Building Company Culture in Logistics
By: Guilherme Luz
Tags: Logistics, Parnity, Culture, Freight Forwarder

The day was May 5, 2014, and I woke up eager to go to work, after all, it would be the first made that I would enter an office of a company that I created.

After years of working as an employee of other companies, it would be the first time that I would be responsible for building a working environment from scratch, and at first, I thought it would be simple.

Naturally, when we start a company, we have the habit of trying to replicate the style of environment and a culture similar to the companies we worked for, after all, we don’t recognize how fundamental this is when we are starting.

Following this logic, I remember that on my first day in my office, which at the time was composed of a few desks and two computers, I was in social clothes and was super punctual. Both the use of social clothes and being the first to arrive in the office were common practices in places where I worked and they meant professionalism and referred to the concept that only by following such practices, I would succeed in my career.

Our first office in 2014

For a few months, I simply repeated some patterns of behavior and tried to reflect the way they managed space and people, in the same way, they managed the companies I worked for in a very traditional way, with top-down decisions, and focused more and results than people.

It didn’t take long for me to start questioning whether such standards of work environment and culture were really essential to what we were creating. So I asked myself a question: What would be the ideal place I would like to work? Well… the answer was exactly the opposite of what I was doing.

WORK ENVIRONMENT

In order to change and create a light environment that would be open to exchanges of ideas, we decided to give the office a new face, changing the furniture, creating an open and colorful environment. We started graffiti painting the office walls with a very famous artist in our city, bringing in the graffiti colorful items, young and geek. Leaving the environment more alive and running away from the traditional environment of a company in the logistics business.

The office started to change with more colors — Photo from 2015

The office was expanded and with it a new graffiti.

An important change in the office was the breaking of walls and having open space between everyone. We decided that no one would have a room of their own and that everyone would have the same space to work.

FLAT ORGANIZATION

With the issue of equality in space, the concept of a Flat Organization (also known as horizontal organization) was born in a natural way where we empower all of the team to be responsible for their work and we decentralized the structure, and all decisions started to be made at various levels.

A participative organization allowed the entire team to be responsible for creating an organizational culture. And with it we decided some small changes that greatly affected our working environment as well:

No fixed time to start working or to leave We abolish the use of uniform or any pattern of clothing We do not block access to any site or the possibility of listening to music at work (believe this is not common in logistics companies) We stop requiring a university degree to hiring staff We gave an active voice in the company’s decisions to everyone in the team, from the intern to the director

Such actions have allowed our team and company to achieve better results together.

COLLABORATION

As time went by, the culture of our office grew stronger and stronger. We understood that one of the main pillars of what we were creating was the exchange of experience between the team. We decided, then, to create processes for such an exchange to happen more frequently and in a standardized way. Our goal was not only for one to understand what the other was doing and give a broad vision of where we were going as a company, but also for people to learn more about others as people.

Workshop: Every month someone from the team teaches the team details of their role, challenges, and daily life. This way everyone can have a clearer vision of the challenges of each function and add suggestions and possible improvements. Understanding each other makes the team stronger and stronger.

Workshop from Parnity’s Product Manager — Thais Faria.

Courses and Training: We created a budget for training and courses where everyone could choose what they would like to learn and which events they would like to participate in. In exchange, each one of the team should share with everyone else everything they learned in this course or training.

Part of our team at the biggest Marketing Event in Latin America — 2019

Celebration of achievements and failures: We celebrate all the victories and achievements, be they big or small. We believe that every advance achieved by an individual is generated by the whole team. We also celebrate the failures! We believe that it is fundamental to learn from the failures.

O ESCRI

“Escri”, which is an affectionate nickname we gave our office, was something that was born naturally, by people. “Escri” is short for “Escritório” which means Office in Portuguese.

Escri is a union of the innovative space, of the collaboration among the team and mainly by the people who passed through it. Dozens of people have passed through Escri, some are now in other companies, other cities, and even other countries, and even so, they stay connected.

We have an active communication group of former employees, and whenever they refer to what we have built together in relation to culture, they refer with affection. This is a difficult achievement to achieve, and one that requires more than planning, it requires that such culture be built with truth.

Photo from December of 2019

The Organizational Culture must be built with the reflection of the directors’ beliefs, but more than that, it needs to be built over time together with everyone who goes through the company.

It has been 6 years since the first day I stepped in our office and I keep trying to build with my team a strong culture that is updated over the years, but mainly that is always a sincere culture and that values the best we have: the people.