A creation process to reshaping our company values: Luko Principles Part 1
2020 was a crazy year in many ways for the tech ecosystem, and Luko was no exception.
We started the year as a small startup of +30 people, with a really flat and non-hierarchical organization. During this year, we step by step switched to a decentralized and a more structured team, with 40% of the people working remotely on a daily basis. We’ve decided to define clear leadership roles, hire our executive committee, triple the size of the team with great talents, assuming a bold policy of working remotely.
This really enriching journey has led us to an incredible team of 90 people, great metrics, and a series B we raised with success. Meanwhile, in these covid times — and considering the huge mutation of our company, we felt we had to deeply rethink our values and put the “who we are” on the table with all our new teammates.
Why we have decided to question our culture and our values?
Previous to that, we already had 4 values that were defined by the 15 first employees just after the seed fund-raising. Even if it was still largely up-to-date, we wanted to design a vision that could empower and belong to anyone, including our newcomers.
Sometimes, you have to assume a courageous move and deeply question your culture, to make sure everyone still feels represented by what you have written when you were working in a kitchen, and accept to grow as a collective. We felt it was good momentum.
How we have collectively rethink who we are and question our culture ?
The workshops session : challenging our values
So that we have decided to organize a session of workshops with all the team. The goal was to question ;
- the way they personally lived their experience at Luko
- what they liked and disliked in it,
in order to find some patterns and re-define our culture. The idea was to really stick to the reality of the moment.
During these workshops, we asked the whole team to answer a set of questions that we had previously designed.
These questions were :
- The 3 most important values at Luko according to you ?
- What kind of behaviors are highly valorized or expected at Luko ?
- What kind of behaviors are prohibited at Luko ?
- What do you love the most at Luko ?
- What surprised you at first sight when you joined Luko ?
- What is your answer when people ask you what is Luko ?
- What would be the best song to describe the Luko journey ?
Each group had some time to debate, bring out some collective key ideas, and write them down on some post-its.
The collective pitches
Once finished, each group represented by one Lukoom had to pitch their ideas to the whole team. At the end of the presentations, people could still put a sticker on the post-its spreading the ideas they wanted to sponsor the most. We’ve post-ited and post-ited the whole day.
To do so, the first employees were of course particularly valuables and their inputs were determinant to build the new “us”. They were true guarantors of the fundamentals and sponsors of some of our core values — as our Bcorp DNA or willingness to bring an impact in our actions.
On the other hand, all newcomers’ inputs have brought a fresh eye and more perspective to the initial picture.
Hopefully, we were really enthusiastic to realize that it was a solid consensus around some core aspects of our culture and values.
The build of our Luko Principles
Then, our co-founders decided to work on designing our Luko Principles, aggregating all the content we had collected from the collective workshop session. Of course, they considered the values that had collected the most stickers with a particular focus.
Raph and Ben finally took the decision to move from our traditional “set of values” to a more pragmatical way of spreading culture : the Luko principles. More than “4 values on the wall” we were more willing to build a real set of Work and Ethical principles that would nurture all our methods, processes, behaviors, etc.
They worked on building 7 Principles that were representing not only our values but also giving concrete guidelines on the way we operate in consistency with who we are, as Lukooms*.
*A Lukoom is a Luko employee — we slightly tend to name every process or internal tool with a random pun with Luko.
These Luko Principles now truly represent all Lukooms, in all their diversities and singularity.
You want to discover our Luko Principles ? Check out our second article “ Processing culture workshops to define a clear set of values: Luko Principles Part 2 “.
Originally published at https://medium.com on March 26, 2021.
