Creating Culture at Empirisys
Empirisys is a year and a half old and while growing we’ve thought a lot about the kind of company we want to build. Here are the five things we do that shape our culture.
Having started with two founders, Gus and Pete, Empirisys now comprises numerous employees, interns, advisors, associates and partners. We’re a team of animal lovers, tech enthusiasts, creators, and devoted parents, all working towards the same outcome: to improve safety without compromising productivity using data science and our expertise in the high-hazard industry.
For Empirisys to achieve this goal, the team must not only work together in a collaborative way but also share the same core values. We need a shared set of beliefs, behaviours and purpose: a culture.
To create an effective company culture, it needs to be clearly defined. These are the five steps we followed to create our culture at Empirisys.
1. Understand Our Purpose
A purpose should be long-term and meaningful. The key for us in finding our purpose was to keep asking, “Why?”
“We’re building a data science company”
“Why?”
“To help organisations in high-hazard industry.”
“Why?”
“So their workers stay safe and the company becomes more efficient”
“Why?”
“So fewer lives are lost, fewer environmental catastrophes occur, and so the organisations can have fewer outages and be more productive”
By the time we asked “why?” a few times, our purpose started to become clearer. As did the value we could bring to customers.
Understanding our purpose early on made it much easier to make big decisions. When struggling with a decision we ask ourselves, “Does this bring the company closer to or further away from our purpose?”
It also helped with defining our mission: to reduce the number of incidents globally through making organisations safer. This is a guiding principle whether we’re talking to potential clients or interviewing prospective employees.
2. Determine Our Values
Following on from our purpose, it was key that we set out our values early on to build a team that has a culture we believe in. Each member of the founding team wrote down the values that meant most to them. We shared them with each other, discussed them, and aligned on four that we felt captured the reasons we we started Empirisys in the first place. These are:
- Teamwork, as we all felt that we could create the most value in Empirisys by building something together.
- Learning & Growth, as we have a duty to ourselves and to each other to continue our professional and technical development in order to create the greatest impact.
- Courage & Tenacity, because we are building products and providing services that impact people’s lives, we need to be able to ask difficult questions of each other. (And because we’re a self-funded startup, we also needed to be able to persevere when things get tough).
- Creativity & Fun, which was a big part of the reason for most of us to leave the relative safety and benefits of corporate life and strike out on our own.
We will be talking more about these values, the tensions between them, and how they manifest at Empirisys in a future blog.
3. Find Balance in Work and Life
Empirisys started during Covid-19 meaning that 100% of the team worked from home every day of the week with the occasional get together when restrictions allowed. For many, this meant working from the kitchen where they eat breakfast or the sofa which is intended for relaxing after a busy day. As a result, work and home life started to blend into one.
To reduce team burnout and create more work-life harmony, we needed to set boundaries, so we encourage our team to work around their daily life when they want and where they want. In practice this means:
- Work where you want. Home. A coffee shop. A co-op space. It doesn’t matter. We’re remote first.
- Work when you want. At hours that make sense for you. Some of us work later, others earlier. (We only ask that once a week we all get-together for a team meeting over Teams).
- Take your leave! We haven’t gone with the unlimited holiday approach as this often puts pressure on employees not to take holiday. Instead, we encourage our team at every meeting to make sure they get the time they need to refresh themselves.
4. Hire Brilliant People
Our hiring strategy is simple — we essentially look for three traits that are fundamental to working at Empirisys and help us maintain a happy and high-performing environment.
- Self-motivated — everybody that joins us, from summer interns through to engineers with twenty years of experience, is given autonomy and the directive to go and help our clients and build the company. Having the drive to figure out the best action to take to make that happen is critical.
- Talented — this is self-explanatory, but to elaborate further, we have used a combination of our own networks to find the best people, plus a pipeline from two organisations: Cardiff University (for interns, employees, projects and more across Computer Science and Business School) and the Welsh Data Science Graduate Program.
- Care about our mission — finally, most importantly, everybody who joins us needs to care about our purpose and share our passion for improving lives through data science in a meaningful way.
5. Be Transparent
We understand that launching a startup will not be a straight line to success. There will be bumps along the way. However, being transparent with our employees and not hiding these low points builds trust. We believe that explaining how our business is doing and the decisions we make allows our team to feel engaged and fully involved in the what we’re building. To reinforce this, at every team meeting we discuss the following as standing agenda items:
- New projects and leads — What projects are coming that individuals may be interested in working on?
- Cashflow & revenue — How are our finances? How much runway do we have? Where are we spending our money?
- Personal wins & challenges — an opportunity for everybody to share.
Out entire team can see how we’re doing, what’s on the horizon, where projects are coming from and question and challenge these in an open forum. The sense of togetherness this brings is priceless.
These are some of the ways we’ve worked on our culture as an early stage bootstrapped startup. No doubt we will evolve further strategies as we grow and although some of the details may change, we will always keep our culture at the front of our minds — it’s what the success of our company is based on.
If you found this interesting, please let us know by getting in touch, giving us a clap or a follow. You can find more about us at empirisys.io or on Twitter at @empirisys or on LinkedIn. And you can drop us an e-mail at info@empirisys.io. To see Tracey Higgins art or purchase prints, please reach out to her instagram page @Tracey.Higgins14.
