Hot off the press… Blueprint for a scalable quantum computing (culture)
Our head of talent, Samantha Edmondson, explains how we set our company values to reflect Universal Quantum’s culture. Spoiler: it features a lot of food and some quantum puns!
At Universal Quantum, we’re building a million-qubit quantum computer. That’s been our focus from day one and it’s also a big ambition. We know we can’t do that without the right people and culture in place.
As we continue to scale both our technology and our company, we wanted to cement our culture with some core company values. But we also wanted our values to be meaningful and truly reflect what it’s like to work here.
To achieve this, we took a unique approach to shaping our company values, with some unique results. In fact, kudos to anyone who works out the quantum puns for every value. (Don’t worry there are some explainers at the end of this post.)
So, here are…
Our company values
1. P-ion-eer the future
(Be passionate about the big stuff)
To change the world for the better, we have to think big. We won’t allow anything to distract us from our goals. We’re not afraid of opening cams of worms. We love worm cans. We tackle the biggest challenges to enable diverse industries to solve problems until now considered unsolvable.
2. Always be error-correcting (and fault-tolerant)
(Challenge and be challenged, correct and be corrected)
We apply rigour to everything we do, details matter, so does fit and finish. We challenge ourselves and each other every day — “could we do this better?”. Making mistakes is an important part of innovating.
A fault-tolerant team requires trust, diversity of ideas, respectful curiosity and a lot of active listening. We share our strengths and weaknesses. We actively avoid group think as we search for errors as a team in a safe space where everyone can communicate honestly and without judgement.
3. Embrace entanglement
(Your wellbeing is entangled with my wellbeing)
We share our successes and failures, challenges and concerns, fears and ambitions to support and elevate one another.
We always make time for each other, work empathetically and help every individual to be successful. Trust, respect and care are integral to our culture. As a team, we are entangled.
4. Make your own super position
(Be the leader of your domain)
We help each other thrive personally and professionally, giving everyone the autonomy to meet their own ambitions.
Every individual is empowered to lead their area and drive their own development. We encourage each other to find the right balance (or superposition) between work and home, so that we can all flourish.
How we did it
So, did you work out every quantum pun? Before we explain those in more detail, here’s how we identified our company values.
1. Let’s get quizzical
To ensure everyone could get involved from the outset, we started by sending out a short culture quiz.
This helped us gauge what people enjoy about working here and would people would like to see more of as we grow. We also asked questions about what’s blocking people, and what behaviour is helpful in their work.
We got a lot of insightful feedback and took a lot of this on board as we moved to the next step…
2. Identifying 18 value concepts
The survey put everyone in the right frame of mind and helped us start to identify some key themes for our company values.
But we needed to hone those ideas more and, to do this, the whole company came together in small groups of three or four people.
Our groups of remote staff met up online (with a free lunch delivered) and down at our headquarters the other groups dispersed to enjoy an informal chat about working at Universal Quantum in one of Haywards Heath’s many friendly restaurants.
The teams identified 18 resulting concepts, which were quite detailed and included:
3. Distilling the feedback (in a pub!)
Next, a group of five came together to streamline these 18 concepts into our four core company values.
We saw some clear themes across these 18 concepts and many informal discussions continued as we tried to bring everything together into a digestible set of ideas.
We also called on the help of others to help generate ideas and make our values really stand out from the crowd. And this is where one of our quantum engineers, Dr Luuk Earl, hit the qubit on the head…
4. A stroke of quantum genius
We wanted to make our values true to us, unique and meaningful. So, once we had our four values in place, we did some cosmetic sprucing.
This is where Luuk helped to really make those values stand out with a little quantum punning.
Did you get them all?
1. P-ion-eer the future
(Be passionate about the big stuff)
Pun explainer: There are many ways to build a quantum computer with many different qubits options available. Our technology relies on trapped-ion qubits. P-ion-eer… get it?
2. Always be error-correcting (and fault-tolerant)
(Challenge and be challenged, correct and be corrected)
Pun explainer: Qubits are error-prone and a fault-tolerant quantum computer essentially avoids the uncontrollable cascade of errors caused when qubits interact with one another and the environment. To help achieve this and reach millions of qubits, we need something called quantum error correction, which is explained in this blog post.
3. Embrace entanglement
(Your wellbeing is entangled with my wellbeing)
Pun explainer: Entanglement is another quantum term. When two particles become entangled, they remain connected even when separated by large distances.
4. Make your own super position
(Be the leader of your domain)
Pun explainer: Superposition (without the gap) is the ability of a quantum system to be in multiple states at the same time until that system is measured. It’s a strange concept and one associated with the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment.
The future
Setting company values is a step that a lot of start-ups face, and it’s an important step, allowing us to define how we interact with each other and the outside world, helping us shape our company.
Plus, these company values provide a solid foundation as we scale, helping people understand what to expect if they decide to apply for a position with us.
These company values are the foundation on which our culture sits. Now, we’re putting actions in place to uphold these values and make sure they run through everything we do at Universal Quantum.
They’re already reflected in our benefits package and we’ll be promoting them more over the coming weeks. We’ll keep you updated on how we hope to achieve this — watch this space.
And if these values have resonated with you, then you may want to check out our current roles.
