Culture is for everyone

Today, I have been invited to speak on the CoverWallet blog about an important factor that influences talent attraction and retention, the ability to innovate and adapt to market changes, and the building of relationships with users and partners. This factor is the organization’s culture.

What is the culture of an organization?

The culture of an organization is the set of values, principles, and practices that define the identity and way of working of each organization. These elements shape its personality and are reflected in its strategy, day-to-day activities, philosophy, structure, and the attitudes and behaviours of its employees.

In a technological company like CoverWallet, the culture rewards practices that promote creativity, innovation, growth, agility, adaptability to change, and a work environment that fosters healthy communication, feedback, and collaboration among colleagues.

Feedback and collaboration as drivers of a healthy and strong culture

Creating a safe environment is essential to build a healthy and strong culture. Through collaboration, mentoring, trust, and the exchange of feedback for continuous growth, the culture of your organization will be enriched, and employees will benefit from cross-pollination.

Promoting a culture of feedback where members of the organization can communicate openly and honestly about what works and what doesn’t work and propose changes/improvements will help the environment grow. It is important that the feedback is constructive, meaning that it focuses on real situations and behaviours (not opinions) and is accompanied by possible solutions, always in a respectful manner without judging others. Additionally, it is necessary for the feedback recipient to have an open mind and not take a defensive position.

To create strong relationships and a healthy culture that we seek, we will foster a collaborative environment so that members of the organization can work towards common goals with trust, respect, and mutual support. Collaboration among employees can manifest in different ways, such as building initiatives across different disciplines (product, design, and engineering), features that impact different teams where joint effort is needed to achieve the set goals, social or volunteering activities, onboarding new colleagues, etc.

Who builds the company culture?

Founders, executives, and managers have an important influence on creating the company culture as they establish the vision, mission, and values of the organization and make key decisions about the structure, talent management, and the company’s strategy. However, the company culture is built by all employees who, through their daily actions and behaviours, can reinforce or modify the values of the organization. Therefore, it is important that all members of the organization commit to create a strong and healthy culture and work together to maintain and improve it over time.

Engineering team mission, vision and values at CoverWallet

We are loyal to our mission: “Accelerate the delivery of value to the business by building and deploying generic capabilities that can be easily and cost-effectively deployed worldwide, while creating a robust, scalable, and reliable platform that enables the business to quickly and efficiently deploy new features and functionality, while minimizing the investment required from our engineering team.” Without forgetting our vision is “Build the top digital product to understand, buy and manage insurance for your business.” Our mission and vision are aspirational, ambitious and are supported by our 5 values:

People-oriented

People are our number one priority, and diversity and inclusion is in everyday decisions. We foster growth, and we understand that merit and teamwork must have recognition.

Feedback for growth

Culture of openness and ongoing learning. We believe a culture of feedback is the best way to grow. We encourage open communication and feedback from and to managers and between colleagues. While doing this, we are respectful of others.

Customer-centricity

Understanding the needs and expectations of customers and using technology to deliver products and services that meet those needs, ensuring that the work is directly contributing to the success of the business by delivering value to customers.

Data-informed decision-making

Data enables us to make informed decisions that can lead to improvements in our processes, products and operations.

Commitment to excellence

Quality is a must every single second. We implement high-quality standards that meet the CW NFRs, reviewing and improving them continuously. We foster proactivity and accountability. We want to feel proud of what we build.

To prevent values from being mere marketing words (with all due respect to marketing professionals), they must be real and known by all members of the organization. Print them out and distribute them, put vinyls in the office, remind them in all-hands meetings, give constructive feedback tied to the values, but don’t leave them abandoned in a document on Drive.

How do we live our values in the CoverWallet checkout tribe?

The values of the team are reflected in our day-to-day work, as evidenced by many of the initiatives we execute and the tools we use in the company:

• 4-weeks onboarding program, assigned buddy and CoverWallet university to boost onboardings.
• An environment full of opportunities and challenges where empowerment is encouraged through a guild system to find solutions in different areas such as observability, developer relations and experience, documentation, agility, and security.
• Culture of feedback for continuous growth in regular 1:1s, retrospectives, and blameless postmortems.
• Daily Niko-Niko surveys to measure people’s mood and identify/resolve problems as quickly as possible.
• Performance review cycles every 6 months to track personal goals and the evolution of each colleague, guided by our collaboratively built career path.
• Spaces for sharing knowledge where colleagues present topics to mentor others and an education budget of €1500/year for professional growth.
• Extra well-being vacation days to disconnect and prioritize people’s health.
• Evergreen’s kudos program to foster recognition and positive feedback.
• ‘Thinking’ and ‘Review of concerns’ ceremonies for understanding the future and risks of our product.
• Quality scorecard for our services, resulting from a formula that includes values for generated errors/incidents, automatic detection, observability, test coverage, and deployment success rate.
• Data-driven decision-making, measure what matters!

In conclusion, I would like to emphasize that culture is not a one-day thing, it is a long-term project where all employees will have an impact. As an individual, you have the power to create a healthy environment.

Become the seed of change.