What’s it like to work at Typeform? Meet their Head of Culture, Gabriela Cantu
As a part of our quest to champion purpose-driven entrepreneurs across the world here is the story of Gabriela Cantu, the tenth of our Humans of Happy Startups Series.
The Happy Startup School community isn’t just for entrepreneurs. We welcome wonderful people from organisations, like Gabriela, who are keen to implement strong startup cultures within their teams.
Gabriela Cantu
Director of the Home Team at Typeform
Based in Barcelona, Spain
Welcome, Gabriela! Tell us more about your background and the work you currently do at Typeform.
I was born and raised in Mexico where I studied Communication (corporate, media, film).
I moved to Barcelona 15 years ago. In my career, I’ve gone from documentary filming and radio production to corporate communication, office and project management across different industries, mostly working for the recruitment and design business fields. At one point, over a decade ago, I immersed myself in yoga, which made a great impact in the way I see life and do things.
My contribution to Typeform goes over three different areas: office operations, facilities and team events. We created a department called Home Team, which focuses on these three areas and aims to create the best possible environment for the Typeform team, supporting and nourishing its culture and facilitating meaningful connections.
What’s the work culture and communication between teams like at Typeform?
We set quarterly goals across the whole company focusing our efforts on three pillars: Business, Innovation and Culture. Each team sets their own vision and values and specific projects that they will be working on, with clear outputs. This helps us get aligned from top to bottom and bottom up. Our culture doesn’t focus on how many hours you spend in front of your computer but rather on what you achieve and how that impacts the company, at every level. All areas of the company contribute to the whole.
We’ve got a team of Scrum Masters who give all teams a hand with their workflow. Each team hold daily (or weekly) stand-up meetings to review their progress.
We have a highly collaborative work culture, which means that we collaborate on projects across teams and functions. We use different tools that help us do this, but communication is challenging as we scale, so we keep iterating on this and trying better ways.
What practices are put in place that contribute to making it an epic place to work?
The company vision is: Make things a little more human.
With this in mind, we continuously try to do things with empathy, putting our best self out there and understanding that success comes from creating a place where people are happy, where work is enjoyable.
Our reception is a bar, so from the moment you enter the office, you have the possibility of connecting with people and starting, as well as ending your day, in a different, friendlier, happier way. In this aspect, our whole office has different spaces that allow people to both work and socialise, which makes the day really enjoyable.
We have an interior garden with over 700 plants that keep the air we breath clean and fresh. There are several living plant walls in the office. We built this project inspired by a short but noteworthy TED talk: How to grow fresh air, by Dr Kamal Meattle. All the plants we have were studied by NASA for their air cleaning properties. This alone is awesome!
We enjoy a healthy and delicious lunch every day and fresh organic fruit for snacking. These things seem to have become the normality in the startup scene. For us, this alone is a great gift. The food is cooked in our own kitchen, the menu is low in carbs and high in veggies; 40% of the company chooses the vegetarian option, and the whole building becomes a dining room for a couple of hours every day, giving everyone a great opportunity to make new friends. Food is important in Spain ;)
We’re constantly looking for new projects that support career development and human connection: there is a recently launched learning and development programme where one can choose any conference, course or class that will support one’s career throughout the year.
We’ve also just opened an Events department that will focus on the team’s needs on team building, networking and learning. And so on…
If a startup came to you for advice on instilling a strong culture within their team, what would tell them to do first?
In my point of view, the culture of a company comes from the leadership team first. Once the founders set the tone, with their management style, set their purpose with a clear company mission, vision and values, everything else will soak up to this mindset.
Hiring an office manager at the early stages of your company, who can focus on supporting the team and promoting a healthy, happy workplace is key.
Another great thing that I’ve seen works, is hiring for culture fit, understanding what’s the kind of people that you want to work with, and sticking to that as you scale.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on leadership. What do you think it takes to be a great leader and motivate your people?
The leaders that inspire me the most are those who seem to be very comfortable with who they are, they’re able to show humility and passion at the same time. They’re the ones who care and empathise with their team members, understanding each person’s uniqueness and connecting as human beings. This, and being vulnerable at times, are for me some of the things that make a leader shine.
Finally, I’d love to hear what an average day looks like for your team. How do you guys check in and stay motivated and on track?
Every team has their own strategies I guess. In the Home team, we hold weekly stand-up meetings and one on ones for alignment. We also talk about our feelings and think about how to make our team dynamics better on retrospective encounters. We go out for fun once a quarter (at least). We give each other feedback and have space to express how engaged or disengaged we’re feeling (once a quarter). There’s a lot of autonomy in the way each team member works, so we focus our efforts on attaining our goals individually or by area; and we continuously report on our progress, plans and problems to the rest of the team. This way everyone understands what everyone else is going through and offers help and support when needed.
I’d like to say that trust and a dose of daily laughter are the things that keep us going and in tune.
Wow what an incredible community-spirit you’ve built within your team. Thank you so much for sharing your culture with us Gabriela!
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