Something to hang our hats on: Chime’s company values

One thing that has empowered and enabled us to continue serving our members is our set of company values. Here’s a look at the role our values play in life at Chime.

Every human has their own DNA— it’s like a set of instructions for how our bodies and minds present themselves in our world. It tells our genes how to express themselves — changing how we look, behave, and feel.

Just like we all have our own string of DNA, companies have DNA, too: they’re called company values. Values inform how a company operates, how employees show up and behave, how they tackle problems, celebrate successes, and how they grow. And while establishing company values doesn’t happen as effortlessly as our bodies creating DNA, having clear, present values in everyday life at work is crucial.

Early on, Chime had five values, but there was a disconnect between the values themselves and how they were showing up in company life. Folks didn’t really have a sense of how we used them, and they were hard to remember.

Just like DNA enables our bodies to work, values do the same for a company. Without values, a company can struggle to achieve its goals. This happened when Chimers started to scale: Leaders helping grow the company found it hard to communicate with everyone without a set of values on which to hang their messages. Without a shared and broad understanding of our values, it was hard to find alignment and communicate clearly.

When the founders and leadership team dug into this problem, they quickly discovered that our values needed a refresh. So they teamed up to rewrite our DNA and come up with a set of values that would be a reflection of our mission, employees, and how Chime shows up in the world.

Scaling — and maintaining — values

Starting the process of establishing our values, the group focused first on how they would scale. With a rapidly growing team, it was important that our values grow with us. To that end, they started to think about how to retain and scale the essence of Chime’s values instead of focusing on the activity or how each specific value manifested over time. They wanted to find the way a set of values could apply through every stage of our growth.

The process of redefining our values began with a steering committee of Chime’s most tenured executives and then added more employees to the mix — via focus groups — to provide a breadth of perspectives. The focus groups focused on three themes:

• Chime’s stories: Employees shared stories about what makes Chime special, from our product to our work environment and team. They documented what’s unique about Chime that they want to preserve over time.
• Value concepts: In the second round of focus groups, they discussed values as concepts. Instead of focusing on the words themselves, Chimers were asked to describe the essence of the values and what resonated with them.
• The words: In the final focus groups, they worked to put words to the essence of the values they’d landed on. They came up with taglines for each concept and discussed what they might be over- or under-emphasizing. At this point, they also dissected whether concepts were standalone values or sub-values.

One important part of the focus groups was that members of the steering committee attended every one. The steering committee was able to hear how the values — and the words that would be used to describe them — were landing with people across Chime.

Once the focus groups had come up with several value taglines, the steering committee of tenured executives gathered one last time and they narrowed it down to the final list. It was important throughout the whole process to remind everyone that it’s not just about their individual interpretation of the values, it’s about how the company will interpret them.

One set of values to rule them all 🥇

As a member-obsessed org, it was important that our values apply both internally — to employees — and externally — to our members. We wanted our values to represent how we work with our members and each other.

This was important to us because we embody our values in how we work with our members every day. For example, the idea behind Chime — that we actually have our members’ backs — is different. We’re constantly rethinking how we can best provide banking services* for our members, which has led to some of our most popular features, like getting paid early and fee-free overdrafts.

And the proof is in the pudding: (not to toot our own horn, but) We’re the most followed financial services company on Instagram, and we’ve got an extremely engaged member base. We believe a lot of that is because of the way in which we talk to our members —with a focus on being human. We take the time to meet our members where they are and inject personality into how we communicate with them.

We also focus on building simple and easy-to-use products for our members — embodying the “Simplify” value. For example, when a member opens the Chime app, they immediately understand how it works because we focus on the most important features for them, instead of trying to hide things and create multiple layers of complexity.

By embedding our product and member interactions with our company values, we can be authentic with each other and our members.

Values in our day-to-day 📆

Our values don’t just show up in our member interactions — they’re in everyday life for Chimers, too. People have naturally picked up the values and use them when they’re communicating with fellow employees. By using values in company communications, employees tie what they say to our company’s why, helping other Chimers understand why messages and the work we’re doing are important.

Chimers also put our values into practice when delivering performance feedback. In every review, we ask our fellow Chimers, “Which value do you embody the most, and which would you like to strengthen?” This way, we can identify our strengths and areas we’d like to improve that are in line with the company.

Finally, we bring our values into day-to-day life by developing values-based cultural programs. Programs are a way to help us scale our culture and emphasize the importance of values. For example, we launched Frontline with Chime, a member support program that gets all Chimers to interact with our members at least once a year.

Building programs around our values helps us further embody them every day and ensure that they’re scaling with our team.

By thinking about values from a programmatic perspective, we can make sure we’re putting values into practice in a way that will scale.

Emojis are 💯

As a company, we’re very meme- and emoji-focused, so we attached an emoji to each value, which has made them easier to remember and more engaging for our employees. By using an emoji for each value, Chimers can drop values into casual conversations and online interactions. For example, rather than simply respond to a post on Slack with a thumbs-up emoji, Chimers can reply with a rocket to say something was bold or dancing twins to give props for teaming up.

Making our values more accessible and fun for everyone using emojis helps us embody our culture more effortlessly.

More than just words on a wall

Though it’s nice to see physical manifestations of our values, like words painted on a wall or office decor, none of that matters if our employees aren’t living the values in their day-to-day lives. As a company, we feel lucky to have a culture so grounded in our values.

If you’re values-driven, our values resonate with you, and you’d like to explore joining our team, we’d love to hear from you! Visit our careers page to see our open positions and learn more about our team.

*Chime is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by, and debit card issued by, The Bancorp Bank or Stride Bank, N.A.; Members FDIC.