Redefining Urban Culture
By - Sana Nayyar, VP HR, Urban Company
On a hot day in 2015, 50-odd passionate (albeit slightly hungry) people are huddled inside a glass room to identify their company culture. Fifty of us engaged in an intense discussion to figure out what we wanted our culture to be and what it ‘smelled’ like to us. We landed at three culture values that defined us and we took pride in embracing:
- Ownership — everyone is an owner
- Basic — focus on the basics, keeping things simple
- Reimagine — constantly rethink better ways of doing things
Finding our way
Five years later, in 2020, we are in the middle of a raging pandemic, building one of the fastest-growing services marketplaces in the world. And we knew the time was ripe for a relook at these values which had held us in such good stead. We ‘questioned the status quo’ and realised that it is time for a rework.
We formed a team comprising cross-functional leaders who spent the next few months collecting data, holding group discussions and brainstorming. In a series of group sessions and leadership offsites, we systematically identified our core values. Here, I lay out how we went about redefining the #BeatingHeartofUC:
- Research — We did a lot of reading and talking to industry experts to understand how companies identified their culture values and made them real. Some of the questions we asked ourselves:
- How do our values align to our mission and strategy?
- What do we feel exists already and is strong?
- What do we need to get better at to increase coherence and performance
- How do these values help us prioritize and make decisions?
2. Data Collection — Using the above information, we started collecting data from our internal teams over successive periods — in focus groups, with surveys and 1:1 discussions. These sessions were for solely identifying what were the values that we hear again and again, how loud each one was in our existence and how critical each of these values was to our success. We wanted to ensure that our values are shared within the team, as they were core to who we are and how we operate.
3. Approach — We used a simple model to identify which of our values was either core or aspirational to us based on their level of importance and prevalence in the organization (refer HBR article)
4. Simplifying — We started distilling this list of 20 values into core lists, unifying under common meanings and common outcomes categorised by their importance score (collected during the data collection phase). Ultimately, we landed on a list of seven values.
Some top takeaways for us were:
- We are a bold organisation
- We are a competitive lot
- We are outcome oriented
- We want to simplify things
- We demonstrate ownership like nobody’s business
5. Writing and rewriting — We broke our writing into four large blocks:
- Why were we running this exercise?
- What is the right title for each value?
- What are the three core behaviours for each value?
- What would be some of the top questions or tension points that would come to our colleagues’ mind?. We felt that helping people understand the nuances, the conflicts and trade-offs that needed to be made with each value was very critical.
6. Final Sign off — After about a month of multiple rewrites, the leadership converged once more to debate and give a final stamp of approval.
Looking forward to the future
Six months after starting this process, we launched our seven new culture pillars on the 18th of June 2021 in a remote all-hands. The founders, in one of the most widely attended and engaging all hands, discussed with the teams:
- What each value meant
- Where we see the big trade offs and tensions in each value
- How we had seen these values displayed in the organisation in the past
There was a clear buy-in. Everyone could ‘smell’ the same culture again and the #BeatingHeartofUC was loud and clear! We have lots more to do, as we continue to create examples, rituals and stories of each of these values and ensure that each of us in UC walks to the same drum beat — but we are excited and raring to go and will continue to share our journey of building culture.
About the author:
Sana Nayyar is a Vice President at Urban Company. She has diverse experience across roles (Business Partnering, Learning, Recruitment, Operations) and industries.
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You can read up more about us on our publications —
https://medium.com/uc-design
https://medium.com/uc-engineering
https://medium.com/uc-culture
https://www.urbancompany.com/blog/humans-of-urban-company/
If you are interested in finding out about opportunities, visit us at http://careers.urbancompany.com
