Wherever there are groups of people, there is culture. It is difficult to capture in words. It is, after all, the bigger picture of how we go about our daily business. How we do things, who we are together, what we strive for, what we aim for and what we believe in.

At an early stage - perhaps before you could even speak of a clear and developed culture - we held a session with the entire team to define our culture. We did this in a very special location, namely at the edge of the swimming pool in Spain during our remote work week. A lot of our culture is hidden in this process alone, you'll see;

➤ Ambition: there aren't many start-ups that do a remote culture brain storm this early on. What we do, we like to do well. We think it's important to start thinking now about how our culture can best contribute to our bottom line, because we're sure it will pay off later.

➤ Team-focused: this whole culture-creation has really been a team-effort. Culture is something you create together, that is what we firmly believe in. team5pm!

➤ Fun: We did this culture brain storm in Spain at the edge of the swimming pool … do we need to say more?!

Swimming pool session

Right there at the pool, beautiful things came to the surface. Together we gave words to what we consider important in our relationship with each other and in the execution of our work. Openness, daring, down-to-earthness, curiousness, energetic, positive, drive, development, sociability, together, smart, team and resourceful are a selection of the keywords that came up when we had to characterise our culture. We have used this input to arrive at a number of core values…