Embracing Betterfication: Building a Company Culture Around Problem Solving
As your company evolves, your company values need to evolve along with it. Without revisiting them, your values can become stale or untrue to your company culture as it exists today.
At Animoto we recently decided that it was time to update our company values, and we landed on three: Oomphosity, Humbletude, and Betterfication.
In a previous post we shared what went into redefining our values, along with a look into two of them, Humbletude (“The perfect blend of humility and confidence”) and Oomphosity (“Living life with that extra gear”). Today it’s Betterfication’s turn.
In this post we’ll share what Betterfication is, how it has manifested itself at Animoto, and a few things to think about if you’re interested in hiring for Betterfication at your company.
What is Betterfication?
After an initial brainstorm with Animoto’s management team on company values, themes around problem-solving surfaced. The challenge? We wanted a word that would be unique to Animoto and embody the key problem-solving attributes the team identified throughout the company.
Betterfication isn’t just the name of our value, it translates into action and and it can be applied to any initiative that can be improved. It’s not always about starting from scratch, but finding an opportunity to improve something that already exists as well. Betterfication is often used as a verb — it’s not uncommon to hear someone from the team ask during meetings, “How can we betterfy this?”
Every day we discover new ways to improve initiatives, and by defining this value, every team member takes it upon themselves to consider ways they can “betterfy” their work, team, and even the company. Continually improving becomes a natural part of our culture.
At Animoto, someone that embraces Betterfication is someone who:
- Is hungry for solutions, not problems
- Possesses a problem-solving attitude
- Strives to solve challenges with positive energy and a can-do attitude
Betterfication in action
There’s a few ways that Betterfication has been put into practice at Animoto, from company culture initiatives to how we structure our teams themselves.
Employee engagement surveys
Engagement surveys are just one of the many ways we’ve discovered a whole slew of Betterfication opportunities. Every quarter, our People team sends a survey for the entire team to complete. The questions range from feelings around company culture to thoughts on management and personal growth at Animoto. In fact, redefining our company values was a direct initiative that came out of the surveys.
OKRs
Another example? Introducing OKRs at Animoto. Establishing an objectives framework at Animoto was a key step in optimizing our day to day performance and quarterly goals. OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) betterfied goal setting, and made sure that the entire company, as well as individual teams, was aligned on those goals and what wasneeded to accomplish those goals.
Design and engineering principles
Betterfication is also integrated into our product teams. Both our design and engineering teams have recently developed design and engineering principles respectively. Both teams went through a multi-month process, not much unlike the process we went through to evolve our company values, to create a common language for assessing and determining how products are designed and built at Animoto.
Creative critiques
At Animoto we make it easy for anyone to make professional videos by providing our community with pre-built storyboards. There’s several people on our team that create storyboards, so to make sure the storyboards are the best they can be we started creative critiques. Folks from marketing and design come together for a friendly, and open, discussion that allows the team to level up their content and develop storyboards that look and perform well. It’s a win for our customers as the critiques encourage the team to betterfy our storyboards on a weekly basis.
How to spot Betterfication
How do you know if you or someone you’re hiring naturally has Betterfication? Here’s a quick checklist that you can use:
- You’re hungry for solutions
- You have a can-do attitude, but it doesn’t mean you never say no
- No task is to big or too small, because you like the challenge of them all
- You bring positive energy into the rooms you enter
Interview questions to ask for Betterfication
If you’re looking to hire for Betterfication, here’s a few of our go-to questions to ask:
- Describe a time you had to solve a problem at work. How did you solve it and what impact did it have for your team?
- Share a time when you identified and fixed a problem before it got out of hand.
- How would you handle a situation in which a project was falling behind schedule?
- Tell me about a time when you found a new approach to a problem.
- What improvement were you most proud of at your last job?
Tip: For all of these questions, make sure you get a clear understanding of three aspects: what went wrong, what they did to fix the problem, and what was the resolution.
We hope this post inspired you to explore ways to introduce Betterfication into your company or organization. Does your company have a value similar to Betterfication? We’d love to learn more about how you put that value into action.
Does Betterfication resonate with you? Join our team, we’re hiring!
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