taking these proactive steps, we can foster positive, sustainable work environments, minimizing burnout and maximizing engineer engagement, productivity, efficiency and work quality.
What sorts of creative stretch projects or meaningful growth opportunities do you offer developers on your team?
PEAK6 empowers team members through several engaging opportunities.
We’re big on guided growth. We assign all junior developers a senior mentor whom they shadow and work with on real projects, enabling them to gain valuable decision-making and strategy knowledge.
Junior developers are also encouraged to engage with colleagues from other teams to understand the complete development lifecycle and participate in challenges to learn new skills and collaborate creatively. We offer internal talks and workshops, as well, that foster knowledge transfer and public speaking skills.
By promoting these diverse opportunities, we’re able to cater to individual interests, fostering a culture of continuous growth and engagement and resulting in a well-rounded team equipped for success.
PEAK6’s approach to work-life balance is grounded in intentional ways of working that prioritize flexibility and focus. By rethinking how and when collaboration happens, the company creates space for deep work while still enabling meaningful team interaction. This balance of asynchronous communication and structured collaboration helps employees manage their time more effectively and maintain productivity without constant interruptions.
“We are intentional about any meeting at the team level. For example, we have shifted many meetings to documents that are shared with a timeline for feedback. This allows our engineers to consume, process and respond to information within a timeframe that works for them. For conversations that benefit from synchronous interactions — like my favorite, whiteboarding — we have two hours blocked off across the entire organization for self-organized collaboration. Many ad hoc meetings end up within these time blocks, which has led to more blocks of focus time.”
What People Are Saying About PEAK6
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Remote or Hybrid Flexibility: Company materials promote a “Hybrid Workforce” with work-from-home autonomy alongside in-office collaboration, indicating day-to-day flexibility. Hybrid norms are emphasized across role descriptions, pairing remote work with intentional in-person collaboration.
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Time Off Access: The company advertises a generous PTO plan, paid parental leave, paid holidays, and volunteer days, with long-tenure sabbaticals also highlighted. These policies signal accessible recovery time when team norms support taking leave.
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Burnout Prevention: Engineering leaders describe shifting some meetings to asynchronous documents and protecting collaboration blocks to preserve focus time. These structured practices indicate an active effort to reduce interruptions and prevent burnout.
PEAK6's Benefits
Offers generous PTO
Offers sabbatical leave
Employees with 10+ years of service can apply to take an 8-week Sabbatical, as well as adding up to 4 weeks of accrued PTO.
Provides bereavement leave
Provides paid holidays
Provides paid sick days
Has employee-led culture committees
Offers an Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
Offers company-sponsored happy hours
Offers company-sponsored outings
Offers Employee Resource Groups
Offers gym membership
Offers wellness initiatives designed to combat burnout and mental fatigue
Offers wellness programs
Partners with nonprofits
PEAK6 offers coordinated volunteer and philanthropic opportunities throughout the year including, Go Red For Women, Socktober, Filling in the Blanks Backpack Drive, Matching Gifts, and Holiday Giving.
Provides access to an onsite gym
Provides recreational clubs
We sponsor various teams and activities based on employee interest
Works with employees to create a sustainable work pace
Provides work from home flexibility
Utilizes a flexible work schedule
Utilizes a hybrid work model
