Making sense of it all: how we re-defined Aerolab’s core values
We set out to make sure our culture was true to our values. Here’s how we did it and what we learned about ourselves in the process.
Aerolab is a pretty fun place. The offices are cool, the work is challenging and the people are amazing, there’s even puppies thrown in the mix.
What’s not to like?
But that’s not what makes people get out of bed eager to get to work every morning (or most mornings, at least). There’s something a bit more complex involved and it has to do with how strong the company’s culture is. In the eight months I’ve been here -that’s around two years in millennial time- I’ve come to experience and appreciate the importance of a healthy culture.
It’s no secret that Aerolab has been growing at a pretty exciting rate lately. This sort of growth comes with a challenge:
How do you manage to scale your team and the complexity of your projects without compromising quality or betraying your philosophy to some extent?
If we’re to keep things working properly, we need to make sure this growth is done right; in line with what Aerolab’s been about for the last few years and with what goals we’ve got for the future.
If I may get cheesy for a bit, the culture is not about motivational signs or fancy lettering pieces occupying immense walls in the lobby, but rather about how the team behaves as a whole and the underlying ideas behind the amazing work they do.
I wasn’t able to point out what it was, specifically, that made Aerolab so special until I got involved in the process of defining and putting into words the Values, Mission and Vision of Aerolab.
Finding our leitmotiv
One of the first and most important steps to keep building our culture was to define a clear set of Values, along with Mission and Vision statements that spoke to the company’s identity and where it wants to go from here.
Maintaining and nurturing a team-oriented culture has been one of Aerolab’s priorities ever since the agency was born, back in 2011. You can usually tell how strong a company’s Culture is by having a five minute talk with any member of the team. If you can consistently spot the same traits in people that seem extremely different, then it’s safe to assume the company is building it’s culture in a direction close to those traits.
In Aerolab’s case, there’s a certain mixture of talent, passion and quirkiness that’s become distinctive by now, and that wasn’t by chance. We already had a set of culture elements that spoke to this underlying culture, but they were defined back in 2011 when Aerolab’s size -and challenges- where different.
We’re on a whole new league right now, so we figured this was the perfect opportunity to take some time and re-vamp and update our Values and Essence Statement. While some things remained the same, some changed in these past five years, and our new culture elements should reflect that.
While looking into the best way of defining our core culture elements, we came across this piece from Teehan-Lax, where they told the story of the agency and how, at one point, they decided to turn things around and re-define their mission statement. They gave a pretty detailed explanation of the process they followed for this and, after doing some extensive research about it, we decided to follow suit. Props to Jon Lax for sharing the knowledge, by the way.
The exercise we used to kick-off this process is called Mountains & Valleys. There’s a ton of material online if you’re interested.
What we did was invite the partners to take part in a three-part encounter where each of them shared their personal experiences and insights and we tried to analyze and dissect them to figure out what values were, or weren’t, present at key moments of their lives, and how those values reflected upon Aerolab and its philosophy.
After the exercise, we landed on some pretty big insights as to why Aerolab works and behaves the way it does. In order to effectively put that down into words, we decided to divide them into three Values that make our overall Essence Statement.
And now, without further ado, I present to thee, Aerolab’s new values.
Make awesome things.
We think of a product as successful not when it reaches one million downloads or when it gets us featured in the media, but when someone picks it up and goes “Wow”.
People come first.
If we’re to make awesome things we need to embrace and celebrate the fact that these things are made by and for people.
Have fun.
Don’t take things too seriously. Let’s enjoy ourselves.
We felt this was the way to go as it really sums up the What, How and Why of what we do, plus it really gives an honest perspective of Aerolab’s philosophy when it comes to the products we make, the people we hire to make them and the way in which we get them done.
These three statements can be applied to pretty much every single situation that we go through on our daily lives. You can take a snapshot of the team at any given moment and ask something along the lines of:
- Does that somehow revolve around making amazing products?
- Is what they’re doing centered on people?
- Is everyone involved having a good time?
The idea is that, if we keep building our culture in the right way, the answer to these questions is always going to be Yes.
This whole Culture thing is more art than science, we’re pretty sure we’re going to find a few bumps along the road. But it sure feels nice to know where we’re coming from and where we want to go from here.
Here’s some more Aeromagic for ya’ ✨
Our website — Facebook — Twitter — Instagram
