First, let's talk about the concept of 'culture'. What is it exactly? You often read about it in textbooks or in beautiful - sometimes meaningless - sections on company websites or in job ads. But what is it really?
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…
Back to culture for a moment. Because what culture is really about is how all of the above is lived up to, the interaction in the workplace, that "fingerspitzengefühl" between the lines.
This document portrays the way we would like it to be. It is up to all of us to live up to it in practice and to be tough enough to keep each other on our toes whenever we risk taking a different turn. Sometimes, by the way, taking a different turn is not a bad thing at all and sometimes it is even necessary! As long as we choose it consciously as it contributes to what we want to achieve and who we want to be. Because that, too, is part of our culture.