On building value-driven culture in the digital and physical worlds
By: Karen Kim
Tags: Culture, Startup, Values, Leadership, Digital

On May 2020, Shopify’s CEO Tobi Lutke tweeted: “Shopify is a digital by default company… Office centricity is over.”

We have seen many businesses announcing the permanent or almost total shift to working from home, including Twitter, Square, and Slack. And this trend is not unique to global American tech firms; in July 2020 Fujitsu revealed their plans to halve its office space in Japan and employees will begin to primarily work remotely.

I’ve been seeing a lot of surveys popping up and have personally been a part of many conversations re-imagining office life post-COVID19. Some of the common line of thoughts include:

“It would be ideal to have the option to work from home whenever I want to.”

“Wouldn’t it be cool to have the office mainly for ad-hoc team meetings, breakout sessions and client workshops?”

“Imagine being a new joiner. Ouch, do they have to do onboarding remotely?”

However, the digital workplace vs. physical office arrangement will merely be an operational decision if it does not align to the wider company’s culture and values.

At Human Managed, I am very fortunate to lead a company that has been “distributed” from Day 1, well before COVID19. The physical location of our people was never a question for concern and it will stay that way. Human Managed’s teams are based in Singapore, Hong Kong, India and the Philippines, with a Service Reliability Engineering (SRE) Command Centre in Singapore.

I am also very fortunate to have learned first hand from LinkedIn that culture and values are probably the most important factors behind a company’s sustainable success. LinkedIn’s culture has a life of its own as the collective personality of its employees — in both the physical and digital worlds — and it carries the company forward during the good times and the tough times.

How can we build a culture around a common mission, but also one that grows stronger from the unique strengths and individualities of everyone who is a part of it?

I certainly do not have all the answers, but here are some things that Human Managed is doing to build a culture from the ground up, based on our mission to push boundaries and find answers through collective intelligence and our values of Fresh, Open & Present.

1. Simplify your company or team’s Why and then repeat, repeat, repeat.

In one of my favourite interviews by Jeff Weiner, he shares, “If you want to get your point across… you need to repeat yourself so often, you get sick of hearing yourself say it. And only then will people begin to internalise what you are saying.”

This really stuck with me and I try to do this as much as I can, not least by starting every weekly team meeting with our Vision, Mission, and Values statements and tying every initiative or strategy down to our Why.

2. Discuss and understand every team member’s personal Why, in multiple settings.

Ask, Why are they doing what they are doing? What is their personal mission? What do they stand for?

And then help them see how your company provides the right kind of environment and the right types of opportunities to realise their Why. If there is no clear alignment, you’ve got work to do. Are they feeling challenged? Are you setting them up for success? Do they feel comfortable to ask for resources and support?

As a team, we all shared what is our Why, using Simon Sinek’s simple yet powerful Golden Circle framework.

3. Codify a Value Creation Process that ties together your A) company’s Why, B) employees’ Why and C) Value to Community

Now you know your company’s Why and your team’s personal Why’s, you have to ensure that there is a right process in place to align them. This will be different for every company or team and requires iterations of thinking, trials and errors, and commitment.

This is what we are doing at Human Managed:

A) Company’s Why: We purposely embedded our collective behaviour in our mission statement: “push boundaries”. We unpacked this phrase even further to mean that: we break down questions, reframe problems and find creative answers by building and creating.

c) Employee’s Why: Our purposes, causes or beliefs are all unique. However one of the common reasons why we are at Human Managed is to learn and try new things. No one is confined to one function or role and many of us are doing things we haven’t done before.

b) Value to Community: We also thought deeply about how we can push boundaries in a way that adds value to our community (customers, partners, wider society) and is true to our values (Fresh, Open, Present):

After considering Human Managed’s Why, our Personal Why’s and our Value to Community, it became clear that our value creation process has to involve documenting, internalising and openly sharing how we understand and reframe problems — in our own, unique ways. We call this our Creative Process.

It’s so crucial to explore how you process knowledge, especially in a remote-first working environment. This diagram is created by Tiago Forte, an expert on topics of productivity and personal effectiveness using technology.

For example, my own Creative Process is reading on a topic widely, typing and scribbling notes, ruminating on it, having discussions with others and then finally writing about it in essay format. This article is a part of my creative process. For others, it could be drawing diagrams, recording iterations of codes and publishing on Github.

We also try to keep each other accountable when people slip (which will definitely happen as we are essentially shifting our mindset). For example, we call it out when someone puts a disclaimer in their work by saying things like “I am not a creative, but…”. We joke and have fun in the process.

In the digital-first world, remote or flexible work is no longer a differentiator for employees. Companies that ensure that their people can do meaningful and productive work, have opportunities to grow, with a sense of belonging — physically and digitally — will not only withstand, but thrive in the “new normal”.

Sense of purpose and belonging form the connective tissue of every company or team. Leaders have to double, triple down on this when there is no office atmosphere, team lunches and activities to connect people.

Companies or teams should work together to find and codify a process that: 1) enables value creation; 2) achieving the company personal levels of Whys; and 3) has an impact in both the digital and physical worlds.

As we grow our team and strive towards our vision, some of the things on top of my mind are:

Ensuring that our digital onboarding sets the tone for the new hires’ experience

Balancing success metrics between productivity /output and creativity / process

Capturing the moments of growth and learnings when we are scaling fast

Getting to a stage where everyone in the company deeply understands the vision and drives their own path to make it a reality

What are some of the ways that you have seen culture being cultivated, evolved or sustained during the physically distanced time? What are some of the big questions on culture you are trying to address in the increasingly digital world?

If you found this content interesting, check out the Human Managed’s blog Human Thoughts, where we cover a wide range of topics that we are passionate about.

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