Uncover the 3ap Culture Code
Core values are instrumental in shaping the culture and behavior of a company — both internally and externally. By having well-defined core values, a company can boost its productivity and credibility, helping it achieve its targets in a sustainable manner. Once we realized that, we set out to uncover and define the core values collectively shared by all our employees. Here is how we did it!
The missing piece of the puzzle
After establishing a clear vision and mission for 3ap in 2019, and rejuvenating our brand identity, we at the People & Culture Team felt we were still missing a piece of the puzzle. It didn’t take us long to hit the nail on the head: We didn’t have a set of official, documented core values yet that helped guide us in our day to day work!
It’s not that we never had business values. Our business already ran on a bunch of informal principles that helped us shape our culture. We, therefore, did not need to reinvent the wheel. All we needed to do was uncover those values and formulate them so they could be easily incorporated into our employees’ work routine.
How we did it: a bottom-up approach
The best part of being a startup is that most processes aren’t formally defined. This allows the employees to use their creativity and formulate the design and execution of those processes themselves. The process of defining our values was carried out in the same manner.
Our values are shaped by how our employees behave, so it didn’t make any sense to impose company values on them in a top-down manner. Instead, we used a bottom-up approach and asked them to initiate the process and contribute their unique and valuable input. Inspired by Simon Sinek we listed all our values as verbs and completely avoided stand-alone nouns (but we used them in combination with verbs). This helped us translate our values into actionable events.
1st step: Survey
To start off, we created a simple employee survey allowing the employees to determine what they considered the best values for the company. The survey consisted of open-ended questions about the company, its culture, and the qualities of its employees. In this manner, the employees themselves laid the foundation of the process.
2nd step: Clustering workshops
Once we had collected all the answers from our employees, it was time to analyze them. For this, the People & Culture team set up two workshops. At the end of these workshops, we had not only examined and rated the vital input from our employees but also clustered them according to their content and similarity.
3rd step: Leadership workshop
Once we were past the idea gathering stage, we set up a leadership workshop in Belgrade. With the help of the shortlisted values, each leadership member would then select and define the values that were deemed essential for achieving 3ap’s goals and vision.
At the end of the workshop, we had successfully shortlisted nine values that we thought best described our culture code.
4th step: Reducing to the essence
While we were convinced the nine values best describe the culture we want at 3ap, we at the People & Culture Team abridged these values further and settled on five core values. To do that we hired Sarah Kohl, a freelance copywriter and concept developer. She helped us formulate the five most unique, memorable, and authentic values that inspire us every single day of our work. But you best see it for yourself: the 3ap values.
5th step: Engraving the values in our minds
As the last step, we needed to officially announce the core values in a way that the team will remember them. On the latest 3ap days, our yearly team building event, we presented the final 3ap core values. After that, we launched a game where we asked everyone to team up to create creative video stories for each of the core values. The results were entertaining videos that made us laugh a lot — and will for sure help everyone remember the core values. Here are some highlights from the video:
And that brings us to the End…
…except that it is only a beginning! Determining our core values was a great experience but the real test has only just begun. We now move on to the real deal — integrating these core values into all our business processes and living them in our everyday work.
Our next challenge: LOVE — Living Our Values Everyday!
