Not Written On The Wall: Living Our Values
A little less than two years ago, we attempted to put into words what can be hard for some companies to put into action: our company culture. It involved the story of how our six core values came to be, telling visuals, and even some waterfowl to prove we weren’t ducking around.
If you need a refresher, our six core values are:
- No brilliant jerks: We’re cool with the brilliant part. The jerk part? Not so much. We work together and respect each other.
- Take action & ownership: Crack the problem, engineer the solution, own the work, share the glory!
- Be bold & take risks: Learning comes from trying new things, taking risks and sometimes failing. Being bold and iterating on ideas favours TextNow.
- Create cool shit together: We’re not here to build what’s already been built. We’re here to build what hasn’t.
- Be respectfully candid: We share our ideas and criticisms candidly and directly, without being political. Feedback is a gift and should be given and received with the same level of care.
- Be resourceful & scrappy: We work hard to charge our customers less (not more) and think about the added value of our choices.
It’s one thing to write down your values, it’s harder to follow them. To make them stick, we’ve woven them into the fabric of our company — incorporating them into posters on our walls, on the landing pages of internal programs, on stickers plastered on laptops, and into company-wide townhall presentations. Everywhere you turn, our values are there. But after two years, we had to ask ourselves: Are we actually living these values?
Reciting the words is one thing, embodying them is a whole other challenge. One of the most important things we’ve kept in mind when setting out on this values-quest is that it’s important that our core beliefs are built from the ground up. The Culture Team simply held up a microphone to amplify the voices of our fellow employees. With that in mind, we recently rallied everyone together to revisit our six core values and to discuss what was working and what needed to be improved.
We started by dividing our 100+ employees into smaller groups of about 20 for three one-hour sessions, where we practiced being respectfully candid. We discussed our company culture openly. “Are we living our values as a company? Which do we call bullshit on? What are some examples of living and not living these values?” And maybe it was the fact that we were willing to admit that some things weren’t working, or maybe it was the fact that the sessions were booked during lunchtime and everyone is more honest over a burrito, but the discussions took off. The teams opened up with minimal coaxing, re-discovering what the TextNow culture meant to them and what we all can do to improve it.
The hardest part in determining whether we are living these values is applying them to our every day lives in the office. Are you taking action and ownership? Does ditching the creamer in your morning coffee count as being bold and taking risks?
Everything in life comes back to personal experience. It’s not enough to read about TextNow’s values, we have to define what matters to us as individuals. In our brainstorming sessions we asked our employees something we like to ask in interviews: What are your two most important personal values? The beliefs that drive the big decisions in your life. Some people chose family, integrity, or even humour. Whatever they were, we looked at how these values fit into our every day lives.
Often, living your values is something you do without really thinking about it. We found it really helpful to step back and examine how our beliefs shape our life at TextNow. Hopefully, rather than wracking our brains trying to get an undisclosed project off the ground, we’ll try asking our teammates for ideas in the spirit of “creating cool shit together”. Or, the next time we are put on a project, we’ll be open to discussion and suggestions from other team members. If we notice something that doesn’t seem right (even if it’s just a coffee machine that has stopped pouring coffee), we’ll ask for help. We’ll be involved. Slowly but surely, we’ve found that we are indeed living the TextNow values.
If you’re interested in finding out more about what makes TextNow tick, check out our Culture Manual and shoot me an email (dunja.vujovic@textnow.com) with all of your culture-related questions!
