Defining Culture @ Carnot
Journey from a fancy buzzword 🌟 to a behavioral guide 🪔
Culture is perhaps the most commonly used but least understood buzzword when it comes to startups. Wait 🤯, is this post about another founder bragging about what is a good culture and giving fundae about how culture is important for the company? No, this is not. Perhaps, we@carnot haven’t figured it out completely, and we keep shaping up our why,what and how. This blog just an honest way to put across Carnot’s identity to the world, to give a little prospective about the way we run the show. 🏃
Around 1 year back, I was interviewing one of the Android Engineers and she asked — “So how is the culture at Carnot?”. Honestly — my answer was — hey ,look we are very passionate engineers who thoroughly enjoy each other’s company and solve problems together. It is not all 🌈 and 🌞 scene, but we are one happy family. But she continued probing more, mostly because of her bad experience in her previous workplace. That interview ended in 30 mins or so, but my mind was wandering to solve another problem — “Hey, what exactly is our culture?” 🤔. So, I decided to have series of fun brainstorming sessions with my team-members to come up with a simple doc describing how is culture@carnot, and long story short —drum rolls… presenting Carnot’s culture to the world. :) 🥂
This document is perhaps the result of not the destination, but the journey Carnot has been through — Read about it here 👈
Is this the best culture document out there? — Definitely not, we need to improve on it every single day. We embrace and live it every single day! 💪
How has this document helped us? I think it has given us a sense of identity and helped us hire, and in most cases not hire awesome people, who were best in professional skills, but not so in the culture fit. This document also forms basis for on-boarding of every new member, and we 💚 to align the synergies on day 1 with this doc !
Most importantly, we keep changing it as we “understand” it even further. And hopefully this will keep acting as a inspirational torch to keep us guided and motivated for the path ahead as we are scaling. 🚀
We’re eager to hear your thoughts. If you have any suggestions or queries, or even better — if you are game to join us — drop me a line at pushkar@carnot.co.in.
