From exploring uncharted waters to riding the waves — How we established our company values
We often talk a lot about how fun it is to work in Umitron despite the challenging nature of our jobs, and I think it’s a testament to the company culture we’ve adopted. From the get-go, there’s been a solid emphasis on aligning the values and needs of all team members, which (hopefully) means everyone is more likely to enjoy what they do.
As our work family continues to grow, it became increasingly important to ensure that this concept of ‘culture’ we embraced continued to play a central role in our daily work lives. So we recently bit the bullet, and the entire team embarked on a 6-month ‘journey’ to nail down 6 core values that now form the basis of our company culture.
Read on if you’re interested to know more (especially if you’re planning on joining us *hint hint*)!
What are Values?
Think of our values as the Umitron’ way of life’. Our team should ideally adopt these attitudes and take action with these values in mind as they go about their daily work activities. Some companies may refer to this as a “code of conduct” or “action guidelines”, but I’d like to think that we are fun, so let’s not use that lingo, hmmm?
A long, long time ago, in a Zoom call from far, far away….. (aka the backstory)
Our mission statement, ‘install Sustainable Aquaculture on Earth’, had already been established from the beginning, and our founding employees were naturally in tune with the need to develop solutions to achieve it.
However, it was unavoidable that as the company grew to more than 30 employees, diversified its business portfolio and expanded into more teams, there would be differences in our goals, priorities and working styles. The COVID-19 pandemic also meant we could no longer meet our colleagues in person and had to onboard people online via Zoom for the better part of two years.
So how could we continue to ensure we reached our mission together as one Umitron team?!
Just keep swimming, just keep swimming…
We basically concluded that we needed to (re)establish a shared understanding of our company goals and what we expected from our team members during the various growth stages of the company.
Coincidentally, this also tied into other happenings in the company, such as officially setting up our company-wide and individual Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), but that’s another story for another day.
It certainly wasn’t a walk in the park! Before we started, we had the following points to consider:
- Simplicity is key — Not all our team members are native English speakers, so all our values must be easy to understand, even by non-native speakers.
- Keep it fun! — we tried to use ocean or sea-related expressions and phrases so team members would feel excited.
- Visualization — We wanted to put it together in an illustration so team members could easily imagine and remember them.
If you’ve made it to this point in the post, congrats! You’ve reached the good stuff. Read on to find out what our six values mean!
1 Explore uncharted waters 🌊 ⛵
Question common knowledge, envision the ideal future of the aquaculture industry from a broad perspective and lead its change. Obtain information from primary sources to learn and uncover current and new challenges.
2 Follow the North Star 👉🌟
Make logical decisions based on facts and data. Set clear goals, formulate hypotheses, execute, and verify them.
3 Don’t forget ship upgrades! 🛠️📚
Upgrade your knowledge and experience and try everything! It’s better to do something versus nothing at all, and failures can often be great learning opportunities.
4 Share the Captain’s log 🗒️✏️
Keep a record of the entire process from start to finish and be proactive in sharing what you know to help your members learn and improve together.
5 Raise your flags and support others’ flags 🚩🤝
Build a team where individuals have freedom and ownership of their work and the space to collaborate organically without being afraid to ask for help. Be considerate of your team members. Give honest and constructive feedback freely, and express appreciation and admiration.
6 Go ride the waves! 🏄🤿
The best way to achieve high-performance, self-motivated and flourishing individuals is to find joy in what you do and have fun doing it. We are now charting new paths in unfamiliar territory to create new and novel technologies with a unique working style and team structure in a global industry.
So let’s enjoy the craziness and the chaos of this journey and work through our troubles as one Umitron family!
What’s next?
We’re definitely not stopping here. Our ultimate goal is to try and embody these values in our daily work lives. Even small acts such as offering constructive feedback without fear of judgement and expressing appreciation with our values in mind can positively affect how we interact internally.
As said before, these values may change as Umitron moves through different growth stages, and ‘Don’t forget ship upgrades!’ will undoubtedly be top of the list as we adapt to new phases and evolve to meet new challenges.
Phew! Well done, we’re nearly at the end! I hope this post has shown you how important these values are to us, which we will incorporate across the board, from the hiring stage to our daily work lives.
If, after reading this blog post, you find yourself thinking, “I’d love to set sail on a great voyage with the Umitron crew!” please send in your application and we look forward to hearing from you!
Position list
https://open.talentio.com/r/1/c/umitron/homes/3604
Umitron website
